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A
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary hope for the.
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B
Expect a worse Some preacher.
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A
Pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope.
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B
For the best expect the worst.
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A
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, September 3, 2025, also known as my wife's birthday. Happy birthday to Ayala. I am John Vadhoricz, 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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A
Washington, Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi Matt.
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D
Hi John.
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A
And here with an apology for the slander of Northern Virginia Senior editor Seth Mandel. Seth hi Seth.
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B
Hi John. I'm going to Read out a letter from my attorney and then I'm not going to take any questions. The funny thing is that the bad said. The funny thing is that this was in yesterday's show. I was attempting to compliment northern Northern Virginia over the place where I actually live in the Maryland suburbs by saying, you know, if they had, many of us in Montgomery county would be freer to go to greener pastures if there were more Jewish infrastructure. And the things I mentioned were an eruv and shul's and kosher Chinese restaurant, the things that Jews need. And I heard from several of you.
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A
Okay, gotta stop you again, because you. We have to define the aruv just very simply. An eruv is a physical construction. It's literally a piece of string that goes around a geographical area that helps Jews get around a prohibition in Jewish law about carrying on the Sabbath. But you're allowed to carry inside your home or inside the area that is your property, but not outside it. And so by stringing this string around a certain geographic area, you can extend what is private space into public space and make it possible, say, for a woman with a baby to carry the baby on the Sabbath or to carry a bag or something like that. And so the Arab is one of these fascinating workarounds of Judaism that is of no moment to anyone but an Orthodox Jew who was trying to follow the rigorously follow the rules of the Sabbath. And so Seth made this joke about how Northern Virginia he couldn't. He would love to move 20 minutes across the Potomac river west from Montgomery County, Maryland, which is a crazy 20 minutes, 20 minutes at 1 o' clock in the morning as the crowd is empty, so that he could move to the nicer part of. To nice Northern Virginia, the home, for example, of one Matthew Continetti. But that failure to have an Arab or some other things. And the first person I heard from in outrage and anger was Ann Continetti. Wanted me to know in no uncertain terms that there is an Arab in Northern Virginia and there's Chabad houses and you can get Chinese food delivered from a caterer if you are kosher Chinese food, if you are of a mind to do that. I just want to make it clear.
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B
Well, you know, John, you know what? Yes, you know what Meatloaf said? Two out of three ain't bad.
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A
Okay, fair enough. So Seth apologizes for the slander of Northern We.
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B
And I also the people who responded to me on Twitter, I started apologizing and they said, no, we understand that you were complimenting us. What we're saying is you can come, the Mandels can come to Northern Virginia. We will open the gates to the walled city. So I appreciate, just want to say I appreciate all the invitations and all the people saying that, you know, come on in, the water's fine.
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A
Okay, well, you know, it's a good time to celebrate this kind of the life of the D.C. area because somebody else is alive in D.C. is alive.
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D
I have it right here. I have it in the.
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A
Please, Matt, who is alive?
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D
This is breaking news from the New York Times morning email. Trump is definitely alive. Quote. Trump is definitely alive.
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B
You believe what the lame stream media would say about Trump?
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D
By the way, this morning email is issued the morning after Trump was in the White House, in the Oval Office in a public event, answering many questions, talking about many issues, addressing these rumors that he had somehow fallen ill or was dead that cascaded over blew Anon over the weekend. And yet the story is still the lead item here. And the New York Times goes on to just reassure us, quote, there's no reason to believe something sinister is happening. Close quote. To which I would add, there's no reason to believe anything is happening. Nothing.
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A
It's Monty Python and the Holy Grail, right? It's the guy wanting to get rid of his mother in law, right? They're bringing around the cart. So you're supposed to throw the plague bodies on the cart, right? Bring out your dead. And the guy says, all right, here she is. And then I can't remember if it's Terry Jones or something. He's going, I'm not Terry, Joe.
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D
The headline of this item, by the way, is Trump. Okay, which is a loaded question, but seems to be referring to again, these rumors that overtook social media. Now, I just want to take a step back because some of our audience might not be aware of what happened. But over the weekend, there was a series of days where Trump gave no public events and he was still active on Twitter. In fact, on Friday evening, just as the appeals court ruled against his tariffs, within a half hour, he released a lengthy Trump like post on true social, denouncing the ruling and saying he would appeal and saying that if his tariffs were overruled by the judicial system, then chaos and would ensue and dogs and cats would be living together in the United States would collapse. So we had he was still apparent visible in the public space, if not actually visually there, right? But over the Labor Day weekend on social media, the blues, so to speak, generated this viral campaign suggesting he was somehow ill or deceased. And as the campaign was going on on the same social media, at least X, maybe not on Blue sky, where many of these people dwell. There were images of Trump golfing at Trump national, which he has been doing the past several weekends because the weather in the D.C. area has been so nice. So my conclusion now, having lived through what was going on online, boosted by the algorithm, seeing the cable reports, cnn, msnbc, talking up whether Trump is alive, is Trump okay now with the New York Times? All of this is further evidence that the paranoid style in progressive politics is real and out of control.
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C
Isn't this exactly a mirror image of the, the idea that there were at least two Joe Bidens, I mean, you remember that, on the right.
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D
But here's the difference. Here's the difference. There is a lot of copying here, and I think some of this is a troll by progressives on conservatives and Republicans for raising questions about Biden's health and mental capacity. The difference is this one is the story about Biden's health and mental capacity is a real story, but it was also a story that was covered up by the mainstream media. And yet here you have this case where while clearly Trump is getting older every day, as we all are, there's no, you know, he's not calling out dead, dead ladies in the middle of a public event. And yet the mainstream media is seizing on immediate, you know, rumors one can dismiss out of hand. I think that's, I think that's the difference.
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C
I mean, that is a difference. But another difference is that the two Bidens, like the substitute Biden paranoia, was a, was an involved fantasy where people would put, put images side by side. And you say, you would say his eyes, you see here are like this, and his eyes in this photo are like this. Not the same guy at all. I mean, it was extended and it was deep.
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D
Well, I didn't get that deep into it.
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C
No, but that's not the idea.
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A
Abe is making a broader point about. You mentioned the paranoid style and progressive politics. That's of course a reference to Richard Hofstadter's famous book, Paranoid Style in American Politics and the Internet Evil in Almost Every Possible way, which we can maybe get to a little bit later, something that Abe and I were talking about over the weekend. The first real explosion of, I would say, like mass paranoid counter theory comes in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. There had been paranoid politics in America before. John Birch Society, of course, famously sort of drenched in it. But that what you, what you had then were people who were actively working to create an alternate Timeline to the official timeline of the Kennedy assassination using whatever materials they had to hand they, the Zapruder film were. And then, and the things that did not hue to the paranoid theory that there had been, there was a conscious cover up of the real murderer and murder and murders of Kennedy in the assassination, that the Zapruder film's frames had been reversed, someone had gone in and cut the Zapruder film. This, I don't know what it is, 22 second piece of film that shows the shot, that someone had reversed the frame in order to confuse things and that this happened and that Lee Harvey Ozzel was over here, not over there, the trajectory of the bullet, all of that. But in order to be that person or one of those people who, whose life was consumed by that paranoia, you had to go very down deep down a rabbit hole and gather material, you know, know going through microfiche and you know, and, and, and sort of like memorizing factoids and placing them in an order. Because there was no culture, there was no ability to study the moment in itself. Right? There weren't iPhones, there wasn't a lot of film, there wasn't, there weren't a lot of people on site who were witnesses. And there was so many. This thing happened and it was a slow bubble over decades as people got more and more and more into it. Now somebody says, well, I think Donald Trump is dead and 10 million people can take it up in five minutes and adduce evidence of his, of his being dead. Which of course is just the plot of the movie. Dave, you know, something's happened in the White House. He's in a, he's in a, he's in a coma in the basement. We don't know where he is. You can deduce it in five minutes and create now with AI and everything else, create timelines and factoids and things that are non existent but that are perfectly convincing at a glance. I'll give you an example of this totally from my own life. Again, not that this is the paranoia, but just how the world has changed. Somebody sends me a clip yesterday of my sister, Ruthie Bloom on Israeli television and she's speaking in Spanish now. My sister speaks Spanish. She learned Spanish actually from friends in our neighborhood when we were growing up and was a remarkable linguist and was pretty fluent for a while, but she hasn't really spoken Spanish in 45 years. And this clip comes and she's talking and it's her voice and she's talking Spanish and, and then as I'm looking at the clip I note, I'm like, my God. Ruthie's Spanish skills are remarkably preserved after almost 50 years in which she didn't speak any Spanish. And then I noticed that slightly, the lips are slightly off. And then I noticed the real tell, which is that the accent, which sounds exactly like her, in other words, you close your eyes, sounded exactly like her, was Castilian. And we here on the Upper west side of Manhattan, people who speak Spanish, do not speak Castilian Spanish. They are Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban. And so the Spanish that she learned would have been Caribbean inflected and not Castilian from Spain. But if you'd asked me and I hadn't looked very closely, I would have said, wow, Ruthie speaking Spanish. This is a minute long clip.
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D
I just, my, my point is very simple. Yeah, the, the, the Biden stuff exit existed on the Internet, but it did not seep into major media institutions. On the contrary, major media institutions went out of their way to echo Biden administration propaganda that not only was there nothing wrong with Joe Biden, he was better than ever. He was. There's a spring in his step. I want you to contrast that with what's been going on with Trump's health. There was earlier this summer, stories about spots that had appeared on Trump's hand and swelling in Trump's ankles. People raised those questions. Those questions were based on evidence, visual evidence. And the White House immediately came out and said, well, this is what's going on. He has this condition because of his age and his physical health, and that leads to this ankle swelling and he's bruised his hand, and that's why we're covering it with makeup. Then you go toward Labor Day weekend, and maybe it's just the fact that there was not much to report because it's Labor Day weekend, everybody's off on vacation. But a online rumor, like you suggest, not only carries this snowball effect into an avalanche of virality on social media, but cnn, msnbc, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, all of the mainstream institutions go with it, even though there is literally, literally no news, no information.
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B
Can we add to that, suggest that.
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D
There'S something wrong with Trump?
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B
Can we add to that Tim Walls, the governor of Minnesota, also joining politicians.
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D
And I just want to add another thing here, which is part of this is wish casting. I think it's clear.
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A
Yeah, of course.
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D
Part of it is there are a number of people, a considerable number in this country, who want him dead. And this just came up with a grand jury in Washington, D.C. in another instance of jury nullification that's been happening in D.C. amid the crime clampdown, the jury refused to return an indictment on someone who was threatening Donald Trump's life. Right in Washington, in Washington, D.C. and so I just, I was very disturbed by this story. Not only the lack of standards, but also what it reveals about the mentality of so many people on the left. And it's not just, it's not just Trump's health. There's another quote today in another. I don't even know why I read these things. I'm a masochist. I read these newsletters. This is a quote from Governor Pritzker of Illinois in Playbook, responding to Trump's calls that he may send in the National Guard or certainly send in federal law enforcement into Chicago. Quote, once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next? Close quote. Pritzer asked ominously at a news conference yesterday. Atrocities. Trump is committing atrocities. And finally, the final example is Epstein. We've had the Epstein blow up in.
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B
July.
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D
Based on, I think, the Justice Department's mishandling of its conclusion that there was not much there in the files. There was a kind of a rush to criticize Trump, a demand for more disclosure from Trump. Trump, of course, went after his people on the right who were making similar demands. It was clear that there was an effort by people on the left in order to suggest that Trump was somehow part of the Epstein sex ring, if such a ring existed. And then the summer happened. Everyone went back. No one talked about Epstein at home to the, to the lawmakers. Well, now Congress is back in session and the Epstein stuff is starting up again. And what's new? Oh, new revolutions, new revelations. Except there are no new revelations. And the Trump administration has released more documents. Two judges have said, we can't release the grand jury material because it hurts the victims and the people mentioned in the grand jury material.
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A
And not just that, not just that. Victims had a meeting with leaders of Congress yesterday.
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D
The two ring leaders.
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A
Yeah, but a couple of others said, we do not want this to be released. We do not want people to know what we said happen to us because it is too graphic and upsetting. So after two months of, we need to have this release so that people should know what Epstein, what happened with Epstein, victims of Epstein said, we do not want this to go more public. We do not want our, the proof of the evidence of the abuse that we suffered to be a matter of public record. We want to remain Private and Nancy Mason, a couple of other people came out of the meeting and said, well, we're going to have to rethink how we're talking about this because the victims don't, don't want it made public.
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D
Right.
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A
Let's talk about myths. Okay. You know how cold weather can give you a cold. That's a myth. How we only use 10% of our brains. That's a myth. You know what else is a myth? Thread count. I fell for it. I've fallen for it several times in my life. And it's, you know, from the sheets you buy when they have high thread counts that it really can be a total fraud because it's simply a measure of fabric density and isn't a good indicator of quality. Quality. If you want great sheets, you need to look at thread quality, not count. Bolen Branch uses the highest quality organic cotton threads for long lasting sheets that get softer over time. That's my experience with them. That's my wife's experience with them. That's Abe's experience with them. We are bowling Branch people and we are because they get softer with every wash. It is a wonderful thing. Bolin brand sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave. Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become softer. As I said with every wash comes with a 30 night worry free guarantee. So feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with bolan branch. Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets@bolandbranch.com commentary that's B O L L A n D B R a n c h.com commentary to save 15% and unlock free shipping exclusions apply John here to talk to you about my beloved quince. You know, cooler temps are rolling in and as always, quince is where I'm turning for fall. Staples that actually last from cashmere to denim to boots. The quality holds up and the price still blows me away. You know Those super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters? Starting at just 60 bucks, I got a drawer full of them. Their denim is durable, fits right and their real leather jackets bring that clean, classic edge without the elevated price tag. So what makes quints different? They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen. So you get top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. I'm going to be putting on those sweaters as soon as it gets cool enough to need them. I spent the summer wearing quince Polos. I am A quince man through and through. It's a go to across the board. You know, they got accessories of all kinds. Just go to quint.com to see what I'm talking about. You keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quints. Go to quint.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C.com commentary free shipping and 365 day returns.
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D
Quints.com/commerce on NPR this morning, NPR's chief political correspondent Domenico Montanaro was asked, well, why is this going on if no one has uncovered any evidence linking it to Trump after years, by the way, and especially in this most recent episode. And Domico Martin Turner said, well, Democrats, they just, it's, it bothers Trump. They don't like it. It's just something to annoy him. So that's, there's, that's the political level. But then at another level, we're going back to what I've been talking about. There are many people on, on the left right now who are convinced that Donald Trump was part of this sex ring. And in fact, there have been multiple legal actions taken over the summer because of this rumor going on in blue and on that somehow Epstein was involved in introducing Donald Trump to his current wife. And so this is what's live right now on the left today. And it is frankly disturbing to me, especially considering all that we discussed last week about the treatment of mental illness in this country.
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A
Okay, I want to broaden this out culturally for a minute. Last couple weeks have been the big film festivals, one in Venice, one in Telluride, where the big movies of the fall are basically shown to critics and people to start creating buzz ahead of their release. And two movies were released, one in Venice, one in Telluride, that reveal why we should be frightened about what Luigi Mangione means and what is going to happen in the wake of his trial. And the general conversation about that seems to be dedicated to somehow psychologically or spiritually exonerating him for his cold blooded murder of healthcare executive Brian Johnson on the grounds that Johnson somehow deserved to die because he was an exemplar of late stage capitalism running a giant health care company. One of those movies is called Begonia. It is by the director Yorgis Lanthimos, who made Poor Things and the Favorite. Both, you know, Emma Stone won an Oscar for Poor Things, Olivia Colman won an Oscar for the Favorite. And Begonia is a movie about two paranoid guys who become convinced that the head of a cosmetics company, I believe, or CEO, ruthless CEO, played by Emma Stone, is an alien. And they kidnap her and they bring her to her, kidnap her in her house and shave her head. And apparently the rest of the movie is them interrogating and torturing her for her to admit that she is an alien. And this is some kind of a. And they are kind of the heroes. And a second movie. I now need to find the site because I should have. The second movie came out. It's Gus Van Sant, who made My Own Private Idaho and Good Will Hunting and a couple of other things. And it is a movie with Bill Skarsgard, who, you know, played the evil clown in it. And it is a story about a true story about a. A guy who took a bank teller hostage in the early 1970s by somehow rigging a gun and putting it. And putting the trigger, a device around the neck of a bank teller. So if the bank teller didn't do what he wanted, the gun would go off and shoot the bank teller because he was mad at the bank. And according to the reviews I read of this movie at Telluride, of course, he's the hero and the bank teller is the representative of the evil capitalist system. Now, why do I bring this up? It's Hollywood. It's. No one watches anything and all this. But if you want to know the primordial stew, these movies are. Of course, it takes years to take. Write a script, get a director, get a cast, get funding, put them into development. Particularly if they're not, you know, Marvel or something like that. There's no pipeline. If you want to know the stew, the primordial stew in which Luigi Mangioni was boiling until he came to the. You know, until he. Until he was done and then went out on East 50 on West 53rd street and shot Brian Johnson in the back. This is the cultural stew. It is this idea that people in power are not human. Right? Begonia. She's an alien. She's not human. So you're allowed to take her and kidnap her and do what you want with her. And I assume that the twist at the end of the movie is that she is an alien. I don't know that for a fact, but it is the dehumanization and depersonalization of a CEO in this movie. Literal. And then also some schlep bank teller in 1970 where some psychopath decided, it is not that story. It's a fictionalization of that story. This is how people on the left are increasingly thinking about the balance of power in the United States and not just people on the left. It's a part of this whole institutional collapse and, and all that. But we are the wish casting that you mentioned in Trump's being dead. And obviously people often wish that political leaders they hate would die because it's the most convenient way for the era that they're governing to end. Right? I mean, it's one of the problems. So this is from time immemorial. Even if you're not willing to be an assassin, you can certainly sit at home and say, God, I wish, you know, that he would get a, you know, a truck would hit him and then he would die. But there is now an industry dedicated to the depersonalization of non leftist figures who are, you know, who are, who are. Now it's going to be, it is as though we now have an 1880s anarchistic Russian Dostoevsky is the demons theme, that it is permitted to commit acts of violence or to publicly do things to people because you don't like their politics or what they represent.
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D
I mean, our friend and Commentary contributor Gary Saul Morrison has been on this for years. And you know, when he first started writing about the, the lessons of the Russian literature of which he is expert toward today, I was like, well, you know, I don't know. America is different than pre revolutionary Russia. Now I'm not so sure. You know, now after, after looking at these headlines, considering what we've been going through the past couple years looking at the rise of socialism on the Democratic Party, his writings are, I think, extraordinarily relevant and people deserve to look up.
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A
The article, you know, he published for us last year. He wrote an article about the demons or the possessed or this book, the explicitly political novel by Dostoevsky about an anarchist anarcho syndicalist murder spree in a small town in Russia. And it was his literal theme, Dostoevsky's literal theme, that these political ideas are demonic, literally demonic, that they stem from a root of fanaticism that comes from the evil in men's breasts, which is the evil that has been summoned by the devil. And there are other such books that aren't explicitly political in this regard, like Satan and Gore by Isaac Bashevis Singer, which is also a portrait of a society that believes it is acting in its own interest and has in fact been sort of overtaken by evil. I am very worried about, I mean, I am genuinely worried about this. And I think that the violence that has been condoned since October 7th in the United States by Figures on the far left toward Jews, toward Jewish institutions at least, or excused away on the grounds that as Zora, as Mahmoud Khalil told ezra Klein, that October 7th was an inevitability and that presumably the response to October 7th by extending out the anti Semitic assault on. On Jews from Israelis to worldwide Jewry, that this is a permission structure and that this permission structure is now expanding and does that. I mean, Trump was subject of two assassination attempts. It had been a very long time since anybody tried to kill a president or an ex president or whatever.
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D
He was shot.
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A
He was shot, you know, and, you know, it's a miracle that he. That he is.
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C
We should just add to this.
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A
Yeah.
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C
There are people in this milieu on the left who say he wasn't shot.
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D
You can, you can do anything.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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D
Start day one with grazed grace for the. In fact, the FBI director said something like the former FBI Director Chris Ray said, that's why he was grazed by the bullet.
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A
Yeah.
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D
I just want to make on Saul Morrison's work. Not only does he bring up the possessed, but another point he's made in several essays, which I think is relevant is the idea of the intelligent, which is that in this, you know, Russia, pre revolutionary Russia, there were all of these students who had nothing to do, but they were over ed. Over credentialed. And so they formed this intelligentsia, the intelligent, and they were increasingly drawn to radical ideas. And I, who was Russ Kov in.
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A
Crime and P. He was a student. Exactly. Blogger. Yes. Right. He wrote. He wrote Pajama.
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D
He's a version of Pajama Boy.
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A
He wrote incomprehensible articles on politics for journals that nobody read. He was a 19th century blogger and he got very sick and, you know, couldn't get medicine. And this spun him off into deciding that his landlady was the epigone of, you know, capitalist or some, or, you know, economic oppression. And he puts an ax in her head and then her daughter as well, for good measure. Like, that's. That's the idea here, that you have people. Yes. Overeducated, underemployed, who do not have purpose, who do not have a sense of the quotidian and like, getting their work done day by day. And now we do have this means of harnessing such people collectively. So Abe wrote a newsletter. Is it yesterday's newsletter about this, the, you know, the. The Annunciation, the. The trans man who shot 20 people at, you know, at the Annunciation Church last week. And how this FBI profiler. Why don't you, why don't you sort of talk about.
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C
He's linked to these two groups online that are. I mean, you know, you could literally think of every awful combination ideologically that and fanatically that influences. And they are Satanic Nazis.
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A
Literally Satanic. You're not just using the word metaphorically.
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C
Right, right, right.
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A
Okay.
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C
At least in combination maybe, maybe one group's more Satanic, the other one's more Nazi. Ish.
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A
I don't know.
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C
And what's extraordinary is they're international and they prey on kids with mental health crises. So kids go into. I got all this from this fantastic interview at the Free Press with an ex FBI agent who worked on.
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A
His name is McGonagall. And the interviews by Frannie Block. Right.
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C
So what happens is kids go, I'm sick. I'm so sick. I'm so crazy. I'm so depressed. I'm so anxious. I don't know who I am. My identity is. And they go into chat rooms and then people from these satanic Nazi cults target them, lure them to other online platforms and then a kind of simultaneous weeding out and recruitment takes place or simultaneous or victimization and recruitment takes place.
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A
Where.
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C
They, if they can get the kids to harm themselves, that's a kind of win for them. That's, that's the goal. And indeed, the case that, that McGonagall was, was investigating was about a 13 year old who was coerced online into suicide. If they cannot get their target to harm themselves, then they recruit him and they have another of their number who will go forth in the online world torturing, preying on vulnerable kids. It is, it is as demonic as you can possibly imagine.
- [40:31]
A
Yeah, I mean, you know, it is this idea that what is the key element that as far as we know, paranoid schizophrenics have in common. I'm not a, I'm a lay student of this. I haven't studied it. But it's the hearing of voices, right? It is, it is the, it is the intrusive thought that seems to be coming not from your own head but from someone else. Or transmitted. You think your messages are being transmitted to you or you hear voices in your head or everything like that. So this is a real thing. It's a real, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a defining phenomena, defining cause of a very specific mental illness. But what if those voices are real? I mean that, that is what this interview with, with Agent McGonagall suggests is that the Internet has now allowed one these voices to not be simply disembodied elements of your own diseased psyche from. For which you can actually take medication that will quiet them, silence them, but that they are real and external and they're. And they. And they. And they transmit and they. They talk to you and you talk back to them, and they talk to you, and it's not you talking to yourself. It's not a crazy person on the street. And then they start saying things like, as we've seen these cases over the last 15 years, every now and then somebody will have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or something like that who will say, well, why don't you just kill yourself? You're so unhappy. Go kill your. What are you, a wimp? Are you a loser? There was that case in Massachusetts where that boy's girlfriend talked him into committing suicide and she went on trial for murder. I don't remember what the final verdict was, but she egged him into suicide because she was real and she was one of the few connections that he had. And the Internet creates this false world of false connection in which you can effectively groom people into evil. All of this is not to sound paranoid, but is connected. And it's all part of this collapse of community, collapse of standards, collapse of boundaries, collapse of guardrails.
- [43:00]
D
I just want to add one more element to it and that can maybe get us to what happened at Columbia yesterday. And that is what's striking to me is the vehicle for this radicalization is what Alan Dershowitz calls Palestinianism. So this, it's. It's not necessarily the critique of capitalism that makes this such a dynamic phenomenon. It's the critique of capitalism conjoined to anti Zionism, anti Semitism. And that is not really a feature of the 19th century Great Russian novels. They're disgusting. As more contemporary, of course, anti Semitism is perennial. But what's happening, it seems to me among.
- [43:57]
C
It wasn't Dostoevsky.
- [43:58]
D
It wasn't Dostoevsky because Russia had plenty of it. But, but what's happening among the new American intelligentsia is this, is this move toward antisemitism, socialism, radical and revolutionary critique of American society. And the pro. And the problem is there used to be bulwarks against it within the Institutional Democratic Party, and those are being knocked down.
- [44:30]
A
Right. So what you mentioned when you said Colombia is that there's a very odd post on the. On. On X this morning that I'm trying to find out what on earth it is referring to, but I'm trying to find this. Did I send it to you guys? Because.
- [44:57]
D
Do you want me to read it?
- [44:58]
A
Yeah, if you have it right here, please. Yes.
- [45:01]
D
Yes. So. September 2, at 10:04pm this statement was released by the Columbia Communications Division. The University's Office of Institutional Equity and the Office of Rules Administration have initiated investigations into incidents that took place today and over the weekend that involve potential violations of the university student anti discrimination and discriminatory harassment policies and university rules. The university takes these incidents seriously, and the individuals involved are being notified that the University will immediately pursue its process for disciplinary action regarding their conduct. These individuals are being informed that further actions design. Further actions designed to intimidate or harass specific groups of students. Students will not be tolerated and will result in immediate action, including interim measures ranging from campus access restrictions to interim suspensions. And then there's some verbiage about their commitment to free expression, but not to harassment.
- [46:04]
A
So I can't find, in the world of the very active people who participate in spotting anti Semitism and anti Semitic incidents, I can't find what this is referring to. And that well may be because it is not public. That is to say that I think yesterday was the first day of school at Columbia, which means students were moving in over the weekend, new students into new dorms, whatever. And maybe somebody sprayed something on somebody's door, maybe somebody slipped a note under somebody's door. Maybe somebody, you know, walked down the hallway shouting, you know, free Palestine and Zionists are not welcome here. We don't know what it is. What we do know is that this statement that has been released is a mark of one of the many reasons that American Jews and friends of American Jews should feel grateful for the Trump administration and its actions on college campuses, and particularly this settlement with Columbia. This statement would not have come out from Columbia had it not been for the deal that Columbia made with the Trump administration to restore the funding of its canceled programs in exchange for Columbia's promise that it was going to police acts of anti Semitism in light of, and in order to fulfill the Terms of title 6 of the Civil Rights act, that that makes it illegal to, you know, to do for groups to be discriminated against or subject to harassment. And there are two ways of looking at this, one of which is, so there's a new academic year and there are new sheriffs in town, or at least they're being forced to be sheriffs, but there are new sheriffs in town. The other is, it's a new academic year and it's all starting up all over again. And Jewish students on campuses all across the country are going to be subject to the same kind of harassment that they have been now. This will be the third year in which they have had to fight for the right to be themselves on college campuses where they are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year simply to go to school and try to get to class and try to, if they are, you know, believing Jews, try to get to the Hillel and eat kosher and do all that sort of thing. I don't know which way to look at it. I can look at it in both ways. But the Palestinian point. I just want to highlight a piece that everybody in the amity of my voice should read. It's by Elliot Abrams, who is in this case entirely coincidentally, my brother in law, the head of the Tikva Fund, the former Assistant Secretary of State, former senior official on the National Security Council in charge of the Middle East. And it is a masterpiece. It's on Mosaic, which is the site of the Tikva Fund. So just Google Elliot Abrams and Mosaic and you'll find it. It's a 10,000 word piece about the history of what you might call palestinism, or at least the idea that the Palestinian Israeli conflict can be solved by giving Palestinians a state. And that this is a delusion that has now persisted since before the creation of the State of Israel. Six or seven times in the course of the history of the State of Israel, gigantic worldwide efforts have been made to do exactly this, which is give Palestinians a state alongside Israel. And that the Palestinian polity, Palestinian culture, Palestinian politics and Arabist politics in general are not interested in a Palestinian state. Palestinian is about the destruction of Israel, not the creation of a Palestine. And that the goal of this world, and this idea is to remove Israel from history, to remove Israel from the Middle east. And that, and that no compromise is possible because people are asking the wrong question or they're searching for the wrong answer, which is how do we get them to stop? Give them things and they will stop. The only thing that can be given to them is the destruction of the Jewish people and the, and the Jewish state. And so Elliot then proposes the classic counter idea, which is that inevitably there will have to be some kind of confederation with the state of Jordan, which is 70% Palestinian, as a, as a governing body for the Palestinian people. Because Israel, under these conditions, after October 7th and everything like that, can never allow Palestinian state to be created on lands contiguous to them. Can't happen. They cannot have an army, they cannot have sovereignty. They cannot have a currency. They cannot have anything of their own because all they will do is use it to try to destroy Israel. So it's a remarkable piece, and you must read it. Yeah.
- [51:45]
D
I mean, there's so much in that rich piece. One of it is, you know, the peg for the piece is, of course, these recognitions or state statements of intent to recognize a Palestinian state on the part of many European governments. And Elliott Abrams points out that, you know, they're recognizing a state that doesn't exist and won't. And one of the reasons these European governments are doing so is because of domestic political pressure from the alliance of the growing Muslim populations in many of these Western European nations. And the left, which the European left, of course, is already down the road of the American left that we've been discussing. And it's another reminder, by the way, of where we would be right now if Kamala Harris were president of the United States. And I think it is very safe to say America would be joining the jackals right now, if not in expressly saying that they, that we recognize Palestine, that we would be demanding more and more from Israel to end the war against Hamas. And if not, then we would recognize this fantasy, just as the Europeans are doing.
- [53:07]
B
I'm Oliver Darcy. And I'm John Passantino.
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D
We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power.
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B
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.
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D
Matter and saying the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud.
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B
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A
We also pull back the curtain via.
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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 for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
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A
Oh, my God. That's Power Lines presented by Status.
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B
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A
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D
Let you know that two way tonight, the destination for the best political news and analysis anywhere is now available as an audio podcast.
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A
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D
Or any other major streaming platform.
- [55:00]
B
Well, there's a movement inside the dnc, the Democratic National Committee to push for recognition of Palestinian state. And while it's not, it has not succeeded as of yet. I think everybody understands that the fight, there was recently a fight at a, at a, you know, resolutions committee of the DNC before the midterms. But the real fight, I think everybody understands is going to be 2028, the Democratic convention. The when the Democratic Party is going to have to put together its platform. The platform fights have been, you know, increasing and increasingly ideological in recent cycles. Really on, I mean on both sides there's been a debate about whether, you know, these party platforms should be big ten things or more specifically or not.
- [56:00]
A
Exist at all or not exist, which.
- [56:03]
B
Was the best idea platforms.
- [56:06]
D
One social media post.
- [56:09]
B
Yeah, but, and so, but in the Democrat part, this is a pre, what we're getting now is a preview is that, you know, that's going to be a huge fight for the Democratic party platform in 2028 and we don't know how much longer they're going to be able to hold, you know, that sort of thing off. But there's no question that, you know, Jerry Nadler retiring and hand picking someone who backed, who endorsed Zoran Mamdani for mayor of New York City as his hand picked successor. You know, this is, this is what, this is where it is going. It's not just Democrats who are reading the, the writing on the wall. It's, they're ushering it along. They're, you know, they haven't, you know, Jerry Nadler, rather than having an open primary and seeing where it goes, is saying like, not only will I step down, but I'm going to make sure that somebody in my place is part of the new young turks of this party. And so, you know, 20 by 2028, who knows if it's even going to be much of a debate? I mean we talk about that now, right? Like, well, what would they say by 2028. I don't know if there's going to be a fight, but I want to.
- [57:22]
A
Talk about the Kamala Harris president versus Trump president. We are in a position right now that is so unprecedented that I can't even fathom that I'm about to say what I'm about to say, which is that the Prime Minister of Israel is standing to the left of the President of the United States on the question of how much violence to use in extirpating Hamas and destroying it. The president, we are told, is getting increasingly impatient with Bibi Netanyahu on the grounds, effectively, that Bibi is being a wimp, that it is time for him to go into Gaza City and destroy Hamas root and branch, pluck it root and branch and do what has to be done, and that the Israelis have been standing outside the gates of Gaza City now for weeks. They're not going in. They keep saying, ooh, we're going to get you. Ooh, we're going to get you. We're going to get you. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers, Israeli troops are building up. There are more guerrilla attacks on them. And Bibi seems to be determined, or the government seems to be determined to pursue this two pronged strategy, which is to say, we're about to go in and take over Gaza City and, oh, boy, and we're going to kill you in Qatar. This is the new thing is El Zamir, the IDF chief of staff, has said Hamas people outside of Gaza City are no longer to consider themselves safe from Israeli retribution, meaning the Hamas leadership, that is, if it's still there, has been living in hotels in Qatar. And so, having eliminated the superstar spokesman of Hamas, Abu Obeydah, last week, the face of the war, the face of the resistance, the face of whatever they are now saying, if we get him, we can get you, too. Khaled Mashal, head of Hamas. You are not safe. In a final push and effort to see if Hamas will return the hostages, will return the 20 living hostages, so that Bibi can then declare the war over, or at least get the final tranche. And Trump, without saying it and without, is saying, I think enough already. You've been fighting for two years. End this war. Go in there and take them out. And that's Trump effectively saying, you are now privileging the lives of these 20 people over this. I've stuck my neck out for you. America is sticking its neck out for you. The entire world is against you. I'm here to defend you. Do what I think is best here. Go finish this war. And Bibi doesn't want to do it that way, it appears. And so we have this circumstance in which the American president is the hawk and the Israeli Prime Minister is not a dove.
- [60:26]
D
Yeah. I mean, it's so, so complicated. Israeli politics is just this whirlpool once you start learning about it. I mean, it's. Even if Bibi does want to do what Trump is urging, which is just to begin the assault on Gaza City and have the final battle there in Gaza, he has to deal with the security cabinet. And you mentioned the chief of staff, Zamir. He's opposed to going into Gaza City. So you have to negotiate that. Then you have that Smotrich and Ben gvir, who are also in the cabinet, and they're angry over different things. And meanwhile, Israeli society is continually wracked, I think, with some good reason, about the Haredi question, the ultra orthodox who are more and more of the population and yet don't pay taxes and don't serve. So it's a, it's a tremendously fraught position Netanyahu finds himself in.
- [61:21]
A
Once again, it is totally fraught. But he has, he, he is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He is saying, we will go into Gaza. He has said from the beginning of this war, Hamas will be destroyed by the time this war is over. And he is trying to step back from that promise and give Hamas a weird moral victory in having the war end early by offering them this weird olive branch, which is that they will, if they give back the hostages, somehow, the, the invasion of Gaza City will not happen.
- [61:59]
D
Well, remember, though, you know, first it was the Witkoff framework, which was half the hostages and Hamas. After the announcement that the IDF would go into Gaza City, Hamas came out and said, oh, okay, well, we agree to that. At which point, both the United States and Israel said, sorry, too little, too late. The only way we're going to stop this battle is if you release all of them, all of the hostages. And as far as I can tell, Hamas has done nothing to, to say that it's going to comply. Which means that this, this operation in Gaza City, which was always going to take time because of the evacuation of the population there.
- [62:44]
A
Oh, not just that. I mean, they have to go. They have to go.
- [62:47]
D
I mean, take time before it starts.
- [62:49]
A
Right.
- [62:49]
D
Remember, they said at the outset it.
- [62:51]
A
Was going to start until the end of September. Right. That Hamas is actively preventing.
- [62:55]
D
Right.
- [62:56]
A
Gazans from fleeing Gaza City.
- [62:58]
D
So I just think as hostages, this, we're still in the early stages of this. It's very hard to see how it's going to be.
- [63:05]
A
That's why it can't be early stages. It can't be the early stages.
- [63:09]
D
But I mean early stages and like of sick of a six month process versus but I don't think I hear. Here's the thing.
- [63:17]
A
Yeah, go ahead.
- [63:17]
C
Sorry, Trump, like, you know, Matt's so right that, you know, Israeli politics is so devilishly complicated always. And around the war it's gotten, and the twists and turns and the sides have gotten, and the competing imperatives have gotten so complicated. The thing about Trump is he doesn't really do complicated.
- [63:41]
A
Right.
- [63:43]
C
He looks at, he's like, when he says get it done, he reminds, this is Trump the radio call in guy. You know, this is like when, when October 7th first happened, I had friends who are not steeped in Israeli politics at all. And they said things to me like, which we all felt, but they said things like they, these are the. Israel just has to go in there, get it done, take out everyone. Right. You know, there's a kind of magical thinking to it. You know, Trump has that to him. It's also, I think, an aspect of his common sense. Like, you know, when he, he sees a bad guy, he sees an enemy at the border. What, what would any sane democracy do that has the military power, but take them out?
- [64:34]
D
So this is, and we also, we.
- [64:36]
C
You know, we can't cut through something that, I don't know, he can cut.
- [64:39]
D
Through when we impose allegories onto Israel. And that's what makes it so complicated. We think. And Trump thinks, what do you mean Netanyahu wants to defeat Gaza? Can't they just do that? But you can't because of the structure of the Israeli government.
- [64:51]
B
But it's not just the structure of the Israeli government. The problem with Trump is that Trump is willing to have the images of supposedly starving children and other things thrown at him. If this is the past tense, that was the price of victory. What he's not willing to do is have those pictures thrown at him every three weeks. If it means the war is ongoing, he's willing to stomach one sort of fell swoop and, you know, and deal with those pictures. But those pictures made Trump say, I disagree with Bibi. There's real starvation there. We got to do something. And America has, I mean, the whole, the whole war has, has not just backed off of the idea of withholding aid, but we're done forever with the idea of the aid just being done through the Gaza Humanitarian foundation or, you know, or that American Israeli co project. The withholding aid has gone from, all right, you could do a siege to, you know, I don't want to be standing outside number 10 in London and asked about, you know, a supposedly starving child. So now we're going to flood with aid. We're going to get, you know, the UN Back and whatever. And then the Israeli military establishment says to, to, to that political leadership, okay, well, that's. We just gave Hamas another six months because we just fed them and bathed them and clothed them and whatever. And so I think that Trump is willing to say, you know, if it happens once, if I have those pictures thrown at me, but this is what it took, fine. But I don't think he understands that you. There is no one fell swoop besides, you know, some sort of Zeus like lightning bolt that just carves Gaza out of the earth and ships it off out into the Mediterranean.
- [66:53]
A
Okay, see, I don't, I don't, I don't agree with, with, with, with any of you here. In a weird way, I think Trump is right and that Bibi is wrong. And I think that the simple fact of the matter is this war is that this war is on the precipice of victory or defeat that will define the Middle east for the next 25 years. And Hamas has to be destroyed. And the, and the privileged position, privileging the hostages over tens if not hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops who are now standing on the verge of going into Gaza City and telling them to wait, telling them to calling up reservists who are going to have to leave their jobs and go back into the field having been fighting there. This is an injustice that is now increasingly being done to Israeli society by its own leadership. They either have to win, they have to win this war. And winning this war means destroying Hamas. And I know the idea of destroying Hamas sounds impossible and insuperable, and it's not. And it just means that this last year and a half in which Israel has had to negotiate its way through what is expected of it by people who have no sympathy for it and do not care whether it wins or loses and kind of want it to lose, and now what they have is the backing of the most powerful country on earth that wants them to win the war. And if Bibi does not follow along this path, he is going to lose the sympathy of the one force that is keeping Israel from becoming South Africa in the 1980s. And I don't think that that's wise. I think Bibi should take advantage of the fact that Trump is the most popular person in Israel to say. I believe that what Donald Trump is urging us is what we need to do. We need to shift strategies. We have done everything that we can possibly do to save and protect the hostages. We have to win this war. And I want the hostages out in 96 hours, all of them out, or we are going into Gaza City full force. I'll give him 48 hours. I'll give him 72 hours. I don't care what it is if he doesn't. The, the long term. Bibi loves to play nine dimensional chess. He is the best politician the west has seen in my lifetime. The most able politician in a democratic country. I, I've seen in my lifetime. He's been a Prime minister over four decades in different iterations. He's unbelievable. But he's great at politics. He does not appear to be great at winning a war.
- [69:47]
D
Well, I agree with you, John, what needs to be done. But I'm just, I think that you're right. The political dimension here is what is constraining or delaying Netanyahu because there is this domestic constituency that prioritizes the release of the hostages over any final victories over Hamas. And apparently Netanyahu thinks it cannot be ignored, right?
- [70:18]
A
No.
- [70:18]
D
And it includes the Chief of Staff, by the way.
- [70:22]
A
I'm saying his caution, which is what led him to slow the war to keep America on his side, now runs the very real risk of losing America when America is on Israel's side in a way that no country has ever been on Israel's side before. And so his caution is one of the reasons that he is this unbelievably successful politician. But Trump is not cautious, as we know. And he is, does not respect caution, I think, and he finds it, I think in the end he will decide that Bibi doesn't have the stones to do what he needs to do. And that will be very dangerous and threatening to Israel in the long run, also. So that's where I'm at, Matt. Now, just to lighten things up as we go, even though we're going along. You have a recommendation?
- [71:14]
D
I do. And it is a lighter side of life, so that I'm very happy to end the show this way, but I've been facing a dilemma. My kids are getting older. They're now approaching the tween years, and so it's hard to select films for Family Movie Night, Constant Negotiation. The Disney films, of course, now are, you know, they're beneath my children, but my son likes comedies rather than, than action. Films and my daughter, you have to find something that she will watch as well. Well, I struck gold this weekend by having a screening of my recommendation and that is Ferris Bueller's day off, the 1986 John Hughes classic featuring Matthew Broderick and Alan Ruck about Ferris Bueller, the high school student who decides to skip school and with his best friend and girlfriend goes on a spends a day in Chicago. It's an absolute delight. I'm sure many people who are listening to my voice or watching us on YouTube have seen the movie. Watch it again. It doesn't get old. And as I'm watching the film, it struck me that basically Ferris Bueller is a dry run for Home Alone, which John Hughes wrote. And so I think in John Hughes's mind, after the success of Ferris Bueller, he was like, well, how can I make this even bigger? And the way to make it even bigger was to shrink it. And to have Instead of a 16 year old skipping school or 17 year old have a 10 year old be abandoned by his family in an affluent Chicago suburb. And nonetheless, that's whole other story. But it's good to have the experience of watching your kids graduate from being home alone obsessives to Ferris Bueller obsessives.
- [73:09]
A
Fantastic. Okay, we'll be back tomorrow. For Matt, Seth and Abe, I'm John Pot Horitz. Keep the candle Bur it's been so long.
- [73:26]
D
How have you been? Hello. I'm doing well, Dave, why are you talking that way?
- [73:31]
A
Please say one for a compliment or.
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D
Two for a question.
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A
Yeah, this is weird.
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D
I think I'm gonna go. Talking with an automated phone tree can feel pretty ridiculous. That's why when you call Pacific Source Health Plans, you'll get a real person.
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A
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D
Find a plan@pacificsourcemembersfirst.com Martha listens to her favorite band all the time.
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A
In the car, gym, even sleeping. So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live. She saved so much she got her seat close enough to actually see and hear them. Sort of. You were made to school screen from the front row. We were made to quietly save you more Expedia made to travel Savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.