The Iran Deal Is Bad and Everyone Is Stupid (#562)

Summary

The Fifth Column – Episode #562: The Iran Deal Is Bad and Everyone Is Stupid

Date: June 19, 2026
Hosts: Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, Matt Welch
Guest(s): Occasional perspectives and extended DSA election focus, with attributed audio/video clips

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Episode Overview

This episode delivers a sharp, often hilarious, sometimes profane “rhetorical assault” on the latest Iran deal, the failures of American and global foreign policy, the ongoing Israel crisis, Ukraine’s war, the rise of the DSA and radical progressivism in U.S. politics, and scandal fatigue in the Trump era. There are also detours into sports as a locus for cultural arguments, and reflections on American and European political realities.

Throughout, the hosts dissect complex topics while keeping the tone irreverent, taking jabs at political figures, other commentators, and each other.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The New Iran Deal: “Everyone Is Stupid”

Major Segments: [02:03]–[21:37]

• Text & Terms of the Agreement: The hosts review the just-released text, quickly declaring it “worse than the JCPOA,” noting essentially all early reporting was accurate ([02:03]).
• Defects & Concessions:
  • The deal provides more money to Iran, loosens oil and asset sanctions, and is vague about restrictions on Iran’s nuclear ambitions — “They’re promising not to try for a nuclear weapon in the next 60 days” ([03:21]-[03:50]).
  • There’s a “reconstruction fund” likened to the Marshall Plan but controlled by Iran ([05:34]-[06:03]).
  • No real Iranian concessions or tangible limits on proxy activities in Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon ([11:24]).
• Israel’s Position: Israel is indirectly affected and given constraints via language about Lebanon, with new, public fissures opening between the U.S. and Israeli governments ([06:18]–[08:18]).
• U.S. Weakness & Diplomatic Failure:
  • “It is in a moment of American weakness that I don’t think I’ve... Can you think of a comparable surrender?” ([06:03], Matt Welch)
  • “Imagine if the Marshall Fund was dictated by the Nazis” ([05:42], Matt Welch).
• Congressional GOP Position: J.D. Vance and Trump exhibit erratic stances, sometimes imploring Israel to “say thank you” for American support ([08:18]).
• Critique of War Hawks: The hawks who pushed for war get scorn for their lack of a workable plan post-conflict; the hosts compare revisionist Vietnam War arguments to present Iran war rhetoric ([14:29]-[17:17]).
• Lesson: U.S. “elective” wars rarely deliver stable outcomes; compare Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Iran ([19:31]-[20:59]).
• Notable Quote:
  • “They are hostage takers and they always have been from the first thing that they did, which was take American hostages, to take hostages in every fucking deal.” ([13:12] Matt Welch)
  • “What is the Iranian concession? That is an actual tangible concession, not saying, ‘Oh, I’ll talk to you again in 30 days’” ([13:49] Michael Moynihan)
  • “Don’t tell the Iranian people ‘hold on, we’re coming to your rescue.’ That is unconscionable...” ([21:10] Matt Welch)

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2. Ukraine, Russia & Lessons in Modern Conflict

Major Segments: [21:37]–[30:31]

• War Dynamics: US and Russia both struggle in “protracted conflicts with smaller powers”; Ukraine mounting sophisticated drone attacks, bringing the war home to Russia ([21:37]–[23:17]).
• Modern Warfare: Ukrainians hit military, not civilian, targets — a “smart, targeted” update on “Bomber Harris”-era psychological warfare ([23:17]-[25:04]).
• Defense vs Offense: Johnson stresses ancient lesson that “defense is sexy”: “People are going to fight for their home” ([25:19]).
• Global Order:
  • Multiple global “choke points” (Strait of Hormuz, etc.) upend predictable world politics ([25:44]).
  • “The old order is gone and it hasn’t been replaced by anything yet.” ([25:44] Jason Johnson)
• European Shifts:
  • Europe has shown surprising resilience/support for Ukraine; right-populist parties struggle with their past pro-Russia positions ([27:35]-[31:47]).
  • “NATO expands as they’re saying NATO is the problem. It’s like the snapback of this stuff is pretty interesting.” ([27:35] Matt Welch)
  • “If nationalists are about defending your country, why are you in bed with Russia?” ([31:48] Jason Johnson)

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3. Israeli Politics in Crisis: Netanyahu, Polymarket & Alliances

Major Segments: [32:21]-[38:50]

• Upcoming Election & Power Shuffle: Polymarket odds reflect a volatile Israeli political scene, with Gadi Eisenkot and Bennett challenging the long-dominant Netanyahu as alliances fray ([32:31]-[37:48]).
• U.S.-Israel Alliance Fractures:
  • “The relationship with America was going to fracture. And it’s fracturing.” ([38:13] Jason Johnson)
  • If Trump “makes a decision to make a 180 turn against Israel, 75% of the Republican Party’s gonna come with him.” ([38:50] Jason Johnson)
• Democratic Party Shift: The post-Bibi, post-Likud future could change the U.S.-Israel dynamic, as the Democratic establishment shows signs of reduced staunch support ([38:57]-[41:49]).
• Deal Ownership: “If the next admin is a Democratic administration, there is a wind in the Democratic establishment that is not very pro-Israel… But the problem for [the Republican critics], and they’re not thinking about this, is that they also own the deal.” ([40:34]-[41:49] Matt Welch)

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4. The DSA Surge: Elections, Ideology, and the Future of the Democrats

Major Segments: [41:49]-[62:34]

• Primary Power: Primaries drive real ideological shifts in U.S. parties (Tea Party, Trump’s populist picks, now DSA left) ([42:08]–[42:49]).
• NY-13 Race Spotlight:
  • DSA-backed Darieliza Avila Chevalier surges after Momdani endorsement; running against a five-term incumbent, infused with “grad school babble” radicalism ([43:01]-[44:51]).
  • Her rhetoric: “I found in my time there was a system of apartheid [in the West Bank]... connections between what's happening to Palestinians... and black and Latino communities... being displaced because of corporate interests… The tear gas that was being dropped on Palestinians… was the same… on black protesters in Ferguson.” ([47:17]-[48:34] Chevalier)
  • Hosts respond with derision, calling these analogies “banana-brained” and “grad school nonsense” ([50:00]-[51:29]).
• DSA’s National Influence: Electoral triumphs in progressive enclaves could shape future party direction, but might spell trouble in general elections ([53:47]-[55:00]).
  • “Mainstream Democrats should be aware... at the other end of this might be what’s happening to the Republican Party under MAGA.” ([55:00] Matt Welch)
  • “If they win, it is bad news for them and probably bad news for Democrats, for America.” ([60:17] Michael Moynihan)
• Gaza Overtakes BLM as Litmus Test:
  • “Gaza replaces Black Lives Matter as the central issue… it is the talismanic thing now in DSA politics: ‘Is it genocide?’ That question has replaced that.” ([62:34]-[63:13] Matt Welch & Jason Johnson)
  • Far-left vs. far-right unity: Both extremes tend to focus on anti-interventionism and foreign blame, especially in the context of Ukraine and Israel ([27:35], [30:31]).
• Notable Quote:
  • “These are people that work within theory... It's an idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it—you know, and that's. You know, these are people that work within theory.” ([61:02] Matt Welch paraphrasing Orwell)

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5. Political Scandal Fatigue: Pardons, Conspiracies & Trump Era Normalization

Major Segments: [71:10]-[85:33]

• Newsom and Weaponization of DOJ: Newsom mimics Trump tactics by claiming DOJ persecution, possibly to fire up his base ([69:10]–[72:09]).
• Trump’s “Brazen” Corruption:
  • “He just takes the beer and walks out. And you’re like, does he work here? ... Be so brazen about it and people just don’t even notice or care.” ([77:26] Matt Welch)
  • Trump’s pardons are described as a literal pay-for-play industry; compared to the “boondoggles” of the Clinton years ([75:55], [77:26]).
• Conspiracy Theory Culture:
  • Both parties rife with conspiracy-mongering (JFK, Epstein, Clinton death lists); yet there’s less outrage at actual corruption ([83:20]-[85:33]).
  • "Conspiracies explain the world to stupid people.” ([83:20] Matt Welch)
  • The hosts praise a recent New York Times piece debunking Epstein conspiracies—unnoticed by most, because it doesn’t serve a political narrative ([84:38]-[85:33]).

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6. Sports & Culture: Baseball, Pride Nights, and Ideological Rituals

Major Segments: [91:10]-[95:20]

• “Gay Baseball,” Pride Nights, and Compulsory Expression:
  • Discussion starts and ends with “all baseball is gay in June” ([00:00], [91:10]).
  • The hosts critique MLB’s Pride Nights and the expectation that athletes wear symbolic apparel against personal beliefs.
  • “To me, [wokeness] was forcing people publicly into political beliefs that they didn’t hold and punishing them if they didn’t.” ([94:31] Matt Welch)
  • “Maybe focus on the game.” ([93:21] Michael Moynihan)
• Hypocrisy and Double Standards: Mention of “military camouflage uniforms,” NBA Black Lives Matter stances, and the rarity of dissenting views among pro athletes ([94:45]-[95:17]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Iran Deal:
  • “What are the major defects…? The fact there’s more money, the lack of a item in it that isn’t a defect.” ([03:18] Michael Moynihan & Matt Welch)
  • “Don’t tell the Iranian people, ‘Hold on, we’re coming to your rescue.’ That is unconscionable...” ([21:10] Matt Welch)
• On U.S. Policy & War:
  • “You cannot have an elective war when you’re a democracy. You just can’t do it.” ([17:15] Matt Welch paraphrasing a point to Bacha)
• On DSA rhetoric:
  • “Gentrification in the United States and say Brooklyn identical to apartheid?” ([49:23] Michael Moynihan)
  • “It is an idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.” ([61:02] Matt Welch, paraphrasing Orwell)
• On Political Culture:
  • “Conspiracies explain the world to stupid people.” ([83:20] Matt Welch)
  • “Being oppressed or attacked by Trump doesn’t much matter anymore, because he does it to so many people.” ([72:09] Matt Welch)
• On Compulsory Sports Politics:
  • “To me… [wokeness] was forcing people publicly into political beliefs that they didn’t hold and punishing them if they didn’t. And that’s a good thing to not have.” ([94:31] Matt Welch)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Topic | Start Time | |-----------------------------------------------------------|------------| | Iran Deal Discussion & Critique | 02:03 | | U.S.-Israel Fracture & Political Crisis | 06:18 | | War Hawks & Vietnam/Iran Political Revisionism | 14:29 | | Ukraine War, Russia, Global Order | 21:37 | | Europe/NATO Reactions & Global Choke Points | 27:35 | | DSA’s Influence, NY-13 Primary, Chevalier’s Rhetoric | 41:49 | | Israel Election Odds, Polymarket, Netanyahu’s Downslide | 32:21 | | Gaza as Litmus Test for Progressive Politics | 62:34 | | Newsom, Trump, Weaponized DOJ, Scandal Fatigue | 69:10 | | Sports and Cultural Rituals: “Gay Baseball,” Pride Nights | 91:10 |

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Tone & Style Notes

• Language: Profane, irreverent, intelligent, and relentlessly skeptical.
• Dynamics: Hosts often riff on each other, inject humor into bleak topics, and reference personal/ideological histories (Vietnam, Iraq, NYC politics).
• Perspective: Deeply anti-authoritarian and anti-tribal, quick to call out both left and right for hypocrisy, folly, or excess.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a densely-packed indictment of U.S. foreign policy failures, the collapse of coherent ideology at the party level, and the vacuity of political and cultural signaling. The hosts emphasize the cyclical nature of political radicalization and the enduring need for institutional skepticism, all while ensuring that no stripe of idiocy—left, right, or sporting—is left unridiculed.

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For further commentary, clips, or to dig deeper into specific segments, visit wethefifth.com.

Transcript

[Michael Moynihan]

All baseball is gay in June. That is the way that we do it now. But I actually wanted to ask you guys about something we haven't talked about, and it's Gavin Newsom.

[Matt Welch]

Well, Gavin speaking.

[Michael Moynihan]

I didn't say you did.

[Charlie Sykes]

We know of new methods of attack. The Trojan Horse. The Fifth Column. Column. Column.

[Matt Welch]

I'm not doing a Broadway show.

[Michael Moynihan]

You know, I mean, a little bit, kind of somewhat theatrical. There's always a possibility. Greetings, and welcome back to another exciting installment of the Fifth Column podcast. This is your most. Well, it's biweekly, it's twice weekly.

[Jason Johnson]

A lot of knee you're showing.

[Michael Moynihan]

It is. These pants don't have much life left in them. Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan, if you'd also like to comment on that. On my left, my jeans that I've been. I mean, these are my beach jeans, and I've been stitching them back up and having people repair them over and over again. I don't know if I need to borrow some money. I really like them. I really like them. I'm paying at this point. They've cost a lot of money.

[Jason Johnson]

I like the jeans that have material between your thigh and your calf.

[Michael Moynihan]

There is some. It's been added in recent weeks.

[Matt Welch]

Can we get that wide so we can see the.

[Michael Moynihan]

Of my crotch? No, just look at the crotch.

[Jason Johnson]

It was.

[Michael Moynihan]

There were things falling out before, but not anymore.

[Matt Welch]

Oh, Lord, what a starch.

[Michael Moynihan]

Want this information?

[Matt Welch]

You thought the Iran deal was bad. This fucking episode is worse.

[Michael Moynihan]

It's not my fault. It's only half my fault. But, yeah, we have a lot to talk about today. Iran deal, recent strikes, escalations in the Ukraine, Russia conflict. We've got some primary results coming in. Various other things. The DSA is surging. I don't know where you guys want to start. Maybe we should start with baseball. Maybe we should start with the Knicks parade, which is taking place outside on Broadway.

[Jason Johnson]

Enough on the New York people.

[Michael Moynihan]

We don't even care about the Knicks anymore.

[Charlie Sykes]

Fair weather.

[Matt Welch]

They didn't care about the Knicks three weeks before they won, and now everyone's clogging the subways.

[Michael Moynihan]

But there's plenty to talk about. So where to begin?

[Matt Welch]

Where to begin? I mean.

[Jason Johnson]

I mean, we did just get the

[Michael Moynihan]

text of the Iran deal. It's only took the events of.

[Matt Welch]

It's been a memorandum of understanding.

[Michael Moynihan]

Four deals, four weeks.

[Jason Johnson]

You know how much of it was exactly as reported? And then J.D. vance had told everyone that that's just your.

[Matt Welch]

Exactly as reported. Yeah. And you shouldn't you know what you shouldn't do?

[Jason Johnson]

You shouldn't accuse people of lying and doing other people's propaganda when they were just saying things.

[Matt Welch]

Well, he's made a bit of a career of being a bullshit artist. This is the administration, this is the man he serves. But yeah, no, it's pretty much exactly what we expected it to be. But the Memorandum of Understanding, I don't.

[Jason Johnson]

It's like a Genesis album, doesn't it?

[Matt Welch]

Well, yeah, exactly, yeah, like a Robert Ludlum book. No, it's also the unmixed version is what they keep on saying, right? This is, we're going to, you know, it's going to be different in the end. It's like, no, it's not. And that's what that last line of defense have been bullshitting about this and gave away the farm to Iran and Iran gets everything it wants. Plus, I mean, the people who said this is going to be like the jcpoa, which is what I said and I think a bunch of us said before are not lying or exaggerating when saying it's actually worse than the jcpoa.

[Michael Moynihan]

What are the major defects in terms of the differences?

[Matt Welch]

The fact there's more money, the lack of a item in it that isn't a defect. The only thing that they keep clinging to is that they promised us the most reliable people in the world, the Iranian regime after we killed the leadership and killed the top two layers of the irgc, is that they're promising us that they won't try for a nuclear weapon in the next 60 days. I think it was a 60 day thing. It's like, yeah, they have to dig it out.

[Jason Johnson]

They promised that we'll come up with an agreement later about the things that were the things that matter for the war.

[Matt Welch]

I've seen that a lot in my life. I've been responsible for a lot of them. I've been kicking it down the road and saying, yeah, we'll figure it out later. We won't figure it out. I mean, on trust is the only thing. Now let's get to their defense of it. Right? The defense is so many of these things in the Reagan like trust but verify have to be verified or certain elements of it don't kick in.

[Michael Moynihan]

Right.

[Matt Welch]

But it's not true. Right out of the gate. They are allowed as two tankers have left in the past 24 hours from Iranian ports that they're already allowed before anything happens, to get a lot of money in their pocket. The $300 billion. Well, it's not our Dollars doesn't make a difference if it's our dollars, if it comes from the people in the Gulf that it's been attacking who are funding this $300 billion. What was the Obama one was one $1.77 billion. And it caused absolute outrage on the right.

[Jason Johnson]

And the people, including Donald Trump, who criticized the JCPOA, criticized that $1.7 billion and characterize it as we're giving that money pallets full of cash.

[Michael Moynihan]

But we're not clear on the timeframe for at this stage. Right.

[Matt Welch]

Well, the sanctions on their own oil, that's been alleviated yesterday.

[Michael Moynihan]

Right.

[Matt Welch]

Which was something the Obama administration didn't even do. There was a bunch of sanctions that were still in place. There's other sanctions that they promised to loosen. I don't see any reason why they wouldn't after they've given away the farm already. So there's other sanctions down the road that will be loosened, provided they don't wash. God knows.

[Jason Johnson]

I mean, they're unfreezing assets, as far as I know, globally.

[Charlie Sykes]

Yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

Right now. And then it's a question. There's also this reconstruction fund, right. So the reconstruction fund, you know, that spigot hasn't started, but you've unfrozen the assets.

[Matt Welch]

So imagine if the Marshall Fund was dictated by the Nazis, right? It's like you have to rebuild the things that you destroyed. And we say, okay, sorry. I mean, it's an absolutely astonishing thing. It is in a moment of American weakness that I don't think I've. Can you think of a comparable surrender?

[Jason Johnson]

I mean, we withdrew out of Vietnam and that wasn't, that wasn't really nice looking.

[Matt Welch]

It wasn't nice. But we didn't say to Ho Chi Minh, do you want us to build some reeducation camps for you? Do you want us to give you some money? That's a different level.

[Jason Johnson]

The thing, kind of malevolence that sticks in my craw the most is that Israel is in this deal and they didn't.

[Michael Moynihan]

Although are they specific? They're not specifically mentioned. I suppose the Lebanon is mentioned.

[Jason Johnson]

Lebanon's mentioned. Lebanon is not party.

[Matt Welch]

Which the administration denied.

[Jason Johnson]

Yeah, which they denied. And it's there, it's like in the first paragraph or the second paragraph. And Lebanon is not part of the war.

[Michael Moynihan]

Right.

[Jason Johnson]

Lebanon is a battle war, ongoing struggle between Israel and. And Hezbollah, which has been backed by Iran, Created by Iran, Created by Iran to harass. So why are there restraints on Israel in a deal between America and Iran?

[Michael Moynihan]

And the Israelis insist that this is not a restraint on them. While the Iranians insist they are holding the United States responsible if Israel doesn't behave itself.

[Jason Johnson]

And also see how JD Vance has talked about Israel. See how Donald Trump has talked about Israel over the last 36 hours. It is absolutely remarkable. Our former guest Nadav Eyal tweeted just like an hour ago that we are at the peak of the worst political crisis in modern Israeli history right now because of all of this, because suddenly Israel is completely isolated. We have a clip from JD Vance, which is from this morning, or like even an hour ago, talking. Yeah, about an hour ago, talking about Israel, which I found pretty interesting.

[Nadav Eyal]

What I will say, and this does bother me, is that you have seen people within Bibi's cabinet who have come out and attacked the deal and in some ways, very personally attacked the President of the United States. And I guess my message to them would be twofold. Number one, Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time, and he happens to be the head of state of the world superpower. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.

[Michael Moynihan]

Have you said thank you?

[Matt Welch]

Well, it's getting the Zelensky. Well, no, no, he gets. He goes further in the same speech or press conference in which he says, you know, we've given you all this military hardware, we fund it, it's built with American hands, et cetera, and it is the exact same thing. Have you said thank you? Look what we do for you now, bow down to what we decide on your behalf. Kind of an inversion of what the crackpot right has been saying about America being Israel's puppet. Right. I mean, this is them, the administration, saying, how dare you question us doing things on your behalf that you have no control over. And it doesn't even matter, by the way, if you agree with Israel going back into Lebanon, which they did in 2006, which they did with the South Lebanon army, you know, in the 80s. It's not about that. It's about this kind of frame in American politics which has infected so many House races, so many primaries. The young people. We're going to get to the DSA in a bit, who are completely deranged by the Israel issue and believe that it's connected to anything. Our mayor in this city, who said, you know, the boots that are, you know, the NYPD boots wasn't. They're laced by the IDF or something like that, because they try to connect it to everything. And this amazing thing is that him saying you should not only say thank you, which is a clip we didn't show, but is that you should do exactly what we say on this. And how dare you personally insult. And this is coming from an administration that has made a sport of insulting everyone, including J.D. vance, the fucking shitheel who insults Zelenskyy to his face in the Oval Office. And you're saying, oh, you're being mean to us, you're saying nasty things about us. See, what did we do for you? At least restrain yourself and don't say things that are obviously true, which is we can't be party to a deal that we didn't negotiate ourselves any. Like they didn't negotiate in any way. They weren't asked to negotiate. They were asked to sit down, be quiet and accept it. That's an insane way of thinking.

[Jason Johnson]

Trump was asked today whether he was going to support Netanyahu in the elections, which have to take place by October 27th. And first of all, presidents shouldn't support.

[Michael Moynihan]

We shouldn't be doing this.

[Jason Johnson]

Donald Trump has.

[Michael Moynihan]

But the administration does that.

[Jason Johnson]

Driven a bulldozer through that norm. And it's a bad.

[Matt Welch]

I mean, J.D. vance went to Hungary, to Hungary, which

[Jason Johnson]

is a pathetic, disgraceful. But Trump said maybe we'll have to see who else is running. Said that today about Netanyahu, which is amazing. But for me it's that it's partly because of my Central European upbringing. The idea of a third party country not there. You're deciding what they can do and they are not party of the discussions about that. They're not in the agreement. They didn't get to negotiate it. There's something very odious about that.

[Matt Welch]

But in the agreement. One final thing, quickly, is that one line item in the agreement that doesn't exist, that everyone was hoping would exist with some restraint of Iranians funding proxy terror armies in either Gaza, you know, Yemen, Lebanon specifically. Right. The axis of resistance. And that could be that pressure valve like this is off if you continue sending them weapons, strategic advice, money, etc. Nowhere to be found. No.

[Jason Johnson]

When you're including Lebanon as a thing that Iran wants to put in the deal and Israel doesn't. So you're conceding to Iran in an anti Israel direction already, then it's sort of just structurally built in that you're not really busting their chops about proxy arms. No.

[Michael Moynihan]

I was just gonna ask you guys if you have the experience that I did. Because in reading this very, very brief memo, I kept hearing these echoes of the negotiations taking place where the United States is asking for precisely what you described. Like, you can't do this funding anymore. We're not gonna commit to that in this document. But you can imagine them saying that in much the same way you need to mention Israel. I suppose the United States didn't want to mention Israel specifically, but was happy to mention Lebanon or at least willing to do it. Similar thing with the Straits of Hormuz, where you've got this weird language in the memo and there's a lot of strangely written things, but the specific bit in there is you won't be charging any tolls for 60 days.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

Which is. Okay, well what about after 60 days? No mention of whether or not that might be possible. Only a suggestion that they'll be having conversations with the rest of the nations in that region. So tolls might be coming soon.

[Matt Welch]

I think it's very likely after 60 days. Something that won't be framed as a toll, but it will be another way of the Iranians enriching, stuffing their coffers full of ill gotten money. Right. They're hostage takers and they always have been from the first thing that they did, which was take American hostages, to take hostages in every fucking deal. But when you are in a situation like that where you're including Lebanon, why are you doing that? That has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Of course it does. It's a echo of what's going on with what Iran's been doing to try to destroy Israel since its founding of the Islamic Republic in 79. But it's because you have, to quote Donald Trump, you have no fucking cards. Right. They are pushing you even for that. And you're saying yes to it because you have no cards. If anyone, and I mean this honestly, I mean, I've read it and the variations of it in the leak stuff. And now the real. What is the Iranian concession? That is an actual tangible concession, not saying, oh, I'll talk to you again in 30 days, 60 days, they're opening

[Jason Johnson]

up the Strait of Hormuz, which was

[Matt Welch]

open before the fucking war. I mean, what an absolute disaster this administration is. Disaster in America.

[Jason Johnson]

I want to also suggest that people, some of the people who are criticizing the administration on the same lines we've been criticizing them today, but who themselves are pro war. I wish that hawks would learn. I really wish that hawks would learn.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

There's gonna be so many people who say the war was A good idea. Just Trump warred badly. If we only had the good. I mean, Bhatia said the other day, like, if we just hung on one more month, and I love Bhatia, but I don't think one month is gonna get the job done. It's not gonna change the fundamentals of that. Americans don't wanna take over Kharg Island. Like, if you don't wanna take over Carg island, you're not gonna have boots on the ground, you're not gonna control everything in a country of 92 million people, and we're not, because there's no political appetite for it, then you gotta have a plan B. And hawks have been wanting to go to war with Iran since the 90s. Since the fucking 90s. World War 4 was going to be about this too, and about doing this. Well, they finally got a war and this is what happened. What happened is the deal that we have right now is unfathomably worse than the situation was in February, with the exception of there's been what, 30% degradation of ballistic missile capacity, which now Trump says, hey, look, they gotta defend themselves.

[Matt Welch]

Literally said, well, you know, everybody else has it, so why, if everybody else has those, can Iran not have a nuke? Because everybody else, particularly in the region is real, you know, wink wink has a nuke. Right? Pakistan, where they're doing the negotiations, why not them? By the same lazy, stupid logic, can they not have it? Because it's very different when a criminal has a gun. And when you have a gun. Right. He doesn't understand that and is literally going off on a five minute tirade about every. They should be able to have them. It's like, who the Iranians are negotiating with themselves. It's unbelievable to see this, but a slight pushback on what you said is that, and I do understand there's an entire genre that people don't really realize because it's so long after it, of Vietnam revisionists. There's a guy named Louis Sorley who wrote a book who started this off called A Better War. Mark Moyer, this guy from the naval war cause, has written a couple books about this too. And the idea of it is we were winning the war, we lost the war on the home front. Provided Westmoreland had done X, Y and Z, we could have easily won that war. It's a compelling argument. If you take out the home front, which is important, you just can't, you can't do that. Right? You can't say like, well, we would have won that game if the Other team wasn't on the pitch. Well, yeah, of course there'd be no one in goal, but so you have to like. So I understand that, but it is. I think the thing is going to

[Nadav Eyal]

war,

[Matt Welch]

trusting this president who today, or was it yesterday, the G7. That's so fucking amazing. I think Zelensky showed him photos of some attacks on churches, the Russian drone attacks on church, and Trump comes out and makes not a pro Ukrainian statement, but a pretty positive statement about the Ukrainians today, because that was the thing in Afghanistan when the first time they showed him photos of women wearing short skirts and, you know, their hair tied up. And he got like, he's actually that stupid is that you have visual show and tell. And he's like, he changes his mind that quickly, you can find the opposite thing he said about Israel a month ago, I was looking, you can see opposite things that he said. The man has no core. He believes in nothing. And when you're going to war, in a war, as you point out, that so many hawks and so many Iranian expats and a lot of people wanted. Because they want that horrid, nasty, criminal regime to be overthrown, he's not the guy to do it with. So I get that as like, if there was someone else, I just, you know, could it be more successful? To the point that I made to Bacha the other day that she texted me about it, she's like, I've been thinking about this, that you cannot have an elective war when you're a democracy. You just can't do it. Because these days, social media, et cetera, the people don't have the patience for it. I think that that's still true to your point, But I think that if there is somebody that says, you know what, I don't give a fuck about the midterms. I care about this. I care about the freedom of the honorary people. Just hypothetically, that militarily, as Bache did point out, there's no navy, there's no air force. I mean, we have tragically lost 13 people and they have tragically lost thousands. In the old calculation of war sounds like a win. It sounds like a win, yeah. And they give away everything at the end. So you're like, what is happening? Could somebody who was a better president not won the war in that traditional sense of taking over Iran and getting a new regime, but turned the screws to get a much, much, much better deal?

[Jason Johnson]

I just, you know, we did it In Libya in 2011, there was a lot of premature celebrations of A military victory in deposing Qaddafi and killing him. Change the regime. But then what? Was it great afterwards? Did we have a plan for afterwards?

[Matt Welch]

Yes. We didn't want to get involved because we didn't want NATO in that.

[Jason Johnson]

Well, we tried to manage nation building in Afghanistan for 20 fucking years.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

Like, you can't just. I mean, the 90 million people are still going to live there. We're going to run a country of 90 fucking million people. No, we're not. We're just not. We're not gonna do that in Iran. We're not gonna do that in Iraq, we're not gonna do that in Afghanistan. Like, it just. It doesn't. It's a bad fucking concept. And people thinking forever, like, oh, if we just do this, you know, we can have this utopian view of how you use the fucking army.

[Matt Welch]

And it's crazy to me, but Iran is a clearer example than Afghanistan in one sense, is that we found a guy that owned a shish kebab shop in Baltimore, right? And it was like, can we have his family. Hamid Karzai come? It's like, where is it? Was there a native movement? Was there an aggressive Afghan population in Europe, in la, in New York City? Was there a population within the country that is super modern, wants to be western, is a very young country, like, even on that calculation. But they didn't even really think about the Strait of Hormuz being a choke point for the entire thing.

[Michael Moynihan]

Donald Trump admitted today, talked about it for being surprised.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, Being surprised. And that this was the reason. Yeah, that's what he admitted today. It's not like, oh, we're militarily. It's World War I stalemate, we're moving 10 yards in the Somme, and all these people dies. No, he's like, it was straight up Hormuz and a financial decision. Okay, I get that. I get where you're coming from. Don't make a bad deal, number one. And don't tell the Iranian people, hold on, we're coming. We're coming to your rescue. That is unconscionable to me that he said that and not only did nothing, but ended up strengthening the regime.

[Michael Moynihan]

Ukraine and Zelensky have come up a few times already. And I want to talk about the. Just the specter of military dominance, hegemony. You can do it.

[Matt Welch]

You can do it. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

See anemones.

[Michael Moynihan]

The United States and Russia, it seems, in two separate conflicts, both find themselves on the wrong end of these protracted conflicts with smaller powers. And the Russian conflict with Ukraine has obviously been going on much, much longer. We are seeing escalations now where the Russians are seeing actual strikes deeper and deeper into Russia, more and more consequential for the Russians. Perhaps this is the specter, some of what the President was trying to avoid, apart from a short term concern about the stock market and gas prices. And that was a little more acute. But it does seem, I mean, whether or not the hawks learned their lesson is one thing, but what lessons have the rest of the world learned, particularly these kind of rogue regimes, about whether or not these superpowers with an asterisk perhaps have the ability to kind of project their concerns abroad. You certainly have other counterexamples in recent months. But this does seem particularly important, the descriptions of the conflict and what's happening between Ukraine and Russia now, where 200 odd drones get shot down, maybe a couple of missiles, but they achieve this devastating outcome, disrupting their refinery capabilities, perhaps impacting something like 40% of their domestic refining capacity, if I remember correctly.

[Matt Welch]

Like that's pointed out, by the way. Ukrainians are hitting military facilities as opposed to churches, as opposed to churches and apartment blocks.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah.

[Matt Welch]

And they're. What this is is the modern version of Bomber Harris who led the RAF in the end of the Second World War in that kind of area bombing campaign to get the Germans to come to their knees because they were going to kill Germans. We know this is true. This is what Dresden was. There were military targets there. That's what hamburg was in 1943, was to make them understand that we will never fucking relent and we will hunt you in your beds, all of you. And that was a psychological thing. The Ukrainians are doing that in a smart, targeted way. Is that one of the things that they've spoken about and no one really noticed that the Ukrainians kept on pointing this out, is that people in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, in Novosibirsk are going about their lives. And it was only border regions, Belgorod and places like that that were seeing the war in any. And if democracies can't fight wars for the reasons we, it's democracy and on the other end it's technology, because they can send up how many drones that are cheap to produce. A majority of them get shot down and a bunch of them hit in Moscow and on the outskirts today. Did you see that skyline photo? Amazing. Amazing. It's like the war is coming home. Which is what the Weather Underground said to the Johnson and Nixon administrations. The war is coming home. The war has come home. And there's always already been an amount of discontent in the United Russia party, in Putin's party that is troubling to Putin and some of the people that you see on the television.

[Jason Johnson]

There's a lot of more public panic than we've seen in a long time.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah. And they are really turning the screws on that. And it's a very, very smart thing, provided they don't hit apartment blocks and try to kill civilians. They should not do that. And they're. It seems that that is not what's happening.

[Jason Johnson]

I think a lesson is an old one, not a new one. One of the lessons is just always defense is sexy. You'll fight better on defense. People are going to fight for their home or they're going to rally around whoever is defending the homeland from whatever. It's just like it's more difficult. And because of drones. And Ukraine's gotten devilishly great at drones.

[Matt Welch]

Very good with, by the way, American and European assistance. Yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

Because of that. It maybe makes it easier for smaller countries to repel those bigger countries, which on one hand is pretty good. But we're in the middle of a geopolitical. The globe is being shaken. The snow globe is being shaken a lot. Right. Because Trump and Vance came in with big ideas about, okay, we're gonna stop this kind of NATO led Atlantic world on day one. On day one. And we're going to have spheres of influence and to sort of project power here and there. And the other. Well, what is one of the side effects of that? That is going to be very dependent on the personalities of whoever has a sphere. It's going to be much less of a predictable world. The Atlantic led world had a lot of problems. It had a sort of democracy deficit. At some point it got out of touch with the people that it was defending. Europe became and incredibly just sort of flaccid and lame in many ways, not taking care of its own business. All that is true. And also it's the most miraculous piece that that continent will ever see probably and has ever seen. And the world was predictable for a really long time. The world right now is not predictable. A big lesson that has been learned is that choke points work. There's more than one choke point. Maybe that's going to lead to people coming up with creative land based workarounds of the Strait of Hormuz. I presume that in five or 10 years there's gonna be some interesting pipelines built, and I hope so, and maybe even some new canals, whatever, to get around it. But some People learn that choke points work, that the old order is gone and it hasn't been replaced by anything yet. And so creative countries and bad people and good people are going to figure out their own sort of workarounds with that. And it's troubling.

[Matt Welch]

The interconnectivity of this stuff is really interesting because particularly in Europe. We were shitting on Europe for so many years for being weak and feckless and free riders on the American security umbrella. And then Yugoslavia happens. And Paul Berman wrote a great book on this called Power in the Idealists about all these far leftists like Joska Fischer, these people in Germany, people in France who are saying, okay, there is genocide happening in Europe and you know, in Serbia, et cetera, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. What do we do? And they came around. And a lot of those guys were supportive of the Iraq war too, interestingly enough. And then you also have the never again lesson, which was actually very much assimilated by Europe because Europe suffered at like in indescribable ways. I mean, the Russians suffered enormously too. But you know, that's what you get when you make a pact with the Nazis and trust them. It's like making a pact with Tehran and trust them. And after that, they've been amazing in supporting the Ukrainians. I mean, what is per capita largest supporters were like Estonia and Poland. We have Finland, Sweden. I mean, NATO expands as they're saying NATO is the problem. It's like the snapback of this stuff is pretty interesting. And then on the political front in Europe, all of these far right parties in Europe, whether it's front national or of day in Germany, in Austria, fpo, which was like the leader of the party had to step down because there were tapes of him with Russian agents saying we're gonna do Russian type fun stuff is that has been hard for those parties because they're in the ascendancy because of immigration issues and everyone else ignored it. And the Russia stuff is not good for them. It has not been good for them. And that is the spider of these conflicts. That affects domestic politics in a million ways. It affects continental politics, EU politics. Are you going to join the eu? Right? I mean, this has been not about NATO, it's about Ukraine joining the eu. It has spidered in this way. And that's all the doing of Vladimir Putin. And in this country you have shitheads like JD Vance and all of these half wits in his coterie of apologists, non interventionists, who never say anything negative about the intervention that it's the same thing true in the horseshoe theory. We're gonna get to the DSA in a little bit. But the dsa, someone pointed out today, you cannot find a statement supporting Ukraine on their website. Just can't. Blaming the, you know, blaming the US because that's the number one problem. Right. It's like the cpusa, the Communist Party in this country and their affiliates in the 30s, 40s and 50s is that they were anti imperialists until it was Russian imperialism. And apparently that is the same on the far right and the far left right now. It's absolutely stunning.

[Jason Johnson]

I think the thing to watch in the European right of center politics is, and I'm saying this out of hope, I don't know if there's a lot of evidence for it yet, but Merloni is the most interesting person to watch, and she was jabbing her finger.

[Matt Welch]

Did you see that video? Yeah, it's great.

[Jason Johnson]

In Trump's chest, by the way.

[Matt Welch]

The great thing about that video is that there's no audio. Yeah. But because she's Italian. Yeah, you don't have to have audio. You can just see it. Like, it's like, not like a Italian. Something that could be a friendly conversation. You have no idea. Like, what did you order? Was it spritz? Like. But she looked angry. And she also just quit smoking. Oh, God. You saw that. She quit smoking.

[Jason Johnson]

There's no way she can quit smoking. She's got like entire.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, of course. Arms collapsed in patches and stuff.

[Jason Johnson]

It's like the first time I met Tucker Carlson, who's like, I think chewing Nicorette and he had like, the patch and he was just like, nervous as hell.

[Matt Welch]

Well, now he's obsessed with Jews and he has a. A snooze company for. He's still in the nicotine business.

[Jason Johnson]

That's fantastic. But she has busted Trump's chops repeatedly about Ukraine. I wish Italy was donating more of their actual money to that, but rhetorically at least. And a lot of nationalists in Europe are now faced with this. What does nationalism look like? It's the defense of your country.

[Charlie Sykes]

Right.

[Jason Johnson]

So what are you in bed with Russia for?

[Matt Welch]

Russia is that was the worry about Melania and Matteo Salvini Maloney, the brothers of Italy? Like, is it. They were considered far too pro Russia and Meloni did an incredible turn, and she's having some problems right now, but she's been a very stable leader for Italy, which is a country that in the 50 years after the Second World War, I think had 56 or 58 governments it's not a stable democracy in that sense, politically stable.

[Michael Moynihan]

So I'm curious. Well, maybe we should move on to talk about some of the election stuff. Cuz I know we want to talk about the dsa. We mentioned that a little while ago.

[Jason Johnson]

Well, let's. So we've started a partnership with polymarket to look at various. Using polymarket as a tool to kind of look at things. So one of the things you can do with polymarket is look at foreign elections as well. And so the effect on Israeli politics right now is insane. So they're gonna have an election, as mentioned before, in October, or by October, it could be called earlier. There's good polling on this. The use that I'm using polymarker here for is that it's focusing on the question of who will be the next Prime Minister of Israel after the next election. You don't directly elect a prime minister, you elect the party and then they have to negotiate between themselves. But it dials to the question and it shows us really interesting movements. So for those who are listening or even watching, we have a visual up here. But the navy blue line is Benjamin Netanyahu, the light sky blue line is Gadi Eisenkot, and Naftali Bennett is the yellow line. And we don't really need to talk about Avidor libremeyer because he's a horrible, horrible human being. But the fun bits is that Netanyahu was crushing it for a really long time. The odds of winning were 50 or more percent for a long time. Until about a month ago.

[Matt Welch]

It gets a tangle all of a sudden.

[Jason Johnson]

Now it's a huge tangle. And for the first time, Eisencot is leading at 38.6%, Netanyahu at 34% and Naftali Bennett at 14%. Naftali Bennett was winning or like at parody in the bet a month ago and has absolutely plummeted. Moynihan, do you have a theory for why Bennett tanks?

[Matt Welch]

Well, I wonder if all this stuff, I mean, Bennett, who is an interesting character and like everybody in Israeli politics, has a very contentious relationship with Netanyahu. But I think that the interesting thing about this is, you know, look, we look at polymarket and we look at polls in different ways, right? Because polymarket is obviously measuring the sentiment of its users, right? People who are willing to put their money on something which is not like the Bradley effect thing, like a teleposter or something that might be wrong. You know, the Trump stuff. It was always said that Trump, like

[Michael Moynihan]

people don't admit to Trump, you know,

[Matt Welch]

this is your money. So. But I think that we want to talk about this at some point in the future and not now that there are also some market distortions in that, right? I think. I don't know. We're going to find out.

[Jason Johnson]

One would presume, but yeah, one would

[Matt Welch]

presume that like, you know, betting on the long shot horse because the money that comes in is much bigger. This one, though, is interesting because it tracks with the sentiments in Israel about the thing that most Israelis believe to be necessary is that its existence as a country is under threat from the Iranian regime. Right. And a war with the great superpower to dislodge that regime, which Donald Trump and Netanyahu had said, don't come out in the streets yet. But this is what the idea was, right? People will rise up because they just killed X number of thousands of Iranians. And then the deal making starts the deal making with Donald Trump.

[Jason Johnson]

And that's when this poll collapses.

[Matt Welch]

And that's when this poll collapses and people start shuffling their bets around to something that looks, look 34, 36%. We don't have a statistical margin of error in polymarket because this is just people's sentiments. It's still pretty close. The Bennett thing is interesting to me and I don't quite understand why it's been such a precipitous drop because I haven't been following the domestic he said, she said every day. But the Israelis are obviously very politically involved and if you see newspapers and the sniping and the Knesset, et cetera, there'll be some obvious explanat for this. But the fact that the Likud Party has run the tables in Israel, you know, you had these moments with like Zippy Livni who had like a breakaway party and like that was like all these kind of almost successes of breakaway Likudniks. The thing about it is, after the second Intifada, the brain of Israeli politics changed, right? It was violence and it was the failure of Oslo and it was a fuck you, the strongest horse here is going to be Likud. And the strong horse led Israel into a war. America joined it and this is the fucking result. And now they might be stronger. You made a strategic error, Bibi, and that is reflected here.

[Jason Johnson]

And you're isolated from American politicians. Like, you're isolated. Like J.D. vance is calling you out even right now. I don't know why our screen changed there, Jason.

[Matt Welch]

It's a zoomed in. That's a zoom in of okay. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, look, I Mean, you see that separation is normal politics.

[Jason Johnson]

And the. I mean, two quick points is just don't bet against Benjamin Netanyahu. He always wins. So the fact that people are actually betting against him is interesting. But. But it's.

[Matt Welch]

It's also the Trump thing.

[Michael Moynihan]

Not that Matt is giving financial advice.

[Jason Johnson]

No, no. I'm saying that in the.

[Matt Welch]

In the abstract.

[Jason Johnson]

In the abstract, but it's also the

[Matt Welch]

Trump thing, is that you lose, you go to jail. Is another calculation here.

[Jason Johnson]

Yes.

[Matt Welch]

Because there's that pending legal case against

[Jason Johnson]

you lose, you go to jail. And, you know, what did Nadav tell us when he was here? Like, the thing that he worried about the most, besides, you know, being annihilated by all of Israel's enemies, was that the relationship with America was going to fracture. And it's fracturing. It's fracturing. Bhatia the other day had a positive. Like, it's gonna recover. I don't share her optimism at the moment, just because if Donald Trump makes a decision to make a 180 turn against Israel, 75% of the Republican Party's gonna come with him.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah. And maybe we could go to the next election. Because there's a parallel there. Because.

[Jason Johnson]

Absolutely.

[Matt Welch]

If you think that this is what happens, you wait until the next administration comes. If the next administration is a Democratic administration, there is a wind in the Democratic establishment that is not very pro Israel. Right. I mean, Joe Biden, you know, gave what, $18 billion in aid to Israel after October 7th? I don't. The number's probably incorrect, but it was something like that. And I interviewed Israel's ambassad to America, and he said, Joe Biden was amazing in those first six months. And he said it was getting bad after those first six months. And he was. He was. He was being diplomatic, he's a diplomat, but he. They were very positive that would never happen again in this. I. Not again, but in this timeframe of the next, unless something dramatically changes. And I think if Bibi's, you know, and Likud loses power. The problem with Likud is that they. To form that coalition, you have to form a coalition with some real rat bags. And you mentioned one of them, but these Kahanus, these Meir Kahane types. But maybe that will change the calculation in a way. The Democrats no longer, or Americans no longer have Netanyahu as the bogeyman. But I can't imagine this stuff changing too much when the administration is having an internecine Republican fight. And it seems right now that Vance and that Very anti Israel, anti foreign entanglement. Supposedly group is winning. The problem for them and they're not thinking about this is that they also own the deal.

[Jason Johnson]

They own the deal. I mean, Trump said it straight up. It's like, I gave this to J.D. i'll blame him if it goes wrong.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, that's right. He did say that, right? Yeah. And it was like kind of a jokey comment. That is also true. And if the Iranians are empowered to kill more of their citizens, to act even more aggressively in the region, and Iran has been very aggressive outside of the region too far as the United States, Argentina, et cetera, then that's quite a millstone around the neck of these people who say that this is a good deal. But you're not going to get a change if you're Israel with the Democratic Party. Right. And they can very reasonably in some way. I think it's a small percentage. But. But say that this is because of what Netanyahu did. This is what people don't understand about Israel is that there is an active debate in Israel about Gaza. There's an active debate about the occupation of the West Bank. It's not a uniform thing after October 7th, that closed quite a bit. But if you see some of the debate right now, I mean, and you see these numbers and then poll numbers in Israel. Yeah, that's a big problem for their big ally. I mean, Vance is wrong. That's the only country in the world, but it's the biggest and most capital.

[Jason Johnson]

But they are increasingly isolated. So race I'm looking at here. I think that especially for those of us who are on the outside of the two party system or just like maybe join it, but with holding our nose at it. The thing that is ideologically interesting are primary elections.

[Michael Moynihan]

Correct.

[Jason Johnson]

This is where a party changes its ideology. So the Tea Party when it came up was a bunch of primary challenges against establishment incumbents. And these newcomers, at least for a while, had a different kind of ideology and temperament than elsewhere. Trump is kind of doing that now when he picks his people to topple incumbents in primary elections. Then it's somewhat ideology mostly. It's like whether you're aligned with Trump according to his own thing. Fascinating race that I was aware of beginning all of Yesterday is New York 13. So this is between Darieliza Avila Chevalier, which is a really good name.

[Michael Moynihan]

It's a good name.

[Jason Johnson]

It's just a good name. Let's. She is a 32 or 33 year old sociology graduate student or getting her doctorate or something. It's suny.

[Matt Welch]

Truly.

[Jason Johnson]

You think justice for Palestine, convert to Islam. She is. The Boycott Divest movement, was it Colombia was on the streets on October 8th. Flood. Flood Manhattan for Gaza or whatever it was called. She was in that protest, the one

[Matt Welch]

that gives away the game, that it wasn't Israel's response. It was like you were on their side when they were killing civilians the day after.

[Jason Johnson]

I welcome everybody to go to her Wikipedia page. It's just like a Moynihan provocation zone. Every single thing. She's. She's most. She was influenced most by black liberation struggles and Angela Davis and Assata Shakur. That's like her opening bid. Anyways, she's entering a primary against a five term incumbent who's the chair of the Hispanic Caucus on Capitol Hill. Adriano Espallat, Dominican.

[Matt Welch]

I think that was a lock. Pretty much.

[Jason Johnson]

He was a lock. And if you go back, those of you who can see the screen, he's on the. He's in the top, navy blue. And as of six weeks ago, he was at 65% and she was at 31%. She'd raised a lot of money, but she was kind of an outsider wacko. But what happened on May 28? She was endorsed by mom Donnie.

[Matt Welch]

Yep.

[Jason Johnson]

And now who's winning in the race? She is up 53%, 48%. It's gone back and forth. They've had a couple of contentious debates, but this is showing in a way that polls cannot. This is a useful tool for Polymarket because they track betting on a daily basis. And you see what they're reacting to. They reacted to the endorsement. There's been two polls in the last month on this, and one had her up by four, one had him up by eight. But it's just a paucity of polling data.

[Matt Welch]

But it's the polymarket test for us. Is. Is Twitter real life? Is Polymarket real life? These bets, I presume, are not. These wagers, I presume, are not.

[Jason Johnson]

These trades.

[Matt Welch]

These trades in the market. Let me start that again so we don't lose this immediately. I mean, these trades, I presume, are not coming from the district. Right. Is this a reflection of hope? Is this a reflection of. The DSA believes it's on the precipice of a 1917 situation in America, if you listen to their rhetoric. And they might be going to polymarket with excitement that is not matched by the people of New York. Thirteen. I don't know.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah, I mean, the volume of the market, though, is interesting because this is far lower than the last one that we looked at here. It's in the tens of thousands.

[Jason Johnson]

82,000 plus.

[Michael Moynihan]

Not a huge number there.

[Matt Welch]

And again, DSA people, they bet five

[Michael Moynihan]

bucks, so that could be it. But they're also. I don't know if they're in the. The people who are most likely to vote DSA are generally the people who are most likely to use Polymarket. So it's also unclear.

[Jason Johnson]

Probably not, but.

[Michael Moynihan]

So my suspicion is that they are, in fact, responding to what's happening on Twitter, that those conversations are driving the interest here, but also possible that someone substantial is getting into the news, but

[Matt Welch]

what doesn't lag behind the fucking media.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah.

[Matt Welch]

And her kind of dominance of the online media space. I keep on seeing her pop up on Instagram. The first time I saw it pop up, I said, I know exactly what this woman believes. I know everything that she believes. And then the next picture of her was her in a keffiyeh on October 8th. And I was like, yeah, right. Right, so far. And then Matt said to me, assata Shakur. And I was like, well, you know, she's actually overperforming. I thought Assad is pretty. Pretty aggressive. But this is a person. We have some clips of her play.

[Jason Johnson]

The Gaza one, if we did.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, the Gaza one is. The one that Charlie just pulled for us, is from the debate that was on New York 1 A couple of days ago,

[Jason Johnson]

and again against a kind of candidate who would almost always win. Yeah, he's an incumbent chairman of the Hispanic Caucus, is the first undocumented immigrant to become a congressman.

[Matt Welch]

He's documented now.

[Camille]

Yes. So I was in Nablus for almost two months, and I visited many cities in the region, both in the west bank and in Israel. And what I found in my time there was a system of apartheid. And I saw so many connections between what was happening to Palestinians there in Palestine and what was happening to so many communities across the U.S. particularly black and Latino communities who have been priced out and pushed out of our homes. When we talk about displacement in the west bank or in Gaza, it is a very similar, visually similar situation where people who have been in a place for generations are being displaced because of corporate interests, because of folks who are coming in, claiming the land, buying it up, and kicking the people who live there out. And I've seen a lot of similarities, not just in the way things are done, but also in the very institutions that are enacting that violence. The tear gas that was being dropped on Palestinians in Gaza in 2014 was the same Tear gas that was being dropped on black protesters in Ferguson in 2014. And that memory that summer for me was incredibly formative because it showed me that connection is not only one that is like. But it is the very same system.

[Jason Johnson]

Okay, Camille, is there anything wrong with that statement?

[Michael Moynihan]

100,000 things are wrong with that statement. It is interesting. I'm. I'm always remembered of that Coats interview with Tony decouplo where he's talking about Gaza, and he is talking about it narrowly in the context of U.S. domestic issues and specifically U.S. race relations. And this rhetoric continues to be recycled because presumably it works with this particular demographic. But I think for anyone with like half. Half a coherent thought in their head that isn't informed by this kind of propaganda, like, you immediately should become suspicious. Is gentrification in the United States and say Brooklyn identical to apartheid? Whether or not it's identical to what's happening in Gaza? Is it apartheid? Is someone coming along and forcing you out of your home, in your community when they pay you an astonishing amount of money in order to move into your old apartment? Because, hey, this is hot. And now it's just so far removed from. They're so far removed from one another that it is extraordinary. Also, the tear gas thing, like the same tear gas in 2014, there were actual protests. There were confrontations with the police, There was tear gas used. Is that consistent with the regular everyday experience in black and Latino communities?

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, well, she did the accent on black too. Cause she started a little early, know I was going to anticipate. No, it's the connection. They've been doing this. People in radical politics have been doing this for a very long time. In the 80s in Latin America, it was the School of Americas. Right. If Reagan wasn't intervening or giving money to something, they were trained here. It was our bullets, it was our things that were given to the contras, et cetera. And that is more understandable in a lot of ways that this comes directly from the person who endorsed her, our mayor, who seems to be singularly obsessed with this issue, much like so many people in his idiotic party are. It's BLM is being replaced by Gaza. Yeah, the fighting Gaza is done, but we need to continue it. I mean, remember, as Arun Ramdani said, when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's laced by the idf. Good Lord. I mean, because they had some. Some training programs for some intelligence in the NYPD and that had a big upswing in the NYPD after 9, 11. There's some reason for this stuff. But this is the endless trying to tie Gaza to America. Even in the most implausible ways, gentrification is the same as apartheid. Israel in particular the west bank is an apartheid state. So therefore, you know, visually, visually it's

[Jason Johnson]

very similar that a majority of. No, it is not a majority of people in any election, primary election, general election, could think, you know what, after hearing that for one minute I'm going to vote for her is incredibly distressing.

[Matt Welch]

Well, it's not for voters. It's not for the voters of New York 13. She's not talking to them.

[Jason Johnson]

She's gonna get elected by them or not. But we'll.

[Matt Welch]

She will get elected or not by them. But that is a message for a larger audience. That is a message for a DSA

[Jason Johnson]

audience and also to Mamdani who endorsed her, who's building a little machine. And this is one of the most interesting parts about the upcoming Democratic primary congressional election. So these are people who are gonna go to Congress. He has, in my district, Dan Goldman is the incumbent who's sort of a semi moderate and Brad Lander, who we always talk about with derision on this program is running against him. Mamdani endorsed Lander and he's on his posters all over the place. Lander, like Chevalier is making the biggest issue in the campaign what aipac. So saying that Dan Goldman is funded

[Matt Welch]

by aipac, it's an. As a Jew, as our friend Eli Lake would say very much, Brad Lander's Jewish and he's desperately trying to say I'm one of the good ones to

[Jason Johnson]

the DSA and he's going to win. He's going to unseat an incumbent again. Again follow the incumbent primary challenges in parties to see where the ideology is going. Where is that ideology going? It is going very specifically to center to have Gaza replace BLM as the central issue. And it's doing it in a way. Mamdani has a little slate and we will see. Her election is going to be, I think one of the key ones to watch in the country. If she unseats a five term incumbent, normal 71 year old Dominican dude who is the kind of guy who would always win in Harlem, in the Bronx where their seat is, if she's going to unseat him, talking that nonsense, just absolute nonsense like grad school babble nonsense, if that wins because that's what she's doing, then this is telling you about the future of the Democratic Party right now.

[Matt Welch]

It's a very dangerous game, right? They've this is very similar to the AOC election, right?

[Jason Johnson]

Yeah.

[Matt Welch]

No one knew of her. Before radical unseats, somebody who had been there for a long time, was a very. Was a power player.

[Jason Johnson]

She's number three in the Democratic caucus.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah. A big power player in the Democratic caucus disappears, she becomes a media darling. And that helps start this ball rolling. Right. It is incredible to me, by the way, the radicalism of these people who are democratic socialists. Why do you have to modify socialists? Because socialism is for so long so undemocratic and so violently oppressive of its own people. The first time I ever came across this phrase was. And I saw it again the other day because I was reading an old Clive James essay about Orwell and about Orwell's kind of ideological transformation after Spain, and he pointed out this is long. It's probably like 2004. He wrote this maybe earlier, and he said Orwell took pains to refer to himself as a Democratic socialist. And I was like, these people in Orwell, they're Orwellian in a different way. And this stuff just drives me.

[Jason Johnson]

I think they're gonna lose the Democratic. I wouldn't be surprised if she does. With her background, she should lose. Just say socialist.

[Michael Moynihan]

Do you think so?

[Matt Welch]

I don't think so, because you've always put, you know, Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Democratic is never, you know, it always means it's worse than that. But I think that this kind of moment for these types is very dangerous because what they don't understand about MAGA is when MAGA took over a party that wasn't wildly unpopular, it wasn't like the Republican Party wasn't desperately in need of tearing down and rebuilding in this totally alien image that has economic policies that are very similar to these people in a lot of ways when it comes to taking over companies that are doing too well, et cetera. If they do that, mainstream Democrats should be aware, and I think a lot of them are, is at the other end of this might be what's happening to the Republican Party under maga. Because the Republican Party under MAGA is not something I don't think either of you would agree is an incredibly sturdy general election party. It's not. Not right, because this shit isn't popular. Half the stuff that Donald Trump does is great for his base. Is it wildly popular? Is it helpful to the people? We might have a DDSA mayor in D.C. dSA mayor in LA, we have a DSA mayor in New York. How well are these experiments going to go unless they snap back into normal Economic policies, et cetera. People are fleeing and rich people are fleeing. You need those people to pay for things, because that is, you know, the Margaret Thatcher. Is it Margaret Thatcher, who's the one that, you know, the problem with socialism is run out of other people's money. And that is going to be a very serious hurdle for these types. And Brad Lander, by the way, was cut out of a bunch of ads, and people were like, oh, they're cutting him out because he's a Jew? It's like, no, because he's winning. They don't need him. But the one ad where, you know, today was the New York. The Knicks parade. And I love that these guys are like your parents trying to talk to you about music when you're young. They're, like, holding basketballs, like, in weird ways and, like, throwing them to each other. And like Nick's. We're gonna put, like, you know, put Nick's garbage cans out. And I was like, that's about right. So they can set him on fire and then beat people to death in front of us.

[Michael Moynihan]

Just steal them.

[Matt Welch]

But I'm play clip of these two who are running against each other on New York one, talking about the World cup, which I thought was incredibly fun.

[Jason Johnson]

World cup is here.

[Michael Moynihan]

The first match this weekend at MetLife Stadium, taking place in New Jersey.

[Matt Welch]

Even though some people say it is

[Jason Johnson]

technically New York, but what do you

[Michael Moynihan]

think will win it all? Who are you rooting for?

[Matt Welch]

I like Mexico.

[Jason Johnson]

Mexico.

[Charlie Sykes]

There you go.

[Camille]

I'm rooting for Senegal.

[Michael Moynihan]

Senegal.

[Charlie Sykes]

Okay.

[Matt Welch]

Fucking seriously.

[Jason Johnson]

It's in America this time.

[Matt Welch]

First of all, first of all, to the host, New Jersey is not technically new. No, Technically is the wrong word there. Number one. Number two. No one. This is a great American team. The first match was incredible to watch. We have a lot of people that play in. In the Premier League is a very, very good team. I don't think they're going to win. But supporting them is not saying they're going to win. That wasn't saying, who are you going to pick to win? He said, who are you supporting? Neither of them could support the country that they're in, who they want to represent. Come on, you don't have to wear the American flag pin all the time. But I see her. Like, there's an allergy to, like, supporting America even in the World cup because of colonialism or slavery or something. But Senegal, the US Already beat Senegal in a friendly. Very fucking good team, by the way. 3, 2. In friendly, right before the World cup started, I thought that Was one of the most amazing things.

[Michael Moynihan]

It's possible she didn't understand the question.

[Jason Johnson]

Yeah, I was in English.

[Michael Moynihan]

You suggested that she might.

[Matt Welch]

She said, you mean football?

[Michael Moynihan]

She might at some point drop the democratic component of it. I think the possibility of an even more intense. Not that there hasn't been one. Cuz there has been for years. With Bernie kind of leading the left flank of the Democratic Party and coming in attention with the establishment once it becomes these national races, it seems like they're very careful to keep the Democratic Party to try and maintain this kind of veneer of something other than being covert socialist.

[Jason Johnson]

They have been. But I think in the similar way that Mamdani made sure that the first line of his speech, he's gonna quote. Who quote Eugene Euge Debs. And very carefully. Government is strong enough or big enough to take care of every single problem that you have. He's using socialist languages. He is, he is the vanguard for unapologetic socialism. I think there has been to this point like, no, we're gonna modify it. It's democratic socialism. It's a little bit different. But I think the young kids growing up and everything about her resume, everything about what she's talking, she's gotten in trouble. Cuz people read her tweets from 2018 to 2022, which was just Abolish the police.

[Matt Welch]

K file is on the case.

[Jason Johnson]

Abolish borders.

[Michael Moynihan]

I mean this is. Yeah, that's the thing. The AOC wing of the DNC is who insisted on quadrupling down on those ideas on putting them to the forefront of the party. I could see that. And it cost them substantially. This is turning you on.

[Charlie Sykes]

This is the whole thing.

[Matt Welch]

I'll move closer.

[Michael Moynihan]

If that is what they have in store for the party, it is bad news for them and probably bad news

[Jason Johnson]

for Democrats, for America.

[Matt Welch]

But you need, if they win, win.

[Jason Johnson]

If they win.

[Matt Welch]

I mean, Bernie joined the Democratic Party to try to destroy it. They need the Democratic in that to pretend to work within the institutions, to make allies within the institutions. Because it is not a revolutionary party in that sense. Because it's not a country that deals with any revolution beyond the first one. So they have to work within the party and then try to take it over in the way that Trump did with the Republican Party. I mean that's, I think, the goal. And it seems pretty obvious that that's what they've laid out. Take over the big cities, you know, places where we're very, very soft targets for DSA people, you know, and it's amazing. It's places where people are highly educated, and the higher your educational attainment is, the dumber the things are that you believe. It's, you know, the famous line of. And I think it was Orwell, wasn't it? Orwell, they said, you know, it's an idea. So stupid. Only an intellectual to believe it, you know, and that's. You know, these are people that work within theory. They work. I mean, there's a clip. I won't play it. I. I grabbed it. Of just her talking about those tweets in the response of her trying to back away from it. Cannot stop talking in graduate school. Language, which is like a Hispanic district in upper Manhattan, you know, is like, this is not the way that you talk to people like this. Because, again, it's not about them. Right. You don't say talk anymore if you're. You say discourse. Everything about the discourse. Because that's just the language of, you know, in everything she says about this stuff, these old tweets of like, you know, yeah, you know, I wouldn't say it that way now. It's like, okay, so you'd say the same thing, but just you would frame it in slightly different language because you're running for office. Right? I still have these incredibly stupid beliefs. You know, ask her about Assata Shakur. Ask her about cop killers and terrorists who gun people down.

[Jason Johnson]

I mean, ask her to volunteer that she thinks someone getting an offer for their house is the same as being the victim of genocidal violence. Yeah, that's a question. She just says it right out loud as part of running for office.

[Matt Welch]

But I've seen a couple of these conversations about this, and I was watching some podcast, some DSA people talking about this, and it was one of the litmus tests for running for office in the United States of America was, who are they talking about? But that wouldn't call it genocide. Like, what are you talking about? Like, are you talking about some sort of International Criminal Court definition? And why does this have anything to do with a congressional race or a mayoral race? It's because this is the talismanic thing now in DSA type politics is, do Black Lives matter? Yeah. Do Black Lives matter?

[Jason Johnson]

Is it genocide? That question has replaced that.

[Matt Welch]

And you have these kind of talismanic things that it is just like Donald Trump. And when you go into the office to get the job. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election? Was the first or second question they asked everyone. And your hiring was contingent upon you answering that in the wrong way. Right. The Correct way for them was to say he won. And if you don't answer that in the right way, you're not going to get a job. We'll primary you, whatever it might be. This is what. But they understand the same type of politics, which is bullying, kind of petty, authoritarian ways of. There's like, no intellectual diversity in that camp. I mean, please, if you say, well, you know, like, Lander had some mildly. I don't want to see the state of Israel destroyed. And they. It was like a go to blue sky that day. It was a very dark sky and blue sky that day. They were, you know, outraged that you didn't want to see a nation taken off the map.

[Jason Johnson]

My city councilwoman, Shahana Hanif, she condemned a fellow city councilwoman to hell.

[Matt Welch]

Oh, that's right.

[Jason Johnson]

Yeah, you go to hell. Because she showed up at the Israel parade. Just how dare you.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, And I think she said it in Arabic. Yeah, she did it in Arabic. You should go to hell. And I think it's also hilarious that, that this woman is a convert to Islam, which I don't know how much I buy that. I've never seen her reference her Muslim faith. But it is like a thing that this is on this side. I'm going to take the personality. It's like the revolutionary personality now is to take on. I am now a Muslim. It's like, do you go to mosque? Are you a serious scholar of. Of the Quran? Like, or is this just a thing that, like, I am now a Muslim because I'm on the side of these oppressed Muslims. It's a very, very odd way of. Of thinking. I just don't understand it. I've never seen anyone talk. I've never seen her talk about it. You know, Mamdani, in fairness to him, talks about it a lot, goes to mosque. It's like, I'm a Muslim. Great, fine. I don't care. Could care less. But I. I don't believe that he took that on to make a political point. You know, I kind of suspect that's the case. I don't know that. But it just seems this disconnect. When I read that today, I was like, I watching all these clips, is she. That's weird.

[Jason Johnson]

The last thing I know, people get a little fed up hearing too much about Mom Donnie. But part of the reason you talk about these things, like I was talking about the New York City school system six, seven years ago, is like, this is going to come to you. And it did come to you. A thing that he's Doing right now, I think Tablet had a good piece about it just today is. And New York has different, much different housing situation market than any other city in the country. It is. Is genuinely crazy. But he's empowering the housing department to go out and try to find bad things on landlords so that he can take over buildings and give them to his connected nonprofits that they sort of seeded with $53 million. So he's out there trying to seize private property and give it to his friends to then do a sort of more equitable, socialist type of housing property. It's a very large undertaking and totally chilling.

[Matt Welch]

And presumably they won't pay taxes on those buildings and they'll get tax abatements and all this stuff.

[Jason Johnson]

And also, who's the worst landlord in the city of New York?

[Michael Moynihan]

The city of New York City.

[Matt Welch]

I literally thought you were talking about some Hasidic guy. And I was like, yeah, probably, yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

The notion of the takeover is like actually benefiting the tenants in a very clear way in terms of better services overall. Just seems like a very low probability.

[Matt Welch]

But you know, it's this, this is taking over. This is the same thing with tariffs. Again, the parallels with Trumpism and MAGA with these people is that you can talk your graduate school nonsense, the laws of economics don't bend like you think they do. And this is the same thing that's true as tariffs. We're going to build. All this shit's going to come back home. We're going to have factories, everyone's going to have more money. Everyone's going to. It's going to be a new age of, of wine and roses. And I said a long time ago, the problem is the long term in this is that people will realize it didn't happen pretty soon. Their prices go up because of terrorists, et cetera. The same thing is going to be true here is that the market dynamics in the housing market in this city is because people want to live here and lots of people want to live here and people who are poor still live here. And what is the thing that everyone says when they, they. I saw a video online, but look at this apartment. And it was like walking up the stairs like a camera in the West Village, that was like $3,000 a month. And it was like a box. It's like, yeah, it's in the West Village. Like, of course There are also four

[Jason Johnson]

bedrooms in the West Village for 700 bucks a month. Because they're rent controlled.

[Matt Welch]

Because rent control. Yeah. That are, that are lived in by Hollywood Producers. Yeah, I knew one who lived in one. But you can live in Queensland. What you're asking for is the right to live in the best neighborhoods for a cheap price. You can. Compared to other places, it's still very expensive in Queens. It's still expensive in the Bronx, but it's still part of New York City. And poor people live here because there are places that poor people can live. Oh, it's too far out. It's like, okay, well, now you're asking for something different. Right. And you're not going to change that dynamic by taxing billionaires and doing videos about Ken Griffin and, you know, wage and price controls next, for God's sakes. I mean, it's a slippery slip to all this stuff. We can control the economy in smart, quote, unquote. Smart, educated people think this is true. We can look at history and nobody decides to do that. They don't have a very deep knowledge of this stuff.

[Michael Moynihan]

There are a few other things that we were talking about before we started recording. I'd love to get to the baseball stuff, man, because I think you've probably been paying attention to some. It's interesting universe where the culture is

[Matt Welch]

talking about gay baseball.

[Jason Johnson]

Gay baseball, yeah. Totally favorable.

[Michael Moynihan]

All baseball is gay in June. That is the way that we do it now. But I actually wanted to ask you guys about something we haven't talked about, and it's Gavin Newsom, speaking of gays. I didn't say you did. Gavin Newsom, who has been pushing back against the Trump administration, insisting that the DOJ is trying to Trump up a case against him, which is interesting, an interesting use of the word Trump there, by contriving some charges. In fact, what Newsom is suggesting is that a bunch of people are being asked a bunch of questions, close associates of his, by various representatives of the Justice Department. And this is an interesting thing. One, it is totally believable. The Justice Department, I don't know that they've actually weighed in on this formally, but there does seem to be some investigative machinery that's beginning to move in this case. But here is Gavin Newsom essentially doing something that we've talked about with respect to Trump in the past. The fact that the movement of the legal system against him turned out to be something that was probably advantageous to him in the race, probably helped rally the party behind him. And Newsom is kind of pulling another page from the Trump playbook. He'd already been kind of talking like Trump online. He was one of the first people to start reaching across the aisle and engaging with Republicans more directly and now attempting. And Hunter Biden, who might be his running mate, that would be phenomenal. But now he's also talking about these kind of legal cases that are pending against him. And it does seem like the sort of thing that could charge up his base and maybe get Democrats excited is again, of course, still exceptionally early, but he continues to kind of maintain the attention of the electorate or at least the media.

[Jason Johnson]

I mean, I just. The rest of the country is gonna like that guy.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

I mean, they might appreciate the fact that he can be an asshole and meme like Trump and they think we need a fighter like that. I can see Democrats kind of talking themselves into that. That may be some small percentage of it. But, like, California is such an easy thing to run against. Like, it didn't work. He was a bad governor. Like, that's not a great record. I mean, at least DeSantis, who was not a great candidate, had had a story to tell that was compelling and interesting.

[Michael Moynihan]

Didn't help him much.

[Jason Johnson]

Newsom doesn't have a story to tell, and he's all he is, is kind of handsome. That's like, I don't really see how that can work. I would love it if he was making the story up. That would be fucking baller. It's like, I've heard that they're coming around investigating me.

[Matt Welch]

That'd be very Trump to make it up. It also be very Trump to do it.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yes.

[Matt Welch]

None of this is surprising. I mean, the Trump people have no sense of limits on this stuff that there's an accumulation of here, all the people that have opposed Trump, and I've gone after all the them with the full weight of the law and the doj. There's a probably a certain. There's got to be a point at which people are like, this isn't good. Right. But they don't. I mean, remember the Nixon administration? Everything that they did and there was so long that, you know, the ex scribble John Dean, who was more tied up in Watergate than he ever wanted anyone to know, was constantly going on TV and saying, this is worse than Watergate. You're at a book club where everything was worse than Watergate. Right? And then this is like. Like blows it away by so much that you have to respect them on one level is that they don't hide it. Whereas everything was subterfuge with the Nixon administration. We should get the files and maybe even blow up Brookings. Right. And we should get the files from people's psychiatrists office. It's insane. When you look at. What was it called? Operation Gemstone. That was Gordon Liddy's thing that he brought to John Mitchell. Like, it was like that thing was all try to be subterranean. They just do this stuff in the open nakedly. So it wouldn't surprise me if they did it. I don't know if being oppressed by Trump on the other end of this is that oppressed, quote, unquote, attacked by Trump, persecuted by Trump's probably the best word even matters much anymore, because he does it to so many people. Right. It's like, oh, you too. You also, to Matt's point, were the governor of a failed state. It's a fail. It's like people go to LA and are like, what the fuck happened to the city? Go to San Francisco and say the same thing. And like, you know, you're going to be my president, you're going to be my latex salesman.

[Jason Johnson]

They go to Mercedes and say, that's a hell of a mile worth of railway that you laid there.

[Matt Welch]

Oh, yeah. How much does that cost? It cost like $70 billion to go a mile. What is it with you fucking Californians? And like light rail and high speed rail is like the. One of the great boondocks.

[Jason Johnson]

There are I think 90 mountains in southern California taller than the tallest mountain in the east coast or the eastern half of the United States. It's kind of a. And there's earthquakes. Yeah. You got to build some tunnels at minimum. Or get in a plane.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

Or drive like.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, but it's like we like Europe and Europe has. And the Chinese have railroads, as Hasan Piker tells us all the time.

[Jason Johnson]

It's a terrible thing that we sort of take it for granted that Trump is just weaponizing the DOJ to go after his enemies. And he's just been doing it widespread in front of everybody. It's not just that the. Worse than Watergate. Name something that's been a scandal, a presidential scandal over the last 30 to 200 years. Just like pull one out of the hat. Mark Rich, boy, that was a sleazy pardon. Denise Rich gave a million dollars to Democratic causes, the Clinton library to the Al Gore recount to Hillary Clinton's campaign. They did it literally the last sort of midnight hour. They circumvented all the processes. He never expressed any remorse. People were outraged. Bipartisan. Jimmy Carter hated it. Everybody hated it. Rudy Giuliani, who had prosecuted the case, I was really pissed off about it. Do you guys have ever even heard the name Trevor Wilson? I think Trevor Wilson is the name, and hopefully I'm not getting it wrong. Trevor Wilson is just a fraudster. Started a company making electric trucks. He would do things like show a video prototype of his truck.

[Matt Welch]

Oh, the one going downhill. That was him? Yeah. It was in neutral. He was in neutral on a hill in Arizona. Shot in a weird way that it

[Jason Johnson]

was like just a classic fraudster. And he, I think, owed something. Like, he was convicted and they were in the process of sentencing, and the government was asking for $667 million in restitution. That's a big number. And I think he was the one who had had his mom donate $3 million to the Trump campaign just openly. And they even came and said, you should go to this million dollar plate fundraiser at Mar a Lago. Okay, cool, I'll go. So he gets the pardon and no one even hears about it?

[Matt Welch]

No.

[Jason Johnson]

And there's 20 like that. No, there's 20. Where people just. There's a whole industry, they calculated that it costs about a million dollars per pardon to get to Trump. There's like lobbyists who've sort of set it up up scuzzier in almost every single way than Mark Rich, with the possible exception of Mark Rich was on the FBI's most wanted list. So he's a little bit more of an absolute crook. But a lot of these guys, I mean, it's more than $2 billion worth. It's something that actually Gavin Newsom has pointed out, and he's good on him to do it, that the various waving away of fees that Trump has done just in pardoning, has amounted to more than $2 billion. And a lot of this is just like. It's not just like fines from the government. It's. It's like, no, you defrauded. You did a Ponzi scheme and you needed to pay those people back. And Trump's pardons or pay for play entirely just wipes it all away. And the people like, what? I didn't get my money back.

[Matt Welch]

There's a tremendous job for historians to do after this. I mean, the amount of stuff we know, speaking of Nixon, about Nixon now that we didn't know at the time is like 40 fold. I mean, people are still writing new books about water with new revelations. The volume of this stuff is why it's allowed to happen. It's just incredible volume. And the thing is, it's like to act like, you know, stealing when you were a kid, just like, hey, guys, what's going on? You just take the beer and Just walk out and you're like, does he work here? Is he like a distributor? It's like be so brazen about it and people just don't even notice or care. I think that the depth of this stuff is only we barely know it because as you point out, we barely know. Can't keep track the names of these people and the fire hose of bullshit in lies. And yeah, I mean, I think that we're gonna see. I mean there's so many that I can think of of like people getting enormous benefits for being close. I mean, set up that way. As we talked about the crypto thing, you can meet the president if you. And then he comes in for two minutes and leaves. It's like going to a signing, getting the VIP ticket and the person spends. Walks by you and says hi.

[Jason Johnson]

And that's maybe worse than what Clinton did with the Lincoln Bedroom.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, I mean the Lincoln Bedroom thing was the stuff of Jay Leno jokes for three years. You know, it was also weird. Like people you forgot, I think Markie Post. You remember Markie Post? No one. Nobody remembers Markie Post.

[Jason Johnson]

No, that sounds.

[Matt Welch]

She was on Night Court with John Larroquette. You remember John Larroquette. I remember that. I'm really dating myself. I was. I was singing the Green Acres theme song this morning. So. I mean, Eva Gabor, the forgotten Gabor. But yeah, that kind of stuff is. Ran the tables in conservative magazines like the American Spectator at the time they were like, this is the most corrupt administration of all time. And it got so bad that when they had no corruption for a month, I think it was Byron York who wrote a cover story for the American Spectator that said Clinton cheated at golf. Cover story, not even joking of Emmett R. Emmett Turrell, famously referred to as Chicken McMenken for his bloated prose, published that as a cover story. And now it's like people say, oh, Obama's tan suit. That was a fake thing. Anyway, somebody said something on Fox News one time. But there were. There's other analogs with conservatives in the outrage over the Clintons was a sustained eight year thing. And Hillary Clinton said the vast right wing conspiracy. She was mocked for it. There's just truckloads of stuff you can mock her for. She wasn't entirely wrong about that there was existence.

[Jason Johnson]

What she was wrong about was that they made up the stuff that he actually did.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, there was a conspiracy to tell

[Jason Johnson]

the truth about Monica Lewinsky.

[Matt Welch]

I bet Monica Lewinsky. But yeah, it was like the main airport. Remember that? The cocaine. That was a that was. Dude, I American Spectator too.

[Jason Johnson]

I went down a reportorial rabbit hole in the state of Tennessee in 2000 and 2001, especially about Mana. No, about one that has never been reported out of guy with an incredible name like Lucky Stomper or something. But it was connected to Al Gore, like possible drug running, some dead bodies

[Matt Welch]

and all of this Clinton death list.

[Jason Johnson]

And there was a local online only reporter who was digging into this stuff who was credible, plausible, and not an anti Democrat. He was just like a weirdo kind of hillbilly investigative reporter guy. And he had his entire life cracked down upon because he had reported these out right before the 2000 election. And in his telling, that might have flipped Tennessee because Tennessee Al Gore didn't win Tennessee, his home state. And maybe that had something to do with it and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, there's some crazy.

[Matt Welch]

One recommendation is if you can find this gave him a hard time about the Clinton cheating at golf thing. But Byron York was on staff at the American Spectator and he wrote a phenomenal piece for The Atlantic, early 2000s, I think, about the decline and fall of the American Spectator and how it got gripped by conspiracy. You know, Vince Foster, the killing of the suicide, but you know, the murder of Vince Foster, Ron Brown. And it was the thing called the Arkansas Project that was funded by Richard Milkshake.

[Jason Johnson]

My first piece is Coming Back to America. In 1998, I started working for the online Journalism Review just because I knew Bob Scheer and he was like titularly the editor in chief. And I needed work and I wanted to learn about the Internet because we didn't have Internet in Central Europe. And so my first pieces were all about salons. Salon.com, joe Conison, coverage of the Arkansas Project.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, Joe Conison.

[Jason Johnson]

So like I was all in that world.

[Michael Moynihan]

The stranger, strangest aspect of the Trumpian various controversies, the corruption, et cetera, et cetera, that we just don't talk about is that all of that stuff is happening during an age of conspiracy where both parties are uniquely. There are wings or elements of both parties that are uniquely committed to particular kinds of conspiracies. You've got Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulino Luna, who's talking about the JFK assassination and us. The Epstein stuff is exceptionally popular. And at the same time, like one might expect there to be a kind of resonance associated with like the Trump crypto scams and the people paying for pardons. None of that stuff really seems to

[Matt Welch]

gain traction anymore, but it's a good point. That they don't think conspiracy theory. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. That's a very interesting point. Because it is. Because it's not a right or a left thing. Because humans are conspiratorial. People love conspiracies. And the reason conspiracies explain the world to stupid people. There's no coincidence that Anna Paulina Luna, that Marjorie Taylor Greene and there's other people that use them in very cynical ways who are smarter. But these people who truly believe them are absolute dopes and don't understand anything about American system of governance. They get there and they're completely baffled by the whole thing. And you hear them talk about certain issues, they can't talk their way one sentence after another. It's just that it's like a high wire act if they can finish the fucking sentence. So it's not surprising that they do it. But to your point, yeah, it is very surprising in a way that they find they're sniffing out the money of Jeffrey Epstein who died what, seven years ago? Incidentally. The common thing that I do on the show is often give the New York Times credit when it's well deserved. They did an incredible piece on his death that came out I think on Sunday. Nobody tweeted about it, nobody talked about

[Jason Johnson]

it, I didn't hear about it.

[Matt Welch]

It is an incredibly long piece, deeply investigated with a number of reporters. They got stuff that nobody. And it's like, yeah, he killed himself. And they say we went through every plausible possibility, every conspiracy theory and it's very, very well documented, incredibly well reported. And it's like, yeah, he killed himself in there. He had tried to do it before. He had written multiple suicide notes. They talked to another guy that was briefly in a cell with him that nobody had interviewed before who was like, yeah, no, this. And it's a really compelling thing, but nobody gives a shit because it doesn't speak to a larger issue about how there are shadowy forces. There were pedophiles on the right and the left and blah, blah, blah. The Epstein class, it's the Epstein class, right? No one is gonna read that. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not gonna read that and be like, yeah, you know, I thought it, there was a lot of anomalies, but they closed all those holes. No one. Cuz that's not the point. I think also the point is not the truth.

[Jason Johnson]

It's also that people seek out conspiracy theories to explain behavior that's inexplicable. Nothing about, very little about Donald Trump's behavior is inexplicable. He's just that guy. And he'll change his mind on a dime about this and that. It's when he absolutely changes on something important. He did change his mind totally about cryptocurrency.

[Nadav Eyal]

Right.

[Jason Johnson]

2021, Donald Trump and Iran and Israel

[Matt Welch]

in the past two days.

[Jason Johnson]

But in a neck snapping way on some issue that people at the moment take as being of profound importance. I think that's when they sort of like grab for it. Something has to explain this. That happens. His mercuriality is sort of built in.

[Matt Welch]

But the Israel stuff has been in Tucker world who utterly lost their minds long, long time ago, but then tripled down on the craziness when the war started.

[Jason Johnson]

That's actually right. No. So they felt like he was acting in an inexplicable way. And the way to explain it was

[Michael Moynihan]

weirdly enough, Israel's mind control controlling him.

[Jason Johnson]

Yes.

[Michael Moynihan]

Although it's worn off now.

[Matt Welch]

I mean it is Occam's razor. And the most simple explanation of this is obviously the one that is true, which is Donald Trump has had his finger to the wind since he started in politics. And everyone pointed this out when he would say we're going to stop all immigration from Muslim countries or these Muslim countries until we figure things out. That was like on the stump and it got a huge response to. It became policy. He saw a certainly. I mean, he's clearly being lobbied by the Vance Brigades who are saying this isn't going well. All of these people in your base in MAGA are turning on you. And then he turns on a dive in. The way you can do that is when you fucking believe nothing, absolutely nothing. You could not get Ronald Reagan because there was Some groundswell of 25 lunatics in newspapers pre Internet to say that the Soviet Union was actually not responsible for all the problems in the Cold War and all the problems in the world because he believed it and he wrote about it and he had radio addresses for GE about it and he wrote his column about it and he ran on it and he gave this speech at Goldwater's convention in 64 about it. When he ran in 76 about it. It was a thing that he believed. And Donald Trump doesn't believe in anything except for tariffs. Right. That's the only thing that he's ever been wedded to in any really serious way. And it's a terrible thing to be.

[Michael Moynihan]

What are the odds of a Carlson Trump reconciliation?

[Matt Welch]

Very, very high. Yeah, it's already happened.

[Jason Johnson]

It's like right now, in the past. Right Now Carlson is, like, gleefully making fun of the neocons who are turning against Trump.

[Matt Welch]

Trump as J.D. vance.

[Jason Johnson]

There's going to be a war. I mean, Vance goes on. Megyn Kelly Vance is sounding a lot like Tucker.

[Michael Moynihan]

Carlson says nice things about Tucker during

[Jason Johnson]

that appearance when he's selling the deal. So they'll come back and they'll then just blame the accounts on Jews.

[Matt Welch]

And then, speaking of mentally unstable people on the Internet, I saw a clip this morning of Laura Loomer, one of the great luminaries of the Russian. Right. Saying, I was tricked by Russian propaganda.

[Charlie Sykes]

Oh.

[Matt Welch]

She contributed to rt. And she was like, I said that the Russians were performing a, you know, anti Nazi operation in Ukraine, and I was tricked.

[Jason Johnson]

Well, good for Laura.

[Matt Welch]

I don't know how the fuck she was tricked, because everybody else knew that this was insane.

[Jason Johnson]

Yeah.

[Matt Welch]

And she said the Russians approached her, and it's pretty interesting, actually.

[Charlie Sykes]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

So she deserves credit for at least admitting her mistakes.

[Matt Welch]

No, I don't give the Gilgo Beach Killer credit because he said, I'm sorry when he was being sentenced. Right. It's like, come on. We knew this because. And she said she was gonna go visit Ukraine or they invited her to Ukraine or something, and she was skeptical about going, but now she might go. But it's like, you could have done that in 2022. You could have talked to anyone who wasn't a lunatic who interrupts plays in Central park and chains herself to the headquarters of Twitter because she goes, got banned for an afternoon or something. I can't remember why she did that, but this is that there's too many unstable people with big audiences in politics. So I'm sorry for mentioning it, but I thought it was funny that she discovered that she was wrong about this, as the Ukrainians have killed 350,000, probably more Russians and have put up one of the most impressive fights in modern military history. Industry. So could have done that from the beginning. I want to be on the right side. Because in one final thing, she did say something was interesting, though, which is true. Russia, Russia, Russia. They blamed everything on Russia, the ubiquitous Russia, the hidden hand. And she said, well, I started thinking that Russia was the good guy because the bad people in my universe were talking about Russia constantly. So maybe they were lying about this kind of thing. And it's like. Like there's a certain capture in there that, yes, it is partially admirable to acknowledge.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah.

[Matt Welch]

All right.

[Jason Johnson]

We can talk about the gay baseballs on another spot.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah. No one has any idea what that's all about. Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

No, it's just that they are. The players in the San Francisco Giants are wearing the Pride caps. And then three of the guys or four of the pitchers wrote on their caps. Genesis scripture reference, which was about rainbows and Noah and stuff. But it wasn't about the gays. And so this was seen as horribly homophobic. And now it's a big thing. And there's a minor league baseball that canceled a team, forfeited its game because it was Pride Night somewhere around here.

[Michael Moynihan]

And they wouldn't wear the Pride themed jerseys.

[Jason Johnson]

And some of the players, like, I don't want to do the Pride themed jerseys. And what makes it interesting. And Ethan Strauss, our friend, has obviously written about it because he writes every morning, noon and night. And I recommend looking at that. But what is interesting to me is that seeing people like Dan Savage, reasons, Billy Binion and others saying, why don't we just fucking knock off the Pride nights? Let's maybe not have athletes wear rainbow stuff.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

Because it puts them in a position of feeling like they're endorsing something that they're not sure they want to. How about that?

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah.

[Matt Welch]

They should do one about tariffs, like jerseys. About, like, weird marginal political issues. We're wearing our light rail jerseys tonight.

[Jason Johnson]

Do you remember they were doing that when the NBA went crazy and woke in the bubble especially, I think it was. And so, like, you were allowed to wear jerseys with, like, approved political mantras. And there was at least one dude out there was like, with charter schools. He had some other kind of like, pretty libertarian. And like, ah.

[Matt Welch]

Who was. He played for the Nets. Right. Who was.

[Jason Johnson]

I think so. I forget who it was on the show.

[Matt Welch]

The weird libertarian guy who was like,

[Jason Johnson]

rent control doesn't actually work.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's too long for the back of the jersey. This thing about the gold standard that you have at the back of the jersey.

[Michael Moynihan]

And now that you mentioned the NBA, I am remembering the Christian kid who I believe was playing for the Magic at the time, who was sort of similarly not excited about some of the Black Lives Matter stuff and some of the.

[Charlie Sykes]

As well.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah.

[Michael Moynihan]

And I'm not even sure if he's in the league anymore.

[Jason Johnson]

Probably not.

[Michael Moynihan]

But it was similarly charged for him to just be on the opposite side of these issues. It is very strange to live in a country, or at least in a time in this country when there is an expectation that you will affirmatively endorse other people's particular sexual orientations or fetishes. In the course of regular business.

[Jason Johnson]

You calling gayness a fetish?

[Michael Moynihan]

There are fetishes. I said sexual orientation or fetish. That's what I said. It's actually kind of both. Look, I don't have any interest in your sexual fetishes and they don't involve me. And it just seems appropriate for that to be the approach of baseball in general. Maybe focus on the game.

[Matt Welch]

I think if I told mine would gain subscribers. That's my theory.

[Michael Moynihan]

You think so?

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, yeah. They're very inventive.

[Jason Johnson]

Fetish.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Nadav Eyal]

Shiz.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Johnson]

I mean, what besides six foot one and skinny?

[Matt Welch]

I make them dress up like Franco cap thing is bike swipes. Yeah. We have a phalangest room in the basement. No, it is true, though, that. That is. We can. I mean, I don't necessarily going too long. Definitionally, when people say wokeness, it's a very. It's like a big flabby word that everyone just started defining it. And to me, it was forcing people publicly into political beliefs that they didn't hold in punishing them if they didn't hold them.

[Jason Johnson]

Yes.

[Matt Welch]

And that's a good thing to not have. And I don't care if it's, you know, gay pride or Christian night. Why is that overlapping with our sports entertainment?

[Jason Johnson]

Aha. But what about the military camouflage uniforms, sir?

[Matt Welch]

Which ones?

[Jason Johnson]

San Diego Padres wear them a lot.

[Matt Welch]

Who cares about the Padres? I mean, if Tony Gwyn was still alive, I'd be wobbling around hitting.370. 370. Wobbling to first bit. But no, I don't. None of it. None of it.

[Michael Moynihan]

Just.

[Matt Welch]

Just, you know, if conservatives say shut up and sing, which is the thing about the Dixie shades, it's like, how about everybody shut up in every way and just play the sport? If you want to do an interview and talk about your interest, fine. Who cares? But institutionalizing it is always bad.

[Jason Johnson]

I think that.

[Matt Welch]

Always bad.

[Jason Johnson]

Don't do the institutionalize. But I'm all in favor of people like scrawling weird political messages or inspirational messages on their own hats. This is outlawed by the mlb. Yeah. So the MLB told the players who put the Genesis thing on their hats, like, we're warning you.

[Matt Welch]

It'd be great if somebody else on the team just put Genesis lyrics from Phil Collins, Genesis on their hat. He's like, I'm into Genesis too.

[Jason Johnson]

That is again, only the Memorandum of Understanding era of Genesis.

[Matt Welch]

Yeah. Peter Gabriel stuff. It's like, you know, what do you. That's. No, I'm not interested in that. Sorry.

[Michael Moynihan]

Yeah.

[Matt Welch]

That's not a Peter Gabriel record, is it?

[Jason Johnson]

Memorandum of Understanding.

[Matt Welch]

Oh, that one is a Robert Ludlum book. Yeah, we discovered that. Yeah, that's right.

[Charlie Sykes]

All right.

[Michael Moynihan]

You should stop. Bye.

[Jason Johnson]

Bye.

[Charlie Sykes]

We know of new method of attack. The Trojan Horse. The Fifth Column. The Fifth. Fifth. The Fifth Column. Fifth Column. Fifth Column. Spies, saboteurs and traitors. These dividing forces are undiluted poison. They must not be allowed to spread in the new world as they had in the old. Our moral and our mental defenses must be raised up as never before. Against those who would cast a smoke screen across RV Sa.