C (4:39)

Hi, John.

A (4:40)

And senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

B (4:43)

Hi, John.

A (4:43)

And also with us today is an author of an article in our December issue which is called Neither American nor Conservative. Global reporter for Axel Springer, James Kirchik. Hi, Jamie.

D (4:56)

Hi. Thank you for having me today.

A (4:58)

So Jamie and I discussed this piece a couple months ago. It had to do with the American Conservative magazine, which has existed for 22, 23 years as an almost explicitly ideological counterweight to Commentary and to the, let's say, the late lamented Weekly Standard, which I helped start, a Washington publication dedicated to what used to be called paleoconservatism, as expressed most pointedly in the political campaigns and the political doctrines espoused by Patrick J. Buchanan. So Jamie started working on this piece when the American Conservative made it its editorial mission to get Patrick J. Buchanan, who is still alive but has pretty much gone into seclusion, to get him a Presidential Medal of Freedom prize, I am proud to say my father, Norman pothoric, received in 2004. Pat Buchanan has not received it for reasons we will go into, but this was a campaign that it's decided to begin. And one of the voices, heated voices in the pages of the American Conservative wishing to push the Trump administration into giving Pat Buchanan a Medal of Freedom was one Kevin Roberts, the head of The Heritage foundation, who of course has now gotten himself into a weeks long political, personal funding donor and moral crisis. And so that piece, commissioned well before Kevin Roberts got himself into trouble, was a presage of Kevin Roberts getting himself into trouble for being on the side of the very ideas that Jamie writes about in the piece. So Jamie, can you give us a flavor of why it is that the American Conservative wish to honor Patrick J. Buchanan, what their arguments were, and why we wanted to do this piece together?

D (7:05)

Sure. So Pat Buchanan was one of the founders of the American Conservative in 2003, alongside Tacky Theato. I'm not gonna be able to pronounce his last name.

A (7:18)

Theodorokopoulos, something like that.

D (7:20)

The notorious Greek fascist aristocrat.

A (7:26)

And Scott McConnell, John for Epstein in so many ways, anyway.

D (7:31)

And Scott McConnell, I think, was a former colleague of yours at the Post.

A (7:35)

Well, he was. I actually, he, he was my predecessor as editorial page editor of the New York Post. Fired at the New York Post because he began to espouse views that were so outside the conservative mainstream that they were no longer held to be tenable.

D (7:50)

And it was founded in the early years of the Bush administration with sort of the rise of, you could call it a neoconservative foreign policy or whatever you want to describe the kind of pro democracy promotion, pro regime change in Iraq policies of the Bush administration. And in recent years there's been this, I would say sort of reassessment of Pat Buchanan and his influence. And purely looking at it as an analytical matter, I think it's fair to say that Buchanan has been to some extent not vindicated. But certainly Trump has in large part borrowed his platform and his ideas. If you particularly look at immigration, I think more than anything, Trump is very much a direct echo of the Buchananite immigration policy, the harsh restrictionist immigration policy. Also on trade, Pat Buchanan was obviously a very strong protectionist. His presidential Campaigns in the 90s were in large part directed against the NAFTA agreements and the free trade agreements that were coming out in the, in the aftermath of the Cold War. But there's this third issue of foreign policy where I think there's actually a very large gap between the Buchananites and Trump. And the Buchananites are obviously basically isolationists. They want a much smaller military footprint, extremely anti Israel to an obsessive and if not anti Semitic degree. Trump, on the other hand, is really none of those things. I mean, he's certainly not, I would say, an instinctive interventionist, sure, but clearly wants a massive military. And we have, I think, the largest military budget ever. And he's constantly talking about the size of the military and how it needs to be the strongest military in the world. And he's now launching, you know, legally specious attacks on boats in the Caribbean from Venezuela. He's talking about expanding the landmass of the United States, potentially Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, reconquering that. And he's, I think, is arguably the most pro Israel American president in American history and bombed the Iranian nuclear site. So he has really disappointed, disappointed the Buchananites, the American conservative magazine, the Tuckers, that whole wing of the MAGA movement. He's really disappointed them on that. And I think this is where there's a lot of dispute, obviously in the future of MAGA is on this foreign policy question right now. And that is what the American conservative has basically been devoting itself to these past couple of months with these hysterical, shrill predictions about, you know, World War 3 being imminent if Trump were to have interest, intervened in Iran alongside Israel. That didn't come to pass, obviously.

C (10:39)

And.

D (10:41)

It, it sort of presaged, I think, the fight that we're seeing now this fall over Heritage and Tucker and Fuentes.

A (10:49)

So let's dig down into the, the anti Semitism and Jew hatred point because obviously there is a legitimate argument to be had about how active, how interventionist, how intrusive America's projection of its own power should be in the world that you mentioned, the controversial bombings in the Atlantic of ships that we claim to be carrying drugs without any kind of declared war or much role whatsoever in oversight from the Congress. Is there a reason for there to be serious policy debates and discussions about what is going on there? Absolutely. Is there a reason to have skepticism or concern about the United States getting involved in a massive bombing campaign of the Islamic Republic of Iran? Not only was their reason, but the United States has felt constrained for at least two decades in confronting Iran in many ways, not least because during the Iraq War, Iran was killing US Soldiers across the border. I think some the count is something like 6 to 800Americans killed by Iranian forces. And the Bush administration deliberately decided not to confront Iran with its efforts in this regard. So there is a two decade history of the United States saying it would be imprudent for us to engage Iran directly, as you might think we would, since we had Americans in arms and combat where Iranians were firing at them and we didn't do anything about it. Beginning around the same time was the drumbeat defeat that we needed to do or the west needed to do something to make sure that Iran did not get the bomb. The, the President of Iran said Israel would not survive long. I can promise you that. You know, we're, and the Ayatollah said much the same thing. They were very belligerent and very, essentially saying they were going to wipe Israel off the map. And the United States only didn't do anything. It in 2015 signed the, the JCPOA, the Iran deal. That essentially meant that wait 10 years and then you can get the bomb. Just give us 10 years so that I can be out of office and everybody. And then in the mid-20s, you'll, you'll deal with it. And guess What? In the mid-20s, the United States did deal with blew up Iran's nuclear facilities along with Israel. So is there a legitimate argument to be had in conservative precincts about how activist of foreign policy we should have? The answer is yes. Even we as participants in this debate would say yes. The interesting question here is they don't like the war in Iraq in Ukraine. Again, okay, they're interesting angles there. Like, do you let the Europeans do it? If Ukraine can't win, why would we get on their side in a fruitless effort that might suck us in still further? I don't agree with that argument, but I don't think it is an illegitimate argument. The question that you raise, and that is so vital to this piece and to the larger conversation we're having, is what is this 9 million person nation sitting there on a sliver of land in the Middle East? What does it have to do with all of this? And in our lights, we are the, this is the Zionist publication as you possibly can have. Israel does not have that much to do with this. Israel is, was the only country that wanted to confront and deal with Iran, but obviously there was no consensus about that in the United States. And it did not do much. I mean, it did a lot of COVID stuff. Israel's a small country defending itself in its own borders against attacks like the Hamas attack. Why is Israel the central obsessive focus in the pages of this important conservative paleo conservative magazine of the entirety of its conversation about the American role not only in the Middle east, but abroad? The obsession is the point. They are obsessed with Israel in a way that I'm not obsessed with Israel. I'm obsessed with. I got a, I got family there, I love it there. I feel a deep personal connection. I feel a connection as a Jew, but as an American looking at the panoply of problems facing the world, I do not think that Israel is The number one problem facing the United States, Israel is actually not a problem because Israel does defend itself and at very low cost, we give it some aid. So, Jamie, give us a sense of the degree to which, as you lay out in your superb piece, neither American nor conservative, the people at the American Conservative think that Israel is the greatest problem for the United States in terms of its pursuit of its foreign policy.

D (16:17)

Right.

A (16:17)

So.

D (16:20)

I've come to the conclusion that being an isolationist in the American context, certainly in the contemporary context, but I think really going back to World War II, being an isolationist is almost inherently, almost not always, you're going to become an anti Semite because there's no other way for those people to explain to themselves, why does the United States have this active global role? That is so, in my opinion, as speaking as the hypothetical isolationist, why does the America have this global role all over the world, bases everywhere, involving ourselves in all these issues and conflicts and whatnot? What reason could there be for this nonsensical, wasteful, you know, backfiring policy other than some sick and twisted, highly moneyed and influential, manipulative lobby in the United States, that is through economic coercion, through blackmail, which is a whole part of the Epstein controversy. Now, you see, that is the only way that they can explain it to themselves how the US has this particular foreign policy. And so they look at the Israel question as being responsible for all these other American involvements. So the Iraq war, Afghanistan, Syria, even Russia and Ukraine, they will connect back to Israel and the neocons, quote, unquote. I think that that is what drives a lot of this. I think that's why you see this relitigation of World War II that Tucker and his, you know, ideological allies are so intent on rewriting the history of World War II to make it so that Churchill was the bad guy.

A (18:13)

And by the way, also, that is by the way, also a Buchanan argument.

D (18:20)

You wrote a whole book, wrote a.

A (18:21)

Whole book, wrote a whole book about.

B (18:22)

How we fought unnecessary war.

A (18:24)

We fought on the wrong side in World War II. And just to emphasize this point, last week, the best Years of Our Lives movie made in 1946 was on Turner Classic Movies because it was Memorial Day, right, Veterans Day. And this is a movie about three veterans who come home after the war and are dealing with the psychological horrors that they, that they experienced and personal physical horrors that they experienced in the war. One of the five greatest American movies, a movie that just knocks, knocks the stuffings out of you as you're watching it. And there's a scene in the middle that I had completely forgotten in which Dana Andrews, who was a bomber, Fighter, Fighter pilot and a bomber, goes back, he was a high ranking official, goes back to his job that he had before he was in the war, which was being a soda jerk at a, at a drugstore in his midwestern city. And a guy sits down and starts talking to his, his friend Homer, who has lost his hands in the war, blown off in a battle, and starts saying, it's too bad what happened to you. 1946 Script by Robert E. Sherwood Pulitzer Prize Rain playwright It's really too bad what happened to you. Why did it happen for nothing? And Homer's like, what are you talking about? And he's like, we fought on the wrong side. We fought on the wrong side. We should have fought. We should have fought the commies and not the Nazis. And instead look at you now, here you are and the, you know, the commies are on the march and you don't have your hands. And this was, this is ridiculous. And Dana Andrews comes out from behind the counter and beats him up, punches him the. And is fired for, you know, doing a the customer is not always right bit. Why do I mention this? Because what this indicates is that the Buchanan argument laid out in early, in the early 2000s in his book who the name I can't remember, and the Tucker martyr made argument on his podcast and all of that has an 80 year provenance. There was a whole body of opinion in the United States even during and right after World War II that said America fought on the wrong side because we ended up allied with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's monstrous and we could have lived with Germany and why did we fight against Germany? Because Germany had a different view of the Jews from us. And Buchanan growing up in a household where they listened to Father Coughlin on the radio as he lays out in his very interesting, very well written memoir, right from the beginning, lived in a household that was obsessed with the broadcasts of Father Coughlin and openly Tucker's complete parallel. Openly anti Semitic, very popular national broadcaster who had one of the nation's most popular radio shows and was openly anti Semitic and talking about how the Jews were going to get us into war. So this is a conservative view. This is a, this is a strain of opinion on the right that has existed since World War II and simply takes new iterations as we go through history. But here.

C (21:36)

But I want to talk about the new iterations because you say, you know, part of that argument from the best years of our lives was this was all for nothing. We ended up on the side, same side as the Soviet Union. But now the isolation. Isolationists say that we took the wrong side of the Cold War too, because what did we get for dirty cities? And Russia has clean cities. And what was the point of this? Doesn't matter. What it doesn't matter. Forget what they're telling you about about what kind of government the Kremlin is and our freedoms. Doesn't it say something that their supermarkets work and ours don't? So there's always an argument against any enemy in any direction, and the argument is always linked to the Jews. To Jamie's point.

A (22:31)

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B (25:27)

And that was exactly what Abe just said, that we talked about the anti Semitism Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley and all that stuff in the early 90s. Josh Moravchik wrote a piece in Commentary at the time as part of that debate where he made the point, Abe, that you're making, which is Pat Buchanan, Pat Buchanan, if he had a foreign policy at all, which he did, it was animated or 100% by anti communism for a period of time in his career. He was, you know, he was very famously raised by a, you know, a McCarthy admiring father. He was, he was raised in it. Anti communism was like the one thing that he knew was in his blood. And Josh Moravchik points out in the Commentary essay around this time that Buchanan is doing something very funny for someone who supposedly believes in anti communism. He is undermining the anti communist coalition because who should he be allying with the neoconservatives in the Reagan administration and others who understood that, you know, Democrats were not taking the communist threat seriously enough. They had, you know, put together a coalition that would take it seriously enough. And that coalition include, you know, was a fairly big tent foreign policy coalition that ended up on the right. And Pat Buchanan wanted no part of it because of the so called neoconservatives, because of the Jews, whereas they should have been his biggest ally and he should have rode that, that you know, popular swell to, you know, a sort of anti communist, you know, a massive anti communist coalition. Instead, he took it apart.

A (27:10)

So, Jamie, taking up from where Seth and Abe were, what you adduce, I think in your description of the arguments being made in the pages of the American conservative this year in particular, is that this notion that America is a missionary country in some sense, that it's here as the light among the nations to help bring the Gospel of individual liberty, human rights, that, that, that come from God and rights are not, you know, are not provided to us by the state. All of that may or may not still be true of the United States, but we have no moral, spiritual obligation whatsoever to help disseminate this idea. And that in fact, the act of disseminating the idea is corrupting to us. And then you get to the question of Buchanan's religious views. I mentioned Father Coughlin and the almost religious tone of attack in 2025 against Jews by this wing. Right. So Tucker Carlson is the best example. But there are bits and pieces of it all over the place. And it gets to this idea that supporting a Jewish state is a Christian heresy, says Buchanan. And Kurt Mills in the. One of the top editors at the American Conservative, the co author of the piece that sought to get the Medal of Freedom, is very much a swimmer in this muck. That the extent to which America, as you said, wants to have a foreign, an activist foreign policy, the purpose of it is to be active on behalf of Israel, not Europe, not, you know, Taiwan, not South Korea. The, the countries and the places in the world in which we have actually committed physical bodies and, and colossal sums of money to protect against the possibility of a communist invasion or now a Soviet Russian invasion. But this little country that we give $3 billion to, almost all of which is spent in the domestic United States. So it's a form of industrial policy support. Are they bad? I mean, they don't, they don't like Europe, like Trump doesn't really like Europe. They seem to kind of want to fight for, against China, but whatever. But that's where the money has been spent in the United States since 1946, in the far east and in Central Europe and not in the Middle east. Except when America has gone to war directly in the Middle east on what it believed to be threats to its own sense of the world order. And that too gets blamed on the Jews. Right. And one of the things that you do point about, because it's an eerie parallel, is the catastrophism that was greeted by the idea of an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities, which directly parallels things Buchanan and others said in 1990, when America was preparing to go to war to reverse Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait. And in 2002 and 2003, as America prepared to go to war against Iraq, what were the ideas promulgated there? Tens of thousands, if not more Americans were, were going to die on the battlefields or in the sands of Arabia and in Mesopotamia and That this was all being done on behalf of Jewish interests that were only really interested in Israel at a time when in 91, Israel wasn't really all that interested in the attack on Iraq and in fact found itself in strategic. In a strategic conundrum. Because Iraq attacked it during the Gulf War and the United States told Israel it was not allowed to respond to the Scud attack. First time in Israel's history, the only time it is Israel stood down as missiles were flying at it. And then in 2003, the idea that Israel was behind our decision to have a misadventure in Iraq is belied by the fact that nobody in Israel wanted America to go to war with Iraq except there.

D (31:49)

Except Bibi.

A (31:51)

Okay, but really the view, the almost consensus view, was Iran was the existential threat, not only to Israel, but to the Middle east, and it was the great state sponsor of terrorism. There wasn't all that much evidence suggesting that Iraq participated in 9, 11. And why were you gonna do Iraq when there were greater threats in Iran? I mean, I was in Israel right before the war, and like, everybody was saying to me, I don't understand what you're about. And I would have to say to them, no, no, the threat is to America. We're not talking about you. And we think that Iraq is a great threat and all that. And they're like, you're crazy. You're crazy. This is not. And Buchanan and the people who founded the American. All this kept saying, this war is for Israel. It wasn't for Israel. Yeah, please.

D (32:41)

I think one of the reasons why you're seeing this vituperation and outrage at the neocons, Israel and the Jews is that they can't attack Trump. Right? Because there's this omerta on the right where you can't criticize the boss. And we're seeing right now what happens with. When you do that with Marjorie Taylor Greene. Right? So there's this sort of unspoken or sometimes often spoken explicit rule. You don't criticize the boss. And rather than reconcile themselves to the fact that Trump for decades has been very clear that he would never accept an Iranian nuclear bomb, they can't attack that. They can't go after him. They have to go after this sort of proxy force which they allege is somehow pulling the strings, which is Israel, the neocons, the Jews, what have you. And I think it shows their impotence within maga. It shows the fact that they are not nearly as influential as they thought or hoped they were. That this guy who they loved and love or proclaim to love. And who they've been holding up as this, you know, restrainer who will end all the wars and be the peacemaker is really not that. He's not, he's not what they've been making him out to be. And I think that's very frustrating for them. And they're in this situation now where they can't criticize him. Maybe that'll change over the next couple of years as he's on his way out the door. I'm not sure. But I think that explains a lot of the dynamic right now.

C (34:07)

I agree. And my favorite detail in the way that unfolded, and I've said this before, is that so they made all these nightmare predictions about what would happen were Trump to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. Trump does it. None of that happens. So their first story is the neocons are furious with him because they wanted a war for regime change in Iran. But meanwhile, we're all walking around with ear to ear smiles. And I think that drove them crazy. So then they blew their stack. And then, you know, they sort of had, they ramped this stuff up after the attack. I mean, you know, who knows whether Nick Fuentes would have, would have, would have. Come on, Tucker, without that wrinkle in the plot.

A (35:04)

The point that I was sort of evoking and going back 35 years to the, to the first war with, with Iraq is that people in the United States who opposed it said, this is going to kill a lot of Americans. And famously, Buchanan said it's not going to kill, you know, Leibowitz and Gold, you know, Goldman and Levy. It's going to kill Polanski and so and so and Leroy Brown. In other words, the Jews are all going to live fine. It's every other ethnic group, largely Catholic and black, that is going to die for Israel.

B (35:48)

And by the way, Pat Buchanan, famous, famous advocate for people named Leroy Brown.

A (35:53)

Yeah. Anyway, famously, nobody died in the first Gulf War. The death toll for the United States in the first Gulf War in 1991 was about 100 people. Americans did not die in the Gulf War. 100,000 Iraqis died in the Gulf War. But Americans did not die in the Gulf War in the second Gulf War, which of course was a, the second war with Iraq, which was, of course, was a, you know, gigantic mess. Again, the issue wasn't the death toll. The issue was that we did not secure victory and that we were kind of mired in an, a highly violent situation and we were not achieving our goals until the surge turned things around in 2007. And we secured a situation in which Iraq has been effectively pacified as a threat to its neighbors and to us and for, you know, 17, 18 years. But even we would not sit here and say, well, Iraq was a glorious success nonetheless. The predictions of calamity and doom and monstrousness seemed always to be accompanied on in certain precincts by the idea that there had to be that. That it was known that it was going to be a monstrous disaster that would kill lots of Americans. And we went ahead anyway because Jewish interests were pulling the marionette strings. And with the success of Israel's mission against Hamas and Iraq and Hezbollah and Syria's regime collapsing, you have there an almost complete discrediting, at least in the short run, of the view that was being expressed to the pages of the American Conservative. And what did they do? If you now move away from their conservative, we can now talk about other stuff here. They double down or they get more or their rhetoric about Jews in America and what we want and what we're doing, and the history, the counter history of the United States the last hundred years gets more and more violent and more and more incendiary, rather than saying, oh, hey, this. You know what? This is pretty great. I thought it was going to be terrible, but in fact, it was very low cost with very high return. You know, better, we'll bank that. You know, I still don't like Israel, but, you know, Trump did a. Trump really pulled it off here. I mean, there is a way, you know, it's like the Israeli left is very happy to give Trump all kinds of credit for what happened, because they like to use it as a lever against Bibi. Right? Trump did it. Not Bibi. Trump. Trump won the war with Hamas, not Bibi. You could say, wow, Trump, we love Trump. Look at him. The way he uses the military is great.

B (38:53)

If you weren't an isolationist, if you wanted to prove yourself as not an isolationist, you would jump on it. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, because you would be looking for places to say, see, I support certain intervention. I'm not an isolationist overall.

A (39:10)

But with Trump, you can say the American mission against Iraq lasted 37 hours. 37 hours. We took out the Iran nuclear program. We didn't get mired in five, you know, 10 in Afghanistan for 20 years. We didn't get mired in Iraq for eight years. We. TRUMP really knows how to do this right? And we should follow his lead. But what they did was say, you know, the Jews are even worse or something.

D (39:38)

It also upsets them, John, because it vindicates the Israeli American alliance. I mean, this was an incredibly successful mission. Flawless that the two countries pulled off.

A (39:48)

Right.

D (39:48)

And it has strengthened that relationship, and that angers them and annoys them to no end.

A (39:54)

Right. Which is why the whole point of your piece is that the motivating factor here is not what should America's position be in the world? How should we conduct our foreign policy in the wake of the Cold War and in the wake of the nature of us being, on the one hand, a unipolar power, and on the other hand, the world seeming to get sort of crazier and more violent or whatever it is. What are the Jews up to now? Every morning they wake up to say, what perfidious monstrosity are the Jews up to now? And of course, now that we can move on to Kevin Roberts and the Heritage Foundation. Also in this December issue of Commentary, we have a series of articles. I've written one, Christine Rosen has written one, and Mike Burke has written another, variously about what happened at Heritage. And what's important about this is that Heritage got itself into trouble because Tucker Carlson had on a Nazi, Nick Fuentes, and did not challenge his Nazism. And out of nowhere, the head of the Heritage foundation, given the fact that there was justifiable criticism of Tucker Carlson for platforming a Nazi, which would not seem to be a controversial thing to criticize somebody for, you could say, well, Tucker has his views and they, yeah, and he did something and blah, blah, blah, was to say that anybody who was attacking Tucker was part of a venomous coalition that was seeking to undermine Tucker Carlson. My friend Tucker Carlson's free speech of.

D (41:33)

Globalists, by the way, of globalists, and.

A (41:37)

They should all drop dead, basically, was the Kevin Roberts statement. And this is the Heritage Foundation. I'm going to say this again. I've said it before on the show. My mother, Midge Dector, was a board member of the Heritage foundation for 40 years. That's a small board. This is not like one of these places that has 100. Like the. Like the Hoover Institution that has 120 people on its board. There were 10 or 12 people on its board. She was one of them. It was a philo. It was a. It was a Zionist philo Semitic organization. The leadership that she worked with retired in the person of Ed Fulner. Kay James came in as his replacement, also ideologically simpatico in this way. And then Kevin Roberts was hired in 2021 to Maga Heritage up. Not that Heritage wasn't pretty MAGA during the first Trump administration, but to kind of help Trump get back into power and try to lay out the terms and conditions under which he would do so. And it aligned itself with populist wing of the Republican or the MAGA movement. And that meant Tucker Carlson. And they spent $1.25 billion advertising on Tucker Carlson's program. And Kevin Roberts felt out of nowhere as though he had to become Tucker's most stout defender and horrified half of the people, at least at the Heritage Foundation. I bring this up when he said that we've published these three articles and today, and I have been in contact with some people on the board privately to say, what are you going to do about what has gone on here? And today, probably the most eminent person, intellectually eminent person on the, on the Heritage Board, Robbie George, Robert P. George, professor at Princeton University, announced his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation. He said he was sad to leave the board. He has great affection and esteem for Barb Gaby, who was the president of the board. And he said that Kevin is a good man. He made what he acknowledged was a serious mistake. Being human myself, I have plenty of experience in making mistakes. What divided us was a difference of opinion about what was required to rectify the mistake. And when Robbie George said was you, for me to stay on this board, you have to retract the video that you put out that basically said that anybody who, you know, criticized Tucker Carlson was an enemy of free speech and was part of a venomous coalition that wished America ill. And this is a very important moment over the last two weeks. Robbie George is the, is the most important conservative intellectual academic in America. He is the sort of highest ranking conservative in, you know, elite academia as, as a, as a, as a professor at Princeton, head of a important sort of academic program at Princeton with, with essentially with the retirement or the, or the fact that he is now a nonagenarian sort of taking the place of Harvey Mansfield at Harvard. These are guys who, if anybody ever wanted to say there are no concerns that people go, oh, what about Robbie George? There's Robbie George. So Robbie George was the intellectual solid.

B (45:19)

Nominee for the medal Freedom. By the way, if we're looking for an alternative to Papp Buchanan, there we go.

A (45:24)

Anyway, so the board is only 10 or 12 people. And now the focus goes to some other people on the board, like Larry Orn, the head of, the head of Hillsdale College, who also has, who has refused to say anything publicly on this matter. And now it will fall to him to say yay or nay if Robbie George finally essentially decided to make this move. Any thoughts on the.

D (46:02)

Oh, sorry, Abe, go ahead.

C (46:03)

Well, I mean, my, my question is how does any of this impact what Roberts has said in his follow after his all hands on deck meeting, he came out and said, I've decided I'm staying at the meeting. He said, some people want me to go. Maybe I'll do that. I don't know. But, but I've taken into my heart the encouragement that I've gotten at this meeting and, and I'm, I'm staying on. Does he, is he still waiting to see what happens here or is he sort of planning his, you know, his, his, his quiet exit already at this point and that, that, that, that's what I don't know.

A (46:53)

My guess is that he decided that he was going to pursue a strategy of seeing whether the waters would deroil and that he could just keep going and that that's why this came as such a surprise to me last night. Like, if you were going to do this, Robbie George doing this when he did it is, is heartening and a little surprising because if he didn't do it last week or the week before last, doing it now must have meant that he had a real moment of confrontation with Roberts and said, you either this or I'm going. And then Roberts said, I'm not doing it. And Robbie George said, fine, I'm resigning. Let's see what happens now. I have no idea where this goes.

C (47:39)

I mean, that's the other. The interesting thing is that I don't.

A (47:41)

Think Roberts intended to leave. If he intended to leave, right, he could have left.

C (47:47)

What's interesting is that everything that's going on at Heritage now, it's such a black box because that meeting got leaked and they were already during that meeting talking about the problem of leaking and how strategy going forward would have to be made at the most secretive, highest level, because otherwise they can't control for leaks. So it's not as if just because there aren't videos that there is, the drama isn't ongoing every day.

A (48:17)

Well, the leaks, by the way, the leaks did end. A couple of people have made public statements saying they're resigning. That's not a leak. Right. And, and by the way, that whole thing about how leaks and you're a Judas if you leak and all of that, that video that we all saw was the result of the fact that they live streamed the meeting to people at Heritage who were not, you know, physically present at Heritage. At the time. And what on earth did they expect? All somebody would have to do is send somebody the link to the live stream. I mean, is that a leak? I guess it's a leak. But, you know, if you want to have an all hands on deck meeting that isn't going to leak, you don't send it out onto the Internet through a zoom like that's not, that's not, that's not good security against leaking, Let me just say so, Jamie, as a. Not that, not that you're a Heritage foundation expert and your piece, again is about the American conservative, not about Heritage, but where stands the conversation on the right on what is anti Semitism and how it needs to be fought in the wake of the last couple of weeks, as we also have Trump coming out last night and talking about Tucker Carlson, which we can get to in.

D (49:41)

A minute, I have to say I'm disturbed that Kevin Roberts is still president, the Heritage Foundation. I thought that this should have ended a long time ago, you know, within days of that first statement and certainly after the meeting that was televised, publicly disregardless from what you think of the issue. I mean, there comes a point when your leadership is doing damage to the institution. And you have to say to yourself is my being here, I might be right, I might really think I'm right, that this venomous coalition is after me and I made a little mistake and they're just trying to divide the right and we should be fighting all this stuff. There comes a point where you have to put the welfare of the institution above your own selfish interests. And on that score, I'm frankly shocked that he hasn't left. It's a very selfish move on his part. And I think it's a kind of disturbing development for people like us because it shows that. And then, look, the fact that J.D. vance hasn't weighed in on this, J.D. vance, you know, has been silent about this whole thing, except over the weekend, he attacked some random person on Twitter for, you know, speculating as to whether or not his deputy press secretary, who happens to be Tucker Carlson's son, whether he shares the views of his father and his uncle, also named Buckley Carlson, who's been going on a crazy Twitter rant. So JD Vance hasn't commented on this publicly. I think that's interesting because it shows that he clearly, from his own political calculation, he doesn't think it's useful to him to condemn the anti Semites and the anti Semitism in his party. And maybe there's something, you know, we all here on the Commentary podcast. We like to reassure ourselves that, you know, the Republican Party, the conservative movement, is overwhelmingly pro Israel and philosomatic. I mean, maybe that's not true anymore, Right? Like, why is Kevin Roberts still there? Why is Robbie George the only board member to have resigned? Why hasn't JD Vance weighed in on this? Donald Trump just came out yesterday and said Tucker can interview whoever he wants. So I, you know, I tend to be like Abe. I'm more of a kind of, you know, glass half empty guy. And that's how I, that's how I see this right now.

C (51:54)

Yeah. I mean, you know, regarding the idea that at some point you have to put the institution over your own interests, it could well be that Kevin Roberts thinking is, oh, no, we're going to go forward as a different kind of institution. That's why I'm saying we're going to, we're going to get rid of the old, the old types and we're going to go ahead with this new vision. And to him, that is aligning his interests or the institution's interests with his own. As far as Trump, I was fearful that he was going to get asked about this question and flub it. And I think that's what happened. He said, oh, Tucker says some nice things about me. You know, that's what he does. He's provocative. He can have people on, you know, they can talk about it. I don't, I think from Trump's standpoint, just to give him a little bit of credit here, I don't think it has anything to do at all with being sympathetic to those views. I think Trump, Trump sort of floats above these kind of fights in a way, not because he is above them, but because they just don't concern him. He's got his own set of goals, and then he doesn't want to get dragged down into this stuff. But the problem with this is that this gives Trump, having said that, gives Vance no reason now at all to have to distance himself. And Vance is much more intimately involved with this whole anti Israel movement. I don't know to what extent he genuinely sympathizes with it. I have suspicions, but I don't know. But he has now been given complete cover by the President to not have to distance himself in any way whatsoever. And that's, that's worrisome.

B (53:54)

And he said, when he was asked the question, you know, they said so, and they gave an interview to so and so. And he said, who did? Who said who?

A (54:02)

Who?

B (54:03)

Who had what? That was Trump's initial response, meaning Like, I don't. What do you have? I'm watching podcasts. Like who. Wait, which one are you talking? And then, you know, so then he goes through the Rolodex in his mind. Tucker Carlson guy who said nice things about me, whatever. And I'd like to get out of this question. I also think that Trump, like many of us, are confused by the fact that everyone in the story is named Buckley Carlson, which is hard to keep track of. But. Yeah, no, I think he's just like, he's not paying that much attention. And, you know, it has the effect of making it seem like it's not really that big a deal. Because what happened at Heritage that affected Trump, he was, he knew to comment on right when the Project 2025 and all this stuff was going on and Trump needed to back away during the campaign.

A (54:52)

Right during the campaign, created this project 2025, which was a classic document of action items that a future Trump administration could take. And the Trump campaign was freaked out by it, cuz it did not want to be pinned down about what it was gonna do in the following year. Certainly these are documents not produced by the Trump campaign. And we're like, we got nothing to do with this. Nothing in there. We, we do not endorse anything that's in there. Which of course wasn't true. Like, there was plenty of simple boilerplate conservative ideas in, in Project 2025, but they understood that Heritage in the running of the election in 24 was a liability, not a help. And they didn't need to have that, you know, like, weight on their back when what they wanted to do was skate around and say, just don't vote for this senile Biden and his moron vice president and don't commit me to anything.

B (55:51)

Paul, Dan's left the Heritage foundation over that. I mean, like, in other words, the Heritage foundation felt like they had to make sacrifice. They had to do something.

A (55:59)

Robert seems to love to do that. He's got a project, he, he makes a video that gets him into trouble and then he fires his aide. That's his, his way of handling it is to say you, it's his face you see on the video saying, venomous coalition of globalists. And he's like, I didn't do that. This kid over here, Ryan Newhouse, throw him out. I. What did I do? I was just reading the teleprompter like, it's a man of great high principle and character, really taking responsibility for the words that come out of his, out of his mouth. But so we can, we can judge him as, as, as we would, as I judge J.D. vance for not denouncing Nick Fuentes. He called him a loser yesterday. That was good. He went on, he went on Face the Nation and said, nick Fuentes is a loser. And he dissociated himself after three weeks and knowing that, that Nick Fuentes had called, had, had, had said extraordinarily derogatory things about his wife, J.D. vance's wife. The only proper response to which is, I'm a Marine. You're a twink in a basement. Come at me, bro. Let's see who survives a confrontation. Say that to my face. Which is what, you know, one would suspect a person would really want to do. But Vance is the game here, right? Trump is gone in 28. This fight, this argument that we're having about anti Semitism on the right is about what is going to follow Trump. Trump has established his bona fides as the most pro Israel president ever. So if he wants to come out and say, I don't want to fight over I don't want to, and is has his education department and his Department of Justice going at anti Semitism on college campuses using Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act. So he is koshered. He is, he is, he is beyond reproach in, in most realms. So this does get to Vance. This is about Vance and where Vance is and Vance going to Israel and saying, I love being in Israel because it's where Jesus walked. And I, you know, and, and, and getting all angry at Sloan Rackliff, a person on Twitter with 50, 000 followers who said, Hey, a public official being paid by the federal government, I. E. Buckley Carlson, assistant press secretary to J.D. vance. I'd like to know how, how aligned his views are with his father, who is basically has become the most prominent Jew hater on the planet earth right now. Maybe it's not that nice to do that if you're talking about the child of somebody, but speaking as the child of somebody, I'm sorry, but sometimes you have to, you, you are put in a position where you either have to defend or separate yourself from the views of the, of your, of your progenitor. And that's part of the cost, the benefit is, of being the son of Tucker Carlson is you get to be J.D. vance's press secretary. And the cost is that if your father goes off and says, repugnant, evil, foul, monstrous things, you might have to be called to account for how much you are. You align with such opinions. I am now costuring the idea that Sloan Rackmith was right and JD Vance was wrong and saying how dare you criticize Buckley Carlson, who, after all, works for the federal government. He doesn't work for jd. JD Vance doesn't pay him out of his own pocket and can say leave the kid alone. I mean, he can say it, but.

C (59:35)

He'S also an adult. He's not a child. Yes.

A (59:39)

Yeah.

C (59:40)

And this also came after Tucker's brother expressed his support for Fuentes in a.

A (59:50)

He said that we should all, all four of us need to register as foreign agents of Israel because we're American citizens and we should register as foreign agents of Israel. He, by the way, might want to register as an agent of the Medellin cartel based on what I know about his. His youth, given what he might have been contributing material support to. But nonetheless, and by the way, on.

B (60:14)

That you should register thing, there's a really funny thing, is that Nick Fuentes is selling hats that say America first in the script that the red hats say make America great again. Except the America first hats are blue and white.

A (60:31)

Yeah.

B (60:31)

And he's. And they're holding up you. You're either. You're either MAGA or America First. In other words, MAGA is Israel first and. Or you're America first. But the MAGA ones are red and white and the America first are blue and white. And again, it's another very confusing detail.

D (60:51)

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A (62:25)

So Trump. But Trump has. I will say that many people I heard from last night are disheartened by what Trump did and said. And, you know, would. Would wish him to have come out and said, you know, this is disgusting to me and all of that, and clearly he just wants us to go away. And we haven't even talked about Epstein. We don't have that much time left. But of course, this bizarre weekend in which on Friday night he withdraws his political support from Marjorie Taylor Greene for pushing for the House resolution to release the Epstein files, and then by Sunday night, has now issued a diktat that all House Republicans are free to vote for the release of the Epstein files. Can I just make one quick point? He can release the Epstein files. The House vote is to encourage him to release the Epstein files. If he is saying the Epstein files should be released and you're allowed to vote on that resolution, the resolution is designed to force him to release the Epstein files. It passes the House so that it goes to the Senate. If the Senate votes yay on releasing the Epstein files, then he either has to veto that bill or release the Epstein files. But if he is on a Sunday night going to say it's okay for you to vote to release the Epstein files, he could write, as I'm speaking, release the Epstein files himself. He's the one. He's saying, come at me, tell me to release the Epstein files, that this makes no sense. He is saying, I'm not going to punish you anymore for wanting to release the Epstein files, but I'm keeping my powder dry on whether to release the Epstein files. Can. Did anybody. Could. Anybody. I don't, I don't understand here what's happening.

B (64:22)

Well, you might just not know.

C (64:25)

I mean, look, if he. And if, if he doesn't want them released in full, by the way, it's, it's. It's only whatever is not classified would be. Would be released full. So there would still be. There would still be.

A (64:34)

Classified is not right. The word. So there is this argument being made, this paranoid argument that Tom Massie made yesterday, which is that he has now introduced the idea of using the Epstein files to investigate Democrats who might be in the Epstein files. And by doing that, he shields them from public view because they become part of an ongoing criminal Investigation. At the moment, there is no criminal investigation into Epstein. Therefore, the files can be released along with names being redacted. But if he's going at Clinton and Alan Dershowitz in this one and that one, then. And whoever that congresswoman is who was in was corresponding Democratic Congresswoman, like, then it's like, oh, the episode files are now actually being redacted. So Trump's game is to hide the dangerous ones. That's that theory. But it is. It is, of course, Tom Massie, who is, you know, the worst person in Congress.

C (65:36)

But. But what I'm saying is, if Trump doesn't want the. The files released entirely, can't he have the Justice Department covered for him? Because. Because he has to. He has to instruct the Justice Department to do so. And they could say no.

A (65:56)

But that's. They can't say no.

C (66:00)

I think they can.

A (66:02)

They can't. They work for him.

C (66:05)

Well, they can quit.

A (66:07)

He can declassify anything. In classification terms, the President is the source of all classification. The president saying something declassifies it. They can say, we can't do it because there's an ongoing investigation and we need to protect sources and methods. He can still declassify it. There are things he can't declassify. Like he doesn't have control of Grand Jury Binets or something like that. Those aren't the possession of the. Those are. But he can. Anyway. I'm just saying I don't think he can order any. The Justice Department can order Trump. Trump says do it. They have to do it.

B (66:46)

I think also we're seeing, like, the classic Trump not wanting to show his hand at all and just, like, let these things linger because there's a certain amount of hostility from Epstein toward Trump in the emails, and that has led some people to speculate that maybe Trump, you know, turned on Epstein, maybe he helped get him in trouble with the Feds, maybe something, whatever the other. And, you know, you'd know, you would think, like, well, if Trump were any. Anything like a hero in this story, he would just say so, but he doesn't say anything. So now it's just the classic Trump situation of the rumors swirling on. On the left, it's, you know, the worst possible case. And on the right, we're starting to see, like, maybe Trump was the hero in all the Epstein stuff, and he's just like a conductor. He's just, you know, playing and guiding the music as it goes. Rather than answering any questions himself, rather than declassifying things and releasing them himself. Other, you should do it. Oh, you should. That's a good question. You should find out the answer to that. You should really look into that. It's just. He has this way of just making sure the music never stops.

A (67:58)

Yeah, don't. I don't think that at all. I think he wants the story to go away and that he decided the way that he thought it was going to go away, which was by threatening people, turned out not to work. And that he was hearing from Johnson, speaker of the House and others, that his going at Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tom Massie was not frightening. That the body of congressmen in the Republican caucus, faced with the discharge petition that would mean that they could get a vote that wasn't scheduled by Johnson, was going to pass and that he might as well say, go ahead and vote on it. But the simple fact of the matter is there doesn't need to be a vote on it because he can release the documents at any time. Jamie, our friend Eli Lake has a piece in the Free Press this morning surfacing a name that I had thought would be buried forever in history. A actual admitted pedophile supporter of pedophilia.

D (69:05)

Yeah, he wasn't. Yeah, he.

A (69:06)

Excuse me, not a pedophile. A. But let's say an a, a, a, A thought experiment in what it is that is sexy to certain types of people. That is Milo Yiannopoulos, who apparently is now an advisor to Marjorie Taylor Greene, saying the reason that Trump doesn't want this coming out is that it's going to reveal that he was a source for the feds or for the FBI. And on the right. And, you know, Milo has just his pulse on the figure of the maga. Right. That, that the worst thing you could possibly be as a source for the FBI and what Trump is keeping out of view is that he was a fed and that, that he can't recover from because everybody on the right hates the FBI.

D (70:04)

I mean, that explanation, frankly, makes a lot more sense than pretty much any other that I've heard about Trump's reaction to the whole Epstein case. It's very possible imaginable that he would have been an informant for the FBI at multiple points in his life, by the way, not just because of the Epstein mess. There are lots of things that Donald Trump has been involved in as a real estate developer in Manhattan, dealing with the construction trades. Okay. Where you might think that, yeah, maybe the FBI was conferring with Donald Trump about certain illegal activities. So that, so what Milo is saying about this, I think is entirely believable it would explain. Now, he might, Milo might be overestimating the anger that would arise from the MAGA land if it were revealed that Donald Trump had been an informant for the FBI. Although, yes, because, you know, that was a different FBI back then. It wasn't the FBI that went after Donald Trump and tried to persecute him. This was in the early part of the 21st century. So I think it's entirely plausible.

A (71:15)

Okay. I thought that it was an interesting view into the fever swamps of the right, that they would actually believe that most Americans would view the idea that Donald Trump getting a phone call from the FBI and saying, what do you know about X, Y or Z? And that him answering the question was an act of monstrous villainy. I still think Republicans are supporters of law and order, and there is a certain subset on the, on the right that thinks that the FBI is an evil organ, but that's still a sliver, like, that's not America. But maybe I'm wrong.

C (71:51)

It's especially crazy in the sense that I thought MAGA was all about cracking down on pedophiles. So if Trump was informing the FBI about the activities of a pedophile, then wouldn't they be thrilled? Wouldn't that be in keeping with like the Trump, the superhero pedophile slayer of 2016?

A (72:15)

That's part of the.

C (72:16)

I mean, it gets, it gets so.

A (72:18)

Knotted up, the conversation that doesn't make sense. The idea that he's got to keep it quiet that he was talking to the FBI about Epstein does not, does not make logical sense. Unless you're so deep in the weeds that it's worse to talk to the FBI than it is to blow the whistle on Epstein. If you want to make the case that he might have been blowing the whistle. Very quickly, before we go, Seth and I have the same recommendation. So, Seth, what is our recommendation?

B (72:51)

Death by Lightning on Netflix is the story of a four part series about the assassination of President Garfield. And it's, it is really about the corruption of the age and Garfield being a reformer and sort of coming up through that, trying to break the wall that Chester Arthur and others had erected around the nation's finances, which is that they had the sort of New York, I don't want to say Mafia, because they weren't the actual mafia and there was an actual mafia. But you know, this New York crew had a, you know, a chokehold on the ports and, you know, certain amount of federal revenue. There's one point in the show where Garfield is joking with, with his secretary of State about. Wouldn't it be nice to find out where the rest of the federal revenue is and how much is there? As if, you know, it was. It was almost as if there was like a second government. So Garfield comes through. They're very powerful and he wants reform. He is just the man from Ohio. He's a regular guy. He grew up poor, he built, made something of himself. He became a congressman. He gave a speech at the convention nominating somebody else from Ohio. The speech was so good that he was deemed the kind of candidate that could probably bridge the gap in the post Civil War Ulysses Grant, a lion in winter age Republican party. And it's very good and the. One of the best really. The cast is all very good. Matthew McFadden is Charles guitar, the assassin. But I will. I just want to say that on the. On the other part, the. The one. The standout I want to say is Shea Wiggum as Roscoe Conkling is phenomenal. The. The sort. The senator who controls Chester Arthur and is sort of at the center of everything.

A (74:51)

Okay, so to. To. I'm a little concerned that you make it sound like it's a C SPAN show about reformists versus careerists.

B (75:04)

No, it's Game of Thrones.

A (75:06)

Right?

B (75:06)

It is Game of Thrones.

A (75:08)

It is the joint story of Garfield and his assassin Charles Guiteau, who was a. Who was a madman and a madman who had various schemes in the course of his life that then culminated in his idea that if he aligned himself with Garfield and the Garfield movement, half of which was an effort by the crooks led by Conkling, played by Shea Wiggum and Chester Allen Arthur led by played by Nick Offerman, that he could ally himself with them, support Garfield, get himself the job of ambassador to Paris. He's a sort of indigent who has. Who has never done anything, spent his life living in a free love community. Six years in a free love the Oneida community in upstate New York. The story of Guiteau is not to be believed. And the show intertwines the story of the rise of Garfield with the increasing madness of Guiteau and what it was that ended up leading him to shoot Garfield in the Washington train station and him garfield surviving for 79 days. It's a beautifully rendered, really interesting, funny, powerful inside look at politics with amazing performances. And it is based on a book. Having I watched it this weekend and then I immediately downloaded the book on which it's based, which is called Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard, which tells the story and resuscitates the life of James Garfield, one of the most extraordinary people ever to hold the presidency. As it turns out, even though he only held the presidency for six months before his death, or even less. He was a dirt poor boy who did not have shoes until he was seven years old. Father died when he was a kid. He went and worked on the Erie Canal and nearly drowned at the age of 18 falling off into the water. Pulled himself up by a rope. Decided that there was more to life and that there was more that he could do in life. Got himself enrolled at a college in Michigan. Learned Greek, learned Latin. In two years became an instructor at the school at which he had that he had entered as a near illiterate. Went off to Williams College. Graduated from Williams College, became president of Williams College, then became a congressman, then became the general who helped save Kentucky in an incredibly daring and bold pincer move of subterfuge against the Confederate army. Who was incredibly progressive on civil rights and on black rights. Nominated and spoken for by Frederick Douglass in 1880. Inventor of the front porch political strategy in which he refused to campaign for himself but allowed anyone to come ask him a question on the. On his front porch in Mentor, Ohio. Loving father to five children, two of whom died in infancy. His wife nearly died while he was president before he was even killed of a. Of like. Of diphtheria. He was an amazing American person and you are led to be reminded of the evil, the monstrousness of assassination because there is no telling what he could have done as president, although in his wake, and this is part of the story, Chester, the most corrupt person ever to have been elected president because of what happened to Garfield, then championed civil service reform and ended the patronage spoils job system that had dominated American politics before that because he knew that it had basically led to the killing of this great, great American. And that's. That's Destiny of the Republic, the book which is really remarkable and the series Death by Lightning on Netflix, which is just candy. Even though the thing that I though.

B (79:23)

Loved about one of the irony, the point that I loved about it was that Charles Guiteau, the assassin people don't actually really know him or his story at all. And that's part of the plot is the battle to make him. Charles Guiteau in the, you know, as you see in the series, wants to be remembered as something. And so there is a bit of an echo in the modern age where we talk about copycat violence and things like that and, and part of the strategy of how to make him Not a martyr and not his name, not well known. And that strategy was obviously successful because people don't know him. But that is what gives you the joy of the show, which is that he was almost completely forgotten. And really his story is quite remarkable. And this brings it back.

A (80:12)

Final, final point here and then we'll go is that, is that he was the first of the assassins that we know about in the modern age. And you know, there were several assassinations in the year 1881, including the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II, who was a reformist who was killed by an anti reformist. But Guiteau was the first madman assassin. He was clearly a schizophrenic. His family had wanted to have him committed. He was, you know, a paranoid schizophrenic, a thief, you know, a person of very low character who was like John Chapman who killed John Lennon or John Hinckley. He had it, got it in his head. God sent him a message that he needed to clear. He needed to save America from James Garfield, whom just that day he had also been trying to get a job from. So he is the first modern assassin in that sense, an assassin whose motive was skit. Who's who was driven by schizophrenia and motivated by fame, by the hunger for fame. So it's an incredibly present story. Michael Shannon is Garfield, you said. Matthew McFadden, who looks exactly like Guiteau, is Guiteau. Shea Wiggum, Nick Offerman, Betty Gilpin. It's an amazing cast. It's a beautiful show. Death by lightning and destiny of the Republic are the recommendations. Jamie Kirchuk, Everybody. Go to commentary.org and read neither American nor Conservative by Jamie Kerchick and look for his work at Axel Springer at the various, at the various publications of Axel Springer.

D (81:57)

Politico magazine being the main one.

A (81:59)

There we go. Okay. And for Seth and Abe, I'm John Pakoricz. Keep the camel barn. Foreign.

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A (83:03)

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B (83:08)

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A (83:10)

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