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- [00:00]
Eli Lake
Foreign. Expect the worst Some reach and pain
- [00:12]
Abe Greenwald
Some die of thirst no way of
- [00:15]
Eli Lake
knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:23]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. It is May Day, May 1, 2026. I'm not calling May Day, but I am just noting the fact of it. I'm John Pot Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:41]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:42]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:45]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:46]
John Podhoretz
And Commentary's contributing editor and columnist for the Free Press and host of the Breaking History podcast, Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
- [00:54]
Eli Lake
Hi, John. For May Day, can I just recommend for our listeners, if they're looking to try to mark the occasion the holiday, I would suggest you open a bank account, start a business or buy some stock. Happy May Day. Losers of the 20th century.
- [01:13]
John Podhoretz
Very interesting thing is happening. Wall Street Journal's lead editorial today makes this point that the economy did much better in the first quarter of 2026 than anybody expected. And the reason that it is is business investment. And the reason that there is business investment in the United States that seems to have been unexpected is that it's probably data centers and the construction of data centers and infrastructure for artificial intelligence for the companies that are doing artificial intelligence. And I bring this up only because we're all very alarmed and worried about artificial intelligence and the effect it's going to have on jobs and work and what we do and how we collect information and fakes and will it take over the world and destroy the world and its hallucinations will be ruinous. But it is worth noting that so far we are benefiting economically, fiscally, financially, and in terms of our employment and our macro economy from it. Which raises the mayday question of why Bernie Sanders, wanting to have a conference on AI, is inviting Chinese government officials and Chinese AI people to have common conversations about this, when clearly this is the economic cold war of our time. We are in. We are locked in a competition with China on how to manage this. We, of course, are worried about the moral frame that AI and the moral threat that AI poses, and China probably isn't, though it needs to protect itself from the liberation from government control that AI might represent. But since I am a believer in the lab leak theory, and I believe that China's behavior in Wuhan and other places is an indication of just how amoral they are willing to be in pursuit of their aims, I just think it's worthy to point out that often our economic success in the last 20 years has come in spite of liberal, leftist, anti capitalist grumbling about the consequences of efforts to build new industries and I think particularly of the fracking hydraulic fracturing industry, which literally was incepted in 2007 and is responsible for the fact that the United States economy did not go into a massive depression after 2008 and that we are a net energy exporter to now and that we are in a position to conduct our foreign affairs and our foreign policy in an entirely new fashion without fearing an incredible disruption in our own domestic natural gas supply. Because we have had this revolution that would have been stopped dead in its tracks had the people who are now screaming and yelling about the building of data centers and how terrible they are if they had had their way.
- [04:30]
Seth Mandel
We do have this. I'm sorry, Eli, you very politely raised your hand, but I just jumped in. We do have this huge challenge with China regarding their battery operated vehicles. They're rechargeable, right? They are selling them all over the world, including right, right, right down below in Mexico. We're trying not to let them into the country in various ways and they're selling much cheaper than any that we're able to produce here. And that is going to take. When you talk about a economic cold war, that's going to take some new thinking.
- [05:16]
John Podhoretz
Fair enough, but. And part of the reason that we have this problem, they're rechargeables are better than ours or cheaper than ours or whatever. It's not just that they're selling them under market and all that, which of course smaller economies do in order to capture market share. But I assume that this is a highly regulated, highly complex, highly interfered with business that American manufacturers are entering are not having the same innovative qualities that they might otherwise. Because it is automobiles, because it is energy, because it is games are being played, particularly in California as Californians love to do with how things are made and built and constructed.
- [06:12]
Seth Mandel
And at the same time, of course, we helped China get started in all this joint projects and then they go, okay, we got it, we figured out what you're up to. We'll right, we'll put an army on this. We don't need you anymore.
- [06:30]
Eli Lake
Yeah, can I steel man an AI argument that yes, we're seeing the benefit now in terms of the construction of data centers and that's good, but that's not a sustainable. That doesn't address what are, I think the fair concerns about the way that AI is going to restructure and revolutionize the economy, which is that we might get data center jobs now, but we're kind of fashioning a rod for our own backs in the sense that if it's true, and I'm not entirely convinced it is, then the people, college educated jobs will be replaced. You won't hire paralegals, you won't hire, you know, reporters that used to just, you know, go to a hearing and tell you what's said. I don't think, by the way, that AI yet has shown that it can write a compelling, like kind of magazine feature or things that require voice. But it's getting there. I was playing around last night with Grok Imagine the latest Grok AI and you can ask it to, I asked it to show me a photo of Ronald Reagan explaining Nicaragua to Joe Strummer of the Clash. And I could send it to you and you'd look at it and you'd say, wow, when did that meeting happen? So it's getting better. And that's the argument, I think, from the AI skeptics. I'm not among the AI skeptics. If Christine was here, she'd probably make a better argument. But the data center boost doesn't get us out of the woods. Whereas I'd say that with fracking. What you said is that that was based on just a kind of a wish casting of the green left and green progressives, which was that we would find alternative energy and it would be, we wouldn't need to be doing fracking. It was basically just they, and they've been doing this as, you know, for years. Solar and wind and everything like that would eventually replace it. So why are we going to risk whatever environmental degradation by doing this fracking when in fact the correct argument was we're still a long way away from alternative energy sources like that, other than nuclear, which they don't like for other reasons. So we should do this for our own energy independence. And we talked about this offline, John, but I don't think we could have done this Iran war had it not been for fracking.
- [09:09]
John Podhoretz
And that of course is an interesting problem because many of the people who oppose fracking also oppose the Iran war. So they don't like the idea that we have been freed up to, to this, to, to allow us to, to go into this military adventurism. I just want to say that while,
- [09:24]
Abe Greenwald
can I just add on fracking, by the way, just on the, on the, on the issue of, of energy, the people who opposed fracking, also this was all based on, you know, climate stuff. And in several times in the 2000 and tens, Andrew Cuomo, when he was governor of New York did all sorts of stuff to try to sabotage, you know, fracking, but it, but it expanded into anything that could be connected with the energy industry. And so in, I think it was in 2019, the New York blocked several gas pipelines that were going from Pennsylvania. You know, Pennsylvania was, was saying, well fine, if you won't frack Wolfrack, we'll dig the oil. And, and then New York was stopping pipelines from going from Pennsylvania to New England out of peak or whatever and, and needed federal intervention because the gas pipelines that they were blocking were New England. Part of New England's, you know, energy field is on gas. And so prices were spiking and it was heading into, you know, a season where the system was, you know, at half capacity or whatever, the whole thing. But, but the point is that it was like this same reason, wasn't even just this one fracking thing. It at one point stopped people from getting heating, from heating energy.
- [10:46]
John Podhoretz
Well, that is open to the north
- [10:48]
Abe Greenwald
to, north to the Northeast, you know, for, for winter.
- [10:51]
John Podhoretz
But that is ultimately the problem with, with Luddism, which is that it's philosophically opposed to the future. And, and therefore you start with there are economic degradation problems with the act of exploring and mining and getting this stuff out of the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania for example. And then because it's coming out, then you just try to stop the pipes from carrying it as though that was going to mean that Pennsylvania wouldn't just like send the oil southward through the pipelines that it was already building to the Gulf of Mexico. The only reason I would defend this, and I didn't even really mean to get into this whole thing in this way, but is that the data center story is one that we did not anticipate. The size, the meaning, the effect of hydraulic fracturing was something that nobody could have anticipated. The world changing effects of this when it was really just underway. And those effects are not just in the United States. Israel is going to achieve total energy independence because of its ability to frack in two fields, one in the Mediterranean and possibly one on Israeli soil. And this will happen elsewhere also. And what is the nature of the natural gas that is being extracted by hydraulic fracturing? It's cleaner. It is cleaner, it is less dirty than petroleum. It is a net benefit in a world where we're not going to move magically to renewable energy sources to power an 8 billion person planet. So you know what's great? When you can take a less polluting form of energy and replace and use it to replace a more polluting form of energy. That's progress. That's the story of capitalism from or of the industrial revolution, is that everything starts out filthy and gets cleaner and cleaner and people want to live in a cleaner environment and all of that. So the thing about AI, and this is a slightly separate matter, is we just don't know what the effect is going to be. And we, I think, are unique. Just as environmentalists, we're uniquely susceptible to the most alarmist possible argument about fracking. In the 2000s, we, because we are college educated people whose professions and livelihoods and children's livelihoods and all that seem to be threatened by what AI might do, we have a potentially luddest attitude about it that we don't know. We just don't know what effect it is going to have. There's always been this theory that, for example, it would kill radiology, it would kill the business of being a radiologist because you take the picture and then AI would go through 50 million versions of every possible radiology X ray or image that had been taken and see what's going on and then announce it. But it's not at all clear that, that, that doesn't in the end improve and enhance this as a business, because then how do you treat it? What do you do? How do you read the results? How do you explain the results? What is it that medicine will always require? A personal touch. It will require the ability of somebody to interact with a real person who knows what real emotions are like and all that. It could increase the number of people who work in this, not decrease it. We just, we just don't know. But I just thought it was interesting to note that A the economy is growing because of this thing that a lot of people in the elites, just as always happens, are very, very alarmed about and B, that Bernie Sanders wants to empower the Chinese. Gee, I wonder why. I wonder why Bernie Sanders wants to empower the Chinese. I mean, they don't have Nazi tattoos on their body, but they might as well. And he wants to empower people with Nazi tattoos on their body. So he might as well empower the Chinese Communist Party in its effort to lap and overtake the United States economically. Because he hates America and he loves communists and he loves people with Nazi tattoos as long as they hate America and love communism the way he does as the leader of that movement. I want to now move on to an important quote I got to read to you from the Midas. Touch is a progressive media company. So it has lots of podcasts and it has very powerful Twitter feeds and various other people. And a person, a staffer from the Midas touch was on CNN's Abby Phillips show, the source of all horrendous clips that we now see on all media. And a guy works there named Adam Mockler was asked about why it's okay for Graham Platner, now the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, why it's okay that he has a Nazi tattoo or why Democrats shouldn't be upset that he's somebody who has a Nazi tattoo. And it's not just a Nazi tattoo. He's got a 20 year record of supporting war. He's a crazy person supporting war crimes and like talking about the good way to rape women. And I mean, he's either a lunatic or a leftist or a leftist lunatic or a Nazi leftist, national Socialist, democratic socialist lunatic. But Abby Phillips says to this guy, Adam Mockler, if this were a Republican candidate who had a Nazi tattoo, covered it up when he was running for something and had said all the things that he had said, that's platinum about black people, about women, about rape, do you think there's a world in which Democrats would be, let's just let bygones be bygones. That's the past, today's the present. What she's referring to is a lot of people saying, he was young, he was young, he was troubled. He's working through it. He's a mensch, and he's really trying to work himself. That's what Jon Favreau of Pod Save America said. He's working through it and he's a mensch. He's a mensch like Goebbels was a mensch. But we'll go on from that. And here's what Adam Mockler has.
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Eli Lake
I liked Favreau better when he was making swingers anyway. That's a joke.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, there are two Favreau. Favreau, who's just made the Mandalorian Grogu. And then there's bad Favreau, who is
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Abe Greenwald
the good Favreau, by the way, just is rehiring Gina Carano and helping Gina Carano get her career back after that awful Disney spat. Yes, the good Favreau is very good Favreau.
- [17:48]
John Podhoretz
Very good Favreau. Okay, so Adam Mockler replies to Addyville with the following. I think we're entering a new era and we'll see what the base wants. We'll see who wins when the actual election happens. So we're entering a new era. Is that The National Socialist era. What new era are we entering into in which it is acceptable for somebody to hold and espouse the views that Graham Platner has held and espoused? These are people who.
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Eli Lake
It's the era where Marjorie Taylor Greene could win a congressional seat after talking about Jewish space.
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John Podhoretz
Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah. Okay.
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Eli Lake
I mean, I mean, I'm saying, here's
- [18:28]
John Podhoretz
what Adam Mockler follows up with. Yeah, yeah. Yes, go ahead.
- [18:35]
Eli Lake
No, no, I'm just going to say that, you know, we're seeing it, you know, especially for congressional candidates. You're going to see that the old gatekeeper rules that we just sort of assumed were in place are no longer there. And both parties are gonna be hypocrites about this kind of thing. I think that's just the case. That's just what's going on.
- [18:55]
John Podhoretz
But we know that. But hold on, here's what he says. Listen, but for the past decade, Democrats have been united by our opposition to Donald Trump. And now Graham Platner has a forward looking message. So if Donald Trump or if another Republican had a Nazi tattoo, I don't know. Donald Trump has dinner with Nazis. It's not that far from, you know, what's happening. But there's also plausible deniability regarding Graham Platner's tattoo. We don't know if he knew. We don't know what he knew. Okay, so Trump is bad because he comports with Nazis, but Graham Platner isn't bad because he comports with Nazis.
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Abe Greenwald
Just to be clear, by the way, we do know that he knew. I just want to make that clear, that this Mockler kid is just making stuff up.
- [19:46]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He looks like he's 12 and he has the, obviously the emotional intelligence of a 12 year old. But this is a very important cultural moment because you are seeing Democrats who have spent 10 years saying that we need to oppose Trump because he has some kind of weird Nazi adjacency.
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Eli Lake
That's the only reason. In fairness, it's over determined for the Democrats, though. I'm just saying there's a million reasons for Democrats as to why proud boys
- [20:18]
John Podhoretz
Charlottesville unite the white.
- [20:19]
Eli Lake
That was the. You're right. You're right. Also Russian Agent 33.
- [20:24]
John Podhoretz
No, it's an agent.
- [20:26]
Eli Lake
I'm just saying there's a man Apple. Bunch of reasons.
- [20:29]
John Podhoretz
I know there's a bunch of reasons. But the idea that Trump is Hitler is the through line from 2015 to the present. It is the through line. He. This is. We're waiting for the Reichstag fire. He's going to suspend the 2028 election. He's the big lie. All of that, all of that is Nazi redolent. And here we have a Democrat running for office as an anti Trump figure with a Nazi tattoo on his body who has spoken favorably of rape. And Democrats are finding it very easy to twist themselves into pretzels, having used the Nazi attack on Trump as a unifying stew for the entire liberal, not just liberal coalition, but also like sensible Americans who don't like the fact that Trump comports and understandably comports with despicable people who have despicable ideas. And I guess you could call it hypocrisy or it's even worse than that,
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Eli Lake
to use Abe's great line. It's worse than that because one of the reasons that we know that Trump is not a Nazi is because he has now publicly broken with the Nazi adjacent Tucker Carlson. So the argument was he didn't know that he was meeting with. He didn't know who Nick Fuentes was when Kanye brought him to Mar A Lago, I think in 2019, okay, Tucker Carlson had a suck up interview, a softball interview where he wanted to be friends with Nick Fuentes. Now Tucker and Trump are, that relationship is over. It looks like Trump attacks Tucker and Megyn Kelly and the people on that side of things. And in the middle of all that, you now have the same people on the sort of left edge, the DSA edge of the Democrats, saying, you know, I never agree with Tucker Carlson, but he's got a really good point on Israel and this Iran war. And so you can already start to see a little bit of the mainstreaming or the second look, Marjorie Taylor Greene went on the View. So I'm just saying that it's. What's interesting is that it sort of, it further exposes that it was never about a principle anyway because all of these people who were the kind of like, you know, garbage beyond the pale types that Trump was associated with, and there was guilt by association, he's broken with a lot of them now for a number of complicated reasons. And the populous left is in this kind of taking a second look at them in the same way they're taking a second look at Hasan Pipker. So you're absolutely right. At least for the partisan party types. It never meant anything.
- [23:23]
Seth Mandel
The one aspect of actual Nazism that the left seems to be least concerned with is the Jews part. Yeah. Is the most fundamental aspect of which is anti Semitism. You're a Nazi. Because there are ice forces in the streets which are redolent of paramilitary force. You're a Nazi. Certainly anti black racism will put you in the Nazi category. And he hinted foreign expansion makes you a Nazi. Any sort of inclination toward authoritarianism makes you a Nazi. But anti Semitism means it's time we talk about Israel.
- [24:15]
John Podhoretz
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- [26:26]
Abe Greenwald
well and that's, you know, that's the funny thing about these, you know, they, it's like they, they are very good at hearing dog whistles but, but only dog whistles. Like they can't hear you if you just speak out loud to them. If you're standing three feet away from them and speak to them. You know, it's like, I mean, no, our Noam makes, you know, has made this joke in the past. I think basically what he said was, you know, he was talking about the, the fact that, you know, Republicans get accused of, of dog whistling, anti Semitism when they say, like east coast or whatever. And Noam's point is, was to the left, everything means Jew except Israel. You can say Israel is genocidal, Israel's killing babies, Israel's poisoning the wells, Israel's doing this and that. And it's like, we're not talking about Jews. Well, who brought, who, who mentioned Jews? So. But that's the kind of thing that Abe, I think you're talking about, which is like, this is. They're very sensitive to the, to the things that could be maybe construed as. But if you just come right out and say it, they play dumb.
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John Podhoretz
Let's move on to the war that fracking has made possible, the war in Iran. We have more polling. It's very unpopular. Two thirds of Americans disapprove of the war in Iran, though I think that number was probably close to 2/3 when the war started. Also, it's never been popular. It's two months. So that's how never it is. We have like, Aaron Blake of the Washington Post saying things like, it took six years for Vietnam to become as unpopular as the Iran war is. Well, first of all, that is a fascinating fact because sociologically, one of the reasons that Americans supported the Vietnam War for as long as they did is that millions of Americans were fighting in it. And it was therefore would have been considered a betrayal, except if you were part of the disgusting class that I came from in New York City private schools, that it would have been considered betrayal of the young men who were fighting there. To say that the war was bad or evil or whatever, that's one thing. And of course, almost no Americans have skin in this game because, A, we have a volunteer fighting force, B, the number of Americans who are actually engaged or involved in the war itself is numbers in the low tens of thousands as opposed to millions or hundreds of thousands. And so it's very far away from them. So it's all theoretical, whether they like it or they don't like it, because it has no impact on them except for oil prices and maybe inflation, which is not nothing, but it's not visceral. Right. Okay. So. Eli was saying just before we went on that there is this world in which we are told the following. Our military has been exposed as being Hollow and like it's lost the thread and it's not that good. That was a New York Times editorial yesterday. Our military is a beat behind or it's not in good shape or whatever. That's number one. Part of that I would agree with in the sense that we should have been spending more on our military. But I don't remember the New York Times ever saying we needed to spend more. Thanks very much to them, but that's not what they mean. They mean that there's something weird that we were unable to deliver the knockout blow that we thought we were gonna deliver. And now the military's exposed as hollow. And of course Iran is winning. This is how much Iran is winning. But I think, Eli, I want you to sort of dial in on this in a story in the Wall Street Journal this morning, which is about Iran struggling to figure out how to. To win this war that it is supposedly winning. Iran is now saying things like, you know what they're going to do with the strait? In order to make sure the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, they're going to use trained dolphins carrying mines on their back to swim in the Strait of Hormuz, obeying their orders and being a mind being essentially alive, traveling mine. This comes from a 1974 movie called the Day of the Dolphin. And I am not kidding you when I say that the plot of the Day of the Dolphin is that George C. Scott is trained, is a, is a dolphin expert and the military is training dolphins to put mines on their back. And guess what they want to do with the mines? They want them to go and blow up the President's yacht so that the military can take over the United States. And George C. Scott has to free the dolphins who are being trained and can now speak English. The dolphins can speak English and they can carry mines and they need to be freed by George c. Scott. That's 52 years ago. Day of the Dolphin. It's probably the first American movie that's been showing in tehran since, since 1979 for all we know, because it's very anti American and incredibly stupid. And it's one of the worst movies ever made. It was by Mike Nichols. So when you hear people talk about how wonderful Mike Nichols is, don't believe them. They are pulling a plot from a 1974 filmic disaster as a public threat to the United States about how they are going to keep us from succeeding in our military aim. So that says to me they are in a whole lot of trouble.
- [32:16]
Abe Greenwald
Before Eli gives us this serious Analysis. Can I just, can I just say what this brings to mind? In 2003, the Palestinians used a, an explosive laden donkey to carry out a terrorist attack against Israel and PETA. The People for the Ethical Treatment of animals sent Yasser Arafat a protest letter saying that there were no Geneva Conventions for donkeys and could he please leave the animals out of it. So I assume that's what we'll see with the dolphins. It's fine to bomb the Americans and bomb people in the. It's fine to mine the, you know, the waterway. Just please don't use poor dolphins.
- [32:56]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. By the way, the Palestinian Authority, someone in the Palestine claimed yesterday that the Israelis are sending trained rats into Palestinian cities either to spread disease or to like leave tiny little bombs somewhere. Trained rats. I don't know if you're aware that rats are, you know, can be trained in this fashion. Maybe they can also, by the way, just dolphins in Day of the Dolphin.
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Seth Mandel
Historically we've used birds for targeting and dolphins have been used for military purposes
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Eli Lake
for like carrier pigeons had very important military applications.
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Abe Greenwald
Of course, there was a whole documentary.
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John Podhoretz
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But the world's largest and most important military can evade a mine carrying dolphin. If there is such a thing, which I'm sure there isn't. And this stuff about training dolphins for military purposes is very fishy and as I say, is semi fictional, but go ahead, Eli. I'm sorry. So here we are. The Iranians are trying to make the case that they are in some one to one fashion fighting the United States for control over the planet, aura frames and Mother's Day. So look, I got three kids. My kids are older now, but life is chaos when you have three kids in a small apartment, as we did. And the photographs that we've taken with my kids and my wife, these are captured moments of wondrous chaos that they freeze in time. And we can look at in my living room on the beautiful aura frame that we have to enjoy. Remember vacations that got out of hand, holiday mishaps, Whatever might have happened that is funny wasn't funny at the time, but maybe funny now. That's why these beautiful frames with free unlimited storage, preloading photos before they ship, you get a gift box. You can share your photos and videos effortlessly using the free aura app or texting photos straight to your frame. Named number one by Wirecutter. You can save on the gifts moms love by visiting auraframes.com for a limited time. Listeners can get $25 off their best Selling Carver mat frame with carver code commentary. That's auraframes.com promo code commentary. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. I'm going to talk to you about Brooklyn Betting. You've heard me talk about this before. I got a free mattress from Brooklyn Bedding to test it, and I loved it so much and my son loved it so much that I got two mattresses, paid for them myself for my daughters. I don't know how I can endorse anything better than that. We're talking about a company, a classic American story. The founder, John, didn't come from some big corporate background. He didn't have a degree. He studied mattresses, bootstrapped the business, built his own factory from the ground up in Arizona. That kind of determination and grit shows up in the quality of the mattresses that my children sleep on every night. So look, go to BrooklynBedding.com and use my promo code commentary at checkout to get 30% off site wide. This offer is not available anywhere else. That's BrooklynBetting.com and promo code COMMENTARY for 30% off site wide. Support our show and let them know we sent you after checkout. Brooklyn betting.com promo code commentary.
- [36:27]
Eli Lake
I don't have any good anymore dolphin jokes. But the idea that the Iranians would fully mine the Strait of Hormuz, they did drop a few is ridiculous because that would be like them blockading their own economy. I mean, and their most important ally is China, which hasn't done much, by the way, for them in this war and could certainly have done a lot more that would sink China's economy. So there's an argument. If you were really reckless, you could say you're telling me you're going to destroy Iran and China's economy. Don't tempt me with the party. You know what I mean? Like, you know, your terms are acceptable. Now, obviously there would be problems with the price of oil and other, you know, okay, I get it. But my point is that it's not a realistic threat. And if it is something that they're seriously thinking about, okay, you know what? We're really going to do that, then they're in more trouble than one might think. I think that my read. I'm not trying to be pangloss about the whole thing. I'm not trying to say that everything is hunky dory because I could point to things that are troubling. I mean, to bolster. The other point about that New York Times analysis is that it is true that our base structure in the Middle east was largely exposed, particularly the closer they were to Iran. And, and we did not have any kind of adequate missile drone defense and they have largely been rendered useless. Now we avoided casualties because we sort of understood this, that we removed a lot of personnel. But we have to rethink our entire basing strategy after the war. That's not the end of the world by the way that happens in war. The main thing you have to keep your eye on is what were the strategic benefits of the campaign. And in that respect I do think there are more targets. I mean I think that there's probably about half of its ballistic missiles that still need to be taken out. But Air Force, Navy, the nuclear program, the industry that makes the missiles, the industry that made their centrifuges and other parts for their nuclear program, they are much further away. It is a much heavier lift. This represents the end on just the nuclear of estimated about 500 billion 30 year project for the Iranians. It is now almost entirely rubble. Even if, I mean, I think we do want the 1,000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium. But even if the Iranians were to somehow figure out how to get it with all of our monitoring and all of Israel's monitoring, they don't have the capability right now to enrich it to weapons grade. They don't have the facilities or the labs that to put it into a warhead. They can't make more ICBMs. So there's so many problems right now that the Iranians face and that is a strategic victory. It's not just mowing the lawn. It doesn't quite capture it because of how much they've lost. So in that respect I still think that that is important. But at the same time, let's give the critics of the war this. Even if it was a temporary, even if it was a matter of a year or two, we don't want to end the war with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz in any. That would be a loss of prestige for us. It would be very bad for the economy and it would help them kind of generate the money that they would need to try to rebuild. But nonetheless, even if all that happened, they're still much further away, they cannot break out and they can't build what was seen as that conventional weapon shield for their nuclear program so that we couldn't do anything about it when they decided to start to rebuild. So all of that is in my view, to the good. Unfortunately, the President has not done a great job of communicating that to the American people. But I think over time, there will maybe be opportunities to try to reassess that. So that's why I still remain relatively. And just the offensive part, I mean, between Israel and the United States, it was a revolution in military affairs. What was able to accomplish in terms of taking out the leadership in the first minutes of the war, that's never been done before without any kind of ground forces. People will be studying that for years. So overall, that's where I'm coming. And it's like, you can't make the argument because twerps like this Midas Touch kid goes on CNN and says, what have we gotten out of the war? I'm like, I don't know. A lot of rubble. That used to be a nuclear program. How about that?
- [41:03]
Seth Mandel
So I want to make this point about the idea that there are problems with the US Military have been revealed here. The US in combination with Israel, certainly we have the capacity to bring Iran to its knees quickly. The way that this has always been done traditionally is total war. Trump doesn't want total war. We could do the kinds of things that could. That would not have the New York Times saying, there are problems with the military. They don't know how to win. It would have the New York Times saying, my God, we are war criminals. This is the worst thing that's ever happened. If you look at Russia and Ukraine, and everyone praises Ukraine rightfully for having been this unbelievably tough, innovative, quick thinking, adaptable fighting force that has revolutionized technology and strategy and everything, how have they done that? Aside from ingenious inventions freeing up the path for those inventions, recruiting more people, they've killed a lot of Russians and put a lot of Ukrainian lives at risk at will, and they've blown up tons and tons of Russian infrastructure, and that's what they're targeting. When you do those, you think, we can't do those things. The second Trump whispers about doing those things, the world goes crazy. So in fairness to Trump here, he doesn't like that, and that's understandable. But that's what total victory in large wars looks like. Historically.
- [43:05]
John Podhoretz
Two things. One, there was this report last night that was very perplexing. The senior official told Reuters and NBC News that the war was over. Today marks the beginning of the period, supposedly under the War Powers Resolution, where Congress would have to authorize the war for it to continue. As I said yesterday, every administration since the passage of the War Powers act does not accept its constitutionality and will not abide by it. Clinton didn't abide by it. Obama didn't abide by it. Trump will not abide by it. But I thought so it was very perplexing that it was phrased this way. And then I thought, well, so what they're essentially doing, in my estimation, which gets to what we should talk about next, is they're saying that there was a war that went from February 28 to May 1, including this period of ceasefire that began, I guess, on the 8th of April, and that war is
- [44:10]
Eli Lake
over,
- [44:12]
John Podhoretz
but another war is about to start. Now, you may not think that these are separate wars. Another way of looking at it is that it's a war. This battle is over and another battle is about to start. We've been told that General Kane and Admiral Cooper have been briefed the president yesterday on new war plans that presumably involve the strait and other matters in order to get Iran to the negotiating table, to give us. To say they've lost and to give us the thousand pounds of nuclear material. They have a plan. They have different plans. We don't know what they are, we don't know what they comprise. We don't know if they feature the kind of total war that Abe, I think rightly says Trump clearly wants to threaten but not carry through with. But there's not nothing. And what's happened here isn't done. The question is what that means. And I think. I think if I read what happened last night correctly, and I may not, because this administration is very weird and communicates in very weird ways, we're about to enter a different phase, an entirely different approach that's not going to focus on the leadership. We may not leadership or the nuclear. So whatever, maybe the Israelis will do it. We're going to focus on maybe the coastline in order to keep the Iranians away from the coastline, to take out their drone capabilities and the threats that they pose in the Straits of Hormuz. Maybe we're going to kill all the dolphins that have the mines on their backs and we're teaching them English instead of Farsi. I don't know where that's going, but clearly something else is about to pop. Do you agree with that, Eli?
- [46:17]
Eli Lake
Yes. And the reason I agree with it is because I think this administration does. Disinformation leaks to what they see as hostile media. I also agree with it because I don't think that Trump has indicated in any way that he would leave the war with some sort of deal that would leave the Iranians in charge of Hormuz. And I also think that there's something that we can't know and that maybe Trump is getting briefed and Netanyahu is getting briefed. But I think it's something that maybe the Israelis would know and maybe the CIA would know, which is what's really going on in terms of the fracturing of the regime. We tend to, I mean it's like lockstep consensus that the new regime is worse because it's more hardliners. I think that's nonsense. It was always very hard line. Khamenei authorized obviously the and Larajani who are no longer, both of whom are no longer with us, authorized the massacres of January that maybe killed up to 40, 42,000 according to Trump protesters. So this is the notion that we got a worse regime is kind of ridiculous. But what are the, where are the fractures here? And I think that, you know, we only see little bits of it. But I bet there's a much deeper analysis. And I think that that's what when Trump talks about it's kind of a new regime. Even though we didn't say we wanted regime change, we kind of got regime change. He's talking around this idea that it's not like there's a coherent and everybody has rallied around the flag. We know that the president who's on this five person council that was delegated under Moshtaba Mohamenei, the son of the supreme leader who we still haven't seen, we know that he has said that there's going to be an economic fiscal crisis and we're not going to pay salaries. We have to get some sort of economic relief. And the blockade I think in that respect is working. So there are parts of the regime right now that are kind of being forced to look at some very hard and unpleasant facts and truths for them. So I just think that yes, we are going to do that. We wouldn't leave with them in charge of the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump, other than that errant post on Truth Social which did freak a lot of people out when he said we would both collect a toll for the straight up Hormuz, you know what I mean? Other than that he has not indicated in any way that he is willing to allow this to be the status quo. And I think if you go back and you look at all the people who are predicting that Iran will be, I mean, Robert Pape, I just wrote a column on him, the University of Chicago professor has written and said repeatedly that Iran will emerge from the war as a fourth Great power in the world with Russia, China and America. That seems crazy to me, but it's all.
- [49:09]
Abe Greenwald
I thought it was crazy, too, before I read about the dolphins.
- [49:12]
Eli Lake
Yeah, right now. Yeah. Who knows, right? Exactly.
- [49:15]
John Podhoretz
But, you know, we have dolphin technology. We must bow before them.
- [49:19]
Eli Lake
Right. I mean, but the idea that Trump is going to just do whatever he can to get out of it, because he always tacos and he doesn't like the poll numbers, I don't think we've seen much evidence of that. If you just look at what Trump says and how he's responded, he has not. If that was what he was thinking, he would have maybe invited Tucker and Megan and the other podcasters in Magaland or to the White House and try to explain it to them and say, hey, I need you to be on side. He would have taken that view. Instead, he says, to hell with him. I know what I need to do here. So there's a lot of indications, in my view, that Trump. And also the other thing is that Trump now has the people in place, particularly in General Kane and in Admiral Cooper, saying, I need a military plan now that will open up Hormuz and he's not going to get rolled as he would have in his first presidency. And he's saying, oh, that's impossible. The only way we could do it is if we drop tactical nukes or something like that. So. So that's why I'm generally optimistic. I think that the commander in chief has made it pretty clear this is where he's going with it.
- [50:27]
Abe Greenwald
He said, John, you mentioned on the group chat the other day, you pointed out how Trump brought this up at the press conference he gave after the attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents Dinner that he basically said, everybody around me was saying, look at the economy humming and all this other stuff. And. And I said, well, look, just get ready, because we need to take care of the Iranian threat, and that's going to have a cost. So the fact that he's still talking about that and still saying, I factored this in. I factored the cost in. I knew it. Yeah. I mean, I think Eli's right.
- [51:04]
John Podhoretz
That.
- [51:04]
Abe Greenwald
That's, that's, that's been a major sign that usually Trump, if he were trying to back off of something, he would start by denying it. I never said. I never said that, you know, we, that, that, you know, we could have higher gas prices in return for Iran, where we just, you know, he would do what he does with, like, turnout numbers or whatever. You know, it's like Hit crowd numbers or whatever, or ratings. There's. He would just deny that. That the gas prices have gone up or something like that, but he hasn't. He's basically said, we've made a choice to have this trade off, which is kind of a rare positioning for Trump to actually come out and state, especially with an election looming and stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean, I agree.
- [51:49]
Seth Mandel
I don't know how many weeks it's been now that the narrative has sort of been, trump's looking for an off ramp. Trump's looking for an off ramp. If it's three weeks, he could have found an off ramp.
- [52:04]
Eli Lake
A battle.
- [52:05]
John Podhoretz
He found an off ramp from Minneapolis. Yeah, I mean, he found an off ramp. Exactly. In four days, he found an off ramp from Minneapolis when he really did feel like this was not going anywhere that he wanted it to go. So we've seen it this year, We've seen him take advantage of that in the last four months. And so I don't know why he wouldn't be able to come up with an off ramp if he wanted one. I also think that the political circumstances of the present moment cut against his need to cut and run. I've mentioned this before, but the events of the last couple of days have made this even plainer. First of all, he's not going to run again in 2028. He though he wants to champion the Republican Party. He's about himself and doesn't really care about what he's leaving behind him or what's happening to other people in the party. Not really. He obviously wants to get people elected. He likes to reward them or punish others and that sort of thing. But that's not party building. That's not looking out to the institutional interests of the GOP that he is at the head of. And we began by talking about Graham Platner in Maine. The nomination of Graham Platner in Maine, I think, effectively lightens some of the burden that a lot of the news reports this year might have been placing on him, on the idea that the Senate really might go Democratic. It might. It might. But winning in Maine, almost every scenario that you had thinking that you were gonna go Democratic in the Senate had a victory in Maine as an absolute necessity, turning that seat from Republican to Democrat. And the Democrats have given themselves a very heavy lift in Platner. Maybe he can do it. But I just remind you, they had a very sane candidate in 2020 when Trump lost. They had a very sane, rational, moderate to liberal Democratic candidate against Susan Collins in Maine. And Susan Collins won by nine points. Now, I know it's six years later, she's older, and all of that, but, you know, the past is prologue. If the Democratic Party is going more radical. But there isn't that much evidence that Maine itself has gone more radical. I don't know if they're gonna want this Mr. Tattoo here are good ways to rape women guy as their candidate.
- [54:52]
Eli Lake
Can you imagine the ad? I mean, it writes itself. You just get a bunch of, you know, former special Operators and other veterans and say, hi, my name's John Smith, and I served in the 86th Airborne. I would never put a Nazi tattoo on my body. My daddy fought the. You know, my grandfather fought in World War II against those Nazis. I know who this guy is. Boom. I mean, I think that'd be pretty effective anywhere, particularly in a country they
- [55:17]
Abe Greenwald
keep saying, like, oh, come on, he was in the Marines.
- [55:20]
Eli Lake
How many Marines do you know with Nazi tattoos?
- [55:22]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, well, you know, you think every Marine has a Nazi tattoo. Cause you think the Marines are the Nazis. So that's one of the reasons that they don't. That they don't have this natural revulsion to what Graham Platner is. Hold on.
- [55:38]
Eli Lake
This gets at a really great point, John, which is that we are talking about Graham Platner's death head tattoo as a question of antisemitism, which of course it is, but it's also a question of, like, you're not patriotic. You hate America. We fought the Nazis. You know, that's the other part of it. Like, are you kidding?
- [56:03]
Seth Mandel
Don't forget, the American flag is a scary triggering image to people.
- [56:10]
Eli Lake
Well, that's what I mean. It's like, this party is a joke. Stop telling me, oh, he's a veteran. And how many. Like, you know, it's like when John Kerry did that in 2004, I was sick to my stomach, by the way, and I'll say this right now. I'll just say, I'll put it out there. Okay, go ahead. I was not offended by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth at all in the least. I'm glad they did what they did. John Kerry was such a fraud in that in 2004, when he's reporting for duty, Lieutenant Kerry, are you kidding me? He hated the Vietnam War. He testified. He called his fellow battle buddies war criminals. It's outrageous. And that's who the Democrats are. They don't like the military.
- [56:48]
John Podhoretz
The proudest rant over the proudest American moment of the 20th century, without question, was the defeat of Nazi Germany. I mean, Untrammeled pride, because there are people in America who remain morally. What would you call it, like, morally ambiguous about the victory over Japan because of the use of the atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That does not attach to our victory in Europe and The events of 1944 and 1945, from D Day to the surrender of Nazi Germany. I know it's a long time ago, but if there's one thing that American school children have not been told, it's that we were bad to defeat the Nazis. They've been told America has been bad on race. America's been bad on Native Americans. America dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan. America's, you know, has this terrible record. They have been told that nobody said that we shouldn't have taken the Nazis down. They have, by the way.
- [58:06]
Eli Lake
They have been told.
- [58:07]
Seth Mandel
They have been told that the Nazis were inspired by American action, by the way.
- [58:13]
John Podhoretz
Right, that's right. Well, that's true, too. Right. Yeah. But even so, this is the righteous. This is why you can still make movies about how wonderful America is, as long as they're about fighting the Nazis in World War II or fighting Nazis in America in 2010 or 2011 or whatever it is. Fighting Nazis. Good. Graham Platner, Nazi. So I'm sorry, it's a heavy lift for the Democratic party.
- [58:41]
Eli Lake
Well, also, 1945 is the same, is 80 years after the Civil War, which was the great accomplishment of the 19th century. So my question is, I mean, in 1945, the Democrats didn't have a problem with the stars and bars and the Confederate flag. Could you imagine?
- [58:58]
John Podhoretz
Well, they were.
- [58:58]
Eli Lake
There was a Confederate tattoo on a Senate candidate in Maine in 1945. It would still resonate, even though it was 80 years ago that we had that great victory. So come on.
- [59:08]
John Podhoretz
And here's the part if you really
- [59:10]
Seth Mandel
want to get yourself crazy, I'm there. To Eli's point about Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo is his celebration of the US's worst enemy, which we defeated. What's his and his ilk's argument about American Jews? That we are more loyal to Israel to another country than we are to the us.
- [59:41]
Eli Lake
Thank you.
- [59:42]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [59:43]
Eli Lake
Yeah. Who are they loyal to, Hasan? I mean, you started off talking about Bernie Sanders bringing in China for an AI conference, and they're gonna talk about the dual loyalties and the Israel lobby and all this other stuff. And I'm like, you guys are. You don't have a leg to stand on on this issue. And the same with the populist. Right. I mean, Tucker Carlson. That's all he wants to talk about is the disloyalty of American Jews and how they tricked the president into the Iran war and the same guy is buying real estate in Qatar and God knows, doing softball interviews with the Iranian president. It's ridiculous. Enough already.
- [60:21]
John Podhoretz
Enough already.
- [60:21]
Eli Lake
You want to talk about patriotism, you have nothing to say about it.
- [60:28]
John Podhoretz
Okay.
- [60:29]
Eli Lake
All right there, everybody.
- [60:31]
John Podhoretz
Have a great weekend.
- [60:32]
Eli Lake
I have a commentary, new album. No, I'm just kidding.
- [60:36]
John Podhoretz
How about, how about the knicks winning by 51 points and the Sixers making
- [60:43]
Eli Lake
it to Game 7?
- [60:44]
John Podhoretz
Let's just say these, this is the age of miracles and wonders. That's, that's all I could, that's all
- [60:49]
Abe Greenwald
I'm going to see next. It was a very, it was a very important night for us homeschoolers because, you know, we got to, we got to quiz our children every few minutes on how big the Knicks lead was. How are their math skills coming along? How are we doing, if you can look at it and right away say 51. So we appreciate the Knicks giving us, you know, a made for homeschool math lesson.
- [61:18]
John Podhoretz
Also. They're fun for the whole family. I don't even care about basketball. But, you know, this is a, this is a once in a, this is a once in a half century event when, you know, when two elite teams come together and one of them just literally crushes the, under the other under the, you know, under the sole of its foot.
- [61:40]
Eli Lake
So elite's doing a lot of work for the Atlanta Hawks. They're a fun story. They have players, but they are, you know.
- [61:48]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. So, so I'm sorry for the Hawks fans and you're all wonderful and I'm sorry, Steve Price. Anyway, we will, we will be back on Monday, so.
- [61:59]
Abe Greenwald
And Dominique Wilkins. We're sorry, Dominique.
- [62:02]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, we're sorry. Dominique Wilkins. For Abe, Seth and Eli and John Pot hordes keep the candle burning. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar sw, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story.
- [62:46]
Abe Greenwald
Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.