Terrorism, Islamism, and the Democrats

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: Episode Summary Episode Title: Terrorism, Islamism, and the Democrats
Release Date: January 2, 2025
Host/Participants: John Podhoretz (Editor), Abe Greenwald (Executive Editor), Christine Rosen (Media Commentary Columnist), Seth Mandel (Senior Editor), Matthew Continetti (Washington Commentary Columnist), Noah Rothman

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I. Introduction: Recent Terrorist Attacks

The episode opens with the discussion of two recent terrorist attacks that occurred within the last 24 hours: one in New Orleans and another in Las Vegas. John Podhoretz emphasizes the seriousness of the New Orleans attack, noting significant casualties and confusion surrounding the perpetrator's background.

Notable Quote:

"The one in New Orleans, obviously vastly more serious. 80 to 100 people injured, 10 to 20 people dead."
— John Podhoretz [00:51]

II. Shamsud Jabbar: A Complex Profile

John Podhoretz delves into the puzzling details of the New Orleans attacker, Shamsud Jabbar. Despite initial reports suggesting he was an American-born Christian who converted to Islam, contradictions arise from testimonies of his brother and ex-wife's second husband. The presence of an ISIS flag and his military background add layers of complexity.

Notable Quote:

"His ex wife's second husband says he only recently converted to Islam and... they have a brother who's like 20 years younger, says they were raised Christian, but he's been Muslim for a very long time."
— John Podhoretz [03:20]

III. Political Responses: Trump’s Impulsivity vs. Biden’s Caution

The panel contrasts former President Trump's immediate and often impulsive reactions to crises with President Biden's more measured and sometimes perceived as lackluster responses. Noah Rothman criticizes Trump's quick statements based on potentially faulty information, while Christine Rosen lambasts the Biden administration for downplaying the threat of Islamist terrorism.

Notable Quotes:

"Trump, we get a report that says... that he owns the issue of the border because of the incredible ideological capture of The Democratic Party establishment."
— Noah Rothman [05:34]

"We're still very much in the age, I guess, heralded by 9/11, in which Islamist terrorism is still a very active threat to the US."
— Christine Rosen [06:59]

IV. Institutional Coordination and FBI Challenges

Seth Mandel highlights the lack of coordination within the FBI's response to the New Orleans attack, noting conflicting statements from FBI spokespersons. The absence of a coherent message exacerbates public fear and confusion.

Notable Quote:

"There was definitely a lack of institutional coordination about law enforcement should be a priority of whoever ends up running the FBI under Trump."
— Seth Mandel [05:34]

V. Homegrown Terrorism vs. Foreign Threats

Abe Greenwald and Seth Mandel discuss the dual threats of homegrown terrorism, including right-wing extremism, and foreign-inspired acts like those from Islamist groups. They emphasize the difficulty in addressing threats that emanate from within American borders versus external sources.

Notable Quote:

"So at the same time, we're sort of like, what should we be thinking?"
— Abe Greenwald [06:28]

VI. Democratic Party’s National Security Stance

The panel criticizes the Democratic Party for what they perceive as a lack of seriousness regarding national security threats. They argue that the party's focus on issues like white nationalism overshadows other dangers, including Islamist terrorism.

Notable Quote:

"If Democrats are looking to get back in the game... they better be part of the conversation about threats to the United States from Islamic terrorism."
— John Podhoretz [24:07]

VII. Left-Wing Political Violence and Public Endangerment

Christine Rosen raises concerns about the resurgence of left-wing political violence, citing instances like chanting "Globalize the Intifada" near the White House. This phenomenon, she argues, poses a significant national security threat by aligning American citizens with external terrorist agendas.

Notable Quote:

"The very phenomenon itself, the fact that there are thousands of people out there chanting Americans chanting Globalize the Intifada and holding up jihad signs outside of the White House..."
— Christine Rosen [15:39]

VIII. Historical Comparisons and Scandals

John Podhoretz draws parallels between current administrations and past presidents, particularly focusing on perceived failures like Obama's handling of terrorism and Biden's ongoing scandals. The discussion touches on the suppression of information and institutional biases that favor the Democratic Party.

Notable Quotes:

"We were being gaslighted about Islamic terrorism."
— John Podhoretz [24:07]

"And I've told the story about meeting him [Biden] in 1986... I never Thought he was a crook."
— John Podhoretz [70:56]

IX. Jimmy Carter’s Legacy and Media Portrayal

The panel discusses the recent death of Jimmy Carter, criticizing his presidency and post-presidency actions, particularly his stance on Israel. They argue that media portrayals have been overly positive, ignoring his anti-Semitic sentiments and policy failures.

Notable Quote:

"Jimmy Carter was an enemy of the Jewish people. He blamed Jews for his defeat in 1980."
— John Podhoretz [81:18]

X. Bob Dylan Biopic and Cultural Commentary

In a lighter segment, the hosts review the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet. While Seth Mandel and Noah Rothman praise the film for its portrayal of Dylan's complex character, John Podhoretz offers a critical perspective on Dylan's legacy and the film's narrative choices.

Notable Quotes:

"A complete unknown in the theater, come home and watch Inside Llewyn Davis..."
— Noah Rothman [88:07]

"But the movie as a. It's not all of it."
— John Podhoretz [92:36]

Conclusion: Concerns for 2025 and Beyond

The episode wraps up with reflections on the current political climate, expressing concerns over increasing domestic terrorism, institutional failures, and the Democratic Party's waning influence. The hosts hope for better days but remain wary of the challenges ahead.

Notable Quote:

"Let us hope that 2025 is a better year than 2024, though it has not started out well because of what happened in New Orleans and in Las Vegas."
— John Podhoretz [93:52]

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Key Themes and Insights:

• Complex Identity of Terrorists: The confusion surrounding Shamsud Jabbar's background illustrates the intricate nature of identifying and understanding modern terrorists.
• Political Implications: The contrasting leadership styles of Trump and Biden highlight ongoing debates about effective crisis management.
• Institutional Trust: There is a pervasive distrust in institutional responses, particularly within the FBI and Democratic leadership.
• Homegrown vs. Foreign Threats: Addressing terrorism requires a balanced approach to both domestic and international threats.
• Democratic Party's Strategic Failures: The critique centers on the party's inability to adequately address or prioritize certain national security issues.
• Media and Information Suppression: Accusations of media bias and information suppression play a significant role in shaping public perception.
• Cultural Reflections: The discussion of the Bob Dylan biopic serves as a metaphor for broader cultural and political disillusionments.

Overall Conclusion: The podcast episode presents a critical examination of the current state of national security, political leadership, and institutional integrity in the United States. It underscores the complexities of combating terrorism in a rapidly evolving landscape and questions the efficacy of the Democratic Party's strategies in addressing these multifaceted challenges.

Transcript

[Noah Rothman]

Hope for the best, expect the worst. Some preach and pain Some die of.

[John Podhoretz]

Thirst the way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst. Welcome to the first Commentary magazine daily podcast of 2025. This is January 2, 2025. I am John Pothor. It's the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.

[Noah Rothman]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, we have not done this for a couple of weeks and there has been so much news that I don't even know where to begin. Except obviously, we have to begin with the news of the last 24 hours, which are two terrorist attacks, it appears. One in New Orleans, one in Las Vegas. The one in New Orleans, obviously vastly more serious. 80 to 100 people injured, 10 to 20 people dead. And the circumstances are extraordinarily confusing. They know it's an act of terrorism. The man drove the car, Mr. Jabbar, was Shamsud. Shamsud Jabbar was in combat gear. Did it on purpose, obviously. Apparently radicalized Muslim, had an ISIS flag in the truck. And sorting through the details over the last 18 hours, been very confusing because we're told he's an American, say we're told he's born in the United States, he's an American citizen, raised Christian, but became Muslim. Now this is. This starts getting confusing because he has a brother who's like 20 years younger, says they were raised Christian, but he's been Muslim for a very long time. His ex wife's second husband says he only recently converted to Islam and apparently has been involved in some fashion or other with a nearby mosque that issued a statement to its members saying nobody should talk to the press and that all communication should be forwarded to the Council on American Islamic Relations or care, which is an astonishing thing to say, like, don't cooperate with the authorities. Talk to care, which is not a exactly helpful way to deal with a terrorist attack coming from inside your own community. So I'm not clear. And then there's this military record and all this, but I am not clear who this guy is when he is. Was he born Muslim? His last name is Jabbar, which would suggest that he was not born Christian unless his father's name. Changed his full name, but he didn't because his brother's name is also Jabbar.

[Noah Rothman]

I see.

[John Podhoretz]

So he does not appear to have changed his name. He was known as Sham in high school. New York Times found one friend from high school, so his name is Sham Jabbar, but he was. His brother says he was raised Christian, but he's been Muslim for 20 years. But he isn't. But he is. But he's not. He worked for Deloitte, and then he didn't work for Deloitte. So much that is so confusing about this, except for the complication and wrinkle in the story as it first emerged that he is American born. And therefore, this does not fit in precisely to the immediate expectation of Donald Trump, who did a truth saying, obviously this is part of the problem we have with radical immigration people coming across the border.

[Noah Rothman]

And that that truth that Trump truthed was itself based on faulty reporting. There's a lesson. There are many lessons of this incident. The first lesson is how quickly information comes at us in the year 2025, and our ability to interpret that information is limited. And so we can only react so quickly. So Trump, we get a report that says that the rented truck that Shamsa Jabbar drove, murdering these awful. This awful act of terrorism, murdering at least 15 innocent people on New Year's Day, had crossed the border at Eagle Pass in Texas. And that's when Trump let out his truth, which is not, I mean, not true. The impulsivity of Trump, I think, was present in that act. But also the flow of data is so quick that we have to continually adjust for it. So people are continually raising this truth and saying, oh, look, Trump, Trump is wrong. Trump is. But, you know, at the way, the way we. We tweet or post these days, you can see why he did it. He shouldn't have done it, but you can see why he did it.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, the FBI also seemed not to be coordinating its own message because at the same time that it spokes, the spokeswoman for the FBI New Orleans was saying, this is not an act of terrorism. They. There were images on social media of the FBI taking pictures of the ISIS flag from the guy's truck. So there, there was definitely a lack of institutional coordination about law enforcement should be a priority of whoever ends up running the FBI under Trump. And to Matt's point, Trump's impulsivity does not help in situations where we have an absent current president who shuffled out quite many, many, many hours later to mumble through a statement, there is a lot of fear after a terrorist attack. That's obviously the point of the terrorist attack. And we don't really. We still have this leadership void, something we were talking about. Well up to the end of 2024. So I think both of those things make this episode much more confusing and much more fear fearing, inducing for lots of Americans.

[Abe Greenwald]

And we're being told that he didn't work alone, that they're, you know, we were, we're told there might have been other pipe bombs or things around and, and the FBI says they, they think there are other suspects as well. So at the same time, we're sort of like, what should we be think. If you're in New Orleans, what should you be thinking is, is this like an active shooter type situation? Are you talking about, are you describing a cell or are you saying there were people who helped him buy fertilizer for a bomb? Like, what are we talking about here? That there are others out there?

[Christine Rosen]

I think my big takeaway here is that we're still very much in the age, I guess, heralded by 9 11, in which Islamist terrorism is still a very active threat to the US this is something that had been ignored for a long time. And if you look at, I think it's an, it's arguably another indication of the sort of degeneration of America's standing, its seriousness about national security, the fact that it, that the Biden administration has been seen as one that is sort of fleeing from the world stage, trying to endlessly negotiate with terrorists, not, not come out and fight them forcefully. And I think it's very inauspicious beginning to the new year, especially if we, if coupled with the exploding Tesla at the Trump Hotel in Vegas, which I'm sure we'll get to. Who knows what kinds of days and weeks and months lie ahead? Who knows what we're going into?

[John Podhoretz]

I think Matt raises an important point about Trump's impulsivity and Christine, about Biden's lackadaisical response. Trump's impulsivity, the instantaneous response to a piece of information that may or may not have been verified, marks him as the plue perfect president for our moment, by which I mean he is a Twitter social media presence. And the thing about social media is that people go on and say whatever they want to say, in part with the idea that whatever they say will be superseded in 10 minutes by another factoid or something like that. It is the speed, it is the response, is the ability to get like, put your points on the board as quickly as possible that marks you as somebody for whom social media is very important. Imagine a world in which Biden weren't this completely absent figure in which an hour after what happened in New Orleans, which actually happened in the middle of the night. So, but, but at 8 in the morning, Biden had come out and said, I've directed the FBI to do everything possible. We are gathering information, we are on top of this. We are trying to find out what's going on. There are many details out there. The federal government is taking this with extreme seriousness. Don't want people to get ahead of themselves. That's why we do investigations. We also don't want to tip off possible people involved to start running or whatever and making a statement, the purpose of which is to soothe the American nerve and to say that, you know, there is somebody with a hand on the tiller who is going to take this soberly, responsibly, work quickly and try to get the press not to sort of interfere with the process by which information is gathered. That's kind of what you should expect from a functioning political system. When there is a kind of moment of unexpected terror or horror is somebody saying, okay, we understand, we're all here, we're all in this together. Let's try to keep our heads and keep calm and let the people who have to do their jobs do their jobs. It does not appear to have occurred to anybody in the Biden administration that that was a job that they had to do on New Year's morning when the reports started coming out that 80 to 100 people had been injured by a car driving through a, you know, driving through a new year celebration on Bourbon street in one of the most famous neighborhoods in America.

[Seth Mandel]

But they, they have long downplayed, to Abe's point. I think the reason they didn't expect, didn't think they have to do this, is that they haven't done this at all for the last four years. There have been ISIS inspired homeland terrorist attacks, several in the past few years under Biden's term. There was one in Oklahoma City. They thwarted a guy who wanted to do a mass casualty event on election day. I believe he was an Afghan national, in this case, not an American citizen. But they have long downplayed this because their narrative about the threat to the homeland is white nationalism, it's homegrown terrorism, it's radical right wing extremism. And to depart from that message is something I think there are a lot of people in this administration and in the extended, you know, the FBI and other outlets, which they don't want to do that. They simply don't have the vocabulary to talk about that. And they see 9, 11 and everything that came after it as something that they Just want to go away. So we don't. We do need Trump. This is why Trump's impulsivity, to Matt's earlier point, is really important. And he has to rein it in because we are under threat. And we must have a leader who doesn't just say we're going to get tough and who doesn't say America is the laughingstock of the world. He says exactly what you just said, John. That's what a president should yin and.

[Noah Rothman]

A yang of impulsivity. And, you know, at death's door, that we've kind of trapped into this dialectic. And the result is a leader, leaderless and rudderless America. And just to underscore something Christine pointed out, confirmation bias works in every direction. So you see the report about the truck coming through the crossing at Eagle Pass and you're like, oh, gosh, the broken border, the open border, this must be related. But you're on the other side. You're the FBI spokesperson and your reflex is to say, oh, this is not, we're not prepared to call this terrorism. After you just. It's a classic terrorist tactic in its brutal simplicity and nihilism to, to run people down with the car.

[John Podhoretz]

You know, we can, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can say that there is a problem with domestic terrorism that seems to stem from a nihilistic right wing route. Their FBI apparently busted a farm or some kind of house in Virginia where they found hundreds of pipe bombs and things that seem to be related to some kind of nihilistic right wing terrorist faction and Sham Jabbar. I mean, I don't know why that's a problem in a nation of 330 million people. That we can have two different kinds of terrorism threatening us and that they have two different routes and that there are two different ways of combating them or not, depending on what the circumstances are. That's the bizarre thing. And this is Obama. Now I got to go back to doing my blame Obama for everything thing, because I'm going to blame Obama for everything in 2012 and in 2016, both times. But really in 2012, not only because of Benghazi, but also, you know, bombings and things like Obama did not want to say that terrorism was a problem inside the United where, that he wanted to claim that Islamic terrorism had been defeated. And in 2015, when we had the San Bernardino event and the Pulse shooting in Orlando, the effort was made by the administration to gaslight America into believing that neither one was a workplace incident and the other was some kind of a self hating homosexual act of abnegation when the guy at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was shouting Allahu Akbar into the phone, killing 49 people. And that's the question. I think that's where I think Abe gets, gets to this is some fundamental lack of seriousness but, but a genuine desire to pretend that the threat that is posed by Islamism doesn't really exist because it's extremely inconvenient for I think the, the larger democratic political coalition which would, which wants to think that 911 was a one off, which doesn't want to be involved in fighting against Islamism outside our borders and doesn't want to think that Islamism is a problem inside our borders.

[Christine Rosen]

I think we should also bring into this what's been going on for more than a year now in the us Namely the woke Jihad and the tentifada terrorist supporters. Right. The very phenomenon itself, the fact that there are thousands of people out there chanting Americans chanting globalize the Intifada and holding up jihad signs outside of the White House shows how thoroughly we have gotten out of the mindset that this is a real threat that is active against the us. It's like they, it's like they were, they, the pro Hamas crowd, the pro terrorist crowd have existed in a different universe entirely, but we're still in this universe. And I think one of the things we may see as a result of this is taking those people a lot more seriously, meaning not giving them their photo op, two hours in jail and then scrubbed from their record. I think it's, this is among other things, a reminder that when you have hordes of Americans out there chanting on behalf of America hating terrorists, it's a really, really big national security problem.

[Abe Greenwald]

I just want to add by the way to that point is that, you know, we're also getting a lot of information out of the UK's grooming scandal. And one of the pieces of information, not to switch topics, but one of the pieces of information in the investigation was that investigators were worried about the racism that would come from busting grooming gangs essentially. Right? These were Pakistani, mostly Pakistani grooming gangs. So that, that is, that is part of something that we have to live with daily, which is this idea that they're going to tell what they think we are capable of knowing without being mean to each other. And then that line stops the flow of information. And so that is the fear of.

[Seth Mandel]

Being seen as Islamophobic on the left is greater than the fear they should have about Islamic terrorism. That's just simply unfortunately the case and.

[John Podhoretz]

You know, getting to the famous line of the last eight, nine years, which is that's how you got Trump. It is the effort to suppress, precisely to suppress conversation about things that are going on in front of people's faces that leads people to say, I cannot trust what's coming out of the mouths of the people in government. I cannot trust what the press is covering. I know that they have another agenda. What happened with Trump in the wake of the Pulse shooting and stuff like that. It was in the wake of the Pulse shooting that Trump said, we need to have a complete shutdown, right. Of. Of all immigration until we can figure out what the hell is going on. The Pope attacked him. All of the press, everybody attacked him. And I'm not saying that what he said was right, but it was a response to the real thing that happened, while the official line was that the thing that had happened hadn't really happened or was something else. We were being gaslighted about Islamic terrorism.

[Noah Rothman]

To me, it is remarkable how quickly the FBI backed off its initial politically correct, let's not call it, because they.

[John Podhoretz]

Found the flag in the.

[Noah Rothman]

It was impossible to ignore with, I mean, an hour, you know, and there was also, of course, the New Orleans authorities, you know, coming from a region of the country that does not subscribe in general to these pieties, did not, you know, they did not echo the initial FBI line. They said, it looks like there could be some terrorist indications pretty quickly on. And so by the time you did get Biden's evening statement, even he was willing to say on the record that the terrorist was inspired by isis. We're not clear what that means or whether there were any communications yet, but at least Biden was willing to put that on board. That, to me, was pretty remarkable, in contrast to the pattern that you lay out during the Obama era, where it was maddening and gaslighting in terms of downplaying the Islamic content of terrorist attack after terrorist attack.

[John Podhoretz]

And again, let's go back to that.

[Seth Mandel]

One more wrinkle to that, which is something that both the right and the left should be able to come to some agreement on as a area of concern is that both of these men were army vets. The one in the little we've known we found out so so far about the cybertruck bomb in Las Vegas. This guy was a Special Ops vet. So there's something going on in our military that we're going to have to discuss in terms of people who might have been radicalized while within an institution that's actually formed to protect American citizens. And I again, we have very early information about what happened in Las Vegas. But if there's radicalization going on within the military, that's something that I think both the left and the right can come together and say, well, this is bad. Let's, let's figure out what's happening here.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, they can't because we've been through in the past few years, we've seen that the establishment is happy to talk about extremism and radicalization in the military because they're very worried about a white nationalist problem in the US Military. And I'm not saying there aren't such problems. As John said before, you know, there are, you know, these gas. Sometimes we see the feds in a standoff out in Wyoming or wherever with like these things exist. They both exist. But we have been talking about, you know, sort of exclusively white nationalist radicalization in the U.S. military. And that then has this effect of putting the right a bit on the defensive and saying, well, you know, what about this, what about that? And the numbers don't show it to really be a crisis. And you're only focusing on that. And it begins to sound a bit like some of the social experimentation and wokeism complaints about the military too. And it gets subsumed into the larger conversations. Unfortunately, I don't know that we can have that sort of national conversation.

[Noah Rothman]

I think Pete Hegseth will have that conversation.

[John Podhoretz]

I think he will try Secretary of.

[Noah Rothman]

Defense and I think the terrorist attack makes it more likely that Hegseth becomes secretary.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, look back to the. That's how you got Trump. Okay, now let's move on. Let's remember where Hillary Clinton was in 2012, 2013 versus what, where she ended up. Right. She retired as Secretary of state with a 65% approval rating. What was it that took her down? Over the course of the two years before Trump even came in, it was Benghazi. Why did the administration respond to the killing of four embassy personnel, including our ambassador in Benghazi, the way that it responded? Because it was running. Obama's running for reelection and they had devised this line. And the line was, bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive saying, oh my God, you know what? Islamic terrorism remains a huge problem and we need to combat it. Seemed like a no brainer to me. Like, it's good to be hawkish when you're running for reelection. I thought, I would think you'd want to say, I'm tough. I'm gonna.

[Seth Mandel]

Nicole, isis, the JV team Or something like that.

[Noah Rothman]

Later.

[John Podhoretz]

That was later. That was 2013, John.

[Noah Rothman]

It's, I'm gonna say our trademark fairies for the first time in 2025, but it's worse than that because not only did they downplay the Islamic content or terrorism, they refused to call it terrorism. As was famously debated that year. The administration blamed it on America by.

[John Podhoretz]

Saying this video, ridiculous movie, the video.

[Noah Rothman]

Somehow they kind of plucked out of thin air and described it so that what was malevolent about Obama in retrospect was it wasn't just willful blindness. It was a blame America first attitude.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Noah Rothman]

Even when we were the victims right now.

[John Podhoretz]

But I want to, I'm only bringing this up not because I want to re litigate, you know, how Obama was bad and all of that. I'm saying if Democrats are looking to get back in the game in the United States after this election, and I'm not saying that the Democratic Party is the respondent to yesterday in the way this was all covered, but they better not go back to this. They better be part of the conversation about threats to the United States from Islamic terrorism, threats to the United States at the border, from an open border, from people crossing who are not only just crossing from Mexico or from El Salvador or from Guatemala, but seem to be crossing, seem to be flying to Central and South America to get to the border to cross over. If they pretend that this is not happening, they are only going to ballast the Republic, the total Republican conservative domination of the conversation about what threatens the United States domestically in terms of crime and terrorism. And this should be a no brainer. And it is not a no brainer for them. And that is where I think Christine's right. Right. That they have a colossal conceptual vocabulary problem simply going where I don't even understand why it's so hard to go there.

[Noah Rothman]

There was also a moment in Biden's statement last night that was, you know, darkly humorous because toward the end of it, after he's after again, I give him credit, he said, look, this was a terrorist attack clearly inspired by isis. We're trying to figure things out. He then goes, when I get the information, I'll be completely transparent with you. Now think about that for a second. The man who hid his condition from the public for four years, promising radical transparency. This is again, this is part of.

[John Podhoretz]

The problem with 18 days to go.

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah, 18 days to go with the Carter funeral, the trip to the Vatican. Apparently he's handing out presidential medals of freedom just today as we. In a few hours. Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. But you know, but it's like the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Bobblehead night at baseball stadiums, by the way. The first like 40,000 people who show up to the White House today get the medal.

[John Podhoretz]

No, the bobblehead. The bobblehead were the commutations. That was bobblehead. Right. As long as you were in the stadium, you got your sentence commuted. No matter what, you know, no matter if you were throwing kids in, in, into, into reform schools or you, you know, killed mothers with machetes or whatever.

[Seth Mandel]

Murdering children as some of the other people murdering children. Yes, yes.

[John Podhoretz]

But I want to abe one of your persistent themes or one of our main conversations here. And we're, we're still, we're only months from the butler, 1/10 of a second and Trump would be dead. Assassination attempt about which we know nothing. Right. We know nothing about the Mandalay Bay Country Music festival shooter or shooting. This is a persistent theme on the podcast that we don't get to the bottom.

[Christine Rosen]

We don't get answers.

[John Podhoretz]

And if we don't get to the bottom of Sham Jabbar and the guy with the cybertruck again, the, the amount of leeway that is going to give the relatively radical agenda of Pam Bondi, the incoming attorney general, and Cash Patel, who I believe now, I don't know how he's not going to get confirmed as FBI director after what is he going to seem too tough to be FBI director? And Pete Hegseth. Right. Because precisely because of the military, the questions relating to the military that Matt raises and all of that, they're going to have a freer hand than people realize. And particularly if you have civil libertarian concerns about an overly active federal government pursuing aims and ends. You have to be part of a rational discussion of what is going on and not just saying, oh, you're all just a bunch of racist or Islamophobes or whatever.

[Christine Rosen]

Here's my. It's worse than that. It's not only that we don't get answers and that information is potentially being withheld from us. I think a lot of the times we get, we don't get answers because an administration like this one, they don't know the answers.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, I hope they don't know the answer.

[Christine Rosen]

No, but I mean, they, in a.

[John Podhoretz]

Weird way, they don't get. You don't want them to, you don't want them to know and not tell. Right. I mean, that, that would be even worse.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, I don't, I don't know. I'm not sure what's worse.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay.

[Christine Rosen]

Because there are, there, there are national security, things that the government shouldn't share publicly. And there's some that they should. But whether or not terrorism is homegrown, not homegrown. If they think that they're, that the guy in New Orleans had accomplices. Who are those accomplices? Are those accomplices foreign? Some of them maybe, I don't know. I don't want to speculate. But I do know that we've had an administrative. And if they are from where there are figures in the Pentagon who have been sounding the alarm for months saying we don't have eyes and ears in Afghanistan anymore at all. We have an administration that has been trying to reignite a nuclear deal with Iran as opposed to seeing them as the very serious adversary they are. Our whole national security front footing needs to be changed. Doesn't have to look exactly like it did during the Bush years, but there has been such an easing up on the gas pedal in terms of protecting the homeland that we have to enter a whole new paradigm again. People don't want it, but it's, but, but it's, it's inevitable.

[Seth Mandel]

And, and to Abe's earlier point about the student tentifata group, there actually is something there that I think would resonate with the American people that is not reactionary but practical and that to say if you're here on a foreign student visa and you're calling for the destruction of this country, you should leave, we will send you home. And there are plenty of people who could take their spots at these elite colleges and institutions who don't have those beliefs. So I think that looking at, and we're not going to get into the visa debate that's going on currently within the Republican Party, but there is, there are actually practical, immediate steps that can be taken to de, radicalize some of the places again.

[Abe Greenwald]

By the way, we had a case where that person, we had an actual case where a person would have, Christine. Right. Lost their scholarship or their, you know, their, their, the school student visa, whatever it is that they were on. And, and they were not punished.

[Seth Mandel]

I think it was at mit.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right, right. Because they would have probably had to have been deported.

[John Podhoretz]

Look, we know that administrations, university administrators are advising foreign students to get into the country before the 20th of January to be here as facts on the ground in case the incoming Trump administration makes some, makes radical moves against foreign born students or, you know, students who are here on student visas. That part of what I am talking about. I understand why they're doing it. I understand what they think they're doing if they think, as a practical political matter, that that is a wise public relations strategy to have the American people believe that the educational, the higher educational sector in the United States is a net contributor to domestic tranquility and positive outcomes in the United States, that they are making a priority out of protecting foreign students from the duly elected government of the United States, enforcing our own laws about what you can and cannot do as a visitor to this country. I mean, that just accelerates the thing that I am talking about, which is that the people from the center to the left in the United States, an almost stark reversal to what happened at the end of 2016, the beginning of 2017, are pushing themselves out of common discourse. Right. In 2017, Trump faced a phalanx of opposition that was pretty centrist. I mean, like, you know, or, or wasn't radical. It was, we don't like you. You didn't win the majority of the vote. We don't like the way you talk about things. Three and a half million people are going to, you know, protest your inauguration. And when you, when you, when you announce the Muslim ban, we're going to have a million people at airports having protests now. And that was a kind of wake up call to Trump and the Republicans that maybe they needed to slow their roll a little bit and not, not be so radical at the outset. I think we're in a reverse position here where we are seeing behavior that is putting the non Trump part of the American political sphere outside the common conversation about what to do on these matters, including domestically or locally. If you only take the city that Abe and I live in, right this, these horrifying subway crimes. You have the Democratic governor of New York State praising herself, praising herself for really taking tough measures to secure things on the subway two hours after a woman is set on fire on a train. And one sign of potential health for Democrats in this realm is that Richie Torres, the congressman from Queens, who was clearly gonna make a run for governor in 2026 against Kathy Hochul, who's the one I'm talking about, is like going at her jugular on Twitter every three hours, every time she opens her mouth, because he is saying, far from securing people, people are getting increasingly afraid to use public transportation in the United States and for good reason and in New York. And Democrats seem unable to adjust their priorities to face the actual conditions of the moment.

[Noah Rothman]

I think a lot of it has to do with the politics of their own constituency groups. And this may be a good segue to talk about. The other incident on New Year's Day, which was the cybertruck explosion outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. The videos are circulating on social media here. Of course, the, the cybertruck, or as Elon Musk calls calls it just cybertruck, seems to have saved the day by containing the explosion to such an extent that the doors of the Trump Hotel remained intact. The only person who died was the driver of the truck. We're just beginning to get some information about him, as Christine pointed out. But the obvious symbolism of this act of political violence, blowing up a cybertruck, which was Elon Musk's company in front of the Trump Hotel and some of the photos online, you'll see. I mean, it this, it's like a, you know, allegory for simpletons, because the Trump name, of course, is right there, all in gold. And the cybertruck is. You can still see it because it's so tough. As Elon said, you have it right there. So the specter of political violence, left wing political violence directed against this president elect, it continues to haunt us. And while authorities seem to be exploring some potential circumstantial connections between the attack in New Orleans and the explosion in Las Vegas, we don't know the truth. But we do know we can say that Donald Trump remains a target of left wing political actors. And of course, the most infamous act of left wing political violence in recent years happened last month on the streets of New York City. And what did we have there? We had Democratic elected officials like AOC and Senator Elizabeth Warren essentially trying to.

[John Podhoretz]

Explain the murderers and Bernie Sanders.

[Noah Rothman]

And Bernie Sanders trying to explain the murderer's motivation. So the Democrats have a problem on multiple bases within their coalition that they find themselves always trying to have no enemies to the left or actually sympathizing with the aims of the radicals and trying to apologize or explain for them whether it's Hamas next or whether it's people who gun down fathers of two because of their job. This is a problem that I think is only going to grow worse as Trump ascends to the White House once again.

[John Podhoretz]

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[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, and it's part of that is that there's, there's a, you know, we could talk about sort of homegrown, the homegrown extremism problem, which I think that it's, that's another conversation we need to be having now, which is that, like, you know, my first reaction to the terrorist attack was, you know, this guy was radicalized and he didn't even go to Colombia. Like, this is, we are, we have like radicalization factories. And what do people think this all looks like in 10 years when you, when you shuffle through the people who are going to be, you know, in, presumably who are, you know, in these colleges who will then go on to be law clerks for Supreme Court justices and whatever and top law firms and all this stuff. We know they're sort of on a path to being prominent in whatever industry they have. That's the whole point, really, of getting the leg up of an Ivy League degree. What, what do we think that looks like when the, the public sort of almost establishment, in a way, has been sort of groomed to be radicalized in this way. And one thing that, that keeps coming up in my head is, you know, Peter Bergen, the CNN national security analyst, he was like the first to interview bin Laden or something. So he, he, he has, he's been on that beat probably longer than anybody. And he wrote a book at Some point about 10 years ago about domestic extremism and this, you know, domestic radicalization called American Jihad. And he, he says in it, and he's talking about why Americans join these, you know, ISIS and these other groups. And at one point he quotes a political scientist who says that there have been four waves of global revolutionary terrorism in the past century, or so he says. The first was the anarchist wave. The next was the anti colonial wave. The third was the new left wave in the 60s. We've been talking about that a lot lately. Obviously the Weather Underground. And the fourth and final was the religious violence phase that began in 79 with the Iranian revolution. Now if you look at that list and you take it seriously, we sort of have a merging of three and four. This is a very worrisome thing, right? We have a sort of new left.

[John Podhoretz]

And one merging and one, because Luigi Nangioni is much more part of the first. You know, the act of shooting an industrialist on a street, that's like, that is like the late 19th century terrorist wave.

[Abe Greenwald]

And if the second, and if the second of the four was anti colonial, then, you know, that's where, like that's where we're head. So you, I think that we're, you know, seeing whether you, whether it's true that these are the specific. They can be chopped up into four eras of, of political terrorism like that. The point is we're sort of seeing like a giant chillant of extremism in America. Everything's being thrown into one pot and is stewing there. And I think that we're underestimating the effect on public safety and the public discourse and you know, establishment style politics in the somewhat near future.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, you know, we talk about radicalization on college campuses. It's almost exactly the opposite. What we've had over the last year is not the radicalization of the conversation on college campuses, but the mainstreaming of that radical conversation. So now it's okay to have been in an encampment. Now it's maybe cool to have been in an encampment. Obviously the encampments haven't returned to campuses per se, but you know, yesterday on New Year's Day in New York, there was a globalize the Intifada march thing going on. So what would people like us to.

[Abe Greenwald]

It goes on your resume. You used to tell people to volunteer at a hospital when you were in high school. Now it's like find an intifada protest to go to and put that on your resume.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. So one of the reasons that this case, the Jabbar case, is so complicated is obviously precisely because he is a native born American citizen and therefore has the rights of native born and married. Not with all the constitutional protections afforded. I mean, he's dead, but I mean, by which I mean that it's not so easy to blame. And then you have this question of, well, if, if there are others like him, what modality do we have to fight them? In the after 911 there was a huge amount of controversy about using surveillance techniques to try to figure out what kind of threats America was under. And it was very clear, though you would not know this from the way it was discussed, that the Bush administration was trying to make it clear that no American citizen was being surveilled under the warrantless wiretapping. So this was all about getting information from abroad from people who did not have these constitutional protections. Well, what do we do if we have a wave of homegrown terrorist extremism that is now emerging in the form of Luigi Mangione, in the form of Sham Jabbar, in the form of the cybertruck guy? Because we have all kinds of things that we can do now that we couldn't do 20 years ago. There is facial recognition software, there is AI deployment of AI in the use of facial recognition software. We could go through a crowd of the globalize the intifada march on, you know, on, on January 1st in New York City and get 5,000 photographs of people and figure out who 50 to 60% of them are even if they're masked. Right. Can we do that? What's the American response going to be if we have a wave of this?

[Christine Rosen]

Look, technologically we can do. You know, Jabbar posted a video before the, his attack saying he was going to kill people for ISIS or whatever his particular message was. Right. Perhaps he was doing that on the drive from Texas to Louisiana was one of the accounts I read. Conceivably in terms of technology, couldn't AI grab that threat, track where it came from and have actually had a beat on the guy before he got there? I mean, well, we don't know. The legal complications are, are, are staggering. Yes.

[John Podhoretz]

And, and, and as I say, like it imagine that we had this capability right after 9 11.

[Noah Rothman]

But I think one of the lessons of 911 is that you can have or even all the less the lessons of October 7th. You can have remarkable technology, but you still rely on humans to enforce the law, and humans make mistakes and suffer these heuristic biases that we started off the show talking about. So even in this scenario, you would still have to rely on human beings on the ground. Let's just not forget that one of the reasons that he was able to commit this atrocity was the barriers. I forget the. There's Ballards. Thank you. The bollards on Bourbon street have been in disrepair apparently for months, if not years.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, they're being replaced. There's some kind of street work being done. Yeah, but they had to be removed.

[Noah Rothman]

They've known about this problem for a long time. And there's.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, they parked a cop car there that he drove around to get to Bourbon Street. Yeah, right.

[Noah Rothman]

Even. Well, right. So because the Ballards were inactive for months, the cops. The police put in their vehicles to block the street, but still left room for him to get around and drive on the sidewalk and commit the mass murder. So there are different levels of failure here, but to me, the most striking is the bollards, because at the end of the day, you know, you can't really count on the New Orleans government for efficiency in repair and. Or, you know, getting to make sure that the AI agent, as soon as they alert the authorities is going to be on top of it. I mean, this is human failure here. And so you can't rely totally more proactive human, I think, action and direction.

[John Podhoretz]

But one of the reasons why I think there is this idea that this was a significant conspiracy is how did he know to go to New Orleans? Was there some knowledge in New Orleans that there was a way around the cop car and there were no bollards and you could do a car ramming? Car rammings are now have been. There were two of them in Europe in the last six months. Right. There was the Christmas market in Germany.

[Abe Greenwald]

Where in the past several years they've emerged in Europe as a regular war threat.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. And, you know, there was one in.

[Christine Rosen]

New York 10 years ago or so.

[John Podhoretz]

There was. Well, that. More than that. Yeah. 15. Yeah. On. On. On. On West Street. Like, this is a very effective form of mass killing.

[Abe Greenwald]

And there was one in Israel two weeks ago also.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, Israel has had it.

[Abe Greenwald]

This is. This is another. This is just another example, by the way, of these things that they sort of get practiced on Israelis and then they go global, these forms of attacks.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay. I Want to move. I'm glad you brought that because I want to move. Part of the, part of this discussion of whether or not, you know, we are willing to look at this square in the face and what kinds of efforts are made to make it difficult for us to have honest discussions of the threat posed, say, by Islamist terrorism is we are, we are having a resurgence over the last two or three weeks of the assault on Israel's efforts to extirpate Hamas in Gaza, both by international organizations, meaning these, this report, you know, these genocide reports and various other things. And then this story about how, oh, now there's it's wet. Now it's wet and people, there's flooding and it's wet in Gaza and you know, the Israelis are going through and trying to get Hamas terrorists in the north around Jabalia and there should be an immediate ceasefire because really, how much, how much more can they do? How much more can they do? Israel's terrible. It's doing terrible things. It's monstrous. None of these people say Hamas should surrender. Hamas should nothing. If Hamas surrenders, Israel isn't doing anything. Isn't. The aid is still being stolen. The aid is sitting there rotting, you know, at the, at, you know, at the Kerem Shalom crossing, all of that. And Israel is getting blamed and blamed and blamed. Why do I bring this up? Because it's part when the New York Times in particular stresses that as the issue when you have a democratic country invaded by a terrorist entity next door, that it is continuing to battle with a hundred hostages whom it is not freeing. And that even though it is headless and shapeless and seems to be directionless, will not give up the ghost. And if the liberal conversation about this is Israel is Israel is getting bad, is worse, Israel is worse, Israel is worse, how does that, what kind of effect does that have on the way they think about what goes on inside the. Of the readers of this most important news organization on the planet Earth, the 10 million people who subscribe to the New York Times now, what does it, what effect does that have on where they focus their attention in terms of. Because the threat to Israel from Hamas is the threat to New Orleans from Sham Jabbar. I mean, it's totally, I mean, there's no. It is the same threat. It's an open society being attacked essentially from within, kind of semi from within.

[Abe Greenwald]

This is the whole point of the Intifada, right? I mean, we can, I know some people were saying this is what globalized the Intifada and other people were Saying, well, you know, that's the, this is the difference, that's the diff. The main point is that, yeah, the point of the Intifada was to make you afraid to go to, you know, your local bar to bikes and Tel Aviv or wherever, afraid to go to the shook, afraid to go to these places. And Israelis, you know, were very famously sort of beat that by refusing to not go outside. I mean, there was just no way to. But, but returning to these crowded places. But part of that security was also fact that you can go through a metal detector at places in Israel that you don't have to go through a metal detector in America.

[John Podhoretz]

You, you, you and the Israeli government went and went and spent two years destroying the fighters of the intifada. Went into Gene and they didn't care, and they didn't care about the headlines and they went in and they destroyed the bomb making factories in Jenin 20 years ago. Or is the United States going to find itself in a position in which there is a wave of domestic terrorism and half of the country's political actors are going to say we have no right, we have no capacity, we have no constitutional right to do anything to prevent these things from happening? And I say the answer is yes.

[Noah Rothman]

The answer is obviously yes, because we went through it before. We went through, we never resolved that.

[Seth Mandel]

With the Patriot Act. So I'm just. Issues are still with us.

[Noah Rothman]

I mean, we're still dealing with part of the fallout when in the past week a court ruled that Defense Secretary Austin cannot void the plea agreements that the government enter into with some of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9 11. The man more than anyone responsible for the deaths of 3,000Americans on September 11, 2001. He's still there. And in fact, he might be transferred to a supermax for a life sentence, which would be a total miscarriage of justice.

[John Podhoretz]

Why?

[Noah Rothman]

Because of the same people that you're talking about who will go on to kind of ignore or excuse whatever we're gonna face in the coming year.

[Christine Rosen]

And with, with Trump in office, the objection's gonna be louder, greater, stronger. You know, this, the, the, the, the idea was that he was going to, you know, institute a police state anyway. So now this is, this is all he needs.

[Noah Rothman]

Right?

[John Podhoretz]

But so much less effective. It's going to be so much less effective if what he is battling is real. That's the thing about the border that is so important, which is that he owns the issue of the border because of the incredible ideological capture of The Democratic Party establishment by these interest and activist groups that wanted to say that it was more that there was something inhumane about secure, securing a 1900 mile long border of the United States, which is demented. I mean, as I've said a billion times, I am as dovish on immigration as you can get in most capacities. But the law is the law and the border is the border. And people need to come into the country and be registered as being people in the country if they come in from out of the country. I just took a trip, you know, I just took a. I was out of the country, went to Italy, you know, you have to go through, tell the Italians that you're there and then when you leave, you tell them that you're leaving and they, they, you know, you come into the country and they make sure that you're allowed to come into the country at an actual border crossing at Kennedy Airport. Like that's, it's not like this is a complicated thing and Democrats have made it an incredibly complicated subject for them. And they are, they are making themselves entirely outside of the common framework of a con, of a, of a, of an issue that is going to destroy them. As far as I can tell, the more this goes on, it's a weird.

[Seth Mandel]

It'S almost an echo of the. Do you remember the big debate about being a global citizen? There were a couple books and big articles in the 90s. It was like, we don't need to be so nationalist and see ourselves as American. We're all citizens of the world. And it was like a big global group hug. I mean, as you can tell by my mocking tone, some of us never bought this idea. And actually it's quite healthy to have a healthy patriotism and a healthy respect and love for your country. But there's a weird sort of curdling of that in this idea that we should open our border to anyone because we're good people and they're good people and we'll all get along. And the problem with that is that it will when as crime happens and terrorism happens and we import a lot of new problems and we shouldn't even, I mean, let's talk about fentanyl. There are all these things that happen when you embrace that model. The backlash to that is going to be extreme. It's not going to be a moderate. Let's sort the wheat from the chaff and have the good people stay and the bad people sent back home. It becomes close the border. America is for Americans. Let's get rid of birthright Citizenship. So those, those extremes, in some ways are understandable. Trump is not going to get his agenda on all of that, particularly on birthright citizenship being revoked. That takes, I think, a constitutional amendment. But he's going to get a lot of what he wants, and it's going to drive the left absolutely insane. And it's going to be easier for them, as Abe and Seth both suggest, easier to attack Trump than it is to. To actually argue the policy matters. But Americans are, are pretty keen on the policies he's so. Including still mass deportation.

[John Podhoretz]

Look, I mean, the problem is that when you get into a crisis, in a irresolvable crisis, you are compelled, as would be true of a pandemic or something, to perform triage. You can't be surgical because you're beyond the capacity for sure, you need to quarantine or you need to do this. If you have a border that's open and you've had four years of, or maybe three years, because I guess they, they've done some stuff this year to restore some element of order to this. In a weird way, the argument that you need mass deportation becomes stronger, not weaker, because how are you going to sort through 10 million?

[Abe Greenwald]

We don't judge.

[Seth Mandel]

I mean, the cases right now won't be heard for five, six, seven years for the people who came in in the last four years. We don't have enough infrastructure to even process the people who are here already.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, you wouldn't have enough interest. I mean, there never was enough infrastructure. That's have. That's why you can't let the. That's why you can't loosen. Because the, the entire infrastructure system depends on the border itself being a point of control. Otherwise, you have to create an enforcement mechanism inside the country that doesn't exist to cope with an unprecedented problem. And that, again, will give Trump much more running room whether or not they attack him and they say he's a fascist. And here it comes. And Bob Kagan becomes convinced that the authoritarian. You know, this is 1932 Germany, and Anne Applebaum says it's 1932 Germany. I don't think that Americans are going to think that it's 1932 Germany if they, if there is a situation in which an important part of the American political scene says you're not allowed to do anything about getting rid of people here who are committing crimes and who are killing people and who are, you know, fomenting terrorism or whatever, or are even, or even on our college campuses calling for violence against the United States government, which itself is a deportable offense. We deported Mafiosi, including American citizens, by the way. We deported Mafiosi for, for being enemies of the United States for 50 years. It was one of the modalities that people had before the Mafia was destroyed in the late 80s.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, we have the same people will argue that it's no, no big deal and, or never happened that, you know, say, for example, when he was Vice president, Joe Biden was hanging out with the Chinese and helping his son make deals. And it took a right wing group suing the federal government, suing the National Archives to get that proof, which of course conveniently only came after election day. I'm sorry, I see. I'm trying very heavy handedly to shift to that story because it drove me absolutely bonded.

[John Podhoretz]

We should, let's shift that story because we have, we have, we have spent an hour on this. So let's shift to the story of Biden on his, on his way out the door. This, this is what's so significant about the photograph of Biden standing with Hunter and I guess his brother and then these Chinese officials is it's not that we didn't know that Hunter had been on travel with him to China. Right. We knew that Hunter had been, had traveled with him to China. It is that the photograph documents his presence essentially as the marketing tool of the James and Hunter Biden company. That if they're going to get a $10 million contract from China, those guys are going to get the photograph with the Vice President of the United States. That's part of the quid pro quo. And Biden can't claim that he didn't know that. And that was the image that we never had. Right. That, that image. And imagine that image in 2019 or 2020.

[Seth Mandel]

That's why the archives refused to release it because someone put pressure on the archivist to say, you sit on that image and they had to be sued in order to get access to it.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. I don't know where this goes. Biden's so infirm. I don't know if it. But you know, I will say this. I always said, look, Biden's an idiot and he wrong about everything. And you know, I've told the story about meeting him in 1986 and at this luncheon and he opened his mouth and he didn't stop talking for 45 minutes. And everybody was like basically, you know, sitting at the table fainting from boredom and exhaustion. And so I had contempt for him most of my, most of my adult life. But I never Thought he was a crook. I mean, it never occurred to me that he was a crook. Why would he be a crook? It doesn't make sense. Just a senator, you know, gets plenty of power and all of that. And then a couple of people said to me, you know what? I think he's a. You know what he is a crook. I always thought he was a crook. And then there were. There are these weird cases of senators. The late Orrin Hatch had a whole system. No one, I don't know where. Where. Where it went to, but where. If you wanted to lobby Orrin Hatch to pass a piece of legislation, he said, I have these two aides. They were my former aides. They've set up a lobbying shop. You go hire them, you sell them, they'll come to me and I will listen to them. That's weird, right? Like, that's some kind of weird cutout middleman. He's outsourcing the lobbying power to a private company. Who knows where that money went. Like, there's a lot of senators, stories like that, but this is something else, right? So Biden has his brother, he has a son. All of that $10 million photograph is right in front of us, and he was the vice president, United States. Does this explain why Obama was so insistent that Hillary be the nominee and that Biden not run for president? Will. Will. Will Obama ever come clean about that?

[Noah Rothman]

Obviously, that didn't work out either, did it?

[John Podhoretz]

Well, I know, despite that, by the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Way, the thing about Biden is that. But I'm not sure a. A sort of fully alive Biden would be that much better in an emergency situation. Because I keep thinking about what happened when we had a. What was it during the Obama administration? Was it pig flu, swine flu, something when we had, you know, go around. And Biden, who was vice president of the United States of America, said, yeah, well, I wouldn't get on a plane. Well, yeah, in that close. And the airline industry was like. And the tourism and people are going, what? The vice president just said, planes and trains, not a great idea because they're, you know, close. And planes obviously have this whole, you know, the air filter system is beyond that.

[John Podhoretz]

It's like, he's always been an idiot.

[Abe Greenwald]

The crisis, the corruption, you know, was almost doubled because Joe Biden as vice president gave some advice. But, you know, he said, well, if you have a home intruder and you have a shotgun, he said, take a shot in the air. Take a warning shot.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

The gun safety people were like, what are you, an idiot? Shoot a shotgun in just a random direction. So I don't, I don't know that we want him.

[John Podhoretz]

No, we don't. But the malignity is the question.

[Seth Mandel]

The gaslighting thing is important here because the, the whole thing he ran on is, let's restore order, adults in the room. But he also ran on character. And he's like, I'm the good guy. I'm the guy who got on the train every week and went back to see my family. I've had tragedy, I've soldiered on. I am a good person. And it turns out, no, he's venal. He's corrupt. He's always been corrupt. And the corruption, when it was tried, when people tried to bring it to light, they were called liars. They were told they were spreading misinformation. And it wasn't just by partisans on the left. It was by infrastructures like the entire media industry and, you know, and 51 national security officials. So this, and this does compromise security because it's why, and it's why we spent so much time talking about the Chinese spy balloons. If you have a corrupt and compromised leader, other countries will take advantage of his corruption, as I think probably China did for years.

[John Podhoretz]

It's very likely. Look, the point of the photograph that is so important again is this $10 million question, right? The contract with China, that, that whatever that company. I don't remember the details, but it links to the stuff on the laptop, right? What was the email between Biden and his sister? Right? It was, yeah, I did this and I got to give 50% to the big guy, right? Or the Tony Bobulinski said the big guy who was a partner of theirs was Biden. Okay, well, if it. So we never had the source of the money. We never had Biden. We never had the thing that directly connected Biden, Joe Biden, to the deal that led to the money that according to his son's private communication with his own sister was. He got a cut. Now we have it. So we have a complete, basically four step process.

[Christine Rosen]

The COVID up of this whole thing beginning with the laptop, ending, probably not ending, but up, up till this. The revelation of the pictures is a bigger scandal than the COVID up of Biden's declining mental state. It was as big.

[John Podhoretz]

Can't they both. Do we have to rank them?

[Christine Rosen]

Well, yeah, I would say, I would say this is bigger because. Because this has to do with the law and because the New York Post was suppressed actively by social media and national security figures made the claim that the laptop was Russian disinformation So that gets into gaslighting about national security and foreign policy. It's enormous. And really it ends up being Biden's presidency is completely bookended by this disgraceful scandal.

[John Podhoretz]

I have always thought that the mistake that the right made in the conversation about the laptop is just logistically, it came out too late. Even if the media had accepted that the laptop was legit, you know, was hunters and it was legitimate and it was legitimate to Peru go through it and deal with it and all of that, it was too late in the game for it to have had a material effect on the. It came out on, I think October 22nd. The election was November. What was it? 5th or I can't remember which date. There was only two weeks people had already been voting. Right. Because we had all that early voting and voting by man, you know, all that. And I don't think that the 7 million people margin, the 7 million margin that Biden scored in 2020 could have been reversed by the laptop. But had the laptop not been suppressed or had the stories not been, you know, suppressed on Facebook and then X and all of that, maybe the margin could have been reduced or maybe Biden would have entered his presidency it with a scandal that could have retarded the horrors, the domestic policy horrors that he then inflicted upon us by weakening him. I'm serious. Like, okay, so he gets in. But this is a real story. People really do have to, are, are in a position to focus on it. And, and, and he isn't then going to be getting his stimulus and his, you know, they're going to spend $6 trillion in a year.

[Noah Rothman]

Isn't the story though kind of less about Biden than about the left controlled institutions that have protected him. And so, so it's Trump derangement syndrome combined with the left dominance of institutions like media and the academy and late night comics. Up until yesterday, the Democratic Party, by Trump's term, much of corporate America, they gave us a situation where we effectively had no president for four years. So it's, it's. Even if the scandal had emerged and there was a scandal, but it was, it was like Biden's condition, suppressed and denied even to last week. According to the Washington Post. Everything's fine with Biden, in case you didn't, and the Wall Street Journal and.

[John Podhoretz]

And Biden saying he, he could have won. Right?

[Noah Rothman]

Well, that's, I mean that's the delusion. But like to have the Washington Post, the Tyler Pager story that.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Noah Rothman]

Well, while we were on vacation Was didn't even mention his, his cognitive decline. Any case those institutions would have. What they did was they gave us no president. We had no president for four years and the whole world has spiraled out of control. I mean there is something I think and just to kind of circle back to how we started. There is something unique to the presidency and it's in the Constitution. Even the President cannot take a recess. Right. Congress. Congress has recesses. The President is always on he's.

[John Podhoretz]

And the Supreme Court. And Supreme Court has a term three branches of government. President has no vacation.

[Noah Rothman]

No vacation. Now of course the President takes vacation, whatever. But the way that the frame is designed is that the President has to be the motive force. He, he. Now I don't. Not talking Woodrow Wilson style Mudro. It's like the plebiscitary presidency. Yeah. But the President is there to be the executor and the take care clause. Right. You have to do. If you have a man in Biden's condition who is essentially kind of a puppet and just a way to block tackle Trump and maga, you're going to get these horrendous results. So I think I side more on the. Let's not rank the scandals in terms of the personal corruption and the, the hiding of the cognitive decline or the denial of the cognitive decline because I. You think about it in terms of just kind of class types like oh, a corrupt politician. Like we've had a lot of those throughout the, throughout the history of this, of democracy. But this situation is we've had it only a couple of times and I don't think we've ever had it quite to this extent because I don't think.

[John Podhoretz]

We'Ve ever had it right on the.

[Noah Rothman]

Show about Wilson stroke and about JFK's medical condition.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, but you're talking. Okay. I was actually thinking more about the money.

[Noah Rothman]

Oh no, I'm thinking about. Not been a President of the United.

[John Podhoretz]

States for four years. Right. Okay. But. But in the other division there is very little evidence. Right. We've had 46 presidents that any of them was financially corrupt. I mean there was the Teapot Dome scandal which I don't even understand but I mean, you know, even Nixon, Nixon the biggest crook, whoever was had to be, you know, driven from office. Nobody thought Nixon was profiting.

[Seth Mandel]

They all made money after they left. And, and there were. And Obama kind of put that on steroids not to keep coming back to our favorite theme.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

You know, and you set up a fat or in the Clinton actually Bill Clinton.

[John Podhoretz]

Reagan, right. In 1989.

[Abe Greenwald]

Company after they got out of office.

[John Podhoretz]

In 1989 there was a huge scandal because Ronald Reagan got a, got $2 million to go speak in Japan. And it was like, oh my God, he's profiting from the presidency. He was gone from the presidency, didn't make money from the presidency. Nixon, nobody. This is a very first of all Biden. I don't think we have any evidence that Biden has made money off this presidency, but he was, oh well, I guess Agnew. There was stuff with Agnew, although a lot of that was during the, during his governorship and, and he wasn't president anyway. But no, but Biden wasn't president when, when the China financial scandal.

[Noah Rothman]

Right.

[John Podhoretz]

Happened either. But this is very uncommon.

[Noah Rothman]

This is theory, right, that a lot of this buckraking was meant to set Biden and the family retirement for his retirement.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Noah Rothman]

So no one expected that he would have this kind of second act.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Noah Rothman]

Where he ends up as president in 2020.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. Well, you know, one of the excuse it of course again persistent podcast theme is that crises and problems and things that happen in our political system that cause people to lose faith in the political system have knockoff, knock, knockoff consequences that you cannot predict and, and you know, so result in political phenomena that are not guessable. 2008 leads to Trump, the 2008 financial crisis leads to Trump, stuff like that. The Biden, these two things together over time pose an enormous threat to the future of the Democratic Party that is not simply ideological. The, the, the COVID up of his cognitive decline and this money scandal and the fact that the Democratic establishment got together to gaslight America about Biden's and his family's financial position. And if the Democratic Party needs to restore confidence in, in, in the American electorate in the time where we just learned from Patrick Raffini, for the first time in a hundred years there are more Republicans than there are Democrats. And remember one of my persistent themes is 1980 Ronald Reagan wins 40 states when there are 44% of the country says they're Democrat and 22% said they say they're Republican. We, for the first time in my lifetime there are more people claiming to be Republicans than say they are Democrats. The Democratic Party is in desperate condition and the Biden, what happened over the last five years is going to make their ability to find, to make their way back to being somebody for whom people, in whom people can have confidence. Not only that they have well, if policy make the right policy choices, but that they are simply trustworthy. It's big. I mean this is big. I, you know, I don't know how you restore it. I don't understand how people restore trust. Trust. I mean the US military restored trust. The US military was a very untrustworthy institution after it lost the war in Vietnam and it found a way to restore trust. Like in the late 70s, 40% of drug testing in the military showed that 40% of the military was abusing illegal drugs. They fixed it. I don't know how they fixed it. It's hard for institutions to restore their trustworthiness. Democratic Party is in very deep. We should also.

[Seth Mandel]

You mentioned the Supreme Court earlier and trust in the judicial system also on the decline. But if anyone wants a bracing and somewhat terrifying reality to grapple with, they should read Chief Justice John Roberts end of year report about the courts in which he names the biggest threat, violence and threats against judges and anyone involved in the justice system. Because we do rely on the justice system to prosecute crimes. And if judges are. And we've been talking about particularly left wing violence, left wing political violence. Been targeting the Supreme Court in particular but also the federal courts for years. And it's a very sobering and scary report to read. But it's something that I think every American should be aware of is that this other branch of government on which we rely and which has much higher rates of trust still than either the presidency or Congress is also under threat of violence.

[John Podhoretz]

Can we before we go Matt's recommendation. We just need to close out. And all of this ties together by the way with the death of Jimmy Carter at the age of 100. And I, I simply need to say that Jimmy Carter was an enemy of the Jewish people. He blamed Jews for his defeat in 1980. He used his position as the noble leader of the moral high ground of the United States to defame Israel. One of the leading figures to use the word apartheid to describe. To describe the Jewish state. And he was a terrible president. He was a terrible ex president. And his lionization, understandable though it is, when someone dies you don't speak ill of the dead. Rare case in which ill must be spoken of. Jimmy Carter. He was a net negative for the planet earth and a net negative for its most uniquely beleaguered people. And I am. We just, I think needed to. Sure.

[Noah Rothman]

I have an observation to make about the. The death of Jimmy Carter there in the flurry of articles. You know it's kind of a playoff that old James Taranto bit in his opinion journal comms like you know, Jimmy Carter dies. Media most hit, you know, hardest hit because there's just been an avalanche of stories about Carter, Carter's presidency, why Carter was a better person than you think or whether Carter was a better president than you think or Carter was a better post president than you think. There have also been a sub genre of articles about. Well, the revisionist interpretation of Carter's presidency gives hope to Biden for his eulogies once he departs this earthly plane. And I think that's completely wrong. I mean, we've established the, you know, the lack of Biden's character now. And I think that Carter's character, of course, has been puffed up by his eulogists, but he clearly had a different kind of moral bent, let us say, than Biden.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, he certainly didn't care about money.

[Noah Rothman]

Right. That's what I mean, you know, the piety. I mean, yeah, Carter's problem was he was so overly pious that it became sanctimonious. And he was also, you know, he's genuinely a weird person. I think that the more you study him. So. Okay, so that doesn't apply. And then what's the other thing about Carter? I think, you know, I share your views of Carter, John, obviously. But I will say this. I think he was a terrible president. Through my study of history, I think he was an awful post president, especially his freelancing foreign policy with dictators and tyrants, much less his, I think objectively anti Semitic approach to, to, to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. But he did get this his last year. He course corrected. His last year he course corrected. And what by what I mean was once the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he set into motion reforms in the Pentagon that, that would help Reagan. When Reagan came in to do the defense buildup that helped contribute to the fall of the Soviet Union. In his last year, he appointed Paul Volcker the chairman of the Federal Reserve. One of the most significant decisions any president has made because it was Volcker's approach to inflation that helped combined with again, Reagan's tax cuts that helped end the inflation that had been plaguing America and Carter's presidency specifically. And then he also, so he did the bout of deregulation with Ted.

[John Podhoretz]

That was a year early. That was actually, that was a year early.

[Noah Rothman]

Okay, so, but so the final two.

[John Podhoretz]

Years of that was trucking deregulation, airline deregulation.

[Noah Rothman]

So one again, what you can't say about Biden that you can say about the late Jimmy Carter was Carter tried to correct from his for his mistake. Like he kind of Figured it out at the very end that, oh, I need to, I need to change course if I want to get a second term. Biden never course corrected. Now maybe that's because, as I've alluded to earlier in the program, he was never in charge. Right. But he never course corrected and to this day continues to defend all of his actions, including I think in light of what happened in New Orleans yesterday, the worst decision of his presidency, the worst decision any president has probably made in easily in 20 years, which was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And he still insists that was the right thing to do and that America is better off for it and that it was done correctly. So that's my comment about Carter. At least you can say that he realized he needed to do some things differently at the very end of his one term too.

[Abe Greenwald]

In Iran.

[Christine Rosen]

I agree entirely. And failed.

[Abe Greenwald]

But he, you know.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, he tried.

[Christine Rosen]

I would just also add Biden is in no position to now build up a puffed up glorious post presidency of, you know, decades of do goodism ahead of him. That's not happening.

[Noah Rothman]

Humanity. Right. That's not gonna.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, that's part and parcel, by the way, wrapped up in, in my lesson from Carter, which is also very similar to my lesson from George H.W. bush, which is that you will live probably a longer, happier life if you just take one term.

[John Podhoretz]

I don't think Carter lived a particularly. Carter never looked like he was having a good time and he was very, very, very, very, very bitter. But he lived a long part of the. That's part of the obsession.

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, H.W. jumped out of a plane for his 80th birthday. Was it his 80th birthday or something like Bush.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, Bush, Bush jumped out. Yeah. Bush had a fantastic presidency.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

One turn jumping out of planes, you.

[Abe Greenwald]

Know, with your grandkids. Yeah, that's the lesson.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

And being a one term president would have saved Biden if he had shown. I'm a one term president, I'm a placeholder, whatever his legacy would be. I don't know, totally opposite from what we're talking about now, but pretty close to it.

[Matthew Continetti]

Pretty.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, it certainly we would, we would be in a very different and interesting position than we are now. Matt, you have a recommendation?

[Noah Rothman]

Okay, thank you, John. For my first recommendation of 2025, I would like to recommend a complete unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothee Chalamet. Got to see it in the theaters. Very rare happening for me at this stage of my life. But that's one thing I did over my winter Vacation. And I have to say, I loved it. I do think your enjoyment of the film is correlated with your fandom of Dylan. I assume that there are many fans of Bob Dylan who listen to the podcast. I am a fan of Bob Dylan and I'm on the podcast. So if you do like Bob Dylan, and the more you like him, I think the more you will like the movie. But even if you don't know much about Bob Dylan as my, you know, beloved wife didn't know too much going into the movie. She loved it as well. And the performances are excellent. Chalamet does a great, I think, job imitating Dylan, kind of getting at the, kind of. The fact that many great artists are complete jerks. And that is definitely communicated in the film. But he also sings and he. It's. It's clearly him playing the guitar with some of Dylan's most famous songs from that early, very early period of his career. So I do recommend it if you have a chance to see it in the theater. Do. If you have to wait until it's on demand, go ahead and watch it then. But a complete unknown.

[John Podhoretz]

So I saw it. I loved it. My wife did not like it and I loved it, and I don't. And I'm not a fan of Dylan's. So I thought that what was fascinating about it is that it is the first biopic that I can think of other than a movie called Godard My Love, which was made by the guy who made the artist Michel Hanavisius. It is an assault on the director Jean Luc Godard, and his behavior in 1968 through the. Through the eyes of his very young wife and how he destroyed his legacy by being a Maoist, anti Israel creep. So that's one movie that's like. But this is a movie about how personally morally unattractive Bob Dylan is. And it's fascinating in that regard because he's not tormented. He's not like Johnny Cash and Walk the Line where it's like, you know, he means whether he's tormented. His father was mean to him and to be, you know, he had terrible guilt and all of this. This is a movie about a jerk, as you say. It is a movie about Dylan comes to New York and he is a jerk. He's a jerk to women, he's a jerk to his mentors, he's a jerk to everybody, but they just can't get enough of him. And the music is fantastic. He knew how to write a tune, I think his lyrics are. I Spent a Couple the pretentious Gobbledygook. That is his pseudo poetry. The fact that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature remains one of the great comic moments of the 21st century. The it's just blather sky nonsense. But the movie as a. It's not all of it.

[Noah Rothman]

Not all of it.

[John Podhoretz]

Let me ask you a question, Matt, because I was thinking about this last night because I couldn't go to sleep. What does blowing in the wind mean? Well, they.

[Noah Rothman]

The answer is blowing in the wind.

[John Podhoretz]

That's what I'm saying. You know what it means? It means nothing. Yeah, it don't mean nothing.

[Noah Rothman]

Sure.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay. Anyway. But I'm just saying John is.

[Abe Greenwald]

John is just upset because that Bob Dylan makes John only the second most famous camper at his summer camp.

[John Podhoretz]

That is not. Bob Dylan did go to the summer camp that my parents. That my grandparents started. Herzl camp in Webster, Wisconsin. I went, but I am not a. Abe Foxman was a counselor. And Tom Friedman.

[Noah Rothman]

Different levels of Dylan, because as the artist has had such a long career. And yes, you can say there's some songs that are completely impenetrable. There is, of course, a tradition of surrealist poetry that. That goes back many.

[John Podhoretz]

Bad. Yeah, Bad's a realist poetry.

[Seth Mandel]

Okay.

[John Podhoretz]

And.

[Noah Rothman]

But if you listen to the Hurricane or if you listen to isis.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay.

[Noah Rothman]

Those songs tell stories.

[John Podhoretz]

Neighborhood Bully, our favorite. So the most Zionist song ever written. That's right.

[Noah Rothman]

You know, we make generalizations.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. Now, I thought it was terrific. My wife really didn't like it because she thought that there was no there there, because there's nothing to connect to.

[Noah Rothman]

The truth is it does fail in its. Well, it's weird because the title is a complete unknown. And one of the messages is. Is that this man is inscrutable.

[John Podhoretz]

He's unknowable. Right, right.

[Noah Rothman]

And they do communicate that because they never really get to never really push into what is behind the mask. Right. And maybe there's nothing there except a.

[John Podhoretz]

Genuine talent, but honestly, it's really. Chalamet is astonishing in it. And I would be shocked if he doesn't win the Oscar for best actor. It is still the second best movie about Greenwich Village folk music in the 1960s. The best movie being Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers movie about the unsuccessful version of. Of Bob Dylan. Basically, Dave Van Ronk, who was a figure of the time, was basically the. The. The subject of Inside Lewyn Davis with Oscar Isaac, who gives an even greater performance in that movie than Chalamet gives here. But. But those are two movies that kind of see together like it's. If you go see a complete unknown in the theater, come home and watch Inside Lewyn Davis, which you could see these recreations of early 1960s New York.

[Abe Greenwald]

And anyway, watch Lewyne Davis first because you get a cameo of a. You get a Bob Dylan moment.

[John Podhoretz]

That's right. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, it's. But. But a complete unknown is a very, very well worth your. Worth your time. Although I will say one last thing. One thing that is missing from this movie is basically that the one thing I will praise Bob Dylan for is that, you know, it's all about basically how he screws everybody, including you know, both spiritually, but Pete Seeger is his mentor and he screws Pete Seeger and all this. And basically when Dylan decided that he was going to turn on the folk scene, what he was turning on was the remnant of American cultural Stalinism. And I mean that literally that the Newport Folk Festival that concludes the movie and this is the famous moment when he went electric was the last gasp of the popular front in the United States, the Stalin. And if you read Sean Wilentz's book, Bob Dylan, America lays it out very well. This was a world controlled by American Stalinists, some of whom were still supporters of the Soviet union into the 1960s, including Pete Seeger. And they believed that their music was necessary for the fomentation of the actual revolution of the working class inside the United States. And Dylan was sickened in some weird way by the politics of the Stalinist left once he came to New York and basically decided in some aesthetic way to take them down. That story is not what's really being told in this movie.

[Noah Rothman]

It's hinted at and I think probably because of the filmmakers own pieties, no doubt. But.

[John Podhoretz]

But if you. Again, Sean Williams really wrote a terrific book called Bob Dylan in America. And it is that if you just read it, it's basically like everybody in this entire world was a supporter of the Soviet Union. And then this 20 year old kid comes from Minneapolis and they think he is the Messiah. He is going to bring their message to America. And he basically goes, oh no, I'm not sorry, you're just another old guy. That makes me sick. The times are not only a changing because the bourgeois capitalists are going down, you're going down too. And I love that, I love that about this movie. I loved seeing that. Anyway, great choice. So. But gobbledygook poetry, surrealist though it may be. Anyhow, so we'll be back tomorrow. Happy New Year and let us hope that 2025 is a better year year than 2024, though has not started out well because of what happened in New Orleans and in Las Vegas. But here's holding out hope that that brighter days are to come. So for Matt, Seth, Christine and Abel John Pa it's keep the candle bur.