Rafael Mangual, Tal Fortgang, Carolyn Gorman, and Renu Mukherjee discuss public safety in New York City, the Senate vote to strip funding from NPR, President Trump’s desire to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and other big news stories from the week.
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Audio Transcript
Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. My name is Rafael Mangual, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal. I am joined by a wonderful group of brilliant colleagues. We’ve got Tal Fortgang, All Things Legal Policy at MI. We’ve got Carolyn Gorman covering mental health and much else here at the Manhattan Institute. And we’ve got Renu Mukherjee who covers higher ed and race and probably a lot of other things too. So welcome to the show everybody. Good to see you all.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Thanks.
Rafael Mangual: I want to kind of get started with a sort of New York, core New York story. We haven’t done something core New York in a while on the show, I think. And what’s more New York than wild, splashy, tabloidy crime stories? And we’ve got a couple of them from this week that I thought are worth talking about, especially in the context of mayoral election where public safety is going to kind of loom large.
But a wild story out of the subway system here in New York. We had a 20-year-old kid allegedly stab a sleeping passenger just randomly at least three times in the head. Turns out that the alleged assailant was recently released without bail on his own recognizance just a few days before the incident after allegedly being arrested for slashing his own mom. Kind of crazy, the sort of case where I think the normie asks, well, you why is this person out on the street? Of course, the answer is because that’s what New York City and New York state policy has demanded should happen. But that case can be coupled with another really kind of splashy one that caught my eye yesterday. A 76-year-old repeat offender is alleged to have shot a cab driver over a dispute about a $40 fare. The 76-year-old septuagenarian is also out on pretrial release with an open gun case from April of this year where he allegedly pulled a weapon and threatened to kill at least one other person and yet was out free despite a long criminal history. You know, I think New Yorkers have kind of grown numb to these stories, but not all of you are based in New York. And so I thought I’d open up the show today just, you know, talking about kind of what you make of those stories, particularly in the context of a debate about public safety and the role of the government in providing it, where you have on the left, I think, this sense that those of us who are worried about law and order should really just shut up because things have gotten better in the recent past. And so of course these things are going to happen, but is it really the kind of big deal issue that should be driving people to push for certain policies? And I’ll start with you, Carolyn. What do you think?
Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, well, this week things have gotten better, but this week there were several incidents. I think the one that you mentioned, Ralph, is actually useful to sort of dissect because it touches on several problems behind the public disorder that, yeah, New Yorkers are still concerned about in public polling. Just for context, again, on Monday, a suspect was arrested for stabbing another subway rider on the one train several times in the face and on the head. It was totally unprovoked. And there’s three things that I think are sort of worth calling out about this. So first, the suspect, as you mentioned, Ralph, had reportedly been arrested on misdemeanor assault charges for stabbing his mother several times with a steak knife. And that was just three days before he stabbed this other random subway rider. So he was released after his arraignment and was back out there violent within days. Point number one then is these state policies like bail reform are continuing to make it too difficult to keep violent offenders off the street. So it’s still a problem.
Rafael Mangual: Can I just cut you off there just to kind of set the stage for how crazy New York’s bail reform is? Like, for those of you who don’t know and who aren’t from New York, New York is the only state in the country that categorically prohibits judges from making pretrial release decisions on the basis of the risk that a given defendant poses to the community. They have to blind themselves to that risk. I mean, in theory, a defendant could say, if you let me out, I’m going to go and kill somebody. They can’t consider that risk. By law, they can only hold people who are charged with certain offenses and even then, only when they are demonstrated to be a flight risk and only a flight risk. It really is kind of insane how far out on the limb New York is on the pretrial release front. I apologize for the interruption, but I just felt like that was important context for everyone to really understand.
Carolyn D. Gorman: No, definitely, and actually that sort of is a perfect segue into my sort of second thing to think about, and that is that this suspect did in fact have a criminal record. He reportedly had at least three prior arrests, one for stabbing his mother with a steak knife, one for weapons possession, and the other one was for fare evasion. So you know, my sort of point number two is that when scholars like you, Ralph Mangual, and M.I.’s Nicole Gelinas, among others, sort of talk about the need to enforce quality of life crimes like turnstile jumping. It’s not because they’re hardos that want to imprison everyone. It’s because they know as experts that individuals like Monday’s suspect who commit violent offenses are likely to also have committed low-level offenses. So enforcing quality of life crimes is just critical for reducing public disorder and preventing violence.
Third point, sort of finally, when this stabbing occurred on Monday, at least one NYPD officer was nearby and acted really quickly to intervene. So police may have saved the victim’s life or someone else’s that the suspect might have gone on to stab on the subway platform were they not there. And that I think brings me to my most important point for New Yorkers who want to feel safe taking public transit—and I’m thinking particularly about young women because I myself have experienced some scary altercations before—a takeaway from this story is that mayoral candidates who want to get rid of police, even when an officer is good and protecting you, those candidates care less about keeping you safe than they care about virtue signaling for personal gain so that the democratic establishment will support their aspirations to be a politician and not supporting law enforcement. I’ll just make a final point here. This goes for not hiring police officers, not funding the police department and for not sending police to answer crisis calls for emotionally disturbed persons who are statistically just more likely to exhibit violent behavior when they have psychotic disorders and are not receiving treatment. And because police…
Rafael Mangual: All real proposals that have been advanced, by the way, here in New York City and state by politicians, some of whom are currently running to run the city of New York. I mean, I want to bring you into this, Tal, and you’re like me, you’re a lawyer by training, and so you have a little bit of legal background. I mean, talk to us a little bit about kind of, are we, is someone like me crazy to look at a story like this and get flared up and get upset?
The idea has been that justice requires a system that allows people like the subway assailant to find their way back on the street. That just strikes me as a bastardization of the concept of justice, much more than an initiative that serves it. I’m open to being proven wrong on this.
Tal Fortgang: Well, you want me to talk about justice. I’ll take off my lawyer hat and put on my political philosopher hat and say there’s a reason that crimes are prosecuted not by the victim. It’s not like a civil suit in which, you know, it’s plaintiff versus defendant. The plaintiff in criminal cases is the people of the state of New York. And there’s a reason for that because crimes do not merely affect the person who gets stabbed.
Rafael Mangual: That’s a good point.
Tal Fortgang: They are crimes against the community because when you have to fear reasonably that dozing off or zoning out on the one train could cause you to become vulnerable to violent crime, that changes your life. You change your behavior. You change the way you approach all your social interactions. And in that vein, I think these two examples are really instructive because the one train stabbing was random, truly random, which is the kind of thing that causes you to have to keep your head on a swivel. You can’t relax. You don’t trust other people. The second, the shooting of the cab driver was escalatory. It was a disagreement that turned into an argument that turned into a violent confrontation. And that’s a different genre of random violence. It’s not random in the sense that it could just happen to anyone at any time, but it is random in the sense that you do not know when your interactions with your fellow New Yorkers are going to turn violent and how you need to change your behavior accordingly. These bail rules about what the judges can consider, you know, violence against the community being an unacceptable factor is a complete inversion of this view of the role of the criminal justice system, right? It totally inverts the view that the system is there to protect the community against violent and dangerous individuals, but we’ve so lost our ability to talk about the value of incapacitating dangerous people because society belongs to pro-social people, and anti-social people do not get to exercise a stabbers veto over the rest of us going about our lives in pro-social ways. We’ve totally lost our ability to think about that. So yeah, there’s the perversion of justice that you’re talking about.
Rafael Mangual: You make a point that reminds me of something that’s always frustrated me and that is that, not just in cities like New York, but around the entire country, we are required to provide public defense counsel to anyone who’s accused of a crime and can’t afford their own attorney. I think that’s a good thing. What’s always frustrated me, however, is this idea that those people, those attorneys who defend criminals in court, are called and have been able to take the mantle of public defender. I mean, to my mind, the reality is that the people who are defending the public are the people who are representing the public in court, as you point out. The only party representing the people in a criminal case is the prosecutor. That’s the real public defender. The person who we call the “public defender” is really just an individual criminal defender. They are a defender of their client, and that’s important, but they’re not defending the public or the public’s interests. So, Renu, I want to bring you in because what about this sense of insecurity driven by the random nature of the unpredictability of some of these encounters, right? I mean, like, I don’t think any cab driver, you know, takes a 76-year-old passenger and thinks like, this is the guy that’s going to shoot me today. You know, there is something about New York that also makes it attractive, right? That it’s you kind of leave your house, you never know what’s going to happen. It’s the greatest show on earth. That’s what they tell all the rookie cops coming out of the Academy. But that show is sometimes a horror show, right? You don’t get a say in terms of how much you enjoy the experience. So yeah, mean, what’s your reaction? I mean, are the people who read these stories and retweet them and get angry about them, is that a legitimate expression of fear or are they just victims of fear mongering?
Renu Mukherjee: I definitely think that it’s legitimate expression of fear and, this might not be true in the very unique case of the upcoming New York City mayoral race where, you know, you have Zohran Mamdani that won the primary, defeated Cuomo because of a lot of support from individuals that would be on the opposite side of this issue that would see how, you know, would look at this and the exercise what’s sort of known in psychology as pathological altruism, you know, like as you know, Ralph, probably better than any of us, that support these policies such as bail reform with the intent to help the disadvantaged, but in fact not only harm the disadvantaged, but harm the public at large. So New York City is a case in which, a unique case with respect to Mamdani and the primary where you kind of have these pathologically altruistic activists that are propelling him to the mayoralship.
But a recent survey came out that looked at how Mamdani was viewed politically, nationally, and he was very much underwater. And I think that’s because the type of people like us, Ralph, the type of people you’re referring to, you know, who look at these stories and on the one hand you have data showing that crime is down, but on the other hand you have these really horrific extreme examples. Like these are the types of people that in battleground states, in swing districts, ultimately do sway elections. And the second example that you brought up about the cab driver, for example, this is something that, you know, I really wish someone would ask Mamdani about because not only now with respect to the mayoral race, but even when he was running for New York State Assembly, part of his platform was, you know, trying to uplift New York City taxi drivers, many of whom are Bangladeshi, Bangla and speak Bangla. You know, he’s reached out to them. So someone, some reporter out there should really ask him, you know, your policies would sort of promote the type of horrific behavior that this cab driver was susceptible to. Yet you claim to support them. What are you going to do about this?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, it’s always kind of strange to me because the sort of articulated rationale for this kind of, if you really wanted to dumb it down, of call it pro-criminal disposition, is it gains momentum through the use of language that is calculated to present oneself as a sort of defender of the common man, right? It’s like, we are fighting power. We’re fighting the system. The system would be oppressing you if it weren’t for us. But my sense is that if you went into some of the low-income neighborhoods where serious crime is concentrated, you wouldn’t see that same level of support for some of these policies, especially if you presented them in terms of their practical implications. Like if you, I think, like walked up to a random New Yorker, know, a working-class New Yorker, whether it’s an MTA worker or, you know, a construction worker, whatever, and just presented them with these facts, right? You’ve got a 20-year-old who’s got three very recent arrests, including for violence with a knife. Should that person get released? And I think a lot of people, probably the vast majority of people, say like, absolutely not. Throw that guy in jail. That’s where they belong and so I mean, the question then gets back, which is like, what is behind the kind of altruism that drives people to push against common sense with more than enough force to overwhelm it and get these kinds of policies into place in a place like New York City? mean, how is it that we have grown as a society kind of so susceptible to this case that like, in order to be a just society, in order to sort of create an equal playing field. We need to somehow excuse away criminal behavior and create the conditions where penalties for that behavior never come to pass.
Carolyn D. Gorman: I have like a huge problem with just like our therapy culture, which I talk about a lot, and how much emphasis we put on empathy, and quite frankly, it’s not only not necessarily good to, you know, feel like we need to be overly empathetic to anyone for any circumstances, but it’s I think problematic in the sense that it almost sort of convinces us to lie to ourselves about what the reality of a situation might be. And that might put people more at risk. If people feel like they are super safe on the subway and there is no reason to worry, then they’re much more likely to not necessarily be paying as close attention as they should be. And this is not about fear mongering, but it’s just about having an appropriate level of awareness for what the risk is. And I think about this when we tell women that they are as strong as men. I think we are doing women a disservice when we say things like that because we are putting people in a position where they may not necessarily be safe and we should be thoughtful about that.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, Tal, I want to bring you back here. I mean, if you’re thinking about the sort of contemporary debates about, you know, kind of fairness, you know, not just justice, but like the sense that like there is a disconnect here between policy and what general people hold as sort of common sense views. I mean, why doesn’t that ever break through? Why doesn’t the common sense break through? How do you get the kind of maintenance of this, you know, overly permissive environment with respect to things that no one really wants to tolerate in their society. No one wants to see the crazy guy on the subway. No one wants to see people, you know, hopping the turnstile with impunity as they, you know, are suckers and pay the, you know, the $3 fare. Like, what is it about a place like New York that just allows that status quo to remain in place despite the obvious frustrations with what’s happening?
Tal Fortgang: Yeah, I’ve been I’ve been rereading James Q. Wilson’s Thinking About Crime on the 50th anniversary of its publication.
Rafael Mangual: Such a good book. 1975, first edition, that’s right.
Tal Fortgang: And it makes it makes it very clear that we still do not know how to think about crime. What we do, and this happens, you know, at our at our dinner tables and, you know, among friends in New York, when you talk about crime, even among people who are willing to speak candidly about the problem of crime, about the problem of random crime, people will say things like, what is the root cause of all of this? Right? And so it’s a little bit passe now to say, poverty causes crime. Like that’s kind of been falsified even in the public imagination. But people will come up with all kinds of ideas about the root causes.
And what Wilson points out 50 years ago already is that’s asking the wrong question. He calls it the causal fallacy. Right? Stop asking about causes because if you try to drill down on root causes, you’re going to try to tinker with human nature and that’s no way to approach a policy problem. If you want to approach a policy problem, think about costs and benefits of each policy and what we can actually do to stop crime without inhibiting our ability to advance other social goods or preserve some measure of freedom. People still just, they don’t know how to think about trade-offs. We still just think about root causes.
Rafael Mangual: I think that’s exactly right. And it seemed like there was a time in which we kind of got away from that. I mean, I remember growing up in like, you know, the mid-nineties and like the, you know, Saturday WPIX movie would be like, you know, always like some Charles Bronson movie like Death Wish or whatever, where, know, the criminal gets their due and, you know, they’re just desserts and, you know, the vigilante is the hero. And, you we kind of stopped feeling bad for… I mean, I just think back to like the react, the public reaction to the Bernie Goetz case where it’s like this was a guy who pulled out a gun and preemptively shot five teenagers in anticipation of a robbery. I maybe he was right. Maybe he wasn’t, but no one wanted to give him up. Everyone was rooting for that guy. Black, white, rich, poor. It didn’t really matter. And so I don’t know. I mean, I kind of get the sense that, you know, in places like New York, we’re almost a victim of our own success on the crime front, right? And we would reduce crime. It’s become it’s consuming less and less of like, you know, the public’s consciousness, even though it still continues to pull as a serious concern for New Yorkers. And so maybe that’s how we kind of get this toleration of the nonsense. I mean, what do you what do you think about that, Renu?
Renu Mukherjee: I think that’s exactly right. And what’s interesting is that in response to, for example, the outcome of the Democratic mayoral primary, you had both, you know, just everyday San Franciscans and also, you know, political activists who are, of course, Democrats, but very much, I would say, you know, they’re not radical progressives, hopping on X and saying, you know, good luck, New York. You’ve basically grown so comfortable that, you know, you voted for what many progressives voted for in San Francisco. And of course you know what’s happened with the election of Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago. And so I think you’re exactly right, Ralph, in that it’s… things have, you know, based on the data based on just you know broken windows being at the forefront in New York City. New York has succeeded of course not always not in the 80s and etc for example but you know, somewhat as of late, especially comparably to San Francisco and Chicago. And you look at this and, you know, people have gotten a little comfortable. And I also think, you know, a lot of the individuals that are, you know, high propensity voters and are turning out are, you know, very highly educated, you know, affluent white progressives that are ensconced in the sort of anti-prison abolitionist material from higher education, which is something, you know, MI looks at all the time. These are the are people that are voting in these elections, specifically primary elections. These are the people that are behind these policies, that are staffing a lot of these more progressive administrations, unfortunately. And that allows New York to go the way of places like SF or Chicago.
Rafael Mangual: I think that’s exactly right. And those types of people that you describe, I mean, this is where I think the role of the media, particularly over the last decade, has kind of come in. I mean, they have been brought along on this ideological journey, in part due to the fact that our mainstream media establishment has completely failed in critically examining these debates. And so, you have major publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post who for years have been sort of signing off on the underlying rationale for pushes to do things like abolish prisons and abolish the police. And at the very least, signing off on the arguments that have led us down the road to some of the more misguided reforms that have really created the situation in which we find ourselves.
And if I’m thinking about some of the worst perpetrators of that failure, one name that comes to mind is an acronym and it’s NPR. And that’s actually a perfect sort of transition into the next topic that I want to talk with you guys about, which is the fact that the U.S. Senate just voted to strip NPR of its government funding, which means the issue’s going to go now to the House of Representatives for them to vote. This is something that conservatives have been pushing for for a really long time. I expect that the House is going to follow through. That would be my prediction, which means that the conservative movement is going to get a win that they’ve been chasing for a really, really long time. You know, that conservative push against publicly funding NPR and its affiliates has really been driven, I think, by the entirely reasonable impression that NPR has kind of morphed itself into a deeply biased outlet that’s been pushing a far left agenda, pushing the kinds of policies that don’t have widespread agreement but are very popular among the portion of the population that lives in places like Park Slope where everyone has a million dollar plus house and drinks eight dollar lattes two or three times a day while complaining about income inequality.
So I want to start just to get the group’s kind of impression of NPR. A while back our colleague Chris Ruffo posted a long series of posts on X where he was sort of highlighting this trove of clips featuring the new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, while she was saying kind of outlandish, super far left nonsense, like decrying the fact that America is cis-white-mobility privilege driven society. Is that the sort of thing that you think Americans should be subsidizing or are the people pushing for this missing something about the inherent value of a public broadcasting company like NPR? Whoever wants to jump in, go ahead.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, sure. So A.E.I.’s Howard Husock, who’s a former MI colleague of ours, has been on this beat for ever. He served on the board of directors for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has raised flags about the threat of liberal bias, and he’s compiled some statistics that I think are pretty striking and maybe useful for framing the conversation. So the Pew Research Center, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit, Howard has written, they find that 87 percent of NPR listeners describe themselves as Democrats, while only 12 percent describe themselves as Republicans. And that’s in contrast to commercial networks, which are close to 50-50. So NPR was created as part of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, and it was supposed to reflect all Americans. I think, you know, those statistics just tell us that they don’t.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, no, I mean, I think that’s exactly right. Look, I’m a pretty conservative guy. I like to think of myself as kind of a happy mix between radical libertarian and sort of traditionalist conservative. And I listen to NPR sometimes mostly just because I’m curious about what the nuts on the left have to say about this or that. But I don’t see myself or my views or those of many of my conservative friends and colleagues represented in any of the coverage. I mean, look, and I’ll say, like, I have appeared on NPR on a number of occasions. You know, it’s usually a very quick snippet where it’s like clear to me that like, they just feel like they have to check a box and ask somebody with different views about the question and have me and sort of seven criminal justice reform advocates, you know, quoted in the same story. But yeah, I mean, think there’s that, you know, when I see those numbers, it completely tracks and I think it just strengthens the case. Why should every taxpayer be subsidizing something that’s really only representing the interest in advancing the interests of a very, very small slice of America.
Tal Fortgang: Ralph, good for you for listening to NPR on occasion. I’ve only had the opportunity to do so in some Ubers around Washington D.C. where of course even the cab drivers listen to NPR. But I’m not sure what the Venn diagram looks like of City Journal Podcast listeners and NPR listeners. I imagine there’s not a ton of overlap there. But for those who have, or for those who have not rather, I’ll say, the audio quality is fantastic and when eventually all of their equipment gets distributed, I think we should try to put in a bid for their microphones and not that I’m unhappy with mine, but they sound beautiful. I mean you can make anyone’s voice sound great on NPR. And every other thing that gets discussed on a random Tuesday morning is, you know, the various gender identities of indigenous groups. I mean, it’s just a parody. It’s just a parody of itself. Compare that to the kind of public broadcasting that you get on TV. I don’t know about you guys, I was a PBS kid. I grew up on Arthur, and I learned math from Cyberchase and it’s so completely different, not just in terms of who the programming is directed at, in terms of age, but in terms of what do we think the public needs to hear? What do we think advances the interests and the education, the edification of the American people? And at night, I guess that’s Charlie Rose. I have no idea what goes on Charlie Rose. I was never allowed to stay up that late. And by the time I was old enough, I stopped watching PBS and it was all ESPN.
But this points to a very important matter when it comes to what the government sponsors and does, what kind of information and content it propagates and promotes. I’m not totally suspicious of the idea that the government has some interest in promoting certain information. And when people rush to defend NPR, they’ll say things like, what about emergency alerts? Right? That’s the most obvious case of the government has an interest, the public has an interest in everyone knowing about certain emergencies and certain developments. But the fact of the matter is that you will not be any more educated, an American, any better a citizen, any better prepared to go about your day by listening to NPR. And that’s a matter of its editorial choices. So to that I say good riddance.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, mean, Renu, you’ve been involved in some of more contentious debates about social issues in our very recent past and, you know, follow the coverage of those issues incredibly closely. I mean, you know, from just the perspective of somebody who, you know, is engaged as a public intellectual on some of these issues, I mean, is your sense that there is like, real value in this to the extent that this is something that the public should be, you know, underwriting or is this just like, you know, is the general impression being asserted by conservatives that this is just kind of you know, laundromat for far left ideas, you know, accurate? You know, one of the things I love about, you know, that Jordan Peterson likes to say, you know, I’ve been kind of a closet Jordan Peterson fan for a while, but he always says like, you know, if I can predict what you’re going to say next, then it’s not really you talking. And I feel that way a lot about certain media outlets where it’s like I can kind of guess what the opinion page is going to have to say about this or that or how the news side is going to cover this or that. I think that’s an impression that’s shared by a lot of people, but we’d love to hear your take on this.
Renu Mukherjee: I agree, Ralph. I think that if there were to be polling done, and I’m sure there will be and it’ll be, you know, really fascinating, maybe, you know, MI should ask a question on this, but, you know, how do you feel about NPR being defunded? I honestly think it will vary based on racial demographic as well as age, as well as socioeconomic status. And so philosophically, the idea of having this public news channel that’s aim is to inform the American citizenry, the electorate. It’s, you know, that notion is very positive, you know, that it was quite important to the founders, for example, that we have an informed citizenry and electorate, which is why they were so, you know, strong on education from the first days of the republic. But unfortunately, just as with education, NPR, there’s, you cited one sort of very outlandish, crazy example. There’s probably and, you know, Chris Rufo has reported on this, there is just so many that it has become a parody. So I do think on balance, you know, if the right, if the Trump administration is able to make the case that we’re defunding NPR, the Republicans, you know, in the House and the Senate, not because we don’t want to have an informed citizenry, but because this is used as a tool now to sort of propagate very radical leftist ideas that are perhaps detrimental to the republic, I do think it will win in the court of opinion.
I also think NPR should ask itself, in a similar way that the New York Times is asking itself, the Washington Post, and I’m not an NPR listener like you, but I do listen, for example, to the Daily every single day to kind of see what the Times is thinking about the most important issues of the day. And there is a marked difference in the Trump era of how they’re reporting things. They do have more divergent voices and topics that are said. And so if NPR wants to stay relevant, if they also want to engage with more groups that are entering American politics, such as Hispanic males, you know, more younger people that have been trending right where they do think they have to have a hard conversation with themselves. I don’t know if that’s going to happen, but that’s where I think that they should go if they want to stay relevant.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I and look, I think it’s important for people to understand, right,If this defunding initiative goes through, NPR doesn’t disappear, right? It’s just going to have to, you know, dip into its other sources of income to maintain itself. And look, if it takes your advice, Renu, I mean, I have every reason to believe that it’s going to do just fine on the private market and, you know, survive, right? I mean, there is a place for even far left wing, you know, media institutions. And there’s a model for being successful on that front. I think the Times is certainly one of them. But even as you know, I mean, the Times has kind of moderated itself in some ways and has been responsive in a way that I don’t think NPR has ever really had to be in part because that’s not who they got their money from. And I think that matters, right? I mean, the market incentive to be profitable is a good one.
Carolyn D. Gorman: No, totally. you know, one thing about funding, Howard Husock has raised a concern that I think is actually sort of interesting and valid. Cutting federal funding might actually backfire if liberal foundations like Gates, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, sort of buoy NPR with financial support, because that would make them both financially stronger and more sort of insulated from public accountability. So we should be thoughtful about that. And I don’t think it’s, you know, it’s a lost cause there. There is some programming that is good. I love the Planet Money podcast, for example. So, you know, maybe thinking about how these public broadcasting services can change their programming to just represent more Americans would be an interesting thing to think about.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, look, I agree. I mean, look, I don’t think it’s bad to live in a world in which NPR is successful and profitable. What bugs me is that as a taxpayer, I’m being forced to underwrite, to participate in an effort to bring about my own demise, which is kind of how I feel when, you know, I listen to some of the things being said on NPR, how in opposite they are to the things that I believe. And yet I know that some portion, albeit a small portion of my paycheck and every paycheck that I’ve ever drawn is going to keep this stuff afloat. And it’s like every other week they’re having a fundraising drive. For as long as I’ve been alive, NPR has been on the verge of collapse and needs more money. And Tal, you’ll appreciate this, but it just brings to mind yet another Seinfeld reference with the fundraising drive for PBS. mean, Jerry Seinfeld is supposed to bring Danny…anyway. Great episode. All right.
Tal Fortgang: I don’t know why you would just associate me with Seinfeld, Ralph. Are you profiling me?
Rafael Mangual: Well, we were talking about this the other day. But yeah, I mean, it’s one of those like 80-20 issues where it’s just easy to win on this. think the Trump administration forcing people to kind of defend the things that NPR has defended. You have like Congress been pulling out some of the wackiest headline. It’s so easy to make this case. And so I have every reason to expect that the House is going to follow through and that Trump is going to sign this. But why don’t we close that topic out with the rest of your predictions, Carolyn? What do you think? Will it be defunded or no?
Carolyn D. Gorman: It does sort of seem like something that’s winnable, for lack of real word. So yeah, it could happen.
Rafael Mangual: That’s a word. Okay, Tal?
Tal Fortgang: Yeah, votes to defund, and then the process of actually pulling federal support gets bogged down and the issue disappears and we never hear about it again. And ten years from now, we look back and we say, whatever happened to the NPR defunding thing? NPR seems to be chugging along.
Rafael Mangual: Okay. Renu, what about you?
Renu Mukherjee: Yeah, think that they will get defunded. The House will definitely vote the way of the Senate. But again, similar to what’s been happening with Harvard, I anticipate story after story after story about the sort of panic, both fiscally and the moral panic, that NPR is going to propagate over the defunding for the next few months at least.
Rafael Mangual: Okay, all right. Well, before we close out the show, because we’re coming up on time, we always like to ask a quick and semi-fun question at the end of our shows. And, you know, we’ve kind of been doing this sort of system where we cover, you know, one or two topics, an episode, which I think, you know, works out just fine. But there’s only so much that you can get to in a show that’s, you know, constrained by that kind of time limit. And so I’m always curious about, you know, what are the stories that we don’t talk about that you all are thinking about or following closely?
And so I want to close out today just by asking you each to tell us what you think the sort of biggest news story of the week is that we didn’t cover on the show along with maybe a few words about why you think it’s important. And, Carolyn, I’m going to start with you because I think I have a sense of what you’re going to say.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, I’ve been paying attention to this news that Trump wants to fire Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, because Powell cut….
Rafael Mangual: And you think this is a bad idea, a good idea?
Carolyn D. Gorman: I do not think this is a good idea.
Rafael Mangual: Okay, tell us why.
Carolyn D. Gorman: I think, yeah, there are a lot of downsides here. It would have a very obvious effect of appearing very partisan, and that’s just damaging to public trust in the Fed, which is supposed to be independent. And also, even if the Fed does cut rates, it’s not clear that this would definitely have the effect that President Trump wants, which is for long-term interest rates to fall. Lowering long-term interest rates means it’s cheaper for the government and for consumers to borrow money, which encourages spending. This is why Trump is interested in this. But the Federal Reserve only controls short-term interest rates, not long-term rates like the 10-year Treasury rate, which is what mortgage rates follow. So Fed cuts don’t necessarily mean a guarantee that long-term rates go down, and they could even go up, especially if investors lose confidence in the Fed’s credibility. And so all of that would make borrowing more expensive, which is the opposite of what any president that wants to lower long-term rates hopes happens. So I would like to see J. Powell stay where he is.
Rafael Mangual: Okay, so Tal. What about you?
Tal Fortgang: Here’s the big news story from where I sit, which is I sit off the grid. My family and I went to Yosemite National Park for a few days over the weekend and through the beginning of this week. So I was totally disconnected from the news. And my news is that America is the most remarkably gorgeous and diverse place in the world. And that’s true in every sense. I mean, the fact that New York City and Yosemite National Park exist in the same country, the fact that San Francisco and Yosemite National Park are, you know, about a three hour drive away from one another. It’s just a remarkable thing.
My fellow Americans, go out there, go enjoy your beautiful country. Breathe it in. Taste the freedom. See the beauty, and appreciate all that we’ve been blessed with from sea to shining sea.
Rafael Mangual: I like that. We should have had that on the July 4th episode.
Tal Fortgang: I’m subverting your question, but only because I don’t have a good answer.
Rafael Mangual: No, no, that was great. That was great. I mean, I think that is news to a lot of people. Renu, what about you?
Renu Mukherjee: I wish we had ended with Tal because my response is so not poignant.
Rafael Mangual: I know, right? I’m almost tearing up.
Tal Fortgang: Sorry.
Renu Mukherjee: It’s frankly a bit, I don’t know, just irritating, I guess I would describe it as. So the organization Do No Harm, definitely a friend of the pod, they do amazing work exposing DEI and radical leftism in American medical schools, the medical profession. They actually have a major report published today in which two researchers there had sent Freedom of Information Act requests to over 90 public medical schools in the U.S. Twenty-three responded and of an all but one, so 22 of these schools had vast discrepancies in admit rate and average MCAT score based on race. And in 13 of these schools, white and Asian American rejected applicants actually had higher MCAT scores than accepted black applicants. And so the point of this is showing that just, you know, in general, higher education is defying Students For Fair Admissions, which banned affirmative action. It’s very bad in American medical schools. And that’s quite frankly terrifying when you think about the high stakes that’s involved in medical education. So, you know, an important story, but not the not the note that I would like to end on after Tal’s beautiful answer.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Well, maybe we could end on everyone’s favorite state.
Rafael Mangual: I think be good way to end. I mean, for me, it’s got to be New York, right? I mean, we’re home to New York City, which is also where the big story that we didn’t cover, I think took place. You had the former interim NYPD commissioner just recently file a lawsuit against Eric Adams and the Adams administration making some pretty wild accusations. So I’m very interested to see how that lands and what impact, if at all, it has on the sort of broader conversation about the future of New York City.
And then another kind of law enforcement related story that I thought was really interesting. You all remember the Breonna Taylor case. This was a police shooting where they were serving a warrant out in Louisville, Kentucky, were met with gunfire, returned fire, and hit Breonna Taylor who did not fire at police but was next to the person who did. A lot of controversy around that case. The officers were prosecuted, sued. Well, the federal prosecution ended recently and the DOJ has put in their sentencing request. And of course, the DOJ under Trump is a very different DOJ than the one under Biden, and they have requested a one-day sentence for one of the ex-officers involved, which is, I think, really interesting. Could spark a lot of conversation. You know, those of you who are listening, think about those, tell us what you think and maybe we’ll talk about them in a future episode.
Yeah, so my favorite state got to be New York, home of New York City, the New York Yankees, some of the greatest restaurants in the world. What about you, Renu, favorite state?
Renu Mukherjee: Massachusetts, I know I shouldn’t say that after New York, but as Tal will make fun of me, I’m a born and raised Massachusetts Bostonian person and my lifelong love is Dunkin Donuts iced coffee, so I have to say Massachusetts.
Rafael Mangual: All right, Tal.
Tal Fortgang: I’m a New Yorker too, but unfortunately the New York Yankees are in New York, so I can’t go for my home state, the Empire State. I’m a big Colorado-phile, I got to say. I think Denver’s a great city. It has some issues it needs to get under control, but the natural beauty of the Rocky Mountains is just magnificent.
Rafael Mangual: All right, Carolyn.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Well, I’m a born and raised New York stater also, and I just think the state has everything you could want. So it’s hard not to put New York top. You’ve got the Finger Lakes, you’ve got the Adirondack Mountains, you’ve got the beaches, you’ve got New York City, the best place in the world. So hard to say anything other than New York.
Rafael Mangual: All right, that’s what I like to hear. All right, well on that note, we’re going to close it out there because we’re out of time. Thank you guys for the great conversation. Thank you all who are listening, watching. We really appreciate it. Thanks to our producer Isabella Redjai. For everyone who is watching, please do not forget, like, subscribe, comment, do it on YouTube, do it on Apple Podcasts, do it on Spotify, wherever it is that you get your podcast, engage with these episodes, shoot us a comment. Let us know what you want us to talk about. Ask us some questions. We’re more than happy to get to them. Until next time, you have been watching the City Journal Podcast and we hope to see you again soon.
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