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- [00:04]
Abe Greenwald
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Eli Lake
Some preach and pain Some die of.
- [00:14]
John Podhoretz
Thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect.
- [00:21]
Abe Greenwald
The worst Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, January 21, 2025, day one and a half of the Trump 2 presidency. I am John Pothorz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:43]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:44]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:46]
Seth Mandel
Hi, John.
- [00:47]
John Podhoretz
And joining us today, fan favorite, Commentary contributing editor, writer at the Free Press, and the host of the new Breaking History podcast hosted by Free Press. But you gotta it's not gonna be where it has been for the last couple of months when Eli does his podcast. It will not be on the Honestly feed that is Barry Weiss's week biweekly podcast feed. It will be have its own feed. That means if you wanna listen to Eli Lake's Breaking History podcast, you gotta go to Apple, Spotify, wherever you find podcasts, and affirmatively subscribe to Breaking History with Eli Lake. Hi, Eli.
- [01:31]
Eli Lake
Oh, thanks so much for having me on. Welcome to the new fascist era. The Overlord.
- [01:40]
John Podhoretz
Yes, Elon Musk is, we are told, making Nazi salutes that he is not making. This is an informia. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, he was not making a Nazi salute. And the most interesting thing that happened, I thought yesterday in response to Elon Musk's weird dance around the stage leading to his arm shooting up, was that Jonathan Greenblatt of the of the adl, a person who has come in for much criticism by Commentary magazine and by our own Seth Mandel over the years, came out and said, did that's not a Nazi salute. You shouldn't be going around saying people are making Nazi salutes when they're not making Nazi salutes. To which Jonathan Mueller has now been subjected on social media for 12 hours to the most egregious kind of you're a sellout. You're like the Germans in 1933 saying there was nothing wrong with Hitler's rise to power. So I think we can see in some of this reaction that at least some people in the Trump resistance or people who really hate Trump or whatever, are going to go down exactly the same road that they have been on for eight years and it only powers him. If you want to seriously contest the Trump legacy, the Trump agenda, Trump going forward, you better stop talking Nazi. He's not a Nazi. Something else. The people who follow him, with the exception of maybe some of the people who got pardoned last night. We can talk about that, too. Are not Nazis. They are something else. And when you use an epithet that is like, about as bad an epithet as you can use about anybody, and it does not jive with reality and does not comport with what most people think, you are discrediting your own cause and making it harder for your arguments to gain purchase. So my advice, not that anybody is going to listen to me, is drop it, you lunatics. Like, go take a shower and calm down and stop seeing things that aren't there. It's, it's, it's pretty bad. But since you brought up Elon and the Nazi salute, I do want to say that what I, what I've been struck by over the last, I don't know what, whatever it's been 16 hours listening to liberal podcasts and stuff like that, is the conclusion that Trump's speech yesterday was very dark. It was extraordinary. It was darker than 2017. It was darker than his first dog girl, which is insane. In 2017, Trump said that our country had been subjected to carnage, that we were living in a state of American carnage. That what he said yesterday was, this government has been badly run for 20 years and we're about to enter into a period in which we're going to unleash the capacities of the American people as never before, using manifest destiny and a proper understanding of the relations between the genders. And if you're a liberal, you hear that and you think, this is the darkest thing I've ever heard, that men are men and women are women, and that there are only two genders, and that America's, America's past is a past of enterprising, bold people who went and settled at mostly empty continent at great personal risk to themselves. And you hear that and you're like, what about the Trail of Tears? What about our genocides? What about how there are 11 genders or 39 genders genders or 72 genders, and you are walking yourself off the plank into, you know, shark infested waters that are going to eat your liberal agenda alive.
- [05:26]
Seth Mandel
Well, you know, he didn't start either of the speeches he gave yesterday with a land acknowledgment. So I think that's probably what, what got them.
- [05:35]
John Podhoretz
I want to point out, I think I mentioned this, I mentioned this on the podcast. Seth, Seth is making a joke. When I took my daughter on a tour of Brown University in December, and we go and we sit down at Brown University in this auditorium, the first thing that comes up is A land acknowledgement that Brown is sitting on lands, you know, that were expropriated from the Pequot. Right. Now, here's what's interesting about that land. If I just finished this point for two seconds, I bring this up only to say that this is where the land acknowledgement stuff, where the rubber meets the road in terms of the ludicrous hypocrisy and nauseating quality of these virtue signaling efforts. Brown University is very rich. It has a $20 billion endowment. It can give back the land that Brown University is on to the Pequot and it could give right back to the Native Americans and build a new campus elsewhere in Providence. Skidmore College in the late 1960s built an entirely new campus and expanded and bought land in Saratoga Springs and built a new campus. Brown could do that. You know what, it's a very inconvenient camp. It's kind of scattered over downtown Providence. So let them. Let that. Don't acknowledge. Like, if you're going to acknowledge give it back, don't just say you're acknowledging that this was on stolen land. Give it back. Buy something else. What's the endowment for? Or is it just there to sit there and let you get rich and evade the tax laws? Okay, that's my land acknowledgement rant, Abe, I apologize.
- [07:14]
Eli Lake
And Jason, point about the non Nazi salute from Elon Musk. Seth's wife Bethany made this great point on Twitter, I thought, which was that the people freaking out about the Musk gesture are the same people who are praising the closest thing we have to Nazis right now, which are the Hamas fan clubs on all the universities that are gathering in front of synagogues and trying to harass Jews. And the thing that is sort of frustrating is, is that they have been calling Zionists Nazis now for more than a year, since October 7th. And they're the ones who are sapping the meaning of it. And so this is like more of that. And there is something dangerous about it. I know it's just language and I know that, you know, our side on the right is supposed to be. We're not George Lakoff. We're not gonna like, worry about, like, oh, if you say it this way, then the reality is changing.
- [08:19]
John Podhoretz
We're torn.
- [08:20]
Eli Lake
Yeah, right. But at the same time, there is something that's happening to the, this concept of genocide and the Shoah and Nazis that is happening largely on the left that is simultaneously, you know, like, misusing it and using it to anesthetize people and also basically devaluing it. And making the term have, like, no meaning. And there is probably a danger in that. So.
- [08:49]
John Podhoretz
Screw. There's a huge danger. You call people Nazis who aren't Nazis, and you don't call Nazis Nazi. You don't call people who are aiming and trying to kill Jews for being Jews Nazis. You are revaluing words. You are. It is literally Orwellian. And this has been going on for 15 months. Abe, I'm sorry I kept interrupting.
- [09:11]
Abe Greenwald
No, it's okay. No, it's okay, because it's all a good buildup from what I'm gonna say, which is.
- [09:17]
John Podhoretz
It's worse than that.
- [09:19]
Abe Greenwald
Well, in a way, I agree with all of you. Of course. I also think Elon invited this backlash. I think he knew what he was doing. I think he said, I'm gonna. I'm gonna give this salute, and they're gonna go crazy.
- [09:32]
John Podhoretz
Really?
- [09:33]
Abe Greenwald
Watch what they say about me. Yes.
- [09:35]
John Podhoretz
Really?
- [09:35]
Abe Greenwald
Well, he's so that type. I. So.
- [09:39]
John Podhoretz
I don't know. He's so physically awkward. He was doing that weird physically awkward dance and bizarre and, like, you know, his body.
- [09:48]
Abe Greenwald
I'm not saying he's a Nazi. I'm not saying he intended as a Nazi sloot. I'm saying no.
- [09:51]
John Podhoretz
But you're saying that it was a massive troll.
- [09:53]
Abe Greenwald
Yes.
- [09:54]
John Podhoretz
Okay, well, you know what? If that's the case, then. Then maybe I. Maybe I did go too far. Maybe he is deserving of the criticism. You also shouldn't play. What? You shouldn't. Like, you shouldn't walk. He shouldn't walk on a stage in a. With a swastika T shirt on either if he's trolling people. So. So we do have a difference of opinion here. I didn't. I didn't see it that way, but I can see why you would see it that way. His gracelessness could, in theory, allow that to be the case. Clearly is not a Nazi. The man is not a Nazi.
- [10:28]
Abe Greenwald
Of course not.
- [10:29]
John Podhoretz
Like, this is ridiculous, and people need to get a hold of themselves. I mean, he. In fact, his family emigrated from the last explicitly racialist regime on earth to come to America to make a better life. So, anyway, but to move on, let's talk about the darkness thing, because I do think that. Oh, go ahead.
- [10:53]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, I did want to say something about that as well. I think this is so dark to liberals because Trump is reversing things. He's undoing their reality, as far as they can tell, and that was unthinkable to them, and that is completely intolerable. And he spent all day Doing it right with the executive orders.
- [11:15]
John Podhoretz
I think that's true, but I also think that you have to. It's not just that he's acting or that he's undoing. It is that he is reframing not to get into George Lakoff linguistic politics territory. Look up George Lakoff if you want to know what we're talking about. You don't, because it's not worth getting too deeply into. But he is reframing the conversation in the United States using the fact that he won the election and the fact that is unambiguously the case that from left to right, people think that the single most effective attack of the 2024 election was the commercial in which he said they're for they them and I'm for you. Right. That was, that was as, I mean, if you read what people say about what the, what the, you know, scattergrams and the, and the audience surveys and all that say, that was the most effective commercial because it drew in stark contrast the, the cultural discrepancy between left and right or liberals and conservatives in the United States. And when he says, I'm directing the federal government to, to say that there are two genders and that this is now being done by executive order and that the military will no longer be preaching wokeness to people, as I said yesterday on the podcast, this is like a 70 to 80% issue. This is not, you know, like, boy, he's really getting in there with, he's being controversial. Where he's being controversial is on the J6 pardons, which we can get to. This is not controversial. The American people are with him in overwhelming numbers. And you could be on the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast and you know, say, oh, this is so dark. It's so dark to hear him say that. It's, I mean, it's very dark. And you don't understand what people think is dark in the United States. They think you're dark. They think you're saying that a 6 foot 2 inch male should be in a swimming pool with a 5 foot 6 inch female is dark. They think that prisoners moving from male confinement to female confinement by claiming that they are the opposite gender so that they can then rape women in prison. They think that's dark. They don't think everybody gets to say what they are and who they are. And you and the entire country has to go along with this deranged fantasy world that they're creating. That's not what they, that's not what the American people think.
- [13:57]
Seth Mandel
That's and it's also, they, they don't, they miss the opportunity to actually have a discussion about something that could plausibly be dark. You know, even if his speech, his speeches weren't dark, they weren't. The theme wasn't dark. But you can see the left blowing an immediate opportunity to corral some conservatives into protesting with them. The fact that the flights of Afghan refugees have been halted. Right. You, these issues where if you're on the left politically, you can, instead of taking the 20% issue, which is men and women's sports, you can say, you know, everybody, we thought everybody agreed that the Biden's Afghan pullout was a disaster and that we left people behind and we shouldn't have. And now we're essentially leaving more people behind because of the disaster we created. You know, these are like, there's an actual issue here that they could say, and they would have conservatives nodding their heads and saying, yeah, well, you know, that's.
- [15:02]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. But they don't care. But they don't care about it. They don't care about the Afghan. They care about trans. Yeah, this is what they care about. They care about trans and they care about immigration. And this is what they have been spending and they care about wokeness. And this is what they have not only been spending a decade pushing on the American people, but they've spent a decade brainwashing themselves into believing that a president who says America was settled by incredibly brave people who fanned out across the continent and braved dangers and wars and animals and, you know, and typhus and, you know, going over mount with no roads and doing all this and making, making this untamed land a great country is an evil thing to say. This is what they have taught themselves to believe. This is the great, you know, American story. And maybe some of it is a myth and maybe a lot of it isn't a myth, but if they want to go around talking, doing, spreading the 1619 gospel through the 19th century into the 20th century, they're free to do so. Go ahead, Zeitgeist unto you. Let's see how many states J.D. vance wins in 2028. If you guys don't, like, sober up like you are walking literally on a political precipice. Am I overreacting because I don't think Trump owns American issues? Let's talk about the pardons of the January 6th people, which are outrageous and unseemly and terrible. Not only that. Washington Post poll in November has it as a 2 to 1 issue against 66% of people said that the J6 people shouldn't be pardoned, and 30% said they should, meaning a majority of Republicans, an overwhelming majority of Democrats do not believe in pardoning the J6. You know, the people who have been convicted for their crimes on, on January 6th. And Trump did it anyway. And you know what? Advocating for a position that is 2/3 against you is not the best way to start your second term.
- [17:21]
Abe Greenwald
But he's with, but he's with the majority of the country on the issues that affect their lives. That's the difference. I think the, the right, the J6 pardons don't affect everyone else. I mean, you can make an argument.
- [17:37]
John Podhoretz
They do, but fair enough.
- [17:39]
Eli Lake
I think the J6 thing could have been more palatable if he stuck to his original promise that he wasn't going to pardon anyone who violently assaulted police officers. That's.
- [17:52]
John Podhoretz
And remember, and J.
- [17:53]
Seth Mandel
And J. Vance was out there 10.
- [17:55]
John Podhoretz
Days ago, said that 10 days ago.
- [17:57]
Eli Lake
And I would venture to guess that, that it's probably a 9010 issue on the violent assault of police officers. I mean, that is. And then weirdly, by pardoning people who violently assaulted police officers, he's kind of horseshoed his way to Black Lives Matter, 20, 20 Protesters who hate the cops. So that's bad. And he deserves.
- [18:20]
John Podhoretz
And on a day. And on a day that Joe Biden commuted the sentence.
- [18:24]
Eli Lake
Yes.
- [18:25]
John Podhoretz
Of Leonard Peltier, who shot and killed two FBI agents in, I don't know, 1972. I mean, a long time ago. It was like 50 years ago. But he shot and killed two FBI agents. And, and there has been a, this has been a sort of liberal cause or leftist cause for many, many, many decades. And, you know, the, like retired. The FBI Officers association is up in arms. And you, you know, this is the kind of thing that Trump and the Republicans could have made hay about for weeks if they had wanted to, along with the pardons that we can get to that. Eli has a very fine piece on in the Free Press this morning. The Biden family pardons.
- [19:06]
Eli Lake
Thank you.
- [19:07]
John Podhoretz
And Trump stepped on that. And Trump completely stepped on that story.
- [19:10]
Eli Lake
However, if he had stuck to his original thing and that this was done, you know, in a more subtle. If he used a scalpel, not a knife, I think there's a totally credible case to say that there were hundreds of people who were overcharged for that and that it stuck out like a sore thumb because there was so little federal law enforcement against the people who rioted in 2020 burning police stations and like having the nightly ritual of throwing, you know, projectiles and, you know, things that blow up at a federal court building in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. So, so there was a way for him to make his J6 point that would have maybe was persuadable maybe. I mean, it would still have a lot of people saying, wait a second, this isn't right. But the way he did it and to pardon the people who really did violently assault police officers, that I think can have a huge ripple effect because the cops like Trump, but I don't think any cop would be okay with that.
- [20:21]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, and this is, you know, one of the things Trump said in his inaugural speech was that he's going to restore law and order to cities. Yeah. So he's also steps on that.
- [20:33]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, and the Tentifada stuff too. I mean, you know, we've talked at length over the course of the past year about prosecutors dropping all charges against the violent tentifata offenders and how, you know, yes, I could believe that some of the, you know, kids on that lawn in those tents were just going along to get along or whatever and they don't need to be thrown in jail. But the people who assaulted cops and, you know, took a janitor hostage at Columbia or wherever and some of the things that went on in student, by.
- [21:06]
Eli Lake
The way, he was a 40 year old rich kid. Dilettante.
- [21:09]
John Podhoretz
Right. Yeah.
- [21:10]
Seth Mandel
You know, there's like we were able to easily draw the line and say, oh, like people who got violent with cops should not have their charges dropped and you know, people who maybe just followed the leader into a stupid situation, you could maybe sort of understand they didn't hurt anybody. And that's an easy distinction to make. And now we sort of lose that on the Tentifada, like you said, and the Black Lives Matter stuff and all of it plays into, you know, graying everything.
- [21:37]
Abe Greenwald
Trump has advanced this dynamic whereby we say we let our mob slide, you let your mob slide.
- [21:45]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [21:45]
Abe Greenwald
And that's place to be.
- [21:47]
John Podhoretz
That's very bad.
- [21:48]
Eli Lake
Or is there like a little bit of a three or four dimensional chess thing happening here? Where he is, this is another provocation. And he wants the party and he wants the activists who defend lawlessness in our cities to howl the loudest, to once again expose their. I think that's stupid, by the way. I think you just do the right thing.
- [22:09]
John Podhoretz
I don't see it as, I don't see it as 3D. I mean, I genuinely don't think he plays 3D chess except to the extent that he says if I really threaten, you know, 25% tariffs. You know, I'm going to scare Mexico and Canada and we're going to come to the bargaining table and make some deal before I, before I do that or I'll, or I'll, or I'll fix it, I'll do it and then we'll change it 24 hours later and I'll be able to claim that I did it. I think if he had said, again, we're like, if he had said something like a lot of these people have served four years or three years in prison and in my estimation, that's enough. This was not the event that people claim it was. It was not an insurrection to overthrow the country. I don't, didn't think it at the time. I don't think it now. It went through the justice system. I understand that. And maybe these people did something wrong and they've been punished for it. And I'm going to commute all of their sentences. Now the ver. The difference, of course, commutation and a pardon is that a commutation lets the charge stand. You remain a felon, you remain a convicted person, but you are let out of jail. Right? A pardon wipes your slate clean. And if you're Q Shaman, as he said last night, now he's gonna go out and buy guns because he's allowed to buy guns because he's no longer a felon. And so, you know, that's, that's the difference. But of course he doesn't believe what I just said. He called them hostages last night, an hour after he had the families, he had the families of the hostages, the American hostages standing behind him, including Noah Argamani, the released hostage. And then he basically did a moral equivalence between the people who stormed the Capitol and you know, and, and then, and then the, the, the dozens of people who actually committed actual acts of violence against cops and things like that with kidnap people kidnapped by a monstrous terrorist organization and held in, held in the most horrible captivity who are still being held in captivity. That's, that's just morally unspeakable. So here's the question I have for you at the same time. What did he do with all these executive orders, right? He, he did all this deregulating. He, he dropped certain. He dropped a 50 year old executive order that created some kind of a permitting process that is now gone. He did various other things like that. He did all this anti. D. I see. Remove DI from the federal government completely and all this other. So is it. Can we say, you know, you got to take multitudes. Yeah. Can we say that as Seth and I were, you know, is this theme song from the Facts of Life, right? You take the good, you take the bad, then you have the facts of life. So there was bad yesterday, right? And the J6 stuff was bad, as was the suspension of a duly signed law that is on the books that he has no right to suspend for 75 days. The TikTok. The. The fact that TikTok had to. Had. Has to sell. President has no role whatsoever in suspending a law that. That is. That is passed. And I don't quite understand how that's going to get, you know, enforced. And of course, birthright citizenship, which is probably too complicated for us to talk about here. But suffice it to say that no matter what you have heard, birthright citizenship has been the. Has been the law, has been constitutional law of the United States since 1866. And I don't care that John Eastman found one senator in the debates at the time who said it shouldn't be that there should be birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled on this 6 to 2 in 1898. And the dissent in the Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship made it literally clear that the problem with birthright citizenship was that other citizens coming here from China are viewed in international law, such as it was at the time, as subjects of the Emperor of China and therefore cannot become Americans because they are under somebody else's subject rule. And we do not believe in subject rule in on this planet any longer. That is a talk about something that is, you know, like gone the way of the dodo and does not stand for this. And so he did announce the end of birthright citizenship. This will go to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will likely find 9 to 0 that he cannot end birthright citizenship by executive order. But it's bad. Now, maybe it's not bad because maybe we need to have this adjudicated because it's such a fetish among so many people and it just has to be dealt with so it can go away. But I mean, so take the good with the bad. And there was a lot of good and there was some serious bad.
- [27:21]
Eli Lake
Right.
- [27:22]
John Podhoretz
But it's.
- [27:22]
Eli Lake
In some ways it's enabled because the outgoing, you know, doddering senile president, only less than a week ago, what did he do? He said it's. By the way, the Equal Rights Amendment is actually now an amendment to the Constitution, like pulling it out of thin air. And what's kind of. I just want to say this is one difference is that everybody in the intelligentsia who knows anything about the Constitution and explains it as eloquently as you said to John understands that birthright citizenship, you can't just get, you can't take it away with the stroke of a pen and executive order. And so there's not going to be no tweets from Georgetown Law School saying congratulations to everybody who hates birthright citizenship. It's no longer a law of the land. But that's what happened with the equal right. It's like, it's not just that the president did it, it was that like all these law professors were like, yay, we finally did it.
- [28:22]
Seth Mandel
Lilly Ledbetter Yay, the law societies that accredit law schools and whatever.
- [28:27]
Eli Lake
Yeah, it's unbelievable. I'm like, the rot is deep. I haven't read it yet. But Ilya Shapiro's new book is about the problem in legal that is a crisis at this point. What is going on?
- [28:40]
John Podhoretz
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- [30:01]
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- [32:21]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, well, I mean, look, we talk about this like constantly. What is the root what is the root of this weird antinomianism where the executive branch is deemed to have the powers of the legislature, Right? I mean, I located largely in Obama. Obama. The Obamas would say, well, it's all your fault because you right wingers were praising the idea of the unitary executive during the Bush administration. So you're the one who strengthened the executive branch, not us. And then we just did what we had to do because that was moral and right and just. And then Trump follows along with Obama and then Biden follows along Trump. And now Trump is going to follow Biden. And if the Congress doesn't do something to reassert its primacy in lawmaking, we are headed down a path not toward banana Republican, but where a president will say I his oath requires him to write to administrative justly administer the laws of the United States. And Trump said yesterday, I'm not doing that with TikTok, I'm going my own way.
- [33:29]
Seth Mandel
You mentioned an obscure term that we might want to explain to listeners at home. Congress, I don't know.
- [33:35]
John Podhoretz
Everybody immediately recognizes, yes, there are two chambers of Congress, and according to the Constitution, Congress makes the laws in a very complex process that involves both houses of Congress voting on a law, sending it to the President, who can sign it or veto it, at which point it goes back to the Congress, and if by a two thirds vote, the Congress says, we understand you vetoed it, but we still think it's important, the law goes into. Goes. Comes into existence without the President's signature, and the law is permanent and irrefutable unless Congress writes another law superseding it or the Supreme Court finds that law unconstitutional. That is our system. And you don't deem that it is fair to, you know, give people thousands of dollars in debt forgiveness, and you don't deem that people who are here under the rules of DACA are now have a, you know, are. Are to be. To remain the. If you cannot violate the law through executive order, that's the Congress, and the Congress has to assert its prerogatives. And, of course, that's not going to happen in these next four years, because, particularly in the House, the only binding glue for this one seat majority that Republicans have is Trump. There is no ability if the Democrats vote en masse against every single thing that's thrown at them, which, by the way, they're not doing.
- [35:11]
Eli Lake
No.
- [35:11]
John Podhoretz
It is important to note that tonight, or today, sometime, Trump will sign the Lake and Riley act into law. Twelve Democratic senators voted for the Lake and Riley act, which makes it easier for the arrest and deportation of people who commit illegals, who commit criminal acts in the United States. So the first thing that's gonna happen with Trump is a bipartisan piece of legislation being signed into law. So we aren't necessarily in the place where there will be no Democratic and Republican cooperation.
- [35:45]
Abe Greenwald
You know what I'm reminded of now? I'm thinking the way Trump flooded the Zone with his Cabinet nominees is sort of. Has been repeated with his flurry of executive orders yesterday, right? Throw everything at them, see what lands, see who people, see what people go crazy over. And then some of it's going to work out, right?
- [36:12]
John Podhoretz
Of course, people are people and policies are policies, and people are fungible and policies.
- [36:18]
Abe Greenwald
Well, but some of these are going to get challenged. I mean, you know, we said, I.
- [36:22]
John Podhoretz
Mean, yeah, no, they are getting a challenge. But it's unfortunate because, you know, it's like That's a what you're wasting America's time that the problem with doing birthright citizenship, which will, which will not pass Supreme Court muster, is that you're creating this entire process. That is a waste. That is a waste of time. Because it's two years, a lot of emotional. Takes up a lot of bandwidth and a lot of yelling and screaming and then it's not gonna, it's gonna be overturned. It's like DACA and that stuff with Obama. It's like, what, are you kidding? Of course you' this isn't going to go anywhere.
- [37:00]
Seth Mandel
And it, and it.
- [37:02]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [37:02]
Seth Mandel
And it replicates a mistake the Democrats do have been doing these past few years, which is, it just creates an opportunity to fight within your coalition. The right is, this is not like a right wing thing. The right is divided. There's a huge portion of the right that agrees with everything we just said here about the birthright citizenship. We're not an outlier, you know, about that. The legal minds on the right tend to. So he's just, this is a thing that's going to have. If it takes two years to go to the courts, it's going to be two years of Republicans yelling at other Republicans.
- [37:36]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [37:37]
Seth Mandel
Could, you know, creating this, like, and then, you know, have the Democrats be able to sit back and do what Republicans were doing for four years, like, let them fight.
- [37:45]
Eli Lake
Right.
- [37:46]
John Podhoretz
And you know, by the way, the other thing is. And let's talk about your piece in the Free Press, because what Trump did with the Flurry, do it, deciding as they did, they were going to do all of this on day one, I think was if we look back on it from the vantage point of like 12 hours after. So I'm taking a deep historical view here, is it was in pr, publicity and political terms a mistake, like, because he could have done this Wednesday, could have done it Thursday, could have done any time. He didn't need to do it yesterday. And what he did was if he had let alone and just gone to the balls and danced and done all of that, the story today would be the Biden family pardons.
- [38:30]
Eli Lake
Yeah.
- [38:31]
John Podhoretz
And it's not. And let's talk about the Biden family pardons.
- [38:34]
Eli Lake
I mean, but I don't, I think it's so bad. You mentioned on the podcast yesterday the Mark Rich pardon and I guess the Hugh Rodham pardon. I mean, there were things that, that Clinton did on his way out, which, by the way, prompted a Justice Department investigation, as I remember. I think this is unprecedentedly awful. First of all, there's never been a pardon for people who were never charged with a crime.
- [39:06]
John Podhoretz
Only Nixon.
- [39:07]
Eli Lake
Only Nixon. But that was.
- [39:08]
John Podhoretz
Nixon is the only person in American history who was. Yeah, yeah, right.
- [39:12]
Eli Lake
I mean, it's like that was like Nixon got the pardon because you could tell that this. You know, eventually it was gonna. He was gonna. That he. There was something there. And it was like a process that was moving forward. This is like, if it becomes a new norm, then, you know, future presidents will just tell their, you know, staff and their loyalists, do whatever you got to do. I'm going to, you know, do one of those Biden pardons at the end. And that right there is such a. Like, that we don't want that. That's a huge norm violation. And I actually think, you know, I think. What was it? I think Matt Continetti said, like, you know, now he can create an amendment to review to change the pardon power. I think, like, maybe we should start thinking about that. So that right there off the top. Now, one of the things I did, and I don't think I was being too clever by half, I think it's also a fair point in a sense. Even though it was despicable what Biden did, not just for his family, not just for his son, but also for all the members and staff of the January 6th Committee and Mark Milley and Anthony Fauci and a few others, he has removed a temptation for Trump or the Trump Justice Department to respond to the lawfare against Trump in kind. And that may be a kind of shambolic way of stumbling towards a little bit of a lawfare truce, which we could use. And there will be other ways to get accountability. There will certainly be investigations. I would imagine there will be, you know, Justice Department reports, there will be congressional probes, but they will not have the prospect of sending Democrats to jail. Now, there were some people who were not on the pardon list, so it's possible maybe they'll go after Merrick Garland. You guys mentioned Jill Biden was not among the people. That's a fascinating omission. But on the other hand, I do think that this is maybe, like, there is this silver lining here, that maybe it's an opportunity to just get out of this cycle of lawfare, which would be nice. I would like that.
- [41:24]
John Podhoretz
That would be great. Except, as you say, the problem here is the precedent that is being established that, again, Bill Clinton established. Well, no, don't you be blamed. No, what Bill Clinton established was, I'm pardoning my family. And now, 20, 24 years later, Biden's like, I'm pardoning everybody in my family.
- [41:45]
Eli Lake
That.
- [41:45]
John Podhoretz
Okay, I'm pardoning them. Yeah. And that is new. Like that is. The point is, it's the classic Pandora's, but you open it a little and it'll be open. And you think Trump will do that with his family.
- [41:58]
Eli Lake
Okay, but hold on, who's gonna object?
- [42:00]
John Podhoretz
We're gonna object, though.
- [42:01]
Eli Lake
It's a little different though, because I think Roger Clinton, who pardoned, had served time. He paid like some, you're supposed to use the pardon.
- [42:10]
John Podhoretz
And Hugh Rodham. Yeah, that's right.
- [42:11]
Eli Lake
It's like they'd already paid a price. It was not like, I mean, with Hunter, it was so bad because what he was doing basically is saying, screw your jury verdict. Oh, by the way, forget what I said earlier when there was an election campaign, I'm just gonna do it. I mean, that was disgusting. But then this preemptive pardon for the family, and you made it a great point that, okay, so it is a Biden crime family. Yeah. Why else would you do that? If there, if you, if there was nothing there, then, you know, let them. And yes, it would be disturbing and terrible and everything else like that, and it would be a burden, but eventually you could, you could count on the justice system. But it's, he is such a fraud.
- [42:51]
Seth Mandel
The problem with this, I mean, I love the idea of a, of a truce, you know, on something like that, but the problem is that whenever you suggest stuff like that, people come at you and say, that's unilateral disarmament. Right. Because Trump just did, Trump just did the, the pardons. So now Democrats are going to say, well, it's our turn. So. And then it would be Republicans turn. That's how.
- [43:13]
Eli Lake
No, but on the lawfare, it's, it's, it's the law firm. There can be a truce because you, because there's, what's the point of prosecuting somebody who got one of these preemptive pardons? I'm saying by removing the prospect of going after this. I don't know. My only point is that I would rather there be a truce for Aaron Sorkin, West Wing high minded reasons. And there's a walk and talk conversation in the quarters of the White House. You know what I mean? And Stephen Miller says, all right, you got a point. Let's bring them in.
- [43:49]
John Podhoretz
Whatever.
- [43:50]
Eli Lake
That would be great, but that's never gonna happen. So let's just. Except the fact that, all right, you've removed some very fat targets for lawfare.
- [43:58]
Abe Greenwald
If, if that's what's happened. If this is a truce, it comes at way too high a price. I don't know that lawfare is worse than our entering an age of inevitable pardons. Pre crime pardon or what, you know, for. For everyone and everyone's family. That's worse.
- [44:22]
Eli Lake
Yeah, I mean.
- [44:24]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah.
- [44:26]
Eli Lake
The Alvin Bragg thing, the prospect that Republican state attorney generals or district attorneys were going to find prominent national Democrats, rummage through the law books, come up with some novel theory and then, you know, try to convict them of felonies so as to deprive them of their. Not only, I mean, like the trial deprived them of his speech rights. And so in order to do that is a kind of election interference, which is disgusting. And the fact that the Democrats did it. And again, we had the Lawrence tribes of the world, the people who were supposed to be responsible for teaching the Constitution to the next generation of Supreme Court justices, saying it was fantastic and giving me like, you know, minute by minute commentary on Twitter. I mean, that's a problem too. So I don't know. I'm with you. I feel like it's a choice between, you know, like cancer and AIDS or something. It's terrible.
- [45:22]
John Podhoretz
It is terrible. And by the way, so we have the Alvin Bragg example and we could have some kind of a lawfare standoff. Right. Or something, as you propose. But Alvin Bragg points to a third way, which is what if you get a politically ambitious attorney general in a deep red state who decides they want to, you know, they, they want to make their political bones and raise money and become the next Marjorie Taylor Greene by doing a completely unjust prosecution of a, of a, of a, of a Democrat on very, very, very slipshod grounds. That is very much within their rights. And they can, it's there. These are state courts and they have to say they're not in the reach of federal pardon power and all of that. So we're, we're nowhere near out of the woods here. And if there is anything that it. That deserves the term banana republic, this pardon stuff is actually. Does fit the model.
- [46:22]
Eli Lake
Yes.
- [46:22]
John Podhoretz
In some sense or other, of the banana republic, which is that you have an entire system. Right. The banana republics that we talk about are republics. Right. They are set up on democratic grounds with constitutions and all that. But somehow the executive gets to do whatever the executive wants. That is the model of the banana republic.
- [46:47]
Seth Mandel
For my friends, everything. For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.
- [46:51]
Eli Lake
Can I. Yeah, yeah.
- [46:52]
John Podhoretz
Exactly.
- [46:53]
Eli Lake
For me, what makes it even more offensive is that like whoever it is Jon Meacham is writing these speeches which are trying to still like his farewell address last week, the televised address was trying to strike, I mean, you're right, by the way, John, that it was a terrible speech in a lot of ways, but it was like he was trying to strike these poetic chords of our republic and our values and like, you know, I still believe in our democracy and I believe in that stuff, but it just crushes me that this guy who is such a stain on the Constitution leaves in this horrendous manner is still talking again like some, like Aaron Sorkin teleplay. I can't. That makes me crazy. It's that contrast of like, you know, we are good enough. I think our fat, you know, all these principles are. They're pretty good, I'll tell you. And here's the deal. I hate that. I hate it, I hate it. I hate it. For him to do this thing and then to still give me this language of, you know, our American ideals, I can't stand it makes me crazy.
- [47:55]
John Podhoretz
Well, you're right. And part of this is what the gaslighting, you know, we spent four years talking about Trump's gaslighting and there was a lot of gaslighting.
- [48:04]
Eli Lake
Yes.
- [48:04]
John Podhoretz
Crowds here. Here's the map I want you to draw of the hurricane.
- [48:08]
Eli Lake
Right.
- [48:08]
John Podhoretz
You know, all that kind of, all that kind of stuff. Don't, don't, you know, don't report on how many people are dying of COVID because that makes me look bad or how many cases there are.
- [48:20]
Eli Lake
But when Trump, when Trump does it, he doesn't have that vocabulary.
- [48:24]
John Podhoretz
No. Right, but. Right, so there was gaslighting. Yeah. The Biden gaslighting is the adoption of pompous liberal nostrums using the classic language of the New Deal and jfk. This elevated language about, you know, the democracy and where we are and our future and our structures and all of that. And then he's just another corrupt, lousy Washington fourth rate hack Paul, who, who serves his party and doesn't care about America or the future in any way, shape or form and looks to enrich his family as we, I think now can say without qualification that his family was enriched by his position as vice president, that he has now put them beyond reach of legal, you know, of legal examination for that. That happened with Hunter, it's now happened with his business partner, Jim Biden, his sister, who knows what his sister was in. We can now think, I think totally justly from now until the end of time, that Biden, far from being the Modest guy who took the train home to be with his family and all of that is a crook. He was a crook and he ran a crook family. And Peter Schweitzer was right. And the people who said that he looks like he's not rich, but he's actually really rich. And the stuff on the laptop where, where Hunter says to his sister, I'm going to have to give him 10%. Give. Give 10% to the big guy was exactly what it meant. Which means that Biden got at least $1 million himself off a $10 million deal with China. And that's the only one that we know about. Firmly. We don't know what he got from Ukraine. We don't know what he got from other players. We don't know what game was being played. But Hunter and, and Hunter and Jim were going around the world selling the hilarious fact that their, that their father and brother was the Vice President, United States. An office that, as was it Alvin Barkley said isn't worth a bucket of warm piss.
- [50:26]
Eli Lake
Right.
- [50:27]
John Podhoretz
You know, was somehow so important that you should buy him off. Little knowing that he would actually end up being president. And that buy off would. That those payoffs would actually not help, but would hurt since they had to be covered up.
- [50:41]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, Biden gaslighting, though, is also. It's not just gaslighting. He also played on the way out of office. He played a very deliberate shell game. He said, don't look over here. Don't look at the pardons. Don't look at what's going on with my family. Here's where I'm going to direct your attention. We have a new oligarchy that is destroying the fundamentals, the ideals of this country. That is the problem. And the media sucked it up. They took it.
- [51:15]
Eli Lake
Yeah.
- [51:15]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, they ran with it. John, you pointed to a headline yesterday that just said.
- [51:21]
John Podhoretz
What was that? It was just that New Oligarchy Takes Over Washington. Literally in the New York Times, the word oligarchy was used without irony or with like quotes around it or something like that. Right. The oligarchy was totally fine with Obama and Biden when the billionaires were on their side. I never heard anybody complaining that Zuckerberg's kowtowing and toadying to the Biden administration was anything but an act of deep patriotism, including the deep pockets. And I think that stuff in the end doesn't pass the smell test.
- [51:56]
Eli Lake
Made that point in a letter that he publicized when he said, like, Elizabeth Warren sent him a letter saying something like, I noticed that you've spent $1 million for the inauguration. Well, it's an awful nice company you've got there. And he said, funny, you never objected when I gave lots of money to Democrats. And Abe, you're getting at something that I think is a deeper point about the New York Times, and that is that it's no longer the paper of record, it's the American Le Monde. It's a very well financed, very well staffed, capable of doing terrific journalism center left newspaper or left newspaper, depending on your perspective. And it is no longer the final word on anything. It is no longer what I mean, I used to have a, early in my journalism career, used to call the New York Times opinion page the Supreme Court of American opinion. It is no longer that at all. It is just the. This, it is, it is a much smaller kind of thing now. It is something that the elite, elite liberals.
- [53:02]
Seth Mandel
It's an oligarchy.
- [53:03]
Abe Greenwald
Awful.
- [53:03]
Eli Lake
Not a lot about what.
- [53:05]
John Podhoretz
It's an oligarchy. Yeah, well, it's a. Yeah, yeah. It's a malaccracy. It's a malacracy. Secular malacracy.
- [53:12]
Eli Lake
Right. It's just, it's like that's what it is. And they've squandered it. I don't think they just squandered it. I think it's been a slow burn for a while.
- [53:21]
John Podhoretz
But by the way, we should make note of that fact that last week the New York Times fired one of its columnists who is a liberal. Who is a liberal who has been red pilled. Right. Pamela Paul, who was the editor of the New York Times Book Review and got this column. And basically the column is a, basically a classic liberal, unthinking liberal who is confronting the consequences of wokeness and wrote about gender stuff and various other things. And she had this job, it was given to her because they wanted to take the book review, I believe, take the book review away from her. So they gave her this op ed column as a consolation prize. And I think she did it for two years or maybe three years. And with Trump coming, rather than saying, you know what, she's kind of an interesting voice because she's not a Trumpian, but she is like evaluating liberal ideas from a relatively innovative perspective. They just kicked her to the curb.
- [54:18]
Eli Lake
Our friend Brett Stevens is like the last Jew in like Kabul, Afghanistan at this point.
- [54:24]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [54:26]
Eli Lake
Well, he's like the last one. Yeah, Ross, you know, he and Ross.
- [54:31]
Seth Mandel
Are those two like you remember those two last Afghans who then it turned out they, they, they had Something.
- [54:37]
John Podhoretz
They each had their own shoel. Yeah. They each had their own shool. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know that I, I, I think Breton, I think Bretton and Ross are perfectly affable. Affable with each other. What is like, the last one is like. Yeah, what? Yeah. Anyway, so, but it is an interesting point that, you know. Yeah. The oligarchy stuff. And again, I just don't think in the end, when it comes to the way people evaluate American politics, that that stuff that's all kind of like debating points for us. And I'm talking about 5:38 and maybe 538. We'll talk about us in response and all of that. I mean, first of all, as Abe said, none of this matters to the American people. Right. It doesn't matter to the American people that Biden says there's a new oligarchy. And here's his warning, like George Washington's warning about the military industrial complex and yada da, da, da. They don't care. Like, what do they care about? They want inflation dealt with. And the one thing that was said on the538 politics podcast that I thought was interesting yesterday was they noted how little Trump talked about the economy in his speech and during the day.
- [55:55]
Seth Mandel
And he said, Trump said something very interesting about that, which I was going to raise earlier. Somebody, quote, one of the outlets quoted him as saying, how many times can I say the price of an apple has doubled? And that was what I thought was really against the grain. Now we're into the political instincts area of this, because most of us, I mean, I certainly thought there, you can't say it enough that you could make a campaign on saying the price of apples has doubled. You could say nothing else. Like they used to make fun of Rudy Giuliani. Noun, a verb. 911, you could do a noun, a verb, the price of apples or the price of eggs on an entire campaign. And Trump got the sense that people were getting bored, and getting bored was worse than anything, because as soon as you, they get bored and you lose their attention, who knows what they'll think? They'll start thinking for themselves. They'll start, you know, they use their imaginations, whatever. But Trump's thing is keeping control of the conversation. And in order to do that, he had to stop saying apple really expensive right now. And I don't.
- [57:04]
John Podhoretz
Right. But I think that's a mistake. That's my point. Which is, like you say, how much can you talk about it? Maybe the crowd that comes to his rallies is Bored because what they like is gender stuff and they like culture war stuff. But he is now the President of the United States speaking to the entire country and the country, 75% of the country thought, thinks that the country is on the wrong track. And the key issue there is inflation and did not. And the board. Well, no, inflation is like. Is even the border is number two. But economic uncertainty on the basis of the fact that people's purchasing power has been eroded over the last four years. And again the gaslighting which is. But it's been coming down. Well, you know what, it came down because it was a 10% but it's actually not coming down. It's crept up a little bit in the last couple of months and it is still higher than it has been historically over the last 25 years. And people's salaries are not increasing in the same way and so their purchasing power is being eroded. And that is the thing that if, if anything aside from age is what is what killed Biden and Harris's chances in, in 2024. And that's what you would think he would be focusing like a laser beam on. And you could say that tariffs are his way of focusing on that. Fair to Ferris Fair Energy saying we are doing whatever we can about energy because that will spur a gigantic economic growth boom. That is the. But even that is not an answer to inflation. Economic growth can have a. Have a terrible inflationary effect if you're sim. If you're not. If you remain, you know, loose with money and stuff like that, which he wants to be. I, I just, I just think you're. It's weird actually that his instincts are leading him to the constantly to the culture war. But that speech yesterday had a bifurcated quality which is as I say, he began the speech, I thought very intelligently and with a long term positive consequence for him and for the Republicans by saying the problem with this country is that the elites don't know how to run it. And they came in and they've been running it for their own benefit, which is sort of like the David Brooks point that for 25 years what happened in America was that liberal elites rigged the game of getting into the elites like college admissions, job security, looking for advanced degrees, not providing any kind of a path into the middle class for people of modest means who cannot go to major institutions or afford to go to major institutions. That was what the Democratic Party was about. That's what liberalism was about. And then it flipped and now it's about preserving its own gentry status Even if it doesn't know that. And that Trump really has a capacity to make enormous inroads here. And he started by saying, you know what? They've taken everything over. They run everything. They have everything and everything stinks. Nothing works. They don't know how to put out a fire. They don't know how to deal with a hurricane. That's root government responsibilities that they can't even perform. And we're going to perform them. But then again, just the siren song of the stuff that sings to us, too. Right. I mean, the di gender stuff is very important. It's civilizationally important, but it may not be directly, immediately politically important in the same way as saying, I'm going to kill inflation. I don't know how he kills inflation. Don't get me wrong. He doesn't know how to kill inflation.
- [61:04]
Abe Greenwald
That's the issue. It's harder. I mean, so, yeah, if you start getting into those promises.
- [61:10]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [61:11]
Seth Mandel
Well, that's the. That's the other West.
- [61:13]
John Podhoretz
Going to Mars is not. Is not hard. He's saying, we're going to go to Mars. That is know. I mean, so no one plant the flag.
- [61:20]
Seth Mandel
That's the other West Wing reference. Right. Which is that the whole. There was a whole episode around, you know, press secretary, a backup press secretary doesn't know what he's doing, and he ends up saying that the president has a secret plan to fight inflation. And there's a whole. That's what, that's what. That's where you end up with that. Which is like, do you have a plan? Yes. What is it? I'm not telling you.
- [61:42]
John Podhoretz
In the next two weeks, we're going to roll out our how to beat inflation plan in the next two weeks. That, that, that was. Trump won. Right. It's coming how we're going to fix Medicare.
- [61:51]
Seth Mandel
That's coming after Infrastructure Week.
- [61:54]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, after. Right. Okay. Eli Lake, you are doing a new podcast. It is. It is a follow on to your brilliant RE Education podcast that you were doing for several years. And it debuts tomorrow with an episode.
- [62:10]
Eli Lake
About Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. So it's the first populist president. That's Andrew Jackson and the latest populist president, which is Donald Trump. And my, you know, historians, I do a lot of research for these. I think there's only been two real populist, Jackson and Trump. And so it's an exploration of American populism. And it makes the argument that there are some dangerous things about American populism. I say that it's a little bit like poison, its toxicity is determined by the dose. But there are some good things about American populism. And I argue that one of the good things about American populism is that it is a little bit like an escape valve, which is to say that for a country that was founded in revolution, our system has endured, our republic has endured for nearly 250 years, in part because we can accommodate political movements that seek to upend and overturn elites. And that is what I think that is. You know, I've had a lot of theories of Trump. I did an episode on Trump and being the greatest BS artist of all time, I stand by that. But this is about the populist moment of Trump coming back to power.
- [63:22]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so this podcast, Breaking History, you will be doing it every two weeks, is that right?
- [63:29]
Eli Lake
Every two weeks. These are kind of manageable episodes. They may get longer over time, but we're aiming for about 40 minute episodes. And what they are is their narrative. They're sort of like an audio essay with. But I do interviews usually with historians. In this one, the episode in the one you're about to, that's coming out tomorrow, we've got some great block quotes or audio block quotes from Steve Bannon, who knows a lot about Andrew Jackson, loves Andrew Jackson and talks about that and Trump. And I think, I think, I think it's a. I'm very proud of the work and I think commentary listeners will really enjoy it. So I hope you also.
- [64:06]
John Podhoretz
Well, I think a lot of commentary listeners have already heard. I mean, there was a point at which the RE Education podcast, I can't remember which one, got to like 40 on. On Apple. We did pretty good. So it's not like. So you, you did, you did pretty well. And you, you have. These are, I think, documentaries. They're like. Or essays or video essay, audio. Excuse me, audio essays. I heartily commend if people want to go back.
- [64:33]
Seth Mandel
We've had the occasional crossover too. Right. Eli did that great podcast about As a Jew and did that great.
- [64:38]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [64:39]
Eli Lake
Oh, that was.
- [64:39]
John Podhoretz
And then wrote this piece. Yeah, yeah.
- [64:43]
Eli Lake
I will say this if we have a little bit of time and this is related to the podcast because I am now working on episode two about California. But John recommended a book to me, which I would recommend to the listeners called Season of the Witch by David Talbot, which is about the San Fran 70s. And it is so good. He gets so much. It explains how, I would say, like, there are a lot of different vignettes in it, but it's mainly the story of. And Correct me if I'm wrong, John. How a kind of the San Francisco very liberal establishment accommodated itself to this radicalism that came out of the late 1960s that burned through San Francisco. And we tend to think of San Francisco as like, you know, the city that invented hippies and is a city of love. But there was a lot of political violence in San Francisco in the 1970s. And it's a very interesting story of how this, how this sort of new guard comes into power. And we still know the names. Dianne Feinstein recently died. Willie Brown is responsible for Kamala Harris. It's sort of the origin story of those, those people. It is a really, really wonderful book. And the irony of that book, and John and I have had private conversations about it, is that David Talbott starts the book by saying, I'm here to defend San Francisco values, and then proceeds over the course of 430 pages or so to bury San Francisco Barrett values. But that said, it's a real. I couldn't put it down. It's a great book.
- [66:10]
John Podhoretz
So.
- [66:10]
Eli Lake
David Talbot.
- [66:11]
John Podhoretz
David Talbot, Season the Witch. Two interesting things about this book, one of which is that David Talbot is the founder, founding editor of Salon. Salon, of course, the first major left wing online magazine, right. Founded in the wake of Slate, which was, which was ideologically unclassifiable, as was its founding editor, Michael Kinsley. And so they wanted to create a left wing version. Salon came into being. David Talbot was its editor. It was a preposterous publication in many ways. That sort of was pre. Woke Jake Tapper, fair enough. But I mean, anyway, what's interesting is that he is a standard issue left wing California guy, David Talbot, and wrote this book about the history of San Francisco, which actually begins at the, you know, in the late 18th century, late 19th century, moves forward. And then the second half of the book really is from the 60s onward. And what, what surprised me and what I think is praiseworthy about him is, yeah, he says he's here to defend San Francisco values, but he's too honest. Like, he actually. What he gathered and what. The story that he has to tell that isn't, that is injurious to his intent is the story of how an entire city's culture went mad and started defending random shootings of white people on streets, defending gangs that were murdering, you know, the Black Panthers, murdered their own bookkeeper because she was getting too close to how, how much money they were stealing. And then of course, the, the two ultimate things, which were the reliance of the mayor, George Moscone, the man who was running for mayor on the votes and the political organization of one Jim Jones, the pastor of the People's Temple in 1978. Moscone is assassinated, thus bringing Dianne Feinstein into power as the. As the unexpected mayor of the city. An office she could never have won on her own. He is assassinated by a right. By a right winger who tries the famous Twinkie defense to get himself off Dan White. And then. And Harvey Milk, the. The famous pioneering gay activist. And then the next year, Jim Jones, the man who got George Moscone elected. And in ways that Talbot makes clear were probably fraudulent.
- [68:49]
Eli Lake
Yes.
- [68:52]
John Podhoretz
Leads the suicide of 900 people in Jonestown, Guyana, where the People's Temple had high. Had run off to. In order to evade legal scrutiny in the United States. And that. That is sort of like, that's the culmination. And then, of course, aids. And then AIDS hits San Francisco and decimates this, you know, city of Love. It's an astonishing story. It's a great book and praised several times on this podcast. So, David Talbot, if the book is selling, I believe you owe a debt of gratitude to neocons who are keeping your book alive long after most people on your side would wish it dead because it tells an uncomfortable story. Yeah, go ahead.
- [69:35]
Eli Lake
Can I give one example that I loved from the book of how his honesty got in the way of his, like, intention to kind of defend San Francisco values? At one point, he is describing the decline of Haight Ashbury, which was the scene of the Summer of Love, as everybody knows. And, you know, by. By the end of the 60s, in the early 70s, it was disgusting. It was, like, really hard, bad drugs like heroin and methamphetamines. And it became a place for Vietnam veterans to basically just sort of lose themselves. And so he has this line in there, and I'm going to probably mangle it. But basically, he describes a scene where one Vietnam veteran is, like, overdosing on heroin and, like, the Hell's Angels, you know, try to rush him to the hospital because the cops really can't operate there. And then he just remarks. He says, so anybody who tells you the right likes to put out this myth that the left, you know, was terrible to Vietnam veterans. And they would always, you know, like, you know, they'd spit on them. And that's just not true. This story tells this tale. I'm like, really? A story of, like, a Vietnam veteran dying of a heroin overdose in, like, a public park is evidence that the left was good to the veterans who came Back from that war. But that said, you know, again, too honest, great reporter and gets. And he. I think that only somebody like him could have written the book because he does have access to so many of these players. He does all these, like, long interviews and it's so revelatory anyway. And he's a good writer, so I like it.
- [71:03]
John Podhoretz
I have one other funny thing and then we can go, okay, so one of the characters in this book is a man named Peter Coyote.
- [71:10]
Eli Lake
Yes.
- [71:10]
John Podhoretz
Born Peter Cohen, of course.
- [71:13]
Eli Lake
Of course, yes.
- [71:17]
John Podhoretz
In New York, Peter Coyote goes to college. He takes peyote and decides to rename himself Coyote. Rhyming with peyote. And he ends up in California, in San Francisco, as part of a radical organization called the Diggers. And the Diggers basically seceded. Said they were like Wesley Snipes or, you know, like some crazy survivalist group in Oregon decides they're seceding from the United States and that they, in their Haight Ashbury neighborhood are going to live without currency. They're going to have a. They're going to have a free barter economy or they're going to print their own money or something like that. At which point, of course, everybody just starts stealing from everybody. And this whole. Anyway, Peter Coyote decides I'm an actor. And the joke of this whole thing where Peter is going to overthrow the government, have a new currency, anarchistic, all this is that Peter Coyote ends up as the narrator voice on Ken Burns documentaries, as the voice of the American soul. Right. And it is his voice that on Ken Burns masterpiece, Country Music. Right. Which is, which is the. Which is, I think, the best documentary series ever filmed. Peter Coyote is the voice. And of course, the story of country music is the one Ken Burns documentary that isn't woke and that can't be woke and that tells a story about these sort of, you know, the people in it who are like basically the grandparents of the Trump voter and the parents of the Trump voter and the voice of Trump's inaugural. And by the way, Abe, I do want to point out that your favorite song was played at the inaugural ball last night.
- [73:11]
Abe Greenwald
I'm not sure what my favorite song.
- [73:12]
John Podhoretz
Is, but go ahead, Anthony. What's his name?
- [73:16]
Abe Greenwald
I love that song. I know it's my favorite song. Richmond north, north of Richmond.
- [73:19]
John Podhoretz
Richmond north of Richmond.
- [73:20]
Abe Greenwald
The.
- [73:21]
John Podhoretz
The totally viral YouTube tick tock song about how, you know, they were ruining our country. You know, the left is ruining our country. And, and this went from basically, you know, having he didn't have a recording contract or anything. Ends up Two years later, people are dancing to it at an inaugural ball. So that is.
- [73:43]
Abe Greenwald
And oligarchy. Fear mongers.
- [73:46]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. And Peter Coyote. Peter Coyote having been the salesman of the Worldview, represented by Richmond, north of Richmond. Anyway, Eli Lake breaking history. Go subscribe today so you can have it right there in your feed tomorrow. Apple Spotify.
- [74:06]
Eli Lake
Thank you.
- [74:07]
John Podhoretz
I don't know, Schmichker. You know, Bonski, whatever podcast server gotta be on title titled Zonal. I don't know, I don't know. People every now and then write me and they're like, commentary is not. I can't find the Commentary magazine podcast on the Schmoochki app. And I'm like, I. I don't know what that is.
- [74:32]
Seth Mandel
I'm searching Netflix, John, and nothing.
- [74:35]
John Podhoretz
No Netflix. The point is that there are these podcast servers that, you know, like, you really need to do something because Boinky doesn't have you. It doesn't, you know. Okay, I don't know what to tell you. I'm happy that a thousand flowers are blooming in the podcast space, but I only have bandwidth for so much. Anyway, thank you, Eli. Like breaking history. Free Press. Read his piece on the Barden. The Barden Pydance, the Biden. Pardons. We'll be back tomorrow. So for Abe and Seth, I'm John Pothors. Keep the candle burning.