Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Rob Henderson, and Neetu Arnold discuss the anti-Israel attack in Boulder, Elon Musk and DOGE, and branded products.
Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel this week are Ilya Shapiro, constitutional law guy at the Manhattan Institute…
Ilya Shapiro: I think that’s my official title.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, no, that’s what we’re calling you. Yeah. Rob Henderson, guy for all things social science at the Manhattan Institute, and Neetu Arnold, responsible for all things education, higher and lower, at the Manhattan Institute. Thanks everyone for being on. I’m going to take us right into….
Ilya Shapiro: Neetu, I had a piece last week on the latest on Trump-Harvard, and I think I linked a couple of your things, so you’re doing such great stuff. Yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: They’re good.
Neetu Arnold: No, it’s a great article, great article, love to see it.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. Neetu, Neetu is coming to me like every day in my inbox. Neetu, it’s like seven new ideas. It’s fantastic. We strongly encourage it. Read all of her stuff at City Journal. Let’s talk about, on a slightly more serious note, last night’s, or yesterday’s attack in Boulder, Colorado. A now known to be Egyptian national, Mohamed Soliman, has been taken into custody after lobbing Molotov cocktails at a group of Jewish marchers in Boulder, who were supporting the release of Hamas’s hostages in Gaza. Soliman allegedly shouted “End Zionists” and “Palestine is free” during the attack. This is obviously yet another attack driven by anti-Israel animus. It follows on the murder that we talked about a couple of weeks ago in D.C. It’s also part of this larger trend that we’re very interested in here at City Journal of rising domestic left-wing violence. So I’m curious to know, what do people make of this latest incident? Is this a trend? What’s going on here?
Ilya Shapiro: I think Tal Fortgang, our colleague, put it well in City Journal this morning, that if you don’t crack down on this stuff, he called it kind of a “broken windows” approach to civil terrorism. I think that’s apt, know, going back, what, 20 more years in New York, if you go after graffiti and broken windows, then that’ll stop general escalating disorder. Same thing here. People. leaders, political leaders, educational leaders, let anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence proliferate, not just on campuses, and so you get more of it.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I’m going to have a piece by the time this is posted, will have had a piece making a similar point, is like, you know, when you call for Intifada on campus, this is what an intifada looks like. Like, this is the concrete effects of an intifada. This is, know, if you talk to Israelis who were in Israel in the Second Intifada of 2000, 2005, they still spend a lot of time like checking their corners when they get on buses because they’re thinking about whether or not they’re going to get blown up. You know, I wonder, you too, Rob, if you think about, you know, how you think about this sort of evolution, do you see this as a natural part of the sort of radicalization of the protest movement and if so, do we do about it?
Rob Henderson: Yeah, well when I read about this, you know. I thought of that viral tweet: “What did you think decolonization meant? Vibes, papers, essays?” And you increasingly see a lot of that kind of rhetoric that violence can be excused. It’s, you know, if you’re battling some kind of oppressor and yeah, it’s really ugly. The response to left-wing terrorism is always very muted. I know you’ve written about this, Charles, and you’ve had a lot of interesting pieces in CJ about this, that if this had been a far right extremist who had done something like this, think across the political spectrum this would have been condemned, but whenever it’s a left-wing terrorist, there’s often a kind of cover up for the atrocity and seems like less anger in response to it. So yeah, it’s really disgusting.
You know, it does seem to be a trend. To your question earlier, “Is this a trend or not?” And yeah, at this point it does seem to be so, and, you know, people aren’t condemning it. And if anything, you often see people supporting it and, you know, people who are far removed from what’s going on in Israel and in Gaza, they are supporting what’s happening.
Neetu Arnold: I think you bring up an interesting point about whether education has any role on this. And while I certainly think it does, I actually think there’s something much deeper occurring. Because keep in mind that a lot of students are coming to campus already radicalized on a set of issues. It’s not just sentiments against Israel, it’s against capitalism. And I really think social media has been a big part of this. There’s a lot of good that social media can do. You can connect with people, you can hear different ideas, but on the negative side of that, you can also have people with bad ideas and bad intentions connecting together. And so I think that’s a big part of why you’re seeing so much radicalization even among younger people.
Charles Fain Lehman: I’ve been thinking a lot about Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist, I forget if I talked about this on the show recently, maybe I did, a book five years ago, six years ago, I forget, called The Decadent Society. It an interesting section in there, the whole thesis of the book was, know, America’s society is decadent, we’re stagnant, we’re not doing anything. And there’s an interesting side argument in there, the thrust of which was,
we would expect the internet to radicalize us and actually it’s done the opposite. It’s sort of become an outlet for expressions of violence that get done on Twitter rather than done in real life. And I think at the time that was this sort of internet-enabled-radicalism was the dog that didn’t bark. And it seems like now it is barking. I think it’s a really good question as to why.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, it’s not just social media or the internet, or maybe this goes into it, but these irresponsible headlines with CNN and others acting as Hamas’s PR agent, people see this and then there are consequences. Now, you want to be careful about cause and effect, but when there’s a drumbeat from the media of how bad Israel and therefore the Jews are, some people who are more excitable and come from these societies that are illiberal are going to act on it.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think, just to expand on I think, and to expand on Neetu’s point, in the 1970s when you think about domestic terror, there was this conversation with the “underground,” which is this idea of like you would go off the grid, would vanish into the underground and join the resistance. This is the Black Liberation Army, and this is the Weather Underground, et cetera, et cetera. And there is, think, on the one hand, is sort of the mainstream laundering of this stuff, but there is a very real contemporary underground that exists on Discord, exists on sort of niche parts of social media that’s happening in group chats where it’s like, you know, Ken Klippenstein just published, the journalist just published the DC shooters text messages. And like the guy was clearly digesting a steady stream of radical media for years and years and years and clearly engaging in conversations about it and sort of part of this network before he decided to act, which gets to Neetu’s point, is like, you know, it’s not obviously what you do at a policy level, but I do think it is true that you’re dealing with sort of… We expected the internet to be sort of like a moderating influence and sort of a stultifying influence, and it seems like finally, belatedly, it’s having the opposite effect, that we’ve reached a point where the internet is radicalizing.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, who expected it to be a moderating influence? I mean, I think it always was a mechanism for finding what in other contexts has been called “imagined communities.” That is, you’re wherever you are and you have some random hobby and you’re isolated, and all of a sudden you find across the country, across the world, people who share that particular hobby. So it’s a way of drawing people together that, you know, feel felt isolated, you know, for good or ill it brings people together. And then when, when there are more people with common kind of common views on things that radicalizes them further. This goes to the studies of jury behavior and judicial panels and all of these things. People who start off at a four out of 10 on political views, if they’re all just talking to each other, end up at a two. So that, I think, is the internet dynamic.
Rob Henderson: Well, I think there was this old idea from social psychology—I don’t know how, if it’s still considered valid, it may have died in the replication crisis—of the contact hypothesis that if there’s an unfamiliar person or an unfamiliar group and you’re exposed to them and you bring people together and they eventually see one another’s common humanity and then this could bring us all together and put our differences aside and see this kind of mutual understanding. But if anything, maybe the social media did the opposite, where we are just finding people who share our interests and our values and the things that we like, and then to Ilya’s point, there’s that group polarization pattern that occurs where if everyone tepidly holds an opinion or tepidly supports a certain movement, and then they see that view reinforced by those around them or those who they spend a lot of time with online, then that view becomes crystallized and exacerbated and can lead people to act out in violent ways.
Ilya Shapiro: I’m glad someone who actually knows something about psychology backs up what I just said intuitively.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, you know, to me, and this gets to the sort of general radicalization, think Neetu’s right that the problem goes beyond campus, and you do get these sort of broader dynamics. It’s not obvious, again, it’s not obvious to me what you do about it. Neetu, I’m curious if you have thoughts on that front, given you identified the problem.
Neetu Arnold: Well, I don’t know what policy could do here. You definitely want to be careful about any infringements on First Amendment; I’m definitely not promoting that. But I sometimes wonder if social media companies, you know, are they applying the rules fairly to all people? You know, not just the views that they disagree with, but even the views they might be sympathetic to, but if they are promoting extremist content, you know, what are… Are they actually applying the rules fairly? I think that’s the main concern I would have because this seems like a Pandora’s box. We’re not putting it back in. I don’t think we would want to necessarily because there are some good things about the internet and social media that we benefit from. But I mean, the extremist content, it’s getting out of hand.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, so let me use that as an opportunity to take us out to our exit, which is, you I was saying earlier there’s a trend, we’ve now seen three of these incidents, there’s also, you can connect it to Luigi Mangione, the Tesla bombings, you don’t… We’ve been in an unusually low period of domestic terrorism. It feels like it’s ticking up. How much more of this do we expect? Do we think this is sort of a blip or do we think it’s going to get, you know, 1970s bad? Where do we see things going over the next couple of years, say?
Neetu Arnold: Getting worse. Yeah, I think it’s going to get worse.
Rob Henderson: Is it?
Ilya Shapiro: Well, aren’t bell bottoms coming back into style? I’m not really up on these things, but I…
Neetu Arnold: Is that good?
Rob Henderson: Full circle, tie-dye t-shirts.
Well, I guess my question is because we have a lot of these are very high profile cases. When you target Jews, when you target ethnic groups, like naturally this is going to attract a lot of attention and it should be fully condemned. But is it actually the case that there is a rise in this kind of organized political violence or do we just, is the media covering it more? I guess, you what are the trends trend lines look like? Yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. I mean, this is a… It’s a thorny question because there are efforts to measure this kind of thing and they tell you that there is an increase. So like I always go to the Global Terrorism Database at the START program at the University of Maryland. But then, you know, what counts as domestic violence? There are certain—domestic terror or political violence—there are certainly political incentives to label things as political violence that aren’t. So those data sources, I mean, they send you some signal, but they are, I think you’re right. You know, can we trust them? Are they reliable?
Rob Henderson: Yeah, I mean, if it is, it does seem to be ticking up, but I just like to sort of double-check my intuitions there. But yeah, I mean, it is the Wild West on social media and online and easier than ever for people to find one another and to goad one another into doing violent acts. So it would be surprising if it declined.
Ilya Shapiro: At a certain point, at a certain point, anecdotes become a pattern. In the 70’s, I don’t think we had a governor’s mansion burned down. So there are things that really are worrying. Just a simple graffitiing of synagogues, which is on the upswing, that doesn’t make national news. So there definitely is something going on.
Charles Fain Lehman: The thing that’s alarming to me about actually both the Pennsylvania attack and also this one is that they’re both arsons and it turns out we had a great piece from Kyle Shideler who’s an anti-terrorism expert at CJ talking about the Tesla bombings and he said that arson is a favored strategy of sort of radical activists because they know that it’s harder to bring federal terrorism charges against arson because of the way in which the statute is constructed, so if you don’t…If you attack somebody with a gun, pretty much regardless there’s a federal nexus, if you throw a Molotov cocktail at somebody, you have to do it on federal property to catch federal terrorism charges, which is weird, but knowing that piece of information is only something you do if you’re pretty plugged into the kinds of people who would plan attacks with Molotov cocktails. And so in some senses, and this is a theme I’m trying to…
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, I doubt they’re consulting the Weather Underground General Council on these tactics.
Charles Fain Lehman: Maybe, but you know, if this is information that’s out there, that’s what is alarming to me. It’s not necessarily, you know, I’m, to talk in the anti-Semitism context, I’m skeptical that there’s a general increase in anti-Semitism of any real size. I think Americans basically still love the Jews, and that’s great. But I’m worried about sort of concentrated pockets of people who are highly motivated.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, that’s the thing. It’s separate questions. Is anti-Semitism growing versus whatever minority, even if it’s, you know, constant and not growing, is it becoming more radicalized and violent?
Charles Fain Lehman: Right. Right.
Neetu Arnold: Well, I think people are more tolerant to acts of violence. If you go through social media comments, it was even over Luigi Mangione, people were celebrating it and they were fantasizing about Luigi. So it’s not just about direct attack, but are people just tolerating? I don’t remember this from 20 years ago. And sure, I was a kid, but I wonder if kids notice this, like we’re just more tolerant to violence against ideas we don’t like.
Ilya Shapiro: That shows up in student surveys about when it’s appropriate to shut down speakers and things like that. Those measures are definitely on an increase.
Rob Henderson: Eric Kaufman’s done a lot of interesting work on this, that even when you control for political orientation, young academics, PhD students, post-docs, they’re far more supportive of political violence or deplatforming or shouting down speakers, more aggressive acts, confrontational acts than older academics. And it’s unclear if that’s a generational shift, if it’s a cohort effect, it’s an effect of age, there is this atmosphere of support for violence increasingly and yeah.
Ilya Shapiro: Does that tie into, you know, safety-ism and the idea of whether it’s helicopter parenting or snowplow parenting, you know, raising kids?
Rob Henderson: What’s snowplow parenting?
Ilya Shapiro:
It’s when you, like, get obstacles out of the way.
Charles Fain Lehman: I don’t want to go too deep into the parenting discourse, although I suspect the answer is yes. No, no, I want to make sure we have time for the other topic. Although now you’re seeing how the City Journal sausage gets made, because I was just like, I’m going to go email Eric Kaufman and ask him to write about this for us. So Rob has given me an idea for a pitch. OK, I want to cover the other item of the day, which is Elon Musk. He’s ending his run at the Department of Government Efficiency. He’s departing his roles as Special Government Employee, which was always time-limited, ending nearly six months of headlines. So I want the panel’s sort of general reactions. How do we think DOGE and Elon went? Was it good? Was it bad? Where are we at? And are there any lessons from this?
Ilya Shapiro: They move fast and broke things and some of those things remain broken/reformed and some of them, a few of them were blocked in court, namely personnel related actions because those have to go through various protection boards and whatnot. And none of it, of course, has been codified by legislation. So presumably, you know, the next president could revert USAID and cut it back out of state and re-up it and redo the contracts that were blocked. I think a lot of what he was doing was popular even if he kind of had a weird vibe around him and so it was a lightning rod even more than Trump. But DOGE has some interesting lessons in terms of is there an outside the box or an exogenous shock way of reforming government.
Charles Fain Lehman: Rob, what’s your DOGE take? Where are you at?
Rob Henderson: Yeah, I just wonder about the counterfactual. I’ve seen a lot of those survey data that Americans broadly do support DOGE and support cutting federal spending, and they liked the idea of DOGE. I think everyone kind of liked the idea of DOGE, at least everyone sort of you know right of center. But yeah, it did. He fell short of a lot of his promises, but that’s politics. That’s what tends to happen anyway. I read earlier this morning that Elon says he plans to spend less on political campaigns in the future and sort of involve himself less in politics. Which is intriguing because he spent the last sort of 18 months throwing himself into it and I do wonder what’s changed there.
Neetu Arnold: You know, I think it’s interesting to watch what happened with DOGE. You know, foregoing procedures. I think that’s been a general pattern with the Trump administration. You know, this is something Ilya and I covered both in Fox and Politico on the Harvard situation and what’s going to happen there. And again, I think the administration has been very quick to take action, to grab headlines. But when you look at the nitty-gritty details, there might be more issues down the road, especially in the courts. And so, I actually see this backfiring. When you go to DOGE, again, I think the idea is great to downsize the government, to make it more efficient. But I wonder if the DOGE team has poisoned the well for any future work because people are now going to see what happened here and they may be a little concerned, a little wary. It doesn’t look good. It’s toxic.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, no, I mean, think that’s to me is the core question is like, you know, in some senses, the experiment was like, let’s take by many measures the world’s smartest man and drop him into the federal government. Can he find a bunch of stuff that nobody else finds? That’s one version of the DOGE theme.
Ilya Shapiro: Okay, but take, take away kind of the noise and the, cult of personality around Elon and his mania and all of this. Let’s say you put in some like boring CEO, who knows about looking at data streams and payroll processing and all of these very “green eye shades” sort of things, you know, cause DOGE was not in charge of like cutting Medicaid or, you know, reforming, you know, these billions of dollars that, you know, have to go through Congress. What can be done purely within the executive branch is waste, fraud and abuse. And, you know, finding, you know, all those sorts of things. If it were done without trying to make big headlines until everything was finalized, I think maybe it would have accomplished more and could in the future serve an example that way.
Neetu Arnold: I guess how do you do that? Because the incentive structures in politics right now is to go viral on social media. It’s to make the biggest headlines. And I think that’s why there is, at least at the national level, I’ve seen a lot of interest in grabbing those headlines. In some ways, it’s acting like we’re always on a campaign, whereas when you go to the state and local level, I don’t see so much of that. I think a lot of people are just tuned in into getting the work done. It may or may not get attention, but they are getting a lot of work done.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, mean, think there is the Elon flashiness factor, but then also I think they did really sort of believe that there was a great deal of waste, fraud, and abuse for them to identify. They claimed to have identified a great deal of waste, fraud, and abuse. Those claims seem perhaps exaggerated. And, you know, I think like, part of what’s frustrating there is we already kind of knew where the waste and abuse were in system. The GAO has been pretty clear about where the problems are. And I think there was a little bit too much cleverness by half. But at the same time, it’s like, why is it that you would expect somebody from the business world to be successful here? Well, it’s like, those people are particularly good at responding to the profit motive, which means that they will like efficiently cut costs because they’re rewarded in doing so. And like the big constraint in government is always that there isn’t a profit motive. And so in some sense, to Neetu’s point, you know, Elon was following the ambient incentives. He was doing like what it seemed like he needed to do that just like was not conducive to his overall project. And so it’s not totally surprising to me that they didn’t come up with a lot because the ways in which he finds efficiencies in the private sector are very different from the ways in which you need to find efficiencies in the public sector.
Right. Let me ask the, and this is a little bit of exit, but we can tie it together. We have a little bit of conversation about it. Is there a next for Elon Musk? Like he said, he wants to back off politics. Somebody was talking about this.
Ilya Shapiro: We’re going to Mars, Charles.
Charles Fain Lehman: Well, yeah, we’re totally going to Mars, but no. So like, is he going to remain a political figure or is he going to go back to like, you know, building Teslas and going to Mars?
Rob Henderson: And making more babies.
Charles Fain Lehman: And making more babies.
Ilya Shapiro: I mean, he’s this Ayn Rand type figure, larger than life, involved in lots of different things. He says he’s going to be involved less in politics. You know, it can’t help but be less involved because he was kind of, you know, first jumped in, you know, whatever it was to the Trump campaign, like last June or July or something, and then kind of decided that politics doesn’t work to his satisfaction. And so he’s going to be dabbling in other things. I think he’ll stay in the headlines, regardless of what he’s actually involved in.
Charles Fain Lehman: Rob, what do you think?
Rob Henderson: Yeah, that sounds right to me. He has this star power. He’s a unique figure, sort of generational figure in American history, so I don’t really see him disappearing anytime soon. He’s already had two biographies written about him. And he may not have actually, you know, he’s not yet achieved probably will be the crowning moment of his life is landing a human on Mars. So, and then at that point we’ll see sort of more biographies about him. So yeah, he’s not going away. Politics, he says that for now. It’ll be interesting to see whether he can resist the siren call. It may have been, he saw another generational figure in Donald Trump. And once this presidency comes to an end, Elon will sort of withdraw along with that.
Neetu Arnold: I see Elon as either a potential donor or a commenter, but I don’t really see him going back to public service. You know, it requires dedication to nitty-gritty details and navigating bureaucracy, and Elon just doesn’t seem like that kind of person. I think he shines in the private sector.
Charles Fain Lehman: So here’s my theory, this is my crackpot theory, and I’m curious what you all think about it, which is like, towards the end, he just did a, he launched an interview where he criticized the One Big Beautiful Bill. It’s beautiful, it’s big. And he’s basically like, you know, I’ve come out of this experience being like, the problem is actually not waste, fraud, and abuse, like there is some of that, but the problem is actually just like, entitlement spending, which is of course what everybody who’s been doing this for like, decades was yelling at him the entire time, but he figured it out. And so my question is like, can Elon Musk be the next Tea Party figure? Like, is he going to be the guy who restores the salience of that set of issues? Because like the base is sort of interested, and there’s this very inchoate sort of division within MAGA of, you know, think Vivek Ramaswamy was trying to be this guy. Unfortunately, Elon finds him very irritating, but he was trying to be the like libertarian MAGA that was like the deep state is entitlement spending, where sort of the J.D. Vance wing is much more entitlement sympathetic. So I could see him playing a role in that dispute where he leans towards the Vivek Libertarian wing that’s like we need to get, we need to get the government, the deep state out of our social security by dramatically slashing social security. Is that a crazy theory?
Yes, no, maybe?
Ilya Shapiro: I think it’s less likely than not.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, okay, fair enough, fair enough. All right, well, before we go, we want to do our, we want to do a little bit of culture. Sydney Sweeney, favorite of regular panelist, Jesse Arm. I think he said, I forget if this, I think he said he would take her into space if he had to name a woman to go into space with. Sydney Sweeney is selling soap with her bath water in it. We’re not going to talk about why or who would buy it. That’s a lot.
But I am going to use this as opportunity to ask all of our panelists. If you were to sell a you-branded product, not bathwater, what would it be? What is the Rob Henderson branded product?
Rob Henderson: Shower water. I mean, yeah. A branded product. You know, I don’t, I, I, isn’t it, I’ve heard this from other sort of marketing gurus that you want something that’s, that requires a subscription service, something that’s expendable. So you want to sell water, protein bars, something that people will have to continue buying. So I don’t know, bath water, I don’t know what these people do with it. They just save it or freeze it or I don’t understand. I would, yeah, I would sell something that people would have to buy repeatedly.
Charles Fain Lehman: We can buy Rob Henderson of protein bars. I would buy them. They help you post. They help you find studies.
Rob Henderson: Keto friendly.
Charles Fain Lehman: Neetu, what’s your branded product?
Neetu Arnold: So I hope I misunderstand this question. think it’s just a product. I guess.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. But it comes with your endorsement, so that’s why people buy it. So what’s up your brand? What?
Neetu Arnold: I mean, it would have to be Cajun seasoning. Cajun seasoning. I put it on everything. I put it on pasta that it shouldn’t go on. I put it in dessert. Like, it goes everywhere. I don’t know what the brand is. It’s Cajun seasoning. Doesn’t matter. I don’t discriminate.
Ilya Shapiro: What’s your favorite brand? Okay. Okay.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fascinating. See, had no, this is why we do these questions. I had no idea. What do you cook with it? I mean, everything.
Ilya Shapiro: I’ve spent time in the Bayou. I love me a nice andouille or whatever, but we can discuss offline.
Neetu Arnold: Yeah, no, I just like I discovered Cajun seasoning in college. It was at my favorite food truck that I would go to at two in the morning and it was Cajun seasoning, french fries, and so I just put it on everything.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, fair enough. Ilya, what’s the Ilya Shapiro branded product?
Ilya Shapiro: You know, I’ve had this beard for about a month or so, a month and a half now. I started off as a playoff beard, but both my teams got eliminated. It’s a hockey tradition. The Stanley Cup is still, they’re about to start disputing it this week, so I guess when the Cup is awarded, then I really have to decide whether I’m going to shave it or keep it for a while. My wife likes it, so that’s a plus. My kids don’t like it, we’ll see. So, know, shaving clippings or something along the line of the Sydney Sweeney? But more seriously though, I was thinking pocket constitutions, because I’ve had people like come up to me and sign not just my books, but pocket constitutions. And I’m like, you realize I didn’t write this. And like, that’s okay. In fact, when I, when I went on Stephen Colbert, it’s coming up on the 15th anniversary of the pinnacle of my career. When I went on the Colbert Report, he asked me to sign this pocket constitution. And I was like, Steven, you realize I didn’t write this? He’s like, that’s okay. So maybe there’s a market for, you know, if Trump can do Trump Bibles, maybe I can do, you know, Shapiro pocket constitutions.
Neetu Arnold: It’s a new founding father.
Charles Fain Lehman: See, I have like five or six pocket constitutions, and I would say half of them are Cato pocket constitutions. There’s clearly an opportunity for…
Ilya Shapiro: Well, I’m happy to sell you, to sign them all for you at a group discount, Charles.
Charles Fain Lehman: I’m saying, I’m saying MI could move into this space distributing pocket constitutions with the Ilya Shapiro, like, you know, Constitutional lawyer, Ilya Shapiro!
Ilya Shapiro: Maybe with my signature like embossed in gold on the back? Or on the front? Yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: Endorsed by Ilya Shapiro.
Yeah, you know what, Ilya, Ilya took mine, but I’m still going to say I’ve been told that this is my trademark beard. So I use like some sort of beard care product I feel like I could go far with. This is like apparently how people distinguish me. I’m like the one with the beard. So you know, that’s where I would go. Cajun seasoning. That’s good one. See, you learn something new every day on the City Journal Podcast. All right. That I believe is about all.
Ilya Shapiro: These podcasts are always a gumbo. Just lots of different opinions.
Charles Fain Lehman: With that, that is about all the time that we have. So thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, or even if you didn’t, please don’t forget to like, subscribe, comment, ring the bell, knock the other pins down. Do whatever the heck it is you do on your platform to engage with us more and to raise us in the rankings. Like, leave us comments on YouTube and questions. We might even answer, you never…
People always leave us crazy comments on YouTube, but maybe they’ll ask a question sometime. Who knows? Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again.
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