John Podhoretz (2:28)

Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

Christine Rosen (2:31)

I won't say happy birthday, but I will say, knowing Naomi, she'll receive all of these wishes with grace and good goodwill.

John Podhoretz (2:37)

So.

Christine Rosen (2:37)

Hi, John.

John Podhoretz (2:38)

Very true. And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.

Eliana Johnson (2:43)

Hi, John.

John Podhoretz (2:46)

So, in the phalanx of the weird conjoining of Twitter, YouTube, social media, Maga, beyond Maga personalities and the administration, there is no more interesting example than the marriage between Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie, who has become.

Abe Greenwald (3:13)

A.

John Podhoretz (3:16)

Video podcaster with a very expensively looking, expensively produced, expensive looking podcast in which she explores what we would call MAGA themes. And she has the same, I would say, calm, reasonable, Respectful, and high level demeanor as her husband in the discussion of these matters. I would not ordinarily bring this in in this way. Family's family, whatever people people have can have careers and have different approaches to their careers if they're married, and that's fine. But we do sort of understand that if Katie Miller does a podcast, that it is some odd reflection of a kind of official line from the White House that is being promulgated in this kind of semi unofficial way. So I'm bringing this up because yesterday she had on Jenny McCarthy to talk about the decision by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To recommend a change in the vaccine schedules and the way that children are vaccinated. And I am very alarmed by this effort to mainstream Jenny McCarthy and alarmed that the White House, which has allowed RFK to become the HHS secretary and Trump, has done this. And Trump has his own history of irresponsible statements about vaccines and the like in his past. But Jenny McCarthy is among the worst people in the world when it comes to the question of vaccinating children and the connection between vaccines and autism. And she is crazy. So Jenny McCarthy was of course, a kind of MTV babe, famous for being curvaceous and for not much else. Though she had a couple of failed sitcoms. She was briefly on the View. She had a kid in the early 2000s. That child was diagnosed with autism. And her life response to it was first to say that she was a member of a group of people who claimed to be Indigo moms or Indigo parents, that she believed that her child was not autistic, but was connected to higher education and deeper spiritual forces in the universe, that they were possessed of a unique and transcendent wisdom that was beyond the reach of our philosophies. And that was argument number one. She then moved on to becoming a fanatical anti vaxxer, citing the data of the not only discredited but jailed Andrew Wakefield, the British false researcher who claimed to have evidence that autism, you know, was caused by vaccination. And it is, of course, that argument about autism and vaccination that is the spine behind this decision to alter America's wildly successful 60, 70 year experience with vaccination. So that's where I'm starting from, which is, does this White House really want not to have plausible deniability about how well RFK is over here? And he's doing what he's doing and we're over here and we're doing what we're doing because the president's chief policy advisor's wife is now retailing the opinions of somebody who is out of her mind and unbelievably irresponsible and wrong and false and a promulgator of deranged theories about her own child. Understandably, if she's grief stricken about the condition of her child, whatever, please have at it.

Abe Greenwald (8:07)

Well, I mean, there's a. The relationship between the blogosphere and the Trump administration generally is pretty extraordinary. People coming in and going out, right? I mean, not blogosphere, the podcasting sphere. I mean, Dan Bongino left to go start up his a new show, right. I mean, so the whole, if you look at the entire Trump, this Trump presidency as a kind of reality show, the podcasts are like the, the tune in to the reality show podcast after the show where we'll further break down what's happening in the administration.

John Podhoretz (9:06)

That's a good point because, you know, it is a thing now where you have these shows that are mystery box shows on streaming and you don't understand what the hell is going on. And then you have cashier telling you for an hour. Yeah, you have, you have a podcast with like the guy who makes Pluribus who then explains what he failed to show you on the show because he was too bored or something to actually provide you with the plot points and the background that you're supposed to get while you're watching it. I mean, I guess the weird part is what's depressing in your analysis, which I think is actually absolutely correct, is of course we're encroached on. Right. The world of people who are supposed to take presidential actions and behaviors and policies and put them into a context and explain them out as doctrines. That's what Commentary magazine did. That's what Charles Krauthammer did. That's what the world of sort of the policy intellectual or commentator was. And of course it's fine. It's not our, we don't have any rights to it. Anyone can do it. And so if it's being done by this podcastosphere, you know, so be it. Like, if that's how it's going to go, that's how it's going to go. So I do think.

Christine Rosen (10:26)

Yeah, isn't it more that, I mean, I think of the Katie Miller podcast and that ilk as being the sort of right wing version of the View in the sense that it sort of retails as entertainment, the policy and politics world. The fact that she's married to Stephen Miller does obviously matter. But, but the, I think there's some future danger for the Trump administration in that, in the, in the seemingly supportive podcast sphere. And it's not just the Tucker Carlson's who we've seen occasionally attack Trump and some of his policies. It's the fact that that's an entire universe that Trump really can't make deals with and any longer control because he, you know, he has Truth Social, but that has an upper limit which it's reached and it's never going to go beyond he, you know, Musk. Musk is still sort of an ally, but Musk has a much more powerful platform now than Truth Social is in X. And there, there could be down the line an attempt for Trump to school and discipline his followers and those rogues will go rogue. I mean, we saw this with Fuentes, that was one example. But that could continue because they are chasing market share and viewers and eyeballs and money, and he has slightly different goals as the president. So I do think that although right now everybody likes to lump them all together, they're are internal fracturing evidence of some fracturing going on in that sphere. I mean, I've watched a few of the Katie Miller things. Look, the great benefit to being married to Stephen Miller is that she's going to score a lot of great interviews because there are people who will appear on her podcast who never would if she wasn't married to the chief domestic policy adviser.

Seth Mandel (12:00)

Such as Stephen Miller.

Christine Rosen (12:01)

Exactly.

Seth Mandel (12:03)

I think that there's also the other connection here is the substack, right. The State Department is on substack. And I always took that. Now I see, I'm looking at it now and I see that they haven't, it seems they haven't posted since July, but they were posting regularly before that. But at the time where that went live, the idea that the State Department would take its official account to substack was, you know, the government has a website where it can, if it wants to blog, it can blog. But these are communication, these are communiques, essentially, you know, one way communicates. And the idea to taking it to substack was that we're not bound by, you know, living within the constraints and the rules of the system and also that we are going to bypass all official channels. It's similar to the way they bypass all official channels of the media to go around, you know, what they see as an unfair filtering of, you know, their message. And so I think it's, it's also part of, of, you know, a conscious thing, which is not just, they're not just letting people sort of do whatever they want to do. But I do think it's the result of, you know, a strategy of every official communication channel goes over here and there's a large segment of the administration that's only going to use the unofficial ones over here, whatever they may be.

Christine Rosen (13:20)

Well, and there is a missed opportunity on the vaccine issue. John, you're totally right. Changing the vaccine schedule and rfk, obviously craziness on vaccines that preceded his joining the administration. They could have taken the path of saying, we are making these changes for these particular reasons. We're aligning with what Europe does, or we're aligning more with the schedule that this other western developed country uses. There was a way of reassuring the public that it wasn't the crazies driving the message. And I think we haven't seen that reassurance. We haven't seen any spokesman saying or doing that kind of path. What they're doing is saying this. You know, you should be suspicious. You should believe the conspiracies. And by the way, here's Jenny McCarthy, who was an early. I mean, there were congressional hearings about some of the crazy she stirred up, you know, 20 years ago over these issues. I mean, it's, she's a longstanding crime and crazy.

John Podhoretz (14:10)

You're not being fair, Christine, because they are citing another country and it's a country much in the news, a country that has not been in the news since the 13th century when its prince, you know, killed his uncle for marrying his mother, that is Denmark. Because what they're citing is Denmark's vaccine schedule. We're just following Denmark now. We will invade Greenland and seize Greenland. But we are praising Denmark for its vaccine schedule. Never before and not ever again in history will Denmark be so cited in the official communications and the commentary surrounding the President of the United States. So congratulations, Denmark, for your sudden position at the center of the universe, is all I have to say now. Eliana, you have a baby. You have two small children, but you do have a seven month old. And how does this strike you?

Eliana Johnson (15:18)

You know, it's funny, I'm sitting here, John, thinking I have nothing informed to say about this. Like one of those awkward, you know, like I think all of us do.

James Patterson (15:27)

I.

John Podhoretz (15:27)

But neither do I, by the way.

Eliana Johnson (15:29)

So I don't know, have something to say about everything. But, but I sometimes feel this way, like I have nothing to say about this. Topic. I literally have not followed Jenny McCarthy or anything she said since I was like 10 or 11 or 12 years old when she had this MTV show Singled out that I was a fan of that was pretty cool. But have not followed Jenny McCarthy since then. I've not followed particularly closely this battle over vaccines just because I'm getting my kids vaccinated. Though my kids didn't get the COVID vaccine. I followed that debate closely enough when they were babies. And I have also not followed Katie Miller's podcast rollout particularly closely, though my general impression is that she is, first of all, she's pretty cute and she's getting in, she's attractive and she's getting in this like more soft focus, influencer type space with a podcast. And as you guys have said, she's interviewed as couples, the Hegseths, Mike Johnson and his wife. She interviewed JD Vance and Kellyanne Conway. And these people, either administration officials or close to the administration, seem to be able to go on her podcast and get treatment that they obviously are not able to get from the mainstream media. That seems pretty good. Okay, that's good. And also she's not implacably hostile to the Jewish people in the state of Israel. So that seems.

John Podhoretz (17:12)

That's a, that's a positive.

Eliana Johnson (17:14)

So that's a positive. I like that. But I'm just not deeply informed on the, on Jenny McCarthy or the vaccine stuffs or even the podcast in particular.

John Podhoretz (17:25)

Bad. You're a bad pundit. Bad pundit. I'm a bad pundit's Notice whether you.

Abe Greenwald (17:33)

Know or not, I have a zoom out sort of observation here, which is that. So, you know, we've talked a lot over the years about how there's a right wing media ecosphere has emerged to challenge the mainstream. In the case of Trump and the Trump administration particularly, there's also a third media ecosphere, which is actually the administration's or his. You know, Christine mentions Truth Social. Seth mentioned the substack. Trump also has a Drudge knockoff aggregator site. That's a.gov site. It's a news aggregator with headlines, you know, that are favorable to him. So this, the administration is actually, you know, when Joan, you talk about the Katie Miller or maybe it was Christine show as a sort of right wing view. There's this very conscious effort to erect all these mirror image right wings versions of, of mainstream products out there.

Christine Rosen (18:59)

Well, that's a good. Okay. The social, the cabinet level social media platforms also troll regularly. We see this particularly with HHS interior. They, they, they use AI generated slop and troll and whatnot.

John Podhoretz (19:16)

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Seth Mandel (22:30)

And they, they. Sometimes they're pretty funny, but I was just gonna say, I, I, I. We were in. We were in Athens, and there was, you know, one of those, like, House of Illusions. And one of the rooms is a room of mirrors where the door is, you know, the same as the door looks from the inside, looks exactly like the mirrors look. And so, you know, you go in and you're supposed to spin around and then find the door, find your way out. So it's supposed to be fun, but I assume for many children it's more than mildly terrifying. But my kids loved it. But it is you in a room, and it's just nothing. It's like an octagon of mirrors. That's what Abe is describing. That's what this sort of looks like, is that there's. They've. They've erected around themselves the room of mirrors, the hall of mirrors, where everywhere you turn, is this the real picture? Is this actually you. You know, at one point, one of my younger children ran to hug his sister and ended up hugging the mirror because his sister was standing over here, and this was just the reflection of her. That becomes a real problem for the Trump administration and people inside it who don't know if the person standing there is really there or if they're going to run into a wall. When they go to embrace it, you know, it becomes impossible to tell the difference between what's real and what's not. And it becomes impossible to find the door to exit this, you know, sort of exhibit. And I think that they get really caught in their own.

Christine Rosen (23:56)

Let's recall historically what happened to the last inhabitant of who built a house of a hall of mirrors for himself. Not good.

John Podhoretz (24:03)

Okay, I. Seth, that is the metaphor of the year so far. I want to salute you. I know it's only seven days into the year, but that was magnificent. I don't even know where to go with that. So I'm going to move on to point this out, which is that I complained in that weird way that somehow the role of defining doctrines and trying to provide the intellectual framework that explains the reasoning and behavior of the administration has been superseded to some degree from the traditional ways in which that has been done. And that is the other thing about the sort of the decade of Trump, which is that the collapse of the structure, the post war structure of the American media is now, it's not complete, but it's about 75% of the way there. And the 25% that remains in the old framework is increasingly getting hysterical about the change rather than embracing the change. And you can see this in the weird amalgam now of the person who embraced the change, who then steps back and becomes part of the old machine. And that's Barry Weiss, right? Leaves the New York Times starts a substack, starts a news organization that is built literally on the substacks framework. I mean it sits on inside substack, the free Press and or did, I'm not quite sure how it is now. I think it's still, I think it's still a substack. And then of course is now running CBS News. So she is still on substack and she's backed into a legacy news organization. And I just want to read to you from a newsletter by Oliver Darcy, formerly of cnn, his newsletter status, which is a nightly newsletter about the media and just sort of the tone, because his audience is the media and you know, people who are subscribed to it are largely in the media. And so he is writing a kind of class notes, you know, for alumni, you know, of the media college. Excuse me. So listen to this. On Tuesday evening, newly installed CBS Evening News anchor Tony Docapil closed out just his second official broadcast with a surreal segment, a glowing tribute to Secretary of State Marco Rubio kicking off his Live from America tour. The broadcast from Miami Dockerville ran through Rubio's ever expanding portfolio as one of Donald Trump's closest confidants. Then, an attempt to create a lighthearted moment, the broadcast aired a montage of AI generated memes depicting Rubio in a variety of imagined roles, including as the head of Hilton Hotels. Marco Rubio, we salute you, Docker pill declared. You are the ultimate Florida man. Now what he is referring to is this stuff that was happening on substack after Saturday, on Twitter after Saturday, that is legitimately hilarious, which is a picture of Rubio sitting in a chair. And because he became Secretary of State, the head archivist of the United States, the national Security Advisor and the head of aid. The whole thing is like he's a guy who has every job. So when they fired the coach of the Baltimore Ravens, he's pictured in a, in the Baltimore Ravens coaches uniform or there are like seven or eight of these. It's funny. It was a funny way of dealing with Rubio It's a lighthearted moment, right? And it was worth a 15 second segment on the news to show these pictures because that is news that Rubio has become a kind of cultural figure. Enough to be at the center of a meme. The Secretary of State of the United States. And what does Oliver Darcy do? He tut tuts. He's just, he's horrified. I mean, this is really terrible taken together because there was also an interview with. With Kristi Noem on the. On the evening news. The MAGA friendly editorial choices made by the freshly relaunched evening news are almost certain to intensify scrutiny of the program.

Eliana Johnson (28:44)

There's no scrutiny now. She's going to get scrutiny. There wasn't scrutiny, but then they did this segment. Now there's going to be scrutiny.

John Podhoretz (28:49)

More renewed scrutin. And the renewed scrutiny will be renewed in the renewal of its scrutiny. And not just from critics outside the building, but from journalists inside it as well. Conversations Tuesday with more than a half dozen staffers and network insiders, two themes emerged again and again. Deep embarrassment occupied with growing alarm. It's so bad in there. One network insider underscored to status. Okay. Suffice it to say it's been a lot. A total disaster, as one network insider put it. A total shit show. Another told status. One veteran television news executive pointed out, they're big on issuing manifestos and value statements, but they can't even get together a clean newscast. Ouch. Internally, I'm told staffers are overwhelmingly depressed at the state of affairs. Okay. CBS has been in third to fourth place now for five years. Nobody watches anything on CBS News. The organization itself has proven unbelievably incompetent at doing the most minimal act of trying to, you know, achieve eyeballs that will watch it. While the network outside the news is the number one network in daytime and in nighttime, it is only on news that it stinks to high heaven. CBS is by far the highest rated network in primetime and it is the lowest rated network in news. So if you're inside, you know what? You don't have standing. You don't have standing to say, I'm so embarrassed. You should be embarrassed because you screwed the pooch and destroyed your own news organization from the inside by stinking and at what you do. And someone's coming in and trying to do different things. And by the way, is interviewing cabinet secretaries on the evening news and is having. Machado is going to be interviewed tonight on the evening news. Barry has had town halls with leading figures in the news. This is what people in the news business are supposed to think the news business is supposed to be, which is it is supposed to engage with people in the news, ask them tough questions and present the world from this high level. Instead, what the network news has become is there's a domino. You know, it's like the thing in broadcast news. Look, someone set up 10,000 dominoes and knocked it over. That's what David Muir does on the highest rated newscast at abc. Barry is trying to actually infuse an older understanding of the news as being interviews with newsmakers and an effort to frame what the administration is doing in a maybe it's friendly, maybe it's not friendly. I don't care whether it's friendly or unfriendly. The fact that they care that it's not unfriendly is yet another sign that what she is doing is. Is she is attempting to save this business from obsolescence and from becoming, you know, vaudeville or burlesque and disappearing entirely. And the response from the mainstream inside is don't save us, let us drown. We're happy to drown because we don't want you performing mouth to mouth resuscitation because you're gross.

Seth Mandel (32:20)

Inside and outside. I mean, George Clooney pointing his finger at CBS cameras and saying Barry Weiss is dismantling CBS News as we speak was kind of a bizarre moment.

John Podhoretz (32:31)

Yeah, but it's also from, you know, French citizenship, George Clooney.

Eliana Johnson (32:36)

The audience that she needs to get for CBS News. No, she needs the average person in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa to watch the evening news again. I mean, if she's alienating George Clooney, she is succeeding. But first of all, John, I really want to thank you for getting to a topic that I'm informed about that I have an opinion about. We've transitioned from freaking Jenny McCarthy and Maxines to Barry Weiss and CBS News. Yes, I have an opinion on this. So thank you. But I mean, you basically said everything. I think I subscribe to every one of these media newsletters. Oliver Darcy and Dylan Byers and you know, yada, yada, yada, Lachlan Cartwright for, you know, I unsubscribed from that one a story I can tell you about. I really, I wonder, unsubscribe from that one. But every one of these people, Oliver Darcy, whatever Dylan has the most fair to Barry. They are not giving you John or whoever me objective analysis of what's happening inside these networks. Though I think, I do think Dylan has been relatively fair to Barry. They are. They want her to fail. They are offering snide, nasty commentary, and they are rooting for failure. These people at cbs, if you go, if you rewind a year ago, okay, that network, and even still to this day, because like, that network is not remade that Sunday morning show with Margaret Brennan at the helm. The headlines that it makes, the attention it gets, are for when. When she is humiliated by administration officials when they come on and J.D. vance or Marco Rubio, as he did this weekend, wipes the floor with her. It is not for newsmaking interesting interviews. It is for administration officials exhibiting her stupidity and bias. Okay? If you go back a year ago, Donald Trump refused to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes because they had been so hateful and biased against it. 60 minutes then deceptively edited. You know, people can debate it, but they aired a promo of a Kamala Harris interview that then wasn't a part of the interview that went on the air. They did not cover Joe Biden's obvious senility. I mean, the mistakes that these networks have made are very recent. And this is the status quo that these broadsheets are defending. Okay, the, the headlines made at CBS News that, by the way, is a story Barry Weiss broke at the Free Press was that the network brass was up in arms when Tony Docapil asked challenging questions of Ta Nehisi Coates about his, you know, hostile turd of the book about Israel, which is what, you know, that is what reporters are supposed to do. And he was publicly, or, you know, not publicly, but like the network brass called him out in front of all of his colleagues on a call, called him to account for doing his job, and caused a crisis because people leaked that to Barry Weiss at the Free Press. So this was the status quo ante at CBS that she's trying to change and that everybody's now leaking to Oliver Darcy about, about how embarrassing it is that she would deign to try and change that.

Abe Greenwald (36:20)

You know, there's another aspect to this. First of all, hostile turd of a book, fantastic. But there's another aspect to all this, which is that what Barry is asking these people to do is much harder than what they were doing. It's not just that they're not inclined to, to end up making a hated administration official look good. It's also much harder to actually do news than it is to say, okay, we have to translate the memo that everyone got into our own network speak today or tonight. And if you look at, for example, the 60 Minutes memo that, that Barry issued regarding the, the, the, The Segment on the El Salvadoran prison. All she's asking is follow this up, do this, add something to it. This has been told already. Go seek out this angle there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, get.

John Podhoretz (37:25)

You know, she's, it's a hard, she's.

Eliana Johnson (37:28)

You know what their issue is?

John Podhoretz (37:30)

Yes.

Eliana Johnson (37:32)

That they are in the wrong business. They want to be in the politics business and unfortunately they're in the news business. And I say this having been in the mainstream media, you know, doing fair minded down the middle news and now running an ideologically driven news site, I've done both. And I know it when I see it. I know ideologically driven news when it comes out of cbs and I know fair down the middle news because I have done both. So, you know, I'm hard pressed when 60 Minutes says no. This Kamala Harris interview was just really fair. Like, I don't think so.

Christine Rosen (38:12)

Well, and if Barry, if Barry fails, it won't be because she's not rebuilding the news as it should be done. And as most people want to have it, which is they, they do want that middle path. They want to just be informed and not be told is how I would put it. If she fails, it's because she actually did take an even bigger gamble than going into the mainstream and trying to reform it, which is going into an old school 20th century medium when most people get their information on social media platforms, YouTube videos, Tik Tok. So if she can actually bring even a small percentage of viewers back to any sort of evening news, especially viewers under the age of 60, 70, that will be a huge coup because she will have, she will be restoring an old pathway of information and doing it in a way that is more fair minded. And she left the new 21st century platform model to do that. So I actually have a lot of respect for her making that leap. A lot of people said that's crazy. Why would you want to care about broadcast news? Broadcast news is dead. I think her biggest, most radical gamble is saying actually it isn't because there's still a desire for that kind of news broadcast and I want to bring it back. So kudos to her. It's a huge, huge battle she's fighting.

John Podhoretz (39:23)

I mean, she hasn't left the other, she is still running by. Right. But one of the interesting aspects of this, as I say, is if the collapse, I mean, look, I'm 64 years old. I began my career after college at a publication called Time magazine that had more than 4 million subscribers and was at the center of a gigantic magazine empire of Which Time was not even the most profitable of the magazines. People was. But there was People. There were Sports Illustrated, there was Time, there was Fortune, and, you know, 10 million subscribers, billions of dollars in revenue, hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. Time is now owned by. By a company in Iowa. I doubt that it sells more than 50, that it has a larger circulation base than 50 or 100,000. Now, that's two generations. The collapse of an entire understanding of how to read the news. That was basically inaugurated by Henry luce in the 1920s when he started Time magazine. Right. That is. That is the progression of my lifetime. The other progression of my lifetime is the New York Times, which was a paper very successful, million subscribers. It went through a dark night of the soul, as did the Washington Post, when classified advertising died away and they lost their biggest cash cow. And then, while the Post floundered, the Times, following in part the model established by Gordon Krovitz at the Wall Street Journal, went the other way and said, there are ways in which we can make a success in the digital universe. But guess what? Did it. Not news. News didn't do it. Being the New York Times was the brand. Cooking and games were the selling points. Recipes, wire cutter, wordle, spelling bee. 4, 5, 6 million subscribers now, but not for news. So what does that tell you? It tells you that this Balkanization is a response to real world conditions over time, and that the people who recognize that the conditions have changed survive, and the people who don't recognize the conditions have changed will fail. And that's why I wanted to point one thing out about the podcastosphere, or some term. We're going to have to come up with it. So someone, Abe, I think you mentioned, Don Bongino has now left the FBI and is going back into podcasting. So I'm watching him over the last three days as he has liberated himself from his position at the FBI and he is doing something very interesting. He is going in as a critic of the Tucker Candace Megan Wing. He was the Tucker Candace Megan Wing, or he was one of the. He had one of the most successful podcasts in America. And he was, of course, a promulgator of conspiracy theories about the Epstein files and all kinds of stuff like that. And he has decided that he is staking his claim and planting his flag in the. You people are all insane. Israel is our ally. America is a force free for good. You're all conspiracy theorists, hucksters, grifters. You're all doing this for your audience capture and to promulgate bad ideas and do bad things. And that is very, very interesting to me. I genuinely, I mean, I find it almost. I mean, I don't find it heartening. I'm not particularly a fan. I'm not. I would have described myself as being an anti fan of Don Bongino's it.

Eliana Johnson (43:20)

Very soon you're gonna be a fan.

John Podhoretz (43:22)

But I think I'm gonna be a fan if this is where he's going. And it's an interesting sign of a maturity. Everything is sped up in this world, right? Everything goes 100 miles an hour. So it was just six months ago that Megyn Kelly decided that she was gonna throw her hand in with the anti Semites and the haters and the monsters and try to build her audience on the backs of disgusting, foul, filthy opinion for which she should be ashamed. Yes, I'm saying on this air, and I hope you hear this, Megan, I am ashamed to know you. I am ashamed to know you. And you should be ashamed of yourself. And everybody who has ever worked with you should be shamed by you. It is shameful what you have done. It is shameful what you are doing. And it's whoredom at the best. At the worst, it's that you believe what you're promulgating, in which case you're a monster. But in this case, I just think you're like a ratings whore. And so it is shameful. And if Don Bongino sees a window of opportunity and going in the other direction, and if it works, then you have a real media war on your hands in the new media. You know, it's not just Ben Shapiro alone who is holding aloft the standard against the idea that it's fine that Nick Fuentes says he wants Americans to die in Venezuela and for the United States to be embarrassed and shamed and defeated in Venezuela.

Abe Greenwald (44:49)

Here's what I find interesting about the Dan Bongino thing is that from the outside, before he was on the inside, it's easy to get sucked into all this nonsense. Then he gets a glimpse from the inside and goes, oh, that's all silliness. Oh, that's just. That's garbage, you know, and now. So it's like it goes to show what getting a peek of the reality can will do. You know, it's hard to go back out there and once your eyes have been opened and I mean, then that takes a real whore, you know, if you could do that.

James Patterson (45:34)

I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis. Morris Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James. And I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon. And this is a really terrific list. I think you'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay. BJ Novak.

Eliana Johnson (46:00)

Yay.

James Patterson (46:01)

Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad. And Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry dogs run faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive, compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson. That'd be me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Seth Mandel (46:32)

And it did something else, like, weirdly good in that respect, right? Which is when Trump announces that he's bringing this crew into law enforcement, into the FBI and wherever, you know, he tries to put, put, you know, the Attorney General's office. You know, what makes people legitimately and rightfully afraid that they're going to convert the, these establishment, you know, law enforcement agencies into, like, conspiracy, you know, promulgators. But the opposite happened, right? There's a weird thing where we're sort of kind of feeling thankful. I know this sounds weird, but we're sort of appreciative that he hired people like Dan Bongino and maybe Cash Patel. Not because I'm suddenly converted into thinking that these two guys should run the FBI, but because he, he, you know, he showed them the cards from the inside, as Abe says, and it, it blunted a really sharp part of MAGA's, you know, anti establishment campaign, which is that you can't see the reality and, and, and go out and be the same person you were before. And so he's actually Trump. Weirdly, I know Donald Trump has, in this weird Rube Goldberg mechanism way, converted conspiracy theories into, like, rational, you know, observers.

Christine Rosen (48:14)

Okay. But I'll push back a little. Cash Patel should not be the head of the FBI. I stand by my, my.

Seth Mandel (48:19)

Well, that's right. And I agree that's, you know, it's, it's more of a silver lining thing. It's not a, you know, oh, this was a great idea after all.

Christine Rosen (48:26)

I agree that it's a silver lining in the sense that Bongino now realizes there's an audience, a new audience capture mechanism that he's going to test. I think this is a market test. It's, see, as you say, John, to see if there are people who are kind of appalled by what the Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly wing has done. But there's the flip side of how Trump has normalized some of the abnormal conspiracy theorizing is. You know the post he put up about January six on a government website which is trying to rewrite a history and kind of, it's not gaslighting, that term is overused these days, but it's a way of sort of normalizing things that even a few years ago an objective observer would say, well, that doesn't seem to normal. So if it's a silver lining, it's usually in specific areas. And I will be curious to see if this market test that Bungino is doing, how it, how it a month or two from now looks for him and if he'll shift because if they're, if they're really only about audience capture, he'll change as soon if he's not getting his audience.

Seth Mandel (49:22)

Look, I just want to be clear. My, my, my, my suggestion is not that we only hire conspiracy theorists so that we can show them.

Christine Rosen (49:33)

What'S really happening.

John Podhoretz (49:34)

You're both making complementary points, actually, because the world of people who say things like there are things going on we don't understand, and they're all the result of agency, choice and purpose on the part of the people in power who are up to no good and who are directing it and causing bad things to happen on purpose for the extension of their own power. And I think a lot of that does happen. Obviously, the Minnesota fraud story is an example. Money usually is a good explanation for these things, right? I mean, fraud is a story about people enriching themselves that we can always understand. It's the story of mankind from the time we emerged from the primordial ooze. But the world of the conspiracy theorist says that the government is all powerful, all knowing and all purposeful. And when you put these guys in and you say, okay, come, I'm going to show you who's behind the curtain. And it turns out that it's the snake oil salesman from Kansas with the magician. Snake oil salesman from Kansas. And not, you know, the orgy from Eyes Wide Shut that involves every powerful person in the universe. That, and that there are rules that have been promulgated for how the government handles the things that it knows that exist for a deeply humanitarian and proper and moral reason that involve things like the Epstein files, which is you want all the documents released. You sort of push Congress into the idea that there should be a giant form of public discovery of legal documents dating back 20 years. Just throw them out there so that everybody can look at it. There are Hundreds and thousands of names in those documents of people who have literally nothing to do with this, including people who were victims or seen to be victims of whatever it was that Epstein was up to, who will never be able to go back into, into private life again, whose identities will be known forever. And we do not expose that. We do not release grand jury testimony. We do not release confidential law enforcement documents or confidential documents that the government produces about sources and methods of swag, of international intelligence gathering and stuff, because those are real people. And they can get killed, and their families can get killed and their homes can be blown up and psychotics can focus on them and stalk them and make their lives a living hell. And they didn't do anything wrong. And they are not supposed to have their names out in public. And you could see Pam Bondi and Patel and Bongino, all three of them going, oh, wait a minute now. Bondi should have known she was Attorney General of the state of Florida. But you go, oh, wait a minute. Hmm.

Christine Rosen (52:50)

There is.

John Podhoretz (52:51)

Yeah.

Christine Rosen (52:51)

No, I mean, the thing is, though, I think what you're exposing is something that exists in two parts for the Trump administration. That's a deep challenge for him in terms of the MAGA movement's ultimate survival once he's out of office. Office, and that's that Trump is a deal maker. He likes to make deals. He likes to pick up a phone and call someone and go, let's make a deal. Whether that's, you know, the head of an opposition force in another country, whether that's Putin, whether whoever it is, he can make a deal. You cannot deal with genuinely hardcore conspiracy theorists, and you cannot really make a deal with hardcore ideology based people. And he has both of those in his coalition right now. And so that's actually where I see, see a lot of this fracturing. So someone like Bongino had his eyes open by looking, as you say, at these files and having luckily someone internally say, you know, we can't release these people's names for this reason. He, he saw the light. But there are a lot of people who have no interest in doing that, and most of them are outside and some of them are people like Tucker Carlson with a massive audience. So that that tension is going to be. I think that's what J.D. vance is trying to split the difference on right now as Vice president, president. And he will have to negotiate that whole challenge if he runs for the presidency. But Trump doesn't really deal with them. He assumes they'll fall into line. But, you know, we're Only a year in, and a lot of them are not falling into line on some of these issues. The Epstein files being the most notable.

Seth Mandel (54:11)

And also there's the corollary to this, is that sometimes you get in the government and you see the things that, you know, there are these things that are not real, right? Comet, Pizza, ping pong, whatever is not running a child sex trafficking ring in its basement. You know, there are things that you see that are not real, but there's also the flip side, which is that you see the things that are real. Right. I always think about, you know, when Michael Mukasey, who was George Bush's Attorney general, George W. Bush's Attorney general, when he, when he got in, he wrote something, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal where he said he was emotionally overwhelmed when he began his work as Attorney General, because he was not. Even though he, you know, he was a judge and he was involved in all this. He was, he really could not understand the magnitude of daily threats against the United States. That's what he said. That, you know, contrary to the idea that that threat inflation was the real post 911 problem, it was almost exactly the reverse, that you could not imagine the number of threats that the security apparatus was saving people from daily. And the card questions they had to ask and have answered with by the, by the court every single day in order to, you know, to sort of, to keep this going. And so when you get in on the inside, you see that too. You also see that this, that's such a, that part of the right is wrong about that too.

Abe Greenwald (55:46)

That's such a good point because it also, by contrast, makes the nonsense theories seem so such a dangerous distraction when you get in there and see the. So if you, so if you go into the FBI and you see the real threats and you go, oh my God, you know, it's probably why cash potential looks like he's petrified 24 hours a day.

John Podhoretz (56:12)

Look, I remember this from, you know, people that I knew in the W. Bush administration, close friends of mine who worked in the White House after 9 11, Scooter Libby being one of them and others, and you know, Cheney's famous formulation of the 1% doctrine, which is the if there is a 1% threat that someone's going to take a suitcase nuclear bomb and blow up Times Square, you have to treat that as though it's 100% threat. Because if it happens, the world ends. And if it, and you know, you can, you can say, okay, well, there isn't that much likelihood of it happening. But you can't act as though it's not going to happen. You kind of have to act as though it, it does. And when you think about it and you say it's 1%, then you say, well, it's threat, threat inflation, as Seth would say. But what if you're the one inside? And the daily, the daily brief, the daily intelligence brief, both from outside and from inside tells you there's a cell here, there's a cell of 12 people in this country. And there's a, we have, we have chatter, we're hearing increased use of the word, you know, the suitcase nuclear bomb in Farsi or whatever. And you have this mosaic of possibilities and you hear it. And the most interesting aspect of it is you can't let out the pressure the way people ordinarily do when things in their lives, they experience that kind of pressure, which is you can't go home and tell your wife. You can't sort of like sit at lunch with your friends and say, I'm really worried about X or that you can't, you can't talk about it, you can't, you're not. It's illegal to have conversations about what it is that you're hearing except with five other people who are at your threat level. And so you exist with this burden on your like. Like Michael said, Mukasey, you know, you exist with this thousand pound boulder on your back at all times. And it is one of the reasons that it takes a certain type of person to do this kind of thing over a great period of time. I once asked a friend of mine who was a surgeon to explain to me Ben Carson. So Ben Carson, famously a, you know, brain surgeon and you know, frankly to me doesn't seem very smart, right? I just say, like, watched him, I read it, you know, even spoken to, didn't seem very smart to me. And I said, explain Ben Carson to me because I don't understand how it is that he can be a brilliant brain surgeon when he doesn't seem that smart. And my friend said, you have to understand surgeons. So you're under stress and your blood pressure spikes and your heart starts to beat really fast and you're like. And your hands start to tremble, right? And if you're a brain surgeon and your hands start to tremble, that person who is under your knife is going to be dead. So the key thing about somebody who does a 20 hour surgery involving the brain is that he has an emotional valence that is able to cope with these things by keeping himself Incredibly still and contained emotionally for a very long period of time. And that. That more than anything else, the rest is mechanical. It's all in the spirit. It's all in the neshama almost. And so this is true of government work as well, or the most serious kind of government work. You have to be able to bear the burdens of leadership. You have to be able to bear the burden.

Christine Rosen (60:01)

But it's not. It's funny, you said boulder. You like he had a big boulder on his back, which of course made me think of Sisyphus. It's actually more Sisyphean, because it's not that the boulder's on his back. It's that there are a few people just trying to push that thing a little further up every day, knowing that every new day, they have to continue that challenge or else it'll roll all the way down beneath it.

John Podhoretz (60:21)

Exactly right. So, anyway, I just think that if we bring. Bring all this stuff together that we've been talking about from Jenny McCarthy to Sisyphus, the, the story of the second first Trump administration, or the first second Trump administration is this tension between how seriously Trump is willing to take threats that he seemed cavalier about in the first term, meaning, I would say, Iran and Venezuela, or the question of the projection of American power about which he spoke so irresponsibly and so foolishly as he tried to get into power in the first place. And then the remaining parts of his coalition, his people and his own brain, as revealed by this Horrible account of January 6th released yesterday in which claims that we know to be untrue, that it's outrageous that the administration should be promulgating like that Ashley Babbitt was murdered or that nobody did anything wrong inside the Capitol building or whatever. That's horrible. It's horrible that he did that. It's horrible that that line is being bandied about. And that's the old Trump and then there's the new Trump. And then there's this weird amalgam of the old Trump and new Trump in the fact that the person who is now the most reliable, his most reliable aide, and the person that he seems to rely on most severely in something you would not have expected, is the guy who was his nastiest and most formidable competition in 2016, Marco Rubio, is now the guy who he is listening to and seems to be listening to more than he's listening to his own vice president. So you have these strains. And the new media part of the challenge for Bari Weiss and everybody in the new media is the ability to understand these things together all at once, which the old media is unwilling and unable to do because they have their idea about Trump and it's fixed and it's he's evil and it's 1934 and it's the Nuremberg rally and everything is terrible. And Trump is a very mixed figure and a very complicated figure. And, you know, the media actually prefer the caricature to the complication. Christine, you have a recommendation?

Christine Rosen (62:59)

I do. I have some interesting fiction recommendations coming down the pipeline for our wonderful listeners who actually appreciate my weird fiction recommendations. Shout out to all of you. I love your emails, but I actually had a book I finished right before the break that I love. It's nonfiction, and I recommend it in another roundup. But I realized I didn't share it with our listeners, who are my first priority. So this is a book. Book. It's called Strangers and Intimates the Rise and Fall of Private Life by a historian named Tiffany Jenkins. And it's, it's described as a cultural history, but I would call it a cultural and intellectual history. She starts in Athens, and it comes pretty much up into the present, but that she does two things really, really well. She describes how concepts of privacy and public and private developed over time, which are fascinating. I mean, she has this whole chapter about letter writing and how in the UK in particular, correspondence came to be seen as private, the same way that a conversation you'd have with someone in private was protected from government interference and surveillance. But she, she has these wonderful cultural byways. She does. She relies heavily on literature and writers who thought deeply about these, the kinds you wouldn't normally find in a regular political history. They pop up here and there. But lots of figures you'll, you'll recognize, you know, mainly in the Anglosphere. She's a, she's a British writer, but it's just a wonderful history that allows us to think, I think, in deeper and more complicated ways about our own conceptions of what is public and what is private. And she makes a very powerful and persuasive argument that we now have to defend a Private worlds, however we define them, whether that's our, you know, at home, whether that's the way we communicate with each other, whether that's what we expose about ourselves online unwittingly and need to think more deeply about, obviously that part of it. As my tech skeptic, tech skeptic in me loved her discussion of that at the end, but it's really just this. It also gave me a lot of food for thought about how we got to where we are and some optimism about how in each era, people find ways to carve out those private worlds. And I completely agree with her argument that human beings need those spaces. We need those places where we can be our deeply weird selves with other people. We trust to accept that weird self and that the compulsion to perform that more and more in the. In the modern world is corrosive in some ways to our sense of self. So it's just. It's a wonderful book. Strangers and Intimates by Tiffany Jenkins.

John Podhoretz (65:26)

Fantastic. Okay, well, we'll be back tomorrow. For Seth, Christine, Eliana and Abe, I'm John Pod Horitz. Keep the candle burning.