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- [00:04]
A
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, expect
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the worst, hope for the best.
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Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, March 24, 2026. I am Jon Pot Horticz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, Jon Washington. Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
And back in the midst of house construction, which has kept her off the show for a week and may return tomorrow. But she is back with us at long last, our Social Commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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D
Hi, John. Very glad to be back.
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A
People have been writing us saying, where are you? Where are you? Where are you? So here you are back and we are going to structure the show a little differently today. This is the am I Taking Crazy Pills? Edition of the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. A phrase that I've become associated with because I use it, have been using it since we really got going here, but I cannot claim authorship of it. Comes from the movie Zoolander. It is something that Will Ferrell, playing the villain Mugatu, says, among other things, he is very proud of the fact that he is the inventor of the piano key necktie. And when he doesn't like how things are going, he says, am I taking crazy pills? And so I adopted this and people, but I cannot claim authorship of it. But I do think it's a really good phrase to talk about the kind of frustration that we experience when we see things happening in the world and watch the way people react to them and think either they're insane or I'm insane. And I don't really think I'm insane. So maybe what's happening is I'm taking crazy pills which are distorting my perception, and that I'm actually seeing things that aren't happening. So I'm going to throw out some topics and ask you whether I'm taking crazy pills or please try to explain what's happening and why I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Okay. The first comes from the stories over the weekend, and they're real. And I've heard from people who are experiencing this that at various airports, the TSA lines have been hours and hours long because of the Department of Homeland Security shutdown and the failure to fund the Transportation Safety Administration, which means that people aren't getting paid, which means that people are either quitting their jobs or they're just not coming in anymore. And Trump then announced over the weekend that he was going to deploy ice agents to airports. Not to work on the homeland, not to work on the TSA lines or do anything related to that, but to do ancillary work that TSA does, like guarding doors and things like that, to open up, to make sure that people can be on the lines, to make them work faster. And the evidence yesterday was that it was working in several airports where the lines had been cut by 2/3 or the wait time had been cut by 2/3. And yet I watched the news last night and this morning and the coverage that I saw said basically that despite the fact that things were better and that the ICE agents were not masked, though they are wearing their uniforms, that the presence of ice agents at many of these airports was making travelers uncomfortable. So there are lines at airports. The Trump administration comes up with a fix, makes things a little better. The problem is that a law enforcement agency of the United States that is controversial with some people, not because of who they are, but because of the jobs that they've been assigned by this administration, they themselves are just public servants, that they're making people uncomfortable. Am I taking crazy pills?
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E
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- [04:56]
A
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D
Okay, I'm going to. I think it's important to have a little bit of clarity, broader context here for this challenge, because Trump Deploying ICE agents to airports is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The bigger issue here is that we need to get funding for so that Homeland Security folks and TSA folks can get paychecks. We should. Congress ultimately needs to pass some form of legislation that keeps critical workers, which I think TSA should be qualified as paid, even in emergencies, even during shutdowns. The. The bigger issue here is that Trump is telling Republicans in Congress not to have any deal, not to make any negotiations to fund dhs, because he wants his save act about voting. About voting and voter ID to pass with it. So that's the broader context. I think people are overreacting. And absolutely, the news coverage you described, John, is ridiculous. Talking about how people feel about ICE agents at a time when people have been going to airports, Atlanta in particular, and waiting six hours and still missing their flights. It's ridiculous. It shows a total breakdown in a critical form of infrastructure for transportation in this country. But I don't have as much sympathy for Trump thinking he solved a problem. This is a temporary bandaid on a really big wound, and he needs to work with Congress, which is trying to come up with a deal to fund DHS and get that problem solved.
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A
This is a fair point.
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D
Go ahead.
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A
Yeah, go ahead.
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B
Now put ICE agents on the planes.
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A
Break up the fight.
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D
Doubling down.
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A
Okay, breaking up the fights. That's good. Maybe we. Okay, so here's.
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C
So it does look like we're on the precipice of a deal to get TSA funded. Well, the White House and the President were. Were hostile over the weekend with the Senate stayed in session. They were hostile over the weekend to the idea of the deal brought to them by Thune. It now appears that the President is open to a deal that funds all of TSA with the exception. Sorry, all of dhs, with the exception of these small parts of ice. And then doing the rest of the ICE funding through a reconciliation bill that would be considered with this safe act that the President is putting huge emphasis on. What struck me is that because of the nature of the media, you would really have no idea who's at fault for this shutdown in the first place. In the meantime. Well, TSA has been shut down. Democrats have actually gotten quite a bit of what they wanted. Kirsty Noem is gone. She's no longer the Secretary of dhs. ICE is out of Minnesota. And Republicans have made concessions about the way. And the White House have made concessions about the way ICE operates. Those have been more minor, but they've conceded to body cameras. And I think Tom Homan said they're actually for that. The other concessions they've not budged on. And I don't think they will with regard to masking when it's necessary and judicial warrants. But because of the tilt of the media and I think because of Republican messaging and the focus on the SAFE act, you really would have no idea who's at fault for the lines in these airports.
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A
Well, let's just lay that out because I'm not sure you're presuming that people know what you're referring to, which is that the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security's funding stream is a deliberate and direct Democratic policy choice by Democrats in the Senate who said that what they want is major restructuring in the funding of ice and they therefore would not agree to passage of this bill or getting to cloture on the passage of the bill to fund dhs. And that happened, what, three weeks ago or four weeks ago or something like that. And so there's very little political pressure on them that the media, media, proper media coverage would create, which is to say, who's responsible for the closure? It's the Democrats. Instead, we have Trump, unfortunately, playing into like giving them a hand over the weekend by saying, no, don't reopen it so we can get the SAFE act. When that is just like there was a gimme political issue here for Republicans in saying the Democrats are the reason that you're online for five hours at the airports here. They're there, the sole reason we were ready to pass this bill a month ago and they want DHS closed.
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C
But they could be broadcasting ads all over the country with footage of these lines and explaining to people why. But I think the White House's desire to focus on the SAFE act has somewhat undercut that.
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D
I mean, imagine the ad Democrats ruined spring break because it has for lots of people. These are all the airports are crowded because it's spring break for a lot
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A
of colleges and schools. Yeah, but because Stephen Miller is a bald idiot, they are playing this game. And I say that. I'm going to say it again. He is a bald idiot. His political ideas are stupid. The fact that the policies in the SAFE act, several of them, including voter ID and stuff like that, have 80% support, does not mean that when you say I want the SAFE act, that the people who support voter ID by 80% no even know what the hell you're talking about. They don't say voter ID is the SAFE Act. First of all, it isn't and they loaded some other stuff onto it.
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D
There's a lot of federalization of state elective practices in the SAFE act, which is conservative. I'm not.
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A
I'm very much opposed to as well. But I mean, like, so say what you want is voter id. Don't say, I need the SAFE act so I can get these seven things snuck in behind. Because the American people don't know what the SAFE act is. You're not gonna teach them what the SAFE act is. And you've taken a winning political issue and turned it into something that can now be used as a cudgel against you if you're Trump. Because the media are playing along with the Democrats, which is why I'm taking crazy pills from the Democrats and from the Republicans. So I am taking crazy pills. Okay, that's number one. Number two, I wanna talk about General Stanley McChrystal, one of the great battlefield generals of our time, who was cashiered in 2011 during an event that nobody even remembers anymore. See, if you remember this, remember that a volcano shut Europe down for a week. Like, this is 15 years ago. Like, all of Europe. Nobody could breathe. You couldn't fly a plane. The entire world's, like, transport system was shut down because of the ash from the S4 Yabogokal Schmuckel volcano in Norway or Sweden or wherever the hell it was.
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D
I think it was Iceland. Was it Iceland?
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A
Iceland. Okay, whatever. It's whatever. Whatever cold place up by the North Sea had a volcano erupt. And Stanley McChrystal got trapped in Germany in a bar with the now late reporter Michael Hastings, and he started ragging on Obama and various other things. And Hastings, a dishonorable person, then reported out what he had said about Obama behind his back. And Obama pretty much had no choice but to fire McChrystal, who was the best general of his generation, for the insubordinate remarks that he made that he had made in private. Sort of terrible moment. Anyway, so he's a great battlefield general, but as an intellectual and a historian and a person.
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C
About Biden, too.
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A
Oh, Biden too? Yeah. I can't even remember what he said, but he was. But, yeah, like, Biden was an idiot or something. So. But so he's a Jetta.
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D
Cathy, that evening.
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A
Yes, yes, he did. Shouldn't have. Anyway, so Michael Hastings, you know, basically he thought he was, like, you know, in private with various people because they were, like, stuck, unable to travel back to where they were going. And Hastings was embedded. And nobody said, this is off the record. So he was like, okay, I. I'll tell Rolling Stone, whatever, and publish it. Rolling Stone would publish it whether it was true or not, since Rolling Stone then three years later, made up the entire University of Virginia sex scandal. But I just wanted to point that out because the person who was responsible for that just got a big job at the New York Times. I thought you weren't supposed to get big jobs at large big media institutions the way Noah Schachman just did after being involved in one of the worst scandals, journalistic scandals of the last 15 years. But that's another I'm taking crazy pills thing that I will put to one side. Stanley McChrystal, in an interview with David French, explained why he thinks everything is going badly in Iran. And here is what he said. And this is where I'm taking crazy pills. We have a tendency in America to view things in very short periods. We tend to come in and say, we are going to fight the war to end all wars, at least in our minds. I don't know. I don't think we've said that since. Since 1917. But okay, that's 108 years ago. But okay, that was the war to end all wars, was World War I, according to Woodrow Wilson, whom we know not to trust. But okay, let Stanley Kristol have his rhetoric here. But for the Iraqi about my age, meaning the Iranian, because he got himself confused. I'm 71 now. For him, it really starts in 1953, when the US and British intelligence services overthrew the constitutionally elected prime minister and put back in power the peacock regime of the Shah. They oppress the people tremendously, particularly through savak, the secret police. So when the Iranian revolution erupts in 1978, we may have been surprised, but the Iranian people were not surprised when they suddenly say, death to America. Most Americans are saying, why are you angry at us? So we are having trouble securing victory in Iran because 80, 72 years ago, there was a coup in Iran led, in fact, not by America and Britain, but by the person who was the Ayatollah Khomeini's mentor, as Eli Lake details in a brilliant breaking history podcast about the history of Iran that you can go find. And the revolution in 1979 comes about not because they were mourning the ouster of Mosadegh, who was a secular leftist in 1953, but because they wanted to restore some kind of Islamic caliphate. This was a reactionary revolution to place religious authorities in power in Iran. That was 47 years ago. So The Iranians now, according to him, are defiant toward us and say death to America because we were involved, according to the mythos here in the 1953 coup against Mossadegh. What that has to do with why the Iranians have not yet surrendered is absolutely incomprehensible. As a matter of logic, history, strategy. They're not giving up because if they give up, they're all dead. That's why they're not giving up. And it's not they don't shout death to America in 2026 because Mossadegh was ousted in 1953. They shout death to America because we're an infidel. And they are the, you know, they are the true believers and we are bringing evil to the world in the form of our, you know, terrible morals and our horrible non Islamic values. So Stanley McChrystal gets this platform from David French to mouth off in this way. Am I taking crazy pills? I'm glad to get another chance to talk to you about aura Frames. I love our frames. I'm looking at one right now, looking at pictures of my kids. They rotate every 30 seconds, little film clips sometimes. I got photos on this frame from 25 years ago and from 25 minutes ago pretty much. And I'm not the only enthusiast for aura frames. It is featured in 495 gift guides during 2024, selected three times as one of Oprah's favorite things. Named the number one digital picture frame by Wirecutter, the Strategist, Wired and PC Mag. And it is so easy to set up. It takes about two minutes. You basically send your photos through an app right into the frame. You can organize them, you can have them do split screens. You can have them play videos up to 30 seconds. And the photos look like real prints when they, when they freeze in place. They look like you are looking at a photograph, not like you're looking at a digital picture through a frame. So it is just a wonderful product. I'm thrilled by it. Named number one by wire cutter, Aura Frames takes the guesswork out of gifting shop now@auraframes.com Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.
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B
Every enemy of this war will be elevated and celebrated by the mainstream media in one way or another. Whether that, whether you are a conspiracy theorist, whether you get history wrong, whether you're right or left. You are now you are on their team because that's the game. They're coming at Trump and this war from every angle. And obviously McChrystal just shouldn't talk. He should write and read. And unfortunately, he can't serve, but he gets into trouble when he speaks.
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A
Okay, so that's the McChrystal story. Now I'm going to go back in time.
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C
I went to look up. Sorry, I was looking down because I was dying to know what the McChrystal folks. It was McChrystal and his aides. They called Joe Biden Vice President Bite me, instead of Joe Vice President Biden. And then all the articles that came up when I was looking for it were McChrystal. It took me five minutes because it was McChrystal endorses Biden after disparaging remarks. So that's where we are.
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A
There we go. Okay. Well, yeah, the sophistication of his slapdown of Biden equals his preposterous adoption of the oh, America was responsible for every bad thing that happened. That was the line when I was in college, when I was in college in the late 70s, early 80s, the idea that the Mosa de ouster and the coup in Guatemala against Jacob Arbenz, which happened in 1954 and what happened in Lebanon in 1958 and what happened in the Dominican Republic in 1965, all of these things explained why the world hated the United States because we were interfering in their elections and doing this and doing that. This was axiomatic to the sort of world of international relations, foreign policy, discussion. And if you said America really needs to defend its interests, people would say, Arbenz Mosadae.
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B
You know this one Barack Obama apologized for, for Mossadegh. Remember that? Yeah, yeah. The. The. When he was trying to. When he's offering Iran the open hand.
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A
Right.
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B
The regime. The regime asked him for an apology and he gave one somehow, some videos. He slipped something in.
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A
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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D
Well, I think. Can I just add that I think especially among a certain kind of journalist, opinion journalists in particular, there's this. There's this wonderful tendency to collapse strategy and tactics. So you can have a sort of sense of the grander strategy that, for example, we used with containment of communism in the 20th century. It worked. Now, were some of the tactics that the United States employed occasionally questionable? You could make some arguments about that. Did that make the overall strategy wrong, immoral, ineffective? No, it did not. And so I feel like opinion journalists often very much want to, particularly when they have a particular audience, a partisan audience to satisfy, they collapse that distinction without understanding that it's very important to keep it because you can have contradictory ideas that you hold in your mind at the Same time. And I think that's the struggle with this current conflict with Iran. We all agree on this podcast, getting rid of the Ayatollah, getting rid of this regime, that is an absolutely good thing. Some of the tactics, I would certainly argue some of the tactics and some of the messaging that the Trump administration has used has been confusing. It's created a fog. The fog of war is usually about the battlefield. We have a fog of messaging here at home that has led to some really confusion where, to Abe's point, that's where the conspiracy theorists rush in. That's where the anti Semites find purchase. So I have problems with some of the tactics, but the overall strategy of toppling this oppressive regime, that's good. So that's where I think that that's where McChrystal finds a little cozy, warm spot with David French in some of those discussions. He should know the difference between strategy and tactics.
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A
What he says is, we went into Iraq, we went into Afghanistan, now look where we are now, and now we're going into Iran, as though these things are all connected. The fate of Iraq is very different from the fate of Afghanistan. Like, Afghanistan is now back in the hands of the Taliban, and Iraq has been removed from the international chessboard as a negative player. Whatever you think of whether or not it was worth the cost, you know, these are two wildly different results. And the Iranian situation is so wildly. Just because they happen to have happened in the same sort of like 2,000 square mile or 3,000 square mile area or whatever, it is relatively contiguous to each other. These are three wildly separate conflicts with different reasons for having happened and why we did them and how we're fighting them and how. How we fought them. And right now, you know, the thing is that McChrystal was a battlefield commander with hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground in Afghanistan, In Iraq, we have not put a foot on soil. I think that's probably going to happen this weekend, but we have not put a foot on Iranian soil. And the fight here is a different fight.
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D
I'm sure we have some special options.
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A
You know what I mean?
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C
His memoir was about fighting a vicious insurgency.
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A
Right.
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C
It's an excellent book.
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A
Okay, Right. I'm just saying he knows this is
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C
how different this is than the circumstances he faced.
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A
Right. And maybe we should worry that, you know, there will be an insurgency at the end of this conflict, even if we say that we won it. But that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about here how the Iranians have A justifiable claim for anger against us that is preventing them or holding them fast and tight to their ideological strength. And that is a bizarre perspective. Like what they're doing here is hanging on to power by dear life. And that's why they're threatening the Strait of Hormuz, because that's their only play. They have no military play against the US Or Israel.
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B
Now.
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A
All they're doing with Israel is some missiles, are eluding Israeli defenses and are causing civilian casualties in a country that is 90% supportive of this military conflict. So to the answer here, am I taking crazy pills? To think that McChrystal's analysis here is bizarrely off point and that Abe's point, which is that as long as he's coming in with a negative perspective, he's going to get a wonderful hearing. I do not think that either he and I are taking crazy pills. Okay, now I want to go into a weird area because this is just like when you can't trust when people tell you stories. And this is Mike Mullen, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Miller center is doing an oral history of the Obama presidency. And Mike Mullen was interviewed and someone went yesterday and looked extensively at his interview. And in the interview, he just discusses the evening of the raid to kill bin Laden. And he talks about how as they were sitting in the sit room, he looked over and there was Joe Biden who was counting his rosary. Man of faith, serious Catholic daily Mass communicant, counting his rosary. And Mullen's like, psst, I got a rosary too. Took out his rosary and they're basically counting their rosary together. And then according to Mullen, while they're standing in a corner or something like that, Obama comes over to them and he takes out of his pocket a crucifix and he's holding a crucifix and Mullen is holding rosary and Biden is holding a rosary. Why would Barack Obama be holding a crucifix? Is he a Catholic?
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D
Well, by it, was it a crucifix or a cross? I mean, Catholic said crucifix, he said crucifix. Maybe it was given to him. I don't know. It's a strange detail.
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A
Okay, I just thought it's a strange detail.
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D
Fear of vampires.
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A
Maybe Mullen misspoke and it was a cross and not a crucifix and all that. And so maybe I am not taking. Maybe I'm not taking crazy pills. There's an explanation for it. I'm unaware of any. I'M unaware of any display after Biden, after Obama became president and was no longer sitting in the pews of Jeremiah Wright's anti Semitic, anti white disgusting pews on the south side of Chicago that he showed any interest of any religious symbolism or religious activity whatsoever once he had established his bona fides in that charnel house of a church. But nonetheless. Okay, so I just thought it was a peculiar detail.
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D
I won't gift you with my vast and useless knowledge of Christian accessories and Christian jewelry when. Because. Because there is, there's a whole, there's a whole subculture of wearing, you know, very various aspects of one's religious identity if you're an evangelical Christian in particular. So.
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A
Okay, well, that's why. Okay.
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B
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- [30:32]
F
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- [31:02]
A
I went to the movies now. Next thing, I went to the movies on Saturday night and I saw a trailer for the lavishly produced new movie called Michael, about the life of Michael Jackson, which stars his nephew, I believe, Tito Jackson's son.
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C
You're not taking crazy pills.
- [31:22]
A
Okay. Thank you. You're jumping in with. Before. Before the buzzer is. Before the buzzer is sounding.
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C
I was just gonna ask. You got so many. Am I taking crazy pills? Like, do you spend all day feeling crazy?
- [31:37]
A
So I'm in the theater and it's like it says from the producer of Bohemian Rhapsody. And then there's like, Colman Domingo is playing his father who is like, I tell you, I tell you what you should think, Michael. And then Michael says to Quincy Jones, I need to do my own music. And then he's like writing lyrics and he's walking outside, like trying to think about what's going on. And then, you know, he. You see a moonwalking and you see the explosion on the Pepsi commercial. And it's like, Michael, you know, and I just so. And I've been hearing about this movie for a couple of years, but clearly it is a lionization and hagiography of Michael Jackson, who, I want to remind you, paid out, at a minimum, $60 billion during his lifetime to the families of young boys who credibly claimed that their sons were molested and. And who openly admitted to really enjoying having small children sleep in his bed. And whose house, Neverland. His estate. Neverland was, as my friend Heather Richardson once put it, was a gigantic bait grooming operation with a zoo.
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C
It was like a lair.
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A
Yeah. To lure small children into wanting to spend time at Neverland. Now that. And we're about to. A movie is about to open, and the expectation is it will make hundreds of millions of dollars. Am I taking crazy pills that this is the end of civilization as we know it?
- [33:20]
B
He's always beaten in the public perception. He's sort of beat the rap. Anyone else, you wouldn't hear his songs anymore. He's got a Broadway. There's a Broadway musical about him wherever you go. There's Michael Jackson songs blaring. There's retrospectives. There's this. I mean, like, it's partially to do with the fact that he was this extraordinarily talented phenomenon that, you know, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the Beatles or something. You know, just in terms of cultural force. And it's partially to do with the murkiness, I think, of the cases themselves. Not that I'm confused about what I think happened, but the fact that he settled and the fact that.
- [34:21]
A
And he was, in fact, right, and he was acquitted. No, he settled before there was a final judge.
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D
Part of the murky. I think Abe's absolutely right that. The ambiguity and murkiness around the cases, because in many of these, as the stories were reported out and unraveling during some of these cases, it was clear that in many of these instances, horrific. The parents were actually taking the kids to Neverland and getting some sort of financial compensation for leaving the children there in his care. And there's also, I think, the fact that he was this child celebrity at a time where child celebrity was rare. He himself probably suffered significant abuse of some sort, either emotional, physical, or both in his family. The father was kind of a terrible human being. And so there was some residual sympathy for him and some sort of attempt to understand why he might have ended up in that way. And he had a ton of celebrity support as well, that protected him for a very long time.
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C
Yeah, sorry. In that sense, it's, it's a precursor to some of what we saw in the MeToo movement where a lot of the behavior was covered up because of celebrity support for many of these people, like Harvey Weinstein. But I think there are two other factors with Jackson. One is racial and the other is his physicality. I don't quite know what the right term is, but he's, you know, there's a freak show aspect to him that makes people want to stare and watch. Plus his extraordinary art and just look at him and. Like a car accident on, on the side of the road. And I think people are loath to admit it, but when you're describing this, John, and I wasn't aware of the movie, I thought, geez, I'd kind of like to watch that. Just as I'd. Just as I've watched the accounts on, you know, the documentaries about his horrific treatment. Because there is something both fascinating about his art and also horrifying about the private behavior that he exhibited all these years. And he's an extreme of what we see in so many incredible artists, novelists, you know, geniuses, where the output is so brilliant and the private lives are so unbelievably tortured.
- [36:52]
A
Right, okay. But I just wanna raise these two things. One, yesterday Bill Cosby was found liable in a civil suit in which he may have to pay $60 million. Now remember, he was convicted of rape, sent to jail, and I think justifiably that conviction was overturned on the grounds that the prosecutor who prosecuted him had violated a deal that he had made with one of the victims that involved a gigantic financial settlement and a non disclosure agreement that was on her part that was broken and that the, the prosecutor in that jurisdiction had agreed to, but it was a different prosecutor. So the new one came in, decided to make a case of it went. After Cosby got his conviction, that was vacated. He was let out of prison. But this is a civil suit against Cosby. Meanwhile, Cosby's show, Cosby was the biggest star in the history of television. His show has been disappeared. It is gone. You cannot Find was the single biggest sitcom hit in television history. And it is invisible and has been like memory hold number two, Woody Allen. Woody Allen may be the most celebrated American filmmaker of the last 50 years. You can barely find a work by Woody Allen that is available on streaming or that you can get through like the Apple Store or so he won three Oscars. What's the accusation against him? It is a Not very credible accusation that he had molested his two year old daughter. Something that the babysitter who was involved in the case did not believe. Something what he did that was horrifying to people was that he had an affair with his paramour's adopted daughter who was 35 years his junior. But he has been married to that same woman 4:35 for like 32 years and they have two children together and he has never been. And there were legal investigations into him, civil nothing. He was not formally accused of anything. But because his biological son and because these two kids still claim son, Ronan, his mother, you know, her mother, his ex girlfriend, Mia Farrow and Dylan Farrow claim that he was abused, though she was 2 years old, so she could not have remembered the abuse. He's gone, he's dead. He's all but basically been erased from history. But Michael Jackson, who paid these things out, who went publicly on television and said there's nothing more beautiful than sleeping with children. I mean, imagine that today. Imagine that a celebrity goes on Barbara Walters and says I love sleeping with small children that I'm not related to. Imagine the world of social media, if somebody ever spoke those words, biggest star in the world or not, like that person is fried beyond belief in an hour and a half and starts making huge apologies and says he's going into rehab and, and says he'll never sleep with a small child again and says that his father abused him, whatever he'd have to do to try to get himself out of the box that he was in. But it was, as we say, a different time and he's dead and he died at 50 of this insane overdose that was the result of the fact that he took propofol to sleep and the doctor went out for a smoke and wasn't monitoring the propofol intake and gave him an overdose.
- [40:46]
D
Can I, can I. That. That child, the childlike demeanor I think is something to Eliana's earlier point about his physicality. What. Which was kind of amazing to watch in performance, but in, in when he expressed himself to the media as a private person, just as a normal person, it really was the pitch of his voice, very effeminate features, all the plastic surgery, the lightening of the skin and very childlike. And the media and the celebrity industrial complex bought into that. And that's I think, part of what that protective bubble was for him and allowed him to say that out loud. Like I like sleeping with children. They're like, oh, he's like a child himself. Oh, isn't that Sweet. You're right. That it wouldn't. That wouldn't pass muster today. But I'll be very curious to see how this film is received because I would. I would suspect that a lot of people aren't going to want to go see this celebrated either, because we know too much now.
- [41:39]
A
Although. Okay, but Eliana.
- [41:43]
D
Eliana's right about that.
- [41:44]
A
Right. So you have two possible audiences. You have the car wreck audience and you have the. I love him anyway. What can I do?
- [41:50]
B
Can I just.
- [41:51]
A
He was so amazing.
- [41:52]
B
Yeah, just that. So it doesn't get lost in the kaleidoscope of Michael Jackson's freakishness. He was also an anti Semite.
- [42:03]
A
He was. Oh, yeah.
- [42:05]
B
In his lyrics. Recorded phone conversations. Yeah. See, I mean, there was so much craziness going on that, you know.
- [42:14]
A
And here I thought I knew everything. Yeah, there was to know. So the hell with him.
- [42:21]
B
There you go.
- [42:22]
D
But somebody has to make a beat it joke or I'm just going.
- [42:26]
A
I mean, I can't pass right over it. I mean, it's hard to explain to people who are.
- [42:34]
B
Like.
- [42:35]
A
When I was trying to explain to my kids who he was in the 1980s, that I was sort of like, take Taylor Swift and then multiply her impact and presence in popular culture by 25 and you get a sense of. He recorded an album that sold four times the number of albums that any album that had ever been recorded before. It was four times. Thriller sold like 50 million copies. And the next one, which was Peter Frampton Comes Alive, had sold 12. Like, he was a figure of enormous celebrity.
- [43:16]
D
I have to add that MTV and the rise of videos happened just at the moment where he was also becoming a celebrity. And a bunch of us, we didn't have MTV in my household. I connived to go spend the night at my friend's house when the Thriller video was going to be released. I think came out like after midnight. And we all stayed up just to watch the Thriller video. I mean, it was just. And he. And he appealed to a mass audience. He wasn't. You know, it was pop, but it was. And the race thing actually, which I think Eliana is correct to point out in terms of how he was protected in the industry, didn't matter. In terms of. His popularity was not even a factor until he did the. What was the Black and white? What was that song Ebony and Ivory? I don't know. He played it up later. But he was just mass. Mass appeal. But MTV had a huge part in his rise. Also.
- [44:03]
C
The race thing was a Part of the spectacle and freakishness because he lightened his skin and was often surrounded by these family members who were black. And it was.
- [44:16]
A
He had family members who were black, but the boys were all white. And it not all because finally Neverland kids were black. But, but the. But, but the kid who was the center of the first major controversy, whose name I won't use, though it is public, was white. Macaulay Culkin, who was one of his bedmates, obviously white and seems to have had a rough go of it in many ways in the course of his life. Though probably not solely because of Michael Jackson, though he was very good on the show Fallout this season. I just want to point out Macaulay Culkin made an appearance as a post apocalyptic Caesar on Fallout was very good. But I think that the question, the larger cultural question is, oh, and had he survived, had he lived, had he not died of this propofol overdose and me too had happened, I doubt that he would have survived that because like there's Kevin Spacey also disappeared, right, for the result of an accusation that he acknowledged that he had molested the 14 year old actor Adam Rapp, Anthony Rapp, excuse me. Adam Rapp is his playwright brother in 1986. And he said he had done it, he acknowledged that he had done it, that he was drunk and all this. But basically he's done, he's gone, he's been disappeared. Kevin Spacey and there's Woody Allen and there's Harvey Weinstein and all of that. And I just don't think he would have survived the sort of revelation of the world in which there were cover ups of sexual abuses in Hollywood had he been there in 2017 to have the ocean wave pour over him. But if the movie is a huge success, I feel like I will be taking crazy pills because we're like talking about Jeffrey Epstein and everything that's evil and horrible about Jeffrey Epstein. And then a movie is going to come up with Michael Jackson that makes $100 million the first weekend. Like what? How does that happen? How are we holding those two opposing thoughts in our cultural, national, cultural heads? Okay, here. Moving on to the next Crazy Pill. This is Eliana's Crazy Pill, which goes as follows. I'm reading from the Harvard Crimson. More than two years after her resignation, former Harvard president Claudine Gay will return to teaching, beginning with a course that asks students to scrutinize the very institution that shaped and ultimately unraveled her presidency. Gay is scheduled to teach three courses during the 2026-2027 academic year. Her fall course is called what Is a University? Purpose and Politics in Higher Education? Selective tutorial. Capped at 16 students, it will trace the evolution of American higher education before turning to present day disputes over curriculum, admissions, research, preservation and governance. A central goal of the course is to encourage Harvard students to engage in critical thinking about their own institution. Am I taking crazy pills? Claudine Gay is teaching a course on academic governance and the controversy surrounding higher education.
- [47:57]
C
She's going to teach a course. Yeah. So she's going to teach a course on how she was unjustifiably shoved out of her job for her appalling handling of the. Of Harvard's anti Semitism after October 7, for her handling of October 7 and her testimony before Congress and for her plagiarism, which she maintains is just, you know, standard way that academics conduct research. You know, typically when you are mired in a controversy and you are let go but allowed to retain your $900,000 salary, which is her situation, you try to keep your head down and just steer clear of further controversy and. But her last on record comment was saying that her successor, the new Harvard president, Alan Garber, is too conciliatory to the Trump administration, you know, that he's pathetic. So she's not going away quietly, as she indicated by her Harvard op ed and by her New York Times op ed after she resigned. And what struck me about this is, you know, one of the main problems in higher education is that the lunatics are running the asylum and that the premise, we have all these kids in there who don't get a high school education who go into college believing that they know everything even though they've been taught nothing in high school, and then go and instruct the schools on what they need to be, you know, divest from Israel and divest from fossil, fossil fuels and are telling the schools what they need to be doing better and differently. So if you didn't think the lunatics were running the asylum, she's now formalized this into a class. The article indicates she'll be soliciting ideas from the students on how Harvard should be run differently. And the whole idea of what this class is teaching undergraduate students is so bleep backwards it's unbelievable.
- [50:33]
D
Those students should probably have some sort of copyright on their ideas because she's more than likely to steal them, repurpose them, and put her name on it. I mean, I think it's also an example of. Unfortunately, as a humanities person myself, I hate to say this, but it's an example of the rot at the core of a lot of humanities programs. Now she really, what she should have done is gone back and done some real scholarship to disprove her critics because she actually wasn't a well regarded scholar in her field. But she's not doing that. She is. You're exactly right, Eliana. It sounds like she's doubling down on the political. The inside backbencher at Harvard who's going to tell Harvard everything it's doing wrong. She is the perfect example of everything Harvard has been doing wrong. And the fact that they kept her in house rather than sending her off to another Ivy League, which would have been happy to snap her up and give her the huge salary and all the perks, the fact that they let her stay is I think long term going to be seen as quite a mistake. If she continues to publicly attack the institution and its leadership, which is trying, however mildly to reform. Reform a little bit under pressure from
- [51:36]
B
the administration, I think she's gonna build a career as a martyr and I think she'll have a lot of assistance in that. You know, she'll become a. This, a symbol of everything that was wrong with the Trump years or something.
- [51:58]
A
Okay, I wanna move on to the final. Am I taking crazy pills? So, yes, I am taking crazy pills that Claudine Gay is going to teach at Harvard not only having had to resign over her. I mean, she blissfully had to resign over the revelations in the Washington Free Beacon and elsewhere about her plagiarism. But that should have been enough basically to cashier her from Harvard. Like you were not. Plagiarism is an.
- [52:25]
D
It does for undergraduates. If an undergraduate did what she did, they would be out.
- [52:29]
A
Yeah. Anyway. All right, so the final crazy pill is related to Tucker Carlson. It's not Tucker Carlson because I'm not taking crazy pills. Say that Tucker Carlson.
- [52:43]
D
That would be a gimme.
- [52:46]
A
It is the following. Tucker yesterday went on and offered peons of praise to Islamic society and Sharia law and said that there is not a Western city that isn't a city in the west that's thriving. There's not a single Western city that's thriving. And he said that Saudi Arabia has been using Sharia law. And that's great. There seems to be a false quote going around that he said that Sharia law has made Islamic societies more advanced than the West. Apparently that is not something that he said. But he made this kind of pee into Islamic culture and attacked the west and said that Islamic culture had good reason to hate the west because of colonialism and basically the Horseshoe. We're back at the Horseshoe. He sounds. What does he sound like? He sounds like Zoram Hamdani's father, Mahmoud or whatever. But here's the crazy pill thing. Ryan Williams, the head of the Claremont Institute, the once kind of ferociously highbrow offshoot of Harry Jaffa West Coast Strassianism, but which has become, you know, very, very MAGA in the last whatever years, basically said yesterday that this was enough. And Ryan Williams tweeted out the following. This is not the crazy pill thing. Said final straw. I guess Tucker has been saying stupid things and hosting low class ignoramuses for at least 18 months, but I challenge anyone to defend any of this sophomoric B. It is B. Listen to that. I did the exact opposite that I was supposed to do. I was supposed to say bull s. And I said, it's fine to agree to disagree on various policies, but at a certain point you got to move on. So this is a larger moment than one realizes, because the sort of connection, the Tucker to Vance to Claremont connection is real. But it raises this crazy pills question. 60 people have resigned from the Heritage foundation after Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage foundation, another Claremont Institute like institution, said that a vicious cabal was attacking Tucker Carlson. He was our friend and we would never turn our back on our friend and all of that. And Kevin Roberts is still there at the Heritage Foundation. He is still running the Heritage foundation, sitting on the iron throne. Am I taking crazy pills? First of all, I can't believe it took this long for Brian Williams to say what he said about Tucker. Because this kind of weird anti intellectual psychosis that, that Tucker has been engaging in deserved separation from by any serious intellectual force for, you know, whenever, you know what?
- [55:53]
C
Good. Good for him, good for them. And I think the average IQ inside the Claremont Institute is higher than, sorry, inside the Claremont Institute is higher than inside what's left of the Heritage Foundation. And I've long thought, look, the Claremont Institute, their founding creed is that the American founding represents, like the apotheosis of, or, you know, whatever the term is, like, of political philosophy, a major achievement in Western political philosophy and is the ultimate act of statesmanship. And so, you know, Tucker's argument that there's no Western society that's thriving, that the American founding isn't a major achievement, is at loggerheads with that. And so, you know, good for him for speaking up about it. I've also long thought, like, antisemitism in this country and around the world has been okay. Politics, like it is not unpopular. And I've thought that it's actually Tucker's embrace of Islam and these Islamic countries that's going to prove more problematic as he goes further and further down that path, because that is not popular in this country.
- [57:27]
D
Yeah, it was interesting because earlier when he was touring Moscow subways and oohing and ahhing over the chandeliers and grocery store, bountiful grocery stores, that even that wasn't enough. You know, there wasn't enough Cold war, post Cold war hangover for people to go, you know, that doesn't seem smart. I think that's a. It's an important point because it speaks to the fact that even the kind of the weird maga intellectual class which. Which has overlooked and in many cases embraced the antisemitism of the populist right, they're being. He's sort of forcing their hand and saying, do you believe this country's values matter at all? He's made his choice. It's very clear. I think some of them still retain some sensibility of the unique project, particularly the unique political philosophy and values of this country and our constitution. And all of this happening as we're about to celebrate the 250th anniversary is kind of epic as well. There were a few stories out there over the weekend about the ongoing conservative think tank roiling and battling the people who. Who left heritage, going to Mike Pence's new think tank. All of this, in some ways, long term will be healthy for the right and for the conservative intellectual movement. There is a kind of hygiene going on now that's important and hopefully will be sustained as people sort themselves out into these various categories. But the ones who follow Tucker, I think long term will find themselves in a very dark, dark hole.
- [58:53]
B
I think there's also. I mean, not to make it. I know it's not supposed to be about Tucker, but there's also a sense now, I think with this of, all right, he's just playing with us, you know, like, if he's. If he's. He's talking about how Sharia is so welcoming and, you know, open to diverse opinions. You know, it's like he's just trying to see how far he can go, what he can get away with, what kind of nonsense he could say. I think people who misguidedly thought he had some sort of serious point at somewhere along this trajectory of his are now like, oh, it's all a game. It's all nonsense. I see.
- [59:41]
A
I would also just like to conclude by saying that he said that no Western city is thriving. I got a western city that's thriving. You know what it's called? Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is one of the most thriving cities in the world. Its stock exchange is going through the roof. It is a vibrant, exciting, thrilling, first class food destination with a world class beach and a terrific and growing transportation system and a beautiful and happy populace that is reproducing at a rate twice the rate that the United States is producing and looks to the future with confidence and hope and a belief in the mission and purpose of the country that it lives in. So Tucker should go to Tel Aviv and bury his head in the beautiful sand of the beaches right where the Mediterranean laps up against the land given to the Jewish people by God. For Abe, Christine and Eliana, I'm Jon Podhoritz. Keep the Caliber.
- [61:15]
E
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