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- [00:04]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Abe Greenwald
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, expect the worst. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, March 21, 2025. I'm John Podhortz, the editor of Commentary magazine. Well, yesterday I told you that we had brand new limited edition merch available@comMENTARY.org in our merch store. You can see if you are following us on YouTube. I'm holding up the thermal tumbler says it's worse than that, which is of course a Greenwald's catchphrase. And of course a hat, beautifully embroidered, very heavy like cap. It's worse than that cap for your viewing pleasure here on YouTube. Selling like hotcakes. And we did not order very many because we didn't know whether or not you guys are going to want it and you want it and we're going to have to order more of it if you order. But if you want this in the first tranche, you got to go today. Get on the merch orders because they are literally going to be gone today. Are we. Are. We have almost sold out. So get in while the getting is good. And we're probably going to have to go back to the well to order some more. So that is the con. And there is existing merch, including our Keep the candle burning mugs. Here's one that right now has my coffee in it. Keep the candle burning mug. But that's not new. But nonetheless, it is a fine mug, high quality. I use it every morning here to record the podcast with my colleagues, executive editor, Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [02:00]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [02:01]
Abe Greenwald
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [02:03]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [02:04]
Abe Greenwald
Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [02:07]
James B. Meggs
Hi, John. Quick question about the cap. I'm sorry? I have a question about the cap. Being the female on the podcast, is there a place you can put your ponytail through? Okay.
- [02:17]
Abe Greenwald
Yes, ladies, get the cap showing you. There's the.
- [02:20]
James B. Meggs
Thank you.
- [02:21]
Abe Greenwald
Holding space. Right. The crucial thing below the Commentary logo.
- [02:27]
John Podhoretz
Excellent.
- [02:27]
James B. Meggs
Okay, thank you. Hi, John.
- [02:30]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, Christine. And joining us, I was going to.
- [02:32]
Christine Rosen
Ask the same question.
- [02:33]
John Podhoretz
So you were.
- [02:35]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, well, I have. It's by me. It's just another way of getting air on my. On my. On my almost bald pate. So get a little ventilation there in the hot summer months. Also joining us today, our tech commentary columnist, contributing editor of the City Journal, veteran journalist and all around great guy, James B. Meggs. Hi, Jim. How are you?
- [03:01]
John Podhoretz
It's great to be back, John.
- [03:03]
Abe Greenwald
So, Jim Meggs, you have a piece in the April issue of Commentary, as you do in every issue of Commentary. This is a piece about the Twitter substitute Blue sky and the question of whether or not we are living in our silos even more radically than we were before and how dangerous this is for liberals to hide themselves away from the common conversation so that they at least understand what is going on. We had interesting data all this week from David Shore, the Democratic data analyst, about just what a pickle Democrats and liberals are in because they don't understand who is voting for them. And that in fact, the massive shift in voters since 2016 is a shift not among white males getting more Trumpian, but about everybody else getting more Trumpian, except for college educated women, period. The only group that seems to be moving left. Everybody else in the country seems to be moving right. And it's not helpful to go on Blue sky, absent yourself from the more common conversation. So that's a great piece that you should look up as soon as we're done here. Go to commentary.org subscribe if you are not a subscriber and read Jim Meg's piece. But Jim is a man of many, many, many interests, among them space. He's written a lot for us about space, about the space program, about the problem of the government monopoly over space exploration in the first four decades of the space race and how the privatization of space has been an incredible boon in many ways. And we saw one example of that this week with the rescue of the two astronauts from the space station whose Boeing craft that took them up to the space station then crapped the bed and could not be trusted to bring them down from the space station. Another feather in the cap for once, for what was once considered America's best run and most important tech company, Boeing and Boeing, of course, is going through a long, dark decade of the soul, what with this and the problems with its 787 Dreamliner and some of these crashes lately and stuff like that. So Jim, just so we haven't even really discussed what happened with the docking at the space station of the SpaceX craft to bring the astronauts back home. How do you look at this? Including the fact that of course, it is America's foremost government slayer, Elon Musk, whose company it was that was contracted to be the rescuer.
- [05:45]
John Podhoretz
Yes, this requires a little bit of background. So bear with me. The history of this is that NASA has what I think is a really innovative program to not have to build its own rockets and fly its own rockets like it used to fly the space shuttle to supply the International Space Station, but essentially charter a rocket and a space vehicle flown by a private company. They called it the commercial crew program. It started about 15 years ago, and when it started, they thought Boeing would probably be their main supplier because Boeing was the world's leading aerospace company. SpaceX was kind of a scrappy little startup at the time, not taking all that seriously. But then SpaceX wound up building its, upgrading its Dragon capsule and using its very reliable, very inexpensive Falcon 9 rockets to just start launching cargo and crew to the space station like clockwork. And it saved a ton of money for NASA and a really good program. But NASA still hoped that Boeing would eventually catch up. So this flight of the Boeing Starliner was Boeing's attempt to show that this craft could deliver people to the space station, fly safely, and after that, it would be certified, and then it would go into rotation as one of the two different craft that are regularly supplying the space station, aside from the Russian Soyuz, which carries the Russian astronauts often. So that all looked pretty good. And people were pleased to see that SpaceX would have a little. Even SpaceX fans thought it would be good for it to have some competition in this commercial space business. But the Starliner had some really, really worrisome problems. On the approach of the space station, a bunch of the little thrusters that control its position in orbit failed, which meant it might have. It could crash into the space station or, you know, all kinds of terrible things could happen. And they got it docked. But then there was this period of study that went on for months where they tried to figure out what was wrong and would it be safe enough to take the astronauts home. So it took off on June 5. The astronauts were to stay there about a week and then come home. And instead, the weeks and the months passed by. And finally in September, they decided, we're going to bring the Starliner home. Unmanned, unoccupied, it came home fine, it landed fine. But then they had this question of what to do with the astronauts. They could have launched an extra mission, an extra SpaceX mission, just for the purpose of bringing them back, but that would be very expensive. So instead they decided to just make them part of the International Space Station crew. And in fact, they made them part of a crew that hadn't even arrived at the space station yet. So in September, when, I believe it was mid September, when, when a new, entirely new crew was due to arrive at the space station, Crew 9, they bumped two of the four people from that mission. And then they had Butch Williams and Butch Wilmer and Sony Williams take their, their places and do the jobs they would have done on the space shuttle for the next six months, which is the standard crew rotation, and then fly home with them on the scheduled return flight. So all of this was planned, you know, basically last summer. People are acting like, you go on Twitter and it's like, yay, Elon, he rescued the, the, the astronauts. Well, yay, Elon. He runs the world's best space company ever. They launch more rockets than, than anybody else in the world. But it wasn't an emergency rescue mission. It was a planned crew rotation that now included the two astronauts. It was great to see it come back. You know, one thing SpaceX does is it gives all kinds of great video images of, of inside the capsule and outside the capsule as they're returning. It was a beautiful site. It was a perfect landing in the Atlantic.
- [09:55]
Abe Greenwald
So surrounded by dolphins, right?
- [09:57]
James B. Meggs
They were greeted by dolphins, like out of central casting.
- [10:00]
John Podhoretz
It was so beautiful. And somebody, I saw somebody on Twitter was like, that looks like AI.
- [10:06]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [10:07]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. Anyway, so it's great to have them back. There are many, many looming questions about what, what's going to happen with, for the future of NASA? What does this mean for their commercial crew program now that Boeing has basically said it doesn't want to participate in this anymore, it doesn't want to build more, more rockets under the strict budgetary terms of the commercial crew program, where they basically are given a fixed price? You know, it's like you'll, you will deliver astronauts to the, you will build a rocket or a vehicle and you'll deliver astronauts to the space station for five fixed price. The old way of building stuff for NASA would be we're going to design stuff mostly in house. We're going to work with your engineers. You guys are going to build it when, whenever there's a design change or costs go up, you can just build that back to us. And, you know, you have no real change order on the budget, right?
- [10:59]
Abe Greenwald
It's a change order. It's like when you're renovating your house and you decide you need to upgrade the tile, and then the change order, your contractor gets to bill you for the change order. But that's not the case with this.
- [11:09]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's, that is the case with most government contracts. You know, that's why Pentagon stuff costs so much. That's why most NASA projects have cost so much. But this was a really innovative attempt by NASA not to do that, to give these vendors a fixed price. SpaceX has been able to work under that, when people complain that SpaceX gets so many subsidies from the government, I say like, look at what they're delivering. They're delivering incredible service for fraction of what it would cost the government to do it themselves. So I think they deserve a lot of credit for that. But Boeing is, is not going to be able to compete in this. There's a question of whether Starliner will ever fly again. One of the NASA supervisor of the program the other day said he thought they were going to work to try to, you know, make sure it was spaceworthy and keep using it. But I, there's question whether Boeing would even want to do that. They've lost so much money on this program. So we're just, now we're just looking at this very dramatic moment and I think it'll be remembered in space history as a kind of a change into the guard where the company that built, you know, helped build the Apollo rockets and has been our preeminent aerospace company and partner with NASA is now stepping back. And this Elon Musk startup, you know, this kind of renegade company, SpaceX is just a world dominating figure in the space industry today and will continue to be so.
- [12:38]
James B. Meggs
Can I, can I ask a question? Because I find it fascinating that the story everyone wants to cover about this is the one you mentioned. This sort of social media ginned up fake controversy about bringing them home. And is it Biden's fault? Did he leave them stranded? And people love a good dramatic space story. We haven't had a good movie.
- [12:55]
Abe Greenwald
It's like the Martian, exactly like we.
- [12:57]
James B. Meggs
Left them behind sort of thing. I get the, I get the narrative left behind but, but the real story here, it strikes me is that Boeing, one of the reasons Boeing doesn't want to do this anymore isn't just the costs, it's also the PR implications if they fail. They have a lot of right now they're doing a lot to kind of pull back and lower expectations for their shareholders. But what would happen, what would have happened if that capsule had blown up or something, you know, really horrible had happened? And this idea that Elon Musk, who's now everything he touches, is politicized. I'm just curious, Jim, do you think that's going to affect how rapidly and how well Space X continues to work with NASA? Because speaking of Martians, I mean this is Elon's eventual dream is to move beyond the places we've already explored, have a moon base, go to Mars, all these things, is that now under threat? Given his political activities with the Trump administration.
- [13:50]
John Podhoretz
I am working on a big report for the Manhattan Institute right now about the future of the space program, and I'm grappling with this question. You know, Musk is such a visionary in multiple industries, but especially in space. I mean, he will go down in history. Like Wernher von Braun only never shot any rockets, and not yet anyway. But, I mean, a true, true visionary. But what but his love of trolling and stirring the pot politically and taking pretty incendiary sides on issues. I wrote a column about this for Commentary, I think at least two years ago when he was in the process or had just bought Twitter, expressing concern for this guy who. The work he does, I think is so important that he often makes trouble for himself by being kind of inflammatory. And he has to operate his businesses in hostile political environments. You know, his social media company has to operate in the eu and he's, he's, you know, and they may be, you know, fuss budgets and silly and worthy of contempt for some of their attitudes about free speech and stuff, but you still have to work with them if you want to run a business that does social media in the eu. Now with NASA, this tendency to make kind of dramatic extreme statements in various areas in American politics has taken a field that usually has pretty bipartisan support. The NASA agenda that Trump established in his first administration was really supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. Democrats and Republicans have both supported this effort to, to some extent to use these commercial vendors like SpaceX and Save Money. So it's been a very positive story. And now I worry that if NASA comes to be considered kind of a fiefdom of Elon Musk, what will a future incoming Democratic administration do? You know, oh, we're going to unwind this whole plan to send a mission to Mars or we're going to cut NASA's budget because it's all going to Musk anyway. I can totally. I mean, people are already saying, and stuff like that. You know, AOC says stuff like that all the time. I can see this becoming almost a cause celeb on the left to, to basically shut down anything Musk has touched in the, in, in the space program. So I do worry about that at the same time that I recognize that we don't have a Space program without SpaceX. I mean, it is right now, you know, SpaceX is kind of carrying NASA on its back in terms of manned spaceflight. So. And I don't want to see anything disrupt that, but I think everybody is on tenterhooks worried about what the Next step is going to be in this evolution.
- [17:02]
Abe Greenwald
Can we talk a little about Boeing? Because I think there is a very interesting larger issue about capitalism and how capitalism works that is exemplified by this weird decline in Boeing's standing, reputation, its achievements and it's innovation. This company that helped create modern space flight, the comforts of modern commercial spaceflight becoming like taking a bus. All of that, A lot of that, if not all of it. Because there was McDonnell Douglas and others, but, and of course Airbus, but there, but there are, but I mean Boeing was the heart of that incredibly innovative, innovative company. But now getting old, you know, 70, 75 years old or something like that, and older, older, okay, but showing signs of what you might call decrepitude or some version of what happens when a company that has to be on the leading edge as the world gets smaller and the demands on them get larger, but they develop a high bound corporate culture, they start functioning as their own internal bureaucracy with their own internal demands and needs and hungers. They are rent seekers. They are so intimately interwoven with the defense establishment and the Pentagon budget and things like that that innovation becomes a near impossibility for them. And I think there is an object lesson in that, why we need constant innovation from below in the United States and in any dynamic economy. Because you cannot rely on a company like that, or a company like Ford or something like that to create the path to the future. Because having created the path to the future once, they are then kind of like defenders of the former path to the future rather than explorers of the newer path. How poetic was that?
- [19:16]
John Podhoretz
That was really good, John, thank you.
- [19:18]
Abe Greenwald
I'm very proud of myself. I'm going to be quiet now because I'm not going to do any better than that.
- [19:22]
John Podhoretz
You just said what I would say about the kind of inevitable bureaucratization of entrenched institutions, especially when there is this element of rent seeking and very, very close relationship with government, both with government, both in terms of the regulatory environment, the various subsidies and benefits they get. And Boeing gets a lot of that especially from the Export Import bank and, and their relationship with the Defense Department and NASA and all of that makes them slow, cautious, still a lot of good engineers and stuff at, at, at Boeing. And then there's another factor and, and I think a lot of people really in a way blame the decline of, the decline of Boeing on Jack Welch. If you go back to the legendary CEO of GE who had just, you know, was a colossus in the business world in the, in the 80s and, and 90s and really led this business philosophy that was kind of the financialization of Sigma. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, that was management practice.
- [20:29]
Abe Greenwald
Right, Management.
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John Podhoretz
And there was a lot.
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James B. Meggs
Beautifully parodied on 30 Rock, by the way.
- [20:33]
John Podhoretz
Exactly. There was a lot to said for the kind of, you know, rigorous, you know, management standards and stuff. But. But when everything is analyzed as a financial problem first, then your business starts making a lot of decisions that make financial sense, but gradually kind of eat the seed corn of the industries or the company's ability to keep innovating into the future. And that's part of what Boeing did. They spun off some of their manufacturing and now some. We're finding that some of the manufacturing problems they're having aren't coming from Boeing itself. They're coming from these vendors, you know, that they spun off the construction of this part of that part of an aircraft. And then the CEO is no longer walking the, the shop floor. You know, it's not his shop now. It's some vendor in, you know, some other state that he's never even necessarily been to. And the reason I blame Jack welch is because two or I'm trying to remember whether it's two or three subsequent Boeing CEOs came out of GE. They came out of the rigorous program of CEO education that Jack Welch had there, and they brought that kind of GE philosophy to Boeing. At least that's the view of a lot of aerospace industry experts that I've talked to. I'd love to get Boeing's perspective on this. I keep emailing them for comment about various things and they often don't respond. I think it would be a certain kind of purgatory to be a PR person for Boeing right now, I imagine, and my heart goes out to them, but it is a sad story. But it's also, as you say, John, it's a reminder of why this concept of creative destruction in capitalism is so important. You can't look at the status quo at a given moment and assume it will continue. It will gradually slow down, it will gradually erode. You need the Elon Musk, you need the startups, you need the challenges. And sometimes you need the sad stories of companies that, that don't make it or have to cut back or get absorbed by somebody else or go out of business. I'm not predicting that for Boeing, but I'm saying that, that, you know, it is good to have change, even if it's wrenching and disruptive.
- [22:51]
Christine Rosen
One of the weird things about the whole Boeing story was that it sounded like problems that were easy to fix were causing a lot of trouble. And I think people in the public don't really understand why they weren't getting fixed. I mean, the example that I always go to is there was like a period where twice a week we got a story about loose bolts on planes. And if you're a member of the public, you're sitting there going, why can't, why don't they tighten the bolts after the first plane has a problem? Like who's, who's not tightening bolts on a plane? What is, is this stuff harder to fix than it sounds like? Like, it sounds like almost, you know, I don't want to make any accusations, but it sounds almost like laziness and, but after the first one happens and something happens to a plane, you know how people get about air travel and thinking of, you know, if there's a loose bolt and a door is going to fly open or something like that after the first one, how does it not happen that that is the first thing everybody does when they get to work in the morning and then there's no more stories. How are there three more stories in the next 10 days of loose bolts and things opening when they should?
- [24:10]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, well, some of it is, maybe people are looking for it and that's why, that's why it's coming out. But airline maintenance, I mean the, the protocols for regular maintenance on modern aircraft are incredibly complicated. They have this whole schedule where they rotate through different levels of maintenance. But to just say, oh, wait a minute, we had a report of loose bolts. Let's take all the planes out of the air right now. And you don't even have enough capacity in the shops to do all that work. So then, you know, they add, it's like a change order. They might add check bolts to the list of things that are done on a regular, whatever the cycle is, you know, six month review. And for some of these things, there's a certain kind of overhaul of an aircraft that is so deep you have to take the aircraft out of commission for a long period of time and it's only done again, I don't know the cycle that probably, you know, every few years and to, to, to, to do that in order to get to some of the parts that require taking apart other parts. Right. It, you know, it's, I get. Everything is simple if you don't know anything about it. I think Kevin Williamson once said he added an expletive in there that makes, it gives a little bit more punch, you know, repairing aircraft or maintaining Aircraft is actually really, really complicated. It doesn't excuse them, you know, having loose bolts, but it shows you once you get a big complicated system up and running with all these airliners, you know, in the air as many hours as possible in order to make money, it's, it changes are hard. And, and so I'm, I'm not saying I'm sympathetic exactly because the problems shouldn't have come out in the first place, but it's, but this is not so easy to fix and it will take time.
- [25:55]
James B. Meggs
Can I ask a question about China? Because the news today is that Elon Musk is supposedly getting briefed in some capacity by the Defense Department about China. Although there was this five byline New York Times story which was then shot down on Truth Social by Trump. So who knows what's going on a typical day in the Trump administration. But Elon Musk has interest, interest in China, does work with China, does business with China. We in part created a Space Force because of what is, I think, properly conceived to be a future conflict in space, most likely with China. So where does all this fit in in terms of the work that SpaceX does? Space Force, China, the U.S. the Trump administration. You know, a simple question for you, Jim.
- [26:35]
Abe Greenwald
Wow.
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John Podhoretz
Well, you know, Space Force, almost nobody talks about it. It's bigger than NASA.
- [26:41]
James B. Meggs
I love Space Force. I really wish we would talk about it every day, but I wish we.
- [26:45]
Abe Greenwald
Had a new season. Where's Steve Carell and Steve Carell, Take it over.
- [26:52]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, everything comes down to entertainment with you guys. Sorry.
- [26:56]
Abe Greenwald
So you're the musician, you're the only actually performing entertainer.
- [27:02]
John Podhoretz
Right, Right.
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Abe Greenwald
Sitting here on this panel, you'd have.
- [27:05]
John Podhoretz
To consult my audience to see whether they're actually entertained. But I have fun. But the, you know, Trump often doesn't get credit for some of the good stuff he did in his first administration. Setting up the Space Force was a really smart move because it took all these military tasks off of NASA. I don't if you remember, but the Space Shuttle used to every so often fly a kind of secret mission to deliver military hardware to space.
- [27:33]
James B. Meggs
As a Floridian, we would always wait, we would always kind of be aware of the secret launch. Right.
- [27:38]
John Podhoretz
And the Space Shuttle's design was actually it had to be made bigger than they originally planned in order to carry military payloads. And that had all kinds of problems. So it's good to split this off. The Space Force off space is already a war fighting domain. Imagine our ships and planes and ground troops trying to operate without gps. But one of the first things a major combatant like China would do in a war would be try to knock out our GPS satellites. And they've already, China and Russia have both very recklessly in the last 12 years or so or 15 years, tested anti satellite weapons that, you know, they blew up an old, they blew up an old dead satellite and scattered debris all over the place. Made the problem of orbital debris much, much worse. They showed a certain arrogance in this and they were sending a message. We're if there's a war, we're taking it to space and we're going after your space infrastructure. So a big part of the space force's role is figuring out how to defend against that kind of stuff and to be prepared for that. And in addition to having sensing satellites, spy satellites, all kinds of communication satellites for wartime conditions, it's a huge job. I'm glad they're doing it and I'm glad that NASA is freed from having to sor. Double duty like that. So that's an important thing. I just think we have to take China super seriously. Their space program is moving ahead very, very rapidly. They're trying to get to them back to the moon. To the moon. Before we get back to the moon. I think there's a good chance they'll do so they look, there's some very attractive terrain on the moon near the South Pole that has sunlight all the time. You know, the moon doesn't have a dark side and light side. It has. Aside from what former Senator Bill Nelson said in a press conference a year or so ago, it has. He only runs NASA now. You'd think he would know this. But it, the moon rotates with the Earth, so has I think a seven day period. I forget the number. Anyway, there's, it's like two weeks of dark and two weeks of light roughly. But the South Pole, you get light all the time. So you can keep solar panels up, you can get energy. There's deep craters that look like they have ice in them. So you have, and there's all that blue cheese. And the cheese is good. It's more aged down in the South Pole. So it's a very attractive terrain. Well, China wants to get there. What if they get there and set up shop and say like, okay, no, no, no, nobody else at the South Pole. You guys can maybe take the North Pole if you want. You know, we don't want that kind of situation. So far there's been good international understanding that space is going to be shared. Nobody's going to claim ownership over Any part of space terrain. And, and the US has kind of led that and well, we're going to.
- [30:39]
Abe Greenwald
Rename the Gulf of Tranquility the Gulf. The Gulf of America, in case you were wondering.
- [30:43]
James B. Meggs
Yeah, it would be the Gulf of Truth Social. You know, it would be true.
- [30:47]
John Podhoretz
So what would. Anyway, what would we, so what, what.
- [30:51]
Christine Rosen
What would we do with that sunlight though?
- [30:52]
John Podhoretz
Oh, make electricity. Yeah, I know, but the moon.
- [30:56]
Christine Rosen
Can we, can we, you know, is it plausible to you to, to farm electricity on the moon stuff like if it is, this is going to be a real conflict that, that is it.
- [31:06]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
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James B. Meggs
No, no, but it can be a launch base. We can have energy for a base right.
- [31:12]
Abe Greenwald
Centrally. We don't, we don't know whether or not the technology is going to develop to be able to harvest things on the moon and get them back to Earth. But it stands to reason it's 93, 000 miles or something like that. It stands to reason that in the next 102 years. I'm sorry, but it stands to reason in the next 50 years, technology may develop that makes some form of that possible. So whoever, whoever, you know, puts plants the flag and, and creates defenses around it.
- [31:46]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yes. I mean there are, there are a lot of scenarios for mining different things on the moon. Actually, when I got to Popular Mechanics, Gosh, it was 20 years ago. Now, the very first cover story we did was that was the astronaut Harrison Schmidt, who was on the final Apollo mission, wrote a story about a plan to harvest helium 3, a form of helium that's found in the lunar regolith, the dusty surface that is useful for a certain kind of proposed fusion reactor. And the idea is you would mine this stuff and you would ship it back to Earth and it would help power this revolution and infusion power on the Earth. There's actually a very good movie about that called Moon John. You've probably seen it.
- [32:32]
Abe Greenwald
Sam Rockwell.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, great performance.
- [32:34]
Abe Greenwald
Fresh from his future Emmy winning monologue about sex in Thailand on the white lotus this week, by the way.
- [32:43]
John Podhoretz
Right. So that's a possibility. It could also just. People sort of turn up their noses at space tourism. But I think this could be the goals that NASA has to build a small base on the moon. And the idea that private companies might go kind of hand in hand and like, okay, we'll set up the living quarters. You know, this company will set up the living quarters. NASA, you can use it for your astronauts when they're there and your scientists. But we'll also host it to private people who want to Come up and spend a few days on the moon for what, you know, for $300 million or something. Another company might mine ice and make fuel, make oxygen, you know, water, of course, for people to live on. I mean you could imagine a nice little economic ecosystem that's a public private partnership, you know, around some kind of base on the moon. And also very important, everything we do on the moon is a chance to try out different technologies and strategies that will later be useful when we go to Mars. And, but we'll be doing it on a location that's a, you know, three or four day journey from Earth, not a, not a journey of, of many months. So, you know, we're in better shape if something goes wrong. We can do things more quickly, we can deliver stuff more quickly. So I'm in favor of that, but I don't think NASA has to do all the work and spend all the money to do it by itself. I think it, I mean we have it.
- [34:13]
Abe Greenwald
We have an interesting conundrum since Christine brought up China and the, and the military questions of space and China that goes to this Boeing question, which is Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in particular, these two great American aerospace firms were weirdly semi private, semi public in the sense that they were developing our military hardware, particularly in the form of rockets, missile, whatever, and, and so people who work there wasn't precisely a private mark free market like they were. They had a major client. The client was the federal government. The federal government had all kinds of regulatory controls over, over them and a lot of those were security controls to make sure that only a certain number of people could have access to a certain kind of information so that, that could all be protected from spying could, people wouldn't be able to go and sell it to the Soviets. And, and we were locked in a cold war and the Soviets would do anything to get, to steal our technology for, for these purposes. And now we've had this, been in this weird relation for 30 years with China where we have, we know that China is stealing our technology. The problem is that a lot of what it's stealing is private, right? It's like private patents, companies that want to do business in China who are essentially saying in order to have access to China we're going to look the other way when you steal our intellectual property. But we cannot do that with stuff that has military applications or we're going to be handing our chief adversary our military secrets and the ways in which to defeat us if we end up in a direct conflict with them. And how you reimpose some of that on a free market or on spay or on Elon Musk is a kind of fiendish problem, you know, because the way you did it with McDonnell Douglas and Boeing was to lavish them with enormous sums of money that made it more profitable for them to be in the government pocket than not like that's what they were. They were among the most profitable companies on the entire aerospace industry in California was there as a kind of government subsidized industry that did what government needed in exchange for extraordinary remuneration.
- [36:38]
Seth Mandel
So, you know, I read all the hand wringing stories today about Musk getting briefed on China and the administration's denial of it. But, you know, I mean, the thing that I think people need to realize is that if you're someone like Musk, well, there's no one like Musk, but someone Musk in his position even before the Trump administration tapped him as an advisor. Someone who has been doing what he's doing in terms of supplying rockets and space programs and doing so internationally and with satellites, and he's already walking around with international secrets in his head that the rest of us are not. You know, you can't be in his position without having privileged information. You have to. It just comes with the job. The job wouldn't get done otherwise.
- [37:37]
Abe Greenwald
So, you know, I mean, that's true of all, to be fair, not only to him, but to the thing I'm talking. That is true of all major industrialists and has been true of all major industrialists. If they have businesses that operate in a lot of different countries with a lot of different political systems, they are maneuvering, they are making deals. They know things about the political systems that, you know, are, they know better than, you know, the CIA and the, than the, and any intelligence agency knows because they're getting it direct from the mouths of the leaders of these countries. And part of what protects them and us from the fact that this information is in their hands and not solely, you know, like there's not a monopoly of that information inside the government is that they want to operate in the United. You know, they know better than anybody else that they jeopardize America's primacy at their own peril. You know, you're doing business In China before 2015, life is wonderful. 2015 Xi starts to tighten and it's no longer so great to do business in China anymore. And that can happen anywhere at any time in a country where the political system flips. And that's not true of the United States because of the thickness of our. Of our capitalist. 250 years of capitalist tradition or something like that. And so you do have this break against Elon Musk. Just saying. Okay, I'll just let China. I'll tell China what we know about their satellites in order to get another 12 cents out of China. But. But it's a. Let's move on now, because I want to also now talk about this amazing story that is being wildly undercovered, which is this 800 billion$666 million.
- [39:44]
John Podhoretz
$ million.
- [39:45]
Abe Greenwald
$800 zillion dollar judgment against zillion billion. Greenpeace, which apparently is actually. Greenpeace, the famous environmental organization, which is actually apparently three organizations or more.
- [40:02]
John Podhoretz
It's a kind of a conglomerate around.
- [40:04]
Abe Greenwald
The world, but international, domestic.
- [40:07]
John Podhoretz
Three of them. Yeah, yeah. Primarily Greenpeace USA in this lawsuit.
- [40:11]
Abe Greenwald
Right. Okay. So they. They were sued by a pipeline company, an American pipeline company, for fomenting, stirring up and supporting, implicitly supporting terrorist acts against the building of this energy pipeline that people will remember was the site of one of the early direct action resistance efforts in the United. Early. It was only nine years ago, but these protests at Standing Rock in the Dakotas, where 300 people would move in and surround equipment or, you know, make a human phalanx or. Or something like that. And the company said, this is being organized from above by Greenpeace, which is harming our reputation, which is encouraging or even, you know, implicitly supporting terrorist efforts to blow up parts of the pipeline, destroy equipment and do all that. And so a combination of this idea that Greenpeace was defaming the company, that it was encouraging domestic terrorism and that it was providing material support to. And trespass. Right. Added up in a. And it's a jury. It's not. This is not a judge coming out of nowhere.
- [41:36]
John Podhoretz
This is a civil trial.
- [41:37]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, it's a civil trial that's been heard for a year.
- [41:42]
John Podhoretz
No, I mean. Well, the suit was filed first. This company, Energy Transfer, filed a suit back, a federal suit not long after these events in 2016 that got dismissed. So they filed again in 2019 in the state of North Dakota, a civil suit against Greenpeace and associated entities for these actions. Nobody ever used the word terrorism, by the way, in this suit, as far.
- [42:09]
Abe Greenwald
As I'm using it.
- [42:10]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but it was for a combination of acts on the ground. So it was like a civil conspiracy to disrupt the pipeline and. And defamation, where they claim that Greenpeace was making false statements about what the company was doing with this pipeline. And they tried to interfere with the company's relationship with investors and financial institutions by basically spreading reputational damage. So banks shouldn't want to lend money to this notorious corporation. And the jury found on their side in almost everything in this huge judgment. So this is a real. John, you and I were discussing it on email last night and, and I think you're exactly right. You said something like, you know, that it's, this will be in the field of NGOs and protests, something like what the Gawker lawsuit was to the kind of freewheeling online journalism, a big red brake light. I think that is exactly right. In fact, I've got a piece, it should be posted by the time this podcast is up on City Journal Today about this. And I had a really in depth piece in the winter issue of City Journal that's also up if people really want to dig into it. But I think that NGOs have gotten away with a lot of kind of subterranean support for real extremism in this country. Organizations that seem pretty legitimate and mainstream on the surface, but they're funneling money to antifa type activists through various cutouts and back channels and whatnot, and maintaining a kind of plausible deniability. I actually, I call these hybrid protests. I compare it to the idea of hybrid warfare, you know, where there might be some random sort of disruptions and sabotage, but stuff that falls just under the threshold of all out war so a country can maintain a certain deniability. Russia, of course, does this all the time. And, but these are these protests, you know, that you do have peace, like Black Lives Matter, the college pro Hamas protest. You have a lot of peaceful, you know, maybe idealistic protesters out there, but then you've got this knot of trained activists who use the COVID of free speech and legitimate protest to, you know, set fires, break windows, occupy buildings. They love fighting with police and they train and they get money from various sources and they travel around the country and they train other protesters in how to evade arrests and, you know, use your umbrella to, you know, keep the tear gas off you and stuff. And it's a, it's a, it's a huge Shadowy Network. Park MacDougald has done some really good work on this in Tablet. It's worth checking out his stuff. And so, and the NGOs are, some of them are funding this stuff. And now this is coming out into the open. I think that's a good thing.
- [45:10]
James B. Meggs
Does some of the money also come from the federal government? We're seeing some of the revelations about how some of the Green New Deal, that was. That is the Inflation Reduction act, which was basically enacting a lot of Green New Deal stuff. That money given to friendly Democratic operatives who then themselves funneled it to these small, unheard of little organizations that did all kinds of mischief. They're spending our money.
- [45:33]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, they are. So I did a big again, for Manhattan Institute, I did a big study on Biden's environmental justice agenda. And hidden in that agenda was an effort to sluice huge amounts of money to these activist organizations that mostly have the phrase climate justice in their names or in their mission statements. And by climate justice, they mean destroy capitalism.
- [45:56]
James B. Meggs
Basically sit on an interstate and throw paint on pieces of art. Yes, right.
- [46:02]
John Podhoretz
And so one of these groups, the Climate justice alliance, on their website they say the road to a healthy climate runs through a free Palestine. You know, like it's the Omni cause, everything's connected. And the EPA sent a lot of money to these people. I think it's a big scandal that will also, you know, be coming out and exposed over the coming months.
- [46:32]
Abe Greenwald
So the lawyer for energy transfer put it this way. He said Greenpeace took a small, disorganized local issue and exploited it to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline and promote its own selfish agenda. They thought they'd never get caught. Now, what's important about that is this notion that the First Amendment only goes in one direction. That is said, the First Amendment protects the right to protest. And so therefore you can do anything in the form of protest. But just as you can't shout fire in a crowded theater, you can't cover illegal actions like trespass or vandalism or anything like that. By calling them protests, that removes it from speech and becomes something else. And you are protecting free speech by making it clear where the boundaries are between speech and crime. And creating those bright lines and drawing them so that everybody understands them makes. It will make it very clear to the innocence that Jim is talking about, like the sort of naive protesters, if they're being exploited, if they're being used, if they're standing there covering for people who behind them are doing illegal things that they would not support, that's number one. And number two, also, energy transfer, though it is not a person, it too has speech rights. It too is an entity. And you can't say anything about it. Which is where the Gawker parallel comes in. Just because Hulk Hogan is famous doesn't mean you can steal things off of his and then run them on your website and say that that's because he, you're protected by the New York Times v. Sullivan because he's famous, therefore his entire life is fair game. It is not fair game. Free speech is not a cover for illegal activity. And energy transfer also has free speech rights. Like to say, we're gonna, you know, we. You're defaming us. We're a business. We need to get. We need to go to banks and try to raise money. If you go to them and say that we're despoiling the environment, when we're taking unbelievably careful steps to make sure that the pipeline does not leach, does not cause, does not get into the aquifer, whatever's in the pipeline and all of that. And then you say that we are sorry, you're not allowed to say that. Not only without proof, it's not true, you're lying about us hindering our ability to do business, you know, defaming our reputations. You don't get to do that. And companies usually settle. Classic thing is for companies usually to settle this to make it go away, to pay Greenpeace off, to buy their silence. And then every now and then, every five or 10 years, there's one business that says, I'm not going to buy them off. Like, that's the famous Red lion, the supermarket that went after ABC for its defamatory report about the meat that it was selling. Alar There were various other things where businesses say, we can't just pay it off to make it go away. This is too dangerous for us to let this stand and to create the precedent that someone else can then use to blackmail us again or again or again.
- [50:13]
John Podhoretz
And this is one of those companies. The CEO is a guy named Kelsey Warren. He's a very innovative guy who built up this company. You know, the company is. People hadn't really heard of before them. It's an enormous company and he's quite wealthy. And they can afford to do this and take the, I think, you know, the risk of having this backfire on them. And he decided he just had enough. He wasn't going to. He wasn't going to take it anymore. And he's been fighting this battle now for close to 10 years. And now they've had this big victory. They're not done. There's going to be a ton of appeals. Who knows, this could go all the way to the Supreme Court at some point. But I think the very fact that the jury saw it, you know, on energy transfer side is going to send a real signal to these other NGOs that they can't count on this kind of teflon of. Of their, you know, their. Their benign image in the public and their ability to claim that this is all just. Just free speech and legitimate protest if they really are funding these actions that break the law.
- [51:30]
Abe Greenwald
Efforts are being made in Europe to use the claim that what Energy Transfer did to Greenpeace is what we call a slap suit. That is to say, a lawsuit that is entered into to impoverish or break the organ. A richer group sues a poor group to run them out of business by. By making their costs impossible. And then if you win a slap suit, if you are the. If you say you're the victim of a slap suit, the damages are either treble or even quintuple or something like that. So that's supposed to be the. That pun, that potential punishment is supposed to be the hedge against Kelsey Warren doing what Kelsey Warren did. And they're going to try to do this in Europe, where apparently new laws have been passed to make it easier to file SLAPP suit claims against people.
- [52:26]
Seth Mandel
Well, they need. Yeah, Europe needs it. I mean, because they've got.
- [52:30]
Abe Greenwald
No, but Europe is. This would be Greenpeace's effort. Greenpeace is going to use the slaps.
- [52:35]
John Podhoretz
Greenpeace is suing Energy Transfer in a court in the Netherlands using. And it stands for strategic litigation against public participation. There are actually many states in the US have slap. Have passed slap legislation to try to discourage these kind of, you know, nuisance lawsuits and stuff, but against businesses, small businesses.
- [52:58]
Abe Greenwald
But this would be kind of the reverse. This is an NGO using it to go after.
- [53:06]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, right, right. There is no slap legislation in North Dakota, by the way. But, you know, but you had. In order to win that, you have to prove that the company that litigated in the first place to defend its reputation was wrong or illegitimate in that. So, you know, the slap rules don't make it impossible for a company to do what Energy Transfer did here in North Dakota. They just raised the risk that it's. That if it backfires, you could be on the hook for a lot of money and a lot of reputational damage.
- [53:43]
Abe Greenwald
The thing about the Gawker parallel that Jim and I talked about last night is that Gawker was, of course, running out of business because it could not afford to pay the $150 million fine that was levied against it for its defamation of Hulk Hogan. And similarly, Greenpeace claims that should this decision hold and the monetary finding remain in place, the Greenpeace will go out of business in. In the United States because it will not have sufficient resources to pay the fine, which I think for Greenpeace USA is in excess of $300 million. There's apparently. Or no, it has assets of $300 million. This is a $600 million judgment. So it would pay what it paid and then go out. Then go out of business. But that's a very high. Now, you can have a court lower the lower monetary judgment, but based on what I'm reading, the idea that that jury will be reversed unless they can adduce evidence that the jury was either misled or that the information provide or that the judge made horrible errors in his handling of the case, it's not going to get reversed. You know, I mean, it's not like, oh, you could just go to an appeals court and the appeals court will say, this civil finding will be reversed. Like, there has to be. There have to be material grounds on which to reverse it. And everybody made the best argument that they could. I guess I just want to make one point, which I just made on Twitter, but struck me as interesting just in the media context. The New York Times went to two people, or there's a letter that was sent out about how terrible a decision this is and what a war it is against the First Amendment. One, the main person involved is a First Amendment lawyer named Martin Garbus, who actually came to fame for defending pornography like 40, 50, very old, like 40, 50 years ago. But the other is a guy named Steven Donziger. Steven Donziger is fresh out of jail. Steven Donziger was the guy who spent his career suing Chevron for its environmental depredations in South America and was sued by Chevron in an. In Ecuador on the grounds that he had. Had lied, had bribed, had done all this stuff to get information against them, and lost the suit. Him personally lost his $9 billion judgment against Donziger and his law firm for materially misrepresenting, for attempting to bribe and impeach witnesses and all of that. Then he came to the United States, was sued again, basically, eventually went to jail for hiding, for refusing to turn over things that were subpoenaed in discovery, personal devices and things like that, pretty much on the grounds that he was hiding evidence that would show that he, in fact, was guilty of the things for which he was charged. And the New York Times simply mentions him as somebody who is known for having pursued Chevron as an environmental, you know, depraved. This is a guy who literally went to jail for hiding evidence that would have impeached him, you know, inter as a, you know, because he was in contempt of court and in front of a liberal judge, by the way, in New York, Lewis Kaplan, who was not exactly, you know, a friend to business. So the fact that some, you know, some 22 year old reporter for the New York Times, I don't even know who this is, Karen Zrake, who's been at the times for 12 years. But Karen's rake could actually cite Danziger without irony as a source of real concern about the First Amendment implications of this decision.
- [57:59]
Christine Rosen
Well, I think what happened was that the, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the accusations against Donziger are untrue.
- [58:10]
Abe Greenwald
Yes. Well, Donziger was lying dead and then when the camera came off, he. There was, by the way, a new piece of footage yesterday of a dead, of a girl supposedly killed in a Gaza, in an Israeli strike on Gaza. And they're showing the camera and people are weeping over her and you can see her eyes moving. You can see her eyes are closed, but you can see her pupils moving under her eyelids.
- [58:36]
John Podhoretz
Pally one strikes again.
- [58:38]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. Amazing.
- [58:40]
John Podhoretz
The Washington Post did something very much along those lines. In their story on the energy transfer case, they quoted a guy, Michael Girard, from a Sabine center for Climate Change at Columbia lawyer. He said that the decision, quote, sends a chilling message to physical climate protests anything that actually disrupts fossil fuel production. So this guy's a legal expert saying you're chilling acts that disrupt actual production. So you're stopping trucks, you're breaking, you know, you're stopping pipelines. That's not speech. That's those are most likely crimes if you are physically disrupting somebody's legal business through your actions.
- [59:30]
Abe Greenwald
Well, not a Columbia, I have to say, as you know, that's the incredible.
- [59:34]
Seth Mandel
Thing is that because they've had this Teflon for so long, we've gotten to the point where we sort of take as granted that it's okay to obstruct actual work and things going on that that's somewhere that that falls within the bounds of peaceful protest and it does not.
- [59:58]
Abe Greenwald
Well, this is important, Abe. You wrote a newsletter about this earlier this week. And again, I really, really, really suggest people go to commentary.org to the Tab newsletter at the top of our page and subscribe to Abe's daily newsletter, which is fantastic. And you made the point that basically there was this kind of five year period of impunity in which from George Floyd, both because of corporate pusillanimity and the Biden Administration and blue state mayors and governors, like turning a blind eye to patently illegal and criminal behavior on the grounds that it was politically. It was stuff that was going on that they did not want to challenge. Either challenge politically or that they actually supported politically. The muscles needed to fight these battles when there is actually a counter fight have atrophied and they don't know how to argue. They just think they're allowed to do anything. And then someone says, no, you're not allowed to do anything. Like the Trump administration on some of this anti Semitism stuff. And they are left sputtering and argumentless because they just did whatever they did without anybody kicking back except conservative media. And Elise. And one hearing by Elise Stefanik, you know, I mean, in over four years.
- [61:25]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, no, it was a total free for all. And where the idea of peaceful protest.
- [61:31]
Abe Greenwald
Became completely redefined as mostly peaceful protest. Right, yeah.
- [61:36]
John Podhoretz
Yes.
- [61:36]
Seth Mandel
Well, if it's mostly peaceful, then it's peaceful.
- [61:38]
James B. Meggs
Fiery, but mostly peaceful.
- [61:40]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, exactly. Right, okay.
- [61:41]
Christine Rosen
Right there, there was that, there was that, that, that, that clip on the news with the fires behind the guy and the tagline. Yeah, like protest. Protests intensify.
- [61:54]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, it's like that's, it's like the great moment in the Naked Gun. Let me recommend the Naked Gun, as the commentary recommends over the weekend. You know, people forget these movies that are, you know, that are 30 years old, that are still as hilarious as they were once were. And the Naked Gun, of course, has the great scene where Frank Drebin is standing as a. As the world's dumbest cop is standing in front of a fireworks factory that has exploded, sending fireworks and into the air. And he's standing there as people are staring at it, going, nothing to see here. Turn back. Nothing to see. Mostly peaceful protests, by the way, just.
- [62:32]
Seth Mandel
To pick up on something that ties it all together. So you have these terrorist acts against Teslas now. Right. And the media is treating this again, I was reading stories yesterday, I think it was in the Times where they went to lawyers because Pam Bondi said, look, these are acts of terrorism and prosecutors are going to treat them as such. And they went to the media, went to liberal lawyers who said, but, well, yeah, technically you could say they're terrorism, but I wouldn't be emphasizing that. We're talking about people throwing like fire bombs and grenades at these cars. Like, this is textbook terrorism.
- [63:15]
Abe Greenwald
Apparently. There was a moment on the Daily Show. Not that I watch the Daily show because I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a hot poker, but there's a moment on the Daily show where whoever horrible 4th rate comedian as the host tonight said something about the Teslas and the audience cheered and he was kind of startled because it's like, maybe he owns a Tesla. I mean, because it was like, you know, you can't like firebomb somebody's car.
- [63:44]
Christine Rosen
Right? Well, this is what happened on snl, right, with Luigi Mangione.
- [63:48]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [63:49]
Christine Rosen
They say, you know, he made a joke on Weekend Update and there were cheers before he could say a punchline. Just after he said Mangione's name. Cheers. And he had to, he actually kind of reprimanded, you know, it slightly the audience, but also as somebody else, as somebody else has said, if you told, if you told him 10 years ago that liberals would be firebombing electric vehicles.
- [64:17]
Abe Greenwald
And concerns would be buying them in.
- [64:19]
Christine Rosen
Protests, they were because they were branded as conservative. Yeah, that's where we, that's where we've gotten so Musk has, Musk has, you know, he's the, the tech guys love to use Disrupt. This has disrupted partisan politics in also some really wild ways.
- [64:37]
Abe Greenwald
Listen, I am not for terrorizing Tesla car. I just want to make this clear. I'm very much against it. People should be prosecuted within an inch of the law. But that cybertruck is one ugly vehicle. That's all I'm going to say. I'm not saying you should blow it up, but aesthetically, the cybertruck is, is, is, is to me is like a glimpse of what it would be like to live in mad. In the world of Mad Max. I don't want to live in the world of Mad Max. I don't want my cars to look like that. So that would be the one possible long term advantage, is making people revisit the question of whether or not they want to own that horrifically u piece of aluminum or whatever the hell it is plastic or. Because steel. Steel. I don't like it. I don't like it. I, I mean I thought the Pinto was the ugliest car I'd ever seen up to now. But, but the cyber truck really took, took, took its, took its thunder. Okay, Jim Megs, as as ever, thank you so much Everybody. Go to commentary.org and read Jim Megs's piece about blue sky. Follow Go City Journal and read his writings on space, SpaceX, on energy transfer and the like. Read Seth Mandel every day here@the commentary.org Christine. Read wherever Christine is writing. Christine also of course, actually Jim inspired.
- [66:11]
James B. Meggs
My most recent commentary column. So that's a conversation we had about our shared love of cults, which is a whole nother conversation.
- [66:18]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [66:19]
James B. Meggs
Jim is the inspiration for the column.
- [66:20]
Abe Greenwald
So and Abe's newsletter. Abe's newsletter every day, probably around four in your mailbox. Go to commentary.org and click on the newsletter tab at the top. And remember that merch is flying off the shelves. I'm not honestly, I'm only telling you now because we are going to run out. So if you want it, you want it in the first go round, you got it, get to it. And I mean, we're, it's going to be gone by this afternoon, our first set of orders. So if you want it, get to.
- [66:50]
Christine Rosen
Your computer and the resale prices are going to, you know, it's like going to be like Springsteen tickets if you miss the actual tickets.
- [66:58]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's commentary.org merch at the top of the page as well. So have a wonderful weekend. Thanks again. And Jim, for Christine, Seth and Abe, I'm John Pothorts. Keep the candle burning.