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- [00:04]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best Expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Seth Mandel
Some preach and pain Some die of birds the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, December 6, 2024. I am John Bodhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine. As we approach the end of the year, the holiday season, the season of giving, I'm coming to you today for the first of many appeals through the end of the year to ask you if you would find it in your heart to find a place for Commentary as part of your year end giving. Commentary is a 501c3 nonprofit. We depend not only on our subscribers and on our advertisers for and our for keeping the lights on and being able to continue to do this podcast. But donors are a vital component to keeping the institution strong and healthy. We are approaching our 80th year in publication. Next November will be 80 years. The commentary will have been in continuous publication. Making it this is actually the case, one of the oldest monthlies still publishing in the western world. We publish an issue every month. That issue is available to you online as our January issue will be available to you online next week with a lot of wonderful stuff in it. We of course also publish our our blog every day and we do these podcasts. And that is not a cheap proposition. People have been extraordinarily generous over the years. I encourage you and prospectively thank you for the kinds of generosity that our listeners and viewers and readers have shown over the years and ask that this year you give dig a little deeper to keep us going at this critical moment. You can go to commentary.org donate very simple. One stop shopping one page right there. And we will all be very, very grateful for your eleemosynary generosity. And by we, I mean executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
- [02:38]
John Podhoretz
Hi John.
- [02:39]
Seth Mandel
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
- [02:41]
Christine Rosen
Hi John.
- [02:42]
Seth Mandel
And Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
- [02:45]
Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
- [02:46]
Seth Mandel
I talked about this yesterday, but I can't get over it. I can't get over it. So we got to talk about it again today. Piece of the New York Times about how people in the Biden administration are seriously talking about blanket pardons for people who have been threatened over the years by Trumpy people with being pursued once Trump people got back into power with destruction. They're going to destroy them. They're going to use the tools of power to deal with them. They're going to get them arrested, they're going to go after journalists, they are going to do this, they're going to do that. A lot of this. Now focusing on Cash Patel, the purported nominee for FBI. I mean, I guess he's kind of. It's not even formal yet, and the FBI director is still there. It's all very unclear, but Cash Patel is somebody who wandered around on Steve Bannon's podcast and other places saying things like, you know, I will avenge you, and, you know, we will take the, you know, the hammer of Thor and smash you to bits and whatever. And the response of people in the administration, people in the press and others to these threats has been this idea that there need to be preemptive pardons of. I mean, it could be hundreds of people, the way they're talking, from Republicans like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney to Democrats like, I don't know what journalists. They're, you know, are on the enemy's list or whatever. And the reason I wanted to talk about this again today is that they invented all this in 2015 and 2016, with the unprecedented emergence of Trump as a candidate who said and did things that, frankly, no American candidate had ever said and done before, said he wouldn't respect the results of the election, said he didn't like, you know, he didn't like people who crashed their planes in war, said, you know, he would lock her up. All that stuff that. Beginning in 2016, beginning with the Crossfire hurricane investigation that started In July of 2016, the Democratic Party officials in the Democratic Party officials, people in the press aligned with the interests of Democrats and liberals, terrified, and I think without genuinely terrified by the prospect of Trump, who does not seem to observe Democratic niceties coming to power, began thinking that it was okay to use the levers of power that they possessed to find ways to prevent him from rising or once he won the election in 2016, to prevent him from assuming the White House. And then once he assumed the White House, to figure out ways to get him out of the White House as quickly as possible before 2020 rolled around. So we had the. We had leaks against his incoming national security advisor. We had James Comey, the FBI director, playing this inside, outside game where he went to Trump to warn him that there were efforts to undermine his incoming administration as an effort to test Trump. The FBI director who was going to work for him to test Trump to see how he would react when Comey came to him with this news, not because he thought it was important that Trump know, but because he was trying to smoke him out, catch him in a perjury trap, get him before January 20th, take him down. And we had 25th amendment talk. And we had, we had three years of efforts, unprecedented in American history of one party and its affiliated press believing that it had the right to violate rules of FISA courts to use double back, double double barreled information, getting a FISA warrant on the basis of the evidence that was in the FISA warrant that got the first FISA warrant for the second FISA warrant against a poor schlep who wasn't even on the campaign or being paid by the campaign. That's Carter Page throwing somebody named George Papadopoulos in jail for 14 days for I don't even know what he did. He had a drunken conversation at a bar in London with somebody who then ratted him out in some fashion for saying something or other. They did all this. They did it. Republicans didn't do it. Trump didn't do it. They did it.
- [07:45]
John Podhoretz
And then this is without even getting into what Trump was subjected to after office.
- [07:52]
Seth Mandel
Right, right. So I'm only, right, I'm only beginning with this part. So my point is not, you know, when I think about friends of mine like David Frum and others like that saying, you know, there are no guardrails. The guardrails only exist if everybody agrees that there are guardrails. Trump says there are no guardrails, so there are no guardrails. So the implicit, what do you call it? The implicit logical follow on from that is he's gotten rid of the guardrails. So you gotta set a thief to catch a thief. If he's gonna play dirty, we have to play dirty.
- [08:28]
Abe Greenwald
But this is where, this reminds me more of the Harry Reid nuking the filibuster story and trajectory than it does this because they actually removed the guardrails on presidential pardons by basically accepting, with very little pushback, Biden's blanket pardon of his son. And it's not just that he lied and said he wouldn't pardon him, but it's the blanket nature of it. It's covering almost 11 years, and that is unprecedented. And so when they, once you've done that and accepted that that was necessary, then it's just one step further to say, let's just preemptively pardon anyone who might be at risk of being prosecuted for things they did that they shouldn't have under Trump. But the preemptive nature of it is also fascinating because blanket pardons do exist. They tend to be used as a sort of tool of reconciliation for people who have admitted guilt or been prosecuted for a crime that Then later a society decides, we need some sort of healing on whether that's draft dodgers en masse, large groups of people who've done something that later on the country decides, this is too divisive, we're going to fix this. But they have admitted guilt in some cases. They've served time in most cases, and then they received the pardon. This is quite different. This is a form of insurance for people who work for Democratic administrations. It's saying, whatever you do during a president's administration, we're going to protect you on our way out. It's, it's an. It's opening a door, which of course, Trump will walk right through, because why wouldn't he? It's opening a door to allow any incoming administration to have this form of insurance, which would allow people who work for that administration to assume a kind of reckless posture with regard to what, following the rule of law?
- [10:09]
John Podhoretz
See, I think it's very worthwhile that we're talking about it today, because I think the story's changed a bit since yesterday in a kind of subtle way. Yesterday, you know, kind of all we knew was the Politico had reported that the administration was talking about this preemptive pardon. Supposedly, Biden wasn't aware of it yet, and it came right on the heels of the Hunter Broad pardon, which a lot of Democrats were distressed about and the media was distressed about. But today you have Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times in favor of it. Today's beginning, the sort of normalization of it, the acceptance of it. And aside from that being a bad thing in and of itself, it tells me that liberals are right off the bat not ingesting any of the lessons of the 2024 election. The main one being the American people. Don't want your hysteria. Stop. Take a breath. As John says, keep your powder dry.
- [11:26]
Seth Mandel
I think Seth Abe brings up an important thing, and we talked about this during 2024, and there was this subtle shift. For eight years, Trump was the disruptive X factor, abnormal presence in American political life, behaved in new ways, did new things. A lot of people liked it. A lot of people were extraordinarily unnerved by it. Then we had this once in a century pandemic crisis that seemed ill suited to disruption and breaking that. What you needed was somebody calming and soothing and seeming to be in control and cool and collected because we were in the crisis. And he failed at that. And Biden said, I'm normal, and went. And then there was this flip in 2023, 2024, in which over the course of those 18 months, really, Trump started seeming the more normal of the two candidates and the Republican platform started seeming the more normal of the two approaches to what the future would be. It wasn't a senile guy. It wasn't a swap out with no vote of a candidate. It wasn't boys should play in girls sports. It wasn't 15,000 other things. TRUMP was there for. They them. I'm for you. I don't like all of this crime coming over the border. You know, your taxes are too high, inflation is too high. I'm going to, I'm going to try to fix things and make them better. That's a normal political message, right? So as Abe says, the Republicans win the election and the Democrats say, fascism is upon us, we better pardon ourselves.
- [13:22]
Christine Rosen
Right? And it's continuing also in a funny way, because during the transition, we don't have a president who's really all there. And Kamala, I think everybody's a bit surprised by just how much she has disappeared. She made that one video. It was a disaster. And she's been hidden away.
- [13:43]
Seth Mandel
Well, you call it, you call it a disaster. I could watch it on a loop 24 hours a day.
- [13:48]
John Podhoretz
Fair enough.
- [13:49]
Christine Rosen
She's, you know what, the president's being hidden in the attic and the vice president's being hidden in the basement. There's something very weird about that situation.
- [13:58]
Seth Mandel
Are you calling Africa an attic? Seriously? They sent him to Africa so they wouldn't have to put him in the attic.
- [14:08]
Christine Rosen
Angola, the Angola, as Christine said the other day. And so Trump, you know, he has this, he has this press conference about Canada with Justin Trudeau and says, with Justin, you can be governor. You know, we'll make Canada 51st state and you could be governor or whatever. And you realize that he's sort of doing the job of a president at a time when normally you get yelled at for that. Normally there's an objection that is, we have one president at a time. But there's a sort of weird sense of relief, I think, on the part of the public that this only feels normal right now because Trump is stepping into the I'm the leader vacuum that has been left. And it's not normal to just leave a vacuum. It's not normal to push a president off a ticket because they, they are past the point where they can handle the job and then just stick it out and wait until there's a new administration with that thought going around. And people said, you know, there really is. So I think that the normalcy thing has been to Trump's benefit. And they, and they do keep going with it. And the other thing, by the way, I just want to, about the cyclical nature of the, of the freak out normalization, you know, whatever cycle that the Democrats have been doing with the FBI. What was George Papadopoulos indicted for? What did he get in trouble for lying to the FBI? What did Michael Flynn get indicted for lying to the FBI? So it's not just that they find a way to prosecute you, it's that they find an excuse for the FBI to talk to you and then they charge you for talking to the FBI and put you in jail. And then Trump has to pardon you because your crime was the FBI didn't think you were honest enough in their interrogation of you during a trumped up investigation that had basically no basis. And then on the basis of those pardons, it's all right, well, the door is open. We got to pardon everybody. Pardoning is normal now because they pardon, because he's going to pardon somebody for lying to the FBI. And I think that's an important part of this, is that the investigation itself sends you to jail. What you do during the investigation, there's.
- [16:27]
Abe Greenwald
Also, there's also a certain comfort level I think that the Democratic Party has now with running that Trump playbook exactly as Seth describes, like having something to point to and say, danger, danger, Will Robinson. Because what they're not doing, and this, this points to another piece in the Times today that I found sort of fascinating. They're not dealing with the fact that on the many of the issues that this election was about, he also has the public on his side. So there's a piece that says Trump better be careful, he doesn't have a mandate. And that's true. And actually that was a warning that people on the right side of the aisle gave the Biden administration early on, which he did not heed. So it's true that he doesn't have a mandate. Mandate in the way we think of a landslide. But then when you break out on a lot of the issues, the economy, crime, the border, all those three in particular, a lot of the social issues, like the trans issue, most of the people who voted for Trump that they're on the right side of the aisle on a lot of those issues, the Democratic Party is really wrestling with why they couldn't persuade people that they represent their interests. And it's much easier to point and yell at Trump and go, he's a fascist. He's going to do all these terrible things. We live in fear than it is to sit down and wrestle in the party about the trans issue, which we had another little stunt performed on Capitol Hill yesterday in the bathrooms where, where, oh, we just want to all be accepted as part of society. Turned into a TikTok video of people gyrating and twerking in the women's restroom in Congress to prove that men should be allowed in women's restrooms. So they really are having a crisis on the issues as much as they are in the crisis and the void of leadership in the party.
- [18:00]
John Podhoretz
It's totally linked. Can I just say, it's the fact that Bradley Manning, and I'm calling him Bradley Manning because he's a traitor to the United States. I don't, I don't. I don't give traitors to the United States the. Their preferred pronouns and their preferred names. And by the way, he should still be in jail, except Obama commuted his sentence. He was, he was supposed to be there for 30 years.
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Christine Rosen
That's a father's love, though.
- [18:32]
Seth Mandel
Yeah.
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John Podhoretz
The fact that they are. That, that the. There was a few days ago that in the New York Times there was a piece saying, you know, maybe we should acknowledge that some of the trans activism has gone a little too far for the general public. You know, and even though our cause is righteous, we shouldn't have been as aggressive, shouldn't have harassed J.K. rowling and so on. Right? Then, boom, yesterday, there's a trans dance party in the bathroom of Capitol Hill. This is the exact same issue. They have no idea how much the public has rejected their agenda.
- [19:24]
Seth Mandel
They do or they don't care. I mean, the best way of looking at it is there are a bunch of people who are normal political players of a classic mold in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. That is to say, they're operatives. Their purpose is to win elections. What they do is try to figure out how to get to 50 point plus one vote to win an election. So they look at issues. They do it almost like a marketing campaign. What would be most palatable? What ingredient do you need to leave out because it's too spicy? You know, try to try to sell it that way. And that's, you know, sort of like the common run of politics in the world is, are those people. And they're looking at the election and saying, okay, we better rejigger. You know, you know, it's bad. Boys and girls, sports. That's bad. That's bad. Trust me. You know, you can go to. You can go to a town in Massachusetts you can go to a town in Mississippi, you can go to a town in Alaska. You can go to a town anywhere. People do not want 6 foot 2 inch boys, you know, playing volleyball and smashing a ball into their daughter's head, spiking it into their head and breaking her nose, like, did somebody. That's not right. So why don't we get rid of that? Okay? Then you have the other people who are like, I don't care what they think. I don't care if they think it's not fair that he's 6 foot 2 and spiking the ball in the girl's nose. Would you say that about Rosa Parks? Could Rosa Parks spike a ball in a guy, in some. In a white person's nose? Yes. Rosa Parks should have been allowed to do that. This is what you're allowed to do. Don't hand me your cynical, craven, nihilistic efforts to win elections at all costs. We're playing for the future of humanity and we outrank you and we are morally superior to you. And Democrats, it appears, have very little immunity from that assault on the very conventional notion that we're all Democrats. You know what we need? We need 220 seats in the House, 51 senators, and we need to win 271 electoral votes so that we can do things that we like to do, like get more health care and provide more benefits and do whatever we want to do. And that's the normal thing.
- [21:56]
Abe Greenwald
But it's understandable from the, from the perspective of the more radical elements, because there's a. There's. Now the moral grandstanding brings them huge rewards, not electorally, but in terms of popularity, in terms of the culture, which is more on their side than not, although that is shifting. And I think they, you know, they are not performing for the constituents of the average Democrat who's elected to the House of Representatives. They're performing for the followers on TikTok and Instagram. And they get immediate reward for that. And they get Hollywood, you know, making film after film that features a trans star and saying, this is. This is the future. Moral grandstanding brings a really strong sense of self to people who don't otherwise have any kind of faith or religion or purpose. And you see it in a lot of the more extreme parts of maga too. But you all this is where you really see it on the left. And I think they, they in the sense that they don't care, you're right. But they're also being rewarded by a culture that has a different system for rewarding. Old school politicians and new, New. New School activists.
- [22:57]
John Podhoretz
You know this also.
- [22:58]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, go ahead.
- [22:59]
John Podhoretz
I just want to say I think that the trans stunt kind of reignites a disagreement that we've had in this podcast about Nancy Mace and how she went about very, in a very performative, theatrical way, putting up signs saying, you know, girls only, girls only, bathroom account. And Christine and I were saying that that was the wrong way to go about it. And John, you and Matt were saying it was right. Now, I have to say, I think she invited this to some degree, which isn't to say may not have happened without her doing that, but I think she hastened it. What I'm now wondering though, is that good or bad? Because now, because she hastened the thing. As Nancy made the point herself yesterday on X, on a post about this stunt in the bathrooms, this, the Bradley Manning stunt, she said something to the effect of, they're proving a point. All right? They're proving our point. So maybe inviting the radical craziness so the world can see it is a win. I'm not sure.
- [24:22]
Seth Mandel
Well, I mean, look, that's a classic dynamic in 60s and post 60s American politics. You're the Chicago 7. You're in a courtroom and you behave in ways with this irascible 83 year old judge that ends up having you gagged and roped to a chair in the course of your trial. You did that on purpose. You wanted to turn the courtroom into a mockery of a courtroom and have the country look at your trial and say, this country is a mockery of itself. And you push Judge Hoffman's buttons. And Judge Hoffman responded and we had the trial. This notorious trial is Chicago 7. It's performative politics. And it's been going on. That was really the high watermark of it in the 1960s. It's been going on forever. You draw fire, right? And then you, then you say, oh my God, they're shooting at me. You know, how could they? You know, it's like, here, shoot at me. And then they shoot at you. And you're like, oh my God, they're shooting at me. How could they possibly do that? It's a form of complex gaslighting. So in 19, in 2016, man, the carpenter. Other people, I think, very fairly made the point that the Trump campaign and the Trump administration were creating new forms of gaslighting the public, that they were saying things that we knew visibly not to be true, that Trump insisted that his staff echo in order to create. What was it that Steve Jobs called it? A Reality distortion field. Just the assertion of something so vividly that you gave people leave to agree with you, that something that actually wasn't there in front of you was there in front of you. So, largest crowd size in American history for actually relatively sparsely attended inaugural and that sort of thing. And then the word gaslighting entered the vocabulary again after decades of misuse. But they did it, and it was a thing, and it was very disturbing, and it was a disturbing thing to enter into American politics. But there has been no gaslighting like liberal gaslighting for the last four years. I am sorry. You indict Donald Trump on 34 charges of writing the same check every month just so you can get to 34 felony indictments. A check where he legitimately is allowed to make a deal paying somebody off, the claim being that the check somehow was illegitimately written off the wrong account. Yeah. So you get a. You get a quiescent jury to agree to it. That was gaslighting. That's gaslighting. It was one thing. It was one check. It was one payment 34 times. So you indict him for 34 times, you get 91 indictments out of everything. Why? Because you're throwing the kitchen sink at it. Why? Because your goal is to say he was indicted 91 times. It's not to say that he was guilty. It's not to say that he was innocent. It is to create the conditions under which he cannot be reelected by using means and techniques that should not be used in American politics, namely lawfare. This is the banana republic that we were being warned that Donald Trump was introducing into the United States and showed some signs of it. You know, the pardon games that he played in the first year of his administration where he was sort of like, give out fun pardons and stuff like that.
- [28:06]
Abe Greenwald
The election denial lawsuits, those were another very, very.
- [28:09]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, I am not excusing, you know, the contribution to the degeneration of truth as a value or fact as a value in how we understand reality. Anybody who contributed to the degradation of that is guilty of a grievous sin. And Trump is, and the people around Trump are and all that. But, you know, he turned out to be kind of a JV athlete in this. And the Democrats turned out to be, you know, Tom Brady for a while, or maybe better, better put, like Peyton Manning. Like, they were great until they had to get to the super bowl. And then when time came, well, this is actually to close the sale when everything they did had to have the effect of making sure that Trump never became president again. Good work, you guys. You did a fantastic job. Now you're going to all just go pardon yourselves. It's. The gaslighting thing is astonishing. They bring up banana Republicanism. They behave like politicians in a banana republic, and they help get Trump elected by their behavior. And now they're running screaming for the exits, fearing that they are residents of the banana republic that they may themselves have helped create.
- [29:37]
Christine Rosen
This is why Cash Patel is going to be confirmed as FBI director. I'm serious. This is. I have. I have watched the changing attitudes. I've watched, you know, Susan Collins go, yeah, you know, he's probably all right, or something like that, you know, versus her reaction to others. You always, you try to look at the moderates, the bellwethers, the ones who can actually sink. Lisa Murkowski, the Lisa Murkowski type.
- [30:06]
Seth Mandel
Right.
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Christine Rosen
Which is the Susan Collins type, the Republican who will go against them, but they've sort of been pushed, probably get confirmed, more so than Pete Hegseth, whose supporters are really fighting for him. And, you know, Gates was not defended. He was dropped out immediately. We'll see what happens with rfk. Cash Patel is, to Democrats the manifestation of the idea that Trump is that the dark knight of fascism is finally descending on the United States of America. Right. That's why you got the column in the New York Times this morning. The column is, cash Patel has the enemies list. Trump should pardon everybody on it. Right. It's Cash Patel.
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Seth Mandel
Is Biden.
- [31:01]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, Biden. Excuse me. Biden should pardon everybody on the list. The list is Cash Patel. So why is Cash Patel not facing more headwinds when we talk about his ability to get confirmed? The answer is because Biden just pardoned his son. And they're talking about the mass pardons before Cash Patel says any, before he gets up in the confirmation hearings and has any confrontations with Democratic senators. Biden is. The Biden administration is floating mass pardons out of mass hysteria for people. And the stuff that we talked about before, the. Well, we don't know what George Papadopoulos and Mike Flynn, all these guys, Carter Page. So let's manifest the crime. Send the FBI to talk to them, and then they'll say something to the FBI that's not truthful, you know, and all apples are red or something, and they will have then committed a crime because we sent the FBI to talk to them. People see this stuff, and I think what they see in Cash Patel is a kind of bodyguard, in a way. They start to sympathize with the idea that Trump wants somebody at the head of the FBI to filter the stuff that comes from below through the FBI. Not necessarily because the FBI is going to listen to him and he's going to go arrest everybody, but because Trump doesn't trust the FBI and maybe has reason not to trust the FBI and Cash Patel is his guy to check every document that comes through and make sure that this isn't continuing under Trump.
- [32:40]
Seth Mandel
The number three official at the FBI, Peter Strzok, had a text chain with his mistress in which she said, don't worry, we're going to get him. Why should he trust the FBI?
- [32:57]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [32:58]
Seth Mandel
I mean, I'm just saying this is a matter of rational fact. Now, my feeling about Cash Patel is aesthetic. I will confess this. I don't know what standing people should have if they're gonna run the FBI. I'm not a law enforcement expert and, you know, I. There are people that I respect in law enforcement and trust. You know, I don't like him because he seems like a kind of unclassy third rate grifter, you know, selling merch and writing children's books about King Donald and the evil Hillary Munster, stuff like that. Selling his merch on Steve Bannon's war room. But, you know, that's me. Like, I like a classier government, but you know what.
- [33:46]
Christine Rosen
The merch is, you know, kshs. The dollar sign. Yeah, he literally uses the cash thing.
- [33:53]
Seth Mandel
But, I mean, that ship has sailed. If a ship can ever have been said to have sailed. When the man who built Trump Tower became President of the United States, my hopes for a dignified presidency, in which, you know, as Kennedy, Kennedy was like raping women in the White House pool, but he had Mislav Rostropovich playing the cello at the state dinner.
- [34:20]
Abe Greenwald
Okay, but I think you can have the sort of taste assessment of someone like Cash Patel. But what worries me is the same thing that worried me about Matt Gates, which is a temperamental argument. You could have someone who wants to burn it all down, but then they have to have the temperament where they get some buy in from the people already in the institution when they understand what kind of undertaking they're having. Patel strikes me as having the temperament of an Instagram influencer, even though he has his resume is not terrible. I mean, he's actually done at all.
- [34:49]
Seth Mandel
His resume is his resume absent the stuff that we know that he said on Steve Bannon's war room and stuff like that. He was a prosecutor, he was a public defender. Yes, okay, all of that.
- [35:02]
Abe Greenwald
But temperamentally Like Matt Gaetz.
- [35:04]
Seth Mandel
Now, people in the White House who worked with him in the Trump White House, there are a bunch of people who really, really, really didn't like him.
- [35:11]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, well, that speaks to.
- [35:12]
Seth Mandel
So, I mean, that. And that is. That's never good. Like, that's. That, you know, who are. Who are unnerved by history. But again, same problem. Like, they probably didn't like Trump either. You know, it's like, again, that ship has sailed. Like, we are not the judges. In a funny way, we don't get to be the judges of the temperament. The Senate does. Trump does. We elected Trump to pick his people.
- [35:38]
Abe Greenwald
That's a better argument for people on the left who want to torpedo every nominee that Trump puts up. It's a better argument to say, look, the guy's resume is fine, but temperamentally, because he's coming into an institution that does need some reform, and that does have a lot of turmoil right now. You know, we need someone with a steady hand who understands how to run a large bureaucracy. I mean, that's a legitimate reason to reject someone like Cash Patel. To say, he does not seem to have those qualities on his resume, and his reputational management efforts have not helped us get to that point yet. But again, that's a normal political response, and we're not in normal political response.
- [36:15]
Seth Mandel
Although Seth makes, I think, what is a subtle point that I haven't really thought of before, which is that maybe what we're talking about is not burning the place down. Maybe he's there because stuff bubbles up from the Kansas City office saying there's somebody with a cross on who said something nasty in an online forum about, you know, Muslim, and we really need to investigate it. And it gets to the FBI director's desk, and he says, no, we're not doing that. Someone wants to issue a report that says, we really need to focus on this sect in Oregon that isn't paying its taxes and send 50 agents to surround the compound and make them come out with their hands up. And he says, no, let's.
- [37:18]
John Podhoretz
Someone comes and says, this laptop, the contents on this laptop have all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And he says, no, it has all the hallmarks of possible evidence of an American crime.
- [37:36]
Seth Mandel
Right. So in that sense, his job as a gatekeeper could be far more negative than positive. That is to say that stuff bubbles up. Innovations, FBI innovations in extending the FBI's mandate, or, you know, mandamus or whatever you want to call it, into finding exotic crimes to investigate are slowed down by a skeptical central office that would prefer that they go after transnational criminals.
- [38:13]
Abe Greenwald
Or I'm sorry to interrupt, but he also has to have the ability to do most of what the FBI does. Like, for example, figure out why a guy got assassinated in the middle of Manhattan yesterday. I mean, so most of what the FBI does isn't political and shouldn't be political. We taught we tend to talk most about the politically adjacent cases, but it's a crime fighting organization and there's a hell of a lot for them to be doing fighting crime, crime that isn't at all adjacent to any political argument. And he's got to have the buy in of the people in that department to do that job well. And the American people want that job done well.
- [38:50]
Seth Mandel
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- [41:56]
Abe Greenwald
This is where the left tells on themselves by the accusations they're making about Patel because their fear is that Trump will do what they did with the FBI, which is extent make political criminal prosecution decisions in the way that the left has done through the FBI, as you say, for almost a decade now.
- [42:17]
John Podhoretz
There's a parallel there with the way the left freaks out over conservative court nominees because they think conservative court nominees are going to be activist judges the way they are on the left. And it's never the case at all.
- [42:38]
Christine Rosen
I mean, nobody ever wonders how Sonia Sotomayor is going to vote in big case.
- [42:43]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [42:44]
Christine Rosen
But you don't know how John Roberts.
- [42:45]
John Podhoretz
Is going to come out.
- [42:47]
Seth Mandel
I just think that, yeah, that they are telling on themselves and that Trump should be sitting here not believing his luck. I mean, he is, he is the luckiest man of our time, I think it's fair to say. I mean he went through extraordinarily difficult, you know, the periods and court five cases at the same time and all of that. And if you think that he's a bad guy, an evil guy and he's a sexual assault guy, you think he's like escaped and he's a demon and he's escaped it. But he is the luckiest guy of our time for various reasons. And no one is luckier than he and his enemies did we expect that he would be sitting here at the beginning of December with Biden collapsing what tiny little bit left of his credibility he would have with this Pardon like, at least he could have waited until the 19th of January. You know, Clinton destroyed his reputation going out the door, but he did wait until the day before he left office to pardon Mark Rich and his own brother and whoever else it was he pardoned. Pardons are very dangerous for people's reputations. And as I said yesterday, and the way that they talk about him and they talk about giving themselves special things to escape Trump's wrath is just like an astounding political gift. Again, it creates this notion that they cannot be trusted with power because they abuse it. They say that Trump's going to abuse it, then he doesn't really abuse it. He says what he wants to do, then they take him to court. Some things he gets through, some things he doesn't get through. Some parts of the Muslim ban or, you know, the Muslim ban is thrown out. But his right to enforce immigration law under the 1952 National Security act is affirmed by the Supreme Court, which apparently liberals didn't expect, since I don't know why they just don't read legislation that says pretty plainly who has the right to enforce immigration law at borders in the United States. They keep giving him, they keep saying that he's going to do things that end up not happening, but they, but they do them, and then he can say that they're doing them, and then they try to hide it. I mean, I watched Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, a particularly infelicitous representative, let us say, of the liberal worldview outside, if you are not a total partisan of the liberal worldview, on Morning Joe this morning, explaining that one of the reasons that people really think this is necessary is that, you know, there are a lot of people on the left, liberals, people who work for this government, right, for the press and all that. And, you know, they love this country and they really feel like they belong here and they're citizens and they don't want to have to go to Canada. They don't want to have to go to Canada, and they may have to go to Canada, and so they need a pardon so they don't have to go to Canada. And I listen to that, and I think, how many times a week are you seeing a therapist? Do you understand what is coming out of your mouth? Do you hear what you are saying that the entire structure of guilt and innocence and rule of law should be overthrown because you're afraid that somebody might throw the book at you because you wrote an article in the New Yorker that Donald Trump didn't like a get A, backbone, B, don't take yourself so seriously. And C, as Val Kilmer says in Real Genius, there are many decaffeinated brands that are just as tasty as the caffeinated.
- [47:15]
Abe Greenwald
But this is an important point because on the media side of this, remember how much a lot of prestige media figures enjoyed cosplaying courage during the first Trump term, And they missed that during Biden. During Biden, they actually had to be house cats. You know, it's like we had to be calm and just purr and really not say much and have them forget to call us on the card, even though our name and picture was on the card at the press conference. And suddenly they get to be courageous again. And not only are they courageous, they're going to be detained. I mean, they might be political prisoners, John. And the weird sort of vanity that this fuels is it's really interesting to watch who succumbs to it immediately. And we will watch over the next four years who becomes this way. And that's why they're also so mad at the Morning Joe crew, because they just kind of threw up their hands and like, our ratings are in the toilet. We got to do something. Let's just go bend the knee. So I think the media vanity is back, but it's not going to play the same way because that industry is in dire straits financially. Like, they need a new business model. Trump will revive them briefly, but it's not going to be like the heyday of that first term.
- [48:23]
John Podhoretz
No. And also, by the way, since that first term, the continued explosive growth of alternative media has really continues to threaten to dwarf mainstream talking heads and reporters.
- [48:43]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [48:43]
Christine Rosen
And Democrats are trying to figure out a way to capitalize on that and follow in the right footsteps. We've had this before, right, with talk radio. We had the Fairness Doctrine and the fights over how much air time Republicans or conservatives or non liberals should be able to get. And then you had the development of alternative media. You had talk radio, you know, and Rush was the most successful at really sort of changing the landscape at that. And then you had what was, what was the liberal attack?
- [49:16]
Seth Mandel
America.
- [49:17]
Christine Rosen
Air America. And then you had Air America with, with Senator Franken and pre. Senator Franken, Pre Senator Franken and Rachel Maddow. That was where she got her big break, wasn't it?
- [49:29]
John Podhoretz
So Jeanine Garofalo.
- [49:31]
Christine Rosen
Jeanine Garofalo, right. Remember this? Barely, because it was not a success. And so now you have this whole podcast thing, right? And Gabby Deutsch in Jewish Insider the other day, Had a pretty good story about how Democrats have been trying to find their podcast Mojo. Or progressives, I should say Young Gen Z progressives trying to find their podcast Mojo. And so they've glommed onto this Hassan Piker character who is on Twitch and has a ton of followers and also happens to be kind of a raging antisemite. He's, he's like, he's, he spends a lot of his time baiting Jews on these shows. And they, but they love him and they think that, look at the audience he has, we can pursue that audience week. And so you're seeing again, this is a sort of, you know, the Democrats are not shoring up the mainstream media model that they had. That was supposed to be a built in advantage for them. They're saying, let it fall. We'll follow the podcast, we'll find our own Joe Rogan. Forget about, you know, needing the New York Times. And in the end they're going to have neither because they don't have a Joe Rogan, because they're not, you know, alternative media.
- [50:46]
Seth Mandel
30 years ago, 35 years ago, when Rush Limbaugh emerged, the AM band was going the way of the dodo. It was failing. The sound quality was bad. The only people who listened to it were like long distance truckers because, you know, the signal could go for 150, 200 miles and FM couldn't do that. The fairness doctrine was lifted. Rush Limbaugh was a radio guy in Kansas City, came to New York, he went to channel, he went to WABC and said, you know what? I'll do a show for you for free if I can syndicate it. You just let me have the studio space and I'll try to sell it into other markets. And created this entire industry or rebirthed this entire industry against Rush Limbaugh. And then the people who followed him were cbs, NBC, abc, pbs, npr, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the United Press, International Time, Newsweek, every other form of news entertainment on the planet. And within two years of Rush Limbaugh finally getting paid attention to, and I say this with pride and brag and with name drop, I published the first articles in Washington in the Washington Times about the phenomenon of Rush Limbaugh. Randall Blomquist, who wrote a column for the Washington Times on the radio, said, there's this guy, he's on wmal, he's tripling everybody's ratings. We gotta pay attention to him. We started publishing, writing about him. No one was writing about him anywhere else in the country. Literally. I mean, this is. This was a sotto voce phenomenon. So finally, in, like, 1994, searching for an explanation for how on earth the Republicans win the House back, suddenly Democrats are like, we've got to do something. We need a Rush Limbaugh. Got to do something. There was one Rush Limbaugh. 70 million people a day watched the networks. Do you understand what I'm saying? 70 million people a day. 10 million people reading the classic mainstream press. One medium, one voice, one place in America had a dominating conservative voice. And Limbo is a different voice from the one he became over time. He was cheerful, he was optimistic. He was pro American. He was pro entrepreneurial. He was kind of a. What would you call it? Like, almost like a motivational speaker talking about how you can.
- [53:38]
Christine Rosen
He was very funny at times back then.
- [53:39]
Seth Mandel
He was funny. He was politically incorrect. And this was deemed unacceptable because you weren't supposed to be able to have anything that broke through any of that noise. So the idea was, we need him because everything we have isn't good enough. Now it's not all that different. The problem is that the size of the mainstream media is probably reasonably the same in percentage terms as it was then. It's that there is no mainstream media anymore. In that sense, everything is the mainstream media, or nothing is the mainstream media. If Steve Bannon can get 20 million listeners a day and NPR can get 20 million listeners a day, the gatekeeping has broken down.
- [54:30]
Abe Greenwald
It's better to call it legacy. Legacy media.
- [54:32]
Seth Mandel
Legacy media.
- [54:33]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I just want to say one thing about this and Seth's point about the left sort of trying to follow the right into the alternative medium. What the left has is TikTok, and how has that worked out for them? Right. They have a bunch of kids or adults acting like kids, acting crazy, spreading nonsense and having no political impact. Ultimately, when it comes to election time, you know, there was all this. The Biden team were trying to get the whole influencer thing, the TikTok thing going. Good luck.
- [55:15]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [55:16]
Christine Rosen
They were talking about shutting it down at the same time. Exactly. Announcing they were opening a campaign account on it.
- [55:22]
John Podhoretz
Right, right.
- [55:24]
Seth Mandel
But the central point here is that this world depends on the idea that while through most of my adult life, the notion is the right is intolerant and won't listen to anybody else and wants to suppress views it doesn't like and wants to put. Throw gays in jail and do all and all that. They cannot bear the existence of voices that are not their own. Now, we all have that problem. Right? We do. Like, you Know, you get really angry when somebody writes something you don't agree with or something like that. But I mean, there is a kind of mania to this. That is fascinating.
- [56:12]
Christine Rosen
That was happening with Blueski. Isn't that the whole Blue Ski phenomenon?
- [56:17]
John Podhoretz
Is that.
- [56:17]
Seth Mandel
Is it?
- [56:18]
John Podhoretz
Actually, no.
- [56:20]
Seth Mandel
Okay, you're calling it Blue Ski, I'm.
- [56:21]
Christine Rosen
Calling it Blue Ski. But the Blue sky, the Blue sky phenomenon, isn't that what's happening? Aren't we watching that in real time? The migration, a new medium that they can sort of control and monitor.
- [56:34]
Seth Mandel
And that's fine, by the way, if it works, it works. If Blue sky can get. Take some of the audience of Twitter and have a sort of secondary Twitter market that should. Twitter deserves to have competition. If Twitter does move too far to the right and alienates a large audience on the left, then maybe somebody can take advantage of that and force Elon Musk to moderate a little bit because he'll want to have the largest platform we got. No one should have any problem with that.
- [57:06]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, ideally we just want some of these. Whether it's a social media platform or a government institution. I think most people, not to make the normie case, but most people just want a place that works because so much of their lives now feel like things don't work. And so I wouldn't argue that. I mean, I think competition in the social media space is absolutely vital, important and good. And one of the things that people who aren't, you know, crazy left wing who go to Blue sky, like a lot of the controls that that community gives them about who to mute, who they can listen to. And there is more content moderation on that platform than there is on Twitter. And that's for some people, that's what they prefer. But I think we should just want institutions that, that generally work, that are as apolitical as possible. And you do obviously have, you know, control by one party or the other in our various elected positions. But that the effect of polarization, the fact that the most extremely entrenched people on both sides seem to control the con in so many realms, not just political, but also cultural and social, is what people got sick of. I think it's why Trump is back in office. It's that weird middle of normal people who are like, just stop. I don't know, consider myself one of those people in some regards.
- [58:14]
John Podhoretz
This is a related point, John. You said, you know, that the left and liberals, they can't tolerate a difference of opinion. And then you said, well, we're all kind of like that. We get mad when we read something we disagree with. But I think there's a stark difference between conservatives and liberals on this in that I only get intolerant when the opinion that opposes mine is oppressively everywhere, and you can't escape it. And then I start feeling like, you know, this is North Korea. I'm thinking of eight years of Obama, for example, when you were just. You were living in a snow dome of liberal messaging. I think conservatives have a tougher skin when it comes to opposing opinions, because they've had to.
- [59:17]
Seth Mandel
There's no question it's worth about that. And it's also part of our internal dynamic that, you know, we know that we're succeeding if they insult us, or we know that we're getting to them when they say we're evil, you know, and so we must be doing something right because of the way they respond to us or something like that. But I think in the ultimate thing about the we need a Joe Rogan is. You don't need a Joe Rogan. Podcasting is a medium. It's like a. It's a. It's one of ten. It's a medium. It's like a communicate. We have it. Joe Rogan has it. Pod Save America has it. Npr, you know, NPR and the New York Times have podcasts that are in the top 10. Ben Shapiro has one. You know, Jonah Goldberg. Everybody's got. Everybody's got a podcast. It's just a medium. It's just a way of transmitting something. They have all of these transmission points. If they could incept a star at MSNBC who didn't shave her head and insult gay people and then say somebody made, you know, hacked her account and then told people to throw their families out at Thanksgiving time for saying something nice about Trump, who somehow got a Harvard degree in 1991. God knows I would love to see Joy Reid's doctoral. Her bachelor thesis. That would be fun. That would be a fun read. But I was just gonna say, like, they could just put someone in that slot and get 25 million viewers if that person had something to say to people that people wanted to see. They got access to everything. They got cnn, they got. They got the New York Times. They can do anything and get 100 million people to listen. People don't want to listen to what they're saying. People want to listen to what Joe Rogan is saying. There's no. There's no. There's no technical means to improve that.
- [61:20]
John Podhoretz
There's a. But there's a reason they can't Get a Joe Rogan. In any case, I don't like Joe Rogan. I have a lot of problems with Joe Rogan. But the right doesn't have a Joe Rogan. That's the wrong way to think of it.
- [61:33]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [61:33]
John Podhoretz
Joe Rogan presents as a sort of apolitical guy who's talking to people. And if he lands on the right side of an issue, it's because in his thinking, he's just using common sense. There's no such. There's no similar phenomenon on the left. Right. So you can't have a Joe Rogan on the left because you're infused with the politics of it. You can't really, quote, have a Joe Rogan on the right either. So they're not going to get one.
- [62:12]
Seth Mandel
And this was always true. The breakout stars, maybe with the exception of Limbaugh. Again, though, PC was a very important. Being anti PC was a very important element of his rise. But if you start with your beloved Howard Stern, move on to Bill O'Reilly, move on to Keith Olbermann before he went totally off the rails. Tucker before he went totally off the rails. These guys are not conventional partisans. Hannity was the conventional partisan. You know, Stephanopoulos was the conventional partisan.
- [62:50]
Abe Greenwald
Hannity's first show was a Hannity and Colmes, where he had a guy on the left and he was on the right and they would debate. I mean, even he. Not like, you know, he started out.
- [62:58]
Seth Mandel
Right, right. But, but I'm saying he was very much the representative of the Republican view or whatever. Whatever it was at that moment, these guys transcended. They were populists. They were the. They were Trump of all Electra. They, they, they. What they were interested in was who is screwing the little guy? Why is. Why does your life suck? Who's making your life suck? And that was Howard Stern, who was like feminists and, I don't know, cops who pulled you over just for having three beers in your car.
- [63:32]
John Podhoretz
And Howard was very pro cop.
- [63:35]
Seth Mandel
Okay, fair enough. I'm sorry. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna. I'm just saying he was not. He was an anti liberal then, but he wasn't a conservative. And O'Reilly was a populist and Glenn Becky was a populist. And these sensations that arose in Neo media did not conform to these bands that people think they do. And that's why when they say they want a Joe Rogan, what they mean is they would like 190 million downloads. Yeah, they want 190 million downloads a month in which they can pour out Democratic talking points into people's ears and have them accept them uncritically.
- [64:23]
Abe Greenwald
But this is interesting because I think there's something here about the tolerance level on the right versus the left for cultural, independent minded people. So a lot of the people we've just listed would maybe be called populist, but also perhaps libertarian and conservatism. I mean, it's failing at this a little bit in the Trump era where there are more purity tests. But conservatism's big tent allowed for a lot of that and still really does. The left has grown increasingly more self policing with regard to litmus testing its various factions. And if you are that kind of. I mean, Joe Rogan has a lot of positions that used to conform to the old school Democratic Party, but now he's stayed in the same place. It's the party that's moved away. So I wonder if. And also even the cultural stuff has now all become political, which I think is a central problem here. But we actually did have on the conservative side, more of a big ten. It doesn't mean that the traditional country club Republicans liked what someone some liked, always liked Rush Limbaugh's style either. You know, they thought he was a little brash and crude and they didn't like the phrase feminazis and all this stuff. But he was still allowed in the tent. And I think that's changed a lot on the left side of the aisle.
- [65:36]
Christine Rosen
And a key part of that phenomenon, right, is that as soon as you express one heterodox opinion, you are coded as right wing. They are doing this to themselves. Right. Joe Rogan. The right didn't claim Joe Rogan as right wing. The left decided Joe Rogan was right wing. Right. Bill Maher is really angering a lot of people on the left these days. Right. With a stance on Israel and some of the other stuff and of course the political correctness and the woke stuff. Right. Bill Maher is not a right wing political figure. But you in the left universe, when you do that, if you have something, some opinion that becomes prominently associated with you and it is heterodox, it is right wing. And so they've pushed all these popular guys in a way over to the right. You know, like Abe is right to say right doesn't have a Joe Rogan, but if the right does have a Joe Rogan, it's because the left gave them a Joe Rogan. Right. The left sort of created this dynamic, in other words, in which things get attributed to being Right wing or conservative that don't think of themselves that way. And then they get jealous of the supposed existence of all these popular.
- [67:04]
Seth Mandel
It's the same gaslighting. We're right back where we started. They talked themselves into the idea that the things that are, you know, that are telling on them are illegitimate. And then they either want them or they want to destroy them. And then they don't understand what caused them in the first place. And they only make it worse for themselves when they attempt to respond, which I have to close. I was not expecting to do this, but since we went in this way and went into this conversation, there is the Commentary Recommends that I have to make. I've never done this before. I don't think I will ever do it again. But there is the seminal book on the topic of what happens when you are somebody who was a liberal, who then stops being a liberal, and then what happens to them among everybody that they know and the experience that they go through. And that is a book called Breaking Ranks and is by my father, Norman pothoritz, published in 1979. A man of unimpeachable left liberal credentials published this influential magazine called Commentary that was one of the first voices against the Vietnam War and took a fairly radical view on race relations and various other things. And then as the 1960s went on and the left turned increasingly anti American in its opposition to the war in Vietnam, and anti American in terms of the changes in mood about race and crime and things like that and moves against Jews in New York City and elsewhere with the vanguard of the explosion of antisemitism that we see now almost 60 years later. My father wrote this second autobiography, which is about his experience becoming an outcast in the community of people in which he was not only a leader, but in which he had all of his friends, all of his companions, all of his intellectual lodestars, everybody that he lived with and dealt with. It's a great American autobiography and it tells this story the way no other book has ever told that story. So that is the Commentary recommends at the end of the week.
- [69:18]
Christine Rosen
There is a wonderful moment in his. I think it's in why Are Jews Liberal? You know, one of his later books. But when he describes when Commentary was still part of the ajc, when it still had a financial.
- [69:33]
Seth Mandel
American Jewish Committee.
- [69:34]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, American Jewish Committee. Norman describes how, you know, at the annual dinner he gave up and gave a speech as the editor of Commentary, which was, you know, some. Some in some ways a sort of house organ or whatever. If you Know, an AJC dinner, the commentary editor would get up and speak. And it was during the time where there was all this, the new left had, you know, was, was up and coming and there all the upheaval was with the schools and education. And he stood up and he gave his speech. And it was during this period of transition where it wasn't clear where everyone was going to end up. And so he describes like the room not knowing how to respond. You know, he's at his organization's annual dinner. He's a major figure in his or his organization. He gets up and he gives the speech and people are sort of looking each other like, I don't, I mean, I kind of agree with a lot of that, but I'm not supposed to.
- [70:33]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [70:34]
Christine Rosen
The education stuff is like there was no warning. There was no, there was no prepping the ground for people at this AJC dinner to expect what he was saying about education and the way things are changing. And they, they literally didn't know how to respond to his speech. And that was, you know, at a moment when, I think he describes it as a sort of moment when people then understood that things were moving in a very particular direction and they were not going to move back in a different direction. But that's one of my favorite things that he describes of this change of what happens when you present to people ideas that they do agree with but are not supposed to publicly agree with and you put them on the spot. How do you handle the being faced with that sort of challenge?
- [71:25]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, one of the things he describes in the book and then we can go, is how as he was altering his political views and saying he did not believe that, you know, North Vietnam was a country of equal virtue to the United States and Cuba was a totalitarian country and Israel was under unjust assault from very left wing sources that more than one friend of his wrote to my mother and suggested that he be institutionalized because he had clearly had a terrible nervous collapse and should go off to Austin Riggs and maybe get a lobotomy or, you know, electroconvulsive therapy or something because he had clearly only an, only a crazy person could have these views. This is a real thing. I mean, I've read these letters myself, so I can just tell you. And they were very loving, by the way. They weren't like, you better get him into a place because, you know, more.
- [72:23]
Christine Rosen
In sorrow than in anger.
- [72:25]
Seth Mandel
Oh, no, fear, terrible grief, sorrow that, you know, oh, what a great mind is here o'erthrown. You know, as someone says of King Lear. Anyway, that's breaking ranks by my dad, Norman Podhoretz. And we will be back on Monday. So for Christine, Seth and Abe of John Pod Horitz, keep the camel burning.