Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Thursday, July 11th.

I'm John Pudhor, it's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always senior editor

A Greenwald Hy-A. Hi John. Associate editor Noah Rothman, I know uh,

Hi John. And in Washington senior writer Christine Rosen,

Hi Christine. Hi John. So uh, we have a an inter nessene battle that has now

broken out in public between speaker, democratic speaker, the house Nancy Pelosi, and

democratic freshman superstar Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, in which I think inevitably something

like this was going to happen over the next two years. I'm just surprised that it's happened now

where essentially Ocasio Cortez has accused Pelosi of racism and kind of sexism

because her claim is that it was an it's incredibly disrespectful for Nancy Pelosi to say

the things that she's been saying about Ocasio Cortez and her dear friends Rashida Tulib,

Ilhan Omar, and Iana Presley because they are well women of color. So Pelosi's being a woman

does not make her a woman of color and being a white ethnic doesn't make her a a person of color.

So I have a great many thoughts about this but Christine to begin with, how does this comport with

the general gender identity politics of the present moment? What do you say?

Perfectly actually because there's this wonderful generational issue to which AOC just added the race,

she just played the race card to add to that but I think what's fascinating to me is that

Nancy Pelosi actually understands what the founders meant by congressional power and how it works

and the negotiation and the compromise and the coalition building that's required to pass legislation.

She understands how that power works and so when she says to the squad as these four ladies are

calling themselves that they have one vote each what she means is that they have no political power

in Congress yet they don't have coalitions they're not like the House Freedom Caucus which could

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