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- [00:04]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Abe Greenwald
Some preach and pain Some die of.
- [00:14]
John Podhoretz
Thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect.
- [00:21]
Christine Rosen
The worst Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, May 9, 2025. I'm John Podhortz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:37]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:38]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:40]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:41]
John Podhoretz
And Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:44]
Unknown Speaker
Hi, John.
- [00:45]
John Podhoretz
A brief note about yesterday because I got a bunch of angry, pedantic emails complaining that I had said that only Islamists refer to Al Andalus as the. What would you call it, sort of the. The wondrous time before everything terrible happened on the Iberian Peninsula or. Or the terrible moment when everything bad happened on the Iberian Peninsula and that many Sephardic Jews refer warmly to Al Andalus. And what's more, Sephardic Jews sing in Arabic I had complained yesterday that about a Library of Congress concert for American Jewish Heritage Month that was being performed by a group called the Al Andalus Ensemble. The group sings in Hebrew Ladino, which is the Yiddish of Spanish, Spanish and Arabic. And I said a why on earth would the American Jewish Heritage Month be be dedicated to a concert in which people are singing in Arabic and Hebrew, among other things? This is American Jews. And so there are plenty of American Jewish concerts you could have at the Library of Congress, and that my presumption, therefore, was that it was a very pointed decision to choose this group to come to celebrate a Jewish celebration month, singing in Arabic and evoking a slightly controversial reading of the past. So I got a lot of Jews saying, no, Sephardi didn't do this and Sephardi didn't do that. Here's a book published by Wayne State in 1873 that shows blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the simple fact of the matter is that I'm right and you're wrong. The Library of Congress clearly decided to do this concert as some kind of weird provocation. And I'm happy to report I would love to believe that I was the animating force behind this, though I doubt it. But nonetheless, the Librarian of Congress was fired yesterday. Not surprising. I mean, the Trump administration is firing.
- [02:59]
Unknown Speaker
I was going to say there have been murmuring about that happening for a couple of weeks now. She was on her way out.
- [03:06]
John Podhoretz
Let me just enjoy my delusion that I played some material role as a result. As a result of this staging of this horrifying staging of this concert by the deep states 18, you know, 16, 17 months after October 7th and the explosion of anti Semitism, that you couldn't just do a concert featuring the music of Gershwin and Berlin and Bob Dylan and Neil diamond and God knows who else. Yeah. Very pointed. Yeah.
- [03:43]
Christine Rosen
Can I just say, I completely agree with you. I mean, I mean, obviously I agree with you.
- [03:46]
John Podhoretz
It's.
- [03:47]
Christine Rosen
And it doesn't matter if all that is the case regarding Andalusia and Jews and music. The point is they went to where they went because it's the equivalent of saying anti Semitism and Islamophobia.
- [04:03]
John Podhoretz
Exactly. Yeah.
- [04:04]
Christine Rosen
It's the broadening.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [04:07]
Christine Rosen
Both sides of the equal sign kind of thing.
- [04:10]
Unknown Speaker
And I just want to. I just want to put in a plea. I don't know how many. I doubt we have many Trump administration officials listening to our podcast, but if we do, please, please, please. I hope they give thoughtful time to choosing a good Librarian of Congress. It's a very important cultural role. And so far, this administration has been pretty bad on appointments to the cultural agencies and decimating some of the cultural agencies. Obviously, I'm a humanities person. I care about this stuff. I spent a year at the Library of Congress on a fellowship, and I love people I worked with. I hope that they pick someone who shares the sort of more patriotic vision for a very important American institution without all the DEI nonsense that has infected a lot of our institutions, but who takes seriously the role of the nation's library because it is a very important institution. It's a wonderful place here in Washington. So there's my plea for a thoughtful new librarian. We've had some amazing librarians of Congress in the past, and we could use a good, good one again.
- [05:04]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Good luck to you on that one. I'm really.
- [05:10]
Seth Mandel
If they need any names, my. The good old Mrs. Z, the librarian at Lakewood Hebrew Day School when I was a kid, was a very good librarian. I don't know if she's still around, but if she is, if you need Mrs. Z's number, happy to forward that to you.
- [05:26]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. I think you're more likely to get Dinesh d' Souza than you are to get, you know, and Roberts. Not that Andrew Roberts would be the Librarian of Congress, but yes, there are plenty of great American Will Maclay, Bill Maclay, Wilford Maclay, would make a great Librarian of Congress. But as I say, I think you are more likely to get a Carrie Lake taking over the Voice of America style thing than you are to get a foremost conservative historian of the sort that we saw. We've Seen in previous moments, you know, Dan Boorstin and others. Anyway, not that he was a conservative. I mean that someone who's a very good steward.
- [06:11]
Unknown Speaker
Library, though, Borstein.
- [06:12]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, right.
- [06:12]
John Podhoretz
But it could suits the political moment for whomever is appointing him while having all of the necessary credentials and managerial skills. I should not have mentioned Wilford Maclay, because now, of course, he'll never get it. Unless, of course, the people who saw to the firing of the Librarian of Congress, in fact listened to this podcast and did it for me. I'm repeating my delusion here.
- [06:34]
Seth Mandel
Well, Borsten was a commentary guy, too, so it's not necessarily a mark against him.
- [06:38]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but he was during the liberal days of commentary anyway. All right, so that's the Librarian of Congress story and the Al Andalus ensemble. And stop emailing me and stop with your narishkite about how, you know Sephardim. A thrill to the memory, the historical memory of the wondrous days before, you know, before the. Both the Muslim takeover and the. And the. And the. Why am I losing. Why am I losing control of my vocabulary? The Bonfire of the Vanities. Or what did they call it? 1919, 14? 92. The Inquisition. Thank you very much. Okay, we would have helped you, but.
- [07:25]
Seth Mandel
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
- [07:27]
John Podhoretz
Okay, well done on concluding this ridiculous section of today's Commentary magazine daily podcast. Now we can move on to Pope Bob. We have nothing to say about Pope Bob.
- [07:39]
Unknown Speaker
I mean, I have one thing to say. I have one thing to say, which actually has gotten slightly overlooked and all the pontificating about what he will. I'm so sorry, it is Friday and I've not finished my. Something that everyone's trying to predict.
- [07:53]
John Podhoretz
What?
- [07:53]
Unknown Speaker
You know, is he a liberal pope? Is he a conservative pope? What's going to happen? Look to the name that he chose. He's Leo XIV. And the last Pope Leo was Leo XIII, who was in fact considered in the 1890s, rather progressive. He issued Rerum Novarum, which was very much about standards of living and how workers are treated. It was a very important encyclical in that period of time. So the fact that he chose Leo as his papal name strikes me as being a little bit of a signal of what he's worried about. In the same way that I think this effort on the part of Americans to overlay our political or left right distinctions on a pope isn't quite working, because that's not how it works. But I'm kind of. I kind of think it's amazing that we have a First American Pope and it makes me very proud. So. And I'm not a Catholic, so.
- [08:43]
John Podhoretz
Right. So we have now had, in the course of my lifetime as an adult, we have had a Polish Pope, German Pope, an Argentinian Pope, and now an American Pope.
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Seth Mandel
So we spent 20 years.
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Unknown Speaker
He did spend 20 years in Peru. Yeah, he's a naturalized citizen of Peru.
- [09:00]
John Podhoretz
Okay. So what strikes me as interesting about that, and again, I'm now focusing on the only thing that I really understand about this, which is the machinations of the way these things are covered. Because I understand media and I don't understand the Catholic Church. This apparently was the fastest election of a pope in 150 years, or maybe even longer than that second, second ballot. Less than 24 hours for the Conclave to meet. And the fact that nobody knew that he would be the choice means that every time I read things where people are telling me what is going on inside of the Vatican and inside the Catholic Church, the secret machinations of this, the other thing I now know are no longer going to believe anything that I see. Because clearly this was a, you know, this is essentially a version of a landslide. You know, it sort of came unbelievably quickly and with great authority and great moment. And, and nobody, from what I can tell, knew that this was even a possible. This was on the bingo card, given that I was reading stuff all in the last couple of weeks about, or even the last couple of months when, when Francis, Pope Francis got sick around Christmas time. And it looked like he was not gonna, you know, he was not gonna survive the year 2024. And you know that literally yesterday was the first time I saw the name Robert Prevost in the Prince. And I read tens of thousands of words about this. So, so thank you Catholic journalists and people who do this for a living, because you have revealed that you stink at your jobs. And so now I've got another set of media institutions that I can cheerfully discard.
- [10:56]
Unknown Speaker
But you could see this as being admiration for the leak proof Vatican. It's one of the few international organizations that doesn't leak anymore. Everyone else leaks like crazy. And so they are the one, they're still holding the line on like old school, not leaking to the press.
- [11:13]
John Podhoretz
Fair enough. But that doesn't let the reporters off the hook who speak in these. And they're not just reporters, but analysts and people who we know. I'm not going to say who they are, but people who speak with great authority about what? About the ideological disputes in particular inside the inner councils of the Vatican. And now I just think basically, they don't know anything and they're just bringing their priors or they're creating imaginative literature that in the end, is not all that dissimilar from writing a novel in a movie in which it turns out that the Pope is a hermaphrodite, like conclave. So that's just. Every now and then, it's worth getting a moment when you can say, okay, here's a bunch of experts who have no expertise. I know we need expertise, and we've been in a period where nobody trusts experts be. And that's bad, because we need experts and all of that. But, you know, when they reveal that they don't know the inner workings of the things that they claim to know the inner workings of, it's good to be able to take some people that you were paying attention to off your, you know, reading list, because they didn't come through at a huge moment. Right? Happens once every however many years, 10 years, 12 years. And they're not help. They're. They're. They're not helping us to understand anything. And let's see, the Pope himself will. The new Pope will make himself known to us how he feels, what he thinks, what. What his focus is, whether he does have the focus that you're suggesting dating back to Rerum Navarre, or whether he will bring a different kind of focus to his papacy. And, and so all the predictions of it and all of that, I think we can just leave to one side and let. Let the new most important religious leader on the planet Earth reveal himself to us as what his papacy will. Will try to direct this most important religious institution on the face of the Earth, and whether he can restore it in some ways to some of its past, to some of the glory that has been tarnished over the last 30 or 40 years. But of course, it's unbelievably exciting that it's an American. Like, nobody ever thought this would happen.
- [13:36]
Unknown Speaker
And from Chicago, it only took 250 years.
- [13:39]
John Podhoretz
I mean, come on, he's from Chicago. No, enough with the deep dish pizza jokes. I'm saying this to every single person who is, like, eager to make a deep dish pizza joke. And you know why? Because deep dish pizza stinks. That's why. It's not pizza. It's not real pizza. Take it from a New Yorker and someone who's a fan of New Haven pizza. This is not real pizza. It's something that's gonna get you a.
- [14:05]
Unknown Speaker
Lot more angry emails in the end of this comment.
- [14:07]
John Podhoretz
Bring it on. Bring it on. Chicago pizza people. I've, I have a couple in my family and I am, I have to suffer through eating some Chicago pizza when we go to Chicago for family events and things like that and, and sit there with this mass glop of sort of pie in front of me with some tomatoes on it. It is not pizza.
- [14:31]
Christine Rosen
Can I put in a word for Detroit style pizza, which is now pretty much come to be my favorite.
- [14:37]
John Podhoretz
Now look, Detroit style pizza is vastly superior to Chicago deep dish pizza. There is no question. There's a very good Detroit style pizza place right in your neighborhood. In my neighborhood that is very, very hot. Very. People are really enjoying it. But that's all I'm saying. So no more. But you, but, but, you know, if he elevates the profile of the White Sox, you know, the least respected in some ways, you have to say a terribly disrespected sports franchise. Wouldn't you say, Seth? I mean, it's a, I think very disrespected because of the legendary and epic nature of the Cubs. Mostly legendary and epic because the Cubs is in a, is in a better neighborhood in Chicago or more accessible neighborhood In Chicago, number one. Number two, because the Cubs had this, you know, 110 year gap between anyone even paying attention to them. And there's the white side.
- [15:39]
Seth Mandel
I mean, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a culture. The Cubby Cubbies have, have a culture. I mean, I, I've sat out there on the ivy and in the bleachers and you know, it was very similar to like sitting in Yankee Stadium with the bleach creatures. We. Yankee Stadium. There's the bleacher creatures. And I forget, but the, there's a, the bleacher something in Chicago also. Bleacher bombs. The bleacher bombs. There's a very like old school baseball culture at Wrigley. And of course, you know, nobody's ever going to call it anything other than Wrigley. Whereas Comiskey park has since become America or something. Yeah, right. So there's, there's just like this kind of. With the Cubs, there's this aura of history that has it. And I will say, as a Yankees fan, by the way, when I went to the Cubs and I people learned we were Yankee fans. They were very happy to see us and they felt like we had something in common. But of course, when we went over to the American League side and went to the White Sox game, we weren't wearing Yankees paraphernalia. Or saying anything about the Yankees. But the people in front of us were. Were arguing over who among them hates Roger Clemens the most. And at the time, Clemens was a Yankee. So it was like going undercover in Chicago. Yeah, they're talking about the Yankees. Even if you're not in the vicinity. They just. So there was like this, you know, sort of resentment that we felt in. In on the other side of town.
- [17:08]
John Podhoretz
Two ancient Chicago baseball stories, and we'll move on to even more foolishness. But I went to college in Chicago from 1978 to 1982, went to a bunch of White Sox games because I went to the University of Chicago. And the White Sox stadium was, you know, a short. Was 10, 12, 14 minutes away from the U. Of C. Whereas the Cubs are on the north side. It was harder and longer to get to. And two experiences, one of which was at the time, the Cubs only played day games. As people remember, the Cubs did not play at night until, I think, the 90s, maybe, because the stadium was in the middle of a residential neighborhood and the lights were deemed, you know, would have been deemed defensive. And then they went up. And so in the. In the late 70s, early 80s, people may not remember this, but baseball was getting increasingly unpopular and attendance at baseball games was incredibly low. I mean, it's one of the weirdnesses that baseball seems to be less culturally important than it was before. But I think the Yankees now draw in excess of four, four and a half million people a year to the stadium, to the 82 games or 80 games at Yankee Stadium. And at the. In the 19, late 1970s when they were winning World Series, they would draw about 2 million, something like that. Like, it's a very. It's an interesting change in the dinette that the game was still central, but people stopped going to the stadium often because it was unsafe or the stadiums were in bad neighborhoods, whatever. I went to a couple of Cubs games and I remember one day sitting there and they do the announcement around the seventh inning about, you know, what had happened at the game and that the attend those. The number of attendees that was announced that day was 877. So there were 807 people in Wrigley Field at that. At that game. And the second was that we would go to these White Sox games. And the way that Comiskey park was built, the old Comiskey park, there were these bars at either end of the field level where you went to get your beer, if you were drinking beer. And they were sort of next to the. They were Next to the area where the relief pitchers, you know, warm up and stuff. And there was a. There was a fence, like an open fence, so you could see out that was, you know, with a grill. So the ball. If the ball hit the fence, it wouldn't come and hit you. And people would plant themselves at the. At the fence in the first inning so that they could keep turning around, going back 15ft to get their beer, and then go back and watch the game at the fence. And so by around the fifth or sixth inning, there were 75 people who had had 100 beers on average, standing there. And, you know, they would start punching each other. At some point or other, somebody would say, he was stepping on my foot or something like that. And this was one of the reasons eventually that they. They stopped. They made all these rules. You can't drink after the fifth inning when they. When they. They moved the. They moved the bars away from the fence. But that people really were going to Comiskey park to stand, drink beer, and get into fights, because there wasn't much going on with the White Sox either. So that was my experience of Chicago baseball. Much less elevated than Robert.
- [20:41]
Seth Mandel
Well, the. The time that I was at Wrigley Field, by the way, that, you know, the Take Me out to the Ball game in the seventh inning is a very big. And when I was there, it was Ozzy osborne, it was 2003, and Ozzy Osbourne sang led Take Me out to the Ball Game. And later that night, when we went back to our hotel after the game, we watched on SportsCenter, and they had done this thing where they had actually put the lyrics on the screen so that you could sing along with Ozzy, because otherwise you could not sing along with Ozzy Osbourne. It wasn't clear he knew the words. It wasn't clear what he was saying or. Or what he was singing exactly. But it was a stadium full of people trying to signal Take Me out to the Ball Game along with Ozzy Osbourne. And that's a very baseball thing.
- [21:29]
John Podhoretz
Well, of course, the Take Me out to the Ball game at Wrigley field was for 50 years, led by its legendary broadcaster, Harry Carey. And I'm gonna tell a commentary story about Harry Carey, and then we really will move on. So Harry Carey, like somebody at Comiskey park, availed himself of the grape or. Or the fermented beverage during the game, so that as he got older and older and got less and less able to handle his liquor, by the time he started singing Take Me out to the Ball game. He was often very, very deeply in his. His cups. So he would sing it and slur the words worse than Ozzy Osbourne because of his ingestion of alcohol. Anyway, as people may know, our longest standing contributor, Joseph Epstein is a Chicagoan or from Chicago and lives in Evanston. And one day he was on a program where he won something in some Chicago radio contest or something like that where he got to ask, you know, got to say what it was he would like to do, especially in Chicago. And he reported that he wanted to have ribs with Harry Carey. And Harry Carey lived at the time, I believe in the Ambassador East Hotel. And there and had it and had a rib joint called Harry Carey's Rib Joint. And so Joseph Epstein, Chicago is one of Chicago's two foremost intellectuals. The other being Saul Bellow, did spend a legendary evening eating ribs with. With Harry Carey, who I believe though he will. He might be listening to this now and can. And can maybe tell me if I'm misremembering this, but. But it continued imbibing after the seventh inning of and Take Me out to the Ball Game. And so by the time he and he and Carrie sat down for the ribs, Carrie was all but incoherent and spent the evening in incoherence eating ribs at his rib restaurant.
- [23:47]
Christine Rosen
Okay, wait, hold on, hold on. I have one more interjection before we actually get. I just want to say I didn't.
- [23:54]
John Podhoretz
Know what we're going to talk about, by the way, which is why we're going on.
- [23:58]
Unknown Speaker
This is like, we're like. This is like the Statler and Waldorf. You know, the old guy Muppets in the balcony. This is, this episode we have Mailbag.
- [24:04]
Christine Rosen
This is the most Friday episode ever. Just wanted to say because Seth mentioned Ozzy. Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Osborne. Fantastic on Israel.
- [24:14]
John Podhoretz
Very true.
- [24:15]
Christine Rosen
That's what I wanted to say.
- [24:18]
John Podhoretz
Hey everybody.
- [24:18]
Abe Greenwald
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- [26:59]
John Podhoretz
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Abe Greenwald
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John Podhoretz
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John Podhoretz
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- [28:35]
John Podhoretz
Commentary that's shopify.com commentary shopify.com commentary Abe, yesterday you wrote your newsletter came out as it does every day around four. Subscribe to Abe's newsletter. Go to commentary.org newsletters right there in the top, at the top of the page. Click on it, put in your email, you can get Abe's newsletter and you are discerning a vibe shift in the behavior of elite institutions, particularly you, the universities, but maybe also mayoralties and politicians in very liberal states toward the Hamas supporting terrorist demonstrators.
- [29:23]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I think Trump's campaign to crack down on anti Semitism on campus, along with things like the lawsuit of the Hamas hostage relatives against these activist groups has sort of brought the true nature of these protests to light in a way that leaves much less room for people to say, oh well, you know, college students always protest wars or you know, this is just, you know, freedom of speech or you know, so whether and by the way, Seth has an excellent, excellent, had an excellent post yesterday and we were, we didn't communicate before we both wrote, but we were kind of on the similar page yesterday to this effect. I think whether or not Trump succeeds ultimately or to what extent he succeeds in sort of cracking down on these campuses and on the radicals and on the networks and on, on getting the non Americans among them out of the country, the effort itself I think has made the nature of these protests very plain and just in reading about these crazy because there was another there was also an occupation of the University of Washington where they destroyed. Yeah. Million dollars in in engineering equipment. And it's like the, as I said in the piece, the line between pro terrorist activism and terrorism proper suddenly seems a lot thinner. It always was. But I think it's because of all the attention I think that, that these protests have gotten and that the schools have gotten for their poor handling of them.
- [31:33]
John Podhoretz
Seth, in your post, which is at the top of our daily offerings@comMENTARY.org right now, although by the time you listen to this, there might be one or two further atop but your post is called Columbia Exposes the Academic Freedom Hypocrites. And I think it's a pretty brave argument that you're making here. And I say brave because. Because, of course, a lot of people are discomfited by the nature of the sort of totalistic nature of the attack on the universities by the Trump administration. Like, it's one thing to go after on the questions of Title vi. It's another to go after somebody and you think that they're being gone after because they've said things that you don't like and that people have the right to free speech. And even if they're, you know, even if they're green card holder, whatever, and they. So, you know, this is an effort to suppress speech and violate academic freedom, and the Trump people really shouldn't be doing that. And you call out.
- [32:42]
Abe Greenwald
Otherwise.
- [32:43]
John Podhoretz
I think, you know, organizations, a lot of people on the right consider unimpeachable, particularly the foundation for Individual Rights and Education. Or I think it's changed. It's called fire. But I think maybe the.
- [32:54]
Seth Mandel
And expression now.
- [32:56]
John Podhoretz
No. And expression, it's not in education. Right. So it's now become a kind of acl. Now that the ACLU is against free speech. It seems to be America's foremost free speech institution. Why don't you lay out what you mean when you say that FIRE has maybe has kind of become a patsy for the kind of Hamas next, who are using the cudgel of free speech as a way of avoiding accountability.
- [33:27]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, well, there's. There's no question that some of the stuff that Trump wants to do and has demanded of the school of, well, Harvard, we should say some of the stuff, and we've discussed this on the podcast, some of the stuff that Trump demanded of Harvard was crossing a line, you know, into that. And so, you know, it's not that they're wrong in every particular that, you know, I'm not saying that Trump. Trump poses no threat to academic freedom, but this, the outcry over academic freedom is, you know, this one of the things that FIRE has been. I mean, fire is fantastic at the thing that they do, which is concentrate.
- [34:08]
John Podhoretz
On.
- [34:10]
Seth Mandel
Government suppression of First Amendment rights. And because of that, they have missed when people are having their freedom of expression, the right to freedom of expression, freedom of speech, academic freedom, trampled on by not the government. And this is part of the problem, which is it's very easy to recognize when the president says of Harvard, you better change your hiring practices and also have somebody oversee the Department of Blah Blah, blah, studies, you know, and then go, oh, well, that's. There's an academic freedom problem. But we've been saying for a year and a half now, as these protests have gone on, the Jewish kids on campus have not had their academic freedom defended or respected by these groups. You know, Jewish kids who can't move freely through campus. Jewish kids who, if you're sitting at a class at, you know, Columbia and a bunch of kids storm into the Israeli history class and hold the class hostage and, and hand out flyers that say, you know, Zionism must be destroyed or whatever, you know, happened at Columbia. Where's the art? Where's the defense of academic freedom from the kids who are just sitting in class? That's only just one example. But the larger point is that Jewish kids on campus have been saying for a long time, you know, we can't take all the classes that we want to take necessarily. If you talk to people on these campuses, they will tell you that they have thesis projects shot down because they involve Israel or some critique of the progressive narrative on the Middle east and Middle east history. They will tell you that, you know, the way that kids have been told to, you know, the way that kids have been singled out in classrooms across the country for being Israeli or Jewish or whatever for a long time now. What that, what, what that has meant has been students afraid in a lot of cases to be open about their identity. And that means, you know, and in other cases, you've had students being told, no, we're not going to give you credit for Hebrew language class or whatever it is. There's just a lot going on that has squashed the academic freedom of anybody that has anything to do with Jewish or Israeli subjects. And honestly, not just Jews, because even if you're not Jewish, you still can't take a class on the Middle east that has a different perspective. And you still can't write that thesis if you're, you might be an Arab who likes Israel or whatever. But point is that on all these things, academic freedom has been heavily constricted. And then there's the problem of what we saw yesterday at Columbia. Claire Shipman, the new president of Columbia. Yeah, interim president, acting. Yeah. Had said in her, her video address to the college. She had been there at Butler Library and saw what had happened herself. And she focused a lot of her statement on the fact that it was finals and there were 900 students supposedly in Butler Library, theoretically studying for their finals. When the Hamas nicks rushed the building, everybody who wasn't a protester Left. And a lot of people apparently left laptops behind, left books behind. People were saying, I have a final. I have a paper, I have an exam. I have this or that. And, you know, I just wanted to point out in my post that this is far from the first time that students at a university have said have been disrupted during finals or during the exams itself, or during plenty of academic, you know, programs that they. That these protesters have made it impossible for them either to study or to learn or to concentrate. We've had Jewish students, particularly, say, I was taking my final exam, and outside my window were 300 people yelling to push me into the sea, like it was hard to concentrate. You know, things like that. And this has been going on for a while. So. So my point is basically that the government is not the only suppressive force when it comes to academic freedom. There is a culture that has been allowed to take root on all these campuses that has really squashed academic freedom and debate and could do so for a generation if it goes on much longer. And people just learn the lesson, which is, you don't ask certain questions and you don't take certain classes and, you know, whatever, stuff like that. And that. They really needed groups like Fire to be out there fight. Not a press release every few months, not a tweet when something really egregious happened. Like, I don't remember where it was, Berkeley or ucla, where the student. Stanford, where the Jewish students were told to stand up, you know, and whatever. Just when something outrageous happens, they needed a pressure group that was there every step of the way, saying, look, watch what's happening. These kids at this school, they can't learn what they want to learn. They can't study. And they have a natural disadvantage now on campus in whatever they do in a lot of cases. And that is, you know, that's also squashing academic freedom. It's squashing their freedom of speech, it's squashing their freedom of expression because they won't say certain things. It's squashing their freedom of association, because how many, you know, the clubs that are getting approved are Jews for Gaza, not Jews for Israel, you know, et cetera, all that stuff.
- [39:57]
John Podhoretz
So what's central to this is that it is all part of. Of a record that is being established that ballasts and provides scaffolding for the Trump administration's argument that the Civil Rights act is being violated on campus and systematically by practices that extend from mere matters of safety, which are not mere at all. They are central, right? Which is just like, okay, you're on a college campus, you should be able to walk wherever you want to walk. Talk to how hiring of assistant professors or the creation of sub disciplines or academic programs and all of that. How they have systematically led to a degradation in the ability of Jewish students to express themselves freely. And that you have, therefore a continuum from elementary personal safety to intellectual safety, let's say, or intellectual exploration. And that it's going to be very hard for these schools if these get into courtrooms to defend themselves. Because if their defense is academic freedom, the answer is no. You denied academic freedom to a specific group of kids on your campus. That's what you did. And you can't defend yourself by saying that you're supporting the academic freedom of others. Because the whole purpose of the idea of academic freedom is that unpopular or unconventional views need a defense from the mob and from the conventional opinion that says we don't want anyone to think X. And so we are going to do what we can to suppress X. That is a. It's part of all intellectual battles. And we were just talking about the, you know, the, the papacy. And academic freedom in part was started as a way of making sure. It started, I mean, sort of began at schools where the entire subject matter that was being studied and, you know, beginning in the late Middle Ages was religious. And so you had to be able, if you wanted to actually do textual analysis of things not to be then taken and, you know, strung up and hanged and drawn and quartered. If you were going to say something about, you know, one of the church creeds that was deemed improper or wrong or were evil or something like that. This is where it all started is the defensive, unpopular views.
- [42:57]
Unknown Speaker
But this is where I think there's a short term and a long term legal strategy here that has to be seen through. And up to now, the universities have been bad on both of these things. But the short term involves the arrests that we saw, but those people being prosecuted. Because there have been a lot of arrests over the past few year and a half or so on campuses and they're always processed and released and there's no consequence, which is why many of them are who. There was a story today about how one of the ones arrested in this last round of activity was arrested before, but there were no consequences. So our legal system, particularly in blue cities like New York and elsewhere, need to prosecute. Prosecutors need to follow through on these charges. But then long term, there need to be, there needs to be civil litigation. There needs to be all kinds of groups of students who can Successfully file a lawsuit and succeed and win those take years. But both of those things will bring us to a place that allows for the kind of academic freedom and freedom of expression that we're talking about.
- [43:56]
John Podhoretz
Right. Well, I want to call out my old friend. Call out praise. Call out can mean the opposite. My old friend Edward Bloom, who is the, you know, the chief litigant over the last 20 years in most of the affirmative action cases brought in the federal court system and to the Supreme Court when including Students for Fair Education. That's the affirmative action case. The Asian American fair admissions. Excuse me.
- [44:26]
Unknown Speaker
They just filed a lawsuit against Stanford, by the way.
- [44:28]
John Podhoretz
That's what I wanted to. Or, or University of California, I believe, a school in the University of California system for, again, for the violation of. Of the speech rights of UCLA Medical School. This is not, by the way, a Jewish free speech issue. This is the race issue. So in defiance of federal and state law, says this complaint against UCLA Medical School. UCLA uses race as a factor in admissions. Both the UC system and Geffen, which I guess is the name of the medical school named after David Geffen, have publicly expressed their intent to racially balance the class. Geffen's dean of admissions, both publicly and privately, said she uses race as a factor in making admission decisions. And whistleblowers confirmed that the admissions committee either led or intimidated by Lucero, that's the dean, use all available methods to glean in an applicant's race, openly discuss applicants race, and use race to hold students to different standards based on race. So the use of it has now become necessary. The only way to get changed on these campuses is to use the courts. And I believe what's so important about all this is that a lot of this litigation, Harvard was a landmark case because it was actually a private institution that was deemed in violation of the civil rights of these applicants. But most of these cases are brought against state schools, which actually are obliged. It's not a matter of private contract. If you go to one of these schools in the same way that it is at a place like Harvard, and they are obliged to follow both state and the federal constitution and the protections thereof, you surrender some of your constitutional protections when you sign any contract with, you know, with a private institution that obliges you to pay them and you have to follow certain rules and they're allowed to discipline you in different ways and all of that. And a lot of that is different at, at schools that are run by states and, and which have a different connection to the law and constitution because they are because they are owned by the people and not by, you know, private authorities. And. And this is a deeply important case because we are hearing this. I'm hearing this from doctors. I know several, that the. The effort to politicize, racialize, and change the direction of American medicine in favor of DEI is very, very potent and is a totalistic. And let's just think about this for a minute. If you're applying to be an English major or to write an English, you know, literature, PhD, the subjective quality of the work that you produce is total.
- [47:43]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [47:44]
John Podhoretz
You want to say that Jane Austen was a white supremacist, Go ahead. You want to say that she was a feminist icon, Go ahead. You can express these opinions. They could be foolish or brilliant or whatever, but, you know, they're European. Then you go teach people and maybe you corrupt the youth, but whatever. Hiring. Getting people into the medical system to be medical professionals who are going to treat people after they finish medical school with life and death in their hands, being able to prescribe medications, do surgeries, do, you know, diagnose people's illnesses, and that you are already elevating the color of their skin over their scores on the MCATs and their grades in pre med. That's. You're gonna. People are gonna get killed. People are gonna be dead. Well, as a result of this.
- [48:43]
Unknown Speaker
This has been a problem for decades in the sense that, I mean, our friend Sally Satel, my colleague at AEI, wrote a book called PCMD, I think in the 1990s, which sort of started alerting people to the kinds of standard shifts that were happening. Now we have. I mean, Stanley Goldfarb has written Start an organization called do no Harm, which also seeks to encourage medical schools to be more transparent about their processes. You do see a lot of these people accepted under easier conditions than failing their medical boards. And then they're even thinking about shifting the standards for the exams for the medical boards in order to accommodate the fact that a lot of people are coming out of these schools unprepared to actually practice medicine. It's horrifying, right?
- [49:24]
John Podhoretz
It is horrifying. And I'm just saying that. That, like, this is where we're talking about things that, you know, mean that education is corrupted. In this case, you're talking about a professional education in which we are at the end of which people are licensed to do things that can kill other people. Right, Right. The wrong prescription, give it to the wrong person, that person takes a pill and is dead in five days or incompetently do a Surgery, that person is dead or crippled or, you know, something terrible happens. This is not, this is not crappy English literature.
- [50:06]
Christine Rosen
This is a diagnosis. I mean, you know, exactly.
- [50:09]
John Podhoretz
You're putting. We have a system in which we grant people life and death powers and this isn't there.
- [50:18]
Seth Mandel
There was a funny story that I wrote about a while ago where, you know, at one of the schools where the astronomy class was given the T, the professor was out. And so it was given by a ta and the TA put in the class materials in the astronomy class. Stargazing in Gaza. And it was all about how we really can't, we really shouldn't so freely look up at the scar, at the stars. When people in Gaza look up and see Israeli planes and bombs and they can't see the stars. And so it's like, why are we doing astronomy at all if people in Gaza can't. This is not that is what you're saying. The point is like, it's crazy to sit down in an astronomy class and be told maybe we shouldn't be doing this because in Khan Yunus they can't do this. But it's like this is another level. It's not just silly, it's like somebody on the operating table.
- [51:10]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. A very specific authority that we grant people through the licensing, medical licensing process that we have essentially offloaded to all universities. I mean, granted, you have to take some test after you get through medical school. But I'm just saying, like there is a 12 year process often where people start, you know, the minute that they get to college and they go through college, medical school, residency, internship, and then they become doctors and all of that. And, and that this is how we create our medical corps in the United States. And if we are privileging race over everything else. Yeah. So if that happens in astronomy, then other countries are going to discover new stars because you're not going to look at the sky because you're in solidarity with people in a con unis. But, but so that, that's a loss. But that star will either be discovered or won't be discovered. And human knowledge will be ballasted or won't be ballasted. And nobody's gonna die from that. Unless it's the. Unless what they see in the sky is the Sofon from the three body problem. The little ship that comes in and you know, takes over, takes over the.
- [52:27]
Seth Mandel
Planet or don't look up. Are, aren't they really saying don't look up.
- [52:31]
Abe Greenwald
Up, don't look up.
- [52:32]
John Podhoretz
That's right. Anyway, my point here is that, is that the watchdogs are real and the watch, the people who are, do have, who have been doing this, who have been laboring in these vineyards for decades are finally, not finally, but I mean they are that we are, we are on the march and on the move against these bad ideas, bad, dangerous, threatening ideas. And yes, it would be better if some of these institutions that are so horrified by the vulgarity of the Trump administration's efforts to kind of take control of Harvard or something like that, if they, if they labored in a more, let's say, even handed way to acknowledge these excesses while saying that the reining in of Harvard's behavior is vitally important to the preservation of the values that they hold dear. Hey everybody.
- [53:38]
Abe Greenwald
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- [56:35]
John Podhoretz
I understand that. I've been through it myself. But in the course of my life.
- [56:39]
Abe Greenwald
I've benefited enormously from therapy in different times, at different places and for different reasons.
- [56:47]
John Podhoretz
So have members of my family.
- [56:49]
Abe Greenwald
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- [57:52]
Christine Rosen
There'S also this sense among the MAGA hardcore, the very Trumpy New right that, you know, they'll call people like us, you know, pre Trump conservatives, liberals or socialists or communists. I've gotten it all, you know. But we're not real. We're not actually of the right. We're not really conservatives. And we're right. That's their sort of take on us. And as has been made clear from this conversation, people in our orbit have been fighting these fights for so long before these people, the Trumpy people, ever got political, ever thought about these issues, some of them. And then the new right has the audacity to say, like, oh, we're liberals, we're not the real right.
- [58:48]
Unknown Speaker
Listen, there's a lot of infighting. Some of the leaders of the New sort of MAGA ish anti DEI crowd love to point out, you know, love to call people to account as loudly as possible, the ones who didn't say enough or, you know, now you're with us. But what about before? There's a lot of internal purging and policing going on that, that I think those of us who are from an earlier generation of actual conservatives, that tendency has always existed to sort of call out people who might agree with you on some things but not others. But the coalition against political correctness in the 90s and then the early DEI stuff actually included a lot of people who disagreed on lots of matters of other policy, tax policy, foreign policy even, but were united in understanding that working together and building coalitions would actually advance the cause. And the wrecking ball approach of the MAGA right is having both very beneficial, immediate shock therapy type reactions, but it's also creating huge mess that we're going to all have to clean up as we've done before. So I think that's, that distinction is important and I think it's strategically a poor choice on, on the part of the sort of new MAGA right types. It's not just a matter of tone and all this. It's a matter of strategy because the long term strategy is the one that's going to win.
- [60:04]
John Podhoretz
I want to.
- [60:05]
Seth Mandel
And also you can prevent, sometimes you can prevent these eventualities from happening in the first place. Right. That's the other thing about strategy is that if you, if you form a coalition and you pay attention to everybody's rights and whatever along the way, you don't get to this point, you know, and as, I mean, like, I don't know that, that groups like FIRE would necessarily even have to be fighting the Trump administration over restoring funding to schools had there been an, you know, a movement earlier on among everybody to defend everybody's rights and that sort of thing. That's the other thing that as you said, the MAGA right also doesn't understand, which is like that they just take this. The, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll call you a peacetime consigliere and you know, but that wartime frame frame of mind, constantly being at war means that they wait for the war and then fight the war and only fight war. But, but as you said, they don't plant the seeds earlier to just kind of prevent what might turn into an all out war later on.
- [61:05]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, I want to talk about planting the seeds early. I'm going to read a passage from something and then I'LL tell you what it is from an article published in 1978. Several months ago, former president Gerald Ford spoke to a political science class at my university. During the question period that followed, he was asked for his views on the Backy case. Bakke case was the original anti affirmative action, anti quotas case that came before the Supreme Court, ironically, about medical school admissions in the University of California system. And Ford replied that he was opposed to, quote, arbitrary numerical quotas, unquote. Thereupon, the class broke into what the local newspaper termed vociferous applause. A few days later, I was interviewed by a young journalist who thought the story might be worth pursuing. He himself had been so disbelieving of the original press account that he had sought out and listened to the tape made during the former president's appearance. Sure enough, he told me, the applause had been enthusiastic. He was dumbfounded. Is this what the students really felt at Michigan, the University of Michigan, of all places, the founding campus of the Students for a Democratic Society? What did it mean? Was I as surprised as he was? I told him I would not have expected the students to have made public their private feelings, but was not all surprised by the direction and intensity of those feelings. That most students, in my experience, have come to despise affirmative action because of the double standards it imposed and which victimized them. Furthermore, that most of the faculty I knew were equally scornful because of the duplicities these programs have come to involve and that, to my certain knowledge, many in the administration at the University of Michigan hoped in private that the court would hold for Bakke and thus rescue them from their own cant. And that, I said, was the story he ought to write. He ought to reflect upon his own surprise and recognize that the press had made almost no effort to discover whether racial preference programs, after nearly a decade in place, had in fact fulfilled their promises and. And what faculty and students now thought about them. Why such indifference to reality? What was at work, I suggested, was a strong wish not to know, to sustain a state of self deception. At this, my interviewer became noticeably morose. He told me he felt very ambivalent about the problem. He had himself been in graduate school several years earlier, had been disturbed by the poor quality of minority students then enrolled. On the other hand, he could see no alternative except to admit many such students in the hope that some of them would make it so. He could not bring himself to write that story. Perhaps someone else could. Perhaps I could. This is from an article called Living with Quotas. It's by Joseph Adelson, who is a professor at the University of Michigan, was published in commentary magazine in 1978. So, yeah, Abe, when people call us rhinos because we're not entering the fight, right. Listen to the, listen to the stark language of that piece. The one difference is that, of course, the faculty and the administration of the University of Michigan that Adelson was referring to in 1978 is no longer the same faculty or administration that was present then. These people who had been at this school as the revolution in consciousness of the 60s took place, this was the old guard. They have been replaced by a new guard. That new guard is now an old guard that has been spending, you know, two generations promoting exactly the ideas that the students in that classroom listening to. Gerald Ford had applauded. Right. Had applauded against, had said numerical quotas are evil. Right. And it took till 20, 23, 45 years after the publication of this article and the work of people like Ed Bloom who have been laboring in these vineyards, beginning again with the University of Michigan, the Gretar v. BOLLINGER Case in 2003, who have been laboring in these vineyards for a generation. And yeah, for these guys to come in and say, you're all a bunch of losers who don't know how to fight, you know what? Come back to me when you show me that you know how to fight. Well, they don't know how to fight.
- [65:24]
Unknown Speaker
Their definition of victory is very different from ours. I think that's what the heart of it is. They want to see some of these institutions fail, burn them to the ground, and they don't care if anything is replacing them. Whereas I think a lot of us think actually these institutions are valuable for their own sake. We know that they can be reformed and we should try to do that. It sometimes does require a stick, not a carrot, in the form of lawsuits and, you know, public exposure and all that. But that's actually one of the things where I think that's why their swagger and self congratulation about noticing something that the rest of us have been doing for decades. That's where it comes from.
- [65:58]
Christine Rosen
But can I say something about that, too? Because I'm actually, I'm perfectly fine letting these institutions fail. And but it's also people in our orbit who are working on building new institutions to replace them. It's, you know, Barry Weiss, who they like to call a squish or a liberal, or whatever, you know, working at the, you know, the University of Austin crowd and so on, you know, and you know, I don't know whoever else, like in Florida, people have been working on education stuff that.
- [66:37]
Unknown Speaker
Well, there's as much an impulse to intellectual conformity among the MAGA crowd as there is among the far left crowd. That's the horseshoe thing, is that plenty of them would be happy to impose intellectual litmus tests for the people in the same way that the left has done, unfortunately.
- [66:55]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I want to quickly make a recommendation and it's very specific to New York and it's very specific to this weekend. So I went to see last night the glorious cultural institution. It remains a glorious cultural institution. There's almost no cultural institutions. I would say that about the program called Encores at New York City center, which. Which stages two week revivals of great American musicals and has been doing so for now more than 30 years. Its most famous revival being Chicago, which is still playing on Broadway. Recently revived into the woods, which is now on tour across America in this really astonishing production, the Stephen Sondheim what happens after the fairy tales Come True show. Anyway, what I saw last night was Wonderful Town. Wonderful Town is a musical from 1953 about Greenwich Village in 1935 and is the story of two sisters who come to New York from Ohio. One wants to be a writer, one wants to be an actress. They move to Greenwich Village and they get crosswise of bohemians and what it's like to live in New York and have a disgusting apartment and, you know, living amongst. Anyway, it's a very shaggy show and this is not the best production of it, but it's one of the most exuberant American musicals. And with a score by lyrics by Comden and Green, who wrote Singing in the Rain and On the Town and various other things. And the music is by Leonard Bernstein, with whom they collaborated on the Town. The story of the writing of the show is that it was in a lot of trouble and Condon and Green brought in Bernstein to help them. Late. Somebody else was going to be the composer, so he didn't have much time to write the score. And it's. I mean, west side Story is a better score than this. It's one of the great American scores because Bernstein's pretentiousness was held at bay. And it's. Instead, it's silly, funny. The music is funny. I don't know if you, you know, it's very odd to say that music can be funny, but there isn't a bad song in the show, there isn't a bad dance in the show. And this sort of evocation of this this sort of golden age of New York is just absolutely glorious. So if you're in New York, there are, I think, four performances this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, where there are still tickets available. Go to just look up Wonderful Town Encores. And you can go and see it, by the way. And if you can't, go to Spotify or Apple Music or go to YouTube and listen to the cast album that was recorded 20 years ago by Donna Murphy and Jennifer Westfeldt of Wonderful Town when they did a revival of it before. It is just pure oxygen, like just a joyous, delightful, exuberant, peppy. It'll just make you feel happy. And that's a nice thing to feel. So I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. We'll be back on Monday. So for Christine, Abe and Seth, I'm John Podwortz. Keep the camel burning.