Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, Tal Fortgang, and John Ketcham discuss the recent executive order from the Trump administration addressing homelessness, mental illness, and public disorder. They explore the implications of the order, the challenges of implementing it at the state and local levels, and the need for a more comprehensive approach to homelessness that includes mental health treatment. The conversation also touches on the political dynamics of redistricting and gerrymandering, highlighting the partisan posturing involved.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, Senior Editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are, as always, perennial guests Jesse Arm, Director of External Affairs, whatever that means, at the Manhattan Institute, Tal Fortgang, who is rejoining us because he couldn’t get enough of us and who works on domestic extremism, legal things, at the Manhattan Institute, and John Ketcham, who is solely responsible for cities at the Manhattan Institute. He’s the only person who thinks about cities. Nobody else thinks about cities.
Thank you all, gentlemen, for joining us today. Let me take us right into the exciting news from last week when we heard from the Trump administration that they have issued an executive order on homelessness, mental illness, and public disorder. It’s a big W for the administration. They’re targeting public disorder. Among other things, they target federal funds for inpatient and outpatient treatment, promote camping bans and public order statutes, cut funding for harm reduction. It’s really just like, you know, not to play my hand too strongly, but it’s kind of a suite of everything you could have wanted out of an executive order. So, you know, I want to talk about this a little bit, because it’s big news for those of us who pay attention to these issues. What do you all make of this? What’s going on with this executive order? How should we be responding to it?
Jesse Arm: Yeah, got to give credit where credit is due. And a lot of credit is due. The executive order is a political and policy triumph for the Trump administration. For years, the left has insisted that these public encampments and open-air drug markets, untreated psychosis are somehow expressions of dignity. And this EO calls that bluff. It treats public disorder as not a social inevitability, but as a failure of public leadership and then backs it up with policy that has teeth. And I think this is the most significant federal action—John will correct me if I’m wrong—but in decades to challenge the dogmas of deinstitutionalization and the fantasy that harm reduction alone can solve homelessness. So I think this is the president calling on agencies to fund inpatient treatment, revive civil commitment, and really just cut off money to the nonprofits that have been enabling this crisis. It’s a statement, I think, of just profound moral seriousness and really a bet that the public is done tolerating this kind of disgusting chaos.
John Ketcham: I agree with Jesse. This is the most major step in the right direction in a long time when it comes to issues like deinstitutionalization. I will note, though, that the federal government has limited power to determine these issues at the state and local level. For example, it directs the attorney general to reverse consent decrees and court precedents that make it harder for local governments to regulate street camping and homelessness in general, but only some consent decrees are between the DOJ and let’s say a local nonprofit or another governmental entity at the local level. Much of the time you have a local government that has a consent decree in place with a local nonprofit. The best example of this is the Callahan Consent Decree in New York City which in 1981 established the right to shelter and continues to govern provision of shelter in New York City. That’s not really something the federal government has any jurisdiction over. It’s between the city and nominally the state and this nonprofit entity that continues to call the shots in part. So it will not have a necessarily sweeping effect at once, but it does signal the policy direction that the federal government would like states and localities to take, and that is enormously helpful.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, you know, no, no, ahead, Tal.
Tal Fortgang: Yeah, looking at this, at this EO, I am as thrilled as anyone by the sort of political theory that it represents, right? That to me is the best part of this, the proclamation, as it were, that society belongs to the pro-social, it belongs to people who cooperate with one another, who are active participants in the economy, in our communities, people who are fully present and contributing to this thing that we all do together, our society, our culture, our economy.
The more difficult elements of this EO and its implementation, as John alluded to, are that the federal government’s tools are limited. It can direct, withhold, redirect funding. That’s kind of its big tool. But to the extent that the EO requires government agencies to develop plans to actually implement policy, that is exactly the kind of thing that is liable to be, you know, slow-footed and dragged out by, I don’t want to, you know, wax too much about a deep state, but there are civil servants who have deeply entrenched views about the right way to handle homelessness, drug addiction, and other forms of public disorder. And if you see the outcry from the regular groups and individuals who oppose this stuff, if you read the NPR coverage of this executive order, you’ll see people saying things like, this is an assault on human dignity, right? We need to give people clean, safe access to drugs, we need to try to push them into housing even when they don’t want housing. We need to basically shove the entire problem of psychosis and drug addiction under the rug. You can expect there to be a fair number of people in actual decision implementing positions to try to put that view into action.
Charles Fain Lehman: I do think it’s important that in some senses there’s more leverage available to the administration than there would have been 10, 15 years ago because the Biden administration went in the other direction on this. Some of this has to do with grant making during COVID, but a lot of this has to do with sort of their ideological predilections. Like you look at what the Biden-era Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug czar’s office did, you look at what they did through the Substance Abuse And Mental Health Services Administration. And this EO says to SAMHSA, it says you can’t hand out grants to “harm reduction” or “safer consumption” facilities or to providers who are motivated by that philosophy. You can’t spend money on that. And all of your interventions have to be evidence-based, which is—you know, I’ve said repeatedly the words evidence-based are a useful cudgel against exactly this group of people because they like to sort of insist that all their interventions are evidence-based and they’re largely not. They’re largely, the high-quality evidence suggests that they are not supported by the evidence. But you know, I think because the administration moved in this other, the last administration moved in this more aggressively sort of pro-accommodationist direction, there’s an opportunity for the administration to sort of, the Trump administration to rein in some of those dollars to pull them back and say, where can we be spending this money more efficiently? You know, I think the other point, to John’s point is, everyone’s sort of gotten this, but I think the response this has been relatively muted, which is marked to me, right? It’s just like,
know, and since this came out on a Thursday, but like, you know, you could read the NPR coverage, but nobody takes those people seriously anymore, right?
Jesse Arm: Nor are we funding them publicly anymore. I think there’s a tendency, but that is actually an important part of this story, right? I’m listening to what you guys are saying and I take your point that there is potential for some of the goodwill that is fostered by this executive order to be slowed down by way of proceduralism or the deep state or whatever. But like, I’m going to be glass half full guy here and just say, look at what we’re doing.
No previous Republican administration was taking action like this. And no previous administration that was a Republican was willing to go and defund NPR, which has these headlines that are so negative, pouring cold water on the whole thing. The wheels are turning, okay? The winds are racking up one after the other. And it’s okay to, I think, take a step back and celebrate those winds, especially in a political climate that is more deeply connected to this story and others. And so that was poorly phrased. But what I’m essentially trying to say is the same cities that have failed to address this kind of homelessness are now electing politicians like, you know, our favorite person to talk about on this podcast, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City, and candidates like him who openly sort of campaign on subsidizing this very dysfunction.
That’s not coincidence. That is connected to everything else that’s going on here. Our president, Reihan Salam, our boss, had this essay in the Wall Street Journal last week talking about how in many progressive cities, you have this growing class of what he calls downwardly mobile and highly educated millennial elites. People who went to all the right colleges, got all the right jobs, had every opportunity along the way and were led to believe that would drive them toward successful, fulfilling careers and lives. And it hasn’t. And now they feel like the system has failed them. They’re surrounded by this disorder in the streets every day, in the cities where they feel like they need to be in order to succeed, but also can’t afford to live. And then they’re hearing from these politicians who, yeah, they’re no longer talking about, okay, we can tweak this subway line, or we can improve this marginal thing, or instead speaking in terms of burning down the whole system. And this executive order, in some small part, I think is a clear rebuke to that vision. It says, no, we do not accept decline. We do not accept lawlessness. And we are not going to let the politics of envy dictate policy at the federal level, of course, but we’re also going to make interventions to ensure it doesn’t do so at the local level. And that’s an appetite for fighting that I think is healthy, exciting, and something worth celebrating.
Charles Fain Lehman: The other thing that you get here very concretely is diversity in policy. Like, the EO tries to put curbs on HUD’s use of funding, Department of Housing and Urban Development’s use of funding for what’s called Housing First, which for listeners who don’t know is an approach to homelessness policy that tries to prioritize getting people into stable permanent supportive housing over and above other interventions like getting sober or getting on meds for this year’s mental illness. Housing First is an official federal policy for two-and-a-half decades since the Bush administration actually and there are a lot of states that would like to be able to spend their federal homelessness dollars on something that isn’t Housing First. Utah, friends in Utah have led I think a coalition of a number states in calling for government to give them more choice and how they spend the federal block grant dollars. I think there’s potentially a move in that direction where they’re not going to have their hands tied in how they want to spend HUD dollars on an issue like homelessness, which doesn’t mean, you know… If California wants to commit itself to building three units of affordable housing at $10 billion a unit, it can continue to do that for whatever reason. Or Illinois, or wherever. They’re plausibly free to do that.
It’s good for, on the other hand, it’s good for Utah to be in position where it can go do its own experimentations. It’s good for Texas, a state that actually builds housing, or Montana, a state that actually builds housing, or Florida, a state that actually builds housing, to also be able to say, we have an adequate housing stock. The problem with some section of the population isn’t just that they are lacking a home, it’s that they’re seriously mentally ill, addicted to drugs, otherwise disabled, and we need to intervene on that level rather than sort of like shoving them in a permanent supportive housing unit and hoping. So, you know, I think there’s greater choice there as well.
John Ketcham: I think you’re both exactly right. And Housing First has now been proven to not work nearly as well as its proponents had originally promised. You go back through the two decades and it was going to be transformative. There have been billions and billions of dollars of investment across the country on these permanent supportive housing units. And guess what? Homelessness is as bad as it’s ever been. And that’s in part because the government is not good at building housing. California spent billions of dollars and on average it costs something like $500 to $600 thousand per unit of permanent supportive housing. You are never going to have enough public subsidy dollars to satisfy that need. And then you’re also going to attract some people who are otherwise not going to be homeless to try and get these units.
So the whole idea was misplaced conceptually, but it’s been extremely poorly implemented and is a major reason why American cities are in such a mess, especially when it comes to homeless policy and on the West Coast too. New York and some Eastern cities, we take a different approach to homelessness. We shelter our homeless, but we spend billions of dollars a year in New York to do that, and other cities simply don’t have the capacity fiscally or even just in terms of shelters to do so.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, I want to leave it there, but I want to ask everybody coming out. I think an accurate point that is made in this conversation is the federal government is just one actor in this space, and because homelessness and disorder policy are so local, there are going to have to be state actions, are going to be municipal actions. In some senses, there’s going to have to be political movement. So I want to, I think we’re on the same page, this is good. My question, and there are different levels at which, Jesse can give political answer, and John can give a local policy answer and Tal can give a Talmudic answer and we can all reach our own conclusions, but I’m curious, what’s the next step after this? I’ll kick it to John first.
John Ketcham: So overwhelmingly what’s needed right now is more shelter bed capacity, and more inpatient bed capacity above all else. Right now, states won’t get reimbursed through Medicaid for “institutes of mental disease” that have over 16 beds of inpatient psychiatric care. That’s a longstanding policy meant to deter institutionalization. But what it in effect does is it prevents the economies of scale necessary to provide care for the most acute needs at a reasonable cost. Overturning that exclusion would mean that states can spend more on larger institutions that are modern and humane, not like the nightmares of the past, but truly contemporary humane facilities so that we can use public dollars to care for the most acute needs in our society, the schizophrenics and those with severe psychosis.
Tal Fortgang: Charles, at risk of stepping on your policy toes and neglecting my duty to give a Talmudic answer, I think this has to…
Charles Fain Lehman: I always go last. I get scooped.
Tal Fortgang: The next step, certainly at a state and local level, has to be addressing the kind of crimes that tend to spill over from scenes of public disorder. And not just crimes, unlawful but not criminal behavior, the kinds of public nuisances that our colleague Ilan Wurman has led the charge in litigating against, right? To show that, again, our society is for the pro-social, right? That means cracking down on the gun crimes, the drug crimes, and the crimes of disorder that allow these loci, I’ll use a fancy, these locuses of disorder to spill over into the cities and start to really interfere with law-abiding citizens’ lives, you need to see local police departments taking that stuff much more seriously and incapacitating the people who are responsible for driving it.
Charles Fain Lehman: Jesse?
Jesse Arm: Yeah, John’s answer is correct. The EO really sets the tone, but it’s just the beginning. Medicaid’s IMD exclusion is what John is talking about. If Republicans really are serious, and Democrats, by the way, about taking the next step on this front. And by the way, a lot of Republicans and Democrats in Congress would like to move forward on this. There’s a whole bunch of stakeholders. A lot of them are kind of progressive mental health advocacy groups, a couple of disability rights groups, maybe to a lesser extent some budget-conscious state officials, but the answer is repealing Medicaid’s IMD exclusions so that states can actually rebuild psychiatric capacity. And really just as important, they kind of need to campaign on this, make it crystal clear that if you’re a Republican, one party is offering treatment and order and the other is offering, I don’t know, fentanyl tents and stupid slogans.
Charles Fain Lehman: No, I mean, like, you know, I think I think the Democrats have walked away from that, which is important for…
Jesse Arm: Yeah, that’s good. That should be celebrated.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, no, it’s good. I think it’s… No, but you know, I think it’s why the response has been muted is that, you know, I had a conversation with somebody. The Drug Policy Alliance is the big pro-reform/drug revolution group, and they pushed this decriminalization statute in Washington, excuse me, in Oregon, Measure 110, which was a huge disaster. They just repealed their ending of drug decriminalization out there so drugs are, drug possession is now criminal again in Oregon, and The Drug Policy Alliance is sort of looking around and going like wow this disorder stuff is not a winner for us, like we got to, we got to… They don’t know what to do about it, but they recognize that this is a huge problem for them.
By the way, you know, I think though, that my answer to this question, I agree with everybody else, but my answer to this question is sort of more airy-fairy abstract which is everybody intuitively doesn’t like disorder. I think that there is still really a struggle, a lack of an intellectual immune system against the arguments that led us into this place, you know, five years ago that said, well, it’s actually not a big deal. How can you justify arresting people for sleeping in public? How can you justify, you know, stopping people from shooting up on the street? Is it really harming anyone? It’s a victimless crime. They don’t have anywhere to live. You need to be conscious of their needs as well. They’re more important than you. All of these arguments actually were persuasive and they will be persuasive again, right? These are not new arguments. These arguments come over and over again. And I think it is, we did not win the intellectual dispute over that. And in some senses that doesn’t matter, but in other senses I think you need a sort of intellectual immune system to be able to say like, no actually I understand why it’s a problem when a hundred people camp on the street, and there’s a connection between that and one person camping on the street, we need enforcement on one to deal with enforcement on the other. So you know that’s, in addition to all the concrete policy solutions, I think being able have the public debate about disorder and why disorder is a problem is extraordinarily important for ensuring against the next time this happens, because it will.
John Ketcham: Well, one reason why we didn’t have to litigate…
Jesse Arm: Charles, before we move on…
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, John and then Jesse very briefly, then we can move on.
John Ketcham: One reason why we didn’t have to litigate the intellectual dispute was because there were more moderates in the Democratic Party that won politically on this issue. Talk about giving credit where credit is due. Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul really do deserve credit for things like lowering the standard for civil commitment. They took a more pragmatic approach to this and were really able to hold progressives’ feet to the fire in the state legislature and score a big win on that front as well.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, in addition to Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul who tiptoed in the right direction on this, I just also wanted to heap praise on New York Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres who introduced legislation at the end of last Congress to repeal Medicaid’s IMD exclusion. Absolutely would have been a step in the right direction, and he’s been a real leader on this issue. And I think, you know, he’d tell you probably his thinking has evolved on the matter because he listens to constituents and other folks who have been impacted by this issue. And let’s hope we don’t go in the other direction as new New York politicians come to the fore.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’ll see. All right, let’s move on from…actually moving on to a related, state level story. I want to talk a little bit about the heating up debate around redistricting. There’s been a push in Texas to redraw the map in the middle of the state’s congressional map in the middle of the decade. The president is on board with this. Critics are calling it a very aggressive gerrymander. Now it looks like there may be responses from among others, Kathy Hochul, but also the governors of Illinois and California are talking about redistricting to cut out Republican seats. I think this is an evolving story. I’m curious, John and Jesse, you’re our politics people. What do you make of this emerging fight?
Jesse Arm: I imagine John will have a longer riff than me on this, but let me just say super briefly, I think we should stop pretending that Democrats are the exclusive victims of gerrymandering. They’re the undisputed champions of it. Just look at Illinois where they turned a 52 percent vote share into an 82 percent of housing.
Charles Fain Lehman: My state of Maryland is remarkable
Jesse Arm: Sure, Maryland as well. New Jersey where Republicans got, think, 45 percent of the vote and ended up with 25 percent of the seats the only reason Democrats are howling now is because Republicans are finally playing by the same rules, especially in Texas, where Trump’s DOJ has flipped a Voting Rights Act challenge into an opportunity to redraw the maps in Republicans’ favor. But that’s the real irony here, right? The Democrats’ long campaign to weaponize Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that’s now boomeranging. And when your whole map-making strategy is built around racial sorting, you can’t complain when the other side begins to follow the same logic. Republicans are using the same legal tools that Democrats created, and if Democrats want to argue that it’s now unconstitutional to consider race, well, welcome to the party. Come on the City Journal Podcast sometime.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’ll happily have them. Sorry, John, I’m curious for, you know, John will have the moderate, reasonable take.
John Ketcham: I’ll do my best. Part of the reason why we’re seeing this development happen is because the checks or the guardrails on partisan gerrymandering have really fallen away in recent years. So stepping back, the elections clause of the Constitution gives Congress and state legislatures the ability to draw maps for the House of Representatives. So states can vary in how they draw their maps, the processes. Some states, for example, just allow their legislature to draw it. Other states delegate that authority to an independent redistricting commission. And there are other ways. But in a 2019 case called Rucho, the Supreme Court held that partisan gerrymandering claims were not justiciable in federal courts, meaning that federal courts really couldn’t hear these cases. They were political situations. So any challenges on the grounds of partisan gerrymandering can only be heard in state courts and many state courts are skewed in a partisan direction. State high court judges are elected in many cases and so there is less of an institutional check from the judiciary against partisan gerrymandering. And that’s in part because it’s really hard to draw principled lines around what’s too much when it comes to partisan gerrymandering? It’s like it has this “I know it when I see it” kind of quality. And that basically means that you can have a good deal of leeway when drawing these maps, especially when the state Supreme Court is tilted in your favor. And we’ve since had a series of disputes in the courts about the independent state legislature doctrine. So courts do have a role in regulating cases and in regulating the redistricting process. It’s not like state legislatures have complete authority. But I don’t know if that is necessarily strong enough as an institutionalist to prevent some of the worst excesses of partisan gerrymandering, I do think is problematic, at its extreme at least.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, I do think there’s a certain amount of like… This is one of those cases where we seem to keep piling legal standards on top of legal standards in an attempt to carve nature at the joints in a way that doesn’t actually make sense. Some of this goes back to the foundational requirements imposed by both the courts and the federal government in the 60s and the 70s. Jesse’s talking about the Voting Rights Act, which requires us to draw lines in ways that are patently racist, right? Like we have to have majority minority districts under such under interpretations of the Voting Rights Act. You know, in some senses, my view is, this seems like an entirely political question to me. I’m not, I struggle, I struggle to find an objection to gerrymandering, but you that may be too in the weeds as a topic of discussion.
Tal Fortgang: I’ll offer an objection. Our political system requires that people do have a voice. I know that sounds kind of idealistic and like vague, know, lib college talk, but it’s true that like people need to be able to channel their preferences…
Charles Fain Lehman: It is Lib College Talk.
Tal Fortgang: People need to channel their preferences through the political system. The people are somewhat justified in turning to causing disorder in order to make their voice heard if they cannot channel it through legitimate means. And gerrymandering at its worst does detract from certain people, often on the basis of geography, certain people’s ability to fire their representatives to say like, this is actually not representing us at all. There are like a great many people who are actually unspoken for as those disparities between statewide election results and representation that Jesse was citing before will attest. With that said, the fundamental political question here is a bit of a third rail, which is like if the Voting Rights Act as interpreted collapses under its own weight, if it’s actually unworkable to put all of the precedents that the Supreme Court has imposed upon the Voting Rights Act into play at once, then how do we reevaluate the Voting Rights Act as a whole?
Jesse Arm: The bigger problem with all this redistricting drama is what it reveals, that neither party really is all too eager to compete for votes outside of its comfort zone anymore. think Democrats in particular have become allergic to ideological diversity. Instead of recruiting candidates who can win tough districts, they’re obsessing over maps in states they already dominate, New York, New Jersey, California, because they’ve already run moderates like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema out of the party. And they’re in the process of pushing out one of their last remaining ones in John Fetterman. So look at who they’re running instead. People like Dan Osborne in Nebraska, who gets marketed as independent, but mostly just parrots, hard left lines about economic issues and Gaza and pretty much every issue of substance.
If anything, guys like him are somehow usually only ever attacking the National Democratic Party for not being far enough left on one of those matters. So you put on a funny accent, you say you’re anti-establishment, and suddenly you’re supposed to be the working-class, moderate option, when in reality you’re not offering any real departure from the party’s ideological core. It’s the same deal with a guy like Tim Waltz getting the VP nod. It’s all aesthetic. Democrats are confusing the vibe of moderation with actually meeting voters where they are. And I do think that’s the irony because if they did have a bigger tent, if they actually made space for culturally moderate, economically aspirational candidates who don’t sound like Twitter activists, they wouldn’t, or Blue Sky activists rather, they wouldn’t be so desperate to redraw the maps every two years. They’d win more naturally.
Meanwhile, the GOP, I guess whatever else you think of it, is doing exactly that. Donald Trump is pulling in, or just pulled in, more black and Hispanic men than any Republican in a generation to the party. So he did that not by changing the rules, but by changing the pitch. And by showing up and making a case. And that’s what political strength looks like. And it’s why the Republican party is expanding, while Democrats are watching their approval ratings hit 35 year lows. They don’t have a redistricting problem per se. They have a persuasion problem.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I think that does seem like the deeper issue here, right? Which is like, there is a narrowly divided house that is not necessarily representative of the House electoral, it’s actually I pretty close to the House electoral vote when you look at the House equivalent electoral vote in 2024. But I think there’s only so much juice that you can squeeze out of the redistricting strategy. Particularly because you end up seeing voters shift, right Nobody would have thought you could get half… Donald Trump nearly won Hispanic voters in 2024, the most recent Pew estimate from last month. I think he won the Hispanic man out, right? Like, if you tried to draw a majority Hispanic district that you thought was going to be reliably Democratic ten years ago, that calculus has now changed appreciably. Alright, I want to take us out. I was going ask about, you know, the fairness of gerrymandering, but I feel like we already got there, so I’m going ask instead, how much of this is just like partisan posturing, right? Like, how much of this… We talked about Kathy Hochul wants to pick a fight. Do we think there will actually be mid-decade redistricting, or is everybody just putting on some saber-rattling shows? John, what’s your read?
John Ketcham: Well, the ability to put on those mid-decade registrations is going to vary by state. Blue states generally have more options in terms of the system by which they redistrict. So it’s not just the legislature calling a session to do that. And one of my big-picture concerns here is that this episode might set back good government reforms in blue states. Democrats are going to see this as a bad faith effort to penalize them for having adopted things like redistricting commissions instead of just having it dominated in the legislature. So it might be a setback in that regard. The trust between the parties is an absolute nadir here. And that ultimately is going to take what is already now something like 85 percent of House seats that are uncompetitive and bring it up as close to 100 percent as we can. There really is no deterrent or disincentive to just gerrymander to the max if the others, if you perceive your opponents to be doing so, but the structure in blue states is not quite as amenable to that and It means that Republicans I think have more to gain here than Democrats.
Charles Fain Lehman: Tal, what’s your take?
Tal Fortgang: It’s a lot of posturing, it’s a lot of saber rattling. The problem is just that there’s a kernel of truth to it, right? That when you posture as a defender of democracy to a base of your party, if you’re the Democrats, and there’s actually something to be said there for the unfairness of what is happening to you, you simply leave out the part where we did this to the other party, we continue to do this to the other party.
And that’s your pitch. You do feel like you’re stymied in a way that resonates with our populist moment, right? Like were it not for these nefarious, the machinations of an elite that do not have the regular person’s interests at heart, we would be able to have all our unicorns and our ponies and our safe injection sites.
And if you’re a Republican, it’s all, you know, your opposition to gerrymandering is limited. As you’ve alluded to, Charles, your opposition is limited to saying like, you know, what’s good for the ass is good for the elephant.
Charles Fain Lehman: Jesse?
Jesse Arm: think it’s 95 percent political posturing. And I think when it really comes down to it, what’s really objectionable about gerrymandering and its use is that it’s used as a crutch because you’re too scared to ask swing voters for their support and meet them where they’re at.
John Ketcham: This will raise the stakes for state Supreme Court judicial picks and elections.
Charles Fain Lehman: Which are already extremely high, right? Yeah,
Tal Fortgang: It’s already happening, yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. All right, I want to, before we go, take us to sort of a lighter note. Last week, the end of last week, American legend Hulk Hogan died at the age of 71. I’m a professional wrestling defender. I’m anti-anti-professional wrestler. I’ve attended exactly one live professional wrestling event in my life. It was great. Highly recommend it. Also, fascinatingly…
Tal Fortgang: I did not see that coming, Charles.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I know.
It was a fascinatingly diverse experience among other things. So my curiosity for the panel is, do you like professional wrestling? And if not, what is your equivalently ridiculous passion that speaks to the professional wrestling ethos? Tal, I’ll you on the spot.
Tal Fortgang: Okay, I can’t speak to the professional wrestling ethos. That’s a little bit distant from me, but New Yorkers will understand.
Charles Fain Lehman: I’m going to take you. We’re going to… We’re going to do a trip we’re going to do a City Journal Podcast attend local professional wrestling.
Tal Fortgang: Please know, New Yorkers will understand that wrestling is popular among New York Islanders fans, right? If you like professional wrestling, you definitely like the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders. In fact, the Islanders have incorporated wrestling shtick into their goal celebrations. It’s like part of the culture. It’s a very Long Island. And I am not from east of the city. I’m from north of the city. I’m a Rangers fan. And the closest thing I get to the irrational love that Islanders fans seem to have for scripted wrestling entertainment is my love for the New York Rangers. But I can’t say that it’s equally ridiculous. It’s a fundamentally different thing. Do I get emotionally invested in the outcome of a somewhat violent, somewhat beautiful sport that I have no control over? Yes. So I guess that’s as close as I get.
Charles Fain Lehman: Hockey, okay, okay. Jesse, you got to come in and defend the Trump-voting wrestling fans.
Jesse Arm: I’m not defending the fans, I’m defending the sport. And I would argue that a sport that involves skating around like a, a whatever is way lamer than professional wrestling anyway. And look, obviously, yes, I’m a massive fan of professional wrestling. And I think Hulk Hogan was a giant just not just for wrestling, but for American culture. And he was the first guy who kind of made pro wrestling feel mainstream and also patriotic and also larger than life. And he handled that spotlight better than most who earn it. And whatever you think of Hollywood showbiz, he’s someone who carried that charisma with, I think, a real sense of responsibility. And he’s an absolute total legend. So Rest In Peace Hulk Hogan. That said, my heart in the wrestling arena belongs to Bill Goldberg, who was a legendary Jewish professional wrestler.
Charles Fain Lehman: The only one!
Jesse Arm: Yeah, extremely jacked, walked out to Sparks and head-butted lockers before matches, just pure intensity. And yeah, I think in some sense you could say Hogan built that stage, but Goldberg made it shake. So you can see him in all kinds of movie. He had a football career too. Yeah, it’s great.
As for Tal Fortgang, I don’t know what’s going on here. He’s got what he defines as liberal college talk and criticisms of professional wrestling. That is what you brought to the podcast today, sir. So, so…
Tal Fortgang: I didn’t realize that being pro wrestling was Manhattan Institute-coded. I thought like…
Jesse Arm: Well, you have not read the handbook, okay?
Tal Fortgang: It’s in the supplement. Yeah. Jesse. Jesse.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s in there after the gangster rap. John, John save us.
John Ketcham: So I think American wrestling is an institution that’s worth defending and preserving in this country. I just don’t get it.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s like Cirque du Soleil. You’ve been to Cirque du Soleil? Same thing!
John Ketcham: I’ve never. Yeah, guess, but I’ve actually never watched a match of professional wrestling growing up or in person. I just never have. I know I’m so deprived. I’m even stranger than the islanders people, you know, but I will say, one of my guilty pleasures that is both rigged and highly entertaining is watching this guy and his son and some of his friends on YouTube gamble high stakes in Vegas and slots. And there’s like this vicarious pleasure because you’re not losing your money, but boy, the sting of defeat is both frequent and severe in these videos. I think he’s down like $350 grand this year already so far. But he’s making way more than that through the YouTube revenue and the business that he’s building. He sells merch and everything. So it is responsible in that sense. And it also helps people who are struggling with this kind of addiction, you know, like see how bad it can get and scratch that itch without actually going to the casino themselves.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, well what we’ve learned is that we’re going to organize an outing to go watch professional wrestling.
Tal Fortgang: Wait a second, wait a second. We’re going to go this whole time without anyone joking about how our favorite rigged pastime is watching American elections, right? The gerrymandered, you could tie it all together. Right, Jesse? Right? Okay.
Charles Fain Lehman: Hey, hey, hey. Okay, okay.
Jesse Arm: Yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: That is about all the time that we have. Thank you, always, to at least some of our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Olivia. I think today is Olivia Caponiti. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, even if you haven’t, don’t forget to like, subscribe, ring the bell, click the button, click the other button, do all the things you have to do to view us on YouTube, Spotify, or all the other platforms where you might be consuming this podcast. Don’t forget to leave us comments and questions down below if you’re watching on YouTube. Or I guess you can do that on Spotify now, Freaky. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
Photo by Christopher Furlong via Getty Images
Source link
