Matt Lewis (4:18)

Yeah.

Abe Greenwald (4:18)

Yeah, right.

Matt Lewis (4:19)

I think any podcast that is able to bring up David Hackett Fisher in relationship has earned its pay. It's just so.

Abe Greenwald (4:28)

Well, thank you to that CBS or abc, that mainstream media, corporate media correspondent for putting the comparison in my. In my head. Just final point. This is another sign, I think, of the revival of traditional culture that we have here two very prominent people, including Taylor Swift, who is a feminist icon as much as she is a musical one, and she is getting married to a man.

Matt Lewis (5:04)

Okay, well, so first off, the tradition of celebrity singers and actresses marrying sports guys has very long provenance, obviously. Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio. The actress Lorraine Day married the Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher. And up to the present day, when a number of starlets in the 90s, CW starlets, Dawson's Creek type starlets, married hockey players, there was a whole.

Unidentified Female Contributor (5:38)

You're skipping over Kathie Lee Gifford, Kathy.

Matt Lewis (5:42)

Lee Gifford, Kathie Lee Singh. Yeah. Oh, Kathie Lee was married at some point.

Seth Mandel (5:47)

Every Kardashian was married to an NBA player.

Matt Lewis (5:50)

Right, Right. So there's NBA players. Halle Berry was married to David Justice. Like it's a whole long thing. So that's why yesterday on Twitter I said that my. My era would be the Divorce album.

Abe Greenwald (6:06)

Because you're already going ahead to that.

Matt Lewis (6:08)

I am going ahead because if this is all part of the lifelong Taylor journey from innocence to experience, from teenage to adulthood, all throughout dealing with heartbreak, heartbreak, puppy love heartbreak, young adult heartbreak, celebrity heartbreak, and all of that, we are going to have to have a divorce five to 10 years from now, so there can be a Divorce Heartbreak album, that will be my album. Because I don't really have an era. Well, you know, that's the problem with the Eras tour. If you don't have an era, you really didn't connect to the Taylor Swift phenomena.

Abe Greenwald (6:52)

This is why I disagree with you. Because I think Happy Taylor Swift is one more commercially viable and two more Musically satisfying than sad Taylor Swift. And I'll give you an example. Her past couple albums have been just dreary messes. The most recent one was like 32 songs long. It's unlistenable. They all sound the same. It's her kind of almost doing spoken word recording about how tough her life is, you know, as this billionaire rock star. And her next album, apparently to coincide with the news of the engagement and all the winning, all the wedding planning is a return to form. Apparently it's short 12 songs and they're all, and I use the term of art here, bangers. And so these, these bangers, these uplifting pops up, that's. I think it's going to be a tremendous success. So she's going to have to ride that wave. I think that's why I'm, I'm going.

Matt Lewis (7:57)

To be contrarian here. I think it's going to last. She doesn't get the high. She's going to get the high. They're going to like marry in space or something and you know, have the world's most celebrated baby since Lilibet. But the life journey of the celebrity marriage is not. There have been three or four.

Abe Greenwald (8:20)

They want to be Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. That's what Taylor and Travis should aspire to.

Matt Lewis (8:27)

But remember, Rita Wilson was never a challenge to Tom Hanks supremacy. The only real marriage of equals in this sense in the world of celebrity, as far as I know, was Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. She won an Oscar when she was 25. He didn't win an Oscar until his late 50s. She was one of the most celebrated or respected actresses of her generation. He was the biggest male star of his generation. They weren't in competition with each other and they had this long and happy marriage. But I don't know.

Unidentified Female Contributor (9:02)

He was a much bigger star than she was.

Matt Lewis (9:04)

No, but she won an Oscar. So she had the Oscar and he didn't have the Oscar. So they had a night. Where do we go? Same thing. That's a good.

Unidentified Female Contributor (9:12)

Where do, where do we rank Jay Z and Beyonce here?

Abe Greenwald (9:18)

Yeah, they're still together.

Matt Lewis (9:19)

Well, that's a merger.

Abe Greenwald (9:22)

They're all mergers.

Matt Lewis (9:23)

That's a merger. I don't know what that. Okay, fair enough. I'm just saying that generally also. So those are, those are performers marrying performers. Kelsey is, is transitioning into being a performer, right? He is.

Seth Mandel (9:37)

I mean, we should say. We have. We haven't spoken about Kelsey's musical talents, but Travis and his brother for Christmas, I guess it was last year, a Couple years ago, covered the Pogues fairy tale of New York on their podcast. And they did a. I think it was a Philadelphia version. And so, you know, maybe there's an album ahead.

Matt Lewis (9:58)

There you go. But he is a wildly successful podcaster. I believe they sold their podcast rights for around $100 million. So he is actually making a transition into post. You know, post.

Abe Greenwald (10:15)

This could be his last season life.

Matt Lewis (10:17)

Right. And he is. The transition is uncommonly smooth. He doesn't look like he's gonna do what everybody else did, which is become a sports cat. I mean, his primary focus is going to be being a bro, a sort of sports bro on a podcast. Literally a bro, since he's there with his brother. So that question of the marriage, where one person outshines the other, which is often a real problem, and often a real problem for men, may be dealt with in this fashion. I'm just saying one should not presume that what we are.

Abe Greenwald (10:57)

I wish them great success and happiness. I think the conflict is mitigated by the fact that they appeal to such different audiences. And the real trouble has been the past couple years with the merger of the 50s and the NFL. And as a NFL super fan, as you know, I grow very tired of having the cameras cut to Taylor Swift after every single. Chiefs. Chiefs down. Yes. And so that will. That will end and she will go.

Matt Lewis (11:31)

And do her musical career.

Abe Greenwald (11:33)

He will go and be his podcaster Pat McAfee type. And I think that will be fine. And have the baby and everything. And yes, maybe they'll get divorced. I don't want that. You know, we saw that recent statistic that showed that marriage is happening now among this demographic cohort, if you get married, which is not. Not that common, but if you get married, you actually have a tremendous chance of sticking together. Now, maybe that doesn't apply to people.

Matt Lewis (12:02)

Well, there are two things.

Abe Greenwald (12:04)

Maybe upper tail, but you never know.

Matt Lewis (12:06)

There are two things about that. One is a really remarkable survey by YouGov that found that young married people are wildly happier than young, young single people. Now, this, by the way, is interesting to note, because historically happiness surveys have shown, and this has always been a problem for the conservative case for marriage, that if you ask people, has having children or being a parent or what, which of course is an offshoot of marriage, let's say. But not. Not necessarily. But being married and having children, has that increased your level of happiness or decreased it? That people are more likely to say that it has decreased it than increased it. And no one really knows why. Our friend Arthur Brooks, former head of the American Enterprise Instit and Happiness Scholar, was very hard pressed to sort of explain. He said, basically, future Dalai Lama, right? Yeah. But life gets way more complicated when you have, when you have a spouse and children and grief and worry and anxiety can wildly increase. And so the fantasy of being unburdened of your connections might, in these earlier surveys have been the reason why people who are married say they're not as happy as people who are unmarried.

Seth Mandel (13:39)

But I have, I have a theory about that. And that is, before you get to.

Matt Lewis (13:43)

The theory, things have shifted. There is this totally acknowledged mental health crisis among people from the ages of about 12 to about 30. And it is without precedent, particularly since, you know, people aren't coming back from war and having PTSD and that sort of thing. And so people now are much more inclined as singletons to say that they are unhappy than they used to be. Maybe defiantly, they used to say they were happy as a way of dealing with the fact that they weren't married. And married people would say they were unhappy as a way of dealing with the fact that they weren't. They hadn't gotten everything they wanted out of marriage. But that is not what the data are showing now. The data are showing now that connection is so crucial to just simple day to day, well being that not having serious connections like that is having a terribly adverse consequence on people's spirits. So in that sense, if Travis and Taylor somehow convince people to give it a shot to be together rather than to be alone, to be a couple rather than to be single, to be connected rather than be disconnected, maybe that will be a good culture.

Abe Greenwald (15:01)

Before we get to Seth's theory, which I want to hear, I just want to say we have these two incredibly successful, good looking people getting engaged on the same day that we won the war against Cracker Barrel. And there's nothing to me that better represents the American revival that's happening here. The end of wokeness that if we just keep fighting. But that's for another time.

Matt Lewis (15:28)

Seth.

Seth Mandel (15:28)

Yes. Yeah. No, essentially the Cracker Barrel thing was Yeltsin standing on a tank. They tried, they tried. And Cracker Barrel, you know, stood on a tank and American glass.

Matt Lewis (15:40)

America stood on the tank. That's right.

Seth Mandel (15:42)

America stood on the tank. That's right.

Matt Lewis (15:44)

You are not moving on our. On Uncle Herschel, which by the way, that's the name of the guy.

Seth Mandel (15:49)

Well, he was, he was in his dental chair out on the Black Sea and Uncle, Uncle, Uncle Herschel, Uncle Herschel.

Abe Greenwald (15:59)

Remember Remember Krauthammer's law, Everyone is Jewish until proven otherwise. Member of the tribe.

Matt Lewis (16:06)

My grandfather was Herschel. This is not, this is, this was very surprising that his name was also Herschel Walker.

Seth Mandel (16:14)

So I, you know, I know there's.

Matt Lewis (16:15)

Herschel, I understand that, but Herschel is already. He doesn't look like Herschel Walker. Well, let's just say that doesn't really look like my grandfather either, but he looks more like my grandfather.

Abe Greenwald (16:26)

He doesn't really look like anything since he's a silhouette.

Matt Lewis (16:29)

Yes. Okay, Seth, please.

Seth Mandel (16:31)

Yes. No, my theory on the, on the marriage and happiness thing is that you having, getting married and having kids is coincides with getting older. And I think that there's a lot an element of, you know, what they used to call adulting, right? The, the forever teenagers, the forever, the permanent adolescents used to say, like, oh, I'm adulting.

Matt Lewis (16:58)

Right?

Seth Mandel (16:58)

Hashtag adulting. But that their concern was that it's, you know, adulting is not fun or whatever. There's all this responsibility. I just, you get older, you have all this responsibility. It's not even necessarily that there is something about marriage and family. I think people are, you know, also thinking about the fact that they threw their back out when they sneezed and things like that. I just, I just think there's a progression to life that makes people, you know, that's, you know, a bit more tired, a bit more responsibility, a bit more stress, but it's not.

Abe Greenwald (17:30)

Life goes on linear. It's not linear. And this is important because Jonathan Rauch actually wrote a whole book about this where he noted that people do report when they, when they're married with kids, a decline in happiness because of what you're saying. Getting older, adulting, raising kids is not easy. But then later in life they actually recover and they become even more, more satisfied with their life outcomes. So it's a dynamic process. I think what's interesting now is that in the earlier surveys John mentioned, you know, the single population was relatively small. Most people were married and this, the swinging singles, you know, the cast of friends, even the Seinfeld neurotic yuppies, you know, they were kind of a minority and they were dating and you know, living, living their lives into their 30s. Well now everyone's single practically. And so. And dating is very hard.

Unidentified Female Contributor (18:33)

Yeah, that's.

Abe Greenwald (18:35)

That type of life is not as enjoyable as it was even 30 years ago, I think.

Unidentified Female Contributor (18:40)

Yeah, I think that's the interesting thing in the switch in self reported happiness and satisfaction among young marrieds. Now is because outside of marriage, if you're single, where is the connection? There used to be connection in the world amongst friends and colleagues and whatever. Now everyone's where are they on Zoom? They're on their phones. They're behind, by the way, masks I've seen come back. I'm guessing because of this New York Times article that Covid is back. So the degree of isolation outside of marriage is enormous. Now, it used to be we had a much more social world decade or so back.

Seth Mandel (19:30)

Covid. Covid sped that up. Covid really blew that up. I mean, we had, you know, I had younger employees who were like, you know, at the beginning of COVID like, this is great. Let's work from home. And then at some point, I heard from, you know, and from friends who were, you know, a decade younger than me, I would say, hey, how's it going? And they would say, I can't play Call of Duty anymore. I can't be paid to play Call of Duty anymore. I thought it would be the greatest thing that ever happened to me to be paid to stay home and play Call of Duty, but it's actually miserable. So, like, Covid really sped this up because you got a taste of it. Okay, here you go. Here's total freedom. But total freedom, especially during COVID was sitting in your apartment alone.

Unidentified Female Contributor (20:16)

Hi, everyone, it's Abe.

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John Podhoretz (21:40)

And I'm John Passantino.

Unidentified Male Contributor (21:42)

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John Podhoretz (21:50)

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Unidentified Male Contributor (21:56)

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My understanding having reported this is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.

John Podhoretz (22:30)

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Matt Lewis (22:45)

I mean, it's a very complicated problem. You talk about it making you an adult and the big shift. One of the, maybe the most important cultural shift of the 1960s, though the least commented on was the shift in emphasis from being a grown up to being a kid. And it was partially the result of the baby boom and partially the result of all sorts of stuff. But that the culture began to be driven by the young rather than the middle aged. That entertainments, novels, ads, television shows, all of this were increasingly being made to appeal to and cater to this gigantic demographic born after 1946 that reached its 20s in the 1960s. And that this was a, an unprecedented thing in the history of culture. And everything shifted to the pleasures of youth, right, which are sowing your wild oats, you know, being unencumbered, you can be whatever you want to be, try different things out and all of that. That was not what it was like to be young before the 1960s. It was like you were in your parents house, you got grat, you graduated from high school mostly you either you, a lot of American went into the military and when they came out they immediately got married or they got married before they went in, came home, had kids. The entire society was structured to can make life easier for them. GI Bill Fed, you know, mortgage, you know, Levitt towns, the construction of an entire world of housing for them to move into as adults and all of that. And the idea was it was good to be older, it was good to be married, it was good to have killed. This is what everybody did and that it wasn't even adulting. Like there was no such thing as being A kid, like you were a kid. And then game time was over and it was time to like, be a person. And then the definition of what it meant to be a real person, then you have 40 year old men envying 20 year old men and divorcing their wives and buying sports cars and doing this sort of middle age, you know, midlife crisis thing at one point. And then that shifted as the generations moved on. Women became sort of bigger force in the workplace, had independent sources of income. Suddenly they're married 20 years and they're like, I don't like this. I didn't mean to, like, be, you know, locked down to this one guy for the rest of my life whom I don't necessarily like. And I married because young and foolish. And now I can get out of it because I can support myself. And so all these split, all this idea of, you know, what's best is to have the freedom of choice that is necessarily limited by connection, which limits your choice, your freedom of choice. If you're connected to your family, you have obligations to your family, your parents, your sibling, you're expected at dinner on Sunday, or, you know, Sunday lunch or Friday night dinner or whatever. And all of that shifted. And that's where I think, if you want to get to. Back to Travis and Taylor, though, I don't think this is really a full connection in that sense that, that people began to feel like they sold a bill of goods or that. Or that Covid showed what it was going to be like to live a life of real lack of connection, in which most connections were made over a screen, in which conversations were by text and not by voice, in which encounters were virtual and not actual. And that after five years of that post Covid, or even the five years before that, before COVID there's been a net decrease in contentment. And then of course, you have liberal politics, where we do have these polls that suggest that the message that liberals convey to each other about the world, America, the environment, global warming, war, all of that injustice has, has led them to be depressed. They have no hope for the future. They don't see that, they don't feel optimistic, they don't think that they're gonna. Things are gonna get any better. And so there is a kind of perfect storm of things here.

Abe Greenwald (27:12)

This, this flight from responsibility and commitment was a major theme in the work of a young promising writer who's featured on the Free Press this morning, man named Norman Pod Horiz. Perhaps you've heard of him in one of his great works, Breaking Ranks which should be republished along with making it. Which was republished about 10 years or 8 years ago now by the New York Review of Books. He talks about this huge chasm between the new liberalism that he saw in the 1970s and the Neo conservatism he came to adopt, which was its attitude toward commitment and responsibility. And so it's nice to see people revive the idea of commitment between a husband and wife. I have an exit question here, though, which is, do we think the wedding will be televised?

Matt Lewis (28:09)

No.

Abe Greenwald (28:10)

You don't think so? I think it has to be. I think it's going to be the biggest wedding, the biggest wedding since tiny Tim and Ms. Vicky. You put it. You put it on. We don't have the late night shows anymore. Trump ended that. But will he do. Do a Netflix special?

Matt Lewis (28:26)

That's what we're gonna ask.

Unidentified Female Contributor (28:26)

Definitely not.

Matt Lewis (28:27)

I don't.

Seth Mandel (28:28)

I don't think so.

Matt Lewis (28:29)

She is too big a special.

Seth Mandel (28:32)

People have their camera phones out at the. There'll be like a red carpet section where we will. Everybody showing up to them. You know, I don't think it's going.

Matt Lewis (28:41)

To be because we don't know when they got engaged. By the way, it important to note that the photo was released and she put out this Instagram saying, we're engaged and showed the ring. Not clear that it was yesterday at all. Like three months. Yeah. I mean. Oh, by the way, another interesting tell, though it's weird because it has weird valences with 21st century weirdness, is that the Millie, Bobby Brown, the star of Stranger Things, the biggest star created by the streaming era, got married at 21 to the son of Jon Bon Jovi. She's 23, I think, and they just adopted a baby.

Abe Greenwald (29:28)

Yeah.

Matt Lewis (29:28)

So they are the most prominent young couple in showbiz. I would say the most prominent, very young married couple in show business.

Seth Mandel (29:37)

She's 21.

Matt Lewis (29:38)

One thinks of her. She's 21. Right. And one thinks of her as a kid because we watched her being 11 on Stranger Things 10 years ago, and there had. They had a baby. Now, they didn't have a baby. She didn't get pregnant, have baby. They adopted a baby. But there you have talk. And Jon Bon Jovi, by the way, his. This, this kid Bon Jovi, who's. I can't remember his first name. His parents have been married for 40 years. Like, that is a stable rock and roll marriage, of which there are. One of the interesting tells of some of these stars, you know, is that some, you know, like he and Sting and a Couple of other of them. Like they actually did. They did settle down. Bruce. Bruce. Patty. Yeah, exactly.

Seth Mandel (30:24)

Well, in New Jersey we have values.

Abe Greenwald (30:27)

Yeah, but.

Matt Lewis (30:29)

You have values and you have.

Unidentified Female Contributor (30:32)

But can I say we're talking about this celebrity choices as if they reflect or are connected to what ordinary people do.

Abe Greenwald (30:44)

Don't you know the motto celebrities, they're just like us, right?

Matt Lewis (30:48)

No, A.B. i think you're. I think you're. I honestly think you're mistaken about this. Matt is right that people are cattle and they follow cultural trend lines. And if Taylor Swift is getting married, that makes getting married thinkable to a great many people. You would be surprised at how she's part of a trip every day thinking about Taylor Swift. Millions like people.

Abe Greenwald (31:18)

We'd be disturbed.

Unidentified Female Contributor (31:20)

I mean, celebrity.

Matt Lewis (31:21)

But what we think about the Roman. I. I gather that we men do nothing but think about the Roman Empire. Remember that story last year?

Abe Greenwald (31:28)

Oh, yeah.

Matt Lewis (31:28)

That was a big one at the forefront. No man goes through a day without, apparently, which is interesting since I've spent many years not thinking about the same here.

Unidentified Female Contributor (31:41)

Celebrities get married and divorced all the time. That's what the tabloid industry is. I mean, this isn't like a. This isn't like Ellie's Comet coming around.

Abe Greenwald (31:50)

I think it's a generational thing, Abe. And I'm just going to add one more element to this equation, and that is the shift among young people, Zoomers in particular, toward the right. And we saw it in the election. We're continuing to see it in polls or pull out. Just in the past week that showed that the zoomers are one of the most conservative generations in decades. Article in the Washington Post today about how young conservatives on campus are breaking out the Bush, the Reagan, Bush 84T shirts. I think there is something changing in. In the Zeitgeist among younger people. Now, Travis, Kelsey and Taylor Swift are older. They're millennials. But they could also be part, I think, of this cultural drift. And so I know that I gave that the exit question, but there's one other element here which is, as we know, Brittany Mahomes is a MAGA mom and Taylor, she affiliates with the left. And so the real tell will be if she depoliticizes as a result of.

Matt Lewis (32:55)

This marriage is as apolitical a person who identifies with the left as anybody.

Abe Greenwald (33:01)

That's.

Seth Mandel (33:02)

She's. I mean, she's Michael Jordan. She's Michael Jordan.

Matt Lewis (33:05)

Right.

Seth Mandel (33:05)

Michael Jordan was that famously asked about the politics and he said republicans buy shoes too. By.

Matt Lewis (33:11)

Remember, there was.

Seth Mandel (33:12)

Jordan came under a lot of Fight.

Matt Lewis (33:14)

Right.

Seth Mandel (33:14)

You know, LeBron James was compared favorably to Jordan and all that. This was supposedly a, A huge negative on Jordan's career because he was famous in a way that athletes weren't really that he was like Michael Jackson famous. He was world famous for an athlete. And they said you did nothing with it. And Taylor Swift, man, at the beginning of the Gaza war, you wanna know how many tweets I saw that said Taylor Swift could end this with a tweet?

Matt Lewis (33:42)

No. And there was all that, you know, she began as a country singer. I mean, her, she, her valence was that she was a rural kid and that she began as a sort of country singer who then broke out into pop. But yeah, there was this huge effort to sort of enlist her in the 2024 campaign, first for Biden and then for. And then for Kamala. And she. Did she. Wait.

Abe Greenwald (34:08)

I think she did endorse Kamala because that's why Trump said, I hate Taylor Swift.

Seth Mandel (34:14)

Oh, I think so. But it was like an afterthought.

Abe Greenwald (34:17)

She endorsed Harrison of post sign Childless Cat Lady. September 11, 2024.

Matt Lewis (34:22)

Oh, okay.

Abe Greenwald (34:23)

That's what I mean.

Matt Lewis (34:23)

So it was late.

Abe Greenwald (34:25)

Trust me, I get into chief's kingdom pretty deeply. I'm just saying. We'll see. Is this going to be a continuing story here beyond the engagement in the wedding?

Matt Lewis (34:38)

But by the way, you can't have a culture, a massive cultural shift without on one side of the political ledger, by which I mean. Right, that's true. It will be a mark of change if liberals get over their solipsistic depression and this concentration on the self over all other things without changing their politics necessarily. Now, I think we think that in the end those things are indivisible over time, but they're not. I mean, people don't do say like, I want universal health care. They'll still say they want that, you know, that or, you know, I want climate change legislation or whatever it is. But the, but the notion that if we want. And now we can get to cracker barrel a little bit, if we want the world to change in a direction in which human flourishing and the possibility of living a good life for people is made easier and more practical and that will make America genuinely great again. In that sense, we have to be willing to let liberals have it too. Without saying, well, if you feel this way, you need to vote, you know, you need to vote for, win some Sears, you know, like, you can still vote for Abigail Spamberger, get married, have children, go to church and you know, it's gonna be harder because of some of the cultural things that we talk about after we talk about Cracker Barrel.

Seth Mandel (36:14)

Well, there's a perfect lead into Cracker Barrel because the Democrats Twitter feed tweeted, we also hate the rebrand.

Matt Lewis (36:23)

Okay, see, that's how significant a mistake this was. And I wanna know, are we talking about. I think what's great about this is not the fact that, you know, conservatives fought back and they took it to a corporation. The corporation like, you know, bet like it would have been insane for Cracker Barrel not to bend. Nobody was asking them to rebrand. It wasn't a necessary fulfillment of their contract with so and so they had to rebrand. They decided to do this unilaterally. They got, they had, there was this massive public response that was negative. And the wise thing to do was before you commit fully to this new thing, you say, okay, oops, we back.

Abe Greenwald (37:07)

Off and they're stuck. Plunged too.

Matt Lewis (37:08)

And they're right. Well that. Right, exactly. So here's my question, is what's important about this? That this is an attack on wokeness, as Christopher Ruffo says in a, in a City Journal piece. That is him taking a victory lap and saying that he's basically responsible for this. Or is this a fantastic moment for Americans and particularly for a certain type of, I don't know, upper middle class American to say, you think that these kind of mediocre corporate chieftains that run these increasingly irrelevant companies that don't really have, it's okay to think they're morons. Don't think that the CEO of Cracker Barrel is smarter than you used to say 40 years ago, well, look, somebody got to, got to be CEO. Cracker Barrel, I mean, got something on the ball to climb to the top of the greasy pole and made it into, you know, running an important consumer products company. And I'm more like every time I turn around, one of these companies is doing something so dumb that it, you know, this is where we.

Abe Greenwald (38:24)

I don't think people have had faith in business executives at least since the financial crisis in 2008, possibly since Enron in 2002. So I, I think this is, I.

Matt Lewis (38:37)

Don'T mean I, I'm, I'm trying. Maybe I'm not being clear because of course you're right. And nobody believes in anything anymore. They don't believe in corporations and they don't like. Yeah, but they like things and they like the products that corporations produce. And they.

Abe Greenwald (38:54)

Small people are small c. Conservative. They like things the way they are. And There was nothing, as we were talking about on the show on Monday, there was nothing wrong with the loco.

Matt Lewis (39:06)

There is nothing wrong with it.

Abe Greenwald (39:07)

They just decided to change it, rebrand it in a way that made it less distinctive, more corporate, more conformist and boring. And I think people responded by saying, what are you talking about? For me, the lesson is that there was accountability. There are limits to this type of corporate declarative engineering, that 10 years ago, a corporation could have not only just changed the Cracker Barrel logo, they could have turned that sign into a rainbow flag, and there would have been angry conservatives, but nothing would have happened. And the message from the President of the United States, one Barack Hussein Obama, would have been, well, that's just the way it is, you know, now. No, it's not the way it is. You even try to get rid of Uncle Herschel, and people are going to come and say, what are you doing?

Matt Lewis (40:08)

Stop it.

Abe Greenwald (40:09)

And the corporation responds, but, okay, I.

Unidentified Female Contributor (40:14)

Have a totally different takeaway from this, which is that the reason this all unfolded the way it did, I don't think is necessarily because people are more conservative. I think it's because what the whole thing shows is that the American people are eager to fight about anything and to politicize everything. I don't know. I still don't know why this was a story. I swear to you. I don't get it. I don't think it was a woke change. I don't. The fact that someone picked up on it, spun it into this political tale is, to me, sort of extraordinary media phenomenon. That's what I can't get over. I don't. I think.

Abe Greenwald (41:05)

I think there's your animus toward Cracker Barrel run so deep. Have you announced that you actually have.

Matt Lewis (41:13)

Been able to break the record?

Abe Greenwald (41:15)

Yes.

Matt Lewis (41:17)

Will you correct Cracker Barrel? Yeah, he's correct.

Unidentified Female Contributor (41:20)

And then it turns out my friend who listens to the podcast texted me and said, you went to Crackle Barrel, Cracker Barrel with me twice 20 years ago. I said, when? And he. He's got a good memory for certain things. And he actually told me both times and location. I said, okay, but okay. I didn't remember it. I have no animus toward. Toward Cracker Barrel.

Matt Lewis (41:39)

Clearly, you've repressed.

Abe Greenwald (41:41)

You've repressed your memory of it for some reason.

Seth Mandel (41:44)

What happened at Cracker Barrel?

Abe Greenwald (41:46)

Yeah, okay.

Matt Lewis (41:48)

I. I want to split the baby between Abe and Matt or on this matter, it's ridiculous that Cracker Barrel becomes a political correctness fight. But it did. That's so. It's ridiculous that it did, but it did. And then you have to ask yourself, well, why. So Abe, your answer is because everybody will fight about everything. And I think that's true, that everybody will fight over everything. But some fights don't catch and some fights do. And the very fact that the stock price was affected means that the fought caught in this case. And as I said on the podcast on Monday, my feeling was that it was for conservatives an invasion of their space and that this is the thing like you will never. And this is. What was it that Rod Dreher called it in the 19, in the like 10, 15 years ago? The law of merited impossibility, which is like liberals want to make a change. Then you say, well, you know what, if you say that there's going to be gay marriage, then everyone is going to be trans. And the people say no, no, this is just about gay marriage. How dare you say that it's about anything. Love is love. And this is not about. It's about its own thing and this is all it's about. And then it turns out no, no, it's a window. It's an opening of a window or opening of a door into more radical action in the case of something like Cracker Barrel or something like that. This came after years of assaults on things that made to the corporate mind and the C suite at Cracker Barrel made them think that the meta message that Cracker Barrel was sending was unattractive and needed to be spiffed up. That it was alienating, not welcoming. And concerns were like, it welcomes me. I like Uncle Herschel. I didn't even know his name was Uncle Herschel. And I like Uncle Herschel. I look at the Uncle Herschel sign and I like it. Don't take it away, right?

Seth Mandel (44:16)

But here's where I think Abe is right though, because there's an element of this that is it doesn't matter and nobody really cares that much, which is why it's outrageous to go and change something, right? Why if you suspect that this, whether you think it's woke up creep or whether you think it's just condescension of the south, which a lot of people, you know, think this is sort of condescension towards there's no reason to do this. It feels gratuitous. It feels like wandering the battlefield, shooting the wounded, salting the earth. And so the fact that you should, no one should care about this is why people care about this. What on earth could you possibly have reason for to come in and Change Cracker Barrel.

Unidentified Female Contributor (45:02)

I just want to add something to what John said. John, you said some fights catch and some don't. I'm not sure some don't anymore. I think every fight cat, I think you could make a fight out of anything. Now I don't. I think. I think it was someone. You can find someone or some critical mass to get worked up over any invented controversy, I think, by overlaying it with the slightest political frame.

Abe Greenwald (45:36)

My takeaway from John's remarks is that the slippery slope is real. And what the right is beginning to do is tilt the angle of the slope so that for decades, the slippery slope just ran downhill toward the left. And beginning with the Dylan Mulvaney fight, the Bud Light fight, some of the other fights during the Biden era. Cracker Barrel is part of it, too, though, as we've pointed out, there were also allies on the left, liberals who thought this was totally superfluous and slightly odd and condescending. But you're beginning to take that slope and kind of build up ground, change the angle so that it's not just running in one direction. And I think that's important.

Matt Lewis (46:29)

Okay, I'm going to give you an example of a fight that's not going to take this morning or last night. Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary, announced that the Trump administration would be taking administrative control over Union Station in D.C. for the last 40 years, Union Station has been, after a really brilliant renovation in the 1980s by a private company, has been sort of. It's divided between Amtrak, which administers the tracks and part of the station, and then this private company that dealt with the front, and something else that dealt with the portico outside. But in fact, under federal law, Union Station is a property of the United States, of the government of the United States, and that these arrangements were made to facilitate its renovation, improvement and better management. And Union Station has become a garbage dump and a horrible place. And Sean Duffy announced that he was. That the federal government was taking, was going to take administrative authority over it and run it better than it had been run before. I see here that AP has put out a bulletin. Trump extends control over Washington by taking management of Union Station away from Amtrak. That is AP's, you know, bulletin line. This is why, this is why I say some fights are not going to take. Because first of all, that's nonsense. He's not taking anything. The federal government owns Union Station. We, the taxpayer, with the American taxpayer, owns Union Station. It is a federal property that has been managed in complicated ways. Amtrak, which is a weird Private, public company and various other things. There is going to be an effort all day to say Trump is now taking, Seizing control of the transportation hubs in the United States so that when he needs to stop all the trains during his coup in 2029, that is not gonna take. That's what I mean. Like, stuff like that.

Abe Greenwald (48:45)

When you go, Sean Duffy wants to take control of Amtrak itself, I would be delighted.

Matt Lewis (48:53)

Right. So I'm just saying, like, there are fights that will and will not take. It really isn't like you can. They're gonna try to make a fight over this and say that this somehow connects to the firing of Lisa Cook at the Fed. And, you know, I don't know. And the. And the Bolton.

Abe Greenwald (49:09)

And I saw my first National Guardsman today on the way to work. I've been looking for them on my daily commute for over a week, and I finally saw some here in Dupont Circle. So that's part of the creeping militarization as well.

Matt Lewis (49:26)

Matt Lewis, whom I really like, you know, conservative commentator, went on Twitter yesterday. There was a picture of the National Guardsmen going down. National Guardsmen going down a. An escalator somewhere. Yeah. And he said, you know, I don't like this. This doesn't look like America to me. Or this is like this. This is happening in another country. And. And I. I live in New York. I've lived in New York for the last 25 years. Whenever I see some kind of armed presence in Times Square, on a subway platform somewhere else, Penn Station, I am happy, because it means something bad went on and somebody moved forces in place to stop whatever bad was going on from happening.

Abe Greenwald (50:16)

The Guard has been in Penn station for 25 years.

Matt Lewis (50:19)

I do not think that a show of order in the nation's capital, in the nation's capital, which is also the seat of the Pentagon, that a show of order is an act of fascism. I'm sorry, maybe, you know, I'm not libertarian enough to look at it that way, and I sort of understand. But that's, again, like, the fight that doesn't take in the. In the way that people who want to have the fight want it to take. Because there are two ways of looking at that, one of which is it's really sad maybe that schools have to have magnetometers in them. Right. There was a whole thing when they started putting magnetometers in school entrances. This is terrible that we live in a society where there are magnetometers at school entrances. And you can say, yeah, it is terrible, but what's better to have the magnetometer or to not have the magnetometer. If one passive way of preventing horrible actions is to make sure that people don't walk into the building with a weapon that can be detected by a magnetometer, you have, you have increased the Pacific quality inside a school. If you're in Washington, D.C. and there's a show of orderly force that reduces crime and makes life more livable, that is not fascism. It was libertinism that led to, to the fact that people felt free to commit crime and felt like they were not at risk of being punished for it in D.C. zorahdani here in New York has literally declared his intention. It's not really his power to do so. To seek the. To seek the ending of misdemeanor arrests or charges. All misdemeanor arrests or charges. Think about what that means. That is a present idea that is moving into the mainstream of the Democratic Party, which is why we should move on to the Democratic National Party.

Unidentified Female Contributor (52:27)

I just want to amend my comment.

Matt Lewis (52:30)

Yeah.

Unidentified Female Contributor (52:31)

Not every fight will take. Fair.

Oliver Darcy (52:35)

Every culture war fight will take.

Matt Lewis (52:39)

Okay.

Abe Greenwald (52:39)

Every culture war fight that Chris Ruffo pays attention to.

Unidentified Female Contributor (52:43)

Absolutely. Yes.

Abe Greenwald (52:44)

I'll agree with you there for sure.

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Abe Greenwald (54:10)

But the DNC is important, you know, because I think this, your comments about the creeping fascism and the charges that Trump is a dictator are more and more just standard Democratic Party rhetoric. And as I've been listening to what the goings on at the Democratic National Committee's meetings this past week, I've been struck by how everyone from the chairman of the party to the politicians, including the Governor Pritzker of Illinois, of course, Governor Waltz of Walls of Minnesota, just state outright Trump. Trump's a dictator. Trump's a fascist. Republicans are part of this authoritarian putsch or coup that's taking place before our eyes. And there the argument stops. There's really, there's really nothing else they have to say because their, their entire line now as a party is that the incumbent power is, is fascist.

Matt Lewis (55:16)

It. Okay, so, and then, so they're doing the fascist thing. And then there was this big fight over Israel, which is the focus of the news stories today, where again we have this like, divide where young activists wanted the DNC to approve a resolution calling for an arms embargo on Israel. And DNC Chairman Ken Martin and the old guard of the DNC did not want this and passed a different kind of resolution calling for humanitarian surge of aid into Gaza. And there should immediate ceasefire and all the hostages being returned to kind of like fantasy, the fantasy position. Everything should just all end and all the hostages should be home and all the Gazan should be fed and you know, lemonade, the ocean should turn to lemonade and that would be wonderful. And that passed. And then they had to take up this secondary effort to impose an arms embargo on Israel. And the articles that I've read have all said, you know, this is a generational split, that it's young Democrats, this young Democrat, that young Democratic organization, that resolution was sponsored by a 25 year old who runs the Young Democrats for Democratic Youngness and all of that. And this fight is talking about the culture war. So Democratic Party is staring down the barrel of a massive deficit in voter registration with Republicans registering voters at a higher rate. More people, claiming, more people now say they are Republican than Democrat. Pretty much for the first time, not only in my lifetime, but I think maybe going back to the New Deal. And they're trying to figure out how to navigate practically in this atmosphere. And what the young people in the activists in the party want, say, is what you need to do is go hard left, particularly on Israel, go as hard left as you possibly can because you have an enthusiasm gap. And that's where all the enthusiasm is. And in any case, it's right and you're wrong and this is, and it's all part of, you know, not fighting with Trump and all of that. And it's weird because as this is going on and all these troubles are taking place, there are little signs of there, there are green shoots for Democrats. There was a state Senate election. Now, of course, my brain is frizzled. So Iowa, in Iowa, where a Democratic state senator won in, I guess in a special and ended the super majority of the Republican Party in the Iowa state Senate, which means that they can't just pass legislation at will.

Seth Mandel (58:18)

And it was a Trump +11 district.

Matt Lewis (58:21)

Right. So that's a green shoot in this sense, which is that, you know, maybe the Republican enthusiasm, the gap between Democratic and enthusiasm, is so focused on Trump himself personally, that if he's not on the ballot or if there isn't a major candidate on the ballot, these new Republicans or these excited, you know, Trump plus 11 people don't come out to the polls.

Abe Greenwald (58:45)

The Democrats are excellent at winning special elections. They have almost an unbroken record over the past five years of winning special elections. The other elections, not so good.

Matt Lewis (58:58)

Right. But, but 2022 said it. The national Senate map in 2022 did not go the Republicans way. It didn't the way we expected it to. So, I mean, it's a mixed story. But I'm just saying at this moment of Democratic Loeb, while they're having this fight about how terrible they're doing and they need to do better, they win this special in Iowa. And I don't know, like the idea that in the middle of this trouble, and I'm not even sure that saying that Trump is a fascist is a bad message for them. Maybe it's a good message for them. I don't know. But like, dwelling on Gaza, well, that's.

Seth Mandel (59:42)

Okay. So that's the thing.

Matt Lewis (59:43)

I mean, Gaza, we're commentary. I dwell on Gaza. We are a publication that centers on questions relating to Israel and the United States and Zionism. And we, you know, we are, we are a publication of the 2% of the United, you know, that grows out of the 2% of people in the United States who are Jewish and have an interest in these matters as well as a lot, a lot of other things. But the entirety of the Democratic Party focusing its, its attention on this faraway war involving people they've never met that they could not point to on a map.

Seth Mandel (60:19)

That is because I wrote about this yesterday and there's a Couple of points to make. The first is that when I wrote about this yesterday, I compared it to what happened in 2012 at Obama's renomination convention in North Carolina where Democrats had pulled God and Jerusalem from the, the platform and then force fed it back in. And one of the things to note is that Antonio Villaragosa, the mayor of la, who was the master of ceremonies on stage calling for the vote, he overrode, you know, they asked for a vote to put Jerusalem and God back in and the vote obviously lost. The floor was very loud, the delegates were against it. And he said a motion passes. And he did this thing where he was looking off stage, right? And Abe, I quoted Abe's, you know, piece from that time from 2012, where Abe said he had to go, he looked like an actor run, suddenly running off script because that's exactly what he was. And so. But that was 13 years ago. And the end result was the Democrats got the. They did it anyway and they did it at Obama's direction, right? Obama said, I don't want headlines with the word godless out of my renomination convention, okay? Keep the words godless Democrats out of the press, please. Can you just do me this favor? Because he didn't necessarily disagree with the point, but he was focused on what it looks like. So Obama says, put God back in, God lives. And they, they did and they won the election. Okay? That was a top down situation of Democrats recognizing that some of this was going too far and ordered it to be moderated for the sake of winning an election. What happened yesterday, Ken Martin, the DNC chair, put forth, supported one resolution, a moderate resolution that called for a two state solution. The, this other activist put forth one that called for an arms embargo and you know, and didn't mention Hamas and didn't blame Hamas. Martin wins, the establishment wins and he pulls his own resolution after he won. Okay? This is a huge change to understand about the culture of Democratic Party activists and the relationship between the establishment and the base, which, which isn't really. There isn't really an establishment and a base anymore is the final lesson in this, which is that back then they had to fight, they had to shout, shout down the activists and order them to get in line and fight with them over it. And they did it. And this time they won. The establishment won, but they, they couldn't deal with the backlash to winning. And so he pulled it and he said, I'm going to have a task force and we're going to figure out one. We have to speak with one voice. Now, as I mentioned in the post, you have to think that Ken Martin has kind of lost his mind because he went into this with two resolutions and he only supported one of them. What did he expect would happen? If you're Ken Martin, the best case scenario happened, right? Everybody did, as you said, you're the chair. You said do this and the party did that. And now he runs away with his tail between his legs. But the other, but the other thing is that the resolution that will ultimately be passed is going to be more anti Israel as a result of this, because the people who are willing to give were the people who support, who didn't support that second resolution because they had minor complaints about it, such as if you put Hamas in the resolution or something about the hostages, some token thing, we will support it. And therefore you can probably expect a resolution that speaks about an arms embargo passing or something like it. And that is the change in a little more than a decade in the Democrats and their interaction with the base and their fear of the base.

Abe Greenwald (64:39)

I mean, a lot of these resolutions will seem small beer when Zoran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York City, right? You have this extremely anti Israel, anti Semitic figure as the face of the party.

Matt Lewis (64:53)

So you weren't on the, on the show yesterday. And I said, and I think that this is highlighted by what happened here, that this November election may have a very key for an off year election, very key set of messages that will be delivered by the three major elections, right, which is the mayoralty of New York City and the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. In Virginia, New Jersey have the Ken Martins basically candidates, the sort of, the, the ones that are seem to be acceptable and want to be able to get votes in the middle from independents and all that. And then Mamdani, of course, being the candidate who was running as on the most distinctly left wing platform for a major and likely winning candidate in American history. Nothing like it ever before, particularly given the almost open anti Semitism which you connect to that. And if Spamberger and Cittarelli, Lou Spanberger and Cheryl lose the Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey, I said yesterday, and Mamdani wins Ken Martin, Ken Martin's disappear. And the story of the Democratic Party will be the vanguard, as happened in 71, 72 and has happened before, will take the party over just as the Tea Party took over the Republican Party. And what the consequences of that will be are very, very parlous. Even one hand you could say, oh great, I'm a Republican. This is gonna be great. They're terrible and nobody likes them and they're, they're crazy and they're going to lose all these elections. And on the other hand, like if one of the two major American parties is taken over by socialist anti Semites who want to destroy our one ally in the Middle east, we ended up in a war because they were attacked by a terrorist squad that killed and injured 5,000 people in a single morning. And that is now held to be an act of injustice. You know, we're going into very dark, very dark times. That if you are going into a dark time, I just want to talk to you for a second about our friends at St. John's College. Because a St. John's education may be the answer to how to survive and thrive and change things in a dark time. Because what kind of education does a free society require? At St. John's College, students study the great books of Western civilization where they learn to think independently, hear others perspectives, and understand the foundations of democratic society. It's an education for citizens, thought leaders, and those who will carry forward the best of the American tradition. Their BA is equivalent to a double major in philosophy at the History of Math and Science and a double minor in literature and Classical Studies. It's demanding. It's not for everyone. It might be just right for your child. Learn more@sjc.edu.

Abe Greenwald (68:11)

So my only quick response, John, to your point, which I didn't hear yesterday, is that it's pretty early to tell. And that could be the big lesson if the scenario you laid out happens. But you know, the most likely scenario is in fact that all three win. New York, New Jersey and Virginia, the Democrats. And so what you'd have is the status quo, which is a kind of decadent Democratic establishment that is increasingly pressured by a socialist, anti Semitic left wing. And that that will play out over the course of the 2028 cycle. I think one other element of the party meetings, which we should just mention briefly is the party is beginning the process, the Democratic Party is beginning the process of deliberating over whether to correct for Biden's ridiculous change in the primary schedule. Remember, Biden basically forced the Democratic Party to de emphasize Iowa and New Hampshire, traditionally the first in the nation, caucus and primary, in order to go with South Carolina as the first nominating contest. Biden did this for a couple reasons. One is he always did poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire. And so he was quite justifiably afraid that he would lose both those contests as an incumbent president. And that would spell doom for of course, his inevitably doomed candidacy anyway. Then there was the PC element to it. Iowa, New Hampshire, majority white states. And in the post George Floyd Democratic Party, this was viewed as part of America's systemic racism. And hence the Democrats wanted to prioritize South Carolina, which has of course a huge black Democrat voting population. But I think this was kind of like the cracker barrel experiment. It was a change that really was unnecessary and done for kind of vaguely selfish and identity politics reasons. And if the Democrats, I think, have their wits about them, they'll go back to the old calendar. And that, of course would be also a way, I think, to potentially actually it may end up highlighting the progressive, the, the socialistic side because those candidates tend to do better in the, in their early states. It would actually be better for the Ken Martins and the Democratic establishment to keep South Carolina at number one because the, the, the black voters of South Carolina are traditionally averse to either progressive technocrat dweebs like Pete Buttigieg or crazy lunatic anti semitic socialists like Bernie Sanders.

Matt Lewis (71:21)

Can I make another point about this, which is, you know, there is this continuing House investigation into the question of whether or not people really on the auto pen and stuff like that, whether people in the White House knew that Biden was infirm and had covered it up and was it lied about it or had taken, you know, unconstitutional control of the levers of the executive branch. And I think that the decision to futz around with the schedule may be a kind of analogical proof that they did know. Because when, when would you have expected that Biden would face a challenge in 2024 like that? There was no reason to think that Biden would face a challenge in 2024. He had United the party, passed all this leftist legislation that people liked, people were defensive of him and all of that they needed to change the schedule. Because there could have been an opportunistic connection made between Biden's, between the ability to get out this progressive vote in these two small states that had never really liked him and an argument that he could not, he could no longer serve as president, that you were not just doing it for ideological reasons, you were doing it for practical and constitutional reasons. And by closing that opportunity off. The only Democrat who ran against Biden in 2023 was Dean Phillips. But imagine a world in which Iowa and New Hampshire were in fact in play as the nominating powers. And you could have had a Buchanan like person, Buchanan, nearly knocking George H.W. bush off in New Hampshire in 92 and of course, Gene McCarthy doing the same to Lyndon Johnson in 1968, McCarthy knocked Johnson out of the race. Bush stayed in the race and lost. I don't know. Like, I think that that's a big thing that we have sort of let go. And also the found it necessary to.

Abe Greenwald (73:19)

Think the attempt to strong arm all potential opponents, eventually forcing RFK Jr. From the Democratic Party.

Matt Lewis (73:28)

Right.

Abe Greenwald (73:28)

That didn't really work out well in the end either. But yes, these moves were happening long before that debate in June, years before June 2024, when according to the media, that's when people.

Matt Lewis (73:42)

Oh my God.

Abe Greenwald (73:43)

Oh my God. What's wrong with Biden? We never had no idea they had it. They had an idea.

Matt Lewis (73:48)

Yeah. Okay. We'll leave it there. So till tomorrow. For Matt, Abe and Seth, I'm John Pod Horiz. Keep the candle burning.

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