Iran’s Jacobin Revolution | Interview: Eli Lake

This episode of The Remnant is brought to you by our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation. PLF is a national nonprofit law firm with more than 200 active lawsuits representing Americans hurt by government overreach. Across the country, PLF is fighting to free up more land and resources. They represent a California family who have oil reserves but can't drill because of a state ban. Alaska lumber companies that can't operate because of a federal rule. and a retired pediatrician in Florida whose property was wrongly declared a wetland. And they represent all their clients free of charge because they believe all Americans should live fearlessly in pursuit of happiness. If you agree, check out the Pacific Legal Foundation at pacificlegal.org slash flagship. Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention? Daniel Jiggins! Greetings and listeners, this is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. I'm recording from the road in, I wouldn't exactly say balmy Fort Lauderdale, more of a brisk Fort Lauderdale, but the podcast must go on. And I have with us today my friend, columnist for the Free Press, host of the excellent Breaking History podcast, not infrequent listener of the Remnant podcast where he sends me notes, Eli Lake. Eli, welcome back to the Remnant. Oh, it's so great to be here, Gerna. Thanks for having me. And I'm a very loyal listener, I would say, at this point. You're in my top podcast diet. We will get you the best doctors. And you're also a GLOP listener. I know that. You're like squarely in our demo. I feel that I am. When I see a GLOP, because they come now, it's once every month, but sometimes it's five weeks. I'm like, all right. Okay. So, Iran's in the news. Yes. You just wrote this really, we'll put in the show notes, really excellent sort of primer. I don't know, state of play about Reza Pahlavi? Pahlavi. Pahlavi. Gee, I had the same problem with Ken Pollack. I've been mispronouncing this name for 30 years. Well, you read it and it kind of reads as Pavlavi. Yeah, right. But that's not how you say it. So we'll get to the state of play with that guy in a second. But why don't you just give me your sort of 30,000 foot view about, as Dr. Strange said in The Avengers, are we in the endgame now? Give me your broad take on how we got here and where things stand. I think that Iran has had a legitimation crisis now for more than 20 years, meaning I don't think that most Iranian people would like to live under this particular regime or believe in the ideology that animates it or the of the Islamic revolution. And one of the signs that we knew even before these protests is that they weren't able to actually enforce the hijab rules. So that is a victory for the last round of uprising, which was the Women Life Freedom Movement in 2022 and 2023. But you have a kind of vicious mafia atop the regime that is obviously now willing to kill tens of thousands of its own people in order to stay in power. so there is a what sometimes is called elite cohesion that's how it looks from the outside I'm skeptical I do think there's a reason why they didn't they didn't kill in that level before and that's because eventually your militia commander they're known as the bossy will have to come home to dinner and it's pretty likely that the daughter and the wife and the brother of you know and the uncle are going to all say, what are you doing? That's something that we can't see, but I assess that that's probably going on. There was a revealing phone call to one of these exile podcasts through Manitou, where a woman who I think credibly, I mean, we can't confirm it, described herself as the daughter of a fairly high-up Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, was asking for information. How can I get in touch with the Hague? My father is a criminal. I can tell you what happened when we were arrested. I was able to get through because my father, but two of my friends were raped and tortured. And it was really emotional, even though it's in Farsi. You see the subtitles and you're just like, this is unbelievable. I believe that that's probably going on in a number of households. And that that's something that I think I don't know that that's sustainable. But it's also true that so far, the fear of stepping out of line with the regime is greater than any kind of sympathy or solidarity that these people might have for their own countrymen. it's also true that they did have to bring in Arabs to put down some of these demonstrations. So that's another sort of sign of, of the weakness. But I think that they're in a lot of trouble just because there's no way out of, out of, out of this crisis unless they strike a deal, which is what's happening now. But I'm not, I'm not convinced that there's, there's a deal to be had at this point. First of all, it's because the American demands are such that I don't think that Khamenei, the Supreme leader would accept it. And second of all, given Trump's history on some of this stuff, I think that Trump is very aware that the Iranians have tried to kill him. And I do think that that is a motivating factor as well. And so I think some of the negotiations or talk of the negotiations is a bit of a ruse. But Trump, you know, you can't predict what he's going to do. And I think we can all agree that it was, even though I cheered when I saw his truth social at the end of December and in his follow-up comments about, well, you know, help is on the way, and if you shoot at the protesters, then we're going to shoot at you. He shouldn't have said that. And the reason he shouldn't have said that is because if that had gone through a normal process of presidential communication, someone would have told him, we don't have the interceptors for our missile defense systems to defend our bases and our allies in the event of a strike on Iran. And that's why I think we're kind of seeing this delay now. I mean, we could have fired all kinds of things into Iran. We didn't need this, as he called it, the armada. The reason, what's in that armada? Well, a lot of Patriot missile defense systems are in that armada. So that's kind of what I think is going on. And that gets to another question, which is like, well, wait a second. And we've known missile defense is going to be key to warfare for more than 30 years. What the hell is wrong with that's an indictment of past defense secretaries and presidents that we have this supply crunch at this moment. But we do because of our assistance to Ukraine, which, of course, I support and our assistance to Israel during the 12th day war. So the cupboard is a bit bare. and I think that that's the negotiations in some ways are kind of cover for trying to get those assets in place and that's obviously classified but what I've been told is that we need to really make a lot more of them very quickly and we haven't done that yet. It's this deal thing, right? What is the ask that just for listeners' sake, what is the ask that we are asking them to come to the table and striking a deal? And what is the threat, you think? Well, I mean, obviously, what's the public threat, but also, like, what's the real threat if the Iranians don't come to the table and don't agree to a deal? Well, I think the real threat is that the last time the Israelis decided to go in, they decapitated your military. and I don't know what Israel's intelligence capabilities are at this moment, but I would imagine that the Iranians probably think they're pretty competent and the U.S. is, I mean, the Mossad chief was here a couple weeks ago, so I would imagine that the real threat is a decapitation. Okay, so what's the deal, though? Like, what are we demanding? Ending the nuclear program? Is that it? Zero enrichment on Iranian soil, no more support for your terrorist proxy groups, and an end to your missile program. I mean, it's pretty much like, you know, disarm, you know, stop what you've been doing. You know, there's been a problem trial. Now, if people say, well, what about the demonstrators? Well, that's the thing. It's unclear. When Trump has articulated different demands at different times, there is something useful about having like a if you if you hang, you know, dissidents, if you shoot protesters, that's another potential trigger or clause for war. So maybe it's a deterrent. Maybe maybe then you'd have the ideal scenario where, you know, the Iranians would go into the streets and they wouldn't be shot because there would be kind of very clear threat that if they were, then all hell would break loose. But the Iranians have already kind of broken through that barrier and there was no response to the United States. And it's unclear whether that's part of the demands at this point. When Whitcoff says that it's all the security things, Trump at times has kind of said, one of the things I want to see is to stop the killing. But that's unclear. I would add that as a as a condition. But at this point, I mean, he kind of he needs to follow through, I think. I think at this point Trump needs to or something. I mean, I, you know, maybe we've lost the moment, but I think the idea that you can let this regime survive and they won't be seeking vengeance and finding a way to just get us later on is foolish. So I think I think at this point I would like to just kind of do the strikes and be done with it. And that but that presupposes that the strikes would actually topple the regime. Right. I mean, what's what I don't I don't I don't know that they necessarily would. but it would at least establish kind of back to the deterrence factor that, you know, if, if it was understood, these strikes are here because you, you, you, you shot or the Iranian people, then it would at least establish that. And then I do think that it would be a signal of sorts. And I just, I just think that the economic crisis in Iran, there's no solving it. So at a certain, and, and, and I think that, you know, it's extraordinary that the Europeans finally are now designating the revolutionary guard corps as a terrorist organization. I think you could see more momentum there. And then at a certain point, you hope that that pressure around that dinner table is such that we begin to see the kind of elite, we begin to break that elite cohesion. And I don't think that's a wish and a prayer. I think there's a lot of things we could do that we, I don't know that we are doing like right now, the state department last week announced, for example, that they are going to be revoking the visas of the family of regime elites. I'm working on a piece on that now. But you could use that as a way of possibly going after individuals. So like Ali Larajani, who some would say is the second most powerful person in Iran right now, he's like their national security advisor. His daughter, until fairly recently, was teaching at Emory University's nursing school. So, hey, do you like your daughter? Do you like her family? Do you want her to go back to Iran, where it's a disaster? So there is an opportunity to try to pressure from the outside and to quietly try to encourage these kinds of defections. And then I just do think that if the Supreme Leader was killed, then you would have a scramble for succession. and there would be more opportunities, I think, to try to have some sort of transition that would get you into a new situation, or hopefully we could get a kind of transition to democracy. That's my hope. I don't normally think of you as a R2P guy, right? Right to protect, you know. No, but that's not the reason why I think you do it. Right, right. We happen to, in this case, be an R2P. In this case, it is an R2P situation, but that's not the reason why we're doing it. We're doing it because this is a regime that is dead set on spreading mayhem in the world in opposing the United States who tried to kill our president, who tried to kill dissidents who are American citizens now who live in America, who is responsible for the maiming of tens of thousands of Americans fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention killing several thousands. Well, this is a regime that is our blood enemy and we have an and it's on the ropes and we have an opportunity to knock it out. And I think that the greatest threat to stability right now in the Middle East is the Iranian regime. So if you want those kinds of things, which are not about R2P, then this is what you have to do. You also happen to be aligning with the interest of the Iranian people. And that's a bonus. So we can debate R2P. I think R2P, I agree, is not a realistic kind of doctrine. So you kind of have to pick and choose and maybe foreign policy doctrines in general are kind of overrated. But to me, it's sort of like, all right, well, you have an abundance of reasons to do it at this point. Yeah, I mean, as we say often on here, monocausal explanations are not very useful for things. But like on a checklist, it's perfectly valuable and worthwhile to put on a list. Oh, and we'll be stopping them from slaughtering their own people, which is a plus side for intervention. Right. We keep dancing around. So I think sort of the key point that people need to understand, which is that regimes don't. Let's put it this way. You talk about your piece about people power and all that. And, you know, was it Ackerman and the other guy? Sharp. Yeah. and there are examples color revolutions you know that kind of thing where it seems like people power works but the reason people power can work of like putting protesters in the street and and and non-violent resistance and all that kind of thing is not because moral suasion alone causes regime change. It's that it causes elements of elite factions within regimes to peel off for one reason or another. And that's the real goal. So mass demonstrations are one tool among many, but they are not, and they're morally more laudatory than a lot of other tools. But, you know, bribing people in regimes, threatening people in regimes, depending on the regime and the situation, assassinating people in regimes. What you want to do is break off pieces of the elite of the regime and so you get elite competition and people rushing to cover their own ass and all that. And by the way, in that respect, a strike that killed Khamenei and let's say other Revolutionary Guard Corps generals is a powerful motivator. I don't want to be on the kill list maybe it's time to make a deal and there will always I mean this is still a revolutionary regime but it's a revolutionary regime in my view that is in this kind of I mean what's the I forget who came up with it but it started out as 80% were true believers and 20% were corrupt now it's 80% corrupt and 20% are true believers I think that's probably generally right I mean we don't know the exact percentages but that's what you want to do is you want to try to take out the true believers and then get the corrupt ones to start hedging their bets. Right, because by definition, if they're corrupt, they're self-interested. Yes, exactly. Right, and the other thing that Gene Sharp emphasized, which I think is important, is that he talks about the idea that when the dictator gives an order to fire on the demonstrators, there are several individuals in that chain of command. And if people in that chain of command say no, then he can't do it. And that's depriving the autocrat, the tyrant of their power. You're now in a situation where the regime doesn't have the money to pay the salaries that are in it. I mean, anything paid in real is worthless of the, you know, local commander of of the Basiji militia or whoever is going to be asked to do that. So then that's that's another kind of scenario. Like, all right, well, what am I fighting for? My family is starving, too. And that's what these people are saying. We want to get out of this. And then every Iranian knows that if there was a new government that just simply said, all right, we're not saying death to America. We're trying to rebuild our country, which is a great Kareem Shahjabur way of expressing it. There would be a lot of economic opportunity that would really open up. And the last time when that was promised after the 2015 Iran deal, that money went to Hezbollah and it went to blind the pockets of the corrupt people who were ruining the country. And, you know, under this guy who was sold to us as a moderate Hassan Rouhani, the president, there were more executions of dissidents than under Ahmadinejad, who was the madman. so that experience of Iranians has said okay we're not trying to reform we're not trying to kind of gradually in the system so all the people who used to call themselves the reformers are now in the regime change camp which is a kind of a process that's happened that I think a lot of the people in the West who are more hesitant have not really noticed so that's the other thing I would date back the kind of beginning of the real regime oppositions in 1999. I think Ken Pollack did that on the show. If anything, the initial calls to say the regime doesn't work because that was in response to the fact that they'd elected a reformer president who didn't deliver and newspapers were still being shut down and that this is an illusion that we can't really work within the system. They've been proven correct. That's 1999 at Tehran University. Now the whole country basically agrees. All right. So I mentioned this on the podcast, the solo podcast, a couple of weeks ago. I just want to check this box. We don't have to do the full version of this. But I was telling you before we started recording, you know, you know, I'm a big fan of the rest of history podcast. They're doing a four parter or they've just done a four parter on. And it's very sad because they were recording like at the very beginning of January. And so there was that sort of a vague undertone of hopefulness that events were going to go differently. And there's one point where they actually start talking about cracking down and whether if the Shah had just cracked down at the right time, would this all have been prevented? And they have this mini discussion about whether that kind of thing works or doesn't work. And it seems pretty poignant in the aftermath of the regime killing up to 30,000 people and charging people for the bullet that killed their family members to get the body back. I mean, it's a grotesque regime. But I've listened to the first three of the four, and I don't think they're going to go back to the original history on this. They use the coup against Mossadegh. They just sort of assert which is not unique to them This is like conventional wisdom among American elites foreign policy elites particularly of the left forever I grew up with this. I would have imbibed it myself, except my dad was always lecturing me about how it's not really true. It's more complicated and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they just sort of simply assert that, but for the United States fomenting a coup against this democratically elected guy, Mossadegh, you know, everything would be different. And the one defense I would offer of it is that what they're referring to is the state of mind of the radicals in 78 and 79 and their view of what happened with Mossadegh. So like, even if it's the actual story is more complicated, the average Iranian in the street who was pissed off at America believed it was true because you had Americans saying it was true. Enough people believe they drew it. In American politics, there were people who believed it was true. So can you give me a sort of the short Reader's Digest version of like how you see the actual events that led to like who was Mossadegh? Who was Kermit Roosevelt? OK, so Mohamed Mossadegh was one of the kind of original heroes of I mean, he was very young man in the 1905 revolution that created the modulus and gave us the original Iranian constitution. And he was, as a legislator and a lawyer, he had an impeccable reputation as somebody of integrity who was not corruptible. He's somebody who came from a kind of, you know, he was part of the court of the old dynasty before the Pallavis, the Qajar. And, you know, the story about him was that he had a very profitable post where he was a tax collector at one point. And he sent tax collectors against his own mother. Do you remember Larry Klayman? Yes. He sued his own mother. Right. Anyway, so most of that has been adopted by the kind of anti-imperial left. But that's not really who he was. He really believed in the necessity of reform that you weren't getting under the Qajar. What he wants is like this very important thing in Iran in the 20th century is land reform. So what he wants is the idea that like, you know, a lot of the mosques and the clerics kind of there were a lot of absentee landlords that kind of had a peasant class. And the same process that happens in Russia hadn't yet happened in Iran. And he wants that. He wants he's an early adopter of like the idea that women should have the right to vote. He wants universal education. He wants more literacy. So he's like more of a good government Iranian constitution. And he also distinguishes himself in 1925, which is when the Majlis overwhelmingly votes to put Reza Pallavi's grandfather, the first Reza Pallavi, on the throne, as it were, as the new Shah and kind of have the constitution gives him all of these powers. And Mossadegh is the one one of the only voices that actually gives a speech in the Majlis saying, this is a very bad idea. We don't want a Shah. We want a prime minister and a president. So those are all to his credit. But then finally, when he does become the prime minister, which is in a period in Iranian history at the beginning of the 1950s, where World War II was terrible for Iran. The British and the Russians invade because they need Iran as a kind of supply route. And they banish the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty. And then because of the lobbying of other Iranian elites, they allow for the very young Muhammad Reza Shah Palavi to remain as the Shah, but is basically ceremonial, doesn't really have any real power, even though you could argue in the Constitution he would have a great deal of power. So when the British and the Soviets finally leave, Iran is at a different state of play. And the prime minister in some ways is more powerful than the Shah, even though that wouldn't be true later on. But nonetheless, the Shah has the ability to fire the prime minister because that was the kind of powers that were invested in him in 1925. Much like the British system, right? Yeah, sort of like that, right. So in this period, Mossadegh wants to nationalize Iranian oil. I think there's a good case for that on the merits. There was a terrible deal that the British cut with the Qajaris that was exploitative. That would basically mean that the British Petroleum would control Iranian oil for decades and decades. Mossadegh doesn't want that. Eisenhower, Truman before him were very sympathetic to the Iranians. Mossadegh goes to the Americans. to be the kind of neutral arbiters in this disputed first. But Mossadegh is also paranoid and is slowly but surely kind of becoming an autocrat in office. So he does a number of things. He purges the top kind of officers in the Iranian army that he believed would have been loyal to others. He passes this weird law, which is basically you can't criticize the government. he eventually kind of fires everybody on Iran's Supreme Court and replaces it with his people. Then the last move is that he closes the Majlis, which is a super undemocratic thing. That's the crisis. And you're talking about the parliament, right? Yeah, that's the parliament, right? That's the crisis. In this period, he's also losing his own domestic allies. Now, this is why I don't believe that at least the Islamists in the 79 revolution cared at all about Mossadegh, because the Speaker of the Parliament, who's incredibly powerful, but is also the most senior cleric in Kome, a guy named Ayatollah Khashoggi, he is one of the people who turns on Mossadegh. And if you really want to understand what happened and why Mossadegh was sort of ousted, in part the role that the CIA and the MI6 played was they had to convince Mohammed Reza Shah who had already retreated to his summer palace and was ready to leave the country I should say and at one point does leave the country they convince him to issue the order of firing Mossadegh Mossadegh then arrests his errand boy and says no so there's a huge crisis Shah leaves the country he's in Italy He then weirdly is staying at the same hotel as CIA director Alan Dulles, which has been fodder for conspiracy theories for ever since. And then what ends up happening is that there are demonstrations in the streets calling on Mossadegh to resign. But that was not because of the black propaganda from the CIA. It was because Khashoggi, who is an Islamist and also somebody who is very influential to Ayatollah Khomeini, decides to switch sides and says i think i'll you know i'll make a i'll i'll have a better deal what's that scene in the sopranos where juniors looks like you know i'm better off with tony right he just can't sell it yeah yeah he can't sell it right exactly so he's like i think i'm better off i'm better off with the shah and so that's what happened and so the real reason is that it's not just fashani it's like all of his allies and for the year before all of these people are kind of quietly going to the americans hey could you back a coup this most of the guy is out of his mind, and he was doing all these things. So that's the story. I like to say it wasn't so much of a coup, it was a duel. It was a duel between these two forces, and at the time, the Shah was weak. The Shah had already left the country, which is almost right next to abdication. So yes, there was some intervention, but the real thing was that within Iranian society, it was Khashoggi who was the Speaker of the Parliament and also the leading cleric. So the clerics and Khomeini himself, they didn't care about that. They didn't necessarily like Masada either. It is also true that once Pallavi's back and he then really does begin to sort of assert himself and undermine the power of the Parliament as well, we're talking over the next few years, he then launches something called the White Revolution, which are many of the same reforms that most of them wanted. So he does the land reform. He gives women the right to vote. He does all these things. And Khomeini hates it. And then Khomeini then starts saying, you know, he gives speeches like referring to him as a boy, saying he's not somebody, you know, he's not somebody who anybody respects. he's questioning his manhood and eventually he is arrested and the irony here is that you know the Shah's intelligence service the Savak does have sometimes a well-earned reputation for torture and doing very nasty things but at the time the head of the Savak was this guy Hassan Pakhravan who himself was a reformer and he said do not treat Khomeini badly has lunch with him once a week trying to get to know him as a good intelligence man would. And in that period, convinces the Shah, as the sort of the main voice saying, I don't think you should hang him to do something else. So he gets out of jail, Khomeini is back to his old tricks, starts calling out the Shah again, and then he's exiled. At first to Turkey, then to Iraq. The reason that this is important, I mean, the postscript to the story is that Pachravan, much older, in 1978, 79, comes back to Iran because he sees the country is crisis. And maybe he believes, we don't really have a record of this, that Khomeini would remember that he treated him humanely when the tables returned. He is one of the first people to be executed. And that's the beginning of the revolution. This is like early 79. What happens? They are these ad hoc 15-minute trials followed by a bullet to the back of the head, and then the corpse literally photographed and put on the front page of all the newspapers. That is, it is a Jacobin. That's what I would compare it to. That's the beginning of the revolution. And that's when you know that what started as a broad base movement to have real democracy and to kind of get rid of what they see as a corrupt, you know, regime that the country stagnating and et cetera, it's hijacked and stolen by the most extreme Islamists. And it is kind of, it has been that way ever since. the idea that Mossadegh would be this sort of wound that was nursed that is not exactly right because there were plenty of people who would have been kind of in the Mossadegh camp that supported what the Shah was doing in the early 60s with this white revolution. They turn on him later because he kind of insulates himself and is obsessed with the 2500 year anniversary of Persian monarchy and this huge party. But it's not like they kind of a lot of Iran had moved on is what I'm trying to get at. So I didn't even buy that. And I also think the idea that this is the original scene of America and Iran is there are a lot of Iranians who will tell you that what ended up happening in 53 with most of that was a restoration of the Constitution, not its abrogation. Okay, so I defer to you on the only place I would sort of modestly, at least for illumination's sake, pushback is and you kind of referenced this is that at the beginning of the revolution, it wasn't an Islamist revolution. The Islamists were the most badass faction among the revolutionaries, right? And this is one of the things that explains some of the jackassery among Western lefties who supported the Iranian revolution is that a lot of it was, a lot of the students were doing sort of lefty sit-in cosplay. and even some of the sort of Islamist guys in the beginning, they had this view of America that was very sort of of the moment, modern 60s inflected radicalism that's why they let the women and the black hostages go to show that they were part of the international coalition of the oppressed and all that kind of thing, right? And so you could see in the beginning, my only point is is that you can see in the beginning when there were a lot of leftists before they were all executed or banished or thrown in jail, a lot of the leftists, they might have been subscribers to the original sin of American foreign policy narrative in much the same way that anti-British paranoia kind of unites all sorts of weird factions in Iran. Yeah, I see that, but there was also, first of all, it wasn't all just nonviolent tactics. there were bombings there was a famous burning of the Rex Theater which was blamed on the regime but probably I'm almost certain was the work of Khomeini's minions and there was also a moment like this kind of reminds me a little bit of Trump but like in late 78 the Shah fires his cabinet including the prime minister and gives a speech where he says I'm joining the revolution kind of not realizing but you could sort of see Trump doing that a little bit like with Minnesota just saying like I'm putting Holman in charge because oh who are these people who hired these people what's going on you know what I mean so there is like an element there where like the Shah is trying to kind of you know he cares about what his people think of him which is why he ultimately ends up leaving and it's the other part of this is that Khomeini is in touch with military at the time and tells them if you declare neutrality, which they end up doing, and you don't fire on the protesters, then you'll be safe after the revolution. And, of course, that was a lie. They were purged and killed, many of them. So I take your point on that maybe they were buying into this sort of lefty thing. I mean, the other big thing is that in 1979, Kermit Roosevelt, who is in charge on the CIA side of this operation, publishes his memoir, basically saying the coup. I did it by Kermit Roosevelt. And I have no idea how that got past the CIA pre-publication review board. It was the worst timing because people didn't really know about this history in America and other places. And that's when you really start to see everybody talking about aha and connecting these events. I take your point. There were probably people who were swimming in these ideas of anti-colonialism that were like, this is this one's for most of that, you know, but a lot of them were also they were more concerned with the fact that, you know, there were still incredible wealth gap. And, you know, let's be honest. Mohammed Reza Shah was a flaunter. He liked to show how splendid his life was as a king, which is a very Persian thing, if you at least take the ancient Greeks word for it. But that's one of the things that the rest of the history podcast they get into is that prior to these events, American newscasts devoted some total of five minutes a year to covering Iran. and it was mostly sort of the Shah of Iran is in San Maritz for the debut of this kind of thing. Pallavi liked to give interviews to Barbara Walters and Mike Wallace. But it was a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous kind of vibe to a lot of it. Also, in 73, he has this huge, he rebuilds Persepolis and invites all of the royalty of the world and drives them down in red Mercedes limousines and it's incredible ostentatious display. Alright, we're going to take a quick break but we'll be back soon with more from the Remnant Podcast. Alright, so we should get to the Pallavi piece of this. The current Pallavi is the son of the Shah who was deposed and the great-grandson or grandson of the first Shah? He's the grandson of the first Shah. For people who don't know, Shah just means king in Persian or monarch. Now, I want to try two analogies that have been in my head since the beginning of this latest thing. One is that the Shah is – I shouldn't say the Shah, but Rizal Pahlavi. It's kind of like Winnie the Pooh in China. It's like in China, you will get arrested or you can get in a lot of trouble if you post on social media a picture of Winnie the Pooh because the joke is that Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh, and it's a way to mock the head of the totalitarian regime. And they keep changing what the meme is because they have to stay one step ahead of censors, who, first of all, you cannot get on a lot of Chinese social media a picture of Winnie the Pooh up there. It's just, like, banned. And so it feels like to some extent, Pallavi is the guy whose picture you would show to piss off the regime, right? He's one of the last symbols that everyone can recognize, that everyone can sort of say, okay, if you're for him, that means you're against the regime. The analogy here is like the first generation of British punks would often wear swastikas, not because they were Nazis, but because their parents fought in the Second World War. And it was the ultimate way to say F you to your parents. Right. And so the second analogy I would use is and this gets into some really dated rank punditry. But in the 1990s, during Clinton's late 90s, Clinton's troubles, polling showed that huge numbers of Americans, particularly Republicans, supported the idea of George Bush running again. And it was George W. Bush or George Bush running for president. And I am convinced, and I've been convinced now for 25 years, that the name recognition part of it was to W's advantage because people felt guilty about firing his dad. And it was simply just a way of saying we made a mistake by electing Clinton or by abandoning H.W. And it had less to do with W himself. People just knew the name, right? It was just brand recognition. and he raised a ton of money off of it and he actually won the nomination in part because he was able to translate that early popularity in the polls. Those are the two ways I've been kind of thinking about this Pallavi is that, because all I've ever heard about the guy is he's kind of kind of an empty suit sophisticated decent, all the rest you paint, you give both sides and you repeat. So So explain how much support he actually has versus how much of his support is simply a middle finger to the existing regime. Well, in a way, I kind of think it's both. But I think that, you know, we have this one poll from 2024, which says that he outpaces every other personality in terms of support from Iranians. He's a 31 percent. Like Khamenei is 9 percent. percent um nick not uh negris wahamidi who is a nobel he's prize winning uh lawyer is i think at six percent palavi is the kind of you know he has more support of the field than anyone else according to this polling and then we also know that this is i mean in women life freedom there were there was evidence that people were chanting palavi's name there have always been iranians in Iran, more kind of in the working class who, you know, have fond memories of nationalistic reasons for liking the Shah. And the other thing we shouldn't discount is that even before the internet, Pahlavi was trying to communicate directly with the Iranian people So I think that there is a sense especially since Iranians have satellites and they can watch satellite TVs and these other kind of Iranian Farsi language networks that are not in Iran. And Pahlavi has communicated and he has expressed a kind of nuanced view that like he'd like to lead Iran to a democratic transition. He is not necessarily he's he's for many years, he did not make claims to restoring the monarchy. He sounds a little different now in these heady times, and also because he has a new set of advisors in recent years. So I think it's a kind of combination of those things. His supporters will say he's the only viable person to lead the opposition. And I can get partly the way there, except in order to fulfill that, to be the leader of the revolution, which is what they've put out these transition documents calling the leader of the national uprising, in order to get there, you have to have buy-in from all of these other groups that I think want to buy in, but they have been alienated. And here we're talking about other resistance groups. Yeah, like some of this is like, okay, so there are 10 million Kurds. That's an estimate. Maybe there's 15 million that live in Iran, and they have two main political parties. And for the most part, they hate the regime for obvious reasons, and they have been part of a national opposition. They don't want to, you know, go into they don't want to break away and become an independent Iranian Kurdistan. All that's good. But he has kind of he hasn't done. He's alienated a lot of the leadership of these Iranian Kurdish groups. There are like all the people affiliated with the Women Life Freedom. We know Masa Alinejad, who lives in America, who's a big part of it. But like, you know, some of Pallavi's supporters have been absolutely vicious against her. There's that woman I mentioned, Nagras Mohamedy, who has also been at times attacked by people who are advisors and including Reza Pallavi's wife, Yasgene, on social media. So in that respect, he's not doing the job that I mean, I wouldn't have a problem if he was the most well-known person leading this coalition and included everybody. But he hasn't really been able to do it. It's been a little bit recently as of my way or the highway. In 2023, there was an effort to try to bring the opposition together at Georgetown University, and Pallavi formally left about a couple months after their inaugural meeting. So that to me says, okay, I could see you in that job, but you've got to bring the people together. And he hasn't done that. And I am holding out hope because I absolutely loathe the Islamic Republic, so I want him to succeed. and he does seem like the viable person to do it, but he hasn't done it yet. The other thing, though, is deeper. And that is, I say this at the end of my piece, but I really believe it, which is that as evidenced by the fact that you have people chanting Javud Shah on the streets of Iran, you could say that nearly 50 years after the Islamic Revolution, they really haven't killed the idea of a Pahlavi dynasty. They haven't destroyed the line. There are probably millions of Iranians who would like to see Pahlavi return. America destroyed the Pahlavi line because he's been here for 40 years and he has assimilated I have in some ways I don't know if I could call it mixed feelings about it but it reminds me and I think you would agree with me that one of the things I love about our country is that we are a magnet for genius we are a magnet for talent and all of these Iranians who came to America after the 79 revolution have built a life for themselves in America largely contributed richly to this country, despite what the alleged leaders of the heritage Americans might say. But I think, you know, I think I think we're a better country for the contributions of Iranian Americans who've come here with all their talents and to make, you know, to to to take part of of of the dream of our country. And Paul Reza Pahlavi is one of those people. And he has said as much. At different three years ago, in a very revealing three hour marathon podcast with the with Patrick Bette David. I don't know if you're familiar. He's an Iranian American and an entrepreneur. But he says at the end of it, I've lived here for 40 years. All my friends are here. My family's here. What would I go back to? That does not sound like the king in exile. That sounds like somebody who is assimilated American. He's 65 years old. He wants to live in this country. I totally understand that. And so, you know, and I think that it's a dilemma for a lot of Iranian Americans. I don't know how many would necessarily return to Iran at this point. They have good lives here. We're going to see something similar one of these days with Cuba. How many of these Cuban Americans... Right. 25 years ago, I knew Cuban Americans... I had friends who were like, my dad will go back and take his house. That friend's dad is gone now. Right. Life moves on. Last thing on Iran, because I did want to get to some other stuff, but... Nationalizing the midterms? um no but like so let's point on around um i'm kind of with the wall street journal i assume you are too that that going for a deal is not like that we just requires a promise from the iranians is basically saving the iranian is saving this regime at a moment where you could actually topple And and I think that I understand. I think you understand. We've been in these in this stuff for a very long time that. Regime change is a very poor odor. It's one of the reasons why Trump didn't do it in Venezuela. And it would be massively hypocritical for this. Administration to actually do it, I'm fine with hypocrisy, right, because I want that regime gone. But for this regime, you don't have the instability. This regime has been the foremost exporter of murder and terror for basically a half century now. Yes. And it is an implacable enemy. And the idea of letting them kill 30,000 of their own people and then getting a paper promise that is not reliable would be wildly disappointing. So, first of all, do you agree with that? And second of all, as you said at the beginning, and I meant to follow up on this, I just reminded myself, that the Iranians are the primary source of instability in the region. I think we both agree on that, right? And you said it, I agreed with it. So, what is your sense of the reluctance of the other nations in the region from actually toppling the regime? I mean, the Saudis have been in a proxy war with... Well, the Saudis are Janus face. Okay, well, okay. But so explain it to me. What's the reluctance from Israel? Well, the reluctance from Israel is the interceptors. They want to get their ducks in a row. But I think the Israelis would love to go forward with regime change. Netanyahu has said as much. I think the Saudis privately, according to recent reporting, their defense chief was in town and he was saying you kind of have to do it now you can't let them you know because if they survive they're coming for everyone they will be driven by you know burning vengeance the Turks are a different story Erdogan the president of Turkey is an Islamist his party is basically a Muslim Brotherhood party it would be wrong to say that the Islamic Republic is Muslim Brotherhood, but they are certainly inspired by political Islam. It's the Shia version of it. For many years, people would say, well, look at Iran. Iran is an example of a successful country that is organized around the tenets of Islam as opposed to other kind of political organization. So I kind of understand why the Turks and the Qataris, who I think also have some true believers in their royal family, when it comes to political Islam, would be opposed to it for ideological reasons. There is, of course, the like, do we trust that, well, there isn't going to be a civil war or something else that comes next that will be more destabilizing. But at this point, it's always compared to what? If you asked that question five years ago, I think you'd say, I don't really like the Islamic Republic of Iran very much, but boy, it's kind of better than if we have all these unknown horribles. But now I think we know how bad they are. We know that we can't trust them. we know that they'll rush to all kinds, you know, a nuke. If they get the chance, they'll try to assassinate Donald Trump. That's my understanding of kind of, I think the Emiratis are on board. So I don't think, I think it's Turkey and Qatar that are the real holdoffs. And I think that Saudi would like to have it both ways. And I think Israel, again, Israel is just, it's about the supply chain and the missile defense. and there is a lot there is a there's a huge unknown and i think if it was up to trump what he would do is he would pluck you know the corrupt and clever you know irtc rat that was leaving the ship at the right time and put him in charge and like he has with delci rodriguez in um venezuela uh i certainly hope that uh rubio is right when he talks about there is a transition and that they will not be in charge forever, but we'll see. Again, I could be wrong, but I just think that... Let me put it like this. Do you think that an aide didn't show Trump the statement from that Iranian general who said, next time we won't miss? They're talking S. You know, they're... I don't know if they can help themselves, is what I mean. And I don't know that they could even accept a paper promise not to, like, the terms that Whitcoff is going to be presenting, I guess he goes, we're talking on a Tuesday, so today. So all of that tells me that I think there is going to be some kind of strike, and my hope is it is either decapitation strikes. We've been talking offline, as it were. You're absolutely free to characterize it as, or correct me as however you wish, but you've struggled, right? Because on the one hand, you're a foreign policy guy, right? You primarily vote foreign policy, you think foreign policy. And for the reasons we've already gone through, getting rid of the Iranian regime would be an unalloyed good for the world. And it would be good for America. And it's something that a lot of people have been struggling, wanted for a very long time. At the same time, you didn't clear your mind. and as instructed in Ghostbusters, and the form of the Iranian regime's destruction is the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, which is Donald Trump. And Donald Trump's motives are not your own, I think it's fair to say. This is a life we've chosen, right? How do you think about the fact that Donald Trump is doing things on the domestic scene that are deeply problematic, but instrumentally you like much more of what he's doing on the international scene than you dislike. It comes down to something that happened last month or maybe it was in December everything kind of blurs together when Maria Machado literally presented her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump one side of me was just like this egotistical man-baby monster and like who in their right mind would accept that what in the world is this about and it's it's almost like this is this is what this what a disgrace but then i was like okay but on the other hand i completely get why she did it because if there is a chance that we can transition in Venezuela to a democracy, to elections, and get them out of the nightmare of Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, then I would do whatever. And she put her ego aside and played to this man's like man-baby narcissism. And I had to ask myself, okay, well, what do you care about? Do you care about these absolutely cringe-inducing optics, which tell you everything you need to know, as if I didn't know already about the character, the very low character of this man? Or do you want the results? And then I have a second set of questions. And again, these are questions that I struggle with them. Because like when he says he wants to nationalize the midterm elections in what, 15 states, all of the alarm bells go off my head. I think that he has absolutely no understanding or he doesn't care about the Constitution. It's terrible. but then I think about it and I say alright there was a consensus in foreign policy that said we had to at some point just make a deal with the Islamic Republic and just accept they were going to be around for the foreseeable future I disagreed with that consensus but I don't know that there would be any other you couldn't have a president that went through the normal processes of making policy that would have been able to do what Trump even did in the first term, which is taking out Qasem Soleimani, let alone pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and all these other things like the Abraham Accords. It was because Trump learned in certain areas where I think the consensus was harming us and the consensus was wrong, not to trust his experts and the institutions of government that we got, I think, decisions that were really good. But on the other hand, that doesn't mean they're always wrong. And it doesn't mean that there isn't a reason for having that, such as his true social posts saying that we would support the Iranians, where I don't think he realized that we didn't have the interceptors to prepare ourselves for the missile tech. So that's, again, a double-edged sword. It's not a justification for Trump. I'm just saying, I don't know that you could get the good stuff without the bad stuff, if I'm being honest. And then the rest of it is always a compare to what? I felt it much more deeply in like 2022, 2023, and 2024 when we had President Biden. And I saw all these kind of failed. I couldn't believe the hemming and the hawing about Gaza and just pulling back on arming Israel and telling them they couldn't go into Rafa. And you could go down the list of a lot of things and the fact that they weren't enforcing sanctions on Iran. And that, I just thought on foreign policy, that was really bad. I disagreed, obviously, on the trans stuff and like the EI and you can go through it. And I know we agree on this. And then the alternative is, you know, the monkey's paw. The alternative is like, OK, you don't like it here. You get what you wish, but you're going to get it all pretty bad. So sometimes I like to think of Trump as like a golem that the Republican Party kind of helped create to, you know, help protect the town. And then he turns on the town. And so that's where I'm at. And I that's I that's why I never called myself a never Trumper. I called myself a neither Trumper because I didn't like the Democrats, but I always could see very clearly the deep kind of flaws in Trump. And I am very worried when I see the sort of his vocal cheerleaders and members of Congress cheering. calling Alex Pretty the domestic terrorist and throwing that word around knowing what that means after the guy is dead at one point I don't know if you brought this up but somebody brought it up I know it was our friend Michael Moynihan he was being interviewed and he was asked about Renee Good and his response was I understand that her parents voted for me so they're good people what the hell is that or the there was a tweet from the guy from the Justice Department saying, if you support Trump, then you should apply for a job. All of these things. I'm like, no, no, no, no. And I'm saying this to somebody who wanted to have very deep reforms of the FBI, who thought that the Justice Department, you know, helped enable a very unfair investigation into Trump in his first term in Russiagate. So I say this to somebody who's very sympathetic. No, not everything was okay. We weren't doing great before until this guy came around. So there's a part of it where like, I have to acknowledge, yeah, I like some of the wrecking ball, but the other parts of the wrecking ball are really bad and dangerous. And I just hope that the country and its institutions are kind of resilient enough to kind of get past this and rebuild what's worth rebuilding, leave aside the stuff that I am kind of glad that he's bulldozed through. I mean, obviously, we're at different valences on some of this stuff, but I can't begrudge the point of view. I think the golem thing, you know, I struggle with the right metaphor. I've used this with you before about how, like, if you've got a bunch of just horrible stuff and a bunch of great stuff in a china shop and you don't leash a bull in it, 50% of what the bull destroys is going to be worthwhile destruction. The other half is not, right? But it is not an argument for putting bulls in china shops. And I worry partly because I'm a, you know, obsessive about conservative stuff, I worry more that the good things don't have nearly enough mass on the scale to deal with the long-term bad stuff on the other side of the scale in terms of if the conservative movement basically just becomes a nationalist populist movement, that is long-term disastrous for the country. And in a way that some of these foreign policy gains and some of the domestic policy stuff, like let's assume it works out well. I don't think it will, but for the sake of argument, like long-term changing America's understanding of itself, Like if we start to see the logic that applied to his trial is bullying on Greenland become sort of inherent and entrenched in American foreign policy. That is, I think, not only the disastrous, it's immoral and dishonorable. I don't have a great answer for this, right? because this is one of these problems like you, you've, we talked about this a zillion times, but like part of the problem is an enormous number of people on the right. Think the job of being a public intellectual is sort of acting like a political consultant for a party. And the problem with this is, is like that expectations there and it's the reality of, of, of our politics. And so, you know, you sort of want to say, you know, make the arguments for the policy but concede that the guy implementing the policy is selfishly motivated and you just have to sort of try to make as many distinctions as you can I just worry if he's serious about this nationalizing election stuff right I think the day he said after Pete Hegseth said the new mission of the military is lethality which in the abstract I can defend. I don't think American military has a huge lethality problem. But then when Donald Trump followed up with that weird infomercial telling the top military brass from all around the world, and we're going to test out our new military in American cities, like that should have been like, okay, I'm done with this. And it's not because necessarily he was going to go through with it, but it's that the fact that he cannot comprehend the problem with thinking in those kinds of terms is really worrisome. And the way in which, I mean, if you just look at the journey that, what's his face from Utah, the senator? Mike Lee. Mike Lee is on Or as his Twitter based Mike Lee Yeah I mean when you go from being like hyper libertarian to trying to start the exploratory committee for Stephen Miller to run for president in 2036 like the corrupting effect of Trump on our institutions on our arguments on the self of America and the self of conservatism is really worrying to me in a way that It makes it difficult for me to say, well, but, you know, if you put his Iran policy in the scale and if you put, you know, the bombing of the nuclear program in the scale and whatever, I just don't know that the weight of that stuff matches. First of all, I think it's fair. I mean, the one thing I would say, just drawing from history, is that the last populist phase we had with the populist president was Andrew Jackson. I would argue that that starts in 1824, even though he technically loses the election, but he got the most votes. And it burns out, you know, if you start in 1824, 16 years later, after one term of Martin B. And eventually we have these moments, these flare ups. It was a perfect storm for the populace, if you think about it, you know, especially after 2020. And so it's kind of weird how Trump's, you know, you know, there's the Biden interregnum, but it's really we're in the populist era right now. And I wouldn't be surprised if people that you might have a scenario where people just forget they said all these kind of ridiculous things in the same way that we've seen in a smaller sense. a number of people have forgotten that they once thought it was a good idea to defund the police or that there was a moment, although I don't know where we are with it, where a lot of lefties are like, I just think women's sports should remain women's sports or something like that. So I'm not discounting what you're saying because I worry about that too, but I'm not sure that that's going to be kind of a new reality. So when you talk about, well, will there now be just a nationalist, nativist kind of party that will replace the conservatives for a little bit. But I just think the conservatives have superior ideas that are more applicable. And ultimately, things will change, especially after Trump has sort of left the scene. Listen, I'm glad that he has put Holman in to deal with the disaster of Minneapolis. But what does it tell you that his secretary of Homeland Security and his top domestic policy advisor and deputy chief of staff thought it was not only OK, but it was like a good idea to lie to the American people about these terrible incidents where Americans were killed who were exercising their right to protest? What does it tell you that they thought that the right thing to do in the Trump administration was to call them domestic terrorists, to lie about the circumstances, to say there will be no investigation? That tells me that we are like, this is a, that there is a corrosive problem. There is that kind of rot. It doesn't, but I also think that we have an ability in this country because of our electoral democracy to renew and to change. And, you know, that's why I think you have to worry, of course, about the health of the Republican Party and the fact that it's become very Trumpy. And you'd like to see more Republicans who aren't retiring coming out and saying these things that this is ridiculous. I was pleased to see that Senator Kennedy said it's ridiculous that anyone would invade Greenland. And he's not and he is going to run again or like he isn't retiring. So that was good. But you also have to worry about the Democrats, right? Because if the Democrats come in, we're just going to, I think, compound the cycle. But, you know, we're largely in agreement. My only thing was to say, I just think we have a capability in our political culture to just have these kind of like, you know, what is it? We're making movie references, Men in Black, where you put on the thing and it erases your memory. Like, oh, I can't believe I ever said that, you know? I think that's right. I mean, I think that was my problem with Ross Douthat's piece about the end of conservatism was... It was, I really enjoyed reading your, his piece and your piece. I thought it was, I really learned, I love that. Can we do more of that, that, that back and forth where really smart people, you know, seriously argue in, but, but like with ideas and not just ad hominem. It was so great to read it. It reminded me of like the Hitchens versus Chomsky after 9-11. Can we just take a moment to talk about Chomsky and Epstein? I don't know if you care. Sure, sure. I mean, go ahead. you and I probably we have the receipts of how awful Gnome Chauncey has been over the years and it is delicious to watch all of these lefties I see on social media twisting or like saying I am through with them how could he be friends with them it's just this is what I voted for even though I don't think they should have been released I get all that like I'm with you it's bad precedent okay, we need to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon. All right, so let me try to tie it back to the conversation we were just having, right? You and I, the life we've chosen is about having arguments, right? That's just what we do, right? And it doesn't mean having fights. It doesn't mean being petty or hurling insults. It means like we like ideas and we like arguing about ideas and we like arguing about history. and that's a whole point of your podcast, a huge point of my podcast, and all that kind of stuff. This is the problem with the Trump administration when you're going through that litany of things, calling them domestic terrorists, right? It's this administration, as you put it, which I've invoked a bunch of times, you did a fantastic podcast episode on how Trump's a b****er, right? And I've since bought and read the essay that sort of, the on BS essay. This administration does not care, and its biggest defenders, does not care about telling the truth or about arguing in good faith about anything. And that is the thing, like, it's, I'm kind of like, I'll be self-indulgent, I'll be a prima donna. I have, that's the one thing I cannot forgive. I can forgive in an intellectual sense all sorts of terrible ideological positions from Bolshevism to racism to all sorts of things. Like I'm willing to engage with people if they're making good faith arguments about things. But when they just lie or don't even lie, as you know, at least lies acknowledge what the truth is. when they just make stuff up pretextually, that means I think that that violates the core idea of, whether you want to call it democratic or small-R republican or Western enlightenment-based values, whatever system of beliefs that we believe in, that is a rejection of them at a really metaphysical level. And so what made me think about wanting to come back to that is the Epstein file stuff. You know, Steve Bannon has something like 15 hours of interviews with Epstein that he did as part of an effort to rehabilitate Epstein. He was very close with Epstein. He wanted to use Epstein's stuff to blackmail other people and all these kinds of things. It makes it impossible for me to take any of the sort of Magosphere influencers seriously when they you know, I don't know, Jack Basobiec and these kinds of jackwads, when they want to sort of use the Epstein files to go after the Jews or go after elites or whatever, but they're utterly silent about like people like Steve Bannon, who is their patron and all of that. It just shows how it's just weaponizing things rather than arguing in good faith about anything. And I think that that's the thing I think of all the takeaways from the Epstein stuff. That's one of the most important ones for me is that even the people who are most adamant about the importance of the Epstein files, they just see it as like this giant flea market bin of bric-a-brac. and they get to rummage through it for the weapons they want rather than actually care about the actual issues involved. Okay, so you're true. The only caveat I would say is that I agree with you that all the BSing is enough already, and it's at a level that, I mean, I would say every president and politician BSes to a certain degree, but the level is too much and the brazenness is too much and i mean even the department of agriculture has standards for fecal parts per billion in our grain supply right i understand that politics is going to have a certain amount of bs in it but it can't be about you can't declare that you're bombing blowing up possibly violating the laws of war to fight the drug war claiming it's fentanyl and then the second you get the opportunity you decapitate the venezuelan regime and declare no this is actually all about oil like you can't yeah no that's operate that way that's super dangerous i just would say i would have loved it like it the old old new republic would have had like a column that would just say when it was about fentanyl i was on board but cocaine come on anyway it's like this is going to raise the price of anyway just kidding um to your point i just but i just would my other part of that though is i just think that america has a soft spot in their heart outside of politics for bs and what i mean by that is like it's huge part of advertising it's like i think of that famous scene from mad men when don draper tells lucky strikes. No, everyone's cigarettes is poison. Your cigarettes are toasted. You know, that's the kind of that's a thing about us as Americans. We are not like ancient Sparta, where no one could tell a lie. And like, you know, if you did, that was it for you. We tolerate it. We tolerate a certain kind of patter, whether it's the modern podcasters, whether it was the old talk radio guys, whether it's like sports talk. If you just listen to it, It's all stream of BS. So sometimes I think to myself, finally, an American president caught up with American culture. Even though I do think you're right, it's disastrous because we're not talking about who the starting quarterback for the Eagles should be. We're talking about the, you know, reasons why we just invaded a country. You know what I'm saying? So those and that's a different thing. And that is a problem. But I also think in some ways I I've always thought that Trump was a kind of reflection of who we are in that moment. And it is not always it. And it's it's sort of sad. I try to be optimistic about America. You know, our mutual friend, Yval Levin. I asked him about this for my Declaration of Independence one. And he's like, you know, I've been long term about it. And he said something about the Declaration of Independence, which I'd love. which is that you can't say you didn't know. These are the reasons for our country. These ideas will endure. And that's giving me just that glimmer of hope that we'll get, you know, we'll burn, the populist phase will burn out. The only other thing I'll just say about the populism is that the people who are most influential in populist land, what's fascinating to me is that like most members of Congress, completely irrelevant. The people who really matter in the MAGAverse are these influencers like meghan kelly and tucker carlson but none of them know like how many parts per billion of arsenic should be tolerated in the drinking water none of them know you know how to think about setting the federal reserve interest rates none of them know anything about like you know how to assess the you know resilience of the chinese military and you know there's all these things that yeah that we rely on in this incredibly complicated world that populists give us zero nothing and so even a populist leader, even a Donald Trump, who is a populist leader, who has many of these same kind of qualities, at the end of the day, kind of does have to rely on people who know what they're doing. Even though I was saying earlier how he rejected certain kind of expert consensus is, at the end of the day, that's just how it is. Cold comfort in the moment, I realize, but I do think that at a certain point, we kind of will get back to certain stuff. Yeah, look, to bring in Yuval about it, Yuval doesn't like the word optimistic because it – and I'm not sure I agree with him about the wordsmithing here, but I agree with his point. He says he doesn't like the word optimistic because it's sort of like hoping the weather will get better, right? It's just like you – there's no agency involved. I think he used a different word, but he's like, you know, long-term, I believe in America. He liked hope because hope, he argues, gives you a sense of agency like you're going to work to make it better. This is the problem with saying, well, America is resilient and all these kind of things. It's only resilient if the people who want it to heal itself work towards the healing. You can't hope just all the animal spirits will do it. And, you know, I'm with you on the American culture and the BS stuff, but you don't want a cardiac surgeon who's a BSer, right? No, you don't. And you don't want a secretary of health and human services who's a BSer. No, I agree. We now have people like his opposite number in the state of Florida just announced that he wants to get rid of all vaccine mandates of any kind because who are we to tell you what to put in your body? Your body is a gift from God. We're seeing spikes in measles. So when you talk about a president who's caught up with the culture about BSing, I take your point. But at the same time, you don't want the sluices of BS to sort of poison the institutions that cannot work with the metaphysics of BS. You need people who know what science does, and you can't do science by BS. And Robert F. Kennedy is a good example of a trial lawyer, Man Kay, who's doing science as BS. All true. And that's bad. But I guess I worry about when I... It's very easy in this moment. And sometimes I find myself saying this. It's like, this guy is going to destroy the republic. What is he, nationalized elections? elections, 15 states, what is this Fulton County thing? He's turned the Justice Department into just an instrument of his own personal revenge. And we can go down the list. And I'm like, this is really bad. But once you then say, all right, and I have to do everything I can to resist him, then it leaves yourself open to, I think, exacerbating the problem. And you find yourself, you know, lying in the other direction. And that's what we had in the beginning with Trump one, where I think he was far more restrained and wasn't, you know, wasn't this form of Trump. But that's when you had, you know, his own government turned against him through his political machinations. And that helped discredit those institutions that we also need to protect from the sluice of the BS. So we're largely in agreement here. I'm just saying that I think that it's important to then kind of keep your head and not get to the point where you're like, all right, we're now in resistance mode. And I do think there are a lot of people, and I don't necessarily blame them. I mean, I don't like seeing National Guard. I'm in Washington, D.C. I don't like seeing the National Guard troops in my city. But I imagine if you're in Minneapolis and imagine, like, you know what I'm saying? I can understand how that would turn you. But once you sort of can get the other side responding and saying we have to treat this in kind, then that's the way I think you extend the cycle and we maybe don't get out of it. My hope is that something comes next that, again, begins to try to transition us and the antibodies, there are enough of them there. But I agree with you. I am super worried. You're right. I mean, HHS is a great point. I mean, this is nonsense. People shouldn't be saying it. And ultimately, these institutions like the CDC, I think they discredited themselves during COVID and they will further discredit themselves under this political leadership. And we will lose something quite valuable. And that's why hopefully we'll get to the reform part of the cycle. I'll see you on the other side. Thank you so much for doing this. Wonderful. Sorry to keep you long. And by the way, along those lines, you're doing exactly what we ought to be doing. That's what the remnant is. That's, I think, what the bulwark. Sorry, did I say bulwark? I'm so sorry. the dispatch. I did not mean the bulwark. The bulwark is the other side of that coin. And that's what I try to do with my work. I think the free press is hoping to do that. And that's the best we can. Alright, Eli Lake has left the studio. Always fun to talk to him. I do highly recommend the piece on Riza Pallavi. And we could have gone another half hour, 24 hours about how to deal with this stuff in the Trump era. there are times where I'm very much on his we'll get through this and things will heal and there are other times where I'm on the other side of it where I say well it's only going to heal if you are more forthright in doing the hard things and making the hard arguments for it to heal and I don't know that you can reconcile all of these things but I have lots more views I'm sure it'll come up many more times but let's just You know, we'll put a pin in that for now. But if you think, you know, what we're doing at the dispatch is part of the solution and not part of the problem, then, you know, one way you could really help us, whether you're a listener or anything else, is subscribe. You know, become a member. The more subscribers we have, the more we can do, the louder our voice, the more it becomes difficult for people to not listen to us. and the more vindicated I think Steve and I and the rest of our dispatch family were and starting this thing in the first place. And, you know, I just got to say, Steve and I were talking about this last night. We had dinner here in Fort Lauderdale. We're here for a speaking event. And we're just, like, amazed and so proud of the staff at the dispatch. You know, we get a lot of the attention because we're sort of forward-facing. but people here work incredibly hard they do incredibly good work work that you would benefit from enormously if you became a subscriber and I think it's also just it's a mitzvah to signal how hard these guys are working and the quality of the work that they're doing by becoming a paid subscriber so that's my guilt trip for now and other than that I'll see you next time. No, you won't. This is a podcast. Yeah!