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- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say, this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary. Go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary Hope for the expect the wor some.
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Unknown
Preacher pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope for the best expect the worst.
- [02:38]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, August 5, 2025. I am John Pod Horitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
- [02:53]
Seth Mandel
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
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Christine Rosen
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
First of all, I want to provide. I want to give a shout out. I got to find the name here. I want to give a shout out to our listener A remarkable listener. Our favorite listener ever. I mean, I'm sorry to say this because I know people, you know, don't want to hear that. There are other people that we prefer to them. Bev. Bev sent us a video of her. It kind of looks like Havanese. It's my. I have a Havanese and it looks very much like a Havanese dog singing along to the Commentary podcast theme song. So she plays Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst and the dog howls along with it every morning. This is our favorite email that we have ever received. I believe we've all agreed. And the dog's name is Murray, which is of course a perfectly suitable name for a dog that would sing along with a Mel Brooks song since the 2000 Year Old Man. If you've never listened to the 2000 Year Old man, the one play that the 2000 Year Old man invested in was Shakespeare's Queen Alexandra. And Murray, in which Queen Alexandra says, what ho, Murray? What could it have been that I have seen? Is it not in our marrow? And Murray says, what are you hollering? You'll wake up the whole castle. And According to the 2000 year old man, this play closed in Egypt. So Murray the dog are a sing along fan and Mel Brooks is sing along fan. We salute you. It was a much needed bit of Lev levity in a dark moment. And so thank you to Bev and Murray for the, for the joy that they have supplied us. And maybe we'll try to put this up on commentaries social media so everyone can hear Murray singing along to. I'm just going to say now that I don't want to talk today about the news out of Israel that Israel may be occupying Gaza and Bibi's announced that Israel is going to occupy Gaza and all of that. I think we know enough to know that we don't know what's, what's real and what's a feint and what's a dodge and what's a negotiating tactic and who is being, who is being served by such stories and whether they are covers for other operations or anything like that. And I think it's much better to keep powder dry and put this to one side until something actually happens. So I am, I am calling a. I'm calling radio silence. I am putting the cone of silence over conversations about what the Israeli strategy is, military strategy in relation to Gaza. And I'm going to move on. I'm saying that because I want to move on to a different issue, which is anti semitism in the United States, which is not that different an issue. But of course, the epochal moment that we are facing here, coming up in November, of the possible election of an open anti Semitic radical communist of Muslim dissent winning the mayoralty of the largest Jewish city, what was for a very long time the largest, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world. It is no longer Jerusalem is now more, has. Has more Jews in it than, Than New York City does. But the, but the rise of. Has had, has all sorts of ancillary consequences and issues. I think there's no question that the Senate vote last week where 27 Democratic senators voted to suspend or voted to say that they would, they would, they would block or suspend US Aid to Israel would not have happened without the Mamdani victory to scare the daylights out of either to provide them with wind behind their backs, to sort of come out and be openly anti Israel or anti this government or scared the bejesus out of them, if you'll excuse the expression, and giving them a moment in which they could look like they were behind the young people who are giving such passion and such motivation to the party, to their party. They want to fight and they want to have this. And so these are the two faces, I think, of this new democratic open opposition and hostility toward the Israeli government and toward the war in Gaza. And a very important moment emerged at a conference of the Democratic Socialists of America, which we can also talk about in a bit. Daniel Gulden of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America at a, at a moment in which he was giving a big panel discussion with a mask on. They were all wearing masks, by the way, because, you know, that's very important. He literally said that the Mandani platform is the Democratic Socialists of America platform, particularly on social issues. And their goal, according to to Daniel Gulden, is to turn New York City into the national distribution hub for gender transition. Quote, what we explicitly wanted to do was use the power of New York City to provide free gender affirming care. And I say free in case insurance companies decide to boot us off. Free gender affirming care not just to people in New York City, but across the country. There's no reason at all that we can't use telehealth, meaning going across state lines and mailing prescriptions to people across the country to undermine state bans on gender affirming medical procedures. The Zorron campaign was always eager to work with us. The team was so happy to work with us on this. And now all of a Sudden, my work shifts from being on the outside to thinking about how to utilize the fairly significant municipal power of New York City. The model we used in New York is 100% replicatable, both in terms of our trans organizing, but also getting Zoran elected mayor. Now, why is this important? Because we keep hearing that Mamdani's great. The secret sauce isn't his anti Semitism or his radicalism, but he's focusing on issues that are important to New Yorkers, like affordability. Affordability. It's so expensive to live here. Food is expensive. Rent is expensive. He focused on affordability. Nobody else focused on affordability. He doesn't mean it. He doesn't really care. He'll change on Israel. He'll change on talking about how, you know, Hamas is okay. He'll change on this stuff because he'll want to be a successful mayor. He'll hire Jessica Tisch as his police commissioner because he'll want to have a successful mayoralty and all this. And here we have an insider on his campaign saying, no, no, no. He believes that he's giving us power over the most controversial issue in American society today, or the one controversial by which I mean that the left really wants it and 75 to 80% of the American people don't. So that's how controversial it is. And I think this is a very important moment because it's like as this goes on and because of the six month, because of the nature of the general election campaign, he's not going to be able to hide and his people are going to shout from the rooftops all of the wonderful, radical things he's going to do. And he is probably going to want to soft pedal it. But you can't get away from what's going on here. What do you guys make of this?
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Seth Mandel
I mean, I continue to think he's safe almost no matter what, because of the nature of the race, because of the anti Momdani vote is this, you know, split mess. And because I no longer have a sense of how horrified my fellow New Yorkers are about hearing such things. And, you know, I don't. When people say he's going to tack to the center or soften his language on this or that thing, then they say it's sort of reassuringly like, don't worry, he's gonna do this to me, that's sort of more the horror is what I always think, like, why do you want him to sort of put on this mask that will enable him to actually do exactly what he wants to do? So I think he's, I don't see him having to run from much because of the unique circumstances of this election.
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Christine Rosen
He also benefits from the fact that our political news cycles now are constant, mainly on social media, and leave voters with a very short memory of what was said even a week ago, to say nothing of what he did a year ago or five years ago. I think the fact that he got endorsed by Senator Elizabeth Warren the other day is also worth noting because she. He's got two things going on here. I think Abe's absolutely right that he's going to make an effort, or at least his campaign people will make an effort to downplay his radicalism, even while I think that radicalism remains the core of his, of his political philosophy. But he's trying to get big Democratic folks to endorse him as if he's mainstream. So she, when she talked about Mamdani, she said his plan is the Democratic message. But if you look at his record, that includes things. Obviously, he talked about defunding the police. He wants to ban ice now, this transgender stuff. So if that is indeed the Democratic platform, then New Yorkers will have a very clear choice. The problem, of course, as it points to, is that the opposition on the other side is split. And I think there were a Jewish Insider had a really good summary of some polling that was done in New York recently.
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John Podhoretz
I was going to get, I was going to get to that. And Seth, I want you to respond to some of this because it's a Rorschach test. So when I say I'm going to read you these numbers that Josh Kraushar has written up and ask you whether you're horrified by them and you are sort of like, they make you a little more comfortable with the crisis inside the Jewish community or whether they just simply track with what you know. So here's Josh's piece in Jewish Insider. A new poll of New York City Jewish voters commissioned by the Pro Israel New York Solidarity Network, underscores the presence of a cohesive constituency opposed to Zoram Mamdani's candidacy to become New York City mayor. So here are the numbers. According to this, Mamdani wins 37% of Jewish voters, with 25% backing Eric Adams, 21% supporting Andrew Cuomo, 14% preferring Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, which means that While he gets 37% of the Jewish vote, he does not get, obviously, 63% of the Jewish vote, which dovetails or tracks with what we, with what we saw in the primary where it appeared it's a complicated thing because of ranked choice voting and who ultimately will be counted as a Mamdani voter as or was counted as they approached and then went over 50% because he got 43% in the first tally. And then he had to go over 50% to get the nomination, which I think he did on the third or the fourth ballot anyway. He, it looked like he got about 20% of the Jewish vote in the primary. So this, obviously the regular electorate is larger than the primary electorate and so less engaged than the primary electorate. And a lot of people may have turned out in the primary specifically to vote against him or to cast a vote for Cuomo, whom they didn't like, clearly in order to prevent him from winning. So you can look at that and say 63% of Jews in New York will not vote for Mamdani as president. Of course, this is a Jewish New York, Jewish city. The Jewish vote trending nationally, nationwide, starting to trend a bit to the right. It's not clear that that's really the case in New York City, except among Orthodox voters who are reliably Republican. But they still make up, I think, 10 or 12% of the overall Jewish community in New York, which is about 900,000 strong. So you can then say there are about 150,000. And that's of course, including children and stuff. So the voting population is smaller. So, Seth, when I say this to you, Mamdani is getting 37%. Is that like great? Good. This is a real anti Mamdani turnout for Jews who are reliably Democratic. Or you like, how can any Jew vote for Mandani? This is terrible. And we're in a nightmare.
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Abe Greenwald
All the above, really. But I think, I mean, it's true because it's all about setting expectations, right? It's a very. New York attracts throngs of, as a. Jews, right? I mean, you have like these, you know, Jews for Social and Economic justice type groups. You have these Jewish groups that are Jewish in name and, and are there to sort of provide cover, to be a blocking back for progressive groups, either regardless of their stance on Israel and anti Semitism or to offer protection to that to those who are explicitly awful on Israel and anti Semitism. And so New York is one of those places where the pro anti Jewish Jews that makes sense. Are very well organized. It's a very well organized group and they're very enthusiastic and they're door knockers and they are well funded. And so to me, overall, I would say the 37% is good because if Any city has sort of built in as a Jew, you know, rocket ship, it's New York. And come the general election we'll see what those numbers do. But I think in general the 37% is good just because all of the work and the enthusiasm and the money and the organizing etc. Is on that one side. Now the one other thing I would.
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John Podhoretz
Say by the way, just for a minute, we should just explain very briefly what you mean by the As a Jew. So as a. This is a term Eli Lay coined, I think. I mean in our magazine we published a piece called the As a Jew that went into the 700 year, 800 year history of Jews who use their Judaism as a weapon against Judaism and other Jews. And so they say, as a Jew I'm shocked at the horrible behavior of Jews. And this, this started in the late medieval times with pamphleteers, Jewish pamphleteers writing anti Jewish works to curry favor with Christian authorities and has moved present into our day in the Peter Beinart as a Jew with a. Wearing a kippah, I believe that, I believe that Israelis are Hitler. He's the most prominent example. But it's a whole world of people, as you say, the Jews for social Economic justice.
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Abe Greenwald
If not now, when Jewish Voice for, you know, for these types of groups. Jewish Voice for Peace. Sorry, Jewish Voice for Peace. These are the ones that explicitly put in a name that's probably the best example. But these are, these are just, you know, New York is sort of the hub for it. But New York is also a central place for union organizing. So here's where the second half of this comes in. The United Federation of Teachers has decided to endorse Mamdani, the United Federation of Teachers president right now. Michael Mulgrew is surprisingly the first non Jewish president of the UFT ever I believe. So The UFT is a classic sort of the type of organization that Jews in America have, you know, especially left wing Jews have, have flocked to. There was, you know, because of anti Semitism and all sorts of stuff in you know, mid 20th century public education was a. Was a place where Jews could go when they couldn't go to private education to teach and be administrators and stuff like that. Public colleges, public high schools, all that stuff. And so Jews got very tied into the teachers union movement. I have a. My great uncle was at one point the head of the. Of the Wikwaic Teachers Union which is like the most Jewish thing you could ever possibly be is be a teachers union head in Newark. You know, in the mid 20th century. But anyway, this was, you know, so, so the UFT is significant in terms of its connection to the Jewish world and all that stuff. The UFC voted to, decided to back Mamdani. There is a splintering within the uft. There are Jewish educators within the UFT who have been holding webinars since that decision was made. Teaching members of the UFT how to not pay their dues. Right. This is big. Thanks to a Supreme Court decision, you know, seven or eight years ago, you, you couldn't, you can't be forced to pay your union dues. And so there is a splintering inside. This is the sort of thing that I want to pay a lot of attention to because the union organizing is such an important engine of Democrats get out the vote, the machine, the energy. It's so important to them. And if there really is dissent in the ranks, then, you know, we'll see. There will be these stories coming out of people saying, I'm not, I'm not paying my union dues and stuff like that. And so far there are. So, so that's the question is, can the, can the, the community organizing element of the, of the New York Democratic Party that is Jewish, can that organizing element push back in some way? Because if not, all of the organizing momentum will be behind the 37% and they'll be bigger than the 37%.
- [22:42]
John Podhoretz
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That's Q-U I N C E.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com commentary the ultimate problem is what is what Abe mentions here, which is that the anti Mamdani vote is split three ways and he's going to win because it's split three ways. Generally speaking, when votes are four ways, excuse me, the opposition split three ways there will be four candidates. Unless something happens, there will be at least three candidates and probably four candidates on the ballot. And it's classically the case that when there are three or four candidates on the ballot, someone can win with 40% of the vote relatively comfortably. Mamdani doesn't even have to get a majority in order to in order to become the next mayor so you could have a significant anti mom Donnie vote that is nonetheless ineffectual and in fact helps him become mayor. That's the paradox of it. One point I want to make about this 37% number is that when you poll Jews in the United States and the pew does this on, I don't know, I can't remember what their term is either. It's either to every 10 years or 5 years or something like that, it's a very difficult thing to do because jews make up 2% of the population. You have to surface them. You want to have them demographically reflective of this. So you don't want too many old people, too many young people. You want people who are. But you have to say that they self identify as Jewish. Right? That's the main thing. Like you're not going to throw anybody out the long as they say I'm a Jewish. You take their poll and Pew did a poll, the last poll that Pew did, 31% of the respondents said they believed that Christ was the son of God. So that is really the core distinction between being a Jew and not being a Jew is that you don't believe that Christ is the son of God or that Christ is a divinity or that Allah is, you know, that you know that Allah is a divinity or that any other divinity, there is no God. You know I am, you know I am that I am as the God. And that's that's where it is. So if you actually have a population of people rigorously polled by a very, very respectable polling organization and 3/10 of them in the United States say that it, that they think that that Jesus is their savior, then you already see it's not just as a Jew ness that is an issue here. It's fundamental Jewish self definition where people who are no longer Jews but have Jewish ethnicity to them claim to be part of the Jewish people and are part of the therefore are part of the way the community is surveyed to explain how it feels. So that number is I think good. I don't want to say that because people are going to come at me and yell at me and say that no Jew should vote for Mamdani. He's an anti Semite, he's a supporter of the murderers of Jews and the worst Jewish slaughter since the Holocaust. And he is barbaric and evil and a contributor to the evil on campus and all of that. And I agree with all of that. But knowing what I know about what it means for people to self define as Jews, both politically and as I say, in this very peculiar way in which people are very confused about what it means to be a Jew, a Jew who is part of the Jewish community. It's probably closer to the 20% that appeared in the primary to vote for Mamdani than it is to the 37% in this poll. And it should be zero. But of course it should be zero for anybody. Nobody in New York City should vote for a Communist. Nobody in New York, no civilized person should vote for anybody who is a supporter of Hamas or of this campaign or calls Israel settler colonialists or wants to defund the police or wants to, you know, end police arresting psychotic people with knives and machetes on subways and instead empower a true a team of social workers to have their heads chopped off by the machete when they approach the homeless person with the machete.
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Christine Rosen
You know, in this sense, it's useful to also see Mamdani within the context of other progressive mayors. Michelle Wu of Boston, for example, we've seen a lot of them out in California, some of whom have been recalled. But there is, you know, the young dynamic. I care about affordability and you know, with a little hint of socialism. Candidates have been winning in some of these larger cities, but then have a real challenge governing. And what New York might be about to experience is, is just that. And you will see, you've already heard from businesses and the wealthy with already articulating that they will leave the city if the kinds of taxes that will be required to import everyone in the country who wants to have trans surgery at the New York City taxpayer's expense, how will you. That is not within the realm of affordability right now. So I do think, I mean, I hate to say it, but some of these cities learn the hard way. Many of the ones in California have. Boston is learning this with some of the woos, Mayor wu's policies with, you know, drug addicts, including some that are violent and mentally ill and on the streets. So I'm just curious though, because that does suggest again, a very short term memory for New York voters because, and these are a new generation of voters, they didn't live through the 70s, they didn't live through Giuliani's mayoralty and watch how cleanup happens and how law and order is restored. So I'm curious, especially for Abe and John, who are the longtime New Yorkers, is this something you sense among younger voters or is it just a shift in terms of what's considered acceptable on the, on the progressive end of the spectrum for Democrats.
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Seth Mandel
Well, this is something, John, you've brought this up before, not even in respect to New York, but generally. And it's stuck with me this idea that you say, okay, well now they're going to learn the hard way. And then they don't learn. They sort of endure it and fall for it the next time it comes around anyway. And I think there's actually a lot to that.
- [32:40]
John Podhoretz
Well, I mean, I was just trying to Google the number here, but I'm not asking the question right, so I'm having trouble. But some very large percentage of people who live in New York now have lived here for less than 15 years or fewer than 15 years. Maybe it's 40%. It might be higher. I'm not sure.
- [33:05]
Christine Rosen
There's a lot of, they lack urban memory, right? There's no urban memory of it.
- [33:09]
John Podhoretz
There's a lot of in migration and out migration. People come here and then when they have families, they leave because they can't afford to stay here. Whatever. The world of the fourth, fifth generation New Yorker is real, but it's pretty stagnant. A lot of it is, you know, in the, in the outer boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. And I think politically they're, they're also pretty static or they're the ones who are moving more Republican as they get older, including, by the way, blacks and Hispanics and Jews and others. But they, they leave, their relatives leave and they stay. And they're still in the houses that they're kind of trapped in because they, you know, they, or they have rental apartments that they can't afford to move out of because moving would cost them twice as much, whatever. And so there is no institutional memory. The New York that they know is the New York that they've lived in since say 2010 or something like that. And, and it was whatever was pretty good in 2010. And then it started to decline with the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio. But a lot of the issues that people deal with when they are voters in a conventional voters, an ordinary place that is not New York, a lot of them don't deal with. They're childless. I think it was 17% of people who voted in the primary in New York have children under the age of 18. That's a very, I mean, you know, so, you know, safety, schools, stuff like that, which are issues for parents much more than they are for anybody else, are not issues at all for more than like for 4/5 of the electorate. They, that's not, that's not their concern. Their Concern is, you know, as I keep saying, I live in 3, 300 square feet and I'm paying $4,000 a month dollars. Do something that what people ordinarily do under those circumstances is move, go live somewhere else, go to the Southwest, go to some other. Anywhere else in America where. Go to Chicago. Rents are half what they are here, you know, so live in Chicago, but for whatever. So that, that's, that, that's, that's that issue of institutional memory.
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Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I mean, I, I think like I, you know, we, we used to. When I lived in Washington Heights, the first neighborhood of.
- [35:49]
John Podhoretz
That's a neighborhood in Manhattan.
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Abe Greenwald
That's a neighborhood in Manhattan. Washington Heights was all. The first time I lived in Washington Heights was near the tail end of the Giuliani era, which meant it was already safer than it had been in the past. It was no longer the dangerous. Like I didn't live in the dangerous Washington Heights. And then the safe Washington Heights, it was already well on its way to being fixed. But the second time I lived in Washington Heights, there were farm shares in Inwood, right to the north of us. And I just remember thinking like there really was a time in my memory, you know, and again, I was at the very tail end of the Julia. I did not see it. I was not there for the early blackouts and things like that in the 90s, the major things in Washington Heights, the looting. But like, there was a time even within my memory that the idea of a fight farm share in washing. Going to get your farm share in Washington Heights was kind of silly. Nor did we live in, you know, we didn't live in a. In, in doorman buildings and stuff like that. There are neighborhoods in Washington Heights where it's a bit more, you know, imaginable, whatever. But the point is that the memory doesn't have to be that long, but it has to be long enough to at least sort of remember that there were things that surprised you about what you could do in New York. Because when you came to New York, people were like, oh, it's New York, you know, this and that. And when you don't have that memory, when you don't have. When you can at least laugh about the, the farm share in Inwood or something like that. I think that you don't really have a sense of how far New York and Manhattan especially has come in all those years. And there's no frame of reference for you that's unimaginative. If you don't get why these certain things are significant. There's no, there's no explaining it to a person.
- [37:45]
John Podhoretz
We're still distorted. It is now five years since George Floyd. Right? Five years and a couple of months or so, I think was June 2020 was the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And so the, the, the world of upper middle class, elite young person's opinion, I don't think, has gone through much emotional revision. If you were 20 or 21 or 18 or 19 when that happened, in the middle of the pandemic, or even in your early 20s, and you were out in the streets demonstrating, and you said that, you know, systemic racism is the great evil of our time, and you said that cops are the problem, not the solution. These demonstrations are mostly peaceful while the Dollar Store is on fire behind you. When, you know, when people are driving their cars into people in Wisconsin and having nightly riots in small cities in Wisconsin, and you think that's all fine, and the only real issue is that a kid took out a gun and tried to defend himself on a street in Wisconsin. And that's the thing that drove you absolutely insane five years later. And most of the world, I think, or most of America has attained a kind of equilibrium about this. And Democrats conventionally don't want to talk about this, right? They don't want to talk about the defund the police moment. They want to move on from that and not remind people that that was a really significant idea that had taken hold of their party and all of that. But there are people under the age of 30 for whom that is still, that remains a completely acceptable set of ideas and precepts. And Zoram Mamdani, who was 33, is one of them. I mean, he believes in defunding the police. He wants to disband even now, we call it divisions or parts of the, of the, of the, of the NYPD that do active response to active shooter moments. Last week when this horrible event happened with this guy shooting up 345 Park Avenue, you know, emptying 60 rounds in the lobby. And on the 33rd floor, the tactical division of the NYPD that deals with active shooters showed up on the scene in three minutes. NYPD is the best trained. It's the largest police department in the United States, and it is without question the best trained, the least. It responds with the least violence to violent events with great effect. After sort of 50 years of a change in the dynamic of the NYPD that is really kind of remarkable. It's the model police department on the planet Earth. And he wants to disband that division of the nypd because it might be too violent for him. He wants social workers, not, not police officers. And ordinarily that would have been enough to, you know, mean that he would get 11% of the vote in a seven person primary. But there are enough people in the city who sort of don't even think that they need the cops or something.
- [41:30]
Christine Rosen
Well, this is also, this is a philosophical and generational divide that the Democrats are really battling with because you're right, I think people like Nancy Pelosi and the elder statesman of the Democratic Party would love that picture of all of them kneeling in kente cloth in the Capitol to just disappear forever. But the younger generation actually wants to move the discussion as I think both what we started the hour talking about, the trans discussion among the Democratic socialists. They would like to see the party move even further in that direction. And that's where we have there. There are still important points of fallout from post George Floyd, particularly with policing. A lot of the gang task force, the anti vice squads, the kind of thing that targeted certain high crime areas in certain cities, Certainly here in D.C. those were disbanded and never really reformed in an effective way because they were considered unpopular among, you know, in a, in a big blue city like the one I live in Post George Floyd, it was targeting dominantly African American neighborhoods. So you couldn't do that anymore. That's racist. And some of those have been built back, but actually many have not. And I think crime rates have, have luckily slowed violent crime rates in particular after the spike we had during, during COVID But rebuilding those requires political will, not just funding. And if you have a Democratic party in some of these blue cities like New York, DC, LA, Chicago, if you have a party that actually is moving more to the left and is more youthful and as you say, doesn't have kids, doesn't really care as much about investing in education, you're going to have a very different kind of municipal government and it is going to be full of social workers and it is going to see businesses and wealthier people leave because they can. And so who's left to govern? People who are heavily reliant on subsidies or government handouts. People who might be living in neighborhoods they can't flee because they can't afford rent elsewhere. And you have what actually is a perfect cauldron for socialism, which is an elite entitled class coming setting prices, government, grocery stores, all the stuff that we've seen in other nations where socialism rises, particularly in cities.
- [43:39]
Seth Mandel
But I want to try to square what we're saying about this generational attachment to some of these 2020 post George Floyd ideas with what we know about 2024 election data and for example, the young male vote. Right, moving right. So what is it that's happening here then?
- [44:05]
Christine Rosen
Well, the women actually have moved further to the left than the men have stayed a little more where they always were. It's particularly educated women who have gone much further to the left just in the country. And my colleague Dan Cox has great data on this at aei. Sort of alarming, actually.
- [44:22]
John Podhoretz
Can we, can we play a little history lesson game here? Because it's important about American politics to understand where this quote that I read at the beginning from the Democratic Socialists of America what the Democratic Socialists of America are and how the political conversation in the United States that we're talking about how quickly things move and 20 people don't. You know, it was only a minute ago that New York was safe and now it's unsafe. And it's only a minute ago that Bloomberg was mayor and now it's going to be Mamdani and all of that stuff. And yet there is this tradition in the country of slow moving, slow growing activism and organizations that sit largely dormant or fallow until the circumstances warrant them, arising from their slumber and starting to move forward because they're a shell. You can fill the shell, you can raise money through the shell, and you can start organizing through the shell. The Democratic Socialists of America is a group that was founded in the wake of a split in what was called the Socialist Party in the United States. And the split was very interesting because it was a neocon split in the late 60s, early 70s, and it involved the same teachers, really inaugurated by the same teachers that Seth mentioned, who led the, essentially the New York City teachers unions and teachers unions generally, because the city school system until the, I think late 1970s, more than 60% of the teachers in the New York City system were Jews. They started to retire and, you know, take their pensions and all of that. But that's who taught in New York City schools and the divisions in the Democratic Party over Vietnam, because you also, you had families who had kids who were fighting in Vietnam who were democratic working class people. And then you had kids who ran to Canada or were, you know, were like protesting, you know, in front of the Reflecting Pool, half a million of them. They were also part of this general democratic world and the Socialist Party, which was largely paid for by the AFL cio and George Meaney, who was then head of the AFL cio, and Lane Kirkland were pro American, I don't know how else to put it. They were, they were aware that the sons of their work, the sons of their members were going to Vietnam and were proud of their service and that their members themselves had been veterans of Korea and World War II and were proud of their service and didn't like all these hippies and didn't like all this protesting. And they tended to be pro Zionist because this large population in New York of the teachers unions and all that were Jews and they were supporters of Israel. And in 1973, Michael Harrington, who was sort of the leading socialist in the United. Intellectual in the United States, a Catholic, wrote a extraordinarily influential book in the early 60s called the other America, which was. Which helped inaugurate the poverty program efforts of the, of the JFK administration and then the Johnson administration, this description of what it was like to be poor in America. And Harrington didn't like the direction that, that the, that the Socialist party was going. And so he started a splinter group called the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee or something like that. And, and in 19, and then 10 years, and this is like 1973, and he left. He left with like 10 people. And the 11 people that were left calling themselves socialists by the mid-70s stayed back. And then by the time the Reagan administrations came around, all those people were Reaganites, all of those former socialists were Reaganites. And they populated the Reagan administration, Penn Campbell and Carl Gershman and all kinds of people who ended up working in foreign policy roles and in and in efforts to sort of promote democracy abroad and all of that. And the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee then merged with a very left wing group called I think, the New American Movement. And there they sat with like three or four thousand people at most in the United States. And they would have a convention every year and they would march around and they would call them each other's, you know, comrade. And it was very touching and ridiculous and out of touch and like a, like a, like Waiting for Guffman or Best In Show. Like you could have made a comic mockumentary about how ridiculous this world was. And then Iraq happened and then they started gaining a little more purchase because the protest movement kicked up again in the United States around the Iraq War. And they got some more people. And then they started getting money. They started getting money from Soros and they started getting money pumped in in various ways into various efforts. And then came the big moment in 2018 when out of nowhere, Democratic Socialist of America candidate Alexandria Ocasio Cortez snuck up Behind Joseph Crowley in Queens, a member of the House leadership who was paying no attention to her anything and won the primary against him by 5,000 votes, 15,000 to 10,000. That was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's debut. And the way she ended up as a Senate was by out distancing someone in the city of New York in a district that represents almost 500,000 people with 15,000 primary voters. But that was the big moment where suddenly there was a. There what? The DSA had gotten somebody elected kind of well.
- [50:51]
Christine Rosen
But it's important to remember how they did that because it speaks to their success going forward, particularly with the young. They basically held a contest and said, if you know someone who might be a good candidate who's, you know, left leaning, let us know. And she was one of them. You know, other members of the squad fell into that group as well. Look at who their 2025 DSA conference speaker is this year. It's Rashida Tlai. She is the keynote. Read their platform. It is anti capitalist. They want to abolish the Senate, the Electoral College, the carceral state. It is radical. And the fact that there is very little effort any longer to pretend that it isn't anti American, that it is an anti capitalist shows that a kind of shift on the left that should be getting more focus. And I think one, one, one thing to point to is the fact that for a very long time all of us on the right have said, you know, this is creeping socialism. Anytime it was, that was an accurate description of some of the policies of the democratic left. But this is real socialism. They're not joking around. Read their platform. Go to their DSA political platform. And I encourage every listener to read it and come back and question whether what they're trying to do has any, any purchase or should have any purchase. In a free, open, democratic society.
- [52:08]
John Podhoretz
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping. Oh, come on. They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool. Whatever. You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.
- [52:38]
Unknown
Hi everyone, I'm Matt Ebert, CEO and founder of Crash Champions. Welcome to Pod Crash. On Pod Crash, we'll dive deep with industry leaders and game changers because we want to uncover their secrets to success. We're going to explore everything from building trust, building a rock solid team to champion blue collar world. And we also want to talk about creating explosive growth in your business. You'll hear actionable advice, real leadership and business lessons along with what's worked for these incredible people throughout their career. We're even going to go in depth into what I call a champions mindset. This is the very philosophy that I use to champion people and take crash champions from a single shop to over 650 locations today. And now I want to share that information with you. You watch or listen to pod crash on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [53:33]
Seth Mandel
I think it's a good point and it could extend to other. I mean I kind of wrote about this a little bit yesterday in terms of anti Semitism. Nothing is creeping anymore and nothing is coded anymore. It's all right there. And they all have license to speak to plainly and the mainstream furnishes them with every excuse to say these incredibly radical things on every front. And life goes on. Now, none of it scandalizes as it should, I think.
- [54:08]
Abe Greenwald
And the question is, you can also ask, I mean, what I was thinking when Christine said that was a combination of what Christine was saying just now and something that Abe said at the beginning about the ability of these candidates to distance themselves from their more radical roots or whatever and try to run to the middle. We sort of, it's kind of crazy that we let them, that we even ask a DSA member or a DSA candidate whether they agree with this or that part of the Democratic Socialists of America. That's what aims their members of that itself, the membership is. This is something that people should be looking. This was when, when AOC was elected. This was something that was briefly mooted as a, as, as a topic that whether she could, you know, whether you had to sort of be raised by the DSA and then, you know, and then learn to fly and fly the nest and you know, raise your own chicks or whether you could stay. And what's happened since then is that that question has stopped being asked.
- [55:14]
John Podhoretz
Well, I think we can put these two together. So I was trying to tell this long story about the birth of this organization that, you know, and the long life of this splinter fringe organization that represented no one's opinions in the United states from the 90s to the to 2018. Right. All of the juice in that realm was in kind of anti globalism, you know, climate change stuff. Like the extent that you wanted to revolutionize and radicalize the US Economy. It wasn't for the purpose of creating a leveled society. It was more to achieve goals like kind of some kind of equivalency between the, you know, the affluent north and the global south or doing something to reorient the way society worked in order to prevent, you know, greenhouse gases or whatever. Not simply the advocacy of socialism for its own purposes, which had really fallen into understandable disfavor with the collapse of all the Soviet, of all the, of all the socialist countries on, on the planet, with the exception of Cuba and China. And so people in Venezuela. And so people were no longer looking to socialism as a, as a, as a counter model. So this world was very fringe. But nothing is ever fringe forever. And conversations don't end. I mean, yeah, Nazism kind of ends and imperial. When you destroy them utterly, they can kind of end and blow up and you can salt the ground and keep it from ever, you know, rising again, you hope. But as long as people feel like they're being screwed and as long as there is a world, there is a political philosophy or a practical philosophy that says, here's how you can deal with that. By throwing the bums out and putting in better and more wonderful people. And it gets some purchase. This is important because it is. People are constantly downplaying the significance of the radical, the rise of radicals on their own side and how no one really believes that. Nobody thinks that. Don't worry. That's all nonsense because as Abe says, there is nothing is nonsense anymore. You know, Tucker Carlson is saying that, you know, aliens came to Earth and, you know, or what, you know, like leading figure people who get millions and millions of viewers a day and have some influence over the White House or whatever. And conversely on the far left believe things that people stopped believing or we thought no rational, non psychotic person believed. And the idea that you could just let it go because most people are sensible and will see reasons has been belied by the fact that again, a city of eight and a half million people that makes it more populous than I think all but 20 states in the United States is about to be governed by somebody who, who deserves to be called a communist.
- [58:47]
Christine Rosen
Well, in this. But. So one of the things that's interesting to me is the. What are the motivations of the particularly younger voters who love candidates like Mamdani and aoc? And this Minneapolis mayor also fits. This would be Minneapolis mayor fits this mold. And they did come of age during a time of a lot of financial instability. They were the ones who were incredibly enthusiastic if they had gone to college to have their loans forgiven because they shouldn't have had to pay that much in the first place. There is a real sense of both aggrievement and entitlement. And that combination is perfect for a candidate who comes in and says, you're right, the system's broken. Let me blow it up as a socialist and just start handing things out. And it's not that they're gullible or stupid or any of these things, but their real world experience is of a world where neither political party in their lifetime seems to have figured out how to fix basic things. And this is a longstanding theme of ours on the podcast, like if you're in power and government, you're just supposed to make sure things work, work. And their entire life experience for 20 plus years has been a system that doesn't work. And that is. That makes them very easy pickings for, for the radical. That plus being young anyway makes it seem much more appealing. So I have some sympathy for their, for their willingness to listen to that kind of messaging at the same time that I'm sort of horrified that none of them seems to have picked up a history book and read about the history of socialism and any other place on earth.
- [60:16]
Abe Greenwald
The reason my sympathy ends very quickly for those people is because they're. The people they're gravitating to are telling them that it's good that these things don't work. Yes, they're not supposed to work.
- [60:29]
Christine Rosen
Very important.
- [60:29]
Abe Greenwald
Not supposed to have a safe subway. A safe subway is a relic of, you know, white supremacist patriarchy, blah, blah, blah. You're not supposed to, you're not supposed to complain about the subway. And so what I don't get is these, these people are like, yeah, nothing works. And then, and then they. Why are they gravitating to the party was like, of course it shouldn't work. What's wrong with you? Why would you want a working subway? Why would you want safe streets? Why don't you understand the hierarchy of oppression contained within your own statements and all that stuff? And I just, like, I don't have a lot of sympathy for somebody who doesn't turn right around and walk out the. At that moment.
- [61:13]
Seth Mandel
I think why I've been in this state of kind of horror for, I don't know, a few months now, and it goes beyond the rise in violent anti Semitism. All of that's very much a part of it is that even for me, someone who's kind of always believed that fights never End, you know, as John was saying, that nothing sort of ends forever. I think I had this base level comfort that the 20th century would not be relitigated in this way. All the horrors of it, the Nazism, the socialism, the communism, America's role in the world, like that seemed pretty well settled, and it's not. And we're like, so we're sort of sliding back into the horrors of the 20th century in some way. And it's so unsettling. It's like, I think that's this overwhelming feeling I have.
- [62:18]
Christine Rosen
Oh, but to invoke one of. One of Abe's favorite conspiracy theories. It's not that we're going back and totally relitigating. It's like we're having to fight the flat earth version of the 20th century.
- [62:29]
Seth Mandel
That's exactly right.
- [62:31]
Christine Rosen
Either side don't really. We're not actually having a sustained article argument.
- [62:35]
John Podhoretz
But that's important because it tells you something about the stickiness, as they now say, of ideas, which is to say that the flat earth ideas last. Yeah, right.
- [62:51]
Abe Greenwald
The.
- [62:52]
John Podhoretz
What would you call the normative idea? The ideas that, that, that, that are, you know, what happened. We learned that the world doesn't work in this way. For example, there are things that. No, nobody would ever do that they did in the 19th century because they didn't understand certain things. My favorite, which is what I learned from TJ Stiles's great book about Cornelius Vanderbilt, the first tycoon, is that when these giant ferry boats were the way you got to across the Hudson or something like that, and they started using, you know, steam to power them, or they, you know, they started. They had engines running these motors, and they used hay to, you know, they threw hay into the, into the, you know, fire to make the ship go. And they kept the hay next to the engine. They kept the hay next to the fire. So a spark would fly out of the fire and it would catch onto the hay, and then the boat would blow up. And it occurred to people, you know what, we better put the hay over there in a box and close it and then bring it to the fire when we needed more. So then if there are any sparks. But it took four ferry boats blowing up before that elementary thing was learned that will not be unlearned. Right. But that an idea is bad.
- [64:30]
Christine Rosen
I don't know. The Pinto was sort of a version of that.
- [64:32]
John Podhoretz
Okay, fair enough.
- [64:33]
Christine Rosen
It had to be relearned, right?
- [64:34]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, fair enough.
- [64:35]
Abe Greenwald
But that also, also, I. I have to say that my. A disturbing number of like, two T size, two T onesies. Have on the, on the. On have a. Don't like that says. Yeah, it says keep away from, you know, flammable material.
- [64:52]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, right. Yeah.
- [64:53]
Abe Greenwald
Keep your child.
- [64:54]
John Podhoretz
So, yeah, but I'm just saying that, like, there are things that people learn that are elementary, that then you're like, well, they. I can't believe they didn't know that before then. But then they didn't, and they learn cause and effect. And cause and effect is kind of. It's impossible not to. To unlearn cause and effect.
- [65:13]
Seth Mandel
Not really.
- [65:14]
John Podhoretz
Ideas don't work that way.
- [65:15]
Seth Mandel
But, John, I don't even agree on that because what's. What, what's going on with. What's the vac business about now?
- [65:21]
John Podhoretz
I mean, that vaccines are counterintuitive. This is why. I got it. I got it. I got to disagree with you on this. What is a vaccine? A vaccine is you give yourself a little bit of an illness to create the things in the body that will fight off a worse version of that illness that is conceptually difficult for very literal people to understand. I'm serious. Like, if I say to you, I'm going to give you a little bit of cancer to make sure that you don't get a lot of cancer. I mean, a little bit of measles. So you don't get a lot of measles. It's like, well, what if the little bit of measles turns into a lot of measles? I don't want. I don't want my little kid getting a little bit of measles. And you're like, no, you have to do it. Because you know what? If 90% of people don't do it, then you can't eradicate measles. I don't care about 90% of other kids. I. I care about my kid. I don't want him to have a little bit of measles. So that's where. I don't think that that example is quite right. And medicine, among other things, like understanding how those mechanisms work, that's where you need to be able to trust experts who say, no, you need to do this every which way you look at it, and you don't need to study it. I'll just tell you.
- [66:38]
Christine Rosen
But early discoverers of some of these treatments often experimented on themselves and their own family members. So I would say, if you want a mom, Donnie, running your city, maybe see, make him live under the conditions he wants all New Yorkers to live under. First, how he thrives.
- [66:55]
John Podhoretz
That's an excellent point, but I just.
- [66:57]
Christine Rosen
Politics, we don't do, we don't learn that way.
- [66:59]
John Podhoretz
Ideas don't have the same. I mean, Jonah Goldberg would say that the thing about socialism is it is way more natural than capitalism. Capitalism is a complex, sophisticated, advanced idea. It is anti tribal. It is the idea that, you know, people can act in their own self interest. It's a complicated thing and it was hard for people to get to because ordinarily it's like I only do what I would do for me or my tribe and everybody else can drop dead. I don't even consider people who are not part of my tribe human. I can enslave them, I can kill them, I don't care, all that stuff. And so it takes a high level of civilization and a high level of sort of experience to get to the point at which you can have capitalism, which is literally a system that has only really been in place for 200 years out of the entire lifespan of human existence. You know, romantic ideas about what people are really like and how people should really function and everybody should give, everybody should share with everybody else and all that are much more natural than some of these other ideas. And so at a time when you lose faith in the idea that people who are more educated than you or know more than you or whatever know better and you're like, basically, nah, they told me that I should, you know, take this vaccine and I got Covid anyway, the hell with all of them. It. That's a little hard to argue with number one. And number two, it's just, it's. It's an opposition to human nature and unsticky idea. Flat Earth. The idea that the earth is flat is much more easy to grasp than the idea that the, that the planet is round. When are we ever walking in some. You know, what does that mean? If we walk to China we would be upside down. I mean that's how your mind would think, right? The earth must be flat because it's always flat. Some point, at some point there'll be an edge and you'll fall off it. Like that's, that's a normal understanding of how. Based on your own personal experience of what the, what the earth is like. So I'm more sympathetic with this phenomenon of people reverting to bad ideas or not sympathetic. I'm more understanding, I think, than I was once where I was like, I can't believe we're after. We have to say this again.
- [69:39]
Abe Greenwald
Well, that you know, and the right, the version on the right of this is There's a lot of people online who will say, you know, there's like, they'll say this is what they took from us, right? And it'll be like, you know, this idea, right, that everybody in the mid 20th century had a four bedroom house on one person's salary and a huge backyard and all this other stuff at the, you know, the wife didn't have to work and blah, blah, blah. All this sort of like trad wife stuff. But there's also this idea, it also creeps into the medicine stuff, right? There's like these, you see these tweets where people say, here are some toxins that our grandparents never had to deal with. And it's like, well, our grandparents survived because we're alive, so what do we need? You know, they didn't have microplastics in their food and they didn't have saturated fat, you know, and whatever. It's like, ask your grandparents. What. I mean, my grandparents were, you know, born, I guess, in the Depression. So like, I don't, I don't, I don't even understand, but like, there's this idea that revert to some sort of natural, more sort of communed with the earth.
- [70:54]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [70:55]
Abe Greenwald
Feeling and rejecting things that are new because they are new and that is really growing on the right.
- [71:02]
John Podhoretz
Look, nature is terrifying and, and romanticizing nature is a very interesting human impulse. Because of course, the one who was.
- [71:11]
Christine Rosen
Born and raised in Florida has this, by the way, because what they all. Yeah. Well, no, because no air conditioning. All those, all those little images are from like New England. I'm like, you never would have survived in Florida in the 20th.
- [71:23]
John Podhoretz
Right. And alligators.
- [71:24]
Christine Rosen
And alligators.
- [71:24]
John Podhoretz
I'm just saying, until we conquered nature to some extent. So there was air conditioning and we had fences and you could irrigate and you could like, you know, structure things and build things that could survive storms and all of that and have electricity. And so that, like, this is the joke. It's like if we stepped in a time machine and went back to 1875, not even 1575, it would be like stepping into hell. You know, step on a rake, step on something, you get sepsis and die. No one can cure you.
- [72:04]
Christine Rosen
All of us, Seth would probably be dead already if we're.
- [72:08]
John Podhoretz
But I'm just saying, like 10,000 different things. You know, one of the great discoveries I made in the last couple of years is if you go to 19th century houses and you tour them and that sort of thing. Just what it meant to clean clothing in the 19th century. If you were the sort of person who cleaned clothing since, of course, many people, as we know from, like, took a bath once a year. Like, if you lived in the west, the cowboy came into town to take his annual bath. So imagine what that person smelled like and what his clothing was like and all of that. Right?
- [72:45]
Abe Greenwald
So, yeah, but he had no microplastics in his food.
- [72:48]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, I know he died at 37 of sepsis from something else. But my point is, like, we, we. That, that is that weird thing where it's like, everything was better before. And it's like, yeah, everything was better before. You would have lived till you were 40. Half your children would have died before they were. Before they were five. You know, you would likely have been killed in a war if you were male and you were in Europe. You know, like, there's 10,000 things that mean that. You know, as somebody said to me, it's like, if you were a king in 1700, you lived a worse life than the poorest person in America does today. Because even the poorest person in America has indoor plumbing and access to a shower. That alone, you know, yeah, maybe you lived in Versailles, but again, you step on a. You step on the wrong thing and you. You're dead in a week, you know, and, you know, you could be one of the Olivia Colman character and the favorite, I can't remember what, Queen Anne. Seventeen children, all dead. Like, that's a real person. It was a real person. She was the Queen of England. 17 children died. Gave birth to 17 kids. 17 of them died. She was the richest and most powerful person in England. I mean, that's what life was like. Anyway, now we're getting so crazy far afield here. I'm going to make a quick recommendation, and it's a recommendation of a podcast, and it is my historically. This is one of my favorite podcasts. It's called the Plot Thickens. You can look it up. It's. It's a. It's done by. By tcm and its host is Ben Mankiewicz, who is. Who's the guy who introduces a lot of movies on. On tcm. And he's done something very special. Here is the current podcast is on the movie Cleopatra. Ben Mankiewicz is from the family Mankiewicz. His grandfather was Herman Mankiewicz, who wrote Citizen Kanan. His uncle was Joe Mankiewicz, who wrote All About Eve, A Letter From Three Wives, produced the Philadelphia Story, and then destroyed his life and career and everything in his, I think, early 60s by taking on the project of then the most expensive movie ever made maybe then. And now Cleopatra, which became this famous three year runaway production that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and ruined everybody's life and came out and was kind of like a dud. And so this is the inside story of the making of Cleopatra. The affair of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. How Joe Mankiewicz had to write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite the screenplay and trying desperately to save this inert blob of a. Of a movie. And there's all sorts of things in it that you've. No one's ever heard before read before from his diaries. And it's. I think it's now in its fourth episode. I think it's eight episodes, episodes long. He's done Previt in previous years, if you go back, like just fantastic stories of movies and popular culture. And he did a series on Lucille Ball last year that was really staggeringly good. So that's the Plot Thickens podcast from tcm. Currently the story of the making and of Cleopatra and the unmaking of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. So we'll be back tomorrow. For Seth, Christine and Abe, I'm John Pod Hortz. Keep the candle burning.