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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary hope for the.
- [02:23]
B
Expect a worse Some preacher pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope for the best expect the worst.
- [02:38]
A
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, September 5, 2025. I am John Pothoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor A. Greenwald High. Abe. Hi John. Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
- [02:55]
B
Hi John.
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A
And social commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
- [02:59]
C
Hi John.
- [03:01]
A
So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Went before the Senate committee on whatever the Senate committee that he was in front of was that does oversight.
- [03:13]
B
The committee on cranks.
- [03:15]
A
I wish I have one thing to say about this hearing which was very contentious, which he started yelling at Elizabeth Warren who started yelling at him and all of that. RFK said a couple of interesting things. One of them was when he was in this contretemps with Elizabeth Warren that she had taken $850,000 from Big Pharma and therefore could not be trusted. Elizabeth Warren is kind of a rep of the modern bar. She was a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard and presumably has the views of a contemporary progressive person in the legal profession. Which is to say that I am sure that she was a deep and profound supporter of class action suits, attorneys generals say, banding together to sue capitalists industries for their evil that they do. And I just think it's amusing that he should turn to her and act like she is the senator from, you know, New Jersey protecting Pfizer and firms like that, when in fact she is a radical left wing senator from Massachusetts who likely agrees with him, that big pharmacist. That's point number one. And point number two is I assume that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has made his living in fact off the Kennedy Family Trust, the size of which we do not know. But the fact that it supports 852,000 people named Kennedy who wander around the country flying on private planes, mouthing off about poverty would lead me to believe that whoever it is who invests money in the Kennedy Family Trust has at many points in the course of its existence purchased stock in pharmaceutical companies. Which means that RFK has made his. Has paid his bills through the investment in pharmaceutical companies, way more than any senator has ever taken money from Big Pharma. Note a point I cannot prove. But it stands to reason that these private hedge funds, which is what these giant family trusts are, are investing for the purpose of garnering large proceeds. And at least over the last 30 or 40 years, Big Pharma has been a huge stock gainer and good place to stash your money or do stock plays in and all of that. So to add, to add to his list of sins, his own rank hypocrisy, I think is worth. Is worth noting.
- [06:13]
C
No, it is. And it's. I mean, I guess we should never underestimate a Kennedy's ability to indulge in ignorant belligerence on the public stage. That's sort of their, their thing and he was doing that yesterday. What was striking about that hearing though is that he was being pressed by the Republicans who had only recently approved his nomination. And that's a good thing that's exactly what those senators should be doing. And I and it reveals once again this challenge with, with the MAGA universe and in the MAHA universe which is slightly different constituency which he represents. And that's that when someone is put in a position of power and demonstrates just incompetence, the charge of oh, you're an ideological opponent of our important movement is always trotted out. And I think that attempt to do that with RFK is starting to break down. It still works with Trump. When Trump does something stupid, you know, and you point it out, you're going to get, you know, absolutely annihilated by his, by his ideological soldiers. But in this case, he's not running this huge department very well and the cracks are starting to show someone who they brought on, who he effusively praised, fired. She has a great op ed in the Wall Street Journal today sort of outlining some of mistruths and just blatant lies that he made in his statements to Congress. Things he claimed she did and said, which she did not. What it comes down to though is vaccines and the, and trying to stack the deck against what we already know scientifically about particularly childhood vaccination. He has a hobby horse. He's a little, he's, Seth is absolutely right to use the word crank. That is what he has always been and he has the, he can do that because he does have generational wealth he can rest on in order to pursue his, his mission. But children need vaccinations. And this is, this is just simple fact. And if we're looking at what Florida is doing in Massachusetts, it's doing. Massachusetts is now saying, no, we're going to still require these vaccines as a response to what RFK saying. Florida is saying we're going to let parents choose. These are the kinds of experiments that we shouldn't be making when we know that, you know, we, we've had the largest measles outbreak. Two children died from this in just the past few months. So I am very concerned about the idea that we turning this into an ideological battle about MAGA or maha because it's not, it's about science, it's about vaccinations, about protecting children who will, we will have more deaths if this kind of battle plays out and if he does what he is claiming he will do with childhood vaccination regulations.
- [08:43]
D
So I thought the, the hearings where it was like this impenetrable cacophony, like I couldn't even, you know, it was I, at a certain point I really, it was it was like, it was hard to sort of get through because very little light on a lot of serious matters and you're just getting all noise, no signal to Christine's point. My fear is that the anti vax cult is just so big. I mean, I think what we're hearing is a piece of it. And I think, like, you know, the iceberg is deeper and it's out there. The fact that we're hearing from so many people who are now willing to say it suggests to me there are so many more who kind of who think it, and they're not even out there yet.
- [09:42]
B
And there's also the, you know, that raises the question of the long tail of the Kennedy Secretariat of Health and Human Services, which is when, you know, when Trump came up, we had this debate over how much of what was happening was Trump led and how much of what was happening was there go my people, I better get out in front of them and lead them sort of stuff. And I think we have to ask the same question with Robert Kennedy, which is, you know, he didn't invent the anti vax stuff, although he's played a very important role in the movement. And we have to, you know, we have to ask whether what we're seeing now is a sort of lightning rod, right, where he attracts all the light and the heat, because he's willing to stand out there and say things that a lot of people agree with. And if so, that's much more troublesome than RFK coming in and making trouble about vaccines. Right? And so, you know, if he's going to embolden an anti vax movement that is still going strong, right? We have, remember, before rfk, we didn't hear as much from them between, like, the Jenny McCarthy days. And I mean, I think she's since recanted and changed her mind on that. But, you know, those days when you had celebrities, right, There was a. There was a pause in the celebrity anti vaxxer. And then, you know, and now we have rfk. And I wonder if that was a, you know, we sort of got lulled into a false sense of security because we didn't hear them and we didn't see them on TV and we didn't see famous people pushing it. And we even saw some, you know, retract their claims or change their mind. We felt like it was receding. And I worry that maybe it wasn't actually receding at all. It was just like a dormant volcano just waiting to erupt the next time. But it had not lost any of its size or power.
- [11:47]
C
And the other part of that is that what that means is that a lot of the there are genuine problems with places like the nih, cdc, fda, all of which he oversees as the secretary of hhs. Those institutions all need serious reform. That's the truth. And so what he's doing, though, is invoking that reality, that that need in order to pursue his cranky vision of, you know, autism is caused by vaccines. And to cite a study which he did again, that has been not only debunked but had to be retracted because it was found to be be completely spurious. So I think that under online, that community was totally flourishing and growing. And then obviously during COVID received a lot of new recruits as a, as a points out. And we don't really know the size of it. But to give the imprimatur to that, to those ideas by putting someone like him in charge, I think was a huge I mean, many of us, we said it was a huge mistake. How it might be undone will be interesting to see because Trump doesn't like to say he made a mistake by putting someone in a position of power. And RFK remains loyal in his rhetoric to Trump.
- [12:52]
A
So.
- [12:53]
B
Well, there was and it'll discredit the, the reform movement. Right. When we talk about these agencies, these agencies need fixing. RFK is going to discredit anybody who stands up in the future in the next 10 years and says, boy, we really need to fix things at the cdc.
- [13:12]
A
I the the world in which vaccination is viewed as controversial is a world that has been transformed by vaccination so thoroughly, so revolutionarily that people are now worried about the vaccine causing disease or creating diseases because they we have lived now, I would say pretty much since 1956 when Jonas Salk introduced the polio vaccine. We have been living in a world in which people are not worried about particularly their children getting sick from the diseases that have killed children since man emerged from the primordial ooze. They have been removed from the list of worries. Polio, measles, mumps, diseases that wouldn't even wouldn't kill you but would sterilize you, would weaken your let would make your life living hell. Smallpox and it is a luxury good to start worrying about vaccines because it means that you don't know that for 5 million years, 20 to 25% of children didn't live past their 5th or 7th or 9th birthdays because of diseases that have been eliminated by vaccination. And we are living in a world in Which I'm not even talking about gratitude. People don't need to be grateful. But in which this is why it's history. This is why there is no such thing as progress. In some funny way. Like we have these, this huge amount of progress and the human brain simply banks it and then reverts to a norm reaches homeostasis. According to which it's like, you're not putting that needle in my kid's arm. It's like we're putting the needle in that kid, in your kid's arm to not only save his life, but to eradicate this contagion from the planet earth so that 4 billion other children won't die or get sick from it.
- [15:55]
C
It's usually their chubby little thigh when they're little. But your point is, this is really important point because it's why we over time made these things compulsory for kids at the school age level. You have to look all of. If you have kids, you've had those endless forms, you fill out the school form, you know, all the different forms for camp, for school, for everything. And you always have to prove vaccination. And pushing back against that, parents say, well, we should have more choice, we should have more autonomy over our child's health. But the reason it was made compulsory is that there are plenty of parents who wouldn't actually, either through ignorance or just because they forget, would not get their kids vaccinated on the schedule that we know to be safe from many, many decades of experience. And you know, there are still these religious groups that opt out of vaccination because they don't send their kids to public or private schooling. But that compulsory nature is an interesting thing. And I think a lot of, a lot of RFK Maha base is, is resisting that in all forms, not just in vaccination. But you can't put that in my food because that's cancerous. You can't do this. You can have fluoride in the water. There's this almost oppositional defiant disorder at a cultural level with some of these things that is, I think indicative of a lot of our challenges culturally.
- [17:03]
A
Business moment, which is also very American. Yes, it is weird that there are compulsory orders, right? And they're only compulsory because of blackmail. I'm not saying this negative, I mean like the following, which is, you are perfectly permitted to own a car. You can own a car. Congratulations, go buy a car. You don't get insurance. You can't drive your car in Illinois. I'm sorry, you can't drive a car in Illinois without insurance. So you don't get to have a car. So you better buy insurance so you can get your car. Okay, so you're. There's no mandate to have car insurance, but there is similarly. It's like you can not get your kid vaccinated. But then your kid can't come to our school. And then we can send, then we can send the authorities after you for failing to provide your child with the proper education. That's less and less a problem. That was a problem like 60 years ago when homeschooling. When there were actual like laws against homeschooling and stuff in certain places. But Americans do not like being told what to do. And this is a world in which we seeded. You can't know what's good or bad for your child in this realm. You have to go to medical school or be an epidemiologist. Trust us, we're gonna. This is how it's done. And we're looking to create something called herd immunity. And it's a complicated concept, the response to that which is, look, you get your kid vaccinated, that's what you want. Your kid will therefore be immune from all of these diseases. Right. Leave my kid alone. I'm willing to risk whatever because I'm worried about, I'm just saying I, I'm worried about the consequences of putting this stuff in my kids bodies.
- [19:04]
C
Yeah, but then it kills other kids when enough. Right.
- [19:06]
A
When they kill other kids who also.
- [19:08]
C
Don'T kill other children who are not eligible yet for the vaccination.
- [19:11]
A
So suddenly we have another two tiered society issue in which you are going to have people who vaccinate their children and people who don't vaccinate their children. And by definition the people who don't vaccinate their children, their children are going to die at a higher rate than the people who don't get their children vaccinated.
- [19:30]
C
But no, it's not a matter of individual ch. This in this sense, if you are not vaccinating your kids and you're exposing and you're. The herd immunity disappears, then the unvaccinated are actually actively killing those who are even those who, you know might. Because there is a certain age range there with measles in particular where a child will die or is very likely to become seriously ill because. And they are not yet old enough to get the vaccine. So if you're a parent with a young child, you go to a public space and enough of those crazy people don't have vaccinated kids. Your Kid could die. So it's much more like an aggressive form of secondhand smoking and its impact on people who aren't making that choice for themselves, but are exposed to the toxic reality of other people's choices.
- [20:13]
A
Let's talk about myths. Okay? You know how cold weather can give you a cold. That's a myth. How we only use 10% of our brains? That's a myth. You know what else is a myth? Thread count. I fell for it. I've fallen for it several times in my life. And it's, you know from the sheets you buy when they have high thread counts that it really can be a total fraud because it's simply a measure of fabric density and isn't a good indicator of quality. If you want great sheets, you need to look at thread quality, not count. Bolin Branch uses the highest quality organic cotton threads for long lasting sheets that get softer over time. That's my experience with them. That's my wife's experience with them. That's Abe's experience with them. We are Bolan Branch people and we are because they get softer with every wash. It is a wonderful thing. Bolin Branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave. Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become softer. As I said with every wash comes with a 30 night worry free guarantee. So feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make. With Boland branch. Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bolandbranch.com commentary that's B O L L A N D B R- A N C H.com commentary to say 15% and unlock free shipping exclusions apply. Let's talk about myths. Okay? You know how cold weather can give you a cold. That's a myth. How we only use 10% of our brains. That's a myth. You know what else is a myth? Thread count. I fell for it. I've fallen for it several times in my life. And it's, you know from the sheets you buy when they have high thread counts that it really can be a total fraud because it's simply a measure of fabric density and isn't a good indicator of quality. If you want great sheets, you need to look at thread quality, not count. Bolin Branch uses the highest quality organic cotton threads for long lasting sheets that get softer over time. That's my experience with them. That's my wife's experience with them. That's Abe's experience with them. We are Bolan Branch people, and we are, because they get softer with every wash. It is a wonderful thing. Bolen Branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave. Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become softer. As I said with every wash. Comes with a 30 night worry free guarantee. So feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make. With Boland branch, get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bolandbranch.com commentary that's B O L L A N-B-R-A N C-H.com commentary to save 15% and unlock free shipping, exclusions apply. But you know, the people, people, we're all passionate supporters of vaccination, so I'm not talking about that. But you know, there was this moment that there was when we say when Seth said we thought things were dormant. Well, they never were entirely dormant. There was a huge issue on the right in 2010, 2011, and it had a big political effect in the state of Texas in particular, which was that a vaccine was developed for human papilloma. Papilloma, papilloma. The HPV virus. Okay, yeah.
- [23:49]
C
Gardasil. Gardasil, yeah.
- [23:52]
A
And states mandated it. And then people said, well, what is this for? Exen. What is this for again? Giving it to my like 10 year old. What's it for again? And it was to prevent herpes and sexually transmitted herpes.
- [24:16]
C
So then you're like, wait, one other. Actually the long term purpose is to prevent cervical cancer which many people contract as a result of that virus and which would. And it has significantly reduced that.
- [24:27]
A
Okay. So as I say, I'm like pulling this up from the mystic chords of memory. And my cord, the mystic chords of memory just went off key because I forgot about that part. But the point is that people took that as a culture war moment in which the idea was, look, all of our kids are going to be, you know, all your daughters are all going to be sexually active. So they better get this. It's like a version of getting that, that birth control device implanted in your arm for five years, right? It was like, look, your kid is gonna be 13, 14. They're gonna have sex. Let's make sure they don't get HPV using this vaccine. And then parents, conservative, Christian conservative, don't. Do not send the message that it's okay for my teenage daughters to go have sex. That is a very important.
- [25:24]
C
But it was, it was also for boys. Again, like it was actually marketed for all kids because boys can transmit the virus to women who can then are higher risk of cervical cancer. So young men were. I mean, boys were supposed to get the two dose as well.
- [25:38]
A
Okay, but my point is that this was read. This is why I say I don't think there ever was a break. This was read as you are trying to make the world safe for teenage promiscuity. It's like handing out condoms. I don't want you to hand out condoms to my kids. I don't want you to be telling my kids, okay, you're getting the shot now it's safe for you to have sex. I am working morally to try to teach my children to not do stuff like this because it's against my core beliefs or what I think would be good for them. And the state is now actively working against my moral frame with this, with this vaccine. Similarly, and maybe not that similarly, we've had this reminder of the Monkeypox moment in 22:23 or 21:22 when there was an outbreak of monkeypox and there was suddenly this idea that people should go get the monkeypox vaccine. Except that monkeypox was. Seemed to be exclusively breaking out in the world of promiscuous gay men who are having unprotected sex, primarily in Provincetown, Massachusetts. And our vaccine schedule guy, doctor, you know, Ulysses Nephritis or whatever the hell his Greek with the, with the, with the tattoos. Sorry. Look, I once referred to Doug Burgum and Shloime Goldstein. So I. It's okay. I can make fun of Greek names too. Said he didn't want to do that because he didn't want to interrupt or interfere with anybody's joy. But then it was also like, why are you telling me to get the monkeypox vaccine? I don't engage in gay sex and unprotected gay sex in clubs. Like that's, that's a misuse. That's the. Everybody should get everything because we tell them to. And that's part of the institutional breakdown that we're talking about that is in need of reform. If the reform is that Florida is going to announce that nobody. That there are no more vaccine mandates, that's bad reform. If you're going to say, if there's a breakout in a specific individual community that requires attention, we are going to be honest and say this individual community requires attention and, and not say everybody. It's like the COVID vaccine. Ultimately, kids didn't need to take the COVID vaccine because we had two years of evidence. We had 18 months worth of evidence that kids weren't getting Covid, or if they were getting Covid, it had no effect on them. And therefore mandating that 75 million people get these two shots, most cases, was an overreach by the federal government. And that needs reform.
- [28:46]
C
Well, this, this is the, this is the part where the reform is going to be worse than the cure, because the reform is an effort to, to, to make sure that we don't put into positions of power public health officials who, who fight culture wars through public health agencies. I think the monkeypox thing was a kind of extreme overreaction to what happened when HIV first came on the scene and aids. So there was, it was, again, it was very clearly concentrated in certain populations of, you know, intravenous drug users and gay men. And so the stigma was vast and the fear was great because there was no known cure and it was deadly and all these other things. And so I think their public health, the mindset of people in public health at that time was the most important thing is really to make sure the whole world doesn't stigmatize the people, people who are suffering from this. So they, the campaign became everyone's at risk. You know, anyone could get this when in fact that statistically wasn't true, the probabilities were incorrect and what they were projecting. Although I do think the effort to destigmatize people who were suffering was fine. The problem is that now we have a lot of identity politics embedded in some of these public health institutions, including the cdc. And so anytime some small group has a, has a higher likelihood of contracting something, they're like, well, let's make sure nobody judges their behavior. Well, actually, public health is about judging people's behavior and they're happy to judge the behavior of anti vaxxers and they should. But that also means we need to, we need to be specific about risk and probability in these cases and not.
- [30:15]
B
Just judging behavior, but like, that's science. You know, different people are affected differently by different things. We had, I remember we had this discussion on the podcast, you know, maybe last year or something, when there was a controversy over men and women. We were talking about the, you know, the trans debate in medicine and there was this question of, you know, prescribing, you know, testing. Basically there were not enough clinical trials being done on women throughout, you know, modern medical history. That, that, that's a, a standard problem that, you know, was happening because of pregnancy and all sorts of other things that just, you know, made it harder to Whatever. And then there was this emergence of this idea that it didn't matter because gender is social construct. So it doesn't really matter if you were born a man or a woman. You know, how you react to this medication is going to be the same, except it's not. Science doesn't care. Right. So we had. So we're back again with this other thing, which is you should be able to say, well, if you're young, maybe think maybe you don't need it. Maybe you should have some personal choice. Maybe there shouldn't be, you know, a requirement in lower elementary school. But I don't know, maybe let's talk about high school or college or what. Especially college, because they're going back to. To, you know, whatever this. I don't know. But we could have had a conversation about how it's affecting each demographic and what that means for what people need to do to prepare. And we can't have those conversations. And not just, not, just, you know, gender, but these age groups and all that other stuff. And the other thing with COVID was that, you know, one lesson I think people really need to learn is don't lie. I know that seems really simple, but, like, don't say that the COVID vaccine will stop you from getting Covid or spreading Covid. Say what? You know, right? Because then people got Covid anyway and spread Covid anyway and said, boy, I wonder what else they're lying about. That's. That's the trick with all these things, which is any community could get it. Everybody's at risk. You know, don't. Every. What you say in messaging about the vaccines is very important because people will be able to make hay out of one lie and say. And see so much doubt and say, well, who knows? How do you know that's true? Fauci told you that you couldn't get the virus, and then you got the virus. What else isn't Foushee, you know, and all this other. And I'm using. I mean, Fauci obviously crossed certain lines and stuff like that, but no, you can. I'm critiquing. The noble lie is the. Is the problem. And I don't think that we're getting much better with that as we move away from COVID and deal with so monkeypox or whatever as it comes up.
- [33:25]
D
What's so ironic about. About that is that the overselling of the vaccine was largely a response to, like, skeptical. To Kamala Harris saying, I'm not going to.
- [33:40]
A
I'm not going to take.
- [33:43]
D
I'M not taking a vaccine that, you know, Donald Trump cooked up in the basement or whatever, you know, whatever they thought. So they had to, you know, like. So they had to, like, make this case, this airtight, oversold case to defend it.
- [33:58]
A
I mean, look, the perfect storm that Covid represented in terms of where the culture war was, where Trump was, the fact that it was an election year when all of this happened, and the general skepticism that Republicans have about Democrats, Democrats have about Republicans, and that everybody in this country now has about health authorities except. Or authorities in general, except the elites who constitute the authorities, who have control. Had control, who have control of certain. A lot of the microphone, you know, in the United States. So they have no trouble listening and believing Fauci and lionizing him and creating bobblehead dolls of him the way they did the same with. With Ruth Bader Ginsburg taking these figures that nobody in America knows and like, turning them into sort of cultural icons that you wear T shirts about and write songs about and do dance celebrations of. At a time when you do that, you start making people say, who is this guy Fauci? Wait a minute. He makes more money in the federal government than anybody else. He's been there for 40 years. He now, you know, he's like, on the COVID of. He's on the COVID of fashion magazines. Something smells I don't like. I, you know, I'm not taking my. I'm not taking my truth from these people. And you're making it worse and worse and worse. And the elite doesn't know how their advocacy of these sorts of people and views and affect make things worse. You know, there was a point at which, in the early 20th, 20th century, when rich people came under attack in the United States during the, you know, sort of the aftermath of the Gilded Age, the recession of 1893, and the rise of, you know, the Progressive era, when rich people who are building, you know, elaborate mansions and wandering around and showing off, you know, peacockery like their lives suddenly said, oh, my God, we better go quiet. Like, they build houses. They built these giant head. No one could see their house anymore. They moved out of the city. They went to Westchester County. They built these massive compounds no one could see. They hired press agents.
- [36:27]
C
They called them cottages, by the way. They built the huge houses that they then called cottages, right?
- [36:31]
A
And then, you know, and then they hired press agents so that John D. Rockford would say, I only give my kid one dime a week so he'll learn real value. And they wore old clothing so they didn't look too fancy and all of that. I'm only bringing this up to say that there are moments at which elites understand that their very existence and where they are and who they are constitute a threat to themselves. And that they need to back off and quiet down and go quiet, go low. Right? And this was the opposite of what happened from 2020 to 2024 during the COVID Rush and the Biden administration, where they just flaunted themselves and their authority.
- [37:15]
C
But the difference, the difference is that our elite today, although very wealthy in many cases, they believe and Abel, this is a point for Abe and he's made it many times. They believe they've earned the right to do that because they're meritocrats. They went to the right schools. They know the things that the hoi polloi will never understand, understand. And so they actually will never have that kind of humility or sense of responsibility or even the kind of impulse to just protect themselves. In that way, they actually flaunt their knowledge and their superiority in a way that I think when it's embedded in institutions like the CDC or in elite, you know, university campuses becomes self reinforcing because they rely on the same experts. They've all gone to the same school schools. And that sense of entitlement makes it impossible for them to acknowledge the impact on people who aren't from their class.
- [38:10]
A
We should move on. As we, as we were recording this, we, we got news of a terrible jobs report just came out. 23,000 jobs created in August. Revisions downward for June and July indicating two things, one of which was that Trump's announcement that, you know, when he was, when he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the grounds that the numbers, he didn't trust the numbers, that was a slander and an injustice because the, you know, the revisions are showing that those numbers were correct. And yet he's going to get what he wants, which is, I assume, numbers this bad and some other things are going to mean that the Fed is going to do a pretty substantial rate cut, you know, 25 or 50 basis points. 25 at a minimum. 50 or it may be even larger at a maximum. And I don't know. You know, it's like part of this culture war stuff. Trump, it's almost like the Fed doesn't want to give Trump what he wants. And now it's going to give Trump what he wants. And the Fed may inadvertently save Trump from his own disaster, meaning the tariffs and various other things by actually loosening so that we don't fall into a, you know, a recession or something. But it's worth noting that the. I don't like what that guy is saying, so get him out of my face thing that Trump seems to like to do, or I like Bobby perfectly well because, you know, he says I should get a Nobel Prize, even though he thinks that I should get it for the vaccine that I think killed is killing people. You know, as long as he says he should get the Nobel Prize, it's all fine, apparently. So Trump's, you know, core. Core weakness. Quick question, and then we got to talk about Israel. Trump is renaming the Pentagon today. The Department of Defense will be renamed.
- [40:22]
C
Well, he is issuing an executive order saying it should be called the Department of War, but that pretty. Most people believe this would actually. The renaming would actually require an act of Congress. So you can call it the Department of War as a secondary title. And, I mean, you can probably also spend tens of millions of dollars getting new letterheads, whatever. And obviously. But this is. This is the kind of thing that drives me absolutely nuts about the Trump administration. It's so performative and stupid and unnecessary. Like, if you want to. If you want to project strength and project strength through your policymaking, through the way that the person you appoint at the top of the Department of Defense runs the Pentagon. No, no, we'll just do our little signing. He loves to do his executive orders. And, yes, I do sound contemptuous because it's going to be a huge waste of money and it requires congressional approval, which he will not seek, and it's just silly. There.
- [41:10]
D
I have a different.
- [41:11]
B
There's a. There's a. Yeah, go ahead.
- [41:13]
D
First of all, I like it.
- [41:17]
C
No, I mean, I get, I get why he's doing it, but just, like, do it the right way.
- [41:21]
D
I also think there's. I think it's. It's a.
- [41:24]
A
Restoring the logo.
- [41:25]
D
It's a very.
- [41:26]
A
They redrew the logo in 1949. And. And it's like, crack.
- [41:30]
B
Department of War is going to be an old guy in a. Yeah, it's.
- [41:34]
A
Sitting in a rock chair. Yeah. Okay, Sorry, go ahead.
- [41:37]
D
It's a very revealing step. It gives you a window into Trump's thinking, which is that he's never on the defensive, or he tries his damnedest never to be on the defensive. He is always advancing. He's pushing things so he. He doesn't. Why? Why Department of Defense? We're at war where we are.
- [42:06]
A
You know, we're.
- [42:07]
D
We're the ones moving forward. You know, let's put everyone else on the defensive. And I think he. And that's infectious. That is why, you know, people are drawn to that. That's, that's, to the extent that he has a vision that, that's, that's, that's the vision moving forward, not just asserting and not having to defend and all his enemies are on the defensive.
- [42:36]
C
Well, but it's like Sweeps week during the Apprentice. I mean, it's a distraction from the fact that what's going on and what has Russia done with Ukraine? Like, how did his ultimatum of two weeks play out? Nobody's talking about that today. They're talking about Department of War.
- [42:49]
A
I hate it.
- [42:50]
B
Can we call it Chesterton's name? Because, like, there's a reason that the reorganization of the American national security establishment in 1947 and on happened. There's a reason that things changed names and like, the Department of War and the Department of Defense are not actually interchangeable. The Department of War was not what the Department of Defense was called before it was renamed the Department of Defense Defense. It was. The Department of Defense was a reorganization to bring, you know, all the military stuff under one roof and to, you know, we, we had separate. We had a Navy Department and a Navy Secretary. We had also, you know, that was its own cabinet situation. It was just a, you know, we just had more of this stuff and there was just less organization. And we brought it under one roof. And so we called it a different name. But it's like there is a substantive problem here with just like, calling things with. But because it's not actually the same as, you know, whether we call, you know, that. That mountain, the indigenous name or Mount McKinley or whatever. You know, it's like that's the same exact mountain whether you call it McKinley or not. You know, that's the same Cracker Barrel, whether there's a guy in a hat or not and a sitting next to the barrel or not, but it's not actually the Department of Defense, you know, by any other name.
- [44:17]
A
I hate it. Because there's no reason to change things that don't need change. That is sort of like the. At the core root of the perspective that we try to bring to you every day. And yes, I mean, Seth makes. There's a broader point about why the Department of Defense became the Department of Defense, which is that our very understanding of what it meant to be at war had to undergo alterations after World War II, because while we achieved peace and victory In World War II, we were already, it was already clear that we were going to be engaged in this long term struggle with an adversary with whom we were not technically at war, but against whom we were going to have to defend ourselves. And that was the Soviet Union. And therefore, the mission of the United States was to defend the military mission of the United States was to defend the United States against international communism and the depredations of the Soviet Union and its desire to take over large swaths of the globe. And so the mission itself wasn't simply aggressive and offensive, it was, in fact, defensive. And our entire military posture in the Cold War relating to nuclear weaponry and all of that was defensive. It was, we're going to have this eventually, not when this first happened, but we're going to. We're going to develop these stratagems to ensure that this weaponry isn't used again. How can we do that? What does that mean? We need to defend ourselves against this unprecedented threat. That isn't something that we're going to be able to take on, you know, on a battlefield. It's going to be a much more complicated matter. And there's no reason to change the name of the Department of Defense. And yes, I do think Trump's ability to just sort of like, throw things up out of nowhere to kind of, you know, provide a shiny object for everybody to chase when, as Christine says, he is in. He is at a very key moment in the war in Europe in where he's gonna. Where his strategy has clearly failed, and he's gonna have to decide how the United States is gonna proceed in being a presence in the continuing battle between Russia and Ukraine. And he can't figure it out yet. Clearly, it's hard for him to know where to come down.
- [46:54]
D
I would argue that this does have a kind of resonance overseas. Or it could. You know, naming the Department of War says something. We do face an axis of enemies. Now, it's ironic that the Department of War is coming out of MAGA because they're the ones who's been screaming how the neocons want war, war, war, war.
- [47:22]
A
More, more.
- [47:23]
D
And then here you've got Trump saying he wants the Department of War, and by the way, being much more blustery in his rhetoric about Russia.
- [47:34]
A
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- [48:54]
C
Yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's $15 a month.
- [48:59]
A
Two, seriously, it's $15 a month.
- [49:01]
B
Month. Three, no big contracts. Four, I use it. Five, my mom uses it.
- [49:06]
C
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- [49:19]
A
See mint mobile.com Bluster is right back. Russia we are firing on drug dealer boats in open waters. We're doing a lot. We want to drug dealers.
- [49:33]
C
We don't have confirmation claimed drug dealers.
- [49:36]
A
They claim they were drug dealers. Where you know, he wants to militarize the border and sort of I guess overtake the Posse Comitatus act that forbids the use of the military for being involved in domestic law enforcement. So there it's. But that's not the war that you're talking about. You're. We're now talking about the question of whether or not he wants to call the Department of War and then domesticate the war or bring make, make our border like a military site or something like that. However, I want to talk about a war. Go now to another war I've been talking about for weeks. All my ads. Israelis are perched on the verge of, you know, a major offensive in Gaza City. But they're waiting. They're waiting see if the hostages will be returned en masse. Threatening Hamas killing Hamas's major spokesman, making it clear that Hamas snakes outside of the borders of Gaza are no longer safe from Israeli targeting, and to see if they can finally pull it over the finish line. Clearly, that doesn't seem to be ready to happen. Adam Borer, one of the, you know, negotiators, the hot. One of the negotiators under Steve Witkoff, yesterday or the day before yesterday, basically said it's time to put the screws to gutter because they're being unhelpful and there's no way that we can get them to get Hamas to do what we want. The Israelis reported this morning or late last night or whenever that they, they have secured 40% of Gaza City. So while we were talking, the Israeli offensive in Gaza City has been ongoing basically for, for 10 days. And, and it's not that they've been waiting. They're not waiting. They're moving and negotiating while they're moving, apparently, which is actually what you should, obviously what you should do is press your advantage, military advantage. They have, they have the spiritual, toxic, monstrous spiritual advantage of holding hostages. So you do what you can do to put pressure on them. And their answer seems to be that they are ordering all Gaza City residents, personnel and people who work in the government, whatever that means, to stay, to be. And you know what? I like that. This is good. You want to know why? So they have Israeli hostages. They have no right to. So let them take Gaza hostage. Fine. Hamas now is in control of Gaza now the population of Gaza City is a hostage to Hamas. Let's see how they like it. Those 80% of, of, of Gazans who say that they support Hamas and the war against Israel, now they're hostages. There's a. The Israeli military is saying, move, get, get out of here. We, we need to clear. We're basically going to turn this city into rubble. We are going to clear everything. We are going to blow up the tunnels underneath Gaza City and take out the last stronghold that we haven't touched. Go away so that we don't kill you. So if they don't go away, because Hamas doesn't let them go away, once again, we now have more evidence, not that anyone in the world cares, that it is Hamas who is morally responsible for every drop of blood that has been shed since October, October 7th.
- [53:00]
B
Well, they're betting that, they're betting that the world is going to continue doing what they've done so far, right. That, you know, Macron and Starmer and all those guys are going to say, you Know, this is, this is, this is still Israel's fault. This is still Israel's decision and all that. So they're just sort of betting on that. I mean, the, the, the question, though is I think that you have to just kind of disregard what people are saying about a deal. I think that is confusing a lot of people unnecessarily. Israel is not going to take anything completely off the table. Bibi Netanyahu is not going to say, under no circumstances would we accept a partial deal that does X, Y and Z. What he's doing is pressuring Hamas, as you say, and, you know, going in. But he's not. The mistake would be to pause for negotiations. Right? Because that's what, that's when the negotiations become part of the strategy against Israel. Hit pause while there's aid coming in and we'll talk. And whether or not you eventually get to a deal, there has been essentially some sort of cease fire. You can't have de facto cease fires anymore. You can't have ceasefires by default. So. But that doesn't mean that Bibi is not going to accept a different kind of deal. He's obviously going to listen very closely to what Trump, Trump and Steve Witkoff, who's speaking for Trump, have to say about, you know, what kind of deal would be acceptable and what kind of deal would not be acceptable. But I think a lot of people are sort of looking at this the wrong way, which is, today there's no Gaza City invasion, tomorrow there is a Gaza City invasion. And everything flips. But it's not actually a switch that is being flipped. Flipped. It takes preparation. And in order to get into the center of Gaza City, you have to take the perimeter. And there are neighborhoods that are town sized. Right? I mean, like, we, like, you know, I'm from New Jersey, where it's like everybody, at some point, everybody decided their own, they were their own borough. So you have like a town, a township surrounded by six boroughs, but they all used to be the same town. They, they have, you know, the operations are going to go neighborhood by neighborhood and area by area, and they have to start. So, you know, this is, this is, it's a, it's a gradual pressure thing. But it's also, I think people just have to get rid of these two ideas in their head. One, that there is.
- [55:32]
A
Can I make a point, though, either, Seth, hold on. I got to make a point because I've been wanting to make it for weeks and it drives me crazy. I've said it a little bit. You Know, the famine. There was a famine. They announced the famine in one part of Gaza. Right. They said there's a famine in this part of Gaza. It's a famine counts as a famine. We are the famine people. We say famine. Gaza is 141 square miles in size. The city of Chicago is 235 square miles in size. If I said to you there's a famine in Lakeview, there's a famine on the, you know, in Hyde park, there's a famine in West Rogers Park. Does that make any sense to you? Oklahoma City is even bigger, by the way.
- [56:32]
B
The monkeys have a famine in the.
- [56:34]
A
Neighborhood in a city. Gaza is essentially a city.
- [56:37]
B
It's at the Lincoln Park Free Zoo.
- [56:39]
A
Yes.
- [56:40]
B
Are starving.
- [56:41]
A
Right. This is my point, is that everything we know about Gaza is, you know, they put a. You. You sort of create this microscopic effect in which you're now making it sound as though the population of Gaza is trudging like Armenians during the Armenian genocide. Trudging on a death march or the baton death march or something. It's 4 miles or 8 miles or 12 miles. We're talking about them moving. Okay, like. So you're saying they're like townships. They're not like townships. They're not even neighborhoods. Gaza City is. Is the. Is the. It's like calling London the city of the. You know, the financial center of London is called the city that's Gaza City. It's the part where there are the bigger buildings. Gaza is a third, is two thirds the size of Chicago.
- [57:43]
B
Yes. The only. The only difference is that in order to. In order to clear these areas, you have to. Because you have to go house by house and underground.
- [57:50]
A
Oh, it's. Don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong. It's awful urban warfare time.
- [57:55]
B
It's. It's, you know, time intensive in a way that it wouldn't be if you were just sort of marching an army over.
- [58:01]
A
No, of course. Now, I wanted to. Here's the other thing about Israel and public opinion and Starmer, and they're going to announce they support a Palestinian state, which is really wonderful. Congratulations to all of them for supporting a Palestinian state that will never come into existence. Mazel tov to you. I hope you enjoy opening a ridiculous embassy and going to embassy parties where you feast with terrorist murderers who are the ambassadors whatever whatever. In 2003, in the 2004, in the middle of the second intifada, there was a moment at which the Israelis, you know, had enough and they went into Jenin and they did exactly what you're talking about. They went building to building, house, house, door to door to destroy the weapons factory that was creating the suicide jackets and vests that were being used to create the human bombs that were setting off the attacks in inside Israel. And at some point for good measure they struck Ramallah, which was the capital and Yasser Arafat stood in this rubble and in English said, is this acceptable to the international world? I call on the entire international world to stop this from happening or something like that. What is the international world going to do for Yasser Arafat? The strike has already happened. Jenin has already been destroyed. There's no deus ex machina that is going to come in. It's only Israel's self understanding of how far it can go. And one of the advantages, in some weird sense, not that Israelis aren't tortured by this because they would prefer to be loved and hated. One of the advantages of this universal condemnation, except for the United States, is they can do anything the hell they want now. Like if they did nothing, they're genociders. If they do anything, they're genociders. If they feed people, they're causing famine. If they don't feed people, they're causing famine. Nothing that they do or don't do has any effect on this body of opinion that has turned so explicitly hostile. And therefore they have a free hand. The only thing that they can't do is what they can't do in their own heads or morally or spiritually that they think goes too far and will cause the country itself to explode in paroxysms of self doubt and self abasement and self hatred because all these people stopped keeping their powder dry. They went all in on the idea that Israel is the new South Africa plus Nazi Germany plus I don't know what else. And therefore, since Israel is not any of those things and is a just moral player that has done everything it can in the course of this two year war to preserve lives in Gaza, to the extent that it is thrown, it has put Israeli lives at incredible risk in order to make sure that the Gazans don't starve and that they're not indiscriminately killed and all of that time to indiscriminately kill, time to starve. Like go ahead, they won't do it because that's not who they are. They are, they are, you know, they're society based and founded on biblical values and they're not going to, even though some biblical values, I wouldn't say that the Bible doesn't say, I believe in our last Torah parsha. We Jews, we read Moses saying, you know, God told me, go kill everybody if they're in your way when you're trying to settle the Holy Land. So I don't know. You know, it's an interesting moment to read that Torah parsha, but they're not.
- [61:57]
B
They might just surround Gaza City and blow the shofars.
- [62:01]
A
Yeah.
- [62:01]
B
Until.
- [62:02]
A
Anyway, I'm just saying that, that Israel has a. Also because of this incredible change in the American posture, which is that Trump thinks they should go in and destroy Gaza City. He wants them to. He want America wants Israel to be. To use its Department of War, its Department of Defense. So, Abe, we were texting yesterday about the sort of, just this kind of the blood libel, the fact that the international community, the media, all that are just engaging in blood libels. And then every other day something comes out. The kid who supposedly was murdered at the Gaza Health, at the Gaza Humanitarian foundation site is alive and well. Our contributor Kasia Akiva found him and did a story about him. By the way, mazel tov on the birth of her baby. She reported this two days after the birth of her baby, which is pretty stunning. So Kassia Akiva found the kid. Every day there's another story that disproves some charge, Right. The Genocide Scholars association, which is like, you know, joining the Lone Ranger fan club. As long as you send $5, you get a Dakota ring. Yeah. All of that.
- [63:32]
D
The debunking of 12 of the, of the photos at the Free Press, the debunking of 12 of those instances of, of starved children that were run at major news organizations, all of them suffering from other illnesses. It's, it's constant. And as you said earlier in the podcast, John, not, Not that anyone is listening. Not that, you know, not, not, not that disproving anything disproves anything.
- [64:13]
A
Right. It doesn't. I mean, nothing. There's no disproving it because it's a lie. It's a big lie. It's. They think it's a noble lie, to use Seth's term earlier. It's an ignoble lie. It's a monstrous lie. It's the big lie. It's Hitler's big lie. Right. Hitler said you tell the big lie to hide the smaller lies that you're actually playing with. It's an anti Semitic lie. It's a, it's a, it's a, you know, it's Jew hatred. And the blood libel is literally the Foundational act of anti Semitism in the West. Right. The blood libel was William of Norwich in the 12th century kidnapped and supposedly his blood used to make Passover matzos, leading to essentially the first pogroms in the West. You can read about it in the book Ivanhoe by Walter Scott and, you know, stall blood libels. They're killing children. They're killing children for their spiritual matzos and stuff.
- [65:17]
B
Well, and we should, you know, it's worth noting, by the way, as you say, that it makes me, you know, people should realize when you see the discussion online and on TV and when you watch the yelling shows, as I call them, you know, Piers Morgan and whatever, and you see all this debate, pay attention to how many times they say children, because there's this, this is, this is a, it's, it's become like a, like a vocal tick. You know, you can say, well, there are children in harm's way and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But when you listen to the focus on repeating children, they're killing children, dead children, you see that there is something else at play here. I mean, that's the giveaway is that most wars we talk about, we don't talk about, you know, oh, man, Russia, you know, Putin, he's just killing children. And what are we going to do about all these children? And the children. And by the way, it's really true in Russia's case because they are like kidnapping these Ukrainian children. And, you know, there's, there's a whole operation to. Aimed specifically at children. But the point is that we don't talk, pay attention to the way that we talk about it. When we talk about Israel in ways that we don't talk about other wars, people should notice we don't talk about war in general as, oh, the children. There are a bunch of child killers, but we talk about Israel as child. You know, the, the candidate trying in Maine, the candidate running against Susan Collins in Maine, has he, you know, he was at a rally and he said something like, you know, we should be using our money for, you know, our welfare, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And not for bombs that kill children. So bombs that kill adults, I guess is like, there's a point to people standing up there and saying, bombs that kill children, weapons that kill children. Yeah, children, children, children. And Western politicians say it, and it has, like, entered the lexicon. And that is, that is absolutely a. That is residue from, you know, these sort of medieval blood libels and the culture that sprang from it.
- [67:35]
A
I want to end on a slightly different point here. Move back domestically and ask Christine about this. So we got word that the president of Northwestern University, Michael Shill, is resigning under pressure from the Trump administration. His conduct was disgraceful. I'm not going to go into it. We also have the thing this week with Harvard, you know, with a judge, and we talked about the other day, the judge in Boston saying that Trump isn't allowed to take the money away from Harvard, all of that. But we talk about incentives and what's going on and how incentives make people do what they do in the world. And since we were negative about Trump and RFK and the Department of War and all this, I do want to say and ask you this. For the last 20 years, there has been no disincentive on the part of administrators or anybody in the world of higher education and the world of secondary education and the world of lower school education. No disincentive, not to cater to the leftist voices in the room or the leftist orthodoxy coming out of education departments or whatever, or on campus. None. All the incentives have been to cater to it because they'll make trouble for you. They'll make your life a misery if you oppose them. They'll occupy your office or they'll issue faculty Senate resolutions against you. And all of that. What Trump has done in the last nine months has, has created a counter incentive across the United States, which is, no, sorry, we have the levers of power in the federal government and we don't like what you're doing. So if you don't stop or if you don't do X, Y or Z, you know, we're going to withhold money from you and maybe you should quit or do what we want. And now there's an actual battle, an incentive battle on college campuses that literally did not exist. There was no reason for the president of Northwestern to say, stop doing that, except simple morality, you know, like being a good person and not thinking that catering to monstrous Jew hatred is a good thing. But, okay, let's assume that that person is a sniveling quizzling and, you know, like a cockroach and should go crawl, you know, into his place. He had no incentive not to go that way.
- [70:32]
C
Well, it's interesting, isn't it, that for several decades now, the job of a university president was sort of like running a preschool. So the most, the people who you were overseeing, who were most prone to temper tantrums would be placated, you know, like, go sit in the corner for you, but not ever actually dealt with because they didn't feel it was their job to make any sort of ultimate decision about that. And what we're seeing now is that it's becoming. Being university president used to be this really cushy job that people love to have is the pinnacle of a career as you clogged your way up as provost this and dean of that. And now it's one of the, I would assume, one of the least appealing jobs. I noted Seth mentioned Starmer, the former president. Colombia is now working for him. She went back to the UK and is working for him. So there is a way in which you see, you see some of them see eyeing the exit, and that is because of the accountability. And this, I think, is a distinction I would make between some of the criticisms I've had of how Trump has dealt with the federal workforce and all the Doge stuff that we talked about earlier in his term. And that's that this is actually a good precedent to set. It's not as if he's establishing a precedent where there's going to be a backlash when a liberal president comes in and wants to, you know, mess around with campus. The campus has been a stronghold of, of the left for, for a very, very long, to my entire lifetime and even longer than that. So in that sense, yeah, there's finally competition in for that kind of power on campus. Now, I still want him to go through the proper procedure and when it comes to federal funding, and hopefully he'll do that in some of these lawsuits, he's going to lose because he hasn't done it that way. But the culture has shifted in a very significant and important way. And I think that's all for the good. And we will see the, we'll see the downstream effects of that, not just in. On the elite campuses, but as the whole conversation around college education and AI and all these things is bubbling up, this could become a hinge moment for how we come to view higher education and its purpose for years to come.
- [72:33]
A
And you have a recommendation?
- [72:34]
C
Actually, it's a perfect segue for my recommendation. I'm sort of springing this on y', all, but I, but I got the book a couple days ago and I've been. I dove into it and really love it. And speaking of education, for those of you who didn't get a good humanities education or perhaps fear that that's an impossibility, there's a wonderful new book. Our contributor and my colleague at aei, Alan Gelzo and James Hankins, are starting a series of books about the history of the Western tradition. The first one is out. It's massive, but it's worth every penny. It's called the Golden Thread and it's from the ancient world to Christendom. And I actually had an opportunity to ask him about the book the other day and I said, well, so how long did this one take to write? And he kind of, you know, smiled and said, oh, you know, 50 years. So it is. He is a wonderful scholar of Lincoln, as many of you our listeners know. But this is really an attempt to do what, what another excellent scholar, Jack Barzan, did ages ago with bringing together a really rich narrative that, that goes really deep into certain things, but gives you this overview and appreciation for the Western tradition. And it looks like a textbook, but it reads like a wonderful history book. And so I would. The first one is out called the Golden Thread. I highly recommend it. I think you can preorder the next volume, which is coming out soon. I mean, they've, they're coming out. It's not going to take another five years to read the second volume. So they've been working on this for a while. So I would, I would highly recommend, if you're interested in that sort of synthesis and really rich, deep overview of the Western tradition, the Golden Thread.
- [74:07]
A
Fantastic. Let's hope that people teach it. Have a wonderful weekend. Crazy night in sports last night. I've never in my life watched a football game that was suspended for weather.
- [74:22]
B
Can I say, I just want to say, I know where the end, but I was at such a game, so I just want to add, I was once at a National Football League game that was postponed for weather. We were. It was a Giants game. I was there with my father and it was in the middle of the game.
- [74:38]
A
Okay.
- [74:39]
B
There was a storm with, you know, thunder and light. I mean, nope, not that thunder is going to hurt anybody, but lightning. And we assume the lightning was the reason. But in any event, it was. We were, we were all cleared from the seats. We were told not to sit out. It wasn't just the, the players that, you know, with all their. Sorry, we had to go into. We went into the tunnels and like just of, you know, however meant how many people fit in Giant Stadium. However many people, you know, the dozens of thousands. Yeah. Were packed into the tunnels waiting for the lightning delay to end. And then.
- [75:14]
A
Okay, anyway, I'm sorry, but you pays your money. It takes your chance. If you're gonna go football, it's not going to be stopped because of lightning. What is. What. Where's the frontier spirit? That's what I say. What happened? What happened to Florida?
- [75:28]
C
And people like you don't want to mess around with lightning. I'm just putting that out there.
- [75:32]
A
People in Green Bay, Wisconsin, sit in that stadium when it's 20 degrees below zero and snowing on their heads. And they stay there.
- [75:44]
B
Nobody, none of the fans wanted it to stop. By the way, everybody had your ad. Everybody in the stands was like, this is football. We came to football because it's an outdoor sport.
- [75:53]
A
Yeah, I mean, I. I don't like going no rain because it's cold and rainy. I don't prefer not to do that, but okay. Anyway, I just wanted to bring that up also the fact that at the Yankees game there was a pine tar bat incident. And I thought I would Suddenly, back in 1982 with Billy Martin and George Brett and stuff like that. Anyway, so it was a weird night in sports.
- [76:17]
B
One of the greatest clips, you know, one of the greatest old clips, by.
- [76:21]
A
The way, of that George Brett charging.
- [76:23]
B
Look it up.
- [76:24]
A
Charging the Empire. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [76:26]
B
My good.
- [76:27]
A
Anyway, Abe doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about.
- [76:33]
D
I actually do.
- [76:34]
A
Okay.
- [76:35]
C
He's gone into TGIF mode. Like.
- [76:39]
D
I pay no attention to sports as an adult. As a kid, I was a baseball fan and a Yankee fan. George Brett had pine tar on his bat. Got called out on it, freaked out. Also. I just have to bring this up just to prove that I remember things about George Brett and baseball and that age. He had hemorrhoids and had to stop playing for a period of time.
- [77:02]
A
That is correct.
- [77:03]
D
Then he said, sorry, everyone, especially Mr.
- [77:06]
A
Brett, all my problems behind me. Oh, oh, he did.
- [77:12]
C
How we want to go into the weekend.
- [77:14]
A
Okay. Anyway, well, no, there'll be more football games this weekend and let's see. See if any of them get. Also, also, I'm sorry, but like, a guy gets thrown out of a football game for spitting, right? Jalen Carter got thrown out of the game for spitting on Dak Dak Prescott. I also don't remember in baseball, players get thrown out all the time. Like three times a week, somebody yells at an umpire and gets thrown out. I'm laboring to remember when a player was ejected from a football game. I mean, they can like, tear each other's heads off and, you know, like, paralyze somebody else and they don't get thrown out of a game. So it was a very weird night in America. September 4th.
- [77:59]
B
You get. If you get hit, like, it's like targeting you. Not if you literally. Sometimes you see, you know, somebody hit a quarterback and the helmet comes off. You know, my dad always used to say when we were watching, I'm so relieved there's no head in it. Every time I see a helmet rolling around. Yeah, that helmet is strapped on.
- [78:15]
A
I know that helmet gets knocked off.
- [78:17]
B
There could be a head. But anyway, the point is that like, that's 15 yards. You knock the head off the head.
- [78:25]
A
But I've never.
- [78:26]
B
15 yards for decapitation.
- [78:27]
A
Okay, I'm not like an obsessive sports fan, but like, I. Players being ejected for unsportsmanlike conduct. That's. I don't know what's going on with football.
- [78:39]
C
Social norms to completely disappear. We have to impose them in new areas, like sports. So now we're. Now we're nitpicking their behavior on the field, whereas the rest of us act like total. In total chaos most of the time.
- [78:51]
A
Fair enough. Okay. Sorry. I'm sorry, Christine. I'm sorry to have ended on a. We talked about.
- [78:59]
C
We'll never speak of this again.
- [79:01]
A
We'll never speak of this again. Have a wonderful weekend. Everybody will back on Monday. For christine, seth and abe, I'm john, but horace keep the candle burning.