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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here.
- [00:02]
John Podhoretz
It's a new year and you know what that means.
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Ryan Reynolds
No, not the diet resolutions. A way for us all to try.
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John Podhoretz
And do a little bit better than.
- [00:09]
Ryan Reynolds
We did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront.
- [00:21]
John Podhoretz
Payment required equivalent to $15 per month.
- [00:23]
Christine Rosen
New customers on first 3 month plan only.
- [00:25]
Ryan Reynolds
Taxes and fees, extra speed slower above.
- [00:27]
Christine Rosen
40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:41]
John Podhoretz
Some preacher pain Some die of thirst.
- [00:45]
Christine Rosen
The way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:55]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine podcast. Today is Friday, January 31, 2025. We've made it through one month of what promises to be one of the most disruptive political years in American history. I am John Pothor. It's the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:17]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [01:18]
John Podhoretz
Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:22]
Ryan Reynolds
Hi, John.
- [01:23]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:25]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:26]
John Podhoretz
And joining us today are tech Commentary columnist, veteran journalist, contributor to the City Journal, and all around wiseman James B. Megs. Hi, Jim.
- [01:38]
James B. Meggs
Hi, John. Good to be back.
- [01:40]
John Podhoretz
So speaking as an all around wise man, Jim, couple of interesting things that have been going on that are that sadly or tragically are in your wheelhouse. We have a disaster. We have several disasters, disasters being a subject that Jim has written about frequently in his column in Commentary. We of course, had the wildfires, which we did not get a chance to talk to you about. And of course, this midair collision a couple of days ago in D.C. we also had the drones, the New Jersey drones. And one of the interesting things that happened at the beginning of the week was that newly minted White House press secretary Caroline Levitt acknowledged in her first briefing that the the drone assault that had freaked everybody out in and around New Jersey was in fact a US Military faa, some kind of a experiment test, something that was going on that was not nefarious or external to the United States or a threat from the, you know, against the United States, which I think a lot of us figured. And we get back to the question of why it was that the Biden administration in its senile death throes couldn't calm the American people down by saying, don't worry, this is not anything that anybody needs to worry about. We can't really go into details, but this is Something that we're doing not that is being done to us by China. Weren't able to say that Trump came in, said it makes perfect sense. They might have been testing the airspace around Bedminster, which is where Trump goes as one of his spots outside of the White House at his golf course. I don't know. So what's interesting is that that was a conspiracy theory that started to develop that got nipped in the bud by Trump, who of course himself is a trafficker in conspiracy theory often. So how stands the conspiracy theory world in the midst of these disasters? And do you think that we are seeing a more adult way of dealing with these matters? Or does the fact that we have conspiracy theorists testifying before Congress, seeking appointment to cabinet high ranking cabinet posts, does that fill you full of dread?
- [04:17]
James B. Meggs
It does, actually. The I've spent a lot of my career debunking especially 911 conspiracy theories. Those took. There were a few that floated right away right after the attacks, but it really took a few years for those to float out and, and, and gain traction. If I could mix metaphors and, but now the conspiracy generation complex clicks into gear within minutes. I mean within, with the plane crash in Washington, following it on X, you could see people saying well that helicopter flew right into that plane. It must have been on purpose. And the essence of a lot of conspiracy theories is to, to attribute to some kind of malicious organized control things that are often random, you know, random accidents, unplanned things, things that, that happen rarely but, but, but do happen. And it does worry me that we've kind of, to use Noah Rothman's old term, we've given the permission structure for everybody to throw out any theory they feel like immediately upon any incident. And so this is becoming more common. At the same time, some conspiracies are true, you know, and you know, the labor.
- [05:46]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah. So we go to the lab league, which we also. I also didn't mention.
- [05:50]
James B. Meggs
Yeah.
- [05:50]
John Podhoretz
So literally from the middle of 2020 onward, intermittently in our pages you have been writing about the growing evidence that the, that Covid emanated from the Wuhan lab and not from some one person eating a bat. And that is the conspiracy that in weird way. So the conspiracy theory has been implicitly proven. That is to say there was some kind of concerted effort to quash the idea that Covid came from the. And you know it's going to take, would take a novelist of Balzac's brilliance to sort of unravel or to tease out the strands that led to this becoming the conventional wisdom. When Occam's razor said there's a virology lab two blocks from where the breakout happened, maybe it was the virology lab. No, it was not the virology lab.
- [06:59]
Ryan Reynolds
The reason that was a classic conspiracy theory is because it did actually involve extremely powerful government figures who knew they were doing gain of function research that was dangerous and shouldn't be being done, and they were trying to cover up something they knew to be harmful because it escaped, literally escaped the lab. And so in that sense, I would be curious to hear what Jim thinks.
- [07:20]
John Podhoretz
So it's not a conspiracy theory there, It's a conspiracy, Right?
- [07:24]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, you, you need, you need like only 2% of your conspiracy theories now to actually be true for most people to accept a conspiracy in the immediate aftermath of an accident or a tragedy.
- [07:35]
James B. Meggs
Yeah. And so when the government does a bad job of communicating, especially when the government covers stuff up, then, you know, I'm, I'm frustrated by conspiracy theories. But I don't, I don't condemn the people who are suspicious of the official story. And in the case of the lab leak, you know, there was a conspiracy to say that the theory, it came from a lab was a conspiracy theory, and it was incredibly effective for at least a year. It was just unbelievably effective at shutting down any kind of discussion. You know, as I've written, you know, many columns about it in Commentary, many articles about it in City Journal. But it's still amazing to go back and look at the two or three years after, after Covid emerged and see how, how, what an amazing job they did of not only suppressing the mainstream news sources, getting social media to censor stories, but also to suppress working scientists from investigating this. I mean, to really hijack the process of science about the most important scientific question of the time. And so that's a warning, I think, to all of us now when we look at things like Robert F. Kennedy nomination in hearings, it's harder to counter him when he can point to cases where things really were covered up or where our public health officials didn't do a good job. And so it's one of the frustrations of trying to, to counter this stuff is you can't just say, listen to the experts because the experts undermine their own authority. Yeah.
- [09:23]
Christine Rosen
My favorite, my favorite part about, if you look back on the campaign to try to turn suspicion of the Wuhan lab into a conspiracy theory is the endless blabbing of experts and pseudo experts explaining, you know, on channel after channel and an article after article how. No, no, no, this is very. There's no, there's absolutely no reason. If you look at it, you'll see there's no reason why this could not have jumped naturally from one species to another. You know, in the normal, in the normal way through a wet, through a wet market. I think people don't really seem to understand how that kind of thing happens. So they get, you know, so you can mar experts out there to talk forever, to talk you down back into a, into a hole.
- [10:23]
John Podhoretz
I mean, look, the thing that's interesting about the, about the Wuhan, the entirety is the discovery of the existence of the conspiracy to claim that it was a conspiracy. And I mean in the classic conspiracy theory way, there was a secret meeting and there were private emails and there was this group of seven or eight scientists who all agreed that they were going to go in on this together because if they didn't, they would surely hang separately. And it took. I mean, it's almost like a joke, you know, that on February 2nd or something like that, they all, you know, it's like all hands on deck. We better cover our tracks because our gain of function research has come back to bite us and the entire planet in the ass. And then the kind of, the brilliance, in a weird way of then establishing that questions raised about this were itself illegitimate because they trafficked in conspiracy theory. Then you have the other side, which is RFK Jr. And why he should not be confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary get anywhere near power, which is that you have people like us, or you have people like Jim, others Richard or Bright, the citizen people who are like looking through the papers that were released online and trying to make sense out of them. And then you have RFK Jr coming along saying, wow, this does seem to be engineered to make sure that Ashkenazic Jews don't get it. And then it's like, great, oh, thanks very much. Like now we're going into some kind of weird anti Semitic Jews in power making sure that black people die from diseases that Jews don't die from.
- [12:09]
Abe Greenwald
And by the way, can't we Ashkenaz Jews just have one thing we don't get?
- [12:15]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, anyway, it is. But I mean, so he. Then you then have the counter conspiracy theories according to which this was, this was produced, it was deliberate and it was engineered to have a planetary effect. And one of the people who was trafficking in these, I'm just asking questions about these numbers, is going to be running the US health establishment if the Senate doesn't do its job and turn him back from doing so. So we're in a sort of weird second generation effect where rather than saying, oh my God, you know, we need to rebalance the way all this is done. The, the, the, the, the other bad conspiracy theorists are now taking over from the current conspiracy theorists.
- [13:13]
James B. Meggs
You know what's crazy about this? It, I, I still, it still kind of blows my mind is this all used to be a left wing thing. You know, the 911 conspiracy theories were widely embraced on the far, on the far left. The vaccine, vaccine denial was, you know, you're much more likely to find that in Boulder, Colorado than in Alabama. And, and all of these ideas that big pharma is a big plot to start diseases and then take our money, it's all migrated. Or you know, in classic horseshoe theory, it's all migrated to the ma, the maga, right to the point where people just really uncritically believe that all of this stuff is organized with a kind of a grand plan and so that not only are they looking back at things in the past and seeing it that way, but anytime a new threat emerges, people are ready from the get go to say, oh, this must be another grand plan. I wrote my last column for commentary on the avian flu epidemic that's going through, you know, farms for chickens and dairy farms, mostly out west. And if you go online, you see a lot of people saying, oh, dairy farmers shouldn't let any health officials on their property, they shouldn't test their animals. You know, of course Robert F. Kennedy is a big believer in raw milk. They're fighting to keep, you know, raw milk available, even though maybe in the middle of an avian flu epidemic, it's not the best time any other time. I'm, I don't care what people drink, you know, if they want to take a little tiny extra risk. But the, the very idea that there might be a new threat is dismissed out of hand before it even emerges. And that makes it really hard to plan and prepare for anything. So gives me a little bit of despair to, to look at this and then to imagine the kind of person who's played a major role in mainstreaming a lot of these ideas over the years is going to be in a. Could be of authority in the government is, is pretty alarming. And, and it makes you wonder if you take it back to Trump, where is he on all this stuff? Does he just, does, does he believe it all? Is it just kind of politically got political utility? Is he rewarding a segment of the the group that, that voted for him. Why is he willing to take, you know, such a risk with a nominee like this?
- [15:58]
Ryan Reynolds
See, I think this is the important question because I think he, he exists at the realm of the performative on all of these questions, which is why he's happy to embrace these very recent converts from the Democratic Party like RFK Jr. Like Tulsi Gabbard. So he's happy at that level. The thing that's frustrating, and I agree with you, Jim, is that this is actually an expression of this crisis of competence and the lack of trust people have, which is all well earned and a legitimate concern they have about whether their government can actually do basic things. I think this is also what's fueling a lot of the, the narrative in the media and promoted by Trump about the recent crash, plane crash, and that's that people don't actually believe the government can get anything done. So they will turn to someone who has a kernel of truth in what they say. I think, look, if you talk to anyone in public health, which tends to be a more left leaning profession, I have friends who are Democrats, who are public health professionals, they'll tell you, our American food supply has a lot of issues that we should deal with. The stuff that we put in our food is banned in other countries and maybe we should question why. And there's a health crisis in this country on a lot of levels with obesity and other conditions. So there is a kernel of truth in this issue of is our food supply a problem? Is what we put in our bodies making us sick or not? But RFK Jr is not the person who's going to actually answer that question for the American people. He's not competent to do that job. However, there's been so many generations of incompetence and so many conspiracy theories and lies fed to the public, they don't care. They just want to put someone in there who has that little bit of agreement with them on their concern. And that's where I think you can, you can look at Tulsi Gabbard in the same way. She's absolutely right that there was probably abuses of the surveillance power used against American citizens under fisa. But she's not right that Snowden is not a traitor, that he just broke the law. So, and again, we have, we have friends of this podcast who are great supporters of Tulsi Gabbard. I don't, I think the fact that she couldn't say yes, he was a traitor in, in her congressional hearings, that's not because she really believes he wasn't a traitor. So the Senate's job is to assess whether, in fact, that makes her incapable of doing the job and having access to the intelligence that she will.
- [18:02]
John Podhoretz
But let's make it clear, right?
- [18:04]
Ryan Reynolds
People want competence in their government, and they've had. And it's not just under Trump, like it's been 10 or 20 years where people feel like this has been a slow crumble of competence.
- [18:13]
John Podhoretz
Okay? But in Tulsi Gabbard's case, the argument or justification for what Edward Snowden did. Edward Snowden was part of a conspiracy. There have been these lionizing hagiographic documentaries and books written about how he spirited this out in connection with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker, and how they got. And how they did it and where they went, where they flu and who got arrested in London demanding to know how this. And all of that. And the idea was that their conspiracy was justified because the government of the United States was engaged in conspiratorial action against its citizens using these methods. And so it's choose your conspiracy. Like I myself actually trust the. That warrantless wiretapping was a necessary adjunct of what we had to do after the war on terror. She doesn't. That's fine. That's a perfectly normal. Where you start going, the extra step is, no, I'm sorry, you don't get to steal America's secrets to make your point. That is actually not right. And if you're stealing them and giving them to China and then moving to Moscow, then you're a traitor. You're not specifically a traitor because we're not in a declared state of war with China or Russia.
- [19:49]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, if he was a hero, he would have been a whistleblower. But he wasn't.
- [19:52]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's the idea. I think the idea is that he's a whistleblower. Reality winner is a whistleblower. There's a whole. I know, but that's the. Their conceit is that it's okay to run a conspiracy against the federal government because the federal government is dangerous. And illegal conspiracies are illegal conspiracies. It's interesting that Tulsi Gabbard, in her hearing yesterday, got tripped up on this one word that she could not was tripped up.
- [20:19]
Ryan Reynolds
I seriously think she was not. She was refusing to say that he was a traitor in order to get that job. I think she was standing on principle.
- [20:26]
John Podhoretz
No, no, that's why I say she was tripped up, though, which is to say she said somebody said to her. What do you make of Edward Snowden? Because in 2020, she and the wonderfully euphonious and incredibly far seeking and serious legislator Matt Gaetz co sponsored a resolution saying that Snowden should be either pardoned or I can't come. It should be the understanding of Congress that Edward Snowden should be pardoned because he had done something patriotic, not that he had done something traitorous. Right. Because what he'd done here was exposed, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so somebody says, do you think Edward Snowden's a traitor? And her, the, what she had developed was this line. He broke the law. No one should break the law. And I do accept that he broke the law. And then the Democrats, as you might say, pounced because in, in trying to make a talmudic difference between breaking the law in the form of stealing government deep government secrets was simply an act of law breaking, like speeding or jaywalking or littering. They just kept pressing the point. She did not have a follow up. She just kept returning to what she had grudgingly come up with as what she thought was her concession to the bad guys. The bad guys being people who think that Snowden is a traitor or should, you know, should be extradited from Russia to, to serve out, you know, to deal with his crimes in the United States for which he is not in fact paid any sort of price and.
- [22:07]
Ryan Reynolds
To put our, our citizens at risk as well as many operatives in the field from our allies. I mean, this is the part that I think.
- [22:15]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [22:15]
Ryan Reynolds
Should have been emphasized, the job.
- [22:18]
John Podhoretz
It's not like she is up for Secretary of Transportation. She is up for the job of Director of National Intelligence, which is the stovepipe for intelligence secrets in the U.S. government. And she is a supporter of somebody who stole all of those secrets. And she actually wanted him to be commended by Congress for doing so.
- [22:47]
Christine Rosen
When questioned about her questioning of a particular instance where Bashar Al Assad had used chemical weapons, it was revealed that she was basing her answer, her suspicion, which was her opinion, which was counter to that of the intelligence community. She was asserting that it wasn't Assad based on reading cranks. This is also a problem for someone that's supposed to be, that's looking to head our national intelligence.
- [23:29]
John Podhoretz
I mean, by the way, I want to dig into this just for like a couple of seconds because you're calling him a crank. You're calling her source a crank.
- [23:39]
Christine Rosen
One of them, maybe two.
- [23:41]
John Podhoretz
And her main source was a guy named Theodore Postol, Ted Postol, who is such a crank that He's a professor at mit. That's how much of a crank he is. Ted Postal has been a presence in American life as a, as an, as an enemy of American national security policy for 30 or 40 years. He, he has, you know, he did, he claimed all. He has had stuff where he was debunking Soviet use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan and claiming that the United States was driving its own soldiers and military to suicide by forcing them to engage in war crimes in Operation Desert Storm, among other things. A, you know, a. Someone who claimed that all of our missile, our anti ballistic missile defense tests were, were, were ginned up and false. He is, he is. Conveniently, of course everything that Ted Postol believes from the 80s onward has been in service of making the claim that we have nothing to fear from people we deem our enemies and that we are the bad guy. That's whom she is going to. He's not a crank. It's weird. Like that's what the Wall Street Journal did or tried to characterize him as a crank. I wish he were a crank. He had great influence in the 1980s. He had some influence in the 1990s. That. He must be very old now obviously because that was like 40 years ago. But he is a PSA professor at you know, the most prestigious.
- [25:20]
Christine Rosen
How does that not make him a crank? It's not really a point I care about, but how does that not make him a crank? I mean the crankiest ideas come out of the universities because you know, I.
- [25:29]
John Podhoretz
Think like Alex Jones is a crank. Like Ted Postal is something, but Ted Postal is something worse.
- [25:34]
Ryan Reynolds
The credentialed crank. How about that?
- [25:36]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, but I don't even know that he counts as a crank because he was somebody who until suddenly Elizabeth Warren doesn't like him or people don't like him because they want it. They want in order to pounce on, on Tulsi Gabbard, call Edward Snowden a traitor. Which I doubt by the way that Elizabeth Warren would have done in 2011 or 2012. I'm sure she went and cried when she saw Citizen Four, the Academy Award winning documentary about how wonderful he was and thought that it was really wonderful. Because of course what George W. Bush had been doing in fighting the war on terror was evil. No doubt. Anyway, I'm just saying like this is what's interesting. She, she represents not just a cranky view, but a kind of institution, weird consensus leftist left, far leftist view.
- [26:29]
Abe Greenwald
Well, and they run in, they run in packs. Which is the other problem here is that. Excuse the concern that Tulsi is the sort of person who would gravitate toward that line of thinking by instinct.
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John Podhoretz
Right?
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Abe Greenwald
I mean, we just watched Jeffrey Sachs on Tucker Car go on Tucker Carlson Show. Jeffrey Sachs is, you know, also somebody who you would put outside the crank cinematic universe, Right. I mean, he's a professor at Columbia. He's somebody who once upon a time was extraordinarily influential in his own area of. Of foreign policy stuff. But he's now a conspiracy theorist who runs around saying Bibi Netanyahu is the reason for all the wars in the world and the Jews are directing everything that's happening. And he crosses over by going on, you know, a show like Tucker Carlson's where the. The far left and the sort of old paleo Kannish write meet and merge. But the concern is that somebody like Tulsi, like, when I see Jeffrey Sachs interviewed, I know that, like, I'm sure Glenn Greenwald is loving whatever this is. You know, like, there are certain people that, you know, just love this stuff. And you worry that maybe Tulsi might love this stuff.
- [27:55]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [27:55]
Abe Greenwald
That's not just that she has made a couple mistakes in her hand in how she analyzed specific intelligence, but that she might be drawn to the Jeffrey Sachs of the world.
- [28:10]
John Podhoretz
I don't know why you're putting it conditional. I don't know why you're making it conditional. It's not that she might be. She is. She herself acknowledges that she is. Her entire. What the kinds of things that she was saying, which were the exposure of the abuses of our warrantless wiretap and all this, were so important. They were very important. And that's what she lined up again.
- [28:34]
Ryan Reynolds
But she, by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt. Let me just add, though, that she didn't, when that was brought up in questioning, though, she didn't clarify. Look, Congress has actually curbed some of those excesses with legislation. I mean, there. There have been changes since the narrative. That was the narrative arc that I think she was telling in her hearing that she didn't address and when she was pushed on a few specific details, she didn't perform well. And again, look, I think people can admire and Tulsi Gabbard as a person and, and, you know, say that she's principled in all this. I happen to disagree with her on some of her policy matters, but that is not what the Senate is assessing. The Senate is assessed, is not assessing the past. It's supposed to be looking forward and saying, can this person reasonably work with five Eyes and our other allies and work and look at our intelligence and keep us safe. And that's, I think that why you see some hemming and hawing from even Republicans who were leaning towards the idea that Trump should get whoever he wants. I, she's, it was disturbing for a number of reasons, not because of her personally, but because of all the stuff they were digging into, which is looking backward, not forward.
- [29:35]
John Podhoretz
I think it's disturbing personally because the simple question of the matter is you have somebody who was in a national security, who was an intelligence analyst at the nsa, at the CIA, in the FBI, I don't care where it is, all of these agencies under the kind of aegis of the Director of National Intelligence. And what are you going to say if somebody gets caught, somebody gets caught doing something or, you know, sending something to a reporter, going to say, well, the head of, the head of the, the Director of National Intelligence believed that it was an act of patriotism to release the entirety of America's Secrets in 2011. What are you punishing me for? She has no enforcement capacity. She literally is on the other side of the, of the question of whether or not the government has the right to keep it. She cannot occupy that job in a way that is not injurious to America's national security, as far as I can tell. And she was given a challenge and I understand why she didn't take it up, not only out of principle, but because if she says Edward Snowden is a traitor, there is a follow up question that needs to be asked of her. Well, if you acknowledge that she is a traitor, why aren't you a traitor for wanting him to be pardoned? Why aren't you lining up? How can a person who says that this person is a traitor and yet four years ago wanted Congress to declare him a wonderful person. How can you run the stovepipe for national intelligence in a way that will secure our national intelligence? That's an unanswerable question. So basically now it really does all come down to does Trump get what he wants? Because in an ordinary circumstance, every Republican would vote against her. I mean, if she were nominated by a Democrat, you know, she had endorsed Kamala and Kamala had won. Kamala had made her Director of National Intelligence. Every Republican would have voted against her in five set without even asking a question about it. And this is where, this is where we get into the, you know, the, the oddity of Trump. Now look at Cash Patel. He was up for his job, right as Director of the FBI. He had a hearing Yesterday. And he, unlike her, made a total break with his past views. Right. He said, I. He actually literally disagreed with Trump for the first time in his entire professional life. He said, I do not believe that people should be pardoned who took violent actions against police officers. Now, why did he do that? He did it because he had to say it in order to get confirmed. He did. He went there. And then they can say, well, I'm sorry, but didn't you do this? And didn't you organize the J6 choir to sing to Donald Trump? And he can say, that was then, this is now. I'm now going to be director of the FBI and I'm not going to stand for this. I can't stand for this. That's what he said. That's a debt. That's a, that's a confirmation conversion that was necessary, and I think he'll get confirmed. But she didn't go there. And what's more, RFK didn't really go there either on some of his other conspiracies, like the idea that, you know, vaccines essentially are a government conspiracy to sicken and poison people. John, Cassie, the doctor Senator who from Louisiana, when I mean, rfk, said there haven't been. We don't do vaccine trials. You know, we don't test vaccines and we don't do trials of vaccines. And John Kennedy said, I was involved in a vaccine trial. I think it was hepatitis C. I think he said, 20 years ago, as a doctor, I participated in a vaccine trial. What are you talking about? So, I don't know.
- [33:44]
Christine Rosen
RFK tried to split the difference. He didn't. He glossed up his language, but he didn't pivot from who he is.
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Abe Greenwald
And he also gets called on things that he said that he says he didn't say. Like, he's still, he's still one. He's another one of these nominees who forgets the Internet exists. And it creates these scenes where it looks like, you know, hey, you once said that worms were eating your brain, you know, oh, I don't remember that. You said that the vaccine for measles kills more people than it saves, you know, whatever. Well, that's. That, that doesn't sound like something I would say. And then they read it back to him, you know, and stuff like this. And then there was one other question where he said something crazy about one of the vaccines. And, you know, and he said something like, yeah, I probably said that or something like that. It was like, you know, like, all right, I, I see where this is going. You know, you're reading quotes to me that I said. I, I clearly don't remember. And so that creates these sort of hectic scenes where it's like this guy doesn't see how much does he believe what he says over time? How much conviction does he actually have? Is there any principle here on his side, however wrong headed we might think that is? Is this guy the real, you know, sort of circus performer here who doesn't actually believe anything he's saying? Is he the mirror image of what he's accusing the government of being?
- [35:17]
John Podhoretz
Look, I mean, there was this exchange in the RFK hearing, which itself should be enough to disqualify him forever. Right. Bernie Sanders following with, with John Kennedy. John Cassidy said, talked about the question of the link between autism and vaccines. Now what do we know? We know that Andrew Wakefield, the British scientist who claimed that he had proved that there was a link between autism and vaccination, that his study was not only debunked and withdrawn by the Lancet, I think, which published it, but he went to jail for falsifying. For falsifying his study. And so Sanders said. I asked you a simple question, Bobby. Studies all over the world say it does not, meaning that vaccines cause autism. What do you think? If you show me those studies, I will absolutely, as I promised Chairman Cassidy, I will apologize. He knows those studies exist. The entire world knows about Andrew Wakefield. This is like one of his two core issues that he raised tens of millions of dollars on. He's selling onesies that say I'm happily unvaxed for babies. He's just lied in front of Congress. Like he perjured himself in front of Congress. He said he didn't know that studies existed, debunking the link between vaccines and autism, which by the way, not to.
- [36:53]
Abe Greenwald
Interrupt, maybe we, we need some commentary. Onesies. That's what I was thinking yesterday.
- [36:59]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, there's nothing that a baby like a baby wearing something that says crushing veracity. That's really good. Yeah, but the baby wearing it worse than that. Commentary. Onesie permission structure. I don't know. There are a whole bunch of ones that would be, I think would be amusing anyway. So the conspiracy theorists. We had a conspiracy theorist at the FBI who threw away his conspiracy theories to, to, to assure his confirmation. We have a conspiracy theorist for hhs. Not clear what's going to happen there. And it's also not clear what's going to happen with Tulsi Gabbard. But then we get to the, the question that Christine asked, which is, is Trump the does it matter? Because Trump is a conspiracy theorist and he's the president and the fish rots from the head. And if it's not rfk, it'll be somebody else.
- [37:49]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, okay, I'm gonna interrupt because he's a conspiracy theorist, but in a particular way. And I think this is where the, the DEI plane crash nexus is important to explore because that press conference was so I had to, I was in Boston, my flight, I was supposed to fly back to DCA yesterday morning, flight got canceled. So I got one of the last seats on the train, sort of long train ride to contemplate what was going on while listening to some of this press conference. And I, I agree that his tone and demeanor were not appropriate for the moment. But that's Trump. So the fact that anyone's surprised about that shouldn't, is itself surprising. But this idea that DEI is the reason that air traffic control might have made a horrible, fatal mistake, tragic mistake, it's not entirely conspiracy theory, but he gets it just slightly wrong. Right. We've already know. We know and Jim can speak to this much better than I can. We know that they were understaffed. And why have there been understaffing issues with air traffic control? Well, there is this, this, there was this policy which was since rescinded. So Trump was wrong about this, encouraging dei, encouraging sort of more diversity in air traffic control jobs that held over from Obama. There is a large class action lawsuit moving its way slowly through the courts that was filed by people who were under that old policy, denied jobs because they were white. So this is a legit thing. It's not a conspiracy theory. However, the way he links all this stuff just makes me think he's just terribly online in a way that, because this stuff was flowing over social media in real time in a way that it just came out of his mouth like a fire hose. But I'll see to Jim on how much of what he said was, was conspiracy versus true.
- [39:28]
James B. Meggs
Well, this is a funny thing about Trump is the first thing is he'll say something kind of on impulse that is maybe at the wrong time seems inappropriate, certainly speculate. The president shouldn't be speculating about anything with a car, with a plane crash until the, until, you know, the investigations begin. But you're absolutely right, Christine. When the, the problem with DEI isn't just that, oh, maybe they lowered standards and some people there that aren't fully qualified in the, the case that you're talking about, they had a program to make sure they didn't hire Too many white people. It was. They had a, they had this wild test. This dates back to the Obama era. They had this test that after you had spent some cases, years going to college, get lots of training to go to become qualified to the air traffic control test. There was a personal questionnaire that people didn't know about you couldn't study for it, and would ask you all these questions about your life and what you liked in high school and did you play a musical instrument or, you know, something like that. And. But the answers were geared to try to favor minorities and weed out white people, which is kind of hard to believe that you could do that. But for example, one of the questions was, let's see if I, if I have it. Oh, one question was if you, you. My lowest grade in high school was science. If you answer, if you click, if you check that, that was a. That was good, that would help you get over. So, oh yeah, let's weed out people who are good at, you know, science and math as air traffic controllers. And then there was a group of black air traffic controllers who got their hands on this test and they were distributing the answers to people that they wanted to pass the test. So it was a big scandal, as you say. There's this lawsuit, this class action lawsuit making its way through the courts now that is no longer the case, but it shows you a mentality in the agency that was working to restrict the number of, of white candidates for those jobs at a time when we've been hearing for years about these shortages. The New York Times did a big investigation a couple years ago into these shortages, these shortfalls in employment. So people are working overtime, they're working seven days a week. These places are understaffed. And the tower at Reagan was not only overstaffed the night of the accident. Understaffed, understaffed. Was not only understaffed, but one of the air traffic controllers had given permission to leave early for some reason. And so the poor guy who was on duty was handling both the fixed wing airplane traffic and the helicopter traffic. Those are two. Those operate on different radio frequencies. It's a huge cognitive challenge to manage all this stuff. And you know, and I in and it's the preliminary look is at the very least the air traffic control could have been more proactive at warning the helicopter, warning the pilot. And really the only thing we really hear is that he called the helicopter pilot and said, you know, do you have visual on, you know, on that aircraft? And you're supposed to go in behind him and the pilot Confirmed it. It's looking like the pilot was maybe looking at the helicopter pilot was maybe looking at the wrong aircraft. There was another one lined up at a slightly different angle, the angle that would have been expected farther in the distance. So those. It's so easy to make mistakes like that. And you know, and, and hardworking, competent people who are experienced and good at their jobs can still make mistakes like that. It's one of the sad lessons of, or the challenging lessons of disaster studies. Is, is a lot of times a disaster happens when everybody involved is pretty, is, is trying to do a good job. They're not being reckless, they're trying to do a good job. And, but there are, there are gaps in the system or there are, there are ways that are easy to make mistakes and there are sometimes cultural factors that have allowed the safety margins to degrade or be worn away over the years. I think that's what we're looking at. But that may be what we're looking at in this. Obviously we'll wait for the NTSB reports and, and all the rest to make final judgments.
- [44:19]
Christine Rosen
I have to say that, you know, this crash reminded me of the Francis Scott Key bridge boat crash. And I said, wait, did we ever get to the bottom of that? That sort of drifted off into the mists. Right. So I looked it up this morning and the most extensive research so far, an investigation is not conclusive. That was almost a year ago. May have been a faulty wire, maybe so. So the waiting for the answer.
- [44:58]
Ryan Reynolds
So this is one of our onesie phrases.
- [45:00]
Christine Rosen
What's that?
- [45:00]
Ryan Reynolds
This is Abe's theme about we'll never get to the bottom of this.
- [45:04]
James B. Meggs
Yeah. And we don't even know the name of the captain on that boat. Right. Actually, they've never released that.
- [45:09]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [45:09]
James B. Meggs
So, you know, it's one thing to shield people from unnecessary opprobrium who make mistakes in the course of disasters, but to not even know who it was is pretty extraordinary. A year after the event.
- [45:27]
John Podhoretz
Where Christine makes, I think, a profound point is that Trump said it's dei. And that's an incredibly vulgar rendering of the larger point that Jim is making, which is that if the federal government at some point in the last five to 10 years took a turn in which hiring the most competent people to do jobs, from the military to the FAA to maybe this doesn't matter that much if you're talking about who is, you know, gonna file paper at the Social Security Administration, but there are these life and death jobs in the federal government overseeing the nuclear stockpile. You know. Yeah. People who are actually making sure that planes don't crash into each other on approach at airports, what goes on in the military when people are carrying heavy weaponry and are in combat together and all of that. And if the mission of the federal government changes from having these be the best they can be to fulfilling a social contract that prizes egalitarian racial and gender diversity, you are. Nothing comes without a cost. If you, if you prioritize X, it means in some sense you're going to deprioritize Y. And if you have a decade of that at the FAA, maybe the end result is 10 years later, the whole atmosphere of how you do your job has shifted or altered a little bit. And how people are promoted or how people are whatever. Are you scared by your supervisor? Are you like, is, is, is at the front of your mind? Is the purpose of being a, an air traffic controller to have 100% success record at, at making sure that planes don't crash into each other? Or is it because you're, you're filling out, you're helping to fill out a checkbox on an org chart for the DEI community? And there can be indirect consequences of policies like that. Trump, I think, has just done something that is injurious to the serious things that are going on in his first 10 days. This fight against D.I. and affirmative action. A lot of all this other stuff is revolutionary and remarkable. And if you're going to go to the cartoon a week after you announce your ending DI in the federal government and say, you see, this is good that I'm doing this because that's why this helicopter crashed into the plane. And it turns out that's not why or what. Don't do that. Like, this is, this is deadly serious stuff we are having. He is attempting to alter the course and direction of the federal government and maybe the United States in this regard. And if he takes the, if, if he goes right to the cheapest and most tasteless way to make that argument with something that is not provable as a, as the cause, he's going to discredit the argument. He's going to make it easier for the people who want to attack the argument ideologically to say they don't know what they're doing and this is stupid and it's also false and he's a character assassin and all of that. I mean, I note that David Brooks has a column this morning called something like the Seven Paths of Stupidity. Not his best work, but what it is is the sort of, I would say the Liberal case against the Trump revolutionary actions of the last 10 days by saying, yeah, you know, there's a lot to this kind of stuff, but everything that, the way he does it is stupid. And it's stupid and it's, therefore it's stupid. The people who work for him are stupid. And it's all stupid. Okay, it's not stupid. It's the opposite of stupid. David would have known that once, but he's so offended by things like the executive order, how OMB tried to implement the executive order on whatever the hell it was that it then rescinded. And then Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, said the OMB guidance was rescinded. The, oh, the executive order stands. That's actually not stupid. Yeah, they, somebody made a mistake and implemented a policy based on the executive order that was ill conceived and too vague and all of that, but you're giving your enemies ammunition.
- [50:15]
Abe Greenwald
Well, it's also the other thing. I mean, I think that you're touching on something that connects all of these stories that we've talked about today, which is Trump coming into office and saying, I'm going to open up the files of the RFK assassination, JFK assassination, MLK assassination, all the assassinations of anybody whose last name starts with K. But this is, but this is part of, you know, the thing with Tulsi and Edward Snowden and the thing with RFK himself on multiple levels, not the tragedies that have befallen his family that people ask questions about, and also the conspiracies that he personally pushes about health and stuff like that. Trump came into office saying, let's just get it all out there. You know, let's get those, he's one of those, let's get the 26 pages of the 911 report out there and you know, whatever type people. And so it's not clear that how, to what extent Trump sees the discretion toward America's secrets as sacrosanct. And that is going to lead to things like, well, let's have a Director of National Intelligence who maybe kind of likes Edward Snowden, right? Because maybe there's a, you know, there's a case there and let's have this. And it also leads to, you know, before he did the DEI thing, the crazy. I thought the crazier part was that he was like a guy who calls into a sports talk radio show. He tweeted or posted whatever it is on his true social man. That helicopter just makes a beeline for the, for the play. Why would it do that? You know, it's like you're the President of the United States. You don't watch a live stream video on Twitter at the same time as everybody else and go, oh man, that looks like some sort of terrorist attack or something. You know what I'm saying? And so has this, like, there's nothing. I guess my point is there's nothing out of bounds to Trump. Let's, you know, put sunlight on everything. No secrets, let's put it all out there, you know, and this is, this.
- [52:29]
Ryan Reynolds
Is, this is important because it is exactly his impulsivity, his impatience, his, his willingness to just jump the gun on all this. It's why he was reelected, because people were sick of the way, the old way of doing things. But it's also, to John's point, exactly what will undermine long term efforts to really shift some of these conversations in a direction that if you're conservative, even if you're not a populist, you want to see the country move.
- [52:53]
Christine Rosen
But it's also so in manner, it's another way in which he really is like his base. They're out there watching these videos saying, man, that looks like terrorism. And then they have a candidate and then president who does the exact same thing. This is where his connection with his supporters is genuine, is real.
- [53:16]
John Podhoretz
But it is a deep problem with the way the right has tried to examine the cultural dominance of the left over the last generation or two, that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate out an actual conspiracy that does real harm. That's what I would say the Wuhan suppression story was and is with the creation of a set of cultural ideas that start to govern the way we do things, both at the workplace and in the culture and in the way we relate to each other and all of that. And that is not a conspiracy, because that's not the people who are implementing these ideas that are bad and ruinous, particularly on gender and stuff like that, they are not doing so because they're trying to hide their tracks or cover their crimes or, or cut their losses or something like that. They genuinely believe that what they're doing is good and it's for the common good. And so if they're, if, as that in the famous gender study issue from last year, if the federal government funds a study on the psychological harms of not, not of transgendering or not transgender, of kids having surgery and the data don't come back saying this, contributing to the, to the cultural propaganda that says this is important, necessary and wonderful, then you just suppress the data. Even that's not a conspiracy. Trump Sees no distinction. Liberals want to stop him. That's a conspiracy. Everything is a conspiracy. Everybody who wanted to get Trump from Crossbow Hurricane, through Dalvin Bragg and Fani Willis and all of that, they didn't sit around in a meeting and say, we need to get Trump by any means necessary. Okay, you sue him in Atlanta, I'll sue him in New York. Jack Smith, you do this, we'll do this, we'll get him before this judge.
- [55:29]
Christine Rosen
And in fact, it was, the fact.
- [55:30]
Abe Greenwald
That that happened was injurious overall to their pursuit of him.
- [55:34]
John Podhoretz
Right, right. But he, but there was no such meaning. They all did it themselves organically.
- [55:41]
Ryan Reynolds
But he understands his opponents as enemies in a cinematic universe, to steal Seth's earlier phrase, he. That's how he understands the world. It's how he's always understand stood the world. And it's also the key to his success with voters.
- [55:55]
John Podhoretz
Right, right. Well, I mean, look, I've long said the thing to understand about Trump is that his business is real estate. His business was for a long time New York real estate. And New York real estate's part of the reason that he has the economic philosophy that he has. New York real estate is a zero sum game. Real estate in the world is not a zero sum game. You can't build a building in New York. You could build a building in Cheyenne, Wyoming on an empty lot. If you want to build a building in Manhattan, all the sites are taken. And if a site comes up, you're not, you're not getting it. You're not just like buying it from somebody. And then you're building a building, there are going to be 17 bidders, and then there are conspiracies. Then you do get people paying off building inspectors and offering campaign contributions to the local city councilman or the, you know, the state senator or something like that to get, pave your way and to get zoning variances and things like that. And it's a totally a zero sum game. You win, somebody else loses, you lose. So one, a person, you know, whom you see three times a week wins. And so this leads to conspiracy theorizing because there are conspiracies. I mean, that's what, that's what, you know, like using the levers of government to get yourself the, to, to get yourself the right to build a building over here and, and screwing Donald Trump out of being able to do it. That is a conspiracy. But also it's what you see on the level. What you see on the surface isn't, isn't what makes it happen. And so that's where he was born. That's the amniotic fluid that he was bathed in.
- [57:35]
Christine Rosen
Not just that.
- [57:35]
John Podhoretz
And it isn't. Yeah, there. What.
- [57:38]
Christine Rosen
I mean, I genuinely apologize for sounding like a broken record on this point, but it seems to find its way into every discussion. When he first ran into. Ran for the. For the presidency in 2016. Well, late in it. I'm sorry, not in 2016. In 2020, in that election, there was a conspiracy on the part of the Biden campaign to cover up the Hunter laptop and a conspiracy to suppress it involving multiple parties from multiple sectors of American life. And there was, as we've talked about here in other cases, an effort to turn those who saw it into conspiracy theorists and to offer a counter conspiracy that it was Russian disinformation. That's real. That's something that his campaign faced and knew it.
- [58:41]
John Podhoretz
Okay, but here's my problem with that. Like, there were plenty. There were people like Jonah Goldberg who were willing to believe that the laptop was Russian disinformation. We don't know of those 51 intelligence officers who signed a letter that they didn't believe that it. That it wasn't Russian disinformation.
- [59:02]
Christine Rosen
We know Joe Biden didn't believe it, and we know Tony Blinken didn't believe it, and we know Hunter Biden knew for a fact that it wasn't. And it's the campaign. It's. It's Tony Blinken who.
- [59:14]
John Podhoretz
So they organize a conspiracy, but the people who were actually the conspirators were unwitting.
- [59:21]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, that's such. That's the best way to saying they're dupes. Yeah, they were easily dupes.
- [59:26]
John Podhoretz
Fair enough.
- [59:26]
Ryan Reynolds
And they're national. They're supposed to be professional.
- [59:29]
John Podhoretz
Right. Okay. Yeah. No, that was a real thing. I. By the way, I said this at the time. I believe this. Now. I don't think that had the Hunter Biden laptop not gone through this, that. That would have affected the course of the 2020 election. That's. I can see that the implicit idea behind going through all this is. Is. Is a kind of counter history, according to which, on October 22, this thing happened that could have derailed Biden's presidency. Fifty or 60 million votes had already been cast by that point. Eighty percent of them were for Biden.
- [60:05]
Ryan Reynolds
Okay, wait, let me. Let me just interrupt because there is a little missing piece here from the perspective of people who believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and that's that when the conspiracy proves to be true, that in fact, there was an effort by the Biden campaign to suppress this true information and call it a conspiracy. They point to that and say, well, if they did that using the power of the government, what else did they do with all these ballots? How do we know that? I mean, so it, there is a kind of fuel that an accelerant it gives to the other theory.
- [60:34]
John Podhoretz
Well, that's why, that's why it's so evil. That's why. You're right. And that's why they shouldn't have done it in the first place. I mean, that's why. Look, look, look at where the tech companies are now versus you think they're not sorry that they shadow banned Trump and that they suppress the New York Post story and all of that? They're so sorry that they're paying Trump off. I mean, talk about a scandal. Like CBS is going to pay him $25 million. ABC paid him $15 million. Like all of these companies are literally writing Trump checks to try to get right. After having participated in illicit efforts to get him out of American public life, they're now literally doing emoluments to get themselves right.
- [61:29]
Ryan Reynolds
They're gonna have to do it for the next administration. That's Democratic, too. It's a kind of tech tithe. It's going to be in perpetuity.
- [61:35]
John Podhoretz
Well, I mean, tithe, I like that. But it's not just tech. CBS and ABC. ABC paid 15 million bucks. We hear CBS is going to pay $25 million for the claim that the 60 Minute story was injurious to his election efforts. That's a lawsuit he can't win. They can't even really adjudicate it during his presidency, and yet they've decided that the better part of valor is to write him a check. So I'm saying you think, you think that they didn't, they don't know what they've done, including help get him elected, and that they now live in a world in which this was the thing they least wanted ever to happen and now it's happened and they have to live within it. I mean, it's sort of an interesting kind of cause we're all paying that cost in some sense. Maybe we're, maybe it's a cost we want to pay because we want to see all the changes being made. But, but that is a, that is a very big fact that sits in front of us, that they bought into the idea that, you know, use of excessive force against the Blues Brothers has been approved. Anything you could do to stop Trump's momentum and ban, get him not reelected and then destroy him between 2021 and 2024 was morally justified and legally legitimate. And, and it all failed. And now they're having to deal with the consequences while he stands beside the narrow world like a colossus. It's, it's an amazing thing. And I, I, you know, and I hope, as I say, my concern now is seeing what he did with the, with the air traffic controllers and the di, is that the things that he's doing that I think may be really transformative for the country, his implementation of them is going to be disastrous, and he's going to misuse them and caricature them, and then they're gonna, they're gonna collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions because of what he tries to make out of them. So, yes, I've ended this on a deeply morose note.
- [63:53]
James B. Meggs
That's really what's, what's, that's what I came for, John.
- [63:57]
John Podhoretz
Anyway, we didn't really get a chance to talk about Jim's piece right now@comMENTARY.org on the next pandemic and the amazing fact that. So you should go read it. It's called the Next about how we just went through a pandemic and now there is this avian flu problem that has obviously made the price of eggs go up 300% or whatever it is. And guess what? We're no better at handling a potential outbreak than we were before.
- [64:29]
James B. Meggs
COVID Hopefully we'll dodge a bullet on this one. We don't know yet, but we've done everything wrong. Our health authorities have done everything to allow this avian flu virus to spend a lot of time passing between animals, people, back and forth, and that's how viruses evolved to become more infectious to human beings. So far, that doesn't seem to be taking that next step where it easily passes between human beings. But, and, and maybe it won't, but it's certainly not a good situation.
- [65:01]
John Podhoretz
So more morosity for you. Jim met ordinarily a very cheerful person. Sunny, A sunny, A person of sunny disposition, but nonetheless, look what we did. Look what we've done. Look what we've done. Just think of the, just think of the world in which you didn't have to bathe in the amniotic fluid of commentaries, crushing morosity. I, I hope, I hope you, I hope you, you find your work, the work that you do for us, intellectually and spiritually and morally fulfilling, because I don't know how good it is for your mood No, I love it is all I'm saying. Okay.
- [65:35]
Christine Rosen
Hey, John.
- [65:36]
John Podhoretz
Well, we love it too.
- [65:37]
Christine Rosen
If you want, I can. I can make a recommendation. Go. The rare moment where I have recommends. Okay, I'm just gonna preface it. My tastes are a little different from the rest of my beloved colleagues. I'm gonna recommend a movie that is, without question, not to everyone's taste. It is a very, very strange film that I think wasn't released for decades. It was made in 1962. It is called the World's Greatest Sinner. It is written, directed, and stars the. The actor Timothy Carey, who sort of always played like, tough guys and. And louts in other. Other films. I will say right off the bat, it is one of the worst made, worst constructed movies I've ever seen. There are. There are people out there who like that in itself for its sort of comic value. If you like, you know, if you're into, like, finding truly bad movies, this is good.
- [66:44]
John Podhoretz
But let's get to the recommends part.
- [66:46]
Christine Rosen
Oh, yeah, yeah. But that was not my interest. I couldn't stop watching it. It is riveting. It is about an insurance salesman with a family who gets fed up and decides he wants to be something greater. He wants to be a sort of self of man, God. And he goes down. First he goes down the role of rock and roll after going to a rock concert. And then he gets it in his idea that he's going to be a politician and he runs for president and he gets a following on this godless populist platform, and he funds his campaign by seducing rich widows. And his. At some point, his family. And he's. At some point his family comes to him. His family. His wife is. Is. Is religious, Catholic, and says, what are you doing? This is a.
- [67:41]
John Podhoretz
You're.
- [67:42]
James B. Meggs
You're.
- [67:42]
Christine Rosen
You. You gotta, you know, gotta choose the right way. And he goes through a crisis, spiritual crisis, at the end. And I won't tell you what happens at the end. It's a fascinating historical document. It is prophetic in a lot of ways. It is completely riveting, somewhat grotesque. And I wouldn't have had the courage to recommend it had I not after watching it, read about it and found that Martin Scorsese is also a fan. So I feel like I'm in good company.
- [68:18]
Abe Greenwald
You make it. You make it sound like Mannos Hands of Faith.
- [68:20]
Christine Rosen
You can. You can get it.
- [68:21]
John Podhoretz
And that's not fair. Man of Sands of Fate has literally no redeeming virtues.
- [68:26]
Abe Greenwald
That's what people love about it.
- [68:28]
Christine Rosen
I know, but may feel that way about this. I thought this was fascinating. You can find it on, you can rent it on Amazon Prime.
- [68:39]
John Podhoretz
Okay. Well, that's the world's greatest sinner, written, directed, produced and starring Timothy Carey, whom you probably won't even really recognize. That's the funny part. He's like one of those guys who.
- [68:51]
Christine Rosen
Was in supposed to be in front of a camera as long as he is in this. Yeah, he doesn't, he doesn't have the face or the right the me in of a leading man, which is like us.
- [69:02]
Ryan Reynolds
He has a face for radio.
- [69:03]
John Podhoretz
Is this what you're saying is a face for YouTube? Yeah, YouTube that. Remember, go to our YouTube channel like and subscribe. Jim Meggs, thank you so much for joining us as always. And for Seth, Christina, Abe, I'm John Pothoritz. Keep the candle bur.