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- [00:01]
Experian Ad Voice
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- [00:04]
Matt Continetti
Yeah.
- [00:05]
Experian Ad Voice
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- [00:31]
John Pod Horowitz
Hope for the best, expect the worst. Some pre champagne, some die of thirst. No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, Thursday, July 17, 2025. I am Jon Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. Matt Continetti. Perhaps you could give us a brief update if you want to take a second to look at where we are on our YouTube subscribership, your current 2025 obsession.
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Matt Continetti
It's my obsession.
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John Pod Horowitz
It's your obsession.
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Matt Continetti
And you are going to last a long time.
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John Pod Horowitz
Yes.
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Matt Continetti
Well, let me just pull it up here. I have to say, you know, I checked last night, John, and I was a little bit disappointed because I have to say we are now at 17,600 subscribers on our YouTube page, the Commentary Podcast YouTube page. And you know, while that is, that's growing for sure, not quite at the pace of recent weeks. And so step it up. That's encouraging here to kind of give a pep talk and everything. You know, our goal was to get to 20,000 by Labor Day. I think we could still make it because we're here in the middle of July.
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John Pod Horowitz
Yeah, that's six weeks.
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Matt Continetti
But it counts on all of you. It depends on all of you.
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John Pod Horowitz
Since you're not going to be. You're going to be hearing a lot more pledge drives on npr. Yes, Consider this. You're going to hear some pledge drives here, commentary along. But consider this a form of a pledge drive. All we're asking you to do right now is go to YouTube and hit like and subscribe.
- [02:24]
Matt Continetti
And really, you don't even have to listen to the podcast. You could accost people on the streets and just ask them to pull out their phone and do it right on the YouTube app. You know, co workers, neighbors, they don't have to listen. They just need to like and subscribe. And that will help us get higher up in the algorithm.
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John Pod Horowitz
Right.
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Matt Continetti
That feeds the world information and slop most of the time.
- [02:49]
John Pod Horowitz
I will say that the last two months for the Commentary podcast on an audio, you know, the version that most of you listen. Listen to and participate in podcasts from have been groundbreaking for us, I think, really beginning with the, with the ratcheting up of tensions between Israel and Iran. Just looked at the numbers yesterday and we are up about 20% a day in listenership. And I'm very grateful to everybody who finds us worthy of your time and that you gain some form of edification or entertainment or whatever from our daily, daily conversations about what is, what is going on. This audience has been remarkably steady and committed since the pandemic brought us to five days a week. It's been a very heartening thing. And I think it's very clear that when issues in the world start reflecting the kinds of things that we are particularly known for talking about, that is a moment when people who have sampled us before really want to tune in, let's say, or download or whatever you want to call, use whatever verb you want to use to talk about how to listen to a podcast. And we are very grateful to you. And as I say, what we do this for is as a form of, as they say, brand extension. This is. Commentary is a magazine. It will hit its 80th anniversary in November, making it one of the, I don't know, 10 surviving print monthlies of any note in the United States and perhaps in the English speaking world of such venerable standing. And we found over the years that the classic ways in which people promoted publications, direct mail, you know, that kind of thing, advertising in other publications or even there were moments in the 1990s, for example, that friends of ours advertised on television, advertised magazines of Opinion, the Weekly Standard, which Matt and I worked on, actually did TV ads on Special Report with Brit Hume, National Review did TV ads, that sort of thing. Commentary never dipped its toe in that.
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Matt Continetti
The American Spectator famously did television ads on the Rush Limbaugh show in the early 90s, right?
- [05:33]
John Pod Horowitz
And that's right, the show that Rush couldn't actually get TV advertising for late at night on, on, on syndication. So we never did that. And there was a point at which all of that stopped working. Like direct mail. No. 1. No one. Everyone throws their junk out. No one. Everyone was discovering that it was extraordinarily difficult to generate followers and paid subscribers that way. And so we started the podcast as some effort to create a new forum in which we could promote commentaries, articles, content. Our website, which is also a foreign brand extension. I'm not saying that the podcast has now become the tail that wags the dog, but it is a way of us keeping Commentary's name in the national conversation. The articles we publish the pieces that we do that I think are very important to us and very important to a lot of people, are long and authoritative and detailed and are not the sort of thing that really will gain a mass audience. And here we're gaining kind of a version of a mass audience. And then hopefully people who are listening to me will go and sample our wares at Commentary and subscribe, which helps to free the cost of the podcast and helps with the magazine and will provide you with greater edification, I think, in whole than our mere conversations here will. This is like the sugar high version and Commentary is the meat and potatoes version. But anyway, your, your, your, your, your support and your listenership and your viewership on, on YouTube are deeply meaningful to us. And it's a moment when I want to offer thanks and not just I would like to offer thanks, but I think so would Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [07:25]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John. And thanks.
- [07:28]
John Pod Horowitz
And the aforementioned. And already heard Matt Continetti, the Washington Commentary columnist for Commentary and Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Hi Matt.
- [07:40]
Matt Continetti
Hi John.
- [07:42]
John Pod Horowitz
Okay, Matt, Yesterday we had this whole conversation about rescission and late last night, early this morning, the Senate passed version of the House bill that will cut $9 billion from already authorized and appropriated monies from I guess last year's budget from particularly from foreign aid programs and public broadcasting.
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Matt Continetti
That's right.
- [08:14]
John Pod Horowitz
While in the course of the negotiation, money was money that was there to cut. The so called PEPFAR program, which was the effort to help provide drugs to combat aids, particularly in Africa but around the world, was restored. And so that that cut was not made, the size of the bill went from 9.4 billion to 9 billion while the PEPFAR money was restored. We had this whole conversation yesterday about rescission and it's funny because this bill is being called a rescission because it's about returning, returning money to the federal government instead of spending it. But the battle over rescission, what rescission was politically has not yet fully been joined. That is the, the idea that the President can, using his executive authority, decide not to spend money that Congress has appropriated, that this bill is a bill.
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Matt Continetti
Right.
- [09:18]
John Pod Horowitz
That the legislature is deciding yes to change the budgetary priorities of the budget year 2024, 2025.
- [09:26]
Matt Continetti
I think that there's some terminology, I think what you were describing yesterday on the podcast is referred to as impoundment, where the President simply says I'm not spending the money and that would generate lawsuits that would probably go all the way to the Supreme Court. That was what the Watergate Congress was trying to restrain when they passed the empowerment legislation some 50 years ago. This bill, the administration set up a, sent up a request to ask Congress to just claw back $9.4 billion, including USAID and NPR and PBS. And the Congress stripped the PEPFAR cut and now it's a $9 billion package passed by the Senate. It has to go back to the House today. It will probably pass the House. And some people are brushing this off. You know, they're saying that it's a drop in the bucket, which of course it is 9 billion when you compare to, you know, our deficits are in the trillions and our debt is over, I think $36.5 trillion. So 9 billion pare back the deficit or debt. But I think symbolically this is a very important vote. You can't recall the last time Congress has passed such a resistance package, number one. And number two, the institutes, the institutions that Congress has defunded as part of the rescissions package are incredibly significant. Conservatives and Republicans have complained, whined, we do it every day on this podcast about public media. For decades, the Republican revolutionaries of the 1990s said that they were going to cut the funding for PBS and npr. Mitt Romney famously got into a silly argument over Big Bird during one of the presidential debates in 2012. Only now, when President Trump signs this bill tomorrow or Saturday will Republicans and conservatives be successful in this. It's a two year cut and I think that's important. It's one of those items that conservatives have long championed but have have never happened until the Trump administration. In the first term, it was something like moving the US Embassy to Israel, to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. It was also not as.
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John Pod Horowitz
Which was. Which was the position.
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Matt Continetti
Yeah.
- [12:22]
John Pod Horowitz
Which was agreed on by Congress, by Congress in 1996 and stayed every year or every six months by the sitting administration on emergency grounds that it was too dangerous. So it was 21 years from the time that Congress said the embassy should be moved until the embassy was moved. So it's not as though there was a national consensus, as reflected in legislation passed by Congress, that the executive branch in its immense wisdom about fears of the Arab street or whatever, or not giving Israel a solid or make changing the status quo. Simply remember this about how Trump isn't obeying the dictates of Congress with the TikTok ban. Well, 21 years, the four successive presidents refused to move the embassy to Jerusalem.
- [13:17]
Matt Continetti
I think this is the point because also in the first term, as part of The Tax Cuts and jobs act of 2017. The government opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling and exploration, something again, that Republicans and conservatives have wanted since the 1980s. You look at this term, we talked about the resistance. There's also Operation Midnight Hammer, attacking Iran's nuclear program, something that presidents of both parties had said at least that Iran could not get a nuclear weapon and held out the possibility of kinetic military action. Only Trump did it. I'd also add the border. The idea that our border could be closed was always ridiculed, Even though for 20 years now the conservative grassroots have placed border security and combating illegal immigration at the top of their priority list. It finally happened in the first months of this year. There were zero entries into this country recorded by the government in the month of June. And lastly, the Department of Education. Closing the Department of Education has been something that Ronald Reagan campaigned for in the original MAGA campaign of 1980. Hasn't happened yet. But because of this Supreme Court decision on the emergency docket over the weekend, allowing Trump to essentially have the staff at the Department of Education, we have the real possibility that the Ed Department will, if not vanish, be so shrunk and essentially disabled that it will cease to be what it has been for decades, which is a full employment program for educants and taxpayer funding of the teachers union. So what this says to me is these things can be accomplished if you have the political will. Which means you don't listen to the Washington chorus, because the Washington chorus, as reflected in the New York Times and the Washington Post and all of the Alphabet soup networks, have said forever that these things can't be done and that you're heartless and cruel if you try to do them. Well, we're beyond that now. And guess what? We're actually delivering on long standing conservative priorities.
- [15:53]
Abe Greenwald
I think this is such an interesting point because a bunch of us have said even since the first term, even when things, even when that Trump administration was more chaotic than this one, more haphazard, there still were moments when we said, well, we like a lot of what he's doing. The problem is in the conduct and in the style of leadership. And I think part of the successes that Matt's been talking about, and I've been thinking about this, because there has been this string of successes, points to the fact that there is this plus side to the style, to the conduct, doesn't mean that the drawbacks aren't still there. But there's something about what his detractors call mean and bullying that actually does have a unique effect on moving what other otherwise we had thought of as these sort of sclerotic institutions into action.
- [17:06]
John Pod Horowitz
Hey everybody, it is summer. It is thrilling to be summer. And it is time for me to talk to you about quints. I am the last person to chase trends. Conservative Jewish magazine editor, not a trendsetter, not a trend follower. But I am all about stuff that fits right, feels good and actually lasts. And I keep coming back to quints. Their lightweight layers and high quality staples have become my everyday essentials. You know this. I've talked about the sweaters. I just bought a whole bunch of lightweight shirts for summer. The kind of stuff you I'll wear on repeat. Like breathable flow knit polos. Those are the ones I bought. Crisp cotton shirts, comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dressed up dinners. And the best part, everything with quints is half the cost of similar brands. By working with top artisans, cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury pieces without the markups. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. So stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from quints. Go to quints.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U Y N C E.com commentary t get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com commentary put us in a box. Go ahead. That just gives us something to break out of because the next generation 2025 GMC terrain elevation is raising the standard of what comes standard. As far as expectations go, why meet them when you can shatter them? What we choose to challenge, we challenge completely. We are professional grade. Visit gmc.com to learn more. I think there are two points to be made about that, which is yes, the upside, the downside. So the upside is that Trump, over the course of the 10 years that he has been a player in politics, has created unprecedented cohesion within the party that he took over. We've never seen anything like this. And we know that because with this two or three or four seat majority in the House of Representatives, he has nonetheless been able to work his will with them. Whereas it would be so easy, it would be so easy for that to have gone the other way. And that's the result of 10 years of conduct that I think all of us found horrifying. I mean, it's not the result of it, but it's one of the byproducts of conduct that we found horrifying in 2016, 2017, when he decided to focus his ire not on Democrats and not on liberals, but on people on the right who were not falling in line with his desiderata. And that was the focus of his political energy at the beginning. Not only during his campaign, that's how he won the nomination in 2016, but at the beginning of his presidency in an effort to make sure that he was not destroyed the way, say, Jimmy Carter was destroyed by forces within his own party who did not like him. And so he created this dynamic in which independent minded or people who were repulsed by his conduct in the Senate and elsewhere, he targeted for destruction, particularly two senators, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker. And he took them out. They basically didn't run for reelection or whatever. And so that was the warning shot that you better listen to him or he was gonna. He was gonna go at you with a hammer and tongs. And he continued to do that. Then as that term continued, the focused ideological, partisan assault on him became so extreme and so determined in the form of investigations, in the form of the two impeachments and after the presidency, in the form of the seven indictments of him by both local and federal prosecutors and special prosecutors, that he really did figure out that his true enemies weren't in his own party, but were in fact the people in the other party who wanted to. Wanted to take him down. I want to make one other point about Matt. You sort of mentioned this as kind of like conservative priorities because of the kinds of. But we haven't gotten to philosophy in when we're having this conversation. And the truth is the problem, the root problem with public broadcasting is not that it's liberal or leftist. That is a problem, and it is a big problem. And you know, if. If they were sensible and not stupid, they would have been more mindful of the need to be more bipartisan or at least less ideological in order to gain support from people in the political world who would say this is valuable, not only it's valuable to us as well as to the liberals and Democrats. Philosophically, and I can say this because I started writing about this in 1984, philosophically, it is an outrage that the federal government of the United States spends direct dollars broadcasting things to the American people on broadcast networks. That is not a task that government should be paying for. We have free speech in the United States. We have a free press in the United States. There should not be government TV networks that government radio stations, even if they're not directly run by the government. It is, it is a betrayal of the American understanding of self governance. And it was the result of the fact that in the mid-1960s, when all this really started in earnest, Democrats were slipping loose from the bonds of all precedent and tradition and deciding that there were things they wanted like a TV channel that wouldn't, that wouldn't be gross and wouldn't be too commercial and didn't have commercials and wouldn't be part of the vast wasteland. And wouldn't that be a nice thing to have? And as George Will has been saying for more than 50 years in his column, that things might seem nice or good to you doesn't mean that government should be paying for them. The, the, the, the root thing that we should think or the default thing that we should think is government shouldn't pay for anything. And that government then pays for things because they are necessities. And if there's any one thing that no one needed, it was another television channel or another radio station that no one needed that. And when you hear Kathryn Marr, the intellectually and I think, I don't know, cognitively compromised new head of public broadcasting, say things like, well, we really need it because local farmers in Indiana aren't going to get their crop reports. Yeah, I'm really sure that Evansville, Indiana, they are like, boy, they need them crop reports. You know, if they don't turn to that station at 90.9 or 89.7 or whatever on the bottom of the FM dial, they're just not going to know whether or not a rainstorm is coming in that's going to hurt the cornfield. Are you kidding me? Like, are you seriously going to. Who are you trying to fool? Like, that is the saying things like Sesame street is wonderful and if you go at pbs, you're going to destroy Sesame Street. Sesame street isn't even on PBS anymore. There is no Sesame Street. It's on hbo, Max. There is no Sesame Street. There is no children's programming. You know what I mean? So the whole thing is now just a kind of perpetual motion machine for the employment of leftist journalists who want to have their day in the sun with, you know, eight minute long reports about, you know, people in Clara Costa County, California, whose bilingual, bilingual curriculum is being challenged by the Education Department or something like that.
- [26:26]
Matt Continetti
We should note that this doesn't mean that NPR and PBS will be going away.
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John Pod Horowitz
They're not. They just have a billion dollar and.
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Matt Continetti
They have a big cut that will affect primarily the stations because the stations are the affiliates that receive the most direct funding. So the network will shrink, but we will have both platforms for some time. NPR in particular generates a tremendous amount of revenue through ads. They say that they're commercial free, but they're not commercial free. Just listen to the sponsorships that they read in between the different shows and break. It's like any podcast.
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John Pod Horowitz
We're commercial free. Right. Because we don't have. Right.
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Matt Continetti
I do. I want to say one other thing about Advertise. I want to say one other thing about Catherine Marr. I mean, I don't know how she can remain in her job after this. It's a huge blow to npr. And I imagine she will continue in her job simply because the board of NPR or however its structure is governed is so out of touch with reality. But she's been nothing but a drag on NPR since. Since 2020, since it was her clips of just ultra wokeness came out, her attacks on President Trump. Now she was unable to save funding simply because no one believes in either the objectivity or the necessity. National Public Radio. So in a world that made sense, in a serious world, she would not be in that office much longer. But that's not the world we live in.
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John Pod Horowitz
She claimed before the Congress of the United States that 3/4 of Americans. There are 330 million Americans, 3/4, 75% of them, 280 million people. Rely on public broadcasting. Rely on public broadcasting. Do you know what happened last week? Just to give you a sense of broadcasting and the atomization of broadcasting, last week the average audience for a network that is CBS, ABC, NBC, not together, but individually fell to around 2 million people a night.
- [28:56]
Matt Continetti
Right.
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John Pod Horowitz
The Fox News Channel outperformed CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox 7 nights last week. Why is that important? Because when you hear, oh my God, the President's going after CB is going to destroy the Tiffany Network or oh my God, these things are going the way of the dodo. I don't even know they will exist because there's over the air broadcasting and there's licensing from the FCC and their stations and they're worth a lot of money and they're not going away. But the notion that what is important is there to be a behemoth institution of any kind who transmit information to the American people is being disproven every single day. And NPR is supposed to be shielded from the logic of a world in which information is being atomized by direct public subvention.
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Matt Continetti
The networks have really just become NFL delivery platforms.
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John Pod Horowitz
Right?
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Matt Continetti
And as the NFL begins to migrate to streaming services, which has already started.
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John Pod Horowitz
That will leave the network and remember the NFL, right? Yeah, the NFL, NFL is not, it's only like two nights of the week. Is there any NFL primetime programming? And it's only from September until, until February. So, yeah.
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Matt Continetti
So popular that it can cover the rest of the network's costs for the years, but you lose it.
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John Pod Horowitz
Yeah. And also they have to pay billions and billions of dollars to the NFL just to, just to get the rights. So all I'm saying is we have lived in a world in which since the advent of cable, which was like really around 1980, all of the, this notion that the world and the Internet, that the world is governed by these large institutions that have the resources and the talent and the sort of the thickness and the history to provide news of the world to the American people. Right. Three networks, ap, upi, the big local papers of standing, and of course, the New York Times and the Washington Post and the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune. This is all a generation in the past that these things weren't, with the exception of the New York Times, which is, and the, and the Wall Street Journal a little bit, which have managed their way through this, the Scylla and Charybdis of the, you know, of the Internet and polarization, all that they have actually got that brilliantly managed their way through tactically as institutions. There's no need for these things. And local stations, you say local stations are going to bear the brunt. Local stations, by the way, in a classic version of how this works, are held up by Washington, by the, by, by, by NPR and by PBS in Washington because they have to pay licensing fees to home base center to air their programming. So like WNYC in New York, which I think is the largest public radio station, pays NPR Central hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the right to broadcast All Things Considered in Morning Edition and, and Marketplace and this and that and the other thing.
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Matt Continetti
And like, that's like, so it's a backdoor subsidy.
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John Pod Horowitz
Yeah, yeah. So, so if you give money to wnyc, you're giving money to npr. NPR gets all this funding from the federal government and WNYC gets money from the federal government also, which it's then returning to home base. So it's all, it's all one of these, you know, cup and bottle real.
- [32:57]
Matt Continetti
What are we going to do in a world where we don't hear the authentic pronunciation of place names?
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John Pod Horowitz
Right. Yeah, yeah, that was, well, that, of course.
- [33:07]
Matt Continetti
How am I going to live, you know?
- [33:09]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I, I, I'm Fascinated by Catherine Maher because she's one of these people. There are a few of them, but to me, she is the sort of the ultimate figure. You could plug her in to any one of these institutions. You could be npr, the UN Wikipedia. Exactly. And she will sort of just deliver the palaver that is that she was delivered. And that's a whole universe. That's the universe that's being targeted by the administration in all its representations. Very interested to see can she continue to fail upward laterally. What happens, you know, when that world starts to sort of disintegrate under fire.
- [34:01]
John Pod Horowitz
You are making a very original point, because we keep talking. I can't even remember who generated the term the Omni cause. Right. Which is the left. Right. The Omni causes. The Palestinians are the. Are. George Floyd are trans.
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Matt Continetti
Global warming.
- [34:18]
John Pod Horowitz
Right. It's all. That's the Omni cause. This is like the Omni Blob. The rhetoric of the Ford foundation is the rhetoric of. NPR is the rhetoric of Columbia University is the rhetoric of, I don't know, the National Resources Defense Council is the rhetoric of these gigantic hundred, you know, six, seven, $800 million budgetary, you know, institutions that all. Whose leaders all believe the same things, say the same things, have the same responses when there are nationwide moments of crisis, like the killing of George Floyd or something like that, where they all somehow manage to adopt exactly the same policies, no matter what they do or where they are or what they. Or what they account for. And, you know, the size of these things. I was editing something yesterday that mentioned the College Board. Right? The College Board, which administers the SAT and the AP tests. The College Board, which is a not for profit, has annual earnings of $11.1 billion. And the piece I was editing, which will be in the September issue of Commentary, deals with how it, too, is ideologically captured by this Omni Blob, or whatever you want to call it, and, of course, the resources that these institutions can bring to bear on the national conversation. When people talk about billionaires and how they have too much influence, all that. These are the billionaires. They're billionaires. They're not individuals. But corporations are people, too, my friend. Right. Even if they're nonprofit corporations. Harvard's got $51 billion. The College Board has $11.1 billion. The Ford Foundation, I believe, is somewhere around $100 billion in its endowment. The Gates foundation has a couple hundred billion dollars in its endowment.
- [36:24]
Matt Continetti
Pretty soon we're talking real money.
- [36:26]
John Pod Horowitz
So. So. And pbs. I haven't looked up its budget but it's not being. It's going to get a billion dollars cut from its budget over two years and it's still going to be standard. It's still going to be. That's not enough to shut it down. It must have billions of dollars in revenue and be sitting there atop, you know, not for profit pool of endowment money.
- [36:50]
Matt Continetti
I'd like to make a related point that also criticizes the media if I may.
- [36:56]
John Pod Horowitz
Oh, go, go right ahead.
- [36:58]
Matt Continetti
Thank you. The recessions also affects USAID and foreign aid, that will also be cut as well. And that codifies the work of Doge. I woke up this morning today to the Axios newsletter whose lead item was quote, trump's soft power retreat scrambles US China race. And two Axios reporters write that President Trump has set a radical new course in the U. S. China rivalry, ceding ground to Beijing in pursuit of a far narrower vision of America's role in the world. So this of course caught my attention since I do believe that the US China competition will define the 21st century. So what's their evidence? Well, we're losing ground to China according to Axios because we've cut Voice of America, we've cut usaid, we have been bullying the UN and the who. We have cut or frozen the university science research which we've been discussing on the POD in order to crack down on anti Semitism in the universities and force them to comply to civil rights law. Also another item, we of course cut renewable energy subsidies in the one big beautiful bill. And all of this is according to the Washington consensus, helping China. But this is such a backward way of looking at the US China competition and what has been going on. Literally 48 hours ago, Donald Trump was in Pennsylvania with Senator Dave McCormick at this Energy AI Summit that Senator McCormick pulled together featuring a cannonball run of CEO and business figures announcing, I think $90 billion in investments in Pennsylvania in order to create data center facilities, promote technological development and artificial intelligence where we're still leading by the way, against China unleash American energy. So I don't, doesn't that help America in the US China competition? Just two weeks ago the Congress passed and President Trump signed into law the one big beautiful bill which has part of it is a huge increase in military spending, including a fund that will go direct into procurement. According to my friend and AEI colleague Mackenzie Eaglen, who knows the defense budget better than anyone, it seems to me that might help us gain an edge over China. Also. Finally, again, two weeks ago, the United States flew B2 bombers halfway around the world and used specialized munitions to burrow into a concrete reinforced facility underground to destroy and lock in one of Iran's main sites of nuclear weapons development. Do we think China wasn't watching? Do we think that the Chinese said, oh, oh, guess it just means this is America is weak. So there is an alternative way of interpreting recent events that rather than, oh, we won't, we won't win solar panel competition with China, maybe we're doing what's necessary to have energy, technological, economic and military dominance in this very important competition. It's not just the solar panels, which we will never be able to compete with China's overcapacity in any case. So ends the rant.
- [41:01]
John Pod Horowitz
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Matt Continetti
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John Pod Horowitz
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Matt Continetti
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John Pod Horowitz
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- [41:47]
John Pod Horowitz
I feel if solar panels were what the people who are their propagandists and the wind farms were what people say and the electrical car charging stations were what these people say, something similar would be happening to them as happened in 2007 when it became clear that there had been this technological breakthrough in the act of oil extraction known as hydraulic fracturing, you know what happened? Tens of billions of dollars of private capital. Talk about Pennsylvania. Flit jumped on Pennsylvania and the Dakotas. Tens and tens of billions of dollars so that by 2015, there were pipelines from Pennsylvania to Texas. There were facilities constructed on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to export this natural gas that had been extracted from the Marcellus Shale and 2000 miles away. All of it happened because capitalists said this is the wave of the future. This is fantastic. This is a real thing for us to invest in. Solar and wind have been conversation points for the Biden people and the Obama people and everybody, Carter people, everybody wants to talk about renewable energy. And it clearly doesn't work because if it worked, $100 billion in private capital would have been raised to put wind farms all over the country and we would all have solar panels. I've told this story before. In 1974, I lived in an apartment building. I grew up in an apartment building on 105th and Broadway. And there was a pilot project for solar energy to power the water in, you know, to, to heat the water in apartment buildings. And my building got the contract, one of the contracts. And so I did a whole science. I know about this because I did a 12th grade science project on it. Because these gigantic solar panels were placed. We had a big building with a block long building. So it had these big roof. And these giant solar panels were put on 1974 on the roofs. And there were countries that were. Israel was experimenting with solar power because they didn't have any oil or had very little oil then and stuff like that. And we had these solar panels and they were big, they were like. It was kind of amazing. It would look like science fiction on 105th and Broadway. And they were put up. And the person who was largely responsible for it was Robert Redford's then wife, Shauna, not his wife Lola, who was like the big activist in this area. And people in our building were so excited to work with her. And you know, maybe he would show up, which he never did and all that. And the panels were on the building and they sat there and I did a big project of it and I can someday post a picture of myself sitting on one of the solar panels, you know, for, for that project. And they never worked. They never worked. It didn't work. First of all, this is not the climate in which to have functional solar panels. It was 50 years ago. So granted, the technology, I'm sure was much more primitive, but in a place where the sun goes down at 4 o' clock in the afternoon four months out of the year, and where, you know, it's not often all that sunny and there was actually a lot of air pollution at the time. The notion that the sun was going to make these panels light up, store energy, and then pass down 13 stories down into the water boiler and heat, it just never, never worked. And so it's 50 years later, right, literally to the day that those things sort of came online. And the only people who want to spend money building solar things and wind farms are, is the federal government.
- [46:04]
Matt Continetti
And can I just spend one more moment on this? Because it really, really got my goat to wake up to this piece this morning. Who, what, what continent has done the most to de industrialize, has done the most to adopt green energy?
- [46:21]
John Pod Horowitz
Europe.
- [46:23]
Matt Continetti
Is Europe more or less dependent on China these days? Is Europe stronger or weaker than China these days? Seems to me they're weaker and they're, they're. There are. They are even more concerned in some ways than we are about the flood of electric vehicles that are headed their way from China. And of course, Europe is not a technological superpower. They are a regulatory superpower. They export regulations and restrictions, not innovation. They are de industrialized, as I mentioned. They are only waking up to the necessity of rearmament because of Putin and because of Trump. So this strategy that Axios is advocating for is the democratic strategy, is the progressive strategy, and it's the European strategy, which gets you nowhere, which makes you more dependent on China and weaker vis a vis China.
- [47:23]
John Pod Horowitz
Okay, I want to attack the media some more.
- [47:26]
Matt Continetti
Thanks. Okay, go right ahead.
- [47:28]
John Pod Horowitz
Just for the hell of it, because we should probably talk about whether j. Should or shouldn't.
- [47:32]
Matt Continetti
Yeah, really.
- [47:33]
John Pod Horowitz
But we're not Fed people. And whatever. You know, the build is costing a lot to build this building. It's a summer.
- [47:40]
Matt Continetti
It's a summer Thursday.
- [47:42]
John Pod Horowitz
Yeah. I mean, Trump does make the point that if you dropped interest rates, you would save it. You could save as much as a trillion dollars a year. And, you know, basically inflation is low and Powell is. Or the Fed is being extraordinarily resistant to the notion that maybe this is a time when it's safe to start lowering interest rates and they won't do it. Which, you know, maybe he's wrong, maybe he's right. What do I know? I don't understand. Like, I'm not a macro economist, but. But we should just say this is an interesting game. Trump is like going back and forth and back and forth.
- [48:17]
Matt Continetti
Well, we should just also note that the Fed was cutting rates in 2024 ahead of and after the election when Biden was in power.
- [48:29]
John Pod Horowitz
Right.
- [48:29]
Matt Continetti
And since Trump has come to power, it has done nothing.
- [48:33]
John Pod Horowitz
But Powell has said explicitly that he's worried that the Trump tariffs will be inflationary. And since the policy of what the Trump tariffs are going to be or how they're going to hold is completely unclear.
- [48:45]
Matt Continetti
Would have been nice if he had said that he was worried that the trillions of dollars of spending by Biden might be inflationary, which, by the way, economics is far clearer on that. But he wasn't.
- [48:58]
John Pod Horowitz
Yeah.
- [48:59]
Matt Continetti
So I do think Trump has a legitimate gripe with the man he calls the knucklehead.
- [49:04]
John Pod Horowitz
Yeah. He's got a gripe. But, you know, there's, there's no political cost whatever, except if you roil the markets or something to making a punching bag out of the Fed chairman.
- [49:16]
Matt Continetti
Well, you know, you know, as I learned from NPR this morning, John, yes, the Fed has been very distant from politics over the years. I mean, really, politicians never get angry at the Fed until Donald Trump became president in January.
- [49:31]
John Pod Horowitz
Yeah, exactly. Okay, now I want to talk about a piece of, in the Washington Post this morning because the Department of Health and Human Services and its grant making capacity dealing with money that is going to labs, made very clear when it came in. And of course, it hired Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institute of Health and it has the extraordinarily controversial Robert Kennedy as the head of Health and Human Services. Don't. I'm not saying anything good about that, believe me. But, but it's very clear. And by the way, there is congressional legislation to this effect that the United States government should be unbelievably careful, if not absolutely dismissive of the use of so called gain of function research, because which is the act of manipulating viruses or things in a laboratory to strengthen them or weaken, to see what happens if you make them tougher and then you zap them with some effort to cure them, that it shows you that the effort works. Right. So gain of function research is manipulating viruses to see how strong they are and what you can do with them. And that it is the question of our time whether or not it was gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab that caused the, that caused the coronavirus pandemic. Okay, so there's gain of function research going on in the United States, a lot of it involving tuberculosis. And there are labs that are performing gain of function research with tuberculosis. And so a review was put in place at HHS to make, to study the cases in which money was going to gain a function of research to see whether that should be halted or frozen or dealt with. And some official went through them and said that some of these were bad and some of them were okay. And then apparently it went up the food chain to the deputy secretary or something like that, who came back down and said, no, we want to stop almost all of this. And this has ignited a huge front page story in the Washington Post that, you know, is insanely biased and hysterical because of the number of bylines on the story. This is now.
- [52:01]
Matt Continetti
The law of bylines.
- [52:03]
John Pod Horowitz
The law of bylines is the more bylines there are, the worse it's Time to hold on to your hat because somebody is about to so this is Hannah Natenson, Carolyn Y. Johnson and Joel Ackenbach. Joel Achenbach, known to me primarily from my days in Washington as a humor columnist. Now I was a humor columnist, so I write about things. But I didn't know that he was like an expert on gain of function.
- [52:28]
Matt Continetti
He spent a lot of time on science over, over the intervening decades.
- [52:32]
John Pod Horowitz
Okay, so I'm, I'm not being, I'm not being fair, but, you know, that's me. I'm not going to be fair. Anyway, so in this story, which is worth reading because it's an interesting account of trying to figure out how these research matters should be pursued here, here are the regnant paragraphs that I wish to read to you guys. For years, the scientific community has wrestled with the question of what constitutes, quote, dangerous, unquote research. The Trump administration's recent actions have raised concern among some scientists that politics is playing too big a role in that debate and could block experiments that are safe and potentially lead to new treatments and medicines. The administration's moves are part of a full embrace of the lab leak theory for the origin of the coronavirus. The origin remains unknown, and the issue has divided the intelligence community. The scientific community largely favors a natural origin via a spillover from wild animals sold in a market. A July 3 draft memo to White House officials said the NIH is in the process of suspending funding for 40 experiments because of fears that the research might be dangerous. So there's more in this story, but note that it is apparently the scientific consensus that people ate a bat and it caused, you know, a worldwide pandemic. I'm unaware of the fact that this is the scientific consensus in the United States. As the head of the National Institutes of Health, renowned scientist Jay Bhattacharya, whose jugular was gone at for suggesting that the lab leak possibility was something to be taken seriously, now believes unequivocally that it was a lab leak. And he's not rfk. He's not somebody who, like, said that vaccines cause autism or, you know, wants to use chelation to cure autism or whatever. He is a renowned Stanford University scientist who is absolutely, perfectly fit. And what's more, the idea that the Trump administration is playing politics by questioning whether or not dangerous gain of function research should be done a it ran on this. This was an issue discussed during the 2024 campaign. The appointments that Trump has made are the result of him winning an election in which how coronavirus was handled Was a, was a serious matter for, in, in, in the conversation in 2024. And no, it's not the consensus. And Congress has already said, all things being equal, we probably shouldn't really be doing a lot of gain of function research. Said that in 2017. And the Washington Post is positing that holding back on gain of function research because the dangers outweigh the risks outweigh the possible rewards is a political act, when in some ways it's almost the opposite of a political act. It is a risk benefit. It's a, you know, it's a calculation that you make based on rueful experience of the past five years when this country was nearly destroyed by something that we know did happen, which was the coronavirus outbreak and that we know happened. We don't know that it was the cause of it, but we know happened adjacent to a lab that was doing gain of function research and that the people who were involved in that gain of function research participated in a conspiracy and cover up via email and text trying to hide the fact that the United States had participated in helping to fund this gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab.
- [56:58]
Abe Greenwald
That's the politicization of science that, that this is trying to correct for. I mean that this is, that this is trying to fix. I mean that was the, you know, that was the out. That was the political outrage.
- [57:11]
John Pod Horowitz
Well, the political hours with that. And then of course, the effort to destroy people who said, wait a minute, I don't really think this happened because somebody ate a bat. Yeah, you know, where did that bat come from? I know, it's weird. It's weird people are eating bats in China, but you know, still a guy eats a bat or three feet from the wet market. There's a lab where they're doing research on bats and coronavirus and they're strengthening the coronavirus using gain of function research. And that lab has already had two major lab leaks in the past 10 years. The previous explanation, I mean, we still don't know if it's true, but Occam's razor suggests that it's truer than the bat story. Yeah. No one has been able to find patient zero who ate the bat evidence.
- [58:06]
Matt Continetti
And Senator Tom Cotton point in all that direction. Good enough for me.
- [58:11]
John Pod Horowitz
Yeah. Okay, so let us move on to commemorate and this is part of our recommendation. But we are here. It is the summer of 2025, and in the summer of 1975, popular culture was forever changed. In June of 1975 when the movie Jaws was released to theaters and we have, we have some recommendations to make on the subject of Jaws which is by. By the way going to be re released into theaters in August. Oh, and it's going to be very interesting to see how much money it makes upon. Upon re release. It was of course the most successful movie ever made up to that time. And then two years later it was beaten by Star Wars. But it revolutionized all of moviegoing. It was the first really huge summer hit, refocused movie going movie making to the summer toward teenagers, toward blockbusters and the like. Anyway, so Matt, you have you and I'll start us off.
- [59:17]
Matt Continetti
Yes, well it's interesting you mentioned that story Star wars appeared two years later, John, because I recently learned of a great anecdote where while Bruce the mechanical shark, that is Jaws from the movie was being constructed, no one knew one would it work or two, whether audiences would see it as realistic. But Steven Spielberg was visiting the construction of Bruce the shark and one of his good friends, the filmmaker George Lucas, who had recently enjoyed tremendous success with his movie American Graffiti was visiting and Lucas alone immediately said, oh, this is going to be awesome. It's going to make more money than any other movie. Flash forward two years and Lucas screens the first cut of Star Wars. No sound effects, no music to his friends who include Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, John Milius, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, his mentor. Right. The only one who said that he liked the movie and that it was going to be tremendously successful was Spielberg. So that strange mind melt, they have despair. Yeah, right.
- [60:38]
John Pod Horowitz
He watched the movie and he wanted to kill himself.
- [60:41]
Matt Continetti
Imagine it with no music and no sound effects.
- [60:44]
John Pod Horowitz
Right.
- [60:45]
Matt Continetti
But that mind melt they have clearly goes beyond one particular project. Of course they collaborate on the Indiana Jones franchise too. But just to talk about Jaws for a second, I want to recommend to all the new documentary Jaws at using the at sign 50, the definitive inside story. You can find it on Disney plus along with other platforms because it was co produced with National Geographic. It's a great little film about 90 minutes about the origins of Jaws, has new interviews with Spielberg. I learned that one anecdote there. I also. One other great aspect is Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, the novel died in I think 2006 so he wasn't available for new interviews. But they use archival footage and they also talk to his family members who have his papers. And one of my favorite moments is the documentary is the multiple pages of potential titles for the novel and just, just you know, from the deep or one I saw was Omnivore. And finally, at the very last minute, the editor of the book was like, why don't we just call it Jaws? No one really know. When you think about it, no one knows. Why is it Jaws? Of course, it's become so enmeshed with the popular consciousness. That's one great story. There are some interviews with the townies, so the actual residents of Martha's Vineyard who played such an important part in the film. And I had not known until I watched the documentary that there are really only six actors from Hollywood who are in Jaws. These are all the major parts, of course, but every other character was played by a Martha's Vineyard local. And it really does lend this authenticity to the film, which you will see anytime you watch it. I've watched it many, many times. And you also see, of course, when they intercut the very. Some of the very famous scenes of the film as well. So that's jaws at 50, the definitive inside story. And Abe, I believe you also watched it.
- [63:01]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. And the two things that Matt has brought up so far, the. Well, the script writing, actually, not the novel writing, but the various rewrites, the bringing in the multiple writers to punch it up, to get it right, to cut out this romance angle, to do that. Corralling the locals, using them, getting them to reveal their sort of natural charisma. A lot of their dialogue was just.
- [63:38]
Matt Continetti
That one villager who has all these great lines. He's on the pier when Jaws attacks. The pier almost pulls him in the water. And then he's on one of the boats when they have that flotilla that goes out. We learned that he made up of all of his lines. It was all improvised. It wasn't written at all. But he has some of the best stuff in such a character. And if you know these small New England towns, you know that they are filled with guys like him and pulling.
- [64:02]
Abe Greenwald
Together the technical aspects of this. There were three sharks, as I learned this, there were three mechanical sharks. They needed one to turn one way, one to turn another way, one to come in in a different angle. And the very fact that Spielberg was insistent on shooting this in the actual water, not in a tank on a backlot, you know, so to give it that real effect, just the mammoth undertaking of making this film. He was 26, I think, when he made it. It's like bringing a country into a war, you know, the fact that he corralled all these forces, even if it ended up a failure, would have been a sort of unbelievable undertaking.
- [64:48]
Matt Continetti
And it Almost did. And we learned from him how he was effectively traumatized by his experience.
- [64:53]
Abe Greenwald
That's what John.
- [64:54]
Matt Continetti
John brings. Brings it up. I just want one more revelation for me, which is I am a huge Robert Shaw, Stan. I think he was one of those brilliant actors ever. And this movie, this documentary was a real shock to my system because I had no idea that Robert Shaw's natural speaking voice was very high and lilting. I. I only know him as Quint or as the man from.
- [65:21]
John Pod Horowitz
Or Henry VIII in the subway movie. Yeah.
- [65:23]
Matt Continetti
Right. Taking a Pellum. One, two, three. You know, one of my favorite movies. Yeah.
- [65:28]
John Pod Horowitz
Henry. All these great with love.
- [65:31]
Matt Continetti
Yes. I mean, he always has this kind of deep, deeper voice.
- [65:34]
John Pod Horowitz
Yeah.
- [65:34]
Matt Continetti
In his films. But you hear him telling these stories in this documentary footage, and he has this high, like, Irish lilt.
- [65:43]
John Pod Horowitz
So it's a very.
- [65:44]
Matt Continetti
You find little things like that if you watch this documentary.
- [65:47]
John Pod Horowitz
So this is the single greatest story of making lemonade out of lemons in the history of culture, practically, because they didn't know that it was going to be a nightmarish, behemoth disaster of a production. It was scheduled to film for 60 days, and they ended up filming it for 155 days. It was a mistake not to have filmed it in the tank because when they brought the sharks, which they had to drive across country since they were built in. In. In California, they had to drive them on trucks across the country. And they had been tested. Turned out once you put them in saltwater, they fizzled out and were corroded and destroyed. And they were. They were fundamentally unusable. And he plan for the movie was, in the first scene, you would see this girl swimming, and then you would see a shark jump out of the water and bite her and take her into the water. And then you would see the shark five or six or seven times in the course of the movie doing shark attacks. And it couldn't happen because the shark didn't work. And so the notion of, hey, wait a minute, what if we don't see the shark? What if what we see is people being pulled under or, you know, or. Or that indelible shot of this raft turning over 10ft from the shore with this little boy on the raft disappearing into the water. All you see is the raft. Right. And it's only, I don't know, 45 minutes into the movie that Roy Scheider says, you know, you start chumming this crap, and then suddenly the shark emerges from the water for a second because they can't do anything with It. Okay, so the entire structure of what makes it such an incredibly effective movie is what is not seen and not what is seen. But that wasn't the plan. And so they had to revise the plan as they were going. And there is the best book ever written or published about the making of an individual movie, which you can get on your Kindle right now, is called the Jaws Log. By Carl Gottlieb. Carl Gottlieb was a comedy writer who shared an agent with Spielberg. He had written for the Smothers Brothers and various other things, and he was a sketch comedy writer. And he. Spielberg asked him to come and help punch up the script, which was a mess. And, yeah, featured, as Abe says, an affair between Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider's wife and all kinds of other stuff.
- [68:30]
Matt Continetti
That there was a mob connection. I think in the movie, in the.
- [68:34]
John Pod Horowitz
Book, the mayor was under the thumb of the mob, and basically they had to write the movie every night, and they had plenty of time because every time they went out on the water, it rained or they couldn't do anything. And there were days and weeks, weeks in which nothing was happening. And all of that and all of the flavor, all of the kind of the stuff you forget because you think it's just like a thrill a minute. But Spielberg, a very interesting and unusual director who is much more interested in character than people realize, understood that this was a movie about three people on a boat mostly. I mean, the last hour is three people on a boat. And you had to get to know them, you had to get to care about them, and you had to get to worry for their safety. And so. And Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss hated each other. So he had a huge problem because they hated each other so much. And like that. And yet. So Gottlieb and these guys, they were constantly trying to figure out, how do we humanize this? And all the stuff on the island, the very naturalistic stuff about the. The life on the island and even these moments that would never appear today because nobody would think about them because it's been 50 years of bad summer movie making. Like the moment when the mayor says, after he's been saying, you got to keep the beaches open. You got to keep the beaches open. And he says to Roy Scheider, he says, my. My kids were on that beach. Like, you seem not to understand. Like, I know how bad this is. And then he gets delivered because somebody bags a shark and says, I caught him. And then the mayor's like, great, okay, we Go back to normal. Right. And everyone thinks it's all over. And then, of course, it's not all over, but even the mayor gets humanized. He's the villain, and he gets his humanizing moment. And I remember seeing it the day that it opened when I was 15 years old or 14 years old. It was like the day after school let out when I was in 9th or 10th grade. And it was the most exciting movie I'd ever seen. I mean, with. Unequivocally. And it's st. I've very few things. Stand up.
- [70:55]
Matt Continetti
Yeah.
- [70:55]
John Pod Horowitz
The way Jaw stands up. I mean, the Godfather stands up.
- [70:59]
Matt Continetti
You know, it made me think, too, as I was watching this documentary just to close. There really will be no one like Steven Spielberg after he's gone from the scene. Just the achievement, the connection to old Hollywood that he has, and then all the way up into contemporary times. So I just appreciated listening to him talking, you know, because Here he is 50 years.
- [71:28]
John Pod Horowitz
He is a great talker. A lot of these guys are not like, Lucas is awful.
- [71:33]
Matt Continetti
Right.
- [71:34]
John Pod Horowitz
Awful interview.
- [71:35]
Matt Continetti
Right.
- [71:36]
John Pod Horowitz
Coppola sounds like a crazy person. Yeah, well, yeah, but Spielberg is an entrancing, Right. Hyper, articulate person and just, like, can, you know, deliver for somebody who thinks visually, he's pretty good.
- [71:53]
Matt Continetti
Yeah, yeah. And just. I mean, there's no one who has. I mean, the only person who I think has combined art and commercialism to this degree that Spielberg has is Walt Disney. I mean, really, there's. I mean, I think those are the two kind of giants of American popular culture in the 20th century. And so it's just valuable to kind of hear what he thinks.
- [72:15]
John Pod Horowitz
And Disney had a short, shorter career. Disney worked from 1927 to 1966 when he died. Spielberg's first credit as a professional filmmaker came in 1969. Right. That is 56 years ago.
- [72:33]
Matt Continetti
Almost 60 years.
- [72:34]
John Pod Horowitz
Almost 60 years. And that was an episode of a TV show called Night Gallery. And if you want to know what. Why people like the person who ran Universal Pictures knew that they had a genius on their hands, go to YouTube and search Columbo. Steven Spielberg, because he. He did an episode of Columbo. And was it the first. It may have been the first episode of Columbo, and it was called Murder by the Book or something like that. And it is all you can see the first two minutes, which is a car driving somewhere where the person who is behind the wheel of the car is going to shoot someone to death. And the person who's gonna shoot to death is a writer. And the whole scene, two minutes. The soundtrack is a typewriter keyboard being typed upon. And you watch that, and he was 22 years old or something, like you say. Yeah, it makes sense that in, like, you know, in 2019 or 20 or 21, whatever that was, he made a masterpiece out of west side story, like, 60 years later. Like, it's the same person. And he's still, you know, active and alive. And he's got a huge. Apparently a gigantic Alien movie coming out next year. Year. And I have some problems with a lot of his work, but.
- [74:06]
Matt Continetti
Yes. Well, when he met the Communists, that was not good for anybody.
- [74:09]
John Pod Horowitz
That was not good. But he. But he is. But he is in a. He. There's just never there. There. There isn't and there never has been.
- [74:17]
Matt Continetti
Right.
- [74:18]
John Pod Horowitz
Anybody like him with this. This. This career is just, you know, the person who did Schindler's List and Jurassic park and Jaws in the same year. No, no.
- [74:29]
Matt Continetti
Right.
- [74:29]
John Pod Horowitz
In the same year he made Schindler's List in Jurassic Park.
- [74:32]
Matt Continetti
1993. Same year, yeah.
- [74:34]
John Pod Horowitz
Just alone. Okay, so we're done. We'll be back tomorrow for Matt Nabo and John Pot Horitz. Keep the candle burning.