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Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.
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It'S going Hope for the best Expect.
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The worst Hope for the best.
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Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, August 28, 2025. I am John Pothorz, the editor of Commentary magazine. A late reminder that we have our annual roast, our big fundraising event here in New York City on October 19th. We are honoring and lambasting in equal measure our friend Cliff Asness. Commentary board member, billionaire, quant genius, comic book collector, all around great guy. Also involved with AI, as are two of our panelists and somebody that you will enjoy seeing made fun of and honored in equal measure at our delightful event that is people tell me the fundraiser of the year that they most enjoy coming to. Please go to commentary.org roast for more details. It's not a cheap ticket. I'm not telling you to come because I think he can, you know, throw, throw us a couple of bucks our way. This is a, a serious ask and it's a serious fun, serious moment, serious fundraising opportunity for us, serious chance for you to meet other members of the Commentary family, Commentary fandom, Commentary readers, Commentary listeners, and to meet my fellow panelists, executive editor Abe Greenwald.
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C
Hey.
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Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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Hey. Ay, ay, ay. Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Cottonetti. Hi, Matt.
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D
Hi, John.
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And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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E
Hi, John.
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Matt and Christine, both of course affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, as is Cliff Asness, which is why I mentioned that before. There's a lot going on in Washington, but I think we have to start in Minneapolis with this absolutely horrific shooting at the annunciation Catholic school. 19 casualties, two dead children, apparently 17 wounded, but expected to survive. And I don't want to make this a media story, but I listened to Matt's and my favorite hate listen of the morning up first.
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D
I couldn't get through it. I couldn't get through it.
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So all you will know about the shooter is that the shooter is referred to obliquely in the course of the story on up first at npr as they they were found them having shot themselves. The shooter is the is the son of a retired employee of the school at the age of 17, mother of the shooter petitioned the court to change his name from Robert to Robin, as he now identified as a female. And the incredible delicacy with which NPR and the New York Times, which barely mentions the fact that the shooter considered himself a woman, though there's now questions about that, too. It is very important to them to be kind and judicious and gentle about the shooter's behavior, conduct and mental health, lest the forces of reaction and monstrosity overtake this. And this turn into a story about someone trans committing an unspeakable crime. Well, guess what? It's a story about someone who is trans committing an unspeakable crime. It is the second major school shooting, elementary school shooting of the last two years. There are two major elementary school. I'm not talking about colleges, I'm not talking about high schools. Elementary school shootings, one in Nashville, one in Minneapolis yesterday, both committed by trans people. Aiden Hale, in the case of the Nashville Christian school that was shot up, that Aiden Hale had been a student of. Aiden Hale became. Audrey Hale apparently wrote a large manifesto that has been suppressed by the. By the police department, though bits and pieces have been leaked to various people like Steven Crowder and Megyn Kelly, showing the extent of the disorder and the hostility toward. Toward the Christian schooling that the shooter got. And in the case of Robin Westman, Robert Westman, the other fascinating, relevant information is that among the many things that have come out that he. Robert, has said or said was that he was tired of being trans or he was sorry that he had been trans or something like that. Meanwhile, his papers and videos and things like that all evoke the joy, the joys and glories of mass shootings and people who have committed mass shootings all across the world, on all sides of the political spectrum. Like he celebrated the. The New Zealand mass shooter, who clearly came from a white supremacist background and then others who shot other people. There's anti Semitic stuff, There's anti Trump stuff. He wants to kill Trump. He wants to kill Elon Musk. He wants this, he wants that. And I'm sorry, but the act of going out and shooting small children is. Is actually even a qualitatively different act from the act of shooting teenage kids. These are. These are. There's a very specific valence to. To. To somebody who chooses to go and shoot up a room, whatever this prayer session, whatever of. Of small. Yeah, this was the church.
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D
It was.
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Yeah, they were mass.
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D
He fired into the church through the.
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He also had been a student at this school when he was young, when.
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D
The mother worked there. Can I raise it? It's an interesting question. Twenty years ago or so, during the second Intifada, David Goller wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard saying the appropriate response to suicide bombings or to mass killings is not to publicize the attacker, not to talk about it, not to give any kind of, you know, extraordinary notice to the event. Because to do so, Guller argued, would be to reward the killer in some way and incentivize copycats. And I've spent the last 20 years thinking that Go learnt is basically right. But in these cases it seems that the information is being suppressed not to disincentivize killings or to shield us from any copycats, it's to shield the killer and to shield the community that the killer identifies with, which is very different sort of thing and very disturbing in.
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A way nobody would, nobody would gain say if these two events, one involving almost 20 casualties, one involving 11 casualties, Nashville and Minneapolis, if they were white supremacist killings where someone went into a black school, if it was Dylann root right in Charleston shooting up a black church. Nobody gainsays that the fact that it was a black church and that he was a white supremacist killer or the Tree of Life shooting or the Poway California shootings, these involving synagogues, no one would gainsay the importance of understanding the targeting of these populations and that the motivations and behavior of the shooter have something to do with an ideology that the shooter had somehow gotten involved with. That then should trigger and has triggered a certain type of increased, what would you call it, increased scrutiny to people online and elsewhere who start expressing vicious, violent and possibly, you know, genocidal or mass murdering thoughts. That of course starts pushing against free speech and government, the limits of what government should be doing to monitor what.
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People do in this, in this case, when, when we've had white nationalists or racist shooters, very quickly the media and political leaders get on board with making sure that everyone on say the right side of the aisle denounces that. And if you don't announce that you're assumed to have supported this action. And in this case we have political leaders who have actively, through cultural symbolism that they've worn on their T shirts. Like for example, the Lieutenant governor of Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan, who a few years ago wore a T shirt that said Protect trans kids. That has a knife on it, which has become a symbol for a rather radicalized and violent wing of the, of the trans movement which is arming itself. They have all kind symbols of this, they are very active online. Some people call it Tranter fa. But it is, it is a very, it's a small group of people with a lot of violent expressions online that was an elected official, the Lieutenant governor of the state in which this killing happened, supporting the idea that they should be armed and you know, that violence is an effective tool in this. And I think what the mayor of Minneapolis did after this killing was egregious. He, he was scolding the public saying, let's not, you know, say anything bad about our trans community. Well, you know what? This guy was an active member of a trans community. And I think just like any white nationalist should be called out for his hatred and violent actions. That's exactly what we should be doing here. And to protect that group is something that only the left is doing, he said.
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Jacob Fry, the mayor of Minneapolis, said that to do, to point out this connection was to, was to lose our essential humanity, that, that we needed to make solidarity with the trans community at this time of trouble.
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What it should do is prompt a discussion about why we have had so many of these trans killers and whether the treatment that these children were subjected to might have encouraged their depression, their suicidal ideation, all of it.
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Well, that's what we're going to get into. Right?
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C
Total, you know, misdirection. What he said, he said to demonize the trans community now would show that you have no scrap of humanity in you or whatever he said. What he, and what all the media and the left are trying to do is prevent exactly what needs to happen, which is not to demonize the trans community, but to look objectively at what is clearly now some sort of subgroup of violent mental illness. We have. Well, John, you mentioned there's two trans school shooters. There are other. There's about two or three more trans mass shooters cases in the past 10 years or so that weren't school shootings. We have the Trantifa, as Christine mentions. There's also this murderous offshoot of the rationalist movement that is. Yeah, the Zizians. Right.
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Christine wrote about the Zizians.
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Yes. Heavily populated and sort of in their upper ranks, trans. So we have to look at this as a subgroup of the very real documented mental health crisis in this country. That's what they don't want. They don't want to return to gender dysphoria being what it was, which was a mental disorder.
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I want to. Jesse Singel, the very brave liberal journalist who has been writing about trans issues and the, the way in which they are discussed in the medical, in medical circles, particularly gender dysphoria, the effects of surgeries and stuff like that. Jesse Singel has a. Had put out a piece yesterday before the shootings about five scholars from the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and impact at McMaster University. They published a statement criticizing the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, an organization they had partnered with for several years. The, the SEGM has been a leading force in saying we are running down this path of saying that we need to allow people to switch their genders or to operate on them, whatever, because without that, they will, you know, they're depressed, they'll commit suicide. They, they will, you know, they're, they, they should be allowed to, to do this because it's really important. That's what SCGM has, has said. And the problem is that this, these scholars at McMaster University did a major study of the studies, a study of the studies of transgender gender reassignment, all of that, and found that as Jesse Singel puts it, the evidence base is weak, meaning we don't know whether youth gender medicine treatments benefit the youth who seek them and are worth the potential trade offs. And yet, McMaster University, these five scholars issued a broadside against the society for Evidence based gender Medicine, saying, you are not allowed to use our material. We must make explicit our view regarding how our findings should and should not be used. Clinicians have an obligation to care for those in need is on. It is unconscionable to forbid clinicians from delivering gender affirming care. It is profoundly misguided to cast healthcare based on low certainty evidence as bad care or as care driven by ideology and low certainty evidence as certainty evidence as bad science. They did a study that said that there is low certainty that gender reaffirming a major form of intrusive elective surgery that involves the removal of body parts in contradiction to everything we know about medicine from the Hippocratic oath onward, which is, if a patient comes to you and says, I would like you to cut my arm off, you're not supposed to do it right. First, do no harm. You are not supposed to cut somebody's arm off, even if they ask you to. They found themselves under Such attack, these five scholars from McMaster University, for having given weight and strength to the case against the onrush toward gender affirmation surgical practices. That they issued a statement that in and of itself is an act of madness. To say that low certainty medical procedures should be performed is insane. Can we parse this for two seconds? You do a study, you've done these surgeries before. You even know whether or not they work or they don't work to cure the problem that they're supposed to cure. You come back and you say, I'm sorry, but the evidence is not there that says that they work. But you know what? They should still be done. Say these Five scholars because they want to get the monsters off their back. They want to stop getting doxed, they want to stop getting 500 emails of people calling them monsters and vicious or.
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D
They'Re, or they're ideologues, they're fanatics and they want, they want to promote this stuff.
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But they did the study like they could have quit the study, they could have taken their name off the study. They did say, okay, we did the study of the studies. The way it comes out is we got no evidence to suggest that they work. And they're saying just because our studies say there's no evidence that they work, all these surgeries should still be performed.
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E
Well, but this is why, this is where I do really fault the medical profession and it's various organizations for not calling this out. I've, I've, we've all had probably people in our lives or ourselves. We've dealt with surgeons, surgeons are actually quite cautious about, and should be about cutting people up even when there is a problem. And I've had, I've dealt with an orthopedic surgeon who, you know, there was an experimental treatment for nerve damage in someone's hand and he basically laid it all out. He's like, there's a, it's very convoluted, it's a multi step process. It's this risk and that risk and in the end you probably have a 50% chance that it'll work. And his advice, and in this case it was dealing with a child. He's like, my advice, wait 10 years, we'll probably have a better procedure and it doesn't impact your life in the meantime, except mildly. So we don't want to be aggressive in this case. So that's where that's a medical professional. They're not, they cannot promise 100% cure in all these situations. But to actually put someone on an operating table and to put a child who you're not only taking off a healthy body part but you're making them permanently sterile with the use of follow up hormone treatments. That is, that, that is unbelievable. And I know we've said this many times, but that is akin to the logic of why they were, you know, cutting, carving bits of people's brains out to make them healthier in previous centuries. And it's wrong. It's just ethically, morally and, and socially it's become acceptable in a small group, but that doesn't make it ethically and more morally passion should be, I bring.
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It up, I bring it up in this context. Obviously these are Separate matters. We have a school shooting of somebody who is, you know, profoundly mentally ill. And. And then we have this academic issue about whether or not the study is being used or misused or the authors of the study are disavowing.
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E
But in a healthy system, he never would have had that treatment if indeed he was under any sort of hormonal treatment or transition.
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To talk about the atmosphere, the totalitarian atmosphere that surrounds discussions of transgenderism, which I believe to be a mental illness. And I'm saying that now flatly. I've been scared to say it. I'm gonna, I'll be honest, like, I'm scared to say it. I know people who are trans. I know people who have family members who are trans who are going to be very upset and mad at me. I believe that gender dysphoria is a mental illness. I follow the. The precepts and ideas most profoundly stated by my dear old friend, commentary contributor and leading American figure in American psychiatry, Paul McHugh, who went to Johns Hopkins as chief of psychiatry. And the first thing that he did when he got there, I think in the, in the mid-70s, was to end the Johns Hopkins practice of transsexual surgery. And he said, this is. These are people who are in deep pain, who are in deep pain about who they are. And you treat the pain. You do not comfort the delusion, you do not serve the delusion, you treat the pain. You try to help them make, understand what it is that they think that they are rejecting. And McHugh's work was state of the. Was always again, evidence based on deeply humane and understanding of this notion that just because somebody comes to you and says, I'm a man in a woman's body, the very simple fact, or I'm a woman in a man's body, the very simple fact that they say it is not evidence of its truth. Somebody can come to you and, you know, a four year old can come to you and say, I'm a dog. You don't say, yes, you can play, play, play being a dog, but you don't then buy them a bowl, feed them on the floor, let them, you know, go to the bathroom, you know, put stuff in doggy bag, all of that. You don't do that. You let the, you let the game play.
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C
So this is why the problem, you know, is that even if the child patient never gets to the surgery part, they're already being treated in a way that's going to exacerbate delusions and anxiety and depression, right? There's not only John, as you said, a culture of totalitarianism. Around the discussion of this, there's also a culture of victimhood which is connected to the totalitarianism. Once you say I think I'm a girl or I think I'm a boy in the wrong body, you are now told by an array of institutions and people in your life that the world is against you, that you are a victim, you will be targeted, and so on. You are given a bleak outlook, your horizons are lowered automatically, and then maybe you're fed with drugs that will alter your mood and whatever else. Hi everyone, it's Abe.
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C
So I'll be stocking up.
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F
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E
Still $15 a month for premium wireless.
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A
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E
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E
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A
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A
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E
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A
See mint mobile.com or and this is part of the almost demonic quality of this. And I've known people who've been through this, Abe and I know somebody in common who has been through this. You're celebrated and particularly as a Parent, you are celebrated for having the courage to recognize the pain that your child is in and to serve as a, as a spokesman, an advocate for them to change themselves in this fashion. And you are given awards, you are asked to speak, you're asked to give a TED Talk. That there, there are enormous benefits.
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C
A lot of it is Munchausen's by proxy, right?
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A
There's Munchausen by proxy. But the effect is to turn you into kind of like a leading figure in American social change and compassion and all of that. And the kids too, once they walk through this door, the amount of attention they receive, the amount the way institutions that they are in schools, sports team, all of that, must flip all of their scripts in order to accommodate this idea, which, again, I'm going to say, again, I believe to be a mental illness and that we are serving the notion that this mental illness is to be normalized and then is also to be praised. And that other kids are supposed to look at this and say what so and so said he was trans. And all anyone could ever do is talk about so and so. And I'm sitting here feeling invisible. Maybe I'm trans. That's the famous. That's Abigail Schreier's point in her book Irreversible Damage, which is that among girls, teenage girls, the assertion of transness became particularly in certain upper middle class places when she was writing the book. An epidemic that one person starts and then 25 others follow suit because all teenagers are in pain. All teenagers don't understand what the hell is happening to them and their bodies and the urges that they're getting. All of them would like some kind of magical solution that says that the anxieties that are provoked by growing up might be cured with some kind of intervention, that someone says, no, here's how we fix this. You're really not a girl, you're a boy, and then you'll be fine having the feelings that you're having.
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C
There is this contagion effect and it's real. And this is, you know, to get back to Galerntra's point, there is also a real contagion effect with naming shooters. And because as we see in this case and in so many others, they all are scholars of previous monsters, you know, and they all have their favorites and they worship this one and that one and they emulate them. So that is a very real thing.
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D
No, and that's my point, is that where do you draw the line? Where does the suppression of the identity of the shooter actually become kind of complicity in the origins of the shooting. And that. That's, I think, what happened in Nashville. And I think that's what was about to happen in this case. It didn't happen because the manifesto, so to speak, was on YouTube and Internet sleuths were able to get photos and video clips of the killer before YouTube and the FBI shut down the video channel. So look, there's a lot of mental illness in this country, and there's a lot of people invested in rationalizing and defending and protecting mental illness, not only in this broad circumstance, but whether it is raiding lunatics in our cities. Right. We've been having a debate about that over the past two weeks. How dare you question the ability of people to. To simply set up shop on a sidewalk, use public space for their bathroom and for their habitat?
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A
Right?
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D
That's treating them inhumanely, is forcing them into. To relocate or into a shelter. And we have this discussion too, with the New York subway crime issue. When the Adams administration decided to take a more aggressive stance toward involuntary commitment, it was the same thing. How dare, how dare you question the ability of someone who is not in control of themselves to. To harass people, to push people into the subway and whatnot.
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A
That's a.
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D
That's a broad question. I just want to bring it back to the actual awful events of yesterday for a second. I think the target is important here that what the FBI says, it's treating the shooting yesterday as a hate crime. And I think that's absolutely correct to do so because there's some connection in both cases in the Nashville Academy and this shooting at Annunciation against religion, an animus against religion, and most particularly in children who are part of a religious community. And that anti theistic sentiment. Of course, these people are psychopaths who are doing it, but it is. It's an expression, I think. Demonology. Right. But it's also. Can't be obscured either. Right. These people are against everything that is good.
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A
Everything that is good.
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C
This is a big point because, you know, you have to look at the trans activist movement as something other than what it says it is. It is not largely about protecting kids, giving them choices, doing that. It is about sort of launching a raid on the good and the orderly. Like there's this trans group, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Remember them? They were the one. They walk around in horrifying, like mock nun costumes and perform their. Whatever, you know, protests. And they were. There was. They were going to have an event or be honored at Dodger Stadium a few years ago at the height of this madness. And then so went back and forth.
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D
One more, just one more follow up to what I was saying, though.
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A
There'S.
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D
A less aggressive version of this that is just so condescending toward religious believers. And you saw this in the immediate aftermath of the shooting when most, most people, most decent human beings of course react, all the decent human beings react to this and say, oh my God, it's so awful. These are, these are children. How enormous is the loss and the pain. And religious people of whom there are still many in this country say, oh, I'm just praying for the family. And the condescension and frankly, bigotry of liberals on social media and in public, including some performative Democratic politicians. To say that means nothing, to say that you're sending your thoughts and prayers, that's disgusting. What we really need, we need action. We need gun control. Even though all of these weapons used in the shooting were purchased legally. Well, that, that, that is a part of what is the cultural background to these events. This kind of. How, how dare you say prayer? And I just want to say one, we're often critical of the Vice President on this podcast, but this morning he tweeted out something that I think really speaks for a lot of people, including me, which is he says, it is shocking to me that so many left wing politicians attack the idea of prayer in response to a tragedy. Literally no one thinks prayer is a substitute for action. We pray because our hearts are broken and we believe that God is listening. That is absolutely correct. 40% of the. Or less of. It's the 8% of the super progressives who dominate our culture, despite being an absolute minority of the, of the population, they, they attack that idea.
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E
But this is, this has been really revealing though, in just the hours after this tragedy is that the playbook of messaging, the contempt, as you say, and the mayor of Minneapolis also expressed contempt about thoughts and prayers. The contempt expressed is not landing the way I think the. They thought it would. And that's. And nor is the. We just need more gun control because as you say, Minnesota has extremely strict gun control laws and this, these guns were purchased legally by this person. So that those two things have always been what the fallback position for people on the left. And they don't want to talk about these more difficult issues and particularly in the case of trans killers. But it doesn't work anymore because we do have access to greater information. The suppression and the narrative building that the media was able to do that would then be followed on by the politicians which made it convenient for them to all have be on the same page doesn't exist. And so the flailing you see, and the which. Which reveals their real thoughts about people of faith, about, you know, whether or not we can even talk about whether this is trans. Being trans is a mental illness, all of that is breaking down. And that ultimately is a good thing for the cultural conversation around a lot of these ideas and for the political conversation, because it is holding them accountable for their genuine beliefs, not for the narrative that they used to very easily just adopt in the wake of all of these shootings.
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A
I want to speak to the idea of the efficacy of prayer among people of true belief. So, yes, J.D. vance said, we pray because our hearts are broken. And obviously prayer is not a substitute for action, meaning political action or police action or something like that. For people who are genuine believers, prayer is efficacious. Prayer is action. When the Pope says, I am praying for the souls of the people who have been, you know, not only who were injured, but for their families or for something like that, he's not blowing smoke like some idiot politician. He believes that asking God to intercede on behalf of the suffering and the broken and the wounded is a real ask that can have real world consequences. Every prayer service that Jews have collectively, and Jews have to pray collectively as a. As a group of 10 can or cannot, but basically on every Sabbath they do, there is a moment where a prayer is called for the healing of the sick. It's called rufua shlemah. And you literally stand up and call out the name, usually the Hebrew name, of a person who is suffering so that the congregation, together, its voice can be lifted up to God to ask for healing and cure for the suffering and the sick? That is not. You want to think that's bullshit, you go right ahead. That is a central tenet of the idea that there is an ongoing relationship between the people on earth and the one God who is in heaven. That is not a metaphor. It is an actual thing. It is a difficult thing to deal with the question of the efficacy of prayer. It is one of the, you know, it's like the central issue at the heart of the most, you know, profound book of the Bible, in some ways, the Book of Job. Right? Which is. What does it mean when your prayers don't seem to be. Or when the world is going against you? How. What is the. How are you supposed to think even.
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D
Further and say that prayers are more efficacious than ritualistic, performative calls for gun control, which is what the Liberals perform. Do every time there's a shooting, you know, if you're a family in the deepest pain imaginable, knowing that there's a nation praying for you and thinking of you, I would assume, you know, would be comforting in some way. But never, never account.
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A
Faith. Absolutely. Yeah. Because you believe. You believe.
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D
But like most of the left, it's their substitute is to say, this is.
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A
This is terrible.
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D
Trump's. Trump's got to be responsible for it. And we need action. We need action now that when the only possible action would be the repeal of the Second Amendment and the confiscation of every weapon in the United States, which will never happen. And so it's delusional, far more delusional than thinking that your prayers will have a salutary effect on the situation.
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A
But this is. If there is a central feature of what we call the culture war. I believe that the central feature of the culture war is whether you have an entirely and aggressively secularist approach or non. You know, an approach that does not. That does not accept the idea that there is a guiding power in the universe and people who do. And that almost every. A lot of what we talk about here is about the distinction between those two. And you, by the way, I'm not saying you can't be an atheist and be a conservative or that you can't be a person of deep faith and be a crazy socialist. Both of these things can be true. You can also be a person of deep faith and have ideas that are evil. That is. That is, you know, Islamists are people of deep faith. Faith is not. Is not a contributor to goodness necessarily. That is not the way it works. Evil goes. Evil and good go through every human heart and how you respond to the world around you and how what you do in relation to the choices that you make, that is. That is what it means to be human. But this thing of saying, oh, you know, particularly when the event happens, as you say, either in a synagogue, these hate crimes at a synagogue or at a church, that you are not to respond to them in a religious frame.
- [39:32]
E
Well, and it's more than that they're being shot because in church, because it's not just that you can't respond in a religious frame of mind by, you know, talking about prayer and praying. It's that you can't even speculate on the motive of the person who attacked the people of faith or the children of faith who were sitting, praying their first week of school. And that's where. And this is where I do think the Hypocrisy on the left is, must be consistently called out because every time there is a right wing shooter. Motive, motive, what's the motive? Oh, and the motive is then instantly broadened into the whole culture on the right. Well, it's because of these people and the way that they talk about guns. And it's all. So there's a, there's a absolutely instant systematic indictment of what goes on on the right side of the aisle. And you know what, in a lot of cases, they're correct about that. And that's a problem. And it has to be. It's an ongoing issue on the right. When it happens with the left though. I mean, Amy Klobuchar got in front of a TV camera yesterday after everyone knew what the motive of this killer was and said, well, we can't really speculate on motives. And the same thing happened when New York City shot up, churches are shot up. It is appalling.
- [40:38]
D
CNN still looking for that motive.
- [40:41]
C
You know, we can't, we shouldn't leave out of this conversation the Pulse nightclub killing because when you talk about the political hijacking of motive and suspect. So I don't even remember the year. Was it 2015, 16?
- [40:58]
D
I think it was the spring of the election.
- [41:00]
C
Guy pledged his fealty to isis, went into a gay nightclub, shot it up and the left immediately turned it into evidence of America's murderous homophobia narcissist.
- [41:17]
A
But that he himself was a self hating gay man. Right. Who was acting on a home, on a, on a suicidal homicidal impulse. And having said why he had done it, which was that homosexuality was an evil. He had pledged himself to ISIS and that he was going to kill as many.
- [41:38]
D
And then remember San Bernardino six months earlier? Six months earlier, San Bernardino, another Islamist attack was described by the media and the authorities as workplace violence.
- [41:49]
C
Yes.
- [41:50]
D
And by the way, Chris, both events, the reaction of the government and the media to both events helped Trump win.
- [41:58]
A
Yes.
- [41:58]
D
And it's the same phenomenon at work in these cases. Now, Trump is president now and I think that's one reason, Christine, why there was such quick pushback. If Biden or Harris were president right now, I think it would be harder to make these points.
- [42:14]
A
I want to, I just want to.
- [42:16]
C
Add one point about the Pulse shooting because it was, it was, it shows both sides. It was a twofer for the left because the, their framing a. Protected the Islamist motivation. Right. Shielded that and indicted the evil.
- [42:34]
A
Homophobia.
- [42:35]
C
Homophobia.
- [42:36]
A
Right now it is not as though having delicacy or a sense of proportion or an understanding of what kinds of dangers are posed when unprecedented things happen that one should not expect that of political leaders. Remember after 9, 11, George W. Bush, the supposed monster of Iraq and the evil person who did all evil in every evil way came out fascist before his time. Yes. Said, you know, Islam is a religion of peace. You are not to go and do any, you know, and that. But it, there was a real possibility. I mean, it, there were, in some ways it was miraculous that there was as little counter response in the United States to the attacks of Nialla because.
- [43:25]
E
Americans are largely tolerant people, which we never hear or talk about.
- [43:28]
A
But it's true, very important to mention that. But it was also that there was a voice at the top saying, this is not, that's not who we are. This was done by, you know, radical monsters who are perverting their religion. Now we can have a, you know, 55,000 hour conversation about whether or not that is true, but it was nonetheless an act of important political, I don't know, prophylaxis for Bush to say, you know, this is not, this was not an attack by all Muslims on America. Leave American Muslims alone. And they were left alone. So I'm not saying, by the way, that you, you can't say, you know, shouldn't make a huge. Everything shouldn't be about how the, you know, every trans person is going to go and shoot up a school. That's not the point. The question is whether or not you take something that is a, you know, a category of mental illness and you enshrine it as something higher or greater or larger. And then you create the conditions under which these pretty, except totally exceptional events. I mean, all school shootings are exceptional events, even though they seem to be. They happen with weird regulations. 330 million people in the United States, there's a lot of people with horrible mental illness who go untreated. And our entire policy in this country for the last half century has been to let them go untreated, that we are not allowed to intervene for civil liberties reasons in their lives once they are adults.
- [45:11]
C
Meanwhile, simultaneously, everyone's being diagnosed with things they don't have.
- [45:18]
H
I'm Oliver Darcy.
- [45:19]
G
And I'm John Passantino.
- [45:20]
H
We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter status.
- [45:29]
G
And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Power Lines.
- [45:34]
H
Every Friday, we're breaking down the biggest stories shaping the industry, explaining why they matter, and saying the things most people are thinking, but too timid to say out loud.
- [45:43]
G
No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes.
- [45:52]
H
My understanding having reported this is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed.
- [46:09]
G
Oh my God. That's Power Lines presented by Status. Follow Power Lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast app.
- [46:23]
B
Hi everyone, I'm Matt Ebert, CEO and founder of Crash Champions. Welcome to Pod Crash. On Pod Crash, we'll dive deep with industry leaders and game changers because we want to uncover their secrets to, to success. We're going to explore everything from building trust, building a rock solid team to champion blue collar work. And we also want to talk about creating explosive growth in your business. You'll hear actionable advice, real leadership and business lessons along with what's worked for these incredible people throughout their career. We're even going to go in depth into what I call a Champions mindset. This is the very philosophy that I use to champion people and take Crash Champions from a single shop to over 650 locations today. And now I want to share that information with you. Watch or listen to pod crash on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [47:18]
A
Right, so everything is all bollocks stuff. But we are. So I'm not saying that, you know, therefore you, you know, a crazy person shoots something up so you involuntarily commit 50 million people to, you know, state run mental institutions that we don't have or that every trans person should be. However, do I think that these and other events, including all, including stuff involving people saying that they are men, saying that they're women so that they can win awards in, in sports, like I'm sorry, that's crazy. That stuff is that, that is, that is evidence of a mental illness that you so need to win a prize that you start dressing and acting as though you're a female when you're a male so that you can get ribbons. I mean, I, I just, you know, every, every way you slice it, we are privileging this, these illnesses and, and elevating them. And so of course, as is the classic case in all of economics, if you subsidize something, you get more of it. If you tax it, you get less. If you intervene in the world of the gender dysphoric in a way that says that we want to treat your pain, not give you, you know, give you a prize that you shouldn't want because it is deeply unhealthy to you. It involves doing damage to your endocrine system, your reproductive system, your body. Who knows what these hormones are going to produce 30 years from now that, that people are taking aggressively in terms of 50s or 60s and, and the diseases that may be caused by, by taking them. All of that. We, we're privileging it and we see this in this response yesterday.
- [49:07]
E
It's, it's also. Sorry to interrupt, but there is another strain here, I think, for, for just a regular person going about their day who doesn't follow closely, as we do, a lot of the political and cultural and social debates around trans ideology. There is an undertone now in the culture that still exists and maybe this will change. I do see some signs that it is of compulsory speech and compulsory embrace of something that perhaps someone individually doesn't agree with because of their religious belief, because of their upbringing. What I mean is there is a sense that tolerant, otherwise tolerant people are instantly called bigots if they don't applaud the boy winning the girls track meet or if they don't immediately accept the idea that a man with male genitalia who tries to pass as a woman is in your locker room or in your kid's locker room. And that charge of bigotry also needs to lose its sting when it's applied in that way. And there are signs of that. And I think the most recent election was a big sign in the ad that Trump ran in the very final days, which probably opposite. Yes.
- [50:09]
A
But the opposite sign is this Jesse Single article that I quoted.
- [50:12]
E
So we still, there's still a lot of compulsory cultural pressure on people who otherwise say, I don't care what, especially for adults, like if you want to dress as a woman or dress as a man when you're. That's fine. Just don't make me endorse what you're doing because I have my own belief system and that is a violation of my. And that's where I think that tension is going to take a much longer time to play out in institutions.
- [50:37]
A
Right. And we're saying that it's not working, but I don't know that it's. Who knows if it's, you know, that, that, that there's now pushback, as you say, that there wouldn't have been had Biden.
- [50:47]
E
It's small. I Mean, it's.
- [50:48]
D
Yeah, but, well, but, but, but, but remember Simone Biles, his exchange with Riley Gaines.
- [50:53]
A
Yeah.
- [50:53]
D
Just a few months ago where she.
- [50:55]
A
Was forced to apologize.
- [50:56]
D
Really? Simone Bile, you know, Simone Biles attacking Riley Gaines when Upenn made the deal with Trump and stripped the medals from Leah Thomas, the biological male who's in women's swimming. Simone Biles attacking Riley Gaines for supporting the deal was speaking from 2015. Her mentality was a decade old and she was not prepared because she's, you know, spends most of her time training to be the best gymnast in the world. She was not prepared for the cultural response which she assumed would have been the same cultural response as 2015. Instead, it's this cultural response in 2025, which is, come on, here there are two sexes and girls. Sports should be for girls and girl spacious should be for girls. And she ended up apologizing for. So that signified some type of shift. And I think it's just without question, it's just an important template for the future because these battles, as Christine says, are going to continue. It's a question of like, you know, in Ghostbusters, they have the vault with all the, all the spooks, all the ghosts, and the EPA official opens up the vault. Yeah, that was basically the great awokening all of the adversary culture, all of the most radical progressive ideas about race, about gender, about crime, about mental illness. Around 2014, 2015, we can speculate why they all came out of the vault and the adversary culture became the dominant culture in the United States and used, as you said, authoritarian tools to suppress common sense and traditional values. And what's happened in the past five years, thanks to Biden's spectacular failure and Covid is that slowly the majority culture is like pressing back the ghosts into that vault. How it's going to take a while.
- [52:58]
A
However, let's let, let's make a move to a tool Washington subject because here, here you have the advert. Here you have a, a radical adversary culture that is now, you know, I see, aligned with the right, though, since its leader is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who was almost a Democratic candidate for president in 2024. I don't know whether I want to claim him as a figure of the right or not, but what is the answer?
- [53:29]
D
You're right, but he is part, this is one, one year since he endorsed Trump was his past week. And that was, I think, a significant event in the campaign.
- [53:38]
A
So. And he was rewarded with getting the cabinet secretaryship, the, to become the, the head of the department of Health and Human Services. And he is behaving like the psychotic monster that he is in every way that we can see. Which is to say that he or his underlings or something like that are now behaving in what are extra constitutional manners. Weird thing happened yesterday. The director of the cdc. We got word in the middle of the day. The director of the CDC had resigned after only a couple of weeks in office. It turns out, of course, that she did not resign, that it was announced that she had resigned and that the person who announced that she had resigned or the people at HHS who announced that she had resigned or that it was then modified to her being out. She's out as director of the cdc. Well, you know, I'm sorry, Trump, Maha, lunatic, psychos and maga. We do have a system of government and in the system of government, the director of the CDC is a. Is a position where nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. And the person who can fire the director of the CDC is the President of the United States. Officially it is not Bobby Kennedy's, you know, underling who is sitting there, you know, throwing darts at seed oils. It is President. United States can remove anybody, you know, can remove a political appointee appointed by the Senate, not some schmendrick there. And this has panicked people at the cdc. Five leading officials at the cdc. CDC have resigned. Now, I am not saying that the COVID changes and what happened.
- [55:42]
D
Can we name the officials who resigned? Because I think that's an important part of this story which I read very differently than you do. You're absolutely right. The person who can fire the head of the CDC is the president who did fire the head of the CDC after this contretemps last night. She has since retained counsel. Her counsel, wouldn't you know, is Mark Zaid and Abbey Lowell.
- [56:06]
A
Yeah.
- [56:07]
D
Resistance, resistance. Lawyers to the stars. Abby Lowell's client list includes Hunter Biden, Tish James, Lisa Cook, and soon apparently John Bolton. So there's something going on here that's beyond a simple personnel dispute. Second, the other CDC officials who resigned. I just want to. I'll mention one. Dimitri Daskalakis. If you Google him, you'll see he's. He's got extraordinary pecs. That's because, you know, he's a great. He's very fit. He's the head of the. I think he's his. He's director of Summit national center for Immunization and Respiratory Illness. He became very famous during the monkeypox outbreak as the White House's main Coordinator, the Biden White House's main coordinator to deal with monkeypox. He is very much on the left. The others, Daniel Jernigan, Jennifer Layden, they are not as, say, politicized as Dr. Dimitri, but they are career CDC officials. They've been in the bureaucracy for decades. And so what some, what the media is reading as a purge may look to others as accountability because the people who have resigned are implicated in the government's handling of the COVID 19 pandemic and the response to that pandemic in 2020 that almost broke this country. So I will just say I am not so sorry to see these people.
- [57:47]
A
Go, okay, can I just read something that where is this that Bobby Kennedy said yesterday? He literally yesterday said the following. I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like. I'm looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges. And I know that's the not how our children are supposed to look. This idea that he, as the leading health official in the United States is promulgating about mitochondrial illness is quackery. This is not a real thing. I mean, I'm sure there's mitochondrial illness. We don't really know what it is. Precisely. We all know mitochondria from reading the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. That's where I know mitochondria from. I guess I didn't go to medical school, but neither did Robert Kennedy Jr. And of course he is, you know, he is doing everything he can to suppress the use of vaccines in the United States as our leading health official. And I was thinking about this. So I'm not going to have a. We can argue about whether or not it's a purge or not. But, you know, you mentioned yesterday, Matt, this interview with my or this piece as told to my father in the free press, and my father lays out the fact that when he was six years old, he got a very bad case of tuberculosis and he was like in bed for six months and there was no treatment for anything. He just had to lay there until he got better. And then that put me in mind of the fact that one of the reasons that the entire world is so skeptical of vaccines and vaccinations is that no one is left alive who remembers what it was like when there were no vaccines and vaccinations and what it was like to be a parent in the 19, you know, until 1956 when Jonas saw came up with the polio vaccine when every Single parent in America lived with the fear that their child might get polio. And millions did. Millions and millions of kids got polio. They're, they're, you know, I'm, you know, we most famous polio sufferer, aside from obviously Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mitch McConnell got childhood polio, walked with a limp for the rest of his life, was one of the lucky ones. You know, Jonas Hawk was the greatest of American heroes because he found this vaccine that effectively cured polio. We eradicated smallpox, measles, which was also a disfiguring and deadly disease. And nobody dies from childhood diseases any longer because of vaccinations. And it's been four generations of this and everybody is forgotten. And so they are now blaming the cure for the diseases that do exist.
- [61:00]
D
I agree with you. But there's another reason that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is in power and that's the COVID vaccine. That's, it's not just people forgot what it was like with, and I am for vaccines.
- [61:14]
A
Yeah.
- [61:15]
D
But the COVID vaccine was sold as an end to Covid and it did not accomplish that goal. And there are questions about its efficacy and its potential side effects for people who are young and so.
- [61:32]
A
Right.
- [61:32]
D
Okay, now again, going back to the cd, this is all about COVID and as you have pointed out many times, the long term consequences of these seismic events, like the global financial crisis, like the Iraq war, like the pandemic, they take years to play out. And I think that's what we're living through. And there's going to be, there's a lot of human damage that's going to happen because of Kennedy's crazier beliefs. But he has running room is my point. Because people remember what 2020 was like and what the CDC was telling us and what Dr. Walensky would get on her megaphone every day. And so now you have to. Social distancing again. Wear your masks again. And eventually people just said, enough.
- [62:22]
A
Okay, so just, just to, just to put a button on this. So part of the issue here was this incredibly indiscriminate way that the society was informed. It had to fight Covid. Right. Schools closed down everywhere. You know, masking, social distancing, all of that, the masking, the social distancing, it turned out were nonsense. This is not the way, it wasn't being transmitted that way. And all of this, maybe at the beginning you could have made an argument that it was worth trying. And what we did know from three months in, because we talked about this here every single day, that was the beginning of the Commentary daily podcast was children were not getting sick from COVID Children did not get Covid. It's the first pandemic in the history of mankind that did not adversely and worse.
- [63:08]
E
Well, they got it. They just didn't suffer as severe.
- [63:12]
D
They're being killed by it.
- [63:14]
A
There were 1/10 of 1% of the.
- [63:16]
E
Deaths from COVID They contracted the virus.
- [63:19]
D
Kids can get it all had it.
- [63:20]
E
It was just like a mild cold for most.
- [63:22]
A
But they got right. No, but right. So 110 of 1% of the deaths in the United States from the beginning of the pandemic through the end of the pandemic were people from the ages of 0 to 18. And nonetheless, the entire thing was directed supposedly to help them, cure them, make sure that they, they didn't make teachers sick, all of that. And there was a wildly indiscriminate thing that happened. And then of course came the vaccine. And it turned out that the vaccine was helpful. It was helpful to people who were at risk. It was helpful to people over 30 who were not. It was, it did affect the efficacy. It was efficacious.
- [64:01]
D
It seems to reduce the lethality of, of it. If you are a. At risk.
- [64:06]
A
Right. And if you were under. But if you were under 18, it.
- [64:10]
D
Does not eradicate an illness.
- [64:12]
A
Right.
- [64:12]
D
So it's more like a flu vaccine than it is the polio vaccine, which you mentioned, or the measles vaccine, Right?
- [64:19]
A
That's right. Fair enough. And it was oversold, maybe, or it was. Or it was all. It was just part of this kind of weird authoritarian. Everybody must do everything in exactly the same way all at once. Then you create scarcities. Then you make it very hard for people, the ones who need it the most, to get it the earliest, for example, because of this bizarre idea that then there needed to be social equity in the distribution of the vaccines and all that. Everything was terrible. And there were many positive cures of what happened. Among them the appointment to run. What is he running? NIH of J. Bhattacharya of Stanford, who was one of the five sane people in the United States to say the way you are handling this is insane. You are directing social resources to people who do not need them, and you are directing them away from people who do. And this is not how we treat pandem. This is not how we treat diseases. And that was a great appointment, and I'm really glad that he has it. Having an enemy and an antagonist and an opponent of vaccines who says, who still believes in the vaccine Autism connection, which does not exist. And all of that is very frightening. And I'm sorry. And maybe these four people are liberals, but that doesn't also mean that they're. And maybe they're being gotten because it's one of those consequences of COVID that you talk about in politics. That's fine. It's not fine. Whatever. I don't care. But, like, I don't, I don't trust that what, what they are doing is for the good of the American people. I do not trust that what Bobby Kennedy, who spent 20 years helping to ruin New York State's economic position with psychotic lawsuits about environmental damage from non existent from companies that were no longer polluting Waterways since the 1980s.
- [66:18]
D
I'm not, I'm not a supporter of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And I disagree with almost all of his positions. But I will say that there is a tendency in the media, especially over the last month, I have noticed any single thing that happens in Trump's Washington is immediately characterized by, in the most alarmist terms, in most negative terms.
- [66:44]
A
Right.
- [66:45]
D
And I have just become accustomed to my. To, to slow down my reaction.
- [66:52]
A
Yes.
- [66:52]
D
And say, you know what? Let's give it a day and let's think what, what are the actual facts? And what I'm saying is when this resignation was. Well, this, the resignation was announced then. Then the doctor said she wasn't resigning. Then Trump, the White House said, well, you're actually fired. And then the four others announced their resignations. I said, okay, everyone's freaking out. Let's see what's going on. And what I noticed in the paper this morning is that clearly there is a Democrat political operation happening here. And the inciting event does not seem to be the autism report, which I am alarmed about. It seems to be about the advisories for who should get the COVID vaccine and the argument earlier this summer over whether pregnant women should get it, and this government now saying pregnant women don't need to get it.
- [67:46]
E
But one of the things that I think the Trump administration could do a little better is I think the reaction is in part because of the chaotic way in which some of the underlings go rogue. In this case, announcing someone had resigned when they hadn't, and then saying they were fired and without word from the top.
- [68:03]
D
And I think especially she's only been on the job for four weeks.
- [68:05]
E
Right. She was just confirmed by the Senate. So the chaotic way in which some, I think, Trump underlings are using their powers might be. I mean, I just, every time I see something like That I think, where was Susie Wiles? Was she on vacation for a day? Like, who was not overseeing the way this thing? Because I think if they'd come out and said, look, as a result of some of our investigations into how this agency handled Covid, we found that these bureaucrats were actually, you know, complicit in X, Y and Z. Like you could do that. You could just have a little press conference, announce that you've. That you're cleaning house for these reasons, and people would go, huh? But that's not how a lot of these things work. I think the Pentagon is another perfect example of that kind of bureaucratic chaos. And I, I hope that they will do better next time. That's just a plea, but I don't think that the overreaction is necessarily entirely partisan in some of these cases, even though it then immediately congeals into, you know, lawsuits that are clearly partisan.
- [68:59]
C
I mean, look, I've been saying what Matt just said for a while about my reaction to each new Trump grenade in the news, but the fact remains, if the Director of Health and Human Services says that he can diagnose mitochondrial illness in children by looking at them, he should go. He doesn't belong anywhere near the levers of power. It's an outrage. It is an absolute outrage.
- [69:39]
A
Okay. With that, we will be back tomorrow. So for Matt, Christina and Abe, I'm John Pod Horowitz. Keep the candle bur.