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A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.
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B
Yay.
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A
Kathy Bates. Dolly Parton. Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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B
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drink champagne Some die of thirst.
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A
No way of knowing which way it's.
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Going Hope for the best Expect the.
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A
Worst Hope for the best.
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B
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, January 30, 2026. I am Jon Podhoric, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, Jon. Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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C
Hi, John.
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B
Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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D
Hi, John.
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B
And senior editor of Commentary, Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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E
Hi, John.
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B
We have a new Fed nominee for Fed chairman and Kevin Morsh. The only thing I can say about that is this makes him the first Fed nominee that I know. So I hope that when he is, when the Senate confirms him, that he will invite me to the two and a half billion dollar building for a tour of the remodel that Jerome Powell had inaugurated. Just why not? Like, I mean, I haven't seen Kevin Warsh in years, but, you know, he could give me a tour. I have nothing to say about what this means, about interest rates or macroeconomic policy or the tariffs or anything like that. I just wanted to drop the name. The fact that I know Kevin, Kevin Warsh, which for a long time bought you nothing, but now gets you a little something. Okay, so that's our Kevin Warsh news, unless anybody has anything.
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C
I thought it was interesting that Trump was. Is back to. Because people were guessing. I was in a conversation the other day about who's going to get the Fed nomination. And I jokingly said, well, he always picks the most attractive person when he's got several publicly vying for a job. And sure enough, you know, there was a kind. He's like, he's right out of central casting it's the.
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B
Yeah, that's true, that's true. There was apparently a last minute effort to get Judy Shelton the Fed chairmanship and she's a very, very attractive person, but doesn't look like a central casting Fed chairman because of course she is a woman. So not what you would expect. Okay, so enough with the Fed. We can move on to other Perhaps I just want to mention in a kind of world historical sense though, this is not news as we would understand it here in America, but it's news here at Commentary that I believe, if I have this right, that for the first time since the Temple Mount was taken by Israel in 1967 and Moshe Dayan the than, the Minister of Defense who made the classically Moshe Dayan arrogant move of granting the Muslim authorities in East Jerusalem control of the Dome of the Rock, that Jews are now going to be allowed to pray on the Temple mount for the first time. Israeli police, according to i24 News, have permitted Jewish visitors to enter the Temple Mount carrying printed prayer materials. Just to explain why this is so earth shaking, the agreement was Jews would not pray on the Temple Mount because that was offensive to Muslims and because the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, the mosque, was built on the site of the destroyed second Temple and it is the third holiest site in Islam, as they say, which is interesting because the Temple Mount is the first holiest site, is the most holy site, is perhaps the only holy site in Judaism. And so if you're counting by who's got the holiest site and should therefore be allowed to pray, probably the Jews win over the Muslims as they have two holier sites they can go to in Mecca and Medina. But in any case, this was an effort to buy civil peace, to create the conditions under which Israel would not be accused of, like interfering with Muslim prayer. And it got so bad for so long that if a person, a Jewish person with a kippah went up on the Temple Mount and just started mouthing words of prayer silently, the authorities would come and make them stop or tell them to leave, mouthing silently the Shema or I don't know, any prayer, shekhianu, whatever prayer you might want to say literally, in Israel, on territory that Israel had annexed and is now considered the eternal part of Israel, there was an area, the only place on the planet Earth that Jews agree they should be legally enjoined from praying is the site of the Temple that was destroyed in 70 BC. So Seth, just quickly, how big a deal do you think this is?
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E
I happen to have Just last month, been on the Temple Mount. So I was very surprised. But the change has been. There's a very recent change. Before the printed prayer material allowance, I was on the Temple Mount. And by then, the chain there, a change had already happened in that they would lead you on the Temple Mount to a spot where everywhere everybody prayed and you would pray. We prayed the afternoon prayers. Mincha together, you know, with the minion, did the whole thing. And with Israeli security.
- [07:28]
B
Quick explanation. Jews pray three times a day, morning, afternoon, and evening. The morning prayer is called shacharit. The afternoon prayer, which is often twinned with the evening prayer, is called Mincha, and the evening prayer is called Mariv. And these are sessions that last 20 to 30 minutes.
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E
Usually, yeah, it's a brief prayer, but it's. It's. So they. So we go to a spot and we prayed and, like, as if we were, you know, on a hike somewhere or in a synagogue. It was. It was kind of surreal. But they hurry you along, you know, you start taking pictures, and they go, all right, come on, come on, come on, you know, and they nudge you along. The only controversial thing that happened was that somebody brought. It was Hanukkah, and somebody brought tea, light candles, and tried to light makeshift menorah on the Temple Mount, and they were excused from the premises for. So still no lighting fires on the Temple Mount, guys, in case you weren't sure. No fires on the. But. But they were, you know, and then you'd stop to take a picture and they'd hustle you along, but they'd kind of do it, like, as if they. You know, they had to.
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B
The.
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E
The mood among the Israeli soldiers is totally different up there now. The mood is as if it has been accepted for a long time to pray on. In other words, there's no. There isn't a lot of tension when you do it. There isn't a lot of guessing. People aren't looking over their shoulders. They don't feel like they're sneaking something. They. You pray. And now allowing people to take printed prayer material up is. Is. I mean, it's a very big deal. The whole. All the changes are a very big deal. One of the things that I noticed when I was up on the Temple Mount, this was my first and only time up there, is how enormous it is. You have. If you haven't been up there, you have a picture in your head of like, well, there's probably a mosque, and, you know, everybody. It's crowded like everywhere else. Look, it's in the old City. Of Jerusalem. If you've been to the old city of Jerusalem, you know that you, you know, you, you, you can't. You walk shoulder to shoulder, you know, front to back with people. It's crowded. It's, you know, you're walking up all ancient steps and whatever. The, The Temple Mount is like a bunch of football fields, large, and there is no crowding and there is no. There's really no noise. There's some kids, some Arab kids playing soccer up there usually. But you, you picture like, a situation where if I go up there, you know, we're going to be brushing up against Arabs praying, you know, going to their mosque on the, you know, and, and, and whatever, and there's going to be a whole. You don't see anybody. You don't go near anybody. You don't even share oxygen with anybody. It's the giant open space when every so often there's a beautiful old olive tree. That's what the Temple Mount is like. And so it's frustrating to be up there in some sense and see that. And because once you go up to the Temple Mount, you realize how ridiculous it is that Jewish tours weren't allowed to go up there. Spend a few minutes up there, you know, and then come down or go up there and pray you're not in anybody's face. And you are so far from a mosque or any. Anything that could be construed as a Muslim holy site, too. So there's, there's no problem of. It's not as though you're standing in front of. Near a mosque, you know, across the courtyard from it, and you're praying this way as people are coming and going from the mosque. There's nothing provocative at all about going up on the Temple Mount. And so, you know, we went up there. It was very moving. It's a very moving experience. It was very moving. For me, praying on the Temple Mount was an extraordinarily unusual spiritual experience because of how close you are to, you know, to the. The know what was once the holy of holies. And, you know, you feel it up there, but also it's. It's serene, which helps. It's not, you know, it's, it's, it's not crowded. It's serene. The olive trees and old stones. You feel like you've stepped back in time. So it's, it's a beautiful experience. And it's just frustrating that this was somehow controversial until very recently.
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B
But it's worse than frustrating. That's why the, it's worth spending 30 seconds on the history. The history is, of course, in the Six Day War in 1967, Israel reunited Jerusalem, which had been divided in half. In 1948, as a result of the armistice, Jordan got control of East Jerusalem. Israel had control West Jerusalem. The city was divided by something called the Green Line, which was part of the Armistice of 1949. And then in 1967, the triumph came when Jewish Israeli soldiers took over East Jerusalem. And there's this, you know, legendary picture of the soldiers, the Jews, for the first time since 1948, going to the Western Wall to pray. And in that immediate aftermath, there was an organization called the waqf, which is the sort of Islamic Council. And Moshe Dayan, who was the single most arrogant person on the planet earth of the 20th century, a self, you know, sort of a self glorifying, self mythologizing military figure with, you know, an eye patch and a swagger and like every, everything that sort of typified a certain type of Israeli obnoxiousness made this decision. I'm not entirely clear what gave him the authority to make the decision that the WAQF would be put in charge of the Temple Mount. And, and, and Dayan, who was a secularist as a Labor Zionist and did not believe the religion was going to fade away and it didn't matter, wait, with a wave of his hand, said, it's okay. Jews are going to be prohibited from praying on the Temple Mount. Himself. One guy decided to do this. And if you want to understand why, 11 years later, 10 years later, there was this huge revolution in Israeli politics in which the Labor, Labor Party, which had run the country basically for the first 30 years of its existence, was kicked out of power and basically never really achieved anything like majority status ever again. It was the kind of airy dismissal of things important to people who were not radical socialist types that created the social conditions under which people in Israel said, we got to get these guys out. They don't understand us. They don't care about Judaism, they don't care about Sephardic Jews, they don't care about anybody but Eastern, you know, but Jews from Europe and their socialist secularist culture, and the hell with them. And had Moshe Dayan been more sensitive to the idea that it actually matters to a lot of Jews whether or not they would get to pray on the Temple Mount. Who knows what the history of the, you know, the last 60 years of Israel would have been if he had, if there had been a greater acknowledgement that, you know, this, this is a thing that is deeply There. That's why Israel is in Israel, because the temple was in Israel, because the Temple was built in Israel, because God ordained that Jews should build a temple in Israel. And then it was destroyed and then it was rebuilt and then it was destroyed again. And, and this one, you know, as I say, this one unbelievably arrogant and quite repulsive person in many ways, waves his hand and says, no, Jews get to pray here. And then breaking that, changing those rules becomes an unbelievably difficult thing because you're upsetting, you're upsetting the status quo. Create a status quo that you upset. Well, you know what? Hamas invaded Israel, won the war in Gaza. One of the main things that this government can do to satisfy religious Jews at this moment that isn't wildly controversial really, is to allow prayer on the Temple Mount. There's an election coming up and it's happening. And just quickly to finish the line here, my person was once my rabbi, very liberal, left wing guy that I've told the story. I left the shul because he stopped saying the prayer for the state of Israel once this government was elected. I once said to him, what do you think about prayer on the Temple? Why can't Jews pray that? He said, you know what, we haven't prayed on the Temple Mount for. What's the big deal? Like, you know, there are a lot of things we don't do that we can't do in order to maintain social peace. You know, we don't, you know, we don't like Davin at the Sistine Chapel, you know, we don't, you know, we don't light Hanukkah candles in Chartres. What are you talking about? And if you think about it, the insane arrogance of this idea that the Jews return to Zion, get back and unify Jerusalem, but the one place they cannot go, and as I say, the one place on earth that the Jewish state enjoins Jews from praying as Jews is on its holiest site is a.
- [17:49]
C
Really.
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B
Psychotically barbaric fact that I think basically now is going to be eaten away at, by degrees. And if, you know, if the one thing you could say is if the Palestinians had a political culture that was at all accommodating and didn't to, to, to Israel and didn't want to destroy Israel and didn't want to go from, you know, from the river to the sea, maybe, maybe it would be worth it to Israel to keep the status quo so that they can have their precious walk of control of the Temple map. But otherwise they can go blow. They don't get to control a territory.
- [18:30]
E
Yeah. And also I was up there. I had the privilege of being up there with somebody who has been up there many times and takes people up there. And one of the things he said was that there has been a huge increase since October 7th in non orthodox Jews going up to the Temple Mount.
- [18:48]
B
But that's why it's important. That's why the printing, having printed materials is important. Because you go, you, you can say Min. Hamariv from memory. I can't. A lot of Jews who are not totally literate and have this all in their heads from stem to stern actually have to follow a text in order to pray. So the only people who could even do this with any sense of command were very Orthodox people who have the prayers, who have the entire service memorized. And so that's what they've done is.
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E
They'Ve, it's, it's become a much more egalitarian policy. It's like, you know, it's, it's like before, if you were Orthodox, you could get a lot more out of it. And what they've done now is made it so that all Jews, all Israelis can go up there and get something out of it. And it's one of those things that it's like, you know, they accuse it of being a sop to the Israel's version of the religious right. But as you say, what these things actually do is allow people who couldn't make the same connection before make that connection. It's allowing, you know, the non or it's, it's bringing not the non, Orthodox into something that the Orthodox already at least kind of felt a part of. It's a much more egalitarian way to do things now. And it has. And the interest, you know, what he was saying was that the interest in, in non religious people since October 7th, we know that interest in, you know, Judaism has, you know, Jewish practice and people attending synagogue and, and people joining clubs and Jewish organizations, all that stuff has, has increased in Israel and that, that as in the Diaspora. And this is one of those cases. The one other thing I would say is, I just want to note is that when you walk up at the top, there's a part where you can see down to something that's known as the Golden Gate. And it's behind a building in the Golden Gate is a pile of wood. And you see, you can see the wood. You're standing on deck, you see the wood. And the wood has been carbon dated from the time of Solomon's Temple, which is very nearly 3, 000 years old. Okay. And what is almost. It's. It's almost, you know, it's clear that the wood came from either Solomon's stables or some part of Solomon's Temple. This is wood from the temple. Some of it is cedar wood, Lebanese cedar wood, which, again, you know, if you know the story of Solomon and all that, it all comes together. But you were looking at the wood that has been carbon dated. It is not in Israel's hands. It is lying outside on the Temple Mount, an area controlled by the waqf, as you say, by the Arab authorities. And when we walked past, the tarp had been taken off of it. So 2,500-year-old Lebanese cedar wood from Solomon's temple was sitting out in the rain. This is how Jewish artifacts are treated when they are not in Jewish hands.
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B
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- [25:35]
E
And this is, this is history on the Temple Mount. This is a piece of the temple. This is essentially something from the temple that is there from the first temple that's still there.
- [25:49]
B
First temple was destroyed in 586 BCE. So that's the first temple. Then of course the second temple was built, you know, in, in, in under the Romans and then, and then, and then destroyed after the revolt the Jewish wars of the seventh decade of the, of the first of the new millennium. Let's move on.
- [26:15]
E
So we have a week, but just, just, just to wrap it up. A week. A week after we got home we read a news story that they had been covered again. So this is apparently an ongoing thing. So the best you can hope for is that Solomon's temple, cedar wood is covered with a tarp every so often.
- [26:30]
B
Right? So moving on to another religious institution that according to many people and the videos that we saw and in fact the law of the United States was invaded and taken over by people who were Attempting to disrupt prayer in Minneapolis. Was the event at the church in. In Minneapolis involving this, you know, sort of troop of antifa. Ish people coming in to attack the congregants who were supposedly pro ice and among those in there supposedly documenting it, but actually part of the planning logistics and the reason that was happening in the first place was former CNN anchor Don Lemon. So, Eliana, what has happened to Don Lemon in the weeks since the event? I mean, sort of an interesting journey that he's been.
- [27:27]
D
It's an interesting journey. So a magistrate judge declined at first, rejected the federal government's efforts to indict him. And the federal government then went to the 8th Circuit seeking an emergency. I'm not sure what it's called, but, like, emergency effort to overturn the magistrate judge's decision, that was denied. My understanding is the federal government then presented the evidence to a grand jury, and a grand jury has indicted Lemon. And so he was arrested while covering the Grammys in Los Angeles last night. And I have to say, I am surprised that a panel of a grand jury comprised of Minnesota citizens handed down this indictment.
- [28:23]
B
Well, okay, so just to explain, and.
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D
By the way, personal connection, my dad called me the other day and said, do you remember I used to take you to piano lessons at the city church? And, oh, and I did not remember this. I had no idea this was a city church. But, yes, I went to piano lessons there as a middle schooler. So, yes, my understanding is the grand jury has handed down an indictment on Lemon, and that is what led to his arrest by federal agents. And by the way, can we just talk about the absurdity for a second of the CNN coverage of this, which I have to pull out our text messages. They have a line in the story that says Lemon left CNN for comments that critics described as disparaging to women. The comments were that women are in their prime, in their 20s and 30s, and maybe in their 40s. And then Nikki Haley, who was 51 at the time, was, quote, past her prime. And Lemon then apologized for these remarks. It wasn't like critics were nitpicking some remark, and there was a debate about whether the remark was offensive. The remark was obviously offensive and misogynistic, and Lemon owned it. And then he was fired. The New York Times, by the way, of course, doesn't remind you what the remark was. It just said, oh, critics attacked him over an allegedly sexist remark. And. And they don't have the real story here of the arrest either.
- [30:07]
B
What is really important here is that Lemon, what happened at City Church was an egregious violation of federal law. You are not allowed to disrupt a. A religious service or a church proceeding with a protest. And the idea was that Lemon was somehow going to be held, was shielded from that law because he was reporting. And therefore this is a violation of his First Amendment rights. But was he really reporting, or was he there as part of the invading force and there to document it and to. And to spread the message far and wide that these people deserve to have their service disrupted? Which, by the way, was something that a lot of people on the left said in the wake of the news breaking that this had happened at the church was they deserve it. Like, they're supporting this inhuman, monstrous, barbaric, Nazi, totalitarian, racist, whatever. And so they need to own up to it. And, you know, it's free speech.
- [31:23]
C
Well, this. This is what will be. It is going to be a difficult case to. To win because he was documenting it. And he will claim these privileges of being a journalistic observer. What they're going to have to prove is that he was working with the agitators who stormed the church in advance of his effort to report. And it. It brings up a couple of interesting issues more broadly about protecting houses of worship in general, whether they're churches, synagogues, or mosques. And in New York State, there's this debate going on about whether or not you can have any sort of barrier to protesters outside of a synagogue or a church, and how far that barrier should be. Are people allowed their free speech rights? And I think that the public's concern about this and the attention brought to it recently is important because we've had these debates about protests outside of abortion clinics, for example, and I think it's 25ft was allowed. But anything more is too far. And First Amendment advocates will say, look, you're allowed to stand outside with your signs and yell at people going in. I mean, this is the right of people to do this. But the kind of threats and harassment that have occurred outside of synagogues in New York recently, for example, and the threats outside of the church in Minneapolis and people storming the church, the law is now going to be challenged in lots of interesting ways that hopefully will spark a conversation about balancing safety over First Amendment speech, because all of us would approve of people's right to. Look, Don Don Lemon can stand outside that church and protest ice. What he can't do is disrupt a service in progress because the pastor of that church was. There was a claim he was linked to ice. So he. But. But proving this case with the journalism angle is going to be interesting. Hopefully it will also bring attention to the fact that plenty of journalists, particularly disgraced journalists, who would, I'm sure, accuse me of being mutton dressed as lamb, given my age, is that they are going, you know, now that he's an independent journal, all he has to do is pretend to be reporting, but he can be actually colluding at the same time. Right.
- [33:22]
D
Lemon was with the activists beforehand, conducted an interview with the leader, Nekima Levy Armstrong, before they stormed the church. He accompanied them to the church and then went inside as part of these storming. So I think the government's. I think the government's argument, and I'd love to see their evidence, which we haven't seen, will be that the journalism is window dressing for his actual participation, along with the activists, with whom, like, he was a coconspirator in all of this.
- [33:57]
C
Yeah.
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B
And he was encouraging.
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E
And didn't he.
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B
Didn't he, like, kiss one of them on the head or something?
- [34:01]
D
Kissed her on the cheek before he started the interview.
- [34:05]
B
People seem to think that you say First Amendment, and it's an automatic get out of jail free card. The First Amendment has three clauses in it. First Amendment doesn't just give you the right to free speech. It gives you the right to exercise your religion and the right to assembly. Three clauses.
- [34:28]
C
Peaceful assembly. Peaceful assembly.
- [34:30]
B
If you impede. If you say that your free speech gives you the right to impede a religious gathering, that is the First Amendment. Sort of like turning into a Rube Goldberg machine. Because nothing in the First Amendment privileges speech over the right to free assembly or the free exercise of religion. These are all our First Amendment rights. All three of them are our First Amendment rights. So why does his right to free speech trump the people in the church's right to the free exercise of religion? It doesn't. This is. There's almost never been a challenge of this sort. An abortion clinic is not a church or a synagogue. A place where you assemble to protest may not be a church or a synagogue if you impede people's access to a place of worship. Which is what this. Which is what the question is in New York that Christine brings up. You are impeding their free exercise of religion. Now, it's a weirder case in New York, because the incident that triggered this at Par Key Synagogue was not, in fact, a religious service. It was a meeting to discuss how to make aliyah to Israel with an organization called Nefesh b', Nefesh, which gives Americans advice on how they might do this if they want to do it. So it wasn't actually that they were going in the synagogue to pray, but it is understood, commonly that a building of worship. What goes on inside the building of worship is not subject. You know, is itself a First Amendment protected activity. And you can't trespass. Here's the thing. They're not. It's not protesting. That's not protesting. Spitting at an ICE agent and kicking his car is not protesting. It's not protesting to park your car in the middle of the road while ICE agents are going about their business. Like, there's a lot of the big headlines coming out of Minneapolis really aren't about protesters. They are about people doing things that I would allege are illegal. Don Lemon's case, we'll see. But they're obstructing law enforcement and creating a commotion. They're not. This is not about having placards and chanting, you know, from.
- [37:18]
E
From.
- [37:19]
B
From the sidelines. This is about getting in people's faces, disrupting things and. And. And impeding things.
- [37:26]
E
And it's the same thing. They do this with civil disobedience, too, right? Somewhere along the way, civil disobedience became a term that's supposed to mean you don't get punished for it. Except civil disobedience is literally the opposite. The point of civil disobedience is that, okay, you go somewhere you're not supposed to go, you get arrested to draw attention to some sort of injustice in the fact that people get arrested for doing what you did. If you don't get arrested, it's not civil disobedience. Well, it's just hanging out.
- [38:00]
B
This is a very important point. So take the. Take a lunch counter. Sit in, right? In the south in the 1960s, so the idea that the person who owns the lunch counter says, we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone that is. And that. That conforms with existing law, and you say that is unjust. So you go in and you sit down at the lunch counter, and the police come, and they arrest you because you are, in fact, violating the law as it is on the books for the purpose of shocking the conscience so that the law is changed, which is what happened, right? So you say, I cannot obey this unjust law. I am going to violate it, Accept the consequences of violating it, because I believe this is one of the ways in which this unjust law can be overturned and revised and more freedom be granted.
- [39:06]
C
And the other thing to add there is that the people who engaged in civil Disobedience had been trained effectively and and thoughtfully by civil rights leaders who knew they were going to be arrested to cesspoint and said, this is what will happen. This is how you behave. This is why we are doing this. And they, they did it as a group and they did it with well trained, peaceful people. And the training, if you look at the people who are being trained, first of all, who, who's offering them training and money in Minneapolis, it's not even always local domestic protesters. It's foreign, foreign folks. And how. What they're trained to do, which is to Abe's point, to commit misdemeanors and felonies. That's what they're doing. That's in many, many cases. So that's a very distinctive new way of protesting. And Obviously in the 50s and 60s there were versions of that, strains of that as well. And there was a breakage in civil rights movement.
- [39:58]
B
But.
- [39:58]
C
But the training matters, I think, because the infrastructure now encourages acts of violence and disorder. And the training then was. If was exactly what John was saying to point to the unjustness of the law.
- [40:12]
B
And again, to follow the analogy through what is it that the people in city church were doing? They were praying. They were not excluding people from prayer. They were not engaged in detaining illegal immigrants. They were not doing things that were directly involved with the subject of the protests. They were in their church at a service that was then disrupted. What did the people in the church have to do with what was going on outside the church? Nothing. Perhaps the pastor supports ice, perhaps he doesn't. What do you do at a service? You are praying to God for the salvation of your soul or your community or whatever. The church is not implicated, it is not involved, it is not. Part of the overall issue in prior civil. The civil rights analogy is the fact that you couldn't sit at the lunch counter was a prime example of the segregationist injustice that was being done. And you could not conform to the rules of the. You were not going to be prevented by the unjust law from doing what you thought was your right as an American, but you would accept the punishment that the unjust law provided. Again, because you had a higher purpose, which was to overturn the law and have a new law written. And what was the purpose of invading the church?
- [42:14]
C
Well, the purpose for John Lemon was content. He was creating content for his personal brand. If he had stood out, even if he'd colluded in advance, curious, if he'd stood outside the church and filmed people going in and coming out, they probably wouldn't have had.
- [42:28]
B
Well, if you stood outside the Capitol on January 6th, and you were even an insurrectionist standing outside the Capitol, but you didn't go into the building. You weren't. You weren't arrested for. For trespass, because you didn't. Trespass. Trespassing is crossing a threshold of a piece of property that you do not own. And they went into which you were not invited.
- [42:55]
D
So the pastor of City Church, a guy named Jonathan Parnell, is an ICE field director, which is why they targeted the church, decided to disrupt the prayer experience of every single congregant of that church. And this is what's happening in restaurants all over the city where ICE agents are eating, or hotels all over the city where the experiences of people. Not that it's just to target the ICE agents, but where there's civil unrest and unlawful activity happening all over the city. And yes, it's worse than a synagogue or church, but it's happening everywhere.
- [43:36]
B
But it's worse. It is worse because of the First Amendment.
- [43:39]
D
Worse.
- [43:40]
B
It's worse, but it's worth. That's the point that, as I look at, I don't know a thing that came across the wire from Entertainment Weekly, unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and Don Lemon's arrest. But if Don Lemon is found to have involved himself in the disruption of a prayer service, that is an unprecedented disruption of the First Amendment. Also, because you are not allowed to interfere with the free exercise of religion in the United States. And lawful and peaceful assembly involves the people who are inside the church who are assembled to pray, including field director.
- [44:26]
C
Of ice I think we know that what would happen if a right wing YouTuber colluded with anti Muslim activists and stormed a mosque in California, for example? Pretty sure there would be some law enforcement reaction to that. And the First Amendment arguments would probably not be given as much praise by. By the mainstream media. I mean, this. This applies to everyone. I mean, that's the thing, is that that isn't happening in mosques.
- [44:54]
A
I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay, BJ Novak.
- [45:21]
B
Yay.
- [45:21]
A
Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [45:52]
D
Where are the profiles of all the church congregants who had their prayer, you know, their Sunday service disrupted, and of the children who, you know, were so traumatized by watching this horrible thing happen? I mean, the way this would be treated if it was a mosque or happened to left wing people is just so vastly different. Or allow me to suggest Don Lemon is a victim of the federal government as opposed to all the people in that church being a victim.
- [46:29]
C
Right.
- [46:29]
E
And allow me to. A third. A third possible building, you know, an abortion clinic. When, when people. When they have recently tried to. When we recently proposed new laws to protect houses of worship. Right. So that, you know, in New York, we saw the Hamas next, you know, mob a Jewish synagogue a couple times. Kathy Hochul and others have proposed, you know, some sort of ordinance where you have to stay 50ft back, whatever it is. These ordinances apply to houses of worship and abortion clinics. So, you know, this is. This is the sort. This is where you get at why it was actually okay, in their minds to storm a church because what they were doing was holy, too. Politics has become their religion, and they have houses of worship. They're just not places where you worship. But this was, to them a religious experience, and they were carrying out their own very religious activity in storming the church. And so, you know, to people in the media, it's not really the disruption of a religious service. It's two competing religious services. And which one is right? Well, I don't know. Maybe the one storming the church.
- [47:56]
D
They know whose side they're on.
- [47:58]
C
Well, it's interesting because the federal law, the FACE act, which provides access to abortion clinics but also to houses of worship, it is both. It really hasn't, until this administration, the houses of worship part really hasn't been effectively prosecuted. And there is a sort of something ironic about everyone on the left now up in arms about the fact that someone might be prosecuted for blocking a synagogue or storming a church, when in fact, no one said a word when this law was used to enforce pro life against pro life protesters outside of clinics.
- [48:32]
B
So the thing that gets me is that in all likelihood, this is going to be a big boon for Don Lemon. Yeah, well, I mean, if people want to be fool enough to subscribe to a substack and waste, you know, $50 a year, you know, Zygos into them. May they enjoy the waste of their money because he is an idiot, among other things. He is one of the dumbest people ever. I mean, he's very attractive and he can read a teleprompter well.
- [49:03]
D
And his core audience, all those women who are past their prime, we're just.
- [49:09]
C
Bitter Crohn's Eliana, you have to feel sympathy. It's our, it's our bitter crone.
- [49:13]
D
Real sweet spot for the lemon substack subscriber, you know.
- [49:19]
B
Okay, so I'm going to make a recommendation and then we're going to go. It's to do a short show today. I have a very surprising recommendation for me, which is I watched with my son all eight episodes of the new Marvel show on Disney called Wonder Man. And what is interesting about Wonder man is that it is a show about Imagine the studio or the Kominsky Method, the show with Alan Arkin and Michael Douglas about the unsuccessful actor in his 70s who runs an acting school or Barry, also about unsuccessful actors in la. Only in this case, this is a story about a guy, a struggling actor who constantly gets in his own way and then finds himself maybe in the running to play a lead role in a superhero movie alongside Ben Kingsley. And he, unbeknownst to anybody, and he keeps it a great secret, has superpowers of his own so that he has to keep secret. Because owing to this is a world. This Marvel show is a world in which the superheroes are real. Right? So everybody knows that superheroes exist. And because of a hilariously depicted disastrous incident and earlier few years before the show starts, a character with superpowers does something untoward. And everybody has to. Everyone who wants to make a movie or be an actor in a movie has to sign a waiver that says they don't have superpowers or they'll be fired because no one with superpowers can work because they're too dangerous to work around them. So he has to keep his super poweredness secret. Okay, so that's the super. So if that already turns you off, I understand. But this is a delightful comic show about the underside of the unsuccessful Hollywood Imagine the studio. Only it's about the world of people who live in crappy apartments in West Hollywood and are driving 15 year old cars and can't get a break and, and are kind of like schlepping through the day going to revival house movies because they don't have anything else to do. And you know, annoyed girlfriends and, you know, and family that's disappointed in them and all of that. And it has the feel and the look of a kind of 1970s Robert Altman movie. Very much reminds me of a French movie from the 70s called Salutiste, which is also about sort of struggling actors in middle age. And it is absolutely delightful. And I really. Even if you don't like superhero stuff, I really recommend it. Also, some of these episodes are, like 25, 26 minutes long. There are eight of them, and they're really short. They get to the point and they get in, they get out. And Ben Kingsley, who is playing this aged actor who wants. Was in jail because he impersonated a terrorist. This is something that appears in Iron Man 315 years ago, is so fantastic, as he always is, but this is a level of sort of comic genius that he has rarely reached before. And I just really loved it. It's called Wonder Man. It's on Disney. Give it a shot. If the mention of the word superhero or Marvel doesn't entirely turn you off, because there's nothing I can do about that part. But I haven't. I haven't seen something. I enjoy this. I really am enjoying the Pit, by the way, the second season of the Pit also. But. But that's the. That's the recommendation. So have a great bomb cyclone weekend, everybody. I. When I first said that, I told my wife that there's a bomb cyclone coming, because I read. I read about it in the New York Daily News website. She was like, there is no that. You're making it up. You're making it up that there's something called a bomb cyclone. So there is a bomb cyclone. Apparently it's a storm that, rather than sitting on top of you and dumping snow, swirls and drops.
- [53:54]
E
That's why the USS Abraham Lincoln was moved to the Gulf.
- [53:57]
B
Oh, good. That's why cyclone is coming. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's. We're not even. We're not gonna go there. We already talked about that yesterday. So have a. Have a great, great bomb cyclone weekend. Store your provisions and we'll be back on Monday. So for Abe, Christine, Eliana, and Seth, I'm John Pot horiz. Keep the candle burning.