The Intifada Is Here in America

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "The Intifada Is Here in America" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: June 3, 2025

In the episode titled "The Intifada Is Here in America," Commentary Magazine delves into the alarming rise of anti-Semitic violence in the United States, drawing parallels to historical and global conflicts. Hosted by John Podhoretz, alongside executive editor Abe Greenwald, social commentary columnist Christine Rosen, and Washington commentary columnist Matthew Continetti, the discussion offers a comprehensive analysis of the current socio-political landscape affecting American Jews.

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1. Introduction to Rising Anti-Semitic Violence

The episode begins with the hosts addressing a recent tragic incident in Boulder, Colorado. An individual, described as an Egyptian national who had overstayed his tourist visa, constructed 18 incendiary devices, commonly known as Molotov cocktails, and attacked a Jewish gathering aimed at highlighting the plight of hostages in Israel.

John Podhoretz summarizes the event:

“[00:55] ...an illegal Egyptian, illegally present in the United States on a tourist visa, which he overstayed, made 18 incendiary devices... he threw these firebombs at... a gathering of Jews in Boulder, Colorado...”

He emphasizes the severity of the injuries inflicted:

“[00:55] ...assemble somewhere between four and eight severely injured. As a doctor friend of mine said, injury in fire is about the worst injury you can suffer in terms of pain.”

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2. Historical Context and Recurrent Patterns

Abe Greenwald draws parallels between the current events and past incidents, highlighting a disturbing continuity in anti-Semitic actions:

“[04:11] ...last month we had the firebombing of the home of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania while he and his family slept during Pesach Passover.”

He further connects these acts to a broader pattern of hatred towards Israel and Jews:

“[04:26] ...arson. That too was by a far left radical who is anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist. And that's kind of the tissue that connects now radical Islam and the radical left is hatred for Israel and of course, hatred for Jews...”

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3. The Role of Media and Propaganda

Christine Rosen critiques the media's portrayal of anti-Semitic protests, arguing that they often misrepresent the motives behind these actions. She contends that what are labeled as "pro-Palestinian" or "anti-war" protests are, in reality, endorsements of terrorism and anti-Semitism.

“[07:17] ...Commentary magazine podcast... they have been unwilling to call this what it is... to globalize the intifada... this is an incitement, a call for violence.”

Matthew Continetti supports this view by criticizing the media's inconsistent labeling of protesters:

“[09:39] ...the media has been playing since October 7, 2023... pro-Palestinian protesters who use slogans that some Jews consider to be anti-Semitic... representatives, endorsers, champions of terrorism on our soil.”

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4. Immigration Policy and Domestic Security

The hosts delve into the implications of immigration policies, particularly focusing on how lenient stances may inadvertently facilitate domestic terrorism. John Podhoretz and Abe Greenwald discuss the "broken windows theory," suggesting that unchecked minor violations can lead to more significant crimes.

John Podhoretz states:

“[24:40] ...he brings with him his ancient hatreds and then imposes those hatreds on American Jews...”

Abe Greenwald emphasizes the necessity of strict immigration enforcement:

“[24:42] ...those students, the student visas... If people like that have a reasonable expectation, either you get him on the overstaying the student visa or the tourist visa... he was here illegally.”

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5. Historical Comparisons: The 1960s-70s Domestic Terrorism

John Podhoretz draws a direct comparison between current events and the rise of domestic terrorism in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He references groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground, highlighting their transition from protest movements to violent extremism.

“[32:36] ...Jeffrey Herf had a wonderful piece... radical leftist ideas which started supporting... violence against Western institutions... students for a Democratic Society... Weather Underground... 1200 domestic terrorist bombings...”

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6. Media Propaganda and Social Media's Influence

Christine Rosen and Matthew Continetti discuss the detrimental impact of social media platforms, particularly TikTok, in spreading anti-Semitic propaganda. They argue that misinformation and extremist content on these platforms fuel violent sentiments among vulnerable individuals.

“[43:46] ...pictures of one supposedly starved Palestinian child after another who may... who is actually suffering from some other disease.”

Christine Rosen adds:

“[43:59] ...TikTok is the worst offender and it should be shut down in this country already...”

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7. International Relations: Israel, Iran, and Domestic Security

The conversation shifts to the geopolitical dynamics influencing domestic anti-Semitism. John Podhoretz criticizes the media's handling of reports from Gaza, asserting that misinformation serves as a catalyst for domestic violence against Jews in America.

“[36:43] ...stories about Israeli troops firing on Palestinian Gazans waiting in line to get food... the New York Times is reporting it as though it is a dead solid fact...”

Abe Greenwald emphasizes the strategic importance of Israel's actions in Gaza:

“[41:05] ...how to defeat Hamas and end the war... Palestinians break into warehouses where Hamas is storing the food for their own evil purposes.”

The hosts also touch upon the administration's stance on Iran, critiquing internal conflicts and perceived weakness in dealing with nuclear threats.

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8. Law Enforcement and Community Responsibility

Christine Rosen advocates for a "broken windows" approach to policing anti-Semitic activities, arguing that strict enforcement of minor crimes can prevent more severe acts of violence.

“[19:26] ...Jewish institutions have been doing this for years with their own private security... law enforcement officials need to start anytime there's one of these gatherings, anytime we've had many of them here in Washington D.C.”

John Podhoretz echoes this sentiment, stressing the importance of decisive action by authorities to curb the rise of domestic terrorism:

“[18:11] ...people who are hate-filled make no distinction between Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora... these should be laws enforced by prosecutors.”

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9. Conclusions and Call to Action

The episode culminates with the hosts urging a multifaceted approach to combat the escalating anti-Semitic violence. This includes stricter immigration controls, robust law enforcement, combating media misinformation, and supporting Israel's strategic initiatives against Hamas.

John Podhoretz concludes:

“[72:38] ...We stand at a hinge moment... the only solution that we have to end the war with a Jewish victory...”

Abe Greenwald adds:

“[65:38] ...foreign support for Hamas must be cut off... America needs to stop negotiating recklessly with Iran.”

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Abe Greenwald [00:25]: "Hope for the best, expect the worst."

• Christine Rosen [07:17]: "There has to start being some responsibility for what is being invoked, incited and encouraged here."

• Matthew Continetti [09:39]: "These are simply representatives, endorsers, champions of terrorism on our soil."

• John Podhoretz [18:11]: "He brings with him his ancient hatreds and then imposes those hatreds on American Jews."

• Christine Rosen [43:59]: "TikTok is the worst offender and it should be shut down in this country already."

• John Podhoretz [36:43]: "The New York Times is reporting it as though it is a dead solid fact."

• John Podhoretz [72:38]: "The only solution that we have to end the war with a Jewish victory."

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Final Thoughts

"The Intifada Is Here in America" serves as a stark warning of the rising tide of anti-Semitic violence intertwined with global geopolitical tensions and domestic policy failures. The hosts provide a compelling argument for immediate and comprehensive actions to safeguard American Jewish communities, emphasizing the urgent need for policy reforms, enhanced security measures, and a critical reassessment of media narratives.

By drawing historical parallels and dissecting contemporary issues, the podcast episode presents a sobering analysis of the challenges facing American Jews today, urging listeners to recognize and act against the evolving threats to their safety and community.

Transcript

[Abe Greenwald]

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

[Christine Rosen]

Some preach and pain Some die of.

[Abe Greenwald]

Thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best.

[John Podhoretz]

Welcome to this laryngitis filled edition of the Commentary magazine daily podcast. I am the laryngitis suffering John Pothor. It's the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Matthew Continetti]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, you don't sound like you have laryngitis. Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Christine Rosen]

Some of us didn't attend a rave this weekend. Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

There you go. And of course, Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John. And a special hello to all of our subscribers at the commentary magazine podcast, YouTube. Chann. You know, I monitor our subscriptions on our YouTube channel every day, and I'm proud to say that we are now close to 12,000 subscribers. We have 11,800 subscribers. And I just want to encourage everyone, even if you don't watch us on YouTube, just take a second, go to our YouTube channel and like and subscribe our videos. I think we should have a new goal, 15,000 by the end of June. That's the goal I'm setting out. 15,000 subscribers. I think we can do it.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, here's my promise. If we get to 15,000 subscribers, yes, I will like Jerry Lewis during the school district telethon. I will sing you'll Never Walk Alone and cry.

[Abe Greenwald]

Love it.

[John Podhoretz]

I weep as I sing you'll never walk alone.

[Abe Greenwald]

Let's do it.

[John Podhoretz]

To our. To our blessed listeners and viewers, and thank you all for listening and viewing. We convene here on A sad morning, 36 hours after a illegal Egyptian. Immigrant is not the right word. Illegal Egyptian illegally present in the United States on a tourist visa, which he overstayed, made 18 incendiary devices, people. They're referred to as Molotov cocktails, which is sort of like a cutesy term by now and is actually a handmade firebomb, as you can see if you watch the video. I wouldn't even call it a demonstration, just a gathering of Jews in Boulder, Colorado, to keep attention on the plight of the hostages in Israel. This man threw these firebombs at the. At those gathered somewhere between four and eight severely injured. As a doctor friend of mine said, injury in fire is about the worst injury you can suffer in terms of pain. And so the people who are in the hospital need an extra dose of prayer and hope for healing because it is so terrible what happened to them. And the aftermath is equally terrible, especially 12 days after the murders in Israel at the Capitol Jewish Museum of the two Jewish Christian Israeli Embassy staffers shot in the back by a radical American leftist. As opposed to this case where we had some kind of a extremist who told the cops after he was arrested that he was looking to kill Zionists, all Zionists, and that he would do it again. So that's my summary.

[Abe Greenwald]

And of course, last month we had the firebombing of the home of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania while he and his family slept during Pesach Passover.

[John Podhoretz]

Also. Also a firebomb.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, arson. That too was by a far left radical who is anti Semitic, anti Zionist. And that's kind of the tissue that connects now radical Islam and the radical left is hatred for Israel and of course, hatred for Jews, because these assailants make no distinction between Israeli and Jew. And this should be a wake up call to American Jewish institutions. Because no matter how much you want to orient yourself toward the cause of social justice and talk about Tikkun Alam and talk about the changing hearts and minds over difficult processes and conversations, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. These people are hate filled. They make no distinction between Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora. And they have escalated. And so while it was just Protest marches in October 2023, it was just ripping down the images of the hostages, more than 20 still alive in Hamas captivity in the fall of 2023, in the winter of 2024, whether it was bullying, harassment, violence directed against Jews, Jews, on college campuses throughout 2024, the occupation of administration buildings, the taking of campus employees hostage throughout the past year, it's now escalated into outright violence, murder, firebombings. We also forget the attack that happened on New Year's Day in New Orleans, the Bourbon street attack, car ramming attack. Right. This is omnipresent. And I think my final point for the moment is let's be clear who's responsible. I've encountered a flurry of articles in the past 24 hours. There must have been a message that went out on journalist or whatever the current iteration of that newsletter group chat for liberal journalists is saying that. Actually, you know, the real problem here is Donald Trump's not talking enough about anti Semitism. Well, that's a little bit odd to me because President Trump has denounced all of these attacks. President Trump right now is being attacked by the left for trying to root out anti Semitism on America's college campuses. Oh, and by the way, President Trump's immigration agenda would have kicked this guy out of the country before he gruesomely injured our fellow citizens. So don't give me this baloney that somehow Trump's fault. It's not.

[Christine Rosen]

There's also, I think it's worth noting that, you know, for a long time when you have discussions with people about what was going on in the Middle east, you would have this contingent, as Matt says, who would say, oh, you know, we actually let, let's talk about peace, let's talk about cooperation, let's talk about how everyone can get along. That has been absent since October 7th in all of the rhetoric I've seen, whether it's on college campuses, whether it's among far left activists. They are over and over telling us what they want to do, which is globalize the intifada, commit acts of violence. Now, some of them will stay with just violent rhetoric and wearing Hamas headbands and, and cosplaying being revolutionaries on Colombia's libraries. But others are going to end up doing what we have seen in the last few months, which is actually commit acts of violence, intend to murder and maim, and actually succeed in doing that. And that's where I think as much as we're all free speech advocates and we all on this podcast are, there has to start being some responsibility for what is being invoked, incited and encouraged here. And that's actually where I think the political left is in dire straits because they have been unwilling to call this what it is. Even the headlines and some of the news stories covering this terrible attack in Boulder, an attack, by the way, that was a regular vigil held by elderly citizens in that community to highlight the fact that there are still people being held hostage by Hamas, that that attack was no one wanted to use the word Jews or hostages held by Hamas or any of the things that would have shown clearly what this was. And this is where I think the public has to start insisting on the truth. We saw this as well, and I know we'll talk about this later with the claims about the Israel military firing on people trying to get aid in Gaza. Also a lot of untruths circulated this weekend. But this rhetoric globalize the intifada, the is an incitement, a call for violence. It has been consistent. It has been all over the place in this country, and it is time to call it out. I agree with Matt that Trump has obviously been much more outspoken about this. I do wish that the truth social post he put up in the immediate aftermath had mentioned anti Semitism. He kind of got distracted by the immigration question. But clearly this is an effort by the left to try to, I don't know, like a squid with ink, distract people from the fact that, that this administration is at least calling this out on campus and elsewhere.

[Matthew Continetti]

There's been a game that the media has been playing since October 7, 2023, which is to say that these protesters are pro Palestinian. Even early on, they would say anti war pro Palestinian protesters, and then people like us would write pro Hamas protesters, right? Or the media would say pro Palestinian protesters who use slogans that some Jews consider to be anti Semitic, things like that. This is all garbage. I mean, if this. And it will keep going on, but it's, it goes to the level of straight up lying that has been covering this entire movement, which has been headed toward targeted violence at Jews from the very start, since before Israel reacted to Hamas War of extermination launched on October 7th. The idea that these are pro Palestinian protesters or anti war protesters, they are simply representatives, endorsers, champions of terrorism on our soil. And this is the inevitable result.

[John Podhoretz]

The phrase globalize the intifada. Let's unpack this a little bit because this is something that is being said by those who wish to encourage an intifada going global. What is an intifada? Well, there were two intifadas, uprisings in Israel and in the environs of Israel in the late 20th century and at the very beginning of the 21st, people may remember the second intifada that was actually a series of bombings largely in and around Jerusalem, but other places that killed more than a thousand Israelis and caused Israel to stage a kind of military assault on the west bank to remove the bomb making facilities and factories and pipeline that the Palestinians had created largely in the city of Jenin. But 14 years or 13 years before that intifada was what was called the first intifada. And that broke out in 1987 when there was no independent Palestinian Authority. That of course, was created by the oslo Accords in 1993. That authority, coming into being after, in the mid-90s, gave the Palestinians sort of dominion over large swaths of the west bank which they used to funnel guns and bomb making facilities and material to the most militant of them to create the conditions of the intifada, which were summoned into being by Yasser Arafat after he rejected a peace deal offered by Israel and Bill Clinton both, you know, in, in 2000 and early 2001. And so rather than accept the deal, he triggered a terror war which was the logical end Result of a death cult system rather than a national liberation nationalist movement that would seek to have its own country on, you know, much of the West bank, but 13 years earlier was the first Intifada. And because there were no bomb making facilities and there were no heavy, there was no heavy weaponry or anything like that in Palestinian hands, they resorted to rocks and firebombs, Molotov cocktails. And so when you say globalize the intifada that is now happening on American soil, the use of firebombs in Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg and in Boulder, is the first intifada coming to our shores. Nadava, who is known to many of our listeners, I think, as a commentator on Dan Senor's Call Me Back podcast, sent out, sent down an email that he then released to his listeners. And I want to read a little bit of it because it sort of explains what we're, what we're talking about here. Eyal writes, I've been covering terror attacks for over 20 years. I began my career as a journalist reporting from the west bank for Israel's Army Radio. I've seen Molotov cocktails thrown with my own eyes and I've seen the aftermath of such attacks. But seeing these scenes from Boulder were deeply shocking. Even more so the realization that this was a replication and imitation of terrorism. Terrorist attacks in Israel. One of the most infamous attacks during the time of the first Intifada was the firebombing of the Moses family's car as they drove from Al Fayman Asha to Tel Aviv during Passover 1987. As they passed near the Palestinian village of Habla, a Molotov cocktail was thrown, hitting their car and igniting it. Ofra Moses, the mother, was six months pregnant. Despite her husband's efforts to save her, she was burned alive. Their five year old son Tal was critically injured and later died. The father and two other children were seriously wounded but survived. So he saw this. Anyway, I'm bringing this up only to say that this is not a slogan. It is now an operational doctrine that is being carried out inside the United States. Is it individual? Is it simply lone wolves being crazy? Possibly, Possibly not. Possibly not.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, talk about the slogan woke mind virus, right? I mean, it doesn't have to be coordinated by a foreign government, which as you suggest, may well be to have some type of kind of loose conspiracy or just kind of shared value system. Because this idea that Israel is committed, committing war crimes and Hamas apparently is somehow a prostrate victim to the IDF and the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, which, and in the west bank, which continues to support October 7th. Well, their innocence and they're being victimized here. That is like the air we breathe now. It's everywhere. And even more so in the corners of different, you know, either far left, radical socialist precincts and. Or Arab Muslim online chat groups. I just want to say I don't think the immigration question is a distraction. I really don't. This man was here illegally. He told authorities that he'd been planning the attack for over a year because he wanted to wait until his daughter graduated from high school. I'm sorry. Kick out the whole family. Kick them all out. If they overstayed a tourist visa, they should not be in this country. He comes to this country and what does he do? He brings with him his ancient hatreds and then imposes those hatreds on American Jews, elderly American Jews who just want to protest silently against the terrorists who are keeping other Jews hostage. It's insane.

[John Podhoretz]

So you cannot say that this is.

[Abe Greenwald]

A distraction because of. Because of what our immigration policy has been for 20 years. We have imported the intifada. That's what we've done. It was just waiting and now it's activated, so we have to stop it.

[John Podhoretz]

I agree. And I think also why this is so central is that why is this guy. We live in the United States. The United States provides us with freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the essential belief that you can do what you're going to do wherever you want to do it until the moment at which you start committing a crime, in which case you can be intercepted or, you know, the authorities can interpose themselves. What do I mean by this? He's standing there across the street from these old people, talking about the hostages, yelling and screaming at them. He doesn't have a shirt on. He's walking back and forth with a bottle. It turns out he has a bunch of things on the ground in front of him, which are these other Molotov cocktails. Name me a country on earth where an authority, a person of authority, wouldn't have simply swept up, gone in, taken a truncheon, hit him over the head, dragged him into a van and taken him off somewhere to be thrown into a day. This is.

[Christine Rosen]

This is actually where I think we need to start having more of a broken windows theory of policing about these anti Semitic activities, because they are, you know, look, a lot of these campuses, for example, a lot of cities have overlooked the vandalism against Jewish institutions, against synagogues and elsewhere. They haven't pursued or prosecuted in large, at large scale people Committing these smaller acts, all of which allows for a culture, a sensibility that it's totally fine. And the fact that you can have someone ranting and raving, clearly you know, with violent intent, standing across the street from people peacefully protesting. And it still took law enforcement some. I mean, they got this guy, thank goodness. But it took, you know, emergency responders and elsewhere too long to get to the victims. We need to be more careful. I mean, Jewish institutions have been doing this for years with their own private security. But law enforcement officials need to start anytime there's one of these gatherings, anytime we've had many of them here in Washington D.C. there's almost always an element of them that becomes quite violent, confrontational, aggressive on the streets. And that is where we need to start cracking down. Because those are crimes, even the small bore crimes like vandalism, if we gone unprosecuted, lead people to believe that they can be even more lawless.

[John Podhoretz]

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[Christine Rosen]

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[John Podhoretz]

Okay, so to follow the broken windows analogy to Matt's point about why illegal immigration or our how we deal with.

[Abe Greenwald]

Those students, the student visas.

[John Podhoretz]

Right, right, right. No, we now we know is broken windows. In other words, the guy comes here on a tourist visa and overstays his welcome. Broken windows theory would say if people like that have a reasonable expectation, either you get him on the overstaying the student visa or the or the tourist visa. Because your idea might be that if he stays too long, he's already committed a crime and he may commit a war.

[Christine Rosen]

He worked the system in that he did apply for asylum request, which I Believe was turned down or was he hearing process. So he was working.

[John Podhoretz]

In other words, he was, I think, turned down. But it was the Biden administration's or somebody's decision during the Biden administration to let him stay here while his case was being adjudicated, which was not necessarily. Which was not necessary. Simple fact of the matter is he applied for student visa, overstayed his visa. I'm not saying that people who overstay their student visas are all gonna start throwing Molotov cocktails at Jews, but I am gonna say that people from Muslim countries who are walking around, going on the Internet, researching how to make Molotov cocktails, doing stuff like that, tried to buy a gun. Oh, he tried to buy a gun.

[Abe Greenwald]

Tried to buy a gun. And the gun shop said, you're an illegal immigrant, we can't give you a gun.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. So my point here is that there are a lot of different ways to look at broken windows theory. And immigration law is a perfect place to start now, because if you are willing to break the laws of the United States when you're here as a guest of the United States, what laws, what other laws are you going to be willing to break while you remain here? So now it stands to reason that most people who are doing this are doing this because they want to work and they don't. They want to keep their nose. They don't want to be exposed to the authorities because they want to stay here. So they, they, they keep quiet and they keep their heads down. But not necessarily. What scenes did we see after the, you know, border completely broke down and all of the people who got in were being shipped around to different places, including into midtown Manhattan.

[Christine Rosen]

But the.

[John Podhoretz]

Why did we see those people do. Having fights with each other, like, you know, stabbing people, pushing people on subway platforms, all staying in one hotel on Madison Avenue and 44th Street. It was like a crime zone. Somebody in here in New York, a girl, has a 1% chance of surviving an attack on Randall's Island. She was jogging. That's a place where they're. They had placed some illegals in temporary housing. Again, I'm not saying that with 15 million people here illegally, that you can then say every one of them is a potential terrorist, but not one of them has a right to be here.

[Christine Rosen]

But that. That has to be combined, I think, again, with the shooter at the museum here in Washington, D.C. was a citizen. He was not. That's homegrown terrorists. So I think we have to see this as a layered strategy where, yes, you do you definitely use immigration policy and enforcement is one aspect. But you also these, I mean, I drive often near the Israeli embassy and for since October 7th there have been these protesters. Sometimes they block the street, they try to surround your car. At first they've had to have a progressively larger zone and more, you know, protection from, from law enforcement. For anyone even driving near that area. There's no reason for that kind of threatening behavior. The people who block streets who, you know, do all these sorts of things, they should be promptly arrested and prosecuted. And the prosecution of these lower level crimes is I think, where there's a real weak link for the, for those of us on the side of law and order and prosecution. Because progressive prosecutors in blue cities and states where a lot of this protest happens are not going to enforce the law.

[John Podhoretz]

And the problem is that those prosecutors are largely elected and they are being elected by the people of Washington D.C. of Philadelphia, of San Francisco, where the progressive prosecutor was actually ousted in a recall. Portland, all these places where they have, you know, the Open Society Institute and the people around the Open Society Institute funding these campaigns. Open site Institute can't fund a campaign. But you know, it's the same funding mechanisms. They are getting these people elected who will not prosecute low level crimes. And the low level criminals are then become shock troops in some cases for political mass action, including after, you know, during Black Lives Matter protests and things and, and what was going on in America after October 7th with the shutdown of, the repeated shutdowns of the Brooklyn Bridge and places like that, everybody in those protests knowing that they will, if they get arrested, they will never come.

[Christine Rosen]

To trial because you see them, their fans are all waiting for them outside the processing center. When they come out after having been bailed out, I mean, it's beaming ear.

[John Podhoretz]

To ear because they have a get out of jail free card. And what happened with the protesters at, what happened to the people who broke into Hamilton hall at Columbia, held two janitors, essentially held two janitors hostage, did property damage and Columbia did, finally called the cops on the protesters for doing this. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA let them off. He let them off. He let them off. And the next one of those people is going to shoot somebody in Manhattan. I mean, I don't know that for a fact, or throw a Molotov cocktail or sucker punch a Jew on a subway platform, something is going to happen. That's what we have when this becomes operational. Copycats begin. Right? I think I said after the Capital.

[Abe Greenwald]

Jewish Museum two in two weeks, right?

[John Podhoretz]

Something was going to happen after this, because this had happened.

[Abe Greenwald]

I do want to note that this kind of institutional problem you're taking place is also geographically cited. That is to say, blue America seems to have a much harder problem combating this evil than red America. And there's the other tragedy here, which is that so many of the victims of anti Semitism are Jews who have been devoted to peace causes beginning on October 7th, right? And so it. It has to be a neoconservative moment, right? You have to be mugged by reality at a certain point, I think for many American Jews, October 7th was itself a mugging by reality. And you began to see the connections between Wokeism and radical anti Semitism, right? And it's that that type of epiphany needs to happen to more people. It needs to happen to the leaders of Jewish organizations, needs to happen to the rabbinate, right? They have to understand what's at stake here. And of course, there's anti Semitism on the right. We're seeing it all the time. We're seeing it in podcasts and chat groups. Don't make the problem worse, right? By. By bad crime policies and by bad immigration policies. Please.

[John Podhoretz]

We stand at a hinge moment. Jeffrey Herf had a wonderful piece hours after what happened in Boulder, talking about something we've talked about on this podcast for four or five years, really since Black Lives Matter, but certainly since October 7th, which is we have had experience when radical leftist ideas which started supporting or enjoying or being tempted by the literal bloodlust created by violence against Western institutions, when that went from being theoretical to being actual. That was the late 1960s radical group students for a Democratic Society, particularly on the campus of Columbia University, morphed into the Weathermen. The Weather Underground, which was a domestic terrorist organization that led the way to a period in the early 70s when there were 1200 domestic terrorist bombings in the United States, a fact that has been memory hold more than half a century ago. But it's been memory hold because of the embarrassment of the left at the excesses of this movement that supposedly had grown out of a simple desire to end the war in Vietnam. Such that as her quotes, Mark Rudd, head of SDS at Columbia, who then became the head of the Weather Underground, said, how joyous it is if you see the blood of a pig, meaning a dead policeman, right? Upper upper middle class kid, Ivy League student celebrating the murder of some working class Irish guy whose only sin was putting on the uniform to protect other people from him. That was the great horror. Horrible irony of the rise of domestic terrorism in the United States, as has been in other countries, is that it was a luxury belief. As Rob Henderson would put it, the people who went active terrorist in the United states in the 60s and 70s were affluent, well to do college kids who bathed in bad ideology turn from protest to violence. And that is what is happening right in front of our eyes right now.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, that is happening, but there's also another thing happening at the same time which I think makes this a more perilous moment than even it was in the 60s and 70s. And that is, yes, there is also anti Semitism. If there's a shared threat of anti Semitism, that it exists on the right too. And that's dangerous. But there's also, I'm sorry, a global radical Islamic terrorist movement. It is, it is committing attacks like car ramming attacks and stabbings all over Europe on a regular basis. There was one when I was there last week in the uk. These are happening all over the place. And that ideology is global. It's very much a, you know, an attack on the west and its values and those sorts of things. I think Americans are hesitant to look at our own society and see any connection with what goes on over there and that kind of violence. But the threat is here. The guy in Colorado was not, as far as I know, an elite Columbia graduate student. He was just, you know, a guy who came over here from Egypt, settled in Colorado and wanted to kill some Jews. There are a lot of those people now too. And that's another thread. They are joined in the same, unfortunately violent extremist cause. But I think we have to start talking again, as we did after 9 11, about radical Islamic terrorism. It is a serious threat now in our own country and it is creating homegrown versions of terrorism that are, that are targeting not just Jews, but symbols of Western values in Western society.

[John Podhoretz]

And I think we need now to trans, to sort of go to the nature of the globalized intifada and the war against Jews and the propaganda war against Jews, because it's happening again this morning, 48 hours after it happened Sunday morning, which is to say a story coming out of Israel that Israeli troops fired wantonly on Palestinian Gazans waiting in line to get food at this new distribution center near Rafah. Now, I don't know the details of the story this morning. I mean, nobody really does. What we know is that the Red Cross and the Gaza Health Ministry report that more than a score of people were killed and dozens injured as the Israelis opened fire on this line. Waiting to get food.

[Abe Greenwald]

We also know that the food distribution process was not interrupted by.

[John Podhoretz]

That was Sunday, right?

[Abe Greenwald]

Or today too. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

So first, that's why the. Okay, yeah, let me just finish. Sure.

[Abe Greenwald]

Finish the time.

[John Podhoretz]

So on Sunday, this story was transmitted by 40 news organizations on the basis of a single source, the Gaza Health Ministry, which has spent 18 years lying to these news organizations about how many Palestinians were killed. They reported double the number of Palestinian deaths than are in fact the case throughout the course of the war. They would claim that Israelis attacked hospitals wantonly when in fact it was backfiring Hamas missiles that had hit some building, or that they claimed that a hospital was a hospital when it was in fact an operational center of Hamas war making capacities. And yet they are still being listened to. And the Israelis then released video footage of what was going on at the food distribution center on Sunday and showed that they had done nothing. So when I turn open my computer this morning and see a report in the New York Times that says flatly, 27 people killed by Israelis in Gaza after they had been snowed on Sunday, quoting same source, Quoting the same source, Gazan officials. So I'm sure, and maybe I'm wrong and I'll have to apologize tomorrow, I'm sure this didn't happen. And yet the New York Times is reporting it as though it is a dead solid fact, two days after having been misled about this by the same people. And here they're doing it. And they know that somebody threw Molotov cocktails at Jews in Boulder activated by these very stories that are lies about how Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, whose population number evidently has, by the way, increased since October 7th. So genocidal a war is this, that the number of living Palestinians in Gaza has gone up since October 7th, not down.

[Abe Greenwald]

I'd like to point out the key word in the stories coming out of Gaza this morning. The key word is near. The lead of all of these stories says that this incident happened near one of the food distribution sites. Near does not specify the distance. And when I hear near. And then I also read in the story that the food distribution was not interrupted by what happened. I have. I smell something fishy going on here in the way that the New York Times quoting Hamas. That's what Gaza official means. Hamas is up to. And here's what they're up to. The entire pro Hamas network, the terrorists themselves, the NGOs that hate Israel and have effectively sided with Hamas in this war, and the media that parrot Hamas lies are against the new food distribution system. That is what we are fighting over now. That's what all these stories are meant to. To achieve, is the undoing of the new food distribution system.

[John Podhoretz]

And this is very.

[Abe Greenwald]

Why are they, why are they against this? Because this is the key to defeating Hamas and ending the war. The way that Hamas has survived is that they have been stealing or probably just have been given the UN food aid since October 7th. And they have used the food and as a tool to maintain their control over Gaza and the population. And what we have witnessed since, one, the embargo on new food, and then two, when the embargo was lifted to start the new joint U. S. Israel operation to create sites of food distribution that are free from Hamas. We have seen more protests against Hamas. We have seen Palestinians in Gaza thanking Trump. Right. We have seen Hamas fire on Palestinians trying to get food. We've seen Palestinians break into warehouses where Hamas is storing the food for their own evil purposes. So this is what we're fighting over right now. And it's extremely important for people who support Israel or for people who just want this war to end, which we all do, is to side with this new operation. Because the sooner you break the back of Hamas's control over the Palestinians in Gaza, the sooner the war will come to an end.

[Matthew Continetti]

I think it's important to note that the people who are animated to attack Jews in the US and elsewhere now, they are not stirred by the bad New York Times stories. They are getting a stream of even more egregious, totally made up stories online. That is where they live and breathe. That is their lifeblood. They are looking at TikTok and Twitter accounts and whatever else that are A.I. i mean, they're just, you know, that make the New York Times look completely credible by comparison. The kind of stuff that they live on, you know, pictures of one supposedly starved Palestinian child after another who may. Who doesn't even live anywhere near the Strip or. Or who is actually, you know, suffering from some other disease.

[John Podhoretz]

Or is in Syria.

[Matthew Continetti]

Yeah, or is in Syria or whatever. So there is this universe of complete propaganda.

[Christine Rosen]

TikTok is the worst offender and it should be shut down in this country already. That's something the Trump administration is defying. Congress passed a law saying it should be shut down because this is, this is CCP propaganda outlet where pro Palestinian, pro Hamas propaganda is rampant and has been since October 7th. And its main consumer, as Abe says, is Westerners, particularly young Americans who look at this stuff credulously, believe it and don't. There's nothing to counter it with because TikTok dominates in terms of their social media feeds.

[John Podhoretz]

But in the end, if you take this all and you put it into a stew pot, what you have is Israel was attacked on October 7, and immediately a psyop counter operation was launched to not only to excuse away the attacks of October 7, but to make them seem justified, conceivably, or to say that all Jews in the world bear collective responsibility for the crimes that are supposedly being done to Palestinians. Such crimes are not being done. So therefore you have a lie upon a lie upon a lie. And that is where this is analogous to the medieval blood libel, which alleged that Jews kidnapped Christian children to kill them, to drain their blood, to use their blood in Passover matzot and in rituals and in religious rituals. Right. The case of Richard of York, which is the, you know, which is the sort of the. The key moment in. In Western history of the blood libel missing boy accusations that Jews had killed him for ritualistic purposes. We are now nine centuries removed from that barbaric moment. And here it is again. Jews are just shooting. Jews are not shooting Palestinians trying to get food. Jews are accused of it. It is reported by supposedly independent, objective authorities that it is true and it is not. And therefore, when you are telling the story of the Boulder firebombing, you somehow get to edge into the story the fact that there seems to be some controversy going on halfway around the world in which Jews are being mean to Palestine, shooting Palestinians. Ergo, there's something a little defensible about what happened in Boulder, or at least exculpatory or explanatory. And that is the horror that we are living with. It is astounding and we cannot abide it. So how do we not abide it? Because we're saying authorities need to be better and our authority this and that and the other thing. Well, I think the answer. There are two answers, one of which is Israel needs to close its eyes and stop, you know, stop taking phone calls from Steve Witkoff if necessary, and win this war. There's a piece in the Washington Free Beacon on the Israeli war strategy. Sounds to me like it's too distended because it takes about four months, according to the Israeli strategy in three stages. And I think that's too long because I don't know how much more. I don't know what's going to happen in the course of those four months, how many firebombings there are going to be elsewhere and how much pressure is going to be levied on Israel, why this is happening. And they clearly have the ability to take Hamas out now. And they're waiting because they want to negotiate over the lives of the hostages. And I am deeply in sympathy with this. But there are 20 hostages in horrible and monstrous and awful conditions. And I think by the end of the day today, it's possible that in this counter war that's launched here now, there will have been four dead. That is the two people shot at the Capitol Jewish Museum. And from what I hear, maybe 2 of the people who were hit by the firebomb in Boulder. And I don't know how many more people are going to die. And so we're going to have this trade off. The way to end the war on the Jews is for the Jews to win this war. It is the only solution that we have to end the war with a Jewish victory. That cuts the heart out of the fantasy that the Jews can be defeated. You know, we can be forced back into a cave. Israel can be destroyed existentially and the like. The impact of Israel extirpating Hamas and forcing it out of Gaza or killing every last member of Hamas or whatever it is, will be very far reaching and revolutionary and change the entire dynamic of the 21st century, in my view.

[Abe Greenwald]

And I want to add one thing to that, which is, you're right. When just to go back to the second intifada, when Israel went into the west bank, into Jenin, had the tanks surrounding Arafat's compound, it was effective. It was effective. And it wasn't just that the next year, 2003, America ended Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein had been paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, had been supporting them throughout the second intifada. And so that foreign support was cut off in addition to Israel's military success in the West Bank. So look at today, Israel needs to succeed in Gaza and we need to cut off the foreign support for Hamas. Now, Qatar, it's complicated, shouldn't be complicated, but apparently it's complicated for the Trump administration as well as other American administrations. But Iran is not so complicated. And so America needs to do two things. One, no daylight with Israel, let it finish the job in Gaza, and two, get out of these stupid negotiations with Iran that are leading nowhere and are reckless, and therefore force the issue of Iranian denuclearization while it's still weakened from Israel's attack last year.

[Christine Rosen]

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[F]

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[John Podhoretz]

We need to talk about that quickly because yesterday came the story that Steve Witkoff had agreed in principle with the Iranians to allow small quantities of uranium enrichment as part of an overall deal with Iran. And for the life of me, me reading the Details that were leaked out to Barack Ravid of Axios. I assume from the Witkoff, Vance, Ambit.

[Abe Greenwald]

Gabbard.

[John Podhoretz]

Gabbard, that not a lot of difference between that and The JCPOA of 2015, the Iran deal that Trump himself said was the worst deal ever struck and that he pulled the United States out of in 2018. Seven years later, he's got this real estate moron from New York who never heard of Iran until, you know, January of 2025. He says, Go make a deal. And Witkoff, who was trying to negotiate a deal and the Iranians say, we need enrichment. And he keeps going back and saying, okay, a little enrichment. So Trump was compelled last night on Truth Social to say, no enrichment, no enrichment, no enrichment. And when.

[Christine Rosen]

Also, can I just add that, that back and forth, which has now happened several times with lots of negotiations. It's happened with Russia, it's happened elsewhere. That makes us look weak. It makes the administration look weak. There was a, there was a story about how Putin has joked Russian state media has been joking about, oh, well, he said that his, his negotiator said that today, but tomorrow he'll change his mind. We look indecisive, we look undisciplined, we look like we're not. We don't know what we're doing. And I think that's actually, that affects our negotiations with other countries as well, not just with Iran.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, looks don't deceive because we are and we are weak. And if we're, we restarted these negotiations with Iran. We wrote Trump wrote the letter to the, to Khamenei. Khamenei didn't write a letter to Trump. And now the Trump administration is negotiating with itself over whether or not to permit enrichment. And you apparently have these two sides of the Trump administration having an argument in public using Barack Ravid and some people at the New York Times not only to reveal what are.

[Abe Greenwald]

The Washington Post has become ground zero of anti Israel leaks from the Trump administration.

[John Podhoretz]

So the two things are what the Trump negotiators are seeming to cave to Iran for and leaking Israel's potential war plans to make it harder for Israel to strike Iran if it feels the need to do so. That's going on inside the US Administration. It's not foreign sources, it's not the Iranians leaking to the New York Times, and it's us leaking to us about us, against us.

[Abe Greenwald]

Can I just make a point about Gabbard in a different, in an entirely different theater.

[John Podhoretz]

And what is our Director of National.

[Abe Greenwald]

Intelligence right Vis a vis a different theater in what is becoming World War iii, in my view. Pete Haggseth, the Secretary of Defense, went to the Shangri La conference in Singapore over the weekend. He gave what I thought was a very good speech. You know, not. I wouldn't agree with every part of it, but the truth is I agreed with 96% of it. And it was about the threat from China and it was about American commitment to the Indo Pacific, and it was about that the potential for a Chinese action against Taiwan is. Could be imminent. Right. The next day I heard an interview with Dni Gabbard on the Daily Wire, its morning wire program must listen. And the anchor asked her, well, what was your take on the conference? And her take was, we sent a message of peace. And then the anchor said, well, what about the China threat? And her response was, you know, there are so many threats in the world. And it was clear from this interview that the debate that we're having about Israel within the administration, about Iran within the administration, is the same debate we're now having about China within the administration. I kind of leave Russia aside. I think there's not much debate within the administration on Russia, Ukraine. There is debate between the administration and Republicans in Congress on Russia, Ukraine. But this is a, you know, we're used to infighting within an administration. There was a lot of infighting within Reagan's administration, but it takes a president to lay down the policy. And this is why I thought that truth social post was very important from President Trump about enrichment, about no enrichment. That has been his commitment throughout this entire process. That is what a super majority of Republican Republicans in the Senate and in the House support. No enrichment for Iran. If you want to make a deal, President Trump needs to send that message not just once, but again and again and again to his own people.

[John Podhoretz]

It's even better or worse than that, depending on where you stand, because according to Rasmussen reports, close to 60% of the American people favor military action against Iran's nuclear program if necessary. A super majority of Americans in a poll that is considered Republican or MAGA leaning support military action against Iran. They are not restrainers, as it turns out. It's not that they want it to happen regardless of circumstances. What they meant is they are open to a military strike on Iran if that's the only way to make sure that Iran doesn't get a bomb. That is the opinion of the American people. That's pretty staggering. And so the restrainers who seem to be motivating this, both anti Israel activism and some kind of, you know, peace deal making with Iran are swimming upstream against American opinion, not leading it, because they have been banging on this for years. And the American people aren't buying. 65% opposed the JCPOA in 2015. Apparently, they didn't all die off. They're still there. They still think Iran is the major threat to the United States and the Middle East. They're right. They believe an Iranian bomb is a major threat to the existential future of mankind. They are correct. And they are willing to, to consider taking very significant action to prevent that from happening. And that should be an arrow in Trump's quiver rather than something that he's got people in his administration attempting to poo poo and pretend isn't really happening. And then finally, I guess, in the last couple of minutes, we should make note of this astounding operation that Ukraine pulled off, doing tens of billions of dollars of damage to Russian military assets deep inside Russia in an astoundingly brilliant plan to hide drones in trucks that they drove as far away from the Iranian, from the Ukrainian Russian border as Sevastopol in Siberia.

[Christine Rosen]

Thankfully didn't give the Trump administration a heads up about this plan before doing it.

[John Podhoretz]

They did. Yeah, they didn't. Or the Trump administration, thank goodness. So. Right, right. Anyway, what they showed was that as there's been this kind of weird triumphalism among the restrainers who seem to have no interest in restraining Russia, just us, like all restrainers, policy is always about restraining the United States and not a global wide restraint doctrine. They are, they said, we can fight this war on many fronts. Don't think we're done. We are not toast. We have just, you know, Russia is going to have to figure out some way to replace the weaponry that we destroyed. Its pipelines are getting shut down. So panicked did this make Steve Bannon, Putin's chief bootlicker, say that we needed to embargo Ukraine for having done such a dastardly act in the course of a war that was a response to an invasion of Ukrainian territory in an effort to destroy Ukraine as a country. So the world is a very interesting place. People are very committed to their own fantasies.

[Abe Greenwald]

Alex Jones 1 upped Bannon because Alex Jones advocated our policy should be unilateral withdrawal from NATO because of this attack?

[John Podhoretz]

Hey, why not? Isn't he supposed to be. Isn't he supposed to be, like living in a cardboard box?

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, he came back.

[John Podhoretz]

Alex Jones. Didn't he have a $12 billion no.

[Abe Greenwald]

That got. He ended up winning in a Kind of a roundabout way. So he's back, back at it and kind of reintegrated into great.

[John Podhoretz]

Congratulations to the MAGA media. To the MAGA media. Let's see what he does next to discredit them.

[Abe Greenwald]

I just want to say a couple things about this attack. It's not going to lead to World War iii. Second, it will protect Ukrainian cities. Think about how Russia, when Russia strikes Ukraine, what is a target? It targets the civilian population centers. Been doing it since the beginning of the war. When Ukraine targets Russia, what does Ukraine target? Military assets. And that should be all you need to know about who is on the right side in this conflict. It's too much for some people. The problem, though, is that Ukraine has stunning technology, stunning operational, you know, knowledge capability, capability sunk. The Russian Black Sea Fleet pulled this off, destroying these strategic bombers deep inside. Russia has held its own for now. Three years of brutal conflict. It still faces a manpower deficit on the ground. Russia is still grinding it out. It is estimated that Russia will reach the million man casualty mark sometime this summer. That is an incredible, incredible damning indictment of Putin there. The issue is Putin's now reconstructed his country for one sole purpose and that's war. That's war. And so this attack by Ukraine is amazing. But it's not enough. It's not enough.

[John Podhoretz]

It's not enough. And I think you make one important point, then we should go to Christine for her recommendation. But not only has Putin reconfigured the country for war, he has reconfigured the country economically for war, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

[Abe Greenwald]

Exactly.

[John Podhoretz]

The only way. Essentially, it's a kind of government command, government economy that is spending money on the military at levels that have never been seen before. And it is the, it is the largest driver of economic growth, sort of Keynesian economic growth is spending on military equipment, materials, manpower, all of that. There is nothing else going on in Russia.

[Abe Greenwald]

But, but, you know, that got the Soviet Union into deep trouble. So I'm not saying that response short term, but I say the response that America should take is to heighten the contradictions.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

As the Marxists say.

[John Podhoretz]

And it was.

[Abe Greenwald]

This is the time for the secondary sanctions that, that the Senate wants to pass.

[John Podhoretz]

That. And of course, yeah, one of the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Time for foreign military sales. Yeah, we don't have to just give them the stuff. We allow them to the Ukrainians to buy the stuff from us. Right. That's what, that's what we need to do.

[John Podhoretz]

Remember that the Soviets were hastened in the last Five years of the life of the Soviet Union. What hastened the destruction of the Soviet Union was the announcement of a policy that everybody, that all the elites in the United States made fun of, which was the Strategic Defense Initiative. Because Gorbachev heard about us trying to figure out how to create missile defense in space and, and said we can't afford. We are in no position to afford to match them move for move. Here we're broke. We need to change our economy to find some way to get funds and resources to protect ourselves from the United States. Technological advantage and glasnost and perestroika were the result. And the internal contradictions of the Soviet Union brought it down. Once there was a little liberation there in five years, if we were to. It's not going to happen. Obviously if we were to start aggressively funding, selling, whatever to Ukraine to put Putin in the position in which every dollar he spends on the military is a dollar wasted and his country begins to sink under its own burdens, that would be an extraordinary benefit advantage except to, you know, except to the people who really love to go to Moscow on his dime and ride in the beautiful carpeted subway system with the chandeliers like and go to a supermarket like Tucker Carlson, who apparently had never been to a supermarket before. Christine, you have a recommendation?

[Christine Rosen]

I know I do. I slight regret about it now after we've had such a dark kind of summary of of the world's events. But I'm going to do it anyway because I'm in a big crime spree. Not a crime spree, crime reading spree. I just finished another.

[Abe Greenwald]

What do you have to confess?

[Christine Rosen]

It's not a crime spree but this actually is a. Is a Netflix crime thriller. It's called Department Q. It's set in Edinburgh. It's actually based on a series crime fiction series is written by a Danish author. But it is, it's very dark. It's very Scottish. British production and British actors including the lead played by Matthew Good, who's great. Kelly McDonald who plays a therapist in there. A lot of a wonderful, wonderful cast. It is gritty, it is dark, but it's mesmerized. And it's the story of a detective, police detective who's injured on the. In the line of duty. His partner also injured and he's sort of shunted off to a basement office to stay out of the way of the. Of the police chief who finds him bothersome and given cold cases to solve. So he has to pick a cold case and solve it. All of this of Course to please his superiors of the government which wants to show that it's solving these cases. But he ends up becoming engrossed in a missing persons report of a prosecutor who'd gone missing four years earlier. And the series over time shows you glimpses of, of her before her disappearance, some of the cases she was trying. It shows them tracking down different leads. What I loved about it, and again, because I read a lot of Japanese crime fiction is just the. It should seem tedious, but it's not just how methodical a really good investment investigator has to be. They have to follow all these pathways that might lead to nothing, but occasionally gives them that one clue that then sends them in the right direction. And the plotting of this is. Is very much in that sort of spirit. The acting is wonderful, the relationships among the detectives and the various family members that are shown is very good. It is not a happy show. So if you're looking for something mindless and enjoying, enjoyable, don't go to this show. But if you like kind of gritty crime dramas, this is a good one with a. With a nice embedded mystery that, that unspools over. I think it's 10 episodes, I'm not sure, but I really enjoyed it. Department Q on Netflix.

[John Podhoretz]

Matthew Good, the star of the show is like one of the great unsung, unheralded.

[Christine Rosen]

He's amazing.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes, remarkable chameleon like actors. If you remember, 15 years ago, there was a not very good film version of the sort of most famous revisionist comic book ever written, Watchmen, which is sort of like the. Just like the Reverse Avengers. And he plays the smartest man in the world. And it's an extraordinary performance as Ozymandias. And then four or five years ago they made this pretty like comically wrong headed but delightful docudrama on Paramount. Plus about the making of the Godfather from the perspective of its weird producer Al Ruddy. A show I loved but is really not a good history of the making.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, you liked the show.

[John Podhoretz]

I did like the show.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay.

[John Podhoretz]

But it's very similar.

[Abe Greenwald]

Watch it.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, it's a wrong perspective. It's like, yeah, how I already made the Godfather, which is really not.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, you're a Godfather, Stan. So if you like the show though, then I should.

[John Podhoretz]

Matthew Good. Matthew Good, a Scottish actor, plays Robert Evans, the sybaritic bacchanalian, shirt manufacturing Upper west side Jew who became the head of Paramount for mysterious reasons and was one of the motive forces and fighters to make the Godfather. And his performance as Evans in the offer Good's performance is like one for the ages is just.

[Christine Rosen]

He is English, not Scottish.

[John Podhoretz]

Oh, he's English.

[Christine Rosen]

He's an English actor.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. But no, anyway, he is one of those guys who you don't recognize from role to role because he just. And it's not like he's Daniel Day Lewis transformed or one of that. He just simply can do anything. It appears in any accent.

[Christine Rosen]

They did. They did have to scruff him up a bit for this one because he's quite physically attractive, you know, and kind of normal. And he's very tall and lanky. So he, he hunches and he's wearing like moth eaten wool sweaters and he's got a scraggly beard. But you're still like, oh no, you're still beautiful. You're still gripping habit. The role of the beleaguered, you know, detective very well.

[John Podhoretz]

All right, so that's again Department Q on Netflix. We'll be back tomorrow for Matt, Christine and Abel. John Pod horiz. Keep the candle burning.