The Price of Chutzpah

I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James, and I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon, and this is a really terrific list, I think. You'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay! BJ Novak. Yay! Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad, and Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry Dogs Run Faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive-compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson, that'd be me, on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Wednesday, February 11th, 2026. I'm John Potthoritz, the editor of Commentary Magazine, excited to announce that our March issue now will be available today, some of it and then all of it, on the Commentary.org website for subscribers. So you should subscribe and get all the glories and benefits of being a subscriber to Commentary, which include the ability to read the entire contents of this and every other issue of Commentary. And I'm just going to tell you a little bit about the issue. We are publishing the landmark prose version, text version of the speech that Brett Stevens gave last week at the 92nd Street Y, the State of World Jewry Address, which has been extensively commented upon in circles that we travel in. uh brett of course a contributing editor to commentary and uh a columnist pulitzer prize winning columnist with the new york times who takes on uh the whole notion of combating anti-semitism and whether or not american jews should spend their time trying to defeat or combat anti-semitism or whether there are other and more useful ways to use their time the piece is called we jews have the honor of being hated i'm very proud to be publishing it also in this issue. David Christopher Kaufman, who is both black and Jewish, has a really remarkable, powerful short piece called Zio is the New N-Word. The anti-Semitic slur is becoming acceptable as, or anyway, so this is how having spent his early years being called the N-Word, He feels exactly the same kind of rage and emotional force being used when people throw out the term Zio for him. And Alan H. Rosenfeld of Indiana University, one of the world's foremost scholars of antisemitism and Jew hatred, has a really remarkable piece called The Pornography of Antisemitism that links the emotional effect of antisemitic thought to the effect that pornography has on the human mind. It's a really pretty amazing piece. Todd Lindbergh and Corbin Teague have a piece called The Age of Trump, A Sobering Return to Reality, which is a defense of Trump's, what he says is Trump's real foreign policy realism, not the fake realism of J.D. Vance, but sort of a worldly understanding that we're not going to purify or do all that much to better the world and that we need to look to our own interests, which also can involve things like regime change when that will help us and that we don't do it solely for the benefit of the people whose regimes are being changed, which of course brings up interesting questions about what is going on between us and Iran and Israel, which we'll get to in a minute. Mike Cote on the case for us getting more involved with or getting control of Greenland. Michael Warnoff on Trump's corporatist capitalism and the idea, the horrendous idea that the United States government should be owning shares of stock or having controlling or semi-controlling interest in major American corporations. Our friend Noah Rothman with a review of a book about how the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 70s in Europe, how they transitioned almost seamlessly to becoming supporters of radical Islam, having been Marxist-Leninist terrorists. In one direction, they decided that it was the terrorism that they liked and not necessarily the Marxism-Leninism. Our own Christine Rosen, with a piece about the astounding jaw-dropping article in The Nation, in which a woman described how her savage rape was something that she would not report to the authorities because she doesn't believe in incarceration. And also on today's podcast, as I will tell you in a moment, our new Washington commentary columnist, James Kerchick, on another speech, speech by Yoram Hazoni, the Israeli-American nationalist conservative, and his effort to weasel his way out of the anti-Semitic corner that he has walked himself into. I have a piece. Rob Long has a piece. Soli Solovacic has a piece. Claire McHugh has a piece. Great issue. Very proud of it. And now I will introduce our panelists and we will talk about other stuff as well. And I include, of course, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. Aforementioned social commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John. Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth. Hi, John. And a voice heard on this podcast and a name familiar to everybody who reads, has been reading over the past 20 years. And now in succeeding Matthew Continetti, our new Washington commentary columnist, Jamie Kerchick. Hi, Jamie. Hi, John. I do want to get to the job numbers quickly because like for the last couple of days, it's been like, ooh, the Trump people, they're really preparing for some bad job. They're going to say it's because of the disruptions and the snowstorms, and it's really, Ted, the job number is very frightening, and it's going to be very bad, and it's all about how AI is eating our lunch or whatever, and the tariffs. And now the job numbers come out for January and 133,000 new jobs, like twice what was expected, twice what the job growth has been over the last couple of months. and uh i have one large thing to say which is that we have a 33 trillion dollar economy now with 330 million people participating uh on the you know inside the continental united states in all economic activity in the united states and i i don't know maybe this is a weird thing to say because it's just a an effort to describe things but i don't know if economics works anymore Like I don't know that macroeconomics – we've talked about this over time. But like I don't know that anybody has any understanding of an economy this vast, this complex that involves manufacturing, services, government employment, private employment, temporary employment, seasonal employment. unemployment, enormous, and a per capita income in a country this large that is, I don't know what it is, is it four times what China's is with five times the number of people? We have an economy, it's not quite a third, again, as large as China's, but something like that with five, China has five times the number of people that we have. So we have this incredibly productive economy that is the largest in the world, remains the largest in the world, and we're all yelling and screaming about how terrible everything is and how ai is going to kill us and all that and i just think then these things these things come out like these job numbers and you're like well that doesn't fit the larger narrative that everybody has been proffering i think we have we're right to talk about the spiritual narrative we talked about yesterday whether americans feel like they're flourishing or whether they feel like there's any hope for the future but But I just – I don't even know whom to turn to right now to explain to me what happened with these job numbers. The fact is there's no one. There's no one that I trust or I think can explain to me why in the face of the tariffs, in the face of this, in the face of that, nonetheless, job growth is good. And we have 96 percent employment, which is another way of saying we have 4 percent unemployment. the question does still remain how much better would things be without the tariffs that that is the sort of lingering i think way to actually frame if you if you have a problem with with tariffs as i do um that's the issue there there are other good um engines uh of growth that are sort of masking what the terrorists would be are doing otherwise but even that see here's the interesting thing so you mentioned that right and you say the tarot things will be so much better trump has his own version of this which is it's the fed it's all the fed if kevin warsh does the right thing we could grow he literally said yesterday the day before yesterday if kevin will grow by 15%. Just to make it clear, unless you're China moving from communist feudal economics to a more open system, there's no such thing as 15% growth in the history of the planet. That won't happen in part because we do have a mature economy that can't grow that fast because we're already at near full employment. But so that doesn't make sense. Anyway, but I mean, so that's – so you were saying, OK, well, the tariffs are bad. They cost – according to the Tax Foundation, they've cost every American household $1,000. So essentially there's been a net tax increase of $1,000 per household in the United States in the year 2025. But that hasn't – so maybe, yes. Without that, who knows how the economy could be or not. Or maybe, you know, maybe this is all being floated by the construction of these massive data centers, which supposedly are there to fuel AI, which is supposed to end up destroying tens of millions of jobs later. I don't know. And so I'm saying, like, nobody knows. Nobody understands. Two things on the tariff point, though. Congress has finally roused itself from its slumber and is starting to do its job again. And there's pushback now on the Trump tariffs from Congress. That process has started. We're waiting to hear what the Supreme Court rules, which will be a very important decision with regard to whether it was even constitutional for him to use these emergency powers in this way. So there's still that uncertainty remains. And the other thing I would just caution in being too enthusiastic about these numbers, the revisions process. John, I agree that it becomes It's difficult to trust any of these numbers or projections because the revision process over the years, particularly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been so massive. The swings, you know, I think in 2025, the administration was claiming half a million jobs would be created. That was revised down to 100,000 something. So in the last time the head of BLS gave numbers to Trump that he didn't like, that person was fired and removed from their job. So I would say cautiously optimistic about jobs is a good way to be. I was happy to see that among the jobs eliminated were a lot in the federal government. So the downsizing of the number of federal government jobs, that's actually a plus if you're a conservative who likes smaller government. And there were also some construction jobs added. But healthcare was the big growth area for jobs. So long term, I think this AI question remains an open one with regards certainly to white collar workers, information workers. I'm just saying, all I'm saying is that even the BLS, even the way, one of the reasons these revisions go crazy is that BLS doesn't know how to collect job data. So it collects job, there are two different ways that the federal government collects job data. There's the household report, there's the employer report, they wildly diverge. And, you know, it's understandable the federal government doesn't have a national database of workers. You know, it does, actually it has social, it has the only national database in the country, which is the social security system. But of course, nothing is reported to the social security system except who, what, whom the social security system pays out to either in the form of retirement benefits or in the form of disability benefits or, or survivor benefits. But so there's no way to track people at a national level, you know, with kind of like big data. All there is, is they send surveys out to people and they collect information and it's a poll, essentially, and the poll is inaccurate, and then they try to purify it over time and kind of get it down, fix it based on some other things. But, you know, we don't know how many people are employed. There was always that line in the 2010s that the unemployment rate, the real unemployment rate was double what we were being told by the government. And I can't remember why that was, But, I mean, that was a respectable opinion to have that wasn't a conspiracy theory opinion, you know, that BLS was playing games with the numbers. It was just that, you know, things are reported that aren't right or a lot of people move in and out of the workforce and their movements are not measured or people drop out of the workforce and don't look for work and therefore they're not counted in employment or unemployment numbers, that kind of thing. But I just think in general, this economy is so huge. huge. It's like five times the size that it was 40 years ago. The US economy is almost five times the size that it was 40 years ago. Think about that alone and how we're still collecting data. BLS, they probably still have 1990s machines. I'm not joking. Half the federal government has old computers, like with 386 chips in them, because they invented software that they haven't figured out how to port from those machines to other machines. And like, I don't know, you know, I don't know how that's going to work. So anyway, I'm just saying, I don't trust anybody about anything, which seems to be the general attitude that everybody has about everything. But in this case, I just think it's an impossible ask to know how the economy is, like a snapshot of the economy. Our economy is just too big, too complicated. Our country is too large. It has too many time zones and weather patterns and all of that. One thing is good for Texas that would be terrible for Maine, you know, on weather, whatever. Okay, so that's my rant. I'm going to get to a refurbished Commodore desktop, and that's going to calm everything down. because that's it and you have to connect with a phone line that doesn't exist anymore um okay jamie kerchick your first piece as washington commentary columnist is called the chutzpah of yoram hazoni you know what chutzpah means i'm not going to translate it i mean it means nerviness but okay all right i'm translating um and let me just set the stage quickly which is yoram hazoni of course, a commentary contributor for many years until we had a really decisive ideological break around 2015. He and I personally, and then he with the magazine's general philosophy, has been leading this national conservative conference that comes out of his Edmund Burke Foundation And though oddly he lives in Israel and came to me when I first started publishing him and I was the first major person to publish him in the Weekly Standard. In the mid-90s, he had been an aide to Bibi Netanyahu, when Bibi Netanyahu was the finance minister of the Israeli government. um a long sick transit Gloria Mundi he it was the two people in his office were Yoram and Carolyn Glick so if you know who Carolyn Glick is you will know how interesting this is Carolyn now back working for Beebe uh and Yoram you know wanted to then wanted to like uh run an institute where he would translate to the great works of western philosophy into Hebrew, or works that praising capitalism and denouncing socialism, Hayek, Tocqueville, stuff like that. That was sort of his intellectual project in the 1990s. This has now moved to the project of affirming American nationalism, I think, as a way of suggesting that one of the things that America and Israel have in common is that we're both nationalistic and particularistic. So Israel has a particularist interest in expansion in the West Bank, would be his view. And America, of course, is particularly nationalistic, which is a very hard lift. so that's your um complicated story complicated issue but what he did now dovetails with this whole question of whether or not the rise of anti-semitism over the last two and a half years how seriously we need to take the rise not only on campus and with the gaza support and all of that but the rise on the right largely you know personified by tucker carlson and candace owens so Jamie this speech you basically take a two by four and smash your arm about the face and neck for you know 1800 words so yeah so when the whole Kevin Roberts Mishigas started within days your arm flew to Washington to basically do damage control for the Heritage Foundation and to help them you know Kevin Roberts had spoken at these national conservative conferences. You know, I went to the first one in Washington. Tucker was a headline speaker. So Joram was very invested in this sort of part of the right. And a couple of weeks ago, I should say in December, actually, he gave a speech, a very strange speech, where on this subject of anti-Semitism on the American right, He had really nothing negative to say about Tucker, Candace Owens. All of his hatred was reserved for what he described as liberal Republicans. And included in this liberal Republican, you know, grouping were people like Mike Pompeo, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, presumably the, you know, assembled people here on your screen, National Review magazine, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, basically anyone who was making a fuss about just how nasty and dangerous and un-American, frankly, what Tucker and Candace are doing. That's who he reserved his hatred for. And to me, it's just a very clear example of someone being unable to have any sort of self-reflection and to look at the mirror and say, you know what? I'm the one who screwed up here. I'm the one who thought stupidly that assembling a coalition of European-style blood-and-soil nationalists would be good for the Jews. That was a dumb idea, Yoram. Maybe I should apologize for that. No, he's incapable of doing that. And so he's lashing out at everyone else and accusing us for some reason I can't understand of being the root of the problem here. The phrase that you highlight or you don't go into deep detail, but the phrase that caught my eye in the speech and that is kind of amazing is the is his denunciation of the, quote, extremely high level of incompetence by the entire anti-Semitism industrial complex. so i guess we're part of by the way is a term is a term you usually hear from like anti-semites yeah it's like meershawn it's like john meersheimer or you know or or jewish anti-semites like max blumenthal or something yeah so there is so there is yoram hazoni like echoing the you know the rejectionist the idea so if yoram's project as i as i believe it is is and I have various issues with this, is making the world safe for Israeli expansionism. He himself lived on the West Bank for many years, was in a relatively dangerous area of the West Bank, a settlement called Ailey, where he had neighbors whose kids were murdered at the Herodian on the West Bank. and believes that Israel should, as a religious Jew, believes that the West Bank, Judea, and Samaria should be part of Israel. And historically, biblically, given to Israel, he's an Orthodox Jew, given to Israel by God, or to the Jewish people by God. This is obviously a controversial opinion, to put it mildly. Right now in Israel, there is an effort to liberalize laws for the purchase of land on the West Bank as part of the opening salvos of the next campaign for prime minister, which the election will, or for, you know, the next Israeli national election, which will either take place in September, October, or November. Nobody really quite knows what it is, but one of the first salvos is an effort to, as I say, liberalize the ability of Israelis to buy land on the West Bank, which apparently the Trump administration is annoyed about or we're told they're annoyed about. Who knows if they're really annoyed about it, but whatever. So there is a – so he has a project and his idea was – That Trump is annoyed. That's exactly right. So, you know, okay. So as I say, Yoram has this project and the project weirdly, because of course it means what he wants to is make common cause with the hardest blood and soil conservatives on the right. Blood and soil conservatives are meaning you are an American because you have sink deep roots in the American soil and the American land. This is not the general thesis of what it means to be an American, which is that this is a nation founded on an idea. Most of the people who are here are descendants of people who came from elsewhere. And, you know, 90% of people who live on American soil, or maybe 80% of people who live on American soil who were not brought here in chains, come from somewhere else. And so the idea that you can only really be an American if you've been here a long, you know, if your great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents were here is a kind of violation of the historical facts of the United States anyway. Yeah, and John, this is the main plank of his intellectual project. Right. As Trude said earlier, it's to deny the universalism of the American founding and of the American idea. He does. He wants it to be his national. Because that's Israel. Israel is the Jewish state, okay? Right. America is the global state. It's the apotheosis of human achievement and state making. We are everyone from around the world. And in his book, The Virtue of Nationalism, he divides all political thinkers into two camps. There's the nationalists who are good and great and virtuous. And then there's the imperialists who are awful, you know, people who want to go over and take over the world. And in that latter group of imperialists, he includes the European Union, Nazi Germany, and wait for it, Charles Krauthammer. Okay, I was so glad you dove a little bit into his intellectual history because I'm curious if you would say a little more. You note that he's part of this counter-enlightenment project. which I see as an effort to put up a scaffolding, an intellectual scaffolding around a bunch of terrible ideas, of which anti-Semitism is a main plank. How much of his anti-Enlightenment approach is legitimate, or is it just an intellectual cover for what he wants to do, which, as you say, is have this blood-and-soil conservatism become dominant? Nobody would ever accuse me of being a fashion plate, But I do know, because I am almost 65 years old, that a well-built wardrobe is about pieces that work together and hold up over time. 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In as little as 10 minutes, you can get your free quote and up to $3 million in coverage at ethos.com slash commentary. That is E-T-H-O-S dot com slash commentary, ethos dot com slash commentary. Application times and rates may vary. I mean, I'm not a history. I'm not a historian of sort of American intellectual history, but this did seem like a pretty radical novel book when it came out. And there are actually some quite good reviews published of it in commentary and other publications at the time that sort of pointed out. Peter Berkowitz has written extensively on this. for various publications, really pointing out where Hazoni is wrong in so many different ways. And you talk about chutzpah. It's not only the chutzpah of an Israeli Jew lecturing American Jews on whom they should be allying with politically and whom they shouldn't be talking. It's just like an Israeli at all telling Americans how we should run our political affairs. It's like you're an Israeli citizen. Stay in your lane. I mean, it's also it's also I believe it. Go ahead. I just want to say it's also the chutzpah. It's like, from our perspective, you got us into this. Yes. I mean, the intellectual project, which is complicated, you liken, I think, very wisely to the 1619 project, which is, oh, here's an alternate actual history of the American founding. We don't come out of the Scottish Enlightenment and John Locke and ideas about, you know, human freedom and the universe. Here are these philosophers you've never heard of that I've discovered and I know. Fortescue and actually, 16th and 17th century pamphleteers named Fortescue and Selden are the founding fathers of the United States. So when somebody ever plays that game with you and does, you know what, here's someone no one ever heard of and has ever mentioned before. That's actually where X or Y comes from. That is the revisionist history impulse that everybody has to – it's so tempting. It's so seductive to say, oh, there's actually the story behind the story, the Gnostic truth behind the seemingly flat fantasy myth-making of sentimentalist hogwash about America. In fact, we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles and that this should be a Christian nation. Why does he want America to be a Christian nation? Because then Israel can be a Jewish nation. and no one can say nay about the idea that Israel, which has had a very controversial path over the last 30 years, trying to claim that constitutionally and legally that it is a Jewish state, which it is not defined as in its own laws. It is not defined as a Jewish state. So the idea is if you wrote a constitution, you would write a constitution that would define Israel as a Jewish state, which is, again, one of his great intellectual projects. Now, I don't want to get really deep in the weeds here, but the complicated part about this is that Judaism is unique among all thought traditions. It's obviously not a thought tradition. It's a religion. It's a faith. But in that it is particularist and universalist at the same time. There is nothing like it. So it's particularist, because God promised the Hebrews a land and it was going to have this shape and form and that they would build it and that they should live according to laws that he laid out for them and that are not necessary for people who are not them to live by, but that those laws involve an understanding of humankind in which all men are created equal. so the idea of human equality as we understand it is a biblical idea it comes from come only from jewish thought but it's but its most powerful expression over the last 3 000 years is is jewish thought so even though you get a state in which you can live according to jewish law as laid out in the torah and then by the talmud but you also have the tradition that grants the world the idea that all men are created equal and that we are all made in God's image. So saying that, you know, it would be really great is to convince Americans that America is a blood and soil nation, taking that part of Judaism and then denying the universalism of Judaism, which is the one part of Judaism that actually applies to people outside our faith. You know, you don't have to keep kosher if you're listening to me and you're not Jewish, but we're supposed to keep kosher. You know, you're not, you don't have to keep the Sabbath from Friday night to 25 hours into Saturday night. But, you know, you don't have to do that. We are obliged to do that according to God, but you don't have to do that. But you know what? We're all equal. We're all made in God's image, including non-Jews. So which part of that tradition do you actually want Jews to espouse when they are talking about the gifts when they talking about our faith related to the 99 of people on the planet that do not espouse our faith I think you want to go with the liberty stuff, just as a practical self-defense measure. You know? I mean, and so Yoram's game is a, and I think in the end, Jamie, you call him a moron and you call him a moron, even though he's a very brilliant guy, because he has now ended up walking himself into this like bramble that he can't extricate himself from, in which by the nature of the philosophy or the ideas that he is espousing, he has to defend the world's worst or America's worst anti-Semites against Jews who are spending their lives defending the Jewish people against anti-Semitism. And it's an astounding twist, and maybe I don't want to make too much of it. Yoram is not a major figure in the world, but it is. You can see how all of this disruption of the last three years, or two and a half years since October 7th, the kind of intellectual poison that is introduced to the bloodstream. So why don't we talk about Cary Prejean Bowler? I was going to just push back on your claim that he's not a major figure. He's not a well-known name, but what he does is quite despicable because he provides intellectual cover to some very well-known people who can point him and say, look, even this Jewish guy's on our side of this. You don't listen to the Jews who are complaining about anti-Semitism. We've got Yoram to remind us that actually what we're doing is just. So I think he's really pernicious as an intellectual. I say that in the piece he's basically the right wing version of the left wing Jew who makes excuses and apologizes for their anti-Semitic comrades there aren't that many of them but Joram I think now is really the most prominent among them I compare him in my piece I compare him to Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf from the plot Against America who you might remember Philip Ross novel he becomes the rabbinical advisor to Charles Lindbergh. I just want to point out one sharp irony in what he's doing and what he's done here, which is that what do his friends Candace and Tucker say about American Jews and Zionists? That we don't care about America. We only care about Israel. That's what they say about Ben Shapiro. That's what they say about everyone. Isn't Yoram's project here? a announcement that he couldn't care less what happens to America. Let it go. Let it let it fall into the hands of these anti-Americans. Who cares about the diaspora Jews, too, as long as this secures a Jewish Israel? Well, my what I've described as his project is not something that he acknowledges as his project. So he is like a fair enough, Dumbledore, Straussian. He is like a – he's got an esoteric project and an exoteric project, meaning Leo Strauss, the philosopher, claimed that great philosophy is written on two levels, that philosophers since the killing of Socrates understood that if they revealed their true intent or their true ideas in a world in which the world was governed by monarchs and tyrants and people who – and churches and all of that, that they would be killed. so that these books are written in lapidary fashion in which there is a narrow and thin reading that you can do of them, or you can dig in the way the Talmud digs into the Bible, and you can find the true meaning. And so Yoram has a Straussian project, which is, I'm saying what he wants is to secure intellectual support in America and the West for the annexation of the West Bank and the creation of what people call Greater Israel. And that, but that's not what he says he's doing. What he says he's doing is understanding nationalism and trying to make a bond between Israel and the rest of the conservative world by saying we're nationalists and you're nationalists. We're this and you're this. We're all the same. But in fact, that is disingenuous because obviously we know that right-wing European nationalism is the thing that nearly wiped the Jews off the planet. And therefore, we really shouldn't be all that supportive of the idea of the revival of blood and soil European nationalism. It's not quite – it's almost not living memory anymore, but it still counts as living memory. Murdered six million people. Like that's not a good path for us to go on. So you need to make up a way to go down this road. So I should say it's not like he says this is why I'm doing it. I'm telling you it's why he's doing it. And I'm right because I've talked to him about it. And I talked to him about it standing on the West Bank at his house in 1996 or 1997. So I know that that's what he wants. so i i'm happy to tell you 30 years later that i assume that his project has not changed um but i can just that's that's where we are and yeah and then so you have kevin roberts oh the other great point you make jamie is that um he was like this is all gonna end you know there's momentary it's a momentary it's a momentary spasm of concern about what's going on at the heritage foundation everything harry harry is gonna fix this harry is gonna fix this I know these people are good people. Yeah. And then the last I checked, 60 people have left over. 60 people have left heritage. And I believe two thirds of the board has resigned. Yeah. Right. So, I mean, Roberts is. They have, they have mostly, they've, they've gone to like this Mike Pence project as like the Polish government in exile. Right. Exactly. They're going to return when, you know, Kevin Roberts is dislodged. And. Yes. Yes. Well, Kevin Roberts and Mike Howell and a couple of other people are in the bunker, shall we say, are remaining in the bunker. So anyway, that's Jamie Kirchik's The Chutzpah Yoram Hazoni available right now, first thing that is available from the March issue on our vertical, on the right side of the commentary homepage. So go there, read Jamie's piece, and be enlightened. As you read it, Bibi Netanyahu will likely have met or will be meeting with Marco Rubio. Bibi has come to Washington clearly to try to figure out what is going to happen with the United States and Iran. and um he's right to have come here in concern because there's been this bizarre morph uh over the last six weeks of relating to iran right so uh he said don't kill the protesters kill the protesters you're you know protesters have heart don't give up help is on the way don't kill protesters, now we're going to make a deal on nuclear materials and ballistic missiles. So we've gone from an impulse to try to help topple the regime, which was toppling, to strengthening the regime in some fashion by weaving it into an international, into a treaty deal with us that might be more favorable to our treaty interests than the 2015 deal, but it's nonetheless us saying, well, you know, these are people that we can make a deal with, as opposed to people who like try to say assassinate Donald Trump, which is one of the last things I heard about them was they tried to take Trump out. Even simpler than all that is the fact that Iran's leaders say, no, we won't do these things that you're asking us to do, right? I mean, Now, when you read about this, you read news stories. One story says Donald Trump tells Bibi Netanyahu, we want a good deal. You know, we'll only accept a good deal. We think, you know, it's possible, whatever. And then the next story you read has Iran's, you know, foreign minister saying, well, or president even saying, well, we're obviously not going to stop with our ballistic missile program. And we're obviously not going to give up nuclear enrichment. So that's the whole entire, that's literally the whole ballgame. That's not even a, that's not even an exaggeration. That's the only things that we have left to talk about are the ballistic missiles and nuclear enrichment. There's literally nothing else to do. And so, you know, that's what's confusing about it is that maybe, you know, maybe they are having behind, you know, behind the scenes talks in smoke filled back rooms or whatever that are progressing in some way. But what the public sees is the Iranians laughing at, you know, America's gullibility. Essentially, the Iranians are, you know, kind of poking us in public. That's really that's a really bad look, too. And it's a really bad look for and it's and it's a it's an ominous note on which to start the negotiations when the Iranians feel like they have this free hand to kind of troll us in public when we all know that they're not kidding about their refusal, that this is not really a negotiation tactic. They will not give up these things in the end anyway. And they're sort of like Babe Ruth pointing at the outfield wall, saying it from the beginning. The whole thing looks bad too. Well, you also have the vice president who's traveling, where is he, Armenia, Azerbaijan. He said yesterday, I think it was, if the Iranian people want to overthrow the regime, that's up to the Iranian people. What we're focused on right now is the fact that Iran can have a nuclear weapon. There's a lot of messaging in that statement. And it goes entirely against what Donald Trump was saying just a few weeks ago about support for the people who were trying to topple the regime. And we do know that the regime is still executing people who were part of those protests, which of course was the sort of strange red line that Trump drew. So I, Seth's absolutely right that they're, they're really poking the bear to see if there's any, going to be any pushback there. But within the administration, you have a lot of mixed messaging. And I know Witkoff and Kushner met with Netanyahu last night. And then, you know, obviously, Bibi's going to meet with Trump later this morning, but he's got to be wondering where, I mean, I assume he's here to figure out what's happening with this administration's plan going forward. Trump the other day talked about sending another carrier group. So that's a lot of different messages coming out of the same administration. We've talked about that kind of confusion before. It's not necessarily being a strategy so much as being a lack of decision-making going forward. Where I'm puzzled is that this entire thing is of Trump's making. i mean granted look horrible things you know the iranian people rose up in the last week of december the real was worth nothing uh you know it's like nazi it's like weimar germany where you know it's like a billion reals to the dollar suddenly you know the money their money is worth nothing. The security forces seemed a little wobbly. And of course, the regime had been humiliated by Israel and the United States in Operation Midnight Hammer, you know, when, and so was still, you know, reeling from that experience. And so there were these uprisings that were of a scale, size, and geographical nature that we had not seen before. They were rising up to do something about the regime, the regime faced choice, which was, does it essentially allow itself to collapse? Or does it do the most ruthless possible thing to crush the opposition? And we were watching while it was happening. So what happened? Trump said, don't do it. Don't kill them. We're going to help you. And I was a little jaw dropped by that when it happened because it seemed like a very dangerous and provocative thing to do based on American historical experience, which is when these things happen in places like China or Hungary or something like that over the course of the post-war period, the idea that America was going to come riding to the rescue had had horrible ancillary consequences for the people who are rising up against their tyrants and tormentors, which is that they thought that the cavalry was going to come over the hill. And in fact, it wasn't. And one thing that we learned was don't make promises to brave people who are up against unbelievably savage forces that you can't keep because then they just become like they're just cannon fodder and trump did exactly trump it now appears did exactly that he raised the possibility of this he then is now negotiating with himself he's been negotiating with himself for a month the problem john the iranians didn't ask to come to the table we asked the iranians to come to the table because Trump is trying to get himself out of the promise that he made to topple the regime. But who told him to make the promise to topple the regime? Just to be clear, we're as interventionist in the idea of regime change as anybody left on earth is. We weren't calling on him to topple the regime. I mean, I would be thrilled if he decided unilaterally to topple the regime. But I didn't think that was within sort of like the ambit of what America would be able to do in January of 2026. That's a big lift when other stuff is going on. John, I think there's a problem here to my mind is that Trump doesn't have an Iran policy. He has a Russia policy. I think it's bad policy, which is to try forever to lure Putin into peace and to try to pressure Zelensky into accepting a bad deal. Obviously, the administration had a Venezuela policy, which was to build up this military force, extract Maduro, and deal with the second-in-command from the U.S. there is no iran policy he his one iran policy was they can't get a nuclear weapon uh there was operation midnight hammer and that was it um now he started uh vamping you know improvising and this is this is what has led him into his this trap of his own making Let's talk about Aura frames. So I have an Aura frame in the middle of my living room. And last night I glanced up at it and there I saw a photograph. Actually, two photographs split in half because Aura does that for you. It sort of seems to understand what photos are related to each other and will kind of edit them for you to put them together in the frame. And there was a picture of my late mother and my late sister, Rachel. side by side and I was of course very moved and pleased and touched to have this memory placed right in front of me in my living room for me to experience almost unexpectedly And that is one of the great gifts that AuraFrames Frames can offer This is a wonderful beautiful piece of living room bedroom whatever I wouldn call it furniture but it literally a photo frame and you download your photos through an app, as many as you want, in whatever order you want, in whatever way you want, and they can provide you with all kinds of unexpected joys and pleasures. There is free unlimited storage, so you can add as many photos and videos as you want. You can add them from anywhere, anytime using the app. If you want to give it as a gift, it comes in a gift box included. You can personalize the gift with a message before it arrives. And if you download the app yourself, you can text photos straight to the frame or to the person whose frame, whom you're giving it to as a present. So that's Aura Frames, the perfect gift anytime named number one by Wirecutter. You can save on this perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com for a limited time. Listeners can get $35 off their best-selling CarverMet frame with code Commentary. That's A-U-R-A, frames.com. Promo code Commentary. support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. I'm James Patterson. I write way too many books. Welcome to Hungry Dogs. The title comes from my maternal grandmother, Isabel Zelvis Morris. Nan used to always say, hungry dogs run faster, James, and I've been running fast ever since. Here's what will be coming your way soon, and this is a really terrific list, I think. You'll hear from some incredible people like Stacey Abrams. Yay! BJ Novak. Yay! Kathy Bates, Dolly Parton, Josh Gad, and Pope Leo. Okay, maybe not Pope Leo, but who knows? Maybe he'll show up. Hungry Dogs Run Faster. Thank you, Grandma, for turning me into a hopeless, obsessive-compulsive. Listen to Hungry Dogs with James Patterson, that'd be me, on Apple, Spotify, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts thank you thank you thank you so i don't know what's going to happen uh the ukraine policy you mentioned which is it's too detailed to get into now but i mean we are we are doing bad stuff on all on on three fronts as far as I can tell, you know, and thus kind of muddying the record of the administration's foreign policy successes in its first year. So having destroyed the Iranian, having done what we did in Operation Midnight Hammer, either like fatally compromised the Iranian nuclear program without taking out all the without obviously assembling ballistic missiles is a different thing. You can't really take that out unless you do something to interdict the supply chain of the missiles that then are assembled inside Iran. So that was a great trial. And now we seem to be pushing Ukraine into elections while the Russians are using America's clear determination to figure out a way to cut off the Ukrainian regime, to torture the Ukrainian people in entirely new ways, you know, like making their lives in winter just absolutely beyond intolerable. Thus, I mean, why we – I know that Trump and people like Vance think that – or Tucker thinks that Zelensky is a cockroach. But like what did the 45 million people in Ukraine do to deserve the America turning a blind eye to these absolutely horrific policies aiming at civilian targets, which we supposedly don't think is cricket, right? So we're going there. So we're trying to create a political crisis inside Ukraine for Zelensky. And now there seems to be – the effort is to move on to phase two of the 20-point Trump plan for Israel and Gaza that seems to be about trying to figure out a way to get Hamas to agree to move on to phase two by letting them keep small arms. Why are we negotiating with Hamas? I don't understand. Hamas is defeated. Why are we negotiating with Hamas? It's like, why are we negotiating with the Iranians whom we crushed six months ago? This is when you say we don't have an Iran policy. Trump's bizarre fetishization of deal points is weirdly Obama-like. like it's almost like let's sit it or like you know better to jaw jaw than war war whatever whatever it is like can anyone maybe i'm wrong and maybe this is all temporizing because better stuff is gonna happen and they're just trying to get all the forces uh sort of like lined up for knocking over the iranian regime i which is like i mean he he loves to he loves the idea that he pushed somebody into a corner and they had to agree to a deal. That's, that's the, that's when you merge the Trump art of the deal with, you know, Trump, the tough guy. That's, that's like all the, all the personality, uh, characteristics that he wants people to think he has can be combined into this, you know, one like Voltron Donald Trump. If you can get them to not only, you know, beat them up, but then get them to agree to a deal that's favorable to, you know, Trump's side. That's, that's everything in the world. But you know, this is not, this is not possible in the current circumstances in either of the ones that we're talking about. There is no deal on offer or will be on offer with Iran. There's no deal to be had with Iran. This just has to be understood when it comes to Hamas. I mean, there is a deal if he wants it, because Hamas will sign a deal that says we get to keep AK-47s. But that's not usually what people think of when they think of small arms. Am I letting the guy keep a cricket pistol in case of a home invasion? Well, I'm actually letting an internationally funded militia that just held Americans hostage for two years, keep a fleet of AK-47s or whatever. Like this is, this is not, none of this is very convincing, but also Hamas must be salivating over all of this. And I don't really know why you would drive them into the corner and then let them out of the corner. So unless Trump has some sort of genius move that he's got planned, he's, he's doing the first half of what he thinks, you know, what he wants, push them into a corner. But to make them agree to a bad deal is, you know, for them is not going to happen in either case. But look, just as he went out of his way to say to the Iranian protesters, keep protesting, help is on the way. He went out of his way to say, if Hamas doesn't disarm the easy way, we'll do it, or Israel will do it the hard way. We will unleash hell on them, whatever the hell's... And now, in both cases, here we are. Well, look, Israel, I mean, reports this morning are that Israel is planning or is, you know, letting it known that it may launch a major military strike on on Hamas this week because of activity in and around tunnels, the same week that they reopened very restrictively, but reopened the crossing between Rakhach and Egypt. So Israel isn't sitting on its tush in regards to this. And of course, there's also the political matter of this coming election that I mentioned earlier, that Bibi needs Bibi's great calling card and political strength is his strength, projection of strength, and the idea that he's the person ultimately that's the only one you can trust to deal with his real security. And he is not going to surrender that unless, you know, on the altar of Trump's temporizing, unless there's a really good reason to do that. Like this is his political future survival at stake. So I don't think we have any idea what's going on here in relation to that. All we know is that the word deal is poison. I mean, his, you know, he wrote the book, right? That made my big bestseller, The Art of the Deal. So he loves the word deal. Everything is a deal. This is a deal. That's a deal. Well, you can't deal with genocidal maniacs and you can't deal with a regime that not only wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, but will literally take its security forces and have them slaughter 30,000 to 40,000 people in 48 hours inside their own country. Those aren't people you can deal with. Those are only people you can either isolate or you can say are a general threat to everybody and need to be taken out because the message that they send to the world that this is acceptable is too dangerous for us to allow to survive well we should add the connection between the two of them the iran and gaza the hamas and iran connection because um if both of them are going to be allowed out of the corner or back up off the mat right israel what israel fears is um you know the like uh like uh the michael jackson uh music video for thriller like you know the the climbing out of these zombies climbing out of the earth and stalking around again is this this idea of a regional uh battlefield that tries to encircle israel in you know the ring of fire as they called it but the other day israel busted a terror cell in the west bank that had connections to both hezbollah and hamas so you have to remember from israel's perspective they're still fighting Hezbollah and Hamas, even within areas that are not run by Hezbollah or Hamas, that Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran's proxies, until they're dead, they're a regional problem. And they're a problem that keeps sneaking closer to Israel and will always keep trying to sneak closer to Israel. And they're still battling it right there on the home front. So they don't see it as, you know, the Iranians far away are on their knees. They see it as, hey, we just busted Hamas, you know, Hezbollah, you know, connected terror cell in the West Bank. Well, and this is also where I think his approach, the deal making, the sort of boardroom, I'm dominating the boardroom at every meeting sort of approach. This is why it falters so severely in foreign policy, which is much more complicated as many more moving parts. And I was reminded again of the whole member, the Board of Peace was supposed to resolve a lot of these issues, but it just became another performative thing that he's done demanding money from all these countries denying entry to Canada because he got offended and very personal. The executive committee is Witkoff and Kushner, and he's going to just use it to do what he wants, whatever it is he wants to do. But he likes that he he and I think in his mind, Trump believes I'm doing something, I have the Board of Peace now. We'll get it done. And it's like a board meeting. And then he leaves the board meeting and it's out of his mind and he's moved on to the next thing. And it's incoherent overall. And I think that's the frustration we're saying. It's not that sometimes the right decision ends up getting made and the United States exerts its power in a way that's better for the world. That does sometimes happen. Operation Midnight Hammer is a perfect example. But it's the overall incoherence which puts our enemies and our allies on edge. And I think it's probably something that Netanyahu is going to want to confirm on a few specific points when he's in the White House later today. Can I just conclude today's podcast by noting that today is the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest moments in human history? And I say that guardedly. symbolic moments in human history. 40 years ago today, Anatoly Shcheransky, then now known as Natan Shcheransky, was released from his captivity in the Soviet Union and flown to Berlin, where he was basically freed on the tarmac at this airbase in Berlin. And the Soviet guards who had flown him said, okay, what you're going to do is you're going to get out of the plane and walk straight onto the next plane, which is going to fly you out of Berlin, get out of the plane. And Sharansky, who is the greatest human being that I've ever met, known, got out of the plane. And then he walked serpentine from the Soviet craft to the plane across the tarmac, because they told him to walk straight. And it was the last thing that a Soviet official was ever going to say to him. And he had spent nine years in jail, many years in solitary confinement, building memory palaces and playing chess against himself in his head not to go crazy, because he would not negotiate over the price of his soul with this regime for the inesimal crime of wanting to depart the Soviet Union where he was a prisoner and move to Israel where he could be a free man and the last thing that he did was walk serpentine jamie your mic's jamie your mic is off there sorry not to be a pedant yes it wasn't on the tar it wasn't on the tarmac in berlin it was at the gleinicke bridge oh excuse me that connected east berlin to west berlin it's the famous bridges the bridge of spies thank you the bridge of spies that's right so i i'm really sorry anyway i i don't know where former berlin resident right so anyway it this was the last moment of his this was the moment at which he became free and the first message that he wanted to send was as a free man you have you had no power over me as it turned out to begin with i would not allow you to break me and uh i am now going to make this joyous trip on foot by myself to my freedom. This is a story that he tells in his absolutely wonderful memoir, Fear No Evil, which we could make today's recommendation as we have made it the recommendation before. And just 40 years ago, and that maybe today Trump could be infused with a little uh, Sharansky indomitability and, uh, and, uh, you know, put the taco down and, uh, and, and be, be the leader and the man that he is at his best. So Jamie Kerchick, thank you for joining everybody again. Jamie Kerchick, new Washington commentary columnist. Read his piece, the Chutzpah Yoram Hazoni. Read Christine Rosen's, uh, piece on the, uh, on the evil of empathy, uh, and everything else in the March issue as it appears today and tomorrow on the commentary.org website. And for Christine, Seth and Abe of John Potthorz, keep the candle burning.