The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Fred Siegel

Episode Date: November 8, 2020

Fred Siegel is a historian and the author of multiple books including his most recent, The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump. 

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the Table, the official podcast of New York's world-famous comedy cellar, coming at you on Sirius XM 99, Raw Dog. And on the Riotcast Podcast Network, this is Dan Natterman. And with me, of course, Mr. Noam Dwarman, owner of the world-famous comedy cellar, Periel Ashenbrand, our producer, and also on-air personality. That's just how things evolved. Again, that was not planned, but that's

what it's come to. And we also have with us Fred Siegel, historian, author of numerous books, his most recent, The Crisis of Liberalism, Prelude to Trump. It wouldn't be a nonfiction book without a subtitle. The Crisis of Liberalism, Prelude to Trump. He is here with us, and his son is joining us unplanned, but we're happy to have him. Jake, Jake Siegel is with us as well. Gentlemen, how do you do? Welcome. An anticlimactic night. Boy, what a night it was last night. We're recording on Wednesday, the 4th of November, so the election has ended,

and they're still counting up the votes. How's everybody doing? Not well. Not well, okay. It's going to go on for a month. And, Jake, are you as glum as your father is? I mean, I think that any kind of

definitive result would have been better than this, whatever it is that we're in right now. So, I mean, I'm trying not to think of it as something that actually affects my life all that much. So, in that sense, I feel okay about it.

Well, actually that's a theme. I wanna come back to what you just said. So Mr. Siegel, I've been reading your stuff for a very long time, but you had a column not long before the election, an ex-liberal reluctantly supports Trump. And I think that you hit the nail on the head better than anything I've read about understanding the Trump, the quotes, voting for this man that smart people like my friend Perry Elgin, they just can't understand how anybody can embrace this horrible man.

So what's your take on it? Well, the take is that liberalism is deeply offensive to much of the population, half the population. And this vote is a vote to prevent liberals from taking power. Let me be careful with the word liberal, because there really are no liberals anymore. There used to be a lot of liberals. Half the population doesn't want the politically correct woke people to run the society. That's simple i i would say it's more than half the population doesn't want the woke but some of them just couldn't bear to vote for trump uh because you know it is tough to vote for him but what that's assuming by the way that the main

reason that people who voted for trump voted for trump was to be was to vote against wokeness. I think some people just voted for him for tax reasons or for reasons of abortion or... A percentage. Pardon? You're right. But far more important than that, in 2016, when you talk to people who voted for Trump, they talk about political correctness. They hated political correctness. And it was a unifying theme across the Trump voters. This time, hostility to liberalism is the unifying theme.

It's not that there are other issues, but it's hostility to this iteration of liberalism, this wokeness. And going from the other side, I talk about in this book, Prelude to Liberalism with Talos Press, which is located here in New York, I talk about the fact that liberalism was created in order to create an American aristocracy. The argument was that thinkers like H.G. Wells, Herbert Crowley, Sinclair Lewis,

that it was the absence in America of an aristocracy that made us inferior to Europe. Whether that was true or not, leave it aside. But all of these people point to the universities as the place from which the aristocracy would emerge. That's pretty much what's happened. The second thing that happened, and this is also very much connected to New York, all these figures had a life in New York. The New Republic magazine founded by Herbert Crowley was published here for many years, and then they moved to Washington. Under John Lindsay, I hope some of your listeners remember who John Lindsay is, the former mayor of New York, the guy who in the 1960s lit up the political firmament. Lindsay accidentally stumbled onto a winning formula.

If you won the top, well-to-do in the upper middle class, and the bottom, those people on social assistance, you could win. And what Lindsey shared with the people at the top was a hostility to the middle class. That hostility to the middle class survives today. It was the center. It's what defined Barack Obama's coalition. And it defined this coalition, however it comes out last night, hostility to the middle class. And as someone who thinks the middle class is pretty good and has very little faith in the American elites. I find that appealing. But how can you have hostility to the middle class? You necessarily must have had a lot of

middle class voters voting for Biden, given the numbers. The people in the middle class who voted for Biden, the core, tended to be public service employees, public sector employees, and they drive the Democratic Party financially and in terms of organization. If you were to ask the question, who supports Bill de Blasio? You know, I talk to my neighbors. I like to sit on my porch and neighbors come by and we schmooze. They couldn't figure out who supports this guy, de Blasio. No one likes him. Well, the answer is very, very simple.

SEIU, Service Employees International Union, and the healthcare workers who are part of that. They're the ones who drive municipal elections in New York. And that's why we have these fractional outcomes, where less than 20% of New Yorkers vote in a mayoral election. But it's okay, because de Blasio gets his cut. Most people just don't show up, they don't bother, they checked out. So, in the Wall Street Journal article, you define political correctness, I thought very well and very simply, as the inability to speak the truth about the obvious. And boy, did that hit the nail on the head to me because,

I mean, you can get in big, trouble now we're speaking the truth about the obvious and I've never seen it I mean every everybody I know says one thing in private and another thing when there might be people listening everybody I know and uh yeah who who doesn't understand that people have had it with this stuff, right? I think they have had it, but it's not clear how this is going to all play out. It's hard to find a mechanism to constrain this lunacy. The elites are in charge. Twitter shut down the Joe Biden story. No problem. Traditional liberals would have never allowed

this. But you don't have those liberals liberals anymore or you have them in much diminished numbers so you want to say something dan well i was going to say that my own personal story of of yesterday was going into the voting booth as disgusted with wokeness and political correctness and all that as anybody else but simply couldn't bring myself to vote for a man that I perceived as has traces of a madman in him, you know. And I just couldn't do it. What I did do is I voted for every Republican I could find, and there weren't many in New York because there were only a couple other people running, to try to offset it. And probably in 2022 the likelihood is I will go in

and I will vote against Mr. Schumer for the same reason. We'll see what happens with just how left a presidency Biden has. But, you know, I'm trying to offset not voting for Trump, but voting for other Republicans. I don't think that's all. Voting in New York is not a much consequence. The outcomes are a foregone conclusion. The margins are so used. This is a one-party state. California is a one-party state. This is not pretty.

Finance here, Silicon Valley there. Anyway, Perrielle, are you, I'm sure you disagree with some of what I said. Everything. How could you possibly get that impression? Your face.

Okay, so, I too read the article in the Wall Street Journal and I consider myself to be a liberal. I'm welcome. No, you say that. I'm sorry.

I'm fine. I'm sorry. You say that. I find this whole cancel culture to be absurd and ridiculous and awful. And I also fancy myself, though no one would probably disagree, to be somewhat of an intellectual. And I believe in debate and critical thinking and free speech and the exchange of ideas. And I think that, you know, all this Twitter mob stuff is ridiculous. That having been said,

I find almost everything about Donald Trump to be so insufferable. You think his tariffs on China are insufferable? I think more of how he behaves and how he talks to people. What about how he acts? What about the consequences of what he's doing? Well, I've heard that argument before, and I understand that there are many people who are just straight policy voters. I can't be one of those people. And I didn't vote so much for Joe Biden as I voted against Donald Trump. You do know that the Biden family is criminal, that they've been involved in shakedowns around the globe.

Yeah. Yes, I do. I'm aware of that, and I'm aware of Kamala Harris's, you know, the Laura Bazelon article in The Times about- Fighting to keep innocent people in prison. Exonerated people. But at the end of the day, I'm given a, I have to make a binary choice, right? Yes. And so, you know, I can't bear to, what am I going to do?

I actually happen to have voted in a state that it did make a difference in. I don't know. You know, my family is a family comprised of immigrants. I don't know. I mean, I just think Trump is disgusting. And I think, you know, a lot of this Israel stuff is bullshit. Oh, hold on. Why is

breaking down barriers of Arab hostility to Israel? Why is that BS? Because she hates Trump. No, it's not just that. Are you telling me that if Barack Obama was presiding over this, you would say this is bullshit?

Be more self-aware than that. Come on. I'm going to go with what Fred Kaplan said yesterday. I mean, I'm just going to defer to the experts. I'm not a foreign policy. Fred's a bright man, but we don't always agree with Fred on this show. Well, that's fair enough. So let me ask Mr. Siegel a question.

Is Jake just spectating or... I was going to say, you know, it'd be interesting to see what Fred Kaplan said in 2016, excuse me, you know, 2012, 2014, about the possibilities of a Arab-Israeli peace deal being signed without Palestinian buy-in. Because the consensus, the total elite consensus at the time, explicitly by John Kerry, was that it was impossible, that it would never happen. And, you know, I think foreign policy is where Trump has been strongest.

I think the attempt to downplay the significance of what he's achieved with the Abraham Accords seems to me purely political. But I just wanted to point one thing out, which is that it's interesting to me that my father started off by saying that Trump support is driven by political correctness or opposition of political correctness. But then your challenge to Perriel was, what about the tariffs? You know, and so I actually think that the political correctness stuff is sometimes overstated and that it's what the political correctness allowed in policy terms, maybe, that was more significant in 2016, which was a kind of pro-American worker immigration restrictionism, quasi-mercantilist trade policy towards China, etc. important if he pushed harder on that stuff this time if he made sure another stimulus you know if more trump bucks went out if he was more focused on the average american worker um i actually think

he would have done better whether that's a good thing or not depends on who you want to win but i think he would have performed better than he did breeze by the way By the way, Jacob Siegel, you're no challenger father here in front of America. I mean, I don't, this is how we relate to each other. That's how I know I'm my father's son. Wait, so I want to ask, I want to ask Mr. Siegel a question about what you're talking about.

So, I mean, well, two things. First of all, he's a boorish, vulgar guy. And I don't like that. I never liked that before he was president. But I have to admit that it really seems like nobody but a boorish and vulgar guy would have the nerve to just not give a shit about what they call him and all this political correctness stuff. Any other normal human would feel the urge to equivocate, to compromise, to give disclaimers before they say anything, to be shamed. And the window would just move. I mean, he is a wrecking ball. He does

not care. And that is the silver lining of that boorish vulgar cloud. However, there is something about him, which I do worry about. And I wonder what Mr. Siegel says, which is that... You can call him Fred. situation on the world stage where you need somebody to shut up and think before he talks and, you know, like a Bush senior Iraq war scenario or something worse. Let me add one other thing. And judging by all the top people in his administration who left with such a low opinion of the man and his ability to rein himself in when he needs to. Am I wrong to worry that that's a dangerous situation to have him as president, if the worst should happen? I think it's a legitimate worry. On the other hand,

the kind of issues that he's gotten caught up in, for instance, Germany's unwillingness to contribute its statutory requirement of funds for NATO. Again, the same kind of boorishness allows him to tick off Angela Merkel and say nice things about Orban and Hungary. Well, you know, the Hungarians right now are thinking about the Austrian massacre that just took place. And they're thinking, you know, what we're doing is not so bad. You know, we don't, we don't, we fended off an Islamic invasion in the 17th century. And we don't want to, we don't have to want to fend one off now. And what's happening in France, what's just happened in Austria, this is not, it's not like the Europeans have,

for all the sophistication and pretensions are doing a better job. And on COVID, my other son, Harry, who's not here, who writes for the Daily Beast, the editor of the Daily Beast, Harry would balk at this, but the Europeans haven't done any better on COVID than Trump has.

I don't think Trump has done a good job. I'll make a case that the Europeans are even worse, in a sense, because we made our big blunders when nobody knew anything. And now with the benefit of nine in a population for inevitably and people are just, in the end, this is a challenge of the discipline of populations. I think that's the one variable that shows where it's, which populations are doing well is that they just wear masks and they don't budge and they don't let it wear them down. That seems to be it, right? So the Europeans have just had enough, I guess. But I agree.

The case against Trump on COVID is a lot weaker when the absence of Trump doesn't seem to be benefiting anybody in Europe. So why would it benefit us here, right? Well, I think you agreed last night that perhaps a better president might have saved. It would have been less of a death toll. Yeah, I mean, when Trump was downplaying masks and tweeting out free

Michigan at the same time he was supposedly behind lockdowns, nobody's going to defend that, right? I'm not going to defend that. No, Fred is. Other people are. I can't control what other people say.

But here in New York, we have Andrew Cuomo. Yeah. And Andrew Cuomo is responsible for 11,000. Not all of the 11,000. But an enormous chunk of the deaths nationally came from New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, because they followed similar policies. That's not very promising for the future, because Andrew Cuomo is going to be, if Trump comes out of this and wins, Andrew Cuomo is going to be there fighting with gavin newsom for the democratic nomination

next time around now how do you how do you rate and there's one other question i want to ask you later i want to forget but how do you compare let me put another way the outcome of biden as president with a republican senate and yes and still being able to pocket all the kind of reckoning that's going on as we speak about the woke and about have progressives taken the country too far to the left. Is this a worse outcome in your estimation than Trump winning? I wouldn't put it that way. I'd put it this way. What states like New York and Illinois and California, what they have in common is not just the Rosenberg sisters, my wife's sisters, each of them are in these states. And I like to think the Rosenberg sisters are responsible for a lot of the world's problems. What they have in common, they all need bailouts

and it's going to be very hard to get a bailout through this Senate and so I think we're on very uncertain ground going at it, supposing Biden is president it's going to be very hard for him to enact an agenda which supports the prolific spending and dysfunctional administration of New York, Illinois, and California. All right, so I wanted to ask you this. So I sent your column to a

important intellectual, I don't want to say his name, and he said to me, I knew Fred Siegel 30 years ago and he was never a liberal. How do you respond to that charge? I should say, because the headline of the you probably write the headline, but the headline is an ex-liberal, an ex-liberal reluctantly supports Trump. So were you a liberal? He's mistaken. He's mistaken. Go ahead. Why? I was in the magazine Dissent. Yeah. Irving Howe. I was an editor at Dissent for many years. Didn't they merge with commentary and it became dysentery? Yes, that's a great line.

One of Woody Allen's best lines, if you're allowed to mention Woody Allen. Yes, yes. You know, that's right. When did you leave the fold? Now, you were close with Giuliani and one of his advisors. Is that right? During the Giuliani administration? I wrote his quality.

I wasn't the only one who wrote it, but I wrote the primary sections of his quality of life speech, which was central to his 1993 campaign. So at that point, was that still, did you still consider yourself a liberal at that point? I would consider myself a liberal in transition. I was becoming more conservative. But I didn't become fully conservative. I didn't vote for Republicans, for instance, outside of Giuliani until Obama came along. And I, you know, one of my, I was mentioning my wife's sisters.

One of them lives in Chicago. Esther and Adele? I said Esther and Adele? I'm just making up names that go with Roosevelt. Oh, no, it's close. Jeannie, Joni, and Jen. Joni, the sister in Chicago, knew all sorts of people who knew Obama, a former tax attorney, a former dry cleaning guy.

And I wrote a piece, it was the first piece I ever wrote for National Review, the conservative publication, saying, this guy has an empty suit. There's no there there. He had no accomplishment i try to look back to what he what he and the thing that clinched it for me is he was tight with blagojevich who's now just left the federal pen who's gotten friendly with trump and trump has pardoned him he went to jail for selling the senate seat or something right when uh yes yes yeah and he should have gone to jail for a lot more, but that was what they got him on.

So when I found out that Obama and Blagojevich were tight, I said, holy mackerel, what are people buying into here? And the other thing I would talk to people about is what community activists, what did Obama, not just Obama, but all of these community activists, tell me what neighborhood did they turn around? I'm waiting to hear about it. Those are the policies of people who have that worldview. But the people close to him, like Robert Gates, they seem to come out of his administration with a high opinion of the man's capabilities, right? They don't see him as an empty suit

having worked with him for four or eight years. No, but they don't have a lot positive to say about him either. They're not terribly critical, but they're not laudatory either. Right. So I wanted to make another observation to you about this wokeness and all that stuff. So we had PC culture for a while, but it never had an enforcement mechanism. So as a matter of fact, being like really anti-PC, you know,

you could almost market yourself that way. And then something changed where, you know, where an enforcement mechanism kicked in, where you could have real consequences to your life. And that changed everything. And I noticed that this, that now is the first time prior to this, this cycle or prior to recent times, elections were mostly entertainment for me. No matter how I felt about who should win, I never really said, oh, this is going to have real consequences to my life. Maybe they'll raise my taxes, lower my taxes. I never really cared. And this cycle, I found myself saying, you know what? The other party here stands for everything that can ruin me. But I mean, really ruin me. I can say the wrong thing. And I can have

my club boycotted. I can have Louis C.K. perform on stage. And I don't know what's going to happen to me. There can be a riot and they can be burning down my building and the mayor will tell the police to stand down. And if I complain about it, the people on the New York Times will say that it's only property and you have insurance, these types of ridiculous concepts and it's spreading through. And this is a fundamentally different reaction

than I've ever had to just things I really thought were, you know, I should disagree with. And I don't think I'm unique that way. I think all through America, the fact that it went from PC to actually having teeth, that you can actually get punished is, I think that's a huge change. You agree with me, disagree with me?

I very much agree with you. But let me let Jake say something. I think that's the kind of, that's the million dollar question is, what is it that prompted this metastasizing of what had been, you know, a cultural element that's been around for a while, anti-PC, kind of campus social justice activism whatever you want to call it how did that go from being a visible but somewhat marginal phenomenon to being the defining quasi-religious ethos of the democratic party

let me let me just let me just say bill Maher marketed his old show as it was called Politically Incorrect. Right. So you could get mileage by saying, did you hear what he said? Right? Go ahead, continue. Yeah, I think that the change, there are two things that are the primary drivers

of this massive change. The first is that the Democratic Party, which had been a party with a certain middle class, working class coalition, for a variety of reasons that my father can speak to far more intelligently than I can, abandoned that coalition, moved towards the kind of Lindsay model he was describing earlier, which started in New York, which is this top bottom coalition, essentially outsourced much of the American industrial working class to China and adopted a financial economic model. And what that meant was you no longer had

the middle class, like you were talking about a minute ago, like what's the constraint? Or somebody was talking about, part of the constraint was you were accountable to the this constituency but as you can see by the feverish embrace of wokeness by corporations they don't apply the same constraint because they don't have skin in the game in the same way so they're like yeah do whatever you want like no big deal we're behind you all 100 percent and whatever you want you know if you want to% in whatever you want. You know, if you want a riot, whatever. If you want to have an anarchist zone in Seattle where four people get shot, great. We support you. They don't have skin in the game.

So that was the part of what changed was the composition of the political parties in America changed in a very fundamental way. The Democrats' old ethos was abandoned. They adopted this new ethos that represented a kind of different sort of professional class and elite class. And then the second thing is the Internet. propagate it wildly, spread it to every corner, and also to organize these social enforcement mechanisms where anybody, anywhere, I mean, what is the internet actually, right? Like in economic terms, it works on a surveillance model, right? So the one part of the surveillance economy is geared towards advertising, but the other part of the surveillance economy is geared towards advertising. But the other part of the surveillance economy is that we're all surveilling each other. And so anybody can dime anyone else at any time. political correctness such as it was in you know the early 90s and transformed them into something that i think is um metastasized metastasized into something that has some similarities but is

fundamentally a different entity at this point what do you what do you expect to see happen at the um new york times now that they've that they've gotten it terribly wrong twice, even if Biden wins? Somebody made the comment that the National Review actually had three different editorials. One hell no on Trump, one maybe on Trump, one hell yes on Trump, something like that. But the New York Times ran zero editorials that supported Trump. So, you know, the supposedly not partisan Times. Go ahead. It will have no effect on the New York Times whatsoever.

They're secure in their upper middle class base, the base of readers, and they're really not concerned whether they have credibility, broad credibility or not. The old days of the Times being concerned about its intellectual credibility are gone. It has none. The 1619 Project was utterly ludicrous. The day that came out, I talked to my sons. There's no reason even my sons would know this. Once upon a time,

I spent a semester in graduate school studying the labor systems of 17th century America. And the chief author, by the way, is a guy named Richard Morris, Dick Morris's uncle. It was clear that African American slavery didn't come right away. It didn't come until the end of the 17th century when it was clear that white indentured servants wouldn't do because they could run off. They could join the rest of the population and disappear into the society. And that's when, for obviously ugly reasons, African-American slavery became more important. But the idea that 1619

is the point that this happened, that's insane. It just reflects, I mean, I hope I'm not wrong about this, but I think it's, they work backwards into 1619. There's just a free-floating resentment slash hatred, I hate to say, of the country.

And they're just looking to put meat on those bones. But that pre-exists. There's just so much. I can't account for it. And I can understand that we have one population, African-Americans, who have every reason to be ambivalent about America and its history. Of course, they have a reason to be ambivalent about America and its history. Of course, they have a reason for that. But it's metastasized, word of the night, to 40, 50% of the country that just seem to not understand the greatness of America. They don't get it.

Can't we all be ambivalent about that history? No, we should be proud of our history. We're better than all the... Only in comparison to the rest of the world is the only fair comparison, in my opinion. I don't know what Fred said. I would agree with you. Yeah.

The fascinating thing about... I have to go in a minute, so I just want to say this quickly, but the fascinating thing about this poll that was reported in the New York Times about Latino voters in America were obviously a very important story now because there's this big swing among Latino voters to Trump, not just in Miami, but in other parts of the country as well, which, you know, causes some problems for the narrative of Trump as the embodiment of whiteness and white supremacy, it's a little bit harder to square that when he also gained among black men. I think actually I'm seeing that he gained among black women as well. So he doubled support among black women, right? Like 3% to 6%, right?

5 to 10. 5 to 10. Okay, so that's very significant, actually. But the thing, the fascinating thing is these two Democratic pollsters did this piece that Thomas Edsel wrote up in the Times where they're talking about they surveyed Latinos in America. And they had these preconceptions going in that, you know, first of all, that they identify as Latinos and people of color. And they identified as neither. The majority did not identify as people of color. And they didn't identify as Latino either, let alone Latinx. They identified as Hispanic Americans. And when you drill down even further, the really significant thing was not that they, you know, rejected one ridiculous label, Latinx, and wanted to be called Hispanic Americans. The significant thing was that they didn't want to think of themselves or to be campaigned to as permanent victims or on the basis

of racial grievance. They wanted to be campaigned to as Americans who had every opportunity to to succeed in America. And, you know, that was the finding. I think there are some good reporters at the New York Times, and I'm glad that that piece ran in the New York Times. But those sorts of kind of ground truths about what's going on in the country now are not, they're so challenging to the worldview of the dominant institutions that I agree with my father, they're so challenging to the worldview of the dominant institutions that I agree with my father, they're not going to find their way. And look, this is a repeat of 2016, but the unfortunate and tragic story of America over the past 20 years is that the people in charge never pay for their mistakes.

And that's going to keep going because it's a kind of Ponzi scheme. And the longer it goes on, the more everybody involved has to not hold the guy next to them accountable. And it keeps going and it'll blow up at some point, but not yet. Anyway, thank you all very much. Thank you. Jacob.

By the way, speaking of Hispanics, have you seen that there's a thing, there's a new thing bubbling up? I saw a tweet by Nicole Hannah-Jones of 1619. I can't can't find it this second then i saw some other people kind of echoing it that they're deciding out his the label of latinx or whatever it is hispanic is uh is kind of racist in itself because she wrote what do uh like venezuelans and indigenous guatemalans and cubans have in common is basically saying like, this is the white man's label on us and implying that they're not to be treated

like people of color necessarily. I mean, it's kind of interesting how the intersectional community can turn on a dime against each other. And let me just add at the same time, I can't speak on whether people who all speak spanish want to all be classified as the same ethnic group but it does seem weird to me that pakistanis and koreans are considered the same ethnic group for the purpose of polling right i don't get that at all we use

we had a word oriental, which you can't use anymore. And the word had a precise meaning, descendants of China, right? And for whatever reason, it was deemed as offensive, but they replaced it with a word which had a completely different meaning, which is just, you know, Indians and Pakistanis and everybody on that continent. And they have nothing in common, do they? No, actually, they hate each other. Yeah. So I wanted to look up the polls of how Asians voted.

And I want to know how the Chinese and the Koreans and the Japanese voted, because I'm curious, because I suspect that no matter what they say, a party that stands for deducting points from their kids' SATs at birth is a party which they're not going to be comfortable in for long. I just feel like that's it. But I don't know, but Pakistanis are mixed in there, and obviously they're people of color, and I don't know what they think. I think you're right. Let me give you two reasons why you're right.

One is California. The attempt to roll back Ward Connolly's referendum on eliminating affirmative action categories, that was defeated. And it was defeated in large measure because Asian Americans were hostile to it. The second thing you need to know, we all live in New York. I'm sitting here in Ditmas Park. There's an enormous movement of Asian Americans out of New York City to Great Neck, to eastern, excuse me, western Nassau County. And they're fleeing New York City schools. They're fleeing de Blasio and de Blasio's dysfunctional schools chancellor, Karanza.

They understand what you're talking about. They're afraid that a place like Stuyvesant doesn't have a future. And it's so, I mean, you know, you say you're not a liberal, but really you probably are just as liberal as you ever were. It's just the definition changed. I mean, the notion that they, they want a world where I said, so they were Asians will replace homosexuals as the one acceptable group that can be discriminated against. Like they, they will, I mean, what,

there's no outcome-based policy which doesn't treat Asians as Asians as opposed to Americans or humans. You can't square those two. They outperform all of us. God bless them. That's very good for America to have a population that does so well, right? Well, they study. Yeah. And we're going to penalize them for it. And let's not pussyfoot. It's because they look different.

I'm convinced that if it was Germans who were doing so much better than all other ethnic European descent, nobody would have any policies targeted to Germans. We probably wouldn't notice it. You know, I mean, it could well be that redheads do well. We wouldn't notice because nobody's ever studied it.

When admissions officers are saying that the Asians don't score well on personality and stuff like that, this is terrible stuff. It is. If that makes you a conservative to be offended by that stuff, then the definitions are just flippant. It's embarrassing. against Trump, might it calm down in a Biden administration? Might we see less of it, less anger and less wokeness?

It's certainly a hypothesis. I don't know. We'll have to see. My sense is, though, is that a lot of people have tasted the fruits of their anger. And I don't think they're going to back off from it. Yeah, there's blood in the water. Corporate America needs to, I think it really, and maybe they will, it was like Trader Joe's kind of showed signs of a backbone with the Trader Jose. But corporate America just needs to call these bluffs because they are bluffs. And

you could probably fill a small auditorium with the number of people it takes, far less than that, to make people think it's actually a nationwide movement. You know, this is what Twitter amplifies. We found this, I don't know if you follow us in the Comedy Cellar. I don't mean to, I know you want to say something, but we had this big controversy when Louis C.K. came back.

And if you looked in the papers or looked on Twitter, you would think we must be we must have tumbleweeds down the aisles because of all the hate we were getting. But the fact is, if you didn't know what was going on, you would have seen absolutely zero impact, zero impact to day to day business. So it's quite an illusion. So go ahead. You were about to say something. My my Jake's wife's my daughter,-in-law's brother is a huge fan of the comedy club and and comedy seller and and follows you guys uh religiously well you gotta you gotta put them in touch parallel ranges we if if and when we open again we'll have them down as VIPs. I have a couple of questions.

First of all, corporate America could give a shit about any of this stuff, right? I mean, this is all just for the bottom line. They're just like they're intimidated and they don't want anything to sully their brand. Right. So they're just pandering. They don't actually care about any of these things. Look, corporations are made of human beings that make decisions and every human being has their own motivations. My guess would be most of them are just looking at the bottom line. Right. But the problem is every time they submit they put blood in the water

and there's no limiting principle and at some point that's important there's no limiting principle but don't we see right through this bullshit who's we well

a lot of people do that's why it was really hard for a lot of people to vote against Trump because people feel like they're voting for that world that they just hate and feel threatened by. In particular, I saw the name Kamala Harris coming, looking up at me from that ballot seat. And I must say, I've never been less happy to vote for anybody in my life. And this is including all elections, be it high school, student council, or any mayor or whatever. I was saddened to fill in that oval. Go ahead, Fred. But I felt less than I was saddened to fill in that oval. Go ahead, Fred. In California,

she ran fourth in her home state. She's very unappealing and she added nothing to the Biden ticket. And we're going to watch a Shakespearean drama as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris fight for control over

this doddering man's legacy. He's referring to King Lear, by the way, for our listeners that may not be averse to Shakespeare. That's over my head. I'm sure Perrielle knew about it because she's an intellectual. You're referring to King Lear.

Perrielle happens to have a master's degree in writing. master's master okay i got i got one last question excuse me i actually did catch that king lear reference but i didn't i i was a king an old king right and his daughters were all scrambling to to get the piece of his legacy while you guys were studying old white men, I was... Anyway. Here's my question. Your friend... That sounded snarky. I didn't mean it. Rudy Giuliani. Yes.

He doesn't seem to be the same guy that he was when he was a hero of mine in New York City. Now, I'm going to... If you don't want to even talk about him, you guys are friends. I'm fine. I'm not looking to put you on the spot. I haven't talked to Rudy in five years. But is there something about the way

he's handling himself these days which seems different? On the negative side, there's no doubt that when Rudy Giuliani is not with a woman, not in a stable relationship, he suffers. And that's been true his whole life.

It's also true that most of what he said about the Ukraine was all true. Yeah. It's also true that most of what he said about the Bidens has proven to be entirely true. So, yeah, Rudy's lost some speed off his fastball, but he's still a formidable character. And, you know, I treat him respectfully. Did the locked arms suppression or attempt to suppress that Hunter Biden story, you think it lost them votes? Or I think it backfired on them because everybody knew about it. Well, who's the,

who's the everybody? I, you know, everyone, everyone who listened to talk radio, everyone who read the New York Post, but that's it. I'll define it. I suspect that people who felt their minds were not made up for sure about voting and we're kind of looking around to see. They were more likely to have heard about this. They watch Fox. Independents watch Fox. They'll sample Fox and CNN. But you've got to be careful with this.

Fox, there are a lot of never Trumpers on Fox. Yeah. And it's not so clear. If they watch the late night shows, Tucker Carlson, for instance. Yeah, that's one perspective on the world. But Chris Wallace could easily be on CNN without any change of perspective. So here we are. We have a Trump, rather a Biden presidency is likely.

Where do we go from here in terms of those of us who think the way we think in terms of our aversion, hostility toward wokeness? And what do we do now? Where do we go? It's going to be, I think it's going to be a very rough stretch. I hope what Biden is going to do, and some of this will depend on Jill Biden. I hope what he'll do is proceed cautiously, recognizing that he's won a razor-thin victory, that he's lost seats in the House, lost a number of Senate races that his party was supposed to win.

That he'll proceed cautiously. But I don't know that that'll happen. I haven't spoken to Biden in a decade, no, more than a decade, 20 years. Personally, I'm happy with this outcome. I think Trump is risky for the reasons that I said earlier, number one. Number two, if he's the cure, to use his analogy, there is something inside me that says he's worse than the disease. I mean, the emotional wear and tear on the country from this guy, and that's who knows how he'd be not having to run for re-election, is truly something on the other side of the ledger.

And if we can have a Biden who's hemmed in by a Republican Senate and a Democratic Party, which is a little bit chastened by the rejection of progressivism, that might be best for America. It doesn't sound like a terrible outcome to me. Go ahead. I think that's plausible. I wouldn't disagree with that. I think that's plausible. On the other hand, I'm not so sure it's going to hold. My hope that Biden is going to proceed cautiously, that depends on his wife, depends on Kamala Harris, depends on his advisors among the Obamites. I don't know where this goes. Nobody knows where this goes.

We're in completely uncharted territory. And he can do enormous, for instance, let's suppose, you know, Biden has been very cozy with the Chinese, taking a lot of money from them. Hunter has taken a lot of money from them. Suppose this resumes, not overtly with Sub Rosa. What then?

I mean, a lot can really go wrong in this situation. Yeah, well, that's a step further than I would go. I always did have a certain faith that the presidents are patriots first. I never, I mean, I don't put it past Biden to allow his son to get rich, but I don't see him making a decision that wasn't in the best interest of America. I know that bias can play on people and they don't even realize they're doing it. But no. Biden had no trouble exporting American jobs for many years until he was called on.

That's the reality. Not Trump. But that was following an economic principle that all the experts said is supposedly true, that free trade is good for everybody. He wasn't a patriot. There was a certain point after about 2007 when it became clear that this wasn't true. Yeah. That the textbooks were wrong. Yeah.

Go ahead, Toriel. I'm going to wrap it up. Go ahead, Toriel. I'm going to wrap it up. Go ahead. So all this having been said, and again, I know that you didn't write the subtitle to the piece, but why reluctantly supporting Trump then? Number of the reasons that the reason Noah laid out, I mean, he's, he's a strange character. I mean, if he wasn't so strange, he would have,

he would have collapsed under five years of relentless pressure and hoaxes. I mean, the Russia hoax went on for four years. What do you mean a strange? I mean strange in? In being immune to ordinary stimulus. He's a strange guy. He's, you know, I met him a couple of times, only a couple of times. And I was, you know, inclined to be positive toward him.

Because does everyone remember the Waldman Rink situation? Yeah. We couldn't fit. The city couldn't build Waldman Rink. It went. We couldn't fit. The city couldn't build Wolven Rink. It went on for years and years. He came in and built it in six months. Trump has his virtues. The important thing is if he's like, and I don't, by the way,

I don't know that he won't come out on top in this contest. This is going to be a brutal legal fight, which will likely end up in the Supreme Court. Oh, God. I can tell you. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead. If you want to finish the thought. Go ahead.

No. I wonder. I have a little bit of analogous experience with people who have become very famous that I knew. But I wonder if after a certain number of years of being Donald Trump, it didn't rot his soul in a certain way. And he may be just not the same Donald Trump who did the Wallman rink. When you have everybody who's kissing your ass for years and years and years and you have money and fame, it's probably not good for you, you know? It might not be. On the other hand, Melania is definitely good for him.

She'd be good for Rudy. Do you think their relationship is, people say that she's just there to be, that they hate each other, that, I don't know if you have any evidence. No evidence for this. The rumors about Trump are endless. The Ukrainian business, impeaching

him over a bland phone call. That was insane. Well, imagine if at that time we had known, presuming it's real, I believe it's real, that there was an email which described the meeting between Joe Biden and somebody from Burisma. Go try to impeach him then. But the FBI, and this is what's dangerous. The FBI is a thoroughly corrupt organization. And they had that information and they didn't pass it on. They kept it to themselves. Well, they had the laptop, I think, but it's not clear that they actually had gotten into the content.

They had the information within the laptop. Yeah. They might not have. They didn't, what they wanted, they wanted to use this information against whoever the next president was. All right, that's your, okay. So listen, unless you guys want to, we're at time. Do you guys have anything else you want to ask?

I would just say that, Noam, you mentioned that the constant mental toll of a Trump administration. I kind of enjoyed a lot of it. I had a constant controversy, the constant, there was always something interesting. Be it a scandal, be it something he tweeted or something. He said, yes, it could be anxiety provoking, but sometimes anxiety, you get addicted to it. Sometimes you get addicted to that heightened state of emotion. And I think there's going to be a, you know, it's kind of like when the OJ trial ended, you know, and people were like, and Rick Crone wrote that song about, I need my OJ, I'm going, man. You know, I think there's going to be that,

people are going to be like, ah, they're going to feel a little lost. I think that's right. Without all that. All right. I mean, I know people who don't see their children anymore or can't have Thanksgiving dinner with their friends anymore.

Apparently, I've never had this problem, but a lot of people, they can't separate. They just can't disagree with somebody and then put it aside and just be, you know, and have a nice time with them. They can't do it. Well, I said to a friend of mine, I don't hate Trump. And he said, well, that's a problem. I haven't lost any friends. I still talk to the same people I talk.

I don't, I don't always talk to them about the same subjects, but, but I haven't, you know, that's, if people aren't going to talk to you because you disagree with them politically, what's the point? This is very inside. Do you know Norman Podhoritz? Not well.

Not well. Okay, go ahead. I mean, it's not just difference politically. Like you can disagree with somebody politically and maybe still, you know, certainly be friends with them. But I mean, I think that Trump is so divisive that... Look, I think there's ideological lines that all of us would be hard-pressed to cross in terms of friendship. If somebody said, I believe, I think that they should send the African-Americans

back to Africa, and that was part of a politician's platform, I might have a hard time being friends with somebody. I would have a hard time being friends with somebody that was on board with that. But I don't think Trump is quite there. And I think if it's a good faith disagreement that somebody in good faith believes

that Trump is best for all Americans of all colors and religions, even if you disagree with them, that person, then, you know, it's not right to end a friendship. Well, for example, do small children belong in cages? Those cages were occupied during the Obama administration. I don't know if you're aware of that. I am aware of that. Not quite as enthusiastically. So let's be fair. Now I'm going to tell you what I think is true, but if I'm misspeaking, of course, somebody will correct me. But I think that we know that Jeff Sessions actually thought this would be a good deterrent. We put a few of them in cages and maybe they'll, they

will learn their lesson and stay out. Which is very harsh. I'm not going to defend Jeff Sessions in any manner. He was a dim bulb. But I will say about the children in cages

that... Were they cages or were they You're right. Whatever. They were cells. But I will say about the children in cages that- Were they cages or were they- You're right. Whatever, they were cells or whatever. But- Put them up at the Ritz-Carlton, but that might be a little pricey. You know, the problem is that people

who wanted to complain about it, they were right to complain about it. But what they didn't have the nerve to do is then offer their policy. Because if you listen, they would say, well, we don't want them in cages. Okay, what would you do? You want to just have an open border?

And then at that point, they got nothing. So the responsible say, listen, no more kids in cages, but this is how we're going to control the border so we don't have to deal with that issue. They never take that extra step. But the extra step has been taken for them. Most of the wall has been constructed. And I don't think the border, there are going to be border problems. There's no way of avoiding

that. But I don't think they're going to be as severe as they were. Is that Biden going to tear down the wall that's been constructed? I don't think so. But let's just be very clear in case it was ambiguous. The kids in cages is absolutely, I mean, nobody loves, I mean, you know how much I love my kids. Kids in cages is just horrifying. And when you've known, which I don't think Jeff Sessions has, when you've known immigrants, illegal immigrants who come here and you know the motivations that they had for coming here and you can put your heart and walk in their shoes,

it's sadistic and it's just horrible. Nevertheless, the ACLU fought to make it impossible to keep these children with their parents as they're being incarcerated, which is also what do they think was going to happen when you get the judge to say you can't keep the parents? I mean can't they keep the parents in with their with their kids i mean the whole thing is so criminal and so awful i mean i don't even you know i don't know how these people sleep at night i really genuinely don't yeah well it's with the aclu stay with us for a second. The ACLU was once a great organization. Yeah. It's a shadow of its former self. Aren't we all?

Well, it's funny you say that because what we're facing within the country is a kind of institutional breakdown. It's not like we can trust the IRS. It's not like we can trust the FBI. It's not like we can trust the IRS. It's not like we can trust the FBI. It's not like we can trust the CIA. We're in a bad place, no matter who's president. The institutional rot is severe. And that's why I hope Biden just perceives, if he does become president,

that he just perceives cautiously. Yeah, I think he will. I can agree with that. All right. I've read you for many, many years, and it's been my great honor to speak to you in person. And I do hope I'll see you at the Comedy Cellar with your family when it reopens. Thank you. And Jonathan, Jeff's brother-in-law,

Jeff, Jake, I don't know my son's name. Jake's brother-in-law was a regular when the Comedy Cellar was open. And so I suspect they'll be coming back. That'd be great. All right. Wait, wait, where can we find your new book? Well, you know, it's from Telos Press and it's on Amazon.

The hated Amazon, the one we couldn't have Amazon in Queens, right? Oh, you know, it's your book. You said the future used to happen here. Was that something like that? What was the name of it? No, that's an earlier book. The future. That was a line from Mario Cuomo.

The future once happened here. So that's when AOC chased Amazon out of Queens. I remember saying the future will be very happy to happen somewhere else. Yes. What was she thinking? Anyway. But just one thing, since you mentioned that. The planning for that Amazon move was so haphazard, so slipshod

that can you imagine coming over the my brain is coming over the 59th Street Bridge or something? Thank you. Coming over the 59th Street Bridge toward Queens Plaza and having it's already a permanent traffic jam.

There was no planning for this. There was no thought behind this. They just wanted the jobs. Amazon wanted the subsidies. And that was it. No thought was given to this. It was terrible. You know, this is a terrible thing to say because he dispossessed my grandparents on one side.

Robert Moses would have thought about this, would have thought about, you know, how do you do this? What transportation improvements have to be part of this? There was none of that. Between our dim-witted governor and our dim-witted mayor, we're in a very bad place. Are we getting, on average, less capable people? If you want to be a center-left person,

one of the assumptions buried in that is that there are really talented people out there who can be put in charge of things and they will do things well. Like a Robert Moses, whatever his immoralities were, he was capable of implementing his vision on something and it was thought through and it stood the test of time. It seems like we're led by empty suits now. Is that always been the case? No, but I think it's been true for the last 20. I mean, Bloomberg, because he engaged in an unleveraged buyout of New York's political culture, Bloomberg was treated with deference he didn't deserve. He was an incompetent mayor.

Wow. And he did a great deal of damage. And then Bloomberg followed by de Blasio. Good grief. And at least Bloomberg had Ray Kelly. And Ray Kelly did too much with stop and frisk. It was too much. And I wrote about this at the time.

They had to back off. But what we have now. It was too much. And I wrote about this at the time. They had to back off. But what we have now, first we had Bratton, and then what's happened to the NYPD? Mostly they're told to back down. Well, we had an incident over the summer at the cellar. They did a great job. Somebody smashed Angelica's phone, the waitress.

Yeah. And did you hear about that incident? No, I don't know what happened. He wasn't. The cops came and the guy ran over, he ran away and they caught him. Yeah. All right. But it was interesting to see. I mean, it was this low level kind of a thing,

but utterly fascinating to watch police work, even at, even at the lowest level, you know, let alone something really crazy, you know. The police problem is a tough one because they deserve a lot of criticism and they also deserve a lot of support. And those are the toughest, you know, things to deal with. Yeah, my goodness. All right.

So anyway, that's it. Fred Siegel, thank you very, very much for joining us. We look forward to reading you in the future. I hope you had a good time. I hope you had a good time. Bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Podcast at ComedyCellar.com for questions, comments, and suggestions. We'll see you next time. And have a table on Instagram and write to us. Okay. Bye-bye.