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- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
John Podhoretz
Some preach and pain some diapers the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst.
- [00:22]
Seth Mandel
Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Wednesday, December 11, 2024. I'm John Podhortz, the editor of Commentary. You guys have been incredibly generous thus far in our year end appeal here for your contributions and support for our 501c3 nonprofit organization that produces this podcast, produces our daily website, and produces our monthly magazine. Commentary Inc. Is the overall name of our institution. We survive and thrive on the basis of not only our readers and our listeners who subscribe, but also to people who are willing to go the extra mile to help us keep the lights on, pay people's salaries, run things through a printer, have them cut and then put in a mail bag and send to your home to read and keep the website going and keep this podcast going. So if you go to commentary.org donate and give generously, the five of us here today would be immensely grateful. And those five include executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:41]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [01:41]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:43]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [01:44]
John Podhoretz
Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:47]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John.
- [01:49]
John Podhoretz
And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [01:52]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John. I don't know about you, but I'm in a very good mood this morning because yesterday was the last New York Times column written by Paul Krugman, the economics writer and Princeton, I guess he's NYU professor now, who has been torturing me over the last quarter century with his bitter partisan screeds twice weekly in the New York Times. And I want to make one comment about the column. Krugman frames his argument in his final column by observing that when he started writing his New York Times column, America was very optimistic. We were in the midst of the dot com boom. We were at the tail end of the Clinton presidency. Everybody was very optimistic, happy, feeling that we were in a golden age. And as he leaves, he says people are feeling down, sour, especially people of his political tribe. And he asks what could have happened? And clearly the answer is staring him in the face. It was his column. That's the explanation that he does not reckon with in his final words, written as a columnist for the New York Times.
- [03:09]
John Podhoretz
So you are feeling a new spring in your step, a new lightness. I don't have.
- [03:15]
Abe Greenwald
I don't have to not read Paul Krugman anymore.
- [03:19]
John Podhoretz
You know, this is the holiday season and there is a controversial, not all that popular, but when I was nine years old, huge Christmas movie, a musical version of A Christmas Carol with Albert Finney called Scrooge, with songs by Anthony Newley and Leslie Brickus. And it's not that memorable. There are many, many better versions of A Christmas Carol at your cinema, including the Muppet Christmas Carol, which is great, and of course, Scrooged, which is fantastic, and Reginald Owen and Alastair Sim versions of the Christmas Carol. But there is this one great moment in Scrooge with Anthony Newley when Scrooge is taken to see his own funeral by the ghost of Christmas Future and the entire cast breaks out into a raucous production number called thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It's the nicest thing that anyone's ever done for me. So, Paul Krugman, thank you very much for this gift you have given us at this Christmas season.
- [04:31]
Abe Greenwald
Just to comment on that, I do think that it was in a way noble of him to recognize that after 25 years he's had enough of writing the column. He hang it up, you know, make room for another progressive, partisan ideologue Democrat to take over that space. And I hope, I hope this is my holiday wish that now that he's not writing his screeds and making predictions such as that inflation will be temporary for the New York Times, Krugman will go back to writing the type of stuff he did that got him the job in the first place.
- [05:08]
John Podhoretz
And the Nobel Prize, right? I mean, he is a Nobel Prize winning.
- [05:12]
Abe Greenwald
He is a specialist in the economics of trade. But more importantly for me, as you know, just a general reader in the 90s, he was a very witty and engaging economics writer, explaining trade and different macroeconomic principles in a very accessible way. So maybe if I have my Christmas wish, that's what he will do and I can go back to enjoying him again.
- [05:40]
John Podhoretz
Hope springs eternal. Hope springs eternal. It is the season of miracles. That could be one of them. Probably could be.
- [05:51]
Matthew Continetti
Yeah.
- [05:51]
John Podhoretz
Okay. Yes. Well, I think that's a wonderful way to kick off what's going to end up becoming a pretty dark conversation as we move on to the topic of the the capture and arrest of Luigi Mangione, the Baltimore scion of immense wealth, family owning country clubs and actually apparently hospitals and nursing homes and various other things. 24, 25 years old, captured at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, made one slip in his entire 20 day plan to take out the head of the United Health Care Corporation, which was dropping his mask to flirt with a young woman at the hostel on the Upper west side of Manhattan that he was staying at that one image then suggesting to two people in Altoona, Pennsylvania, hey, that looks like the guy in the picture. And. And he was tale as old as.
- [07:08]
Christine Rosen
Time, by the way, getting tripped up by a girl. This is the man. Man's eternal weakness. Right?
- [07:15]
John Podhoretz
That's from Delilah onward. You are. You are correct, sir.
- [07:20]
Matthew Continetti
I feel like I should defend my sex, but I'm just not gonna bother today.
- [07:24]
John Podhoretz
Then what? Defend? There's no reason to defend.
- [07:26]
Matthew Continetti
I know.
- [07:26]
John Podhoretz
Actually, you. You saved. Who knows whom you saved?
- [07:30]
Matthew Continetti
Well, the hostel also.
- [07:32]
John Podhoretz
You and your.
- [07:33]
Matthew Continetti
Yes, the hostel also cooperated with law enforcement, which has led to them being boycotted by progressives who now are like, oh, this hostel. Is there a bunch of snitches? We're not going to put people up in this hostel anymore. Whereas most law abiding normal people would say, yes, they did the right thing in helping capture an assassin. So.
- [07:49]
Christine Rosen
And we're going to break you bombing the McDonald's also.
- [07:53]
John Podhoretz
This is our Yelp reviews.
- [07:55]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, this is a very weird sort of super online period where people go after anything they can find online by any institution connected to the story.
- [08:07]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I want to break this then into three chunks and try to take them one at a time. Seth, you mentioned the sort of the online quality of the response to this event. And we could even then add in the acquittal of Daniel Penny, the heroic ex Marine, who faced with a schizophrenic psychopath threatening people in a subway car, you know, detained him and held him in place between subway stations. And of course, Jordan Neely died. It's not clear whether he died because of the chokehold that he was in or whether it was because of the drugs in his system. We cannot trust that the New York City medical examiner made the correct finding here, since apparently she largely seemed to make the finding based on a video and not on a forensic examination of the body. But there's been a lot of online response and sort of like the sort of people who are online to Daniel Penney's acquittal. That tracks with some of the things that have gone on in relation to Luigi Mangione's act and then his arrest. That's one thing I think we need to take up. There are two other things that we need to take up. One is whether this crime of Mangione's is a larger deal than a young man. All these things were sort of being speculated on. Was he in debilitating back pain from an injury where he'd had surgery and it didn't help. And, and that, you know, as can happen when people are in chronic debilitating pain and maybe taking meds or to deal with it, opioids or something like that, that he had some kind of a psychotic break as a result of it and went down this road or whether. So, you know, should we look at him as a, this is a mental health issue and that there are two different tragedies here. One of course, is the murder that he committed and the other is the, the fact of his own degeneration and what will now happen to his own family, which will have to live with the guilt of not having been able to prevent him in some fashion or other from doing what he did. And then the third issue is whether there is larger sociological meaning to the act of terrorism that he committed. Is this a one off, weird event that is the sort of thing that can happen almost randomly. And we should not be reading should we or should we not be reading larger meaning? Is this the beginning of something larger in American society and maybe even in Western society that we need to take the full measure of those?
- [11:13]
Seth Mandel
Can we take the third one first? Yes, I think it is something larger, but I don't think it's the beginning. I think it's a step along the contagious nature of political violence, namely left wing political violence that we've been seeing for years in various forms. Go back to 2020 and the George Floyd riots, to the pro Hamas hordes, to the showing up at Supreme Court justices homes or you want to go to the congressional softball game shooting. There is a. And by the way, I think this is reflected in the fact that he, that Mangione has become a hero to a certain contingent of the online left. They certainly see this in a larger context. They're not looking at this that you would think a saner political left culture would say, don't uphold this one example of a guy going off the rails. Don't take that as representative of where the left is and what we believe in. That's not at all what this contingent is saying. They're saying this is heroic. There's a real infusion of old school anarchism that runs through this and through a lot of other examples that we can bring up from the past few years.
- [12:35]
Matthew Continetti
And the one thing that I've noticed about the coverage of this particular case is how swiftly the arc from the very online people cheering him as some sort of anarchist folk hero to the mainstream media, barely nodding at his violence and instead going, but you know, he Had a point. Let's talk about that broader point about our health care system pivoting from this absolutely horrific action where he murders a man to. Well, maybe he had a point. And that laundering of the larger idea, sure, look, our healthcare system, we could have debates all day long about what's wrong with it, but they use this as a very particular kind of pivot, which is to silently nod at an action that I think even 10 years ago would have still drawn a few paragraphs of appalled horror at the political violence.
- [13:23]
Abe Greenwald
By that measure, he succeeded in the propaganda of the deed, which goes back into the 19th century. Nihilists and anarchists. And I would say observing his behavior when he was transferred from one facility to the other yesterday does not seem to me to be someone who is suffering from chronic pain. He took the opportunity when the cameras were pointed at him to begin screaming that this was an insult to the intelligence of Americans and their lived experience. Now, that's the first sign that he's an Ivy League graduate using the phrase lived experience, which is one of my least favorite locutions. But second, it suggests that he's going to use his trial as further means to portray his message that somehow the corporate America is a bunch of parasites. And that I think slightly goes against the interpretation of him as mentally deranged. We could find out more about that. I was struck when I reviewed his Twitter account when it was first pointed to as his the other day. A lot of discussion of shrooms and psychedelics. And if we're looking at something that may have radicalized him or pushed him over the edge into the abyss, I would look at that. Not necessarily the chronic pain. There's a lot of people who have chronic pain who don't go around shooting fathers of two in the back in New York City streets. And we need to make that very clear in all of our discussions about this man.
- [15:13]
Christine Rosen
Right. I think we should take, to take, we should take off on that and look forward because I think the point you make about the trial mat is a very important point, which is all the people who are using him as a martyr are. This is just the beginning of that in public discussion. We should, we should be clear eyed about what we're heading into. This won't be, you know, had he been, had it been like a suicide by cop situation, this would have been guy kills healthcare CEO gets shot and is, you know, turns into a sort of Boston marathon bomber style heartthrob slash martyr for a week, two weeks, whatever it is. But there's nothing More after that. This is going to be. This is. We're going to see a bunch of journalists say, follow the trial and help him turn the trial into one in which he's not in the doc, but healthcare CEOs and insurance companies, they're the ones in the document. And we're going to see stories about how the points that he's raising, and I mean, reported stories, not just, you know, crazy commentators who are like, this guy has a point. But, I mean, we're going to see stories in the New York Times explaining the healthcare system as heard in the trial. You'll bring up a point like this, and then they'll have their healthcare writer say, what is he talking. What is Mangyon talking about? What does he mean when he says this? Well, this and that. And we're going to have months of putting the insurance companies on trial, essentially for murder in a swap. So we have to be aware of what we're walking into.
- [17:01]
John Podhoretz
I think that is a very plausible scenario. Obviously, a case like this, and given the fact that he apparently, in family terms, has relatively unlimited resources when that actually comes to be the case, is very much an open question. I mean, it could be two years before he even sees the inside of a courtroom, except for procedural events and that sort of thing. So I think that's one scenario. The other larger question is when we get to the, well, he had a point argument. This is a very important dividing line in modern American political history. And like many bad things, we can date it back to the 1960s, but I would date it back in my own reckoning to the Watts riots in LA in 1965. So I'm not going to go through the history of the Watts riots in 1980, but that was the first real urban action in which people in a city and neighborhood sort of like, took to the streets violently to complain about social policy and street removal and cops misbehaving and all of that. And from the Watts riots onward through the riots that greeted the assassination of Martin Luther king, that saw 10 cities in the United States have vast swaths of minority neighborhoods pretty much destroyed in rioting over those three days, the release of the Kerner Commission report in 1968 about the inequalities between black life and white life in the United States and others, that the idea that so giant criminal social action arises from an understandable route that we need to understand, sympathize with, and take action to solve, so that the people who did it are satisfied that there is change that can belay their Impulse toward murder is one of the two or three bright dividing lines between left and right in the United States over the last 60 years. And I don't say that hyperbolically. There were two elements of the crime surge that started in 1963. One of them was various forms of social change, including changes in the way people thought cops should interact with the public and exposures of corruption in police departments. That meant that cops were suddenly in bad odor with a lot of people. They should stay in cars and not try to prevent crimes, but respond to crimes after they've been committed. And a general view in liberal jurisprudence that we needed to focus on the reasons that people became criminals in the first place. And what could we do either to prevent that or to rehabilitate, to clean, to make prisons better places, to make rehabilitation more and more sort of like an option and something that could really work to help us in a progressive way, make America better. And that it became very clear very early on that we had an entire side of the American ideological political conversation that was siding with the criminals over the ordinary people whom they were terrorizing in neighborhood after neighborhood, particularly in cities. You saw New York City depopulate by a million people between 1970 and 1980 as the crime rate rose. And all of those people were white ethnics living in Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, all of whom no longer felt themselves protected in any way, shape or form from muggings, from burglaries, from rapes, all of that. And that they're. Yeah.
- [21:26]
Abe Greenwald
So about your narrative, which I. Which, you know, I agree with, but I will say that so far there's a difference in that Democratic politicians are not lionizing or saying that the killing.
- [21:42]
John Podhoretz
Some are.
- [21:43]
Matthew Continetti
Ro Khanna went on a Twitter.
- [21:45]
John Podhoretz
Some are, yeah, ok. Tiffany Caban. Tiffany. Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Governor Shapiro, Governor Fetterman. Yes.
- [21:54]
Abe Greenwald
This guy is not as a monster and a murderer, and you shouldn't. But. So, okay, so maybe there are.
- [21:59]
John Podhoretz
The party is split. The left is. Let's not say that Josh Shapiro and Fetterman are leftists, because that's not fair. But on the. On the left of center, there is clearly a split. Politicians who, like, need to appeal to a large number of people, particularly in a state like Pennsylvania. We have Fetterman and Shapiro, both of whom are up in 26, saying, this guy's a monster. I hope he rots in jail. And everybody like him is thrown in jail. And they're terrible. And then you have the recently defeated Jamal Bowman, Ed D. As we now know him on Twitter. Jamal Bowman, Ed D. Because some school system foolishly made him a principal for a while, writing a Dear White People tweetstorm about how the death of Jordan Neely is yet another example of how we black people watch you white people kill us every day and we and you do nothing. And how many more times am I going to have to appeal to you to see that? You should see clear reason that you're slaughtering us in the streets. Tiffany Caban, almost district attorney from Queens, now a member of the City Council of New York, praising Jordan Neely. Jasmine Crockett, congresswoman from Texas, saying, you know, why isn't anybody helping Jordan Neely? Somebody who had nearly killed a woman three years ago and had open access to voluntary hospitalization, to voluntary housing, and went on that subway car as the Michael Jackson impersonator and said, I'm going to kill all of you.
- [23:39]
Matthew Continetti
But there's, but there is, there is. There's an important distinction here that I think helps us think about how this might play out in the future. And that's that the people we're talking about, the ones who say what's important here isn't the individual's action. It's not Jordan Neely being violent and threatening people. It's not this, this kid killing someone. It's the underlying causes. And we should look at those causes, both of their personal circumstances. In the case of Neely, he was failed by the system. He was homeless. This is why he behaved this way. Excusing the behavior or the mission of this self appointed assassin was legit because the healthcare system is a mess. Those are two separate things. But what's interesting about the Jordan Neely case is that a jury of Daniel Penney's peers looked at that evidence, heard the Black Lives Matter activists outside their deliberation room screaming and yelling, and still said, you know what? This was not legitimate. It was not legitimate to argue that we should excuse this man's behavior. And what this other guy did was a hero. Whereas I think what we're seeing in the case, well, we'll have to see. But with this assassination attempt, I think you'll see again because it's more about, you know, it's this very technocratic, difficult, complicated system of healthcare who a lot of people individually have been frustrated with. In America, there's more sympathy for that narrative. And we should think about how the public accepts this narrative too. This is used by politicians, it's used by media figures on the left because it works with the American people. If you talk to people and Say, what do you think of the health care system? A couple some people who were otherwise rational, they're not going to excuse assassination, but they will express their frustration with it. So there are, the narrative does work with the public up to a point, and that's a concern going forward too.
- [25:21]
Christine Rosen
And also that element of the healthcare system we should say is something that people deal with regularly and is not. Some of these things are not part of the discussion at all about policy. And that's one of the reasons that some of these people are jumping up and saying, yeah, let's talk about this. Because we, when they talk about health care reform, they tend to talk about, you know, large things and you know, you know, major policy changes through the whole system and not like, hey, you know, there's this thing where doctors, you know, who are technically out of network come into the emergency room and then you get a bill.
- [26:00]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [26:00]
Christine Rosen
So there's like a, that's part of it too, which is that people who deal with this sort of stuff who never see it in conversation at all are like, well, I guess that was my chance, but it's just a pretty morbid chance.
- [26:14]
Seth Mandel
I just want to add something to the discussion that Matt and John were having there about the Democratic politicians reactions. I think even if you set aside the overt sort of enthusiasts like Jamal Bowman here, there is a reality that for years the democratic establishment has been trying to meet the mob halfway and sort of say, well, I understand they have a point, as many Democrats said, of the, let's say the Hamas, the pro Hamas crowd or the mostly peaceful riots or whatever else it is. And that I think first of all is clear as day to most Americans. They see that. And that doesn't, I think, fly with the American public. I don't think they do like that. But it is a problem. It's something that they're going to have to extirpate, they're going to have to stop doing that.
- [27:10]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, there is a difference between mob violence and a shooter who in his letter that the authorities obtained say, I'm going to save you the trouble. I acted alone. So there's just a difference. And, but I would also add this. You know, so much of the celebration of Manjoni has occurred online. And you know, there are hostile foreign powers at work online manipulating social media. And I would not be surprised if those hostile foreign powers are involved in amplifying some of the celebrations of his awful deed as well as the criticisms of the American system. I would just caution us not to go Too far in accepting this narrative, right? Americans are so upset at their health insurer that they're willing to commit bloody murder in the streets. Because I don't think that's where we're at. And I think Mangione is either deranged or he's a terrorist. And he needs to. He can't go on the death row because the murder happened in New York, but he certainly needs to spend the rest of his life in prison. And final comment, I think this events of the past week expose the idiocy of the narrative of the race hustlers you mentioned, John, what's their narrative? White privilege. Okay, let's talk about privilege. Daniel Penny, Luigi, who They're both white. One was privileged, right? Class privilege. Luigi Mangione. And what did that class privilege turn out to? A murderer. Daniel Penny. He didn't have any privilege. He's stuck on the subway after serving his country and he does the right thing trying to protect the people in that subway car. And Alvin Bragg tries to put him in prison and ruins over a year of his life. Right, because in lawfare, the process is the penalty, as our friend Andy McCarthy always says. So there's no privilege. The privilege is a kid who goes to boarding, goes to prep school upenn and becomes intrigued with self help and the Unabomber. The terrorists tend to come from privileged backgrounds. The heroes, like Daniel Penny, come from working class, modest backgrounds.
- [29:31]
John Podhoretz
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Go to quince.com commentary for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q U N C E.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com commentary One reason that I brought up the 60s is that a topic that has consumed conversation between Abe and me for a year and really was arose from the fact that Trump was so close in the polls all through 2023 and 2024 was this question of how America would respond or how liberal leftist America would respond if Trump won the election in 2024, particularly given the explosion of violence and extralegal and criminal action on college campuses throughout the past year that seemed to be breeding a kind of cadre of Americans who might repurpose their anger toward other things as time moved on. You know, whether this was a kind of they were being they were put in a kiln on October 8, baked, came out, you know, fully cooked and were then ready for other action. And so I thought that if so that would mean there would be riots after the election and all of that. And obviously that did not happen. What happened in the United States after Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey and then came into the presidency and did not immediately withdraw forces from Vietnam or whatever wasn't I mean there were a couple of big demonstrations and stuff and obviously there was Kent State in 1970 where an anti war demonstration turned unexpectedly and tragically violent and other such incidents, but other stuff happened. The radicals of 1968, not that many of them, but enough of them turned into terrorists. And I'm not saying they turned into terrorists. Like they published manifestos online and said they were full of joy because somebody shot a healthcare worker. The weathermen who were domestic terrorists in The United States grew out of a cell at Columbia University, our favorite college, Matt's alma mater, and, you know, blew up a townhouse on 11th street in 1970, where they were manufacturing and fashioning bombs to use on military recruitment centers and banks all over the northeast. There were 1200 domestic bombings in the United States. According to Brian Burroughs book, Days of rage, between 1969 and 1973, the Black Panthers for a street gang in San Francisco, largely committing robberies and things like that, morphed into a political force. And among the things that we learn from Daniel Talbot's book Season of the Witch, which is a history of San Francisco in the 20th century, is that there was a period of time, I think in 1972, when one of the policies that the Panthers had adopted was that they were driving around San Francisco looking for lone white people walking on a street at night and then would shoot them dead. There were 10 or 15 such cases. You remember, if you're old enough to remember this, in 1992 or 1993, there was this bizarre incident around Washington D.C. where there was this sniper shooting people at gas stations and places like that. The entire city and environs of Washington D.C. basically shut down. People stopped going out at night. It was 2002. Was it 2002? Was it that late?
- [35:48]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [35:49]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so it was 11. Okay. So it turned out that it was this 14 year old kid and his stepfather who were.
- [35:57]
Abe Greenwald
Is a weird term, that relationship.
- [36:00]
John Podhoretz
Okay.
- [36:00]
Abe Greenwald
We never really got. That we never really got was the name of the terrorist who was going around the D.C. area shooting people. And he had a companion who was.
- [36:07]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, Lee Malvo. Right. Was the companion. Who was, who was the gunman? Right. He was. I think it doesn't matter.
- [36:14]
Abe Greenwald
But yeah.
- [36:15]
John Podhoretz
The point is like random shootings are the heart of terrorism. Terrorism is not. You know, we look. Think of, we think about 911 as being the model of terrorism that is actually not the model of terrorism is random violence against lone individuals with no reason behind it. You know, that's when. When you start talking about anarchists of the 19th century, aside from political assassinations, of which there were plenty in the 1870s and 1880s here and in Russia and in Western Europe, in Serbia. Serbia, right. The act of going around and just finding somebody to kill so that you could terrorize, you know, very, very high reward, low risk, high reward, benefit. You just shoot somebody dead on a street. Every single CEO in the United States now is scrambling to find 24 hour, seven day a week protection, maybe for the rest of their Lives. This is an extraordinarily effective terrorist act that Mr. Mangione pulled off.
- [37:31]
Abe Greenwald
He was on a laptop when the cops found him, so he was following the coverage of his events. And I would not be surprised if he had plans for another attack. I mean, just looking at. I know it's based on little visual evidence, but just looking at how he responded to those cameras, you almost get the sense that he's in his head is thinking of himself as the Joker or something like that. Somebody Bay or Bay.
- [37:55]
Christine Rosen
Well, and what's funny about that is.
- [37:57]
Abe Greenwald
That, I mean, even the movie, right? If you think about the two recent Joker movies, this is the plot is that the character played by Joaquin Phoenix commits this awful atrocity and then everybody, actually not everybody, but he inspires people to join him. Right.
- [38:14]
Christine Rosen
And what was the online debate going into the Joker when it was first released? There was a. There was a huge outcry about how this was going to encourage white male violence.
- [38:26]
John Podhoretz
Incel.
- [38:27]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, incel. And white male vigilantism.
- [38:30]
Matthew Continetti
This is important because I think that's part of the reason why it's very difficult for a lot of our legacy media institutions and the people who work for them to understand what's happening in the way that we're discussing it. And that's because we've been told for decades that it's Christian white nationalists, it's incels. It's all these bad right wing people who are the domestic terrorists.
- [38:49]
Abe Greenwald
This is very important because on my favorite podcast and John's NPR's Up first, they have tasked their extremism reporter to cover Mangione. And of course the extremism reporter's job is supposed to cover right wing extremism. And now she finds herself having to cover this case, which I think will be kind of an obsession for America for some time, and maybe even getting to the equivalent of the O.J. simpson case 30 years ago, she's covering this case, which is clearly anti capitalist violence. And if you think about all the political, the political violence we're talking about, it's, as Abe points out at the top of the show, it's emanating from the left. I mean, think about the. Think about what's been going on outside of Atlanta for years now. This kind of weird antifa fight against the so called COP City Atlanta PD training facility. You think about the disgusting acts of vandalism against great works of Western art that the climate radicals have been doing. Black Lives Matter, of course, came up the attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh. The two Attempted assassination on Trump. We talked about the baseball team shooter.
- [40:19]
John Podhoretz
The Capitol baseball team nearly killed Steve Scalise, the whip. Yeah.
- [40:26]
Abe Greenwald
Rand Paul was at that site and then he got beat up in a dispute with his neighbor a few years later. There is a. Oh, just last night there's reports that a man attempted to assault Nancy Mace because of her.
- [40:41]
John Podhoretz
He didn't attempt to assault Nancy Mace. He assaulted Nancy Mace. She's in a sling and he's a.
- [40:47]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, I didn't see that.
- [40:48]
John Podhoretz
He's a trans activist, though. It's not clear that he's trans. He's pro trans.
- [40:53]
Christine Rosen
So maybe, maybe he's an ally.
- [40:56]
Abe Greenwald
Wake up for a second and just look if you. The scales of justice here, obviously there are far right racist, antisemitic extremists. Obviously January 6th was a riot at the Capitol. But, you know, the left wing extremism is really weighing down that scale.
- [41:20]
Christine Rosen
Can I make a point about the way that this is portrayed? Because this is something that's been bothering me for a long time, which is the way that these things are reported when it's right wing or can be blamed on right wing ideology. And when it's violence, it can be blamed on right wing ideology. The coverage is about how there is a pipeline of extremism and a network and all these things are connected. And these are. We see, projected onto the ceiling like a planetarium, these constellations. Right. And the way that they write these stories is like when you're sitting at a planetarium and certain constellations light up and the other ones fade out. That's how we read about right wing violence. Left wing violence is always lone wolf, is always a single event. It doesn't mean that, you know, AOC is a story.
- [42:15]
John Podhoretz
They say they had a.
- [42:17]
Christine Rosen
Whatever.
- [42:17]
John Podhoretz
Right, right. Well, so let's go to the. Let's go to the.
- [42:20]
Christine Rosen
They had a point, right?
- [42:23]
John Podhoretz
Go back to where, where I was where a couple, a couple minutes ago. That they had a point argument is the argument that says it's terrible what he did. It's a terrible thing. It's terrible what the, you know, the Panthers shouldn't be going around killing people. But look, it's terrible injustice toward black people in the United States. I mean, what do you expect people to do when they feel frustrated and they don't see justice? Like they're going to take justice into their own hands.
- [42:52]
Matthew Continetti
Not murder. We expect them to not murder. That's just baseline.
- [42:56]
John Podhoretz
Well, that, that's, that is the correct answer.
- [42:59]
Christine Rosen
How did we go.
- [43:00]
John Podhoretz
How did we go from, yeah, it's very simplistic.
- [43:03]
Christine Rosen
How did we go from teach men not to rape to not also teach bed not to murder healthcare.
- [43:10]
John Podhoretz
But so what happens when you have evidence that a society may be in the nascent stages of spiraling out of control? And remember how easily America took to the crime wave? Crime wave. America was a country with very little crime until 1963. By 1973, the crime rate had tripled in the United States. And the general attitude was, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? I mean, look, you know, you know, it's thin red line. And, you know, now that they're doing it, I don't know how to sweeten, how to stop it. Supreme Court has made all these rulings that seem to privilege the rights of the accused over the rights of victims. And 911 policing is there. What are you going to do? Everybody kind of accepted it and then had to make a decision about how to live by voting with their feet, by moving away from places where crime was, rather than saying, criminals can't take over our streets, our cities, our place. You know, that is not what a civilized society does. It is that idea that, you know, is best typified by George Orwell's immortal statement that there are some ideas so stupid only an intellectual can believe them. This is the paramount version of that, which is, you see a society hurtling toward a kind of anarchism or, you know, of lack of faith in its own institutions and a lack of belief in its own efforts to maintain order. And what you see is an intellectualization of something that should not be intellectualized, which is what is the primary purpose of a society. It is to protect people from random acts of violence, theft and murder. Someone's not allowed to come into your house and rape your daughter. Someone can't take your gold from your, you know, from your drawer. Someone can't just come up to you and cut off your arm. We come together in a general compact that says, you don't do that to him, he doesn't do it to you. And we can all kind of go on day to day not living in a defensive crouch, you know, assuming that the next person who walks down the block is going to kill us. That's literally the foundations of our society. But liberal opinion, and I now use the word liberal from the 19th century onward because I'm about to quote something in relation to this. Liberal opinion loves to abstract and try to come up with complex ways in which that raw, naked fact about the idea that Societies exist to provide order for everyone in them is heartless or not an understanding of the true workings of things. And I want to quote from a brilliant essay that we published in Commentary by Gary Saul Morrison, the professor of Russian literature at Northwestern, about Dostoevsky's novel the Demons or the Possessed or the Devils, however you want to translate it. And this is the greatest political novel ever written, he says, and I think that's probably pretty much an accepted opinion. And it is about a terrorist cell in Russia in the early 1870s that kind of takes over a provincial town and is largely composed of the town's pretentious intellectual bourgeois elite who are harnessed into becoming a terrorist cell by a charismatic intellectual leader. And what's important is not the terrorist cell, though that is important. But here is what Morson says in his essay. It is telling that Dostoyevsky directs his most savage attacks in the devils, not at the radicals, but at the liberals who fawn on them. Here too, he proved prophetic. In the years leading to the Bolshevik takeover, the liberal Russian party known as the Cadets, the constitutional democrats, refused to condemn terrorism and other violence completely at odds with their own professed values. As long as the barbarities came from parties to their left, they, the cadets, became the Bolsheviks first victims. The lead terrorist in the Pyotr Stepanovich, understands precisely what motivates such liberals. And here Morrison quotes Dostoevsky. I could make them go through fire. Pyotr Stepanovich says, one has only to din it into them that they are not advanced enough, supposedly rejecting all authority. These liberals are, quote, ashamed to have an opinion of their own. They favor the guillotine, explains one character, because it is easier to cut off heads than to think through an idea. Shatov, another character, calls their mindset flunkyism of thought. So what we have here is the idea that the villains aren't necessarily the evildoers are the evildoers, and they are demons, as Dostoevsky calls them. This is a demonic force that has taken over. Dostoevsky was a deeply religious man, and he was not using the idea of demonic force metaphorically here. He believed it to be the case. But that this demonic force, absent this cadre of opinion that would back it up because of its supposedly enlightened framework, is what led inexorably in this book, 30 years after Dostoevsky's own death, to the Russian Revolution and the single most evil regime that the world has ever seen. And I want to overstate, like what? Mangione is shot, you know, shot A healthcare official. And I don't want to go too far, but I do want to say that when you see a tiny green shoot come out of a ground, fertile ground, like the 20 year anti institutional feeling in the United States, the sense that we're not all in it together anymore, which I think, I think we all understand has now sort of left our political life, at least for the time being, that without that everything is permitted. As Dostoevsky might say, I agree with.
- [50:06]
Abe Greenwald
You because obviously there is a thin veneer of civilization that protects us from the barbarians and that never goes away. But I do think that we should observe what's unfolding here through the lens of the recent election. And I think that the election shows that Americans are willing to not let everything slide out of control and have looked over the past four years where it does see, did see that criminality was increasing, that the rule of law meant very little, that kind of abnormality was being renormed and said no, stop. And so that's again, that's why I think I'm slightly more confident that here the antibodies will work as well and that what we're seeing is of either just deranged lefties whose voices are amplified on social media or like with those TikTok Osama bin Laden videos from last year, some kind of foreign power trying to undermine the US system from within.
- [51:26]
John Podhoretz
I don't think in the 60s and 70s that there was any sense in the United States that the ideas that I am talking about, the Kerner Commission ideas, the liberal jurisprudence adopted by the Supreme Court and federal courts all over the country, all of that, that any of that had common public purchase, in fact, you could say almost exactly the opposite was the case that there was a kind of a vomitous revolt against all of it, that if you take Watergate out of the scenario in 1974, you would see an uninterrupted period from 1968 to 1992 in which the people who espoused those ideas only remained in power in Washington due to gerrymandering and a kind of entropic degradation.
- [52:22]
Abe Greenwald
Cultural rot is still there. Right?
- [52:24]
Matthew Continetti
But this is, this is why we.
- [52:25]
Abe Greenwald
Didn'T turn into this. We didn't have a Bolshevik revolution.
- [52:28]
John Podhoretz
We didn't exactly because the American people wouldn't let that happen.
- [52:31]
Abe Greenwald
I'm saying that the American people are.
- [52:33]
John Podhoretz
Still won't let it happen.
- [52:35]
Matthew Continetti
And this is, this is why, to a point we were talking about the other day on the podcast, this is why Trump's remark about success could prove to be important. Because his definition of success is rooting out some of these things, whether it be dei, whether it be progressive prosecutors. And the irony of him being becoming a stand in for rule of law, obviously is noted. But that is, I think Matt's absolutely right. People are voting against this. And he doesn't actually have to be as radicalizing a force as he appeared to be in 2016 to do it. He just has to return to a mean that I think a lot of people want to return to.
- [53:10]
Seth Mandel
I just want to point out on this Dostoevsky point about the liberal support network and the flunkyism of thought, what makes someone like John Fetterman great? And I do think he's great. It's not that he agrees with us on Israel. I'm very appreciative that he agrees with us on Israel. It's that he's not afraid of the radicals. It's that he doesn't demonstrate the flunkyism of thought, if I'm getting the quote correct, that's what makes him stand out. And the fact that he stands out, because we don't see that anywhere, at least not articulated consistently, at least not sort of couched, is worrisome, right?
- [54:03]
Abe Greenwald
Absolutely. And if I can just make. I know we're coming to a close, but I want to make one observation. We're talking about history. It's all really interesting. There was a decision made in the 1990s by the federal government to publish the Unabomber Manifesto in order to suss out the location and identity of Ted Kaczynski. And indeed, the Unabomber was caught. Kaczynski is in prison, in solitary. But the ripple effects of that decision, I think, have carried over. And just as we look through history and we kind of see what are decision points that have unintended consequences, the fact that Kaczynski is still exerting some influence over young male minds and perhaps even inspiring copycats decades later is reason to kind of think about the nature of that decision. And I think a similar decision will have to be made once this guy Mangione begins writing from prison. I think I have no doubt he will do that. He's a very intelligent person. That's clear. And I don't think his writing should be allowed to be published. There, I said it.
- [55:29]
John Podhoretz
Censorship. I am so glad you brought this up. I've been thinking about this obsessively for the last couple of days because, yes, the publication of the UN Obama Manifesto, which was done in two major newspapers in the United States, the New York Times and the Washington Post at the request of the federal government and did lead his brother David to recognize the pros as the pros of his brother and call the FBI and say, I think that's my brother Ted, who wrote this manifesto. They asked it because they had no idea where he was going to strike next. They didn't know what to do. And he had said, if you publish my manifesto, I will belay my next act. And you can see how tortuous a decision this was. Now, I don't want to do one of these like I'm an old man thing, but, I mean, I was there while all this was going on. And it was a very hot, complicated matter. And the publishers of the New York Times and the Washington Post did not want to do this. They didn't want to do it. And Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the United States, kind of talked them into it. There was great fear of doing it. It was published if you ever saw it.
- [56:59]
Abe Greenwald
I remember the day.
- [57:00]
John Podhoretz
Almost illegible type.
- [57:02]
Abe Greenwald
Yes, I remember.
- [57:02]
John Podhoretz
Published in the morning Five Point Agate for the purpose of making it as difficult to read as possible. There was very little online presence, so it wasn't as though it was distributed nationally immediately. And then a couple of years later, when I was the editorial page editor of the New York Post, there was a guy, a young, rich, repulsive, radical publisher by the name of Beau Friedlander. And Beau Friedlander decided that he was going to publish the Unabomber Manifesto as a paperback because he had a point, you see. I mean, granted, you shouldn't be sending bombs to David Galorn, turn blowing his hand off, but we were going down a path toward scientific rationalism that was going to lead to the destruction of all humanity. And one of the two campaigns that I waged as the editorial page editor of the New York Post in my two years that I did that job. One was to go after Al Sharpton for failing to pay the $165,000 that he had been judged owed to a man named Stephen Pagonis, the Deputy DA of Dutchess county, whom he had defamed by claiming that this man had he and his friends in the nascent Black Lives Matter before Black Lives Matter movement had masturbated to a photo of Tawana Brawley. That was one of the things that they said about Steve McOnas, sue them for defamation. He won the suit. I believe Sharpton has still to this day, never properly paid his debt to Stephen Pagonis. And I wrote about this every day for I did what was an early version of a GoFundMe for Pagonis to pay his legal bills. And we raised, I don't know, 250, $300,000 to pay his legal bills. And the other was a campaign against Beau Friedlander in which I basically just published editorial after editorial after editorial about the moral depravity of this act. He loved it, Beau Friedlander. He wasn't mad at me. He thought I was doing him a huge service. And the fact that the Unabomber Manifesto remains available is not the result of the New York Times and the Washington Post having put it in 5 point agate. It is because Beau Freelander published the book version of that. And who is Beau Friedlander? He is the guy that Saul Morrison is talking about in his essay Repossessed and Commentary. He is the liberal who is the enabler of the terrorism. And should that regime ever. I don't know where Beau Friedlander is now, but should a regime that Mangione or somebody like Mangioni would want to come into being came into being, he would be the first person in front of the firing squad, because that's how it works. They're not going to shoot us first. They shoot them first.
- [60:24]
Christine Rosen
Can I say something about that point, about the he has a point thing? And the reason that somebody like Beau Friedlander would publish that, the other part, the other lesson from that book from Demons, Devils, the Possessed, whatever you want to call it, which is something on its own, that it doesn't have one name, but is that these guys, they find along the way, these theorists, these radical theorists, they find that a few years ago he was in this city in Europe and he was spouting this sort of thing, and it got him kicked out of town or whatever it was. The point was that there's a cynicism in the people who are credited with ideas that have a point that is that. And that they're getting too much credit, that they try out ideas and when it doesn't work, they drop it. They are. They are traveling salesmen in a way, right? They are the Wells Fargo wagon coming around the bend in a way. They are not deep thinkers who have, you know, who've really seen the future. They are people who are. Look at, you know, the ideas marketplace as an actual marketplace, and they test things and what works and they use it. And then they get sort of. And so this is the other thing about the, you know, they have a point is that they get lionized as if they were philosophers when what's really happening is that they're just playing on people's fears and, you know, and the things that they worry about and the things that they're angry about and the things that they care about. They're just people who say, there goes my crowd. I better get to the front of it sort of thing.
- [62:25]
Seth Mandel
But they are true believers. I mean, Una Bomber is a true believer. Magioni is a true believer. They're not, it's not to them from their standpoint. They're not snake oil salesmen from their standpoint. Sure, yeah.
- [62:39]
John Podhoretz
Can I make. I'm going to make one more point in praise of Dostoevsky. Who needs it, you know, because he just says, you know, he needs a little boost. Wish he got more credit, you know, so more people read him than Colleen Hoover. You know, the other novel that Dostoevsky wrote about murder. I mean, he's written. Most of his books involve a murder, but is Crime and Punishment, obviously. And Crime and Punishment is also about a 20, 21 year old intellectual living in St. Petersburg, Ras Kolnikoff, who was trying to write articles for radical magazines in the late 1860s. And why do I bring this up? Because we hear that Mangione had had this terrible problem with his back. Spine was misaligned. There are photographs on his social media of screws in someone's spine. Looks like maybe it's his. He had debilitating back pain, according to his roommate in Hawaii. And you know, he went off the grid. Family didn't know where he was. Maybe he was disfigured by chronic pain and driven mad by it. This is in Crime and Punishment. In Crime and Punishment, Ras Kolnikoff takes an ax and severs and splits his landlady's head in two. And for the 100 pages before he does this, what you were reading about is Raskolnikov getting sicker and sicker. He has a flu. He has a terrible fever and he is feverish. He is having hallucinations. He is, you know, he can't get warm. He can't get cold. You know, he can't. His body temperature is all over the place. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's getting into arguments with people on the street and doesn't know what he's saying and all of that. And Dostoevsky says he was really sick. He was not in his right mind. He was deeply 104 fever. He was deeply, deeply sick. Guess what? He's still guilty of the crime that he committed. And the book ends with him being sent to Siberia to pay for the crimes that he committed. Because sick or not sick, as Matt would say, there are 200 million people in America with a fever, and then they. Or. Or with back pain, and they don't go and shoot a guy whose father was a pipe fitter while his father owned country clubs in Baltimore in order to even the American score in terms of fairness in healthcare, like, ultimately, there are no excuses. Ultimately, Raskolnikov doesn't have an excuse. What Dostoevsky is saying is all of human nature is contained within the decisions that we make at any given moment. Any human being, as he says in the Brothers Karmatov, like, what person has not at one point in his life, wanted. Not wanted to kill his father? Right.
- [65:51]
Abe Greenwald
Is very intelligent and attracted to nihilism.
- [65:55]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [65:55]
Abe Greenwald
And. And also, you know, that the medical term escapes me, but this idea that the. The physical sickness is hap. It could also, you know, be a result of what's going on in the person's mind.
- [66:08]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [66:08]
Abe Greenwald
The person's psychology, too. And so when you look at what Manjoni, one wonders, you know, this pain, where was it actually coming from? And because he had also expressed interest in Lyme disease, he was, you know, and there's this critical moment, it seems, in the six months ago, where he just drops off the radar.
- [66:29]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [66:29]
Abe Greenwald
And the family.
- [66:31]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [66:31]
Abe Greenwald
His family had no idea where he was. His mother reported him missing in San Francisco in early November. His friends didn't know where what had happened. So there's, you know, I. I was looking at the psychotropics, but there's also this issue that perhaps this is the physical was a manifestation of deep psychiatric problems.
- [66:53]
John Podhoretz
Absolutely. And as I say, a great novelist like Dostoevsky with an infinite capacity to understand the complexities of human nature, can simultaneously say, had Raskolnikov not had this fever, maybe the thing that kept him from taking an ax and splitting his landlady's and her daughter's head open, he would have been able to control. But ultimately, that's not the point. The point is that they're dead, and he's trying to evade responsibility for the crime that he committed on the grounds in his own head that she was abusing him by charging him rent that he could not afford.
- [67:37]
Abe Greenwald
In a great American twist, the Peter Porphyry of our story is a coffee clutch at a McDonald's in El Snow. That is a true American twist.
- [67:48]
Matthew Continetti
Because you know, who hangs out at Fable.
- [67:50]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [67:51]
Matthew Continetti
You know, who hangs out at McDonald's? Retirees who actually still read newspapers and watch local news and have a sense of what's going on in the world that isn't online. It's. They're not on Twitter or X.
- [68:01]
John Podhoretz
There we go.
- [68:01]
Christine Rosen
They are. And so is Fetterman, right? They asked Fetterman once why he is the way he is with all this stuff. And he said, you know, it was making my head crazy. I got offline. I literally just stopped reading the Internet. And now he's, you know, the guy who can see right from wrong because he got off the Internet.
- [68:18]
John Podhoretz
We didn't even get to the, you know, the repulsive Taylor Lawrence, the world of the joy, the expressions of joy and all of that. Maybe that's something that we will be revisiting, you know, as this case continues. Because I think, as Matt said, I don't think it's going away. It's too suggestive of so much that is going on that we are not going to. We are not going to easily and.
- [68:45]
Matthew Continetti
To continue our discussion or move on from it, to continue our Dostoevsky theme. Remember when he tries to write someone who's more like the Christ like figure, like in the Idiot, he's a less compelling character. I hate to say it, but like, you know, people, you can connect the sort of good, evil warring within of the Raskolnikov is. Is a better story.
- [69:02]
John Podhoretz
Al Karmatov, same thing. I wanted to finish the point that I was making about the brothers, because I want to end up by having been quoted as saying, hey, you remember that great thing Dostoevsky said about how everybody at some point or other wants to kill his father? Which is something that Ivan Karmatov says. And the brothers Kov. The point is that Ivan Karmatov says that and then kills his father, which is the crime. And the brothers Karamazov. The point is impulses are impulses and actions are actions. And the crisis in American liberalism is the idea that the impulse should. The impulse, whether it's evil or noble, lead to evil action. The impulse provides no excuse. You're mad at your dad. You're a Menendez brother. You're mad at your dad. You don't get to shoot him in the face. You know what? Even if he abused you, you don't get to shoot him in the face. Go to the cops or the woman.
- [70:15]
Seth Mandel
Or the woman who just killed her father after Trump won, right?
- [70:19]
John Podhoretz
Oh, yeah, the impulse. Yeah, the impulse is explanatory, but it is not exculpatory. We live with evil impulses. Like this is the theme of Yom Kippur for Jews, right, is you have these two inclinations. There are these two kinds of bad inclinations, and you have to atone for having them, because having them is what it means to be alive and not giving into them is what it means to be a civil person living in a civil society with everybody that you.
- [70:56]
Christine Rosen
Live with and not nurturing them. Right. The part of the whole point is that you recognize them as impulses and you say, oh, I'm angry. Okay, that's anger. That's bad right away. Or are you the type to nurture that thought and let it sort of.
- [71:12]
John Podhoretz
Grow and thrive, let the inclination turn into action? And the great, as I say, from the 60s onward, the great crisis in what I view as sort of the distortions of American liberalism are the idea that when you can lay out that somebody had a grievance, that they are then allowed to turn that grievance into action. That then excuses the monstrousness of the behavior that they undertake in order to express and channel that grievance into something real as opposed to something that is working out in their head. So our commentary recommends today the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the essay by Gary Saul Morrison called Repossessed in Commentary. Just search at Google. GARY SAUL Morrison, M O R S O N and the word repossessed. It was from our October issue. Very proud of this essay. We didn't, you know, we commissioned it with the thoughts, as I say, of what might happen after Trump's election if there were going to be a lot of it was about after October 7th. But, but I think, you know, like all not only Dostoevsky and Works of Prophecy, but Mor Sonian Works of Prophecy, it seems to have it seems to have purchased beyond the initial inspiration for its writing and publication. So we'll be back with you tomorrow. For Matt, Christine, Abe and Seth, I'm John Plumbort's Keep the Candle Bur.