Robbin' Hood

Summary

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The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Episode: Robbin' Hood
Date: April 24, 2026
Host: John Podhoretz
Guests: Abe Greenwald, Eliana Johnson, Seth Mandel, Charles Fain Lehman

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Episode Overview

This episode dissects a controversial New York Times video conversation featuring Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and writer Gia Tolentino, moderated by Nadia Spiegelman. The panel critiques how this exchange—celebrating acts like “micro-looting” and justifying violence against powerful figures—reflects a broader cultural and political trend of antinomianism (rejection of traditional laws and norms). They explore its connections to anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and generational rifts in political identity. The discussion expands into the dangers of conditional patriotism, generational romanticization in politics, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and the erosion of shared civic values.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. NYT Roundtable: Radicalism and Anti-Law Rhetoric

[02:08]–[07:00]

• John Podhoretz introduces the episode by dissecting the New York Times conversation with Hasan Piker (“notorious Hamas supporter,” “radical beefcake,” [02:08]) and Gia Tolentino, which centered on the morality of stealing (“micro-looting”).
• Seth Mandel summarizes the exchange:
  • Both panelists argue the U.S. capitalist system is so broken it justifies “breaking the rules.” Tolentino admits: “I do this all the time. I go to Whole Foods and I steal lemons" ([03:46]).
  • Piker justifies violence against health executives, referencing Engels’ idea of “social murder”: “Engels talked about social murder and Brian Thompson was guilty of social murder” ([05:42]).

Memorable Moment:

Tolentino: “Micro looting. I do this all the time. I go to Whole Foods and I steal lemons.” [03:46]
Piker: “Engels talked about social murder and Brian Thompson was guilty of social murder.” [05:42]

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2. Hypocrisy and Double Standards of the Elite

[06:37]–[08:41]

• The hosts note Tolentino’s and Piker’s privileged backgrounds (wealth, family scandals) and their defensive reactions when their rhetoric is used against them in real life.
• Abe Greenwald draws parallels to Tom Steyer's proposal to prosecute ICE agents and the broader leftist mentality that “the law does not bind me.”

“The idea is just...I am not obligated by the civil order as such. I have no responsibility to it because I have some objections to it.” – Abe Greenwald [08:41]

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3. Linking Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Social Breakdown

[10:54]–[14:23]

• Eliana Johnson highlights how overt antisemitism and anti-Zionism, once fringe, have become mainstream leftist cred, used to justify all manner of social transgressions and violence.
• “Once you decide that it's okay to wage war on the Jews, you have already broken the social contract ... You don’t get to sanction antisemitism and then choose what kind of repulsive, violent outrage comes down the pike next.” – Eliana Johnson [13:35]

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4. Improv Politics: “Yes, And”-ing the Radicals

[14:57]–[18:04]

• John Podhoretz critiques journalist Nadia Spiegelman for playing along: “She is doing what we call an improv ‘Yes, and-ing’ ... they are effectively, yes, ending the views of this supporter of mass murder and this rich girl New Yorker writer…” [17:11]

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5. Anti-Zionism as All-Encompassing “Worldview”

[18:04]–[20:54]

• Charles Fain Lehman: “Anything is someone who is building their entire identity around...the hopeful destruction of the other...Stealing from Whole Foods makes sense to an anti-Zionist...everything has to be decolonized—your grocery store too.” [18:47]

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6. Elite Denial: The ‘Radical Chic’ Phenomenon

[19:26]–[21:13]

• The hosts compare today’s leftist elites to the “Radical Chic” of the 1960s—romanticizing radicals without acknowledging the genuine intent behind their violence and hatred.

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7. Second-Generation Decay: Linking Art & Nadia Spiegelman

[21:13]–[27:52]

• Discussion of Nadia Spiegelman's lineage—daughter of Maus author Art Spiegelman—and how her detachment from Holocaust memory echoes in her willingness to platform anti-Jewish rhetoric.
• Charles argues, with a quote from Art Spiegelman, that Maus itself has been appropriated for anti-Israel messaging: “I didn’t make Maus as a recruiting poster for the Israeli army.” [27:13]

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8. Anti-Americanism: Three Attitudes

[29:48]–[38:56]

• John Podhoretz introduces Charles Lehman’s Commentary article, outlining three types of American identity:
  • Unconditional patriotism: Loving America regardless.
  • Conditional patriotism: Loving America only if it reflects your politics.
  • Active anti-Americanism: Rejecting or loathing the nation itself.
• Lehman notes the dramatic drop in Democratic patriotism since 2016 (Gallup: 92% of Republicans vs. 36% of Democrats express pride in America in 2025 [34:39]).
• Democratic efforts to “do the patriotism stuff” now feel aesthetic and hollow.

“There is no willingness to sort of unironically say America is the greatest country in the world.” – Charles Fain Lehman [37:56]

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9. Historical Parallels: 1970s Revolutionary Left and Today

[38:56]–[44:08]

• Podhoretz notes 1960s–70s revolutionary fervor led to a backlash and Republican dominance. Today’s anti-American rhetoric is less confined to elites and might spread further into the base.

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10. Rise of Left/Right Revolutionary Politics & Role of Social Media

[44:08]–[50:04]

• Abe Greenwald: Revolutionary, anti-establishment politics are “retailing better on the left,” but Trump’s rhetoric reflects a mirror dynamic on the right.
• John Podhoretz and Seth Mandel: Social media fuels the spread of anti-American and antinomian ideas, not just among intellectual elites but through “ignorant, vulgar politics.”
• The failing of civic education: students are no longer taught to love America or see themselves in a shared civil order ([48:00]).

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11. Elite vs. Mass Radicalism and Generational Rifts

[50:04]–[57:30]

• Eliana Johnson asks whether the radical left's podcasting is an “elite phenomenon” or resonates with the party base.
• The convergence of disaffected youth, radical ideas, and party “coalition logic” (necessitated by a two-party system) blurs responsibility and accountability.
• Lehman observes emergent “strange bedfellows” coalitions on both left and right, where radicals are included for “coalitional” reasons, sowing the seeds for future regret and political instability.

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12. The Weaponization and Myth of Youth Politics

[57:30]–[62:08]

• Romanticizing youth as inherently progressive or wise is fallacious: “Youth is a cudgel, not a demographic.” – John Podhoretz [60:04]
• Both left and right use young voices to justify shifting policy consensus, but data show youth’s future views change with age and life experience.

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13. Regime Change: Threats to Democratic Order

[62:08]–[64:16]

• Abe Greenwald recaps Lehman’s article: If anti-Americanism means hating not just the regime’s current occupant, but America’s foundational democratic order, then democracy itself is at risk.
• Lehman invokes Aristotle: “You can be a revolutionary or a patriot, but you actually can’t be both.” [64:13]
• Valorizing youth means “being led by barbarians. That is what's happening. And they're going to do the revolution because that's what barbarians do, they tear down the gates.” [65:22]

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14. The Right’s Post-Liberal Critique and the Suicide of Ingratitude

[66:55]–[73:40]

• The post-liberal right’s attack on the Enlightenment (Deneen, Ahmari, Hazoni) is self-defeating—enabled as it is by the freedoms the Enlightenment secured.
• Podhoretz: “To attack the Enlightenment is to attack oxygen, civilizational oxygen.” [67:17]
• Caution Against Revolutionary Fervor: Those who advocate tearing down existing orders rarely consider they may not prevail in the chaos.

"Their refusal to acknowledge that everything that they do is the result of the gift of being an American is not only ungrateful, but it has about it an interesting suicidal quality. Because if they got what they wanted…they might be the first ones to be mowed down by the firing squad.” – John Podhoretz [71:08]

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15. Obedience to Law and the Flaws of Utopian Thinking

[73:40]–[76:43]

• Podhoretz recalls The Federalist Papers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Laws are for the fallen, not the perfect, which is why antinomianism is not a harmless intellectual pose but a dangerous cultural disease.

“You don't get to do whatever you want because you're a human being and you are flawed and sinning and external forms of discipline are necessary to ensure that we don't all stand in the middle of the street slicing each other's heads off…” [74:27]

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Notable Quotes

• On Justifying Theft:
  • “Micro-looting. I do this all the time. I go to Whole Foods and I steal lemons.” — Gia Tolentino [03:46]
• On Social Murder:
  • “He says, you know, Engels talked about social murder and Brian Thompson was guilty of social murder.” — Seth Mandel relaying Piker, [05:42]
• On Antisemitism/Antinomianism:
  • “Once you decide that it's okay to wage war on the Jews, you have already broken the social contract…” — Eliana Johnson [13:35]
• On Youth Politics:
  • “Youth is a cudgel, not a demographic.” — John Podhoretz [60:04]
• On Revolutionary vs. Patriotic Identity:
  • “You can be a revolutionary or you can be a patriot, but you actually can't be both.” — Charles Fain Lehman [64:13]
• On Law and Human Nature:
  • “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” — John Podhoretz quoting Federalist 51 [74:00]

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Segment Timestamps

• 02:08 — “Radical beefcake” and the NYT panel overview
• 03:46 — Tolentino on “micro-looting”/Whole Foods lemons
• 05:42 — Piker’s justification of “social murder”
• 13:35 — Antisemitism as breaking the social contract (Eliana)
• 18:47 — Anti-Zionism leads to “decolonizing your grocery store” (Lehman)
• 27:13 — Art Spiegelman anti-Israel quote (Lehman)
• 34:39 — Pride in America: Gallup polling
• 48:00 — Decline in civic education, rise of anti-American ideas
• 60:04 — “Youth is a cudgel” (Podhoretz)
• 64:13 — Revolutionaries vs. patriots distinction (Lehman)
• 74:00 — “If men were angels, no government would be necessary” (Podhoretz)

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Tone & Style

• The discussion is sharp, analytical, and frequently sardonic. The hosts blend policy analysis with cultural criticism, using humor (“radical beefcake,” “improv yes, and-ing,” “the COVID charge of anti-Zionism”) and historical references to add depth and color.

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Takeaway

The episode forcefully argues that the normalization of antinomianism—whether through anti-Zionism, anticapitalism, or generational self-absorption—corrodes civic bonds and places democracy itself at risk. The panel warns against romanticizing radicals, weaponizing youth rhetoric, and ignoring the foundational gratitude owed to liberal-democratic institutions, making the case that America’s crisis is as much cultural-spiritual as it is political.

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Recommended: Read Charles Fain Lehman’s full Commentary article, "Anti-Americanism is a Disease", for an extended take on these themes.

Transcript

[Abe Greenwald]

Hope for the best, expect the worst

[John Podhorts]

Some drinks and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect

[Abe Greenwald]

the worst, hope for the best.

[John Podhorts]

Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, April 24, 2026. I am Jon Pot Hors, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Eliana Johnson]

Hi, John.

[John Podhorts]

Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi John.

[John Podhorts]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Charles Fay Lehman]

Hi, John.

[John Podhorts]

And joining us today, the author of Commentary's lead article in our May 2026 issue, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Fellow Fellow, just a hail Fellow well met. Charles Fay Lehman. Welcome to the podcast, Charles.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, Jon.

[John Podhorts]

We're gonna get to Charles's article, which is called Anti Americanism is a Disease, But I thought we could get into it first by talking about the most talked about journalistic coup or anti coup of the week, you might call it the much discussed, evidently alarming to all sides video conversation sponsored by the New York Times opinion pages between Times editor Nadia Spiegelman and two contributors, Gia Tolentino of the New Yorker and the notorious Hassan Piker, the Twitch podcaster, Hamas supporter, a supporter of the attack on America on 9 11, but very good looking and model good looking. And now he's sporting kind of a beard and glasses to make himself look a little more scholarly.

[Seth Mandel]

In the words of the Free Beacon's Andrew Styles, he's a radical beefcake.

[John Podhorts]

Radical beefcake is excellent. But now he's sort of affecting a kind of like Raskolnikov, Bazarov, Chernyshevsky, some kind of weird Russian.

[Seth Mandel]

He wears like a Mao kind of, you know, shirt jacket.

[John Podhorts]

Yeah, a Mao shirt jacket and a kind of 19th century Russian revolutionary beard, glasses combination as and so why is this conversation creating such a frenzy? Abe wrote a wonderful newsletter about it yesterday. But it's not just us. It's not just people on the right. Matt Iglesias is deeply concerned about it. People all over the sort of moderate liberal left are up in arms about the conversation that is being had there. And it's basically because they are explicitly antinomian. Let's say that this is what they're basically saying is laws shouldn't apply. Standard issue laws that have existed throughout human history about how you shouldn't steal things, for example, should no longer apply and that it's okay to commit murder when a person who works for a company is deemed to have been committing social murder through the policies of that company. So let's just try to unpack what Gia Tolentino and Hassan Piker said on the conversation.

[Seth Mandel]

So I listened to the, the whole thing. And the premise of this and the reason that it relates to Charles Peace, which is about the rising sentiment of anti Americanism in both parties, is that the premise of the conversation is that the system, the American capitalist system is rotten. And both Piker and Tolentino assert that the rottenness of the system justifies and the, and the rottenness of our laws justifies breaking them. And so one of them asserts that in our system, the, the rich steal from the poor, but the poor are not allowed to steal from the rich. And so people should remedy that by stealing from big box stores. And they call this micro thieving or micro stealing. And Tolentino says micro looting. Micro looting. I do this all the time. I go to Whole Foods and I steal lemons. And Piker says our system is so rotten where, you know, only people with jobs can have health care and health care executives are effectively murdering people that that justifies.

[John Podhorts]

He called it social murder.

[Seth Mandel]

Social murder. And he cite, um, he cites Lenin or Trotsky. Who, who did he cite? One of them? Well, he cites a Marxist.

[Eliana Johnson]

I think it was Engels.

[Seth Mandel]

Engels. He cites Engels. You're right.

[John Podhorts]

Damn. The third, you know, like the, the most obscure.

[Seth Mandel]

So he cites actually the rich one.

[John Podhorts]

He cited the rich one. That's the good part. Because Engels, of course was the.

[Charles Fay Lehman]

Engels is the. Engels is the shemp of that group.

[Seth Mandel]

And he says, you know, Engels talked about social murder and Brian Thompson was guilty of social murder.

[John Podhorts]

Brian Thompson being the health.

[Seth Mandel]

United Health Care CEO. Yes. He was gone down, you know, in broad daylight in New York City. And so his murder was justified. And the New York Times journalist, you know, in air quotes, is facilitating this conversation, not really pushing back. It starts with a sort of quiz about what social transgressions would you participate in? Would you steal from the Louvre? And they both talk about how that's so cool. I would totally steal artifacts from the Louvre, but I wouldn't steal from the public library. And why. And why not? So, so that's the conversation.

[Abe Greenwald]

The, you know, there were like a whole bunch of remarkable elements here, which is, I think, to John's point, why so many people were offended by this. Right? I mean like, you know, Hassan Piker lives in a three million dollar house and Gia Tolentino's family may or may not have engaged in human trafficking from the Philippines, but I think the.

[John Podhorts]

She lives in a two and a half million Dollar house in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. So that's a good.

[Seth Mandel]

She got really upset when people were engaging in their own form of social protest and confronting her outside her brownstone about the views she expressed. She didn't like that kind of direct action, it turns out.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, well, it's different because it's not happening to the rich, I guess. It's not structural.

[John Podhorts]

Well, that's the question. Who, what counts as rich? She's rich. Go ahead. Anyway.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, I mean, the sort of quirky that Eliana gets at here is like, you know, it is, it is. It is justified to engage in these actions because there is something that the social contract that has just sort of totally broken down. Nothing is fair anyway. We might as well do it. We can be revolutionary. It's totally fine. The thing that I actually thought about, to sort of connect this to broader politics. I mean, it's intrinsically ridiculous, right, to say we should go shoplift for revolutionary purposes. But I was thinking about two weeks ago, Tom Steyer, who's maybe gonna be governor of California, came out and said, if I'm elected governor of California, I'm going to mass arrest and prosecute ICE agents. Right? That's his big plan. And I mean, this is straightforwardly insurrectionary, right? Like Tom Steyer's plan is that the state of California will deny the legitimacy of the federal government enforcing whatever you think of the enforcement law. That's that. That's the plan on the table. And I think, you know, they're different, but in both circumstances, the idea is just like the law does not bind me. I am not obligated by the civil order as such. I have no responsibility to it because I have some objections to it. I don't. I don't like how things are going. So I'm just going to say the law is irrelevant to me. I don't have to. I don't have to listen to it.

[John Podhorts]

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[Eliana Johnson]

Yeah. I mean, I came at it from a slightly different place, which I'll get to in a second, but I want to mention that the Nadia Spiegelman who was sort of facilitating the conversation, not only did she not push back. I didn't even write about this. But what was funny to me was she would pose this question of like, well, are we on a slippery slope here in talking about committing a dozen different crimes?

[Abe Greenwald]

Because

[Eliana Johnson]

the system is unfair. And the answer is no, you're not on a slope at all. You're on the wrong side of the law and morality already. There's no slope. You're not slipping down. You're not slipping down anything. You've arrived at the wrong place already. You showed up on the wrong side of everything.

[Charles Fay Lehman]

You start out stealing, and then before you know it, you're stealing.

[Eliana Johnson]

Right, Exactly. Yeah.

[John Podhorts]

I mean.

[Eliana Johnson]

Cause we should say that they. She. No, not she. Tolentino said that there was this round at the end where they were asked, is there anything that is illegal that you Think shouldn't be. And she went through this long discussion anyway. She came right to saying, yeah, blowing up pipelines, that should be legal and private schools should be illegal. But the angle that I took with my newsletter and truly what occurred to me about this was because look, Hasan Piker is a superstar of the left and of the liberal establishment. Now what facilitated his rise? How did he get there? How did Mamdani become a superstar among these people? It was their overt antisemitism, their Israel hatred, their anti Zionism, their promotion of globalizing Intifada or from the river to the sea, all of that. And that at some point the liberal establishment decided to fully embrace these overt supporters of anti Jewish terrorism. And my point was, well, this is when we've been saying for years a free society will head down the is headed for the tubes if it turns on its Jews. This is what I'm talking about. Because once you decide that it's okay to wage war on the Jews, you have already broken the social contract and you have decided that you can scapegoat anyone and commit violence in the name of scapegoating. Which is exactly what they're talking about when they're talking about killing CEOs because the system's unfair. The rest of it and you do not. For all the liberals who are watching on, who are alarmed, I would say you don't get to sanction antisemitism and then choose what kind of repulsive violent out outrage comes comes down the pike next. You've opened the door to all of it. And that's what we saw yesterday.

[Charles Fay Lehman]

So I would say that, you know, like first of all it's kind of funny to me that like the, you know, the POD Save America crew are like, you know, this guy's great. Look at this anti Zionist who calls Jews pig pig dogs. You know, he's, everybody should go on his show. And then now they're like, maybe we made a mistake. He said something about stealing lemons from Whole Foods. I, maybe we promoted the wrong guy. I mean he seemed like an innocent, the anti Zionist, but it turns out that he might also be a petty thief. No, but he didn't realize that.

[John Podhorts]

I mean that's a funny joke. But he wasn't the one who was talking about the lemons. She was talking about the lemons. He, he was talking about how it was okay to murder somebody in cold blood on the street. So he did nothing different from his regnant antisemitism and his violent anti Americanism. A supporter of the attacks on the United States on 9 11. That's completely consistent and congruent. If you think that that's okay as an expression of rage against American imperialism, then shooting a guy in the back on 53rd street, you know, you kill 2,3000 people on September 11th. You kill one, you shoot one guy in the back on 53rd Street. What's the difference? In fact, you know, you should kill 3,000 people on 53rd street just to make things equal. So I think you have a continuum with Gia Tolentino saying, you know what? Capitalism sucks. And so I'm gonna steal lemons from Whole Foods. And he's saying, america sucks. Jews suck. Let's kill them all. And it turns out that they're happily having this interaction with each other where she's not saying, no, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm just talking about lemons. I don't think you should shoot somebody in the back. She effectively, and Nadja Spiegelman as the moderator, is doing what we call an improv. Yes. Ending, which is an improviser proposes some outrageous game or idea. And if you're playing along on an improv game, the thing you're not supposed to do is say no. Because if you say no, the conceit dies right there. Someone says, oh, look, we're walking on the moon. And the second person. Second person says, no, we're not. We're here on Earth. That's the end of the skit. But the second person says, oh, look, we're walking on the moon. And there's Brian Thompson. Let's shoot him in the back. Like that's how an improv would work with. Yes. Anding and the New York Times A. By having them do this conversation and publishing it after it was done, editors listened to it and said, hey, let's release this. They are effectively, yes, ending the views of this supporter of mass murder and this rich girl New Yorker writer, bestselling author, who is stealing lemons from Whole Foods as an expression of what exactly? What is she proving by stealing lemons from Whole Foods? She can afford the lemons. She could buy me lemons. She's worth way more than I am.

[Charles Fay Lehman]

Well, but the thing is that she'd

[John Podhorts]

be buying me a couple of lemons.

[Charles Fay Lehman]

This is the thing about anti Zionism, right? Anti Zionism is the. It's the COVID charge, right? So that's how you get in the door once. Once you pay the COVID charge of anti Zionism, you get in the club and then, you know. And the thing about anti Zionism Is that is a worldview. It's not a. You know, we've been saying this for a while, but it's, it's not a position like on a. You know, it's not, it's not a debate position. It's not, it's not somebody who, who considers themselves an anti. Anything is someone who is building their entire identity around, you know, the hopeful destruction of the other, of the thing that comes after the anti. So anti Zionism is a worldview, and because of the way it's wrapped up in academia and academic lingo and rationalizations today, it is a worldview that says the world is unfair. Right. Stealing from Whole Foods makes sense to an anti Zionist because an anti Zionist has been steeped in the idea that the world has to be decolonized. Not just Israel, but everything, everything has to be decolonized. And so you also have to decolonize your grocery store.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think it's also worth dwelling on just very briefly and to Ave's point, I'm speculating, although I think I'm right, that somebody with the name Nadia Spiegelman is Jewish. And, you know, I think her engagement with Hasan Piker, a guy whose views are very well known, is sort of telling here. Right? Like, she's obviously happy to do the podcast with him. She spends like half the podcast giggling at things he says. Obviously he's very good looking. He's making all these points. But I think the regard is just like this guy, you know, it's almost like she doesn't quite believe that he actually means what he says when he says the things that he says. And I think this is both typical of how many liberals regard the radical left. I think about the classic Tom Wolf story, radical chic that, you know, New York elites who are hanging out with the Black Panthers and raising money for them, they don't really believe that the Panthers actually want to kill people. But then there's also this, you know, this is the alliance of the nature of the alliance between American liberals and the global decolonial anti Zionist movement. They like, don't really believe Hamas, and Hamas says we want to kill all the Jews. They don't like, deeply believe that, that that's what's actually. They like, think they're kind of like, yaya Sinwar is actually like kind of a hunk and he's probably a ton of fun at parties. And they had this like, total inability to wrap their heads around, like, no, when we say we want to use violence as a political means, we want to use Violence. We want to kill all the Jews. That is our goal. We want to accomplish that. There's just this total veil of unwillingness to, you know, go. Actually, these people who hate us, they really mean it when they say they hate us.

[John Podhorts]

Okay, well, first we should say, since we're talking about parents, we mentioned Gia Tolentino's parents who are credibly accused of having been human traffickers. That's number one. Okay, Charles, I'm going to give you one guess. Who do you think Nadja Spiegelman's father is?

[Abe Greenwald]

Oh, gosh.

[John Podhorts]

Spiegelman. Art Spiegelman.

[Abe Greenwald]

I'm losing it to his geography.

[John Podhorts]

Art Spiegelman is the author of maus, the most read work of American Holocaust literature, because it is a comic book that you can give to kids to explain to them what happened in the Holocaust. In which two mice live through the Holocaust. This is one of the most influential Jewish books published in the last 40 years. Nadia Spiegelman is his daughter. Art Spiegelman is a. I am not an admirer of maus. I am not a fan of the fact that MAUS has become a key work of Holocaust literature. I am not a fan of the role that Art Spiegelman has played in the world of graphic novelization and cartooning. But speaking as somebody who has spent his life having to answer or deal with the fact of his parentage, I feel absolutely no compunction in saying that Nadja Spiegelman is a perfect representation of the second generation of thinking that follows a book like MAUS that decouples the Holocaust and the Jewish experience from the larger political framework that led to the Holocaust and that has caused the politics of the world of Jewry following the Holocaust and an understanding of how to prevent any future Holocaust. And she is the. As I say, she is the Jewish version of the person who fundamentally functions as a Holocaust denier in the sense that she does not accept, believe, or even want to argue with any of the ideas about how to prevent a second Holocaust. Even being able to sit on a zoom with Hasan Piker reveals this fact that she. Ezra Klein, who published the column two weeks ago in the New York Times. It was originally titled, hasan Piker is not the enemy. Hasan Piker is the enemy. He's not only the enemy of the Jews because he is a supporter of Jewish murder. He is an enemy of the United States because he supports 9, 11. He is an enemy of law because he supports the social murder. He supports the murder of Brian Thompson on the grounds that Brian Thompson is a social murderer. And he is being placed on a pedestal by the New York Times, which considers him a contributor. This is the paper. I just want to remind you before I get too ranty. Five years ago, in a move that revolutionized American journalism, inadvertently, the New York Times, in the person of Bari Weiss and Adam Rubenstein, published an article by a sitting senator of the United States saying that the disorder and scene in the park directly across from the White House should be met with and the scene in Minneapolis after the shooting of George Floyd should be met with federal troops thus leading a riot inside the New York Times building. Mara Gay and others at the New York Times op ed page saying that they felt like they were personally unsafe. The publication of this op ed represented an act of potential violence against them. Adam is fired. James Bennett, the editor of the op ed page of the New York Times is fired. Bari Weiss quits. Here we are in 2026. Bari Weiss and Adam Rubenstein are now running CBS News and the New York Times op ed page is hosting Hassan Piker and Gia Tolentino and Nadja Spiegelman in a giggly, cutesy, smiley faced presentation supporting mass murder. That is where we have come to,

[Abe Greenwald]

which is where now can I just,

[Charles Fay Lehman]

but can I, before we do, can I just disagree on one minor point, which is Art Spiegelman is, is, was transformed supposedly by the war in Gaza into someone who will be writing a graphic novel, a mouse type graphic novel about Israel's crimes in Gaza. And he teamed up with Joe Sacco, who is an anti Israel graphic novelist to do this. And so I wonder if actually, I mean, he said at one point he said, you know, this is a quote from him, my superego about writing a book on Gaza. My superego says you must do this if you're going to live with yourself. And then in a comic post in the Guardian he wrote with Joe Sacco where the mouse, one of the characters is Mouse and the mouse says the mouse represents Art Spiegelman and he's having a debate with this other guy and he says I didn't write Maus so that it would be, you know, so that it would inspire people to sign up to, for the, with the idf. I didn't make it. I didn't make mouse as a recruiting poster for Israeli, for the Israeli army. So my, my only slight disagreement is that I, Nadia, I think the apple is actually closer to the tree than we might think. And I'm not even sure it's a first or second generation thing.

[John Podhorts]

Oh, we're not in disagreement at all Maus, it seems to me, is a direct analog 40 years ago to where we are now. Because by effectively deracinating, de judefying and de ideologizing the Holocaust, which is what MAUS does, you lead directly to the ideas that suggest that Israel has no right to defend itself in the way that it defended itself after October 7th. So we're not in disagreement, but let's move off Israel and talk about the United States, which is the.

[Seth Mandel]

Can I just say one more, one more thing? Okay. I think it's a mistake to. To isolate Piker and Tolentino. And the thing I wanted to add is that their anti Israel, anti American, essentially socialist views, of course all these things come together, but you can trace them across the insurgent Democratic Party to Mayor Mamdani, who shares the same views, to the insurgent Abdul El Sayed, who is likely to win the Democratic primary in Michigan, to Graham Platner of Nazi Tattoo Infamy in Maine, who is out campaigning saying Google and Palantir shouldn't exist. And the New York Times, which you thought reached, you know, peak, woke in 2020 when it fired James Bennett and everybody, you know, needed smelling salts because it ran. Tom Cotton's op ed is valorizing these views. This wasn't the first time they hosted Hassan Piker. Ezra Klein just did a glow up of him. Ross Douthat did a big interview with him a few months back. There was a separate style section profile of him. These are the people on whom they are lavishing attention and, you know, glazing to their readers, to their readership, because this is who the liberal elite is embracing, both the candidates and the media personalities. And Piker, the one thing we haven't mentioned he said is he was in front of the Yale Political Union and he told the students that the fall of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century. That's where that party's going.

[John Podhorts]

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[Abe Greenwald]

Well, and you know, I think part of what motivated me, and I want to stick on the polling for just a second because it's an even bigger gap than you talk about. If you look at the most recent Gallup numbers, fractions who say they're extremely or very proud to be an American, it's a good measure of patriotism. In the most recent numbers, it's 2025, 92% of Republicans are extremely or very proud to be an American, 36% of Democrats. Right. So that's, you know, almost, almost a 60 point gap. It's a 50 plus point gap. And that, as you said, has opened, you know, there's kind of a break between, there's like a 10, 15 point difference between Democrats and Republicans prior to 2016. But then 2016 happens and it just, it's this yawning maw part of again, whenever I think about this, and this is sort of a fourth type or third type of response, patriotism or engagement with American politics that I talk about in the piece. There is this thing that Democrats now do where they should have realized that it's alienating to the median American for them to be like so viciously anti America. And so they say it's like we need to re. Embrace the symbols of America. We need to, we need to have a lot of flags around. Democrats seem to be patriotic. What does that mean? I don't know. But we're just going to do more of the patriotism stuff. We're going to talk about America in a sort of purely aesthetic sense. And I think it's in some senses the most telling kind because, you know, you saw this at the 2024 DNC, right? There were, there were little American flags everywhere. There was just lots of red, white and blue. But nobody, there were no like believable statements, professions of love for America. At any point, nobody got up. There was like, you know, I indisputably have a deeply felt love of this country. And there's just this sort of total alienation from that core idea that, that idea of just like at a pre rational, emotional, effective level, I love America. And so instead, you know, when, when that, when that, you know, when you lose that from your politics, when you lose that prior assumption of or of. Of affection for the American order as such, then you can end up in lots of very weird places. So as you know, as you alluded to, I sort of lay out this typology of how Democrats. Some of it is this like purely performative, we need to wear the patriotism skin suit so that we can get elected. Some of it is this, you know, the Hasan piker, Graham Platner, just sort of like open disdain for America, a belief that America is like fundamentally evil and that actually the American people agree with you, that America is fundamentally evil and fundamentally broken and we need to have some kind of revolution. And then, you know, there's also this sort of like conditional relationship to America. I think I quote the. There's a Michelle Obama line from after, after Obama gets nominated where she says, for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country. Which is. She then tries to walk it back, but I think it's incredibly telling. It's like until we nominated your husband to be president, you weren't really proud of your country. And I think that's, you know, the sort of 16, 19, kind of quote unquote patriotism, which is like, America used to be really bad. Of course, America is built slavery and that's horrible. But we've gotten slightly better. And to the extent that we continue to improve ourselves, we will, you know, we can like America insofar as it gets more progressive, essentially. And so, you know, I think all three of these things, again to reiterate what they have in common is that they don't. There is no assumption that America is good. There is no assumption of affection for America. You know, there is no willingness to sort of unironically say America is the greatest country in the world. There's actually, I think, active disdain for people who think that. And when you do that, your politics gets really screwed up. Because politics, especially Democratic politics, has as a predicate the idea that we're all in this shared order, that we dwell together and we make decisions together. And that requires us to actually like that order and to like the society in which we live and have affection for it. And when that doesn't happen, this is my quote from earlier. You get revolutionary politics. People if people hate the established order, eventually they want to overthrow it. Those two things go hand in hand.

[John Podhorts]

So you have serious revolutionary passions which manifested themselves in the 1960s and the 1970s. You know, there were 1200 terrorist attacks inside the United States, according to Brian Burroughs count in his book Days of rage from 1969 to 1973. Recruiting stations being blown up, you know, all kinds of literally like 1200 domestic, what would be considered domestic terrorist attacks inside the United States by forces inside the United States against government symbols and banks and other things that represented either capitalism or the system of government. And that was a direct outgrowth of the increasing radicalization in the 1960s that came both from discontent over the slow, the, what was deemed to be the too slow pace of civil rights change and the Vietnam War. And American and supposedly American perfidy, aside from Vietnam, around the world and staging coups and things like that, and a concurrence, speaking of Hassan Piker talking about how terrible the fall of the Soviet Union was, a concurrent emotional connection to forces outside the United States, the only one of which we can really have an analog to right now is Hamas or the Palestinians, in a kind of general sense that there's a noble force out there that is not American, is even anti American. That could be Che, it could be Castro, it could be Mao, it could be a guerrilla army somewhere, somewhere or other, it could be all kinds of places. But that there were literal people outside the United States doing glorious and wonderful things that could be supported, that our government was even attacking Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and the like. And so we saw, we lived through. I lived through. You guys are all too young to have lived through, but I lived through this period in my early teens of watching America and Americans and leading Americans and American intellectuals from Mary McCarthy to Susan Sontag to Leonard Bernstein and the people at his party and others embrace this idea that violence against the United States, that violence inside the United States and that the violent attacks on the United States were all merited and justified because the United States was fundamentally unjust and evil. And what were the political consequences of that in the 1970s? Richard Nixon wins by 25 points in 1972, Jimmy Carter, who runs as a right wing Democrat, religious right wing Democrat, barely squeaks by after Watergate wins by a tiny margin in 1976, but then governs effectively as a Democratic liberal from 1977 to 1981. And then Ronald Reagan wins a 10 point margin in 40 states in 1980. And why did all of that happen? Because the Democratic Party ceded love of the United States to the Republican Party. And if you were an ordinary American, aside from all the bad policy implications and bad things that happened in the 70s, some of which were Nixon's fault, nonetheless, you didn't want these. The American people didn't want these people governing them. Some of them, they remained in power in the House because of the peculiar circumstances of the politics of the House of Representatives and gerrymandering and various other things. So that was the case for 40 years until 1994. But otherwise, revolution in American politics. American politics shifts dramatically to the right. The Senate shifts radically to the right, all in response to, not just because we had the better ideas on the right, but because they went crazy. They hated America. They hated the place they lived in. Their hatred was having policy consequences. But now it's 45, 46 years late. It's 46 years after Reagan's victory in 1980, and we are not the same country. We really aren't. I'm not sure that if you had done this poll, if you had done this poll in 1972, that you're talking about, 36% of Democrats, broadly understood, would not have said that they didn't like the United States. Those numbers would have been equal because the Democratic Party was a much looser, less ideological coalition of all kinds of people, just as the Republican Party was. And love of country was sort of assumed. This was an elite madness. This was elite sickness that also leached into the political leadership of the country, but not to the base. And I'm not sure that's true anymore.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, I think that's right. It has become a lot, and this gets to the San Pedro point. It has become a lot easier to sell revolutionary politics as something that you're going to promise. And this is clearly a bipartisan phenomenon, if not Trump himself. And certainly there are many readings of Donald Trump where, like, Donald Trump is promising. Donald Trump is saying, can be termed to be saying the same set of things, right. It's like America is broken. The system is rigged against you. I'm going to come in and tear everything down. And we're just going to. We're going to start over again. We're going to have a bold reaction. I think there are certainly certain people who see in Trump on the right who see in Trump that kind of politics as well, but it's clearly retailing better on the left in the Democratic coalition. And part of the reason I brought up Tom Steyer earlier is in some senses, I think that this is the style of politics that's going to define the 2028 primary. It's not really. We said we've gone from DEI wokeness, racialism, whatever, to class politics, Occupy Wall street and capitalism. I think that's like, kind of true. But the way that, quote unquote, moderates Gavin Newsom, you know, the folks who are going to run without the A or C brand in 2028, they will also be running on a. Politics of the system is fundamentally illegitimate. America is fundamentally broken. We installed this, you know, we installed this tyrant despot who's stealing our elections in the White House. We need a total overhaul of everything and everyone at all times. I think about even something as simple as there's this weird phenomenon of the Democratic tax revolt, where Democrats have these plans now where it's like, nobody making less than $100,000 a year should pay any taxes whatsoever. And it's like, if you want public services, you need to pay taxes. That's how taxes work. But this is sort of the implication there is just like the system is all rife with dysfunction and it's all going into Trump's pocket anyway, and it's all corrupt. And so therefore we can just say we're going to throw it all out. I think that that is for contingent reasons, but also just for institutional propagation reasons. Right? The people in the 60s and 70s, only the elites supported that kind of revolutionary politics. That's part of what was being rejected by the Reaganite voters or Nixon's silent majority is like the Yale professors and the New York elites who are saying, we like this. They hated that. The voters hated that. But those ideas, I think, have to some extent, you know, because they dominated elite institutions, have obtained purchase, at least in certain parts of American society, and sort of trickled down in a way that makes that prior message much more tractable, at least to the people who are more exposed to those ideas than they were.

[John Podhorts]

I mean, also, obviously, social media changes this. The fact that this can be transmitted in this form that originates not even in politics. But Hassan Piker emerged from the gaming platform Twitch, not from a congressional office

[Abe Greenwald]

or

[John Podhorts]

the Harvard Crimson, and then started writing editorials for the Richmond Times Dispatch, and then moved on to write a column for the Baltimore sun and then got himself to the New York Times. This is all short circuited. And so you have this kind of ignorant, vulgar politics of we say things like, the Soviet Union's collapse was a huge tragedy, and, you know, do we know that Hassan Piker literally knows a single thing about the Soviet Union? Doubt I doubt it doesn't matter.

[Seth Mandel]

But his views are a difference of degree, but not of kind. From the things that are written on the pages of the Harvard Crimson and the views that are espoused by the students of Harvard. And I do think, you know, at Harvard, at Yale, at Princeton, by the elites of all these schools and frankly, of what's taught in our public schools. And I think parents had a rude awakening about that in Covid when they saw this slop that's taught. We don't have anymore a public school curriculum that is intended to weave together, you know, our diverse republic, to believe a common thing about our country, a common narrative about our country and that our country is actually a good place, and to teach its flaws and the mistakes that we've made as a republic.

[Abe Greenwald]

Public.

[Seth Mandel]

No, and this is not to single up public schools. This is all I was ever taught in my private school is, you know, the ways that the Native Americans have suffered at the hands of the whites, the strengths of obscure South American tribes. All I learned in elementary school was about the Yanomamo Bushmen and about how, you know, what peaceful, wonderful people they are until they had encounters with the whites. I suspect this is not very different from what, you know, kids today are learning. And so, of course, when people educated in this way, and by the way, few classes on American history or English literature, kids are not taught about the Civil War or the Revolutionary War. So when you're educated like that and then you have an encounter with the ideas of a Hassan Piker, you're of course, more open to them and to valorizing people like that and to the slop printed on the pages of the News York Times, I think civic education is a huge, huge problem.

[Eliana Johnson]

Here's my question. When we talk about the extent to which this is an elite phenomenon, as opposed to one that to what extent the base, the Democratic base, is on board with this? What is the average New York Times subscriber who reads Tom Friedman and Michelle Goldberg and whatever else? If they sat there and watched the entirety of that conversation yesterday where everyone's quoting Engels glowingly and talking about blowing up pipelines and stealing, are they thinking, I guess they have a point? Or, I didn't realize I was already in this world where these kinds of ideas are on the table, or were they thinking, geez, these sound like a bunch of dumb rich kids? Because that's the other thing about this whole conversation. They sound like idiots.

[John Podhorts]

I mean, I genuinely don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's very hard to know in part because of the way our politics functions, because we have a two party system and we really don't have other ways to express themselves, other parliamentary systems, multi party systems. People's votes go to more finely honed ideological differences so that you can be on the left, but you can be a Christian socialist or you can be a free market socialist or not. There is such a thing as a free market. But I mean, you can, you can vote in three different ways as a leftist or two different ways as a right winger. I mean, Israel is the perfect example of a parliamentary system gone, run completely amok because it has, you know, six people and 27 parties. But in general, our system requires us to cohere as coalitions inside these mammoths parties. Which also I think gets to. Aside from the point that you're making, gets to a point that Charles makes toward the end of his piece, which is to what extent is this anti American disease leeching into the right in a new kind of way? I was struck you didn't mention this in the piece, but I remember in 2020, or actually in 2016 at the primary in the convention in 2016, both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama made these passionate patriotic speeches about how America was never going to support Donald Trump because we were better than that. And we've shown that we're better than that. They go low, we go high. The American people aren't going to stand for this kind of loathsome rhetoric about gold star families that people have sacrificed so much. And this is the greatest country on earth and all Trump does is trash talk the country. And I remember writing blog posts and commentary saying, whoa, look what Trump has done. Trump has kind of repatriotized or whatever you want to. I don't know what the verb would be. The Democratic Party, which is now standing,

[Charles Fay Lehman]

I believe it's repatriated.

[John Podhorts]

Yeah, repatriated them back to America so that they are standing as the patriotic party against this insurgent complaint about America in which Trump was the one saying everything's rigged, the system is unfair, you're being screwed, all of that. And they're like, no, this is the greatest country on earth. And that's where the conditionalism comes in. Because of course, this is what they said in August of 2016. And then Trump wins and then suddenly America, not so good anymore. All it took was them not getting what they wanted at the ballot box for this heartfelt. I'm not Talking about the 202008 quote that Charles, you know that the first time I'm proud of my country. It's like, what a great country. How dare Trump trash it like this? And that's like, well, I guess Trump was right somehow, only in reverse. He was right because he got to win. And therefore what he was saying about how our country stinks turns out to be true.

[Abe Greenwald]

The point that I want to make in response to Abe, that I think is also connected to the point about the right is I think there's a sort of like. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier about Nadja Spiegelman. It's like there's a strange bedfellows phenomenon, right? It's like you don't, you know, actually rioting, pretty unpopular. It's pretty unpopular in 2020. But you can often end up in this dynamic where you, like, you sort of concede all the premises of the radicals. And then you're like, but I wouldn't reach your conclusion, but we're going to, like, keep you around and say nice things about you and be kind to Hasan. And then when the opportunity emerges, you're like, whoa, I didn't realize that this person. I have an acquaintance, for those who don't know me, I'm fairly aggressive critic of criminal justice reform. And I have an acquaintance who used to work in the criminal justice reform. He still sort of does, who's sort of a moderate, but pushed for a bunch of stuff. And he will, you know, we've talked a couple of times, and he said to me, look, you know, in 2020, I had all these people, I thought I was just trying to get, you know, I was trying to reduce mandatory minimums. I was trying to make sure we won't go to jail for smoking a joint. And then all of a sudden, there were all these crazy people around me saying, we need to abolish the police and abolish prisons. And Marshal was like, well, yeah, did you not notice when they were saying that earlier? But people don't, right? They ignore and they dismiss and they sit there. And I think there's a similar phenomenon on the right that we can talk about here, Right? Because I think obviously the average Republican is very patriotic that says, I'm polling. And I think it's true. But there was clearly this sort of similarly revolutionary tendency on the American right now that makes the same sets of arguments that talks about the Epstein class that says, America is. We've given short shrift to. We've given short shift to the workers. And it's the same stuff as on the left, but they're more explicit about blaming the Jews than the guys on the left who also blame the Jews. But I think there was clearly a similar dynamic of strange bedfellows on parts of the right where they're looking at somebody like Nick Fuentes and going, well, I don't agree with his conclusions about international Jewry, but he makes many reasonable points. Some of his premises are good and we need to include him in the coalition because. Because it's very important to bring in voters who agree with the radical premises that the Jews are out to get us. And eventually they'll go after the Jews. And many of those guys will go, whoa, I didn't realize this was happening. And their sense will be, did you not listen when they talked? But it's there, too. I think it's nascent on the right for similar reasons. It's less potent on the right, obviously. And I don't think even everybody who's sort of a new right type is anti American. I don't think that's true. But I think that anti Americanism has a specific form on the right that is increasingly potent, and we'll breed that kind of strange, bad fellow phenomenon the same way.

[Eliana Johnson]

I think the one difference here, though, is that I'm just going to tell a story. I know someone quite close to who I like a great deal. He's a New York liberal, found out he voted for Mamdani. And I was very much taken aback and I said, why? And he said, well, I think it's important that the youth be involved in politics. And I like to see this youth participation. And I think what it is on the left, see, the right doesn't have this. They romanticize the aesthetics of youth politics sort of from a distance. And then when you look at something like this obscene podcast at the New York Times, you go, did you realize this is what youth politics is? It's not like just, oh, look at all the young faces who care. Which is like holdover idea from God knows when. But the right doesn't really. We don't have that in the same way. Right? It's always like, I mean, it's changing. But for the longest time there was a sense of like, older people kind of know, like, you know, older people are the ones that grow out of stupidity, you know.

[John Podhorts]

Well, the classic joke, right, was that a person at 20 who isn't a socialist has no heart and a person at 40 who is a socialist has no brain. That's the long time line going back to the 19th century. But I think the use of youth as A weapon as a general thing is a very interesting. It happens on both sides. And you now have it, by the way, in terms of the attacks on Israel, by which I mean people say, ho, ho, ho, ho. You people who are supporting the Iran war and who like support Bibi and all that, you know, he's already lost the Democrats. Right? Well, look at the polling. Look at the polling among Republicans. 57% of Republicans under 30 have an unfavorable view of Israel. That's the future. That's youth, youth. You better do something because they're sending you a signal. Youth, youth, youth, youth, youth. Well, we know all kinds of things about youth, or we have used to know all kinds of things about youth. Like when people have kids, their politics change. When people get a mortgage, their politics change. And when they see changes in the world that make them uncomfortable, their politics change and alter. I'm not saying everybody goes to the right. I think there has been a marked shift to the left because of Trump among a lot of people who wouldn't ordinarily have gone in that direction but are very, very, very distrustful of or disgusted by Trump. And it's had a deep effect on their politics. But youth is a cudgel. It's not a demographic. First of all, it's a weird demographic. This is a very big country. And comparing saying that people in a certain age cohort are consistent with one another and can be counted in that way is very odd. I mean, maybe advertisers know that it works to understand what somebody who is between the ages of 18 and 49. The classic rule in advertising is you want people between the ages of 18 and 49 because they don't brand switch after 50. But you can get someone to change to your toothpaste from another toothpaste between the ages of 18 and 49. That was a long term, long held view. Turns out not to be true, by the way. Turns out to be absolutely untrue. People, Brad, switch after 50. But people love these categories and this is not innocent. It is being used to tell people and tell Republicans to move off Israel and to move off. Or in Cass's nonsense about economics, like Republicans under 30 feel like they're never gonna be able to buy a house. And so you better change your economic policy to socialism on the right in order to win them over.

[Charles Fay Lehman]

Well, that can I, I want to ask Charles about something related to exactly that. If I can interrupt on that. Is that in the piece. Charles, you make an important point and an interesting point later on in the piece where you talk about the idea of regime change and how regime is not the president, regime is the type of government, the type of, you know, the way of society governs itself, whatever. And the. The implication there is that if people. If the anti Americanism catches on, being that it's an anti Americanism that is fundamentally anti Americanism, that more people saying that America is, you know, has not just lost its way, but it's, you know, it was always riding a broken, you know, system is there that. That says to me that democracy itself is also under threat from this trend. Right? Because although many people in our industry say, well, Trump is a threat to democracy, so regime change would actually be ditching this fascism and going back to democracy. The people you're talking about in this article, they don't feel that way. They don't actually think that democracy is so great. And Trump's problem is that he's a fascist, right? I mean, the problem is that you have this. This swelling up of sympathy for socialism and other systems and, you know, the elites gathering around a podcast microphone at the New York Times, talking, you know, talking like Marxists and whatever. Democracy seems like it's gonna be put in the sights if you keep going down this road too. No?

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, well, I mean, I think. And, you know, it was extremely indulgent of John. He. We were talking about writing this piece, and then I come back and I'm like, I wan. I filed the piece and was like, I'm gonna finish this piece by talking about Aristotle for a thousand words. And I don't know why he let me do that, but he did, which was very nice of him. So thanks for that.

[John Podhorts]

I went to the University of Chicago. What am I. You bring Aristotle. Like, that's like giving me crack.

[Abe Greenwald]

No, but, you know, what is a.

[John Podhorts]

I know you're against crack. You're very anti crack.

[Abe Greenwald]

I'm very anti crack. That's another thing about me. No, I mean, and when you think about it, you know, what's a regime? What's a constitution? It's the fundamental political order, right? The way in we do things, right? We live. It's not just that we live. And this is a thing, I think that's really important. It's not just that we live sort of in a nation, and America is not a nation in the sense of being a homogenous ethnos. Right. We're not predominantly defined by being an ethnic group, unlike many countries, pure countries, France or whatever. We are a polity, Right? We are a shared political project. We are invested. She's the Rustilian framing. It's, it's a shared political project, the participants in which are working towards the good of all of the participants, which is to say, you know, virtue and we get into whatever that means. But, you know, there are different ways of ordering that polity, of saying that there were like fundamental ways of operating. And one of the things I say in the piece is like, you can be a revolutionary or you can be a patriot, but you actually can't be both, right? Either you believe that the political order as it exists is something not only just but deserving of intrinsic affection, or you believe we need to overthrow it. And I think that that revolutionary tendency is inimical to the kind of affection that we're talking about. I do think just to stick on the youth point for one second, I think a. To John's point, you know, one of my responses there is the conservative under 30 is kind of an oxymoron, right? It's like half of conservatives under 30 don't like it. So, okay, well that's six people. So that doesn't tell you very much. But I think that the broader point is to the valorization of the youth. Young people are those with the least amount of understanding of and investment in the importance of the established orders. They're the most antinopian, they're the most disestablishmentarian. And I think as you age, as you have a family, as you become invested in the community around you, as you pay your taxes, as you receive services, you come to understand I'm not just a free, liberated individual. I'm dependent on the nature of these relationships. I live in this. I live in a polity that structures everything around me. And you come to appreciate and have affection for it. And that's fine. But part of the disorganization of a youth centered politics is it inverts the natural relationship. There's a great, I think, Chesterton line. Each new generation is something like horde of barbarians needing to be civilized. If you regard the children as leading the politics, you're being led by barbarians. That is what's happening. And they're going to do the revolution because that's what barbarians do, they tear down the gates.

[John Podhorts]

I mean, this is all very, very important. The central thing, one thing to conclude on you mentioned Aristotle. Let's go to the. Again on the right, not necessarily the sort of the total crazy anti American conspiracist Fuentes to Carlson to Owens, world of the podcast to stand. But, but if we look at the post liberals, Patrick Deneen, Saurabh Ahmari Yoram Hazoni, others, right, their criticism. They have now decided to predate their criticism, not of the United States, but of the Enlightenment itself, that the civilization took a wrong turn around the Enlightenment, because I'm not even going to go into it, but they're doing this on a laptop through social media. In the year 1800, when the Enlightenment really sort of took off, we wouldn't have a laptop, we wouldn't have a light bulb, we wouldn't have air travel, we wouldn't have mass media, we wouldn't have universal literacy. We wouldn't have the world in which we sweat like a fish in the ocean. We live in a world created by the Enlightenment. And to attack the Enlightenment is to attack oxygen, civilizational oxygen. And similarly, Gia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, talking about how America needs to be overthrown, are speaking in a country in which you are allowed to say, our country should be overthrown by violent means. And then you don't get thrown in jail or tortured with electrical prods attached to your genitalia or beaten or exported or shamed by your parents or anything like that. Their presumption is that they can say anything about America because. And say that America is corrupt and say that America is evil while they retain every single benefit there is that is unique to being an American. All of which are laid out in the document called the Bill of Rights that no other country on earth has. And that was created by these guys in Philadelphia 240 odd years ago who sat down and said, we need freedom of religion, we need freedom of speech. They can't put soldiers in your house without letting you. You are not. You cannot be forced to testify against yourself, which is a way of preventing the act of torture for self, you know, to create yourself, make yourself a martyr or make yourself, you know, purged, like in the Soviet Union, you know, and all rights that are not claimed by the. That are not granted here into the federal government are arrogated to the states to break up and eliminate the possibility of a monopoly of power centering in one political body or in one political city. And their refusal to acknowledge that everything that they do is the result of the gift of being an American is not only ungrateful, but it has about it an interesting suicidal quality. Because if they got what they wanted, as we constantly say, they might be the first ones to be mowed down by the firing squad. How do they know that they're gonna win? Tucker could win. I Mean, you know, I don't know who could win somebody. You know, one thing we know is that the Jews are gonna get it. But you know, no matter where, where we are politically, wherever on the spectrum. But they have no, they need to support this simply as a matter of self protection. Because you want revolution, revolutions can go and don't go in your direction necessarily. Look at 1979 and Tehran, like look at 1989 or whatever year 1996 and the Taliban. Things can go in all kinds of directions when you deny the legitimacy of your political order.

[Abe Greenwald]

I think just talking briefly about the sort of post liberal tendency which I think is those guys in my mind are distinct from, as you alluded to, is distinct from the most insane conspiracists on the left. And part of what I want to say to them is if and when I talk to them is like, I am sympathetic to some of the arguments about the effects of liberalism, modern liberalism in particular, it's deracinating, it's hyper individualistic, it's destructive to culture, tradition, whatever. But I think part of my response there is many of the things that, if you want to blame it on the Enlightenment, to the American principles of the American founding, whatever, actually these were concerns that the Founding fathers thought about quite articulately and had articulate answers to. Like the American tradition, you know, is not 20th and 21st century liberalism. It is actually much more subtle and nuanced and concerned with, you know, there's a really funny phenomenon happening in American law schools where there's this sort of common good constitutionalism, the Adrian Vermeule thing. And Vermeule's book is kind of funny because he's like, he's like 70% of the way to. He just doesn't believe in federalism. But then, you know, there's this sort of, this copying of Vermeule where people are like, like actually the Founding Fathers did believe in natural law, and that's like a thing that should maybe inform our jurisprudence, which is a very American tendency. So in some senses, like those guys are often missing, missing all of the available stuff in the actual American tradition that would say, like, no, these, these concerns about liberalism are legitimate, but we can answer them without getting rid of the Constitution, which is actually a document totally conducive to human flourishing, because it's like a genius stock event,

[John Podhorts]

you know, what is the most important sentence in the Federalist Papers? The philosophical fundament from which America springs, let's say as an abstract fashion, which goes to this entire point. We're talking here about antinomianism. Getting back to Hassan Piker and Gia Tolentino and Nadia Spiegelman and this whole conversation. We're talking about the idea of whether or not the laws are to be obeyed because they are laws, right? And what is the most important sentence in Federalist In Federalist 51, if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If we could all trust in each other to do the right thing and behave in the right way, we would not need law, because heaven doesn't need law. Heaven is full of angels, and angels are good, and they are always good. And man is not necessarily good. Man is fallen. Man is flawed. Man is driven by by everything that the Ten Commandments enjoins us not to do. You wouldn't need the Ten Commandments if men didn't need to be told not to do the things that their passions drive them to do. And that's why I think if you really want to get down to the bottom of why this podcast at the New York Times is such a significant cultural moment, oddly, it is because it is the purest expression of this kind of antinomianism. We get to do whatever we want because the system is bad. And the answer is no. I'm sorry. You're a human being. You don't get to do whatever you want because you're a human being and you are flawed and sinning and external forms of discipline are necessary to ensure that we don't all stand in the middle of the street slicing each other's heads off with machetes or walking up to somebody on 53rd street and shooting him dead in the back for the sin of being an employee of a company that, by the way, does an extraordinary amount of good. But I'm not even going to get into that. As it happens, our system has empowered and created these companies that have provided immense benefits to American health and the American people, whether or not they themselves are flawed, like all such organizations. And this is why. Anti Americanism, as Charles's piece indicates, is a disease. Anti Americanism is a disease. His piece is a description of how that disease functions. It is a necessary piece to read. It'[e-mail] Charles thank you so much for being here to talk about it. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. And for Seth, Eliana and Abe, I'm John Podhorts. Keep the candle burning.

[Abe Greenwald]

Sam.