C (4:25)

Well, let me start by saying that I'm very glad to be with you on this Saint Crispian's Day. And lesser men in their beds, dying in their beds, will wish that they were on this podcast today. So first, to recognize the astonishing success of the New York Times. And this is something you and I have talked about. When I started out writing for newspapers, I thought people were buying the newspapers to read my insightful takes on county government. They were not. They were buying newspapers for the movie listings and the classified ads and the stock prices and the sports scores and

A (5:07)

the comics

C (5:10)

and the horoscope, obviously.

A (5:12)

Horoscopes.

C (5:13)

Kitty Kelly I learned, and the New York Times definitely learned that those things are the revenue and wordle and cooking and all of the other things that have made the New York Times a juggernaut in the news. There was a time where the big three networks programmed their and the cable channels. Basically whatever was on the front page of the New York Times was gonna be what was gonna go. You could pretty reliably predict it, much like when I worked at Fox News. You could look at the New York Post and say that is going to enter the bloodstream of coverage today because it's all inside the building. And these are you can just see it in the New York Times. Was that for the whole country? But I think it was more or almost entirely aspirational and ideological. Now it's just necessary, right? The Wall Street Journal does a lot of great reporting and they put in the money on projects. The Wall Street Journal gets more bang for its buck because they are willing to spend the money to devote reporters to long term reportorial projects, to dig deep. And when they hit the Epstein birthday letter, whatever, right? When they get there, they really get there and it works for them. But nobody matches the New York Times for the breadth of the reporting and the amount of stuff. So the media is attitudinally inclined to. Much of the media is attitudinally inclined to parrot the New York Times, but they're all left and right. This is the Sean Hannity phenomenon by which you're like, they're not even covering. And it's like you're quoting the New York Times. They must be covering it because you're talking about their reporting. So it's the necessity component that comes in. And that is all true.

A (7:10)

But I will say also that when, you know, 30, 20, 30 years ago, there was the Washington Post, the, there was a. The Wall Street Journal was pretty much in the same place that it is now as a, as a sort of like a breakthrough news source that popped big stories. And there was, and arguably the Associated Press was more important than the New York Times. It was the first source in every newsroom in the world.

C (7:34)

And it had competition itself.

A (7:36)

And you had ABC and you had NBC, all of whom together had 40 million people a day. And now there's the New York Times with 13 million people a day and nobody else.

C (7:45)

And the, and the, the like. I'm going to keep sticking up for the Journal here.

A (7:49)

Four million subscribers. I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm just saying that there. Right. So.

C (7:54)

Well, first, when are you going to move back to Washington? And we're going to take all of Robert Albritton's money that he wants to spend to start a competitor to the Washington Post and start an awesome competitor to the Washington Post because the what. How I would like to have the next decade of my career go definitely would look like you and me running a Washington newspaper. Because that would be an excuse.

A (8:20)

That would be fun. But I am, I am. I am nearing retirement age, unlike you, number one.

C (8:25)

And number two, lies.

A (8:26)

Robert Albritton loves. Loves to pretend to be an alt. An alt voice, but of course is an establishment. Yes, exactly. Would have no particular interest in this. But I still, aside from the atmosphere, which the New York Times is the only.

C (8:43)

Yes, okay. But I do. I am going to address the substance of your point. That is how I am sure the editorial board and the newsroom leadership of the New York Times sees this conflict. So I don't think they're lying. I think they see it that way. But to be cynical, and I think you can see this more on the right than on the left. There is, if you are wrong about a war going poorly, there is Little consequence to be had. Right. If you predict doom and gloom and everything works out, yeah, somebody will cut you. Actually, when I say somebody, you, John Podoritz, will come back with the receipts and post them on the Internet and say, dummy, you said this would happen and that didn't happen. But it's a fairly low cost failure. But the rewards are substantial. Right. If you're Tucker Carlson or whatever. Right. Being right about a thing that you don't know how it's gonna go, going badly pays dividends. Right. If you say, I told you all, I told you all this war would be a disaster. And of course, it becomes self fulfilling in its own way because the limiting re age. Donald Trump once said that the only limit on his power internationally was his own conscience. The only limit, the first and most important practical limit on Donald Trump's use of power internationally is his approval rating among independent voters and, and the consequences for Republicans in key races. And the. So it becomes self fulfilling that negative coverage helps drive down public support and a decrease in public support saps the war effort of the strength that it needs. We're just, It's Thucydides all the way down. And I think the New York Times, there is ample reason to be concerned that this war could go in a lot of different directions. But one of the directions I wrote about this, because I steal from you about a third of what I write, I steal from a stray text that Siri read to me from you as I'm driving down Massachusetts Avenue. And it may go very badly. Right. Is it possible that we end up in a Sunni, Shia, civil war, mass conflagration across.

A (11:18)

Sure.

C (11:18)

Turkey gets in. Who knows what the Pakistanis are going to do, which caused the Indians to do. I don't know. That's certainly possible. Is it possible that the United States and Israel will win in the fullest sense? Yes, that is also possible. It is also possible that there will be a receptive regime or a new regime or things will go right there. And the other possibility that I think only yesterday, so I got the column out in time, only yesterday, people started to realize, which is that one day Donald Trump is going to say we won. And people say what you said. I came to this when I heard Pete Hegseth say to Major Garrett, Major Garrett said, well, unconditional surrender. And Pete Hegseth said, unconditional surrender means what we say unconditional surrender means. And he said, yeah, but you need someone to unconditionally surrender to you. And he's like, no, I don't think that's what we need. We get to defi. We. We get to he's. Is it Hirohito on the USS Missouri and Tokyo Bay?

A (12:19)

No.

C (12:20)

Maybe we just define what it is and we declare victory and vamos.

A (12:26)

Okay, Abe, let me ask you this. Yeah.

B (12:30)

Can I just first add something?

A (12:32)

This

B (12:34)

Two things. One is that it's also very safe, I think, to talk about how bad the war is going, not just because the downsides are small, but also because there's something in the culture where there is a substantial group of Americans that are willing to believe that any war, any American war, was or is ultimately has done more harm than good, as we now see with all the World War II revisionism, horror as the most extreme example. But you don't even need that. The other point I want to make addresses something that Chris was saying. I also don't think the New York Times reporters are lying when they say they view the war this way. But it takes a lot of work to muster the evidence at this point for seeing the war the way they claim to be seeing it. You can look down the road, as Chris said, anything is possible in the future. It could go wrong in myriad ways. But to look at what's happening, which is what I see the Times doing every day and saying Donald Trump miscalculated, the administration was taken by surprise. The Iranian people are very unhappy with what's happening.

A (14:04)

You have to go out of your

B (14:05)

way to marshal evidence for the truth as you see it. If that's the truth as you see it.

A (14:13)

I need to cite to you a Pew poll released yesterday.

C (14:19)

Oh, I was just pulling that up. That's what I was clicking at.

A (14:23)

Because what you say, Abe, is in fact true in a way that it has never been true before. A majority of Americans view their fellow citizens as morally bad and believe that the United States, not a majority, but a plural, that enough Americans believe that the United States does more harm than good in the world in aggregate than has ever thought such a thing.

C (14:52)

And the now part is significant. I wish Pew, and maybe they did. I haven't. I'm going to write about it. I suspect I'll be writing about it for Friday because I find it also fascinating the way they phrase that question was now. So they started it and they said in 250 years, after 250 years, the United States did it today. And of course, that's the signal to Democrats, to all. And Republicans hold up this poll and they say Democrats hate American. It's like, no, they hate Donald Trump. And these numbers would be flipped if Joe Biden was. If you went back and ran the same poll and said now. But lordy day, the contempt that Americans feel for each other and the deeply cynical attitude that Americans have about their countrymen and countrywomen is an acid bath in which no decent discourse can occur. When I look at these numbers, there is no reasonable way that people who feel this way about each other can engage in effective self government. It's really, it's a jaw dropper for me.

A (16:06)

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D (19:04)

Hi John.

A (19:05)

I think a key moment here connects to the point that we're making about how nobody ever went broke saying that a war was going to go badly and then it went well. But you could go broke saying the war is going to go well and then it went badly. In a world in which half of the country or half of the political partisans in the country are for ideological partisan reasons, kind of rooting for failure for the country to fail in a military exercise that is the end result of 40 years of heightened, consciously and deliberately ginned up partisanship that simply would not have been the case two generations ago. Ideological camps were much fuzzier. You had Republican landslides in 72 and 80 in a country that nominally claimed to be 44% Democratic and 22% Republican. And Richard Nixon won 62% of the vote in 1972, and Ronald Reagan won 50% of the vote in 1980, and he won 59% of the vote in 1984. And George H.W. bush won 54% of the vote in 1988 at a time when Democrats outnumbered Republicans in surveys 2 to 1. So it was a much different country. You couldn't reliably say that a Democrat was a liberal. Conversely, in certain circumstances, you couldn't reliably say that a Republican was a conservative or defined. That's not the ideological definitions of the United States did not hew across party lines. And now they are completely congruent, almost hyperbolically congruent with these party lines. And so when there is an action by a Republican president or a Democratic president, that action is going to be met with skepticism or outright hostility by an enormous number of people who two generations ago would have been more open minded about what the government was doing, particularly abroad. They would have thought they know what they're doing. They're seeing things. I don't know. I don't really pay attention to this stuff. What, what purpose would it serve for them to like, fight another Vietnam? They know that was bad. So I'm going to kind of give them the benefit of the doubt. And we have men abroad who are fighting and so we need to start support them. That is all out. That is like it's mythology now. That is not what America is like anymore.

B (21:48)

And also, John, I would add to that the fact that because the. At the national level we have been zigzagging back and forth from party to party so much that we're always in a moment of the other side just having been let down and being enraged.

A (22:11)

But that's a weirdness if you think about it, because the fact that we are, we had also in that period of time, I'm talking about Democrats had unitary control of the House of Representatives for 40 years without, without let up. Four decades in which Democrats controlled the House from 1954 to 1994. And yet, so, and yet we're bouncing back and forth. You would think that because we bounce back and forth and one year you're the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and the next year you're a backbencher that you would want to, that ordinary logic would suggest that people in this universe would be nicer to each other and, and kind of like more uncertain of their futures and therefore play a more prudent game because they might be out in two years and maybe they would still want to have some influence over the conversation when they're not actually holding the gavel. And so which is what the Senate was like in some ways because did change hands time and again during the, from 19, the 1950s to the 2000s. But that is not what's happening. You have the House going from Republican to Democrat to Republican to Democrat. And when they come in, everybody's a jackaman looking to take the other team to the guillotine. And it's like, you know, this could be me in November. Maybe I should be a little nicer. But, but that is, again, that's what, that's what logic or human nature would suggest. But that is not what politics has done to our party system.

D (23:59)

Well, they have more to fear. They don't have as much to fear from their fellow congressmen, from their fellow members as they do from their voters. If they're in a, you know, if you're in a safe district, a relatively safe district, your, your base voters own you. You know, they're the ones that call the shots, right? I mean you don't, you don't have. You also with the, with the lack of control the parties have. Oh, the party leaders, excuse me, have over the parties. There's not that much they can do to punish you. I mean, there's some things they can do, but a lot of those tools are not in their toolbox anymore. You don't have to rely on floor leaders for funding and campaigns at all, for fundraising, for anything like that. And so you just, you have less to fear from them, you know that it's, it's. If unless that congressman I'm being mean to is going to move to my district and then vote against me, I don't feel like I need the camaraderie. I feel like I need the political survival. And my political survival may depend on me being extremely antagonistic toward even my own members of my own party.

A (25:12)

Okay, so you had two, two different kinds of politicians. The classic politician that I came up knowing and that Chris interviewed and covered and all of that in the 90s and 2000s of people, you know, they're glad handers. They're used to, they're retail politicians. They're used to like their, their purpose is not to.

C (25:34)

I'm not kissing a baby, I'm stealing its candy.

A (25:37)

Right, Exactly. And now there were always more controversial politicians, more serious politicians, more reserve politicians who weren't, who weren't like that. But this was a type, if you needed to figure out what the mean type of person, median type of person who was in Congress would be somebody who was like, would come up to you and go, you look great. Have you, you lost weight? Like that's, that's who those people are. And then over time, the people who get the most attention and get the most and get the most clicks and all that are people who go up to you and say, you're so fat, I hope you die of diabetes and cancer. Like, these are the two types. You have Marjorie Taylor and Lauren Boebert and AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Graham Platner coming up on the pike on this side. But you still have 250 politicians in Washington who are the, have you lost weight people. And they, their style. Maybe they're, it's like vaudeville when movies come in, that style may be got, may die out over, you know. But it is weird how again, if you are interested in policy, which of course the, you should die of diabetes people generally aren't all that much. If you're interested in policy and you want to have an influence over time in your career, you are better off cultivating relationships across the aisle for when things change because then you might be able to be in the room to talk about how we're going to handle the Veterans Administration bill or this DHS bill or something.

C (27:26)

I asked Tom Cole on Sunday, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee about the rumor, the talk that I had heard about maybe he would be the person appointed to fill out the remainder of and I had forgotten this that why am I drawing a blank? Oklahoma Mullins moving I had forgotten that Mark and that Mark Wayne Mullen is only serving out the unfinished term of Jim Inhofe who left after oh my. So Graham, Graham Platner, Mark Wayne Mullen hasn't even been in the Senate for a full term, not even all he's not a one term senator yet. And the I asked him and he laughed. Tom Cole laughed in my face. He said I would never give up the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee so that I could have and I'm paraphrasing him, you know, an eight month stint as a U.S. senator. And I thought, well, here is Tom Cole who likes he is the last survivor, one of the last survivors of the House that you're talking about. He's good at it. He, he can work across the aisle. He likes to get stuff done. He likes to legislate. He keeps good relationship with the, with Rosa Delora who is the ranking Democrat on the committee. He's good at his job. He likes to be good at his job and he likes the power that is accrued to him as a chairman of this committee. Being a US Senator now is a ridiculous joke. Right. Serving in the United States Senate is what what is it that would make Mark Wayne Mullen even think about wanting to go have what I can only assume is an awful, awful job of managing this Frankenstein agency where you're doing the Coast Guard and ICE who wants it and it's a political hot seat. And then this morning I read John Cornyn said, you know what? Nuke the filibuster. Go ahead, get rid of the filibuster. And I thought, well this is interesting because I think it was Jason Willock and if it wasn't Jason Willock, I'm sorry to Jason Willock, but I think it was Jason Willock who made a provocative as he often does, a bold and provocative argument about the Washington Post.

A (29:56)

Yeah, yeah.

C (29:57)

About why did just go actually, actually do get rid of the filibuster to increase the Senate's power, right? If we need a Senate and we have no Senate, let's go ahead and nuke it and let the Senate start passing more legislation so we can start to break the logjam. And I'm not persuaded by that. But it's like, okay, if the problem is that the most important entity in the Republican form of government, which is the Senate, is failing, then we need to do that. And maybe that's a radical solution that has merit.

A (30:29)

Why?

C (30:29)

What is John Cornyn and what does Mike Lee and what do the Democrats who talk about this say? Well, we should bring back the talking filibuster. I read Cornyn's piece and I thought, Cornyn's gonna take a real radical position here. He said, maybe the talking filibuster. And I thought, you know, and I know why John Cornyn's doing this. He's doing it cuz it won't happen. And this is a way that he can say to Ken Paxton, with whom he is now locked in the suicide pact of a runoff in Senate in the Texas Senate primary, he is saying to Ken Paxton, hey, look, you say you'll drop out of the race if we nuke the filibuster. I'm for nuking the filibuster. I'm right there with you, brother. And he knows he can say it because they don't have the votes to do it. So he can comfortably say it because he knows that Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, I assume John Curtis from Utah and a bunch of other Republicans say, we are not getting rid of the filibuster. We need the filibuster. I say all of that to say the talking filibuster would actually be the perfect expression of our profanely bad Congress. The reason they got rid of the talking filibuster was they couldn't advance legislation and do anything because you could always get enough of the other side together to say, yeah, we'll hold the floor. There's 50 of us, there's 48 of us. We'll just keep the floor indefinitely and nothing will happen in the Senate until we are done.

A (31:55)

Guys, let's talk about aura frames, because as I'm speaking to you right now, I am looking at an aura frame. This is a product you send your photos from your photo roll on your phone through an app to the aura frame, which sits on your wall, on a bookcase, on a desktop. And you can look at the photos that you have taken, taken for many, many years. Just last night I downloaded about 100 photos that I had from the 2000s that I had yet to put on. I have about 450 photos on my aura frame. I see my kids when they're babies. I see them at college. I see my family, I see my friends. I see happy moments. I see powerful moments. I see some of my nicest nature photography. Not that I'm that good at that. But it is an absolutely wonderful thing to have free unlimited storage. You can even preload the photos if you send it as a gift before it's sent to the person that you are giving it to. And I love this thing. And my associate Stephanie has one right. Sitting on her desk in her office. So I don't know what more I can say to tell you about this number one by wire cutter product. You can save on this perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com for a limited time. Listeners can get $35 off their best selling carver mat frame with code commentary. That's a U R A frames.com promo code commentary. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Can we just stop for 90 seconds and explain this? So the filibuster is the way in which a the Senate senators prevent the vote for cloture. Cloture being the 60 vote margin on anything but a bill affecting the budget. That and now also certain Senate judicial nominees that you have to. You have to get a vote to close debate on the floor of the Senate because the Senate has unlimited debate. And then you can start moving on a bill. And so in a filibuster, senators prevent the vote for cloture because the debate is kept open since it is unlimited according to Senate rules. And the talking filibuster most famously portrayed in legend by in Mr. Smith goes to Washington became this like noble moment of one man standing up against the forces of corruption. Joyous great cinematic moment of Jimmy Stewart and Gene Arthur rising up and saying, stop, Jeff, you're gonna die. Or whatever. Cause he's like talking for 20 hours, which apparently is like akin to dying. And his voice is hoarse and all of that. And then the filibuster gets all romanticized. And then guess who uses the filibuster in the 1950s and 1960s segregationists to prevent civil rights legislation. Right. So then the filibuster gets. Anyway, in order to create the conditions under which senators can stop debate on something without holding up the entire Senate forever, they ended up inventing a kind of. I'm declaring that I am filibustering this thing. I simply Put it to the side and then we can go on with our other business. Because the whole point of the filibuster was that it freezes the Senate in place. So if you bring back.

D (35:44)

It's like the auto walk in baseball, right? You used to actually have to throw,

C (35:51)

throw

D (35:53)

out to the side outside the batter's box.

C (35:55)

Yeah, great.

D (35:56)

Now I hate it.

A (35:58)

I hate it. I hate the auto walk, though I understand its purpose. Anyway, so to bring back the talking filibuster is in fact to create an interesting political condition, which is if you're really serious about not wanting a bill for the Department of Homeland Security, put your money where your mouth is, freeze all legislative activity, don't let anybody go home.

C (36:22)

Right.

A (36:22)

People are not allowed. We are not going to close off, you know, the, the Senate isn't going to adjourn for the night. And in theory you can keep passing the talk from one senator to the other and this could go on for six months. But it's actually really grueling. It's.

C (36:39)

Let me clarify. Okay, and let me clarify. Going to a talking filibuster might do something. The knock on consequences of making it more important and empowering. Like, I don't know what would happen, but I can tell you for sure what would not happen, which is that in the short term, the Senate would not be more powerful, the Senate would be less powerful. The Senate would not be more influential. It would be less influential because the, and I will limit my harangue about this, the Republicans have lightning in a bottle on voter id. They got a good one, baby. And they've quite accidentally stumbled into it. 80% they thought, Republicans thought, like, we have this poison pill thing that Democrats don't want. And then the survey work came out and it was 77% of Democrats and 80% or whatever of black voters or whatever. It's like, oh, and I think only 11 states and DC or something don't have voter ID already. So the Republicans had this, they've won the argument. And if the Senate brought forward, they could totally jam up, they could totally jam up these Senate Democrats and say, here's a clean bill that requires people to present photo IDs to vote in federal elections, which will have all the knock on consequences to other elections for state and local things. And they, they, they could get it. I believe that they could get one page.

A (38:19)

Yeah, it's a page. One page long.

C (38:22)

That's it.

A (38:23)

One issue.

C (38:24)

And then I was watching the president's press conference and so they start out with the voter ID and then they're like, okay, but now we want you to prove that you're a citizen with other documents beyond a driver's license when you go to register to vote.

A (38:41)

Maybe, maybe. Right.

C (38:42)

Like you're now putting your chocolate in the peanut butter of the states and how the states run elections. Now there's some other considerations that get into federal power, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But okay, so so far, then it's like, also, you're going to end mail in voting. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Washington state has been doing mail only ballots for, you know, I don't know, 15 years. Yeah, 20 years. And it works. They like it. It works well for them. Why can't they have it? And you're like, okay, so you freighted it with some other stuff that's going to make it impossible to get to 60 votes, let alone maybe 51. You'd have a problem at 51 with those three things. And then the president says, also trans. We're also putting trans in the legislation. You're like, oh, you don't want to pass this. You don't want to pass it. You just want to put it out there. And they're saying, we want you to abolish the filibuster. Okay, what's it for? It's for easy win. Okay. But it's also for these other two things which are more complicated. Okay? And also trans. Trans women in female sports.

A (39:58)

Huh?

C (39:59)

So it's just like it's watching. There is a perfect expression of what you just talked about, about why our Congress doesn't work because they don't want it to work. And Seth is exactly right that in the perverse incentives of a duopoly, it doesn't matter who wins the cola wars. It only matters that the cola wars be fought and that people drink more cola. And it just makes me crazy. And I will shut up now.

A (40:29)

Voter ID is a perfect example of the perverse incentives, according to which what is great is to keep an issue open forever that you, that you have the public on, on your side on. But that is not, is not resolved because if they did, the one page that says you shall submit a photo ID for identification a polling place for elections for the House, the Senate, and the presidency signed, you know, every senator. Yeah, it could pass in five minutes at this point. But then guess what happens. Voter ID no longer is an issue in the United States. It's gone. We have photo, we have voter id. If it, if in policy, procedural terms, you believe that this is A signal issue that is important for the good working order of the Republican. That is a no brainer if you think it's bull and you're just using it as a weapon against Democrats who foolishly continue to act as though the fact that you have to submit a photo ID @STAPLES to use your credit card sometimes, but that you don't have to vote, use one to vote. They continue to argue this point in demented fashion. You would just love to have them continue to do this to annoy the people who think that this is rational. And so the Senate is more powerful, but as a player in the political partisan fight by not acting. By acting, they resolve a political issue in the United States, which is after all what legislators are supposed to do. There is a controversy, right? There's a controversy. Someone attempts to resolve the controversy with a piece of legislation that then passes, that suggests that the will of the people is that this controversy be decided on this side or that side. Either it passes or it fails. Controversy can continue. If it fails, the controversy ends. If it succeeds and over time you can get a go back look at you.

C (42:52)

I said I'd shut up, but I lied. You cited civil rights. We reached the end on the fight over civil rights. The segregationists, the Southern Democrats fought for segregation for decades, right? In a real way, it became a starting with women, the fight over women's suffrage. And if you haven't read Chris Cox's fantastic book about the history of women's suffrage and Woodrow Wilson, I recommend it will make you all radical feminists the.

D (43:31)

But the fight, if we aren't already,

C (43:34)

already too, too late, tell me what I don't know, bro. The fight over segregation went on for decade after decade after decade and in the end they were defeated and they were defeated in a legislative process that at the end, and I think this is an underappreciated important, important function of a republic, is that these last hangers on. What was his name? The senator from Alabama?

A (44:09)

Talmage. No, in which, in which. In the Civil Rights Act. In the civil rights.

C (44:15)

In the final passage. Not important.

A (44:18)

The last segregation, right?

C (44:19)

Yeah. These old bulls of the Senate, these guys who at the end could go back to their states and say, you cannot say we did not try and you cannot say we did not lose because we definitely lost, right? We definitely. Richard. Shoot, I can't. It'll haunt me. But it was over. Because it was over and it had gone through the regular legislative process and the matter was concluded. And occasionally people will still say, like, well, the civil rights act was whatever, but it passed and it's done. Which is different than the Supreme Court waking up one day and saying gay marriage. Get after it, go for it. We're doing it. And a dysfunctional Senate robs us of the ability to reach conclusions and say that things are done. And I cannot agree strongly enough, John, with what you're saying about how it's very important to effectively disagree. And I'm just cribbing Yuvalov in here. And it's very important for us to be able to effectively disagree so that we can stop disagreeing about this and start disagreeing about the next thing, as opposed to living in a country where 70% of the people agree on immigration and have for, I don't know, 30 years, and yet we cannot have an immigration bill that passes where the country agrees, even on abortion, on late term abortion, supposedly the impossible issue, broad consensus that people don't want late term abortion, and yet we get no legislation on the matter. Now, I'm really. I will not say anything else. I will just sit and listen to Abe.

B (45:56)

No, I think what's interesting is I think we've sort of solved the question raised earlier by John, which was why when he described the two types of politicians, the glad handers and the obnoxious, the obnoxious ones who want to take the other side to the guillotine, the answer is that the second batch, the obnoxious ones, are ascendant because the energy is in keeping the issue, not resolving

C (46:32)

it and winning your primary.

B (46:34)

Right.

A (46:34)

Okay. So getting back to the war. And Seth, you were not here from the beginning, but getting back to the war, we determined in our first solution to all the problems in the universe that there is no cost to being negative about the war at the beginning if the war goes well, because. So you were skeptical and you were worried, and guess what? It worked out. No one's going to punish you for that, but they might punish you if you say, rah rah, sis boom ba, and then it goes badly. And then you're like, oh, you were rooting this and it's your fault. Okay, so that's that part. But if we go now to the question of the media's role in how we deal with the fact that the country is at war and we have an overwhelming media consensus that the tone to take is at best skepticism and at worst or at most intense outright opposition, even in news pages, that what role is this? Do you have to be Donald Trump and be cauterized from your fear of bad media opinion? Because as you say, if I didn't he say something like, if I presented you with Jesus Christ, you would still be negative about me. So if I said, here's Jesus Christ, you would still say I was a bad president, like the risen Christ.

D (48:06)

So the opposite of he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue for his supporters. It's the two extremes.

A (48:13)

Yeah, so. So he's like, I, you guys are never going to give me any. I get nothing. So what am I going to do? I'm going to close my ears to you. So if that's the case, then, you know, a president like Trump who has already taken in the fact that he's never going to get credit, are they being self defeating by being negative? Because imagine a New York Times that doesn't spend the entirety of its resources in the last week desperately trying to prove that an American missile killed 157 girls at a school. The overwhelming majority of its war coverage involves immense resources going to data and video and this and that, proving the trajectory of a missile that hit near a Iranian military installation, next to which there was a girls school. They want to prove that Americans inadvertently killed girls at a school. That is their mission this week. They are not stopping. They will not stop until they can smear the blood of the girls on the American flag. So that's a choice. That's an editorial, deliberate editorial choice. Is it worth factoring in the fact that terrible things happen in war and, you know, bombs miss their targets? Of course, that's fine. If the. If the. If. The idea which I think is implicit in a lot of this coverage is somehow that we kind of wanted to hit the school. Maybe we wanted to, which is insane, but nonetheless seems to be kind of an overhang. If, like you want.

B (50:09)

Or we just don't care.

A (50:11)

Or we don't. Yeah, we. Yeah, we don't care enough and we're sloppy and Pete Hegseth's an idiot. I mean, I had a whole exchange on Twitter with somebody, I don't even know who, about how Hegseth. We have to blame Hegseth if this missile went awry, because he's clearly not creating rules of engagement that are careful enough. I'm like, the Secretary of Defense is up here. There is a. There is an admiral running the message down here. There's a. There. There's an Air Force subaltern to the admiral who is helping run the American flights. The American flights are going, and there's a pilot. The pilot gets a telemetry reading that says, drop the bomb here. He pushes the button and he drops the bomb and it hits exactly or very close to exactly where it's supposed to hit. Only it turns out there's a building nearby that may have got hit. I have to.

C (51:10)

I have to leave you. But I do have to say before I leave you, one of the reasons that you do not post Iron man videos and one of the reasons that you do not come out and say, we, we have no mercy. We have no mercy. Watching General Kane doing that, it was like the Obama anger Translator from Key and Peel but for the Pentagon in reverse. Pete Hag said we have no. No mercy. Like the, the cornerstone of the American military is mercy. That's the whole. That's. That's the jam, guys. That's like why the world liked America is because we conquered Western Europe two times and only asked for enough terrain to bury our dead. We don't.

A (51:55)

We.

C (51:55)

Mercy is the thing. This mercy is what Americans are all about. That's what, that's how we have become stuck being the policeman of the world. But it's us. And to listen to then Cain, as soon as Hegseth is done, say, we are very sorry about the American service members who have died and our sympathies are with their families. This is very hard for us and we take this very, very seriously. And the videos at the White House and whatever else unfortunate things happen and more. You want the benefit of the doubt. Definitely. And the New York Times might never give and wouldn't have given the Bush Pentagon in the Iraq war the benefit of the doubt on this either. I believe that. I think that's true. But you are sure not going to get the benefit of the doubt if you begin by saying no mercy.

A (52:43)

Fair enough. Chris, you got to go.

C (52:45)

I got to go. I love you guys. Have a great rest of your podcast.

A (52:48)

I didn't know we were going to get into segregationists. And that's why you and I should

C (52:54)

start that newspaper, John. It gets weird and we have fun.

A (52:58)

We would have fun.

C (52:59)

Okay, bye, guys.

A (53:02)

Seth, I want to now talk to you a little bit about your really remarkable post yesterday about what it means kind of that Zoram Hamdani hosted Mahmoud Khalil at his house. But that's at Gracie Mansion. But that's not really the sole point of it. In your post, you point. You talk about what Jews are learning, have Learned in the two and a half years after October 7th and. But particularly in the last couple of weeks about what their fellow Americans and a lot of them, and particularly activists on the left actually think of them or, or how what their emotional feelings are. Emotional feelings? What their feelings are about them.

D (54:01)

Yeah, I mean, I, I think that it's, I mean, first of all, this was, you know, the, the, the jumping off point here was it was Mahmoud Khalil being in, being sort of feted by the, the first couple of New York City not just invited over for dinner, but making a whole show of the fact that they invited Mahmoud Khalil over for dinner. And Zoran Maldani, the mayor, posting, it's been a really rough year for Mahmoud Khalil. So we're, you know, we're hoping this is going to be a better one. It was like a very deliberate. Our empathy is with people like Mahmoud Khalil that, and that is, and that is how a lot of this has played out. And American Jews are learning that the empathy that they thought people might have had across the board for their fellow Americans or their fellow humans is wildly out of whack. And in fact, there's a tremendous reserve of sympathy, of actual sympathy for bad people who, who think bad things and have bad ideas. Mahmoud Khalil justified the attacks of October 7th. He did so in an interview with Ezra Klein. I mean, we, I think we talked about this on the podcast yesterday, the day before, but he, you know, he justified October 7th. That's, that's enough. But he also went into detail about, you know, his upbringing in Syria and how he, you know, what he thought about Jews there. I mean, it's just not a very, it's not a complicated situation. And, and yet the, the vast reserves of empathy are, it's sort of a zero sum game are reserved for, for people like this, that he's the victim and he's, you know, sort of the victim of people like us who are just saying, stop saying anti Semitic things or you know, whatever. And, and so, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's this sort of, you know, living in the upside down that American Jews are seeing and that I, I think also there was this sense that of course America is different and has been different than countries in the past that host, you know, I don't say host countries because it makes it sound like we're visitors. But there's the way that Jews have been treated right, as if they're guests or, and of course America is, is better in so many ways. But what they realized was how many people around them were like, eh, at the thought of something terrible happening to the Jews. This is, this is important.

A (56:34)

Okay, I Just want to. So I want to quote you it yourself because I think the deep, the deepest point that you made in this piece is what it reveals about the people who do not feel as though October 7th was a unique moment of horror in our time, not only for Jews, but for humanity, that we saw something happen where people let were let loose on another bunch of people, treated them in the most dehumanized way, killed them, injured them, raped them, kidnapped them in a spree the likes of which we simply have not seen in our lifetimes or we have not witnessed in real time as was being witnessed. And the point that you make here is we need to use October 7th as a barometer for political, ideological and moral hypocrisy, not because we're looking for gotcha moments. We know, for example, that people who travel in the same circles as Duaji, that's Mrs. Mamdani and her husband, are not interested in protecting women from sexual assault. And that when they sign on to such campaigns, it is because they are lying. We know that when they falsely accuse Israel of child murder, it is because they support the murder of the children of Israel. The war began with Hamas carrying out the largest massacre at a musical festival in recorded history. Musicians and artists who ignore this and instead parrot the propaganda of those who carried out the massacre do not believe in artistic expression. They only believe in dogmatic political expression. They support regimes that would abolish the arts. So it's not just that there's a lack of empathy for Jews that we need to deal with. It is that what is being revealed here is that people who claim that they are acting on good liberal instincts to protect women, to protect children, to, you know, to defend proper morality are. It's not just hypocrisy. In fact, what they have proved is when push came to shove at a moment at which their support was needed, they sided with the murderers and the rapists. And so when if Zoram Hamdani gets up and gives a speech about how terrible rape is and he wants to support new laws that do X, Y, or Z, the proper thing to do is to say you support rape. You're not an opponent of rape. You are a supporter of rape. You have made that very clear. And you will not speak a word without somebody responding that you were a supporter of murder, of torture and rape. So congratulations to everybody who voted for you. They are stained with your stain. And I haven't seen anyone quite characterize it like that. So I wanted to commend you.

D (59:46)

Yeah, I mean, you know, again, as I said, it's the hypocrisy. Searching for hypocrisy is something that happens a lot in politics and is sort of a fun game, but that isn't really the purpose of this. The purpose of this is to understand what people really believe. People with power, people with influence and their voters and supporters, of course, and stuff like that. But, you know, it's. It's. It's. It's. It's. It's a silly comparison, but it's like when I was a kid, the Simpsons Arcade game was really popular in the arcades. And the Simpsons Arcade, you know, off the. Off the TV show, the Simpsons Simpsons Arcade game was. You had this power where you could hit a button and you could see all the people walking around. You could see who was an alien and who was not an alien, but only if you press the button. Everybody looked human. And if you press the button, you saw that it was like an X ray thing. And some of these people are clearly aliens, and those were the enemies. Those were the guys. You had to. You had to avoid, you know, harming actual humans and whatever. That's kind of what this has revealed. This has been a sort of button. You can push the October 7th button and see. Does this person really care about sexual assault in wartime? Does this person really care about artistic freedom and expression? We've had ongoing fights about. About who's being silenced and, you know, and when and where. And it turns out that, you know, the people who claim to be silenced for, quote, unquote, supporting Palestine are just really being criticized. Not Silent Islands, but we have watched Jewish music acts lose gigs. We have watched, you know, famous people be told. We've watched Doggo Be Told to Stay Away from Cannes. Was it can? I think it was can, yeah. But, you know, one of the major films, we were actually watching this in real time. We watched the comedian, right? The Israeli comedian who had shows canceled. Matas, Yahoo, etc. So, you know, these people don't care about artistic. There's no open letter being written from, you know, Echo and the Bunnymen to the Guardian about the Radiohead guitarist who is losing gigs because he's married to an Israeli woman and is being protested because he's married to an Israeli woman and he has Israeli nieces and nephews, you know, who were in the war, you know, and so that's really just how to understand people. Do they really believe what they're saying? Because you have to know that on other subjects, too, it's not just about this. It's just, is this a person who says, you know, who I can work with? Is this a person who I can work with in a coalition, you know, who cares about this issue? Or is he going to drop me on my head the moment it's convenient to do so? We have to be able to live within, you know, in a self governing political system. That's an important part of learning how to work within it day to day.

B (62:42)

I think, you know, there are two aspects to this because the thing is, when you hit the the Simpsons button, let's say, right what, what it reveals now is so many people are aliens, just, you know, sticking with the metaphor. And there's the sort of day to day social dimension of it. So many people that you encounter in your actual life. And then there are people as you talk about, which is the main thrust of your piece in positions of power, celebrated people high up in society with respected jobs and they're famous and they control levers. And so it's a lot of work on our part or on the part of any decent people to make the points that you are making, to call out all this vast group of people who are hypocrites and believe in murder of innocents and so on.

A (63:56)

I want to recommend for a second time something I recommended weeks ago. It's a long book, I haven't finished it yet. I recommended it early in the reading. I'm now deep into it. It's called the Oppermans. It's by Leon Fruitwanger. And this is the reason I want to recommend it. In particular, thinking about what Seth said today. Ferkwanger was a German, Jewish writer. I believer successful and. And he started writing this novel in 1933 and he finished it in 1933. And it is about a Jewish, wealthy Jewish family in Berlin as the Nazis are rising to power. And you know, somewhere around a third of the way in is when Hindenburg appoints Hitler chancellor, who is Hitler's only called the leader in the book. And there are portraits of various ways in which the Nazis are coming to dominate society. In particular a focus on a school, high school, where one of the kids of this family has to give a presentation about a German literary work. And a newly appointed Nazi teacher in the school decides to target him for being a Jew and create a controversy in the school because of his interpretation of this, of this moment in German history and this piece of literature. What's so astounding about this book is that it was being written in real time as you're reading it, it reads like almost any novel that you have read about the rise of the Nazis to power. But of course, any novel you've ever read about the Nazis as they rise to power was written after the Nazis had been defeated in war. And so if you watch the Holocaust miniseries or you read, you know, War and War and remembrance or the Winds of War, you know, all the books that sort of do this job of trying to show what it was like, how, what German Jews, how they were responding to the signals that were coming about what was coming. The fact that Footwanger is showing this happening as he's writing it and that the book has exactly the same effect as you're reading it as any of those post war novels about the rise of the Nazis to power, which is you're getting this sickening feeling in your stomach. This 15 year old kid is something bad is going to happen to him in the school. Something bad is going to happen to the Opperman family business, which is a furniture making business. Something bad is going to happen to the doctor who the, the member of the family who was a doctor. Something bad is going to happen to the intellectual professor rich guy who was writing a biography of the great German poet and playwright Lessing. Something bad things are on the horizon, like in Leopoldstadt or something like that. It's all ominous. But he was writing it in medias race as though he was a man from the future seeing everything that was coming down the pike. Now I don't know how it ends. I'm only bringing this up because while I am loath, extraordinarily loath to say that, you know, we are anywhere near, I don't want to sound like Timothy Snyder from the other side and say, you know, fascism is coming, right? Or you know, this is, this is the moment at which we need to stop Trump because fascism is coming. It's almost entirely the opposite. Trump, as far as I can tell, in certain, certain ways. And not just Trump though, to be fair, because there was this wonderful conference that National Review sponsored yesterday on anti Semitism and our friend Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz got up and made resolute, powerful, heart rending speeches about how they would not allow the conservative movement and the Republican Party to be taken over by anti Semitism. This could not happen and they would do everything in their power to stop it. But so I don't want to be Timothy Snyder and say the wolves are at the door, because the wolves are not at the door. In the leadership of the United States, the wolves were at the door in Gracie Mansion. The wolves are at the door in the House chamber where Rashida Tlaib was sitting next to Ilhan Omar and shrieking at the president as he spoke. The wolves are at the door in the main Senate race, the wolves are at the door in the Florida governor's race with James Fishback trying to knock out Byron Donald. The wolves are at the door all over the place toward Jews 3 a guy speaking Hebrew got beaten up in San Jose, California yesterday by three Assyrians. I didn't even know Assyrians was still a thing. That's like from, you know, ancient literature for speaking Hebrew. The wolves are at the door, but they're not governmental wolves. It's not that Hindenburg is going to give empower Hitler to show that he can't do it and then Hitler will destroy Hindenburg and take over. It's that our culture is being taken over. It's that our universities have been taken over. It's that the Oscars are going to feature yet another speech by somebody about the evil of Israel. Two different films, documentaries, one feature length and one short, about the evils of Israel's actions to defend itself in Gaza. And reading this book, the Oppermans by Leon Fruitfanger, which really is a magnificent piece of literature in my Though I'm again not done is very unnerving to me because like imagine if you were writing, you started writing the book on October 8, started writing a novel on October 8 about Jews in America on October 8. And one of them is at Harvard and one of them is a business. You know, one of them is in Toronto and one of them is in London and one of them is, is in Amsterdam and is on the Israeli soccer team or something like that. I don't know. It is chilling beyond belief because we are getting all of these pieces of information that suggest that America is growing less and less safe for Jews and that the, and that Cotton and Cruz and the Department of Education and the Justice Department and Trump in his own way are standing up against this. But is the governor of New York? No, she's kowtowing to Mamdani. Is the governor of California the largest state in the union? No, he's calling Israel an apartheid state or sort of an apartheid state or whatever.

D (71:28)

And the up and comers claim dyslexia

A (71:31)

caused him to say right.

D (71:32)

And the up and comers for 2028 are backing Graham Platner. Rohana was another one who did that the other day.

A (71:39)

Right. So the read the Oppermans and I can't recommend it highly enough and see if you have the same experience that I have. It's very hard to keep this bifurcated fact about this book in your head because it was like, it was like a work of pro. It was like a work of prophecy being written. You know, before. It was like Jeremiah writing before the temple fell, before the exile of the Jews from, from Jerusalem and the, and the destruction of the first temple. It's eerie and uncanny and like, it does give you reason to like, get your guard up and start thinking about where to go. And one final point, which is that Alana Newhouse and Tablet has a. A pretty remarkable piece called Zionism is Everyone or Zionism is Everywhere? I can't quite remember the title of it, but I read it last night and for everyone I think Zionism for everyone. Thank you. And so what is the central point of this piece which is that Jews are now unique in the world because they have a refuge from the horrors of this creeping Western civilization that no longer knows how to defend itself or is actively joining the forces that would destroy the enlightened west and its political, cultural, social and religious traditions. And Jews have one. And as she quotes Michelle Wellebeck saying in submission, this guy who ends up giving into Islamicization, this secular, depressed, porn addicted professor in a France that is slowly being taken over as Germany was being taken over, but in this case by, by Islamists, there is no Israel for me. So reading this book of course then makes another case. You know, the fact that not only is Israel necessary, but anyone who attacks Israel or is an anti Zionist is getting very close to the point at which they are rooting for the destruction of the all, you know, of the Jews because no Zion. If Zion goes, we go. That's pretty clear anyway. Seth A.

D (74:31)

Brilliant. And what it says about, you know, what we, we as a people, right. Like the fact that what it says is that we as a people, Jews are people who make sure to have this place and build things, build things and, and make things and make things work. Right. A big part of her essay is, you know, this idea that it's just like there's a problem. We're going to band together and fix it. We're going to find a solution, we're going to find a way back that it just says about us as a people. It's a point of pride as well. Amid all the bad news, we remain, you know, in some cases hated or envied or out of place because we are people who, when you have to do something, you do it and you find a way to, you know.

A (75:16)

Right. So two recommendations then. Alana Newhouse's Peace and Tablet. And again, the Oppermans by Leon Fruitfanger, which I expect when I finish, I will recommend a third time. Anyway, it was great to have Chris Starwalt on. Watch him on the hill Sunday on News Nation every Sunday morning. The best Sunday morning talk show in America and maybe ever. And for Seth and Abe, I'm John Podworth's Keep the Candle Burn.