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A
Hope for the best expect the worst.
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Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect.
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The worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, September 16, 20, 2025. I am Jon Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi John.
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Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
And the author of our cover piece in the October 2025 issue of Commentary. David is Goliath, and that's a good thing. Our senior editor, Seth Bendell. Hi, Seth.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
David is Goliath is an interesting subject matter for the fact that Israel has now conclusively begun an all out ground offensive in Gaza City and has said in no uncertain terms that it will reduce the city to rubble if the hostages are not released and it will destroy Hamas by doing so. This is the last redoubt of Hamas in Gaza City and everybody batting down the hatches because the now we're going to have urban warfare images and these are not going to be faked. If you have a ma, if you have a major incursion of tens of thousands of regular infantry and reservists who are going to be using conventional weapons to clear buildings, destroy places, make the rubble bounce, blow up underground tunnels, all of that, there's going to be a lot of blood, there's going to be a lot of casualties, and nobody's going to have to be making up footage or inventing preposterous claims of famine and genocide. There is a war, but they will, but they won't need to, is my point. Having, having had no, but in other words, having had two years in which to make stuff up, now they'll actually have real footage of dead and bleeding, you know, people in, in, in, in, in horrible circumstances, as is always the case with street warfare, tragically. So that's why I say batten down the hatches. Already this morning, you know, the un, a commission group, an independent group commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, the most disgraceful group pretty much of the last 50 years when it comes to human rights, chaired by the world's worst human rights abusers, run by the world's worst human rights abusers, has issued a report, you know, unequivocally stating that, you know, Gaza is a genocide. Just want to make a quick note here that Jonathan Lemire of MSNBC and the Atlantic, who's a nice guy, tweeted out uncritically and without any qualification A sentence from this report, which is like tweeting out a sentence on Jews by the Nazi propaganda arm run by Joseph Goebbels. And I say that without any effort at hyperbole. That is what the UN is toward Israel. That is what the UN Human Rights Council is toward Israel. That is what this commission is toward Israel. And so the idea that the Atlantic, run by Jeffrey Goldberg would be released, would be quoting without any qualification sentences from this document is an intellectual, journalistic and moral disgrace. Now, Seth, David is Goliath little back behind the scenes of how this article came to be. You wrote a blog post six weeks ago, sent it to Abe, as is your want. And Abe said, this is so fantastic, we need to turn into a piece. And so we have turned it into this significant article that simply states basically, why do we know the name of Goliath?
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Because he lost.
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A
Because he lost. Because he lost. Why do we know the name of David?
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Because he won.
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Because he won.
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B
Because not only did he win, but he won a kingdom after that.
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Won a kingdom, ironically, because he was a king. The opening of the Pilgrim's Path to date to the temple, that, that and David's. And the, the David's castle. What am I saying? Castle. Like palace. David's palace. Castle. The path between David's palace and. And the. The temple was opened on Sunday and the walk was taken by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the path, this 3,000 year old path. And so the whole idea that, you know, Jews want American Jews and other liberal Jews want Israel to be the small suffering tough guy who sort of like desperately keeps himself floating above water and not be this weird combination of David and Goliath, which is to say Israel will always be small. It will always be less, sort of like numerous than its enemies and stuff like that. But it has to be, it has to turn into Goliath in order to defend itself.
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B
Yeah, it has to be strong and it has to. You know, the story of David is a story where, you know, he, he wins that one fight, but that's not the end of his. You know, that would be a legend if, if it was just David and Goliath. And then he went back to being a shepherd, like some sort of Jewish cincinnatus figure or something. But he went on to. It was clear at that moment that he was special, that he was a warrior, you know, in shepherd's clothing, that he was, you know, somebody who was going to do great things. And that, that, that was really the lesson that everybody around him took from that which is that this guy is something special. And, and he did. And eventually when he became king, he inherited, you know, a divided kingdom which he united and he inherited the Jews enemies obviously, which he defeated and therefore expanded the kingdom in most cases. You know, the same way Israel has done in its brief existence, through defensive wars and fights that it was forced to fight and you know, and just winning them. And, and so the idea of Goliath in people's minds is of like this really strong lumbering giant. But the reason that Israel's enemies have such trouble with it is because Israel combines the strength of, you know, a giant in the form of a nimble, you know, quick witted, you know, shepherd warrior who knows that he has to keep moving to stay alive and always outwit the enemy and all that stuff. And as the stories really are, you know, the point, one point of the piece is that people loved the idea originally, especially American liberals of Israel as the underdog, because America loves an underdog. But that David was the underdog in the literal sense of being underestimated, but he won the fight. And it's good that Israel is strong, that Israel was underestimated, but it wasn't weak. David was underestimated, but he wasn't weak. He was strong and he won. And that strength is inseverable from Israel's survival. Right? You can't have Israel perpetually be a scrappy underdog getting pushed up against the wall and finding a way to, you know, out of this situation, to just barely survive by the skin of its teeth in the real world. You can't survive that way in the Middle east, especially when you have all these enemies. Israel had to be strong. It could not be the, you know, this quirky, underdog, scrappy figure that people loved to root for. It had to figure out how to be strong, how to be dominant, how to defeat its enemies, how to keep them at bay. And that was always the second half of the David story. You can't stop the David story halfway when he beats the giant.
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D
Can I have been so struck recently Netanyahu has said or signaled in a few of his remarks just prior to the invasion of Gaza, saying, you know, saying a version of that, like we have to, we have to be independent. The world is turned against us. It's always been a version of that. But we, that we've been told we're going to be further isolated and that's fine, we will survive. We will have a way and a capability of continuing to protect our people and to ensure our borders. And you know, he, and some people are going to interpret that as him being, you know, bloodthirsty warmonger. I heard that is something that many of our friends have been saying and some even on this podcast, that Israel's need to be strong and independent, including even of reliance on, on American support. You know, wanting to not, you know, needing it at a certain point, but also not wanting it in terms of its sense of itself, as that's a positive development that actually shows a country that is getting stronger with each generation rather than becoming dependent on anything. And it struck me that that's going to pose a real challenge to all of these people, some of them on the right, a lot more of them on the left who say we shouldn't have anything to do with Israel, who are either anti Semites or, you know, anti Israel in whatever capacity Israel is doing the thing that they claim they've wanted to see Israel do for many generations. And I think their unwillingness to acknowledge that strength. And we will see all of this in the fallout of this current military activity. That's why I think, Seth, your piece is so great because it shows this longer history and this longer sense of nationhood and what it means to the Israeli people when they are forced to defend themselves. And so I'm just curious if you have a, do you have any take on Netanyahu's recent remarks in that regard?
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B
Well, I think that's the other part of the article which is, I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't know how much that it really is like Sparta. So much. But.
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A
Well, hold on, you should explain that. So Bibi yesterday said two things. He said we need to, we need to become an autarky. Which apparently terrified everybody in Israel who doesn't know the meaning of the word autarky because they thought he was saying and like a is a term for a completely self sufficient sovereign land that.
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D
You should read the golden thread. It explains that in the book.
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A
Yes, now we're back to the golden thread. Three times now we've mentioned the golden thread in a week. Okay, so autarky is, and it's almost impossible in the present circumstance, but is a, is a completely self sufficient polity is called an autarky. And he said it's not Athens or Sparta, baby. He said we need to be Athens and a super Sparta. Why did he say a super Sparta? Because Sparta loses to Athens and a Sparta might actually end the Peloponnesian War and super Sparta might win so. Or not the Peloponnesian War, you know, like part of the Greek Wars. Anyway, so the, so the super Sparta and Athens and then everybody in Israel has a complete meltdown because why is he talking about Sparta? What does he mean? What is this? And in fact, I think what he's saying is largely uncontroversial, that it has been clear since Biden started futzing around with releasing weaponry to Israel that had already been authorized and appropriated by Congress, that in the future, and given the nature of the United States, that Israel, Israel was going to have to make sure that it had the means to defend itself completely independently without having to buy arms from somebody else. That it needed a domestic military infrastructure to build and make arms and then also in a more complicated way to sink them, to create underground facilities so that they could not be taken out from the air. Not like the Hamas tunnel system, but you know, but basically that now they needed, you know, they couldn't just rely on Iron Dome, they needed to have a more complicated structure. And because everybody in Israel goes completely psychotic every time Bibi opens his mouth. They all went psychotic. Although I don't think in the end any of this that he said is anything that would have come as a surprise to Ben Gurion or Begin or anybody who, who was in the founding of the country or, you know, or his own spiritual leader, Jabotinsky, that, you know, Jews. Israel exists because Jews cannot rely on people elsewhere in the world to, to make sure that they will survive the efforts to destroy them. And this is just the logical, would be the logical result of a country that is getting rich and successful and has goods that it can sell and all that is that it should be devoting its resources to seeing about building a domestic defense industry so that it, so that if it gets cut off, if, you know, President Ocasio Cortez says, I'm not sending you those weapons that you, you know, that, that, that Congress said you could get, or Congress says no more weapons for you. It is not cut off. And then its enemies, you know, like come together and attack all at once.
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B
As I think, I think people, you know, need to understand that the setup now with the way that Israel and the US cooperate on weapons development is, and the fact that Israel isn't completely self sufficient is not because Israel couldn't build those weapons or whatever. It's because it makes more sense to do it this way for both countries. Right. The US and Israel.
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Yeah. So, you know, the President, globalism, it is, it is. You know, you don't have, you don't build your own factory. If you can buy something from a factory that's already making it somewhere else, why, why double the cost? Why have, why sink to, you know.
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B
And it deepens the alliance.
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A
We go buy them. Yeah, we. It helps the American defense, Right. Industry stay afloat, and it helps Israel not have to spend money spending 10 years building a, you know, an airline industry so that it can build its own planes. That's like somebody does.
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B
Somebody does cut off those weapons. It's, you know, it's, it's going to be cutting off the nose despite a face situation. You know, it's going to. And that, and that, I think, is what they're, what they're, you know, talking about, which is that, you know, is there's a. Well, I'd say the other, the other part, the way this jives with my piece, with the other part of my piece, is that the lesson is that there was this entire generation of American liberals who like the idea of Israel as the underdog and want to see Israel sort of return to being the underdog because that's how they understand the Jewish place in world history and all that. But it's being replaced by a generation of liberals or leftist progressives, whatever you want to call it, it's being, being replaced by a generation that doesn't care if Israel is strong or weak. It still wants it gone. Right? So the, the we love Israel as the underdog was a sort of bargain, right? If you stay weak, if you don't blow up too many buildings, if you don't, you know, if you don't make a scene, if you keep your head down, will, you know, we can still tell the same story we've been telling, telling, you know, for a century now about Israel and say the same narrative and, you know, and will, like you, the problem now is that the people who have a conditional love of Israel are leaving the scene and they're being replaced by people who have a sort of unconditional opposition to it. And so Israel's decision, Israel's becoming a powerful nation is being borne out, is being justified, is being vindicated, should say, by the fact that they're no longer, they no longer have supporters who say, well, we'll just make sure that you don't get obliterated, you stay weak enough, and we'll make sure you know that there's a Nixon in the office, in the president's office, whatever, and you won't get obliterated. Those people are gone. And so Israel has vindicated that it has to take care of himself. And it had to be planning and preparing for this moment for a long time.
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D
It also, that generation, it allowed it plausible deniability about the activities of groups like the UN and these human rights organizations who were constantly accusing Israel of things it wasn't doing. Those folks who say it's fine because we know Israel is actually a supplicant, an underdog, like they're not. This is overblown, but it's. That weird tension was allowed to continue. And now what they have are people like Mamdani running for mayor of New York, saying, if Netanyahu comes to New York, I'm going to arrest him, something he has no legal authority to do. But that kind of rhetoric and the younger generation who actually listened to what the Human Rights Council of the UN says and say yes, see proof that what we were saying about genocide is true. So I think it disrupted not just the understanding of Israel's place in geopolitics, but the role of these international organizations. And they can no longer pretend not to see what those organizations do with regard to Israel.
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C
And, you know, I was also from listening to Rubio yesterday, we were speculating a little bit about, you know, because there was a lot people wanted the story to be that the Trump administration and Bibi weren't on the same page, or maybe they weren't. They're listening to Rubio yesterday. It sounds to me like they are on the exact same page. If there is either a sort of absolute deal for every hostage, living and dead, no more Hamas in armed or in power or total military defeat, that's it. We've come to the end. The US And Israel are on the exact same page on that.
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A
The only thing that we've heard definitively from the administration that, that and from Trump, and he said it yesterday again, is that's it on gutter, no more attacking gutter, no more. Now, I don't think my guess is that there's no reason to attack Qatar, that, that, that whoever survived the strike, the Israeli strike is gone from Qatar and maybe in Turkey or something like that. But I somehow doubt that they're, if they, if, unless they're like grievously wounded and in, in somewhere and can't be moved, that they haven't left and gone somewhere else. So there, so Israel, though Bibi has said no one has safe haven and we'll hit Qatar if we have to. Trump has said no more. And I doubt that sounds pretty definitive. And I doubt that they either have to or will at least under this, under these current circumstances about this, this, this particular action. So that would really be the only division moving on to The Charlie Kirk story there are. We can go 50 different ways here, but there is a sidelight that is actually a sidelight in the story that is connected to the larger story of the response in the United States. And it is this bizarre rear guard action by what people have increasingly called the Woke Right. And increasingly the woke right seems to be defined as a term by its anti Semitism that say if you were trying to figure out who belongs in the woke right. The issue that seems to be the main collective focus of this group that is outside of MAGA or to the right of MAGA is aside from we need to do everything we can by any means necessary to stop the left and anything we do is justified is their hatred of Israel. So that's Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Ian Carroll who is some foreign sponsored Twitter person, all the people that Tucker has on his show and the fight that is going on. And that shamefully Vice President J.D. vance guest hosting Charlie Kirk's podcast yesterday allowed Tucker Carlson to come on to continue to proffer is that implicitly that Charlie Kirk was only talking Zionist in the last months before his death because he was under immense pressure from secret marionette like funders who were threatening his and turning point USA's financial well being. Ergo the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a meeting to crush dissent from the bout of Because Tucker Carlson said when Bibi who said, you know, like express condolences for a true friend of Israel, Charlie Kirk, that he was doing something disgusting by suggesting that Charlie Kirk was loyal to Israel or something like that. People then surface 50 quotes from Charlie Kirk over the last three months saying I will always stand with Israel, I defend Israel, I am with Israel is you know, you have to stop attacking Israel. Any Candace Owens seems to have gone insane or sick for the way she talks about Israel and that all of that was is not a sign that he was a supporter of Israel, but rather that he was being manipulated or blackmailed into supporting Israel. Thus showing that this event, you know, is immensely is destructive in every possible way of our civil order. And been talking about how the left's response is destructive or civil order and all that. But so here we have an example of how this is being weirdly deployed by people left like Heather Cox Richardson saying no, no, he wasn't really a leftist or you know, a trans advocate.
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B
Heather Cox Richardson by the way is you know, not just a respected historian but somebody who managed to become at one point and I don't know, maybe she still is the most read person on Substack like the most, the most.
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A
Historian, the most red person on substack.
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D
She is, she is. She was respected, I would say, until she became a highly partisan promoter of things and often cherry picks from history to make those points.
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A
I've actually lost respect for her. And she is advanced.
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B
Well, the point is that her audience is.
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A
There is a false flag narrative on the left, which is that in fact, Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin, is groiper, is. Is from the far right, not the far left. And, and that this is all, you know, and we're going to find out in due course that's what's really happening here. And so, you know, there's that bad part. There's this other false flat that Charlie Kirk wasn't a supporter of Israel and was being forced to. And so this, this the one thing you could say about Charlie Kirk, I think without, you know, he loved Jesus Christ and he loved Israel and he loved the Jewish Sabbath. Those are like three things I think, you know, love Donald Trump and he loved Jamie Vance.
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D
One other thing, though, that's important, and it was especially important in the last few years of his life. He was highly critical of the anti Semitism on the right. It wasn't just that he was like pro Israel. It's that he would point to his own side and say, this is not how we do things. And that was very important. And that's why he called out Candace Owens, because he knew her and why he actually said, and I don't think he said it as a joke, I think he seriously was concerned for her mental health because he knew her before and he saw where she had gone and he pointed to her as an example of what could happen to the right if they continued to try to thrive in that cesspool of antisemitism.
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A
Right.
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B
And what happens to the human brain, what antisemitism does to the. The human brain. Right. He spoke a lot about that, about just how destructive it is. But the other thing is that it's just so weird that the fight over Charlie Kirk's legacy becomes Israel centric because of Israel's haters.
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A
Right.
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B
We should know that. And John, when you said earlier that, you know, the woke.
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A
Right.
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B
If you want to identify them, you can usually follow the scent of anti Semitism. And you know, that's borne out by this. No, the fact that they have. These are people on the right, American rightists, American conservatives, whatever you want to call them, who are constantly talking about, well, we're American, we're not Israeli, it's not about Israel. It's not about a foreign country. Everything's about America. America first. And when Charlie Kirk is killed, they turn the whole conversation into one about Israel and the Jews. They did that. And I just want to say, you know, I, I mean, I attended the, the, the KIRK Vigil in D.C. there's been, you know, all over the place, all over the country. But one of the things that was.
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A
You know, at the Kennedy center, at.
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B
The Kennedy center, and, and so there were, you know, members of Donald Trump's cabinet speaking and all that, and Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. It was an interesting set to see what people had to say. And at that, nobody said anything about Israel, because it wasn't about Israel. It was about Charlie Kirk and his life. And the people who knew him got up and spoke about Charlie Kirk. Nobody mentioned Israel positively or negative, Erica, to make this about it.
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A
Yeah. And Erica Kirk, in her astonishing video eulogy for her husband, did not mention Israel. This was not.
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B
Right.
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A
The focus of his existence. This was one of 15 different issues that was of interest to him.
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C
He mentioned it when people came up to the mic and said, I have a problem with you because you support Israel and don't you know that the Jews are this and the devil and this and that and that. And then he rebutted it. That was his position.
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B
Right. And the speakers, the speakers at the Kennedy center were not people who are famous for their Israel support necessarily. Right. Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Both spoke. And so, you know, it's not like this was intentional in some intentional way for the people on stage to sort of try to protect Israel or, you know, whatever, anything like that. It's just. It's not about. It wasn't about Israel. These were people who knew him. It wasn't about Israel. I mean, the interesting thing was that they all spoke. You know, nobody really said anything about this being a war. Nobody said, this is a war and we're going to go get them. And, you know, in fact, they were, you know, it was sort of the peacenik part of the administration that spoke at this, at this event, you know, Robert F. Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard said, you know, Tulsi Gabbard said somebody came up to her and said, what do we do now? Because Charlie tried love and it didn't succeed, so what do we do now? And Tulsi said, I told this person, no, it did succeed. That, that.
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A
Look at.
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B
Around you, look at the movement, you know, whatever that grew out of it. So there was like sort of an explicit, we're not at war. We're not making this about conspiracy theories. We're not. It was a. There's a sort of kind of like rational, you know, it was just a sort of, you know, love and God loves you and, you know, all the other stuff. It's these people on the outskirts of it, like Tucker and on this woke, right. That have tried to transform this to really hijack it from Kirk and his friends and his family and turned it into something that they want it to be.
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C
Here's the thing about this, because, sorry, Tucker would be on the outskirts except for the fact that he's got this relationship with the vice President. This is, to me, the most disturbing part of all this. Tucker has been very critical of Trump at this point. He's been critical of the administration's moves. He's gone into deeply strange territory regarding Israel, the Jews and beyond on great many things. This Vance Tucker thing is extraordinarily concerning to me. And I'm trying to figure out where it goes, how it lasts, if it lasts and if it does what, what it, what comes of it. Because this is a minority opinion within maga. Mainstream maga, let's just call it that is not doing any of this, you.
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A
Know, the most prominent supporter of Israel in the United States, Donald Donald Trump. Trump is the most prominent supporter of Israel in the United States. So saying that MAGA is against Israel, MAGA is Trump. The point here is, and it's important that you mention this in relation to Vance, is this is a fight about the future. It is not a fight about the present.
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D
He's trying to co opt his potential critic, I think is why he had.
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A
Co opt his critic, co opt his possible running, you know, someone who could run for president or. And hear me out here, you know, one of the arguments that I made when Trump arose, and there he is, and he's got 20% of the primary vote after two weeks in 2015, announcing when we thought he was like a freak outlier candidate. And there he is, like leading the polls in the Republican primary is a high. You know, he has been spending years under the radar making connections to what I called this conservative proletariat voter, the ufc, the Alex Jones listener, the mixed Marshall artist, you know, the wrestling people and the beyond wrestling people and all of that. Go peering at wrestling matches going on Alex Jones's show, going on other radio shows you've never even heard of, all across the country building this network of support that was invisible to the mainstream media and to mainstream Republicans. And that was what gave him this.
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C
You called it like alternate pop culture.
- [37:55]
A
Yeah, this alternate, yeah, this kind of alternate pop culture that we didn't. And you know, alternate pop cultures are what America is like now. You know, an anime movie just made $70 million at the box office last weekend. And I, my, my guess is that 80% of people don't even know what anime is. But it is now like a dominating feature of the culture. That's how our culture works now is that things are so siloed that intensity can overcome raw numbers and all of that. Okay, so Vance is cultivating Tucker based on some version of the Roger Stone Trump theory. Theory that there is political gold to be mined from the people who are considered out of the bounds of proper common discussion. And that's. Even though he's successful and famous, that's who Tucker is. Who is he uniting with his podcast? People who think that, you know, they're ufo. You know, it's, it's, it's Alex Jones, right? Because it's UFOs and demons and supernatural effects of our daily life, conspiracies involving health and these, this revision of American history and world history. According to us, Churchill is the bad guy. And the Nazis really weren't so terrible once. They didn't really mean to, you know, try to destroy the entire planet and impose a thousand year Reichstag and all of that. And that there is this world of, let's say in the United States, 10 million people or 12 million people or 15 million people who are particularly susceptible to this kind of thinking. And if you could get them all to the polls for you, if you could register them and get them to the, to the Republican primary polls, you would have a real leg up. And I actually think that's pretty consciously what J.D. vance is doing.
- [39:54]
D
Okay, but this, to tie this to what Seth was saying about the vigil, and not just the vigil here at the Kennedy center in D.C. but all across the country that these vigils have been held, including in Beverly Hills of all places. I saw somebody sent me a link saying, can you believe this? The point is that I think he's missed. He's. That's a stupid gamble for him to make because those fringe people will always be out there. But you know who he really does need to collect are, are a lot of the people who voted for Trump the second, second time who actually aren't super political. What they connect to when they, when they saw what happened to Charlie Kirk is also what happened to Irina, Right, The Ukrainian immigrant who was, who was stabbed to death. Those are the things. They're connecting. They are not political people. They might not even follow political news. They're not active on Twitter or any of these social media sites. They, like, get Facebook jokes from their relatives. But when she was killed and then he was killed, that connection was made for what? I mean, mean, it's not pejorative, but for normal people, normal people who don't follow politics like we do. And they looked at that and they said, something's gone terribly wrong in our country. And we think most of it's coming from one side of the aisle. So no matter what Heather Cox, Richardson and whatever, you know, sort of liberal folks want to try to claim, that's what I, and certainly it's what I've heard from my friends who aren't political, who are kind of on both sides of the aisle, but mainly in the middle, have said they're like something in our society has broken, broken down. And when we ask for answers, there is one whole side of the aisle that says, either you didn't see what you think you saw, or they say, well, actually, because of racism, this, that, the other, we can't do anything about it. This is just how the world works. And those voters would turn out for a successor to Trump if the message was to them about order, about restoring some normalcy, about trying to understand why so many young men are picking up rifles and shooting people because they don't like what they. They say. That is, I think, what a lot of Americans are really deeply concerned about. And if Vance wants to run after anti Semites like Tucker Carlson, good riddance. Let him. He will not win.
- [41:53]
B
I'm Oliver Darcy. And I'm John Passantino. We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now, through our nightly newsletter, status. And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Power Lines. 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. No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is.
- [42:22]
A
We also pull back the curtain via.
- [42:24]
B
Our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes. 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.
- [42:44]
A
Oh, my God. That's Power Lines, presented by Status.
- [42:48]
B
Follow Power Lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app.
- [42:58]
A
I'm Mark Halpern. I want to let you know that two Way Tonight, the destination for the best political news and analysis anywhere, is now available as an Audio PodC podcast. Each weekday, I'll be joined by special guests from the worlds of news, politics and the media, along with members of the two Way community for conversations like no other. It's the best way to stay informed at the end of your day or first thing in the morning every weekday. It's a show like no other because we involve the community. We hear from people from around the country, around the world. They're part of a conversation. There is no other platform like this, and I hope you will find it to be not only different than everything else, but more meaningful as you become part of a special community around the program. So listen and follow two Way tonight with Mark Alperin on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other major streaming platform. The danger is that in an atomized atmosphere, I'm now talking only about the Republican Party's contestation of the future after Trump. In an atomized situation, building a weird coalition of outsiders may be sufficient unto the day to get you to the 22% that beats somebody else's 18%. Vance, obviously, in these polls that are being taken, that are meaningless now, is, you know, in the high 50s when you ask who you want to succeed Trump and Rubio's at 18 or something like that, like, that's, that, that's the kind of division that, that's there now. Vance is obviously like all vice presidents and like all such people in a poll position, if he, if he doesn't, you know, screw it up or if the world doesn't turn against, including the right, doesn't turn against the Trump administration, which could happen. It's, it is a second term, even though it feels like a first term. And, you know, things happen in midterms and after midterms and the economy, let's not forget the economy and other stuff. And people do turn on popular parties. Their own parties do turn on popular presidents, like the Republican Party turned on George W. Bush, who was wildly popular, got 93% of the Republican vote night in, in 2004. So, you know, it happens, it could happen to Trump does seem to have a unique, you know, connection to his voters. But we, we, we don't know yet. But that is the, that is the danger is that. And of course, empowering them and making them feel empowered is the Plato's cave effect. If they feel empowered, they are empowered. If they, if other people think that they're powerful, the woke, right, then they're powerful. You know, it's, it's all a question of, you know, of, of subjective analysis. So that's the fear. And that's why I think Abe is right to find it extraordinarily concerning that, you know, J.D. vance didn't have Ben Shapiro on the Charlie Kirk podcast yesterday, and he didn't have on, I don't know, I'm trying to think of some Christian broadcast, you know, somebody who would come on to talk about his Christian message or, you know, the family message or something like that. He had on the most controversial person on the right to be his co. Eulogist.
- [46:17]
B
And it's also, you know, that there's a vacuum now, right. This is the other obvious part, which is that Charlie Kirk, when we talk about, maybe we could call it the right wing street, right. When we talk about the right wing street, Charlie Kirk was representative of a huge portion of that. And this is all happening because he's not there. And so, you know, to, to put it in sort of vulgar terms, if you're J.D. vance, you don't have to court someone who's not there. Right. I mean, that's not, I don't mean that as though, you know, there's any sort of, God forbid, relief or anything on any, anybody's part. Everybody is, you know, J.D. vance is obviously heartbroken by his friend. But I just mean that you who do have on the show. Well, normally you would have Charlie Kirk on a show like this, and the show was actually called the Charlie Kirk Show. Right. And that tells you that you had to cultivate him. Now, one of the things that came out at the Kennedy center vigil was the number of people who were up there who work in the administration who credited Charlie Kirk with where they were. Caroline Levitt is the President's press secretary. And she got up there and she said, I decided to run for Congress in Maine in 2020. This was only three years ago.
- [47:37]
A
New Hampshire.
- [47:38]
B
New Hampshire. I'm sorry, excuse me, New Hampshire. I decided to run for Congress in New Hampshire in the 2022 midterms, you know, because of all the stuff that was going on. But then I won the nominate the Republican nomination, you know, because of Kirk. Charlie Kirk decided to elevate me and I became a person who got noticed, essentially. And two years later, I became the press secretary for the president of the United States. I didn't win that congressional seat, but I'm here because Charlie Kirk made me here. Like there's no other way around that. Anna Paulina Luna is a Republican congresswoman who said she was at a fork in the road in her life. And one of the offers on the table, I think the question was, should I do. Do I go away to college or do I take this job with Turning Point? But, you know, like 24 hours before she was going to leave, she says Charlie Kerr called her and said, I want you to be our Hispanic national, Hispanic Outreach Director. And so she, you know, paused her. She changed the direction of her life. She was going to do other things and instead went to work full time for her Turning Point. Now she's a member of Congress. You know, these were the things RFK said Charlie Kirk helped, you know, bring or organize a sort of, you know.
- [48:58]
A
Come in, come in.
- [49:00]
B
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, you have. So. So you have the HHS secretary, you have the press secretary, you have a congresswoman all up there saying, I'm here because of Charlie Kirk, essentially, not in a. In not meaning he inspired me. Meaning I'm literally here because Charlie Kirk put me, you know, made decide, deigned to support me. And that was enough. And so the thing for J.D. vance is, you know, the Republican street that's broken into these different divisions, the Charlie Kirk division, what happens now with it is an open question. But before you would have had to court Charlie Kirk, okay, the President's administration was up there on stage saying, I'm here because of Kirk, not I'm here because of. Because Tucker Carlson saw something in me. And now the question is, is there an element of the right, of this, of the conservative street, the right wing street that has to be courted, that contains within it the sense of moderation that Charlie Kirk proposed? And by moderation, I mean the actual definition of the word, which is, you know, to be a sort of moderate in. In spirit and, you know, and not want to go too far in any sort of direction, not necessarily way people use in terms of moderate policies. As if Charlie Kirk wasn't, you know, really right wing in his policies, but just moderate in terms of presenting oneself. Can you. Do you have to appeal to people of moderate temperament anymore? Is a question. Question that is highly concerning. Also for the same reasons that, you know, Abe was mentioning before, and we shouldn't.
- [50:45]
D
I mean, Kirk had Tucker Carlson on his show right after Carlson left Fox News. He had more recently when people had said, are you sure you want to have this guy who's gotten fringy on your college tours, he's like, you know what? That makes me want to have him on the tour. He was. He had a kind of controversialist stance towards a lot of the range of opinion on the right, which is a good thing, because it all comes back to his view of free speech and debate and argument and the idea that that is a. That's the way you want to have these arguments in America, not through the barrel of a gun. And I think the other concerning thing we should mention in the wake of his assassination is that the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is now saying she's going to suppress the speech of anyone who watch who she says talks about hate speech speech. We have a free. We have free speech in this country. And when an official of the federal government starts talking about policing speech, I get very upset. Charlie Kirk was against the idea of hate speech. There's plenty of evidence of that. And for her to say she's going to pursue people for saying things that. That she disagrees with or the government disagrees with, unless you are violently threatening someone using your speech, that is a separate issue, that is a threat to your life that you can take legal and. And law enforcement action against. And unfortunately, many people. And this has come out more since Charlie's murder, many people have noted on the right that they. They have to take those threats more seriously now. But for her to start talking about the federal government getting involved in policing speech is also something that worries me.
- [52:11]
A
You're right to be worried. And it is this question of where this legacy goes. It is rare in modern American history for there to be a martyr on the right. We don't. We don't. There haven't. I mean, and when there are them, when there have been, they're very problematic. Like, the last martyr is Ashley Babbitt, the woman who was killed during the. During the January 6 riot and has somehow been turned into some kind of a martyr for the idea that, you know, I don't even know what. Like, they went too far. We just broke into the Capitol and were rampaging through the Capitol, and then, you know, the authorities went too far because she wasn't pointing a gun directly at the guy, at the. At the terrified Capitol policeman, whoever it was that shot her, who was, you know, who was in the middle of, you know, being stampeded, you know, whatever, so. But everybody loves a martyr on their side. And it's a very dangerous thing because, you know, it's a Rorschach test. Is the mar. Does the martyrology lead to, you know, we need to appeal to the better angels of our nature or is the mark. Does the martyrology appeal to. We need to do to them what they've done to us. And there's clearly both. Impulses are being expressed all over the place. But there is one thing. While we talk about Pam Bondi saying something that's like, is a firing offense. And my. The Attorney General, the United States should not say, I will be prosecuting people for hate speech. Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. There is. I don't even know how much case law there is on this in the history of the American courts. You know, you can't. As far as I know, you can't shout fire in a crowded theater in theory, because you can create, you know, you could create a disturbance. And yeah, you can't say, I will. I, I will kill you, or, you know, I, I am coming and I will kill you if you say X, Y or Z or I'm coming to kill you anyway. Those are. That's not protected speech. Almost every other form of speech is protected by the First Amendment. You don't want the chief law enforcement officer of the United States advocating for something that is, you know, settled everything, particularly when people on the right are talking about how, you know, in Europe and elsewhere, including J.D. vance, by the way, that Europe is going the wrong way when it comes to speech, that people in Britain are being prosecuted for simply saying things like, there are too many Muslim immigrants in our country or that kind of orb, you know, do it.
- [55:08]
D
Tweeting someone who posted that statement.
- [55:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's horrifying to read about and think about. And he was right to highlight it. And now, you know, the Attorney General is saying it. That's really, really, really bad. And it's a sign that these things can go in any direction if you're not careful.
- [55:26]
C
This is like, always the way it goes in the. When someone leaves a legacy. And it's like we must, in our effort to be like Charlie, do exactly what he was against. You know, it's like, it's. It's a, It's a very common kind of impulse because you get. Because you get the COVID of, of the, of the person's ideology and intentions for you to then, you know, you can then bend that to, To. Into something distorted into your own me, you know, into your own ends.
- [56:08]
A
Yeah. So two things emerged from that, I think. One is that it's not just Pam Bondi. Stephen Miller said, we're coming after you. We're gonna get you, you know, we're gonna eat you, then we're gonna, you know, cut you. We're going to slice you up and eat you and destroy you and all that. And in that weird, unsettling, unblinking.
- [56:29]
D
Pam Bondi, by the way, said those remarks on even Miller's wife's podcast. So I just. Just to give you the kind of.
- [56:35]
A
Yeah, right. So he's, you know, senior adviser to the president, United States. The president. Now you can say again, what can you say? What can you not say? Well, say whatever you want, I suppose, and then you have to be judged by it. But you can say we need to make sure, find out if Tyler Robinson was part of something larger. We do not know. Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, said, we're pretty sure he acted alone. We do not know whether he acted alone, but that there was a crew of people who sort of knew that he was about to do this and did not alert the authorities that there was a direct threat to the life of, you know, Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Right. I mean, that. That we don't know. And that's what they're looking into in the, on these gamer boards and things like that. But it's one thing to say we need to find out whether there was active participation in either the assassination, lead up to the assassination, or in helping or trying to help Tyler Robinson evade justice after the assassination and saying people who think like him need to be investigated. All people who think like him need to be investigated. I say this having said yesterday that do we need to take seriously a look at the question of the connection between transit trans people, mental health issues and crime? I do. But that's also not a speech issue. That's a behavioral issue or a, an, you know, actions, not words issue. So that's number one. Number two is the question of whether or not the people who are collecting information about people who celebrated Charlie Kirk's death, giving it to their bosses and then trying to get them fired. Whether that constitutes a form of cancel culture that the right was so heatedly upset about in the wake of, I don't know, the wake of everything from 2015 onward, particularly, you know, George Floyd and all of that. And you. It's not because cancel culture was a way of taking conventional ideas, declaring them out of bounds, and then making examples out of people who held them. That was what we meant by cancel culture. Do you think marriage is between a man and a woman? You should be fired. Do you think that boys shouldn't play in girls sports. You should be fired. Do you think that, you know, do you think that crime, that they're. The police should not be defunded or that black people are disproportionately both the commit. Both the committers and victims of crime. You should be fired. These are all a, true b. Completely acceptable forms of expression or relaying facts. And then there was an entire culture that looked to destroy anybody who said this. What people are doing here is contacting employers and saying, is it okay that someone in your employ celebrated the public assassination and murder of somebody who we watched die on social media? Is that a person you want working for you? And that's not cancel culture. I'm sorry. That is people who are openly supporting a crime, murder. And then saying that effectively there should be more of this, or if you did this to another person, like Charlie Kirk, we would support that as well. All. Also, in the world of private employment, there is no such thing as cancel culture, by which I mean you work for somebody. And unless there's a union contract that makes it very difficult for you to fire that person. That person works at your sufferance.
- [60:46]
D
Which, by the way, is why a lot of the school teachers who are in teachers unions have only been suspended for praising assassination and not.
- [60:54]
A
Right. But when Karen Attia of the Washington Post says white men are evil, and he basically retweets something that says he got what's coming to him. And then she gets a letter from the personnel department saying, you have immediately been. You are dismissed as of now. Do not say that you represent the Washington Post in any way, shape or form. Goodbye. It's been 11 lousy years. And, you know, go. Go be on your merry way. And she shocked. She shocked.
- [61:26]
D
She fabricated a quote. She also fabricated a quote.
- [61:29]
A
Right. She f. Where she quoted a fabricated quote. Right. She. She promoted or popularized a fabric.
- [61:37]
D
Yes. And refused to acknowledge that it was right.
- [61:40]
A
Okay, so the Washington Post can fire anybody it wants. A private employer. They already tried. You know, the editor of the opinion section went to Karen Atia two months ago and said, you should take a buyout. I'm sending you a signal. Take a buyout, which is a message to anybody that if you step one, you know, one millimeter off the. Derek, as we say, you. You will. You will be. We're. We're getting rid of you. So do yourself a favor and get paid two weeks for every year you worked here for free and go find something else to do. And she didn't do it because she thought that she was immune, that she.
- [62:26]
B
Or she wanted. Or she wanted martyrdom?
- [62:28]
A
No, that's possible. No, I don't think so. Not from the way she.
- [62:32]
D
For more than a decade, she was immune.
- [62:34]
A
And Adam Rubenstein, her friend, has a fantastic piece at the Free Press, but she says Karen Attia was one of the people who tried, who wanted me and helped get me fired at the, at the New York Times for the sin of commissioning and publishing the Tom Cotton op ed in 2020. And I don't think she should be fired, he said, because I'm. I don't like people. But she should never have been hired in the first place. And she had every reason to believe, based on her prior conduct, that she could say or do anything. That's who she was. She was a purveyor of hate against white men. And that was fine for the Washington Post until things got too hot. And that's not a good now. But I disagree with him because I think the Washington Post should be able to fire anybody. And I'm glad that she was fired. Christine's written extensively about Karen Attia and for us and for her disgusting, disgraceful, repellent and abhorrent views that she is free to express. Free speech means you can say anything you want. It doesn't say you can say anything you want on someone else's dime. It doesn't say you can say anything you want on someone else's newsprint or on the website that somebody else pays for. You can say anything you want. That's the danger of Pam Bondi, who is saying, you know what? Maybe you can say anything you want.
- [64:01]
D
Right. If the government had pressured the Washington Post to fire Karen Atiya, we would be defending Karen Atiya as well. Anyone should, right?
- [64:07]
A
Yes. Okay.
- [64:08]
B
So we should also, by the way, just mention in terms, in explaining how Karen Attea sees herself and this whole situation, that when she wrote her first person account of what happened, she used a photograph of herself, a professional photograph of herself dressed as the Statue of Liberty, holding a torch, as the Statue of Liberty does. But the torch was a rolled up Washington Post print edition that was. That had been set aflame. And she was wearing a kind of face gag that was a flower gagging her mouth, and she was standing in front of the Washington Post offices. So there's a, there's a, you know, there's a perception and reality thing here, but it takes a sort. It takes a certain kind of person to be prepared immediately. You know, I, oh, well, now is when I throw on my statue of Liberty dress and hold up my flaming Washington Post in front of the Washington Post. You know, but, but this is. But, but also that, you know, the hypocrisy that Christine was talking about, that's. You're either the Statue of. You're either a gag statue of Liberty or you're not. But if you're, if you're a gag Statue of Liberty, then you're not trying to get Adam Rubenstein fired.
- [65:30]
A
You can't. Commissioning an op Ed can't be Torquemada and, And Sidney Carlton. Like, you can't be. You can't be also being marched to the guillotine by the Jacobins and be the Jacobin. I mean, you get. Good luck to you. I mean, eventually, of course, if you're a Jacobin, you do get marched to the guillotine. That's part of the story here, perhaps.
- [65:50]
D
But the tumble roll for them all eventually. That's the lesson.
- [65:54]
A
There we go. Okay, so just in closing, news came as we were taping this that Robert Redford has died at the age of 89. And he represents a easily the biggest. He was easily the biggest star of my lifetime, by which I mean in the time when Hollywood was still the star factory and the person atop the food chain in Hollywood was the most, I don't know, exceptional person in showbiz in America. Robert Redford held that position probably for 20, 25 years, and in a very interesting way, because he made. He didn't make a lot of movies. And so the movies that he made were an event. He didn't give a lot of interviews. He was very mysterious. He kept himself aloof, and he was politically very active. So he was one of. He and Warren Beatty were sort of like the two people who introduced the, the idea of Hollywood star leftism as a, as a sort of a, as a commodity. Good. He also was a promoter of the independent film and various environmentalists and this and that and the other thing. But, you know, it's funny because he still maintains this in death. Like, the name Robert Redford has a strange elevating valence. Like you're not talking about an ordinary person. That's like the death of a king or the death of a, you know, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a noble or something, a person apart from, from the rest of us. And that's the total difference between stardom now and stardom then, which is stardom now is you're on Instagram five times a day, you're doing little stunts, you're dropping music 12:00 clock at night, you're marrying the tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs. You're constantly trying to keep yourself at the center of public attention. And stardom in Redford's era was about holding yourself aloof and sort of dropping in and out at moments. And that impact, the impact of, you know, scarcity. It's like diamonds. When diamonds were scarce, they were really expensive. Now you can get a lab cut. Diamond and diamonds are not the same thing that they used to be. He just had this amazing presence, amazing power as a figure, as an, as a, as a not particularly versatile actor. Just, he was himself in everything that he did. And that was something that everybody wanted and wanted to see and could not, not get enough of. And he made sure they could never get enough of it. And that reticence, that conscious, well designed reticence simply doesn't exist anymore. And, and we're probably the worst for it because, you know, just like a wash in all of these pseudo stars and fake stars.
- [69:18]
B
And, and, and can I, can I add something to, and, and sort of make it the recommendation if one of the most popular GIFs, or GIFs, depending on you, how you pronounce it on social media, you know, which is a looping video. I, I don't think I still have to define it, do I? But anyway, the looping video is of Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson where he plays a mountain man. This is the Mountain man movie. So when you think of Mountain man for a long time, Jeremiah Johnson was the sort of reference point where he looks over his shoulder, he looks back over his shoulder at the camera and he smiles without, you know, a toothless smile. He's just sort of smizes whatever you want to call it and nods. And this, this GIF is like, it's kind of like the Jack Nicholson nodding gif. You know, people use it when they want to congratulate somebody on a good line or something. But here's the thing. He's bearded because he's Jeremiah Johnson, the mountain man. Thick bearded, his hair is longish and he's sort of looking kind of squat because he's, you know, sitting on a riverbend or whatever. There are an inordinate number of people who believe that this is a GIF of Zach Galifianakis. And so I wish, I want to, we should make the recommendation Jeremiah Johnson or something like it. Because the, the, the fact that this GIF got so popular among a generation who don't know who it is in the GIF is its own sort of thing. So learn who it is that you're. The picture you're sending around, why it matters, why that happened.
- [71:04]
A
You know, you have stumbled into an interesting political why can't we all get along Moment. Because Jeremiah Johnson, Robert Redford, Hollywood's foremost leftist, was written by John Milius. John Milius, the. The screenwriter. Beloved. Everybody loved him personally and was very, very, very right wing. And probably the last time that Robert Redford ever worked with anybody. Right wing. Anybody off the top of your head. Have a. Have a Redford recommendation. What's that?
- [71:42]
D
Butch Cassidy?
- [71:45]
B
I have a weird one.
- [71:46]
A
Yeah, go ahead.
- [71:47]
C
Which of course is my favorite type.
- [71:48]
A
Yes.
- [71:49]
C
No one will have seen it.
- [71:50]
A
Yes. What's that?
- [71:51]
C
He's in an episode of the Twilight Zone called Nothing in the Dark. It's about a woman who. Old woman who believes that she saw death in. In. In. In person years back and that death has been hunting her ever since. And there's a knock on the door on a cold night and it's Redford and she thinks he's deaf. And I won't tell you anything else.
- [72:18]
A
Yeah, it's so good. And he was one of these guys who like, came up. He's a movie star, right? You don't think of it. You know, he came up. He worked in the Broadway theater. He made his big. He like. His big moment was starring in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the park, which he then starred in the movies. And two funny stories about Redford is that the novel of the Graduate by Charles Webb describes Benjamin, the hero eventually played by Dustin Hoffman, as basically looking like Robert Redford. Although Robert Redford was short. That's the great secret, Right? He was like five, seven or something. So he was actually in person, very slight, but he did not look slight on screen. Right. So. And Benjamin Bragg, supposed to be 6, 2 and like the strapping blonde Aryan type. And so there was this idea Redford should play Benjamin Braddock. And Mike Nichols, the director, had this idea that the point about Benjamin Braddock was that he was kind of a loser. And that one of the reasons that Mrs. Robinson was able to seduce him was that he was an unsure and tentative person. And so Redford comes in and Nichols already knows that he doesn't want him. And he's like, all right, when you play this scene, you know, play it like, you know, you just struck out with five different women you asked out and read for. According to Nichols, like Redford says, what do you mean? He says, you know, like when you ask somebody out and they say no, and he's like, well, that never happened to me. I can't, I can't play that because that's never happened to me. So that was how Nichols was able to sort of say to his producers, he can't play the part because he doesn't, he like doesn't have any life experience similar to Benjamin Braddock's. Even as a, as an unknown art student in the 50s in LA, everybody, you know, everybody wanted Robert Redford. So that's, that's, that's anecdote. Maybe that's anecdote number one. The best movie that he ever made, in my opinion, is a movie in which he is really a supporting player, and that is the Sting. Because the dominating performance in the Sting, which is one of the best American studio movies ever made, is Paul Newman's as the guy who comes up with the idea for the con that will be the revenge play against this remorseless psychopathic criminal. And Redford is his sidekick. And Redford did not like being a side. Never again really played a sidekick or when he did, it was Hoffman was his sidekick and all the President's Men. But if you have not. And amazing numbers of people, as far as I can tell, have not seen the Sting. The Sting is one of the most sheerly enjoyable movies ever made. It is a joy from start to finish with one of the best executed plots you have ever seen. And that's probably his high water mark on screen. So we'll be back tomorrow for Abe, Christine and Seth and John Bob Hordes. Keep the candle burning. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to outdo your holiday, your hammocking and your pooling. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.