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You know when you're shopping online, you want to buy something and you're on a website that you already have a login to but you can't remember the password or you want to buy something. You got your credit card out but you can't remember the three digit number that you got to do at the end of your credit card number and then you got to go find your wallet and it's late and you're tired. Picture this though. Late at night. You're scrolling, you see the product and you know what you see there? You see a purple pay button right there next to the product you want to buy. It has all your information saved. It makes checking out as simple as a simple tap of your screen. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like the Commentary Magazine podcast to brands just getting started. So for vendors, you got to think about how Shopify will help accelerate your efficiency, whether you're uploading new products or trying to improve existing ones, and packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines and even enhance your product photography. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary shopify.com comment. Expect the Worst Some drink champagne, some die at first no way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the Best welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Friday, June 5th, 2026. I'm John but Hortic, Editor of Commentary Magazine reminding you of our offer, our once in a lifetime offer to subscribe to Commentary Magazine and have a subscription to everything available to you@comMENTARY.org for the low low price of $19.95 a year and 80% savings for first time subscribers. This is the best deal we've ever offered. Please go to commentary.orgoffer to sign up. And as I mentioned the other day on November 8th here in New York City we will be hosting the 17th annual Commentary magazine Roast. And our roastie this year is Ron Dermer. So if you want to find out about that, buy a seat, buy a table. You can go to commentary.org roast roast. And if you come, you will be meeting our panelists, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe, hi John, Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
And I assume an attendee, though not necessarily, you know, obligatory. But our guest today, Tablets own, Lielle Leibovitz, Hyliel Boker Tov, Joan Bokartov to you, and a very weird Bokeh. It is indeed, as we remain in this incredibly unclear nether region, on the Mideast, on our war with Iran, on where Israel's conflict with Hezbollah and its relation to Lebanon is standing. It's maddening and demoralizing. And so we're going to move off that and talk about the story that has everybody buzzing, which is the story of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and the New York Times article that came out yesterday afternoon about his conduct and treatment of women over the course of at least the last 10 years with the naming of somebody that Seth and I both know, Lindsey Fifeld, a one time sort of Washington Republican figure or sort of person in the Washington Republican ambit, now a homemaker, a mother, suburban mother, as she puts it, but was dated Graham Platner and is basically the source of the fact that we know that he has this Totenkov tattoo on his body. Seth Mandel, your wife Bethany is a very close friend of Lindsay's, indeed. They did a podcast together, I think, for a couple of years called Lady Brains, which was my idea, actually, and Lindsay. So Bethany has been there to sort of coach and help and advise and encourage and comfort Lindsay as this story has unfolded and as Lindsay was approached by the New York Times to emerge and be a named accuser of Platner, not only on the question of his tattoo, but on his beh question of his behavior toward women. And Lindsay has come out after the story to say that the Times has mistreated and blindsided her because it promised her that there would be others named in this I believe they led her to believe that there would be other named accusers in the story and that she would not be alone with her name out there as somebody who said that Graham Platner was a very peculiar person to date and who was physically intimidating toward her. And that the Times then apparently excised Benchen either of the names or of the details of these others that she had been led to believe were going to also be sources of the story, thus leading social media to come down on her head like a ton of bricks about how she's a Republican operative. And this is this is all an op to try to destroy Graham Platner and all of that. So Platner went on with Chris Hayes on MSNow last night, I think it is fair to say that he acquitted himself horribly. It was a terrible. He did not know what to say. He basically said that things that we know are true or not true, like that he knows what a Totenkov is and that he has that tattoo and that he got it on purpose and all of that. And he is sticking to his story that he didn't know and that he never did anything to Lindsay. Whereas Lindsay has contemporaneous emails and diary entries and things like that detailing it in real time.
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B
So yeah, yeah, so, I mean, I know Lindsay, so I know, I mean, the most I can say is that I know that, you know, she's telling the truth, but people would expect me to say that obviously.
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A
But.
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B
And yeah, my wife is close friends with her and so ever since the Times reached out, you know, her friends have been there for her and tried to be. And so, you know, I'll put my, you know, nobody's going to look to me about Lindsay for objectivity on that, I guess. But the good news is that I don't really have to be objective because my, my opinion is that people's response to the allegations was really what caught me out. In other words, you can, you know, I did, nobody has to take my word for anything. And I understand that. I'm, you know, I know Lindsay personally and I can't claim to, you know, not have a, not feel like, not feel a personal stake or connection or something in this. But isn't a Republican op. I mean, that's, that's for sure. But, but from, from my perspective, it's really about the reactions that people had because whatever you believe about whether it's possible for a one time Republican personality in D.C. to be honest about her past relationship with an aspiring senator, there are ways to respond to the news, to analyze it and to talk about the things that people are saying and how we try to figure out what is true and what is not. And so because there were others in the story who were also not Republicans who described concerning behavior, it would have been more normal, I think, to watch people say, you know, he really appears to have been a scumbag at one point in his life and there are allegations here, you know, he, it looks like he might even have been physically abusive on occasion with women. But I don't believe he's that guy anymore. That's what I would. If you were going to defend Graham Platner, that is the tack that I would expect people to take in a way that, you know, was consonant with, like, basic decency in the discourse. But the response was, well, she's a Republican, so this is a Republican op. And I just was surprised at how many people openly admitted they just said that their opinion of this story is entirely ruled by the party identification next to his name and the party identification next to her name. It was that the number of people who just came out and said, he's a Democrat, she's a Republican, therefore, here's how I feel about this story. And so I think that the Platner story a while ago even, has stopped becoming only about Graham Platner and is also about the way that negative partisanship infects a political system and infects people in a way that can be harder to root out down the line when you don't realize it's happening. But there's a rot around Platner that the people who have put themselves in a position that to defend him have absorbed. And you can see it rotting away at the American political discourse more broadly. And not just one candidate with a Nazi tattoo.
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C
But, I mean, Seth, isn't that kind of the whole point of Grant? I mean, Grant Platner is so amazing. He's like a bad guy Ritchie movie character. I don't know. Like a lot of people missed what I think was the actual kind of incredible, mind boggling thing. This is a man who said, if someone breaks into my house, I will rape him, but not in a gay way, just to assert my dominance. I mean, this is a caricature. Don't you think that the whole point was to shove this person down people's throats? Say, guys, you only have one concern. Your concern is to vote for whoever the heck we tell you to vote for. And it's not a bug that he happens to be a complete abusive Nazi sympathizing Luddite. It's the feature.
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B
No, he also didn't deny, by the way, the Times was explicit in that part of the story that Platner did not deny saying those things.
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A
When we talk about.
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D
I have a question. I think what you said is very interesting about the bug, not the feature. Is it that he is. Is it the idea that all of these dark eccentricities, put it mildly, make him a regular person and to accept. No. Look, I get the feature about his sort of extreme leanings, ideological leanings and interests, but the. Seth used the technical term, the scumbaggery. How is that a feature? I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just curious.
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C
And maybe it's Just me. Look, I come from a crime family. My father's a bank robber. The world of crime is all I know.
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B
Right.
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C
So there's a moment in every crime movie in which the mob makes you do something horrible from which there is no return. Hey man, you killed that stripper. Like you're part of us now. To me, that is increasingly the tactic of the Democrat parties. Like hey man, you have to vote for this guy or else you're not part of the good righteous people who are on the right side of history. And it's not I'm a little bit uncomfortable cuz he seems to be the scumming. It's precisely because you are now the person who supported Graham Platner. You are now the person who voted for all this. You're now the person who compromised all of their morality just to stand on the quote unquote right side of history in the uni party world. That's increasingly my analysis.
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D
In for a penny, in for a pound.
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C
Oh yes.
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D
Yeah.
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B
of Maine initiation ritual, basically.
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A
Yeah, exactly. So I don't know if that's the people of Maine or not, but I do know that it is. The left Twittersphere has decided, and they decided last night to say that what he did did not outweigh the need for him to be in the Senate and that the person who accused him is probably a liar, and they have no grounds on which to call her a liar. And they might as well just embrace the idea that they don't care about his Nazi. What do you call it, Nazi curious behavior or the clear violence that is awash in his brain as a. As a kind of fundamental answer to anything and everything.
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B
I also think the other part, the other sand trap that we get caught in once you get go into this initiation ritual is you don't just minimize or defend whatever your guy or your team will do, but in order to do that, you have to inflate the threat of the other person. And so we get into a situation where people who are trying to find a way to still support Graham Platner have to elevate Susan Collins. Susan Collins as the epitome of. Of Trump world, as the epitome of bad politics, as the epitome of corruption and being dangerous to the survival and the health of the Republic. This is something that we kind of laughed at at the beginning, which was this idea that you need. Well, you got to support Platter because Otherwise, my God, Susan Collins might win again. But now it's actually become a thing because you are forced to say, well, if my guy is this ex bad, right, my guy has all these skeletons in his closet, if I'm going to make the argument for him, I have to make the other person seem worse, more dangerous and all that stuff. It cannot be, you know, unless I'm willing to say, well, he's a Democrat, which is basically the same thing in a lot of ways. Um, but these, this idea that Susan Collins is an enabler of Trump and therefore she's Trump and therefore she represents all these things. This is the woman who, the Republican who voted to convict Trump and bar him from office when he was impeached. So that's part of it too, is that I worry we start looking at each other as threats. Everybody sees a threat everywhere in the political world. This person votes a different way. And therefore they're, they're a physical threat to my safety, they're a threat to the Republic. Who, what does that allow me to do? You know, what, what permission structure does that raise, you know, for, for, for us to, you know, go forth in politics and have the kind of mudslinging that we're seeing now and stuff like. So that, that's the other thing is that I just worry about the way that a low trust society, the bottom falls out and it becomes a no trust society overnight because we have to make other people evil. And I saw it, we all saw it. I think in regard to the response to October 7th, we saw Hamas record their crimes. So there was no. Well, they didn't really do this or that we saw them record and they recorded them because they were proud of them and because they expected it to gain them support. So it turned people into. Well, I don't like Israel and I want the Palestinian. I like the Palestinians, therefore I'm going to accuse Israel of one better. Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians. That's what I'm going to say. Because otherwise I'm stuck with the, the guys who drove a rape caravan through the Gaza envelope. And that makes me have to believe that the Jews are poisoning wells and training dogs to rape and all this stuff and the amount of rot that it does to people's brains, it spreads quickly and far and wide. And I feel like that's a version of what we're seeing here.
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A
But I don't think it's brains, I think it's souls. I mean, honestly, I think this is a sort of a. These are Rubicon moments where you either cross the Rubicon into excusing the inexcusable for reasons you believe are grander or more important than the crime that is right in front of you. Either you do that or you don't. And when you do means that all kinds of guardrails in your own moral sense and your own conduct and all of that just come crashing down. Because once you do that, you can do it again and again. I'll give you an example of this and why this gets really interesting. So say the politics continue to be bad for Trump and the Republicans through the summer and early fall. And there is a real possibility that Democrats can take the Senate as well as the House. Okay, Real possibility of a choice in Maine. You have the Totenkoff tattoo. I would rape a guy and was physically intimidating, though the description that Lindsay gives is of somebody behaving in a physically abusive manner. But nonetheless, I'll say physically intimidating toward women, says disgusting things. And then you have Susan Collins, moderate Republican, voted to convict Trump, as you say. And the entire American political future comes down to the voters of Maine, right? So let's just say the polling says it's going to be 50. It comes down to Maine. The voters of Maine are effectively going to be asked to vote in a guy, you know, a morally depraved person over a morally clean person, for the purposes of securing a political victory for an individual political party. That is a lot of burden to be placing not only on them, but on the political party itself. Because if the Republican Party has been tainted, and I think it has in many ways and for many people, by the fact that it, you know, basically put Trump up for president three times, despite everything that we know about him, the Democratic Party is now could be in a position in which its power in Washington and its power, by the way, to potentially convict Trump for real this time in a real impeachment that actually could get 67 votes, in theory rests on saying it's okay that Graham Platner is in the Senate. Is that really while claiming to be the moral party because the Republican Party is now so depraved that it has had this Nazi would be Hitler at the top of the ticket and in the presidency and running roughshod and all of that?
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C
John, not to sound like even more bearded than I am, but isn't it precisely such moral choices for which this great and godly republic was established? Isn't this like a wonderfully clarifying moment in which we all finally look and say, hey, we are actually grappling with A real thing with the soul of the matter. I'm like actually kind of moved by this moment.
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A
I think that, I mean, of course the issue for people like us is what if it goes the other way? What if the choice is, is what we deem to be the immoral, amoral or anti moral choice? What will that say about this great and glorious and God fearing country and the party that rallies itself behind platinum? Now, I believe, to be perfectly frank, that most elections come down to the idea that the person who generally wins, and this is obviously a two person race, so it's a binary choice, is the one who seems the more normal or the least even between Hillary and Trump. Remarkably enough, because remember, Hillary spent that week before the 2016 election once again with the issue of her emails and what Anthony Weiner was doing reading her emails and all of that. And you were reminded of Hillary's history and then you're reminded of Bill Clinton's history and there's Trump standing there and he spends 10 days saying nothing and just letting her cook and stew. And then he sort of pulls this inside straight and wins. But mostly, if you're going to pick between two people and you're a person in Maine, are you going to pick Graham Platner? Aside from everything else, just forget, you know, what awfulness is displayed in the physical, in his physical being. She's normal. She's been your senator for 18 years. She's, you know, she votes sometimes, you know, sometimes she doesn't vote for with Trump and she is a modifying force against Trump. And I understand that, you know, people in people, leftists are mad at her because she voted for Kavanaugh, but she did vote to convict Trump. One of 10 Republicans to vote to convict Trump in 2020 thus could be a vote to convict Trump in 2027. Like, and 10 Republican was 57, the vote was 5743. They only need 10 more people to vote to convict him, to throw him out of office. And she's one of those potential, you know, she's already shown her willingness to do it before.
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D
I think it depends how committed you are to the partisan narrative, the dominant partisan narrative, which gets back to Lielle's point. The appeal of voting for Platner now is to say they threw everything at this guy and we're not going to let that keep him down. We're now going to show that they can't bring him down. I mean, it's not unlike what happened with Trump and his years long legal gauntlets and whatever else So I don't know. I don't know. Just sort of anecdotally when I speak to Democrats and liberals, they're more into the partisan lean than the candidate generally in a sort of abstract way in every spot. In, in. I'm not talking about just Maine. I'm talking, you know, when I speak to them the narrative is more important than teasing out well, this is bad about this person and that's good about this person. It's being one of the troops that gets the designated winner over the finish line.
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A
Look, I mean I think that's been true for 10 years and true of Republicans as well. But you have to say that in two very red states, relatively red states. Let's say in Louisiana it was Louisiana. Roy Moore was Louisiana or Alabama. Alabama. Okay, so Roy Moore vs Doug Jones can't get much redder than Alabama. The people of Alabama voted for Doug Jones instead of for Roy Moore who was a, who was chasing 16 year old girls around malls. There is evidence that even people with an extraordinary partisan lean faced with a binary.
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B
Other Republicans in the state told them to also. Yeah, like people whose careers were being elected by Republican voters said you probably should vote for the Democrat.
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A
Yeah, I mean that's what we're sort of, that's the weirdness is that there is actually a 30. I'm talking about the 35 year history, 36 year history of Republicans standing up against extremists in their own party and trying to bring them down because of the taint that would be represented by it. David Duke running for governor of Louisiana in 1990. I'm once again blocking on the name of the congressman from Ohio. The sort of the anti semitic congressman from Ohio that was primaried out. Or Iowa. Excuse me, the congressman from Iowa and Thomas Massie.
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B
Excuse me, Steve King.
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A
Steve King. Thank you. Thomas Massie. Now, I mean there is a Republican history of extreme versions of this where the party itself expels the person and sort of purifies itself a little bit. You could even say that with the squad. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman both expelled in primaries for being too extreme for their districts. So are Democrats going to do the same kind of cleansing here? It doesn't look like it. I mean it certainly doesn't look like it at the national level. But if you're the dcc, if you're the dscc, you're the people who raise money for senatorial candidates and stuff like that. Do you really want to commit $50 million to Maine to get Graham Platner elected. If you're going to do that again, you are getting yourself complicit in his election. Maybe he'll raise all the money by grassroots and it won't matter.
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C
But I would say that you absolutely want to go behind him, because the Democrat Party, and this is a favorite obsession of mine, it has shifted. It has gone a very, very long way under the aegis of its dark Sith Lord, Barack Obama, who changed this party wholeheartedly and completely into something very different, making it into a party driven by a third World. This narrative in which, you know, everything is political, everything is, you know, relegated back to your ability or lack thereof, to vote correctly again. All this moral choice and wrapping, everything is like, oh, no, these are dreamers. Oh, no, this is Black Lives Matter. Everything now is like, fraught with morality. We're no longer talking about issues which is a fantasy of, you know, the early 90s, nor, for that matter are we even talking about personalities which, as you said, ought to disqualify individuals like Graham Platner. We're talking about tremors here. We're talking about, like, very deep tribal. You see this in third world countries. I don't care what, you know, the hoodoo do. I am a member of this tribe. And if someone calls me to pick up a machete and go over to the next Tsetse village, well, man, that's a Wednesday in my country.
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A
This gives me a chance to recommend to everybody the op ed that you published yesterday in the New York Post. You mentioned you called Obama a dark Sith Lord. So that gives the game away about what your theme here is title, which is not your title, of course. Editors write the titles behind today's radical Jew Hating Democratic Party is a monster created by Barack Obama. And you analogize the current Democratic Party's spirit and animating principles. You liken them to Mary Shelley's invocation of this creature created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein in the novel of the same name, a cold, arrogant man. So Obama's 2008, this is now 2026. It's 18 years later. And Obama, of course, came to national attention by preaching a message opposite to the one that you just proposed, right? He said, we are not red states, we're not blue states, we're the United States of America. That was 2004. That was Obama's breakthrough speech at the convention. In 2004, he was something new. Not only he represented in himself as a biracial person, a new kind of bridge, as David Remnick called him, a new kind of way for America to come together. And in fact, in your argument and estimation, he, in fact, was the harbinger and the implementer of a new way for America to come apart.
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C
I believe that wholeheartedly. Look, I think if you look at Obama's tactics across the board, this is precisely the M.O. i will now deport 2.7 million undocumented immigrants to show that I'm very tough on immigration. And at the same time, I would pass DACA and take the whole discussion over immigration from the realm of cold policy, of American economic needs, national security interests, et cetera, to this vague moral zone. No, these are dreamers. And we absolutely must let 750,000 undocumented immigrants become American citizens, because citizenship is a human right, which is exactly the dominant narrative that we're facing with today. This is what Obama has done with literally every big kind of wedge issue, is present himself as a candidate of one thing while behind the scenes working to do something very different. And the big kind of narrative of the Obama years is first of all, dismantle the Clinton party, which was some kind of weaponized version of yay, older traditional Democrat party, turn everything into a forever campaign, and make the heart and soul and fuel of this campaign be this idea of the Democrat party as a gorgeous mosaic of aggrieved minorities that could only pursue their grievances by tripling down on the instrument of their redemption, which, of course is the party. I mean, if you look right now and you see, for example, so many women who otherwise in earlier ages in American history would have been wives and mothers being unwed without children at an unprecedented rate in American history, these are brides of the state. This is what Obama has wrought. No, you don't need emotional engagement in real life. You just come and wave the flag that we tell you to wave. It's Ukraine, it's Palestine, it's global warming, it's this. And it doesn't even matter what it is, just put your identity in us and we will give you redemption. It's kind of a Kim Il Sung ish cult, and it's worked extremely well. This man has been kind of in power behind the scenes for almost 20 years now.
- [40:34]
A
I'm excited to talk to you about Brooklyn Bedding today because I have an honest to goodness endorsement. A friend of my daughter's came to sleep over and slept on my son's mattress. And she said the next morning it was the most comfortable mattress she has ever sl. And that is the Brooklyn bedding mattress that we got from Brooklyn bedding to test whether or not Brooklyn Bedding would be a good advertiser for Commentary magazine. So I don't know what more I can tell you that would tell you that Brooklyn Betting is worth your time, your money, your attention and your customs. So go to BrooklynBetting.com and use my promo code commentary at checkout to get 30% off site wide. This offer is not available anywhere else. That's BrooklynBetting.com and promo code COMMENTARY for 30% off site wide. Support our show. Let them know we sent you after checkout. BrooklynBetting.com promo code COMMENTARY. A quick message from today's sponsor, the ASPCA Pet Health Insurance Program. If you've ever owned a pet, you know they run on their own logic. Jump first, think later, ask questions never. It's part of what makes them so lovable, but it's also how you end up with those surprise vet visits you didn't see coming. ASPCA Pet Health Insurance helps cover eligible vet expenses. So when those moments happen, you can focus on getting your pet the care they need without overthinking the cost or second guessing your decision. When you enroll in an ASPCA Pelt Health Insurance Plan, you could get a $25Amazon gift card card. It's a little treat for you while you're doing something great for your pet. It's been around for almost 20 years and has covered nearly 1 million pets in that time. You can tailor your plan to fit your budget, your lifestyle and your pet's particular quirks. To Explore coverage, visit aspcapetinsurance.com Commentary that's aspcapetinsurance.Com Commentary Eligibility restrictions apply. Visit aspcapetinsurance.COM AmazonTerms for more info. This is a paid advertisement. Insurance is underwritten by either Independence American Insurance Company or United States Fire Insurance Company and produced by PTZ Insurance Agency Ltd. The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance. So we're, you know, get a month out from the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, which we spent the whole show yesterday talking about. A lot of people think that the great glory of the United States is that it makes political participation. It made it possible for everybody in the country. And then after the Civil War, really everybody in the country. And then after Jim Crow, really everybody in the country and, and suffragacy, the suffragette movement. Finally everybody is able to participate in political life fully. But you don't have to. That's the other thing that you're free to do. You are free by the rights that are enumerated to you to do everything. You have to obey the law, and that's all you have to do. You don't have to do anything else. They can't make you do anything else. They can't make you vote. There are countries where it is, in Switzerland, it is actually, you know, it is a crime not to vote. Can't make you vote. They can't make you do all kinds of things. And modern day politics features political parties that almost are creating a condition under which we are taking the very fact of voting and kind of making idolatry, making an idol out of voting. Everyone, every vote must count. You must count every vote. Every vote. Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote. This vote is. They're trying to suppress the vote. They're stealing a vote. All of that is to redound to the benefit of the political class. That's what that's about. That's driving us crazy. And if you're saying that sort of Obama, who did in fact create this entirely new class of voter, right? I mean, he had, he got the largest majority that America had ever, largest number of votes. He, I don't know, 7 or 8 million more people voted in 2008 than had voted in 2004. And this fetishizing of the vote then means that your vote is a commodity that your entire being is then expressed by. And America was almost about the opposite, 100%.
- [45:43]
C
And it gets worse. It's not just your vote, because once you've done the first thing that they ask you to do, then every other aspect of your life becomes some kind of referendum on quote, unquote, moral worldview dictated from above. Oh, you buy this product? Well, you know, this product is from a company owned by a Republican who gives money to organizations that are pro choice. So your, you know, purchase of your favorite soda brand means that you are actively, personally keeping women from having abortions. This is the whole kind of narrative of the last, you know, 15 years in American life. And this is the sort of brainchild of Barack Obama through his, you know, master of puppets, Ben Rhodes and their echo chambers. I mean, Ben Rhodes in that famous David Samuels New York Times profile basically admits, this is what we're doing. We're taking people who know absolutely nothing. We're creating huge echo chambers and we're giving them sort of like moral pulses to say, support this or don't support this about everything. It is so incredibly exhausting. Look, I had an opportunity to drive across this amazing country last week to sit in diners in, you know, Washington state, in Wyoming and Montana, just hear normal people talking about their lives.
- [46:59]
A
Not like, oh, could you believe that?
- [47:02]
C
Just like, hey, man, you know, I hear Susie has a new car. It's really cool. Like, it was so incredibly refreshing. And that's the opposite of the nation that Barack Obama has worked very hard to fashion.
- [47:15]
D
I just want to say also, you know, the way the Obama years supplanted culture with politics, which is sort of what we're talking about here, has to do so much not just with the man, with Obama who was president, he's also a product of this academia, NGO world that supported him and that he then empowered in office. And this also happened at an extraordinarily lucky time for him because social media was just exploding. And into that mix, he got Silicon Valley on board. And so the crafting of the narrative that Liel is talking about was so seamless and was overlaid over everyone's online life so perfectly that we didn't notice it. You know, I mean, we noticed some, some didn't notice it.
- [48:24]
C
But, but.
- [48:25]
D
And that's, that's the creation of the world that, that we live in. Yeah, Yeah.
- [48:30]
B
I mean, also, Lielle, you say you make a point about a very good, interesting point in the, in the piece about this, about how to, how they brought this all together. The, the, the means by which to do that to, to bring it all and overlaid on their lives and all that stuff. And you, you mentioned the Red Green alliance, and you say that in order to bring a socialist, you know, a socialist trust fund, oyster farmer or whatever, whoever you're talking about, right. And a, and a Sharia law, let's say, you know, somebody who, who, you know, is, is, is all in on values that are antithetical to what we think of, you know, in a free society. How you bring them together is you need something, a, you need a common interest or a common enemy or a common something. Right? These people are theoretically so fundamentally different.
- [49:30]
C
Right?
- [49:31]
B
It. Hamas, I've mentioned before about this, this, the fact that, like, people who play music for a living love Hamas. And it's like there's no music in the world of Hamas. Right? So, like, you talk, can you talk about that? This sort of like Islamic totalitarianism plus secular socialism, you know, worship Gaia and the environment and all that stuff, they need something to bring them together. And in many cases, as you say, it was just rank Jew hatred.
- [50:06]
C
You would never guess who they picked as the one common enemy to hate. Not in a million years. Of course it's the Jews, because of course, anti Semitism is the most potent political fuel in history. And look, first of all, to those listeners who doubt that this is a thing, Obama worked very actively to cement this coalition. When he came into office, there was an ongoing DOJ investigation against cair, against all sorts of Islamic organizations that were found to be absolutely complicit in aiding and abetting terrorism through the Holy Land foundation case. Eric Holder stopped this immediately. And Obama brought CAIR and all these characters into his good graces while at the same time also kind of pumping the narrative that there is a gorgeous kind of minority coalition here that includes the radical left, that includes the Islamist, et cetera, et cetera. The Jew hatred is, I think, interesting for several reasons. First of all, again, historically, they're picking the one proven winner of scapegoatism. But also it's interesting because the role Jews have historically played, from Moses to Joey Ramon, was always to stand outside of history and be like, guys, we're our own thing. We don't check any of these boxes because we predate all these boxes. I've written several great pieces for commentary about this. Like, what, are we white? No, of course not. It's a ridiculous statement. But if you need these boxes, if these identity markers are everything that you have, there's actually kind of a seamless bond between the Islamists and the socialists because these are two people who have been trained to understand their world in terms of these narrow boxes. And then all you have to do is fit them into a very narrow, a very kind of broad, loose framework, which in this case was hating Jews, while, of course telling everyone, oh, we don't hate Jews, it's the Zionists or Bibi Netanyahu and Bezala Smotrich and Itamar Bengri. Those are the bad guys. The rest is fine. Now, the interesting point that I make in the piece in the New York Post is that, as Dr. Frankenstein himself could tell you, at some point where you create monsters, monsters have a nasty habit of going off the leash and eating you, which is how you get an actual literal acolyte of the blind, Sheikh Omar Abdelah, winning a primary in New Jersey's 12th congressional district, because once you let the third world in, well, you become the third world.
- [52:32]
A
I want to point out, also to add to this, that the Obama administration, dating from 2009 on, not only failed to connect dots, but misidentified or pointedly and purposefully denied the role of Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism in crimes inside the United States and political actions outside the United States over and over again. The Fort Hood shooting by a doctor at Fort Hood who was an Islamist was not characterized as such by the Obama administration as it pursued him. The Pulse nightclub. We remember two days of people trying to tell us that this was some kind of self hating gay massacre as opposed to being somebody who had called and said Allahu Akbar on the phone to explain why he had shot 49 people. The Christmas party in California around the same time. The hyper cacher supermarket massacre in France in 2015, which John Kerry refused to call an anti, you know, essentially, you know, an anti Semitic Jew hating spree. This always seemed very odd. I mean, after all, the enemy here was identifiably evil. We aren't support. No one supports massacres of civilians by Islamic fundamentalist radicals. But the Obama administration, deliberately, because it has to be deliberate, because it's a pattern, never wanted to say that this was an issue, maybe because it would interfere with this coalition that it was trying to build. And if you want to see where it's possible for the Democratic Party to have taken such a horrendous turn, we talk about the money that gutters spent, we talk about what goes on in the universities and the corruption of Middle Eastern studies and all of that at the highest levels. But there is also the fact that as things were going on that would have reminded the American people, had they been treated and talked about in the right way, of the threat to the west inside our country, outside our country, not only to Jews, but to everyone. If that reminder had been that rather than saying that the problem, the terrorist problem in the United States comes stochastically from churches, we would say we still have a really serious Islamic fundamentalism problem inside the United States. And that would have been a kind of prophylactic against the rise of Dearborn, Michigan as a sort of epicenter of Democratic votes and Adam Hamawi's victory in New Jersey. Because people, it would still be present in people's heads that these guys now, October 7th, should have done that. But because the Democratic Party refused to participate in grokking the meaning of October 7th and why it was important to stand with the Jewish community after October 7th as it was taken on opportunistically as a way to spread Jew hatred.
- [56:19]
C
You know what, Jack?
- [56:20]
A
They have no antibodies against it.
- [56:22]
C
But Jet, standing with the Jewish community, I don't even need that right. I'm a proud Zionist. I'll Stand with my own people. How about just saying, you know what, Beating people up in the street because you don't agree with their political ideas is about as anti American as it gets. And if you go ahead and block roads and block hospitals and bash people's heads in because you believe you have some kind of thing to say, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna arrest you violently and then we're gonna fricking deport you because you are not an American. That is a very simple, non confrontational, non, you know, like this should be obvious. Americans don't resolve differences by beating each other up in the street. We're not a third world hellhole. And yet the Democrats are like, no, these are mostly peaceful demonstrations and freedom of speech means that you have to support people walking around with Hamas banners and beating Jewish students. And when they do, they become civil rights heroes like Mahmoud Khalil, who every single Democrat, from the judge that released him to all the Democrat political machine are now celebrating as their kind of poster child. That's what they bought, that's what they want. That's their vision for America.
- [57:36]
D
You know, in connecting Obama to the current moment. And looking back how, looking back at how far this has come and advanced, it occurred to me, remember the Rashid Khalidi tape? During Obama's first run for president, there was a videotaped toast that he gave to Rashid Khalidi, who is a Palestinian pro Palestinian academic,
- [58:13]
A
not a pro Palestinian academic, a former official of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
- [58:18]
D
Yes, yes.
- [58:19]
C
And
- [58:23]
D
in the speech supposedly, because I'll get to that, the speech supposedly shows Obama being more overtly and aggressively anti Israel and, you know, pro radical line than he ever had been publicly. So what happens? In a foretaste of the kind of media Democratic Party collusion that we saw throughout the Biden and Trump years, the LA Times gets the tape and refuses to release it. Which is still an extraordinary outrage to me. It's still, I believe, somewhere in a vault in the, in the LA Times, I don't know. Because it would be too damaging for Obama. And what has occurred to me now is today they would, that they wouldn't. There would be no need to hide it. There would be no need to bury it. Right. He's going to say anything that surpasses
- [59:30]
C
what we've heard a Today they run it with, I endorse this message.
- [59:35]
D
Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Right.
- [59:39]
A
Before we go, I just want to point out that this is the sixth anniversary of the most remarkable slide in the history of television news. I found this on my own Facebook page. I had forgotten it, but because it was a landmark moment, and this was a landmark moment in understanding that in the wake of the coronavirus that we had somehow transmuted the United States into some version of Animal Farm. Here is the slide. Remember, this is a week after the George Floyd killing. Updated stay at home order in Contra Costa county in California. Here's what you are allowed to do or you can't do. Social outdoor gatherings of up to 12 people permitted. Protests of up to 100 people permitted. So you can have an outdoor gathering of 12. If it's not political. If it's political, you can have 100 people. You can have eight times the number of people because it's a protest. And somehow protests don't spread. Covid this moment, when it was determined by public health officials across the country and by others that it was so important to express your outrage about what had happened to George Floyd, that the once in a century epidemic that was going to kill us all and had forced the closings of businesses and schools and made it so that people were not allowed to visit their elderly parents in nursing homes, or that a pregnant woman giving birth couldn't even have her husband in the delivery room or things like that. That those rules would be suspended if the political needs of the left required them to be suspended. And I still think that in this world of moments where the fault lines in the way that people think about or people where people exist, that slide on June 5, 2020, represented that fault line. Or this hinge moment where people like us said, all right, this is war. We get it. You are waging war on ordinary American life, and you have 10,000 different reasons to do it. And you're going to continue doing it. You're going to keep schools closed for the teachers and not because you're concerned about the students. You're gonna be Andrew Cuomo, and you're gonna determine that bars can have 25% occupancy, but not 35% occupancy, because you can, because you're hungry to do so. You are the head of the cdc, and you are going to change rent law in the United States, nationally, as a state of emergency. You are going to void contract. You are going to void the contracts in a violation of the Magna Carta, which established the principle of contract. You are going to void contracts in order to make sure that people don't have to move, because that's how you think things should be. And I just think that there are two kinds of people now in America, there are those who said, oh no. And there are those who said, you're bad if you don't go along. You are wrong. And we all felt that. We all felt the pressure of it. Even those of us who knew that it was wrong were a little scared to say things like, Jai Bhattacharya was right about this spread of COVID We didn't want to get into trouble. We didn't want our neighbors to hit us. We didn't want our families to stay. I don't want to see you anymore, or whatever. That's how powerful the cultural messaging was. But nonetheless, here we are. And that is another version of this fault line we're living here saying. The America that I think of as America could never possibly have nominated Adam Hamawi in New Jersey's 12th district. You know, who lived in New Jersey's 12th district, as Guy Benson pointed out? Todd Beamer. Todd Beamer, the hero of Flight 93, the one who said, let's roll. The one who said, the one who stormed the cockpit. His grave is in Adam Hamaoui's district. Where is Todd Beamer? Why isn't the spirit of Todd Beamer what Governs in New Jersey 12 and not the spirit of Blind Shake admirer Adam Hamawi, who probably in theory then was delighted to watch as the towers went down and as Flight 93. Had Flight 93 reached its target, he would have celebrated whatever that target was. Was it the White House? Was it the Capitol Building? We don't know where it was headed. So I thought it was an interesting moment to commemorate today. Leah Libavitz, Everybody again. Go to the New York Post and find Leel's piece Today's Jew Hating Today. Behind today's radical Jew hating Democratic Party is a monster created by Barack Obama. You can of course follow Leal at tablet, wherever your fine websites and magazines are sold. It's always a pleasure to have you on. What a pleasure. It will be back on Monday. So for Abe and Seth and John Pothor, it's keep the candle burning.