Slouching Towards November

[MUSIC] >> Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, September 28th, 2026. I am John Pudhorz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. Commentary.org/Rost, that is the URL to go and look and see if you want to attend. The November 8th roast of Ron Dürmer here in New York City are a big fundraising event of the year information to be found at commentary.org/Rost. And if you do come, you will meet my fellow panelists, executive editor Abe Greenwald, hi Abe. >> Hi John. >> Senior editor Seth Mendel, hi Seth. >> Hi John. >> And Washington Freebeak, an editor, Eliana Johnson, hi Eliana. >> Hi John. >> Okay, so we're going to do and ask me anything, but I'm going to ask and you're going to answer. This is not a mail bag. I am the mail bag and you are answering my mail. Okay, so we have a bunch of topics to talk about. We got the UN, we got Iran, we got Iran's peace proposal, we got Trump rejecting the peace proposal, we got the midterms, so we've got the upcoming Israeli elections. We have Lesbian bars and Massachusetts where people are masking. I don't even know if we'll get into that. We have sun-kissed fruit shoes, we're attracting their decision to end the sun-kissed fruit shoe, business, very important to us, people of the- >> Weirdly, I have so many thoughts on that by the way. >> I'm sure you do. Anyway, the tradition at a happy occasion of wedding or a bar mitzvah abot mitzvah in particular is that you throw candy at the person who is being feted or the couple and used to be that these candies would be hard candies. As my father once said, you would see these sort of like angry women in the women's balcony if you were at a sex-separated synagogue. When you were up on the Bima, that's where the action takes place in a synagogue delivering your bar mitzvah speech. And then at the end, it would be time for the candy to be thrown at the kids and they would have in the '40s, these like ball, like candy, what do you call those? So hard candy balls, as he would say, see them like a sharpshooter. Like getting ready to throw that hard candy ball directly at your head. The point was to injure, not to celebrate, so as we became more humanistic and warm feeling, these hard candies turned to soft candies, sun-kissed fruit shoes and they are thrown by the congregants and then little kids go around and pick them up and the horror news last week was that the sun-kissed fruit shoe was being discontinued by sun-kissed and therefore how on earth were people, maybe we're going to end up going back to the candy, the ball, and then kids were, there was going to be liability issues and people were going to get hurt and to take your eye out. Anyway, apparently the mere existence of this story has caused the sun-kissed fruit shoe corporation to re-institute the sun-kissed fruit shoe to cancel their discontinuation of the sun-kissed fruit shoe. Most important news in the world of jewelry, if you want to know more important than NASA, more important than the upcoming commemoration of October said this was a huge, you can't imagine the conversations that were going on this weekend about the sun-kissed fruit shoe, so we wanted to commend and thank the sun-kissed fruit shoe corporation for its humanistic decision to protect the life and safety of poor, suffering people celebrating, as we call them, simicas, not being injured by hard candies, but rather being caressed by their soft candies. Okay, it's the end of my monologue, now I'm going to ask you some questions. Question number one, Iran said it wants a peace deal before the midterms, or rather a Rachi, the Prime Minister said he wants, or the President of the. I can't remember, one's the President of the. A Rachi is one of them is the President of the legislature, and one is the Prime Minister of Rachi and Peshashkian, and they said they want a deal before the American midterms and Trump basically rejected their proposal, which was essentially the memorandum of understanding that JD Vance negotiated in Pakistan back in April. It's basically almost exactly the same text, and Trump said, no, no, no, no, no, no, you had your chance, you blew it, you refused to open the Strait of Hormones, we're not making this deal with you, which was interesting, because we keep reading that Republican politicians panicked over the midterms, are begging the White House to do something to end the war before they face the voters. So, the. is Trump doing this to put the screws to them to refine their proposal to make it more accommodating to what we want, to opening the Strait of Hormones, and to letting him figure out a way to say he. he made them bend to him, and so he can now therefore say that the hostilities have concluded, and we won, and that's where he's going, or is he really preparing to do something very significant and serious, either between now and the midterms or after the midterms, which is what he keeps saying, I say, well, we're going to do it after the midterms. I'll go first. I don't know if he knows which of those he's going for at the moment, but I do think he understands that every. that he's gone to the well too many times on the Iran deal front, and that whatever he does, he can have another embarrassing fake deal blow up in his face. We've seen it far too many times, so I think he knows enough to know that whatever they're offering this time is nonsense, and he's just not going to go with it. I don't. I continue to wonder how important, in terms of our next moves in Iran, how important all the stories are about our running low on munitions, because if the most. if anything like the most dire accounts are accurate, then he's going to have a very hard time ramping up military action to any sort of to the degree anywhere near that he's talking about. I don't think he's. I don't think he's going to annihilate a civilization, as he said. That's never. that's never, I think, really in the offing, but to really do something spectacular and decisive, if we are as low as some of these reports suggest, I don't know that he can do that. Let me ask you this. So, A, brings up the munitions crisis. The munitions crisis is not as I understand it, an offensive munitions crisis. That is to say, we have plenty of bombs. We have plenty of dumb bombs that we can drop anywhere we want in the world. We have. we're loaded with dumb bombs. It's the defensive munitions that are the crisis point that we are really, really low on defensive munitions and the idea is that Trump wanted to conduct a costless war, so that he could bomb at will and then shoot down anything that came our way from Iran and did so until the point at which people in the military said, "You know what? It's like six weeks of constant use of our defensive capabilities have used them up and we've got to go back to the well to make more." Well, there are two things, so that is my understanding that the shortages of defensive munitions that would prevent us from foiling Iranian aggression and from protecting our troops if we were to take offensive action. But there are two factors that I think we haven't talked about that way in the president's decision making here. The first is that a number of Republican senatorial candidates came out and they're calling on the president to end the war. To reach some peace deal and the war do it now. They include Ashley Hinson of Iowa, who's in a competitive Senate race, Mike Rogers and Michigan, in a competitive Senate race against Abdul El Sayed. And I believe John Houston in Ohio. I think they're making a political miscalculation. My view as Republicans are going to get hit on this either way, so you might as well stand by, you might as well keep your principles. So I think it's a miscalculation, but I also don't think the president. I think he's going to get his backup about this. And I don't think he's going to want to be perceived as doing what Republican candidates are calling. falling on him to do. It's just not in his nature. So it's not going to have the perceived effect. So I think I think that's a factor here. And and I think they're wrong. So time is running out on. Oh, John. And the other thing. Sorry. It escaped my mind. But the other thing is this foiled British terror attack in the UK, which shows that Iran is aggressing the US asymmetrically. I'm assuming. Okay. I'm assuming that this was Iranian plot on British soil. The president said as much. And it shows that even as Iran is saying we want to reach a peace deal. Their aggression hasn't stopped for a moment. And they're striking at bases in the UK where we have major material and personnel. And they remain an imminent threat to the US. And the president, you know, his remarks showed he's acutely aware of this. Look, that's very important. And they threatened the Iranians literally threatened that base a while ago. So they they actually said, you know, this base Americans are taking off from this base. And we know exactly where it is. And we can get to it. So it was kind of a telegraph to move it. It would almost be hard to believe if it were somebody other than the Iranians. Yeah. I love reading in all the coverage that five men were arrested in in the UK. They can't tell us anything else about the men. Five British men. But you know, we'll find out soon enough because the British won't tell you anything until they're actually charged with the crime, right? I mean, this is a very important event because from what we can tell while because it was telegraphed, obviously intelligence, British intelligence and US intelligence had their eye on what was going on there. But that the reason that the arrest happened was that it was about to go operational that apparently there was a phone call of some sort that seemed to be the go, you know, it's go time. And so they they left in and rolled up whatever this conspiracy was. But that means right that this week after this week at the UN, somebody decided to push the button and say, we better go and stage this attack to show that we mean business, not knowing how much information the intelligence services must have had about this to be able to roll it up in time unless they just had a lucky break. And you know, something came through on signal or, you know, or through some kind of an AI search that led them right to these guys and got them arrested. But that is, you know, this weekend after, after all of this talk this week about peace and all of that, I was about to say that we're time is running out for there to be any political utility to the ending the war. Remember, it is now, it's the 20th of September early voting has already started in many places early voting will be and mail in whatever all of that stuff will be going on over the next three weeks. By the time election day rolls around, I think that projections are the two thirds of the vote will be in before election day. And so and at some point they end early voting right because they need to collect ballots and then be able to count them. So if they're, if he's going to end the war to help Republican candidates, he's got to do it like the next week because because the if that's the calculation because people are starting to vote based on current realities, which are gas prices going up. Hormuz is still very much in question. And, you know, and the war is getting increasingly unpopular, which you know, because actually incident particularly Mike Rogers seem to be panicking. I mean, if he, if he did that, the democratic messaging would be he lost the war, he lost the war, he lost the war, he's a loser. I mean, that is not the way to go either. And also, I know, I know, I know, also to my earlier point, so imagine he does it in the next week. 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In at like an 18 point, her final poll, the gold standard pollster of all of history of the suitsayer, the truth teller, the Cassandra got the results 18 points off. There's something hinky about polling in Iowa. It's hard to poll Republicans in Iowa. It appears. Ashley Henson, not taking any chances, is worried she's going to lose. This is the game that she decided to play. Rodgers was a hawk, right? Nick Rodgers is a is a defense hawk saying we need to end the war. That's panic. That is, I don't know what to do. I have the worst person I'm running again. The guy who I should be able to wipe the floor with, he's support. He's like all of his supporters, say 9/11, we deserved it and they're like the people in Michigan were commemorating the death of the Ayatollah Khameenay with rallies and basically effectively in favor of Iran. Abdul Ilsaid should not be in a competitive race in a state in which the Trump won two years ago and all the polls have Rodgers behind. We know that he thinks he's behind because he would not in a million years say we need to end the war right now. That's the, that was going to be my answer to the question of whether Ashley Henson is really in trouble because normally if the polls show them in trouble and they have internal polling that they can at least throw out as a smoke screen, they will and they clearly do not have internal polling that shows it much different for whatever reason. I mean, I'm not saying the internal campaign polls are the reliable ones. I'm just saying that the internal campaign polls function best as a counter narrative. If you suspected new polls coming out or if a surprise ball comes out and it's much worse than you expected, something they have these at hand to toss out and go, we have it as a two point race, not an eight point race, something like that. And they didn't have any internal poll to throw out as a counter. And that's usually the way to see that they're in trouble is that they don't have anything that they can counter the narrative with. And I think that's the same, you know, I think by Rogers is having the same problem, even though I think think that is a remains a close race. But I think, you know, every once in a while, there's a poll that somehow shows Rogers up, you know, six points or something like that, which is on, let's say, unlike, I would think it would be unlikely, but it's an outlier among the polls. You don't see a lot of cross static from either campaign when those polls come out because I think the campaigns understand what we see, which is that these are indeed very close races. Well, our friend, Chris Steyerwald, puts it like this. He says, Republicans are constantly underpulled in key races and key moments. Democrats are not underpulled. So in other words, if you see a race and it says it's 49, 45 and the Democrats at 49 and the Republicans at 45, the Republican is being underpulled. He's not going to get 45. He's going to do better. But that doesn't mean that the Democrat is going to do worse. And in a couple of these polls, like the latest poll of Abdul, Abdul said, is it 50, which is the, you know, panic button number, right? If a poll, if a poll shows in the two-way race, one candidate at 50, if the race is 47, 46 or something like that, anything can happen. If somebody hits the 50 point and particularly for that, someone is a Democrat, you know, it's, as I say, it's like a, you know, pull the emergency cord and see what you can do. And that seems to be what's going on there because clearly the Republican numbers are too low. That doesn't mean the Democratic numbers are too low. And you have Talarico at 50 in Texas. You have, Abdul, I'll say, at 50 in Michigan in some, in some of these latest, latest polls. And so the hope that a lot of people have, including James Blair, the former White House, Deputy Chief of Staffel was essentially there is working for the Republican Party to stave off, you know, a blue wave. And has a, Audrey Falberg in the free press has a long interview with him this morning in which he explains that he doesn't think there's going to be a blue wave, which is what he has to say because if he said, well, there's going to be a blue wave, you know, and he's running the Republican effort to prevent that, then he's already admitting defeat. But his logic is not, the only convincing part of that logic is that, you know, we have no idea how to model the electorate of 2026. We don't know how big it's going to be. We don't know how comprehensive it's going to be. We know Democrats, people who don't like Trump are going to want to go out and vote, you know, symbolically and a nationalized election against Republicans to punish Trump. We don't know that Republicans are going to turn out for none for people who aren't Trump to vote to save the Republican majority because the Trump fans or Trump fans, not necessarily Republican fans. And under those circumstances, things just don't look good. And the fact that where they've gone to is and the war itself is an indication of the brain death of the Republican party in the Trump era because as Ellie Anna says, that doesn't make, it actually doesn't make logical sense. I understand why you're sitting right at table with a consultant and your campaign manager and whatever it is that you're feeling and hearing at town halls or something like that. And you're like, oh, my God, what do we do? We need to come out and say we don't like the war. Otherwise, people aren't going to like us. And there's this is often the case with political advice from political professionals. It's pennywise and pound foolish that it doesn't you, it's like a cheap, a high, you know, or a cheap, you know, it's like a happy hour drink that's been watered down. I don't know why you would think at this. I think it's not just a watered-down drink. It's a, it's a, my opponent was right all along. Exactly. Yeah. What's my opponent? My opponent was right all along is what you're saying. Right. And so how is that supposed to win you? Certainly, you're not going to win any kind of, if he's talking about, you know, Mike Rogers needs Democrats to cross over obviously. But if he's trying to get Democrats, he's not going to get them by saying the Democrats were right about the war. And he's not going to get people on, you know, he's just, he's just solidify. I think it solidifies that argument solidifies where people are rather than shakes free any loose votes. I mean, I think this confuses and misunderstands the opposition to the war. I don't think that the opposition to the war was on the merits of going to war. People are opposed to the war because it raised gas prices. And unless they can say, hey, yeah, we're against the higher gas prices and we, we've got a way to bring them down, they're going to be penalized by the decision to go to war. And they don't have a solution to that. People are angry about that fact of the status quo, which is why I don't think it makes sense for them to say, oh, I'm against the war. Can I make a plan? Can I make a plan? Can I make a plan? Nothing to bring the gas prices down. And it's also a very specific gas price problem that we face that is uniquely difficult for Republicans and conservatives and the people you would think would want to vote Republican for Trump. Right now, the gas price crisis is in diesel. Diesel is at $7, almost $7, a gallon. Regular gas prices are, you know, I drove from Washington to New York yesterday. So I went from DC to Maryland to Delaware to New Jersey, you know, into New York, whatever. And, you know, for four, four forty five, four forty, something like that. Diesel is at seven. And I say this as a class-based thing because who buys diesel? Who has diesel? Who needs diesel gas? Like people with trucks, you know, people who have trucks that have 50 gallon tanks, long-range truckers, farm workers, people who work with their hands, all of that. And their gas prices have doubled in the last six months. And this is their livelihoods. And these are the people that probably voted overwhelmingly for Trump in all three elections who are either going to stay home or going to punish them because like they really are. This would be like if everybody's gas price is doubled. But everybody's gas price didn't double. But a specific cohort of people who vote, small businessmen who use, you know, who have diesel vehicles, are in real trouble. And that's who, that's who the Republicans need to vote for them or the people who voted for them in prior elections. So that, the thing to watch there is the diesel gas price because it doesn't feel materially harder right now than it did two months ago. Like gas was also, I think, you know, the low force at various points during the summer. Not that that's good. It's bad. Obviously, there's no good, good message there. But we're talking about an actual crisis this week, like this, this week and next week and the week after, right when people are starting to vote. Okay. So diesel prices are sneaking up on the highest they've ever been. That's a, that's a landmark that gas is not flirted with. Would it be that idea that you were working towards since you were a kid, something that came to mind when you were college or perhaps a passionate project? You've always wanted to put out the world but never quite gotten around to Shopify could help you start that business. 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And I think there's this question somebody said to me yesterday, hey, what if the Iranians try to stage an attack, try to do a provocation or like attack us or do something to discombobulate the American voter in the two weeks before the election. And I still say, well, you know what? I think that's possible because the Iranians have a pretty decent understanding of us. But I don't know how granular that understanding is and that they sort of understand they need to do it like next week or the week after to have the maximum effect because of early voting. And not like an October, the end of the month, like dropping, you know, finding out that, you know, Bush had a DUI and therefore dropping a late hit. You know, five days before the election. But I have another theory here, which is that there's an actor that they are more obsessed with than us. Though people, we are obsessed with us. October 27th is the date of the Israeli election. What they have to fear is Israeli action before the election. That's my take. My take is, hmm, Bibi Netanyahu is either going to lose the selection and his career is going to end, or he still thinks he can win, or it's going to be like no resolution. One where the other, his purpose as prime minister, his historic sense of himself, is that he is the person who has to defame and basically cripple Iran and its ambitions to end Israel's existence. And he may only have a month left. He may be out in a month, and they know that, and they know that he means business. And he is a very, you know, he's a player of a certain type where you really don't know where he's going to go. He's pretty cautious, mostly, but he can also throw Hail Mary's at times. And if I were the Iranians, I would be afraid of Israeli action. And I bet they are any, any thoughts? - I think it's clear that they are afraid of Israeli action. I can't, I don't know if there's something in the, you know, if there's, if there's something coming or not, but there's always something plant, there's always something that can be put into effect, right? This is the thing that the Iranians I think have learned about the Israelis, not that they shouldn't have known this earlier, but the recent war and just the past three years in general, even the beeper plot against Hezbollah, for example, which was not supposed, the trigger was not originally planned to be pulled when it was, but they got word that the Iranians were sniffing around, and it was a use it or lose a type situation. But the general point is that the Israelis developed things over the course of years. They develop assets in Iran over the course of years. They have developed, they developed a base in Iraq over the course of years, right? And built up in Iraq a place to strike Iran from, so I think that the, you know, with the beepers and the getting Nasrallah and the bunker, by the way, and all these things, Israel is used to having contingency plans. And if it needs to be done, there's a trigger that can be pulled, and it's sometimes almost a decade of work that gets triggered in that situation. That seems to be what the Iranians, I think, have learned this war, that there are tricks up the Israeli sleeve, that they, not only that they didn't imagine, but that are in the end planning stages, like they're pretty much ready for one last proofread and then print. And I think that they don't know what's left. They don't know what Israel has planned, and they do know that BB is in a fight for his own political life. And it's near the end of his career anyway, just because I, you know, he's nearing 80 and whatever. He's, you know, I don't think they expect him to be Prime Minister forever at this point. And they know that if BB is not gonna leave anything on the field, I mean, he's gonna leave it all on the field. He's not gonna, you know, he's gonna take every shot, he's gonna want to at least, if he can get it through the security council and his advisors and all that stuff. And he usually can't. So I think that they're thinking like, uh-oh, if BB thinks he's in trouble, we're in trouble. - To set this point about what Israel has up its sleeve at any given point. I mean, Israel is still taking out all sorts of terrorists that were involved in, you know, Hamas terrorists are involved in October 7th. They're still bringing the fight to Hezbollah. And don't forget that BB said, BB gave Iran reason to worry at the UN when he said, I will tell you that listen to my words carefully, could this could be sooner than you think the Iranian regime will be gone and the people of Iran will be free. So I'm certain that they are very concerned with what Israel has in store next. So these news stories keep coming out, talked about the bad war polling. Then there's other stories and there is a very weirdly compromised complex issue with the polling firm called Trafalgar, which refused to reveal its methodology at some point. And then it turned out that they were just adding five points to Republican totals in certain polling in 2020. And just, you know, when they were sort of counterintuitive based as opposed to other polls and they were just like, well, Republicans under poll. So we're just adding five points. Trafalgar has Darlene Graham. Is it Darlene Graham? - Darlene. - Darlene Graham, who's last name isn't Graham but is calling herself Graham because that's her brother's name and she took her late brother's candidacy over. And she's in trouble in South Carolina and that comes from Trafalgar, which is a firm that wants to find good news for Republicans. If she is in trouble, this is a wave election like 2014. In 2014, last month of the election, Republicans gained nine seats in 2014 and one place is nobody even knew were up like we're even possibilities for them. Do you look at that? I mean, what do you make of that? - I don't think you need to look to get to South Carolina. I think if you look at the real clear politics average of the polling, Democrats are leading in, I think quite literally every competitive race. - But races that you didn't even think were competitive. That's what I'm saying. There were competitive races and there were non-competitive races. - I mean, Iowa shouldn't be competitive. Democrats are ahead there. They're ahead in Michigan in every race with the exception of Kansas, which people are now talking about being a race in the average of polls they're ahead. So I think, yes, I don't think South Carolina will go blue. But I think we are, you know, things are looking grim for Republicans because midterms really, look, it's tough. Republicans control all three branches of government. People are dissatisfied with the status quo and midterms are going to measure just how dissatisfied are they? Are they? How angry is the opposition? And I think we're finding out the people are really dissatisfied, really angry. And it's not just Democrats, but it's independence and it's also normy Republicans. You know, the mega faithful are still hugely supportive of Trump. But polls are finding that traditional Republicans are likely to stay home. - Okay. - And the intensity of the opposition is high. So all this being the case, what is the next month going to look like to you guys? Like what do you, we are five weeks, I guess five weeks out from the election. And I just, you know, the classic rule of thumb is that race is tightened but maybe they're not going to tighten. I mean. - Well, one of the things I think will be interesting to watch over the next month is that there's a huge asymmetry in terms of money in this election. So Democrats have an enormous asymmetry in terms of intensity and passion. Republicans have a huge asymmetry and an advantage in terms of money. And that is just starting to be spent. President just started to spend. So it will be really interesting to see how good are the ads? I mean, we're going to see the politics of personal destruction. And how effective are they? Does it have any impact? Does the financial advantage matter at all? And if so, how much? That's what I think we're going to see over the next month. Play out. - But, Ellie, I have a question because I've become increasingly skeptical of money. money's ability to shape races, what would be the best use of that money at this point? Here's the problem I think that these candidates are confronting is you can use money to get out a message. But what exactly is the message? Yeah. Right? Okay. Yeah. What exactly is the Republican message? Certainly there's no, I don't think there's much of a unified message among these candidates. So then you drill it down into individual races and they, they seem to think that saying my opponents too scary, too crazy, too nuts, is this sufficient message and we'll see if that's true. I'm somewhat skeptical because people are so dissatisfied with the status quo. Okay. Can I talk, can I talk about what message, the messages are in the ads that I am seeing here in New York because there are actually competitive races around New York, the, on Long Island, the two districts on Long Island, which are maybe competitive, Mike Lawler's district, North of New York and the race between Tom Kane Jr., who disappeared for four months with a mental health crisis and the Democrat name Rebecca Bennett, who is another one of these veterans pilots, I think she's a helicopter pilot, you know, just this kind of like central casting Democratic candidate of the last couple of years, like, you know, like Abigail Spanburg, a couple of other people, you know, where she's like, they're in the military, there are no Democrats and Republicans. We're all just trying to fight for our country and, and please vote for me basically. That's one message. So she's also like her governor. Right. Carol is. Yeah. Right. So, so she's running on the, I'm a patriot. You can vote for me. I'm a patriot. And I, without like saying, you can't vote for this guy who was like, you know, you know, in a lunatic asylum for four months, which is not what she's going with. But she's effectively saying, I'm normal. I'm a normal person. Vote for me. I'm in a, I'm in a very swingy district. And maybe you can vote for me. On Long Island, the message is all corruption. It's all corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption. And some of it is that the Democrat, that's what is a, you know, Democrats, corruptism is the Republican is corrupt. So they're going with non-ideological messages to get. And I assume that's because they're trying to reach independent voters. Like they're doing what they can to get whoever, you know, isn't fully aligned to jump on the, on the bandwagon. And I think that's very striking because it does speak to the fact that Republicans in particular have nothing to run on where they think they have nothing to run on. I'm not sure they have nothing to run on. They seem pretty sure that they have nothing to run on. Having data centers played a big role in that Long Island district, am I making that up? It may not be, but that's not what the ads, I'm just going by like TV ads, right, which are no longer the way to, supposedly no longer the way to judge anything. But the virtue of the TV ad is that who watches TV? People over the age of 60, watch over the air, cable and broadcast TV. And they are the most reliable voter age cohort voters. And so the messages that are being imparted to them are not data center based. It's, this guy is, this guy is with Trump, Trump is bad, Trump is evil, Trump is corrupt. He's corrupt. This guy is corrupt, Bruce Blakeman is corrupt. He's the, he's the Republican candidate for governor against Kathy Hocal. So I'm just taking it from them. So I think data centers are not a New York issue. That's not how they're being, they're trying, trying to get votes. So I, I, data center apparently that, that's the other thing for Republicans is they're also trying to thread some bizarre needle with data centers. Because they're seeing all this in, they're getting all this raw information that says people don't like data centers. We better be against data centers. It is so inimical to the Republican message or the conservative, whatever to be against data centers. This is economic growth. This is like the, the economic warfare with China. This is our future. This is our technological future. Republicans tend to be techno optimists, you know, conservatives believe in entrepreneurship. We need enough power. We need enough energy to drive our, you know, our, our, our future in this, in this energy munching realm of, you know, of, of AI and the like. And this is just some kind of like lunatic environmentalism that is trying to block progress. But that's not where they're going. And they seem to know that the term data center has now achieved what in the 70s, the nuclear power plant achieved, which is even if you believe nuclear power was good, which it is, all you had to say was nuclear power plant and, and, and you weren't negative. You were dead, you know, it's like. The, the, that's an issue where I don't think people saw the backlash coming as ferociously as it did. And both on the war with Iran and on data centers, you have Republican candidates contorting themselves and taking positions that are not naturally the, that are not the positions they really believe in. I think it's clear. And I do think voters perceive that. I think voters pick up on it. So what does it mean also the thing about the AI is that the, it's not like data centers are not the same thing as AI, but now they've become it. And this is what frustrates me about this whole debate, which is that there are Republicans out there who know that data centers does not mean robots taking over the world. And it doesn't mean flock cameras and all this other stuff. And it just all gets thrown together in the same pop. But data centers are, you know, it's not like they didn't exist before AI. This is a use. We need their power. We need their, their ability to concentrate so that we can host things, right? I mean, people don't even realize how much they have to lose one, you know, Amazon web services goes down or something like that. Like, who do you think's powering Amazon web services? So data centers, like this is the cloud is data centers. We put all our information into the cloud, right? And so I feel like this is, this is a runaway train. It just, it went right off the tracks and there's no stopping it, no controlling it. But it's so far off, we can, I mean, that's why the nuclear power, by the way, that's why that comparison works to a large extent is because it is a form of, you know, not its own power, but pooling power and whatever. But we need this for computing power. And there's no future in which we don't still need it. I don't really understand what the plan here is. There's no future in which, you know, we have, we have, we have countries, major countries at war right now that are, that are using, you know, that are using data centers for drones and all sorts of stuff, the future is going to need more data centers because it's not, it's not a, it's not this one thing, just saying we need to power it. You're right, but you're also wrong. I mean, you're right. And first of all, the idea that Republicans know, or, you know, these can't, they know, but this is, this jumped up on them. I don't know what they know. I don't know, you know, these, we're talking about hack politicians. What do they know about anything or policy people that we have Republicans who used to support data centers who now, but they did because they did because the idea is, oh, look, here's a thing that makes energy. Let's build it and we'll build it and they'll be jobs and then they'll be jobs and we'll have a new shiny, new facility and everybody wants new things in their district. And then suddenly it's like, no, we don't want this in our district. It hums, it makes noise, it's ugly, it's physically ugly. I keep wondering like, it's poisoning you, it's polluting the environment. Yeah, and then it gets, and then it starts getting into that, but secondarily, but the first thing is like, what is that humming noise out on Route 73, you know? It's like, hmm, you know, like how these people who build the data centers, this is where, you know, they really are partially responsible, like, make a nice looking building. Put in sound insulation, like I know you need to slap them up really fast, but like, don't do a garbage job on the aesthetics of where people live, like they don't like that. You know, like do yourself a favor, like have lots of greenery, have a nice building, you know, have fancy architects come up with some kind of an impressive design where people want to work. John is available for data center design. I am not, but smart businesses when they want to build, put it, put it Dunkin' Donuts And Baskin Robbins at every. the data center and you will have a different reaction. - As long as you make it aesthetically pleasing, and of course the classic thing about warehouses, which is what a data center is, is you slap it up and you put it down there and who's gonna look? But they've made a huge mistake. They made a huge mistake technically and in terms of presentation, because if they looked nice, they wouldn't be ominous and they wouldn't have this ominous quality to them. And you might call them something else or come up with another euphemism for it that's a better term, you know, like, I don't know what it is, but they, so they, their ideas, I got, we gotta do this. - I would call it a free tax revenue center. - I'm just saying like, I understand why the people who build them are like, we gotta slap these up. We need them in five minutes. But don't do, you know, like that's, again, Pennywise and Pound Foolish, like every, like every bit, like somehow read the room, read the American room and people are unnerved by AI, by the possibility of drop replacements, all of that, by, on the one hand, everybody is now totally reliant and dependent on every aspect of the high tech culture and the stuff that does power AI. Like, as you say, like Amazon Web Services, AidaBoot, which is basically the internet now. I mean, this is, people don't even know this. You think Amazon is where you go and you buy books and you get them to ship you, you know, a $25 rug that, you know, could have cost $150 at some other time. That is not the core of their business anymore. The core of their business is hosting, as Seth says. But people don't know that and they know what they know is, I don't know, they have these cars, they drive themselves, that scares me. And like, from what I hear, no one's gonna have a job in five years and it's because, so we can like, as long as we don't build these places, they won't take our jobs and they don't have an answer for it. So I'm saying, I don't know that I trust that they know better. I don't feel like they know better. The politicians know better. All they know is that they're donors, they have people that they wanted to raise money from who like it and therefore they were for it. And now the public seems not to like it and now they're against it and they have no core that says, let me stop for a minute and tell you why this stuff is fantastic because they don't know why. And you know, we talk about the low information voter. There's a lot of low information politicians in America who like get these jobs, they go whatever, either they're, either they're sort of populous to come in or they're just like local hacks or something like that. And they don't know anything about anything. And so they basically, one of the reasons it's been easy for all the politics in America to get nationalized is because nobody comes in with a fundamental understanding of basic theories of government or something like that. And they just like take their policy off the shelf that's sent to them from the White House and they just do whatever they're told because all they want to do is get on TV or hold their job or something like that. So this is another crisis. - Yeah. - Two points. One is that I think in some sense, the gas prices and the data center issue, they're related in that both has to do with people in America saying, hey, well, you're squeezing us. You're squeezing us out, you know. You've forgotten about us. You've forgotten about our communities or jobs or this. Now, to whatever extent, whatever the merits of the particular arguments in those both cases are, it's the easiest thing for Democrats to swoop in there and say, and amplify this and say, I hear you, that's exactly right. They don't care. Donald Trump and the Republicans are full steam ahead with the war and with data centers and with AI and whatever that does to your jobs and so on and so forth. Part of why I think the Republicans are having a hard time answering to any of this for any of this. Part of it, I agree with you, John, has to do with, there's a lot of them just don't know anything. But there's also so much of Republican and Democrat, so much of our politics messaging is trolling, is rubbing it in the other guy's face constantly with memes, with slop, with quotes, whatever. It's all about owning the Libs or MAGA that when it comes time to do the reassuring part, it's like that muscle is gone. There's not a lot of that happening, especially on the right. There's not a lot of, let me tell you why this is good. It's, they're too busy rubbing it in everyone's face and that's a sort of lost skill. - I think that's absolutely right and we just living with the consequence. Part of the virtue of being a policy-driven party or a policy-driven movement rather than a personality-driven movement is that when the personality starts to get tiring, you can move away from it onto firm or ground talking about things that matter. And like using, I know people don't believe persuasion works. I don't know why persuasion has worked in the past and no longer works in the present. I don't know, human nature hasn't changed. It's just that there's this one figure who figured out how to like browbeat rather than persuade and so everyone is using that model. Doesn't mean the model is wrong because this is the way self-governing societies function and now that they're in trouble and could use some other message other than I'm with Trump, they have very little to fall back on. So I think everybody needs people who are worried about, look to me, the only election that matters in November is Abdul Sayed's election. And I am deeply pessimistic now that Mike Rogers can close the sale. I mean, I'm hopeful that the people of Michigan are more sensible than the polling is showing and that they will look at him and say, this is not the kind of person who should be representing us in the United States Senate. But I don't know if I should be hopeful or that's just foolishness. It's like foolish optimism based on nothing except my own, priors, but there we have it. I want to make a recommendation. I don't want Matt Contnetti coming on one. So he's the only person who recommends things, those sets that recommend something last week. But out of nowhere, I ended up reading a book published 40 years ago, 43 years ago, by a writer named Max Allen Collins. It's called True Detective. Not no relation to the TV series. Max Allen Collins, who is now almost 80 years old, has written more than 200 books. And I think graphic novel, various other things. He's written romance novels, he's written mysteries, he's written all kinds of stuff. And his most famous work is probably the Road to Predition, which was a graphic novel that was made into a movie with Tom Hanks about early 30s Chicago and a Hitman. Not a very good movie, very beautiful movie, not very good. This book, True Detective, which is the first and endless, apparently endless series of novels about a detective cop in early 30s Chicago, who ends up becoming a private eye in an entirely corrupted political and economic system. Book is interwoven with real personalities. Capone, Anton Sermack, the mayor of Chicago, General Dawes, former Vice President of the United States, who runs a bank in Chicago, Elliot Ness, various other people with whom this detective, Nathan Heller interacts. And I got this served up to me by Amazon because I started reading hard-boiled. There's a whole series of books called Hardcrime. And just to clear my head and have some appellate cleanser, I started reading these very hard-boiled, those novels in the hard-boiled tradition, detective novels, which are sort of set in sleazy precincts with one of my reds is about sort of like a detective working in porn and various other things. There's a series of books called The Hardcrime series that have been republished in paperback and on Kindle. So somehow I ended up with this true detective by Max Allen Collins, and it is fantastic. It is, among other things, just as Edmick Bain, the novelist, the eighth precinct novelist, wrote some of the best writing about New York and the history of New York, even though the city that he's writing about is called Isola, but it is New York. This is a book about you because this is one of the best books ever written about the city of Chicago. And there are many great none. So at the City of Chicago, great American novels. You know, The Jungle by Uptons and Claire, Studs Lawnigan by James Farrell, An American Tragedy and Sister Carry by Theodore Dreiser, Augie March and Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bello, great Chicago novels. This is not a literary performance. This is a, you know, a sort of Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chan, where Ross McDonnell type of book, but it's evocation of this completely upside down topsy-turvy political world of Chicago and the visual picture it presents to you as you're reading it of this great city in hard times in the Depression is just spectacular. And I haven't enjoyed reading a book this much in many, many years. I say that oddly because like I do a lot of reading for homework, but this is just like candy. I don't know in some ways. So that's true detective by Max Allen Collins, 43 years old, the book is 43 years old, and it's set in 1932. And it is as fresh as it was when it was first published. So that's my recommendation. We'll be back tomorrow. So for Abelliana and Seth at John Putthoritz, oh wait, hold on, like and subscribe on YouTube. Give us a five star review and Apple or Spotify. Thank you very much. I'm going back tomorrow. Keep the camera. 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