E (5:46)

Can I, can I suggest that maybe the. There are some reasonable uncertainties that separating those of us who are concerned about the trajectory of some of these uncertainties is not the same as I think what you've just described. John, I saw a lot of that commentary over the weekend as well. But you know, Mojitabak Khamenei's appointment, the son's appointment is not a great sign coming right after Trump announcing that he would not accept him as a leader. He himself did a stint in the IRGC as a young man in it's clearly a doubling down on, on no regime change, Israel and the US working together. That has to continue to be sustained. We've got Witkoff going over to Israel, I think today or tomorrow to go have some negotiations. We have to make, make sure that relationship stays on the same page with regard to the goals of the war. The oil prices are a huge challenge. And I don't think that Trump did himself any good this weekend saying, well, we'll have some near term pain. But everyone understands, unless they're a fool, they understand this is what's going to happen. Obviously people understand that's what's going to happen. But the question is, when will that end? The China stuff is interesting to me because actually they're in a very tough position as well. They get most of, they get a ton of oil from Iran and they're now having their access to that cut off. But I do think we've had seven dead Americans. So I think the uncertainty is what's fueling some of the sort of polling data from regular Americans understanding of this war and that some of those uncertainties I think could be clarified in the coming weeks. But it is very early, very early in this conflict. So the looming uncertainty is how long do we think it's going to last till we've reached our goals?

A (7:30)

I have no problem having conversations about uncertainty. I am referring to articles that are stating baldly in the Atlantic, in all over the place that are saying things like we're losing is what I'm saying. Now, is there an oil shock? Is there a price hike when there is a war in the Middle East? Yes. That price hike has now brought prices to the level they were four years ago, during which happened after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, which was not taking place near oil fields because world disruptions lead to an increase in oil prices. So if Trump says anybody's a fool who didn't think that this was going to go like this, what he means, of course, is that he's reading it through his own perceptions, which is when they were talking about whether or not to go ahead, the thing was they would say, okay, well here, here's what you can expect. You can expect that we're going to have to start restocking our, you know, we're going to have to make some cheap, we have to make some more drones, we're going to have to make some cheap ballistic missiles if we can, as fast as we can. And there's going to be an oil shock because that's what happens at these moments, particularly if it happens in the Middle East. And so he already heard that and acknowledged it and he's annoyed that people are bringing it up. And I'm now going to say something that I hope everybody isn't going to like throw rocks at me and say I'm a terrible person. But if you say that the United States is committing itself to a major war with a 90 million person country with one of the largest standing armies in the world and a huge number of ballistic missiles and all of that. And after eight days, seven Americans have been killed in the course of this major military conflict. And I said, you say seven. I'm sorry. We are now grading on a negative curve. It's like when Britain and Nazi Germany went to war. Nothing happened in the first seven days. But you know, by, by the, by, by the, by the spring of 1940, the, you know, London was being air bombed and 25,000 people got killed in a month. Seven servicemen died. Not even in combat, as far as we can tell in the sense of an actual conflict between a guy with a gun and another guy with a gun or a guy with a plane and another guy with a plane. So this is a very. The only plane we know that has been shot down on our side was shot down from friendly fire. And when the pilot hit the ground, the Kuwaitis came out running to give them water and say thanks for coming.

E (10:17)

So I don't think that's how the American people. Well, I won't speak for the American people. I don't think that's the right calculation to make about the loss of American lives in any sort of military conflict. I don't think they're comparing it.

A (10:28)

Then you can't have a military conflict if that's the case. I'm just saying that absorbing seven deaths,

E (10:33)

I'm just saying if the administration's message is trust us, we know what we're doing and we have goals in mind, then any serviceman's death is a tragedy. And that's going to go into the American people's calculation of whether, how long it's going to be. The other thing we heard over the weekend were sort of hints from Hegseth and others that maybe they would send, there would be boots on the ground. That that's certainly a possibility. And that. So I think people are making that assessment on a lot of the, again, a lot of these uncertainties. Will we be sending more troops on the ground? Will there be more loss of American lives? So it's not just the number of lives. It's the fact that there could be many more. And people are uncertain about if that might be the case.

C (11:13)

John, sorry, you're sort of marveling at the media coverage and the columns in the Atlantic. And if you pull up the front page of the New York Times now at the top of the fold is Iran's choice of leaders signals defiance. Oil prices jump above $100 a barrel. US missile hit naval base beside Iranian school. I think this is what you're talking about, a just sort of roar from the media complex of negativity about the war. And my interpretation of this is that much of it is wishcasting, that this goes terribly because it's Trump that's prosecuting the war. And so well, this war may, may well end up poorly. It could, you know, there's just a tremendous amount of uncertainty. As you say, eight days in, it's just not going poorly, even though we're reading that it's going poorly. And if you're China, what you're seeing is just an astonishing display of air power by the two mightiest air forces in the world. You cannot be looking at this and thinking this is a good thing for you when you were buying oil at a discount from Iran. And on the oil part, it is clear that Iran is trying to inflict massive damage to the markets. And that calculation is obviously Trump cares about the markets and he's watching these things and he's sensitive to them. So that will be interesting to watch how that plays out, how it affects his prosecution of the war. But it is impossible rationally to conclude a week in a little more than a week in that this war is going poorly, that our enemies are perceiving that they are not. But the President is also up against in media complex that is telling the American people things are going poorly.

A (13:22)

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B (16:18)

point, it's not just because it's Trump. It's Trump and bb. This is, this is, you know, some this is a combo they cannot handle. I do think that the uncertainty about the end game that was there from the start is very much still there. I know Trump had said at the end of last week that he demands total surrender that seems to have been sort of defined down.

C (16:48)

I don't think they're clear on it.

B (16:50)

Yeah, I agree. So that's a problem.

A (16:55)

I there are. Let's take a spectrum of how to respond to a deadly serious geopolitical moment. Right. I think we all agree that it should be met with sobriety. We're doing something very serious, high risk, you know, using destructive force. Two nations against a very bad actor that is conscienceless and remorseless and will do whatever it thinks is necessary to get itself out of the box that we are in. It's a complicated, multifarious, multi headed problem requiring all kinds of creative footwork and improvisation to deal with whatever happens that goes along the way. And so triumphalism is, it would be a terrible way to respond, not only as a matter of public relations, but as a matter of seriousness. Like, this is deadly. This is as serious as a country gets when it uses military force in this fashion. So sobriety is a virtue. And it is of course not a virtue that the Trump administration is aware of or believes is a virtue. And so it becomes a problem. Trump wants to win, claim victory three seconds after he does something, rather than say, we are determined to see this through. The American people have resilience and strength and fortitude, as do, as does our military. And we will see this through and achieve our aim and make the world a better place and make for our interests, make America healthier, the world safer, whatever. And this will take time. And we are ready to invest that time. And so far our efforts are meeting with success. He can't do that. It's not in his emotional toolkit to do that. On the other side is the insta we suck line that happens every single time America uses force, including when beloved Democrats use force. Because force is the problem in a certain international relations. Understanding the use of force is a failure. The use of force is an evil. The use of force should not be taken out of the toolbox. People said that the Libya mission was failing six hours after it started. That was Obama's mission. And so the Obamas, of course, immediately said, no, no, it's not our mission. We're leading from. We're not. It's their mission. And then when it started looking like it was good, then they tried to take claim and credit for it by saying, we're leading from behind. It's not that we're not. We're not like support, we're leading, but we're leading from behind. One of the great quotes of the 21st century thus far, but the fact that there's an entire world of people at the ready who are ready to say that it's bad. It's just like push a button and they're there to say it's bad. And I'm not talking just about like anti war neck you know, pacifists or people who are, like, just resolutely anti American, but a certain type, the Tom Ricks type again, the people who are publishing in the Atlantic and others. When Elliot Cohen, who was not somebody I put in this camp, says, as he said last week, I don't know how the war is going, he says it after three days. That's right. I mean, we don't know how the war is going. If by the war you mean is the regime falling? You know, are the steps that are being taken sufficient to make the regime fall? And for Iran's future to be a different future than Iran, than the trajectory that Iran was on, that is unknowable after three days, which is why you want sobriety, purpose and intention. And if you want to know what that's like, go read a transcript of the speech that Netanyahu made on Saturday to the Israeli people after, after, after Shabbat, which is. And of course, Israel's now been through this since October 7th, which is, we've seen this before. We're all showing, you know, we have to be strong. We have, you know, everyone's going into shelters and we're doing what we have to do, and this is what it's like. And our, our military is amazing, and we're going to do whatever we have to do, sober, serious, you know, you know, serious as a heart attack and, you know, going ahead. And obviously, that is not something we get from our leaders, and it's right now, and that's bad. But he's also facing Trump, is also facing Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries declaring this effort a fail, like rooting implicitly, almost like salaciously hungry for bad news because they believe good news will help Trump, and they're on the trajectory for a big victory in 2026, and they don't want that stopped.

D (22:24)

Well, that's what feels like what's behind the oil panic, especially because, you know, it's not. We're not in the position that we were in in the 1970s with global energy. Right. We're an exporter. The United States is an energy exporter. And so, you know, there's the desire to reach for a comparison that, you know, can scare people. That's what, that's what strikes me as, like, the obvious. Like they're trying to find something, you know, like they wait until the oil stuff sets in. But as you said, In 2022, we had prices that were this high. We don't know what's going to happen exactly. With them. But the idea that nobody expected oil prices to go up is silly. Right? I mean, nobody obviously people expected this. And there's some been some other comments about how like there was a story that said the Trump administration said they were really surprised by Iran's committed response to the war and they didn't expect them to fight this hard for this long or something like that. And it's like, I don't know who you're talking to, but that's insane. And you have to realize that that's like people are going to dumpster diving. On the other hand, they aren't really getting a clear description of the mission from the president. But I think that that's partly because he can't tell people how it ends. He can't tell people how the war ends. And that is the question that his detractors right now seem most wanting to pose to him. How does this war end?

A (24:06)

I don't agree. I think he said how he sees the war ending. And maybe we, you know, maybe they're trying to define what it means. He said unconditional surrender. This war ends when Iran acknowledges that it has been defeated in the war. That is how we will know that the war ends. And that can come in a thousand different ways. And one of the reasons, and by the way, let's just talk about the boots on the ground thing. Of course he should now in terms of sobriety. Of course he shouldn't rule out boots on the ground. He's in the middle of a military conflict with another nation. It has to believe that we're going to use whatever means we have to hand to defeat them. We're unilaterally negotiating with ourselves about what our war strategy is. We're trying to soothe public concerns about what our war strategy is. Winning the war is the primary.

C (25:03)

You know, the same goes for the length of time.

A (25:06)

Yeah.

E (25:07)

Like, although again, if it's a war, then he then and he's going to send troops if there's going to be boots on the ground. And he sees an extended conflict which clearly is what Iran wants to draw us into. And it's not just oil. Half of the world's nitrogen based fertilizers come out of the Gulf region. Our farmers use those. I mean, there will be these cascading economic effects beyond oil. But they know they just want to wait out Israel and the U.S. that's what the Iranian regime's want goal is. They think we will blink. And so if we're not going to blink, which I think has been Trump's pretty consistent messaging about this conflict and it is going to stretch into weeks and months and it is going to involve more troops sent with boots on the ground. That's a war and that requires congressional approval. And he will have to seek it if he doesn't want to lose. Whatever amount of public trust is sort of very fragile right now, but exists for this conflict. It is not technically a war. So if it's going to become a war, that's a different. That, that is something approval for.

A (26:03)

Okay, but boots on the ground also has 10,000 different meanings. Let me just give you an example. Total. We have total air superiority, right? And we. And Iran is like rel is relatively pacified and like staggered and doesn't know what to do. And there is Natanz or in Fordow and supposedly, as we're now hearing the Iranians bragging that they know that they have enough uranium, enriched uranium, for 11 bombs, but it's buried under there. And we then read these reports that say that there's, you know, sort of like a little hole that, you know, people can kind of climb into and then maybe get in and go three, you know, 400ft down and find the uranium, which is in canisters right now, supposedly the hole isn't big enough to pull the canisters through and they don't know where it is, but it's down there. Right? So let's say all of that is true. There are the canisters, they have the enriched uranium. It was, you know, the access to it was blown to smithereens in the 12 Day War. And we need 250 special forces to go secure it along with Israelis to go land in the desert. Go to the spot, blow a hole open, go down, take it out, bring it out. Are those boots on the ground as you calculate? It is? The use of Special Forces with some training on how to secure nuclear material along with Israelis. Does that constitute an expansion of the war to ground forces? Because I say it doesn't. What we mean by ground forces are, you know what happened in 1991, we had 500,000 people in the desert of Saudi Arabia ready to go. That was the overwhelming conventional force that our Joint Chiefs then said we needed in order to secure our war aims. Half a million people at arms in the region at that time. That's boots on the ground. Special forces doing mop up operations in places. Again, this is a question I'm posing. Do we need a congressional authorization of war so that 250 guys can go in and get out the nuclear materials.

E (28:42)

If that's going to happen in a month or two, perhaps. I'm not sure. It's just the matter of troops. It's the amount of time a conflict can be considered a temporary. What's the phrase? Someone was sending around a hilarious cartoon military operation. Yeah. A limited military operation. I think the American public has in the past really shown a lot of leeway, given a lot of leeway to the commander in chief for that. We're more polarized now. Yes. But I think that still remains. But if you're talking six months from now, if they're doing that, I'm not. I think there has been. This grace period will not last forever is all I'm suggesting.

A (29:18)

There is no grace period.

C (29:19)

Are you, Are you talking about the cartoon that we had?

E (29:22)

Yes.

C (29:22)

War versus war and kinetic military operations.

A (29:29)

Military operations in peace.

E (29:31)

Yeah.

A (29:32)

Yeah.

B (29:34)

I just want to say my general reaction here is. I mean, I'm. I would say buckle up, because the, the reaction from the places that you're talking about is only going to get more negative because war by nature generates bad headlines one after another. They're going to keep coming. And there's also going to be all, all the stories about the horrible things that, that we've done or that Israel has done or is doing. This is like, we've seen this every time. I mean, we, we saw this during

A (30:11)

the 12 Day War.

B (30:12)

I mean, the stories immediately came out about how we didn't. We didn't inflict the damage on Iran's nuclear program that Trump said we did. You know, this is, whatever you're seeing, this is the grace period, as far as I'm concerned.

A (30:31)

Right.

D (30:32)

It's also, it's kind of reminiscent of, like, the Trump terms more widely, which is like, you know, when they look at corruption or something like that. And it's like, oh, Trump, you know, did this with Ukraine. We should impeach him. And everybody is like, well, wait a second. I promise you he's going to give you a pretty good reason to impeach him if you give him long enough. You know, it's like three months in, they're like, all right, pull the impeachment trigger. You know, and then it's like. And then his family does, like, some bitcoin deal with, you know, with the UAE or whatever, and it's like, oh, maybe we should have waited until he did the bitcoin deal. But, you know, we went first with you. It feels like that, like people expect. But the truth is that as the war goes on. There are going to be worse headlines, and there are going to be snafus, and there are going to be mistakes. And they're, you know, we. We saw the first taste of it with the school that was near the IRGC compound.

A (31:27)

Let's talk about the school. Okay, so the school is a very good example of. And you guys are right, the school next to a. Next to a military facility, and nobody knows how it was hit. And the New York Times, obsessionally now, for a week, has had a team of 20 people desperately trying to prove that the United States hit the school. Their purpose is to prove the United States hit the school, which it likely did, but it's a question of emphasis and the resources that are being deployed and why. Right. Which is, if the school was hit, it was totally inadvertent. We have no reason to hit a school. We're not looking to inflict civilian damage. The opposite. We want to. We want the Iranian civilian populace to want to rise up and be, you know, against their regime and to what they're doing.

C (32:30)

And the coverage of what they're doing is totally minimized by comparison.

A (32:35)

And so that's my point, which is so they're literally expending. They have like, this digital team and they're looking at videos and they're doing. They're plotting trajectories, and it's second by second. And all of this in order to. To prove this case. That's one thing that was done. And then the other, which is, I think, comic, is an American submarine blew up an Iranian ship, and then it didn't go rescue the soldiers who were in the water. Again, it's not our job in the middle of a war against an enemy to rescue their soldiers from the water. Never in the history of warfare has it been the responsibility of a navy to rescue the people from another boat. In part because unlike on a battlefield where you can take POWs, ships have limited capacity for people and there's nowhere to put them. And they'll come and they'll try to kill you with their knives or they'll try to strangle you after you bring them out of the water or something like that. So suddenly, America is being held to a preposterous, unreasonable standard that somehow, if Iran had cared about its navy, it would have agreed to the terms in Geneva and then there would have been no war because it didn't want America to be attacking its ships and killing its sailors. Other thing that's going on is that the UAE is being hit by thousands of Drones and being struck by thousands of ballistic missiles, right? Where's the New York Times cover? Where is the New York Times showing Iran's cluster bomb attacks? The trajectory.

D (34:19)

This is, I mean, this is an extension of everything since October 7th, right? This is, this is an extension of what we've been seeing for two and a half years, right? And this is, this is the attention being paid to. It is exactly, the ratio is exactly the same, right? I mean, they view these outlets, view their job as finding a way to convict America and Israel of atrocities. They, they're the icc.

A (34:46)

Otherwise, they would say otherwise.

D (34:48)

Of course they would say otherwise.

A (34:50)

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D (39:00)

Well, but also the other thing that bothers me is the assumption that every death in the war is on the US and Israel. This is, this is also what's, what's similar to, you know, the past to the post October 7th war in Gaza and elsewhere, which is the idea that if you fire, if you, if you build a military compound and you put a school in the middle of it and, you know, you make it a target, that it's automatically the fault of, you know, the army who hit it. But even, even if that is like this idea that, you know, there's these stories like in the New York Times, there was this headline that was like, Fear and fury or something in Iran. And it was like all the, what the terrible position that the civilians are caught between. Right. And all that stuff. And it's like, yeah, well, their regime was mowing them down in the street before this, the period before the war was the Iranian government taking guns out into the street and shooting these people dead. So it's like the idea that because we decided to hit back or because we decided to, to intervene in a situation in which every Western country said something needed to be done, all the deaths in the war are on us, not on the country that began this war 47 years ago, not on the country that has been mowing down its civilians.

E (40:29)

Let me just add one I agree with, definitely with what you're all saying about how the media, New York Times in particular, how they're trying to frame this narrative. We actually read all these stories, but most people don't. And one concern I have in terms of the domestic response to the, especially if this conflict needs to continue for weeks and into months to be successful, is that most people just read the headlines. So we. They are seeing the. They get most of their information on social media. They see school children, hundreds of school children killed at the beginning of this conflict. This is terrible. And they keep having that served up to them on whatever platforms that they get their information. The response from the administration should take that into consideration. But so far, I haven't seen that. I've seen kind of stupid memes and like, compilations with like, of action movies. It doesn't seem serious. And, John, your point earlier is absolutely right about the need to have some sobriety and seriousness. I do think they could have some success in messaging about what they're doing. They don't have to respond to these ridiculous claims in the stories in the New York Times. But I would like to see something that is a little more of a concerted communication effort about this conflict. I just haven't seen that.

A (41:39)

Look, I mean, it's ridiculous or preposterous to compare Trump to Churchill. Like, Churchill is a unique historical figure in the sense that he was a leader of a country that was being humiliated. You know, he came into power, country was being humiliated in war. Not just being defeated in war, but humiliated in war. He had warned that this might happen. It came to pass. It took three years, four years for the tide to turn in the favor of Britain and the Allies. And so he, from a position of great weakness, went on the radio and went to the people and said, things are going terribly right. I mean, the Dunkirk Speech, One of the greatest speeches ever given on the planet is a speech, the first two thirds of which are about how awful things are and what in fact we in Britain might have to do in case we're taken over the Nazis land and take the islands of Great Britain where we will be then. I mean, he actually made. He was not like, we are never going to, you know, and concluded by saying, if they come, we will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the streets and we will never surrender. Right. So I'm not saying so there you have the example of not just sobriety, but like recognition of reality, where a leader takes a moment and says, I'm going to treat you like grownups. Things are terrible. We did have this triumph getting these people off the beach in Dunkirk, but there's no denying that Dunkirk was a catastrophe for us. And I'm not going to pretend or claim or say anything otherwise. Again, Trump's impulse is to say, this is going at a 15 and we're great and my God, and then his idiot staff, you know, these sort of social media moron kids, then you know, clip together scenes from parody action movies to try to rally and buck up the spirits of the American people. It's an embarrassment and it is an embarrassment and it's shameful and it will harm his legacy in some sense if this gets way more complex. He needs a little bit of Churchill in the sense that he go at any moment and say, here's what's gone well, here's what we need to do better, here's where we're going. Right. But I think in part because he knows what you know, which is that the more defined as a war this event is, the more buy in he is going to need from other politicians whom he is trying to ignore, because he does not trust that they will not hand him a humiliating defeat. I mean, think about the House of Representatives, which doesn't really play a role, but it could always do a. It could always do a. Yeah, it would play a role in a war, in a declaration of war. But, you know, he's got a four seat majority in the House, he's got 10 lunatic Republicans in the House who, you know, are isolationists or whatever. You could say they're not lunatics, a couple of them are lunatics. He doesn't know that that's going to go the way he wants it to go. And he's concerned that in the middle of a war, the American public, the American people, as expressed with the will of their representatives, is going to say no. Then we're really in the soup because we're halfway in. And then America pulls the plug on its own efforts, regardless of where they are. This is a weird moment that didn't even happen in Vietnam until 1974. Congress did not vote against any effort that we made in Vietnam until a year before Vietnam fell, when it started pulling money away. That's 11 years that Congress, even though Vietnam was unpopular and, you know, Democrats had 275,000 seat majority in the House and all of that, nonetheless, American members of Congress don't vote against our troops when they're fighting in the field. And one last. I know, I'm sorry, I'm just like, dumb. I'm like monologizing here. But Harry Anton made the point on CNN yesterday that if you ask that polling, asking people how they feel about the war, that people who have served in the military in the United States support the war effort by 20 points. So people who know what combat is like, people who have seen people, their friends die in combat or have had to suffer combat wounds themselves or dealt with the trauma of combat and PTSD and all of that, they nonetheless believe in the utility of force and they support this mission by landslide numbers. And it is Americans who have never seen combat, who have never met a person in uniform, who don't care, who have no patriotic feeling about this country whatsoever, who oppose this effort by 50 points. You think that's, you think that's because they're worried about our troops? They don't care about our troops. They don't care about the condition of the military. They don't. They hate the military and they hate people who are in uniform, even if they learn for a while to say, I honor your service, some of them. But I mean, I think that's important to note that when people say, well, there are people dying, it's. I immediately go, my BS detector goes off. Whether or not they care. I don't think they care, to be honest.

E (47:48)

Well, the politics of a lot of the Democrats right now saying Trump should have come to Congress, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, there weren't actually officially declarations of war from Congress for any of those conflicts, but administrations had to go to Congress for funding and for what is the Tonkin Resolution for Johnson in Vietnam. So there are cases where, I mean, in this administration will fail, face this sort of deadline itself when it comes to funding for this war. This war is very costly, which I think is another reason they don't want to call it a war. They want to call it a very limited conflict because they will eventually have to go before Congress for appropriations, not just perhaps for this conflict, but to rebuild our arsenal after it's over. So in that sense, I think long term strategy for Trump's legacy for his second term, he's being, he's burning a lot of potential capital now by not even keeping more of them in the loop or I mean, perhaps this is going on behind the scenes. I haven't seen a lot of reporting about it. I know he's been, they've been briefing leaders of both parties throughout. But that's something I hope someone in the administration is thinking about long term because we will need to appropriate and rebuild our arsenal after this is over.

A (48:59)

Very important. Well, so let's move on to the question of Iran's response or response of people who explicitly or implicitly side with, with Iran in the streets of New York City. As a possible bellwether harbinger moment, there was this rally designed last Friday by a January 6th protester which was, you know, let reverse the Islamization of New York City or something like that. So protest outside of City Hall. And of course every liberal politician in New York City lined up to say this is disgraceful, it's white supremacy, it's Islamophobic and all of that. But then in the middle of it, an 18 kid, 18 year old kid and 19 year old kid from Pennsylvania run into the middle of the street having made an improvised explosive device, two improvised explosive devices, threw it at people and then ran away and were apprehended. And the, they didn't work, but they had an accelerant, they had a product in them that was, is used for the purpose of creating roadside bombs and igniting roadside bombs. And there were nails in the package. So it was supposed to be a nail bomb blow up and then spew nails at whoever was nearby. They've been arrested. At least one of the homes of the two of them, one of them both born here, American citizens, one with parents from Afghanistan and one with parents from Iraq. No Turkey. I'm sorry, but they're, they're American citizens. One of their homes has been raided. It's clear they were motivated by I, by they, they self educated apparently, by watching ISIS videos and things like that. And so that's the other shoe that may be dropping here is the question of whether or not there is going to be domestic terrorism in response to our decision to go into this conflict. And of course this came on the heels of the revelation that the wife of Zoran Mamdani had on October 7th. On October 8th, liked, according to Olivia Rheingold of the Free Press, 80 or 90 posts celebrating the murder, rape and death spree of Hamas, to which Mamdani responded angrily that he loves her, she's a private citizen and what she says privately doesn't matter. Just imagine you know, Melania Trump liking white supremacist posts or something like that, just as a comparison point.

E (52:08)

And when actually don't imagine Melania, we have an example in Justice Alito's wife flying a patriotic flag and being called a white supremacist because she did that and being attacked in multiple stories in the New York Times.

A (52:19)

Right.

D (52:20)

And then even Dan Goldman's wife got a story in the New York Times about his.

A (52:26)

Dan Goldman's. Right. Yes. Well, that's a whole. We should talk about that tomorrow because I think there's a whole thing we need to talk about about anti Semitism tomorrow because there's also this wave of anti Semitism. We don't have time to deal with it today. And the Goldman's wife story is part of that. But Mamdani went on social media and did the following. He said he named the white supremacist organizer of the rally and said, he's disgusting, you know, and he should, you know, this has no place in Islamophobia. It has no place in our country. So. And then he said, but what happened after was more disturbing. Terrorism has no place in our society. And I commend the police department. The police were so brave. And I'm working with Jessica Tisch. Goodbye. He did not name the suspects. He did not say that one of them had yelled Allahu Akbar as he threw the bomb. He did not mention the fact that this was something that happened as a counterweight to this protest. And so we have the mayor of New York City covering for an act of Islamist terror in New York City. I mean, I don't want to go into the can you imagine just a quarter century after 9, 11, this would be happening thing, because I think we've already been through that. The fact that he got elected in the first place is itself a miracle of, of historical forgetting. But I don't know, is the Democratic Party, is this how they're going to handle this? They're going to talk about Islamophobia when there's a terrorist attack on American soil by Islamists because 12 schleps are standing in front of Gracie Mansion yelling he.

C (54:28)

His comments were intended to shed light on the you know, right wing protesters, naming them, talking them, what they're about and then to obscure the actual violent, you know, threat outside his mansion. His exact line is. What followed was even more disturbing, which would give you no sense of what actually followed. Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The, the attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, blah, blah, but essentially you'd be left with no idea of what actually happened.

D (55:14)

And what struck me is, well, you'd have the opposite. You'd have. You. You would be left thinking that it was the protesters who did it, even that it was the anti Islamic protesters responsible for the bomb.

A (55:27)

Yeah.

C (55:28)

And what struck me is that, you know, Mamdani is of the, you know, Islamic far left and it would take real, you know, balls for him to call out these people in his ranks, which he's not going to do and which is a project that like we're sort of engaged in on this podcast talking about anti Semitism on the right and the problems on the right. And it's clear he's not going to do this because he shares their sympathies at a fundamental level.

B (56:06)

Yeah, I mean, you know, nice liberal New Yorkers are. Consider it a revelation that Mamdani's wife has liked 80.

C (56:18)

Yeah, exact.

B (56:20)

In support of Hamas. The all the 20 year old would be jihadist or jihadists out there. This is no revelation to them. They, they knew this. This.

C (56:35)

That's why they like him.

B (56:36)

Yeah, exactly.

A (56:38)

He.

B (56:38)

He had given this, the permission for this a long time ago.

C (56:42)

And by the way, John and I were texting last night. I was so amused by the New York Times describing the assailants in this attack as. What was it, John? It was counter protesters staring down ultra right wing protesters. An obvious attempt to cast them in the best possible. How do you cast would be terrorists in the best possible light? Well, they were just there counter protesting a far right wing protest.

A (57:18)

I think all of this, I think all this suggests an unbelievably successful 25 year PSYOP that really came to fruition in the last two and a half years after October 7th. Which is that the, that the New York Times, the good liberals that Abe is talking about, who of course would never support terrorism and are horrified at the loss of life and rapes and things of Hamas and feel this way nonetheless have been schooled in the idea that participating in Islamophobia is one of the most egregious acts you can possibly do and that there needs to be a kind of corporate and sonnetaire around any event that happens in America involving somebody of the Islamic faith where there is some kind of confrontation with authorities or violent or anything. And that as a result, you are not to mention their faith. You are not to mention the role that their faith plays or where they're from or what they do. They are just first Amen activists. They are just counter protesters. They are this. Because if you don't, you are essentially participating implicitly in a white supremacist act of bigotry. So if this is inherited in you and you, like, have it as an operating part of your operating system, you know how to do this without anybody saying, don't mention that they're Muslim. Don't mention that they said aloha Akbar. You just censor it yourself. Because your hierarchy of values has anti Islamophobia at the top. It's very, very important. And this has been, you know, I mean, I. I even remember when this. To be honest, I could. I can pinpoint the moment that this started with in a very weird way. It's 1990, 1991. We're about to start these wars in the Middle east, you know, partially to save Muslim countries from other Muslim countries. And what comes out in 1991, but the Walt Disney film Aladdin, right, Huge hit, and it begins with a song called Arabian Nights. And at some point, there's a joke about. In the song, there's a lyric about cutting hands off, like, because of, you know, with a thief. And a anti Arab American Discrimination Committee was formed to start pressuring Disney to remove this from subsequent versions of Aladdin on the grounds that it would stimulate hostility toward Muslims. And I think led by one of the Zogby brothers. There was a Zogby who was in Congress, and there was a Zogby who was a pollster, I can't remember which one. And it was successful. Disney, a second version of the song released on the. On the. On the VHS tape kind of took the joke out, added different things, and they were off to the races, you know, successful. And you can even say, okay, that's sort of understandable, right? Like, it's. It's like a hit out of nowhere. It's disrespectful, whatever. They got their way. But it was. It was the opening moment in what is now 35 years later, a thing where the New York Times does not report or does not highlight the fact that a nail bomber from either Turkey or Afghanistan or, you know, with Turkish, Turkish or Afghanistan roots, parents are immigrants from Turkey and Afghanistan threw a Nail bomb and said Allahu Akbar and was led by isis. I see. I just got an alert on my phone that the New York Times has now done a story saying the federal government is. The feds are investigating this as an act of terror inspired by ISIS. But that took 48 hours, 96 hours before they reported that or, like, made it a central feature of the coverage. I want to talk about the Times. So, like, we always talking about the Times, it is the only really successful journalistic organization in the world right now. Everything else is failing in class.

D (61:54)

The Times also had a headline that. That people are, you know, were making a lot of fun of that. They also changed and came around. But the initial headline on the story was smoking jars of metal and fuses thrown at protest near mayor's house. Like, you know, so, as I said and then. And it has now been changed. The headline now says, homemade bomb thrown at protest near. But it's like, no, they. They talk wires and some circuit boards,

E (62:23)

like a science fair project.

D (62:26)

Dissecting the car rams, et cetera.

A (62:29)

Right.

E (62:29)

Car.

A (62:30)

Car rams into people. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I just think that that's. What's interesting here, is that now there is this war. We are fighting a war against an irredentist, millenarian, evil regime that deploys its faith to make the case that it has the right to develop a nuclear bomb to blow up a country with people from another faith. And we are acting as though it is the victim because of 35 years of training for the liberal elite and everybody else, that the crime of con. That confronting Islamism is itself almost implicitly a crime because it leads to Islamophobia. It's sort of like how, you know, the problem of music is that it leads to dancing. You know, that joke about fundamentalist Christians,

E (63:27)

we call that clothed fornication.

A (63:29)

Thank you very much. Yes. Okay. So anyway, but it would be, you know, yeah, the administration needs to wise up and sirius up and all of that and do this the right way. But it is fighting cultural. It is fighting cultural riptides and a cultural current that is, you know, way predates it and that has all kinds of institutional support and has, as I say, I think, infected the brains of leading figures in our culture and in our media and all of that. And that virus that they have, the Epstein Barr virus that they have, that flares up every time, you know, there's a moment of stress, will have this, you know, effect. And so Trump's general feeling about this, when the media behave this way toward him, even if, when it happens. And he's justly being investigated for bad conduct. Is all the, all they'll ever, all they want to do is destroy me. So I can't even begin to think about how to neutralize them or, you know, or, or win the argument with them because there's no winning an argument with them. So we'll. I'm just gonna barrel ahead. And that's probably. That's bad in this context because the country is engaged in a national mission and it would be.

E (65:04)

I would like to hear from the administration's counterterrorism units about safety, about the. These attacks are unfortunately likely.

A (65:13)

We just lost the leader of our counterterrorism, you know, because her $220 million ad campaign didn't deal with any questions like this, but rather had her on a horse talking about self deporting. So that's her job. That's why we set up the Department of Homeland Security was to prevent terrorist acts on American soil. That was the entire idea behind the reorganization of the federal government in 2001 and 2002 because there was a new threat to the homeland and we got no one there running it. And I don't even know who is head of counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, but I bet it's no one that good. If I had to bet. But the humanist church could deploy. Anyone, you know, could have Tom. It could ask the Senate. It could ask Tom Cotton to do it. You know, it could ask anybody to do it. Rubio could do it along with his other 27 other jobs.

E (66:05)

Not give that poor man another job.

A (66:10)

Okay, I have a very important recommendation to make because it's very salient to this moment politically, ideologically, culturally and in terms of our understanding of what's going on right now on Hulu for free. If you are a Disney plus or Hulu subscriber, and this is unlike. I'm getting this right, it is on Hulu. Last week I said something was on Netflix that was on Hulu, but this is on Hulu is a film called It Was Just an Accident. It's the seventh or eighth film by the Iranian director, writer, director Jafar Panahi, who won an Oscar 20 years ago for a really brilliant movie about divorce in an Islamic country called A Separation, but has made many others. He is a weird kind of semi dissident because they don't. They haven't locked him up and thrown away the key as, as they would if this were the Soviet Union. But he has been jailed several times. He makes very Small movies without permission from the regime. He often makes them in secret, which is to say when you actually watch them, you can see how the camera work is being done in the most unobtrusive possible way without any fancy shots or anything, because he's got a, you know, jump out of a car, film a scene, jump back in the car before anybody spots them working a lot of interiors, a lot of stuff done in inside things so that, you know, it's not seen that the authorities don't seem from the street. And he's made five or six movies this way, but it was, it was just an accident. Which won the Palme d' or at Khan and is up for the Oscar for best International Film. And for screenplay is a black comic, dark, brilliant tale of a surprise moment in time when a former prisoner stumbles upon the man, a man who he thinks was his torturer in what is was clearly Evan Prison, the notorious place where distance have been taken in Iran and kidnaps him, grabs him, puts him in his van, but he isn't really sure that it's the guy and so he needs. He can't do what he wants to do, which is kill him without some kind of like a second witness of his evil confirming that this has happened. And I don't know how it's been sort of hijinks ensue, more people end up getting involved in trying to identify who he is. And then there's a complication involving a pregnancy and a wedding and another wedding. And it has this weird picaresque, semi comic quality. But it is of course, a blistering tragedy and a portrait of a society of good people who have been driven into terror and, you know, whose lives have been ruined by the estate that tortures them and mistreats them and empowers sadistic monsters to do the same to them. It's gripping. It's. I, I'm telling you this because like, I avoided watching it because I thought, oh no, it's going to be one of these, like where they yell at you for two hours about torture. And that's not. This is a sort of gripping comic thriller almost with qualities of a movie like Anora in that it just keeps kind of like building, like they can't quite get to doing the thing that they want to do because they keep getting interrupted by weird events and new players entering the scene and all of that. And so it's unbelievably clever, subtle, powerful, funny. It was just an accident. And here's the thing, it's not going to win the Oscar because sentimental Value, the very beloved Norwegian movie about acting and that's also up for Best Picture, but isn't going to win Best Picture. So it's almost certainly going to win best international Film. And that's a tragedy because what would be great, even though it's a pretty good movie, but not the equal of this one, what would be great is if it was just an accident, one which it would probably in any other year because it won the Palme d' Orod Khan, but because somebody would get up. I don't know if it would be Panahi because I don't know where he is or if he's able to come to the States or anything. But to get up in the middle of this war in front of the audience at the Oscar Theater and in front of the world and talk about Iran, I have to say supports the war as opposed to the war, but talks about his work and dealing with living under that. His work is about what it has been like for the last 47 years to live under this barbaric, monstrous regime, particularly and for artists and for people who are liberal in a sort of Western sense. And that would be a moment of political clarity at this event that always features political horror and will likely feature political horrors this year as well. So among the tragedies portrayed in it was just an accident. What you will not see on screen there is the profound cosmic injustice of it not winning the award next Sunday. That it should win both for itself as a work of art and for the world as a revelation of what it's like for Iranians who want this regime gone. So Hulu, Disney plus It was just an accident. We'll be back tomorrow for Eliana, Seth, Christine and Abam. John Podhortz, Keep the candle burning. Foreign

F (72:53)

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