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- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best Expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of.
- [00:14]
Jon Podhoretz
Thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect.
- [00:21]
Christine Rosen
The worst Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
Jon Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, January 3, 2025. Yes. Time to write 2025 on those checks that you don't write anymore. And when was the last time anybody has written a physical check? Have you guys written, do you guys write physical checks? Christine, our Luddite, is still writing physical checks. I really don't think. I do, too.
- [00:48]
Matthew Continetti
We still write physical checks sometimes.
- [00:50]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay, well, you know, so we have, we have two, we have religious traditionalists and we have, we have sociological traditionalists writing checks. And the rest of us are just.
- [00:59]
Christine Rosen
I occasionally receive traditional checks.
- [01:03]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, but those you don't have to take to the bank anymore because you just take a picture on your phone and deposit them through. You do mobile check deposit. Well, I will show you how when you, I don't want to know.
- [01:13]
Matthew Continetti
Wait till, wait till you hear how expensive a stamp is, guys.
- [01:17]
Jon Podhoretz
I know it's not going to believe it, right? Or something like that. Here's a hilarious quick story. And then we show you. We, we went on vacation in Italy, and there was this restaurant we were at in Milan, and it said, write a postcard to your, you know, home with from our restaurant, you know, the picture of the restaurant, and we'll mail it for you. So my wife was like, okay, I'm going to write a postcard to my friend Molly. She wrote it down, wrote the postcard down. And we didn't read the fine print because the idea was they'll mail it for you, but you have to buy the stamp from them for the postcard. So the stamp for the postcard from Italy was €7, which is $7.25 for one stamp to put on a postcard to mail from the very fine Lubar restaurant in Milan to the United States. So we forbore. And either my wife brought the postcard home and we'll mail it from here or isn't going to mail it at all. But the mail, mail is just, it.
- [02:18]
Matthew Continetti
Would get there faster from Italy, from your wife bringing it home by hand, no doubt.
- [02:24]
Jon Podhoretz
Anyway, I'm Jon Bodhoritz, the editor of Commentary. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [02:30]
Abe Greenwald
Hi.
- [02:30]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [02:31]
Jon Podhoretz
Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [02:34]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [02:35]
Jon Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [02:38]
Matthew Continetti
Hi, John.
- [02:39]
Jon Podhoretz
And Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continetti. Hi, Matt.
- [02:42]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John. And I'm happy to know that you were visiting Italy over the break because I was unaware of that until now. And I had just thought that you were suffering from terrible insomnia when you were sending text messages and emails at 4:00 in the morning throughout our holiday.
- [02:59]
Jon Podhoretz
That is, there you go. That is, that is, that is correct. I, I, we, it was a wonderful vacation. This will come up later. I'm just Spoiler alert. I will be discussing this more later on the podcast. Right now we, I guess should talk about the complicating factors in the narrative that was emerging yesterday about the two incidents. The, the absolutely horrific hundred casualty event in New Orleans with the car ramming and the explosion of the cybertruck outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. So this, the second one, appears to be a genuinely personal story about a suicide effort being made by this gentleman whose wife had just dumped him and why he was carrying explosives on the truck when some of that, some of that is still not clear. It may never be clear. The story about Sham Jabbar, the, the New Orleans driver. Matt, I want to bring this up because the efforts to kind of fit this into our conversation in 2025 have been eluding the commentariat because first, of course, Trump said, well, the truck came over the border. This guy came over the border. This is a border issue. And he's of course an American citizen, A veteran, a 10 year veteran, apparently radicalized, not clear when or how long. And so it's not a border story, it's not an immigration story. It is a domestic terrorism or homegrown terrorism story. And your column this morning in the Washington Free Beacon, I think is a useful way of framing this in a larger context, which is that it's not that we've taken our eye off the ball on the border, which we may have, or that we've taken our eye off of the, the threat of domestic terrorism, which maybe we haven't, but that we have taken the eye off the ball of the flag that was hanging from Jabbar's truck, which was an ISIS flag, and that we contented ourselves 10 years ago with the idea that we had destroyed ISIS and that ISIS was no longer a factor either in global politics and Middle Eastern politics or indeed in American politics, if it ever was. And that appears to have been an illusion.
- [05:41]
Abe Greenwald
Absolutely. You know, I think the very label homegrown terrorist is a misnomer, especially when you find that the terrorist who committed the atrocity on Bourbon street had pledged fealty to the Islamic State, to the caliphate, and he had the black Flag of ISIS in the truck that he used as a weapon of mass murder. So what does homegrown mean in this context? He. He believed himself to be part of a global jihadist movement. And this movement still exists. And it has, I think, grown in intensity in recent years. That you can see the attacks on the Christmas market just last month in Germany. You can see the devastating attack in the mall in Russia last spring. You can look at what's happening in Africa, whether it is Western Africa or sub Saharan Africa, the growth of radical Islam. And then we look at what's happening in Syria and Iraq as well, where the fall of Assad has created complications on the ground that may lead to the revival of the Islamic State. So this ideology, I think, is persistent. And I, in fact, believe, believe that it's strong and growing now. And that raises the question, why? And I believe that even a virtual caliphate like ISIS rests on a material infrastructure. You need hideouts, you need bases, you need weapons caches, you need networks. And then, of course, the networks have nodes which include the membership. And it is a fact, a sad fact, that even while our ally Israel is showing how you deal with terrorist movements and ideologies, America has been very distracted, complacent about this ideology. And I just look at what the real wellspring, I believe, of the recent growth in the Islamic State was our retreat from Afghanistan and everything that Biden promised when we retreated from Afghanistan. He believed that we would have eyes into Afghanistan, we would have intelligence capabilities. He said that we would have an over the horizon strike capability. He said that we would continue to do everything to support Afghan women and girls. None of that was true. It was Frank McKenzie, the retired CENTCOM commander, who last year said, we have no visibility into what's happening in Afghanistan and we have no ability to really, other than the occasional drone strike, do much about it. And what we've found is that isis, k. Isis, its current incarnation, is incredibly strong there in Afghanistan. It's actually fighting the Taliban, and then it's also fighting the Pakistani government. And of course there's the Pakistani Taliban, which is fighting everybody. It's that type of environment that is leading to the growth in the ideology, the persistence of it. And then just finally, you know, President Trump has a big decision to make early on in his tenure, in his second term, he has long believed that we should just pull out all of our forces from Syria. But those forces are there to be boots on the ground in order to combat isis. And let's not forget the reason ISIS emerged in the first place was Barack Obama's withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. And Obama reluctantly went back in to Syria and Iraq to initiate a counter ISIS campaign that was kind of typically Obama and kind of Obama and kind of desultory and ineffective. But then Trump, when he came into his first term, he intensified that campaign righteously and ISIS was suppressed. To remove our troops from Syria now and to deny ourselves another means of combating ISIS would only lead to the further growth of the ideology and more attacks like the one that we saw.
- [09:52]
Jon Podhoretz
Can I just echo. There's always this question about the relative risk versus the reward. The whole point about Afghanistan was not only that it was this disaster with all of these follow on consequences, but that, but that the Biden pull out from Afghanistan was nonsensical as a matter of geopolitics because the risk, as we learned, was not worth the risk of pulling out, was not worth the reward. And the cost to us of remaining in Afghanistan was extraordinarily low. Even when, you know, that we hadn't pulled out, Americans weren't dying. We were there obviously as a kind of plug in the dyke to prevent this wash over of the Taliban restoring itself to power and then becoming a regional threat again. And similarly with Syria. We have a small number of troops in Syria. I mean, apparently we had more than the Biden administration was admitting. I mean, we had like maybe close to 2,000. They, they said there were 800. But I mean, we're not hearing about casualties, we're not hearing about terrible incidents and that sort of thing. And so the, the, the fact of our pulling out would be such a large statement compared to the cost of keeping our people in there, particularly while Syria is going through this period of very complicated transition with the Assad regime collapsed. And it's not clear how all of that is going to sort through.
- [11:36]
Matthew Continetti
Well, it's, it's kind of like if you were to say, you know, I'm pulling the rest of our troops out of Korea because it's time for the Korean War to officially be over.
- [11:47]
Jon Podhoretz
And I mean, that really is true. Right? And that is true. 71 is 7. You know, it's been 72 years since, since the armistice in Korea. We still have troops in Korea. No one's saying we better get those troops out of Korea. We got.
- [12:00]
Matthew Continetti
And so that I feel like, oh.
- [12:03]
Jon Podhoretz
No, you're right, Matt is objecting. I have the Quinc Institute. I'm sure Trump might want to remove.
- [12:11]
Abe Greenwald
Our troops from there too.
- [12:12]
Jon Podhoretz
So. Right, okay. But, but I'm just Saying that, that, that the. It's one thing if we had 25,000 people in Syria and there was a hot civil war going on and we couldn't figure out who, whose side we were on and you know, we weren't. The risk wasn't worth the reward. Clearly this is a very low cost presence that we are facing in Syria. And with the rise in, in ISIS related activity, even apparently given what we've seen here in the United States, the consequences of a change in the status quo there could be really parlous.
- [12:52]
Seth Mandel
I think there's an important question that has to be asked and resolved about this most recent New Orleans attacker and that is how he was radicalized. If he was actually recruited, actively recruited by someone overseas, as we have seen seen happen in the past, both in our country and elsewhere, or if he was just in a weird way sort of embracing the ideology and becoming a copycat style ISIS killer with, by pledging his own loyalty without ever actively working with a terrorist organization. Because if that's the case, that actually comports more with the weird normalization of so much radical terrorism on the domestic front. I was struck by reading the other day a comment by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who likened her support for Gaza, the Gazans and Palestinians in general with the Vietnam War. She said this is radicalizing an entire generation, just as the Vietnam War did. And why that bothered me is that there was no discussion of why Israel is in Gaza and what happened on October 7 and the presence of American hostages. She wants to normalize a very fashionable radicalization program when it comes to the Palestinian that we have seen in the past, but is quite new in its absolute unwillingness to talk about terrorism. Now that we have homegrown terrorists who are allied with this extreme version of Islam, they have to talk about it, but they aren't. So I wonder how. I would be very curious to see what we uncover about the attackers radicalization process.
- [14:25]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, look, the other part about this is Matt says, you know, using the term homegrown terrorism is a misnomer because there are these international connections. But in the wake of 9 11, we did have a aggressive government pursuit of internal organizations inside the United States, including the largest single Islamic charity in the United States, the Holy Land foundation, based interestingly enough in Richardson, Texas, which first was sued for liability in the murder of an American Israeli in a civil court and then was found to have been funneling money to Hamas in 2007, 2008, its leaders were thrown in jail and it was shut down. That was A multi year effort by the federal government to find sources of material support for terrorism inside the United States illegal using legal modalities like the 501c3 nonprofit system. You can do that. You have to be committed. You have to have a Justice Department and a Treasury Department that, that are committed to this as a major effort of the federal government to provide the deterrence to raising money and, and creating a network inside the United States of support for Islamic terrorism that might then also end up expressing itself on our own soil. It's not just gonna go away on its own. As we now see. We're almost a quarter century from, from 9, 11 quarter century and we got it. We got somebody flying an ISIS flag injuring and killing 80 to 100 people in New Orleans on New Year's Day. That, that's still happening is the point. And it's happened 15 years after the same, you know, after Fort Hood, after Dr. Nadal Hassan shot up Fort Hood as a homegrown radical, current sitting member of the US Military who had been.
- [16:49]
Abe Greenwald
Corresponding with Anwar Al Awlaki who was hiding out in Yemen before Obama droned him. Remember this, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. And the Biden administration has not prioritized fighting Islamic terrorism.
- [17:08]
Jon Podhoretz
The opposite.
- [17:09]
Abe Greenwald
There's the withdrawal from Afghanistan. That's a more foreign policy move. But think about the directives that the Justice Department and the FBI have been following and or the rhetoric coming from Biden and Merrick Garland, even Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin saying that the primary threat to the United States is white nationalism and domestic extremism. I'm not going to dismiss that there are security threats from those directions. But when you look at the broader picture in the totality, you cannot wish away the fact of Islamic radicalism, Islamism in its jihadist form. It's everywhere and unfortunately it doesn't go away on its own. I mean that's quite the opposite. That's what you're alluding to, right? That's the message of my column is.
- [17:58]
Jon Podhoretz
You have to consistently press forward and on multiple fronts. That's the problem. It's a hydra headed monster.
- [18:06]
Abe Greenwald
The contrast with Israel I think is really noteworthy here. I mean after October 7, the failures of October 7, the failures of the so called concepcia that had to do with this kind of the similar logic. Well, don't worry about it. We'll just mow the grass every so often. You know, Hamas has been there now for over a decade. We're gonna, we know how to deal with them. That broke down awfully and tragically on October 7th. And so Israel did what it had to do, which was it took the fight to the terrorists, and not just in Gaza, but then because of its infiltration of Hezbollah, it could fight in Lebanon and it could penetrate the Iranian government, whether it was killing Haniyeh at the inauguration of the new Iranian president or destroying the Iranian air defense network without losing a single plane. Something that we still, I don't think, really recognize the enormity of. Right. That's how you have to deal with this. And that is the approach that the Obama, that the Obama and Biden administrations did not take.
- [19:16]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, and to. Just to emphasize that point. So Israel failed on October 7th or before October 7th with Hamas. We now know that Israel did not fail precisely in the north with Hezbollah, that it had been preparing, in what Jonathan Chanzer has called in our pages, the war between wars, that it had been preparing for a moment like the moment that finally took place with the pagers and the destruction of Hezbollah's facilities and weaponry and leadership in Lebanon for 15 years, because it knew, inevitably that something was going to have to happen. It let down its guard with Gaza. We appear to have let down our guard on all fronts, which I think is the point here. We have, we have issues of what the United States needs to do abroad. That's Afghanistan, Syria, whatever, and including, by the way, the right kind of support for Israel and its efforts that, as I say in my editor's piece in the current issue, America wanted Israel to prevail in some fashion against Hamas, but not to win. And there is no such thing as prevailing without winning. So it was going to give Israel enough support to kind of be in the lead in a long baseball game. So Israel could stay up 3 to.
- [20:50]
Abe Greenwald
2 against the pre October 7th mentality. Right. Clear. The administration want, okay, you guys go bomb Gaza for a while, kill some Hamas terrorists, then stop, then stop, and then we'll just move on from there. Israel said, no, not this time.
- [21:05]
Matthew Continetti
They also maybe overestimated what Israel could do in Gaza as what it can do in Lebanon. I mean, I think part of it is that the Biden administration the whole time sort of bought into this idea that Israel hovers above humanity and, like, zaps people like a thunderbolt, you know, a lightning bolt coming down from. From heaven that strikes you down. If I, if I lie, may I be struck down right here. Right. That Israel is sort of playing God, and that's what they did in Lebanon. And that was years and years and years as we, you know, have been writing recently, especially with the revelations of Preparation and they didn't, they thought that, well, if Israel wants to take out sinwar, they can do, you know, like those machines at the arcade, the claw will come down, the Mossad claw will come down, pick up sinwar, whatever. There's, there's long been a, a, a, a sort of supernatural.
- [22:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, but to be fair, the Israeli people themselves believe this. Yes, well, we're allowed to believe this by the Israeli government. What I'm saying here is that, is that we have a, we have a Jabbar in a different world in which we remain the country that was pursuing the Holy Land foundation as we did throughout the decade, the first decade of the 21st century. Jabbar might not ever have arisen as a radicalized person because the, the infrastructure inside the country, this mosque that he went to in Texas, all of that might have been much more deterred from preaching radical messaging and being connected to sources abroad, providing information from madrasas that provided Quranic textual support for the idea that it was okay to take these kinds of actions.
- [22:59]
Christine Rosen
And there's, you know, John, when you say that this is a multi headed hydraulic. One of those heads is there's a whole new network of hothouses that has not yet borne fruit. I fear, and I'm talking about again, the post 10-7-pro Hamas Americans. I'm interested and concerned about the reality of a sort of cosplay to terrorism pipeline. If you start. Yes, of course. I think the majority of college kids who are shouting globalizing Intifada are terrible and horrible and whatever. I could say enough bad things about them, but I don't think the majority of them are going to, are going to actually turn into terrorists. But are some of them?
- [23:57]
Jon Podhoretz
Sure.
- [23:58]
Christine Rosen
You see, you see, I've seen the scenes of them being led in prayer by actual Islamists on campus. When you start using that language, when you start speaking in the terms of Hamas and Hezbollah and you start looking online and you start getting into the ideology, what happens then? And we're talking, this is among a group of thousands and I think that's something we have to be very concerned about. Obviously that's, I think Jabbar is a different issue, but I'm not so sure.
- [24:34]
Seth Mandel
The younger generation, also unlike older generations who were radicalized, if you think about in the 60s and whatnot, they act, they have no trust in either party, in our political system or in very few of our institutions to push back on any of this. I mean they, they think that there's very little difference between Biden and Trump when it comes to the Middle east, for example, that gives very. And certainly on their campuses, their radicalization is being encouraged by some of the things they're learning ideologically in the classroom about colonialism and whatnot. So there really is not a lot of backstop beyond a kind of conservative and right wing media world that says these guys are acting like terrorists. You should stop. Because they're not getting the pushback that maybe earlier generations of student radicals did.
- [25:20]
Abe Greenwald
We have evidence of this. Last month, the George Mason University student was arrested by the FBI for plotting a mass casualty attack on the Israeli consulate in New York City. Now, this is not your ordinary, you know, Tentifata person, but there's got to be more like him. His sisters also have Hezbollah material in their dorm rooms at George Mason University. If you go into this, though, from the perspective that, well, CARE is an honest player.
- [25:54]
Jon Podhoretz
CARE is the Council on America.
- [25:56]
Abe Greenwald
And honestly, this is the group that the mosque where Al Jabbar seems to have been associated with. It's not clear how often he went, but that mosque, as we said on the podcast yesterday, has informed its membership to refer all inquiries to the. From the FBI to the Council on American Islamic Relations. So if you go in with the attitude, oh, CARE is an honest actor here, and you know what? Islamophobia.
- [26:25]
Jon Podhoretz
And who says cares an honest actor. The Biden administration has hosted. CARE was part of.
- [26:36]
Matthew Continetti
Of the first gentleman's strategy to fight anti Semitism. Try to battle.
- [26:44]
Jon Podhoretz
Right. Whatever.
- [26:46]
Matthew Continetti
Second.
- [26:46]
Jon Podhoretz
Sorry.
- [26:46]
Matthew Continetti
Second.
- [26:47]
Jon Podhoretz
Whoever. Whoever he is, you're not gonna.
- [26:48]
Matthew Continetti
Second, gentlemen, first, in your heart, the.
- [26:51]
Seth Mandel
Left has lost the ability to discuss any of civilizational terms. I mean, this is a war against Western civilization and its principles. It's not merely against the United States anymore because we're seeing the same thing in Europe. And there's no one on the left who's comfortable talking about it in those terms. That's just. Well, I mean, to return to, I.
- [27:10]
Matthew Continetti
Think also we need to say that we. We're not like when what Abe says about these hot houses producing future tariffs, where this is not really theoretical. I went to Rutgers with Charlotte Cates, who went on to marry Khaled Barakat, who is a leader in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist organization, and a famous one, too, because of the hijackings in past decades and, and all that. And she has, you know, been at these encampments. This is somebody I was in school with who was running, you know, student pro Palestinian stuff. And she's now married to the PFLP and running, helping to run encampments at these schools. Again, you know, this was 20 years ago.
- [28:02]
Jon Podhoretz
Let's talk about Rutgers for five seconds. So Rutgers has now seems to have entered into some new kind of deal in which it is, it is asserting after behaving pretty badly last year, going at encampment and nod and talking, helping and hosting anti Israel organizations. And then, not that it is now determined that it is not going to allow in some fashion or other, whatever fits in with the First Amendment rights of students and all that, but it will not allow the, on campus the calls for violence against Jews and Israel. It took a year. This is a state school in New Jersey, the state with, I think the fourth largest Jewish population in the United States. It's madness that it should take a year and a half to get to some kind of agreement where, and I.
- [29:06]
Matthew Continetti
Think the second most Jews on campus of any college in the country.
- [29:12]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, that's right, exactly. Okay, so, so, but I want to say that there are two ways of looking at the Al Jabbar situation, one of which is we're now told he acted alone. I don't know how they know that so fast. The FBI is behaving in very, you know, the FBI has so lost everybody's confidence that they come out, they say we have no evidence of terrorist attack. And then five minutes later they say it was yesterday. They said they have no evidence he did anything but act alone after conducting hundreds of interviews. Really? They conducted hundreds of interviews in less than 24 hours? I don't believe that is true. I don't believe they could, first of all. So they conducted, they spoke to each person for 30 seconds. How many agents have been deployed to this task force? Where are they? Who are they talking to? That is clearly a lie that they've spoken, that they've done hundreds of interviews in 20. That's what I said yesterday. So they're not credible when it comes to what they're reporting about his influences and his connections and all of that. So the holiday rush is over.
- [30:26]
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- [32:42]
Jon Podhoretz
But let's just say that he doesn't have any and he's a lone wolf. That's even more terrifying because a network you can interdict, right? A network, if you have the will, you can try to infiltrate, you can do whatever you can, you can try to entrap whatever you want to, you know, insert yourself, compromise people, figure out what they're doing and stop them before they do anything. A lone wolf gets in a car, rents a car, drives it into a parade and kills 100 people. Is that better? Lone wolf is a much better terrorist strategy. That's the suicide bombing strategy.
- [33:21]
Matthew Continetti
Well, that's isis. ISIS has pioneered a kind of, what they call it, you know, jihad in place.
- [33:28]
Jon Podhoretz
Okay?
- [33:29]
Matthew Continetti
And that's. And that's been the kind of thing, the reason, one reason that ISIS flags keep showing up and ISIS videos keep showing up as opposed to anything else, a green headband of Hamas or something else, and these types of attacks is because ISIS branded itself as, you can be part of our global victory by going out in your neighborhood and killing your neighbor. And that's Good enough. You don't have to travel to Syria through Turkey and whatever and get a fake passport. All this other stuff just go hurt someone. And that's what makes ISIS as a brand so dangerous.
- [34:05]
Jon Podhoretz
Right? So I'm not sure that we, we even when we're looking at this, that we should take any comfort in the idea that he was a lone wolf. If he's an example, just like Luigi Mangione is an example, you give people an example of, you know, what's a good thing to do? Go shoot an industrialist in the head. Take your gun, Go shoot an industrialist in the head. Your people are going to start celebrating you, and they'll be Disney kid concerts where they sing your name and people will applaud on Saturday Night Live. That's great. And this guy could inspire other people to do exactly what he did. And the only way to stop that ISIS to destroy ISIS. I mean, in the end, even though that's a very hard lift. I'm not saying that it's not, but if you don't create the conditions under which the influencer starts looking like a loser to people who might want to be influenced by them, you have no power over the influence that they might spread.
- [35:08]
Seth Mandel
There's another challenge here, though, which is you remember post 9, 11, see something, say something. Citizens were supposed to be enlisted in an effort to notice if there was something going on around them that seemed unusual and to report it. The difference now, a quarter century later, is that people don't necessarily trust the institutions to which they would report that activity.
- [35:26]
Jon Podhoretz
And would you?
- [35:27]
Seth Mandel
No, I mean, this is the problem. Like, am I going to call the FBI and trust that the FBI is going to run down a lead from a, from a concerned citizen and do it in the. Or are they just going to.
- [35:37]
Jon Podhoretz
Or they would say, oh, who are you? You sound paranoid.
- [35:41]
Seth Mandel
Right?
- [35:41]
Jon Podhoretz
You seem a little paranoid. What's your story?
- [35:44]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [35:44]
Matthew Continetti
And also, I mean, this is like, you know, woman was set on fire on the subway. And, you know, it was like a few days after Daniel Penney had walked out of a courthouse and people were trying to figure out the connections. Well, if you prosecute the people who try to intervene when they see obviously dangerous behavior, you're going to have fewer people intervening in, in all of these areas.
- [36:06]
Christine Rosen
Well, I have a question. Setting aside the possibility that he made it, where does an American get an ISIS flag? Right. Start there.
- [36:18]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, it could God have gotten it from his church. How do we know?
- [36:21]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, I mean, or, or online or.
- [36:23]
Jon Podhoretz
You know, excuse me, not his Church, I apologize.
- [36:27]
Christine Rosen
Yeah but got it from a shul. But. But you're right.
- [36:33]
Jon Podhoretz
Peter Beiner shul.
- [36:34]
Christine Rosen
That shouldn't be that, that, that literally raise a flag for intelligence people. I mean that isn't that in and of itself a good starting point for.
- [36:48]
Seth Mandel
Should be low hanging fruit for the intelligence community that is looking into this.
- [36:51]
Jon Podhoretz
That wants to look into it, that.
- [36:53]
Matthew Continetti
Wants to look into well, the girls.
- [36:55]
Jon Podhoretz
Who were by its superiors and by a strategy that is laid out by the administration for which it works. By the way. This is also could be state level. It doesn't have to be the FBI. It doesn't have to be federal, although terrorism laws are federal. But I mean Texas could do it. We don't know what the. We don't.
- [37:14]
Abe Greenwald
You know I just think at the point is you're not going to find all of these guys.
- [37:18]
Jon Podhoretz
Right? You're never. There are 330 million people in the United States.
- [37:21]
Abe Greenwald
But you can make the ideology less attractive by burning whatever infrastructure it has to the ground and showing that this is a dead end. And we have not been doing that to the extent that we have done in the past. And it is just true. The original Al Qaeda was pretty much delegitimized by our efforts after 9 11. Then it morphed into Al Qaeda in Iraq which we then defeated thanks to the surge. And then it morphed into ISIS after we left Iraq and took our eye off the ball and we've been playing whack a mole ever since. A more concerted strategy would say just like I think what Israel is showing to the counter to the terrorism strategy of Iran. A more concerted strategy would say this is don't do this, don't even try it. And that would reduce the threat at least for some time.
- [38:11]
Matthew Continetti
I mean because we should acknowledge that we actually followed that strategy part of the way. At one point ISIS took over parts of Iraq, we went into Mosul and we had the kind of urban warfare battles that we're watching Israel have in Gaza. Not exactly the same because Hamas built underground tunnels. But it's the general idea. And every time we talk about the casualty numbers in urban warfare and what to expect from Israel and what Israel's responsibilities are in the field of battle in a dense place like Gaza, we refer back to Mosul. This was the American mission. And they the casualty counts, everything compares. First of all, everything, pretty much everything compares statistically in Israel's favor in terms of the care they're taking to try to avoid knocking out civilians. But, but the point is that we, we literally, we went into this part of Iraq and had a very bloody long. It was like, I don't know, the nine months, the Mosul campaign. It was not a joke. And we cleared them out. And while we eradicate them everywhere, we, we, we followed this strategy and it made a monstrous difference, a huge difference in the fight against is time.
- [39:27]
Jon Podhoretz
And it was three years after Barack Obama pulled out of Iraq. That's the important point here is you can't pull out. You see, like John McCain was made immense fun of and was considered a lunatic by a lot of people when he said. People said, how long do you think we should be in Iraq? And he said 100 years. He said this in 2006 or 2007. And it was like this. What are you talking about? We need to get. That wasn't the point. The point was if things go in Iraq the way that we would wish them to, this is going to be a friendly country in which we would likely want to have or be in a position to have a base, good relations, have a forward strike capability that we need all across the world. We had such bases in the Philippines for decades. We have bases in South Korea. You know, we. This is, this was something that should have been a desired outcome as part of our efforts and that America has gone. America's headspace was so screwed around sideways that this was considered an incredibly offensive thing to do. So Obama comes in, he says, we're going to pull out of Iraq. We pull out of Iraq, and then we got to go back into Iraq three years later and kill 10,000 civilians in Mosul in order to secure the aim that we wanted. If we hadn't pulled out of Iraq, we wouldn't have had to go into Mosul. ISIS would not have been reborn. That's part of what. That's part of Matt's point in his excellent Free Beacon column and why this is so central. Speaking of what Abe said about the globalize the intifada, eight hours after Al Jabbar drove into the crowd on Bourbon street, there was a globalize the Intifada march in New York City. One person, one person in that thousand person march up 6th Avenue has to go to Hertz, rent a car, and drive into, I don't know the. I was gonna say the Roosevelt Field Mall. I mean, whatever. I don't know what he would do. It's not. These are not hard things to duplicate. Networks are hard to duplicate and they're hard to manage and all of that. But all you need to do is to convince, you know, when you have an assassination, when you have a world in which assassination becomes thinkable, assassins pop up all over the place. If you have a world in which ISIS is homegrown in the sense that, or you know, as you say, I, you know, terrorism at home, all you gotta do is follow Al Jabbar's example and you can be a martyr and you can do what you think is necessary if you can figure out where the best crowd is to, to do that. So yeah, if we don't, if we don't have a kind of comprehensive approach to this like oh, you're gonna go march and say globalize the intifada, we got 500 cameramen, they're gonna take a picture of every single one of you. And if you, any single one of you is a foreign born citizen, we are deporting you beginning January 21st. Stuff like that. Like it's, it's not that it's not doable, it's hard. And you're going to get a lot of crap and you're going to get New York Times op EDS and you're going to get the, and New York Civil Liberties Union setting aside trans issues for five seconds to take up religious and speech liberty issues which is what they were made to do and see what, see what might happen. Then let's move on to domestic politics because today, and you know, I don't know when you're going to be listening to this, events may already have taken place while you're listening to this that will render some of this conversation or.
- [43:18]
Abe Greenwald
They could still be taking place right there.
- [43:20]
Jon Podhoretz
They still could be taking place, right. So today Mike Johnson, there's a vote in the House to, for the Speakership. Classically the rule are there 435 members of the House majority votes, simple majority chooses who the speaker of the House is. And classically all the members of the party out of power will vote against the chosen speaker of the majority party, which of course is the Republican Party. So you can't expect any votes from the Democratic Party's caucus. And the Republicans have a two or three seat majority or maybe one seat. I'm not even clear what's clear because we know one person is going to vote against Johnson, that is Thomas Massie of Arizona has said he will vote.
- [44:03]
Abe Greenwald
Against Johnson from Kentucky.
- [44:05]
Jon Podhoretz
Did I say Arizona? I'm sorry.
- [44:06]
Abe Greenwald
And he can lose, Johnson can lose only one vote.
- [44:11]
Jon Podhoretz
Right. So Massey can vote and said he's going to do it.
- [44:15]
Abe Greenwald
Right. And that's representative who votes against Johnson.
- [44:21]
Jon Podhoretz
Right.
- [44:21]
Abe Greenwald
Sink his speakership on.
- [44:24]
Jon Podhoretz
On the first ballot. Right. Now, remember, it took 14 ballots in 2023 for Kevin McCarthy to finally get to the speakership. Vote after vote after vote, and many, many deals that were pretty bad.
- [44:40]
Abe Greenwald
And he was the first speaker in American history to be overthrown in the middle of the.
- [44:47]
Jon Podhoretz
By the vote, by the vote, by. By the rules that he had agreed to to allow himself to be dethroned. He agreed to rules that would make it easy to dethrone him.
- [44:58]
Abe Greenwald
Carthy nor his enemy, Matt Gaetz are in.
- [45:02]
Jon Podhoretz
Right.
- [45:02]
Abe Greenwald
The 119th Congress, which is sworn in this morning.
- [45:07]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [45:07]
Abe Greenwald
You know, this is a real challenge for both the House Republicans who, you know, might not want to start off a very important year in complete chaos and disarray. They might want to do the responsible thing and just get this vote aside so that they can move in the next three days on January 6, Monday, to certify the Electoral College vote for Donald Trump. There is some question about whether that certification might be delayed if the Republicans remain in chaos and without a speaker. So it's a test for the just the responsibility of the House Republican Conference because at the end of the day, there really is no alternative to Johnson. If you sink Johnson, there will be other people who will be nominated, but none of them have.
- [46:04]
Jon Podhoretz
Right. So there are three potential, based on the last couple of years, there are three potential speakers besides Johnson.
- [46:12]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [46:13]
Jon Podhoretz
One is Steve Scalise, who is the House whip. One is Jim Jordan, chairman, Majority leader. So the majority leader is the whip is the whip, and Jim Jordan is the chairman of the Oversight Committee and.
- [46:24]
Abe Greenwald
Kind of the shadow MAGA leader.
- [46:27]
Jon Podhoretz
Right.
- [46:28]
Abe Greenwald
And none of them have the votes either. So what it would lead to is what happened after McCarthy was defenestrated where you had weeks, but there no speaker, total paralysis in the House. Is that how the Republicans want to enter Donald Trump's second term? And then secondly, it is something of a test for Trump. Now, you know, we were on hiatus, but Trump was rebuked by the House Republicans at the end of 2024 when he's called on the Republicans not only to pass a continuing resolution, but to include in that continuing resolution a either extension of the debt ceiling or an abolition of the debt ceiling. 38 Republicans voted against Trump on that. And so now Trump is coming in again prior to his inauguration and saying he supports Mike Johnson. Mike. He just wished Mike Johnson good luck today on Truth Social. If, if the House Republican Conference rebukes Trump too, this is another very bad sign for the legislative year. And for the Trump agenda, by the.
- [47:47]
Jon Podhoretz
Way, I should just say that Thomas Massie, who is this poison pill here, potential poison pill, is not a good guy. He is not a principled libertarian who votes against. He is, I mean, he is a libertarian and he is, you know, very serious about that. But so is Chip Roy. But Thomas Massie is extraordinarily bad on Israel, for example. Like, he's not, there's, there's, there's, there's, he's not, he is a, he would be a bad example to follow for represent.
- [48:19]
Abe Greenwald
He doesn't represent the House Republican Conference.
- [48:22]
Jon Podhoretz
Right.
- [48:22]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, take the Israel issue for sure. I mean, he is a complete outlier. He is with the squad when it comes to Israel.
- [48:29]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [48:30]
Abe Greenwald
That is not what House Republicans believe. That's not what Republicans believe. And he's also, you know, he suffered a personal tragedy, lost his wife in the past year. He, he is not. He's out for spite. It just seems like he just wants.
- [48:44]
Jon Podhoretz
And it's not clear, and it's not clear what it is exactly that Johnson himself has done to earn the spot. We know what Matt Gaetz had against Kevin McCarthy. Right.
- [48:57]
Matthew Continetti
Massey hates the Ukraine funding and hates, he hates that Mike Johnson made his.
- [49:04]
Abe Greenwald
Side for a second. But. And think about the other members of the Freedom Caucus there. I think, John, you're absolutely right. It's not, it's like, what do you want this guy to do now? What? You listen to Maga, they say, well, he hasn't been serious about the spending. But of course, that just takes us back to the debate we had at the end of the year, which is, you know, if you want to be serious about the spending guys, you actually have to vote for some of these spending bills in order to get them across the finish line. The House did try to, to go by regular order, and it was oftentimes the very members who are complaining that the leadership's not doing enough about spending who are blocking the individual appropriations bills. Then you have somebody like Victoria Sparks who is just kind of, you know, who knows what's. She's like the genie or something. She's taking all these different forms. Sometimes she's in the conference, sometimes she's out of the conference. Sometimes she's supporting Johnson for being pro Ukraine. Then she's not supporting Johnson for being too pro Ukraine or not anti enough. I mean, she's all over the place. A lot of people are paying attention to what she does. She could be the second vote that sings Johnson on the first ballot. I do Think it's one of my friends. I have so many friends, I forget who they are sometimes. I think it was my friend Liam Donovan.
- [50:22]
Jon Podhoretz
You sound like Trump now.
- [50:24]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I know. And they're all the best. All my friends are the best. Yeah, they're all the best. I love them all. I think my friend Liam Donovan points out that with the Republicans in the House, it really is kind of a membership issue. You know, one, you don't have enough members to compensate for the members who are complete irresponsible people. And that. So there's a membership problem in the margin, but there's also a membership problem with the. Some of the members. And I'm not even saying Marjorie Taylor Greene here, who, at the end of the day, kind of knows how power works. I'm talking about people like Massey and Sparks where you're just like, nothing can be done.
- [51:07]
Jon Podhoretz
Right. And we talked about this before, but in a, in a classic House, even with a close in which the margin is relatively small, right. 15, 20 seats, which would be a small but measurable margin that the majority had, you are in a position where 10 or 15 people can go to you if you are not Nancy Pelosi, who didn't want anybody to ever do anything she didn't want. But to go and say, you got to give me a shot. You got to let me not vote for this bill. Very important in my district that I not vote for this bill. Tell me you have enough votes so that I'm free to cast a no vote on this involving foreign aid or something like that. If you're a Republican. And the speaker would say, of course, yes, we do have enough, but I'm banking that I'm going to need, I may need you to cast a tough vote three months from now for something that you may not want to vote for if somebody else has the same problem, Right? That's classic. If you're in the majority and you have enough, they don't have enough to do anything.
- [52:18]
Seth Mandel
They also have this problem where they lack both discipline and enforcement mechanisms. So Johnson doesn't have an enforcer and the caucus lacks discipline. So the wayward children like Massie run free. And he is, if he wins this, this speakership, he's going to have to start doing not just the horse trading, but the enforcement, the punishment of his own worst part. Keep them in line.
- [52:40]
Jon Podhoretz
And the worst part about that is that Johnson doesn't really have any enforcement power, no matter if he wins or he doesn't win. Which means, and this is a problem for the balance of power in the United States, that Trump has to be the enforcer and Trump should not be the enforcer for discipline in the House. We have a separation. We have. We have three branches of government and they're supposed to be independent and they're supposed to function independently of each other, even if they are in ideological concert. And that the party is now relying on Trump to be. The House will now rely on Trump to say, do this or I'm gonna primary you. Which I guess is. I don't know how he primaries Massey or whatever, but I mean, he is gonna have to be threatened that he hasn't.
- [53:30]
Abe Greenwald
And it would be unlike last year at the end of it where Elon Musk was saying that if you voted for the kind of crash omnibus Johnson had negotiated with the Democrats.
- [53:40]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, he's not president yet. I'm not saying he won't be president by. By March.
- [53:44]
Abe Greenwald
Elon.
- [53:45]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah, Elon. Maybe by March he'll be happy president. He can't be president.
- [53:50]
Abe Greenwald
Trump pointed out.
- [53:51]
Jon Podhoretz
Yes.
- [53:52]
Abe Greenwald
When he spoke to the Charlie Kirk a group in December. But I think it's going to be close to the president. I mean, that whole Lincoln bedroom, I think they're going to be.
- [54:00]
Jon Podhoretz
You know. By the way, can we talk about this for two seconds? I don't want. Okay. He's having fun. It's great. I'm not talking here about the good working order of the United States. We need Elon Musk at Space X and Tesla and that doing that. He is a. He is a generational potential millennial figure in American innovation. And we got plenty of people to futz around in politics. And this is an opportunity cost for the United States and the future of humanity that he has gotten himself so mixed bollocks up in to matters that, you know, not just our politics.
- [54:40]
Abe Greenwald
Now he's entering UK politics and German politics.
- [54:44]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [54:45]
Matthew Continetti
I happen to think that this is the perfect representation of Twitter as a distraction.
- [54:52]
Jon Podhoretz
Right.
- [54:52]
Matthew Continetti
He bought Twitter. He was making rockets going to Mars and then he bought Twitter and now he's tweeting memes.
- [55:00]
Jon Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [55:00]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, it's like this is. That's.
- [55:01]
Jon Podhoretz
That's.
- [55:02]
Abe Greenwald
Rockets are still going up.
- [55:04]
Jon Podhoretz
The rockets are still going up. And they caught the rocket and all.
- [55:07]
Abe Greenwald
Of that substances in Elon Musk's body basically guarantee that he needs no sleep. So he could be renting out the $2,000 a night cabana at Mar A Lago. Interfere, you know, interfering in the political system here and also running all of his companies.
- [55:23]
Jon Podhoretz
Fair enough. I'm just Saying like Steve Bannon and whoever is, you know, they had nothing else to do. They have nothing else to do.
- [55:29]
Abe Greenwald
They are beginning to hate Musk.
- [55:30]
Jon Podhoretz
I mean, that's a real interesting turn.
- [55:33]
Abe Greenwald
That'S happening again under Trump. It's funny. It's like Trump is much more of a, I hesitate to use the word, he's much more of a normal second term president Looking, looking at this. He's, he's facing challenges from within his own movement or rather schisms. He, the specter of lame duckism is hanging over him. I mean, there is the rebuke I mentioned in December. There's a possible rebuke today. So even as Trump seems more like a traditional president, even though he's a very untraditional figure, the, the people around him are not. You know, there is no precedent for Elon Musk's standing in American politics. There's none.
- [56:16]
Jon Podhoretz
There's J.P. morgan at the beginning of.
- [56:18]
Abe Greenwald
The 20th century, but even he wasn't like, he like, helped.
- [56:21]
Jon Podhoretz
No, but he saved the American economy. Yeah. Okay. He got, he got his buddies together in 1907 and they did stuff to make sure that we didn't go into a depression. That was arguably like the most significant intervention in American history, non political intervention in American history by the private sector. But, but he, that's the only example, right, that, that he had 2%, that Morgan himself controlled 2% of the American economy and was therefore in this position. But that's it. Like, there's nothing.
- [56:54]
Abe Greenwald
I just, I want to talk, just make two points about the other branch of the legislature because again, it's the Congress that's being sworn in today, not just the House. And of course the Senate Republicans who will take charge of the majority for the first time in four years there. They do not have the problems of leadership and dissension that the House Republicans have. John Thune will be the new Senate majority leader. Mitch McConnell, of course, is moving to kind of the backbench in a way. He's going to make foreign policy and defense budgeting a priority in his, in the two years remaining in his current term. But I also. So, big day for John Thune. John Barrasso is going to be the whip and then our friend Tom Cotton is ascending to leadership as well, is going to be the Senate conference chair, an important role as well.
- [57:50]
Matthew Continetti
One of Matt's friends who are all the greatest equally.
- [57:53]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, well, he's a friend of the pod.
- [57:54]
Matthew Continetti
Our friend.
- [57:55]
Jon Podhoretz
He's a friend of the pod. He's a former commentary roast and Drinking game commentary podcast drinking game aficionados know that that is a, that is a tile on the bingo card. The phrase our friend Tom Cotton even in dry January.
- [58:11]
Abe Greenwald
One other thing about the Senate that I think is worth pointing out is that today Senator Tim Scott will be become the longest serving black senator in the history of the United States. And isn't that remarkable that not only is the longest serving black senator in American history a Republican, but he is a Republican from South Carolina. I just think that is worth pausing and reflecting upon.
- [58:36]
Jon Podhoretz
Well, I think maybe the longest serving. I mean so the longest serving African before him was likely a Republican, right? It must have been Edward Brooke of Massachusetts.
- [58:48]
Abe Greenwald
No, it could well be. Yeah.
- [58:50]
Jon Podhoretz
But anyway, a very different kind of Republican. Let's just say. Let's quickly mention the moves by the Biden administration in its last 11 days in office. I was amused yesterday to read on Twitter and now read store articles in the paper about how Biden is going to decree that we he is going to set aside. I need to find the actual where is this actual he is decreeing no drilling in some places. And and that he is doing it in a way to gum up Trump. So since Trump says drill baby, drill, the way that he is going to do it evokes a little known act of 1953 that will make it impossible.
- [59:45]
Abe Greenwald
For Trump to push the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
- [59:50]
Jon Podhoretz
Thank you.
- [59:51]
Abe Greenwald
Includes a provision this is Bloomberg. Giving presidents wide discretion to permanently protect waters from leasing. But it didn't explicitly grant them the authority to undo those designations.
- [60:05]
Jon Podhoretz
So in other words. So apparently a president can decree something and then his leave office and his decree remains in force when the not a law. Right. We laws are perpet. Laws are permanent. That is how we work in this country. You pass a law, the law is permanent. Unless the law is either ruled unconstitutional or it is revoked or superseded by another law. A presidential decree by definition cannot be binding on a future president. I don't care what the act says.
- [60:43]
Abe Greenwald
Really? How the Constitution.
- [60:44]
Matthew Continetti
Well, if he signs it with the royal signet, I mean what if the.
- [60:49]
Jon Podhoretz
World signet then passes to the next person.
- [60:52]
Abe Greenwald
This could be on the agenda of the 119th Congress. If they are able to elect a speaker in a normal fashion, they could revisit that law and say this is ridiculous and Biden's decree, such as it is.
- [61:06]
Jon Podhoretz
Or Trump will simply ignore it. He will overrule it. Then there will be a court case and the Supreme Court how we work. And the Supreme Court will hear the case because it is A con. It is a controversy between the. Specifically between. You know, it's an executive branch controversy. And I cannot imagine that it could stand like it just. It's nonsensical. Biden can't, without the force of law, bind Trump to a policy that he puts in place 10 days before he leaves office. It's madness. You know, so that's one move that.
- [61:45]
Abe Greenwald
Trump will challenge and yes, challenge at the same time, definitively. Biden this morning, before we began recording, blocked Nippon Steel's activity acquisition of US Steel. This has been hotly debated in Washington and in Pennsylvania, of course, the home of U.S. steel for over a year now. And Trump is on the same side as Biden on this. But I want to say something. You know, I think this is the wrong move for a few reasons, not just economically, because it's not clear to me that this will help save the company or save American jobs at all, but also geopolitically. You know, Biden somehow has this reputation of defending American alliances, and America is back. But there have been plenty of allies that he has treated Shabbily. Israel, of course, always on our minds. European allies in terms of trade and industrial subsidies. They're. His ridiculous inflation reduction act, are very upset. And here you have Japan, the keystone of our. Of really our global superpower, right? Having Japan, this incredibly modern economy on our side, a strategic ally basis for the United States, and, and a counterweight.
- [63:15]
Jon Podhoretz
To China, our primary rival.
- [63:18]
Abe Greenwald
You know, here we have Japan. And Biden says in his statement blocking the deal that if Nippon Steel had acquired US Steel, he could not guarantee that the company would act in ways conducive to US national security. So what he's basically saying is that the Japanese can't be trusted to help us, which is just an affair to me, an offensive statement and something that's almost designed to hamper relations between our two countries. And finally, here's another act of Biden in his lame duck period, behaving in character as a partisan hack. You know, this is the moment, the lame duck period should be, the moment where you're like, okay, I'm out of here in 17 days. I'm going to try to take a larger view and think about what's in the public interest. And the truth is this deal, you know, it doesn't help our ego to think that this Japanese company is acquiring this, you know, brand US Steel. At the same time, it was probably for the best, certainly good for our relationship with Japan. And I know that Trump is going to fight it. So maybe I should just take one on the chin and say, you know what, I'm going to be for it. That's not what he's done and that's not what he's done in any move he has made since he, since his designated successor lost the election, November.
- [64:46]
Jon Podhoretz
And one quick point, now I'm going to do a recommendation relating to this which is that in the 1980s, you have no idea, you guys, you're too young, you have no idea. The paranoia that was represented in the United States by Japan's industrial policy, industrial economy. The idea was Japan had solved the problems of modern capitalism through its top down industrial policy. And that they were, they were going to lap us, they were going to beat us. And then they came to America and they bought two things. They bought Columbia Pictures and they bought Rockefeller Center. And you would have thought that buying the buildings in Rockefeller center was an act. It was akin to, to, you know, Moscow coming and buying the Statue of Liberty. I mean the, the, the kind of insanity. And what happened was Japan got fleeced, it overpaid for everything paid for in the United States. And it was like a kind of bonanza for whoever got to sell stuff to Japan because they didn't understand America. And the Japanese economy went into its 30. It's three decade doldrums from which it has yet to emerge. My guess is that this was a pretty good deal for U.S. steel for. And U.S. steel is also very con because it's got weird pension problems and stuff like that. And it's probably good that it was, it might be taken off the hands by a com. By a country that is loath to do things like downsize and that sort of thing because of its own industrial psychology. And so basically I think Biden and Trump in this policy that they're pursuing are kind of screwing the workers of U.S. steel, whoever owns stock, whatever. It's like we have a history of this. We misread Japanese intentions. We don't understand, you know, that they don't have imperial designs on our economy. And this is a incredibly stupid move, period. Okay, now I'm gonna do my quick recommendation. As I said, I was in Italy, I was in Italy. I went to Rome, I went to Florence, I went to Milan. It was glorious. We had a wonderful time and we came home. My wife and I decided to watch the 1953 movie Roman Holiday directed by William Wyler, starring Gregory Peckin in her first major performance performance. Audrey Hepburn filmed entirely on one of the first movies made in Hollywood to be filmed entirely on location. In Rome, in the streets of Rome. And so we wanted to watch it in that weird way so you could say, oh, look, there's the Trevi Fountain. And look, there are the Spanish Steps. And, you know, this and that. Anyway, and so it satisfied that feeling, you know, that kind of. Yeah, looks the same, except now they cleaned it up. And, you know, this is just after the war, like seven, eight years after the war. It is such a glorious movie that if you have never seen it, we rented it, it's not available. We spent 399 renting it on Apple TV. You could do it on. On. On Amazon or whatever. It is a glorious classical comedy, romance piece of work. There is nothing wrong with it. And it has maybe the most beautiful concluding five minutes of any movie that I have ever seen that I will not describe to you here. But, you know, it's about a. It's about an overworked, overstressed young princess of a country that is never named, who is traveling Europe on behalf of her family and is. And. And like, freaks out and runs away from the embassy where she is, you know, in Rome, and kind of comes across. A reporter, doesn't know as a reporter. She's stoned because she's been given a shot to help her sleep. So she's like out of her wits. And he. He can't just leave her lying there on the streets. And he sort of takes her back to his room to sleep it off, then he realizes that it is she. And then he finds himself with the exclusive of a lifetime, right? He's with the incognito princess in the eternal city. And it's just the story of the day that they spend together. And if you've never seen it, trust me, the incandescence of Audrey Hepburn is beyond imagining. I mean, it is like she is lit from within from the first moment you see her to the last. Gregory Peck is the most relaxed, attractive example of sort of like the post war, you know, likable American. You know, he's sort of on his uppers in Europe. Eddie Albert from Greenacres is a kind of beatnik photographer who follows them around. And there's Rome, and it is beautiful and I love it. Even though it was written by a Stalinist Dalton Trumbo, who might despise and was awarded an Oscar in absentia. Oscar for screenplay was given to the movie and Dalton Trumbo, it had to be restored to Trumbo 30 years later after his death, because, of course, he was blacklisted. And so another writer had his name on it. But that's Roman Holiday. Rent it. You will thank me.
- [70:18]
Matthew Continetti
Do you know if it's streaming anywhere?
- [70:20]
Jon Podhoretz
It is not. You have to rent it. But it's 399 to rent. Right?
- [70:24]
Christine Rosen
I like to, I like that we mentioned our hatred for Stalinists at the end of every show so far this year.
- [70:33]
Jon Podhoretz
We will never, if there's a Stalinist in the wood pile, that Stalinist will be, will be lifted out of the wood pile.
- [70:40]
Christine Rosen
We could do recommends and then an astolinist.
- [70:45]
Matthew Continetti
You could add it to the, to the tagline, keep the candle burning down. Stalinism.
- [70:50]
Jon Podhoretz
There we go. Okay, well, let me try that. Okay. So we'll be back next week on Monday. Have a wonderful weekend for Christine, Seth, Matt and Abe. And within the spirit of anti Stalinism that motivates us all, keep the candle bur.