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A
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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Some drink champagne Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst, Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, December 12, 2025. JOHN I'm Jon Podhorowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. It is the month of giving. Please go to commentary.org donate to if you are of a mind to do so, provide us with an end of year tax deductible gift to keep the lights on, to keep the candle burning, to keep us talking here every day and publishing our magazine and releasing content on our website that that is illuminating, necessary and important. Again, that's commentary.org donate with me today, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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B
And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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A
Hi, John.
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B
So, you know, I keep reading these pieces every day, basically from the never Trumper wing, that is now the anti Trump Trumper wing, that is now the soft Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, about how the wheels are coming off the Trump administration. This is it. Everything is starting to go wrong. His numbers are bad. His numbers on the economy are bad. In Indiana, the state legislature rebuffed efforts to change their redistricting plans or something or other. And even despite threats that Trump would target them. And nobody likes anything in the economy, the health care plans are all going awry and everything is bad. And Peggy Noonan, who is a pretty interesting weather vane in this regard, the Wall Street Journal this morning has a piece saying Trump is losing the script. And I remember very well in 2005 when she wrote a piece saying that George W. Bush was losing the script. And she, she got it right. She said Bush had stopped listening to people and was very, getting very messianic and wasn't really focused on how to win, how to, how to convince people, but was more focused on his own virtue. Anyway, all of this is Trump's going down to 2026 is coming hard upon him and the Republicans are in, are in disarray. But so my first impulse is to go whenever anybody says stuff like this, and then it turns out like it's all nonsense and it's all like wishcasting, But I'm not really sure it's wishcasting anymore. And I think maybe we want to do the question of whether or not not just Trump, but the right in general, which seems so ascendant and so energetic at the beginning of 2025, is losing the thread of what brought it in, what brought it back to power in the first place and the kind of fights that it should be having. Because, of course, the drama of the eight years before drama was Trump unexpectedly becoming president, being all over the map, having two impeachments, losing, having this fit about losing January 6th, and then the drama of the next four years, which was not only Covid, but Democratic efforts to prevent Trump from getting back into the White House, Failing him getting back into the White House. And now he's gonna leave the White House. January 20, 2029. There's some sense in which this existential drama is kind of over. Like the Trump roller coaster isn't over because he'll still be president for three and a half years. But the where is Trump going to be at any given moment in the rest of our lives? Starts, we see an endpoint. And I think that cuts into his ability to control political events of the United States. Obviously, he can control events outside the United States in very interesting and unexpected ways, like what is going on with Venezuela and of course, what went on over the spring and summer in the Middle east, but not here.
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C
So I've written some of that stuff, not from, certainly in my case, at least not wishcasting. It's just what I've observed is this, I think, a breakdown in the system, the administration, since really, I think since from my perspective, the high point of his going to the Knesset after stopping the war in Gaza, I sort of feel like after that, this slow but pretty steady decline started to happen. What I do think, though, is that we do underestimate Trump's ability to pull a rabbit out of a hat at any moment. Not even ability, his penchant for doing so. And I think there's going to be many more sort of big, giant, dramatic, unexpected moves that will set the Trump drama back in motion, even domestically. And I don't know what they're going to be, but I think that's something he needs to do for himself. I don't mean I'm not advising it. I mean, I think it's a sort of almost sort of compulsive approach, modus operandi for him.
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B
I'm just thinking that, you know, what he decided at the beginning of 2025, Eliana, was obviously that he was going to use executive action in a way that almost no one has ever done before. He was going to simply declare that he had the right to do X, Y and Z, to sort of like, initiate lawfare proceedings against his enemies, to pardon people at a rate that is just absolutely staggering. Ordinarily, Pardons came out from a president at the tail end of his administration as he was walking out the door just yesterday, he pardoned this Arizona electoral official who literally, you know, was convicted in a, in a, in a relatively probably friendly courtroom of having falsified votes and had a seven year sentence. So she's like the 10th pardon of the week. So he's just doing whatever he wants to do, saying he's going to make a decision on or involve himself in the decision on the antitrust implications of the Warner Brothers Discovery, Netflix, Paramount, Skydance deal, on the grounds that he wants CNN to be sold to somebody that he likes. No one's ever talked this way before, behaved this way before. That was his decision. Like he made a conscious decision he was going to break to China however he could, in whatever way he could. And the thing is that, that he can break to China, but he's still going to be gone. So we can break the China. Like the weird thing is he can build a ballroom. I mean, it would be a ridiculous thing for a Democrat to do when, if they came in, in 2020, he can build the ballroom, but then when he leaves, somebody can take a wrecking ball to this, to the ballroom.
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A
I'm sort of doubtful that will happen. I think the Democrats will like having the ballroom there probably. But as it pertains, you know, you started with are the wheels coming off this administration, administration. And there are several people out there saying that, that Democrats have won a series of special elections, they seem to have more control of events. Is that true or not? Two points, I think. The first part of this, I think is a sort of natural jockeying because Trump is a lame duck in his second term for who will control the party afterwards. And we see this, it's a combination of Trump being a lame duck and I think of Charlie Kirk's death, this jockeying for control of the movement between various forces in on the one hand, the political realm and on the other hand the podcasting, influencers, social media sphere. So it's a mixture of events. And number two, I think for Trump and the Republicans more broadly. And our friend Kristen Soltis Anderson makes this point in a piece today in the New York Times that in the first term, Trump was Trump, but overall his approval rating was quite high on the economy. The economy was good and it was always a bright spot for him. And that's not the case in this second term. Voters are, their top concerns are the economy and taxes. And the economy does not remain a bright spot for him. And that I Think amid all the noise and the drama is what does threaten to drag down the party ahead of 2026 and then 2028.
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B
So obviously the proof of the pudding is in the eating. He is alternately saying that the economy is in the best shape ever and then saying that he's going to fix the economy. He loves tariffs, but he's going to give farmers money to defray the effect of the disastrous effect of the tariffs on the American agricultural economy and all of that. That's where I think the idea that he's losing the thread starts coming clean like he's always in motion. And so you get the look, hey, squirrel problem. But in the end, there is the question of how the voters feel about the country at any given moment. And that's what they bring into the ballot box in these special elections and when they will go to the ballot box in November of 26. And it's very unclear to me how his effort to constantly change the subject will lead people to think, oh, my God, he's got a stable foundation here. We're on the way up. You know, let's make sure he has all the tools that he can use to help us before he leaves power. I think it's just as easy to see not only he, not only the people who hate him, but the people who don't hate him, but aren't necessarily like, you know, MAGA enthusiasts going, he really needs more Runway. Like, I don't know what that. That's, I think, where the, where the question comes in.
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A
I think we should add one other thing to the mix, John, and that's the expiration of these Affordable Care Acts subsidies. And this is to the, not to Trump's problems, but to the GOP's general problem. Look, it's ridiculous that Republicans should be saddled with the Affordable Care act and its problems, but, you know, life's not fair. So the fact of the matter is that the Biden administration increased subsidies for the Affordable Care act during COVID The. Those subsidies are now expiring at the end of the year. And premiums, healthcare premiums will go up for 20 plus million people if action isn't taken. And health care is just, it's not our issue, you know, it's not the issue that we excel on. And so Republicans in Congress right now are bickering amongst themselves and arguing over, you know, seven plans in the Senate and seven plans in the House. And this is just not terra firma. It hasn't historically been terra firma for the gop. So I Think you can add that to the mix? And then the fourth thing I would add is that it's hard. You know, the issues that Trump campaigned on really effectively were, look at all this trans insanity. I mean, his best ad was she's for they them, I'm for you. And a lot of the insanity taking place on the college campuses. And so I think he's in a challenging position of having actually done a lot to address these issues.
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C
Yeah, right.
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And then it's okay, where do you go from here? And I think it would be useful for Republicans to remind people actually what life was like. And we're not, we're not actually hearing a lot about that, but it is hard when you've come in and to your point, John, he's used executive action and he's done that quite effectively. He's been vindicated by the courts in a lot of his use of this to cow university leaders. Okay. The ones he hasn't gone after are afraid he will go after them and like they are behaving much more sane now. That's relatively speaking. But like campuses aren't doing as insane things as they were doing. And the trans stuff has like taken a backseat. And those were pretty effective campaign issues and campaign messages for the president in 2024, aside from having a senile president and then a total non entity and Kamala Harris on the ticket.
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C
Yeah, I think Eliana is right in that, you know, when Trump first got into office and he signed this flurry of executive orders, there was a sense of suspense because we didn't know sort of how they were, where they were going to land, how it was going to be implemented, what was going to work, what the courts were going to shoot down, how, you know, and then, so, and then a lot of it really did come to pass and was put into action. But I think also Eliana's point about the jockeying on the right, because MAGA is a sort of ideas vacuum or in practice has been a sort of contradictory set of actions, he's left this vacuum has to be sort of filled. And that's the jockeying and that's the competing ideas in the opposing camps on the right. And that looks from the outside like disarray because it is. And that itself creates projects a kind of weakness on the right.
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B
Well, you said he's had a lot of vindication on the courts and he's also had not a lot of vindication on the courts. I mean, the, the, you know, he's made three goes at indicting or have making sure that Letitia James, his enemy, the attorney general of New York, who brought the ludicrous case of the legitimate checks that he was using to pay off Stormy Daniels, even if you think that that was unseemly and gross, which it was, that those were, you know, felonious transactions or, you know, to tort transactions, whatever, and he can't get an indictment like the grand juries will not indict her. The Comey case was thrown out the and all that. So that stuff hasn't worked for him in certain types of courtrooms. He just lost again with a very left wing judge, but he just Kilmar Abrevo Garcia, the Maryland man, has been ordered freedom by a judge. That's not going to happen immediately, but it's not as though he has scored the kinds of successes I expected he would score in courts. Based on the primacy of the executive branch in the enforcement and interpretation of immigration law, Based on the 1952 National Security Act, I assumed that basically courts would say, well, there's really nothing we can do. Yeah, you can deport Mahmoud Khalil and you can deal with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as you wish. And he's lost those. Now again, maybe in the end he won't. Maybe in the end It'll be another 10 things that get elevated to the Supreme Court that will be ruled in his favor. Justifiably, of course, the biggest two cases that are before the court, one we've heard, one we haven't heard, one we heard this week, which is the question of whether or not the president has the right to fire the heads of quasi independent agencies, which will probably go his way. And then the tariffs and whether or not he has the power to impose these tariffs independently, which it's very hard to see going his way. And then the third, I'm sorry, and then the third, which is birthright citizenship, which again, it would be an oceanic event were the Supreme Court to announce that birthright citizenship no longer attained as we understand it, it and as we have understood it in this country for 140 some odd years. So I don't know, I don't know where any of that is going. He's had a very mixed record on this, a more mixed record, as I say, than I would have expected. But he also has some pretty lousy lawyers that he's put in place all in, all over the place, trying to make these cases in courtrooms because he's getting, you know, loyalists because very experienced prosecutors and stuff. Don't want to do what he wants them to do because they know they're going to lose or they know that the cases are lousy. So I don't know, like it's, there's a personnel issue. I was just thinking, like, what was the big story for three months in the United States? Things keep moving and moving, moving. Doge was the big story in the United States. Does anybody remember Doge? What did Doge do? We don't even know what Doge did. Did nothing. Now Elon Musk is off gonna make a trillion dollars because of his latest contract with.
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Well, he says he regrets it. It wasn't worth the drama. He said he regrets Doge. Too much drama, John, I should add. But also Trump has solved the immigration problem and came in and solved it. There's basically no illegal immigration. And so that. And that was the single most effective issue that he campaigned on and the single most effective Republican campaign issue. So this, this does pose a challenge for Republicans in that they can't campaign against, that they have to campaign on. We have solved this problem. And do you want to go back to the way it was?
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B
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Well, look, that's an interesting point. It is sort of like the Republicans wanting to be the national security party after winning the Cold War. Exactly right. So if you actually do come in and solve a problem, you don't get credit. I mean, you do get credit. That's not true. You do get credit. If Democrats keep saying they hate ice and you know, they, they, ICE is evil and ICE is a government agency with employees who are risking people who work for ICE or law enforcement officers who are risking their lives doing things and you talk about them like they're Nazi brown shirts. That's something that I think you're going to be making a mistake with. However, then there's the other way of looking at it, which is don't attack ice because ICE is people and they're American people who are doing this for America. And on the other hand, do we really like these raids? Do people are very. Made uncomfortable by these, A lot of people seem to be made uncomfortable by these raids who aren't just, you know, lunatic left wing activists. It's, it's a, it's a lot of government action and a lot of, you know, behavior that is not a usual site. You know, this kind of like semi military law enforcement in the middle of cities and that sort of thing. So it's very vague how much credit or blame he'll get for stuff like this. But let's talk about health care also for a minute. So look, this is the problem with Republicans and Democrats and the things that Democrats want to do. Democrats say here, we'll give you money. Then Republicans come in and they're put in a position of having to say, we're gonna stop giving you money. That's why it's such a fiendishly effective tactic to want to use the government to give people money. Because then you either have to stop it and then they're like, wait, what happened to the money you were giving me? Now everything that I'm doing in healthcare is more expensive. You're like, well, you know, we shouldn't have done it in the first place. And it's not right and it's distortive and we can't afford it and all that. It's like, well, I don't know, I had it last year and this year I don't have it. And now my bills are going. You're not, it's your fault. And that's the problem is it will be their fault. And if I were a Republican in the House or the Senate, I would be terrified because, you know, if you do anything that looks bad, Trump is going to screw you. Trump is going to say, I never said that they should eliminate all that money. You know, I said, he wants to send out checks. Yeah, send out checks. I'll give, we'll give it to you in the form of health savings accounts, like, I still want to give you money. It's these, these guys over here who, you know, do whatever I want them to for the most part. And then they need to do something principled and then I'm going to cut the rug out from under them. So if you are a person in the House or the Senate who wants to take a lead in this, you are like looking at Democrats calling you a monster and Trump cutting your knees out from under you. Am I? Is there any. I don't know. So I just think, I don't feel for them. They chose this. No one told them to run for office. You know, so suffer the consequences of having decided you want political power in the United States.
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C
I think we should add, there's something else I think, that's draining Trump here and his, his sense of mastery of events, which is this long losing and unprincipled pursuit of Vladimir Putin and trying to get a peace deal in Russia. I say on principle, not because it's unprincipled to want to stop a war, but because of the terms Trump is trying to impose and the enemy he seems unable to stop making of Zelensky.
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B
I, My, my. The thing that I was horrified by this week in terms of was Trump's public case that Biden gave Zelensky money and Zelensky took the money and then lost 25% of Ukraine's territory, which is really a shocking, you know, fake history that he's telling. The loss, the major loss of territory to Russia happened during the Obama administration in 2014, not during the Biden administration in 2023 or 2024. And Zelenskyy wasn't, Was performing on sitcoms, on television when all of that happened. And he's trying to create the conditions under which people in the United States will blame, say, Zelenskyy stole our money and then lost territory anyway. And that's just defamatory. I mean, you can like or not like Zelensky. I don't really, genuinely, I don't really understand why people would dislike Zelensky. Also, by the way, all the people decrying the corruption in Ukraine and how terrible the corruption in Ukraine is. I mean, wars involve the expenditure of money by governments at a very, very high and unprecedented level. And every war feature people stealing money from governmental coffers. Like, you know, not to liken everything, but, you know, there were famous commissions in the United States, the Wade Commission, which discovered that half the budget of the Civil. Of the Union and the Civil War was stolen by quartermasters in the Union Army. And then Harry Truman became vice president because he chaired a commission on military theft, you know, theft of dollars from the World War II military effort. So it's the nature of. Yeah, I think it's also. I think it's all disingenuous. They just.
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C
Yeah, well, I mean, what the hell do they think happens in Russia, for God's sakes?
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B
Well, I know, right?
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C
I mean, I mean, so, but, but yeah, in Ukraine that, you know, they had to sort of tear down any regulatory walls to get that incredible drone effort going and other technological advances. But also, I think there's just the fact here that aside from the unprincipled part of it, it's been almost a year of Trump saying, we're very, very close, Putin's close, we had a really good talk. And then getting shot down. And that simply, that's, that's, that's not a winning posture.
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B
Right. I want to shift gears wildly and bring up, surprisingly, bring up an article in the New Yorker by Rachel Aviv about the neurologist, essayist, sage, you know, sort of lionized figure in the world of late 20th century, early 21st century America. Oliver Sacks, whose I think, most famous book was called the man who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. The guy who wrote these stories about people with neurological illnesses and diseases and conditions that he treated and what those unusual stories that they went through in their lives and their life experience tells us about being human and what it means to be human and what it means to how perception works and what humanity is and what empathy is and how everything works. And this extraordinary article, which is very confusing and very long and basically is. Talks about two different aspects of Sachs's character, one of which is his tortured relationship to his own homosexuality and the half century that he experienced in treatment with a psychiatrist that he loved who seemed to have done very little to actually help him, but with whom he was deeply obsessed. That. That part of his story and then the other part of his story, which is. And this is really the meat that all the stuff that made him world famous, he made up a lot of it, just like totally invented and says so in his diaries. Rachel Levy got access to his diaries and private papers. And he said as he was getting famous, he basically was terrified that he would be exposed, that people would learn that he was fictionalizing details from these case histories that he was writing about. And a lot of the stuff that he fictionalized is weirdly sexualized material about whether or not people like this, the famous case that became the movie Awakenings with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, about people who are in this kind of state of deep paralysis, frozenness, who were treated with the drug L dopa and then sort of came to after decades of somnolence. And the, the movie is all heartening and loving about how wonderful it is that they've come out of this. And the, the. The book is much more about how one of these guys, Leonard, the central character, basically becomes like a sexual maniac, deviant. Stuff like that, or what I would call a deviant and that some of that was true, some of it wasn't true. He made up a lot of it because he wanted to push a line about sexuality. It's very unclear. Anyway, that's this piece. You should read it. It's really a remarkable exploration of a literary man's reputation. But I do think it's very important in a world in which we constantly talk about how the media are untrustworthy, that we spend very little time on how the highest. The highest peaks of media, celebrity and fame at the. At the most profound levels also feature people who make shit up. All the time, John. All the time.
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A
My impression was I wrong in reading this, which. It is fascinating, but I think we were talking before this, and I said she kind of buried the lead like you do take away. He's obviously making this stuff up. But that's not. You got to get into the piece to kind of understand what. What. Like, it doesn't lead with that. So definitely read. Is that he's putting autobiographical stuff into what he presented as case studies of patients, Right?
- [34:53]
B
Yes. So his own. Yeah, his own favorite quotes. Quotes.
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A
So when you're reading. Basically, Sachs is credited with, you know, originating, inventing the patient case study. But if you go back and read his case studies, we now find out through this article that there are just tidbits of his own life and his own experiences and his own favorite things. Things, whatever. His own psycho dramas. In a bunch of these case studies, they're not at all about the patients. And that's like the scandal here.
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B
Well, I wanted to go to the. Right. So those case studies that you talk about. Right.
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A
And the Leonard is one of them.
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B
Right. They follow in the tradition dating back to Freud of psychoanalytic literature, which are ordinance. Which are based on Freud. The work that made Freud's reputation were case studies. The Wolfman, Dora, the Sexual Hysteric. I mean, these sort of famous accounts that he would provide of patients that he met, all of whom were suffering from neuroses that were based on childhood experiences or fantasies that they believed or didn't believe and all of that. And, Abe, last night you said when we were texting back and forth, you're like, probably Freud made that stuff up, too.
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C
I've always felt that. Yeah. Because the kind of maladies he talks about, we don't see. I mean, you know, hysterical blindness.
- [36:34]
B
Blindness, Right. Yeah.
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C
You know, I mean, it makes for, you know, really fascinating writing, you know, So I think there's a really long tradition of this. And we also see it. We saw it A few years ago. And like social science writers, popular social science writers.
- [36:53]
B
Jonah Lehrer.
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C
Right. Yeah. There's this. I think, because they're not dealing in hard science, there's a lot of room to inject things into it. And if you. Especially if you want to use the field, the social sciences, to say something larger and interesting about the world and experience, you've got to sort of massage things into shape to create a solid narrative out of, I think, pretty thin evidence. And I think we see that over and over in this particular field. And people eat it up, by the way, because it's. It's because you're. You're on this edge of very fascinating material. You know, it's like, has to do with experience and then the mysteries of how the mind works and the mysteries of human relations. And people love to believe it. So the audience is always very willing to go along with it.
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B
Right. Well, so. And if you take the. So the New Yorker turned as. Turned 100. There is a documentary on Netflix called the New Yorker at 100 that people are telling me to watch that I. I've never been.
- [38:10]
C
I started it.
- [38:11]
A
No, thanks.
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C
I couldn't get through.
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B
I. I've never been. I've never been. Yeah. I've never been part of the cult of the New Yorker.
- [38:17]
C
Congratulations.
- [38:19]
B
Yeah, right. Okay. But here's the thing. So the New Yorker invented the. The field of what you might call literary nonfiction or creative nonfiction, these long, impressionistic essays by writers who wandered around and told stories about race. You know, there was AJ Liebling, who wrote about sports, wrote a book about Huey Long, wrote about food in France, and of course, the sort of legendary Joseph Mitchell, who was a courtly Southern gentleman who wandered around New York telling stories about demi. Mundane figures and bars and, you know, scragglers, and then had the world's worst case of writer's block and spent 30 years coming into the office every day and never producing another article. And basically, we now know that Liebling and Mitchell made. Made stuff up. Made a lot of the stuff up that they claimed. And then, like the most famous article in New Yorker history, which was John Hersey's account of going to Hiroshima a year after the bombing of Hiroshima, which took up an entire issue of the New Yorker. And as a kind of legendary feat of magazine publishing, we have no way on earth of knowing whether or not any of the tales that he tells in that account are factually accurate. I mean, they might as well be. I'm sure the horror stories are the horror stories. These are people who were living on the side of a. Of an atomic bomb strike. I'm sure the things were horrible beyond belief, but the New Yorker has about it this patina of. They have so many fact checkers, and they said, you're fact checking the vaunted New Yorker fact checking machine. And yet their main contribution to nonfiction was creating this weird category of writing in which people were making claims about the accounts and lives of people that were unverifiable by definition. And that 30 years after the fact, somebody goes and starts digging around and it turns out that the stories were made up. So what does that. Does that. What does that tell us about the way nonfiction developed in the United States from the night from 1925, when the New Yorker came into existence, till 2025, when the New Yorker is now debunking things that appeared in the New Yorker. You know, and what this means about what you should do when you. It's literally what reporters have always said, which is, you know, what is it is if your mother, you know, if your mother tells you something, you better check it out. When something sounds too good to be true, it's probably too good to be true. If a quote is too opposite, somebody may have goosed it a little bit or made it up entirely.
- [41:39]
A
This is not entirely the point you're making, John, but, you know, I was a subscriber to The New Yorker 20 years ago and thought it was a great magazine. I think over the past five to 10 years, it's been driven into the ground largely under the editorship of David Remnick. I think it's a much less relevant and great publication than it once was. And I think the cherry on top of that was the Pulitzer Prize award to the New Yorker for commentary for its poet, Mosab Abu Toha, of the Palestinian poet who has made a career accusing Israel of genocide and whose social media posts savaged mainstream media outlets for, quote, humanizing Israeli hostages. And that, to me, was, you know, an embodiment of what much of what the publication has, has become. And of course, the New Yorker had to nominate and approve of, you know, his app, his application to the Pulitzer.
- [42:54]
B
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- [44:16]
D
And I'm John Passantino.
- [44:17]
E
We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter, status.
- [44:26]
D
And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Power Lines.
- [44:31]
E
Every Friday we're breaking down the biggest stories shaping the industry, explaining why they matter and saying the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud.
- [44:39]
D
No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via our exclusive report reporting to take you behind the scenes.
- [44:49]
E
My understanding having reported this is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
- [45:06]
D
Oh my God. That's Power Lines presented by Status. Follow power lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast app.
- [45:21]
B
I mean, there are so many such cases in the New Yorker's, you know, history.
- [45:25]
A
I don't know where the fact checkers were on, on his commentary, but yeah, right, somewhere else.
- [45:30]
B
I mean, you know, E.B. white advancing the interests of one world government, Jonathan Schell trying to create the nuclear freeze movement. You know, time and time and time again, the New Yorker has been guilty of using nonfiction as a form of advocacy with the patina of, you know, factual, you know, absolute factual perfection. But this thing that, you know, Abe mentioned, you know, the socio, the world of the behavioral, psychological, sociological anecdote, which is by definition anti science because it, it involves things that, that are irreproducible. Right? That, that, that. If you're going to claim that People do X, Y or Z, you need to study it. You need to have a sufficient number of people who do the same thing. They need to do the same thing and have it recorded over time. And then that result needs to be reproducible by another scientist who can back, who can, you know, make sure that the claim that, you know, 50% of people who do X when they're 5 years old end up, you know, molesting their own children.
- [46:56]
C
I'll give you example. Like, it happens on a small scale all the time. I'll come across these articles. It's not necessarily in the New Yorker. This is all over the place, some sort of social science. It'll start with some type of counterintuitive claim like, turns out being lazy is good for you. Something like that. And the second I see that, I go, I know this is made up. I absolutely know this is made up. And you can, you could spot these, I mean, made up or massaged or, you know, whatever cherry picked. You can, you can spot these every day. That's, it's a, it's a kind of game.
- [47:44]
B
I mean, look, it is, this is a problem in hard sciences where it turns out that people, scientists who are needing to get more grant money or do whatever, fiddle around with their results, you know, study things, have to be withdrawn. We just went through a five year period in which the world was thrown into turmoil and chaos by people using the patina of hard science to say that it was okay for the Centers for Disease Control to suspend rent increases nationwide, things like that. So, you know, the skepticism, having skepticism is now a rational, defensive weapon. And something like this is just exhibit number 200,000 in be skeptical when an expert tells you something. But this is sort of bigger because he will. Of course, Sacks became a kind of sage, like a kind of saintly figure who brought a new form of empathy to describing what happens to people who suffer from injuries to their brains and how we need to understand them and have empathy for them. And as Eliana says, he was largely writing about himself, probably, or making, taking these people and then making autobiographical points about his own suffering or applying things that he thought to them that they were not. That had nothing to do with them. And it's weird when stuff like this heads, like discovering that, you know, a saint. It's like discovering that the, the woman who was New York Marathon 40 years ago took the subway to win the New York Marathon. You know, it's like she gets garlanded, she gets the medal, and then like 24, someone like, I never saw her between milepost 6 and 22. She gets on the subway. Rosie Ruiz was her name. But anyway, I don't know. I just. It's important to maintain that attitude of. Of. Of skepticism, like stay toward Ilana Omar's history of her marriages. Because the free. The Free Beacon is back with more. More on the Ilhan Omar marrying her brother story.
- [50:41]
A
Well, I have to say we don't have more on the Ilhan Omar marrying her brother story. This has all been out there. However, we're revisiting the story because, you know, the massive Somali fraud, mostly Somali fraud grabbing national headlines, has put Ilhan Omar also in the middle of this story because her district is at the heart of this. She took a video of herself at the restaurant that was at the heart of much of this fraud. And as a result, President Trump has been mentioning this. And so he's been at rallies talking about the fact that Congresswoman Omar came into this country. All she does is complain, and he's right on the money. And so he said, and she married her brother. He's at a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and says, and she married her brother to get into this country. Can you imagine if Donald Trump married his sister? How long do you think it would take for them to come after me? Two hours or less than that. And he said, my sister, you know, she's a beautiful person, but can you even imagine? And so I, you know, my dad actually was the original reporter on this story, dating back to 2016. And so Trump is right. He's correct. The crux of the story is correct, she did marry her brother. She did not marry her brother in order to gain entry to the country. And so I thought, you know, setting the record straight on precisely what happened and why would be useful as the president is seething on this. And I would say, you know, we still don't know why she did it exactly, but what's important for people to understand, you know, you can go look through all the social media posts of these folks calling each other brother and sister and referring to their father, their mutual father, as their father. On the marriage certificate which we published at the Beacon, Omar puts her last name as Elmi and then crosses it out and puts Omar and Elmi is their shared last name. Somali sources say that. That the reason Omar's last name is Omar is that she actually came in as a child. I mean, this part is not her fault. She came into the United States as a fraudulent member of the Omar family, which I think the State Department has said that in the 90s when Somalis were gaining asylum to the country, the citizen relationships were like 80 or sorry, the folks claiming familial relations, there was huge fraud in that. So this is not at all surprising. So Omar, my understanding is, is not her real last name. Meanwhile, a few of her siblings got asylum in the uk so these guys were separated. And then she married her brother to get him, to get him citizenship and bring him over to the country in 2009. So you can go read about it all at the Beacon. Trump is very much on this, but getting the facts a little bit wrong. So if you really wanna understand what happened, and I think my dad says in the piece that this does prove there's a new form of political scandal under the sun.
- [54:07]
C
Right. What's important and maddening about this is that liberals who hear this, they think we're like in Candace Owen land when we discussed this. Yeah, yeah. They think this is, this is wild, conspiratorial right wing craziness.
- [54:30]
A
And she was married to two people at the same time. It wasn't even that. She just married her brother. She. And then filed fraudulent taxes returns. I mean, it's totally crazy. And to your point, Abe, when this happened or you know, a few years after this happened, I was still at Politico. And you know, I'm keeping my head down about it because I know where I am and who I work for. I'm not saying a word. And I was about to leave from, to to go work at the Free Beacon, but an editor yelled to me across the newsroom, hey, Aliana, do you know your dad is pedaling this, you know, Ilhan Omar married her brother conspiracy just wide across the new newsroom. And so like, if someone's going to come after my dad, like I wasn't going to bring it up, write a story on it, but they yelled across the newsroom. So I turned around and said, yeah, yeah, I know what my dad's writing about. And actually he's right. Do you know, I wonder why Politico isn't covering it. Do you have a thought? Why aren't we writing a story about it? But the mainstream Minnesota press has actually covered it. And her response to anybody who writes a story about it is, you're racist.
- [55:43]
B
That wasn't Ryan Lizza. Or it was Ryan Lizzo.
- [55:46]
A
That was not Ryan Lizza.
- [55:47]
B
Oh, well, well, there is part five of the Ryan Lizzo Olivia nutzy story, which is, I believe, out behind a paywall so you can read it. And it's now Getting very Byzantine. But let me just, let me just say that Ryan Lizza keeping his powder dry while this, while his fiance after his fiance cuckold humiliated him, sought a restraining order against him when he didn't do anything to her. And then he just kept it quiet, he kept it still head down until she popped her head up and then he is like the receipts that he is releasing against her. This is one of the great acts of revenge I have ever justifiable revenge I guess. I mean not that I find him an admirable person in any way, shape or form but I, I, I certainly think that he should be enjoying his, his, his triumph. If you wanna, if you wanna follow the world iconic story especially contrasted with.
- [57:02]
C
Her with how her book tanked.
- [57:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. 1200 copies sold. I, I, you know, I, I figured there would be a little, at least a little more curiosity about this than.
- [57:15]
C
Someone said on Twitter. There's you can't find more people who just want to buy a gag gift.
- [57:21]
B
Ah, there you go. Well, you know, that's by the way and of course Ryan Lizza fired by the New Yorker in 2017 so that I don't know what that means but we'll bring that full first, full circle. Just, just, just for the, just for the hell of it. Okay. Well, we have come to the end of another week. I hope everybody has a wonderful weekend. Sunday night of course is the first, the lighting of the first candle of Hanukkah. I'm sure that we will get some really fun anti Semitic content out of Tucker and Candace relating to how the Maccabees were actually, you know, unjust enemies of the wondrous Greeks and, and God knows what else what other nonsense they'll be peddling. And we'll be back on Monday. So for Abe and Eliana, I'm John Pod Horitz. Keep the candle burning.
- [58:32]
F
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