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- [00:04]
Unknown Speaker 1
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.
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John Podhoretz
It'S going Hope for the best Expect.
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Abe Greenwald
The worst Hope for the best.
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John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, July 22, 2025. I'm John Pot Horse, the editor of Commentary magazine. We are three months away from our grand 15th, 16th, 17th, 23rd, I can't remember. Annual Roast, our big fundraiser of the year, happening October 19th here in New York City. Our Roasties have included in the past Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney, Mayor Soloveitchik, Barry Weiss, Jonah Goldberg, Ben Shapiro, and many others. And this year's is a guy named Cliff Asness, who you may not have heard of, but is one of America's most successful investors and hedge fund guys, and very brilliant and very funny and very worthy of being teased and poked at, as we do during this very unusual annual fundraising event. You can find out all about it by going to commentary.org roast. It's our. It's how we gather the Commentary community once a year for an evening of hijinks and merriment and high good humor and laughs and no, maybe a tear. Maybe there could be a tear. Every now and then there's a tear. But people love this event and it's how we keep the lights on. So commentary.org roast to find out more, and if you come, you will meet my fellow podcasters here, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
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John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
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John Podhoretz
And social commentary columnist. Whoa, whoa.
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Christine Rosen
I thought I was going to get a new title in real time.
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John Podhoretz
You might.
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Christine Rosen
I'm still barring for Zarina is still available.
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John Podhoretz
Zarina of the podcast, author of the Extinction of Experience, and our social commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
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John Podhoretz
I hope you are. If. If you are, you know, you don't want to be a tsarina.
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Christine Rosen
No, I know.
- [02:37]
John Podhoretz
It's true.
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Christine Rosen
They don't end well.
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John Podhoretz
You end up in bed with a horse, as I recall. I'm sorry, It's. That's what they said. That's what they said about Catherine, that she. That she slept with her horse. I. That's not me. That's history. History. And, you know, this is a history podcast. As you know, we're not a history podcast. We just basically talk about whatever. So here's a whatever. Abe, you were looking at your window last night or something and you saw ragtag bunch of folks. I was walking my dog through Menta. Oh, walking your dog. What happened?
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Abe Greenwald
So I started hearing this Mob chanting somewhere behind me. And then I couldn't make out what they were saying. But then they got closer and I began to see them and I began to hear them. And they were chanting, trump must go. Colbert stays. Trump must go. Colbert stays. And they had flyers and they had placards to this effect. And it was about 50 of them, I'd say. And there were like three, four cops walking alongside, you know, as they do they accompany such demonstrations. And I just thought that's the dumbest protest I've ever witnessed in my life.
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John Podhoretz
Well, because you told me about this story, something scratched my memory dimly and I went back and looked and there are, There have been occasions in American history when television programs or radio shows or things like that have been canceled, thus occasioning protest. And there was one where the eventually legendary disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz, who had a show in New York for almost 40 years, largely dedicated to Frank Sinatra, but who was the son of a great songwriter, Arthur Schwartz, who wrote the Bandwagon, that's entertainment and stuff like that. Anyway, he, he was a disc jockey and a novelist and a short story writer. And he had a show in Boston in the 1960s as this sort of radical wing public radio show or sort of some sort of public show. And, and the station decided to cancel his show and to go to an all news format. And, and there was like a march on Harvard Square or something because they. People liked his radio show. So there is sort of like a weird history of people thinking that they can protest their way into people changing decisions about programming on radio and television.
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Christine Rosen
The difference between then and now is that there are lots. If something's actually wildly popular and it's canceled for reasons besides its popularity and people protest, those shows are then often picked up by some of the digital streaming services. This happened to Arrested Development and some other programs. If the show is really good and people want it, it can find a home. I think the irony of the protesters here is that they're protesting what was by any accounts of financial decision on the part of a network. But Colbert had been fashioning himself as, you know, this anti Trump cultural figure. But it's the link to the politics that I find interesting. I mean, what would have been the like, Nixon stays, Some unpopular comedian goes like, what's the reverse? Why, why the link to Trump?
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John Podhoretz
Why didn't anybody march on the Fox News when Tucker Carlson was fired? Totally for political reasons? I mean, it's interesting because I, you know, you couldn't do anything bad, bad to Tucker Carlson that I would not wholeheartedly support.
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Christine Rosen
He cost the money, he cost them.
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John Podhoretz
Money, but he didn't really cost the money because the lawsuit that, that the Murdoch that, that Fox settled was over the Dominion voting machine scandal. And Tucker alone among the hosts of the Fox News evening lineup was talked very little about was Murdoch's decision to get rid of Tucker as some kind of move. And, and I guess people kind of like the Fox viewer likes Fox more than it like Tucker. So there was no such protest. Of course, nobody has any emotional connection to the CBS brand, so they don't care. And I'm amused by this fact about what happened yesterday. So there's Abe walking his dog and there are these people marching up 57th street or wherever to go to the Ed Sullivan Theater, which is on 53rd and Broadway, which is where Colbert tapes. And Colbert, you know, they march there and then Colbert does his show. And Trump, of course, over, over the weekend or whenever celebrated the fact that Trump, that Colbert was being canceled. Even though every bit of evidence we have is that this was not part of the deal that CBS made with Trump to clear the deck so they could have their merger approved with, with Skydance. So Colbert has, I don't know, 80 writers. He doesn't have 80 writers, but let's say he has 14 writers and he himself is a comedy writer. And you know, they write things and he writes a monologue and you know they get nominated for Emmys for writing. And here is what he came up with. He had like 72 hours to come up with saying something to respond to Trump based on Trump's gloating over his cancellation of a show. And he said, go F yourself. That's it. That's what a staff of a show that costs a hundred million dollars a year to produce. That's what they came up with. That's the Swifties very famously, final three.
- [09:25]
Seth Mandel
Words of the Gettysburg Address.
- [09:29]
John Podhoretz
I mean, Oscar, could Oscar Wilde have done better? I mean, it's almost like a kind of a crystallization of why these shows don't matter anymore and what it is that makes them less appealing as the, as the, it's not even the politics. We could talk about the politics until the cows come home. But like the witlessness, like, where's the really. I mean, like, even if you're gonna go serious instead of funny, like, that's how you commemorate a conflict with the President of the United States, where you want to engage with him and kind of have a back and forth battle.
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Christine Rosen
But the politics thing, the politics did ruin the comedy, I think. And it ruined it because it created this bubble in which Colbert and all the people he would have on, on his show and all the people who watched it, the dwindling number of people who watched it were all in on the joke. So it was a, it was a conversation that Colbert and people who were like minded politically with Colbert could all agree was just hilarious. And it's. But if you're the average viewer, there was no humor in it. And it was very, at times even scoldy. But with this wink, wink, like, aren't we funny? Aren't we? It was a kind of knowing cleverness that I think doesn't, doesn't translate into comedy for most people. He. It's just not funny. And it's clear he used to be funny. There was a point at which he was funny, but he stopped being funny. I think it was the politics that curdled the humor.
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John Podhoretz
But I mean, I don't even. What's clever?
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Christine Rosen
Well, I don't think it's clever. But they think it's clever. No, they think it's clever because they're all in the know and they're all in on the joke of how Trump is terrible and fascist and wink, wink, will joke about it, but also it's serious and.
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John Podhoretz
Right. But that's not even a joke. Like they believe that in earnest. So it's not even a joke. Like there's a way.
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Christine Rosen
Yeah, exactly. It's not funny.
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John Podhoretz
So I was. Let me reflect on this by talking about a movie that I saw yesterday that is a remarkable piece of work. I didn't expect to be talking about it, but it was sort of wandered into this area called Eddington, written and directed by the sort of very. The sort of a. An art horror movie maker named Ari Aster. And it's a movie. It is a. It is a satirical portrait of how America went insane during COVID And it's not funny. I mean, actually there are things in it that are very, very funny. But it is actually, it plays like a combination of a dusty Western, like neo Western, sort of like Hell or High Water, and a horror movie and a revenge drama and a. It's a combination of a lot of things, but mostly it is a satire and it is a satire about madness. And so it takes every crazy idea that was around during COVID and it kind of puts them in a blender so that there's George Floyd, there's masking, there's masking mandates, there's politicians who are demanding that everybody wear a mask while they themselves have meetings somewhere else where they don't have to wear masks. There are seemingly sensible people who object to masking. There are white kids having Black Lives Matter protests and talking about land acknowledgments while they don't know anything about anything. And there's a Kyle Rittenhouse like figure who begins the movie as a kind of just trying to make time with a really pretty girl who is reading Angela Davis and ends up as Kyle Rittenhouse. And the thing that is so remarkable about this remarkable, though very emotionally unsatisfying movie is that like all great works of satire, no one is spared. And so it goes after leftist shibboleths, right wing paranoia and craziness. The, you know, the sort of the what happened to us when we all went on screens, how screens destroyed us. How the argyl bargle about AI and new forms of technology saving us are covers for land grabs by neo tech corporations that want to build gigantic facility, you know, energy chomping facilities while claiming that they're going to save the environment. Everyone's ox is gourd. It's an amazing piece of work. And I was just thinking about how has Stephen Colbert ever gored the leftist ox? Ever? He's supposedly, this is supposedly a kind of heightened reality talk show about politics and stuff like that in which, you know, when he really originated it 15 years ago, he was literally playing a character. He was playing a right wing populist character and showing how stupid that guy was, meaning Bill O'Reilly whom he was playing. But you know, you want to be. Satire is famously unsuccessful, like at the box office. You know, people don't really like satire because when it comes down to it, if it's really good, it offends you too. It picks apart your desiderata and the things that you are, you are sort of humorless and you know, think of right and good and true. And if it's really, really great, as I say, it spares no one. And that's where I think the comedy issue comes in here. Because people really, really don't like to have their. The things that they are pious about needled. And the number of things that people, liberals and the left became pious about over the last decade has metastasized like cancer. Like there is from a bunch of things that you couldn't that might really irritate people to the inability to say anything about anything has really been a kind of remarkable series of developments. I think that is kind of without precedent.
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Abe Greenwald
I mean, but it's just, look, the whole Purpose of late night talk shows. And a number of areas of entertainment shifted. It became this is where you come if you are a liberal who needs comforting. And that is a, that entails a very different type of programming than making someone laugh, than looking at the country as a whole. That is a guided, directed, therapeutic approach to broadcasting. And as we saw the country, they ended up clearly not in the majority. So it ended up being this niche programming where you had, where you have a staff of I don't know how many, you know, working on a show that's costing the network how much a year? 40 million.
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John Podhoretz
It was losing 40 million. Losing 40 million a year.
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Christine Rosen
Yeah.
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Abe Greenwald
I mean.
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John Podhoretz
Why would you, how do.
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Abe Greenwald
You protest the shuddering of a money losing undertaking? That's just, that's the dumbest thing. That's what I don't get. I mean, I get it because they think that we just want it, it's ours and we want it and he's nice and he makes us feel better and Trump's mean and all that. But you know, I just, I actually, I mean, I looked at them sort of baffled when they came down. I should have taken one of the flyers. I would have been able to read it today.
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Christine Rosen
But, but there, but, but Hollywood is capable of producing self parody that works. I mean, I'm thinking of American fiction, the movie based on the Percival Everett novel that came out what, a year or so ago or maybe two years. Time is a flat circle since COVID but that actually did it really well. It was going a lot of liberal oxen, but it also did it in a way that was very humanizing for the person whose motives we were led to believe were a little misguided, but. But not evil. And I think that to Abe's point, that's actually what the Colbert audience started to cultivate. A good versus evil. And good comedy has to see be in between that and understand that all human beings are between that somewhere. And to mock the parts that are mockable without, without making it vicious. And I do think that that, you know, good standup does has to walk that line every time. But when you have a variety show format and you start to believe your own hype about how you're not just a comedian, you're actually an important cultural figure. Capitalize all those terms, which I think is what happened to Colbert. Your comedy is fueled by hubris and not actually funny anymore.
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John Podhoretz
You know, you so right that stand.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah, go ahead.
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Abe Greenwald
I was just going to say no to Christine's point that, you know, comedy in general is about sort of making light of human flaws, you know, and there's, there's a universality there. It's not about, oh, look at, look at that party. You know, like they're bad, we're great night after night.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah.
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Seth Mandel
And I also think like that it's a, it's a very important point about the stand up because what you've, what you notice is that if someone has a, if there's a person holding a microphone, it has to be serious. That's the rule that has developed. Right. In other words, everybody can laugh at Portlandia, which was, you know, at, at times brilliant send up of mostly wokeism and you know, pre woke ism. It was really pre wokeism. But what.
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John Podhoretz
No, it was wokeism before wokeism. I mean it was, was the, and.
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Seth Mandel
It was, and it was funny and people, people liked it. People enjoyed it on the left too. I'm saying, you know, there was like this and, and you know, Fred Armisen is not, you know, he was a Saturday Night Live guy and then doing this show like he, he was recognizable to the same people and this was a show that they really liked. But when you take a microphone and you're standing in front of people and it's live, it has to be serious. And that happened with comedy and that's happened with the late night show and stuff. And so that has removed an entire category really of entertainment for them. I mean, I was, you know, I was thinking about Lenny Bruce over the weekend because I was reading this book that did a great riff on the very classic Lenny Bruce routine, Jewish versus Gayish and how to understand the two categories, right. One of his legendary. And it's just like there's a whole form of entertainment that you were supposed to be in on the joke. And anybody who wasn't in on the joke to the left, right, to the left was, you know, square and, and, and, and proto fascist, right. If you, if you weren't laughing at the intentional humiliation of whatever it was, you were proto fascist. It was a sign of an authoritarian growing within you, you know, and that's how far we've come. And that's an entire type of entertainment. The other thing is that I always remember when Colbert got the, got his own show. This is on Comedy Centrals before he, he became a late night go host. But you know, Deborah Solomon used to do the interviews for the New York Times Magazine, those one pagers. And she interviewed him and you know, she said, well, you know, you're going to be. How, how's your show going to be the Colbert Report going to be different, you know, from Jon Stewart show. And, you know, aren't you the same guy from the Jon Stewart show now, just with a full half hour or whatever, like, is it, you know, and, and she said to him, will you continue the tradition of political satire that allowed the Daily show to inject so much welcome gravity into the light, goofy realm of late night tv? Now think about that question. Welcome gravity. This was, this was 2005. This was the New York Times, Deborah Solomon asking him, you know, we, we welcomed the gravity on Comedy Central. The network was called Comedy Central. Welcome the gravity into, you know, late night. And his answer was even more telling. His answer was, John would be so happy as a comedian to hear that he injected gravity. Can I be the one to tell him, in other words, gravity. We don't do gravity. What is, what is gravity? It's all comedy. We don't do. That's ridiculous. Late night.
- [23:54]
Christine Rosen
This is so. This is a. But this is actually a broader cultural shift from the 20th century to the 21st. In that, in the 20th century, the worry about, you know, you're right to talk about how if you didn't get the joke, then you were perhaps proto fascist or authoritarian. But the people who talk to the public about authoritarianism are people like Theodore Adorno in the authoritarian personality. And now we turn to Stephen Colbert to outline for us, you know, what fascism looks like. And that's a shift in terms of the appeal to authority now is often appeal to entertainment. And so the entertainers have embraced this idea that they are political authorities, cultural authorities in a way that the best, the best entertainers know themselves never to be.
- [24:34]
Abe Greenwald
You know, I was just thinking when Seth was talking about Portlandia and John, you had said it was sort of woke before. Woke and Portland. What's that?
- [24:44]
John Podhoretz
A parody of woke.
- [24:46]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, right, right. A parody of woke before, before it was even woke. And, and liberals could laugh at it. And I'm thinking, what changed when woke actually became woke? All every other liberal concern funneled down into race. And then you could, then you couldn't joke about it. That became serious business. This is nothing that we're gonna mock. This is nothing that we're gonna parody. And that, that sort of sucked the humor entirely out of what humor was left on the left there.
- [25:28]
Unknown Speaker 2
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- [26:37]
Unknown Speaker 1
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- [27:30]
John Podhoretz
Well, I will say I, I, I spend more time in comedy clubs than most 60 plus year old people because my, my wife works in, in comedy and so I've actually seen a lot of comedy in the last five years and you're right that race is an off is an off limits topic but only for white people. Black comedians. It is the consuming obsession of black comedy and it's a little like Lenny Bruce. In other words, what they are doing is the meta subject for black comedians is no matter what happens, we're outsiders and here's the truth, this is what we're like and this is what most people are like and it's really very different. And the humor that they mine comes out of the differences between majority culture and their lives or you know, sort of like white lives in their lives and what white people are like. And so they are, they have free rein which is I think to say whatever they want to about white people and sort of to Say whatever they want to about black people, because who's gonna hold them to account? You know, Jason Zinneman of the New York Times, the leading comedy critic in the United States, is gonna attack some black guy for saying something that he considers offensive about black people. That's. That's really not. Not going to happen. So it has always been the case in the United States that there's a special corner of comedy that is carved out for minorities, dues in particular, in the first 75 years of the 20th century to do the. I'm kind of like a visitor from Mars. So I'm going to go look at what ordinary American life is like and say, you people are crazy. You think you're all normal, but everything you do is nuts. Here's what you do. This is nuts. That's nuts. That's not the way people are. And then let me tell you about how well, my mother is nuts and my uncle is nuts and my family is crazy. And comedy, as you say, like the famous difference between comedy and tragedy is that tragedy is the portrait of great men failing, and comedy is about people behaving badly. All comedy, the subject of comedy is low human behavior. That is the difference between Aristophanes and Aeschylus. You know, that's. That from. From time immemorial. Comedy is about human foibles and, and tragedy is about, you know, the human drive to do great things and how pride and other qualities, including, you know, including sort of like the order of the universe, hand you. You know, hand. Hand people terrible defeats that they. That they must deal with. This is.
- [30:40]
Christine Rosen
This is why the moral grandstanding is a new thing for comedians, because they're rewarded for it by their tribe, you know, the people who already agree with them. But it ruins the comedy. And that's the. And too many things in our. In our cultural lives. I mean, wokeism was only the final endpoint of this, but have been moralized. A lot of the things we disagree about are just human things, and we should be able to laugh at ourselves. But that unwillingness to laughs, like certain things are too. Too serious to laugh about. Like fascism and Trump. Actually, no, those two. Those things also are hilarious. Some of the things Trump does should be mined constantly for comedy. But so, too, that was true of Obama and Biden, and they didn't want to. They didn't want to go there. And I think that's the. That the moral positioning, the moral grandstanding is now rewarded in our culture in a way that it wasn't in previous eras.
- [31:29]
John Podhoretz
And So I don't think it's race. I actually think it's sex, gender. That is the thing that has choked comedy in the last 10 or 15 years. See, I think, like me too, ism and transgenderism have both risen, or sort of the rhetoric or the theory of. Of both, you know, sort of the complete egalitarian view between gay and straight. And then transgenderism have placed all sorts of material out of the realm of what you can talk about without offending people or, of course, getting canceled. I mean, you know, by. And that. That while there are people like Shane Gillis who got canceled, meaning he lost his job on Saturday night live in 24 hours because he had said something racist 10 years ago, that somebody, you know, surfaced and has now become the. One of the two most successful comedians in the United States, it was only a benefit to him. I'm telling you, when it comes to talking about what the main subject of comedy has always been, which is the inability of men and women to understand each other, I mean, that is the subject of American comedy, is men and women cannot understand each other. And men, you know, great comedians of the 50s and 40s, 50s and 60s, Alan King and Bill Cosby, when he. When you could mention Bill Cosby and all of that, that what they were talking about was, I have this wife, and I don't know what the hell is going on. I don't. I don't know what she wants from me. I don't. She seems to. I don't know what the hell to do. And I'm just like, I'm lost. I'm lost because. Because we're just. We're like, from different species. And now, even now, I guess if you're a woman, and there's all this material now being published by the New York Times, I keep sending to Christine 10 pieces in the last month about how women are like, what's wrong with men? Nobody will ask me out. And nobody wants to have sex anymore. Nobody wants this, and nobody wants that. So apparently, if you're a woman, you can complain about men. If you're a man, you cannot complain about women. You cannot complain about women. You are that. That is. That. That will have your head cut off. And so, you know, complaining that it's hard to be a comedian now. Who cares? Hard to be a comedian. Now, that's not even what we should be talking about. What's more interesting is the idea that CBS cancels a guy has a show and cancels the show, and that. That should be a matter of deep cultural moment when 2 million people watch him a night, whereas 40 million people watch Johnny Carson 40 years ago. Just think of what, what is the percentage difference there between 2 million and 40 million? I again, John, nowhere not to do math. It's a big difference.
- [34:52]
Christine Rosen
There we go. That's, that's fair.
- [34:54]
John Podhoretz
Okay, it's hundreds of percent lower or something. Okay, not hundreds of percent, whatever it is. Anyway, so like, these shows don't matter. They have no cultural footprint anymore. They're really small. Do, do you think they're not leading the conversation?
- [35:14]
Christine Rosen
I have a question about it though. Is some of it also, even if we set aside the partisanship of some of these sort of larger, well known comedians, is it also that our politics has become such a form of entertainment that we don't need to seek that comedy elsewhere in the, and I'm thinking here of Hunter Biden's interview. I mean, I would much rather watch that guy go off the rails for three hours than listen to Stephen Colbert scold me about Trumpism. And, and we do consume politics as entertainment. I mean, one could argue that's why Trump is president again, because he understood very well how to calibrate that and walk that line between celebrity and political power.
- [35:51]
John Podhoretz
Okay, but is that why he's president again? Or did something else happen which is.
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Christine Rosen
That I would argue the moralizing culture brought him back because people were like, enough of this scolding. Like, give us something that's straightforward.
- [36:04]
John Podhoretz
But I would say that it goes to something like this. Biden came along and said, enough of this already, enough of this. Like, you know, he's driving us crazy. Like, let's calm down. I'm not going to be on television every five minutes. Like, we got to like get through this and, and rebalance our lives so that this giant shadow of this one person isn't cast on our lives. And then by 2024, people were like, you know what? There's something worse than having this giant shadow cast on their lives. And it's this guy, this senile guy. And even before we thought he was senile, the demented policies that he has been instituting that are causing inflation and that are, you know, that are, that are normalizing things like trans that are saying it's okay for girl men to participate, boys to participate in girls sports, all of that. Like, you know what, there's something worse than the bread and circuses that Trump.
- [37:05]
Christine Rosen
Also, he was disingenuous in this idea that, oh, we're now going to go back to being the adults in the room. Because he, from the very beginning, he adopted many of the successful techniques that Trump had used in the first term and during his first run for president, which was, you know, the dark Brandon meme, the optics, the sort of, you know, funny little things. And the person who really flamed out trying to do that was Kamala Harris with. With her run, for which I think we were yesterday was the year anniversary of her announcement, which was hilarious. But I do think that part of it's that they actually saw it working, but they didn't want to acknowledge that yet they still wanted to use the tool. So there was a lot. Also a contradiction there.
- [37:41]
Seth Mandel
But that was. Didn't. We didn't. Wasn't the guy who interviewed Kamala on the sort of lefty but humorous podcast that they didn't end up using, wasn't he just interviewed about that they had a whole conversation about. We. We knew at the time this was. He did an interview with Kamala. We knew at the time that it was never going to air because it had gone so badly. And we, we. And we heard snippets of. Not from the, you know, recording of the conversation, but we heard, you know, recitation of some of the dialog. But he was just interviewed and, you know, and just said, yeah, everything you. You heard was.
- [38:16]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [38:16]
Seth Mandel
It was like she didn't know what a joke was. You know, it was like, what's your favorite?
- [38:22]
John Podhoretz
You know, a Kareem Rama, right?
- [38:24]
Christine Rosen
The spider. What's your favorite spice? Was that the weird question that it.
- [38:27]
Seth Mandel
Was bacon or something? Yeah, like, I guess it was like, she didn't. It was like talking to. Through a. An AI interpreter to a human. That's what he was dealing with. And it was not. It's not like, okay, if it's not funny, you still can post the interview, right? Because you want to. You're interviewing either the next President of the United States or at the very least, the sitting Vice President of the United States. So if you're a podcast guy, like, it takes a lot to trash that recording, right? It takes a lot. Especially because your first loyalty isn't to the Democratic Party, you know, as an institution or whatever.
- [39:08]
Abe Greenwald
It takes a lot.
- [39:09]
Seth Mandel
So it's not just, you know, she's not funny. It was like some of the people who have imbibed all of these rules and supposed safeguards, they don't know how to talk.
- [39:24]
John Podhoretz
No, no. I think it's more. I think it's trickier than that because I think that the reason that that was suppressed and stuff like that was precisely the authoritarian personality stuff that you're talking about, which is that in the view of this part of the country and 90% of the entertainment industry, however you want to define it, Trump was such a threat that anything that you could do that might realistically boomerang against Kamala Harris, even to help Trump by an infinitesimal amount, infinitesimal, excuse me, amount, had to be suppressed because the danger was too great and the entire world of the Democratic response to Trump. And we could. Give us five seconds to talk about the Tulsi Gabbard revelations of, you know, 2016, that, that the, that the Obama administration knew that the investigation that had launched into Trump's ties with Russia and Russian interference in the elections had come up with nothing, and they nonetheless went ahead with efforts to continue to tar him. As a, as a Russian agent, I'm very complicated story here. It's much more complicated than people realize. But I think it, what. And so I don't want to, like, get into the nitty gritty of it, because I think in earnest, they actually believed, even if they hadn't gotten the evidence yet, that it was true and that. And that they had from Election Day until the swearing in of Trump, they had two months to save America from a Putin stooge being in the Oval Office, and that therefore, you know, use of excessive violence against the booze brothers has been approved. So you can wiretap Michael Flynn, you can do this, you can do that, and you can continue to say or act as though he's a, he's a Russian agent. Now, I say this ties to it because I think this has been an attitude that has choked the Democratic response and choked Democratic spontaneous spontaneity and an ability to deal with issues sanely since 2016. Because anything that is seen as not advancing the interests of the Democrats or liberals against Trump or seen as maybe being helpful to Trump has got to be suppressed because the country is at stake. And that is an incredible disciplinary. What would you call that standard? Like, it means that anybody anywhere, if you're in your group chat at your office and you say, I don't know, I, you know, what he said about Israel is fine with me in 28. Like, they don't jump down your throat and act like you're a monster and you're going to get Trump elected again, there's all.
- [42:41]
Christine Rosen
But there's also, we should at least acknowledge, at least for those of us who are fans of comedy, the extraordinary challenge Trump poses to comedy with his own behavior in the sense that he does these things that are so beyond parody that all you can do, I think, is point and go, what? What? Like, remember when he was selling those crazy sneakers and then he had the perfume? And then he goes on these, as he did the other night, these sort of late night truth social tirades and posting weird AI generated video. It's almost difficult to parody someone who is in on his own joke in terms of the cult of personality. So even if you wanted in good faith as a libert liberal comedian to, to go after Trump, there's a challenge there, I think.
- [43:23]
John Podhoretz
I don't know. James Austin Johnson's impression of Trump on Saturday Live is an act of genius. And why is it an act of genius? Because he's not playing him as a monster. That's the secret is that Trump, his Trump is in on the joke and at the same time is crazy. And he's constantly admitting that he's, you know, doing emoluments and he's behaving unconstitutionally and all of that in asides and offside remarks and things like that. But he doesn't scream, he doesn't shout. It's all quiet. It's all this kind of like interior monologue as it's, it's Trump's interior monologue that is being exposed. And the key to it is not that they humanize him, but that they are, they are not looking at him as though he is a gorgon. Because that's not funny, right? There's nothing funny if you hate him. And it's like, okay, here's two minutes of hate about Trump. We hate Trump. We hate Trump. We hate Trump. We would now, you know, live from New York, it's Saturday night. I mean, so I think you can do really funny stuff about Trump, but you can't if you're in a rage about him 24 hours a day. You just can't. It's. That's not funny. It's like talking to one of these anti Trump obsessives that you may know in your life who, when you see them coming, unless you share every view. Like, you turn and you want to run in the other direction because it's like, you know, how is your brunch? And it was like, well, it wasn't as good as it was in 2015 before Trump came down the escalator. I'm not joking. I mean, that's actually a conversation I had with somebody once. So I don't know, it's like, it's.
- [45:30]
Seth Mandel
A, it's a ruined Avocado toast.
- [45:34]
John Podhoretz
There you go. Exactly.
- [45:35]
Christine Rosen
See, that's funny.
- [45:37]
John Podhoretz
That is funny. So I'm just saying that I think Rahm Emanuel went on Megyn Kelly show and this is the conundrum of the, of the Democrats as they look to the future. And we can also talk about Hunter in this regard when a Megyn Kelly show yesterday, and she said, can a man become a woman? And he, former mayor of Chicago, former Obama chief of staff, former congressman from Illinois, former ambassador to Japan, who was thinking of running for president in 2028, said, no. And then she said, do you think that people born male should be able to participate in women's sports? And he said, no. And she said, well, that was easy. Why can't other. Why. Why did you find it easy to say what you just said? And he said, because I'm about to go into the witness protection program, which is basically the only funny thing I've ever heard Rahm Emanuel say. And of course, it wasn't funny, but what he's doing here is Pope putting his.
- [46:52]
Christine Rosen
It's funny because it's true.
- [46:53]
John Podhoretz
I mean, yeah, he's putting his. Like he's putting his toe in the water to see if I wanted to run for president in 2028, maybe as a socialist, but not as a social radical accepting the panoply of redefinitional ideas about what it is to be a man or what it is to be a woman. Can I get anywhere? Is this something that will be of appeal to the larger Democratic electorate that is going to choose who the nominee is going to be? And the only way to know is to give it a shot. Don't presume that it's not going to work. He's not going to get the nomination in any other fashion. He's a Jewish with an Israeli father in a party that's going anti Semitic. I don't know how that's gonna, how that's gonna work, but I thought this was a very telling moment because he said it and then he said it again, and then he said, now there's a target on my back. People are now gonna want to kill me for having said this to you, Megyn Kelly. And so.
- [48:09]
Seth Mandel
And it's also funny because to live in that world, and it's also because it's Rahm Emanuel, right?
- [48:15]
John Podhoretz
We.
- [48:15]
Seth Mandel
The first time when he, when he, when he left Congress to be Obama, to work with Obama and be Obama's chief of staff, what were all the stories? Oh, here's the time that Rahm Emanuel mailed me A dead fish wrapped in a newspaper. Seriously, those. Those were actual, literal stories of Rob Emanuel. He behaved like a mobster, right? He was a. He was like a mafia guy. And all the stories were, you know, I was in. You know, you'd have a congressman saying, I was in the shower, in the, in the congressional showers, and Rahm Emanuel walked in and starts poking me in the chest while I'm naked in the shower. You know, whatever. Every story about Rahm Emanuel was like, this guy is behaving like a mobster and he wants you to think that he might kill you for, you know, a bad, you know, a wrong, wrong headed blind quote to a reporter or something like that. And the transformation is Rahm Emanuel choking about going into the witness protection. You know, it's almost like. It's almost like if John Fetterman one day were to say, well, now I have to go into the witness protection program or something like that, like his Persona, right? Rom's Persona is a totally different person than this. But there's no, there's no exceptions. And that's what, that's what's really funny about. Because he was supposed to be a tough guy. There's no tough guys.
- [49:36]
Mark Halpern
I'm Mark Halpern, and I want to let you know that two Way Tonight, the destination for the best political news and analysis anywhere, is now available as an audio podcast. Each weekday, I'll be joined by special guests from the worlds of news, politics, and the media, along with members of the two way community for conversations like no other. It's the best way to stay informed at the end of your day or first thing in the morning. Every weekday, it's a show like no other because we involve the community. We hear from people from around the country, around the world. They're part of a conversation. There is no other platform like this, and I hope you will find it to be not only different than everything else, but more meaningful as you become part of a special community around the program. So listen and follow two Way tonight with Mark Alperin on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other major streaming platform.
- [50:23]
Donny Deutsch
Hey, this is Donny Deutsch. I host the podcast on Brand that comes twice a week. We give you two for the price of one. One day a week, we do our big interviews with our big personal, some of the biggest names in politics, entertainment, culture and business. And on the second wave, we do what we call our brands of the week. These are the brands that are shaping the zeitgeist. Who's up, who's down, and you can really enjoy both of them. So tune in twice a week to on brand. You can get them anywhere. You get podcasts, Spotify, Apple, anyplace else. We look forward to seeing you and hearing from you.
- [50:56]
John Podhoretz
Let's talk about Hunter Biden and his hyper aggressive interview yesterday, which I will confess that I didn't watch. So therefore I'm going to Christine wanted to talk about it. I'm going to step back. I saw, you know, I read about it. I saw like 30 seconds of it. Christine, what was so striking to you about the Hunter Biden interview?
- [51:24]
Christine Rosen
I didn't watch all three. I think it was three and a half hours total. I watched long portions of it and I marvel, I marvel at the amount of entitled behavior of this particular person, someone who has had pardons granted, cases dropped, tax liabilities and felonious behavior, you know, taken off his record and still he's angry and he's self righteous and he is absolutely unhinged. And it was revealing because he didn't just attack prosecutors or, you know, particular personal things. He went after his own people, went after the many, many Democrats by name, George Clooney, Obama, you know, Nancy Pelosi. He just has a hit list. And the sense of grievance was the overwhelming thing. He could have done a lot of different things to cause damage to his father's reputation, but that interview was the perfect storm and it is the grievance. And I think that's actually the difference between I'm glad Seth brought up Fetterman. Fetterman is doing a lot of sort of unusual things for someone in the Democratic Party. And his popularity is remaining fairly high, correct me if I'm wrong, but among voters in his state, in his state, in his state. So Rahm Emanuel's testing to see if that idea could go national. And I think he's, he knows cuz he's been doing a lot of small polling all around the country. There are a lot of quiet Democrats who, who wouldn't mind the restoration of that form of sanity to their party. What, what Hunter Biden is, is offering to the Democratic Party is a different path, which is a continuance of a grievance culture. And we've talked many times at length on this podcast and Noah Rothman in particular was always very good on this idea that the grievance culture is something the right shouldn't embrace because it is not conservative. It's not good. It's, it's just bad. I think the Democrats are going to have a hard time releasing themselves from the grievance culture because it touches on each little identity group within party that feels it's justified in making its priorities the party's priorities. And if Rahm Emanuel can have some success as nationwide as Fetterman did in his state, that means the party could possibly be saved. The Democrats actually are not entirely unhinged in that regard. But Hunter is another choice. In the same way that you can choose anti Semitism as the Democrats are, or not, he is the grievance culture magnified because this is this man, this grown man has been given every opportunity to understand the damage his own behavior caused and certainly his responsibility for likely helping cover up the damage his father's condition caused the country. And he has zero interest in that.
- [54:09]
Abe Greenwald
But see, I'm wondering if Hunter coming out swinging and screaming the way he did, particularly on the matter of the party pushing out his father, isn't all this effort to just combat the narrative about Biden's condition, you know, isn't just.
- [54:30]
Christine Rosen
That could be.
- [54:30]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what I thought on the entitlement point. I didn't watch all of it either.
- [54:38]
Unknown Speaker 2
But I watched a good deal of it.
- [54:40]
Abe Greenwald
One of the great parts was when Hunter was talking about illegal immigration and he talk about, he was a self parody of the sort of, you know, limousine liberal here going, you don't want them coming in here. Who do you think washes your car? Who cleans your clothes? Who trims your lawn?
- [55:05]
John Podhoretz
Who the.
- [55:05]
Abe Greenwald
You know, it was like this. You know, he only sees immigrants as manual laborers.
- [55:14]
Christine Rosen
Didn't he also blame Mexican men, nameless Mexican men, for the gun that was found that he had?
- [55:20]
Seth Mandel
Yes, he did.
- [55:21]
Christine Rosen
Okay, so. Ick.
- [55:23]
John Podhoretz
If. If he wanted his father's reputation to be burnished the. A year after he issued the letter announcing that he was withdrawing his reelection, his effort to be reelected as president, he would have kept his mouth shut. What, what possible good can the ex crack addict pardoned son who had an affair with his dead brother's wife and got her addicted to crack. What, and then threw a gun in a dumpster and then had his computer searched and, you know, his compute left his computer at a store in Delaware only to have, you know, its pornographic contents made public, including emails that seem to suggest that his father took money off the top of his business deals. How is he. He. How, how is anything that he says going to help? Like he should just stay silent. He's not going to help in a week or a couple of weeks when the House has been having hearings and Three different officials dealing with the question of Biden's fitness to be president in 2024 took the fifth. His doctor could have said, going before the House, I cannot speak to you about any issues regarding Joe Biden's condition as president because of the rules, the HIPAA rules governing the confidentiality of patient doctor communications. But he didn't say that. He said, I am asserting my Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate myself. And so did Neera Tanden, and so did somebody else. Now Neera Tanden can't claim hipaa. They're taking the Fifth. So Hunter, having been offered an interview by somebody, could have said, no, I'm not gonna be interviewed, because I'm only gonna make things worse. And I think he probably made things worse because it's like, no, no, no.
- [58:06]
Christine Rosen
He.
- [58:07]
John Podhoretz
He wasn't like, non compos mentis. He was high on Ambien.
- [58:11]
Christine Rosen
Yeah. I was just gonna say we shouldn't acknowledge that he. He said something that had not been in the public record, which is that someone gave his father Ambien before the debate, and that was the reason. And who did that? That's terrible. And there's no. There's actually no public record in. In Biden's medical record of him being on Ambien, which is a fairly powerful medication.
- [58:30]
John Podhoretz
Why?
- [58:31]
Seth Mandel
Also, he made things worse just by. Just by talking.
- [58:34]
John Podhoretz
He had a cold. First they said he had a cold. Now he has Ambien. Who would give somebody Ambien before he had to stand in an 80?
- [58:44]
Christine Rosen
Well, other meds needed titrated by a different drug. That's.
- [58:49]
Seth Mandel
Interviewing. Hunter Biden would give somebody Ambien in that situation.
- [58:54]
John Podhoretz
I just.
- [58:54]
Seth Mandel
That was the.
- [58:55]
Christine Rosen
He needed a tranq gun at that point.
- [58:57]
John Podhoretz
I was just like, he's gotta, like, stand and perform for two hours. Like, he doesn't. Ambien makes you groggy.
- [59:06]
Seth Mandel
Is that even. I mean, that's the thing. Like, we don't even know if that's true. Right. Because it's Hunter Biden thinking he's defending.
- [59:12]
John Podhoretz
His father, saying nothing that he could have said would have done his father any good. Good. And it's amazing that he thought that. It was a sense now, bad judgment there. Of all the people in America whose judgment, you can say has been legitimately problematic over the last 15 years, Hunter Biden would be in the top five, maybe. So that he made a really bad call. And being interviewed, I think, is understandable, you know, or, you know, that's what you would expect. But, I mean, this is a story. That's not the Biden infirmity and the role of the people around him and covering it up. I mean, if everybody in the administration is summoned before Congress and everybody takes the Fifth, I guess they can, you know, they can stonewall. I don't even know what it is that we're supposed to. There is this question of whether or not he executed the pardons according to how pardons are supposed to be executed, meaning that he signed off on them personally. If he did not do that, then there was a serious constitutional issue about the legality. Is that the word or the, or the. No one's ever challenged the legality of a pardon. The famous pardon scandal in the United States was you couldn't, you couldn't unpardon the pardoned. But in Tennessee, when it turned out that a governor had been selling pardons in the Marie Rajani case, Marie Regani being a whistleblower, who announced that the governor she had worked for had been selling pardons. Pardons, there was no way to de. Pardon the pardoned, but the governor was sent to jail. Right. So there's no modality that I know of to retract a pardon. Even if, but if the case can be made that the pardons were not actually executed by the one person who has pardoning power, then a bunch of other people can go to jail. I mean, right.
- [61:29]
Seth Mandel
These are people who are going to work in future Democratic administrations.
- [61:32]
John Podhoretz
Maybe not.
- [61:33]
Seth Mandel
I mean, maybe that's true, maybe not.
- [61:35]
John Podhoretz
But it's a confirmation hearing, right? What are they going to say about the.
- [61:39]
Seth Mandel
But that's the thing other. Otherwise Neera Tanden would be every. In, you know, in, in some way in every administration. These are the types of people who keep appearing until you stop them from appearing. And that's, that's part of this, which is like the, the Democratics that the real establishment, real establishment are being implicated not, you know, radicals, not cowboys within the government, not young up and comers who don the rules or the lay of the land. The. As establishment Democratic Party as it gets are lining up to take the Fifth. That's really what's so explosive about all this, because these are the names and the faces that you always and forever see.
- [62:24]
John Podhoretz
It's just, I think Abe, this is something that Abe and I have been talking about on this podcast for, for years since Trump was on, which is that he has this demonic, almost demonic power for every attack on him to boomerang against his foes. Right? So, you know, in the most obvious case, it's the Mar A Lago search finding that he had mishandled classified documents, followed up three weeks later by the oh, guess what? Joe Biden also mishandled classified documents. Guess what kills the issue of Trump mishandling classified documents? Apparently, everybody does it. Everybody does it being the line that is often proffered by the guilty, except in this case, it was true. And here we have Trump From January of 2017 onward, constant talk about how he's so crazy that the 25th Amendment should be. Should have been invoked against him. That talk starting on Morning Joe, a week after he was sworn in as president. And here we have the Democratic Party engaged in a conspiracy to hide the fact that its obligation was to invoke the 25th Amendment against the sitting President of the United States. And a conspiracy in at the top levels of the party, meaning there are different ways for this to happen. The Vice President can do it, A majority of the Cabinet can do it. It's a complicated procedure, and they didn't do it. And I don't think that. That's why I say I don't think this issue is going away, even though you can stonewall it, because as I. Trump. Trump has this mystical ability for these issues to keep. Stay alive and continue to redound to the negative benefit. We're down negatively on his adversaries.
- [64:33]
Abe Greenwald
You know, the question, it's funny. I mean, there's so many examples of this, and there's, you know, but is it that Trump has the mystical ability to get his adversaries to be guilty of what they accuse him of, or is it that his enemies, on some weird psychological level, know what they've done? And, you know, the way we hate our own faults the most when we see them in other people and they try to tag him for what they did.
- [65:15]
Christine Rosen
Is a confession thing. Does apply to many of these folks. You're right.
- [65:18]
John Podhoretz
That gets us right back to Eddington, a movie that you should really see, even though it's gonna. It's gonna anger you, because.
- [65:24]
Christine Rosen
Can I make a second recommendation off the cuff, please?
- [65:27]
Seth Mandel
I'm.
- [65:27]
Christine Rosen
I'm bummed that I missed the wonderful AI discussion that you guys had with Eli last week, because I was off that day. But if you're interested in these questions of AI and ethics in particular, everyone should go read Jeffrey Hinton's Nobel Prize acceptance speech that he just gave. He's a godfather, one of the godfathers of AI and he's raised a lot of concerns about it and enthusiasm for it as well. But his. His speech, he accepted the Nobel Prize in Physics and chemistry this year is. It's well worth reading. It's on the Nobel Prize website. It's really. It's fascinating.
- [65:59]
John Podhoretz
Now you're depressed because you mentioned AI and by the way, I play a role. What? The facility that is being built in Eddington to lead us to the future, which is right, is an AI isn't IS an AI Energy farm. So all things lead back to Eddington. The most brilliant and though emotionally unsatisfying movie, American movie, in very, very long time, I have to say. So that's us for today. We'll be back tomorrow for Seth, Abe and Christina. I'm joking. Compound hordes. Keep the camp aboard.