Kentridiction

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast Summary: “Kentridiction” (March 18, 2026)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the Commentary Magazine Podcast panel—John Podhoretz (Host), Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, and guest Noah Rothman (National Review)—delves into the political, ideological, and antisemitic dimensions surrounding the dramatic resignation of Joe Kent, former head of the National Counterterrorism Center. The conversation unpacks how Kent’s resignation letter, rife with accusations against Israel and the broader “Restraine”r right’s worldview, signals deeper tensions within the MAGA movement, the Trump administration, and the Republican Party as America wages war against Iran. The episode also highlights ongoing strategic issues regarding the conflict with Iran, the administration’s approach, and the persistent strain of antisemitism shaping both left- and right-wing discourse.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Joe Kent Resignation: Beyond Principle

• Origins and Details: Joe Kent resigned from the National Counterterrorism Center with a letter blaming Israel for "manufactured wars," including the one in which his late wife died.
• Panel Analysis: The hosts agree Kent’s letter is a launchpad for self-promotion, not a principled stand (08:31, D: “He wants his own podcast and wants to have Candace Owens on his podcast…”).
• Political Calculation: The view is that Kent is positioning himself within a faction of the right that could benefit from war skepticism if things go badly for Trump in Iran (13:20, B: "He's used this as an accelerant...to launch himself into a second career").

2. Antisemitism as the Movement’s Spine

• Through Line of Blame: The panel contends that blaming Jews and Israel for America’s wars is not situational but a constant and unifying theme for the so-called “restrainer right” (16:22, B: “The constant is the antisemitism, as it turns out. It’s not situational, it’s constant.”).
• Consequences: This anti-Israel focus overpowers other ideological stances on the right, just as left-wing antisemitism supersedes progressive values (21:29, C: “It is the spine of this movement. It is the point.”).
• Historical Parallels: Reference is made to Pat Buchanan and decades of right-wing anti-Israel conspiracy, linking today's rhetoric directly to that lineage.

3. Strategic Realities of the Iran War

• Progress and Hazards: The podcast details targeted U.S. and Israeli strikes as part of an ongoing campaign, with special focus on intelligence breakthroughs, decapitation strategy (removal of Iranian leadership), and the painstaking process of neutralizing threats in the Strait of Hormuz (33:20, A: "The reopening of the Strait is a sequential process...").
• War Calculation and Dissent: Trump’s apparent calm and focus contrast with public and elite skepticism about America’s aims and the potential fallout (32:41, B: "He is getting calmer, more focused, more determined...").

4. Internal GOP/MAGA Fractures

• Line Drawing and Leak Wars: With Kent's resignation and expected purges, especially of those aligned with Tulsi Gabbard and J.D. Vance, the administration appears to be entering a period of internal strife—especially over foreign policy direction (59:27, B: “Battle lines are being drawn, people are resigning over the war...”).
• Trump’s Management: Trump is depicted as increasingly intolerant of dissent and focused on success, not on holding together a fractious coalition at this critical juncture (59:27, B; 62:58, B: “He could also be like, I don’t have time for this. We'll win the war, then I’ll eat everyone's lunch who was disloyal.”).

5. Neoconservatism, Regime Change, and Trump

• Not a 'Neocon’ War: The hosts underline that this war is not being conducted according to neoconservative doctrine; Trump is uninterested in the nation-building or democratic transitions that defined past U.S. interventions (68:37, B: “He doesn’t care what comes after the Iranian regime...He doesn’t care.”).
• Bolton as Irony: John Bolton’s hawkish realism is seen as closer to the current administration’s posture than classical neoconservatism (65:00, D: “This foreign policy of this administration is the closest we’ve ever had to a President John Bolton. That’s Bolton's revenge.”).

6. Looming Questions and the Future

• Is the Resignation a Trend?: The resignations' potential to trigger more exits and spark a populist podcast/media faction on the right is considered (25:45, B).
• Strategic Judgement: Skepticism persists about whether war can ever achieve American aims, with acknowledgment of the chronic problems in post-war planning.
• Persistent Antisemitism: The closing reflects on the unyielding machinery of antisemitism, concluding that—despite cycles of blame and targeting—the Jewish people endure (74:25, B: “We’ve been around for 4,000 years. We’re going to be around for another 4,000 years…”).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Betrayal and Self-Interest:

  • "He is launching himself into a second career using the accelerant of the fame that he can get by issuing a letter like this..." (13:20, B: John Podhoretz).

• On the Persistent Blame Game:

  • "The constant is the antisemitism, as it turns out. It’s not situational, it’s constant. There’s trouble in the Middle East, it's Israel." (16:22, B: John Podhoretz).

• On Antisemitism as Movement's Core:

  • "It is the spine of this movement. It is the point. And it becomes...the sole focus. Everything else gets blotted out on the left and right." (21:29, C: Seth Mandel).

• On Trump’s War Leadership:

  • "He is getting...calmer, more focused, more determined...unlike the last time that he was in the middle of a huge crisis..." (32:41, B: John Podhoretz).

• On Decapitation Strategy and Intelligence:

  • "The decapitation strategy is more than just taking out institutional knowledge and command. It’s also...getting the U.S. and Israel informers clearly on the ground..." (42:14, D: Seth Mandel).

• On Strategic Patience and War Fatigue:

  • "This is the last mile, and it's deadly serious. And Trump is getting more serious in his rhetoric, in his demeanor, and in his comportment about what he is doing here." (29:46, B: John Podhoretz).

• On the Role of Personnel:

  • "It seems to have really mattered to have Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio in these positions because he uses them as his brain trust..." (56:10, D: Seth Mandel).

• On Neoconservatism vs. Trumpism:

  • "Whatever Trump is, he’s not that. So this is his war. It's not my war. It's America's war." (68:37, B: John Podhoretz).

• On Enduring Antisemitism:

  • "If this is a fight between this sliver of people and Joe Kent, we'll fight him. We'll fight the Joe Kent's. We've been around for 4,000 years. We're going to be around for another 4,000 years. And Joe Kent's...come and go..." (74:25, B: John Podhoretz).

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Important Timestamps

• Discussion of Joe Kent’s Resignation and Antisemitic Letter: 02:33–08:31
• Panel on Antisemitism’s Central Role in Right & Left: 16:22–21:33
• Strategic Update on Iran War, Decapitation, Intelligence: 33:20–44:32
• Trump’s Management Style in Wartime, Internal Leaks, Personnel Shuffles: 59:27–63:38
• Neoconservatism vs. Trump Foreign Policy Doctrine: 65:00–71:05
• End Reflection on Enduring Antisemitism, Jewish Survival: 74:25–76:14

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Conclusion

The episode presents a sweeping, historically informed debate on the significance of Joe Kent’s resignation—not as a singular event but as a harbinger for deeper trends within American conservatism. Unmasking the antisemitic logic that animates parts of the MAGA and restrainer right, the panel argues these fissures matter far beyond the moment, especially as war places ideological, strategic, and moral imperatives under a harsh spotlight. Throughout, the hosts maintain a tone that is acerbic, combative, and darkly humorous, but also steeped in a sense of historical continuity and existential gravity.

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Recommended reading from the episode:

• Jonathan Schanzer's “Regime Change Without Nation Building” at Commentary.org

Book Mentioned:

• Blood in Progress: A Century of Left Wing Violence in America by Noah Rothman (May 19, 2026)

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Transcript

[A]

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

[B]

Some drink champagne, some die at first, the way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best. We spend a lot of time on the show talking about the long arc of American institutions. How they rise, how they decline, and occasionally how they come back. One of the industries that more or less disappeared over the last half century, watchmaking. Like a lot of manufacturing, it moved overseas. But today's sponsors trying to reverse that trend, Vare, that's V A E R, is a Los Angeles watch company whose goal is pretty straightforward. Bring American watchmaking back. They now assemble watches across California, Arizona, Rhode island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. And these aren't fashion accessories. They're proper tool watches, sapphire crystals, premium materials and full waterproof warranties, meaning you can actually swim or dive with them on. I've been wearing one recently, and what stands out is how solid and understated it feels. The kind of watch that seems designed to last for decades. Vare has already earned over 10,000 five star reviews, and it's become one of the largest independent watch assemblers and in the United States, if you like the idea of owning something rugged, timeless and thoughtfully made, go take a look and go to their watches dot com. That's va e r watches dot com welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, March 18, 2026. I am John Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[C]

Hi, John.

[B]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[D]

Hi, John.

[B]

And joining us today, our old colleague, the founder, in many ways, of the Commentary magazine podcast, and now National Review senior editor, senior writer, Senior Pooh Bah voice on the editor's podcast and very much like five, six, seven pieces a week on the website is, of course, Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. You're muted, so you need to unmute so I can hear you say, hi, John.

[A]

I was so geared up for my hi, John. I've been saving that one up for months and I ruined it.

[B]

All right, let's hijon. Hi, John. Okay, there we go. Okay, Noah, you, like the rest of us, are fascinated by the internal machinations of Maga World. Trump World, Extreme Trump Fandom World Restrainer World, Foreign Policy World, Iran World. By the resignation yesterday of National Counterterrorism Center, Pooh Bah Joe Kent, and the very strange letter that he issued on his resignation and the backdoor dealings that seem to involve him, his big boss, Tulsi Gabbard, others in the ambit of J.D. vance, the Vice President of the United States, who told him to go, apparently, and be respectful in resigning to Trump. And then he issued a letter saying that Israel had had his wife killed. Not specifically that Israel had, but that his wife had died in one of the wars that Israel started. His wife manufactured, manufactured, manufactured. His first wife, Heather, an intelligence officer, died in Syria while the United States was battling isis. Not sure where the hook nosed Jews and the moneylenders and the Shylocks and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion holders enter into that transaction. But we get the weird treatment of Joe Kent from people as situationally moralistic as Tim Miller of the Bulwark to others in the coverage in the New York Times suggesting that this letter, again blaming the Jews for his wife's death and manufacturing wars was a principled resignation from the administration rather than the self flushing of a piece of feces down a toilet.

[A]

Yeah, you reference Tim Miller's reaction over at the Bulwark, and he's not alone. There are a lot of folks over on the anti Trump side of the ledger, left and right, who just subordinate all common sense. When they encounter an instrument of political utility, I feel like they have to use it even at the detriment of their own credibility, which is. Anybody who holds up Joe Kent as an example of somebody who's engaged in anything resembling a deliberative process here opens themselves up to. He. He essentially posits three allegations. One, that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, which is the democratic angle. Two, that Israel, well, four. Okay, two, that Israel whispered sweet lies into Trump's ear about how easy victory would be in this conflict. Three, that those lies were akin to the ones that, quote, the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War. And four, that his wife passed away in service, tragically, in the United States in combat against isis, which was a war Israel, quote, unquote, manufactured. That is all crazy stuff, crazy talk. The notion here that anybody, especially somebody who's at the head of the nation's counterterrorism apparatus at a time when we're at war with the world's foremost exporter of Islamist terrorism, should understand that the threat represented by Iran to US Service personnel, US Civilians, US interests, is measured in degrees at any given point. The threat is always imminent. It has been since 1979. It is just a matter of how imminent, how mature an operation is at any given time.

[B]

So I got to interrupt you because you say, and you said this on the editors yesterday on the National Review podcast that this was crazy talk. I think it's evil talk. I don't think it's crazy talk at all. In other words, it's crazy from the perspective of what is.

[A]

Well, we should stipulate those other things. Why? They're wrong, too.

[B]

We could do that. But I think what's interesting here is the politics, because we can talk about whether or not anyone should listen to Jo Kent or not. You know, he's a serial loser of elections. Couple of other things about him, not to continue to character assassinate him, but I don't think you can character assassinate someone with no character. He is married to a woman named, whose name I can't quite recall, but who is actually an employee of Max Blumenthal, who is a basic agent of the. Was an agent of the unpaid agent maybe of the Bashar al Assad Syrian government. Maybe the worst commentator or the most anti American, most pro terrorist commentator in America in the world of the coverage of the Middle East. And his second wife works for Max Blumenthal, which in and of itself should have denied him security clearance to become head of the National Counterterrorism Center. And I am not joking when I say that. So let's talk about the politics. Seth. Now, you could say it's principled because he's like, I can no longer countenance fighting the Iran war, and that's principled. So he's quitting the way we say people should quit when they can't agree with a government's policies. Is that what's going on? Or is there a race towards something in 2028? Which is what I think, but I want to hear what you have to say.

[D]

I mean, it's not, I don't think with Joe Kennett's principle, but it's pretty clearly not, you know, from my perspective, because Joe Kent was supportive of the Trump administration's hawkish posture toward Iran until the day he signed that resignation letter. So Kent isn't ideologically opposed necessarily to serving in this position at the pleasure of the president, but it seems like he was wearing out his welcome within the government and casting lines into the water for his next move. And the next move sounds a lot like he wants his own podcast and wants to have Candace Owens on his podcast and maybe, you know, with the Ovan on his podcast and. But that is, that is where a lot of this seems to be heading. That there is just, you know, this group of people that sees that the next, the next place to go in their shape shifting is to be part of some Kind of we're the real America first activist, rump of the party. That's where he's going.

[A]

The restrainer right has this mythology to them, right, where their ascendancy is inevitable. So it's kind of Marxian. Anything they do to accept, to, you know, advance the arc of history, the inevitable arc of history, is going to be acceptable in posterity's lights, because those are the people who will write that

[B]

history,

[D]

speak that history on podcasts.

[C]

I think it's more mercenary than that because their agenda has been canceled by this administration, effectively, and I think it's a sort of career movement. No one knew. No one. John, you're on mute.

[B]

Can't hear.

[C]

No. No one knew Joe Kent's name Monday, today, the entire country. Well, no, we did.

[B]

We did.

[C]

But I mean, but, I mean, but I mean, as of yesterday, it was. He was the lead of the New York Times.

[A]

Jamie Butler Herrera's revenge.

[C]

Yeah. And so this whole.

[B]

There's a trivia question. Go ahead.

[C]

This whole podcast world is almost like this shadow, right? Because the right that's actually governing, as I say, has killed their agenda. And it's more lucrative to get out if you have no effect on policy. If you've lost the restrainer argument, then why not just get out and make money?

[B]

Okay, so I want to go further than this. So you and Seth are in agreement. Noah's making the case. You're all in agreement. Abe, you're agreeing with Noah that there is an overarching ideological Republican Party MAGA thing going on here. And Abe and Seth, you're agreeing that maybe he jumped before he was gonna be pushed, and that by making this big statement, he is launching himself into a second career using the accelerant of the fame that he can get by issuing a letter like this, which is both pleasing to the anti Trump liberal left, to whom I assign the situationally principled Tim Miller, once Jeb Bush's spokesman and now a never Trumper propagandist who will have Zoran Mamdani on his show because he's not a Republican to gripers and the front page of the New York Times. So he's got it. So he's used this as an accelerant. But I want to talk about how far an accelerant it might be, because here's the lineup. We win this war and it goes and it's a triumph. And as Abe says, that worldview, the restrainer Trump only didn't want interventions. Trump said all wars were stupid. Has to undergo extreme revision. Will have been tested by real world circumstances, Trump will have gone in a different direction. And again, if he succeeds, which we all hope he will, and I think he will, that 10 year game has been blown up, will have been blown up as, as convincingly as Ali Lajani. If it doesn't go well and oil prices go up and we have an inconclusive ending to this military conflict and everything is kind of a mess, there is going to be a very significant rump on the right that is going to organize around the idea. Consider this in modified form, that Kent is Barack Obama in 2002, making his speech in Illinois about how stupid and foolish the Iraq war would be in September of 2002. Now, he's not Barack Obama. He's in the administration. This, this is. And the war that Barack Obama opposed was being led by the other party. But parties don't matter anymore. So Joe Kent is getting out in front. I'm an official of this government. I am leaving. This is a war for Israel. Trump has been manipulated by Israel. He's been ruined by Israel. And I am the pure voice. I'm an insider who's become an outsider to be your tribune. Because even the swamp even swallowed up Trump and the Jews ate Trump. And everybody has taken, even somebody like Trump. And so you're gonna need somebody like me. You thought Trump was gonna clean the Augean stables. Now I have to clean the Augean stables and the Trump stables and that. This is 2020. This is a picture, possible picture of 2028. Maybe it's not Kent himself personally. Maybe it's his boss, Tulsi Gabbard, who I assume will be out the door in a week, given little things that we're hearing. But maybe in his dreams, it'll be JD Vance who will somehow find a way to become an opponent inside as well as outside. But these are the stakes.

[A]

Look, I think that's 100% being drawn. I think that's 100% true. It's probably clearly the political calculation that's being made in their minds explicitly, not even implicitly, that look what happened to Hillary Clinton, literally fighting the last war. Anybody who got on board with that war regretted it. Let's get on, you know, in front of the opposition to it and, you know, secure that moniker for a future political career or a career in podcasting, what have you. But how did. Where did the. Does the anti Semitism come into play? The notion that the Jews engineered the Arab Spring and thus created ISIS even though they toppled the Hosni Mubarak government and let a Muslim Brotherhood functionary in there. Oops, kind of a blooper there. But like, where? There was some of that in the run up to the Iraq war and in the immediate aftermath of it, but it was far more muted. So they're making a calculation based on domestic political culture, online culture.

[B]

35, 35 years ago, 35 years ago, Pat Buchanan said that the war to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was a war for Israel. 36 years ago, Pat Buchanan spoke those words. So where does it come from? A war for Israel that led to Saddam Hussein firing missiles, Scud missiles at Israel was such a war for Israel to liberate an Arab country that was part of the alliance of hatred against Israel, from another Arab country was a war for Israel. So where does this idea come from? The constant is the anti Semitism, as it turns out. It's not situational. It's constant. There's trouble in the Middle East, It's Israel. Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, it's Israel. ISIS arises as a result of the Arab Spring. It's Israel. ISIS is killing other Arabs and it's Israel. Syria's committing chemical warfare, weaponry, monstrousness, genocide against their own people. It's Israel. And now Donald Trump is actually in a war with Israel, but against Iran, an enemy of the United States for 47 years. And why would we be doing this? It's Israel. So since that the constant is the word Israel. So let's take them at their word. This is who they are. There is a through line from Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, some of the right wingers at the Cato Institute and in the libertarian movement, we're talking about the 90s through the 2000s. Scott Ritter, before he was hunting down little boys on a playground, talking about how stuff was being done for Israel. And then we had 2015, 2016, this huge explosion in online antisemitism in response to concerns that Trump, who had said he wanted to be. He wanted to be a kind of mediator between Israel and the Palestinians and make a deal that would help everybody, thus making people, certain people who do not believe the Palestinians are good actors, get nervous about him as a possible presidential candidate. And then that's where the first explosion of Pepe the Frog memes and Seth's wife Bethany getting 10 billion, like, go into the ovens emails, and Ben Shapiro getting them, and I getting them to a much lesser extent, and all of that, Israel, Israel, Israel. So why does Joe Kent go to Israel? Because this is about it. This is not a war for Israel. This is their war against Israel. And they know that a victory in this war is a huge problem if what they actually want is to discredit, disarm, destroy, defame and ruin Israel and American Jewry. So the stakes are high. The they are actually making clear to me, and I hadn't really thought about it in this way, how high the stakes are to them, that all he needed to say right was I'm opposed to this war. Iraq went badly. Afghanistan went badly. Our interventions don't work. Trump seemed to know that and now he seems to have forgotten it. I cannot in good conscience work for an administration that seems to have forgotten the lessons of the last 25 years. Wasn't that why he got elected? Isn't him saying, I'm not going to do stupid wars why I got elected? I can no longer in good conscience serve in this administration. And he could have started a podcast and had Candace Owens on and Nick Fuentes on for saying that alone. But he didn't just say that alone. He had to go to phase two, which is it's Israel's fault and phase two is phase one.

[C]

Abe, all I can say is I agree entirely. It's not just that the antisemitism is the constant and is the through line. It is the spine of this movement. It is the point. And it becomes, I mean, I've been writing about this. It becomes the sole focus. Everything else gets blotted out on the left and right. If you're on the right and you get on board the anti Semitism train, you give up on any type of free market principles, everything, all that goes to the side. You can get on board with Elizabeth Warren's economic agenda, whatever. If you're on the left and you get on board the Jew hatred, it's so much for LGBTQ rights. You're pro Hamas, you're whatever. It becomes the sole focus. It blots out everything else in your ideological spectrum.

[B]

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[A]

who just resigned, presided over the last two weeks over four potential mass casualty events inside the United States linked to Islamist radicalism. You want to talk about a domestic liability? The American public isn't going to stand for that. You know, they're very discomfited with gas prices. But once people start being blown up in the streets, it's a whole nother ball game.

[D]

Well, it is if you, if it is, if Americans point to him and say this happened on your watch, Mr. Counterterrorism Man. But it's more likely that a lot of these people are anonymous to, you know, to the country and are not the people who get blamed for it. And you know, the President is the guy who usually does. And maybe some of Joe Kent has

[A]

anything to say about it, right? I mean he wants to be right.

[D]

Joe Kent is going to want to put himself out there. But it's worth recalling, by the way, that how did Joe Kent get here? Joe Kent ran with Trump's blessing to punish a Republican, a six term Republican member of Congress who voted for Trump's impeachment in Washington state. And Trump, you know, rode him to, you know, the, the, the, to smash the, the non believers, the dissenters, whatever. Joe Kent won. It was pretty, I mean the primary

[B]

was pretty close he won the primary.

[D]

He won the primary, Butler, Herrera, and then he lost the general election to Murray, Goose, Glus and Camper is that he pronounced the middle name everybody there,

[B]

except for Joke and has five names and seven.

[D]

Way too many names.

[A]

Way too many.

[B]

Way too many syllables. Yeah.

[D]

And although Joe Kent would have been a terrible congressman, it might have been worth it to have the name Joe Kent. And. Yeah, yeah, but so he, so he, so he loses the seat. So that, that loses a Republican seat, that's a Republican incumbent seat for six terms. Joe Kent comes in to say, no, we're going to punish anybody who didn't like the capital ride on January 6th and loses the seat. Jo Kent runs again two years later and loses. And I think by bore. So the thing about people like Joe Kent is there is a limit here to when they go out there and they say. I'm part of the vanguard of this new ideological project. Right. I'm here to punish people. And all he does is lose. So there's that sense of a ceiling over this sort of, as you call this shadow group, the shadow ministers forming, which is that they don't have talented people outside of J.D. vance. The question is whether J.D. vance wants Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard and this and Dan Caldwell around him and be backed by Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson and you know, in that group, if he wants to be so overtly associated with the dissenters from his own administration who have a not great history of being valuable on the campaign trail.

[B]

This is a very important point because. So Kent's a loser, as you point out, to two time loser, but he gets a, essentially a consolation job or a consolation prize for being a good soldier. And now he is a bad soldier. Right? He's literally a bad soldier. He's saying that Trump is a, is a, you know, is dancing on the strings of the, of the Jews, you know, like the COVID of the Godfather, he's the little marionette and the Jews are in control of him. So he's not a good soldier anymore. And here's what I'm proposing. And again, this is speculative. This is a very serious business we're in here. We're in a war. We are attempting whatever anybody says, or as we say in commentary, we are attempting regime change without nation building. It is clear that the only end result of this war that will be satisfying will be that the Islamic, the regime that has been in place for 47 years is removed from power. Whatever comes after, we don't know, because that's the nation building part, it's a deadly serious business. It's gone astonishingly well in every respect, except this question of the strategic problems with the Strait of Hormuz. And that's more fiendishly complicated because it's so easy to threaten the shipping with one, you know, one bullet with one drone with one whatever, and the insurers won't pay for the shipping and all of that. So it's a complicated, difficult matter. And. And it is. It's like the last mile. The classic rule of something like wiring electricity is it's incredibly easy to get 99% of the way there. It's the last mile. Mile that ends up being really costly. And the Strait of Hormuz is like the last mile, since clearly there is no war in the sense that we are fighting them and they are not fighting. They have no capacity to fight back except to fire off missiles at civilian populations in various places. So this is the last mile, and it's deadly serious. And Trump is getting more serious in his rhetoric, in his demeanor, and in his comportment about what he is doing here. And rather than having people say, aren't you afraid that this is gonna go on too long? And he says, I'm not afraid of anything. And they say, aren't you afraid that oil prices are gonna go up too high? And he says, higher oil prices are a small price to pay for what we will achieve if we achieve our aim here. He is getting unlike Covid and that

[D]

those prices will plummet. He says, this is going fast enough that it's not gon long before the prices will go rock bottom.

[B]

Unlike the last time that he was in the middle of a huge crisis that was afflicting the world, where he got crankier and weirder as it went on and more untrustworthy and more flaky, he is getting calmer, more focused, more determined based on what we're hearing, what we're saying, and the fact that he's now essentially decided to push off this summit with Xi and all of that. And a person like that doesn't need gnats and pests on the inside distracting him from what it is that he

[A]

is doing, none of whom are getting the briefings that he's getting. Like, we understand from just public information produced by CENTCOM and the Pentagon that this happens sequentially, that the reopening of the Strait is a sequential process that unfolds over the course of several weeks in which we degrade Iran's capacity to project power into the Persian Gulf. And that is ongoing. Latest news being the use of multiple 50,000 pound deep penetrating ordnance bombs on anti ship missiles. Really scary stuff. Road mobile anti ship missiles is the sort of thing that keeps you up at night if you're a sailor, if you're a mariner. And that's the sort of thing that we need to neutralize and demonstrate that it's neutralized.

[B]

Right? So this.

[A]

And then things may break apart really like crack open faster than a lot of people who think this is an interminable conundrum that we just can't unravel faster than they think.

[B]

Look, this is a very important point because this is a war that is being conducted, right? The targeting of assets inside Iran is a dynamic process that involves a lot of intelligence that was developed before the war, a lot of sites, a lot of preparation to know where people were and what, and set up the traffic lights and all the stuff that Seth likes to talk about, traffic lights in Tehran and all that. And then it's dynamic because as the war is going on, as we understand it, the Israelis in particular, but us, we are gathering intelligence on an hourly basis as the regime degrades and erodes and people are looking for an exit ramp and they're yelling and screaming on their phones or whatever. And why were we able to drop this massive ordinance that is designed to injure and damage the Iranian capacity to keep the Straits of Hormuz under threat? Because I don't think we had, we knew where it was until a couple of days ago because there is that amazing detail that, Noah, you surfaced from this wall that you, I think thousands of people have retweeted since you pulled it out of the Wall Street Journal story of this guy standing on a street, an IJRC member or a BASIJ member getting a phone call in Farsi from an Israeli intelligence officer saying, whatever you're thinking of doing, don't do it, don't shoot anybody, don't be bad, do the right thing. And the guy in the other line saying, brother, as is my witness on the Quran, come and come and finish this off like I'm dead anyway.

[D]

They're picture an IRGC commander like reaching into a cookie jar and then a voice in a, in a, in Farsi Israeli accent just comes over the line.

[A]

That is from the Wall Street Journal. Street Journal's piece. Israel is hunting down Iranian regime members in their hideouts one by one. It is information dense and it is very illuminating about the Israeli campaign which targets regime apparatus. The United States is currently degrading Iran's capacity to project power. Israelis are focusing on degrading the regime and they're doing a spectacular job of it from that piece. But we have to remember that this was, there wasn't an eight month buildup here like ahead of the Iraq war in 2003. This was a contingency, an exigency presented by the uprising of the Iranian people after Midnight Hammer. There was no intention to pursue this kind of a regime change operation. It came together sort of on the fly. And while we're, while we're executing plans that have probably been on the shelf for a very long time, that doesn't mean that we had everything in place in the moment. We said go because it would have taken a long time to get stuff there. And people are, you know, people will say, oh, we'll reintroduce it. Nobody had a plan for this because we have a Marine detachment that's leaving two weeks after fighting has already started. And yeah, I mean, you adapt. Fighting forces adapt. That's what good fighting forces do. But you know, there's a lot of consternation that this didn't happen over the course of two weeks and the enemy didn't get to fire a single shot, which would have been a magnificent success if we'd pulled it off. But that's also an unrealistic standard to hold any country to even a hyperpower like the United States.

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[D]

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[A]

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[D]

Toyota, let's go places. And Israel has the same problem, right? It's the age old Mossad on the big screen problem which now people are, you know, are using against the United States too, is this idea that why would, why would we have to lose a single soldier? Why should there be any American casualties? Why don't we just push the button that says end the regime and the regime disintegrates into the air? Why would we even go through the process of flying planes and striking? There is this sense that like we could be doing this in some, in a way that would have no casualties on any side and nothing would have to blow up. And all this other stuff. There's a sci fi element to the criticism itself, which is not threat inflation initially. Right? Initially criticism was threat inflation. Oh, you don't know what the Iranians are capable of. You know, Tucker Carlson saying it's going to get 100,000Americans killed if you do this. This is the other kind, not threat inflation. This is inflation of our capabilities. We, we are too strong and too capable for this to be considered a success.

[B]

Okay, but this is the comedy of what you're saying. You're exactly right. But there's an inadvertently comic element to this. Because if there could ever have been in the course of human history, a war on this scale that was as bloodless to one side in the combat as this war has been, I mean, you cannot, there is no way even to calculate how bloodless this has been. But you know that two planes, we've been fighting now for almost three weeks. Two planes, we don't even know what the damage is in Iraq, except that we're in Iran. Excuse me? Except that we've been. We've hit 25,000 sites or something like that.

[A]

We've lost planes to friendly fire, we've lost MQ9 reapers to friendly fire, and we lost six soldiers to hostile enemy fire. Right, but those are the only six fatalities due to hostile fire.

[B]

But I just wanted to finish this point about the massive ordinance used yesterday on the materiel that the Iranians need as threats at the Strait of Hormuz. So there are little threats, right? Like a mine is a little threat and then a drone is kind of a little threat, but scary. It could hit your ship and all of that. These, these missiles are like a serious threat. Like if you use them and they go off and they hit you, they could really blow up your tanker, Your tanker could blow up. Fire, you know, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil could explode. You know, all of that. Now I'm saying we, in the course of this 18 days, found out where those missiles were found out how to target them. And then when, as sequentially as Noah said, we took out this, we took out that. We went at this, we went at that. The Israelis are going here, they're going there. We took out Khamenei. We may have taken out Khamenei Jr. We took out Larjani, we took out the other Soleimani, we took out the head of the parliament, we took out this. And as all this is going on, people are suing for peace by telling us other stuff to say, maybe be nice to me, don't assassinate me. Here's where the missiles are that you want to take out around the Strait of Hormuz. And then we go, great, now we've developed that intelligence, then we'll bomb them. But we only got that stuff, I believe, I'm guessing. But because of the successes of the last two weeks.

[D]

Right, Exactly. The decapitation strategy is more than just taking out institutional knowledge and command. It's also. It's getting US informers, it's getting the US And Israel informers clearly on the ground. It's eroding Iranian officers will to continue putting up the fight against the US And Israel. And when they get a call on the phone, they say, look, I'll leave the back door unlocked, okay? There's milk and cookies out there. They're kosher. I checked. Okay, here's what time we'll be expecting you. We'll make up the guest bedroom for you. And they wouldn't have been saying, we'll make up the guest bedroom for you if Ali La Rajani were talking in their other ear, if Mossad was talking in this year. Larajani talking in the other ear. They're not saying. They're not responding to the Mossad guy. Come on in. They're. They're responding. Yes, sir. To the other side. And now they've got no other. Nothing is telling them what to do besides the Israeli. Besides the Mossad. And a KU call.

[A]

So here's something that happened yesterday that I want to get you guys take on because it surprised me. It was premature from my understanding of how this was supposed to unfold. Benjamin Netanyahu tells the Iranian people, go outside, celebrate Nowruz, because we're overhead, we're watching, we're protecting you. He didn't say, now's the time. We prepped the ground. Now's the time for you to go. Which my understanding was that would follow many weeks into this campaign. We're not there yet, but the Israelis might have another understanding of things

[B]

I think saying you're allowed to go celebrate now is a very suggestive and interesting play because of course they wouldn't say that if they didn't know that it was safe. Like they're not saying go out and celebrate Nowuz in the streets if 15,000 people are gonna get shot by the Basij. That would be so self destructive, given the Israeli aim. Which would be the end of it, right?

[D]

That would be the end of the operation.

[A]

There was literally a leak in the press yesterday saying that the Israelis were going to encourage these protests knowing that everybody would be slaughtered, which is really stupid for you to believe and then publish.

[B]

So they would only be making this gesture. This is like I think Abe's point earlier, or maybe Eli's. I'm saying maybe it was Eli Lake's point. But like they wouldn't be doing this without an almost hundred percent assurance that their advice having been followed would not become a catastrophe. Because it's not necessary. Like it's not. You don't have to say go out and celebrate Norwoods. You could say, hey, be careful out there. Still be careful. We're concerned about you. Be careful. They're like, we're pretty sure no one's gonna fire on you if you go out and celebrate Norwus. And if you start shouting like death to the Ayatollah, that no one's gonna come and shout at you or they're not gonna shoot at you. So they know things. And it's by the way, not just that they're being told, leave the bat, we're gonna leave the back door open. Don't forget, like they've shut down the Iranians have shut down the Internet, but they clearly haven't shut down all of the Internet because they must be able to talk to each other or something like that. So there's like some secondary Internet. But guess who probably has penetrated the secondary private Internet? The Israelis. And do they know what they know? They have somehow have gotten the phone numbers of everybody in the igrc. Where did they get those? So they can call them one.

[C]

The play to say go out and celebrate Nowruz is also a message to the Basij and the other forces that would be doing the shooting. They've got to think, if Israel's saying that and we have any inkling of picking up our guns and going out there, they must have a laser dot on each one of our heads.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And it's a challenge. Like, do you feel lucky, punk? Like, do you think it's a bluff? Are you willing to call the Masonics bluff when Larajani and all these other leaders were eliminated in their bunkers.

[B]

Right. I gotta make reference for a minute to my I'm not a huge science, but you know, the best science fiction novel that I've ever read, the Three Body Problem, which I have made reference to in the past because it has all kinds of interesting metaphorical connections to things like Covid and other stuff. But the central conceit of the Three Body Problem is that a foreign alien intelligence believing that the world will inevitably become the Earth will inevitably become a hostile force against them, preempt. And they have advanced technology. And one of the things that they are able to do is, for reasons I can't quite remember, they know what we're thinking. And so if anybody thinks thoughts about how to develop stratagems against them, they will know that that has happened and they will be able to eliminate that pattern of thought in its crib before it can develop into anything. These are called so fons. This is the technique by which the earth is rendered impotent and defenseless against its enemy. And that is exactly what Israel seems to be doing to Iran. The idea is, as you would say, are you lucky? Don't even think about it because you don't know what we know. But everything that you think, haven't we now demonstrated over the last 15 years that there is not a step that you will take outside your house that you have any realistic belief we are not aware of that is a terrifying reality to confront. If you are on the receiving end of that idea, it is beyond measure, paralyzing. Like, you don't think anything anymore. You, you know, you can't move. And so, as I say metaphorically, that's why this book is so rich and suggestive about all kinds of things. That's where I feel like these Bibi speeches, Trump's eerie self confidence, which is different from bluster, the tone on these, of these interviews with Liz landers of the NewsHour and stuff he said on the planes and all that, this is not the same Trump, right? He blusters about the paint at the Kennedy center or the East Room or the East Wing or the New Ballroom, but he's very chill about the war, very calm about the war. So you got to say again, just as we're saying, what's the through line here? The through line when Trump is like off his meds, is that he gets wacky and he is less and less and less and less wacky and more and more and more coolly. Determined. And that's where the Strait of Hormuz stuff comes in for a second. So, Abe, I want to ask you. So the general proposition is that we didn't plan, and we didn't plan for the Strait of Hormuz. And isn't this terrible? We didn't plan for the Strait of Hormuz. But a world in which we plan for disaster in the Strait of Hormuz is a world in which we cannot go to war at all. Eventually, in some sense, if Trump is betting on going to war at any point, including if he has a year to prepare, the Iranians are going to involve the Strait of Hormuz. Why? Because they've involved strait of Hormuz five times in the last 50 years in an effort to create international pressure to have their way. So if you say, well, there's the Strait of Hormuz, the only proper answer in a world in which you don't think that dynamic effects occur as a result of war is this is too high risk. Oil prices go to $200 a barrel. It's too high risk in that world.

[C]

You're making sort of every ability of your adversary to deter you. You're making it analogous to their holding the bomb. Right? It's like, we can't strike North Korea because they have the bomb. You can't strike a whole host of nuclear countries. If the idea now is we can't go to war because country has holds this card or that card or the other card, then you're right, exactly. Then that means the US Is forever deterred by whatever contingencies may lie ahead.

[B]

So if that's the case, then, I mean, I believe that there are many people in the world who are serious and respectable people who have looked at the last 25 years and said, war doesn't work. This is a messy way to try to get your way, and it doesn't work and it's a failure. And so projecting power in this way that involves the use of force will inevitably backfire. And you can't say that. That is a dismissible position. And that, oh, the hell with that. What about World War II? Because it's 80 years since World War II and we have had this follow through problem in our wars where we don't really win them. And then, then, and then, as Charlie Wilson said, we f up the end game. So I don't want to, I don't want to belittle the seriousness of this view. I think it's wrong. I think Israel has just proved its wrong by the way with what happened in Gaza over the last two and a half years. But I don't want to belittle it, and I want to take it seriously. But saying that because the Straits of Hormuz. Shouldn't be under threat, that's not a serious engagement with that idea. I mean, maybe the ultimate, maybe an unconscious outgrowth of that idea, which is that any time you do something, there are going to be consequences that either you didn't foresee or you didn't calculate properly or something like that, but you can only deal with them when they happen. Like, how are we gonna keep the Straits of Hormuz open? What does that even mean? What are we gonna do? Like, I still don't understand what it means. If one mine closes the Strait of Hormuz or one drone closes the Strait of Hormuz, then the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed or opened at will by anybody. The Houthis could close the Straits of Hormuz. They have a lot of drones. They can fly them over water and have them hit a ship. If hitting a ship with a drone.

[A]

Well, they did for a couple of. Almost a year. They essentially closed off access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. And then we all wrung our hands and said, well, can we live without the Suez Canal? And it turns out the answer is no. The planet Earth cannot live without the Suez Canal. So, yes, the Straits of Hormuz will be open one way or the other. But one of the. You know, the analysts always said that it would be particularly powerless for Iran to do this, because, yeah, it would impose a lot of a huge shock on the oil market, but it would cut off Iran's capacity to sustain its own economy and most importantly, to sustain the IRGC, which gets about 40% of Iran's oil revenue. So they could cut off their own nose, but only for so long. Eventually this thing opens up, whether we do anything about it or not. So there's. There's a ticking clock here, irrespective of our efforts to open the Strait, which I think will be relatively robust in pretty short order, given the pain that it is objectively imposing on the Western world and maybe not imposing inconstancy on Donald Trump because he is rather stalwart. But nevertheless, you peruse the truth social posts, and you still see a very erratic person there. Yes, habitually erratic, saying things that are trying to get him through a disadvantageous news cycle, as he always does. He says whatever gets him through the next five minutes. That's just his style.

[D]

I will say talks.

[A]

He's not so constant when he writes.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

I will say, by the way, that in terms of that constancy and Trump not really changing as a person, it has made a monumental difference who he has hired in key positions in ways I think we're not 100% sure. It would have been the old saw that personnel as policy usually works. And then with Trump, we have debated now for years whether it's all his brain is the one calling the shots. And he can have Mike Waltz on this side and Tulsi Gabbard on this side and come out with his own. It doesn't matter who he put around him. But actually, it seems to have really mattered to have Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio and some of these guys in these positions because he puts. He clearly uses them as his brain trust. Right. When Walt was removed from one post and over the signal gate, you know, whatever you want to call it, the leak. Jeffrey Goldberg Group chat. And when Walt was put then at the UN Right. He was given another cabinet level appointment position. But more than anything, it was a signal that Trump was saying, well, he's not leaving my inner orbit. I don't, you know, it's fine if he's not getting along with these guys. If this part isn't really working, or if I need to punish somebody for a bad leak or an embarrassment, whatever, fine, we'll rearrange the pieces. But that's all we're doing is rearranging the pieces. And Rubio, you know, the great. The meme of Rubio on Twitter that has been giving us endless joy. I mean, I can't remember the last time, if you're not online. Sorry. Speaking to our audience. But, you know, there's a meme of Rubio sitting, looking. There was a picture of Rubio sitting, looking grumpy in the meeting with Zelensky in the Oval Office. The time when J.D. vance dressed down Zelensky in front of Trump. And Marco Rubio looks like he's trying to sink into the couch. And that. That picture has been remade by, you know, by people to. Every time there's a new opening, Marco Rubio has to take it. So, you know, dress him as a Venezuelan, you know, but that's because Rubio.

[B]

But you. I mean, the joke there is that Rubio was made head of usaid and he had a voice of a. He got like five jobs. And so the idea now is using that picture.

[D]

National Security Advisor.

[B]

Yeah. It's like, then he was like yesterday, he was like the leprechaun in charge of St. Patrick's Day. It's the same picture. It doesn't matter what it is, it is a joy. But it does reflect this reality.

[D]

Right. It makes it clear that Rubio is among the most trusted people in Trump's orbit over the past 10 years of him being in public life.

[B]

Yeah. And who is not, and this is pretty striking. Is Vance. And how do we know that is Vance speaking? Has Vance been sent out to go on the Sunday shows to defend the administrative. Now, maybe he doesn't want to. It doesn't matter. Is he.

[A]

He's not speaking, but his people are leaking.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Variously.

[B]

That's my question that we don't have an answer to, which is, war is not going to end in a week. It's serious business. Battle lines are being drawn. People are resigning over the war. As I say, Tulsi Gabbard can't stay for very much longer. As far as I can tell, if she hires Caldwell, she hired Caldwell, which is like a direct shot. Like it's like shooting Hegseth in the leg. Very interesting, very provocative thing to do. Somehow got it through White House personnel. I don't really understand how we're gonna get stories about this. I think it's a suicide mission and that she can't stay for much longer, particularly cuz she does seem to not be on the same page with the major effort of the administration and the single most important thing it's gonna do in this second term. So battle lines are being drawn and we'll see where people are. But I don't think Trump has the patience to let this go. Look, he's already shown that he'll offload people. He just offloaded Rick Grinnell, to whom he gave this like suicide mission of dealing with the Kennedy center and now he's closing Kennedy Center. And he also like kicked Rick Grenell down the stairs. He said something nice about him while he kicked him down the stairs. He got no problem kicking people down the stairs who were loyal necessarily. If he sees that there's another way to go, or he doesn't really need the trouble or something like that. The only person he can't kick down the stairs is Vance. Cuz Vance is the Vice President of the United States and that is himself an elected official and he's not fireable in that sense and he is the President of the Senate. But I mean, we'll see what goes on. Either everyone gets in line or if there is like a serious internal deep state maga, deep state leak Campaign against the Iran war. Is Trump gonna stand for that? I can't imagine that he would. And I don't even say this as some, you know, it's like a joke because there's all this, oh, he's a neocon. And so we're saying this because, talking about him like, he made the decision to go to war. He made the decision to jump in because the Israelis, when the Israelis said, we can really hit this meeting and take out Khamenei and, like, start. Start things going. And he's like, okay, epic fury. It's a go, you know, lock and load or whatever it was he said that Friday afternoon that began the war.

[A]

But here's the thing. There almost certainly is an Anti War League campaign coming from inside the House. I mean, you can say that the Strait of Hormuz thing, where nobody had ever even contemplated the notion that Straits of Hormuz would be closed, that probably came from a Democrat in one of these classified briefings. But the intelligence assessments that we're reading about constantly from every other media outlet, that the regime is digging in, that the regime is stronger than ever, that the IRGC may be stronger than ever, which, by the way, is not the same thing as the regime becoming stronger than ever, as The IRGC is 20 of the clericy and the clericy is being decimated. Nevertheless, you have to have a lot of literacy to be able to read through the lines. But the lines, if you don't read through them, are saying that this administration knows this war is going badly and is not telling you that. And there's only one place that could come from, and it's inside the executive branch.

[B]

So we'll see. We'll see how. We'll see how comfortable Trump is now. He could also be like, I don't have time for this. We'll deal with it later. We're going to win the war. And then when it's all over, you know, I'm going to eat everybody's lunch who, like, was disloyal. But we can't do it right now because it'll look, you know, it's like too much trouble or something like that. But this is it for him. This is him. It's not me. It's not commentary. It's not, you know, there's no neocon conspiracy that is in con, you know, is in control of him.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, it's like when the, you know, it's like what I've told the story before, when the Americans reached out when I was an editor about 10 years ago at Commentary and the show, the Americans, the producers reached out to ask me permission to put a copy of Commentary on Air Force One. Commentary right now is not the in flight magazine of Air Force One, of Trump Force One. So whatever, you know, there's, it's not even really like, it's kind of silly to even have that discussion about, oh, the neocons are pulling him into this and that. The whole point of the Trump world is that, like, this didn't happen. He just came around to ideas that worked.

[C]

I mean, what's even sillier, if you think about it, without naming names, most of the neocons not sitting in this meeting here are against the war because in opposition to Trump.

[B]

Old neocons.

[C]

Old neocons.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Who are not.

[A]

But even people who don't identify as neocons like John Bolton is out there criticizing this administration's lack of cooperation and failure to liaise with the opposition.

[B]

Well, first of all, he's a real problem. Joe was never a neocon, number one. Number two, he's under indictment. So, like, why should he be nice? Fair enough, fair enough to the administration. They indicted him for mishandling classified information.

[D]

Like, yeah, but the great, the great Bolton's revenge is that this foreign policy of this administration is the closest we've really ever had to a President John Bolton. That's Bolton's revenge. You can indict the guy all you want, but offensive realism, where we break your nose if you step out of line but don't go in and rebuild your state for you, is a much more Boltonian approach than a neoconservative approach.

[B]

Right. Look, the neoconservative approach, this is the interesting thing. So as I say, I'm going to propose again, you go to commentary.org and read Jonathan Schanzer's piece, Regime Change Without Nation Building. Neoconservatism from the 1980s onward had about it the idea that the west was good and that the West's example should be the world's example, and that Therefore, in the 1980s, when we weren't even like, we were like, trying to get $100 million to the contras. That was it. That was the. We're trying to get a little bit of money to this ragtag force to oppose the Sandinistas, it was almost impossible to get them $100 million. I'm going to repeat that again. $100 million. Couldn't even get it to them. But while this was going on in the 1980s, all these regimes in Central and South America were being encouraged to transition from authoritarian to more republican regimes. Right. And this happened in country after country, state after state. And then we sort of had the same thing happen in the Philippines and all of that. There was this component that the world is safe if countries become more western aligned in their values and all of that. Right. So, and, and so that then this got messianic under second Bush with the second inaugural, where it's like, freedom. We're going to bring freedom to the planet over the next century. And this is our aim and this is our goal. And even people like me went, whoa, whoa, Mike Gerson, like, hold up there, buddy. You're getting a little. I understand that you're an evangelical Christian, but don't imminentize the eschaton. We're not. The world is a dangerous place and we'll remain a dangerous place. But neoconism had about it the idea that not just not regime changed at the point of a gun, but that we should, to the extent possible care that the governments that follow, because of the security that would be brought by them being more democratically aligned, we should care about their internal makeup and do what we could with soft power and advice and the international Republican and Democratic institutes and various help them write constitutions and do this and do that. Right. So that's neo Konism. That isn't just let's go to war everywhere, which wasn't even neo Konism. That's not here. Trump doesn't care. He doesn't care that Maduro has been replaced by Maduro's vice president, who is every bit as much of a commie as Maduro is. He's not gonna care.

[D]

And not just that, he's been celebrating sort of, yeah. Venezuelan victory.

[B]

I know.

[D]

Over America in the World Baseball Classic. Because he's any seriously.

[B]

I know it's ridiculous, but yeah, he's

[D]

been, look, I made Venezuela great again. Is essentially. He didn't say those words exactly, but we know that's exactly what he's thinking. I freed them and now they're good at baseball.

[B]

And he doesn't care what comes after the Iranian regime. He's not going to insist that there's a Loya jirga and then they go to democratic elections and they have a fingerprint print and whatever. I mean, he'll care because he wanted to be Western aligned and he'll want us to get the contracts to help rebuild the infrastructure and he'll want us to get the oil, but he doesn't care. So in that sense, he is not a neocon. This is not a neocon war. This does not follow the precepts of neoconservatism, if it even ever existed or exists now. And I, speaking as the world's remnant neocon, now that Bill Kristol is the opposite of a remnant neocon, speaking as the remnant neocon, trust me, there never really was a neoconservatism in any real sense. But whatever Trump is, he's not that. So this is his war. It's not my war. It's America's war. Though, of course, you wouldn't know that from everyone who writes for a newspaper in the United States who seems to think, once again, that they're not citizens of a country at war and believe that it's okay to be traitorous, as far as I can tell, but nonetheless. So that's life. It's not an Okan war. He's fighting it. And the people who are now opposing it increasingly are supposedly his closest allies, or a lot of them are his closest allies intellectually, though, of course, we do also have that polling that Harry Enton mentions all the time. 90% of Republicans are supportive of the war. 90% of Trump voters are supportive of the war. So all of this Megan Tucker, the groipers, Nick Fuentes, Joe Kent, whoever Joe Kent is gonna follow, who's ever gonna follow the door out Joe Kent? 10% of the Republican Party is on their side. I mean, that's enough to win you a, you know, an ad from Blue Bullet Coffee or, you know, buy gold or something like that on your podcast or to give you a bit of an accelerant if you run in a primary in 2028. But it does not reflect consensus opinion in the Republican Party. It reflects you're now fronting. If you're Joe Kent for Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, you're not fronting for, you know, Andrew Jackson.

[A]

We haven't even talked about the return of the moderate Iranian Mullah Clarissy notion here. Everybody we kill was the person we were gonna work with. What are you doing, guys? All you're doing is just killing off the people we could do business with Ali Larjon. Trump himself almost said something like that, where he's like, yeah, everybody posted on Twitter.

[B]

They're all dead. I know that was somebody posted on Twitter, though.

[D]

BBC's foreign affairs editor Simpson tweeted that about Larajani, and somebody posted on Twitter that he had posted. The BBC guy had posted the same thing about Assad years ago. Like how. How well did that turn out Bashar al Assad reasonable? Bashar Al Assad, a guy we can, you know, make a deal with or whatever.

[A]

But that's what they're looking for. They're peeling back the layers of the onion to find somebody farther down the chain who's willing to work with you and say, okay, we cry uncle.

[B]

So who is that? That's someone you buy. That's not someone who believes in the future of Iran and is looking for Iran to find its way into the community of nations or sees that the regime went too far and spent too much money on the nuclear program and needlessly was needlessly provocative toward Trump and did all this stuff. That's what he's got, apparently, in Ms. Rodriguez, the president of Venezuela now, the interim. Whatever title she holds. I don't even know whatever she is.

[D]

The Trump assistant to the regional manager.

[B]

Yes. The Dwight Schrudi of Venezuela. That's who he's looking for. You come in. I'll be nice to you. I'll say really nice things about you, and we'll make sure you get a couple of billion dollars in a bank account, probably when all is said and done. After all, Khamenei Jr. Supposedly has $100 billion in real estate that he owns all over the west, including a 20 million pound mansion in Belgravia. I'd like to know why, by the way, the British aren't seizing that mansion. Maybe somebody could explain to me why they're not, you know, seizing that asset while the. While we're at war with. But whatever, okay, so don't seize it.

[D]

My hope is always that when they don't do that, it's because they've wired the place and they're getting some sort

[A]

of intel because the Starmer government is just committed to British suicide. Did you know? I did not. That there isn't a single. To say nothing of the enervated British Navy, that not one of the two carriers that the UK operates has a catapult on it.

[B]

Not one. Just to explain. You have to explain what that. That means they can't fly a jet off. It is what it is.

[A]

They can't really launch an aircraft that

[B]

you cannot fly a jet off.

[A]

They're either powered by steam on the Gerald Ford, they're powered by an electromagnetic rail, which is really spectacularly cool. The Gerald Ford is one of the most impressive pieces of military equipment ever. You should look into it. But, yeah, they can't really launch jets. So what is it?

[D]

So what you're saying is Post Armor is committed to managing the decl. Decline.

[B]

I mean, to be fair to Starmer, he's. He just got in like this decline is a. Is a.

[D]

And he's about to.

[B]

It's a. It's Brit. It's Britain's decline. It's not Starmer's decline. He just doesn't mind it when Jews get set on fire. That's. That's his great contribution to Western civilization. So we get back to the Jews because it always comes back to the Jews. All I want is to be left alone. That's the point. Joe Kent wants to blame us for everything. And I would just like to be left alone, to go to shul without having people drive their cars into our buildings and to, you know, not to complain when we circumcise our children as people do in England, and to be able to slaughter meat ritually for kashrut, which in Europe is increasingly impossible. And, and to just go on as this tiny minority on the planet with this little sliver of a country and be left alone. And I'm not looking to control the world, but you know what? If you want, if you're joking, I would rather that we control the world. That the Joe can't be anywhere near, you know, the button. So if he's, if this is a fight between this sliver of people and Joe Kent, we'll fight him. We'll fight the Jo Kent's. We've been around for 4,000 years. We're going to be around for another 4,000 years. And Joe Kent's and Megyn Kelly's and Tucker Carlson's come and go and they're always there and they're always threatening and they often get people killed or they kill people and they're horrible. But you know, some people have history on their side and some people just have, you know, advertisers who want to sell coffee made in America. All right, Noah Rothman, your book is coming out in a couple of months, right?

[A]

Yeah. Less than two months. May 19th. Two months. Exactly. Almost two months.

[B]

Two months.

[A]

May 19th. It's called blood in a Century of Left Wing Violence in America. It is available for pre order now and it is a commentary product, really. You commissioned the essay on which it's based in December of 2024 and consigned me to the next two years of my life to be doing this work chronicling left wing violence in America over the course of the last century and a half or so. And why it is a problem in the United States, why there is a concerted effort to promulgate the false notion that the American political right is the font from which all political violence in America springs. And there is evidence of not a conspiracy per se, but an intimidation campaign aimed at the students of left wing violence in America, particularly those in law enforcement. Some of the studies that are cited by those who believe that the right is uniquely violent in America are authored by the participants in left wing violence initiatives, and the researchers fear for their careers and indeed for their very safety. It's a real problem and it really needs a book Link Argument we will

[B]

be hearing more about this book in due course. It is our recommendation today that you go and pre order Blood in Progress by Nora Rothman from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you get your fine books. So if you are an ebook reader, will pop right in there into your Kindle the minute that it's published at 12:01am on publication date May 19th. Very exciting. It's a wonderful book. And it's not just wonderful because I commissioned the original article. I read this book and it is an important, very important contribution to our understanding of American history. So Noah Rothman, as ever, a joy to have you. Listen to Noah and the editors. Go read him today, tomorrow and every [e-mail] and for Abe and Seth, I'm John Pot horiz. Keep the candle burning.