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- [00:00]
A
You know, we got a Covid dog. My family like a lot of people, feeling lonely, kids feeling lonely. We got ourselves 13 pound Havanese. Wasn't 13 when we got it. Named Georgie. And we, of course, now love this dog. Dog comes with me to the office every day. I'll do anything for this dog. And that's why I want to talk to you about, as a pet owner, about the ASPCA Pet Health Insurance Program. Quick message from today's sponsor. These days, we insure just about everything. Cars that lose value the second we drive them. Phones we trade in every two years. Trips we haven't even taken yet. But our pets, who are truly irreplaceable, often go unprotected. With ASPCA pet health insurance, you can get help with unexpected vet bills and make sure your dog or cat gets the care they need when they need it. And when you're looking out for them, there's a little extra something in it for you, too. When you enroll in an ASPCA pet health insurance plan, you could get a $25Amazon gift card. It's a little treat for you while you're doing something great for your pet. The program offers customizable accident and illness plans, making it easier to get your pet the care they may need. To Explore coverage, visit aspcapetinsurance.com commentary that's aspcapetinsurance.Com commentary. Eligibility restrictions apply. Visit aspcapetinsurance.COM AmazonTerms for more info. This is a paid advertisement. Insurance is underwritten by either Independence American Insurance Company or United States Fire Insurance Company and produced by PTZ Insurance Agency Ltd. The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, Friday, February 13, 2026. I'm John Pothor. It's the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. High, Abe.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [02:28]
C
Hi, John.
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A
And Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [02:32]
D
Hi, John.
- [02:33]
A
Now, we can go all policy or we can go all sleaze. So I'm gonna leave it up to you guys. We're gonna take a vote.
- [02:43]
D
There's an overlapping Venn diagram for those.
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A
I think that's true, but we're gonna take a vote here. All who want to go with sleaze, say I.
- [02:53]
C
Okay, I want to go. I want to go with a policy discussion of what to do when a blanket is left on a Coast Guard plane.
- [03:01]
A
Okay, well, I guess we're going with the sleeves. Okay, so that refers to a story, to be fair, a story that was first surfaced the specific detail that Seth is alluding to in a Washington Post story last year. But there is a compendium of stories involving the behavior of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her special government employee Swain Corey Lewandowski, famous 10 years ago for being a leading figure on the Trump campaign who had to.
- [03:41]
D
Be.
- [03:43]
A
Offed from his position after he manhandled the reporter Michelle Fields, who was working at the time for Breitbart and is a person known for being hot headed and eccentric in his personal behavior. And this piece is about his relationship with Kristi Gnome and Christine Ome's behavior as the Homeland Security secretary. And it is a doozy. In 40 years of paying attention to hit jobs on leading figures in Washington, this one beats them all. I mean, maybe it's close to the notorious Sally Quinn piece from the 1970s where she talked about then White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan spitting amaretto on, on, on somebody's dress when he was drunk at a party or something like that. That was sort of like the foundational hit job, social contour misbehavior of Washington leading figure piece that kind of began an entirely new era in Washington press coverage. But this one is very, very close. And I just suggest to you that you go to the Wall Street Journal and read this piece in its entirety because you're not going to be more entertained today, certainly because, you know, it's the perfect compendium of embarrassing personal details, a horrible boss behavior, weird political machinations to get around, why it is that people who aren't properly vetted shouldn't have power in political offices in Washington. The question is, cui Bono, why is this piece, which is clearly essentially intended, and there are a couple of others, whether there's one in the Washington examiner this morning also, that kind of takes the same aim at Noem and Lewandowski. Apparently they have people building up a lot of string and are, you know, just wanted to offload this and are trying to cut her jugular and cut Lewandowski's jugular and get them out of office and out of power. But what do we make of this story as a whole if we take it not as what's it about or who's benefiting and all that, assume that 30% of the detail in the story is exaggerated or is unfair or is kind of like just sort of salacious gossip that doesn't actually necessarily have a fully Sourced basis and maybe just, you know, sort of like what we call Lashon Hara, which is like, you know, bad, which is bad gossip. But 70% is true. What do we take away from this sort of 12 month experiment with Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security?
- [07:20]
D
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- [07:49]
C
See terms you take away that first of all she, nobody there has any question that all of this is looks bad for the administration. So all the stuff that that rings true and surely is is the infighting about what to do about the videos of ICE agents shooting or beating or whatever, you know, protesters and, and people blocking them from trying to carry out ICE raids and things like that. They, they all sort of freak out over this. They all understand it's bad. But it looks to me like Todd Lyons, you know, who is technically he's the ice, he's the director of ice. So Todd Lyons is the supposed to be making this many of these types of decisions. And Holman, who we mentioned earlier should also, who is also we haven't mentioned Homan yet.
- [08:43]
A
We haven't mentioned Tom Holman who is the head of the border Patrol. Right.
- [08:49]
C
So you know, these two, these two, you know the story is the policy relating stuff in the story is that they wanted there to be, they wanted the ICE rage to be low profile and not everything on camera. Gnome and Lewandowski wanted there to be a sort of perp walk atmosphere to ICE strutting around Minnesota or wherever it would be. And that Noem believed that this would, would add deterrence to enforcement and that people would see this and not want to be, you know, perp walked or whatever. And in the literally the exact opposite happened. But it sounds to me like Homan and Lyons and the people around them have really had it and would like to make it clear for posterity if it's true that they did not want any of this, that they were against this whole circus atmosphere and that it had exactly the effect that they expected it would. And now that you're telling them to clean up the mess, at least in Homan's case that is, you know, literally true. He's there to clean up the mess. Now I think it's the career guys and the people around Homan and Lyons who are saying, you know, stop telling us to just clean up the spill. Let us, you know, let us cook the soup ourselves, you know, instead of just cleaning it all up when, when the spill happens.
- [10:15]
D
Well, and this is a, there's a, there's a certain logical consequence to Donald Trump's insistence on choosing camera ready cabinet members. And Kristi Noem is the perfect example. So Lewandowski was pushing, pushing her to be his vice presidential nominee. He's been sort of reshaping her image for some time now. And even setting aside the rumors about them being engaged in some sort of extramarital affair, the two of them have been, you know, connected at the hip for a while in promoting her as a new star on the, in the gop. But she's terrible political instincts. She had no experience with immigration and she did earn her nickname of Ice Barbie because she was doing so much posing and so much Instagram ready content building. But that's precisely the kind of people that capture Donald Trump's attention in the first place. What's interesting about her and Lewandowski is that they overplayed their hand. They, I think if the, if, if they'd actually been running that very important and critical department correctly, efficiently and well and not ended up having, you know, all of these terrible videos and all this behavior that has turned the tide on immigration, feelings about immigration for Trump, they, then she would just be chugging along. But she insists on putting herself in positions that make her seem tough. So she, you know, wears a very fitted white T shirt and stands in front of a bunch of tattooed prisoners. And she loves the vamping, really, but doesn't understand the policy. And so when things go south that she starts looking for people to blame. And Lewandowski obviously helps her with that. And she's angered a lot of people there. But the ultimate person she has to answer to is Donald Trump. And I was struck because I read that piece just before reading Phil Wegman's discussion of Trump's media diet, his sort of, which was on Real Clear Politics this morning. And Trump's kind of old school. He still reads print newspapers. He like, he watches a ton of television. He is a news junkie. But he, so he has a real feel for when Things are curdling. And so what happened to her is that I think he loved her when she was doing all of her posturing and whatnot. But as soon as it became a negative political ramification for him, he drew her back. Now he won't fire her. That's the thing that I think is interesting, and he probably should. It would make him look better because she's a liability, Lewandowski's a liability. But I don't know. I actually think he got exactly what he deserved in putting her in a cabinet position in the first place.
- [12:38]
B
The thing about these wild card figures that are camera ready that Trump is drawn to, they all kind of overplay their hands because that's what they are. They are performers, which is why Trump is drawn to them. So, you know, you have rfk, you know, running wild. You know, you have, as Trump said he would let him do, let Bobby run wild. Right. Hegseth, you know, grandstanding and talking to the generals. And this is. This is the type that. That Trump likes to gather around him some sense. It makes Trump's own conduct. It normalizes it.
- [13:24]
A
Well, I mean, to be fair. So Hegseth really was a. Basically a Fox News personality. Right? And there are the. So. And RFK is. Is a Nepo baby lunatic who ran a bizarre campaign for president. Kristi Noem is a relatively conventional politician. She was a member of Congress, and she became governor of South Dakota. You know, she served, I don't know, four or five term, four terms in Congress, then won the governorship of South Dakota. That person, though, she doesn't have any experience with homeland security. We have other governors, former governors, who are sitting in the Cabinet. Governors are obviously very good choices, usually for their executive. They have executive experience. They've run large organizations. You know, Doug Burgam right now is the Secretary of the Interior. It would be perfectly conventional for Kristi Noem's appointment and her management of the Department of Homeland Security is well within the parameters of what we understand classic cabinet secretaries to be. But she is not a classic cabinet secretary in this sense. I don't know if this is true in other places, but in New York, for example, on New York One, which is our, like, local cable news channel, Spectrum, whatever it's called Spectrum New York 1. Every day on the news and sometimes on the Today show news for a long time, maybe not every day, but there was a commercial. And the commercial is, hi, I'm Kristi Noem, head of the, you know, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and here's what you should do, you need to self deport. And if you self deport, we'll give you, we'll pay for the plane flight and then you can get online to come back into this country. But if not, we're going to throw you out. I'm Kristi Noam. I'm Kristi Noem. I've never seen anything like this, a cabinet secretary starring in a television commercial. I don't know who appropriated the money for this. I don't know where it comes from. It must come from some kind of public relations line at the Department of Homeland Security to, to provide the public with information on how to do what it does. But she has used this department as a personal thief to try to launch herself as a major public figure, possibly for 2028 in 2017. The Trump of 2017 would not have tolerated this. She would have been kicked out the door. He didn't want anybody else in that administration getting the spotlight put on them ever. Remember, it's like one of the reasons that he kept replacing his White House chief of staff and stuff like that. He didn't want anybody else to be thought of as an independent personality under the Trump ambit. He seems less concerned about that now and much less right and has given these people their heads. And then she is behaving, if this story is to be believed, she and Lee Wendowski are behaving like, I don't know what you would call it, like demented aristocrats abusing their court, the people in their court. So the story that Seth alluded to involves the fact that for some reason they were switching planes or there was some plane, they were getting on another plane and, and somebody forgot Kristi Noam's blanket as they moved from one plane to the other. And the pilot who was supposed to get the blanket was fired because he didn't get her blanket. And then he had to be rehired because there was no one who could fly the second plane back to D.C. that alone.
- [17:43]
D
It's worse than that, John. It's worse than that, John, because it's, it's a massive kind of entitlement on the taxpayer's dime and the public trust, because it's, and she and Lewandowski both are, it's appalling everybody behavior. She wants that jet bought for her personal use when she's a cabinet secretary, you know, she, she wants all the trappings. And that is a very, that is something that in a democracy, the people will not accept. The whole point of the private jet fleet that the federal government has is that people don't know much about it. We don't fly in private is something almost an infinitesimal number of human beings on this earth ever have the opportunity to do, and certainly very few on a regular basis. But when you're living off of your salary is the taxpayer's dime, you can't be insisting and demanding it. But the other thing that struck me about the piece that was really worrisome was that Lewandowski was pressuring people within DHS to give him a federal law enforcement badge and gun. A federal federally issued gun and a law enforcement badge. He's had no law enforcement training that would make that something anyone should put in his hands. And the guy who wouldn't sign off on it got moved out of his position. So they are trying, they're making these kind of entitled demands for things like badges and guns. I mean, that means he could go around and arrest someone if they, if they heckle Christie when she's, you know, standing in front of a group of prisoners. This is not acceptable. And this is not something that I think once exposed, people are going to forget. Remember she shot the dog? That used to be the thing everyone knew about her. Now it's the blanket. I mean, these things pile up. And at a certain point, I think an overall portrait of the character and judgment of this person has got to make the insiders in the Trump administration really question the judgment of keeping her there.
- [19:21]
A
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D
But like he, it certainly would have to be something that would make it difficult for him to get a federally issued pistol.
- [22:49]
A
Yeah. Or let's say, let's say. Yeah, he. Yeah, he needed to write that. That is something that they would have to deal with in a clearance process for him and he might be denied it. Also, he is not in fact an employee. Right.
- [23:05]
C
This is what I was going to say. I'm not convinced that he has Any legal reason to still be there. I mean, he's a special advisor, which is the sort of thing that allows you to double dip and stay in the private sector as long as you only spend a certain amount of time, it's on your federal job, and there's.
- [23:28]
A
No 30 days a year. So he.
- [23:30]
C
There's no question that when he passes that, like, even the story has people complaining like, you're past your 130 days. I'm not taking orders from you. But he very, very clearly, nobody, besides the people who don't like him are tracking that. Like, nobody's actually paying attention to what kind of authority he has or where his limits of authority are. And one of the reasons they're not paying so much attention to that is because he just tells Christy Noem, I mean, that's the picture that they paint. And so then it comes out of her mouth instead of his. And nobody can say to Kristi Noem, you're past your 130 days, so I'm not listening to you, because she's the actual boss. So they've figured out a way here for Lewandowski to be a kind of permanent fixture and a shadow chief of staff in a way that complicates what other people in the department are actually being paid to do. And therefore contracts are piling up and not being signed. And, you know, other governors, other Republican governors are complaining in the story about, you know, they, Governor Kemp, Brian Kemp said that they needed disaster aid in Georgia, and they didn't get it because the Lewandowski Nome tandem has put limits on the amount of money that you can get from DHS without her approval. And so when she's going on these world tours, taking, you know, glam photos in front of prisoners and stuff, there are papers sitting on her desk that say the people in Georgia need hurricane relief or some kind of whatever it is, and they're not getting it because she personally has to sign off on it.
- [25:10]
A
And.
- [25:10]
C
And she made it that way. So Lewandowski has himself in a situation where, you know, this is. There's obviously, you can't say it's technically illegal, but it without question is improper and legally suspect. And it's having actual real, real world effects on what people are able to do. Because when she started this position, she brought this power under her wing to say, if it's over a certain amount of money, I have to personally sign off on it. And now you have to go to Lewandowski and Gnome hand, if you power.
- [25:46]
D
Does come from somewhere. Lewandowski's power comes from his association with Donald Trump. The only reason that he's allowed that much leeway in that cabinet level position is that Trump likes him and has trusted him for a long time. Long past the point where he should have been questioning his character and judgment. And that's ultimately the buck stops with Trump on this one. I mean, Lewandowski is terrible. And when his 130 days are up, he should be tossed or he should have to reapply for his status again. But that's never going to happen because he and Noem are now really laying it on thick with Trump, trying to make sure that he understands that, you know, they have absolute loyalty for him, etc. So all the stuff that works on Trump, they'll probably succeed, which is why she's still in a job, even though he's got more competent people actually doing the work that she's supposed to be doing. I know I sound angry, but the Lewandowski Trump connection goes way back and he's been a Trump loyalist for a long, long time.
- [26:36]
C
I think one other detail to add to that is that he lives with her. According to the story, he live under the same roof. They live under the same roof. And he's paying, technically paying rent. So there is, there's no way actually to literally stop him from giving her advice. Even if you say you're past your 130 days, you're only now collecting your private sector paycheck instead of both your private sector and your public sector paycheck, they're sitting there together. There's no way, there's no way to cut that off.
- [27:04]
B
When John talks about the difference between the first Trump term and this one, and, you know, people going out there and making commercials on their own and grandstanding, I think it's significant. There is a sense of decadence that has infused this presidency that is even something for Trump. When you talk about commercials, Trump's out there selling watches on TV every night. Here's the Red Beauty, latest one on offer. You've got this interview. I just saw RFK Jr saying, I'm not afraid of germs. I used to do coke off toilet seats. This is a very wild sort of saturnalia situation we're in. Look, as John, as you've observed, the gold leaf dripping by the day, it seems to accrete in the Oval Office. I mean, this is, you know, we.
- [28:17]
D
Need PJ o' Rourke to be resurrected from the dead. I mean, I'm missing so much in these moments.
- [28:23]
A
Yeah, I mean, it is, it is sort of like bread and circuses, you know, that is, that is you know, the greatest work of exactly right. History ever written.
- [28:31]
B
I just want to say I never had a problem. Yeah, I never had a problem with the ballroom. But sort of taken as a piece of this, of this, of what we're talking about here now, it takes on a sort of a different aspect.
- [28:47]
A
Again. There's all this good news for Trump. There are pieces of good news for Trump right this morning. Inflation report is out, very low. Right. Job report at the beginning of this week, very good. Public does not think he's doing a good job in the economy. Public does not think he's doing a good job on immigration. And there's polling this week that has him in the 30s. And there's a reason that the polling has him in the 30s. Part of it is, as Christine's great hobby horse, is just because the macro economy has all these favorable signs doesn't mean that the individual American is feeling any relief from the burden of economic worries or real time economic hardships. So that's not registering. But even if it were, even if it could, just this onslaught and of bad news, and the bad news, unlike the deep state inventing the Russia hoax stuff is self inflicted. This stuff that Christine Om and Lee Windowski are doing, they're doing. It's not that somebody else is, you know, doing it to them. What happened in Minnesota yesterday, another piece of either good news or palliative news that should help move this stuff out of the headlines was Tom Homan announcing that the mission in Minnesota is over and that they are in fact removing the, you know, border Patrol people in the ice. It's over. They've declared, you know, they've sort of declared mission accomplished and they're pulling out, which is the purpose of which is to sort of end the story because they have other things to do and other things that they want to get accomplished and they want to calm the waters in part so that they can move ahead with the funding of Kristi Noem's department, which is about to be defunded. I don't know when tonight or like midnight tonight or something like that, as part of this Democratic effort to cast a spotlight on the misbehavior or what they believe to be the misbehavior of people in the DHS ambit. And Trump is suffering, he is suffering from the behavior of his underlings. And unlike the unbelievably instrumentalist Trump of the first term who would literally kick anybody to the curb at any point. He has developed a kind of what you might call a conventional political circle over the last 10 years. And he does seem to feel loyalty. He does seem to feel a connection to the people who were there in the old days, just like every politician always ever has. And when they get into trouble as president, they have their people who have been with them from, you know, back in the first campaign, you know, when they were just handing out leaflets in, you know, in Pasquie. And what am I going to do? Get rid of this guy. He's been loyal to me for 30 years. Trump was like, I don't have any of that. You know, I'm not part of the swamp. I don't have these connections. Well, now it's a decade and he's got these connections.
- [32:15]
D
Can I add that his connections, that the vetting that his connections, the ones that continued from first term Trump to second term Trump were required to do a few things. Defend, defend him against the genuine, all the January six claims, be on board later with the blanket pardons and to deny that he even lost that election. They have to kind of at least to curry favor with him and to maintain a sense of loyalty. They could not have criticized the claims he made about having, having that having been a stolen election. And that makes them very different from, because a lot of people wouldn't do that and they didn't stick around and they are not back in the second Trump term. A lot, a lot of people, many of them actually far more competent than the people he staffed his administration with now. And I think it's also why at, even at the very entry level job position, the social media, the 20 something social media people at all these different departments, that's why they're kind of nuts. I mean they, they actually dredged the swamp, brought them in and they're now running the social media accounts. And a lot of them are nuts. And I think that's, that shows you that, you know, one of you, I think it was Abe a couple of weeks ago said something like the conspiracy theorists are now staffing the administration. I mean there's some truth to that. And that's because the loyalty he requires, requires people to suspend reality, political reality, which is what Trump has made all of us do for the past more than a decade.
- [33:33]
A
Right.
- [33:34]
C
Also, you know, you have to remember that this is supposed to be a signature issue and he's still like allowing this stuff to go on right on his signature issue. So that, that loyal, whatever he feels, that loyalty, that special place in his heart, he has for the people who were there, you know, from the moment he came down the golden escalator or whatever. It's strong enough to allow them to stay in their jobs when essentially they're sabotaging not just his presidency, you could say, overall the numbers, but specifically by sabotaging the one thing that he has built his political brand on. If you ask 100 people on the street, right, like Family feud, we asked 100 people what Donald Trump's main policy issue is, 100 of them will say immigration. That's not even a question. And that this is happening around immigration is really telling.
- [34:26]
A
Also, there are signs that he is losing his absolute dominance of the Republican Party. And the signs are little bits of signs. But Thom Tillis, who is of course retiring as senator from North Carolina, has announced that he will not vote to change, confirm whatever anyone on the Fed, meaning he will not approve. I don't know what the committee structure is or whether he is on the committee that will report this out to the floor of the Senate. So I'm a little confused about whether he's just one out of 100 or he is the. Or he is a key vote on a, on a subcommittee because I, even though I started talking about this right now, I didn't look it up before the show. So I apologize. But he said, I'm not voting for Jay Powell. I will not have. There will not be a vote not for Jay Powell. I will not have a vote for Kevin Warsh, the new head of the Fed, or any changes in the Fed until I am told that the Fed, this administration drops its criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, which is an act of injustice and I will not stand for it as a senator. Similarly, Senator from Utah yesterday announced that Curtis announced that he would not support the reporting out of the nomination of to for the Assistant Secretary of State for international organizations of a man whose name right now because Jeremy Carl. Jeremy Carl. Thank you. A woke right intellectual who espouses who he actually specifically did not talk about his replacement, his playing in the playground of replacement theory, but said that his views and expressions and things about the state of Israel and anti Semitism were deeply concerning to him and that he would not vote to let that nomination go to the floor of the Senate, thereby killing it. Talk about the Jeremy Carl thing or not, we can we talk so much about these anti Semitism issues that like it can just bury us under. The point that I'm trying to make here is that he sees no difficulty in this. And again, somebody wasn't thinking ahead to think this guy is really like, gonna get us into trouble if we let this nomination go further. But he apparently has very serious protectsia from very high in the administration, is part of this bizarre Claremont Institute network and is disgusting and should never have been nominated. And even if you think that what he says is fine and you like it secretly and you giggle in your corner because you think it's really great that he says that, you know, Israel has too much power over our deliberations in the United States and all Democrats want to do is make sure that white people are replaced by non white people. That even if you agree with that, maybe it's not the best idea to bring that person before the Senate when you don't have enough people in the Senate to ensure that he's going to slide through. Do you really want this exposed? Do you want the President to be humiliated by having a nomination rejected? No, you don't. That's classic protective behavior by administration of its husbanding, its power and authority. And if the Senate is the individual. Members of the Senate on individual issues are starting to turn. There was the turn in the House on tariffs. I think something is going to happen with this stuff about Vinay Prasad at the FDA and the Moderna vaccines that might yet come before the, you know, sort of health committee of the Senate and that kind of thing. Like there are. It's February, the election is in November. If his. If Trump's numbers don't improve and he seems to start to weaken and there's enough points of disagreement where individual Republicans feel strong enough, as say, John Cassidy did not feel strong enough back in back last year to oppose RFK's nomination. But if they start to feel like the bloom is off the rose and his power to punish me is not so strong and he's got 10 fronts on which he is dealing with horrible personnel and policy issues, a lot of bad, you know, the normal balance of power between the Hill and the executive branch could start reasserting itself.
- [39:40]
B
I think you're right. I think the two are related. What I mean is the excesses that we started out discussing have created this kind of internal. The room for this internal backlash. Just because no one was sort of playing it anywhere near down the line. And eventually you're gonna get people saying, okay, this is too much, this is too far, this is damaging.
- [40:06]
A
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- [42:02]
D
We should add, you know, Tim Scott, Senator Tim Scott came out over the weekend when the, the video that Trump posted that included images of former president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama looking like monkeys, which he then, he blamed on a staffer and then said, oh, I didn't see it. You know, whatever usual excuses. Tim Scott came out very, very strongly saying this is absolutely unacceptable. This is racist. And so that, you know, the National Guard, the quiet withdrawal of National Guard troops from some cities. There's just a number of data points over the last, I would say two or three months that are showing a thankful and welcome redistribution of our well designed 250 year old system of government. That means the executive is going to be reined in and not just from the. Because MAGA might turn on him or voters might turn on him, but because Congress has equal power.
- [42:54]
C
Like how's the House vote in that sense? Christine? The House vote really is hugely significant. Right? I mean this is. He lost the vote because of Republicans. He would have won if Republicans stayed in line. Right? I mean and it was the, the resolution, you know, was a, was essentially like A resolution of, you know, disapproval. Like it was a finger wagging piece of legislation that said Donald Trump, you can't do that. And that was like. And the fact that it passed because now only six Republicans, you know, but still the fact is that you only did six. It passes if Republicans, it fails if Republicans stay in line, it passes. If enough Republicans decide to defect and make it pass, that speaks very loudly, regardless of the specific number that was needed.
- [43:45]
A
Okay, so to move on to policy, here's an interesting thing where the, I would say the abuse of executive authority, not by Trump, but by Obama, who of course was the president who started distending executive authority in the way that we are now, you know, so powerfully objecting to in the Congress not asserting its prerogatives. Major move yesterday. Right. Which was the lifting of this idea that the administration had the right to impose all sorts of restrictions nationally on the CO2 emissions creations on the grounds that carbon dioxide was a carbon is a pollutant that kills people and that it used a Supreme Court decision to make an executive policy out of the regulation of CO2 emissions and using the penumbras and emanations of the Clean Air Act. And yesterday Trump said, I'm lifting that. You know, you can't lift a law. But nobody ever passed this law. Congress was not involved in the decision to give the administration the power to regulate CO2 and methane emissions. That was not in the Clean Air act or the Clean Water act or whatever Clean act we're talking about here. It was done through executive action and, and the, and the seizure of regulatory authority. And therefore that can be undone with the wave of a hand. Remember when Tom Cotton wrote the letter after the, after the 2015 JCPOA, he wrote a letter to the, to the mullahs and said, just so you know, because you got cause Obama did this the way that he did it, you shouldn't get comfortable because the next president can just, if Obama can do it with a wave of his hand, the next president can undo what Obama does with the wave of his hand. And people yelled and screamed at Cotton for getting involved in foreign policy and said it was so terrible. And then of course Trump in 2018 waved his hand and ended the JCPOA. Similarly here you have overreach by the executive branch under Obama, not taking it to the Congress so that there will be a national consensus on this policy and giving the administration the power to do this. And now that's been wiped away.
- [46:44]
B
Yeah, I mean it's not even a, it's A lowercase. What Obama did. Lowercase endangerment finding. I mean. Right, yeah, that holds. No, you know, that, that, that's the easiest thing to, to, to wipe away.
- [47:00]
C
So.
- [47:00]
B
Yeah, no, I think it's a good move. And you know, I wrote about it yesterday. I was just interested in this return to the sky is Falling climate change hysteria over it. I'm, I'm surprised Trump didn't do it earlier, actually. Although, you know, it's like he's, they.
- [47:18]
A
May have been formulating it like these things are not that simple to just do, you know, I mean, I don't know what the document is that is the overriding document to the current regulatory framework, but you know, you don't just like, I mean, now maybe AI could do it in two minutes, but I mean, it's not, it's not that simple to actually construct a superseding regulator.
- [47:41]
C
You have to do it in a way that will anticipate what the courts will, what will happen in the courts is essentially the point and the political story on it says that they, they have to now put, to get. Trump has to replace the old advisory board, the old EPA advisory board with an EPA advisory board that will put together a finding, you know, this document to like, whatever it takes a year to, to, to put together, you know, under normal circumstances or whatever, because you need all these process things. And then of course, they're looking ahead to the courts and that's going to be where it's going to be tested. They think they'll win, but they have to, they still have to do it.
- [48:14]
A
Well, Abe, yesterday when you were reading the New York Times, you know, like, hysterical story about the trouble, right? About the horrors that have been inflicted on America by the, by this, by this overruling. You quoted a sentence from the New York Times's report which reads, by repealing the endangerment finding, the United States is likely to add up to 18 billion metric tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2055, according to the Environmental Defense Fund and advocacy group. That is about three times the amount of climate pollution the country emitted last year. Now, here's the problem with this kind of reporting, as you say, wait a minute, three times the amount of last year's pollution over 20 years. That sounds great. So we don't even know from the formulation of this sentence if the writer of the sentence even understood what the claim was. But if the idea is that given natural population growth and all sorts of things that, that pollution, as they determine it, would only go up three times in 30 years. That's a deal you're willing to take? Sure.
- [49:38]
B
I mean, I think they mean in addition to what, what would have normally happened. So in other words, by 2055 we would, I mean, by the way, the whole idea that they can even look forward and project any of this in a straight line is absurd, but let's just pretend. So by 2055 we would be at the pollution level of 2058. Like, does anyone. Do you notice a significant, significant difference between the environment today and in 2022?
- [50:16]
A
I mean, you know, it's important.
- [50:19]
D
The reason it was it flumped, it's, it flummoxes readers is that, and there's no curiosity on the part of the Times reporter to actually explain it is that it's a faith based claim, Abe. It has nothing to do with reality. And I think it's part of this broader effort to see the climate emergency as a constant emergency. And I talked about this years ago when my kids were, you know, younger and this was a full, full scale indoctrination campaign in the public school system where they ought to do science projects that were like anti cow. You know, how can we live on a planet where so many people eat meat? Because look at all the horrible gas the cows create. I mean the parents were just trying not to laugh during some of these science fair presentations and, and I think I joked them, but it was totally true. I took my kids out for hamburgers after that. But it was one of these things that just became conventional wisdom among a certain class of people of a certain political persuasion. Not entirely on the left, some, some on the right too, but it is, you're supposed to just accept it as faith based. And I was wondering, we must have some sort of clock to see when Greta Thunberg is going to stop, you know, attacking Israel and go back to attacking our climate emergency. Because remember she, it became unpopular after a while so she had to find a new cause. But this is, this resurgence I think is we're going to see more of this again, but the facts don't really matter. It's really about having a constant state of climate, climate anxiety.
- [51:41]
A
Okay, another.
- [51:42]
C
And then our, like the market happens to be really good at getting energy in slightly cleaner ways over time. So the emissions, whatever they're worried about, like the emissions go down without laws telling them to go down. They don't go down in China. So it's not, it's not a law, it's not a directive saying stop emitting. It's that, you know, energy gets cleaner. The market figures out better ways to do things. They understand that they have to, you know, respond to certain public opinion about certain things. But mostly it's just progress. The private sector progresses. It makes things better than it did. It makes a better mousetrap this year than it did 10 years ago. That's just a thing that the market does. And it happens with energy, too, and emissions too. And so their, their predictions are right off the bat never going to be true, because they're predicting it like, well, if we take today's. But the truth is that the market is going to cut those down.
- [52:41]
D
They want the regulatory. They want the regulatory state to make those decisions, not the free market. So if you say that which is absolutely true, you're still called a climate denier. And there are so many people on the right who do not deny climate change, but who have exactly completely rational approach to it. And you are still going to be grouped in with the deniers because you don't want that. You don't want the government to tell everybody how to run their factory and build their cars.
- [53:05]
A
So, two things about that, right? Let me just. One is let's take hydraulic fracturing, right?
- [53:10]
B
The.
- [53:10]
A
This remarkable, you know, things sort of started in 2007 when it turned out that we could, we could extract natural gas from shale through this process. And natural gas is immensely cleaner than classic carbon fossil fuels. So how did the environmental world react to fracking? They tried to ban it on the grounds that the process of extracting this stuff from the ground was polluting the ground, which was not true. But in a state, New York State banned fracking. And so in the I drink your milkshake logic that we learned in There Will Be Blood, the state of Pennsylvania took all of New York's natural gas out of its shale in the Marcellus Shale field because New York wasn't extracting it. So New York, a state desperately in need of new sources of revenue in this environmental panic over nothing, lost out on most of the shale revenue that it could have gotten. And this is a benefit if you're worried about global pollution because natural gas is cleaner. So that's number one. Number two is the detail in the New York Times story projecting forward that because of this decision, there will be, and it says this with a straight face, there will be 37 million more asthma attacks experienced than there would have been had the current regulatory frame remained in place. Now, asthma is an autoimmune disease that involves your body believing that it is being attacked by something that is not Actually bad for it necessarily. It is not a. And it's a kind of weird neurotic disease anyway. Whatever. Asthma is controllable and potentially cure. How do we know what's gonna happen in 30 years with asthma? Maybe they will develop a pill that will keep the pathways open or will suppress the body's weird overactive autoimmune response that causes asthma attacks. Asthma attacks are not a one to one creation of particulate matter.
- [55:53]
C
Million. There's a million environmental factors that go into that. Not just air quality specifically, but there's a million things that go into. People who grow up in apartment buildings are exposed to more. You know, it's the way there are more rodents in the building people. There's a, there's, you know, a connection between that and. And kids growing up with asthma. I mean, they're playing God here. But it's like this is not a one thing where if it's, if it's smoggy outside, you have an asthma attack. That's not how this works.
- [56:23]
A
But you can't. Anyway, you can't know that it's an outrage that they play this game. All of which is designed to make sure that parents live in a condition of anxiety and that therefore they can get parents out and say, you know, Trump is causing. Is going to cause my kid to have asthma attacks and creating more of this bizarre world in which people. I believe, I mean, it's a much bigger topic, but like people are being driven to believe that or living ordinary lives in the world, in a world in which the world is 50,000 times cleaner than it was and you are much less, you know, likely, no matter where you live on Earth, to die of environmental diseases, meaning the kinds of things that come from potable water being portable, you know, being full of poisons or, you know, you're whatever. Like this is part of Steven Pinker's point about the incredible improvement in sort of daily lives of everybody on the planet. And American people do not believe this, but they're middle class Americans think that they are less safe than they were when they were children and that they were less safe than their grandparents were. And this is madness and mania and it is all being fed, fed by this machine.
- [57:48]
B
I just want to add one point. This. And they believe. I'm sorry, Christina, I'll just. Was this one point. And they believe that we are more at risk of illness and death from the environment than we were, than people were centuries ago.
- [58:04]
A
Yeah.
- [58:04]
B
Before industrialization, when cold and heat could just wipe out, you know, an entire Population.
- [58:12]
D
But there's also something to be said for the role that our information ecosystem plays here, which has just accelerated immensely in the last, I would say 10 years. There's so much the fire hose of information people consume on the daily basis means anything you want to leave a real dent has to become a civilizational crisis. And so I think there was a lot of savvy in those climate change activists reframing this as an apocalyptic scenario to get people's attention. You keep saying it's the end of the world, which is what they're saying. And that makes that fixes in people's minds. But then you also have the people like the climate reporters. There were several that lost their job to the Washington Post recently. They had like 10 climate reporters and the ones at the New York Times. I would challenge anyone reading their stories to ask themselves, has this person ever driven a truck like a Ford F150? Do they know anyone who drives a truck to work or who works in an industry that requires the use of fossil fuels? Many of them actually don't. They themselves are not part of any sort of social world where these things are taken for granted because they're useful and they help you build things and they are the way you get to and from work. So there, there is a, there's a disconnect there. Again, I don't think it's always intentional. It's just the bubble world they've always lived in and it's really difficult to break out of that bubble.
- [59:32]
C
Abe, your thing reminded me of.
- [59:35]
A
You know, I was watching this newsletter, your newsletter, yesterday.
- [59:39]
B
You're.
- [59:39]
C
No, what you, what you just said about the, the newsletter is great and.
- [59:43]
D
We should always plug newsletter.
- [59:45]
C
Yes, absolutely.
- [59:46]
A
Letter.
- [59:47]
C
Yes. But he just reminded me of when you said about, you know, centuries ago, before industrialization, you know, more at risk for this stuff. You know, I was like, I was watching this, this show A Thousand Blows on Hulu. And you know, it's a, it's about London from that period and the poor parts of London and people get, get work in a match factory in one very minor scene. And they get diseases, they get like lockjaw and growths and all sorts of like terrible things from work. And they're like, apparently it's, it's one of the chemicals we're using to make the matches, you know, whatever. And it's like these are just. Take a waltz through history before we had that, you know, great leap forward and see like people worked at a match factory and they couldn't open their mouths anymore. And it's like, it's just amazing to me that, that we have these sorts of, you know, boy, things were better when we were all eating coal stories. And I think one of the problems is that the New York Times fired its science writers during COVID and maybe shouldn't have.
- [60:51]
A
I don't.
- [60:52]
C
Because boy, could we use.
- [60:54]
A
They would have said exactly the same stuff before COVID as now. Like this is war. This is the ideological war of our time, which is the idea that industrialism, even though we're so sad because we don't have jobs where people make things anymore and all of that, every job that makes things is bad according to the logic of the American upper middle class because they throw off pollutants and they contribute to capitalist, you know, sort of machine, the capitalist machine and, and all of that. So I, I wish it were the case that it were as simple as, you know, what we need is like rational people like Donald McNeil writing about this. But they, they never had any, they never had any real, you know, real sway here. And the final, final detail I want to point out from this New York Times story, which I know I'm like now, this is not the fifth time I'm mentioning it is, it mentions in passing that we are no longer the global pollute, the major global polluter, which we were by dint of the fact that from, you know, we, 25% of all industrial production on the planet Earth is done in the United States. And there was a point at which in the 1950s and 60s that somewhere between 40 and 60% of all industrial production on the planet Earth was by the United States. So naturally, by the law of simple acts action, America was the foremost polluter because nobody else was making anything. We are no longer the world's foremost polluter. China is the world's foremost polluter. But, and it says that in passing, but it points out that America has been the foremost polluter since the Industrial Revolution. So therefore we should probably have these regulations as penance for having been the world's foremost industrial polluter 120 years ago or 170 years ago or something like.
- [63:03]
B
That, because it's cumulative or something. The other absurdity about these straight line projections into the future is that this doesn't take account for the fact that when you unleash productivity with deregulation, certain amount of that productivity is going to go into saving lives. You're going to have automobiles and vehicles moving around in emergency situations. You're going to have energy for, for machines that Save lives. You know, it's like there's this, it is an infinite number of inputs that we're talking about here and they are acting as if the entire fate of humanity hangs on the EPA's ability to rein in methane and CO2.
- [64:01]
A
But I do want to, I do want to do a reverse shout out then because I'm very happy about this decision. But if you have this decision which is forward looking and understands the value of human progress and the idea that these regulations hinder the human progress that you're talking about. Abe, we do have at the Department of Health and Human Services, we do have this bizarre retreat into conspiracy and the idea that the wondrous products that have lengthened lives and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives in, you know, on the planet Earth in the last 50 years, that is vaccines and then new medications and new vaccines and new things that are tested over 10 year periods at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars that they are now to be viewed skeptically and as though they are somehow monstrous visitations upon us that are killing us. And that is what happens when you put a psychotic Luddite like RFK Jr. And his squirrely little minions in various jobs of authority. And it's a kind of weird counterbalance to what's happened here at EPA that these medical Luddites have been put, you know, have been given the keys to the kingdom.
- [65:25]
D
I don't want you to use the word Luddites to describe them. I think there's a whole that they are sort of anti enlightenment reactionaries. And there's always been a core of MAGA that has that tendency, but they are applying it in the realm of vaccines.
- [65:41]
A
Well, you can also crazy for anti enlightenment reactionaries. If you think enlightenment helps give birth.
- [65:47]
D
To the value in the skepticism.
- [65:49]
B
Don't forget, okay, RFK comes from the left. I mean this is so it's all this is of a piece with, you know, the environmental hysteria and the vaccine hysteria.
- [66:01]
C
It's also wild to watch like the administration science people say are going around now saying please get the measles vaccine. Like everybody who works for the administration.
- [66:11]
D
Is like oops a daisy.
- [66:13]
C
Measles vaccine.
- [66:14]
A
Not every day. Dr. Oz, Dr. Oz did it.
- [66:18]
C
Dr. That's what I'm saying. Dr. Oz, everybody, he, he brought in, you know, a team that was, you know, much more open minded about all this stuff, especially vaccines because of what happened over Covid and stuff. And they're all like, no, you should get the measles vaccine. What are you crazy? And that is a sort of, you know, the administration of, you know, of. Of gadflies trying to balance out the other gadflies within the own. Their own administration going too far for, you know, for themselves. It's wild to see.
- [66:49]
A
Christine, you have a recommendation? End of week recommendation?
- [66:53]
D
I do. So a couple of years ago I recommended a book by the Hungarian novelist Magda Jabo S Z A B O called the Door, which a lot of you wrote me saying you enjoyed. So I'm going to recommend another one of her books. It's a little darker. It's called the Fawn, and it's a novel that's narrated by a single narrator, a woman named Esther. And she's. She's writing from the perspective of having been a very famous actress. But it's all about envy and it's about. I mean, obviously set in 20th century Hungary, so there's all kinds of stuff about communism there too. But what it really gets at is trust and envy because she's a. She proves to be a very unreliable narrator. I'm not going to give it all away and it jumps back and forth. But if you are a fan of psychological novels, which I am, this is an excellent one. And the, the difficulty in capturing the complicated relationships that develop from childhood through to adulthood because this is the story of her childhood relationship with a. With a girl who she very much envies and she becomes quite bitter about it. Angela. So there's stuff about social class, there's stuff about, you know, just how, how you develop a sense of self in relation to someone else when you're a child. And whether you outgrow that as an adult or whether it stays with you, there's just all these interest, interesting threads you can draw from the narrative, which is itself at times quite disturbing. So I would highly recommend it if you like weird psychological novels, which I happen to like. And it's not Japanese, so see, I. I've done it. I've actually recommended something that isn't Japanese and dystopian. So Magda Jabo S Z A B O and it's called the Faun. The translation I read was by a guy named Nix, I think something N I X New York Review of Books. There are a couple different issues of this novel that you can find out there. I have the New York Review of Books version, which is great, very good translation. So that's my recommendation.
- [69:00]
A
Okay, well, we are not going to have a show on Monday as it is President's Day and we salute our presidents, even though I wish we celebrated their birthdays on their birthdays. Nonetheless, we will not be on on Monday, so we will return on Tuesday for Abe, Seth, Christine and I should introduce our new producer, Noam Bloom, who is making us sound better and look better and do everything better. So thank you. Thanks to Noam and we will be back on Tuesday. I'm John Pot Hort's Keep the Candle Burning.