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Hope for the best, expect the worst
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Some drink champagne Some die at first no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect the
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worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, July 10, 2026. I am John Pod Hortz, the editor of Commentary. With me is always Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, Jim.
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A
Did I say editor or evitor? I think I said eviter, but I don't think you're ever.
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C
I could try.
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B
Okay.
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A
We could change your title to Executive
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C
Editor
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A
Senior Eviter, Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
And contributing eviter, a columnist with the Free Press, and of course, the host of the Breaking History podcast, Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
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B
Shalom, John.
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A
So, Eli, are we at war again? Are we not at war again? Maybe we're at war again. The ceasefire is over. But if the ceasefire is over, then aren't we at war even though it's not a declared war? What do you think?
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B
I think Seth came up with this in the context, I think, of one of the Gaza ceasefires, but and I used it in a column a few months ago for pre MoU ceasefires. This is Schrodinger's ceasefire. It's simultaneously not a war and it is a war. And my theory of it, I think I said this on the podcast when we were, I mean, I was first, like, everybody like, oh, my God, these terms of the MOU of this is real is terrible. And then I was like, you know what? This is just Trump is tapping the Iranians along. He wanted to stabilize the oil markets. He wanted to allow for the sort of arsenal of democracies, if you want to call it that, because I'm including Israel there to replenish particularly the interceptors, but also some of the more sophisticated, precise munitions that we would need. And he didn't want to be in a position where we would be withdrawing enough material from the Pacific that would, that would potentially tempt China to do something aggressive against the Taiwan Straits. So we had our own limitations. It is troubling, and I think we could all agree it's troubling that the vice president and the president said a bunch of things that were not true about Iran's regime. And we're in the journalism, we're in the truth business. So we should always call that out and say that's not true. But on the other hand, that happens all the time in diplomacy. It happens to be just a fat, let's be grown ups about it. And Trump is particularly elastic when it comes to, you know, saying things that are true and BSing and so forth. And so he said what he had to say in order to get the oil on the market and to get everybody off of his back and to kind of buy him some of the time. But the Iranians didn't mean it. And good news, we didn't mean it either. So, I mean, in some ways, and I think that the MoU in that, and then the best, the masterstroke is Secretary of State, national Security advisor, chief national archivist, et cetera. Marco Rubio comes up with, you know, and figures out another agreement with the Lebanese government in Israel and the United States that makes it very clear that the most, you know, the worst concession in some ways of the MOU wasn't really true because we have now another agreement with the elected government of Lebanon that says Hezbollah out. So in my view, we're dealing with some of these structural problems, and I don't know that necessarily is going to be some sort of coup de grace. But I mean, this is going to be sort of the new normal. And hopefully this kind of we end up accidentally getting into what we always wanted, which were freedom of navigation missions to find routes through the Strait of Hormuz, with our navy on the Oman side of the strait, and the rest of the world oil markets kind of adjust and we take this, what many were saying a month and a half ago, the trump card away from the Iranians. And it looks like that's basically what we're doing. And meanwhile, they still have a. An incredibly diminished military. They don't really have much of a nuclear program anymore, and they do not get that economic relief that was the pot of gold at the end of an imaginary rainbow.
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A
Okay, so Abe Schrodinger's war or War or not war.
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C
I liked Eli's summation. I desperately want to share his sort of calm, adult, not panic, not panicking over this approach. I don't think it fully takes into account the degree to which I believe Donald Trump does not want to go into any type of big, extended combat operations. Again, I believe he wants to. He wants an explosive show of force here and there that for reasons, by the way, that I'm not clear on. I'm not sure what I mean. I'm clear on why we would engage in operations to clear the Strait. But aside from that, he says they can keep talking, and then he. And we. And he tells them in advance that we're going to light them up every day before we do. And I don't know what that's supposed to achieve in itself.
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A
Seth, I guess the question goes to what do we want? What does the United States want at the end of whatever this is?
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B
What do we want?
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C
Yeah, Just to sum up what I'm.
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B
Yeah.
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C
My fear is there's just this aimlessness here that is just going on and on.
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A
That's what I'm getting at. So what is it that we want? Because we did not define an end point of this conflict at the beginning. Generally, a war is you want to defeat your enemy in a war, and that's usually over something specific. And either it means you change their regime, you take back a piece of territory, you claim a piece of territory, you assert your primacy and dominance by setting sort of the terms of what they're supposed to do, to pay reparations, something like that. And we did this, and we don't know why. I mean, I think ultimately we did this for regime change. If you want to say Trump, then I think, as I've said over and over again, Trump seemed to change the terms of what it was that he wanted by saying he wanted to get the dust. He wanted physically for America to take the dust. Eli, you were going to.
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B
Don't overthink it, John. Thirteen months ago, Iran had an industrial scale nuclear program that was capable of producing enough fissile material for several warheads. And the breakout seemed like it would have been inevitable under the terms of the old nuclear agreement from Obama, which obviously Trump got out of in 2018. But what was accomplished, Iran doesn't have a nuclear program anymore. And.
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A
Okay, but we were told. Okay, just give me a second then. Yeah, we were told after Midnight Hammer that they didn't have a nuclear program again. Now, maybe then they got a nuclear program where they restarted their nuclear program, in which case they oversold the results of Midnight Hammer and we had to go back in. But they didn't say that. They didn't say, we need to finish the job. They said, we're going in decapitating the regime and we're gonna get the dust. And I think he said, we're gonna get the dust in order to establish an endpoint for what he had started. So, Seth, can you see now, after the 30 day ceasefire and after the 30 days of the MoU preceded by the eight week ceasefire, can you see an endpoint that is definable?
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D
Well, I think also the missing factor in the factors that you just said in terms of why we went into this war was there was also the protesters and the Iranians in the streets and Donald Trump saying, help is on the way, and to the regime, you better stop this or you're going to pay the price. So there were a number of aspects of this that are indefinable by nature, right? If you, if, if something is retribution, if you say, if you cross this line, I'm going to hit you for crossing that line, that, that's not a war goal, right? So in a certain respect, they're, they don't have, they don't have the ability to set goals in each and every area unless they want to set the goal as actual full regime change. Otherwise, when it comes to things like killing protesters, which they started doing again and started and started killing prisoners again and things like that, you can only hit them back unless you're really gonna devote yourself to full regime change. Now, what they're doing. So that's one. What they're doing in the straight of Hormuz is that is, you have to look at the type of targets that they're hitting, right? So they're hitting, I mean, we are hitting air defense systems and, and, and, and things that are, that are enabling Iran to shoot at ships in the strait. So that's good, right? But it also has the feeling of managing and a conflict and not setting toward an actual goal. Right? We are, and we say this, degrading their abilities to harass ships in the strait. We're going after air defense systems, we're going after radar systems. We're going, whatever it is, we're going after all the things they use to be able to tell which ships are transiting when, which ones have, you know, not necessarily paid a toll, but maybe have, you know, sort of signed up to their system for a future toll, whatever it is. And we're making it hard for them to differentiate between the ships, and we're making it hard for them then to shoot the ships, right? It's like step by step. And so that has the sense of managing a conflict. So all of this feels like managing the status quo, which is a war. None of it feels like a ceasefire in any sense of the word, or even really a serious negotiation toward peace, that this just feels like part of the war. They're still firing at us and at innocents and doing things that we told them not to. We're still degrading their capabilities to do those things. I don't personally see in that a goal or an ability to even state a goal and point to something and say, this is it. Because the only way you would do that is to either get them to sign something that says yes, inspectors can come in and take the dust and, you know, you could do whatever you want for our nuclear program. No enrichment, all that other stuff. They, they, they completely capitulate in, in a, in a meaningful way on the nuclear issue and, or you initiate and follow through on regime change. Those are the two permanent things that you can do. Everything else is impermanent.
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A
Eli, let me ask you this. So they say in a negotiation at the end of the process that they forswear ever having a nuclear weapon. They'll never have a nuclear weapon. They're not going to ever have a nuclear weapon. So what? They sign their name to it, Their name, their, their signature is worth nothing. They're liars. They don't, they don't, they don't agree. They don't fulfill international agreements. They have a higher, they have a higher calling. So I think, like staking this on them. Signing a piece of paper is a very peculiar thing for Trump. I'm not saying that's what he's doing or that's where he's going. That was clearly what Vance and the negotiating team believed was their ultimate purpose. But of course, and I say this with the deepest respect, they are all idiots. And I say that because Vance, of course, said the Kellogg Brian dumb thing of our time by saying it was really cool how now he had figured out how to talk to the Iranians, where For the last 47 years no American had ever known how to talk to Iranians. A comment that will come back to haunt him if in 2028.
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C
John, can I just add, he said, isn't it really cool that we figured out a way to talk to the Iranians, get them to change their behavior for the first time in 47 years.
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A
Right. So that's even worse. Right. So we have basically Vance on record now as being the American politician who said we did it. Even Obama didn't say we did it when he did the jcpoa. He said we have interwoven them into a, not like Gulliver trapping Gulliver down, but we've interwoven them into a process that will benefit them and benefit us and won't be easy for them to extract themselves from. But he didn't say I, I have gotten them to change well and voluntarily.
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D
That was, that was the other key, was that it was, we didn't, he, we didn't trick them into getting into that system. We, they, he said they have realized that the way that they've dealt with the world until now is bad. And actually they really do want to change. So from Vance's perspective, this was, they went into this with eyes wide open. They weren't, you know, we didn't, we didn't run circles around them. They just decided that they want to be a different kind of country within the global, within the international community. And so they voluntarily stepped forward into this framework. And that is even harder to, to, to walk back, you know, from Vance
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B
Foreign
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A
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B
I'm going to push back on that, John.
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A
Okay, go ahead.
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B
The Foreign Service academies and you know, the consensus position of, you know, the Council on Foreign Relations and the various institutions that are supposed to be the sort of expert class, with some notable exceptions, people like Ken Pollack and others, but for the most part, they say the same thing. They, they said the same thing and they said it over and over again about Iran, and they said it in 1990.
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A
Before you, before you blow back on me, I didn't really finish. My point is that you're sitting across a negotiating table and you've had negotiating experience and your negotiating partner says, well, you know, I might maybe if we do X, we're going to do Y. Having read a lot of diplomatic history, the person on the other side of the table doesn't immediately take the floating of the game, which is trying to establish where the boundaries are in the conversation for their adversary, does not take them at their word. And that's what I mean when I say Foreign Service 101. If you're a low level person negotiating over fishing rights or something like that in Mongolia, whatever, and you're sitting across the table from your interlocutor, the first thing you need to establish is that you're not gonna be a mark, you're not gonna be a patsy. You are formidable and you're not taking the first offer on the table or you're gonna understand that they may have an ulterior motive and you need to like lay back and see where they're gonna come, particularly if you have the whip hand. And it looked in this negotiation as though almost exactly the opposite thing had happened. We had not lost, we'd lost 13 men, we lost one aircraft. We went into this negotiation and they immediately were like, we did it. And that's Narishkite. That's foolishness. This is a complicated country with a 250 year history. They weren't an imperial, they weren't taken over by European powers. They are, this is an ancient civilization. They have a very radical Islamist ideology. And you don't just because you want to tell your boss back in Washington that he got what he wanted at the lowest cost possible. You don't declare victory in a negotiation when you haven't won anything. And Vance now has this in the file of what it is that he is going to have to defend when he runs for president in 2028, that he said this jaw dropping thing about Iran that was patently disproven by Iran's behavior about three seconds after he said it. So that's what I mean. I'm not saying that the overall goal of the Council on Foreign Relations and the foreign policy establishment hasn't been to strike up any kind of arrangement you can with Iran and say they're now part of the international system and let's be friends. Like that, of course has been where we've been with them and not just the international system. I mean there was this delusion during the Reagan administration that that there were interlocutors in Iran and Michael brought the cake in the shape of a key in order to show that we were ready to deal with them. And that was only seven years after the hostages were taken. And we got our hats handed to us there too in 1986. And then here we are 40 years later and our vice President gets his hat handed to him at least rhetorically or allows himself to look like he had his hat handed to him.
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B
I guess what I would say is that if you looked at the reaction to Vance, it was our side which has been skeptical of the Iranians now for decades that were saying this is a huge mistake. And it was the Council on Foreign Relations side that were like what a breath of fresh air JD Vance is. And the fact that somebody like Trita Parsi, who apparently now is is advising directly JD Vance. Trita Parsi is somebody who is in some ways comes out of. I mean obviously he comes from Sweden and is there as a agent of influence for a segment of the Iranian regime. But my point is that he had his credentials come from this kind of the foreign policy blob that has wanted to deal with Iran and that I guess I don't see as much of a distinction there. I mean, I understand what you're saying is that you don't just accept a bunch of promises from the people across the negotiating table and think you won the negotiation and that a more seasoned negotiator might have figure that out. But he's like this is the problem that every again I come back to it. This is the problem that everybody that, that these establishment blob has had with thinking about Iran. And by the way, it wasn't just Reagan. It was like there were elements of the Bush administration that thought we could do a deal with Iran. There was a huge effort after 911 by the way, with Jessica Matthews and all these, you know, people in New York and the Council on Foreign Relations to put together this new initiative that would understand like a future Iranian American detente. Because they had a common enemy in Sunni jihadists. Right. Well, not the Saudis per se, because
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A
we're also working with Sunni. Right. Sunni allied with Shia against.
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D
Joe Biden famously proposed sending Iran millions of dollars after 9 11.
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B
Right, yeah, exactly. And then, and that there was, and it all conveniently overlooked the fact that the Iranian regime also had no problem working with Al Qaeda when it suited them. So you know, my point here is that this has been a, that J.D. vance is actually channeling a consensus naivete of the Washington establishment. What Trump represented and what Netanyahu represents in some ways is pushing back against that. And I think a more ultimately more clear eyed view of the regime. The problem with Trump is that he didn't ever want to pay the costs for doing regime change. And if those costs had been an invasion, I would have agreed with him. I don't think we should have invaded Iran. So he wanted to come up with, you know, he wanted to think he could pull off of Venezuela or something like that. And that was never realistic. And that what we really don't know, we think we know because we have the first reports from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which I'm not, which I think are accurate by the way. And my sources have basically said they are accurate. They're terrific reporters. But we don't know the rest of that story. There were several layers of the Israeli plan and the Israelis themselves may have gotten been at odds like the Mossad disagreed with the IDF intelligence and there's all kinds of stuff in this. But there are a lot of people in Israel working on regime change. And what we know is that an element of that plan, I think there was a lot more than just arming the Kurds and having them, you know, start an insurrection and go to Tehran. That was vetoed by the administration and with under pressure from Erdogan and the Turks. So he himself didn't want to do all the things to get to the maximal goal, which he certainly acted at the beginning of this was the plan, and it was basically like, hey, if we just do this leadership strike, they'll topple and we'll figure it out, because the universe is on my side. That's obviously not a good plan. And you can say, hey, that was a blunder. But I'm saying if you take another step back and you say, all right, has Trump managed to tap dance his way out of a global recession? So far it hasn't hit. So far we haven't seen the catastrophic rise in the price of energy. Has he managed to keep our deterrence in the Pacific and at the same time through two wars, not just gotten rid of the nuclear program, but a lot of the defense industrial base and, and significantly neutered Iran's ability to break out, which was the crisis of our day. Then that, in that perspective, is a win, even if we didn't get regime change yet. And I would say, and I think we would all maybe agree, I would like to hear pushback. I mean, I could argue it maybe both ways, but I tend to think that getting rid of the nuclear program, getting rid of a military humiliation, which is what Iran has suffered in these two wars, ultimately is good for the end goal, which is to get rid of the Islamic Republic. Because these kinds of regimes rely on a kind of idea that there is a momentum to them that is inevitable as part of the direction of history. And when you suffer a setback like that, I would imagine that it would lead many people, and hopefully people in the middle and middle upper ranks of the security services to say, perhaps God is not on our side. So the problem with the MOU and all of the pageantry around it and what JD Vance did is that made Iran feel that they had won or that they had discovered this new thing with the Strait of Hormuz. But once again, if we can figure out a way to get some ships through that, it's not quite the card they thought it was. That, as we said before, it's a depreciating asset and we don't have the global financial melt on everything else, then Trump will have been responsible and Israel will have been responsible for dealing with one of the naughtiest and thorniest security dilemmas of our age. So, look, let's not lose that.
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A
I think that is a really good argument, and it is the most potent argument that the long term goal, that this shock and awe at the beginning or the four weeks of the kinetic attacks by Israel and the United States after February 28th may have been all that was necessary over time to bring the regime down, and particularly if we remain patient and follow Project Freedom and don't let the Saudis scare us out of it and reestablish the embargo against Iranian shipping. Or Trump does what he said he might do this week and destroy the refineries on Carg island to really set back any Iranian oil exporting capacity. That with a regime that is not stable. There's the new ayatollah, who is apparently gravely injured. The IRGC seems to have taken control of the political apparatus inside the country, but that's not necessarily stable. The internal contradictions of a regime in crisis combined with a gigantic economic shock that will linger and weakness because their military program has been destroyed and they're going to have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get it back even to where it was 10 years ago. That they'll collapse or they'll go into civil war. That they will have to look inward and deal with their own crap and stop futzing around on seven fronts against Israel or with the Houthis going after Saudi Arabia. And that by the middle of next year, what happened will look like a brilliant, not a masterstroke, but will look like an extraordinarily successful intervention that used America's and Israel's best capacities with very limited risk. Except to our stockpiles.
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B
But.
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A
Of course.
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D
Right, but that, so, but that, that is, that is, I mean, that's what I want. Want to ask about. It's a genuine question. Like the stockpiles, we were told that we didn't have the material to continue on an indefinite basis with the status quo. So last night, according to the journal, we hit 90 targets. And, and those included some bridges and roadways and stuff that Iran was using to transport missiles or to reconstitute their missile program. Stuff like that. So Trump's threat. If you keep monkeying around here, if you keep, you know, if you keep trying to jerk us around, we're going to keep striking. Is that a serious threat? Is that threat backed up by reality? Are we going to continue striking them so long as they continue jerking us around? I don't, I don't know the answer to that. And I feel like I'm not sure the administration does know the answer to that because the administration has been saying we don't have.
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B
They just, they just did it. But I think when we're talking about munitions, distinguish between offensive and defensive. The real issue is the defensive. So the problem is that with the missiles that Iran has left, they can hit infrastructure. And we don't have the interceptors to knock them down. But on the other hand, my reporting, I haven't written this yet, I'm still working on it. But my reporting is that we've come up with helps and our allies, the help of the Ukrainians, that we're more efficient now at dealing with some of the drone threats to our bases and other things. There is a calibration because we, the Iranians aimed at tankers and they retaliated at our bases, which are now vacant, which is a whole other thing, which is that we're going to have to rethink our force posture in general in the region, given what we learned. But the they could have gone for the big desalination plant in Saudi Arabia. They could have hit other things that were harder to replace and would have had far more economic impact on the rest of the global economy. They haven't done that. So I'm not saying that they wouldn't, but I'm saying the dilemma is the defense. And again, I don't want to listen. This is a big black box. So I don't know and I don't think anybody knows except for the Israeli. You know, it would be highly classified and the U.S. but you know, the Israelis did briefly unveil Iron Beam, the laser based system which would revolutionize missile defense. Then they had to take it back offline because there was something wrong with it. But if they fix that and they can get that deployed, that's a game changer. So there's technological potential solutions that might be very close. And the Israelis are really good at that. And they have and they're, and you know, what do they say? Necessity is the mother of invention. So this war may force us to solve a math problem that defense intellectuals have been warning about now for 25 years. So that's another thing that might end up coming out of it. And that would also change the calculus.
- [35:43]
A
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- [37:14]
D
I mean, I suppose the other thing is that you. We're hitting, you know, thinking about it, I suppose we're hitting targets that don't need to be hit twice in a row in a short time span.
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B
Right?
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D
That's the other thing is that we
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B
can, well, we've, we've hit certain targets like five times. I mean, we, we have.
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D
I know, but I'm saying we can. If we're taking out like certain bridges and roadways, we're not going to have to do that again tonight. So perhaps the target, the shifting types of targets are also a way to manage, you know, the stock.
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B
We hit a lot of the IRGC speedboats. We hit a lot of the cruise missile storage facilities and drone storage facilities that they have in that area. So it is also, I mean, again, they have more. And what they've proven is that, you know, sometimes we think we hit something and it turns out we didn't destroy it and they can use it. But again, we are still hitting stuff. We're diminishing their capabilities and that's the game.
- [38:10]
A
Well, look, this is a new kind of war, right? We are fighting a new kind of war. It's war from the air. No one on the ground. I mean, it's not new. We've been doing variations of this since the Balkans in contradiction to the famous Powell theory of using overwhelming force. If America was ever going to be involved again after Vietnam, what we needed to do bring to any fight was overwhelming force. So we had this gigantic army in the desert in 1991 fighting against Iraq. But this is like we have no footprint. And so, you know, to Seth's point, one of the things about war when you have a footprint is you take territory and then you have to hold onto it. And holding onto it is. The second is a very complicated proposition because either you keep moving in order not to have to be a sitting duck, and then you take more territory that you also then have to defend, or you sit where you are, and then you have to figure out how you can achieve your aim without moving forward. We're not there. We're up above. And there was incredible pessimism three or four weeks ago with the. Here we've gone again. We keep thinking that there's some way out of doing a war where we only do it from the air, and it's never gonna work. This is like how people used to think that you could win naval, you could win wars like Gallipoli, you could win. You could succeed at Gallipoli without putting boots on the ground. And. And then you had to put boots on the ground. And then the Gallipoli was a military. Epic military disaster for Britain because British soldiers were sitting ducks. So we are in this different place. And so maybe that also defines how a war isn't going to end in the same way, because we're not looking to take over territory. We're. Or to have Iran recede from territory. We are looking for them to undergo a. We're looking to weaken them and then to have them undergo some kind of a psychological shift in understanding of what it is that they can do going forward if the regime is to survive or the regime will fall.
- [40:49]
B
I want to add something else. The problem with the MOU from five weeks ago, the biggest problem, and we all saw it immediately, was that we seemed to be conceding that the Iranians had some role through Hezbollah in the affairs of Lebanon. Lebanon would continue to be basically a staging area for attacking Israel, and that they would. That we were giving them part of the Ring of Fire back that Israel had revoked. And that's not true. And so, I mean, listen, one way to think about this is that Trump could not have avoided maybe the economic calamity that he was. That hasn't happened yet and hopefully won't happen if he did not appear to be really willing to negotiate. And that was a bit of a trap because the Iranians thought, oh, my God, look at these amateurs. Look at these suckers. And so in some ways, like that's part of it, which is that he was talking about trying to get a negotiation almost as soon as the war started. And that was always the theory of it after Midnight Hammer, the original idea was, all right, we just destroyed your nuclear program, so let's just negotiate and move on to the next thing. So Trump has always wanted some sort of a deal, but in some ways that has maybe given the Iranians a false sense of hope that we've lost our military nerve. And that was necessary because if they thought that there was a hope that they could accomplish what they wanted, as they always do through the negotiating table, because they never win wars, but they always win negotiations, then that's one of the reasons why they didn't destroy the world economy. I mean, that and their relationship with China.
- [42:42]
C
But this is all in service of managing the strait crisis. Yeah, we have to resolve it.
- [42:51]
B
Sure.
- [42:52]
C
Yeah. But that's where I don't see the forward movement at the moment.
- [42:57]
B
If you can create a way through the strait with navy escorts and you over time diminish their ability to. To harass the shipping and you develop alternative routes to get oil to the Pacific and other things, then, yeah, you've. You. Again, it's not ideal, but the alternative was Iran on the brink of a nuke. So, I mean, as long as, as long as it doesn't become, you know, for the next 10 years, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and. Or as long as. Or we have a global recession or something like that, as long as that doesn't happen, I'll take it.
- [43:43]
C
I just want to just mention this. I mean, I've beat this drum a number of times here. Look, I take, Eli, your point very seriously and I agree with you in large part. I mean, I remain thankful about it, that having the US And Israel having taken up the nuclear program, very thankful. There is still this issue of, to me, this, in a sense, larger issue of the US the world's strongest military power, the only backstop to the international system, the only country in the world that is going to enforce the rules of the road on bad actors. We said we're going to come in, we want, I mean, as we know, Trump said a number of things, unconditional surrender, you know, we're going to have peace, we're going to have this. We're coming to the rescue of the Iranian people. None of those stated aims were achieved. And I do think that Iran, the message broadcast as a result of Iran surviving, preaching death to Trump at Khamenei's funeral and continuing to be belligerent, still standing. And our sort of, you know, going along with this deal, that isn't a deal. That isn't a ceasefire. That's a ceasefire. Whatever. Our not having clearly and decisively defeated Iran in, in connection to our stated aims sends a really bad message globally and means something internally.
- [45:50]
B
Let me be Mr. Can I be Mr. Brightside? Can I be Mr. Brightside, America just demonstrated. Israel has just demonstrated that it has the ability to take out your leadership without invading your country. And the fact that Mojtaba Khamenei was not at his father's funeral sends a very loud and clear message to everybody else. So, yeah, they're gonna say, death to America. By the way, our friend Max Blumenthal was there reporting it for the Gray Zone. And you're gonna have. All the useful dummies are gonna be out there and they're all gonna say, look, Iran. Robert Pape is gonna deliver a lecture at the University of Chicago about how it's the end of the American superpower, Jeffrey Sachs. Everybody's gonna say all that. Let them talk, okay? You know what I mean? The bottom line is that they had a funeral for Khamenei and lots of people couldn't show up because there was still lurking in the back of their head that we had the ability to take out their leaders. And that fact remains. And every leader and every adversary and every ally knows it. They all saw it. That's what happened. So I agree with you. Ideally, it would be nice if they. We're meek little kittens now, and they just. We better not upset them. But it's not a total. Like, we just look like suckers, you know, and weak, because that is coming because of an enormous show of American strength.
- [47:18]
A
I think that where the rubber will meet the road, as I say, maybe, you know, six months to a year from now, but there are another piece of rubber will be hitting the road, which is the Constitution of how the US Government is constituted after November. We're describing a situation in which the military has been learning enormous lessons about how to fight the next war, what we've done right and wrong, how our basing in the Middle east is too static. And therefore, once there was a military conflict, it was apparently not all that difficult to compromise our own fixed positions. And we need to do something else. And we need to replenish our stocks of defensive munitions in particular. And that's all gonna cost money. And the desperate desire of Democrats to make sure not only to not hand Trump any victories, but to beat Trump like a drum, to give him nothing that he ever wants. And to say that anything that he has ever done is evil is going to create a real problem for us next year. If they are in control of one or both of the houses, as I think is a 90% certainty that they will have at least one of the houses, that that money will not get spent and that we will end up ourselves in a militarily weakened position because we're not going to do what is necessary to replenish our stocks. So that's where American politics, and it's not just Max Blumenthal and Kala Walsh and whoever is essentially a kind of catamite of the Shiite terrorist movement. It's Chris Van Hollen. It's whoever would be the head of Ways and Means under Speaker Jeffries and how the budget is planned and all of that. Now, we have a colossal defense budget. We spend 10 times what other countries spend. We have a colossal defense budget. It can be allocated differently if necessary, if we have the wisdom and the smarts and the toughness to allocate it differently based on what we've learned and probably spend what is necessary to spend to replenish what we have. But that's also an open question because the Pentagon is usually very, very, very slow to be able to change its force posture and its theory of what it needs to have in the bank. So these are unanswerable questions at the moment, including whether or not we've won or lost the war, because we're back at it. And so we're not talking about where we were last week. We're talking about what Seth said. I mean, we hit 90 targets. We've hit several hundred targets in the last three days. So, yeah, we're not out of stocks. We got plenty of stuff. And we're not out of offensive.
- [50:49]
C
But we knew that. We knew that. I'm just so, you know what? I'm so beaten down by the daily zigs and zags that I would like to think, okay, yes, Trump gets it now. You know, Seth wrote a great post a few days ago about, you know, Trump seeing reality, facing reality on Ukraine and Iran. And I really hope it's. I hope that's the case now. You know, but there were already, like, I got a few scares on Twitter the other day that Trump was saying, like, there's a great new. I mean, or someone in the administration was saying, there's a great new opportunity for talks.
- [51:32]
A
Now, look, you're right. Trump not only hasn't rallied public opinion to support this war, he has been doing in his inconstancy and rhetorical confusion, he has been punching at the heart of people who do support the war and degrading what support there is, degrading it himself by saying, it's over. It's not over. We've won in one sentence saying they're garbage and slime and they suck and they're good people. So it makes it very hard to feel as though what's going on here has a geopolitical framework behind it. Eli laid that out at the beginning of the podcast. What Trump may have done here in saving the world economic system and freezing the Far east and making sure that nothing happened there while we were looking over here and all of that. If that is true and that was deliberate, Trump is not doing himself any favors by acting as though he's mad King Leopold able to say anything at any given time and making if you feel this way Abe, then he has really blundered in at least that capacity because he does have 40% support for the war, but it'll be 30 and 20 if he doesn't make us feel as though there is an end game here and that we are on the march and this is showing America at its. At its finest. Okay, let's move on.
- [53:23]
D
And there's a weird. Just one last point.
- [53:26]
A
We gotta move on. We gotta move on.
- [53:27]
B
No, no, I wanna move on to something. Can I, can I throw in a wild card? A new topic?
- [53:31]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [53:31]
B
Okay. With all the news in Maine and America and Iran, everything else this week, there's also been the beginning of the pre trial motions for Tyler Robinson, the Charlie Kirk's assassin. And this is not news to our listeners because we know that Tyler Robinson is the assassin, likely based on all the evidence that's come out. But I have noticed, and I think this is important to our listeners that Candace Owens, Ian Carroll and the conspiracy crew are really backpedaling and you are now starting to see pretty definitive, like you're, you know, there was a weird kind of thing with Turning Point USA for a while where she was attacking Candace and saying all kinds of. Candace was attacking Erica Kirk. They are now fully engaged in that fight. I don't watch or listen to Megyn Kelly anymore, but Megyn Kelly has said definitively there's you know, zero evidence that it was Israel or the Egyptians or the French or whoever you know, is in that. And it is crazy and in some ways it's sad that we have to talk about this, but there were lots of people who were part of the right that really believed and it's not even a year that Israel or that Charlie Kirk was killed because he was changing a position on Israel. And Tucker Carlson, among others, is somebody who has put that out there. The benefits of our system and it was initially handled horribly by Cash Patel and the FBI. There's now a trial, and this is a little glimmer of hope that when there is a trial, the evidence is presented that actually you can begin to push back on people who create what we used to think. Like, you know, it's a crazy bubble. And people in the crazy bubble, even Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, are attacking Candace for being a lunatic. And that to me, is cause for maybe just slight tempered hope. And yet another reminder that our founding fathers and our rule of law in our system works. And this is one of the benefits, is that when you present it out there, it does. Sunshine's a great disinfectant.
- [56:02]
A
Can I bring this very interesting factoid about the podcast Bro World that is really the floaters of this deranged conspiracy theory? I mean, first of all, it's all over because Lance Twiggs, his lover, said in court on Tuesday that he could make Tyler Robinson confess to him that he had done it.
- [56:26]
B
So
- [56:28]
A
the only reason this is happening is that for reasons that elude me, Tyler Robinson pled not guilty. I guess it's a death penalty case. So, you know, he's got. The one way he can maybe elude the death penalty is entering evidence that suggests that he's too mentally unstable or something. Not the insanity defense, but something. Something else. But nonetheless, he did it. So what interests me is you're mentioning Alex Jones is attacking Candace Owens. Alex Jones, remember, claimed that the kid. That there were no killings in Sandy Hook. But I bring this up only to say that for some reason, these people who are theoretically rivals, right, they're like, imagine that they're television networks or broadcast networks or sports teams. They're competing for the same audience. And the classic way that people behave when they're competing for the same audience is to be hostile to one another and to go at one another. If you're Howard Stern, you go out every other morning drive guy in the country who comes at you go after mankind.
- [57:50]
B
You go after Don Imus.
- [57:51]
A
Yeah, Don Imus, whatever. You act like they're all idiots because you wanna be the dominant figure. Something weird happened over the last year where all of these people are going on each other's shows and they're boosting each other and they're friendly to each other, and they're sort of like creating some kind of weird phalanx with common views. And this is not normal in our capitalist system where you want to be number one. So you can charge twice for your ads what the other person charges. And of course, the only person that they all seem to be attacking. As one is Ben Shapiro, who kind of invented this world. And that's where Israel comes in, because it seems like the binding glue for these people is Israel. And it was when Megyn Kelly decided to throw in her hand with them on Israel that you knew that something weird was going on. And so somehow Israel trumps anti Semitism, anti Zionism, anti whatever, trumps ordinary, conventional capitalistic behavior by small businessmen or like, you know, by individual businessmen who are trying to make as good a living as possible. It's a weird fact.
- [59:20]
B
Same on the left. Israel, Israel, Israel, Trump. You know, like on Graham Platner, they were willing to put up with a Nazi tattoo because he was against Israel. So I'm sorry, but.
- [59:30]
C
But I think there is a mercenary angle to. To their joining forces, which is they want to. The medium is different than radio. You can't.
- [59:41]
A
You can.
- [59:41]
C
You can listen to multiple morning. You couldn't back then listen to multiple morning shows at once, but you can share now. You can share your competitor's audience on podcast because you. They can. Someone can listen to your show, then they can listen to the other person's show. There's. So if you can get yourself into a. You create a sort of network, an unofficial network, and I think that informs it.
- [60:11]
A
I mean, fair enough. I accept that. I accept that. I'm just saying that differentiation, no matter how you slice it, differentiation is how you. In a medium, you want to establish yourself as the authoritative voice in that medium, and you don't want to elevate others to your level. If you're one of the winners, you don't want to get them like, you don't want to get them in the same atmosphere as you are, because they're going to cannibalize your. They're going to cannibalize your profits. And so something larger than that was going on here, which is what is so weird to Eli's, where I just. I do not rule out the presence existence of invisible money coming from abroad that is flowing to all of them to get them to be some kind of a. To make some kind of common cause.
- [61:16]
C
I don't rule it out. I just don't know.
- [61:18]
A
But I don't know either. Yeah, I do know that Cutter spent $20 billion on American universities over 20 years, and I don't see why they wouldn't spend $50 million on podcasts if they could get that money to where they want to get it.
- [61:37]
C
I'd like to address Eli's point about the sort of the backtracking now. And Candace Owens has made this the heart and soul bad word choice of her show and her career. This is, this is, you know, she is the Charlie Kirk Conspiracy Channel. The others dabbled in it because she was becoming a freaky phenomenon that was, you know, getting a lot of attention. They can now afford to pretend they have scruples because this is coming to a close. They have other things to move on to. I don't know. You know, as far as Megyn Kelly is concerned now, now saying, back off, back off, Erica, you know, whatever, I don't want to hear it. You know, I mean, as if there was ever any reason. From the very start, from the, from the first second, the first accusations left Candace Owens mouth, as if there was any reason not to say right then and there, what are you doing, you crazy evil person? Instead, Megyn Kelly said, candace is a brilliant woman. I'm not, I'm just, I want to. The questions are worth asking and blah, blah, blah. And don't tell me, don't. I won't be silenced and I won't silence her and I should be, my friend and she's a mother. And now all of a sudden, because the jig is up, because it's up, because we're going to get, I mean, God willing, the right ruling here. They're ready to move on. That's, that's all I see going on here. They don't.
- [63:14]
D
Right. I mean, I don't. That's like the other day, Hasan Piker was doing his live stream when the Graham Platner, the Politico story on Graham Platner and the allegations of sexual assault came out. And, you know, much was made of Hasan Piker saying, well, this is, it's curtains. This is curtains for, you know, this is the trifecta. It's, you know, whatever, it's Democrat. It's, you know, it's credible accusate, blah, blah, blah. And, and, and he's reading comments, you know, on, on stream as, as he does this. He's, he's getting people typing comments to him and you know, and, and he's responding to them. And so, you know, one of them was like, oh, something about the Mossad, you know, and, and Hassan Piker says mossad set this up. Nah, no way. No way. This is, you know, whatever I looked, I didn't look at that and say, I feel like Hassan Piker is turning a corner.
- [64:09]
B
No.
- [64:09]
D
And I just want to be careful not to do. Not that he's the same. Not that Hasan Piker and Megyn Kelly are the same person. But what I mean is people who indulge for, for professional purposes in widespread conspiracy theories, they'll. They're not necessarily going to endorse 100% of them. They will backtrack at times. But I want to be. Care to not get fooled into thinking the model has changed is what I'm saying. If the model is going to move on to another conspiracy theory that's not about Charlie Kirk.
- [64:46]
A
Well, that's the likeliest, right? That, that's the likeliest thing, is that it's the conspiracy theory that matters. And, and of course, you can discard one element of it and pick up, you know, another very, very easily. I don't know what it will be. It's all situational and it's all, you know, opportunistic. You find something and you just plug it in and you go from there.
- [65:09]
B
Okay.
- [65:10]
A
I want to make a recommendation before the weekend for moviegoers opening today, a hilarious, absurdist, silly movie called Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass made by David Wayne and the team that made Wet hot American summer 25 years ago. This is a wild, wacky, raunchy, anything goes comedy about a innocent, naive young woman who, for reasons that I, you know, for complicated reasons, ends up going to Los Angeles on a quest to find Jon Hamm and sleep with him because her fiance has used his celebrity sex pass. The this is the one person that you get to sleep with without it harming our relationship idea. And this turns into a deranged version of the wizard of Oz. And it is hilarious and stupid and delightful. And it has an incandescent performance by Zoey Deutch in the lead role and an unbelievably hilarious turn by John Slattery, who played Roger on Mad Men as the worst version of John Slattery. He plays himself as a loser living in a garage doing taekwondo against a dummy. And Gale enlists him to get to Jon Hamm. And there's lots of stuff happens in this movie. It's like one of these Go for broke. Whatever you think is funny, throw it in there. Almost like an early Marx Brothers movie. And I can't recommend it highly enough. So that's Gail Daughtry and the Hollywood Sex Pass.
- [67:14]
D
There were hints of real physical comedy in the, in the trailer sort of comedy. There was one trail. There was one trailer that was out with John Slattery. And it's just, it's. It's the trailer. Half of the trailer is him having his foot stuck in the door of Jon Hamm's assistant or whatever, and it just feels like. And the door just keeps slamming on the foot. So is that the kind of.
- [67:36]
A
Oh, that's. That's just one moment out of it. It's a nice. It's 93 minutes long. And comedies that know to go 90 minutes, which is like the classic Hollywood screwball comedy length, know a lot about how to satisfy an audience. So Gail Daughtry and the celebrity sex Pass. Eli Lake. Thank you for joining us, everybody. Have a wonderful weekend. For Abe and Seth, I'm John Pod Horowitz. Keep the candle burning.
- [68:06]
B
Sam.