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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Sometimes the most painful part of getting sick is the getting better part. Waiting on hold for an appointment, sitting in crowded waiting rooms, standing in line at the pharmacy. That's painful. Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy remove those painful parts of getting better with things like 24. 7 virtual visits and prescriptions delivered to your door. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful.
- [00:33]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:39]
Christine Rosen
Some preach and pain, Some die of thirst. No way of knowing which way it's going.
- [00:47]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best.
- [00:49]
Abe Greenwald
Expect the worst, Hope for the best.
- [00:53]
Christine Rosen
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, January 7, 2025. Happy birthday, Naomi. I am John Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:08]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:09]
Christine Rosen
Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Christine, are you muted? You are muted. So we didn't get to hear your.
- [01:17]
Seth Mandel
I know. I am only on my first cup of coffee. I apologize.
- [01:20]
Christine Rosen
That's okay.
- [01:21]
Seth Mandel
Second day of a snow day here in Washington.
- [01:24]
Christine Rosen
Oh, man.
- [01:24]
Seth Mandel
There are no rules.
- [01:26]
Christine Rosen
And also, also buried under in the snow, senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:31]
Vivian Berkovich
Hi, John. We're about 7% of the town is plowed. We are not part of that 7%. So we're working on it sounds like.
- [01:42]
Christine Rosen
New York in some of its glory days. And it's time we got, we got about, we got about a quarter of an inch, but that's okay. There's black ice everywhere.
- [01:53]
Seth Mandel
All of this with scorn, though, because it's like five or six inches of snow and we're paralyzed. So.
- [01:59]
Unknown
Well.
- [02:02]
Christine Rosen
So let's see what's going on. Trump's gonna give a press conference later today, presumably to announce the annexation of Greenland and Canada. And of course, Canada now in the news because Justin Trudeau announced yesterday that he was complicated maneuver but he was stepping down as party leader. Stepping down as prime minister. But he wouldn't step down as prime minister until the party chose his successor. And there could be an election giving his party a chance at not being completely wiped out as the Conservative Party in the. In Canada seems to be about 25 to 30 points ahead of Trudeau's Liberal Party. I was going to say that we could have a whole conversation about Trudeau and being a kind of himbo and having bad policies throughout Covid and, and you know, like imprisoning truckers who were complaining about taxation and going after them with two by fours and all kinds of things.
- [03:00]
Seth Mandel
Supporting euthanasia, you know.
- [03:03]
Christine Rosen
Yeah. Doing nothing about Anti Semitism, all of that. But, I mean, the salient detail about him, and I think this goes to this whole question of what's going on in the west with the rejection of all of its leaders, is that he's essentially been in power for 10 years uninterruptedly. And this is a strange set of circumstances that has beset the west in the 21st century, you could say, which the United States, of course, generally avoids because of the. Because of the fact that we have a constitutional amendment limiting our leaders to two terms in office. A lot of what has gone on here with the sclerosis in Western Europe and elsewhere has to do with the fact that leaders stay too long at the fair. Angela Merkel, I think that's true of Trudeau. It was true of the Tories, though of course, they have many leaders in a row. But nonetheless, the fact that we have, we here, though, you can say that our political system is not in the greatest shape. We're constantly bouncing back and forth, or really have been since, since the 1970s, between the parties having either ideological dominance or political dominance or something like that. Nobody has it for too long. Nobody can really seize it and, and make substantive changes. And in all these countries, leaders stay too long. They, they forget how to be leaders. They forget how to appeal to people. They, for they, they lose their sense of touch for what voters want and what the, what the ordinary people want. And I think, my guess is that that more than anything else, explains Trudeau's collapse over the last year, year and a half, two years, because the unpopularity of his policies been very much evidence.
- [05:00]
Abe Greenwald
For.
- [05:03]
Christine Rosen
Half a decade. My friend Vivian Berkovich, who is a Canadian Israeli Jewish commentator, has been sort of Trudeau for, you know, forever and wondering at the fact that he has remained in power despite all kinds of scandals involving native native populations and things like that. I just think you, you gotta get off the stage.
- [05:32]
Abe Greenwald
I think I. John, I'm sure that's true. I. But I think it coincide. This stretch of time where leaders in the west are staying in power too long is also coinciding with something in the culture in the west, which is this sort of unwillingness to buy the official story all over. And I think Covid, because it was global, played a part in this, this sort of pushback on what a lot of politicians and leaders had taken for granted as inevitable, a lot of sort of inevitable suppositions about what's good, where we're headed, what we're telling you, the compact between government and the people. And because so much of the west and so much of the world looks to the US Having seen us reject it in so many ways, I think sort of spread that condition around.
- [06:30]
Christine Rosen
I'll give you another example of this. So Bibi Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel for Seth. Was it 12 years? It was 12 years. He lost his premiership in 2021 or 2022, I can't remember when. And then came back into power at the beginning of 2023. And he, it seemed clear from the resistance to him, though, he had won this absolute majority for the first time in seven years or something like that in Israeli politics in the parliament, that he did not under. He had misread and misunderstood the nature of the political challenge that he faced coming back into power. He endorsed these judicial reforms, which I think substantively are largely correct. But he misjudged what was going to happen when he did this. And had it not been for October 7th, changing the dynamic inside Israel and playing to his strengths, I don't know how much longer he would have survived. And that was a sort of weird fact that he had stayed too long at the fair, lost his premiership, got it back, and then showed that maybe that had been an unwise choice on his part because his command of the levers of power was halting. That's an interesting thing to think about in relation to Donald Trump. Now, because Trump will be starting his presidency, it will effectively mean that he will have been the dominant, he will be the dominating person in American politics for 12 years when he finishes his second term, and that maybe people are beginning this term with optimism. We talked about yesterday about how he seems to be running the transition much better and they have plans. It's quieter and calmer and all of that. But 12 years atop apart, that's a long time. And he's old. And I don't know. I think that there was something in the decision to limit the presidency to two terms after Franklin Roosevelt's death that has made a huge difference in American politics for the better, that parliamentary systems obviously don't necessarily hew to well.
- [09:05]
Seth Mandel
And that'll be the test both here in the US And Canada is about to go through its own test of populism as just merely a blip, a historical reactionary blip. Or can you have second generation populism? So if JD Vance is able as vice president to shape the Trump movement into something that he can run on himself, if he chooses to run for president in four years and is successful, then we have second generation sort of populism. And the guy nipping at the heels in Canada of Trudeau, also sort of a, sort of mini Trump a little more. It's funny, these Canadian politicians are much better looking than our politicians. But he's, he's attractive, he's articulate, and he speaks, to Abe's earlier point, he speaks in a very direct way that addresses a lot of the concerns of the people who are very online and very conspiratorial at times, but absolutely correct about their government lying to them.
- [09:57]
Christine Rosen
Look, I was just in Italy and I had the interesting experience of going on a Jewish tour of Rome with a tour guide who was asked by one of the people, very literate woman from a Roman Jewish family. That means that her family has been in Rome for 2000 years. Not that they're, you know, that they migrated after the war or, you know, came after the Spanish Inquisition, but have been there forever. And she said that what was interesting to her is that Giorgio Maloney became Prime Minister of Italy and everybody that she knew and everybody that, that was friends with her and all that, they all thought that Giorgio Meloni was a fascist. And then October 7th happened. And for somebody like her, a Jew among 35,000 Jews in the city or in whatever in the country, very tiny population, how the government relates to Israel is an extraordinarily pressing issue, particularly given the rise in anti Semitism, Muslim immigration into Italy and all of that. And that they were startled to discover that she was a friend of Israel, that the official narrative about her being a fascist was not one, once she got to know Maloney's politics on a day to day basis, did not represent what she thought fascism was. And we get this now all over Europe, right, there's this fight going on over the, over the populist right wing party in Germany, which we are simply told is a neo fascist party. I'm not literate enough in the, you know, in the interstices of German politics to understand how it fits in with Germany's own complicated political relationships. But I, but, but I think as to Abe's point, I have no confidence anymore that the people that I would listen to who would say, oh my God, this party is terrible and it's so dangerous and they, they, they hate minorities and they're going to be anti Semitic. And it's really, I have no confidence that that line is true. Just like I have, just like, I think people who may be confused or concerned about Viktor Orban's leadership in Hungary have been sold a bill of goods about how he is an, you know, authoritarian neo fascist. He. There are many issues you can. You could disagree with Viktor Orban on and how he handles things. But. But that simply was a kind of pulled off the shelf line about a ideologically conservative, non globalistic leader that everyone just said, okay, great, okay, well, he's a fascist. The Germans are fascists. Baloney's a fascist.
- [13:01]
Vivian Berkovich
Well, especially because they told us that they were all the same. Right. So it was like Viktor Orban and Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu and Boris Johnson, we were told, are all part of the same trend.
- [13:13]
Christine Rosen
Yeah. And they all work for Putin. I mean, there's a kind of off the shelf quality to these objections. And as Abe says, I think even for people like us who are not inclined, I think, toward, you know, paranoia about official lines and things like that, I think we've just learned that we better keep our powder dry and like, learn more about these people and pay more attention if you really want to pay attention to the issue. Just you. You can't accept the conventional wisdom, I mean, about anybody.
- [13:50]
Abe Greenwald
I think. I think we live in a different world in a lot of ways. I think October 7th is a contributing factor. And so too is the explosion of the modern American liberal project this year in the U.S. it's hard for me not to be very U.S. centric about this, but something's been punctured and it's this effort to render anyone that's anywhere to the right of you as beyond the pale. That was such a concerted effort. It was so total, it was so international. And then it sort of disintegrated all at once. And we'll see what the next iteration is.
- [14:42]
Vivian Berkovich
Well, Christine, I also think that with John, with what you're talking about, there's two things also that come to mind in your observation about Rome. One is that the last time I was there, I believe that they still referred to the historic Jewish part of Rome as the ghetto. They still, in order. They still called it the Jewish ghetto. And so I think that that brings to mind the fact that things in Europe for Jews are different than they are in America.
- [15:11]
Christine Rosen
Although the ghetto is now. Is now like Soho or, you know, it's like. It's like Silver Lake or something like that.
- [15:18]
Vivian Berkovich
And by the way, in terms of kosher food, Rome is really hard to beat. In terms.
- [15:24]
Christine Rosen
Well, I had a really bad meal there, so I gotta. I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to object on. Maybe I just had a. Maybe the restaurant I was in, they had an off day.
- [15:32]
Vivian Berkovich
We went on our honeymoon to Barcelona in Rome. And Barcelona is a wonderful, beautiful, great city with no kosher food. And Rome was like, you're not allowed to flag a taxi down in the street, but they have great kosher food. But Europe, Europe is, you know, the memory is different, right? So Jews in Europe and sort of snap back into place. You talk about somebody, you know, who's a Jewish family, been in Rome for 2000 years or whatever. It's like, you know, the. The institutional memory operates differently. So that's one thing that's different, is that Jews and in Hungary and those places, part of is that they don't have to be lectured about nationalism in Central Europe, right? In Hungary and places like that, they know they're there, right? They're aware of how things can spin out. They don't need necessarily Americans telling them, but also they can see the differences. But the institutional memory is just sharper. And so when you talk about Israel, when they see Georgia Maloney is actually something of a friend to Israel or, you know, is on the same wavelength on some of these issues, and Israel was the thing that brought it to the surface that memory kicks in, you know, in terms of who Jews in Europe are looking for and, you know, to be on their side. The other thing is that that there's a Israel is like the great destroyer of conventional wisdom, right? You hear all these stories. You talk to a lot of conservatives. How many conservatives became conservative because they say the first thing that they realized the establishment and the media were lying to them about was Israel? Right? How many times have you heard that story? Somebody's journey from left to right began with Israel. Jewish Insider has an interview with Brianna Wu of Gamergate today. Same thing. The journey from left to right. Why? Because when you're steeped in this stuff, you know the difference. And we used to call this in. In my house, we used to call this the Economist effect, where when, you know, when you. When you actually know about something, you see bs, like really easily, no matter whether it's said with the voice of God or not. And then you realize, well, you know, that whole special section on Djibouti or whatever later in the Economist magazine, maybe that's also not right.
- [17:54]
Christine Rosen
Well, we should explain that the Economist was uniquely. Because it was considered a sort of conservative publication. The Economist was unbelievably and unimaginably anti Israel in the 80s and 90s. So. So it's. Its coverage of the Middle east was so loathsome and noxious that Even though it seemed very authoritative as a, as a publication and so high flown and all of that. Yeah. When you turn to other things in the magazine, it led you towards skepticism. Christine, I wanted to point out that as Abe said, there's been this collapse of the liberal consensus or the power that it seems to have. And we have this very interesting thing going on with one of your bugbears in social media, Facebook, which of course you called for the breakup of in the pages of Commentary a couple of years ago. Mark Zuckerberg has basically decided in the last 10 days that he is white washing his hands of the Facebook posture that he assumed out of nervous defensiveness in the wake of the 2016 election when people said that Facebook had improperly had gotten Trump elected by allowing misinformation and it's pages. And so what did he do? He empowered these committees to examine the fairness or you know, they shadow banned or quieted stories down. He hired Nick Clegg, the head of the Social Democrats in Britain to be the content chairman of Facebook. He apologized repeatedly to Congress for being terrible. He did all of this stuff. He said he changed the name of the company. He said they were going to do glasses instead of, you know, he was, they're gonna basically be a VR company and an AI company instead of a, instead of a, you know, place where you showed people the pictures of your high school reunion. And now in the last 10 days, he has fired Nick Clegg. He has hired Joel Kaplan, former deputy chief of staff to who worked at Facebook anyway but has brought him in to be the to replace Nick Clegg. He was the George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff. He has asked Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who introduced Trump at various things, was there on election night at Mar A Lago and spoke to join the board of Meta. And he announced this morning that they were ending all moderation at Facebook and that they were going to follow the X policy of community notes on things that were controversial or questionable. Allowing people in the Facebook community to establish what their disagreements with posts that that seem to be problematic. That's an amazing. It's basically like, well, this is the election. There's a new sheriff or the sheriff is back. I screwed up. I screwed up when he was sheriff in the first place and I'm not going to make that mistake now. I have too many regular. I know who knows what he thinks. I have too many regulatory issues. I don't want to get in trouble with him or they sold me a bill of goods. I got sold a bill of goods by these people about how I needed to do this in order to preserve the integrity of Facebook. And in fact, they did the opposite. They made Facebook seem less interested, less whatever. What's your, what's your take?
- [21:41]
Seth Mandel
Well, I think the first thing to understand about Mark Zuckerberg is that he, he will forever and always see politics as an obstacle to the power he wants to amass. So he doesn't actually care who's in charge. He just sees it's a constant speed bump on his road to a much broader and vaster sense of what he wants to do, which is to function as a mini nation state. So he's not just dealing with politics here, he's dealing with it all, all across the world. Because, you know, Facebook is this, you know, it has more users outside of the United States now than it does in. I think it's, it's comical that though, that he was trapped up in the liberal bubble that we often talk about here. And there's, there's a great piece that David Samuels, who's part of the excellent county highway crowd, wrote for Tablet towards, I think just towards the end of the year called Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment. And his argument, I think, captures a lot of what we see. People like Zuckerberg and others who were part of the sort of censorship industrial complex online, their shifts occurring now are completely explicable if you understand that they did think that they were on the right side of history when they were censoring conservatives, when they were censoring voices that opposed or questioned some of the judgments of, say, public health officials during COVID So he is, I mean, Zuckerberg is, I think Zuckerberg compares himself not to any particular political leader but to, you know, former Roman emperors and says, now what could I do to get to that position? And so in this sense, Trump is just, he's, he's going to court Trump the way he's, he courted, you know, Obama and the way he courted Biden administration. The difference is that now there's some pushback from the people who he wants to keep on his platform. Americans who looked at what Facebook did under Democratic regimes, looked at the, looked at the lies that were promoted and the truths that were suppressed and say, huh, maybe we need to build our own platforms. Maybe we need to go elsewhere. Maybe we actually shouldn't trust the judgment of these so called Facebook fact checkers. Now I'll add that Facebook also for a while had these relationships with publications, including at the Time, the Weekly Standard, where there were sort of expert fact checker institutions mainly on the left, but a few, you know, handpicked on the right as well, to sort of give feedback to Facebook about the kind of content that it was promoting and the way that it promoted that stuff. And I think that also was a form of window dressing. I know some of my colleagues at the time thought it was a good sign. But you need to understand Metta in particular as the, as a, as having a long term strategy when it comes to this stuff. So if in four years a very left wing progressive becomes a president, United States, they will shift immediately back to that side of the aisle too. It's all it for them. Again, politics is an obstacle to power.
- [24:26]
Vivian Berkovich
There was outrage too, you remember, on the left. The left was up in arms over the idea that the Weekly Standard should be part of a fact checking operation. That was one of the, that was one of the trends that was happening at the time was that it was very clear that this, this whole movement against misinformation, disinformation and all that was really just a political red team, blue team, left, right thing.
- [24:48]
Christine Rosen
Well, that's, I think, I would say.
- [24:50]
Seth Mandel
I don't think it started out that way. I think there were some, and there still are in, in academia, some thoughtful scholars really trying to get at how information spreads and what spreads and what doesn't. And they're studying it as a, as a, an ecosystem versus a political thing. But it very quickly, as Seth says, very quickly morphed into a weapon that particularly those on the left, became extremely skillful at wielding against their political enemies. And Facebook abetted that.
- [25:16]
Christine Rosen
And they had about them, as I think you, you point out, aside from the fact it was politically, they thought it was politically good for them, which I think we should get to, because of course it turned out that it really wasn't in the long run, it was incredibly injurious to them. But that, that even if they were only doing it out of naked, raw, Machiavellian reasons, the idea that they could sort of put the, you know, put their finger on the scale of what kind of information people got and from where, and that this would then help them with their advocacy of certain types of causes and politicians and all of that, that they, they had the added benefit in their own psyches and in their own bubble of believing that in so doing, they were saving the country and the world from fascism and that. So, yes, maybe they were using me. The means that they were using were means that had it Been like four or five years earlier, they would have been hor by. But desperate times call for desperate measures and you have to censor. If the people that you are censoring themselves in their minds don't respect democratic norms, don't respect niceties, will do anything, will say anything, will throw anybody into jail, or will get people killed by the millions because of their horrible views on social distancing and vaccination and all of that. And so you're saving lives and you're saving democracy using pretty illiberal methods of doing so, which I think even they would acknowledge, right? Like saying the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop should be shadow banned. It's not that the people who shadow banned it didn't. Don't know that that's kind of like out of the norm of how information is supposed to spread in a, you know, in our, in our First Amendment dominated system.
- [27:15]
Seth Mandel
But the seductive thing about how these platforms are actually designed and what they reward, which is, as you say, they reward moral grandstanding. So if you're, if you're on the moral high ground in your own mind and everyone's telling you you are, then you'll continue to do what you're doing. But look, Elon Musk had a big stumble this past week where he tried to ban a story and ban a reporter, a reporter's account on X. That led to a bit of a kerfuffle. And I think some honest, honest people from the right were pointing out to Elon Musk, look, this is what, this is what happened with the New York Post laptop story. Don't do this. But the, but the allure of having that sort of power is very difficult to. At least he did by it, I would say.
- [27:55]
Christine Rosen
At least, at least that's like his house, you know, I mean, Twitter is his house. He owns Twitter, you know, lock, stock, barrel.
- [28:02]
Vivian Berkovich
And I, and I agree with, I mean, I agree that it was wrong to do, but also the story was literally about him, right?
- [28:08]
Christine Rosen
So I'm just.
- [28:09]
Vivian Berkovich
That's bad that he does that. But it's also there, there isn't this, this, this sort of like, well, we're saving democracy from, you know, the dark night of fascism through misinformation. Elon Musk is like, hey, stop talking about me and my friends.
- [28:23]
Christine Rosen
So the holiday rush is over.
- [28:26]
Unknown
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- [30:44]
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- [31:13]
Christine Rosen
I think centrally after 2016, this idea that Cambridge Analytica had somehow magically caused Donald Trump to get elected, that there was some kind of all hands on deck emergency set of meetings or conversations at Facebook where the idea would have been we can't be seen as being this powerful. Number one. That's bad for my effort to become a shadow emperor. As Christine would say. You know I got to do this more quietly, number one. And number two, like, I don't want to be blamed for, you know, changes in the Democratic makeup of the West. What do we do about that? And it's like, oh, well, we've got some solutions. We can do this, we can do that, we can highlight this. We can bet. We can, we can make sure, look, we've already said we're not going to have pedophiles on here and we're not going to have Nazis on here. Well, I mean, you know, maybe somebody who says vaccination is bad isn't a pedophile, but effectively they kill people. So they should be banned or this one should be banned or that one should be banned. And it's very seductive, particularly if you have the means at your disposal with, you know, a button.
- [32:20]
Seth Mandel
And this is why the Tick Tock Tick Tock is presenting a similar dilemma for the Trump administration, because it was, it was, I think, correctly opposed to it on national security grounds, on privacy grounds, on the fact that it is.
- [32:31]
Christine Rosen
A, on its existence, on presence in the United States.
- [32:35]
Seth Mandel
We know this like, it's literally been studied. That, that is, if you, if you search for terms like tenement square on TikTok, you get propaganda. So, but he shifted now because he's got a lot of followers on TikTok. He has reach on TikTok. So that's again, to the point about how these platforms are designed. You can talk about design choices, I think, in a way that is nonpartisan. But the people who are, who are winning on particular platforms don't want to do that because they're winning. So I think those debates will continue. I hope the Trump administration goes back to what its position was on TikTok, which is, it's just clearly a matter of national security at this point.
- [33:09]
Christine Rosen
And build it up on the Supreme Court is hearing, as Supreme Court is hearing, hearing this case on some sort of emergency basis this week. So it's interesting that you bring that up. And I was listening to the advisory opinions podcast, Sarah Isger and David French's podcast at the Dispatch, and she was reading out details from this report on TikTok. And for example, if you search Uyghurs on YouTube, 55 or 60% of the content on YouTube will be negative toward the Chinese government. And if you search Uyghurs on TikTok, it's 12%. So and, and there are like, I think three or four issues on which it is, it is unambiguously the case that TikTok's management is, isn't this algorithm.
- [34:08]
Vivian Berkovich
Isn'T the Israel Hamas war one of those?
- [34:10]
Christine Rosen
It is. But, but in this case, let's just say it is the pot. The specific policies of the Chinese government that you can track very plainly on, on TikTok, thereby making the case, which is the case that the legislation that was passed made that it's a national security issue where information about China's behavior China is successfully suppressing or confusing or you know, screwing up the minds of the young who are disproportionately involved in TikTok.
- [34:45]
Seth Mandel
Well, also Hoovering up massive amounts of personal information from American citizens. That's, that's the part that concerns me the most. But yes, the propaganda part of it is also very worrisome.
- [34:54]
Christine Rosen
But I think again, Zuckerberg and these, you know, thought, and the pre, the prior owners of Twitter, right, Jack Dorsey and whoever the other guy was, Dick Costolo, they thought that they were, they needed to protect themselves from, you know, the, from the, not the, the, the right wing mob that was going to destroy democracy and the left wing mob that was going to destroy them for not act, not interfering enough. And so they, they, they interfered. And I think Zuckerberg took one look at 2023 and 2024 and said I went the wrong way here. This has been of no use to me whatsoever. And all of the data that we have. Tom Edsel has another interesting piece on the danger, the future danger to the Democratic Party or what the data now show about the Democratic Party we've been talking about for the last week or so on the podcast. Patrick Rafi's discovery that there are now more Republicans than Democrats for the first time in, I don't know, a century or something like that, people identifying in that fashion. And it's just not, you know, the, the behavior of the Biden administration in winning in 2020, how it handled the suppression of conversation about COVID how it handled the lawfare toward Trump, all of that has led the Democratic Party down a very, very bad alley. Where they are, where they're relation to the public that is not completely committed to the Democratic cause is not good.
- [36:32]
Abe Greenwald
And you know, and this to tie it to the earlier point about what's happening in the west, largely a lot of these issues that the, that we're talking about the Biden administration handling and the way they approached it aren't unique to the US the migrant crisis, that's the Canadian border crisis is an issue up there. The transing of kids you see now internationally, you see pushback In Europe on the, all the, you see policy changes in terms of treating kids. After all, the BS studies have now been supplanted by some actual data on the harms and so on. So there's a whole host of issues that don't affect just the US but that the liberal establishment of various countries have propped up only to see them collapse. And I think that those also contribute to this changed world.
- [37:38]
Vivian Berkovich
It's glass nosed.
- [37:40]
Christine Rosen
It's a kind of glass.
- [37:42]
Vivian Berkovich
It is, yeah. People, people did studies on. Let's, let's use the trans stuff that Abe mentioned. Did studies. Those studies were suppressed because they came to the wrong conclusions. Those studies are now not being suppressed or it's coming to light that they were suppressed. Right. Things like that. It is this sort of, this, this transparency awakening that it's like information that was here that existed but was suppressed, you know, underneath is now sort of coming out and it feels like this sort of global glass nosed type of wave.
- [38:20]
Seth Mandel
Well, and the way it started out, this is why the Samuels piece, for anyone who's interested in how this both developed and then collapsed so quickly, he uses the Iran nuclear deal under Obama as his example because of the echo. The way the echo chamber was developed at that point in time was novel and it worked for a while, but then it collapsed. It was actually built on a house of sand, but it took, it took a while and it did a lot of damage obviously on the international front. And so the piece in a way serves as a warning against seeing that sort of infrastructure developing again. And it can develop just as easily on the right side of the aisle as the left. It is a, it is a means of amassing power and shaping public opinion using digital technology and digital platforms that have international reach, that have a lot of opacity in terms of how they work and why and who they target and why. So it's a, it's a very good warning against, I think for Republicans who are coming into power in a few weeks, it's a good, serves as a good warning to check their own priors when it comes to using these tools themselves.
- [39:23]
Christine Rosen
Look, David Samuels surfaced the fact of the Iran nuclear deal echo chamber in a piece that he wrote for the New York times magazine in 2014 or 2015, I can't remember which year. And what was interesting about that is that it, is that it was a. Yes, it was a harbinger of things to come because Ben Rhodes, who was the subject, who was the subject of the piece now, you know, head of the pod Save America Network, or whatever the hell that that thing is, podcasting network, spoke contemptuously of how easy he had found it to manipulate the press corps around the White House because they were 27 years old and didn't know anything. He said. Now why is this interesting? Because in back in my day, it took 25 years to get to the White House. As a reporter like you worked, you struggled, you fought your way through. You started at the school board, you went to the state capitol, you got to report on a senator, maybe you then went to a couple of foreign bureaus. Then when you were at the summit of your career, you got to report on the White House. So at least you were, you were older and seasoned and you had seen everything and you had written 10,000 stories and you had had some experience of politicians and their, and their henchmen lying to you and trying to play you and all of that. And all that world collapsed, I think, right?
- [41:08]
Abe Greenwald
And then I think the echo chamber, the Ben Rhodes echo chamber is an important data point in this discussion because I think what we're talking about collapsing here is kind of Obama's world, the world that he sought to create, this inevitable liberal edifice that would carry on forever because it was self evidently just and right and moving toward ever more justice and rightness.
- [41:41]
Christine Rosen
And so the contempt, see that's what's interesting about the contempt, which is that Rhodes could have contempt for these people who were, after all, serving his interests and doing what he wanted them to do because it was self evident contempt for their toadies.
- [42:00]
Seth Mandel
I mean, that's just a rule of humanity.
- [42:02]
Christine Rosen
Yes, but the other way of looking at it is that he is that he thought again that sort of the ends justified the means. That is to say, maybe he was feeding them crapola ideas about Iran. The deal was self evidently a wonderful thing and therefore whatever methodology he used to get it across the finish line was acceptable. Not only acceptable, but morally praiseworthy. And that's why I say it's partially a harbinger of things to come, because this is what happened in the Trump years also, and during the post Trump years, which is that people who didn't know anything were confidently asserting all kinds of things about epidemiology and national security and the prosecutions under the foreign, you know, under a foreign recognized, registered foreign agent, biological basis, people. So like, I'm not saying that there was epistemological modesty in the days before the Internet blew up American journalism or reporting, but there was some sense of proportion and you know, the world of 20 of the 2000s is a world in which people can confidently assert three hours after congestion pricing is introduced in Manhattan, that it's working. I mean, literally, there were like 10,000 tweets about how wonderfully well it was working. And it had started in a snowstorm on a Monday, the first Monday after, after a vacation. And we don't know if it's working. We don't. There's no way of knowing that it's working. We don't know that things work or don't work that like.
- [43:51]
Vivian Berkovich
But there's also the. There's also the sort of the pressure to conform to that style of thinking. Not even necessarily the same opinions, but. Oh, you don't have a strong opinion on seed oils. How could you not have a strong opinion on seed oils today? It's already Tuesday. You know, that's kind of like, what's the thing of the week? By Wednesday, everybody should be an expert in that sort of thing. And so then we all just sort of. It's a weird monoculture thing, right? Which is like the Internet expanded all these horizons, but. But the kind of, you know, what my former colleague used to call guild bullying inside each industry pushes everybody into, like, the same door through the same doorway. And so now it's like we're all. Well, we're all talking about seed oils, and next week we're all going to be talking about something else, and we're all going to be doing it with surprisingly limited grasp of the concept, which was the whole point of the Internet broadening our horizons and democratizing the. The public space in the public square was so that you could have all this information at your fingertips. But really, we sort of ended up having all the opinions at your fingertips.
- [45:04]
Seth Mandel
Because your crazy aunt at the dinner table, who has a strong opinion about seed oils and has done the deep dive, is given just as much weight because of the architecture of the platform as the Nutrition scientist with 30 years experience studying seed oils. It's the same. There's no difference there.
- [45:20]
Christine Rosen
But the other thing that we learned and I think is important because it goes to like, as I say, sort of like whom we look to for expertise. Not the crazy aunt, but the nutrition scientist is that. Then it turned out that the nutrition scientist wasn't even a nutrition scientist, by which I mean that the leading public health official in Los Angeles, California, the second largest city in the country, had a BA in communications from Brandeis University.
- [45:45]
Seth Mandel
Well, and they all want to be.
- [45:46]
Christine Rosen
Not a doctor. She was not an epidemiologist. She was Not a data scientist. She was nothing. She was a political, Democratic, political hack who was closing restaurants and shutting down parks and things like that. And who the hell was she? And once we. Once that door cracks open, I think is. I think partially Abe's point here, right? Once that door cracks open, you can't close it again. I mean, you can. It will close again because there are places where you are. There are things you need expertise for, right? You're not gonna. You're not gonna, like, go in and punch a hole in your own wall and fix your plumbing unless you're really, really skilled. You ha. You can't do that. But it is in this weird combination of public policy and.
- [46:32]
Vivian Berkovich
Challenge accepted. John, I.
- [46:34]
Christine Rosen
Well, you. You know, I. I'm sorry. What can I tell you? But I'm just saying, like, there, there.
- [46:40]
Vivian Berkovich
So, you know.
- [46:41]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, well, there you go. I'm just saying, like, it's there. There are things in which, obviously, we need expertise more. More than. More than ever, because things are so incredibly complicated, and you wouldn't question it all that much. But then there are things where it turns out that the people who are supposed to know more than we do don't. A disinformation specialist who was hired by the Department of Health and Human Services to run a disinformation department, who, again, was, like, I don't know, writing erotica on the web. I can't remember what the hell it was that she did. She had no expertise. There is no such thing as expertise in disinformation because one man's disinformation is another man's information. But, you know, that's not true of data science, where, you know, data science also would incline you toward a certain degree of epistemological modesty.
- [47:37]
Vivian Berkovich
That was always Andy Ferguson's point in the many things that he's written over the years on social science, right? Which was the idea that we do have things that are science. We do have hard sciences. They exist, and we do have mathematics, they exist. And we do have things that can be measured in numbers and that we know how to research and how to test hypotheses and all this stuff. And what happened over the years was that we added to the category of science things that weren't science. And now everything is treated as a science. And it makes us suspect, unfortunately, of the things that are actually science, which. Which do still exist and can still be tested.
- [48:18]
Christine Rosen
An important point because, for example, so we got rfk, right Lining lined up to be the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. And he's a kook. And I don't mean he's a kook because we should then say, oh, this is like saying that Viktor Orban is a fascist. He's not really a kook. He is a kook. He has argued things that are not true. He makes stuff up. He's really bad. However, the epistemological modesty of genuine science says things like this. You know, there's fluoride in the water. 330 million people are dealing with fluoride in the water and in. And what we know from large data sets is that there is a tiny but measurable number of people who might be adversely affected by fluoride in the water. Maybe they have an allergy, maybe there's this, maybe there's something in their own systems, whatever. Just as we learned that there was a small but measurable effect potentially on young men between the ages of 15 and 30 from the COVID vaccine, who then had a, should have been in a position to make a choice about the COVID vaccine because so few people between the ages of 15 and 30 were dying from COVID And that since there was some idea that there was going to be, there was a myocardial infarction risk associated with the COVID vaccine in this one subpopulation that was not horribly at risk from COVID What?
- [49:50]
Seth Mandel
Myocarditis.
- [49:52]
Christine Rosen
Myocarditis. I'm sorry, that. But that conversation was not permissible because the idea was if you went down that road, then you were going to tell people that it was okay for them not to get the vaccine and so you weren't going to allow that to happen. So this is where you get the problem that I think. Christine, you said Republicans need to, or conservatives need to check their priors because, yeah, fluoride in the water has been an unbelievably successful three generation experiment in, in ending tooth decay in the United States as a major problem. But you can't say that it is completely risk free because nothing is risk free at all. And then once you, once you're in a position where you have these propagandists and tort lawyers and all of that, an article is published that says, yeah, there's some, you know, they're potentially minor risks from fluoride and water to some people, then you get, ah, you see, they've been covering up for, for 70 years I've been covering up the danger of fluoride.
- [51:01]
Seth Mandel
That's the perfect combination of the fact that we now govern from extreme exceptions to the rule, we do not trust the people who lay down the rules in the first place. And you have platforms that allow for everyone to do their own work and find their own, you know, conspiracy rabbit hole to go down to, to prove the extreme. And so that combination of those things leads to policy making that is just absolutely insane at the end of the day with regard to things that. Look, there have been countries that have removed fluoride from the water and then gone back to putting fluoride in the water because of the actual measurable increase in cavities and children in particular. So we know we have plenty of evidence. But you're right that it doesn't. The exceptions are governing so much of our politics right now that it's difficult to come to compromise or to acknowledge the range of non Manichean interpretations of just regular things about life.
- [51:55]
Christine Rosen
So let's. I think we should talk a little bit. We did not get a chance to talk about the, interestingly relating to Hungary, maybe a little bit Joe Biden's Medal of Freedom grantees over the weekend, those controversial, I guess, being George Soros, the billionaire of Hungarian Jewish descent who, who has served as the counterpoise ideologically, personally, in terms of his own efforts to build institutions inside his home, his birth country of Hungary. George Soros against Viktor Orban, whom we talked about earlier. But the world of Biden's conduct in the last month of this presidency is uniquely suggestive of the reason that he would have, had he not had mental problems, mental acuity issues and had stayed in the race, he would have lost anyway. I think because his, his root instincts went totally off the rails once he became president and did not have institutional boundaries of the Senate or institutional boundaries of the Vice presidency or something like. And I think that this helps explain this very peculiar decision to try to permanently ban the outer shelf oil exploration. Because I'm trying to figure out why he bothered, why he's doing it, it's probably not going to work and all that, because I think the idea that he can enjoin future presidents from action seems demented. But somebody came to him, in my estimation, and said, as they said, said, you can be the greatest climate president ever if you do this. Similarly, ban Nippon Steel from buying US Steel. So you will be known as the greatest pro union president ever. And if you go to Joe Biden and you say in his ear, you will be fdr, you will be Lincoln, you will be this. That's all you need to do to get this very thick now, as I say, mentally Compromised, but very thick, quite dumb and weirdly instincted person to do what you want him to do. So if only somebody had said, you will be the, you know, you will be like the, the king of the Jew. You will be the hero of Yad Vashem. If only you stay on Israel's, you will be considered the greatest president in Jewish history. You know, maybe, maybe he would have been enjoined from some of his bad behavior beginning in November of 2023 against, against Israel.
- [55:11]
Abe Greenwald
But, well, he's been so cut off at the knees that he's trying to grasp at any brass ring. Right. I mean, don't forget when he came into office, the historians he met with, sat down, they put into his mind that he was destined for historic greatness in the first place. That clearly fell apart. So now on the way out, he's trying to do something, some big thing, some swing for the fences that will enable him to go down in the books. I think the Medal of Freedom ceremony, the recipients are interesting because clearly so many of them are. He's trying to zing Trump and the right. Hillary Clinton, George Soros, George Romney. And he's sort of trying to say, we're still here and we're gonna, you know, this the fight continues kind of thing. But I sort of read it as, I think we'll look back on it as you had a good run, guys, here's your gold watch. It's over, right?
- [56:24]
Vivian Berkovich
That's the other way to see it, which is that Biden is leaving office and Mitt Romney, who, you know, I have a ton of respect for, but he's leaving office.
- [56:32]
Christine Rosen
But George Romney.
- [56:33]
Vivian Berkovich
No, I. But Mitt Romney, he gave the medal to George. But Mitt Romney was there to accept it. And the scene was supposed to be Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton and all these people that, you know, you don't think the political element of what Abe is saying is.
- [56:50]
Christine Rosen
You don't, you don't.
- [56:51]
Vivian Berkovich
They wouldn't know George Romney if he got out of his grave and walked into the room.
- [56:55]
Christine Rosen
No, George Romney, he knows George Romney is fine. George Romney is like from his 20s, right?
- [57:01]
Vivian Berkovich
That's true.
- [57:01]
Christine Rosen
Maybe he doesn't know who Mitt Romney.
- [57:03]
Vivian Berkovich
Picture was to put Mitt Romney up there one last time, right? Take a shot at all this stuff.
- [57:07]
Seth Mandel
I don't know.
- [57:08]
Vivian Berkovich
And I think there are a lot of them. This. They're obviously all leaving the scene in a way. And I think you put, that, you put your grandparents on a cruise.
- [57:16]
Seth Mandel
I disagree. I disagree. Because you know, who accepted George Soros as a award. Alex Soros, his son, who spent the last year stuffing the, putting pictures on his social media of every single major Democrat and on the bench, the people who are the next, supposedly the next generation of Democratic leadership like, like, you know, trophy heads he'd gotten on his African Savannah hunt. I mean, this guy, he is a player. He has a lot of money, he has a lot of influence. He sits on a lot of boards of NGOs and KN nonprofits on the left. So you could argue that while, you know, giving the Gold Watch to a lot of these guys, he was also signaling, look, here's the next gen of our funders.
- [57:53]
Abe Greenwald
I'll say two things about that. One way to look at that is that George Soros didn't bother to show up to the White House to receive a Medal of Freedom. And the other is, look at the Harris campaign. You can spend as much money as you can print, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get anywhere with it. And I think we're in a place where it takes more than throwing billions at a cause to get something happening.
- [58:22]
Vivian Berkovich
There's something else with the Harris campaign, which is now that you bring it up, which is that these very rich liberal donors, they establish huge foundations and the money trickles down, right? Where did we see that money trickle down? Danielle Pletka wrote this great cover piece for Commentary magazine about how a lot of the money that came to the Tentifada groups and these more extreme radicalized groups on campus was trickling down from, you know, from on high, the top of the mountain, you know, the soroses, to some of these foundations which then give to other foundations, which then gives other foundations and cutouts, the cutouts and cutouts and blah, blah, blah. But the money really does start at that top. And if anything, all that stuff hurt the Harris campaign, right? I mean, she, the, the, the, the, the.
- [59:15]
Christine Rosen
Well, it hurt her freedom. It hurt her freedom of mobility.
- [59:18]
Vivian Berkovich
Certainly this, the, the fight over the war was these groups were empowered by these same money men, right, in Michigan and exploded in their face arguments.
- [59:29]
Christine Rosen
You, you know, it's, it's all, it's all very interesting how people go out the door, right? It's, this is all. So the, the worst person to ever go out the door was Trump went out the door the worst possible way. It was horrible, right? You had bitterness in 2000 when Bush was sort of mandated president by the Supreme Court and you had had Clinton people taking the ease off the keyboards of the computers in the West Wing as some kind of weird middle finger to the incoming Bush people. And then you had Bush, who gave all kinds of Bush, was incredibly gracious. And so how people go out the door, you know, is. Is. Is an interesting. Is an interesting matter. I don't know how Jill Biden is going to go out the door, seriously. I mean, how many. How many. How many more documents is she gonna sign?
- [60:34]
Seth Mandel
Still waiting for that pardon of his brother, which has got to come.
- [60:38]
Christine Rosen
Oh, that will happen on the morning of the 20th, right? That will happen.
- [60:42]
Vivian Berkovich
My old rabbi used to say that the way you went into Shabbos was the way that you would go into the next world. That if you were rushing and you needed the extra 18 minutes and you didn't finish everything and you didn't plan, then that's how you go into the next world, that you leave things unfinished. So we could. We could move that over to this and apply it and say, the way you leave office in D.C. is the way you will enter the next world. If you're pardoning bad people and, you know, handing out gifts to your friends and all sorts of stuff like that, the way you go out is actually quite. Quite significant. Significant.
- [61:16]
Christine Rosen
And we should say. I think just to. I'm just gonna say something nice just for the hell of it. According to Susie Wiles yesterday in Axios, she, the incoming White House Chief of staff, has been treated extraordinarily well by the outgoing White House Chief of staff, Jeff Zion. I don't know how to pronounce his name. Zence, but she said that, you know.
- [61:37]
Vivian Berkovich
It rhymes with science.
- [61:39]
Christine Rosen
Had, had, had. Had them over to dinner. Has been incredibly gracious, has been very. And it's worth noting that that has taken place while we make fun of a lot of this other stuff. Hey, Christine, you have a recommendation?
- [61:52]
Seth Mandel
I do. It's not a new book, but it's a book that I. When it first came out, I read sections of. I was a undergraduate history major at the time, but I had an opportunity to revisit it over the holidays, and it so struck me as something I enjoyed and as an artifact of the way even academic history used to be written in the 1990s. Something I would like to recommend, and it's a book called Mystic Chords of the Transformation of Tradition in American Culture by historian Michael Kammen. Michael Kammen won the Pulitzer for a book he wrote called People of Paradox, which is also excellent. But Mystic Chords of Memory came out, I think, in 1991, and it is a vast, sprawling, almost 900 pages. So it is a doorstopper cultural history of America. And the question he starts with, and I think in some ways never quite answers, which is what makes the book really fun to read, is how does a young nation that is always looking to the future and trying to capture progress, harness progress? How does it have a past? How does it create a history for itself? So he looks at, because he had this. He's incredibly idiosyncratic historian who could actually write beautifully those two things both rare in academia and in academic history, unfortunately, he just found all these unusual stories that the book is full of wonderful images. He talks about, you know, the creation of things like Old Town Alexandria or, you know, Disneyland and Disney World and the sort of the way you could almost bureaucratize nostalgia for the purposes of entertainment and why Americans loved that sort of thing and what it said about us as a people. And I mean, it starts in, you know, at the founding of the country and goes all the way up to, I think, the Reagan. It ends around Reagan's term. So it is just. It's just great fun. If you don't want to read it all start to finish, you can pick a chunk of history. So I think one of the most overlooked times in American history, that it's also culturally rich or the late 19th, early 20th century. A lot of wacky stuff going on. A lot of interesting threads to pull there. And that section is one of my favorites. But you can kind of dive in and just read bits and pieces. It's just a beautiful book. And he taught at Cornell for a long, long time. He passed away a few years ago and he was a wonderful scholar. All of his books worth reading. But I would recommend Mystic Chords of Memory by Michael. That's Michael, A M M E N. Right.
- [64:12]
Christine Rosen
Okay, great. Well, we will be back with you tomorrow. For Christine, Seth and Ave, I'm John Pothorotz. Keep the candle bur.