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Packages by Expedia. You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower. We were made to easily bundle your trip Expedia made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.
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Hope for the best, expect the worst. Some preach champagne Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, September 17, 2025. I am John Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
And joining us today, it's our honor to have our old friend former. Hold on. Your titles are too many. You're a senior editor at National Review. You've written many books. You were the lead prosecutor in the Blind Sheik terrorism case in 1996, and you've been writing for Commentary since my editorship began in 2009 with brilliant pieces on that and on the Progressive Prosecutor project. Andy McCarthy. Andy. Andrew C. McCarthy, known familiarly as Andy. Andy, welcome back to the podcast.
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B
Honor is all honor is all mine. And I'm happy to just go with my usual, you know, old man screaming at the sky.
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A
That's good. Well, you know, you sometimes look like old man yelling a cloud, as I do, but you don't write like old man yelling a cloud. And you, you bring a kind of layered sophistication to your analyses of legal procedure and particularly cases as they come before the courts, and particularly politicized cases. One of your points that made you emerge as a leading figure in discussions of this was that the prosecution that you had to enter into of the blind sheik in 1996, it was the wrong way to handle that kind of externalized terroristic political violence. Well, so yesterday here in New York. Yesterday in New York, and then we'll get to Tyler Robinson in Utah. But yesterday in New York, Judge Caro hearing, the first hearing, the first major procedural hearing on the Luigi Mangione assassination of healthcare executive Brian Johnson, threw out the leading charge by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg of first degree murder involving terrorism, saying in his opinion that the he what the crime was not an effort to. Okay, well, we'll get I'll let you explain what Judge Caro said. There had been this idea before the trial, including among conservatives tough on crime people, people horrified by the assassination, that this might have been an overcharge. Interestingly enough, an overcharge by Alvin Bragg last overcharge we had. Violet Alvin Bragg was, of course, the unjust prosecution of Daniel Penney, the, the man who subdued the schizophrenic person on a subway who then tragically died. But, but. So he has a history of overcharging, but that this case where he charged a first degree murder using a terrorism statute was an overcharge. And that is, in fact, I believe what Judge Caro found.
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B
Yeah, I think it's probably as well understood as just the wrong charge. You know, I said back in December I didn't think the terrorism charges were going to stand up. And it doesn't trivialize murder, which is nearly as bad a crime as you can come up with, as heinous a crime as gets punished under New York law or any other law. I don't think it trivializes it to say that it's not terrorism for the same reason I thought it was bad enough to call a riot a riot without having to say that it was, you know, sedition or insurrection. I think prosecutors tend to do this. And this particular set of charges in Manhattan, I think came out of a political context and dynamic that's worth remembering. This was a horrific homicide on the streets of New York that was jointly investigated by the federal authorities and the state authorities. And at the time, I thought they were kind of playing a. Can you top this? That they weren't particularly sincere about. So Bragg brought this not just as a murder. That wasn't good enough. It had to be a terrorism murder. But why did he do that? Well, at the same time, the Biden Justice Department indicted it under a theory of basically following the stalking the guy in interstate commerce so that they could indict it not just as a violent crime, but as a capital offense, as a death penalty offense.
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A
So I mean by that, just to, just to, just to clarify, because he had crossed state lines to kill Brian Johnson Mangioni, therefore this somehow implicated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, which isn't, as you say, I think, a novel way of looking at the interstate commerce clause. But. So that's what you're referring. So there, there is a. Still a pending federal capital charge against Mangione on those grounds that is not. That is not affected by what happened yesterday in New York, which is the state prosecution.
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B
Correct. Now, there is a, there is a wrinkle in the federal state dynamic that I can get to in a second, but I just want to be clear. I don't have a problem as long as it's lawful. There's a Federal stalking statute on the books. There are other federal crimes that you bring, often in a organized crime context, like the Travel act, where you use facilities in interstate commerce in order to carry out a violent crime, and that gives you federal jurisdiction. The. The thing I thought was interesting with the Biden administration is that they had a moratorium on the death penalty. There wasn't any way on God's green earth that they were actually going to execute this person. So they played this game where they want federal control of the big case. So they indicted it the way they indicted. But on the, you know, the other side of their Janus face, they're telling their base, don't worry, don't worry. We're not actually going to do the death penalty. We're just going to indict the death penalty. They did kind of the same thing in connection with the Boston Marathon bomber, whose death penalty finding by the jury got thrown out by the First Circuit on appeal, which put the Biden administration in the quandary about whether to appeal to the Supreme Court or not. So they appealed to the Supreme Court in order to defend the death penalty so they could show the 70% of the country that supports the death penalty that they were with them. But they quietly told their base, but don't worry, if we win the guy, it's not like the guy's actually going to get the death penalty. So this kind of stuff goes on. This was two prosecutors offices that were actually working together, but were trying to make splashes at the time. So the Biden people do the death penalty thing. Bragg does the terrorism thing. The problem with Bragg's case is to prove a terrorism angle, you have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the motive for carrying out the offense was essentially to change government policy or to intimidate a whole civilian population. The idea is very similar to the sedition statute that I used in the Blind Shay case, which actually was a terrorism case, where the crime is either using force against the government qua government, or as they put it in a statute, levying war against the United States. So the idea is that you're essentially at war with the society and trying to coerce or intimidate the society. As horrific as this was, it was going to be next to impossible, I thought, to establish that intent in this case. And one other thing I think is worth mentioning in terms of the dynamic. I write about Lawfare all the time. It's been a big story for, sadly, I think, for over a decade. But the interesting thing about Lawfare is it's a lot easier to do it if you have a fairly neutral criminal justice system. New York's criminal justice system is really very pro defendant. So even though you can, you can make these prosecutorial decisions and tilt it in a certain way to accomplish at least politicized prosecutions as the cases go through the legal system, the bent in New York's legal system in favor of defendants, I think, comes up again and again. I think Trump's conviction by Bragg's office would likely be reverse on appeal for a variety of reasons. In terms of the irregularities that happen there, you just saw the, the Tish James civil fraud case that went kablooey when they got up on appeal. It's just a very defendant friendly system. And the one other thing maybe to say about it being a defendant friendly system is it was one thing when the Biden administration and Bragg were working together cooperatively. You are not going to get cooperation, obviously, between Bragg and the Trump Justice Department. And the reason that's interesting is because New York, unlike almost every state in the country, has what we call equitable double jeopardy. So in virtually every other state, we have a dual sovereignty exception to double jeopardy. The idea is that the states are sovereign in our system and the federal government is sovereign. So even if crimes arise out of the same factual transaction, and even if they're very similar or even the same crimes, the fact that you get prosecuted by the Feds doesn't stop the state from prosecuting on the same act and vice versa. In New York, it doesn't work that way. In New York, the federal government can always jeopardy out the state government if they go first. Because under New York's equitable double jeopardy doctrine, if you get prosecuted on an act that arises out of a particular factual transaction, New York can't bring a case based on any crime that arises out of that same transaction. So if the Fed's here, put the pedal to the metal and try to get this guy to trial, it would be very hard for Bragg's office to do a case at all.
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E
I hope everyone's taking notes. The exam will be on Friday about New York double equity double jeopardy doctrine, which I just learned about now. That's fascinating. Thank you.
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D
Yeah, well, that's the case in any other state because I know that the Feds could kind of swooped in on the, the Charlotte murder on the subway, on the train because they felt that they could do it better or that the state wasn't jumping in. But the state, can the state still do it in that? I mean, how Often is this the case that we're dealing, that we're looking at, whether one or the other has to, you know, get precedence.
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B
Yeah, Seth, I think that New York's a real outlier on this. I wouldn't want to say there's no other state that follows equitable double jeopardy. I will say overwhelmingly the state. Overwhelmingly. It's a dual, it's a dual sovereignty system so that one systems prosecution doesn't block out the other system.
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A
For in fact, Mangione's lawyers before yesterday were petitioning very aggressively to have his diary excluded from consideration in the set of facts or, you know, exhibits that will be shown in the New York State case because they said that would prejudice the federal jury, which, because the facts would come out before, in the New York State case, before the federal case, making it impossible for him to have a fair trial. Because, of course, I think the diary is the rock solid hard evidence, aside from the video, that he had intentionally, he had planned this and intended to do this actual specific act. And so in a very nervy fashion, you know, they, that's what they, that's what they were trying to exclude. A lot of people after the judge's ruling yesterday were outraged at the thought that somehow, you know, Mangioni had gotten off or, you know, that he had been that here, this soft on crime New York, you people are all crazy. And then there was this absolutely, terrifyingly awful celebration outside the courthouse of about 100 Mangioni fans dancing and singing and celebrating the dismissal of these charges. They weren't all dismissed. I mean, there is now a second degree murder charge that carries a maximum penalty of 25 years. I guess the question I have for you then is let's say Bragg had not gone this route and had simply indicted him for first degree murder. Right. Intent, whatever, all the, whatever all the rules are, even New York State actually makes it difficult, I believe, to indict for first degree murder. Like there's, there's, it's, it's harder here. Or that where the, or the fact pattern has to be very explicitly, though this is pretty close to that. That's another way in which we're defendant friendly here or something like that. Is that.
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B
Yeah, well, so I've been asked like a million times, how come this is second degree murder instead of first degree murder. So New York, as with almost everything New York has a very confusing history with respect to murder and how it's categorized under New York law. They haven't actually executed somebody in New York for decades. I can't remember. I knew this a few months back, but I don't remember when the last execution was, but it's, but it's a long time ago. So during the Pataki days in the 90s, New York wanted to reinstate their death penalty.
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A
It was, and this was 63. Eddie. Eddie Maze. Yeah.
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B
The last time.
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A
Sing Sing. Yeah.
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B
Yeah. So New York, the Republicans under Pataki in New York wanted to get the death penalty rolling again. This was happening in a lot of states. After the Supreme Court's Furman decision, there was a moratorium in the United States on the death penalty for a considerable period of time because of a couple of important Supreme Court cases. After the Furman decision, a number of states tried to try to use what the guidelines that the court had laid out to re, to get the machinery of capital prosecution going again. And New York wanted to do that as well. So what they did under Pataki to try to make this cleaner was they took only the categories of homicide that would give you potential death penalty charges, and they put those all in first degree murder. And those because of the wacky way New York law has developed, those crimes were along the lines of murders of a police officer, murder of a prison guard in prison. That's a pretty common one because you, you're dealing in prisons with a lot of people who are serving very lengthy sentences. So in most states, if you kill a prison guard, since there's not much, you have to have something to hold over their head to make them behave if they're, you know, the worst kind of criminal. There's a potential death sentence for killing prison guards. So there's a, there's a small category of heinous, heinous murders that they put into first degree and everything else got dropped into second degree. So it's not like they made a judgment that, that a murder of the heinous kind that we, that we saw in Mangione's case, the murder of Thompson, the, the health care, the health insurance executive. It's not that they don't think that that's a serious crime. It's a heinous crime, but it wasn't under New York law ever going to be a death penalty crime. So it ends up in the murder two category. And only the stuff that they hoped were going to be death penalty cases went into murder one. And then what happened was completely.
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A
This completely ruins my understanding of law as, as garnered from television, where, as we all know, first degree murder is the crime that happens with intention. And secondary murders where you just Lose it and you kill somebody, you know, on a momentary impulse. And that's, that's my understanding of eight centuries of common law. And you're really offended.
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B
This is because. This is because you were crimes of.
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D
Passion in the real world than I expected as a kid watching shows right now.
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B
John and I grew up at the same time where at some point Jack Lord comes on the screen and says, book of murder one. And then, you know, we proceed with the episode. Yeah, but so in. What ended up happening in New York was after Pataky and the Republicans who were then in control of New York, it seems like eons ago. Right. But after that, they got another terrible decision from the court of appeals and they never got the death penalty rolling again anyway. But they had by then changed their law in terms of what was murder one and what was murder two. And that hasn't changed since then. So it was an, it was a failed experiment to try to get capital prosecution going again.
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A
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D
We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter status.
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A
And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Power Lines.
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D
Every Friday, we're breaking down the biggest stories shaping the industry, explaining why they matter and saying the things most people.
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B
Are thinking but too timid to say out loud.
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D
No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis.
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A
That isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes.
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D
My understanding, having reported this is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried.
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B
To effectively exile the CNN producer.
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D
And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
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A
Oh, my God. That's Power Lines presented by Status. Follow Power Lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast.
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E
So just to maybe connect Manjoni to the next case, Tyler Robinson. You know, it is striking. John brought up the diary, and we know that Manjoni had an online presence and was communicating with various kind of lifestyle and tech people about political philosophy and health and, you know, maximizing productivity. And it's similar to me to what we heard yesterday from these text messages between Tyler Robinson and his transgender boyfriend, this kind of highly articulate, highly politically aware type killer that seems to be kind of a type now between these two murders.
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A
I think what's also important is that what connects the two of them is that they are not insane. I mean, I think you couldn't sit listening to the Utah, a prosecutor going through systematically through the cases and reading the text messages between Tyler Robinson and. And lan Lance Twigs and say, well, this is somebody with a disordered intelligence who was acting on the basis of hearing voices or being a schizophrenic or wanting to impress Jodie Foster or whatever this was. He says very specifically that he was tired of the hate and. And he wanted to do this. And, you know, the only thing he was scared of was his dad getting mad because he lost grandpa's gun. That was the only sort of emotion being expressed there. And Mangioni, similarly, in what little has leaked from his diary. And then the stuff that he was doing online was clearly completely compos mentis, and that that is what is necessary here to mean that these two guys are involved in conscious, politicized acts of assassination.
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C
I think the most sane thing in the Robinson exchange was his saying he had hoped this would remain a secret until his grave.
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A
Yeah. And that he thought he was going to get away. If he could just get his hands on the gun, there would be no way to trace him. Now we know that he ended up being traced in the Most by his mother. Heart rending Fashion Week, one could imagine, which is that his mother recognized him and said to his father, I think that's Tyler. Which is, you know, I mean, I don't know that that is Dostoevsky. You really would need a Dostoevsky to get to the psychological deformation of that mother's real. Is that the horror of that mother, of his mother's realization. So he wasn't going to get away with it, but his intent was to get away with it. He wasn't. He wasn't, you know, the. The Butler shooter who killed himself immediately on the roof for these were these.
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E
He was killed on the roof.
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A
He was killed on the roof. Fair enough, but I'm sorry, but. Or like the school shooters who often take their own lives as soon as they're done with the school shootings. He had a plan. He executed it. He had to leave the gun. He thought if he could just get his hands on the gun, there'd be no way to trace him. The gun didn't have a serial number. How would anybody, you know, he had changed clothing, he had done this, he had done that. It was a very calculated, you know, dispassionately thought through act of political assassination.
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B
Yeah, I thought, I guess doing what I used to do for a living, I couldn't help listening to the prosecutor describe the chat and thinking of this as, you know, man, if. If this was a guilty plea allocution. He checks every single box that you would want checked in the case in terms of, you know, intent, motive, the fact that he planned it, the fact that he had a plan for getting away with it, you know, new to change his clothes, new to bury the weapon, thought about going back to get the weapon. That was the, you know, there's a hiccup in all of these things. If they weren't, we wouldn't solve as many of them as we do. But that particular chat, I think it cooks them. It's fair enough to say that a prosecution never sounds better than when the prosecutor announces it at the beginning before the defense lawyers have rolled up their sleeves and dug into it. But, you know, if you make a statement to the police, you at least have a shot at saying it was a coerced confession and trying to get it thrown out. If you voluntarily spill the beans to somebody else and it's captured in the way this was by, you know, electronic media that's coming into evidence, the prosecutors are not going to have trouble getting that in. And I guess I had two. Aside from the fact That I just thought the whole case is in that chat. I had two emotional reactions to this. One is, you know, taking everything Matt said about the background of this guy and the thoughtfulness that, that went into all of this. You know, I have a kid almost the same age as this alleged killer. And when I read the, when I heard this yesterday and I read the New York Times backgrounder on him over the weekend, you know, he was this, he seemed like this bright gifted student up until about 2021. And then his life takes a detour that goes off the chart. You know, 2020, 2021, that was a Covid year. That was the year these high school students, if you're a high school senior in those years, you had no, you know, the second half of your senior year, you know, no problems, no baseball season, no normality in what you would expect in a very important part of your life. Then colleges, universities were unreal atmospheres. For a couple of years they didn't function as normal. The social environment of a normal university was not there. Completely surreal. And a lot of these kids who were gifted kids, smart kids, sunk into this miasma of social media and video games and all of the dysfunction that I think we actually need to have a much longer look at than we've had. And I just couldn't help but think that that has a lot to do with what went on here.
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A
But I will say also in the chat, in the checking off element, Tyler Robinson does not appear to check all the boxes that we have come to associate with these crimes that we like, boggle the mind and terrify the consciousness. Right, right. He's not an incel. He's in a relationship living with another person. He has a relationship with his parents that is normal enough for him to worry that his dad is going to be mad that he lost the gun. He was not living at home in his parents basement. He was living in an apartment in a city nearby. And he was as you say, like he was a successful suit. So the first thoughts that people had that I was involved with were things like, well, he's probably on the spectrum. He's on the spectrum. He was a gamer. So he was in this weird gaming world and all that. He might, all that might be true.
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D
He also had a good sense of humor about, I mean, weird to say it, but he was joking about memes on the bullets in a way that suggests somebody who is not.
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E
Let's not normalize him too much.
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A
No, no, I know this was not a bourgeois relationship.
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D
He was conscious.
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A
I'm not. What I'm saying is there's no escape from the fact that this was a political assassination done consciously by somebody who is making a political decision. What his motive, what, what went into the political decision. The. His. His bizarre relationship and all that is a secondary. But this is really important because people always want one of the comforting ways to deal with the horrible fact of Mangione and Robinson allegedly, if they are, if it is proved to be the case, is there are able people among us, radicalized in whatever fashion who now suddenly have the means, the motive and the opportunity to do these crimes and that they are not. We can't comfort ourselves with the idea that they're lone lunatics, but rather that they're something.
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E
On the contrary, there's. This seems to be a movement of radical left wing ideology that views Republicans as a class, as fascists and, or. And like bigots, people who are ready to end the existence of trans people and therefore believes violence against 49% of the country is legitimized. That's, that's the terror aspect and that's.
- [32:49]
D
The difference with Mangione, right Matt? I mean that's, that's the key thing here was.
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E
I think Mangione would agree with everything I just said.
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D
It's not, it's not a. Like we're not looking at a specific, you know, the guy who, you know, supposedly, so Mangioni was had. There was reason to believe he had some sort of chip on his shoulder that was non political, that was like this personal at health care executives, whatever. But the question is, is the scary part about what happened to Charlie Kirk is that in a certain kind of way Kirk makes. What happened to Kirk makes a lot more people think that they could be targets then the Mangione case did. Kirk has had the effect of making people think if I'm at a, you know, college debate or whatever, if I'm in an open air thing or you know, is my Twitter feed enough?
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B
I just need to. I disagree.
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E
There are more businessmen in this country than there are Republicans. But so theoretically Mangioni's criticism is even more radical and systemic because he believes that the health care industry, he believed that capitalism killed people.
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A
Right? Now that is where the judge in the Mangione case made a value judgment about the terrorism charge is he said this does not rise to terrorism because as this was not an effort to either change government or change the quality whatever or to affect, you know, make large scale terror of the American public. He had a grievance. He was, he was motivated by what he viewed as the greed of the health insurance industry. And I think.
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B
But, John, I would. I would just say that we shouldn't conflate the inability of prosecutors to prove an element of a charge beyond a reasonable doubt with the dynamic that causes something like this to happen.
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A
Right.
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B
I think what, you know, what. What Matt was saying to me, it's reminiscent of what I dealt with prosecuting jihadist terrorists, because there was, especially politically speaking, when you were dealing with an ideology that had the patina of religious doctrine, even though it was the thrust of it is political and anti American and anti constitutional, etc. But there was a. There was an impulse back in the Clinton days, and I think this. This even proceeded after that into the Bush days with the idea of trying to marginalize these terrorists as a bunch of knuckleheads who were just wild men and, you know, really perverting a belief system when, in point of fact, their beliefs were representative of a strain of fundamentalist Islam that had 14 centuries of solid academic work behind it. It's a heinous doctrine as far as I'm concerned, but that doesn't mean there's not a logic to. Is very influential in the. In the places where it is. Where it's on its home turf. My def. My lead defendant, the blind sheikh, was often painted in rhetoric by the Clinton administration as just a maniac. In point of fact, he was a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence, graduated from Al Azhar University, which is the seat of Sunni Islamic learning since the 10th century. And as. As awful as the things. As awful as the things were that he said in terms of. For a society, society, you know, that believes in equality and property and liberty and all the constitutional principles that we have, he's antithetical to all of it. It was very representative of what is the dominant ideology in that part of the world. And he was highly, highly influential. And what always drove me nuts was, was because they didn't want to. Because the government didn't want to appear to be Islamophobic, which, by the way, is just like a. It's a. It's a word that was made up by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to try to discourage people from understanding the doctrine, the threat doctrine that we were dealing with. But in Washington, they never wanted to connect the dots between. You have scriptural injunctions to violent attacks. You had mediating people like the blind sheikh or Sheikh Kharadawi from the Muslim Brotherhood. And then they were. They were the filter of this doctrine for young Muslim men who were then animated to commit these attacks. And they weren't attacks that were committed because people were maniacs. They were attacks that were committed because that was the logical thing that you did. If you were animated by this particular doctrine. And can I ask you a follow.
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D
Up question on that, then? So you, I mean, one of the things about your book, Willful Blindness about that case was that the, you know, was about connecting the dots, right? Which was about, you know, is this just a police case in one single case, or is it connected? And how do you, how do you connect those dots and stuff like that? So if, if, if you're, if you see similarities, Andy, with some of the things that we're seeing now, not exactly the same, but if you do see the similarities, murderers who are not a maniac, who have been radicalized, who are part of some network, how does the law enforcement system and the national security establishment, and how do we deal with domestic radicalization that isn't, you know, ISIS in place or something like that? If you see similarities between some of the cases we're talking about now, does that suggest a change in any kind of public enforcement strategy?
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B
Well, I think, you know, unfortunately, the change happened in the wrong direction under Obama. So we had counterterrorism from the Clinton years through the Bush years, right? And then the Obama people come in and we're not even allowed to call it terrorism anymore. It becomes countering violent extremism. And the thrust of that approach is that we believe that the reason that we're being attacked is in many ways our own fault. We're taking actions that, that hurt the dignity of Muslims, except that we're not allowed to address it in that context. Right. And their whole, their whole approach was to tell law enforcement and intelligence officials exactly the opposite of what we know you have to do in a sensible security strategy, which is to discount ideology. And what, what the Obama people used to say is, look, any extremism, any, any thought system taken to an extreme could cause violent attacks. And maybe that's true as an abstract proposition, but in the, down here, in the real world, if you look at every attack, there's a, there's a particular group that's carrying out every attack. And then the other thing is all those lone wolves, Seth, they turned out to be lone wolves. You know, every single time an attack happened, you learn that the person was on the FBI's radar or they were on the police radar. But the incentive system in law enforcement, you know, if the bosses tell you that we're not going to say jihad Anymore. We can't say mujahideen anymore. Jihad is the internal struggle for personal betterment. That's what.
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A
What.
- [41:07]
B
That's what it's going to be from now on. The guys get the. The guys get the very distinct message that if you want to have career advancement, you're not going to do investigations like they were done before. We were doing. Countering violent extremism. Right. So the way that you try to protect yourself, there's no such thing as perfect protection, but it's just, it's almost the same approach that drove crime down from the early 90s until like 2015 or so. Right. You have to do intelligence first policing, which means you don't wait for crimes in the crime wave or a terrorist attack to happen. You have to beat the bushes in the places where you have every reason to know that radicalization is going on. So in the. There may be like 200 and something mosques in New York. At the time that I was doing our case, there were a handful of them that we knew were the places where this ideology in a firebrand style was being promulgated. There were incidents that happened that enabled the police and the FBI to infiltrate the organizations and learn what they were up to. The nosere. I talk a lot in the book about Nasser's killing of Meir Kahani, which ended up in a trial in New York City, the criminal trial of Nasser that turned out to be like a big event for fundamentalist Islam in New York. Every day of that trial, there were, you know, there were. There were Kahani supporters on one side and there were no SEIR supporters on the other side.
- [42:50]
A
This is the murder you're referring to of the American Israeli rabbi extremist politician who came to New York on a fundraising trip and was killed in his hotel room, which you identify in, I think in 1990 or 1991, which you identify in your book as the first. This was the beginning of the jihadist violence spree in the United States.
- [43:15]
B
In the United States.
- [43:16]
A
Right. And it was not seen as such or understood as such. Had it been. Had it been clear to people or had people open their eyes to see that this was happening, that could have started the process under which you did the intelligence first policing that would have caught the. Maybe you wouldn't have caught the blind cheek, but you could have, say, caught the 19 hijackers or something. Like, again, the mindset altering, which gets to. I think Matt and Abe should probably. Well, I just want to.
- [43:48]
C
Yeah, I want to make a point about Andy's point. Regarding not conflating what a prosecutor can do with sort of what is to my mind, no matter what the charge ends up being, the killing of Brian Thompson is an act of terrorism. Legally, it may be something else. But when you're killing to affect a change in policy and practice because of an ideological bias and sort of an ideological system that you're involved in, that to me that's just analytically speaking. The very definition of terrorism.
- [44:36]
A
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- [45:08]
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A
And build your dream with sweat and steel?
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B
Can you chase thrills and conquer curves in a Mustang? Can you take a Bronco to where.
- [45:26]
A
The map ends and adventure begins?
- [45:29]
B
Whether you think you can or think.
- [45:31]
A
You can't, you're right. Ready?
- [45:34]
B
Set.
- [45:34]
A
Forward. Well, if you take. Again, I'm constantly going to Dostoevsky, right? If you take Crime and Punishment as your model. Ras Kolnikov is a. Is sick. He's ill. He's got 104 fever and he is a political radical writing stupid articles for left wing magazines. And his act of terrorism is to kill his landlady and her daughter with an ax. Now is it an act of terrorism under New York State statute? No. Was he acting on an impulse to. A politicized impulse to strike out against having to pay rent, therefore participating in sort of like the rules of civilized society? Yes. So he's. That's not that that's moral, you know, that's why I bring.
- [46:24]
C
This is even more.
- [46:26]
B
I could. Can I prove Abe, I could prove your point though, I think because if I had tried to prosecute no Sayre as a one off act of terrorism, I wouldn't have been able to do it. We convicted him because the people he was working with bombed the World Trade center. And as a result our investigative aperture widened and we were able to. Now we had to tell the story of how did this conspiratorial group begin? How did it get a beachhead in this country what were its objectives? How do we know that they were seriously going about it? So in that way, the homicide kind of gets swept along with everything else in the bigger terrorism case. But I don't think if the Trade center hadn't gotten bombed, I couldn't have prosecuted Nasser as a, as a terrorism homicide. But I think as you're, as you're trying to point out, it doesn't change what happened. Right. What happened is it was a terrorist. It was, it was a terrorist action and by a group that perceived itself.
- [47:39]
E
And the frightening thing. Well, he also, we see this ideology, and now that both Manjoni and I assume Tyler Robinson will become folk heroes in different ways and to different audiences, is then you have the potential for a much more lethal and explicit act of terrorism, just as in the precedent you were citing, Andy.
- [48:02]
C
And also, you know, just regarding Thompson here, while he may not have been a politician and United is not a government institution, immediately after his killing, you have politicians coming out saying, well, we should talk about health care prices. Right? So this was. And that was. That was where it was aimed. I mean, aside general destruction of a system, but it was aimed to get that level of change moving.
- [48:35]
A
So Andy and I think this is Matt's. This is where Matt is going with this point and why we are in a fiendishly difficult moment and possibly hinge moment in our society, which people keep saying, but I think people say that because they're saying, oh, you know, now there's the right's going to shoot the left and left, and we're going to have a. We're going to descend into civil war. Something else is happening here. If we have these two examples, and they do seem to have certain relations and connections. Robinson and Mangio and the attacks on the churches and the attacks on the.
- [49:06]
E
Church by the trans shooters.
- [49:07]
A
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so what we have here is an entire generation of people bathed, as you say, literate, right. Able to write well or write coherently, bathed in an atmosphere of politicized thought that has opened the window to the idea that politicized violence is acceptable because America has always been a politicized country and a violent country and white males and CIS males and all that have been controlling everything anyway, and that there's no way around their control of things. And how. That's why this argument over the last week about where people on the right are saying, we need to go after people who are celebrating this, praising it, we need to go after administrators, teachers, people on campus and all of that. And then the left And a lot of other people rear in horror saying, well, people have a First Amendment right. You can't prosecute someone for saying they're happy about something that's not fair. And yet we, if we don't do something, and I don't know what that means, because we do have the First Amendment, we do have academic freedom, we do have all kinds of protections for political speech and political thought that are necessary and that our attorney General should not be going around saying, there's speech I don't like, so I'm going to prosecute it. But just as we needed to look no sayre in the blind shake in the eye and say there's a genuine threat to the United States here that we need to take seriously. And taking seriously means changing policies and approaches to prevent the worst things from happening. And we didn't do that. And then the worst thing happened. And then we ended up in two wars. And the entire 21st century was defined by our response to them. Similarly, if something is not done to alter the atmosphere of this body of opinion and its effect on young people, this is only the beginning. It's only the beginning.
- [51:24]
B
It's a big problem with having the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the government poisoned in the public mind and for a very good reason, as something that's hyper political and used as an offensive weapon, because we really, we really need it in these times. The First Amendment doctrine is that you can't criminalize speech, but speech is always available to be used as evidence of other wrongs. So the example I always use is like, you know, the, the don in the back of the social club who's sitting at the table with the fellows and says, I want that guy whacked. If you try to put in the statement, I want that guy whacked at the trial, he doesn't say First Amendment first. But you can't do this. You're allowed to use speech as evidence and you're allowed to use speech as intelligence. But you have to be able to trust that the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the government is going to do that the right way in order to promote national security rather than to weaponize the tools that we give them in order to protect us. And I think we're at a, we're in a crisis mode as far as that's concerned. The other thing I would say, and this, this goes to what you guys talk about almost every day here. And I remain astonished by this. There's been almost no attention to the fact that the most success the Muslim Brotherhood is the most successful Islamist organization in the west in history, in modern history, in any event. And the most successful project of the Muslim Brotherhood has been the Muslim Students Associations, which started with maybe a handful of chapters in the Midwest in the early to mid-1960s and now boast that they have hundreds of chapters in universities across the United States and Canada. In many universities, there are multiple Muslim Students association chapters and offshoots. That's not a social club, you know, that's an organization that actually has a program, you know, we talked about. These are people who have beliefs and coherent thoughts. They're not, you know, maniacs or dummies. They're being taught Sayyid Kuddam, and they're being taught, you know, the scholars of fundamentalist Islam. They're being taught things that have, you know, virulent anti Semitism, anti Westernism and anti Americanism. And we've just allowed that to go on without. Because, you know, everybody says First Amendment and it's, you know, they're just college organizations. Well, you know, you let that go on for three generations and then something like October 7th happens, and the next day in college, in Harvard or Columbia or wherever else, they're having, they're having demonstrations that are obviously pro Hamas demonstrations. And everybody says, gee, what happened on the campus? What happened here? Well, it's been happening for 60 years.
- [54:55]
D
So then what can be done if we say, you know, that you have the First Amendment issues, so you have the groups meeting, right? What, what, what do you, what, what are you saying should be done between the groups meeting and learning, said Qutb, and then a few years later having these Hamas marches. What wasn't done that could have been done legally, constitutionally, in that time?
- [55:16]
B
Well, I think for one thing, it needs to be exposed. You know, I mean, there's, you're right that there are a number of things that, because of the First Amendment can't be done through criminal enforcement or even other kinds of legal enforcement. But there's nothing that says that you can't shine the light of day on it. And there's nothing that says that you can't hold the colleges accountable for it. You know, there's one thing, it's one thing if you have students who go off, you know, off campus and they decide to have their own organization and it's not under the auspices of the, of the university, that's one thing. But all of this stuff grew up under the supervision of all these colleges and their trustees and their boards and their administrations. Our basic theory in the United States is that, you know, we don't want to prosecute our problems into, to disappear because you can't and you wouldn't want to live in a society like that in the first place. But you can marginalize these hateful ideas by shining a light on them. One of the reasons that I thought it was important to write a book about the case and then write another book about how the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States is I thought that the idea here is to shine a light on something that is noxious and anti American and has the seeds of something that can tear your society apart. Because people will wake up and do something about it if they know there's a problem. But if it just continues to fester and nobody does anything about it, I think, you know, then you wake up after October 7th to the world that we're in.
- [57:05]
A
So in literally in medieval times and really in England, but elsewhere. Because as I think we all believe this problem is a problem of the highly educated creating these permission structures and ideological through lines that are carrying these arguments into the mainstream and then radicalizing people who then a very tiny fraction of a fraction of them will actually activate to commit criminal acts. But the decision was made that scholarly pursuits would, would be respected and separated from the rest of society. The famous town gown distinction in Oxford and Cambridge where scholars would be left free to investigate what they needed to investigate with the implicit understanding in common law that those that Oxford and Cambridge and places like that as academic freedom and these ideas spread through the Enlightenment, that they would be self policing, that like any society granted some kind of exception, they would have to monitor themselves and police themselves and keep themselves clean of corruption, intellectual corruption, and to become like methods of overthrowing the civilized and established order. And that is exactly what has not happened in the United States. All the tools that we're talking about, the First Amendment, again, academic freedom, all of that have been weaponized by people who hate the United States, hate our traditions, hate our Constitution. But understand as, like as, as Lennon said that you know, they're the, you know, they're the rope that we can hang them with. I don't really, I mean maybe that's, maybe I'm being like wildly over dramatic.
- [59:16]
C
Here, but I had this thought yesterday. Early on in the war on terror, we talked a lot about how terrorists from non free countries exploited our freedoms to do violence against us. First of all, that never stopped because a huge amplifier of all this, even domestic ideological radicalism are these foreign bot farms that amplify these Messages on the Internet here, they're Russian, they're Iranian. You can't do it there. You know, they have closed Internets and closed whatever, but they are doing it here. So that is still. That is something we, again, need to. We have to get our eye back looking on that. And as you say, John, the people who live here are also exploiting their freedoms to do violence against the system by spreading this incitement freely because we can.
- [60:31]
A
But like, as I said, this is really hard. I'm not, you know, I mean, I think, you know, when Stephen Miller says, we're gonna go for a go at you, that's a nice, clean, vulgar. You know, I mean, this is the project of a generation. And it's, it's, you know, it has to be. It's really, really hard. And it really does involve not just, you know, changing norms or whatever, but changing hearts, changing minds. And that's not the project of firing some professors and, you know, and then deplatforming people on the Internet. And it's cheap and tawdry to say that that's what you're going to be able to do if you, you know, you're going to be able to make these sorts of changes. It's fiendishly difficult. But what is required to do it is first, I think, as Andy says, not just to shine a light, but to identify the illness. To say, there was a cancer here and we don't know how to cure it, but if we understand that it's a cancer, we have taken a step toward at least isolating and understanding it and then being able to take steps to cure it or to figure out how to treat it or extirpate it or make it go into remission. Maybe in the United States, you can never. You can't. Because of our Constitution, you can't extirpate a body of thought. You can't eliminate a body of thought. And you probably shouldn't want to either.
- [62:07]
B
But.
- [62:09]
E
I was just saying I have a recommend. I forgot to mention I have a recommendation, if you would like.
- [62:13]
A
Okay.
- [62:13]
E
If you would like a commentary recommendation.
- [62:15]
A
I would like a commentary. Before you do your commentary recommendation.
- [62:18]
E
Yes, I'm just, I'm just pointing.
- [62:20]
A
Just before you do the commentary recommendation, I, the. I just wanted to mention that in Florida, the man who was caught in a, you know, like, jumping out of a tree and running into his car with the. At the intention of assassinating Donald Trump three weeks after the near, near murder in Butler, Pennsylvania, is in a courtroom, and it's Very interesting what's happening in that courtroom because he has decided to serve as his own attorney. And every time he opens his mouth, the judge says, shut your mouth. You're not this court, you are not going to, you're not serving as your own attorney so that you can make political speeches about, about your views that will get covered by the media. I'm not going to allow that to happen. I'm just only noting that because I think it's an interesting example, another way of a, of a methodology somebody could use to, you know, like, remember, you.
- [63:19]
E
Know, Brandon Ruth's ideology, while, you know, kind of nuts, was also heavily involved in pro Ukraine, kind of transnational, humanitarian.
- [63:35]
A
That's the name.
- [63:35]
E
Philosophies.
- [63:36]
A
That's the name of this defendant. Yeah, yeah.
- [63:38]
E
And of course he was asking prospective jurors how they would respond if a turtle was crossing the road while they were driving. It's just a complete, it's an embarrassment what's happening. I mean, but of course, this is the system that's allowed him, you know, it allows him to, to represent himself, right?
- [64:02]
B
Yeah, he gets to represent himself. Doesn't mean he doesn't have an idiot for client. The oddball thing with this is, you know, it's a stupid thing even for somebody who has a little bit of familiarity with the system to try to go up against experience. You know, prosecutors are experts in the criminal law, and if that's the arena you're in, you want an expert in the criminal law, you don't want to, when your life is at stake, do what this guy is doing, doing. But on the other hand, you know, the rules of the game don't change. So even if you have somebody who is going to insist on his constitutional right to represent himself, that doesn't mean that the court has to change the rules to try to accommodate his, you know, the flaws in that approach. And I think you're just seeing this is how it works out. The hardest thing in this case is for the judge and the prosecutors to just kind of put them their heads down and be professional and just get to the finish line.
- [65:07]
E
Matt, thank you.
- [65:09]
A
You have a recommendation?
- [65:10]
E
Just to inject a little lighter note into this very sober podcast. I do want to recommend the latest edition of the Almanac of American politics that landed on my doorstep just the other day. 2026 midterms are about to begin as soon as the off year elections are over. The Almack has been coming out for over 50 years. The first edition was for the 1972 elections of course was started by my colleague and friend Michael Barone, along with fellow Harvard student Grant Ujifusa. It's now been under the auspices of National Journal and the Cook Political Report for some time. And so the introduction is written by Charlie Cook, not by Michael Barone for this volume, but nonetheless, more than you would ever want to know about each of our House districts, each of our senators, governors, now, and essay about the president and vice president. And I'll just note that the turnover in the House of Representatives is so enormous that I have to look at the almanac frequently because sometimes people will show up on my computer screen or cable news channel and I have no idea who they are. So I have to run to the almanac and figure out, oh, they were.
- [66:37]
A
Just elected and where were they elected.
- [66:39]
E
From and what, what's their actual background? And of course, are they pro Israel or not? That's, that's the thing that I look at immediately. So again, you know, what would they.
- [66:49]
D
Do if a turtle was crossing the road?
- [66:50]
E
What would they do if it was crossing the road? It's, of course, it's, you know, it doesn't come cheap, but it's a hefty volume. Always recommended for people who love politics. The Almanac of American Politics 2026.
- [67:02]
A
It is one of the great feats in American political history. This book and, you know, before the Internet and, you know, people arose in the Internet era who have this kind of encyclopedic knowledge of politics, usually often through polling. And Michael was a pollster like our friends, you know, Steve Kornacki and Harry Antin and people like that, who also probably, if you say, well, what about the, you know, seventh district in Arizona? They'll tell you who ran in it 25 years ago. Michael was, Barone was a, you know, I mean, in, in his heyday was like the mentat in doom, like you say to the human computer. Like you'd say to him, what about, you know, Mississippi second? And he could open his mouth and give you 75. He still can. He still can. I haven't seen him in years. Yeah, but, but that is now a less necessary feature because, you know, there is this ability to do instant research and analysis. Until he and Grand Ujafusa started putting this book out, there was no such thing, right. As a place where you could see what is going on in US Politics, district by district and Senate seat by.
- [68:22]
E
Senate seat, and the history and the geography. That's what I find. It's so interesting.
- [68:27]
A
You know, and going back, if you get one from, like, the 1980s. It's just, it's like the baseball. For people in politics. This is a combination of Bill James and the Baseball Encyclopedia and I, you know, and. And the phone book and the greatest sports writing. You know, I don't know if you like, if you like Jim Boswell. I'm not that crazy about it, but all together. Tom Boswell. Excuse me, I'm getting something wrong this week. I said that. I said that Sparta lost the Peloponnesian War yesterday, and Sparta won the Peloponnesian War. So you have to read the Golden.
- [69:06]
E
Thread by Alan Guelzo and Jim Hankins.
- [69:09]
A
I can pull it out if you'd like. Every single day, we're going to mention this book until it is in every home in America. The Golden Thread. Okay.
- [69:20]
D
I have friends who listen to the podcast who've been texting me. All right, what is this Golden Thread?
- [69:26]
A
Yeah. All right. So as always, your body of knowledge and your ability to synthesize is invaluable and. And just is. You know, you've given us all a master class and how to understand so much legal procedure, the Muslim Brotherhood and. And all that. So I can't thank you enough, and I hope to see you again here soon. And for. Or not. Maybe I don't want to see you again here soon because you are sort.
- [69:58]
B
Of like, never a good sign. Never good.
- [70:00]
A
But you are a. You are an analyst of doom. So maybe we will find pacific ways to solve our disputes here in America. And amen. We will have less need of your. We will never have. We will always have need of your insight, but less need of your emergency insights. Anyway, so thanks again, and for Seth and Abe, I'm John Pot Horitz. Keep the candle burning.