Charles Fain Lehman, Hannah Meyers, Ilya Shapiro, and Daniel Di Martino discuss Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case, New York City’s mayoral race, and Bible stories Hollywood should adapt into films.
Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on our panel today are Hannah Meyers, Director of all things public safety at the Manhattan Institute, Dan Di Martino, immigration guy at the Manhattan Institute, and Ilya Shapiro, constitution guy at the Manhattan Institute. We’re gonna jump right into the news and specifically we’re gonna dip into the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
The Salvadoran man slash Maryland father slash domestic abuse alleged committer, may or may not have been in MS-13, individual was deported by the Trump administration, possibly accidentally, to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia’s case has become sort of a cause célèbre with those on the right seeing him as an example of the person that we really want to get rid of and those on the left seeing his case as an obvious and substantial deprivation of due process.
There’s some really live and interesting issues here, so I want to get right into it. Ilya, there’s been a great deal of back and forth at the Supreme Court and in the courts generally over Abrego Garcia’s case. What do you see as the state of play and who do you think has the better argument, the administration or their critics?
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, so the let’s work backwards counterintuitively with what the Supreme Court said was it affirmed the lower court ruling against the administration, but asked it to clarify what facilitate means. That is, the government is ordered to facilitate Garcia’s return. What does that mean? The government’s lawyers have represented Pam Bondi, the attorney general, has said that a plane is ready to go. We’re removing all domestic impediments to his return.
Is that good enough? It’s unclear actually. It’s unclear whether a federal court has the authority, for example, to tell the president, even deferentially, do whatever you think is right to diplomatically get the exchange, know, get, get, get Garcia back, ask, uh, Bukele, the president of, of El Salvador to get him back or whatever other channels. I’m not telling you how to use your foreign affairs power, but facilitate his return. Again, it’s, it, there’s just,
not really law on this on whether the district court’s jurisdiction extends to that. And that is where the legal fight is going on. Nobody disputes that there was an error. The administration says there was an administrative error. And to be clear, there was an order of removal imposed and affirmed against Garcia. But then there was another order saying that he can’t be removed to El Salvador specifically. I imagine what’s really going on in the background right now is the administration is trying to negotiate to send him somewhere else, whether it’s another neighboring Central American country, who does some island in the Pacific that they’ve sent people to in the past under these kinds of deals or what. But, you know, it’s sort of become a political pinata. The legal issue is fairly narrow. I don’t think it’s a constitutional crisis. I don’t think it’s the administration trying to ignore the Supreme Court or what have you. But it’s all about this definition of “facilitate.” Meanwhile, it’s become a political pinata, if you will. And I think the Democrats have been hauling on down, like in the Mohammed Khalil case, are not picking a very good poster child for resisting immigration, the administration’s immigration policies.
Daniel Di Martino: Sir, Ilya, one question about that. Imagine this case was not about him. Imagine he had been an American who had been wrongfully deported. Does a court have the authority to tell the president you must return an American, that you’re wrongfully deported?
Ilya Shapiro: I think that’s the same legal question. An American would have more legal rights, but that doesn’t go to the question of what power a court has to order the executive branch, generally or the president specifically, to act with respect to the foreign affairs power. The American would probably be able to file for habeas corpus in various ways, but again, the court’s jurisdiction does not extend to a Salvadorian prison.
Daniel Di Martino: I guess the American could, or even Abrego Garcia, could they like sue for damages and then get a monetary reward for that?
Ilya Shapiro: unclear. That would be kind of a, what’s known as a Bivens action for violation of federal civil rights and the court does not like to expand. You know, really hasn’t applied that in many, many years. I don’t think damages is really what, know, here you can stay in the Salvadorian prison, but the government has to pay your family $10,000 a day or something. That’s kind of an odd resolution of this.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, but what concerns me, what concerns me about all of this is that if the precedent is, that if they mistakenly deport you, you know, no matter your legal status, and especially if you’re an American citizen, and there is no recourse for you, that is kind of a way out for a future president. I’m not saying that that’s what the Trump administration is trying to do. I actually don’t think so. I just think this was really a mistake. But they could just take anyone and they just send them to another country and you get rid of people.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, think there is, and I want to talk about the policy implications in a second, it seems to me at least that the question is a little thornier when it comes to removing an American citizen, right? There is a substantive difference between, as Ilya alluded to, American citizens have habeas rights everywhere on earth. That the court has said pretty clearly. So it’s the case that there’s a substantive difference between asking El Salvador to give us one of its own citizens so that we can perform procedure on him and then probably ultimately give him back.
Because like his credible fear claim is no longer plausible because it was based on there being gangs in El Salvador that no longer exist. There’s a big difference between asking for Salvadoran citizen and asking for an American citizen back. That said, I think this is a real ambiguous question. I do want to talk just for a second, Daniel, about sort of why they’ve done this. I mean, the administration has been extremely recalcitrant. It said we’re going to facilitate it. But there is this sort of like legal two step where on the one hand, the courts can’t make them give Garcia back. On the other hand, like, El Salvador’s a client state. If we said to El Salvador, give us three ponies and a mule, they would absolutely do it. They would totally give us this guy back, if we asked.
Ilya Shapiro: Even beyond that, Charles, there’s, I just learned of this from a piece by Andrew McCarthy on Friday in National Review. There is a treaty or at least an agreement between the US and El Salvador when they were negotiating the housing of people that the US could send to this Salvadorian prison that at any time, either the Secretary of State or the President could simply ask for someone back and Salvador is bound to give them back. So there’s even that.
Hannah E. Meyers: Is that why they got such a good,
Daniel Di Martino: Wow.
Hannah E. Meyers: Why you got such a cushy audience the other week?
Charles Fain Lehman: No, I think that was mostly a photo op. You’re referring to the meeting with Senator Chris Van Hollen and Garcia. That was, yeah, I mean.
Hannah E. Meyers: Yeah, it was like in the cafeteria of, I don’t know, assisted living homes.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, this-
Ilya Shapiro: It reminded me of the beer summit, you know, Obama and the guy.
Charles Fain Lehman: It was a little like the beer summit.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, you have to think what’s going on here is that Bukele is in cahoots with Trump about this. I mean, they are not asking for him to be back. They want him to remain there. And this is very dangerous for the administration legally because the courts have ordered him to facilitate it. And with any FOIA, I am almost certain that you can find emails or text messages between different government officials saying, yes, do this. You don’t want him back. And like literally flouting the law.
You know, now it was discovered that Bukele put the margaritas and all of that on purpose and then took the photo. Like, like this is classic, like an American move.
Charles Fain Lehman: In this photo op.
And you know what? This is a great political strategy. Bukele is not doing anything illegal because American courts do not apply to him. Right. So the… and by the way, Abreu of Garcia, you know, the more information we find out about him, the more it looks like he was actually an MS-13 gang member. You saw the tattoos on his knuckles that the White House, I know they share like a digitally altered image with like MS-13 written on top, but it was more like a description of what the tattoo meant. It was so bad.
Charles Fain Lehman: He has some tattoos on his hands that may or may not mean MS-13 and that his wife keeps blocking out in Instagram photos.
Daniel Di Martino: Exactly, his wife’s social media blurred the tattoos every time she posted something with his knuckles on it. So clearly they wanted to hide this. Clearly he claimed that he was a MS-13, so that’s why he couldn’t be sent back to El Salvador. So come on, can’t the Democrats just find an innocent person to defend? Why do they have to defend gang members?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, so and this is a question I want to bring Hannah on this too, is, you there’s a political angle to all this, because on the one hand, there’s a very technical legal debate going on here about core powers of the executive and can you compel the return of this guy? On the other hand, it’s like, you know, there were five to six million people in the country who are sort of plausibly democratically deportable in the sense that like most of the public would support removing Biden era rivals and criminals. And this guy is like almost certainly one if not both of the at least one of these.
And so to the average American, just like, why are you fussing over sending this guy back to El Salvador? And I wonder about, you know, how the politics plays out here. you know, a friend put this to me, was like, this is the first time I might believe in 5D chess from the Trump administration.
Ilya Shapiro: You’d think that that… you’d think that that gay hairdresser who was mistakenly apparently also sent to the same prison as part of the Tren de Aragua Venezuelan gang thing would be a better poster child for this. And the Supreme Court had a midnight ruling on that over the weekend as well.
Daniel Di Martino: And it’s not his country, you know, he was, it’s not his country.
Hannah E. Meyers: It’s very effective. I don’t know. I mean, I think that’s one thing that makes it so frustrating when the Trump administration is reckless doing the things that are so important to do, like limiting the monitoring federal agencies to make sure there isn’t waste. Well, could you just do it in a not reckless way so that the narrative doesn’t spin out of control about how you’re doing it? Because it’s so important. Deporting violent criminals that are all coming here is so important. And then doing it in this way that had all these little errors that seemed really unnecessary, down to the police officer who had put Garcia into the gang database originally, was prosecuted for corruption because he tipped off a brothel madam who he frequented. Just like every level of it has all these little like, ugh, that then just weaken the whole thing. And they are really effective.
Ilya Shapiro: If this was written for a TV show, it’d be rejected as too fanciful.
Hannah E. Meyers: Too fanciful! Yeah, I don’t know. And even though like his wife saying, I wasn’t, I didn’t mean, we’re working out the domestic abuse. I just I’ve had a lot of domestic abuse partners in the past. And so I’m a little sensitive about it. It’s like, well, then you for sure didn’t again pick…
Daniel Di Martino: The ideal immigrant.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right, I mean think that’s the core of the issue and you know the administration’s line is like we have been put here to remove immigrants that most reasonable people agree should not be here and it is hard to make the argument that, it is hard to make the argument to the average voter who doesn’t care about who doesn’t know what habeas corpus means that like this is a serious violation. Now in fact it seems like you know in this particular instance the sort of non… the tiptoeing around noncompliance seems like a serious future issue.
Hannah E. Meyers: I think we again got here by having such weak law and order for the last four, eight, ten years, because, you know, I live in the like Columbia University area and there’s just posters everywhere of Mahmoud Khalil, you know, like looking off in the light, you know, like Soviet propaganda style. What’s that? Yes, exactly. know, free Khalil.
Charles Fain Lehman: We talked about two episodes ago.
Hannah E. Meyers: And again, like, why would we want him here in Morningside Heights? Like he obviously supports terror. He obviously is like someone, I don’t want him around here. Like I don’t know enough about, you know, I’m not as good as some of our colleagues in nitpicking the legality of how easy it will be to deport him. But certainly we don’t want him. But had we just, you know, use a little bit of basic law and order over the past year and a half around Columbia in terms of vandalism and kidnapping maintenance staff and walking around masked, screaming about Zionists, it wouldn’t be an issue because he wouldn’t, you know,
Daniel Di Martino: Absolutely. If all these people had been charged and convicted with the crimes that they committed, we wouldn’t even have had to go through like the specific revocation process. would have been automatically revoked.
Charles Fain Lehman: Let me, and I wanna take this out in a minute…
Hannah E. Meyers: And the same with the deportation. I think it’s because we let it get so out of control. And now we’re doing things that seem more drastic, where it’s easier to seem reckless, because it’s really hard to put the toothpaste back in the law and order tube.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to and I think that’s right and I want to bring Daniel in before we move on because I think this is something he and I have been talking about and I’m curious for your thoughts, Daniel, is you know it is the case that there was a great deal of recklessness in the prior administration that results in a very large influx of particularly illegal immigration and I think you know the administration is sort of trying to clear the current administration is trying to clean that up they may be doing it poorly but I mean is there a way to do it well is there an available way to do it well how do you think about that?
Daniel Di Martino: Yes, in about a month from now, my next report with the Manhattan Institute is coming out. It’s about how we can do this in an orderly way, and that is with immigration judges. Meaning to deport someone, you need a deportation order. The deportation orders are issued by employees of the Department of Justice that we call immigration judges. They are part of the Executive Office of Immigration Review. And we have about 700 of those in the country. I estimated that if the Trump administration just hired an extra 250 ones a year, so a thousand over four years. You could get rid of the entire backlog of deportation cases and immigration cases in courts within the four years of the Trump administration. And then you can just not hire anymore. Just let them be, you know, quit through attrition. It will cost you about a billion dollars a year, which let’s be real on reconciliation, that is peanuts.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, you could redirect some of the people who are being fired by Doge.
Charles Fain Lehman: They could become immigration judges. After the Trump administration, these are all administrative law judges, so after the Trump administration guts the National Labor Relations Board, all those guys could go become immigration judges.
Ilya Shapiro: Hahaha
Hannah E. Meyers: Talk about efficiency.
Daniel Di Martino: What they’re trying to do though, and I saw this recently, that instead they’re trying to not hire new judges. They’ve actually fired some, but they will try to make them decide more cases faster. So they’re really going to pressure them. They’re saying dismiss cases that are incomplete. That might be an issue. So I’m not sure about the legalities. I just think that if they want a quick legal way that is not going to be challenged to do their agenda. Just ask Congress in reconciliation, give me a billion dollars a year and we solve the deportation mess and they will give it to you.
Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, I want to take us out. Before we jump to the next topic, let me ask just the administration has a mandate, or thinks it is a mandate, to remove like millions and millions of people. Are they going to succeed? Is the illegal immigrant population substantially lower at the end of the next four years or like the last Trump administration is it going to be a little bit higher? Daniel, what do you think?
Daniel Di Martino: I think it’s going to be lower. I also think the legal immigrant population is going to be lower. I think they’re not going to reach a million people a year. They might reach maybe 2 million over the four years entirely of deportations. But the main reason it’s going to be lower is because entries are going to be very low. And some people are going to self-deport. That’s going to happen.
I’m just concerned that part of the decrease is just going to be decreasing legal entries too. We’re seeing massive decreases in tourism because of new stories that are freaking people out to come to America. We’re going to see a lot of fewer people maybe come to work and do other business activities. So there’s going to be a downside there. But I certainly think that the illegal immigrant population is going to be lower. But we’re not going to push out all the people that Biden let in in four years.
Charles Fain Lehman: Hannah, briefly, lower, higher, what’s your prediction?
Hannah E. Meyers: What Daniel just said because I like his take on this.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair. Ilya?
Ilya Shapiro: It’s going to be lower. You know, you asked whether it’s going to be substantially lower, you know, I don’t know about those “–ly” adverbs, but, I, you know, in 2023, the U.S. made about a million repatriations, deportations. So I think we can probably hit, hit that number.
Daniel Di Martino: I’ll say those numbers and repatriations that includes all the people that showed up at the border and were turned away, not because few people are showing up at the border.
Ilya Shapiro: You have the better numbers. What is the high? I have this recollection that like the last year of Obama was particularly high.
Daniel Di Martino: Yes. So when we look at deportations, we really mean people from the interior, right? Not people who are just showing up at the border. And that is in the hundreds of thousands, really. The maximum it’s been is like near half a million. So if Trump went like full speed, I’m going to reach the peak for four years, he will reach two million people in four years.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think, yeah, I think that’s plausible. think the other thing they have going for them is just the apparently deterrence works. And so the number of encounters at the border has dropped to near zero. And so just the fewer people coming in as a result, the backlog will just decline mechanically because the admission rate is lower. So I do think they’ll get there. think Daniel’s probably right. You’re not going to be getting to a million people a year.
I want to move us on to our next topic. This is City Journal podcast. And so we’re going to talk a lot about cities and particularly our dear city of New York, where there is a hotly contested race for the mayoralty. Over the weekend, Mayor Eric Adams, who’s the mayor of New York City, for those who don’t know, made an appearance on Lara Trump’s show on Fox. He defended his push to cooperate with the Trump administration and specifically allowing ICE to return to the city. New York’s a sanctuary city. New York state is a sanctuary state. It’s hotly controversial. For those who don’t know, Adams recently dropped out of the Democratic primary, and he’s now running a Hail Mary reelection bid as an independent.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic primary, former governor Andrew Cuomo looks likely to be the nominee, but he’s facing a serious challenge from Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who’s running at about 20 percent to Cuomo’s 40-45 percent. So I want to sort of come to Adam’s first, though. What do we make of this most recent move to sort of double and triple down on immigration enforcement, and his work with the Trump administration. Does he have any kind of chance, Hannah? Like, is he gonna get anywhere, or is he totally done?
Hannah E. Meyers: I don’t know. The first time he won, I feel like he tries to he got the law and order vote the first time just by being like real old school. You know, he wasn’t making like a complicated conservative argument. He wasn’t being that law and order or stringent. He was just being like, hey, we need police, you know, kind of thing. And I think he’s trying to get that again here, but focusing more on immigration. Like, hey, we spent billions of dollars in New York City that could have gone to other things, as he said. It could have went to this and it could have went to that was his explanation, to children, to seniors, and instead it went to illegal immigrants. And I think he’s just trying to market that kind of like “reasonable guy” tack. It’s gonna be hard against Cuomo. But Cuomo doesn’t have that voice. He has his reputation as being savvy and competent and a real politician’s politician.
He has more baggage than Adams, you know, in terms of things people hate about him, the letting old people die during COVID, the sexual harassment stuff, and also that he himself was governor when we passed discovery reform and bail reform and lots of things that are now the thing we’re pushing back against. And he hasn’t really been clear that he would undo that work, that he is culpable, that they went wrong, what he would do to change it.
And then Mamdani is just really shows that if you go full throttle progressive, you can just win all that you just push aside all the slightly more reasonable progressives and just be full anti-Semitic pinko and you’ll get far, which is just so depressing. But hopefully,
Ilya Shapiro: But let’s get real here. Isn’t, and I’m the one panelist who doesn’t live in New York, have never lived in New York, other than, I guess, one summer during law school.
Hannah E. Meyers: We miss you.
Ilya Shapiro: If you’re not gonna vote for the socialist, which I imagine most Democrats are not, you know, they’ll have Cuomo, warts and all, and it’s a Democratic city. He’ll beat Adams. Isn’t that the dynamic or, what, or is what we’re really talking about here that there’s a new lane opening up for our Generalissimo, Reihan to jump in.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, we can’t comment on any pending electoral campaign for Reihan. No, so I think, no endorsements, no endorsements, no…
Hannah E. Meyers: I was gonna say Curtis Sliwa.
Daniel Di Martino: Nor make endorsements. Only in a personal capacity. Only in a personal capacity.
Hannah E. Meyers: Really?
Ilya Shapiro: I was asking an empirical question of…
Charles Fain Lehman: So I think the really interesting question about what happens in the race is Adams is the incumbent. He’s an incumbent to the advantage, although he’s not very popular. So you have Adams on the ballot. You have Cuomo on the ballot. There is a lot of discussion of if Mamdani does not win the Democratic primary, he will still likely be able to run on the Working Families Party line, which is a major third party in New York State. So he could also be on the ballot and there will be a Republican on the ballot. Curtis Sliwa is likely to be re-nominated.
So it’s a weird race. Maybe some people decide they want Adams because they don’t like Cuomo. Maybe Mamdani draws who, you know, if Cuomo and Adams and Sliwa all draw some votes, maybe Mamdani could end up getting a plurality if not a majority. Things could get pretty weird. I do think that the calculus is, you know, the most likely outcome is that Cuomo gets elected. But I think there’s a real question about New Yorkers and how they feel at this moment. Daniel, I’m curious for your take as, what’s your read on the situation as another New Yorker?
Daniel Di Martino: I mean, just know, look, anyone but the socialist. If it is crooked like Adams, it’s okay. The socialists are more crooked, don’t worry. They will reveal themselves in time. Mamdani is essentially running for president of Venezuela on the United Socialist Party of Venezuela line with Maduro.
And you know, it might sound funny, but that’s exactly what he wants. He wants government grocery stores. Obviously government healthcare, obviously, but like government grocery stores, wants everybody to live in public housing. It’s like, “yes, in my backyard,” but you’re going to be forced to live in public housing. And that’s insane. He would destroy the city if he could. So…
Hannah E. Meyers: Yeah. Social workers in place of mental health, know, place of police. Yeah.
Daniel Di Martino: Of course, no police, we have to disown the police. Like it’s worse because most socialist countries at least are safe. Like the socialist of America are like socialism, but with crime, you know, the cherry on top. And then Cuomo, you know, I saw his video launching the campaign. I like a lot of the things he’s proposing. I just kind of don’t believe that he believes any of the things he says. I think he’s just there to be in power, like a lot of career politicians.
And Adam’s kind of, you know, it’s also in a lot of problems. You know, if anything, Curtis Sliwa, you know, might be like the most honest one of them all. I don’t know much about him, to be honest, but he seems like a good guy in his heart.
Charles Fain Lehman: He’s a character.
Yeah, mean, one thing I want to underscore there is the question about Mamdani, and I think this gets to a bigger discussion of urban politics. I’m curious for people to weigh in, which is, you know, there seems to be 20 percent of the Democratic electorate that keeps going up who are just saying, don’t want, A, they don’t want Cuomo, but B, they so don’t want Cuomo, who is sort of perceived as a more moderate candidate, that they’re willing to vote for, Daniel’s right, an explicit out and out socialist. You know, there’s this sort of like, Brooklyn socialist vote that he’s likely to capture. I mean, and so I wonder about more broadly, do people see that as a viable political strategy for urban candidates going forward? Right? On the one hand, he’s probably not going to win. But on the other hand, he’s doing surprisingly well. In 2025, we’ve allegedly had this vibe shift, this backlash. What do we make of the fact that there’s a socialist candidate who can pick up 20 percent of the Democratic primary vote in New York in 2025?
Hannah E. Meyers: Well, I think that there’s something to be said too, for we have another little bit before the primary and crime has been going down a lot under Police Commissioner Tisch and, you know, that vibe shift, the NYPD police commissioner and, you know, other sort of elements of the vibe shift that pushed policy and strategy in the city back towards something a little bit more pre-progressive, a little bit more traditional and I wonder if it bears even more fruit toward the summer and people are enjoying New York more, whether that’ll adjust it.
But I wonder if it’s also, you know, the disillusionment with the sort of the move away from the progressives of Kamala Harris who lost so disastrously and now there are all these young people who still want that feeling, who are pretty ignorant about socialism and what’s been tried and failed a little bit. And so they’re just, they’re going to jump at it without even knowing what the heck’s going on and just sort of thinking, well, if he’s a mainstream candidate, this must be a reasonable way to run a city. We’ve never experienced it. Let’s, let’s try this.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, and remember…
Ilya Shapiro: If he only gets 20 percent in the Democratic primary in New York, mean, that would be a positive thing.
Daniel Di Martino: I think he will get more at the end of the ranked choice voting thing. But I do think that Cuomo will beat him handily. But my concern is, remember New York had done this massive shift to the right in the last election. I think some of that, if not a lot of that, is going to revert for the mayoral election just because now Trump is in office. There’s going to be a very large Democratic turnout, more than Republican, I think. And so the Democrats are going to win the mayoral election, the question is who. And if Eric Adams is running at the same time as an independent and divides some of the vote and shifts some of the vote away from Cuomo, what are the percentages gonna look like, right? I don’t know that.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, I think that’s a good opportunity to go to our last question, which is next year on Inauguration Day, who is going to be mayor of New York City? Hannah, what’s your answer?
Hannah E. Meyers: Raihan Salam.
Daniel Di Martino: Wow, the dream! The dream!
Charles Fain Lehman: In a coup that we will help orchestrate. If only, if only. Ilya, who’s your mayor?
Ilya Shapiro: I don’t know, I’m focused west and south where the future of America lies.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah.
Hannah E. Meyers: You take that back, Ilya.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’re, we’re pushing New York into the sea. Daniel, what’s what’s
Daniel Di Martino: It’s gonna be Andrew Cuomo. It’s gonna be Andrew Cuomo.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I’m forced to agree. think it’s going to be I think Andrew Cuomo is going to be yet another mayor who is going to rule in spite of how unpopular he is, which is a persistent problem, right? You go back to de Blasio, people like Bloomberg, iffy on Bloomberg at the end, but same thing with Adams. He’s going to become the least unpopular of all the unpopular choices and that will let him pull it out. All right, before we wrap up, let’s just talk a little bit about what’s going on in the culture.
Over the weekend the unexpected breakout film of the Easter weekend was The King of Kings, was an animated retelling of Charles Dickens’s adaptation of the story of Christ. It’s the work of a new studio, Angel Studios, which is meant to deliver sort of more religiously themed content to audiences who are starving for that from Hollywood and are interested in seeing those stories depicted. I have actually, I will admit, not seen The King of Kings because it’s not really my story, but that’s okay. It sounds like it did well and I’m glad that people got to see it.
But I’m curious, I want to hear from our panelists, what story from the Bible would you like to see next adapted to the silver screen in animation or non-animation? Hannah, what’s your pick?
Hannah E. Meyers: Thanks for coming to me first. I think the Book of Esther, you know, which is what we read on Purim, because there’s a guy who’s wicked and he wants to annihilate all the Jews and at the end he gets hanged with all his sons and it’s very satisfying and there’s a lot of carousing and there’s a lot of feasting and there’s a lot of drinking. It stars a gorgeous Jewess who I’m sure they would cast a shiksa to play in true Hollywood form. Like, I don’t know.
Hannah E. Meyers: like Blake Lively or someone. I was supposed to Gal Gadot or someone obvious. Yeah, that would, I’d take my kids to that.
Charles Fain Lehman: Blake Lively is Esther.
Ilya Shapiro: And, and well, but you could also have lots of drinking parties surrounding that because you’re it’s a it’s a mitzvah to get drunk. Yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair, okay.
Hannah E. Meyers: Yes, and then the drowning out. Yeah, drink till you don’t know one character from the other. There’s a lot of marketing potential here.
Charles Fain Lehman: You could have very… It’s a lot of marketing potential. Ilya, what’s your pick?
Ilya Shapiro: I think it’s time for a remake of The Ten Commandments. I mean, it’s been, what, 60 years since, what year was that? 70 years, even? 1956. So that’s been a long time, you know. Having just gone through Passover, you know, the story of Exodus and all that. I don’t know who would play the Charlton Heston, the Moses role now. I’m not gonna start playing amateur casting director, but I think that would make for a good movie.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah.
Daniel Di Martino: They’re gonna cast a black person.
Hannah E. Meyers: Although Charles has a really good Bible beard. I’m not the first to point out, so…
Charles Fain Lehman: Our producer in the chat, our producer Isabella says it should be Glenn Powell, which would totally happen. It would work. Daniel, what’s your pick?
Hannah E. Meyers: This is really popular.
Daniel Di Martino: You know, by the way, I do know Angel Studios and I mean, they were the ones that made Sound of Freedom, remember? Very big movie. I really liked it, I will say. You know, I think, and I was checking if somebody had made this movie before, but about the Book of Daniel, which has always been my favorite book in the Bible, in part, obviously I’m Daniel and my mom read me the children’s Bible, which I think I still have it over there.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah.
Ilya Shapiro: That’s why I like Passover. I get Elijah’s cup, because he never comes. So, Ilya is Elijah, you know?
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, so I like that. I should also say, you know, Pope Francis just passed away this morning and I’m praying for him and I think maybe Angel Studios should make an actual movie about the conclave, not the blasphemy that was released by Hollywood.
that made the Pope be trans or something like that. I refused to watch it, thank God. I had bought tickets to go watch it with my girlfriend, then a friend of mine told me, Daniel, don’t go. And she spoiled the end and I’m like, wow, thank God we switched because it would have been a total waste of time. So let’s push back against the Hollywood blasphemy.
Ilya Shapiro: Wait, are you saying that Reihan should run for Pope instead of Mayor?
Charles Fain Lehman: Good, there’s the episode title, Reihan Salam for Pope. I will admit I was discussing this question with my wife and she gave me my answer, which is what she said is she really wants the story of Exodus after they leave Egypt, the 40 years in the desert. She wants that story told by Wes Anderson as a comedy, which I would absolutely watch. I think that would be excellent. All right. I believe that is about all the time that we have.
Daniel Di Martino: That’s even funnier, that’s even better.
Hannah E. Meyers: So it’d be sort of dreaming.
Charles Fain Lehman: So thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you have enjoyed this episode or even if you have not, we encourage you to like, subscribe for more content. Leave comments and questions below. Who knows at some point we might even read some of them in this closing segment. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images News
