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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint.
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Jon Podhoretz
You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments.
- [00:14]
Ryan Reynolds
But that's weird.
- [00:15]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, one judgment anyway.
- [00:18]
Ryan Reynolds
Give it a try.
- [00:19]
Jon Podhoretz
@Mintmobile.Com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mintmobile.
- [00:30]
Seth Mandel
Do.
- [00:34]
Jon Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the.
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Seth Mandel
Worst Some preacher pain Some die of.
- [00:44]
Jon Podhoretz
Thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect.
- [00:51]
Abe Greenwald
The worst Hope for the best.
- [00:55]
Jon Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, May 20, 2025. I am Jon Pod Horace, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:06]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:08]
Jon Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:10]
Ryan Reynolds
Hi, John.
- [01:11]
Jon Podhoretz
And joining us today, the editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon, Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
- [01:17]
Eliana Johnson
Hi, John.
- [01:18]
Jon Podhoretz
I'm gonna start by doing something slightly nepotistic. I want to read to you guys from my sister Ruthie Bloom's column in the Jewish News Syndicate, which is called Jill Biden Should Win Worst Wife Award. So the timing of the announcement of Biden's diagnosis fit right in with his family's mendacity and manipulations. Indeed, it came on the release of the her tapes and two days before the Tapper Thompson revelations were set to hit the stands. But if former first lady Jill Biden imagined that sympathy for her husband's dire condition was would upstage, if not put the kibosh on the depth of the conspiratorial deception. She's in for a rude awakening now that members of the press and previous White House staffers are rushing to shove her under the proverbial bus, she's on her own. Still, she might just be flattered by her depiction in original sin as the real power in the White House running the show. If not, heaven forbid, the country with an iron fist. Okay, so Jill Biden is, I think, Jill Biden and everybody is the day two story of the Biden cancer diagnosis, which, as I said in my post yesterday, I started with the sentence, come on, man. I mean, we know that he didn't just find out on Friday that he had stage 4 prostate cancer metastasized to the bone with a Gibson score of nine. That's not what happens with prostate cancer. Zeke Emanuel, one of the Emanuel brothers And the. And Obama's Obamacare official and Biden's Covid official, an oncologist, said as much. So the question here is who. Who was propping Biden up and for what reason? And obviously, the person who is most responsible for this is his wife. Because, of course, if his wife had said, my God, we have to get my husband into treatment, or, my God, my husband really, this is, this is straining his capacities. And you know, this is. Aside from not being good for the country, it's really not good for him. She is the central figure here. Historically, if you're writing a novel, any wherever, wherever you were, this. This is where you would go, Eliana, give us some. Give us some of the free Beacons juice on this matter.
- [03:55]
Eliana Johnson
Well, I do think there's another possibility here, and that involves this White House physician, Kevin o' Connor, who is a longtime Biden family confidant. And we have this story in the Washington Post that we were all laughing about last night. And the headline is Biden Diagnosis Draws well Wishes, Questions and Conspiracy Theories. And you're in the conspiracy theory camp, John, you conspiracy theorist, saying they hid it from us. But I do think the other possibility is that Kevin o' Connor in the White House, he may not have actually been testing Biden for this. He may have been completely negligent. So far as we know, the guy wasn't actually given a cognitive test. That is what Tapper and Thompson report. Now, he didn't need to be given a cognitive test, but.
- [04:59]
Jon Podhoretz
But he was given a cognitive test every single day, every time he appeared before the court.
- [05:04]
Eliana Johnson
Right. But like, this guy should be subpoenaed and asked questions. What tests were you given and what tests weren't you given? And he actually may not have been testing this guy for anything because he didn't want to have to say if he was asked that Biden had X, Y and Z condition. I mean, we just don't know. And the President of the United States may have been getting negligent medical care on purpose. I mean, I think there's a lot we don't know.
- [05:34]
Jon Podhoretz
So that's even worse. Right, Right. We're just getting worse and worse to kill him, basically make sure that if you might have cancer, okay, I think.
- [05:44]
Eliana Johnson
That there are a lot of people who would have been fine to run Biden again, thinking he would win and swap him out for Kamala because they thought that was better than having her run and lose. I totally think that. But I think there's a lot we don't know about the medical treatment he was receiving, the role of this doctor. And rather than calling people like you conspiracy theorists, the job of the mainstream press right now would be to be asking these questions and trying to get to the bottom of this.
- [06:16]
Jon Podhoretz
Let's talk about some of the questions, okay? Because what we have are details like a kind of mosaic or like impressionistic series of things that you can put together into a credible portrait. Right? There is the extraordinary amount of time that Biden spent in Delaware at home, in his home. No visitors logs, right? No release of visitors logs from the White House. So we don't know who was going in and out. We don't know what was going on in Maryland. We used to make jokes on the podcast I did about how he was going home to. To the house in Delaware and getting his blood, you know, like getting a full body blood transfusion like Keith Richard used to get when he needed to clean his system out if he was going to get tested at the airport for whether or not he was a heroin addict. This is literally something that happened that Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones, you know, guitarist, would, Would. Would have to do so that he could get through if he were tested. And so that was a joke. Maybe it wasn't such a joke. You know, I mean, we don't know what's in Biden's basement. We don't know what kind of stuff he's got there. We don't know if in 2017, 2018, he might. They might have diagnosed him with prostate cancer and that he was treated. There are different ways to treat prostate cancer. You can remove a prostate, which he probably didn't have done because he wouldn't be where he is now. But you could have. There was a kind of zapping with a radio sort of. Kind of chemo or not chemo, but like radiation and stuff. There are various things that people do with prostate cancer. The point is that we don't know. It does not pass the smell test, that. That they only found out last week, just in time for the publication date of Original Sin, that. That he is dying. But.
- [08:11]
Abe Greenwald
But to Eliana's point, if prostate cancer is. Is detected early and treated, the survival rate is so high. Like, why. The fact that it got to this point at all has me wondering if, in fact, they ever knew. I mean, that, I think, is a legitimate aspect here. I mean, if they were blindsided by this late day at this late date, it is an extraordinary negligence.
- [08:46]
Jon Podhoretz
Zeke Emmanuel.
- [08:46]
Ryan Reynolds
Right. I mean, my favorite headline about this whole thing is on the Washington Post. And it Says Biden's cancer debate. Biden's cancer renews debate about prostate screenings for older men. I mean, you're told to start getting prostate screenings at 45. Biden is 130. No, no, no, this is not about prostate screenings.
- [09:07]
Jon Podhoretz
So there is, there is a thing which is that they basically decided and this is now, as Mark Siegel said on Fox last night, this is now like been superseded by the effectiveness of cancer treatments. But there was this idea that you should stop testing for prostate cancer after the age of 80 or from the age of 80 onward because prostate cancer is so prevalent in old men and it's such a slow growing. If you get it when you're 80, you are likely to die of something else before prostate cancer kills you. So in the world where people were trying to stop unnecessary testing, there was a guidance somewhere or other that said you don't test someone 80 or older for prostate cancer.
- [09:59]
Ryan Reynolds
So then what Abe says is true, then it's more realistic that they genuinely didn't know, isn't it?
- [10:05]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, here's why. Because he's got a nine on the Gibson score. He's got stage four cancer. So he was 82, right. Last year. It is possible that it can move that fast. It is very rare in a man that old for it to move that fast. If you're in your 50s and you are diagnosed with prostate cancer, they have to move instantly because it is very dangerous in your 50s, but it is not so dangerous in your 70s or 80s. However, if you're the person who goes and gets a full battery of medical tests as the President of the United States, you would probably have to make a conscious and deliberate decision not to test. It's just, it's part of the blood test. Now. It's not like you have a separate, you know, when I get my annual screening and they take blood, you got your blood sugar level and this and that, the other thing, and then they test for PSA like that, that is, that is a, that is a thing. It's not necessary to like have a separate elaborate. It's only getting a colonoscopy or something like that.
- [11:19]
Eliana Johnson
But isn't a cognitive test a routine thing for an 80 year old guy? And they weren't doing that on him either.
- [11:25]
Jon Podhoretz
I don't think it is routine actually, honestly. But, but as I say, as you say, really need one. And of course, the medical testing in the very rare case that you have the President, United States here, even that is not, he is not obliged to release the results of his medical tests, and he didn't. What's more, that's another thing that's revealed this week is that his medical reports were like, Trump's, in a weird way. They were like, he's great. He's fine. Don't worry. He had a little skin cancer. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. So he doesn't have to issue the. The medical forms.
- [12:06]
Abe Greenwald
The quote from the Tapper book, you know, from the. From the doctor that. From the physician that they got a hold of on the. On the White House medical Unit, is, if there's no diagnosis, there's nothing to disclose.
- [12:21]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [12:22]
Abe Greenwald
That was in reference to the cognitive diagnosis.
- [12:27]
Jon Podhoretz
But let's get back to Ruthie's point about Jill Biden being the worst wife in the world award. Like, we. It's not like over the last two, two and a half years, that was crocodile tears to say, why was his family putting him through this? What. You know, strains like this on a person who was suffering kind of like a downward slope hastens the downward slope. I mean, some of this is like whatever's going on in the brain, but, like, stress. The stress of being put under pressure to perform in this way, as you are less and less capable of doing so, contributes to the decline. And it was. He needed to be staying there for as long as possible for other mo. For other reasons and not for his own good. And Nancy Reagan is somebody who, you know, kept. People didn't do this. Right. I mean, people didn't. Didn't behave this way, and now she's behaved this way.
- [13:34]
Abe Greenwald
But I very much get the sense that he was very stubborn about this and wanted to stay, and obviously.
- [13:41]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [13:41]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. I mean, so a lot of this comes from him, right or wrong. You know, even after. Even after Kamala lost, he wasn't quite grappling with reality of the situation, talking about how polls show she could have won, he could have won. You know, so I think it's. A lot of it really does have to do with him. For all we know, there were conversations between the two of them where she said, what are you doing? You can't do this. And he said, don't tell me.
- [14:12]
Ryan Reynolds
I mean, I think that's right. But also what we know from his memoir and stuff is that he cares very much what his family members say about running and about staying in public office. And so that's the one thing that doesn't really connect, which is asking his children and asking Jill before he runs and all that stuff suggests, you know, and what he went through in 2016. And then the process up to 2020, it all suggests, at least from Biden's own history, that if Jill had said, you can't do this anymore. You're dying and your brain is oozing out your ears, he would have said, okay. You know, she would have devised. She would have said, look, you'll go down a hero, be cincinnatus. And he probably would have listened to her. And, you know, you need loved ones around who are willing to tell you, I'd rather have you be alive.
- [14:57]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, can I make a dumb analogy? Like there are people who have elder, you know, have their parents who are living in Florida and they're 87 and they're driving, and they have to have the incredibly painful conversation where they say, we have to take your keys away and sell your car and get you to turn in your driver's license because you're going to kill somebody if you keep driving. And if you're President, United States, making life and death decisions about the future of the planet Earth and choices that are made, you are going to kill somebody in, you know, in an enfeebled condition. And therefore, the person who doesn't have the difficult conversation about taking away the car keys, which I every. Everybody says this is like one of the hardest things on Earth to do with your parents, right? But people have to do it, right? And so Jill Biden. Now, what Joe Biden might have been thinking is, you know, it'll be Armageddon for the planet if he doesn't stay in as president. Therefore, you know, fewer people will get killed than if he is the one behind the wheel of a car. Because you're going to give a, you're going to give a, an 18 wheeler to Donald Trump and he'll smash, you know, into a nuclear power plant and blow the planet up or something. That would be the only, that's the only explanation that we're given, right, is that, is that he needed to be there to save the world from Trump. And of course, the fact that he stayed in too long is one of the reasons that Trump is now president again. So great, great plan there. That was also Ruthie's point, I think, about the bad wife and bad judgment Olympics that we talked about yesterday. Like, how stupid are they? I mean, this scenario that you laid.
- [16:44]
Ryan Reynolds
Out, more so than the public, right? It's one thing if I wasn't alive when the JFK cover up was going on or some of FDR's health stuff, but I get the sense that nothing was nearly as obvious to the public, of course not. Just not just. Not just obvious. Like, oh, if you looked, you could see it. What I mean is the public was polled and said, he's too old, he can't run again. And a majority of Democrats said that, in addition to a large majority of Republicans. So, like, the public was screaming, yeah, we see it. It's not. You're not actually covering it up.
- [17:25]
Seth Mandel
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- [18:33]
Jon Podhoretz
So. And I don't really need it too.
- [18:36]
Seth Mandel
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- [21:13]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, no. So in the case of FDR and JFK, the funnel was totally tightened. Like no one ever saw FDR in a wheelchair, let alone saw him. When you see those pictures of him at Yalta in 1945, I mean, he looks like a corpse. And he died six weeks later or something like that. I mean, he was only 64 years old or something Roosevelt when he died and he looked like he was 90. And it's like imagine if you saw, if it was a world in which you saw him every day on television. Like he would not have gotten through 1944. He would have said, we're at war. We just did D day. He's too old to be president. You know, I mean that's a real thing. And he knew it too, because as Matt said yesterday, that's why he swapped out his vice president from a kind of Soviet loving lunatic to this, you know, machine politician from Missouri who unexpectedly became a great president.
- [22:16]
Eliana Johnson
Can we just pause for a second to discuss the fact that we may have had a President of the United States with a terminal illness and that the mainstream press, despite everything we know about what his aides did to conceal his enfeeblement, is saying that the idea that they may have concealed his illness is a conspiracy theory rather than trying to Report out, what did the Bidens and his aides know about this serious illness and when and did they try to hide it from the American people? It is another chapter in this story, right?
- [23:16]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, you, you texted me last night, you're like, so Will. You know, and this is actually, this goes to the enfeeblement part, right? That semaphore reported that in the Tapper Thompson book that he had Spielberg editing his material for a never aired made for video town hall, that his staff used slow motion videos of Biden so people didn't realize how slowly he was walking in real time. And you asked me over text like, so the NYT and Washington Post wrote about right wing cheap fakes. And here we had, here we had the most expensive fakes in the world going on by the world's. By the single greatest film director who has ever lived and still couldn't pull it off. And they're talking.
- [24:10]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah, yeah, no, if you go and look at some of the Biden campaign ads, you can see how much slow motion footage of Biden was used. And that is apparently on Spielberg's guidance to conceal how old he seemed and how slow his movements seemed in real life. Meanwhile, the Washington Post and the New York Times are writing that Republicans are spinning conspiracy theories that make him seem old and demented. And Steven Spielberg's in the White House doing this. So the White House is actually producing expensive fakes and they're gaslighting the public to say those videos are fake. So my question to John was like, okay, so do we think Katie Glick at the New York Times, who wrote the. Was, you know, one of the triple byline authors on that piece and to lose Solar Nepa at the Washington Post, who wrote that piece about the conspiracy theories, like, will there be any price to be paid for this? And none of them got the story about what was happening inside the White House about their, about Steven Spielberg going in there and they're trying to produce videos to conceal Biden's old age.
- [25:30]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, we knew that Spielberg.
- [25:34]
Eliana Johnson
This medical story comes out zero.
- [25:37]
Jon Podhoretz
So we knew that Spielberg was consulting with them. And that was of course considered. Wow, that's great. Like, Steven Spielberg's gonna help him.
- [25:44]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah. Jeffrey Katzenberg was like, holy crap. Like, get over there.
- [25:47]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah, it's the best. Like he's got the best. Who does Trump have? Lee Greenwood, you know, who does Trump have? Kid Rock? Biden has Steven Spielberg.
- [25:58]
Ryan Reynolds
I would just, I would just suggest that, that in the future, in the future, that should be their attitude toward the President's doctors, He should have the best medical care, not the best filmmakers to hide the fact that he's not getting medical care.
- [26:16]
Jon Podhoretz
This is the genius of what Trump said yesterday about Biden when he said, I feel so sorry and it's a terrible thing, but we really need to figure out. He was like, look, I know I was at Walter Reed, right, because he got Covid and nearly, he was taken to Walter Reed when he nearly died of COVID that week. And he said, I mean, I've never seen such good doctors. They have such great doctors at Walter Reed. So I don't know who was actually treating him. I think we need to get to the bottom of this. It was like one of Trump's animal cunning genius statements. Like he had access to the world's greatest medical care at a drop of a hat. He's the President of the United States. And when you, it's like when, when Trump needed it, he got it and was saved from, you know, from COVID And when Biden got it, he ends up stage four prostate cancer and a nine Gibson score. The point about the nine score I just want to point out is prostate cancer is in almost all cases a very slow growing cancer. That's why Zeke Emanuel, the oncologist said he's had this. Likely he's had this for 10 years. And what beggars belief is that he had it for 10 years, meaning that he might have had it when he was 72 and that it was never detected. And I just don't believe that that could possibly be the case unless it turns out that he's a, you know, he's like somebody who had a 5% of cases or 4% of prostate cancer cases as an 82 year old man. He got it and then it just, you know, then it just whipped through his body.
- [27:57]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, but then I did. But then why don't, why don't you treat it aggressively then?
- [28:02]
Jon Podhoretz
Because if you treat prostate cancer, you got to get off the stage like it is, it is, it is exhausting. It is painful. If you have the prostate removed, you know, there's surgery and if you, if you are, if you are actually getting kind of like the, the non removal treatment you are in, I mean, you're not necessarily incapacitated. But trust me when I tell you from personal experience that, you know, it's very hard to get around, you know, do a day's work if you're not President of the United States.
- [28:39]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [28:39]
Jon Podhoretz
You know, that's, you know, it's like lucky people are Often retirees when they're in this position because, because they, you know, they can't ask anybody who had it before.
- [28:50]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, this is, look, this is too much speculating.
- [28:52]
Jon Podhoretz
But could have been treated. Yeah, here's my totally ignorant speculation. I'd say it's ignorant and you can attack me for being irresponsible if you want. He could have had a treatment that stated or abated it without having the prostate removed and that the treatment wore off and was ineffective. And that, that's when they stopped looking because the idea was, okay, he went into remission or something like that, but we don't know anything about his medical condition after 2016. I think if I read correctly, as vice president, he had, he did release medical records.
- [29:34]
Abe Greenwald
But you don't stop. I'm so, I hate to do this because I'm not a doctor or anything, but you don't stop looking when you get a treatment. That, that, that, ah, that you monitor it. I mean, ah.
- [29:47]
Jon Podhoretz
But this is, I think, Eliana's point, right. And the quote, which is, maybe you don't want to see it. Right. He's over 80 and you know what? They treated it and it seemed to work. So. Or maybe it didn't work. Like, here's the other possibility. Just everything that we've been talking about for four years, the slow gate, the shuffling, the, you know, the this, the that. The other thing, all of this could have been the result of the prostate cancer. And so that speaks to. It beggars belief that they wouldn't have been just looking to see how he was. In general, you don't need a neural. But, you know, there are all kinds of ways you can test somebody without giving, you know, saying, who's the President? And you know, put. Repeat these five words back to me, that neurological test, like there are all sorts of things like walk across the room. Does this hurt? Does that hurt?
- [30:38]
Ryan Reynolds
All we know is the president would have been a great question to ask him actually during that time.
- [30:45]
Jon Podhoretz
Whatever the actual question they ask you, Right. What year is it and who's the president?
- [30:51]
Abe Greenwald
But I mean, so whatever the actual scenario, it's just not this one, you know, but it might.
- [30:57]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, it could be five others, but yeah, it could be.
- [31:01]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [31:01]
Jon Podhoretz
But we have no reason to believe that they're telling us the truth. Which is, I think Eliana's point here.
- [31:07]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [31:08]
Jon Podhoretz
Is that if they take in the fact that he, they. His decline was hidden as a deliberate strategy by the White House and the people closest to Biden for years that everything they say about him now has to be taken not only with a grain of salt, but you should probably presume that it's false. They're guilty until proven innocent because of what they did on the cognitive stuff before.
- [31:32]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah. And my understanding is that they are laughing at all of the mainstream reporters for picking up and running with their bs, including the cheap fake stuff.
- [31:46]
Jon Podhoretz
You assume that or you.
- [31:48]
Eliana Johnson
You hear that I'm here. That.
- [31:51]
Jon Podhoretz
Wow. Well, I mean, look, Jake Sullivan, last week, his national security advisor, his closest. The person who was closest to him in the. In the realm of foreign policy says. I mean, I was just shocked by his debate performance. And I do. You know, I mean, I never. Blah, blah, blah. It's like, how. How can you open a mouth and say this in 2025, when he had to leave the race? What happened? He had a bad day. And then you're like, okay, leave the race. Like, you're just. How can you. Like, I don't. It's amazing.
- [32:29]
Eliana Johnson
You know what, though, John?
- [32:31]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [32:32]
Eliana Johnson
All right, well, two things. Somehow, you know, all the people who saw him the most, like Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, like, they only ever. They saw him every day, but they only ever saw him on good days. And like, the American people, like, you know, we all saw him on bad days. But in their defense, like, it is their job to lie. Like their political hacks. It is the media's job to, like, try to pierce through all their lies. So that's the only thing I will say in their defense, like, okay, they're supposed to be lying to us, kind of.
- [33:07]
Jon Podhoretz
So my beloved Seth, an alumnus, and I. My beloved New York Post, greatest Wood of the Year. That's what you call the front page headline in the New York Post. The Wood. Just to give you a little side tip, it's called the Wood because when they laid out the paper in the old days with ha. Type, the letters that they needed for those. For those were so big that they couldn't be. They needed to use wooden blocks to make the letters because the. Because the type was the type. You couldn't get them big enough on a type tray. And so it's called the Wood. The New York Post front page. And it's. It's. The headline is Spin Doctors. Right? That's. That is the headline. And the question now, again, is not about Biden. I mean, we can raise the question about Jill and her, you know, and her moral whatever, but it is all these people around him who never. Who never blew the whistle or tried to move because they were tasked with the security of the American people and the oath that they took to the Constitution to preserve and protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and the United States itself. And they're all scurrying, running for the hills and trying to, you know, you know, sort of retcon whatever went on and say, yeah, they was terrible what they saw and all of that in, in June of 2024, but nothing before. And you know, as Matt said yesterday, like, there are these people they should not get anywhere near, you know, power again.
- [34:43]
Ryan Reynolds
I mean, I mean, that's, that's the thing, that's the other thing the press can do is how many stories did we see? You know, Alyssa Farah gets hired by cnn and it's a week long story about a revolt inside CNN that somebody who worked for Mike Pence, who worked for Donald Trump would, would, we would be hired, you know, as an analyst or something like that or his, you know, any other press secretaries. There was a, there was, there was outrage every time. Basically somebody from the administration or at least who was in the position of being a spin doctor, and they were like, fine, that was their job there. But you can't put them on cnn. Yeah.
- [35:25]
Jon Podhoretz
Who's got a nightly show, who's got a nightly show on msnbc, right?
- [35:28]
Ryan Reynolds
Jen Psaki. I mean, this is literally his press team is on tv. I saw, you know, at one point there was, you know, his former chief of staff was being interviewed by Jen Psaki and it was like the Biden administration is talking to itself on msnbc, right? This, his, this person who worked for him and this person were in a different capacity. The two people responsible, right, for managing the way that he looked to the public daily is Chief of staff Ron Klain and his press secretary, Jen Psaki. And it was like watching a strategy meeting inside the Biden administration. But the media could muster some of that outrage that they had at, you know, how dare so and so get hired, you know, to cover election night or whatever. Whereas the, we're watching, I mean, it's like, and after Trump had his battles in his first term as president with the FBI, CNN basically went on an FBI hiring spree. And, and it was like watching, it was like watching some weird militia coup tv. It was, it was like everybody works for the FBI except for the anchor interviewing them. And it was like, this is, this is the sort of thing that the press could say, hey, that's also bad. And it's bad that Jen Psaki has it. By the way, Jen psaki. Also, there were a lot of pretty convincing reports that she was negotiating her move to MSNBC while she was still under contract with the White House. She was standing in front of the press, taking questions from the press and interacting with the press while she was negotiating a contract to go work for the press. I mean, these are things that the press. Why isn't there. Why isn't steam coming out their ears?
- [37:15]
Jon Podhoretz
Because it's a guild. Right? Look, you. Eliana, worked in the mainstream media. I've worked in the mainstream. It's a guild. And ultimately, though, theoretically, it's competitive. Theoretically, they're all in competition with each other. They want to get the story first. I got the story 15 minutes before you did. Practically speaking, it's a guild, and they defend their own and protect their own from the worst accusations. Unless, of course, they're on the right, in which case it's thrilling to say that, you know, I'm not safe with Adam Rubenstein in the building. I'm not safe with Bari Weiss in the building because she's commissioning an op ed from a senator from Arkansas or, you know, Adam Rubens from a senator from Arkansas who says maybe we should bring out the National Guard to deal with the protests in Lafayette Park. How dare. My God, 800 people. Mara gay of the editorial board, like, having a, you know, like, nervous breakdown in front of the entire staff of the New York Times. Why? It's all nonsense. You know, it. She felt perfectly safe. It's because they pull up, you know, they, they. They like a phalanx. They, they take their shields and they make a big circle. And the circle is to defend themselves from the outside and not to. Not to be, you know, not if the point of the, of the, of the media is to, you know, is to afflict the powerful. Right? The media are powerful. Guess what? The media don't police themselves. Just a fact of nature. And that's why the Free Beacon and places like that are so important, because the media don't police themselves. Eliana, I just want to give you and Andrew Stiles and everybody on your staff props for the week of hilarity in the coverage of Jake Tapper's. I like Jake Tapper. I like him personally. I like his novels. I haven't read the book yet, but the. Jake Tapper, the sort of. The uncovering of everything that Jake Tapper ever did or said to squash anybody who ever raised the question about Biden's fitness for office is pretty staggering.
- [39:43]
Eliana Johnson
The reinvention of Jake Tapper is something to Behold. And I talked about this with Mark Halperin on Friday, maybe I can't remember what day last week, but anyhow, I think it would be one thing, and it would be quite interesting for Alex Thompson in this book to write about what his experience was like trying to cover Biden's decline in office where the White House, they really bullied reporters who tried to do this and their editors. And for Tapper to write sort of honestly about why he averted that coverage and what the pressures in the mainstream were to not to do it. But instead he's come out and tried to pretend that he was on this beat the whole time like we were doing it. And so Andrew Stiles has gone back and looked at what Tapper was covering at key moments when we learned during the Biden presidency, important things about Biden's age contrasted to what they say in the book was happening at those times. So I think it's quite a useful piece that's up. It's the main piece on our site right now. The headline is the Tapper dossier how the CNN journalists covered parentheses up the Biden cover up before writing a best selling book about it.
- [41:14]
Jon Podhoretz
You mentioned Mark Halperin. I just want to give him a shout out his Wide World News newsletter this morning because it speaks to this point about the press being a guild. Okay. So he says this morning I do my best daily to find a way to understand the news, get ahead of the news, summarize the news. Some days the top story or stories is clear. On some occasions, the job either requires picking a few obvious candidates or combining a handful of storylines. In the history of this news, I've never seen a day like this. In fact, among the first 25 news sites I perused this morning, literally no two had the same top story. This has never happened to me before. And he goes through it, right? So the AP's lead story is about Democratic Representative McIver charged with assault after skirmish at ice center. New York Times has Gutter had no luck selling a luxury jet. Then Trump set his sights on it. Moscow Times as Trump says Russia and Ukraine to immediately start ceasefire talks after Putin call. Then there's the Washington Post that we cited comically by Biden diagnosis draws well wishes, questions and conspiracy theories. Then the Daily Mail has a million pound mistake, a couple who did something rather. Los Angeles Times has the Palm Springs bombing investigation. Detroit News has GM faces perfect storm. Wall Street Journal has migrant labor force withstands mass deployment deportation push and like. So what does this tell you? This tells you that what is not the lead story in the press this morning is Biden and his cancer. And the COVID up, that's the only thing that matters here is that everybody in America is talking about this one thing, which is Biden cancer and what was going on there. And what about the, in what about Biden's, you know, mental infirmities? And everybody in the press is looking to cover anything else if they can and by the way, really like to cover something else and, and help obscure this, these stories, these joint stories.
- [43:13]
Abe Greenwald
We've seen this so many times in the, in recent years. I mean, you know, not, I mean, Mark gets this, this day where it's perfectly set up like this. But the general impulse we've seen on the, on the press's part so many times never works, right? The thing that everyone's talking about that everyone knows that everyone sees, that's only being covered as some people are paranoid and suspect X. You know, some conspiracy theorists are thinking that thing always rises to the surface over time. It builds, it grows tails, it grows wings. Other stories come into it and you cannot keep it down as hard as they try, especially now. I mean, that's the lesson with the new media.
- [44:01]
Seth Mandel
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- [48:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Trump is, you know, is a millisecond away from being assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania. This 20 year old kid climbs up on a roof, you know, you know, nearly gets him. Kid is killed. Where are the stories about the kids? And after three or four days we heard nothing. First there was a whole thing about how the Secret Service mishandled. It wasn't, you know, didn't spot the roof, what was going on, the secrets. The head of the Secret Service resigned, all of that. That's a Secret Service story. Everything was done to demonetize the Butler Pennsylvania assassination story. Somebody nearly killed the, you know, the former president United States and future President of the United States. And we, I don't even remember his name. I don't think after it was like, well, he's dead and we can't find anything and all that. And then that was it. Where was the six week investigation into him and his school? Where was them pouring through, you know, his house, whatever? Where, where were the leaks from the FBI and the Secret Service of docket things that, that related to why he did it or how it happened? There is no story about this guy, this kid. And that's because they didn't want to cover it. Right? They didn't want to cover it because every time they covered it, they would have to remind people that somebody tried to, you know, somebody nearly killed Trump and then they would actually have to run the photo of Trump with his fist in the air, which is the single greatest advertisement for Trump's second term. I mean, am I taking crazy pills?
- [49:51]
Eliana Johnson
Eliana, I think you can see that in all the journalist awards where that iconic picture that was obviously the best journalistic picture of 2024 didn't win any awards.
- [50:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, one picture did, Doug Mills New York Times picture But it wasn't the great, it wasn't the best, it wasn't that great. It wasn't the AP picture.
- [50:11]
Eliana Johnson
Exactly. The Aven Vucci picture from the ap. Yeah, there was just a reluctance to acknowled that moment.
- [50:21]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, it's like these decisions get made in a kind of weird. This is, this is where John Corey 40 years ago came up with the term dominant media culture where decisions are made not because they're people sit in a room together and conspire to make the decision, but because they share a comparable mindset and they all have the same reaction in the same way. So just as after 9 11, a deliberate, a kind of weird decision was made by the press never to show photographs of the falling of the people who jumped off the Trade center because it would inflame public opinion. Right. That would just be too inflammatory and it might stimulate Islamophobia or something like that. Everyone just made this decision, sort of. Every major media outlet made this decision to the point that even a place like Fox wouldn't do it because it didn't want to get accused of being the only, you know, of doing this in order to be inflammatory. And so this happens time and again, as Abe says, and it creates this. Matt, again, to cite what Matt said yesterday, it is a little like late Soviet, the late Soviet circumstance in which literally nobody could trust that the news that they were getting out of the, out of the news sources was reflective of reality. So you have this now, and Trump, you know, plays this brilliantly because it's like anything he doesn't, any story he doesn't like, he's like, they're just coming at me again. Stephen Miller, who's called Red Steez on Twitter, pointed out that, like, three of the last stories that the press have covered as conspiracy theories and downgrade as conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. So what does that say about the next time somebody comes up with a conspiracy theory and they say it's a conspiracy theory like this? What it does is just means that their credibility goes down and they're already, they're already lacking in credibility. And now, like, it's almost like you're, you have to believe the opposite.
- [52:36]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, this is, we're, I mean, this is going to continue the rise of what we were, of what we're seeing with all these, like, podcaster historians and whatever now. You know, when Eli was on the show recently, he talked about this and Eli Lake said his, his, his conservative motto or his motto for conservatism is to a point, right? Distrust the media to a point, distrust, you know, scientific journals if you want to a point, but don't get to like, RFK land with that sort of thing. And that's, you know, and that's the danger in all of this stuff happening, which is like, we can't go to people and say, well, you know, the New York Times wouldn't have reported it if it didn't go through a rigorous process. And, and by the way, as an alum of the New York Post, this, all of this stuff is pretty hilarious to me because I, you know, we were always, we were always told like, oh, that's, you know, it's in the New York Post, and who knows if it's true or whatever. I dealt with the legal department at News Corp. They were not, like, they didn't, they, they didn't think all of this was a joke, you know, in terms of, like, legal liability and fact checking and stuff like that. I still stayed afterwards after papers had, you know, issues had been put to bed to reword things because a lawyer saw something and said, no, you can't send it on, even though you've already sent it on. Pull back the page. You know what? But this is like, you can't tell people. Well, you know how famous the New Yorker magazine's fact checking desk is? It's world famous. It's what they're known for. It's like, you see. So what happens to the appeal to authority, right? You bring in Eli's point, which is to a point which is where if you don't have some skepticism, you look kind of silly, right? So how, where's the line? How far do you take that skepticism? It gets harder to tell people. Your line is too far. My line is the comfort zone. You should be here. You should be as skeptical of mainstream institutions as I am, but you shouldn't be much more skeptical of mainstream institutions than I am. You've gone too far in that direction. This is what they make it difficult to do.
- [54:55]
Seth Mandel
Very.
- [54:56]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, I think when, when Matt Continetti started the Free Beacon, which Eliana now runs, he basically, the idea was, we're going to do to them what they do to us, right? That's kind of like his, the opening manifesto of the Free Beacon. And, and in press terms, it was, you look at us on the right with unbelievable skepticism and the presumption that we work in bad faith, we argue in bad faith, we have bad motives and we have bad incentives. And, you know, tu quoque, buddy. Like you're. This describes you to a T. And Trump is the ultimate example of, of this, which is everything that they accuse him of and some of which is really true, you know, and particularly now in the second term is true. This, particularly as regards things like emoluments, like, this is a real problem and a real issue, and they, because of how they behaved in the first term and like going. Announcing that he should be 25th amendmented in the first week of his presidency because he was so crazy, right? Like Joe Scarborough said he, that we needed to invoke the 25th Amendment on Trump in the first week of his presidency. And last year, he has a meeting with Biden. He and Mika have a meeting with Biden and they're like, he's great. He's a genius. He's. I couldn't keep up with him. It's astonishing. Rather than saying, oh, you know what? Here's actually a case where we have to invoke the 25th Amendment on somebody. You know, so, so what happens is that Trump ends up as the recipient, as the, the end result, not only of the media's, you know, the downgraded importance of the media's ability to control the conversation, but actually benefiting from this skepticism to the point that 40%, you know, 40. The 40% of people who say things like we should take the plane or something like that. The 40%. No, Republicans. 40% of Republicans say we should take the plane from gutter. They're saying that because it's like, I don't believe anything you say about anything. And if Trump says he wants the plane, let him take the plane because you're not telling me. I've stopped listening to you. The fact patterns that you allege. I now believe everything you say is a lie. And they did this to themselves. The media did this to themselves. As far as I, as far as I can tell. Do we need to talk about anything else today? I mean, there's so much more, you know, there's Trump and Ukraine and Russia and Russia basically saying they're not going to stop firing until Ukraine says uncle. So I guess the real question there is, you know, whether, whether Trump will take their no for an answer and say, well, I can't deal with you then I want to stop the war. You clearly don't want to stop the war. So we better, we better help Ukraine because you're killing them and they need to be able to fight back. At least you're just killing civilians with drones or something. I don't know. Eliana, you have a. Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you. I just need to look at the Free Beacons front page before we go because you have been doing some fantastic coverage of other stuff, not just the Biden thing. Oh, it's John Levine's story. Bloomberg journalist among anti Israel radicals arrested for storming Columbia Library. This is a fantastic story because among the people who got arrested, this guy whose name is.
- [58:50]
Eliana Johnson
Kal. Kal.
- [58:52]
Jon Podhoretz
Jason Cow.
- [58:53]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah.
- [58:54]
Jon Podhoretz
Works now works for Bloomberg, works at the New York Times before he worked for Bloomberg. Does like, is one of these graphics guys. Like he's now doing graphic journalism, you know, which is the new way to create propaganda is to put things and make them look in graphics. So you could say, well, it's facts. Look, there's a chart and the line goes up. So therefore it must be true because it's a chart. It's like how we always used to think if you saw a digital clock that it was true because it was like a computer. You know, there's a, there's a clock on, on the Upper west side. A bank building has a clock on it. And it's like the minute you look up on it, you're like, well, it has to be true. It's on the building. You know, so that's the graphics reporter who has his own Twitter feed, like an anonymous Twitter feed which is just devoted to Gaza and how evil the Israelis are. But you got him fired some or.
- [59:51]
Eliana Johnson
Well, Bloomberg, we know he worked at Bloomberg as of May 1. The storming of the Columbia Library took place May 7. Bloomberg said in a comment to the Beacon that he no longer works at Bloomberg. Bloomberg did not want to say whether he was terminated over his participation in this event, so.
- [60:17]
Jon Podhoretz
Or whether he was terminated because John Levine made the phone call.
- [60:20]
Eliana Johnson
Exactly. So the likeliest of scenario, we don't. We don't know. But, I mean, it's a perfect story, right? Like, these are the people who populate whether or not he was terminated because we made the phone call, because of his participation in this event. The people with these beliefs who would participate in such an event are the people who populate mainstream newsrooms, more or less. It's sort of a perfect story. And, you know, to your point on the media and trust in institutions, it's, yes, it's that they've gotten things wrong, but I also think it's important which stories they've gotten. Gotten wrong. Have had an argument with someone about this, and they were saying, well, you know, the difference is that when the mainstream press, like most of the stuff they get right, and when they get things wrong, they admit they got things wrong, you know, but it is not insignificant that they got the biggest stories of the past several years, like literally the three biggest stories of the past several years wrong. And they got them wrong all in the same direction. And they haven't really admitted, actually that they got them wrong. And those were Covid, where they said the lab leap was a hoax. And not only that, attacked people who dissented from that view. Biden's decline and the Russia hoax. And. And I don't think, like, that's unimportant because it puts the media crosswise with the public, you know, the American people on the narratives that are, you know, the dominant political narratives of the time. It's not like, you know, they got some sports story wrong.
- [62:20]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [62:20]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, you know, it's like.
- [62:21]
Ryan Reynolds
And also it's like, you know, well, you know, Tom, every time that Tom gets caught robbing a bank, he pleads guilty and that. That's how, you know, he's a man of integrity. Like, at some point, the admitting you did Something wrong. Like, I, it's true, that is part of the growing process. But it's like if you are a serial committer of certain offenses, how many, oh, oops, I'm sorry, I did it again. How, how many of those add up to. Well, this is, you know, this is the defense of the institutional integrity of this place is that we keep getting caught. And when we get caught, we acknowledge that we've been caught.
- [63:10]
Abe Greenwald
But wait, I haven't seen that.
- [63:12]
Eliana Johnson
Like, Jake Tapper is not saying he did anything wrong.
- [63:14]
Abe Greenwald
It's like, why was covering it right about to say. It's been a long time since I've said it. But it's worse than that. They don't, they don't say we were wrong. They say, well, 50 something experts told us this. They say the White House team was coordinated to throw up this fog, to cover up the truth. You know, what was the other one? So we got the COVID Covid, the Russia.
- [63:46]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [63:47]
Abe Greenwald
We were going by the public health establishment. This is what they were. This is the best available information at the time was what we were going with. They don't ever actually say, you know what? Could have dug a little deeper. We, there were questions that, that went unasked and it was our job to ask them. We didn't ask them. They don't.
- [64:08]
Jon Podhoretz
There's always one or two pieces, right? There are always one or two correcting pieces. So the Atlantic, which was one of the worst. Covid. The coverage of COVID in the Atlantic was disgraceful and nauseating and horrible. And every Covid leftist conspiracy theory was aired out about every. And the nature and the severity of all kinds of things and why you needed to keep schools club, blah, blah, whatever, just awful coverage. And then they publish a piece that says, one piece that says, well, I get, you know what, it turns out the blab leak was real or something like that. One piece. So it's like, oh, well, we just, we just cleansed ourselves of three years of false coverage. Or, you know, Tyler Harper the other day in the Atlantic writing a piece saying, I guess all of this Tapper stuff calls into question not only whether or not Biden declined in the. But whether he should have been president at all, whether he should have been stopped from getting to the presidency in 2019. It's like, oh, really great, you're right, he's right. And I would say, where were you back then? Because, you know, or where was the Atlantic back then? But these kind of efforts to kind of, you know, do one thing, publish One thing that then says, here are £10,000 on one side of the scale and one feather on the other, and the feather equalizes to the £10,000. You know, that's the other, that's the other way that it starts getting maligned and malicious is that they, they do claim that they correct themselves. Look at the one thing we published. How can you say we didn't do X? It's not that they say it, but that's clearly the mindset. And you know, when I was growing up, the great sentimental line about journalism and its toughness was if your mother says she loves you, check it out, right? That was, you can't even trust your mother, so you better be tough and unsentimental and you check out if she says she loves you, you should do that about everything, skeptical about everything. And of course, people are not skeptical in the media of anything that liberals or Democrats say. They don't come to it with an attitude of skepticism. They come to it with an attitude of, that's my, you know, college classmate who was standing there on the podium telling me that it's a lab, that the originated from a bat, you know, somebody eating a bat at the wet market. So of course I'm going to believe him and everybody who says that because they're, and, or they're all in the guild together.
- [66:52]
Ryan Reynolds
Okay, I got, I mean, this is a great example of what's happening with Fetterman too, is it not? It's not exactly the same, same thing, but it is, you know, the reporting was about, you know, him. He's, we all saw that he was struggling post stroke during the election, John Fetterman, and that, you know, there was a three week period where he was in the hospital. We weren't getting updates and stuff like that. And now it's like, oh, you know, who's got real problems in the head, that John Fetterman. He's got real problems in the head because he's pro Israel, because he has hostage posters up in his office and people stop working for him. It's like, he must be really difficult to work for. No, there's a bunch of progressives who don't want to work for a guy who's pro Israel and the whole thing gets turned into, well, yeah, maybe we overlooked some stuff in the past, but now conservatives are doing the same thing. They're defending John Fetterman when clearly there's something wrong with him. You know, it's like this, this, this constant, this circle that we go around and around with is like, always find a way. You know, there's a headline at the Atlantic today, the Congressman who saw, you know, what was happening to Joe Biden or something like, the Congressman who saw the truth about Joe Biden as a Democrat from Illinois who knew recognized signs of dementia or something like that. And it's like the headline should really say, the Democratic Congressman who saw the truth about Biden. Because I'm sure if you go back on the record, you will find lots of Republicans saying the president is non compos mentis. You know, this sort of thing to find a way to make the left the heroes right of the story in.
- [68:35]
Jon Podhoretz
The end, can I give it. And it's worse than that, because the Fetterman. So this is another thing where suddenly there are five stories at the same time talking about how Fetterman is impossible and probably should. It started with this one story in New York magazine with the sourcing of Adam Gentleson, who should be, you know, thrown in a river and, you know, and sort of, you know, made to swim back to shore. Five miles was scum when he worked for Harry Reid and his scum leaving John Fetterman and, like, dropping dirty dimes on him in public. But he was the first. And then four or five different outlets do the same story, like, chase the story so that there is now a phalanx of stories about Fetterman and how he should probably. The implication being that he should be compelled to resign from office because he cannot fulfill the duties of his discharge duties of his office properly. Right. It's worse than that, because not only did they defend Fetterman over the course of the campaign against Oz and even after his own version of the horrible debate where he said good morning instead of good evening and various other things, and you were sort of heartbroken for him. But, you know, after he was sworn in as senator, he tried to kill himself. He tried to kill himself. He went into Walter Reed for six to eight weeks or something. Clearly a moment when you could say his wife and his family should say, this is the burden of this office is too much for you, and we should get. They didn't. When he came out, there were all these sentimental stories about how now he really knows the value of family and life and he. He understands better and he calmed down and all of that. And. And these kind of stories that say, stop talking about John Fetterman and his suicide attempt and all of that because he's now back and this is the spin that we're using and everybody shut up. Now, two years after he seems perfectly compos mentis. And maybe he shouldn't have left office or whatever. Or 18 months after. After October 7th. Now he should be forced from office. So they covered up for him or, like, created a Pro Fetterman narrative for a year until October 7th. Right. That's the story. And now. Now they want him out of office when. When what he's. What he says about Israel is perfectly coherent. It's just that they don't like it. It's not that it's incoherent anyway. Okay, Eliana Johnson, thank you so much. Everybody, go to the Free Beacon and savor the delights therein.
- [71:24]
Eliana Johnson
Thank you, John.
- [71:25]
Jon Podhoretz
You're welcome. And for Seth, was it Abe? I'm John. Pod Horiz. Keep the candle burning.