Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, Neetu Arnold, and Carolyn Gorman discuss Elon Musk and fiscal conservatism in the GOP, the anti-ICE riots spreading across the U.S., and favorite rockstars.
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Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: What’s sort of funny about Musk is like by the end of this, he sort of speed-ran the like fiscal conservative experience. He was like, we’re going to come in and cut all the waste fraud abuse. By the end he was like, no, the problem really is entitlements. Like that’s actually the issue. I think he still believes this waste, fraud, and abuse problem to some extent, but he has really sort of hit the like Tea Party finishing point. I think that’s good because he’s like, it’s good that he had that realization. But then also, I am concerned about that kind of fiscal conservatism, which I’m sympathetic to, having purchase in the current Republican Party slash the broader conservative movement.
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 today are Jesse Arm, politics guy at the Manhattan Institute, Neetu Arnold, education lady at the Manhattan Institute. Can I call ladies “guys”? It’s unclear what the policy is.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Yes, yes.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay. Neetu, you can be a guy if you want to be. And Carolyn Gorman, mental health policy guy at the Manhattan Institute.
Thank you everybody for joining me. We got to set up a… We like to have ladies and gentlemen on the panel. We’re in favor of that.
I want to take us though straight into the news of the day. We’ve been following a little bit the feud between, now quashed between, Elon Musk, outgoing advisor to president and President Donald Trump. It seems like they publicly mended fences. Elon has sort of retracted his more extreme comments about the president. The president seems also to sort of have tried to walk back. The whole thing’s sort of been pushed down. Maybe Elon is starting a third party, maybe not. It’s a little unclear. But I’m, you know, I will admit, not that interested in the drama of it all and more interested in what comes after this. You know, Elon Musk is sort of symbolic of this Silicon Valley shift to the right. He’s a major tech billionaire. And I’m curious how you guys are thinking about what he symbolizes, what his departure symbolizes. Is there still room for somebody like Elon in the GOP? What do you all think?
Carolyn D. Gorman: You might not be interested in the drama, Charles, but I almost feel like the drama is part of it. It’s like the nature of being able to just generate attention from this type of stuff maybe is incentive enough for some like legitimate engagement between Musk and Trump at least moving forward if not the broader GOP. But I mean, I’m sort of worried about how disillusioned Musk sounds. That does seem sort of genuine and you know he’s no Palmer Lucky. He hasn’t like expressly committed to like wanting to help the U.S. over other countries, so if he is like really disillusioned about just like government capacity and capability that is something that I think makes me a little worried.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, I think the Musk-Trump spat was entertaining, but the deeper point here is that the Tech Right isn’t going anywhere. This wasn’t really about individual personalities. It’s about alignment on a shared enemy, which is the bureaucratic state. So the new tech elite, these people who want to build rockets, reactors, miracle drugs, I think see Trumpism, for all its chaos, as the only political movement willing to smash the regulatory barriers that throttle innovation, right? So that’s why even after fights over trade and personal insults, they’ll stay aligned with MAGA because only the right for now is willing to clear the runway for those guys. There are varying degrees of immigration, tariffs. There are varying degrees of these tensions, but as long as the left remains captured by the kind of HR Industrial Complex, environmental review attorneys, and equity consultants, the tech right, I think, will see the GOP as the more salvageable vehicle.
Carolyn D. Gorman: I could not agree more. The Free Press had a good piece last week that made a point about some real fundamental differences between the goals of the tech sector and the political right. Immigration, as you mentioned, Jessie, is one of them. But the tech sector just overall is about results and not silly virtue signaling and culture war stuff. And anyone who has ever worked in the private sector knows that these DEI initiatives at their least inflammatory are just like B.S. corporate compliance trainings. People just like click through this stuff as fast as they can while doing other things. And that’s just like antithetical to productivity that the tech sector likes. So, so long as the left is like not willing to change their beat on all this sort of like silly DEI stuff, there’s going to be a place for the tech sector on the right.
Neetu Arnold: I don’t know. I see it very differently. I see the spat between Elon Musk and Trump as a clash of big personalities. And there can only be room for one guy. at the end of the day, the American people voted for President Trump. And I think someone like Elon Musk saw that the president is kind of moving away from some of the priorities, especially in the Big Beautiful Bill. And I think Musk just wanted credit and a acknowledgement that he was part of the movement and he was going after cost-cutting measures and it seems like there’s been a distancing between the two over the past couple of weeks. I mean, I see Trump’s, or Elon Musk’s apology and I’m a little skeptical that it is genuine, in part because I think he’s thinking about his own business interests. Trump did threaten to cut government subsidies to some of Musk’s companies like SpaceX, which is a huge NASA contractor. I’m just a little skeptical of…I don’t think we should really ignore the fact that there are two big personalities and this may be something very specific to Trump-era GOP and what comes after it could be the same or it might look a little different.
Jesse Arm: Well, maybe we’re not as far apart here as we think. Right, I mean, I ultimately agree. This was a, you know, this was a random spat among big personalities. When you’re doing a lot of ketamine, that happens.
Charles Fain Lehman: You do a lot of Ketamine?
Jesse Arm: But I think the fundamental point is that ultimately, I think the fundamental point is that ultimately these two camps are obviously still going to remain in the same political coalition, right? So if we zoom out, and look at where the tech right might go, right? Like who might their allies be on the left? You can look to this kind of new crop of pro-abundance liberals who talk a good game, but they’re still trying to revive a machine that was designed to jam. And Charles has written about this. This is procedural liberalism, which can’t be debugged with a kind of like vibes-based messaging tweak. Those guys on the left, know, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, who wrote this book, Abundance, their agenda is fundamentally about managing a coalition, not producing results. And the people associated with the Tech Right from Silicon Valley who are getting involved with MAGA World, they know that. So I don’t know.
I think it’s a mistake, really, and a lot of people do this, to reduce Trump’s movement to kind of like a run-of-the-mill populism, that would be sort of missing the plot. There was this essay in the New York Times the other day by a guy named Nathan Levine about how what we’re witnessing is actually more of an anti-managerial revolution. And I think that’s kind of the key to understanding why MAGA and the Tech Right, for all their differences, are ultimately going to end up on the same side. The left is basically betting that working class Americans primarily hate CEOs and the right is sort of betting that what they really hate is HR. And so for the Right, I mean, my opinion is that so far the Right’s bet looks a lot closer to the mark.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, can I just sort of build on that one thing that I’m sort of wistful about with the whole Musk-DOGE time is instead of just slashing and burning, there could have been a lot more sort of like thoughtful, like prudence about modernization. Like here’s a guy who really understands technology and the federal government, I mean all levels of government, are just like woefully antiquated in so much of their technology and process and like all the, all the rest. So I think it would have been really cool to see Musk at DOGE go in and just get the low-hanging fruit, help modernize some of this stuff because you know, there’s going to be so much cost savings just in that, that although, you know, the slash and burn is a good media generator, there was really a lot to be done and still could be done on just like that simple sort of like efficiency stuff. So I would have liked to see that.
Charles Fain Lehman: That that you know that I think gets into another wedge here where we’re going to have a piece running hopefully tomorrow at CJ by MI fellow Danny Crichton writing about the news that the Trump administration wants Palantir to come in and basically do crosswalks between all the diffuse databases they have and this gets covered as like “the Trump administration wants to build a database of all Americans!” Like, the database of all Americans already exists. What Palantir is doing is modernization. But there is this intrinsic hostility on the left to an organization like Palantir, to an entity like SpaceX, to somebody like Musk, someone like Marc Andreessen, which is just fundamentally resentment of their success. That is an important and powerful driving force. This gets to Jesse’s point about “abundance.” Reihan Salam, president of MI, wrote a great piece for CJ about
Jesse Arm: Our boss.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, our boss, about the problem with the abundance movement is they won’t say greed is good. Like that’s what you need if you want to have abundance. So I think that’s right. You know, on the other hand, I am a little bit concerned. What’s sort of funny about Musk is like by the end of his, he sort of speed ran the like fiscal conservative experience. He was like, we’re going to come in and cut all the waste, fraud, and abuse. By the end he was like, no, the problem really is entitlements. Like that’s actually the issue. I think he still believes this waste, fraud, and abuse problem to some extent, but he has really sort of hit the like Tea Party finishing point. I think that’s good because he’s like, it’s good that he had that realization. But then also, I am concerned about that kind of fiscal conservatism, which I’m sympathetic to, having purchase in the current Republican Party slash the broader conservative movement. So, you know, that’s my sort of stopping point. It’s like on the one hand, you can sort of get stuff with modernization, but in terms of like, you know, openness to that of concern, support for lower taxes, a belief in fiscal responsibility. I think that’s something that’s attractive to the tech right, and isn’t all that hot on the right more broadly at this moment.
Jesse Arm: Charles, you mentioned the left’s hostility to Palantir in particular. It’s worth also mentioning that beyond the tech right and beyond the MAGA movement, traditionally understood, the ones who are populating the White House right now, there is something out there lurking, I guess, I don’t know whether you want to say further on the right or maybe further on kind of the horseshoe right that almost, you know, angles back to the left, where there’s a lot of hostility to Palantir, a lot of buying, you know, the B.S. New York Times story about them that does emanate from corners of the online right. And that’s something to be wary of. And the partnership between MAGA as traditionally understood as the president’s political movement and the tech right associated with Joe Lonsdale, David Sacks, some of these Silicon Valley guys, that marriage has to stay strong because what lurks beyond, the faction of the far online right that has bad things to say about Palantir and other major American innovators, that’s a dark corner of the right that I think we don’t want to come to the fore. So whatever the disagreements are about tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill, skilled immigration, that stuff needs to be weathered in this political marriage needs to be stay strong I think to keep out like a popular population within the right that is fundamentally, just the same version of the degrowth people on the left, you know, but with a kind of like rightist tinge to it
Neetu Arnold: I don’t think it’s just limited to the online right though. I think there’s a general anti-competitive spirit that I’ve personally seen as I’ve traveled the country, you know, especially in more rural areas. And I’m, I think this tension between, you know, I think of the tech, right? I think of innovation. And then I think of more of the populist right where some of it is protectionist. Some of it is, I think rightfully so, you know, they’re concerned about jobs and just having a better life and finding solutions where it appeals both to innovation but also caring about our own people. I still see the GOP being more budget hawks and still caring about fiscal conservatism, but I think it’s really going to depend on the locality, the constituents.
I noticed this especially with Josh Hawley of Missouri who came out against Medicaid cuts. And I think it’s important to notice that, you know, among his constituency, 1.3 million people in Missouri benefit from Medicaid, 26 percent of state funds goes to Medicaid, which to put that into context is one of the highest rates for the state, and typically the Republican stance has been, you know, if we’re going to costs, we have to go after Medicaid or some of the more larger welfare programs. And so I think that tension is still going to be there, but I don’t think it’s just limited to the online, right? I think there’s just a growing faction of people who are kind of dismayed at the institutions, and honestly, you know, class differences.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, mean, Josh Hawley’s not out there vilifying Palantir or like, on the contrary, he’s a champion of growing American industry. So I think the right as an ideologically diverse movement is a good thing.
Neetu Arnold: Sure.
Yeah.
Jesse Arm: I saw one tweet yesterday, someone suggesting, should the Democrats, someone thoughtful, know, creative said, should the Democrats reach out to Josh Hawley with an olive branch? But then the replies and the comments and the quote tweets from people within the Democratic realm were like,” of course not. That’s a terrible idea.” But that’s kind of the stupidity of the modern democratic party, right? They’re all tripping over each other to see who can condemn John Fetterman, the loudest. Whereas the right has these kind of thoughtful, differentiated, ideological strains all operating under the same umbrella. That works when you have an effective dealmaker, you know, big personality, really just kind of incredibly talented politician in Donald Trump at the helm. When we get past the President Trump era, it becomes a bigger question mark whether that broad-based ideological coalition can sustain itself.
Charles Fain Lehman: So this is good opportunity for me to take us out and leave us with our parting question, which is, I think there is this real question about the future of fiscal restraint, fiscal conservatism in the GOP that has already been sort of a little bit chipped away at by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. On the other hand, I think there is a real political potential in it. I think about Elon. I think about Vivek Ramaswamy. I think that there are people who are concerned about the deficit and the debt, even rank and file voters. So guess my question is, do we see a future for that kind of physical conservatism in the GOP? In the 2028 cycle, is it going to be more or less potent than it is today? Let me kick it to Carolyn to start.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Look, I’m not very confident. I think fiscal constraint and restraint is like a nice talking point for politicians. There’s no real incentive to actually carry this out. And we just like see that with such massive growth in spending. I mean, Medicaid cuts and like the criticism of Medicaid cuts is like sort of a perfect example. Work requirements in Medicaid that used to be like not really a big issue. People just agreed that that should be a thing. We’re not in that world anymore, so I’m skeptical that fiscal restraint is anything more than a talking point at this point.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair. Jesse?
Jesse Arm: Well, work requirements for Medicaid are still very politically popular. It’s worth saying that from a polling perspective. Yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: In the polling, and they’ve always been popular in the polling, right? It just, like, doesn’t translate.
Jesse Arm: In any event, I think fiscal restraint will return as a Republican priority, but probably not out of principle, out of necessity. Once the interest payments and entitlement overhang start to bite, everyone from every ideological camp will be forced to reckon with trade-offs. The tech right for its part wants growth, not austerity, but it knows a stagnant, kind of gerontocratic welfare state is the true death of innovation.
I think expect fiscal fights, but framed around building smarter, not just spending less.
Charles Fain Lehman: Neetu?
Neetu Arnold: I think the Republican political class will tend to be more fiscally conservative than the voting base. That’s where I see it going.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s certainly the long run trajectory, but I’m sympathetic to Jesse’s view that at some point… It’s hard to get people to care about the future crisis, but the crisis will happen at some point, right? We’ve already seen debt downgrades. We just saw another one. People learned if they hate one thing more than their taxes going up or spending going down is that they hate inflation. And the thing that will happen with the debt crisis is mass inflation as we inflate to pay off the debt. And so when that happens, I think there will be a great deal of interest in what do we need to do to stop this from happening? The answer is going to end up being fiscal austerity. I’m not sure you can get there before that though. So like the debt will get a lot bigger.
Carolyn D. Gorman: But it’s coming. I mean, look, we’ve got an aging workforce. A lot of people work.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s okay, I’ll pass it on to my children. On that cheery note, let’s talk about another cheery topic.
Jesse Arm: We need a, wait, just to say one last thing, we need like a Greta Thunberg-like figure, but about the national debt. Like, “how dare you saddle me with this generational, crushing debt!” That would be a good project for the conservative philanthropic industrial complex to get behind.
Carolyn D. Gorman: No, don’t put that idea out in the world, Jesse.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’ve got to find one.
Okay, okay. I want to turn this back to, we talked about this last week, but obviously it’s remained a story. It’s a very CJ story. So I want to get this panel’s opinions on it. But the riots that started in LA, the anti-ICE protests and riots that started in LA, they spread now. I was reading earlier, I think it’s 37, or 36 major cities in all, or cities across the United States. We’ve seen mass arrests in New York. There’s a curfew imposed in LA on Tuesday.
So where do we think this is going? Do we expect it’s going to burn out or do we expect more of this all summer long? Is this, to use the canonical phrase, a long hot summer or yet another one in the making?
Jesse Arm: Yeah, I fear it may be time to gear up for yet another summer of chaos in blue America. During the COVID lockdowns of 2020, we had the BLM riots. Then after October 7th of 2023, we had over a year of masked Hamas sympathizers sowing disorder, and now it’s open borders. But what you’ve got to understand is that these aren’t organic peaceful protests. They’re coordinated displays of lawless radicalism with a slightly differentiated costume each time. The imagery isn’t subtle, right? Keffiyehs, gas masks, Molotov cocktails, Mexican, Palestinian, and various versions of the LGBTQIA alphabet flags. And it isn’t spontaneous. It’s trained. It’s orchestrated. It’s designed to provoke, destabilize, and ultimately intimidate.
And that’s what Omni-Cause Leftism is. It’s an ideological blob where every grievance converges into a single mass movement against order itself. But what I think is still unclear is if the Democratic Party understands this, is that it’s also utterly politically toxic. Rioting is near-universally unpopular. Every shred of data tells us it hurts the left, yet too few Democrats have the courage to go out there and say what the public already knows. Like that one clip from New York that went viral, I think yesterday, maybe the day before, where you’ve got a white progressive hipster, Brooklynite, blocking a black mom from driving to work, mocking her for caring about her kid. And he’s sipping some 9 percent alcohol content booze can while he’s doing it.
So you’re watching the modern left in its purest forunk on moral vanity, blind to working class reality. And there’s just no popular base for it. But there is an activist industrial complex that feeds off chaos, professional protesters ready to deploy anytime immigration law is enforced or the rule of law asserts itself.
Carolyn D. Gorman: You make sort of an interesting point, Jesse, Charles, when you ask, is this going to burn out or keep going? COVID, riots, October 7, now, is it just sort of like a continuation? And are we going to see these continuous more frequently? You know, there’s almost like a social contagion element to it. And what does it, what does it sort of culminate to? When does it end? Has this just become a new normal for sort of how people think behavior looks appropriate.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I’ll have a piece on this hopefully on the website Monday, but I’ve been thinking a lot about—I may have talked to this in the last show—Ed Banfield, the political scientist who wrote about rioting in the 1960s and one of the things he observes is that you know, rioting is the thing that gives permission for more rioting. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle where A) once you realize you can riot, it becomes, you know, because I can write perhaps I should write and then B) when you see it happening in one place everyone goes “oh, here’s an opportunity for me to do it in some other place.” In some senses, there is this feedback loop. It kind of worked in 2020. It kind of worked in 2024. Maybe we want to try it again in 2025. So it’s an option on the table.
Neetu Arnold: I mean, it’s really become part of the culture of the left. Again, going back to something Jesse said, you know, was this white guy who was telling a black woman, you know, he was kind of laughing off, she has to go to work. I mean, I think that’s what we call white privilege. You know, that’s not something the left will say, but I think it’s a privilege to be able to go and protest or riot and take a day off of work and not worry about putting food on your table or having income in the family. That’s what really stuck out to me about that particular interaction.
Carolyn D. Gorman: The other thing that’s been frustrating for me is just watching the political showmanship. Like, no one has an incentive to not be dramatic. Like, Trump has incentive to send the National Guard, Karen Bass has incentive to push back. Like, what gets lost simply is public order and safety. And so it’s been really frustrating, I think, to just watch this when no one’s asking a fundamental question, like what is the end goal that the left can agree on or the right can agree on? Like, can we agree that people who are here illegally and who are violent criminals should not be here? You know, whatever the aim is, you have to agree on something and then that has to be enforced. But by not spelling it out, we’re just sort of allowing the political body to sort of like abdicate authority and then people feel like they can behave this way and it’s appropriate and all downhill.
Jesse Arm: You know, this is a take that I’ve heard a lot of people who I think are really smart in our broader orbit communicating recently that the incentives for both sides here are to ramp it up and have a showdown. I don’t get that. I feel like the political incentives or the lessons that we learned from the Floyd summer riots of 2020 were pretty clearly that if anything, the president would have been better off had he sent in—President Trump, who was president then—would have been better off had he sent in forces to quell the riots earlier and probably would have politically benefited from that. Maybe would have staved off some, you know, if any of the, you know, kind of inconsequential primary challenges he faced in 2024. But like, I’m not getting this, right? For normal people, American citizens who don’t use absurdist, inaccurate jargon like “undocumented people” to describe illegal immigrants, saying “Abolish ICE” is every bit as nutty as running with “Defund the Police.” So I actually kind of think like, Gavin Newsom getting up there and acting like he’s on the precipice of a major civil war, standing behind the California flag with the bear on it and tweeting just the California flag and acting like he’s about to have a major standoff with the federal government.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Or like secede.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, I think it’s the wrong play. He’s a talented politician. And by the way, he’s probably like still has the best odds of being the Democrats’ guy in 2028, if for no other reason than he has like a personality, can complete a sentence, and like isn’t a socialist.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s a strong series of claims. Let’s be clear.
Jesse Arm: But I think it’s the wrong play here. I think this is the time for a Sister Souljah moment. This is the time to tell your people, you know, don’t be insane, which some Democrats are doing, but I’d like to see more of it.
Carolyn D. Gorman: No, look, you guys were talking about this on the podcast the other day with Nicole Gelinas. I think timing makes a lot of… it’s a big question. When is the right time to step in? When is too early? When is too late? It is a question that is worth thinking about. And I don’t know what the right answer is, but to your point, Jesse, like the American people, don’t want this. And I think that is why the right has had success because there’s just such a disconnect, it seems, between like what politicians are saying a lot of times and what’s actually being done, and I think that is why the right is just like seeing so much more that people are saying that they just want they want government to govern.
Charles Fain Lehman: I do think that the particulars of the situation matter a lot in the sense that—Chris Rufo had a good column on this at CJ. I’m just pulling out all the CJ. Everyone go read City Journal on the website. If you’re listening to City Journal’s podcast, you should read all that stuff too. But Chris had good column on this about how he thinks about sort of quelling the riots. And I think a lot of his argument, because this is how he thinks, came down to the presentation of it. His point was you need to have a clear show of force, but you need to mostly try to deprive the left of the images that they want to be able to deploy in these riots. And indeed, in some senses, the strongest position the left is able to take on this is, why are all of these ICE officers wearing masks? Doesn’t that seem like a storm of troops? Of course, the answer is because people keep taking photos of them and threatening their families. That’s why they’re wearing masks.
But I think that the—let’s zoom out to the question of how are the American people going to respond to this? I think that in general Americans want mass deportations and they also want no enforcement to get there. They want there to be civil peace and they want there to be no enforcement to get there. You know, as a strategic and tactical matter, I am generally of the Tom Cotton school of like you need to send in the troops now to get it done. As a political matter, I’m like, I think you do have to do that, but you have to be careful to deprive your opponents of the ability to paint you as like stormtroopers who are crushing our civil liberties. You don’t actually have the civil liberty to riot, but you want to disable that argument at the same time.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, I mean, Ben Shapiro made a similar point to Chris on this, that it might be politically beneficial to some extent to Republicans to let Democrats be the victim of their own insane policies that they voted for time and again. I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, like disagreeing with everybody, but the American people voted against this kind of lawless chaos and they voted for these deportations. And I do think the president kind of owes it to the voters that put him back in the Oval Office to come down with a heavy hand on this stuff, to have the show down.
And yeah, I mean, there’s going to be a temporary hit to the president’s numbers, which were, you know, kind of unbelievably sustained good despite all of the kind of ups and downs of the last couple of months.
Charles Fain Lehman: Back up.
Jesse Arm: There’s, you know, they’re going to maybe take a small dip when like, especially on the immigration thing itself, just when these scenes kind of break out. But ultimately, the American people want to see stability, and if the president can deliver that, I think it will be more politically beneficial for him to deliver it rather than, you know, allow instability to take over in California as a result of their politicians’ terrible policies.
We’ve seen this play out time and again, right? Like, when bad things happen under a president’s watch, even if they might have been caused by the other party, the president takes a hit for them. So this is an instance when you’re talking about you know, law breaking at mass scale, violent riots, and the president, you know, deployed the National Guard, really just to kind of be on hand, not to necessarily start, you know, going and cracking the whip and arresting protesters, but to be ready and available should things, you know, really hit the fan. And you’re already seeing a positive trend with the way the riots are going as a result of that action. I think President Trump is doing the right thing here.
Charles Fain Lehman: Neetu, I want to make sure that we get your thoughts on where are you at? Do think they should let California burn? Do want to send them to the military? Where are we on the spectrum from Ben Shapiro to Jesse Arm?
Neetu Arnold: I mean, I think the wildfires are already going to, you know, burn California. So I don’t think you need to rely on the riots for that. I do think there’s a line where, of course, yes, I think the visuals matter, the optics matter. But I would say on something like law enforcement, like riots, it is better to address it quickly. I think that was the big mistake in 2020 for letting it just occur. Like, I remember I was sitting in my apartment, and this was in Philadelphia and I was seeing helicopters just over like over the buildings and you couldn’t go outside. It wasn’t safe, and this had been for weeks, and it’s like why isn’t anything being done about it? Why, and you know all of us were supposed to stay inside for COVID, and yet there were all these people who are outside because somehow rioting for racial justice, that’s okay. COVID goes away if you’re rioting for racial justice. And I did feel like that was a very late response. And so I think in order to prevent that kind of… People just feel disillusioned, I do think it’s important to enforce the law and make sure that it’s followed as quickly as possible.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, I want to take this out by doing more future prediction. So between, I talked about the riots in 1960s and they really ran 1964 to 1969, 1970, and it’s really the tail end of the first part of the Nixon administration that ultimately quells them. So I’m curious, I think we’ve seen a series of like long hot summers, 2020, 2024, 2025. Part of this Omni-cause that Jesse was alluding to. How much longer do we think this is going to go on for? I mean, is this going to be, do we think that we’re going to successfully make this the last one, or do you see this just being part of American life for the next half a decade? Okay, a lot of head shaking. Jesse, I’ll give you the first head shake.
Jesse Arm: I think as long as the activist industrial complex remains funded, unpunished, and politically indulged, we’ll keep getting new masks on the same movement. Blue state Democrats are highly unlikely to restore order. So as I said previously, let’s hope President Trump can crack the whip.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair, okay, okay. Neetu, you were also shaking your head.
Neetu Arnold: Yeah, I see these kinds of protests and riots continuing, maybe not over immigration necessarily. It will always be over a different cause and I think it’s especially going to be strongest in the cities.
Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, I totally agree with Neetu. I just think we’ve started normalizing this too much for it to sort of be rolled back. It might take some really different, dynamic change, some big thing happening in the world to disrupt this at this point, I think.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, you here’s here’s my case for optimism, which is in both 2020 and 2024, the goal of the exercise, I mean, the goal of the exercise is always to extract political concessions, right? This is what our colleague and sometime panelist Tal Fortgang talked about as “civil terrorism,” the idea that you’re engaging in these activities to extract political change by annoying inconveniencing, scaring, etc. the general public until they do what you want. And that like, that worked in 2020. That was successful. That worked to some extent in 2024, much of the goal of the Tentafada was to get the Biden administration to change its policy on Israel and it blinked a couple of times. And so the evidence there was like, if you riot, we will change our behaviors.
And the question here is, you know, I don’t expect the Trump administration to fold on continuing to do enforcement. I think they’re going to keep at it. I think that’s really important. And if they do, think it will say, this isn’t going to be a useful strategy going forward to the people who organize these riots. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, maybe they escalate further, maybe they start murdering people in the streets. Oh wait. Yeah, yeah, all right.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, we’re already there.
Charles Fain Lehman: Uh, one more sort of melancholy… It’s a very positive episode. We’re very positive here at the City Journal Podcast. Big, cheery people. Uh, Brian Wilson, the Beach Boy, died yesterday at the age of 82, a great musician, world historical figure. So I want to ask everybody, who is your favorite aging rock star of that classic rock 1960s era? Uh, Bob Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles. Tell us, you know, who, who sticks with us as, you know,
I think we’re all millennials here, millennials and zoomers, but who works here? Carolyn?
Carolyn D. Gorman: Well, can I just, Sly Stone also just died very, very of that era, on June 9th, I think. So, and actually I’ll, I’ll just say, which is not answering your question, but Brian Wilson had schizoaffective disorder, a very serious mental illness. Just to like, sort of put a plug of an idea out there, there’s been sort of some like anti-psychiatry strains, in the conversation these days, but he had said that medication and treatment really saved his life. So, you know, there’s a longer story of people taking advantage of him there, but just for this sort of like anti-psychiatry movement that’s out there, medication can be really important for people with very serious disorders. And so he’s a great example of that.
Charles Fain Lehman: I would read that City Journal piece. I’m just saying. You should email me. Neetu, who’s your favorite aging star from that era, living or dead? You say Sly Stone. Oh, good one.
Neetu Arnold: Carol King, I think she’s a great songwriter. She’s said to be Taylor Swift’s professional grandmother and I can definitely see that in her songwriting.
Charles Fain Lehman: I, we play the, she did a children’s musical based on the Really Rosy stories that we play for my four year old all the time. I also like her, you know, music for adults, but I like that one too. Jesse, who’s your pick?
Jesse Arm: I’m definitely too young and probably too naive to have serious views on that whole era of rockers, but I’ll go with Gene Simmons from Kiss. A lot of artists from that generation turned into insufferable political cranks, but when Simmons chimes in on current events, he tends to sound like a fairly reasonable guy and Detroit Rock City is an all-time banger, one of my favorite songs. So yeah, I’ll go with Gene Simmons, AKA Chaim Witz.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, okay. Wait, really? Fascinating. Okay, yeah, mine is also a renamed Jewish singer, which I have to say Bob Dylan, because he’s my wife’s favorite. But also I learned, I thought of this question because somebody had retweeted an account that is probably maybe Bob Dylan, but appears all that it does is post about like famous people who have died and or famous people who Bob Dylan was friends with sending them messages of condolence. You know, there’s, the Free Press had a great story about Dylan. This is part of the movie too that just came out about him, you know, Dylan going electric and sort of bucking the protest generation, and being like more focused on the music, which I think is admirable. Also, I like it so much.
Jesse Arm: By the way, Charles, our producer Isabella, who is a fellow Zoomer, right? I’m really an edge case, but a Zoomer, just posted “not Kid Rock, Jesse?” But Kid Rock is way too young to be considered part of this era, right? I mean, I’m a huge Kid Rock fan. I actually, did a little bit of acting when I was a kid in Detroit and I’m like in a Kid Rock music video. But I just, mean like…
Carolyn D. Gorman: No way!
Charles Fain Lehman: Isabella, can we put that in?
Jesse Arm: Kid Rock is definitely not in the same category as these guys from the 60s. So, no, not Kid Rock.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, all right. On that note, that is about all the time that we have. Thanks as always to our panelists. Thanks to our producer Isabella Redjai, who’s going to have to go find that video for us so we can play it on the next time Jesse is on.
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