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Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best expect the worst.
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John Podhoretz
Some preacher pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, January 28, 2025. I'm Jon Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi.
- [01:07]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
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John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:11]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [01:12]
John Podhoretz
And joining us today, our old friend, Washington Free Beacon editor and co host of the Ink Stained Wretches podcast, or co host, of course, on last week. So we had to have Eliana on. That's Chris Starwalt on. For not only equal time purposes, but just to have somebody who doesn't think that the McRib is the most delicious sandwich on Earth. Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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Eliana Johnson
Hi, John.
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John Podhoretz
You don't really think the McRib is the most delicious.
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Eliana Johnson
I am not a fan of the McRib.
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John Podhoretz
Yes, and Chris is. Chris has a thing about the McRib and the McRib. I haven't eaten one in many, many years, but it's disgusting anyway. Okay.
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Eliana Johnson
I ever ate one was when Chris took me and made me do a taste test. But I am. I'm Big Mac all the way.
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John Podhoretz
Okay, the classics. You're a conservative. You don't need any innovations. You don't need fake ribs. You don't need like something that's fake. It's just like pouring barbecue sauce. And I love ribs, mystery meat. And you love real ribs. Okay, so that. Right. And of course, the Big Mac is the perfect. Again, haven't had one in many years, but the perfect sandwich. So now that we've moved off, since your podcast usually begins with two minutes on food, we have just done an homage to Ink stained Wretches, which everybody should subscribe to. And I would say that Donald Trump is doing an homage to Ronald Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981. By firing a bunch of people in the federal government who never expected to be fired. Of course, the Paco strike came. The Paco firings of the air traffic came as a result of an illegal strike. Trump has now fired 12 career prosecutors in the Justice Department who were detailed for or worked for Jack Smith in his prosecution of Trump over the last four years. And this, this has occasioned lead stories. I will just tell you last night, because I was switching around lead stories were it not for the AI Sputnik problem, which we'll get to on the three news networks, MSNBC basically suspended all of its programming and started playing funeral music over the, over the firing of these, of these 12 prosecutors, sort of like the death of Stalin or the death of a leader in a communist country. Gloating on Fox, there was some gloating and chin scratching on a CNN panel featuring two interesting things, one of which was Mondaire Jones, the defeated former Justice Department official, far left Democrat, defeated in his race for the Congress, Margaret Hoover, who is only a Republican because her name is Hoover. And then, interestingly enough, also worrying about the firing of these prosecutors, a Colorado Republican politician named Ken buck, who in 24, who said this is not the way you should handle career prosecutors. And the Justice Department isn't the president's law firm. This is not his law firm. It's there to seek justice. And so he's uncomfortable with this. Ken Buck in 2014 was deemed, or 2013 was deemed too right wing for a Senate race in Colorado and was sort of moved out with a promise of a comfortable congressional seat, having his seat having been gerrymandered out of existence so that the Republicans could run. Cory Gardner, who was a much more moderate figure in a state that was moving rapidly to the purple and now is reasonably blue. But Ken Buck was thought to be kind of like a, not a proto Trump because we didn't have Trump on them, but he was like on the far end of the Tea Party. And he came on CNN last night to say he was, he was discomfited by Justice Department firings. That was the only ideologically interesting moment that I experienced watching the reaction to the firing of the prosecutors. And so does Trump have the obligation to not to say, look, if you spent four years trying to put me in prison and you're working for my Justice Department and we're going to be pursuing aims and ends that comport with my political values, and also you wanted to throw me in jail, go find yourself another job. Is that unreasonable, irrational? I mean, is it just Is it just the naked, raw use of power that's understandable? Or is there. Is it. Is there more to it that deserves, like, just common sense maybe, to say.
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Abe Greenwald
Well, I don't think it's unreasonable or irrational. I am concerned that a lot of new ground is being laid in this partisan arms race. And it's not that Trump even started it. In some ways, he's responding to the lawfare efforts, which are the main part of it. I feel like precedents are being set every. Every day that will, at some point, come back to hurt everybody.
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John Podhoretz
Well, okay, so that's always the problem when you change policies or you do things like this in that way. It's like Mitch McConnell saying to Harry Reid in the Senate in 2013, don't you be getting rid of the filibuster for any reason, because don't you worry if you do this, I'm telling you not to do it, because if you do it, I'm gonna do it like you. You can't expect me. You can't expect Republicans to unilaterally disarm. If you're gonna hand this power to yourself, it is gonna be used against you. And boy, was it used. Boy, did was he not kidding. Like, did this happen in the biggest possible way, in pretty astonishing ways, as a result of this prophetic warning that Harry Reid didn't listen to. So, Abe, you're. You're offering this as a warning for 2029. Democrats win in 2029. Trump has basically said you're allowed to fire people if they disagree with you or if they are. You know, they're not. They're not totally in your camp. Not only political appointees, which we already know, we expect all political appointees have to change. But these are career civil servants.
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Seth Mandel
Well, I think that. And the Republican response might be in this particular case. So the Democrats, you're saying, are going to politicize career prosecutors and the civil service and stuff like that. Like, we've already been there. You know, I think. In other words, I think that, you know, the filibuster was one of these things that was going to really affect anybody, every. Every party going forward, because it's a procedural thing. And I think that Republicans would probably respond that they're not that worried about the blowback for this particular thing, because what they're doing now, what Trump administration is doing now, they see it as a response to the already politicization of these, you know, of the civil service. And therefore, the worst that can be done back to them is for Democrats to return to power and restore the way things were working before Republicans got in. That's my sense of this from them.
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Eliana Johnson
I'm sorry, but the career civil servants are basically all Democrats. Okay? And I think the Republican view is that these institutions are sick. And this seems like to me a pretty gentle, obvious measure. He feels, and Trump is operating on the theory of governance known as the unitary executive, where he believes in strong executive power. There are real drawbacks to that and that almost everything he's done so far can be undone by the next administration. Now, there may be political costs for them to pay if they reinstitute, say, the DEI policies, but I agree with what Abe and Seth has said in that, what's the worst the next administration can do? Hire back Democratic civil servants. Okay. But it seems to me reasonable that Trump feels he cannot trust the left wing civil servants at the Justice Department who work to put him behind bars.
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John Podhoretz
We should put some meat on the bones of what you just said, because taken totally at face value, you've made an assertion that is very broad, which is that, look, all these civil servants are mostly Democrats. We can put meat on these bones. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the people who are employed in the federal government as civil servants, that is, most of the employees in the federal government outside of the military, are overwhelmingly Democratic. And we know that from voting patterns in the places where they live, among other things, and from all kinds of other policy pursuits inside both Republican and Democratic administrations. There was a funny note last week. Glenn Thrush, who was a reporter at the New York Times, said, you know, one of the things that happened last week is that the Justice Department, the Trump administration ended or paused or did something. There was a program at the Justice Department to bring in. To bring in young lawyers who have just graduated from law schools to learn the ropes at the justice to see if they should be career civil servants at the Justice Department. And this is a nonpartisan program, and it's really set now. They accepted their jobs there, and now their jobs are taken away from them. Isn't this terrible? And I'm going to now point to you the fact that we have surveys of the top 50 law schools or something like that, that show that something like 7% of the people in law schools currently, or major law schools currently identify themselves as Republicans or conservatives. Now, that did not used to be the case. This is part and parcel of the issue involving how di at universities and the pursuit of certain types of holistic admissions methods and the employment in admissions offices of people who are literally looking at people to bring them in if they have certain types of values, by which they mean activist values, by which they mean Black Lives Matter values, so that they can get them into their law schools. And so the notion that conservative administration should be helping the liberals to infiltrate, not infiltrate, but to get themselves employed inside and burrow inside the federal government, that's, that's the thing that you're going to see a lot of people in a lot of departments trying to figure out how to stop. It's not just who's there now, but who is recruited to come in.
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Eliana Johnson
And by the way, John Trump campaigned on upending protections for civil servants whom it is very difficult to fire. These people's jobs are protected in such a way that it is virtually impossible to fire them. And the reason, part of the reason that I said with such confidence that these people are mostly Democrats, is that for those of us who live in the D.C. area, northern Virginia, and are surrounded by these people, they're called from the same milieu as the people who work at the nation's major newspapers, which is why it's funny you reference this Glenn Thrush tweet. They're highly educated, you know, liberal. They share the same sensibilities and values. And, you know, my husband works at the State Department as a civil service. As a civil servant, I have a pretty good window into the sort of culture of these bureaucracies. And I would say, apart from their politics, all of the incentives built into these places are towards mediocrity or sub mediocrity. And Trump is right that they need to be upended.
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John Podhoretz
Look, I'm going to tell you a story. I worked for. I worked. Still have an affiliation. I worked for many years at the New York Post. Seth worked at the New York Post. New York Post, a Murdoch paper, right? It's the Murdoch paper. It's so, you know, it's Murdoch paper and it's da, da, da. Okay, so, but at the Post, there was an HR department and personnel department. And in News Corp. In general in New York, Eliana worked at News Corp. In New York, I did.
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Eliana Johnson
In the same building as the Post.
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John Podhoretz
Right. And so, you know, this is the, this is Rupert Murdoch's company. And every week there would be a Lunch and Learn panel. You could go Friday afternoon to go and have the lunch and learn, sponsored by the hr, whatever. And every week it was how to recycle, what to do about Earth Day, how to, you know, how to avoid, you know, how to, how to bring more women into the Workforce. Everything inside Murdoch land that was not explicitly dedicated to the, you know, for furthering of the ideological mission of the op. Op ed page and the editorial page where Seth and I worked was institutionally liberal. Inside News Corp, Inside News America, inside, you know, Fox News, New York, Wall Street Journal. So if it's like that there, imagine what it's like in the federal government, civil service. They also have lunch and learns. They also have sessions where you should. You're going to have an instruct. You're going to have some kind of an indoctrination session that it is mandatory to attend, or a test that they give you on your computer. If you've never taken one of these, this is one of the reasons why the DI attack is going to work with a lot of people in middle management in America who may not be explicitly ideological. Everybody in this world has been told, okay, tomorrow you have to take 45 minutes, sit down at your computer and take this test about your attitudes about women, minorities, the environment, something like that. And you can't stop. The whole way these things are set up, and I'm sure people listening have done this, so you know as well is once you click on the first question, you can't get your computer back. You can't stop it until you go through question 100 and answer it. And then get these like, Johnny, is the blah, blah. And then, you know, Stella comes into his office. Can he say, are you pregnant? You know, or, you know, can he say, are you taking time off? That's illegal. You can't do that. Johnny, don't you dare, you know, like that. Or, you know, you answer these questions. All of these methods of personnel indoctrination have been put in place by these permanent bureaucracies. And they exist, I think, probably more radically. And this is part of the thing that we've heard about the military and the, and the intelligence agencies and stuff like that, is that all of this was then brought into those departments which are literally have the task of trying to protect the United States from foreign invasion, infiltration and the murder of, you know, thousands if not millions of Americans by, by enemies. And they're busy having their racial consciousness checked to make sure that they fit the proper program, as though that is the purpose of working in the federal government. So this is a large step away from the question of whether or not Trump is allowed to fire 12 processes. He probably isn't allowed to fire 12. They will, they will sue. They will win a suit. Andrew McCabe won such a suit. Andrew McCabe was dismissed by the, in the course of the Trump administration, not because Trump hated Andrew McCabe from the Justice Department, but actually as a result of an inspector general report that found that he had perjured himself or he had done. I can't remember what the thing was that he had done or he had misled investigators or something like that. And he sued for back pay and his pension, and he got it. He was fired for cause. There was no question that he was fired for cause. Nonetheless, the civil service protections were so strong that he got millions of dollars back or hundreds of thousands of dollars back.
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Seth Mandel
Well, you know what this, this brings up, by the way, John, the all time great example of this was just a few Years ago in 2021, the CIA put out this ad. It looked like a recruitment ad. And it was like trying to get, you know, young Americans interested in the CIA and make it cool again or something like that. And the script was wild. It was like it had, the video was called Humans of CIA. And you know, there's one employee who, who, who comes on the screen, she goes, I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. And you are supposed to see a cisgender, you're supposed to see yourself in a fellow cisgender bomb who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. Now, I remember at the time, by the way, thinking it's probably better if our CIA agents aren't like, going around, you know, waving their, their medical charts. It's just probably not, you know, what, what you want the spies to be doing. But, but this, this, this was like, you know, this, this was like when Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo did his I am a woman, I am a Muslim, I am the, you know, sort of thing. And it was, and it's exactly this where you, like, you come into a national security program, you're being recruited to, you know, the CIA, to work in the CIA, you know, by people, fellow people who, you know, sort of wear their issues on their sleeve or whatever and, and appeal to millennials and, and I mean, not millennials anymore. I'm a millennial. Right, so we're old now. But, but, you know, this idea that in order to recruit among the young, you had to be like a DEI robot. And, you know, the thing was obviously made fun of far and wide, but it's like, it's not just, it's not just making sure that you check that stuff every six months. It's like, that's the recruiting video that's who here, here's who we're looking for. People who speak like, you know, a progressive campaign aide.
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Abe Greenwald
But those, those efforts to crowbar in, you know, that kind of culture really backfired because everyone, I think, did think it was a joke. But so, so this will be adjudicated, as John says, but that's all. And, you know, and if Trump can't do it, he can't do it. But that's also, to me, part of this partisan arms race. I mean, Biden did things that he knew were unconstitutional and let them be challenged and get shot down, like, you know, student loan forgiveness. It's another, if Trump knows somewhere in his heart or head that this may not really be possible, it's another sort of performative waste, actually. But it's now part of this back and forth of these executives knowing that they are trying to do things that they probably can't do unless, unless they.
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Seth Mandel
He want, unless you can argue, he may want to draw attention to the fact that he can't do this. He may want to, may not be totally performative. He may say, like, look how things are. I can't fire people who think I'm a Russian stooge and who are burrowing into the Justice Department, whatever, to, you know, spread that stuff like that. He may want to say, like, I'm the president and I'm apparently not allowed to fire these people. And that sort of, you know, is a play for public sympathy also, you know.
- [23:27]
John Podhoretz
Well, look, I mean, again, there are 12. He fired 12 people, right? So it may be unjust. And if it's unjust, they will, they will get, you know, doesn't obey the law or something like that. They will get restitution. And either a court will order their reinstatement in some fashion or they will, they will be paid money. They will pay compensation for this. We just go back to the question of whether or not if you knew, if you were in the Obama administration and you knew that there were 12 people who were working in, you know, important prosecutorial positions, who were people who were retailing the idea that Obama, Obama's birth certificate was fake and that he was actually, you know, and he was a Manchurian Candidate and his, you know, he was born in Kenya and his father, his father was on a mission to, you know, impregnate women to deba. Blah, blah, blah. And the Obama people said we need to fire those people because, A, they're crazy and B, I mean, they're, they're, they're retailing an idea about the president. That is wrong and injurious. Would anybody have complained? I mean, yeah, I mean, sure, Glenn Beck would have complained or, you know, Alex Jones would have complained or some. There might have been workplace protection people, people who would have complained, but nobody would have thought that, that nobody on the, who was screaming now would have thought that there was anything wrong with this. I did hear, you know, someone say, well, look, every case that these people were involved in, they had to go to a judge, they had to get a subpoena. You know, they empaneled up a, you know, grand jury. So they're not responsible for the decisions that are being made. But, I mean, common sense says, of course, you don't employ this tiny number of people who are detailed to work for Jack Smith, like, go find another job. How can you even, how can you even stay and work for Trump if you think that he's a felon who should have gone to jail? What's the matter with you? You're not allowed to go in there and, and, and oppose the president's agenda. That's not, that's not that you don't. Civil service protection doesn't allow you to do that. You're just supposed to perform your job without fear of favor. Well, you've already, so you better get out of there anyway.
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Eliana Johnson
I think the larger point, too, is that this is, this is an issue that Trump campaigned on, which was reforming the way that civil service protections work. And just as you guys have talked about how much more serious and careful many of his executive orders have been, by contrast to, say, the travel ban of his first administration, he should approach this in a similar. If he's serious about it, which he should be. It's an important issue. He should approach this in a similarly careful, legal, meticulous way because it is worthy of doing so.
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John Podhoretz
Now, people tried to dovetail this with the fact that on Friday night, he fired a bunch of inspectors general. These are the people who do internal investigations at, in, in, in cabinet departments to determine whether or not the people in the department are, are obeying the law. And there was another, like, outbreak of hysteria about this on the, on the left. And it is the case that during the Trump administration, actually the inspector general of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, found that officials inside the Justice Department, including the famous Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, had behaved inappropriately and in violation of 10,000 different Justice Department internal rules, doing what they were doing and saying what they were saying and pursuing, again, pursuing the person who was the chief Executive of the United States as they were pursuing the chief executive of the United States. Nonetheless, they fired these inspectors general. And you would have thought that this was, you know, Zenoviev lining everybody up and having them shot or sent to the gulag. Again, this is. These are. This is a sensitive position. And you don't. The clear concern, and maybe it's paranoia about the deep state or maybe it's not, is that you need to make sure that the people who are doing these internal investigations inside these departments and have the power to issue these reports that can then power investigations, congressional investigations, or trigger legal action, trigger, you know, trigger a necessity for the Justice Department to prosecute, aren't looking to destroy your administration from within. I mean, again, common sense says you can't just simply take it as a given that people, a lot of whom were installed by the liberal establishment themselves, aren't going to use the powers that they have inside to derail the cabinet departments in pursuit of the mission that the President has put them on. And people don't get these jobs for life. Nobody is tenured for life. That's the whole point. Like, this is politics. This is Washington. Like, nobody should think that they're. I understand people get mortgages and they want to stay and they need their jobs and all of that, but, like, nothing is supposed to be permanent. And that's what Elian's talking about. About the job protections. Like, yeah. I mean, you want people with institutional knowledge and memory, and if you have somebody who's, like, really good at, I don't know, handling personnel requests in the Department of Agriculture who is a liberal, that person should probably stay because they're good at that and they can't really muck anything up.
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Seth Mandel
The guy who knows how to. Or the gal who knows how to fix the copy machine.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, well, we don't have machines anymore. You are. You are. That is very embarrassing. Who are you? What is this, Dunder Mifflin? There is no copy machine. No one has a copy machine.
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Seth Mandel
We ran. We ran. We ran on copy machines. What do you mean? At the Post.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, I know, but that was. You left the Post like, Like a decade. You are. I'm just saying Xerox doesn't even exist anymore.
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Seth Mandel
John, John, you're also. You're not returning my faxes, by the way. I just.
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John Podhoretz
Thank you very much. Okay. Anyway, I'm just like, these are commonsensical things that everybody. That liberals are losing their cookies over, and they're crazy. Like, nobody cares. And if they cared, they care. On our Side, not on their side. People who actually care about who the inspector general is right now are people who want the deep state to be destroyed. They're not like, oh, my God, this is really, you know what? I voted for Trump against my better judgment. But now that I've heard that they're firing the inspector general at the Commerce Department, I am going to work for the Democrat running in my district into 2026.
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Abe Greenwald
But liberals are losing their cookies over this. Not, not in isolation because it's a, they're losing their cookies because it's a piece of this flurry of bold activity that the Trump administration has just taken off with, you know, right away. So they see it all as this frightening tectonic change.
- [31:15]
John Podhoretz
They're right. They're right to. It is a frightening tectonic change. But the question is, is it fascist or is it a rebalancing of American politics where it was accepted in a weird way by everybody on both sides that, look, this is what government is like. People go into government cuz they're, they're more likely to be liberal than conservative. And you know what people? Reagan succeeded while he had a hostile, and George W. Bush had a good first term even though he had a hostile. So, yeah, you have one arm tied behind your back, but you know what a good president can get, can, can make his will known and a good civil servant will do what he's supposed to do, and everybody somehow works it out. And the Trump people are kind of saying, well, why do we have to have one arm tied behind our back? Right?
- [32:02]
Seth Mandel
I mean, this is not, that's the thing. It's not like the media bias question. Right? Like, the media bias is like Republicans win the presidency, win presidential elections despite the clear media bias. But it's different when these people work for you or for your administration. Right? You, you, if you are the executive, you should have some say over who works for you. You know, it's the, it's the, the cook wanting to, you know, do the grocery shopping too sort of thing. I mean, so, you know, I think that the left is sort of taken for granted. The idea that since Republicans can win despite the roadblocks that we've set up, therefore the roadblocks are fair to everybody.
- [32:46]
John Podhoretz
Right?
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Seth Mandel
And, you know, Trump comes in and says, well, why, why? I don't want a roadblock here. I want to move this boulder. And there's, you know, that it's a reasonable thing. And their response is always like, well, the republic has stood anyway despite this roadblock. And it's like, you know, all right, so, you know, so clear the land. The republic will stand without the roadblock, too, like this. The idea of, in other words, the idea of ideological parity is not going to be reached in the civil service or in the federal government, but steps in that direction are viewed as such a disruption that it points up the fact that it really is a problem in the first place, because to hire 12 conservatives would make a big difference and feel like an earthquake.
- [33:37]
John Podhoretz
So a lot of us had the, you know, the scales fall from our eyes or whatever in 2017, 2018, by the behavior again, of the sort of the common workings of the federal government, where you would say, as everybody, you know, most people are. They're good. They're. They're good people. They just want to help the country and they're, you know, doing their jobs. They're doing their jobs well. And there are all kinds of protections and fail safes to make sure that people can't just, you know, abuse the system. And I think the big one here, and this, this is a weird thing because it's a strange animal, was the discovery. And the thing that like, changed my mind on some of this stuff and Eli Lake's mind on some of this stuff and others, was the discovery that we. We kept being told that the FISA court, right, which approves investigations into, you know, can be used to approve secret subpoenas into people's behavior based on the possibility that they are compromising American intelligence. And it was like the FISA court is. It's sacrosanct and they would never do anything. They, the, the level that you have to reach in order to get a FISA court ruling that says it's okay to do a secret, you know, wiretap or something like that there you jump through hoops and they are. You need to. Probable cause has to be the standard, and that's the standard. And then we discovered that they were just handing these things out left and right and that they used a single newspaper clipping to justify the harassment of this guy, Carter Page, for two years, the sole piece of evidence in the fisa. The filing to get this wiretap on him was a news. Was sort of like it said, well, this is the story, and the story was a newspaper article. There was nothing else. And a phone call or someone, he had a meeting, he had a drink with somebody or something like that, and that was it. And so even though this doesn't really jibe with the civil service, protect, whatever, but like, this notion that you you, you give the federal government or you give the workings of the way things go, the benefit of the doubt that everybody is a professional and doing professional things and not, and not skirting the boundaries of what's fair. That's over with like on the right, like people just don't. From me to, you know, to, to again, to Alex Jones, like people don't believe that anymore really. Right. Elliott, wouldn't you say that sort of, like this is now a, sort of, this is now conventional wisdom if you're not a liberal?
- [36:32]
Eliana Johnson
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [36:35]
John Podhoretz
And in the 70s it would all been. The shoe would have been on the other foot in the 70s it would have been that no lib. No liberal, self respecting liberal believed that federal government officials weren't covering up and weren't sort of part of a conspiracy to cover up the fraud at the Pentagon or, you know, or the fact that we were losing the war in Vietnam or 10,000 other things.
- [37:01]
Eliana Johnson
It's of a piece with what we were talking about with civil servants. And that goes to, I think, the right suspicion of institutions, which extends from civil servants in the federal government and which means the major institutions of the federal government, which is the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department, the FBI, the institutions of the mainstream media, America's colleges and universities. There's nothing specific, I think, to the federal government government, but it's the feeling that there is decay and rot and corruption in the major institutions of American life. I would put America's major financial institutions in there that lost the trust of Americans during the financial crisis and, and Trump is the representative of that Tribune that wants to wage war on all of these.
- [38:05]
Abe Greenwald
So, you know, I, I share the disillusionment we're talking about here for all the obvious reasons. And you know, there's too much overwhelming evidence not to be disillusioned. I mean, it's overwhelming evidence to make one disillusioned. At the same time, it's a scary place to be because as Noah Rothman would say, what's the limiting principle? It is, it is. The line between the disenchantment and nihilism is very blurry.
- [38:44]
John Podhoretz
Well, look, in 2009 we had a crisis, right? We had the financial crisis and the federal government. This is sort of where you started having things like Barack Obama bringing in the auto industry executives and saying, you're going to do X, Y and Z or I'm going to attack you and try to destroy you. Using my immense power as a rhetorician and the fact that I won this landslide, first landslide and, you know, however long it was, 25 years to, you know, basically destroy your reputations and make it so, you're going to, you are going to bow to my will, right? You're going to change the way you pay your debts, right? There's famous people took loans. There are these ways loans are paid back. Someone is in first position, someone's in second position. And basically he said, you're not paying them back in this order. You're going to pay the UAW whatever the UAW wants, and that's how it's going to work. And you better do this right. So right there, we had the world of governments using a crisis to advance its interests, to advance the interests of its supporters righteously, in its view. Because if Barack Obama did think he was somehow saving the auto industry or something by doing this or saving something or other, but from there onward, we have a world in which every political leader believes that they have a kind of Runway to do things that, at least from Watergate onward, no, no other political leader would dare have attempted for fear of looking like they were trying to be a dictator. So that's like three decades and maybe longer. Like, there are some things that nobody would ever have done. And so, you know, we now come to this point where the limiting principle is, they'll do it to us. We have four years to do it to them. We have four years to rebalance because they could come back into power. Sometimes it's two years, right? It's like, well, you know, the midterm elections are going to be terrible, so we better do everything in the first six months and get it in, because that's the limit of our, of our ability to do things. And maybe what we should do is do a lot of things that might be unconstitutional, but they'll have to work their way through the courts and we'll at least get credit for having tried. And I think that's very much what is on the Trump people's mind, is we want to get these ideas before the public. And birthright citizenship, the way we would get rid of civil servants, all of that, we may not prevail. Biden didn't prevail on student loans. Biden didn't prevail on 10,000 other things. But at least we will have put it in the, put it on the table so that the world may change and we'll get credit with our voters for having fought and for the issues that we're about to have.
- [41:44]
Seth Mandel
A perfect example of this, right? Because RFK confirmation hearings to, to become HHS secretary, are going to. You know, we had this story yesterday in Politico that according to Democrats who were in the room, RFK is open to seizing medical patents on behalf of the federal government and distributing, like the Salt Bay guy, just, you know, sprinkling patents around the private sector and let everybody just sort of go at it. And, you know, there was a time where conservatives would like, you can't seize the intellectual property of like, no one's going to make a vaccine anymore. No one's. And now you have conservatives who say, well, maybe that's a good thing, you know.
- [42:32]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [42:33]
Seth Mandel
In other words, and so that, you know, the nihilism versus anti institutionalism line that Abe talks about is going to be front and center within the Republican Party because whatever vote, however the vote comes down on rfk, it's going to be very close. But he's a living example of, you know, somebody who seems to be. Have an almost, you know, Leninist glee for burning down the system. And when you respond to that by saying a lot of this stuff is crazy, the whole system doesn't need to be burned to the ground, the response is, well, you know, it's better than, it's better than we had Covid and this, it's better than when the pharmaceutical companies. And so now you have a larger share of the conservative movement saying things like big pharma this, big pharma that, big business this, big business that. And that's a very. And right, that's populism. And it's. And it's. And so we're going to see it, we're going to kind of see that tested, I think immediately, because that's the choice facing some of the administration here, is that they may actually get people in position who want to just pull structures down.
- [43:46]
John Podhoretz
But that gets to Abe's point about the lack of a limiting principle. The limiting principle for the right has always been its ideological hewing to certain ideological standards. Right? Which is when, when, you know, all things being equal, less government, all things being equal, less regulation, and all things being equal, you let people alone, particularly in business, to do what they have to do. And if they, if there are all kinds of protections in place for the environment and the workplace and things like that, that a lot of libertarians don't like either, but that basically, all things being equal, you, you, you stand on the side of less oversight, less, you know, big the hand of government being able to guide things. And populism is anti ideological. So it is if, if this is what's going to help people, then, yeah, let the government will use the lever of government. If it's not going to help people the way we think they should be helped, we'll destroy the lever of government. You don't like wind. You think wind farms are imposition, will destroy the wind farms. But if the wind farms benefit, if for some reason poor, you know, certain people in a state that went 70% for Trump are making wind farms, then you like wind farms. There's no, the limiting principle is what you say is best for the people who voted for you and doesn't screw them and doesn't help people abroad and that kind of thing. And that's not really a limiting principle because it's not a principle. It's the opposite of a principle. It's a, it's an emotion or it's a kind of prejudice or I don't know what you would call inclination, but it's not. You know what, I'd really love it if we could have 10 billion windmills making energy, but it's A, too expensive and B, you know, we can't make private industry make windmills. That's not what America is. But if you live in, if you live in Brazil, you could, if you live in, you know, if you live in a banana republic, you can, and that's, that's the, and look, that's where the banana republic fear comes in on, on our side is they're, they're not, they are working in a certain sense without constraint. Or at least what they're saying is we're not limited by what liberals thought were the limiting principles, but, or conservatives, they're not really limited by what conservatives saw were the limiting principles.
- [46:24]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, I, I would say that, you know, RFK Jr. S significant role in our politics suddenly is itself a significant warning sign about this problem, about, about this, you know, sticky dynamic of being disillusioned with everything. That's that, that's how, that's how you get him. When, when, when, when Trump first, you know, announced him as a pick, everyone was like, what? What? Wow. And now it's now it's, now it's a fact on the ground. You know.
- [47:07]
John Podhoretz
Can I bounce totally crazy into a different area?
- [47:11]
Abe Greenwald
Sure.
- [47:14]
John Podhoretz
So there was an amazing quote last night, and this goes to the cultural, the culture fight in the United States and how the high mark people in the popular culture are not getting it and are like, going down. And that is a quote that I saw yesterday from. So in two weeks, the first Marvel movie in a couple of years is coming out, and it's Captain Brave New World. And in Captain America, Brave New World, as if you have seen all the other. Captain America was played for many years by Chris Evans. And he decided he didn't want to play it anymore after. After the big endgame thing. And they decided, apparently, something in the comics to make. Can't remember the name of his Falcon, who is a black superhero who has a. He's not really. He has wings. He can fly around on these wings. He becomes Captain America and he's a black guy. And they made a Marvel series called Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which was a total mess because it was about a pandemic and they had to recut it. And it was made after Black Lives Matter. So the idea was, how do you deal with Captain America in a world of Black Lives Matter? And it turned out that there was a black Captain America and he was living in Baltimore and he was 80 years old, and he was mistreated by the federal government. He was living in a row house in Baltimore. Very angry. Was an angry old African American Captain America that because he was black, the government didn't want to use, which of course is, you know, I mean, just follow the logic. It was a terrible show anyway. So Anthony Mackie, his character Sam, is now going to be Captain America and he's black. And clearly that. That is going to raise issues within the world because apparently the villain is Harrison Ford and he's the President, but he's also a character. He's also a villain called the Red Hulk. And if you see it in the trailers, Harrison Ford says, you're not Steve Rogers, who is the name of Captain America, real name, and the idea being obviously that he's not Steve Rogers because he's black. And Anthony Mackie, the star of this new movie, who is in the other movies and is really not a very good actor in my opinion, having seen him on stage. And I think he was pretty wooden in Captain America in the Marvel movies Yesterday, had made an appearance at whatever in preparation for the giant publicity push for this movie, which comes out on Valentine's Day. And here is what Anthony Mackie said. Captain America represents a lot of different things. And I don't think the term America should be one of those representations. It's about a man who keeps his word, who has honored dignity and integrity. So let's follow this. The guy who was playing Captain America says Captain America doesn't represent America. The character's name is Captain America, but America shouldn't be one of the representations.
- [50:46]
Seth Mandel
So they just. They just need to spell captain with a K and America, you know, with a K. Yeah.
- [50:54]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so look, Anthony Mackie is an actor. Actors are stupid. A lot of actors are stupid. As. As. As Zero Mostel says in When Gene Wilder suggests to him that they should blow. When Zero Mostel says, in order to end, to get out of the jammies and the producers, because he's made his flop, has become a hit, and he can't possibly pay back his investors, that he wants to blow up the theater. And Gene Wilder says, you can't blow up the theater. There are actors in there. And Zero Mostel says, oh, really? Have you ever eaten with any of them? They're people. There are actors in there. They're people. Oh, yeah. Have you ever eaten with one of them? Anyway, that's Anthony Mackie. But it's very suggestive to me that this guy who was promoting a $350 million movie made by the Disney Corporation, which is desperately trying to get itself right with America after these three years of having gone psychotically woke, has now just said that his character, Captain America, who is a hero and is supposed to be wonderful, doesn't represent America. And that could only be because America's not wonderful. America's. He's wonderful. His character is wonderful. America is awful. So anybody have any thoughts about this? Because I could say Anthony Mackie is stupider. I could say, gee, Hollywood is in real trouble here. Like, they're really now being asked to chew. They're really now saying openly that America is evil to Americans.
- [52:42]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah. They will be the last to get the memo. They're still stuck in 2020. I'm sort of reminded of when Colin Kaepernick began his kneeling and his bending his knee and his antics. And the defense was that he. How much he loved America, and that's why he was protesting and doing whatever he was doing. And then a few years later, it was like Fourth of July or something. I. I'm getting the story wrong, but he said something overtly about how America's a terrible country.
- [53:20]
John Podhoretz
Right?
- [53:20]
Abe Greenwald
And it was like, oh, I thought he. I thought. I thought he was doing all this because he loved it.
- [53:25]
John Podhoretz
Well, protest is the highest form of patriotism, as you know. But I mean, I. There's something very. There's something very crystallizing about this very specific thing. But because the idea is don't Captain America, a character who represents America, represents America because he's good. And therefore, the. The clear imputation is that America is bad.
- [53:52]
Abe Greenwald
But the only Thing that'll change Hollywood is if the woke products keep losing money. I mean, that's, you know.
- [53:59]
Seth Mandel
Well, they'll have, they, they, they are. They have Chinese safety net. China doesn't mind bankrolling films that say Captain America is bad because he's America.
- [54:11]
Eliana Johnson
Don't you think that they would just see that the failure of their world products as an indictment of America? Well, that's a perfect example that they don't even like our virtuous products, I guess. John, I'm actually surprised that you're surprised because of course they believe these things. And you guys just yesterday on the podcast were talking about Obama's foreign policy views and his belief that America the bully should apologize for.
- [54:45]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [54:46]
Eliana Johnson
Who it is. And he is, you know, he. I believe he spent a year in college out in California at Occidental. Right?
- [54:55]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, he spent a year, went to Columbia and. And so you think he got infected with Hollywood politics?
- [55:03]
Eliana Johnson
Well, no, he is like the Persona. He is the embodimen of all of these views and is, you know, rumored to be flitting about with Jennifer Aniston.
- [55:16]
John Podhoretz
Oh, we got it in.
- [55:18]
Eliana Johnson
Right?
- [55:19]
John Podhoretz
We got it in.
- [55:20]
Eliana Johnson
But of course they think this and it is why their products have been.
- [55:24]
John Podhoretz
Jennifer Aniston is way too smart to go. Jennifer Aniston has $50 million a year in endorsements and makes a lot of money. And she is too smart to go out and say, I don't like America, trust me. Because she's never done it and she would never do it, no matter whether she hues to Obama's foreign policy or not.
- [55:45]
Eliana Johnson
Okay?
- [55:45]
John Podhoretz
But I have a feeling sometimes there is a. There is a moment. I'm not surprised, per se. This is Anthony Mackie's moment to become a gigantic star. Okay? He's second banana in Marvel movies. And I'm telling you right now, he's not a very. He's a very wooden actor. So this is his moment where he can break out and start making $20 million on his own if the movie goes very big and make passion projects and do stuff like that. And he has just made him. He has just taken himself without even knowing it, I think, and made himself a gigantic object of controversy. This is not going away. This quote is too perfect. It's not like he said the Hulk shouldn't represent America. He said Captain America doesn't represent America. Captain America was created in the course of World War II to be a character to represent America in America as a hero of World War II in America. I mean, I'M not a comic book person. I don't know the real history. I may have bollocks up the history, but in the Marvel movie, in its own. In the Marvel universe, in its own terms, the original Captain America is a creation of the federal government who becomes, you know, the biggest hero in the Marvel universe because he represents the values of, you know, fair play and good values and da, da, da, da, da. And he is America personified. And Anthony Mackie saying, I am good and therefore I can't personify America. I don't know what I personify ta Nehisi Coates or I personify the 1619 project or something like that. So you don't get a quote as good. As good as this. This often. And of course, this comes a week after the Oscars took a movie that literally no one has seen called the Apprentice.
- [57:44]
Abe Greenwald
Wait, John. I have to say, because while we were talking about this, I felt like I had a sense of deja vu. And I figured out why in 2021, DC Comics announced that it would be changing Superman's iconic motto from Truth, justice and the American way to Truth, justice and a better tomorrow. So this is not new. Taking the pro American core out of American superheroes is. Is. Is already out there. Has been out there.
- [58:24]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so DC Comics is a public. Is a comic book publishing company, right, that publishes comic books. And then there's dc, which is owned by Warner, I believe, owned by Warner Brothers, and is a whole, you know, universe. And they're about to release a big Superman movie that they spent $300 million on. And the guy who made it, James Gunn, isn't going to go around anywhere and say he doesn't think that Superman stands for the American way because his entire life and career is on the line here. And anti. And you think that right now Bob Iger hasn't convened a crisis management meeting to deal with the question of how on earth they're going to get this movie out without every single article saying that the guy who plays Captain America doesn't like America. I mean, I'm sorry, but, like, that's. Read the room. This country voted. 50% of the country voted for Donald Trump, you know, and they're not going to like. And a lot of them don't like America either, by the way, but they don't like it not because of Captain America. They don't like it because of Anthony Mackie. What they don't like about America is people like Anthony Mackie, not America. And so, I don't know.
- [59:51]
Seth Mandel
I have the Solution. The superhero. Do superhero. Captain Gulf of Mexico.
- [60:04]
John Podhoretz
I, you know, look, the next two years are going to be very interesting. We have the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the summer on January, July 4, 2026. Donald Trump is going to make a huge deal out of this. There is going to be a huge effort to wage an ideological war against the 1619 Project ideology on the right in the form of the celebration of the Declaration of Independence and the creation of America. And it is going to be a huge temptation for the left to say, you see, they don't talk about the problems, they don't talk about this. And then the counter response is going to be just admit it, you guys hate this country. You hate this country. You don't want to celebrate this country? Fine, let's go to the American people and see who they like better. Do they like America and living in a country that they think is the freest and strongest and wealthiest on earth. Maybe they're angry because they think their, their own pocketbooks aren't going so well, but where else would they want to live? And you guys just hate this country. It's like a gimme. It's a huge political opportunity. And right now all the evidence and all the indications are that while major American industrialists understand the threat that is posed to them by this new Trump world order and they're trying to figure out how to maneuver their way around it, I don't know, like the culture is, doesn't know it at all. I think they're scared. They're scared. They're scared on the universities, they're scared of the law firms, they're scared if they're civil servants, they're scared of what's going to be done to them. But the possibility of them walking just, they, they figured out how not to walk into these Buzz saws from 2017 to 2021 or to set up other pathways for them to express their feelings here. And now they're just going to walk into buzz saws. Like, did Anthony Mackie have to say this? Could have said, I love this movie. It's really great. You know, it was great to work with Harrison Ford. What an icon. The man is an icon, let's face it. And you know, the Marvel is the best. And people just go see Captain, you know. No, he had to decide that he was going to parorate. And I was just going to say that the Oscars nominated so this movie the Apprentice, which nobody wanted to distribute because they knew that There was no audience for it because the audience interested in Trump wouldn't go see it because it's hostile to Trump, this biopic of early Trump and Roy Cohn, and that people who hate Trump wouldn't want to go see it because they don't want to watch Trump. Even when they hate Trump, they would rather, like, avoid thinking about him. And so it was barely released and then the Oscar nominations come out. And Sebastian Stan, ironically, the co. Star of Anthony Mackie and Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney plus, and Jeremy Strong. Sebastian Stan playing Donald Trump, Jeremy Strong playing Roy Cohn. Both are nominated for Oscars for a movie that nobody, literally nobody has seen. Gee, I wonder why. So it's really. They're just. Hollywood is showing that they're not giving in to Trump by wasting a nomination on Sebastian Stan that they could have given to Daniel Craig for bravely playing William Burroughs in a explicitly gay movie called Queer. So important was it to Hollywood to get this out about Trump that they didn't nominate Daniel Craig for his bravery in representing, you know, gay, gay America. So I don't know what to say. I've taken this totally in a. In a weird direction, and I've been.
- [64:01]
Eliana Johnson
Waiting for you to mention Amelia Perez.
- [64:04]
John Podhoretz
I already talked about Amelia Perez. Amelia Perez isn't set in America. So that's just. What if El Chapo were trans? That's all Amelia Perez is. You know, what if El Chapo were trans? I think I said this on the podcast before, but if Amelia. If El Chapo, I could have said it on glop. I don't do too many podcasts. I don't remember. But if Amelia Perez, if, If El Chapo could just have a sex change operation, he would become a social justice warrior. That's why we need to have access to gender reassignment surgery, so that psychopathic world monsters can become women and therefore in. Inhere in themselves, the values of cooperation and love and support, that, that really are the. Are the. Are the things that toxic, toxic masculinity makes all men into El Chapo.
- [64:56]
Seth Mandel
And that is the real American way.
- [64:59]
John Podhoretz
But it's not set in America. So I just want to say America plays no role in Amelia Perez. All right, I apologize for having gone totally off the rails here. I just realized that I had wanted to talk about it and forgot to mention it. So our, I guess our dis recommends is don't go. Don't go buying tickets for Captain America. That should be. That should be. But I've already done it. So my son wants to see it. He wants to see it opening weekend. So I've already bought tickets for it. So I don't know. You see, that's where, that's where they get you.
- [65:34]
Eliana Johnson
Should I do my recommends?
- [65:36]
John Podhoretz
Do your recommends.
- [65:38]
Eliana Johnson
Okay. It is sort of the polar opposite of your dis. Recommends. My recommends is I've just finished the book thank youk for your Service by David Finkel, which came highly recommended by my dad. Finkel is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who was on the ground in Iraq during the surge. And that's the subject of the precursor to thank you for your service. But thank you for your service follows several soldiers when they come home, and it is phenomenal and takes you back to that time and the costs of that war. And I highly recommend it.
- [66:24]
John Podhoretz
So that is thank you for your service by David David Finkel. Eliana Johnson, editor of the Free Beacon, the most entertaining serious investigative news site on the web, which has posted today a job opening for Doug Emhoff's secretary as he goes to work for Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher. And you know, who knows, if you work with or around Doug Emhoff, you might, you know, you might get a bun in the oven as your Christmas bonus.
- [66:58]
Eliana Johnson
Just might happen.
- [66:59]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, it just might happen. Anyway, we don't have to be pious about Dagatmoff, right?
- [67:05]
Eliana Johnson
Not if you're a Free Beacon reader.
- [67:08]
John Podhoretz
My wife taught me to be a better Jew with her brisket.
- [67:11]
Eliana Johnson
Yeah, there are some. Some interesting qualifications requirements for this job by the pieces by our humorist and Andrew Stiles.
- [67:19]
John Podhoretz
Andrew Stiles, one of the signature talents of the last 10 years in the funding department. So thank you for being with us Inkstain wretches. Every Friday, go to subscribe and listen and discover what is going wrong and what's going right in the American news media. Only really, really what's going wrong and not that much about what's going right. Despite, despite our. Our dear friend Starfish Walt's desire to find merit in the mainstream media. It's just increasingly difficult, let's face it. Anyway, thank you again. Thank you, Seth and Abe. I'm John Pod Horitz. Keep the candle burning.