Pyrrhic Victories

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Commentary Magazine Podcast – "Pyrrhic Victories"

Date: August 6, 2026
Host: Jon Podhoretz
Main Theme: The intersection of radical leftism, Islamism, American political identity, and the 2026 Michigan Senate race—exploring how radical politics have taken root in elite institutions, where American political culture stands 25 years after 9/11, and what the rise of figures like Abdul El-Sayed signifies.

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Episode Overview

This episode is a sharp, freewheeling discussion among Jon Podhoretz, Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, Mike Rogers, and guest Noah Rothman. The conversation centers on the political and cultural significance of the Michigan Senate race, the normalization of anti-American and anti-Western sentiment in American political discourse, and the consequences of elite institutional capture by ideologically driven radicals. The hosts repeatedly return to the question of whether America’s “victory” over jihadist terror has created complacency and opened space for internal ideological threats, especially in the political mainstream.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Michigan Senate Race as a Symbolic Battleground

• Abdul El-Sayed’s Candidacy: The hosts dissect the rise of Abdul El-Sayed, described as an “Islamist psychotic” and radical leftist, as the Democratic Senate nominee. They see his candidacy as a Rubicon in American politics where explicit anti-Americanism is no longer fringe but a live option for high office.
  • “This is no joke. This is all the marbles. This is the entry of explicit anti-Americanism into American politics at the highest level that it has ever been.” – Mike Rogers [21:12]
• How Should Republicans Respond?
  • Debate over whether to attack El-Sayed as a “communist” or focus on his jihadist sympathies.
  • Discussion of the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, balancing a focus on Michigan-specific issues versus national security and ideological extremism.

2. The Paradox of Victory: Terrorism & Cultural Amnesia

• “Victims of Their Own Success”:
  • America’s success in preventing another 9/11-scale terror attack has—ironically—hastened the forgetting of why vigilance mattered, giving space to anti-Western radicals to make headway.
  • “What if we so convincingly won the war on terror… that the space is cleared for people who don’t remember [9/11] or had no impact from it... they now have the luxury of imagining that the world of the Islamic radical is not anything they need to worry about.” – Jon Podhoretz [06:12]
• Cycle of Complacency:
  • “We could take our eye off the ball now. But the bad news is that when we take our eye off the ball, we're going to have… something in the future to remind us why you can't get complacent.” – Abe Greenwald [08:53]

3. Radicalism, Academia, and the Red-Green Alliance

• Rise of Institutional Radicalism:
  • How Middle Eastern studies departments and other academic programs have become “marinators” of anti-Western views, often funded or influenced by foreign (Gulf) actors.
  • “We are here 25 years after 9/11… 22, 23 years into this experiment in Islamic radical institution building inside the U.S. And it’s been way more successful than anybody would ever have thought.” – Mike Rogers [13:14]
• Manifestos and Viral Radicals:
  • The periodic recirculation of Osama Bin Laden and Ted Kaczynski manifestos among disaffected youth, enabled by online echo chambers.
  • “Radicals are radicals… The Unabomber's manifesto could very easily be published today in the pages of Jacobin…” – Mike Rogers [15:58]
• Blurred Ideological Lines:
  • The confluence of Marxist-Leninist (PFLP) and Islamist actors—once rivals—has produced a hybrid radicalism palatable to American leftwing activists, especially on campus.
  • “The threat is worse than it looks… There is an alliance of people who are very much alike and have more common ground than people seem to realize.” – Abe Greenwald [52:05]

4. Political Strategy, Labels, and Diminishing Returns

• Dangers of Over-defining the Opponent:
  • "When you make the entire race and the entire issue about the dangerous threat posed by the other person, it actually has a weird kind of diminishing returns effect… The other person gains notoriety." – Seth Mandel [32:05]
  • Need for candidates to articulate their own vision, lest they just reinforce the radical’s profile.
• El-Sayed’s Self-Image and Party Dynamics:
  • Noted for megalomania, self-congratulation, and biting attacks on moderates.
  • “Democrats really should be afraid of what I mean for their system of politics when I say I'm coming for it. I'm coming for all of it.” (El-Sayed, quoted by Podhoretz [35:52])
  • Democratic establishment nervousness: “This guy is introducing anti-American sentiment. We can’t stand with him." [35:52]

5. The American Political Imagination: Fantasies vs. Reality

• Cosplaying Revolutionaries:
  • How American elites indulge revolutionary fantasies without truly wanting to live under the regimes (Islamist or socialist) they claim solidarity with.
  • “They think that what they’re going to do is live like they live in Detroit, only in Ramallah. Guess what? You don’t get to be free in Ramallah.” – Mike Rogers [62:21]
• Enlightenment Values Taken for Granted:
  • “Everybody in America thinks that… they would still get to be Americans… They just think they can sort of extricate, go somewhere. Just like… the Paleocons who believe the Enlightenment was a mistake, as they take the medications made possible by the Enlightenment…” – Mike Rogers [65:36]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the cyclical nature of complacency and threat:
  “Victim of their own success… The good news is we could take our eye off the ball. The bad news is something in the future reminds us why you can't get complacent.” – Abe Greenwald [08:53]

• On radical manifestos reemerging online:
  “Osama Bin Laden's document comes back… every five years Ted Kaczynski's manifesto comes back. The Unabomber's manifesto… could be published today in Jacobin or at Columbia University Press.” – Mike Rogers [15:58]

• On labels and campaign messaging:
  “The real thing to do is to go to the people of Michigan and say, do you want this guy… who will not say that an effort to commit a terrorist assault on preschoolers at a synagogue… was wrong?” – Mike Rogers [21:12]

• On Abdul El-Sayed’s own declared intentions:
  “Democrats really should be afraid of what I mean for their system of politics when I say I'm coming for it, I'm coming for all of it.” – Quoted by Podhoretz from Time (May 2026) [35:52]

• On radical chic and revolutionary playacting:
  “This is a rich person thing… Working class people don't want to go to Cuba or Russia… The rich people… think they can buy their way out of trouble.” – Jon Podhoretz [64:43]

• On American innocence and fantasy:
  “There's a degree to which everybody takes America for granted… it's just a backstop. It's always going to be there. And that's not necessarily true.” – Jon Podhoretz [73:20]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:00–02:11] – Setting the Stage: The darkness of the current political moment and the “crazy” candidates.
• [05:26–08:53] – Is America a victim of its own anti-terror success?
• [10:31–15:56] – The spread of radical ideas and academic institutional capture since 9/11.
• [16:43–19:13] – Why radical manifestos keep coming back; academic radicalism and its connection to real-world violence.
• [21:12–28:05] – How should the GOP campaign against El-Sayed? Ideology, jobs, and messaging strategy.
• [31:44–35:52] – The risk of over-boosting your opponent by focusing too much on their extremism; El-Sayed's PR instincts.
• [40:12–44:31] – El-Sayed's self-definition versus actual economic ideas: “I’m a capitalist who reads about capitalism.”
• [49:37–56:29] – Probing the challenge of aligning far-left Americans and Islamists; PFLP and Red-Green convergence.
• [62:21–67:16] – The fantasy of living elsewhere; the cosplaying element of American radicalism.
• [73:20–77:44] – What is America’s “vision” and can moderate candidates offer one?
• [79:07–83:33] – Polling errors, voting blocs, and what Michigan might signal about the broader electorate.

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Conclusion

"Pyrrhic Victories" is an urgent, skeptical assessment of the health of America's political identity, taking the Michigan Senate race as a microcosm of broader trends: the normalization of anti-Western radicalism; the risks of complacency bred by earlier victories; and the challenges mainstream candidates face in a political culture awash with performance, grievance, and ideological showmanship. The hosts call out the dangers of both underreacting and overreacting to radical candidates—and warn of the deeper cultural rot within elite institutions that makes such candidacies possible.

Final Words:
Despite the gloom and alarm, the hosts ultimately express a hope—however tentative—that an American commonsense majority might still exist and that the right vision could reknit the frayed consensus. Whether that hope is grounded or not is left open, with skepticism about polling and worry about elite-driven ideological tides.

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Recommended Reading:

• Noah Rothman’s “Blood and Progress” (discussed throughout)
• Jim Garrity's pieces on radicalism in holidays and American culture

Closing Thought:
"Keep the candle burning." – Jon Podhoretz

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For listeners who missed the episode:
This summary should provide a rich, structured sense of the key themes, arguments, personalities, and memorable moments in the discussion—anchoring it both in the immediate context of the 2026 midterms and in the longer arc of American political and cultural battles since 9/11.

Transcript

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Foreign.

[Mike Rogers]

Champion, pain.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Some die of thirst.

[Mike Rogers]

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 Thursday, August 6th. I am Jon Pod Horticz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[Mike Rogers]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[Mike Rogers]

And joining us today, the originator of the Commentary Magazine podcast now, senior editor at National Review, and of course, the author of the very important book Blood and Progress, which, if you are watching on YouTube, you will see behind his left shoulder, Noah Rothman. Noah, welcome back.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Thanks for having me, John.

[Mike Rogers]

You should really be thanking me for having. Because it's such a wonderful day. We have so much to be thankful for. We have an Islamist psychotic as the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan. We have Donald Trump wandering around looking for somebody to surrender to in the Iran war. And Iran seems to be refusing, refusing to allow him to do so unless the terms of his surrender get ever more humiliating for him. And I don't know, the Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and the Democratic Party, I guess, who will. I guess that's next week, is the Wisconsin primary is so crazy that even Bernie Sanders thinks she's too crazy. That is how crazy Francesca Hong is. It's not even just that she thinks that Thanksgiving is evil and that

[James Patterson]

her

[Mike Rogers]

own child means that she is in the vicinity of or in relation to whiteness because she's apparently married to a non Asian white person, so her son carries some kind of a disease, maybe that she needs to be separate from.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Okay, you're not even. I mean, you say crazy like it's kind of a metaphor or a literary device. Yeah, I think she's unbalanced. I made a joke yesterday on Twitter. I don't joke on Twitter very often. It's an unrewarding thing to do. But I tried.

[James Patterson]

What?

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Maybe Francesca's favorite holiday is Thanksgiving because now she's doing damage control, which is exactly where you want to be doing damage control around your denunciation of the universally beloved holiday. But she's like, it's actually my favorite holiday. So I was like, well, maybe it is. Everything's relative, right? She could just hate all holidays. Ha ha. It's not a joke. My colleague Jim Garrity had a fantastic piece where she's going through Francesca Hong's thoughts on holidays, and she hates them all. She hates July 4th. She doesn't like fireworks. She hates Halloween. She doesn't like the costumes. She's not a fan of Christmas, for obvious reasons, although she likes Kwanzaa, and of course, she can't stand Thanksgiving. She is one of these caricatures of the. Of a class of people in the United States. There are probably 400 of them at most, but they're all very literary, they're all in academia and they've been denouncing holidays. I wrote a whole chapter on it in my last book, Rise of the New Puritans, where they hate every holiday because it just distracts you from the great progressive project, which compels you, by the way, to be miserable at all times and in all hours of the day because somebody somewhere might be experiencing oppression, persecution, what have you. Even if it's all imaginary, these people do exist, but they're infinitesimally small as a constituency, and they all seem to be represented in Francesca Francheska Hong's head.

[Seth Mandel]

But where does she stand on non Western holidays? You know?

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Well, Quanza, she's a big fan of, I would think so presumably the ultimate

[Mike Rogers]

Western holiday invented in New Jersey. So I don't think.

[Matt Ebert]

Right.

[Mike Rogers]

Well, somehow.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

So it's, it's very American in some way.

[James Patterson]

Yeah.

[Mike Rogers]

Okay, so I'm just saying that things are not, not, not good right now, and I don't want to just sit here and sort of like luxuriate in the awfulness of the current political moment. So what is it that we can maybe pull out together here as a group therapy session? What is it that we can try to find in this August 6, 2026 morning, on this morning that gives us a ray of hope for at least? I mean, it can be short term, it can be long term. What is our ray of hope? Noah, you seem to have a. I'll give a proposition.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

I'll give a proposition. It's delusional, but the instinct is right. I've read at least two pieces and multiple tweets from unnamed people in the orbit of Democratic establishmentarians who thinks this whole thing could be sewn up in Michigan if El Sayed denounces Hasan Piker, which is not going to happen, he said as much explicitly, unless he experiences extreme duress over the course of the next few years, few weeks, and the polling collapses for him. Not gonna happen. But at least you have some Democrats who are willing to entertain the notion that most Americans did not like 9 11. That's what I got for you.

[Mike Rogers]

I mean, I don't wanna call that the lowest possible bar in human history, but, you know, if that is something that's supposed to make me, you know, cheer Up. I could be cheered up 10 times a day, you know, by things like that. It is an interesting aspect of everything we're talking about here that we are 35 or 36 days out from the 25th anniversary of 9 11. And, oh, here's something we can talk about that actually dovetails with the COVID story that will be in the September issue of Commentary, available late next week online, I think, which is, what if we so convincingly won the war on terror? Because we have had no major terrorist act on American soil since 9 11. I mean, we've had incidents, the Pulse shooting and all that, but not a grand assault. Sort of the big one of some sort of. And as a result, this has cleared the room a generation later for people who don't remember it or had no impact from it because they're under the age of, let's say, 30, and they may dimly remember it from being 4 years old or they don't remember it at all, and they're 24 or younger. And that they now have the luxury of imagining that the world of the Islamic radical is not anything that they need to worry about because the country, in fact, protected them from the threat. We feel like we don't protect them enough. But all that stuff that everybody made fun of, security theater at airports, the tsa, you know, taking off your shoes, I don't care what we going at them at the source, in isis, in Libya, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, that we effectively did win the war on terror, and our victory is now giving space to people who seem to want to empower people who actually kind of supported what happened on 9 11. Because what happened on 911 is science fictional or some past history to them. That's my proposition.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, this is the old victim of their own success thing, right? I mean, years ago, Charles Lane wrote a great column about this, which was basically making the argument that Republicans were, at the time, Republicans were losing because they had won the argument over crime. And that meant implementing policies that reduced crime, and that meant that all these things were safer than they would have otherwise been. And people just weren't generally as worried, not just about crime, but they. They weren't quite as worried about, you know, illegal immigrants in their cities, let's say, or they weren't quite as worried about this or that. And so they had been a victim of their own success. So that's, that's the. But that's what makes it cyclical. Because really, you know, you could say the good news is that we, we could take our eye off the ball now. But the bad news is that when we take our eye off the ball, we're going to have, you know, something in the future to remind us of why, you know, you, you can't get complacent. So it's, it's a, I think it's a cycle in that sense.

[Mike Rogers]

I think, I mean, go ahead.

[Seth Mandel]

You know, and I've written about this. I think we're a victim of our own success in the war on terror in more ways than one. In that because we closed down essentially spectacular terrorist attacks as an avenue, the Islamists took to invading politics and advancing their cause in that way.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

I mean, right after 9 11, I was a sophomore in college in 9 11, very interested in geopolitics. And when that happened I, you know, I took courses that were geared towards addressing it and that's, you know, read the, the Islamic Bible, whatever, the Quran, and was exposed to Sayadian thought Edward Said in this, in this lecture about, you know, why 911 happened. Embedded within it was my very Saidian professor's assumptions that the United States deserved it. But he didn't dwell on OBL's logic, which was the United States kicked out Saddam Hussein in Kuwait and then by invitation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had a presence there. That was OBL's logic, which was crazy. And nobody signed onto that. It was, you know, a grand orientalist thesis around the West's abusives of the Arab body, et cetera, so forth. But now Osama bin Laden's logic is being accepted in total. Milad Kiros in Colorado all but endorsed it. Edward Said will not denounce it. And it seems like those are the only people who are willing to give voice to this sentiment. But I bet you it has broader purchase.

[Mike Rogers]

Not Edward Said. You mean Abdul Al Said.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Abdul Al Said, sorry, Edward Said the academic? Abdul Said the Senate.

[Mike Rogers]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's very true. And indeed our response, the anti jihadist response is also to quote Osama bin Laden in a weird way, which is to say the argument that he said that America, that what's important in the world is to be the stronger horse and that America had become the weaker horse and was therefore exposed, uniquely exposed to being hit by the spectacular attack, the weirdness, I think. And Abe, your idea that they moved into politics. The thing about that, of course is that that would not have been possible without the infrastructure, the academic infrastructure that was built to educate, marinate people in the acceptability of these views in the American elites and to educate them in not only Ideas of social justice and the virtues therefore of socialism and the evils of late capitalism, all of which are part and parcel of what makes the DSA manifesto on the economy so attractive to so many younger people. But also the rise of these departments at colleges across the country of, you know, East Asian, Asian Studies, South Asian, you know, Middle Eastern Studies, Arab Studies, all of that. And a great deal of that was exogenous. A great deal of that was being paid for by, by forces outside of the United States, by gutter and other rich actors. And these universities were being tempted and successfully tempted into bringing into their folds as students all of these full freight paying kids of the Arab and Islamic elite who then also populated campuses and spread their ideas around. And we are here 25 years after 9, 11, by kind of 22, 23 years into this experiment in institution, Islamic radical institution building inside the United States. And it's been way more successful than anybody would ever have thought.

[Seth Mandel]

I agree. I don't like to use the term perfect storm because I'm tempted to use it in every discussion because there's so many streams that contribute to our woes at once here, particularly on this. But you've also got the emboldening of a bunch of NGOs and activist networks domestically and internationally that got involved in this, that also receive foreign money. And you've got the online information warfare at the same time, which really sort of seems to have taught one generation of Americans everything that they know about Islamism, which is not much. I mean, when you know about Osama Bin Laden's manifesto, recall when was this?

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Might have been 20, 23 years ago at most.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah, when, when there was this viral TikTok moment of a bunch of, you know, 22 year olds saying, wow, you gotta read, you gotta read bin Laden's manifesto.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Turns out the first clue that that was all false is that they read anything.

[Seth Mandel]

Right?

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Read things.

[Mike Rogers]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

But that doesn't mean it wasn't an effective campaign.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Yes, it was very effective.

[Mike Rogers]

I mean, radicals are radicals, right? So Osama Bin Laden's document comes back and people are like, that's sort of interesting. The same way every five years Ted Kaczynski's manifesto comes back. And Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, the Unabomber's manifesto, is a highly literate example of an argument against capitalism and modernity and the evils and dangers of our technocratic society. So much so that it could very easily be published today in the pages of Jacobin or in some eco sustainable publication or at Columbia University.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Press or at American Conservative. I mean, this isn't limited to the.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, the thing about the Kaczynski thing is that that it very closely mirrors the exact discussion that we're having right now in America with the left, which is, you know, the Unabomber's manifesto, as you say, highly literate. It is actually interesting to read because of what he was, right? I mean, it's not. It's not itself some kind of massively profound thing, but it's interesting to read a serial killer killer, a, you know, attempting to. To be a sort of intellectual sitting in the woods and whatever. But the. What follows from what he says, right? There's, like, part one and part two. There's like, all this stuff you could read. You're reading along for a few pages, and you're like, yeah, you know, we are too. Too much about computers and modernity and I don't know, are we losing the common touch and blah, blah, blah, you know, and then eventually it gets to blowing people up. And today that's the. That's the direct line that we keep having this conversation. It's like when somebody said, what did. What did y' all think decolonization meant? You know, vibes papers. October 7th was the announcement of the academic. The. The. The fulfillment of the academic movement toward that thing. It wasn't like there wasn't an abstract academic movement about decolonialism. And then there was this thing that happened that was somehow connected to it. There was a movement toward an academic movement toward October 7th. And that's really why Ted Kaczynski is so relevant now, because now we're skipping this middle part where people pretend that it's not about violence. And you get to this, like. And again, you know, go back to Ro Khanna on the drop site podcast, right? They were saying it's, you know, as. As Abe said in his newsletter that day, if you believe what Ro Khanna believes about what Israel is doing and what's supposedly happening to the Palestinians in Gaza, why wouldn't you support, you know, a sneak attack on an IDF base three miles from Gaza or whatever? And then from there, maybe a few miles inward, and then from there doesn't have to really be an IDF base, does it, because there's universal conscription in Israel. So when you think about it, everybody goes to the Yama. This is the. This is the snow rolling downhill.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

So here's what I wonder to your point, Seth, and to John's about this, how this all gets kind of muddled in this undifferentiated radicalism in the radical mind. You know, we reviewed the revolutionists, this Jason Burke book for commentary and he details in the 20th century how the radicals who were sort of committed a little bit to Marxist Leninist, but not really just, you know, 100% because they eventually evolved into pan Arab nationalists and straight up Islamists with the Red Green alliance, that they were attracted to radicalism, anti Western radicalism and violence more than they were strict Marxist Leninism as interpreted by the Cuban revolutionaries. So you have this. El Said's a true believer, right? He's definitely agreeing. But the broader audience for this, maybe they just see it as generally anti Westernism because the DSA's platform is explicitly anti Enlightenment. It wants to do away with the separation of powers. And that is a function functionally. What it advocates when it says do away with the Supreme Court, do away with the Senate, make the presidency a head honcho. Was this video where they talked about. We'll just call it a hedgehon show. I would submit, General Secretary. What they were after is some sort of new conception of the American, of the, of the Western ideal that endorses the West's critics of it. Which is why I have written what I wrote about the Michigan race, that it's no longer about politics. It's no longer about tax rates or health insurance or the enforcement of federal immigration law. It is about. It is a referendum, a straight up referendum, up or down, about whether the West's critics are right, about whether the American experiment is flawed, irredeemably so, and that the Enlightenment ideals that are enshrined in our founding documents need to be done away with so that we can realize a more communitarian conception of the human condition. A much more social justice fueled idea of what the optimal theory of social organization is, which is incompatible with our present system.

[Mike Rogers]

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[Jon Pod Horticz]

Well, he is, but he says it's a function of Israeli violence. In his mind, it's justified by virtue of Israel's campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah.

[Mike Rogers]

Okay.

[James Patterson]

So

[Mike Rogers]

I'm worried that they're going to go at this in the wrong way. And on the other hand, then there's the other way that they could go, which is he wants to talk about Israel, he wants to talk about this, he wants to talk about that. I'm going to talk about jobs. I'm going to talk about our, you know, America's critical position in the world, the need to replenish our military stocks, the things that Mike Rogers actually knows as a former congressman, FBI agent, veteran of the US Military, a person who I think was on the Armed Services Committee in the House. And so he knows his stuff. Does he go, he's airy, fairy, pie in the sky, blah, blah, blah. And I'm here on the ground to be a representative of the people of Michigan, which I think is probably the right way to run in the sense that it's like he's crazy and I'm not. So all the Republicans are going to vote for me anyway, and we just need Some independence to cross over for us to get to cross the finish line. And so running a less ideological campaign against him might be wiser or not, because maybe the fight is too important and that it's important that it be fought on the basis of who El Sayed is and why he poses such a particular danger. And I don't know, you know, because

[Abe Greenwald]

if the end, well, you can do that danger without calling him a communist is the like. I think that your instincts were right about, you know, communists being too vulgar. But I think that, you know, Mike Rogers has already started workshopping lines like, Abdul Al Said cares about Palestine, I care about Michigan, and stuff like that. It's a version of. Obviously, it's not nearly as clever for reasons, but it sounds a bit like the I'm for you, she's for they them type of formulation. And the thing about El Sayed is that he very brilliantly turned this on its head against Haley Stevens, right? He said, she cares about Israel. You know, she's for Israel. There were trucks the day of the election going around Detroit, say, that had giant signs on them that said, Stevens equals Israel's future. El Sayed equals Michigan's future. Right. That was the thing. But he was the one talking constantly about Israel. Haley Stevens never brought it up. She never brought up Israel. And she very rarely brought up anti Semitism, usually only in response to something he had said. Like, by the end, she was saying, you need to stop scapegoating Jews because it's. It's ridiculous. But she never brought it up. She never talked about the conflict. She was like, I'm going to diners, I'm going to factories. I'm going to churches, I'm going to community centers. I'm with the people. And he's a podcaster with a national campaign. And. And despite that, El Sayed, you have to give it to him. He was able to brand the race in some way as she being, you know, a sort of cat's paw of a foreign power or whatever. He was able to just by repeating it over and over again to make people think it was true. And I think you have to start against him and Mike Rogers, you have to start by turning that on him. You have to. You. You cannot let him begin to establish a narrative of the race, because when he does that, he has this echo chamber and he has this, you know, this sort of natural propaganda echo chamber that is going to make it louder than whatever you say. So I think that's a good start that Rogers has to start by Flipping that around and being like, all this guy talks about is Gaza and Palestine and whatever. And we've got all this work to do in Michigan. And that is not disconnected from talking about the stakes and who El Sayed really is. Because once you bring that around, you know, when you say, let's say you take these two candidates, Haley Stevens and Abdul El Sayed, and you say, this guy's for, you know, on this side of a foreign conflict, and she's on this side of a foreign conflict. Well, her side technically was Israel, America's ally. Right. His side is Hamas. I'm not saying he's Hamas. I'm saying if you frame. I mean. Right. But if you frame the. If you frame. If you remind people, you know, what's on the other side of Israel. He says she cares about Israel. What's Israel facing? What is he running interference for? It's Hamas. And I think that that is a way that you can connect.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Why can't you do both? I don't know. I don't know why they're mutually exclusive. Maybe the communist jihadist talk is too hot for the candidate. But typically, you outsource those attacks to surrogates. They do the hot stuff, you do the cool stuff. And while they're saying, he's a communist, he's not focused on your issues. He's saying, these are the issues I'm focused on, which are your issues as well.

[Mike Rogers]

But, you know, fair enough.

[Seth Mandel]

Can I say something? There's another risk in this, in that we've seen it on both sides. We saw it with Trump's opponents. We continue to see with Trump's opponents. When you make the entire race and the entire issue about the dangerous threat posed by the other person, it actually has a weird kind of diminishing returns effect. Instead of you defining who you are, the other person gains notoriety, which is. Turns out, even if it's bad, it turns out not to necessarily hurt them. They become the topic. And all you are known as is sort of part of the attack on the main event. The other person becomes the main event. And so you've got to be really careful about elevating the other person's dangers as the number one problem. It's not fair. Even if they are. Even if that is the real problem. But you see this all the time. I mean, you know, Democrats talking about nothing but the threat against Trump, the threat against Trump, the threat against Trump. It's very tune out able at a certain point.

[Mike Rogers]

Look, all of these are very, very fair points, and I don't think that running against El Sayed by saying he is, you know, he's too dangerous to be in the Senate, you know, then it's like, oh, so to whom does he pose a threat to corporations, you know, that are, you know, that are monopolizing or to, you know, to energy company, whatever, you know, he, yeah, he poses the threat. He poses the threat to the establishment. And so if you want an anti establishment candidate and not somebody from the swamp like Mike Rogers, you can vote for Abdul El Sayed. So it is, I think, a problem, a danger to give him that kind of space to say, they're scared of me and they should be because it's their system that has led to the current terrible conditions that 70% of you think means that America's on the wrong track. I think that watching him over the last five days, both before the election and after, he is a larger target of opportunity. We can now, we can acknowledge that he is a serious political talent. He climbed this greasy poll. He managed to sort of worm his way between these two more plausible candidates for Senate, McMorrow and Stevens. He leveraged various things together that individually would not have been sufficient to get him to where he got, but leverage them. So he's good. He's good, he's strong. There is something very, very unattractive about him. Now, granted, there's something very unattractive about Trump and he nonetheless won. It's a national election. It's a different set of circumstances, very binary. Right. There's something about the guy. He took a victory lap before he won. He acted as though he was already in a position to start talking about how he was going to dictate the future of the Democratic Party before anyone had even cast a vote for him yet. And he kind of took a victory.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

I came across this quote. I don't even interrupt you, but to illustrate this quote, which was from May in Time magazine, in an interview with Time magazine, quote, democrats really should be afraid of what I mean for their system of politics when I say I'm coming for it, I'm coming for all of it. Which is part of the reason why you had Michigan Democrats, including Hilary Schloten, coming out and saying, this guy is introducing anti American sentiment. We can't stand with him. Which is extraordinary in an age of hyper partisanship like ours.

[Mike Rogers]

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[James Patterson]

we will

[Mike Rogers]

like America when it no longer has these institutions that get in the way of a kind of fiat effort to level American society and level incomes and level corporations and level everything. And classically, as Noah indicated, that is all done not by having a system of checks and balances that makes legislation hard to pass and makes change very slow. It is that you have a strong man at the top who waves his hand and wipes away and waves away things and destroys things. That's why it's an interesting thing to see what EL Sayed himself said about capitalism. Remember one of his shticklach as we say is that he says he's not a socialist, he's a capitalist. But here is how he describes his capitalism. He said he asked in May also why haven't you joined the democratic socialists? He says too much of a scientist I guess. I'm a capitalist who reads about capitalism. And when you read about capitalism it's very clear even to the originators who coined the idea that the biggest risk to capitalism was not going to be government regulation as much as the corporatists want you to think it is. It was always going to be monopoly. And we know that hyper capitalism tends toward monopoly. We also understand that that happens in part because when a corporation gets big enough, it has enough power to start rent seeking, which is a fancy way of saying influencing government action to protect its own interest. And that's the place we are right now.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

That's a contradiction. The sentence contradicts itself.

[Mike Rogers]

Explain why?

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Because capitalism does not proceed towards monopoly. Capitalism proceeds towards competition. And you have to appeal to the public sector to intervene in order to raise barriers to entry into your field to artificially make it harder for competition to enter into the system.

[Mike Rogers]

Right. Rent seeking is how you deal with capitalism's. Inherent nature, which is that you rent seek by trying to get rules written that interfere with the free flow of a capitalist economy.

[Abe Greenwald]

Not just that, but when you, when you, when you, when you introduce rules that seem self limiting, that are really about limiting competition. That's the other thing, right? Like the stuff that these guys like to do and they like to. The regulations that they like to do to keep capitalism in check is those they themselves raise barriers to entry, right? If you say you like when, when we had the, the whole trans fats thing, an Oreo, Oreos, Hydrax, whoever the owner of Oreos was at the time was like that, this is great because they had the R D money to create a cookie that tasted the same way without trans fat. They'll use a different kind of fat. Or whatever they had got, they got, they were like the bell Labs of cookies. You know, they got Nobel prize winning labs that are like, you know, chem, a chemist's stream. Who couldn't do that? Literally everyone else, nobody had, nobody had the money to like tear up their rest their cookie recipe and remake their entire product line. And it's the same thing with it. You could say that with them. I'm just using the cookies as an example. You could use that literally with anything. You introduce these regulations and whenever you see these companies who like the regulations, you know, like Facebook is. When Facebook, you know, signs on to anything that, that seems to limit social media, better read the fine print because most likely it's the sort of thing that will, that will pull up the ladder behind Facebook. I'm not trying to make them or Oreos or anybody evil. I'm just saying the guy at the top, he's the one who is most threatened by the free market and the, and the regulations that you come in to say to keep the market in check and protect the consumer, they end up not protecting the consumer, they end up doing the opposite because they end up pulling the ladder up behind this one company. And that my friends, is how you get to effective monopolies or at least one way to get to effective monopolies, right?

[Mike Rogers]

So he wants to call himself a capitalist when he is in fact an anti capitalist. Even his description of it, which is the people who came up with the idea of capitalism. Capitalism is not an idea, it's not an ideology. Capitalism is an explanation of human interaction in the economic sphere.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

It's like saying Isaac Newton invented gravity, right?

[Mike Rogers]

I mean it is an effort to illuminate what happens when people come together to buy and sell goods and Then whatever flows from that. Adam Smith was not a philosopher. He was a philosopher, but he was not creating a philosophical system. He was attempting to describe an almost right scientific process of human interaction. What these guys think is that either capitalism is evil or capitalism fantastic, let's use the same tools that capitalists use to create socialist outcomes. Now why am I bringing this? He is a very target rich opportunity in part because of unattractive personal qualities. That's why I brought up the five days of taking victory laps saying extremely insulting things about Haley Stevens intelligence. And then after he wins, sort of getting this unity coalition to endorse him the day after he went and acting as though this is just his, it's his right and their kowtowing to him is his right. And I think that it matters what people are like. And sometimes if you're a Trump, you say it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken. I'm a brute because the system is brutal and I know how to be a brute for you and how to be corrupt for you. Essentially having had to do this myself to get to be pro, you know, to make money and become famous and all of that. But Abdul Al Sayed doesn't have any such thing to offer his voters or his potential voters. He's going to be one of a hundred senators now. He can say, I'm going to change America, change the Democratic Party, put Fetterman's head on a spike, destroyed Chuck Schumer, change everything. And therefore he's a dangerous type. But his self congratulatory and megalomaniacal qualities are not, I think, gonna serve him well. He's gonna stumble into thickets of his own devising. And just because Haley Stevens was too chicken, because she was too afraid of the Michigan radical Democratic electorate to exploit his weaknesses, she thought she would just stay quiet so they wouldn't get mad at her and she could kind of sneak in. And I guess she almost did. But Mike Rogers is gonna have absolutely no such compunction, nor will the outside groups that are gonna spend tens of millions of dollars to try to defeat El Sayed. So I think he's a weaker candidate than people seem to think, but not for the reason that, you know, oh, you know, the electorate is more moderate. It's more that he's obnoxious. He has a. He has a. He has a. He spikes footballs before it's time to spike them. And people like that, fate is not often kind to them.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

That's why I don't think you can abandon, I mean you got to be clever with it. And probably the surrogate strategy is best. But I don't think you can beg off the whole Red Green alliance thing to which he's beholden, because he is a true believer, and he will, when pushed, defend his views. Benji Sarlin over at Semaphore had a smart observation. I think it was 2016, maybe not the 2020 cycle. I think it was 2016 when Bernie Sanders ran, and he was doing quite well. And it was getting close to the point where the party had to, like, make or break. And the whole process was derailed for Bernie because he went on this incredible digression and continued to do so when he was pressed about Cuban social programs and Cuban health programs. And he just could not stop defending the Cuban communist model, which freaked out the democratic establishment. And, you know, that was the end of that story. So here. Yeah, it's like, prod him a little bit with the whole Hamas thing. Give him a little push on whether or not, you know, October 7th had some justification behind it. Or maybe, you know, the Beirut barracks bombing. You can see the justification for that if you really look hard at him.

[Seth Mandel]

Why?

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Why give him that kind of space? I mean, just make him defend his own views until he says, yeah, I ordered the code Red.

[Mike Rogers]

See, I think that is a better thing to go at than the communism thing. That's what I'm saying. What he is, is a jihadist. That's what he is. He is a jihadist. He is a. He is a. Or jihadist adjacent or a jihadist fellow traveler or whatever you want to call it. Maybe he is not himself the setter of bombs or the person who paid, you know, whatever, but he is intellectually a jihadist. And that is the thing. To go to the people of Michigan who are otherwise undecided on this, and

[Seth Mandel]

say,

[Mike Rogers]

here's what we're talking about here. We're not just talking about synagogues. We're talking about the Pulse nightclub. We're talking about the San Bernardino Christmas party. We're talking about any number, the Fort Fort McNair. Was it not Fort McNair?

[Jon Pod Horticz]

It was Fort Hood.

[Mike Rogers]

Fort Hood. We're talking about people in this country who live in this country who are homegrown, going at killing people and creating an atmosphere and a culture of violence. And he is sympathetic to them. Are you sympathetic to them? Because I, Mike Rogers, am not sympathetic to them. I want them to be arrested before they do anything bad. And I want them to. If they do something bad, I want them to rot in jail or get the death penalty, because this is America and this is not a place where we should have any truck with any of this kind of political violence. So, yeah, I think even politically going at that is important. Except now we get back to where I started, which is, is it too late? Did a quarter century of fighting the war on terror successfully domestically mean that threatening, making it clear that he lines up with the terrorists is less potent than it would have been? Certainly, I mean, we know it was less potent than it would have been 5, 10, 15 years ago, because nobody like him would ever have gotten anywhere near the, you know, 20% in a primary vote, particularly in a state like Michigan.

[Abe Greenwald]

Here's one of the challenges for that and why I don't, why I don't think the victims of their own success then can go on for too long. Because the red green alliance that we often talk about, Islamists and the far left, they are, I mean, Noah reviewed a book about this as, as he said earlier. But one of the things that I've been commenting on since October 7th is just how much how the, the PFLP and groups like it are everywhere. The Popular Front for the Liberation of

[Mike Rogers]

Palestine, which is a group far, it's the most left wing of the Palestinian irredentist, destroy Israel, the most terrorist group,

[Abe Greenwald]

it's fundamentally a Marxist Leninist organization. And so what you have is the threat is worse than it looks, which is going to wake people up. In other words, the threat is not that there's a convenient alliance of far leftists and Islamists who are nothing alike. The threat is that there is an alliance forming of people who are very much alike and have more common ground than people seem to realize. One of the reasons the PFLP is everywhere, especially on campus, is because it is that Marxist Leninists, you know, Palestinian nationalist group, it is, it does not force American leftists at university to defend a lot of the things that they don't like having to defend it. It doesn't come off as trying to create, you know, an Islamist superstate or it doesn't walk around saying, here's why you need Sharia law. It walks around saying, here's who needs to own, you know, the, the own and operate the, the methods of production and whatever. And here' leads to, you know, here's the role that class plays in this conflict. And on and on they speak their language. Not because they are adapting to what Columbia University kids say these days, but because Columbia University kids are saying what the PFLP has said for 60 years, right. This is. This is a key thing here, which is that there was an existing and powerful and fairly permanent, obviously, as they're still here, Marxist Leninist Palestinian national Movement and a sector of that movement. And because of the way that the movement is today, they are not at war with Hamas the way they would have been 40 or 50 or 60 years ago. Once upon a time, these groups fought for control of Palestinian nationalism. What happened after October 7th? The PFLP puts out a statement that says, we are with them. We are part of this. Anybody who's part of the PFLP is part of this struggle. And you know, we are. We are one. We, Hamas, whatever, are one. The PFLP took hostages. They participated in this. So, you know, we no longer have the fight within the Palestinian movement between the branches that you used to have. But. And so they. That has leaked into the pro Palestinian movement in the west, which is now much more comfortable, no matter with it, no matter where they stand on economic or cultural issues.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

You reminded me of another legacy of 911 that I was privy to when I was in, you know, that college course, that the left doesn't really believe that Islamism, radical Islamism and leftism are compatible. It's not that they're not familiar and they're not. They're not familiar with the Soviet origins of the PLO or the Soviet origins of Palestinian nationalism. They're not. They don't think that Islamist radicalism is anything other than a conservative project. Conservative, as those in the Middle east would understand it, traditionalist, anti Western, not internationalist, much more culturally insular. That they see that as conservative.

[Abe Greenwald]

The New York Times calls, calls groups like this ultra conservative. If you read the New York Times, you do. That's exactly right.

[Mike Rogers]

You know, in 1939, Winston Hugh Auden wrote his most famous and most notorious poem at the same time, September 1, 1939, about the outbreak of World War I, World War II. And it was a poem that he disowned later because ideologically he decided found it noxious once he thought through its implications, which is that he essentially blamed the war on the Treaty of Versailles. This is a longstanding idea that the Allies were too harsh on Germany and the reparations punishments were too severe. Through Germany into this economic turmoil for 10 years that turned out to be fertile ground for Hitler to rise up from and seek to national vengeance and to take over the world because of what had been done to it. And he wrote this line, which is, there is this thing that all schoolboys learn those to Whom evil is done do evil in return. This is in essence the philosophy of people who are apologists for Islamic terror against Israel, against American forces in the Middle east. Supporting Iran, like people like Max Blumenthal and others who are actually open to people. Hurt people, hurt people, hurt people was Abdul El Sayed's version of those to whom evil is done do evil in return. And if you think about it, why Auden disowned this line of his, this most famous thing he ever wrote, it's because it's evil to excuse evil on the grounds that the evil is blowback exists in response to evil doing. That's the real culprit here is to say that the west deserved the attacks from Nazi. That Poland deserved to be taken over by Nazi Germany, that Britain's. The bombing of London was okay because look at what they had done to Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. And here we are 25 years after the war on terror when it was understood that America had been hit in this unbelievable way, sitting there quietly on a beautiful day with absolutely no idea what was gonna happen to it. And what exactly was it that we had done in the previous 10, 15 years to deserve Osama Bin Laden's attack? We had defended and we had defended one Muslim country from the depredations of another Muslim country. We had defended Kuwait against Iraq. We had committed blood and treasure to securing the sovereignty of an Arab nation against the imperial ambitions of another Arab nation. And that was humiliating. The idea that Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, would welcome the intervention of an infidel power to help settle and arrange things properly in the Middle east was a bridge too far and therefore it was time to hit back. Was that an evil? Did we go into Kuwait for evil reasons? We went into Kuwait because a neighboring country had swallowed up Kuwait and we were the guarantors of the international order. And if such a thing is allowed, then other countries will feel free to swallow up other countries elsewhere, not just in the oil rich Middle East. They want us to think that. What they believe is that America deserves what it gets because of its depredations in the world. But in fact what they really believe is that a strong America is a humiliation for the countries and the worldview and all of that. That they actually, they believe, though I think falsely, they think they want. They think they want to prevail and win and hold us and hold us back. I doubt that Abdul El Sayed would want to live in a world dominated by Islamic fundamentalism. By the way, he is, after all, a Rhodes Scholar and a doctor and married to a doctor and makes $700,000 a year and, you know, was a high school foot. Like, he doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't want to live in Riyadh. He doesn't want to live in Ramallah.

[Abe Greenwald]

But he thinks that, like Rashida Tlaib, he was born here, right? He's not. He's not an immigrant like, she often talks about, you know, and it. And it's like, you know, Rabaduaji, the first lady of New York City, right? Zoran Mamdani's wife.

[James Patterson]

She.

[Abe Greenwald]

She puts, like, in her bios and her social media bios that she is from Damascus, but she's actually born in Texas. So there is. There is this cosplaying element to all of this. But, yeah, all these people were born here. And. And much as they like to pretend otherwise, they have not chosen to leave their country of birth, the United States of America, for Egypt or Syria or the west bank or Gaza.

[Mike Rogers]

It is of. You know, in the early 60s when Black Power and black nationalism arose, there was a crew, a crew of African American intellectuals who picked up stakes from the United States and moved to Ghana under the rule of. Was it Julius Nyerere? I can't remember. Enchromo, Nkrumah. Because that was the future. That was a sort of socialist paradise, Afrocentric, you know, Afrocentric country. And Maya Angelou lived there, and a whole bunch of people lived there. Malcolm X describes going to Ghana on his trip to Africa in the Autobiography of Malcolm X and meeting all these people. And as true of all revolutionary tourism, including Lee Harvey Oswald's, for all we know. But I mean, revolutionary tourism in the 20th century, where people do and try to go live in Cuba or in the Soviet Union or in North Vietnam or whatever, 95% of them, if they can get the hell out of there and come home, because, in fact, this is a delusion. They think that what they're going to do is live like they live in Detroit, only in, you know, Ramallah. And guess what? You don't get to be free in Ramallah. You are living under a satrapy and a dictatorship. In Ramallah

[Abe Greenwald]

also, you can have, like, as long as you travel, a lot of these, a lot of the, you know, poverty tourists, as we used to call them during the Cold War especially, who were like, I'm gonna go to East Berlin. I really want to be in East Berlin. When you try, if you're traveling with an American passport or an EU passport, you're not you can't actually blend in because in the end you have this kind of shield around you. Like, that's the other things. Like you were. If you were born. If you Ramaduagi were born in Texas, that doesn't go away just because you want to go see how the other half lives or whatever. You will be the first person lined up outside the US embassy at 6am on the day that something happens.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

What was the most important thing you said there, Seth? Invoking Jacob Riis, how the other half lives. This is a rich person thing. I was sitting. I was having dinner with my wife the other night in a fancy inn in western New Jersey. There's money floating around. And I overhear this conversation at the bar among these people who are like, yeah, this guy's gonna. My friend, he's gonna give up his American passport and get a Bahamian passport. Why? Because you can go to places like Russia and Cuba. And I overhear. I'm overhearing this conversation. I'm like, why? Why would you want to do that? The only reason you'd want to do that is because you're curious and you have money to burn. Working class people don't want to go to Cuba or Russia. They know they're gonna get conscripted. They know they're going to Magnitogorsk. They understand how this works. The rich people don't. They think they can buy their way out of trouble.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, they understand they're often right. That's the thing.

[Mike Rogers]

I mean, they understand implicitly. But I mean, this is the point, which is that everybody in America thinks that if they got in a time, if they went anywhere else or lived anywhere else, or lived under different circumstances in countries that they believed to be morally superior or something like that, that they would still get to be Americans. They would still have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. They would be able to not have percent of their money taken by the government, all of that. They just think that they can sort of extricate, go somewhere. Just like the natcons or the sort of the Paleocons who believe that the Enlightenment was a mistake, as they take the medications that were made possible by the revolution in science created by the Enlightenment, as they type on their computers, which would not have existed without the economic growth that was caused as a result, beginning in 1800 by the Enlightenment. Everything that they are, everything that they believe, everything that they're marinated in is a result of the Enlightenment. And they're now against the Enlightenment because they don't actually think that they would ever have to live under the conditions of the world in which the Enlightenment didn't happen or were somehow reversed, when their children would die of scarlet fever, or they might. A Catholic person in the wrong place in France would be murdered by a Huguenot. You know, that's what.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

They'd just be dragooned into serfdom. That is just the natural human condition in the Hobbesian world, in which might makes right.

[Mike Rogers]

Right? So all of this is a ludicrous fantasy, but that. It's a ludicrous fantasy, as Noah details in his book and as Zade Ayres Dorne details in his memoir of his two Weather Underground parents. They live in fantasy. But what their fantasy is also is of murder, is of destruction. They're not just talking about building a better world or a nicer, better place. The real passion there is killing the pigs, blowing up their buildings, taking them down. Look at the rhetoric of all the people who work for Zoran Mamdani that people dig up every day from their things they've written or tweets that they've done and all that, or Francesca Hong or something like that. It's all bloody, violent fantasy.

[Seth Mandel]

By the way, that destruction, it's also overwhelmingly the only phase of the process they ever get to, like, you know, they never end up building these paradises, you know, these paradises anywhere. You know, they just. They go, but they live. They spend their days in the destruction phase, in the disruption phase, in the bloody phase. That's it. That happens over and over and over again. That's the fun, that's the fight. Who wants to fight?

[Abe Greenwald]

And that brings you back to the war on terrorists, how to build a state, you know, and that brings you back to the war on terror stuff, right? The people save them from the consequences of their own actions. The terrorists didn't win. And so they can keep doing this stuff, right? Because they think that in the end, America still, you know, the wealth and the comfort of America will always be there because someone will always, you know, save you. They don't. They don't pay attention to what happens after, you know, victory or whatever, unless you were an ISIS bride. Some. Some Americans did go, you know, it's. And. And we did have. Some. We had. And we had the Taliban, the American Taliban.

[Mike Rogers]

You can count.

[Abe Greenwald]

Those guys should come back and talk to the people.

[Mike Rogers]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

Who work on Zorhan Maldani's.

[Mike Rogers]

But, you know, we can count those. Those people on two hands, fortunately. But here's the ultimate question. And then we should go. Which is this primary took place in Michigan. A million, 1.5 million people voted, right? It was pretty much a tie. I mean, so he got 15,000 more votes than she did. So he got 760,000, she got 750, 50,000 or something like that. He wins, she loses. You have that 750,000 that did not vote for him, combined with the independents in Michigan, combined with the Republicans. And my question is, are the American people still to be trusted as a body of commonsensical, no bs, we just want politicians that we can trust to do what we need them to do? Or has the educational collapse of the last two generations sunk its roots so deep they don't just affect the elites at elite colleges, but that enough people in the world of the less politically committed would tend to be seduced by some of El Sayed's talk? Whereas again, 10, 15 years ago, if you were Barack Obama, you wanted to make sure that those people did not think that you were anything like Jeremiah Wright, that you were in any way, shape or form radically disposed. Your temperament, your mien, your disposition said, I am a calm, moderate person and a grown up and I don't lose my temper and I'm not hostile and you can vote for me. I am a positive force that will bring positive energy to change in the United States. I don't think El SAYED and the DSA has that. And so the DSA has been very successful in places where they're 80%, 70% Democratic turnout. That's not Michigan. So do we think that the good people of Michigan who are gonna decide this election are filled with classic old American common sense, or are they just uniquely susceptible to social media crap?

[Seth Mandel]

Just to frame it slightly differently, I think voters want to be sold a compelling vision, and the only people selling them a compelling vision are the radicals. Right now on the other side, it's just people saying, look, there's a radical look, there's a communist look. And that's. You've got to say something unique, be a bit of a showman in one way or another. I mean, this is the story of Trump, this is the story of Mandani, and to some extent, it's the story of El Sayed. Sell them a different compelling vision. It can be a good. Even Joe Biden in 2020 said, I'm going to bring you back to a normal world. He wouldn't sell himself so much as that idea. I think if you can sell them, it doesn't have to be a destructive vision. It doesn't have to be an anti American vision. So in that sense, I think, yeah, there is an opportunity to counter this stuff still among the populace.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

I mean, to your. I agree with all of that. And it's really depressing the degree to which you used sell in Showman, which is true. It was all true, but totally depressed. There's a degree to which everybody takes America for granted, as you said. You know, they're like the parents that are paying your rent. It's just a backstop. It's always going to be there. And that's not necessarily true. As you, you know, Back to the 911 thing. It's been so long since we've been forced to confront a competing vision of civilizational organization. The Soviet Union represented one. It's gone. ISIS I think represented the only true challenge to the Western theory of social organization that we've seen in our lifetimes, in my lifetime, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And that was soundly defeated. So they don't really have a competing model and think that this one is just. It has triumphed. It's the end of history. You know, to really borrow the horrible attacks on that book, Fukuyama's book. But nevertheless, they think that this is just the apex of civilizational evolution and it's not going to change except around the margins. And that's what they want. They want dramatic change at the margins and are willing to say that they want a much broader revolutionary kind of change. At least they're willing to tell pollsters that when they don't really mean it, but the radicals mean it.

[Abe Greenwald]

The best. The best version of that was the. Were the. Were the. The guys who would leave their parents townhouse downtown and walk across the street to Zuccotti.

[Mike Rogers]

Occupy Occupy Wall street, right.

[Abe Greenwald]

I just live in a tent for six hours and then walk back across the street to a brownstone. This is. This is. That was highly typical. Not just of that movement, but every version of it is that every version of it.

[Mike Rogers]

It is true of every revolutionary movement. That's part of the story of the book that Noah wrote about, which is that radical terrorists in the west tend to be disproportionately well to do and well educated and alienated for very complicated reasons from their own backgrounds or their own parents or whatever that lead them to these extreme violent efforts to destroy rather than create. But Abe, I just wanna leave you with this. Like you say that you need to have a vision that competes with the El Sayed vision. And I'm wondering. I have no answer to this. Whether that's true, in fact, that

[James Patterson]

what

[Mike Rogers]

we're talking about here is this election is gonna be decided by people in the middle right. The Republicans are going to vote for John James. Maybe a bunch of Democrats are going to stay home or vote for John James rather than vote for El Sayed. Mike Rogers, certainly I think you can expect that a significant number of Jews who vote Democratic will not vote for El Sayed, just as they didn't vote for Mamdani. Much smaller number in Michigan and not, not like, not enough to sort of change the balance of things unless the election were incredibly close. But do these independent, do these less committed voters, less involved voters, do they need a vision? Or do you go, what is this craziness? This is all craziness. He likes Hamas, you know, he wants Medicare, he wants socialized medicine, you know, he talks about overthrowing capitalism though he says he's a capitalist. What is this? This isn't us. He's meshuggah.

[Seth Mandel]

You need that in the mix for sure. But if that's all, then you got a problem. I think you've got to have a compelling positive agenda. Well, by positive I mean what are you going to do? What are you gonna give them? I mean, that's the other thing. Like, you know, past 15 years of elections are always about vowing to give people material things or understandable, non abstract things. You gotta come up with something.

[Mike Rogers]

I don't know, I mean, maybe just, you know, maybe just saying, this is the 250th anniversary of the United States. I like the United States. I'm proud to be an American. I am grateful that my forefathers somehow got here and that our forefathers built this nation based on these principles. And this guy doesn't like America. And I'm here to stand up for you as an American. And he's looking to stand up for some people who like to slaughter children in tunnels after kidnapping and torturing them. But, you know, is that a vision? I think that's a vision. It's not a. I don't think so.

[Seth Mandel]

I really don't. And I think there's another problem here, which is that we're at this, you know, phase, sort of population wide, where people resent being told what to think of someone else. I don't want to hear your assessment of this person. I'll make up my mind. I don't trust you. And so people don't want to be like, you know, told what to think, told how to assess. So you can't lean to it. Even if it's all true, you can't lean too heavily into it. Okay.

[Mike Rogers]

Well, anyway, this is all interesting as a prediction game and we'll see what happens. Remember that even though we're in a world in which obviously all the trade winds are blowing in favor of the Democrats, the polling does suggest that. That as this campaign, this head to head campaign begins, that Rogers is slightly favored. So the atmosphere.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

I wish I thought I agreed with that.

[Mike Rogers]

Well, I mean, I'm just saying. Polling says that Rogers is up over El Sayed. That's just.

[Abe Greenwald]

Except El Sayed's poll says that he's up 97 points.

[Mike Rogers]

Right, exactly.

[Abe Greenwald]

And that Mike Rogers pollster is quitting because there's no path to victory.

[Mike Rogers]

Right.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Yeah. Last I checked, actually RCP had it tied between Rogers. Now Rodgers has 3/10 of a percent advantage in the RCP average.

[Mike Rogers]

Well, and by the way. No, but part of the problem here then. And let's just make this point and then we could start like. The polling firms in Michigan that polled the Democratic race are completely discredited because they over sampled left and they got the race wrong by 13 points on average.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Importantly, they oversampled the people who vote for DSA degree holders. Affluent educated people, as opposed to the people that are hard to pull, which are working class minority voters.

[Mike Rogers]

Yeah. I don't know why they're so hard. Why would they be hard to pull? I don't even believe they're hard to pull.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

They're working.

[Mike Rogers]

They have cell phones. Everybody has a cell phone. Everybody has a.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

You answer cell phone pollsters.

[Abe Greenwald]

I get those. You know how many texts a day I get. I'm sure everybody in this podcast. I know, but you're answer 0% of them.

[Mike Rogers]

You do. But that doesn't mean that like, you know. Anyway, you're the people who want to take polls.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

Yeah, right. You're just. You're agitated. You're probably an educated left wing person.

[Mike Rogers]

I believe, I seriously believe that this polling error was deliberate and that it was. That these were push polls. You can't have polls this extreme with that kind of margin that aren't there to depress the Stevens turnout and to sort of. And to make it look as though this is a boulder rolling down a steamroller that you cannot stop because it's just incredibly easy to gin these up by doing exactly know what you're talking about, which is over sampling the people that you know are gonna vote for for El Sayed or over sampling them. And then if you try to then use Formula to recreate more precisely what the electorate is going to be like applying a screen so that this 13 point margin, which seems incredibly unrealistic, isn't a 13 point margin. But they didn't do that and they all heard it and they all did the same thing. And so maybe the polls have it Stevens up by 0.3. But what we know is that the polls have been over representing the El Sayed vote in Michigan for six months. So why aren't they over representing it now?

[Jon Pod Horticz]

I mean, if that's true, why would it be limited to Michigan? The phenomenon could be a board.

[Mike Rogers]

It could be. But no, but in this case there was a very specific race that was being polled. It was a three.

[Abe Greenwald]

Michigan had trouble. Michigan was, did not. Was not as poly, you want to say it as. And so what else I had was able to do was take his own polls and flood the system and they made up a larger percentage. And that caused what John calls the hurting. Because if the last three polls all had him up by double digits, then the other pollsters just, everybody just kind of shifted along that line that he was just able to. But it is, but it is a national thing, right? I mean, we had the, we had those polls in the presidential election that suggested at times that Trump, you know, had basically no path to victory. We had the polls showing Kamala Harris, you know, she was polling well, reasonably well, and far better than she performed right throughout the process. So it's the question of, is the level of like how badly you miss is really the, the question?

[Mike Rogers]

I guess there is now, it would appear a 3%, a sort of standard 3% poll error that needs to be taken account of where Democrats are simply oversampled in polling. And either the firms do something to take that into account and adjust their screens and their numbers accordingly, or they don't. And that's why Ann Seltzer was run out of business, supposedly the gold standard pollster of all time. And she of course had Harris winning Iowa by 12 or something, I can't even remember. And Trump won it and that was the end of her career. That was the end of her career. So there is some kind of weird inability to properly poll electorates in the United States. And so right now, El Sayed is the person who benefited from the wrong polling in the sense that it made him look like he was a winner. And I'm just saying if the poll numbers right now look like it's a tight race, you might want to immediately think, nah, Rodgers is probably up by two or Three. Because whatever they're doing, they're still not going to just design the electorate properly. Okay, this has been a very long podcast and we didn't even have anything to talk about. So let's see if people get here all the way to the end. If you did, congratulations to you, Noah Rothman. Everybody read Noah's book, Blood in progress, still available. Jim Meigs wrote a wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal's free expression vertical today, largely taking the measure of Blood in progress. And so this is the day to go get your copy. And great to see you as always. And for Seth and Abe, I'm John Pothoric. Keep the candle burning.

[James Patterson]

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. Yay. 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.

[Eric Gertler]

From the State House to the courthouse, in the emergency room and in the classroom, Americans are losing losing trust in their leaders. In a 2025 U.S. news and World Report survey, 85% of Americans said government leaders care more about their own power than the people they serve. 73% are disappointed in healthcare leaders, 72% in business, and 68% in education. But there are still leaders worth believing in. I'm Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. news World Report. This is the Best Leaders podcast sponsored by the Noble Reach Foundation. On this show, we'll go deeper into the stories, challenges and lessons of extraordinary leaders across public service, business, healthcare and education. You can find the Best Leaders podcast from U.S. news World Report on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Matt Ebert]

I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.

[Mike Rogers]

When you get momentum, you step on the gas.

[Abe Greenwald]

That's how you get separation from everybody else.

[Mike Rogers]

I was at Harvard Law School. I was blah blah blah. I looked up, let me tell you something. There's kids in my neighborhood putting in sheetrock that are smarter than you.

[Abe Greenwald]

AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff.

[Mike Rogers]

It is never going to disrupt physical blue collar trade skill.

[Abe Greenwald]

And the guy just looked at me

[Mike Rogers]

and he said it's bloody impossible.

[Jon Pod Horticz]

So I asked him this question.

[Matt Ebert]

I said it's impossible unless that's pod crash with me. Matt ebert watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcast.