The Bulwark Podcast - Insurrection and Its Consequences

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

A Colorado case will determine whether Trump should be kept off the ballot there because of that annoying little insurrection issue. Plus, founding father wisdom, the gag order is back, and a quiz on left-wing antisemitism. Ben Wittes joins Charlie Sykes for The Trump Trials.

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This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Whether you're navigating workplace stresses, complex relationships, or family dynamics,

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Ben. Good to see you again. Greetings from Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas. You get around. It was New Orleans last week. Is this part of your train ride around America? No, so I didn't do this by train. I came to Austin yesterday and went to the border. I went to McAllen, Texas to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, flew over the border in a helicopter to learn about the border management issues, about which I'll be doing a little bit of writing, and then came up here to Austin for a conference on Middle East stuff. Okay. Well, I do want to talk about the Middle East in a little while, including your rather remarkable checklist to see whether or not you are a left anti-Semite,

which is generating a huge amount of reaction. Enduring influence of BuzzFeed on me, you know, just figure, need a BuzzFeed checklist to see if you're an anti-Semite. You can test yourself. Yeah, if you want to test yourself, I have a link in my newsletter, Morning Shots. And of course, the whole thing is in Ben's newsletter, The Dog Shirt Daily. But we're going to talk about that a little bit later. But let's start off with the Trump trials. I think it's safe to say that Donald Trump is not handling this well. I think there have been several dozen. I saw one estimate of more than 70 social media posts in the last 24 hours, including in the middle of the night, where he's raving, you know,

leave my kids alone. And of course, this is the week that we're going to be seeing testimony from, let's see, what do we have here? The Trump kids. Don Jr. is going to be testifying today. Eric is going to be testifying on Thursday and Ivanka testifies next Wednesday and will be the state's final witness. In case you missed it, Trump is also posting videos where he's talking about the various prosecutions. And I wanted to play this one because the stable genius, the one who discovered that U.S. was the same as United States, the United States spelled U.S., remember that revelation? He's had another big discovery. And I want to share that with you. Listen to this clip. These highly political Biden lawsuits and indictments shouldn't be allowed to start

until after the election is over. Who would ever think a thing like this would be allowed to start? We actually have one judge that wants the lawsuit to start the day before Super Tuesday. These are corrupt people. Our founding fathers are looking down at Biden with scorn right now. They're looking down on Biden and this administration with disbelief. We're going to make America great again. We're going to put America first. We're going to have a great country. It's going to be called the United States of America. Thank you very much. Whoa, Ben. It's going to be called. What is it called now? That's right. Who's going to tell him that the country has a name and it is the United States of America? I do agree with him that the founding fathers are looking down and they are shocked and they're horrified, probably not for the reasons that he suspects. Yeah, I also think the question of what aspects

of modern America the founders would look down on with pride and what aspects with shame is an interesting one. If you could imagine Alexander Hamilton, who wrote the famous 1794 account of a demagogue that reads like it was written yesterday about Donald Trump, and he could look down at the way the system is managing Trump. Yeah. Appalled? Would he be proud? These are systems he helped build, and they have removed a demagogue from power. They have also allowed a demagogue, the institution that he was most, that he was very proud of for its ability to manage demagoguery, the Electoral College, sort of midwifed the- That seemed like such a good idea at the time, right? It did. I can imagine these guys all sitting around in the founding fathers Olympus and somebody's going, who thought the electoral college was a good idea? Well, no, seriously, we just assumed that this is going to mean that we will get honorable, respected people in the office, you know? And that we would control the influence of the mob in the form of the popular vote. And here the popular vote made

a very responsible decision to avoid demagoguery and the electoral college picked for its ability to resist the popular vote, midwifed the demagogue to power. But then the system self-corrects and removes the demagogue despite January 6th, the system of, you know, the oath of office gets sworn and all of a sudden the power is in the hands of a different person. And that person has supervised a process of dispassionate investigation and prosecution, including of the former president, who is trying to make a comeback. And so I actually think that there would be, you know, a lot of interesting introspection on the part of Madison and Hamilton, who are really the two key founders for this purpose, on what's worked and

what hasn't. And then there's George Mason off in the corner going, you know, I warned you guys about the pardon power. This is not a good idea. Okay, you should have listened to me. So Alexander man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. He thought that the electors, the electors, would be a bulwark against men who had talent for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity. It is not too strong to say, he wrote, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the presidency filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue. Okay, wrong, wrong. Right. On the other hand, let me read you what Hamilton wrote about Donald Trump. Dueling Federalist Papers here. Yeah, well, so this one's from a bit later than the Federalist Papers.

Okay, okay. When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits, despotic in his ordinary demeanor, known to have scoffed at the principles of liberty, when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, to join in the cry of danger to liberty, to take every opportunity of embarrassing the general government and bringing it under suspicion, to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day.

It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion, that he might then ride the storm and direct the whirlwind. Pretty much on the nose. So what year did you write that? Yeah, I believe that's 1794. Okay, so who is it? It seems very specific. Was he talking about Aaron Burr? He seemed to have somebody in mind there. So I think there was a bit of Burr in his mind there. But of course, it's been a while since I've looked at it. I believe it was a letter on the debt repayment issues. He got a huge amount right, and he got

some big things wrong. That's predictive. I mean, honestly, the founding fathers understood what the great danger was and the kind of person that would come along, and they thought they were protecting us against that kind of person. And that's the extraordinary thing about Donald Trump. It's like he's raising his hand and saying, you know, what, what you called? You're talking about me, right? So here's another thing you can say Hamilton got wrong, right? So the great power that the U.S. federal government is wielding that is actually, you know, arguably managing the Trump threat is the power of criminal prosecution, which Hamilton doesn't imagine a justice department. He imagines an executive branch that is really unitary in the

famous Federalist 70 argument for the unitary executive. And of course, what Biden has done is created, it's notionally a unitary executive, but many ways, a very effective thing. And so I want to praise Donald Trump in this palate cleanser and say, the exercise of imagining what the founders are looking down on us thinking is a really good one, a really valuable one. It's just not one that he's actually doing. Yeah. Or one that he could possibly comprehend. Right. Yes. So as they're looking down, let's go back to the trial. What do we expect from Don Jr.,

Eric, and Ivanka? Eric, when he's testifying tomorrow, has allegedly essentially been running the company for several years. So is it fair to say that his testimony will be somewhat more significant than Don Jr., who's been doing God knows what the last few years? I think that's probably right. First of all, what we can expect from them, and I don't mean this mockingly, I mean it literally, is embarrassment. And the problem that all three of them have is that the company that they have, to one degree or another, in different ways and at different times, been effectively running on behalf of their father is engaged in widespread and systematic fraud of a pretty dramatic variety. And so, you know, you have a very significant personal desire, presumably on behalf of all three of them, to deny their role, minimize their roles, you know, shift responsibility onto others. And I think part of the point of their testimony here is to,

or of forcing them to testify on the part of the attorney general, is to basically get them on the record doing that. And either they will admit things that are substantial for purposes of her case, or they will squirm and deny and obfuscate in a fashion that, remember, this is civil litigation, not criminal litigation, that you can actually make inferences from. And so I think it's a smart move by Letitia James and her team. And there's a reason why Trump squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire.

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Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. Okay, so let's shift to the federal case because we had a lot of movement on the gag order. The federal judge, Chutkan, reinstated the gag order against Trump in the election subversion case. He may already have violated it. What a surprise that is. Okay, the background of this is Tanya Chutkan, Sunday night, lifted the temporary hold she placed on the gag order. Trump had complained the order was confusing, violated his free speech rights.

She paused it while briefs were being filed on Sunday, though. She flatly rejected the claim the order was unconstitutional and wrote in the ruling that Trump was unlikely to win on appeal. She also noted that one of his recent statements, his attack on his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, would almost certainly have violated the order had it not been on hold. Trump was referring to that ABC report that Meadows was granted immunity to testify. Trump said such cooperation was for cowards and weaklings and any unfavorable testimony would be a lie. So Judge Shutkin specifically prohibited the targeting of witnesses around 1 a.m. on Tuesday. Trump writes on Truth Social, all in caps because they're all in caps. Remember, crooked Joe Biden and his radical left thugs waited three years to bring these indictments

and lawsuits against me right in the middle of the campaign. So where are we at now on this? What violates the gag order? What doesn't violate the gag order? And how careful is Trump being to walk the line? Walk the line is the right phrase. He's going to put his toes on the line and lean over it and, you know, like a five-year-old and see if he gets pushed or if he trips. The order forbids incendiary statements or targeting court personnel, I believe, other than the judge. She classically left herself out of it. And potential witnesses, which is to say people who were involved in the events, right, who might be called to testify, as well as staff of the special counsel's office and the like. You know, he's allowed to say crooked Joe Biden

is coming after me for political purposes. He's allowed to rail against Washington, D.C. as a filthy city, which, of course, could affect the jury pool. But he's not allowed to say Cassidy Hutchison is a horrible person who is going to lie because Joe Biden's henchman—that's too long a word for him. Joe Biden's goon deranged Jack Smith is, you know, paying her to or, you know, dating her or whatever. Right. She specifically cited the use of the word thug, saying that he cannot mount a smear campaign. And it looks like she's talking about words that would trigger violence by his supporters. So Trump's trying to get around this by not using Jack Smith's name, kind of this half-clever attempt to avoid consequences. So is that going to work? Well, look, I think if you were going to impose a sanction that was serious, like, you know, it's one thing say, that'll cost you five grand, as happened in New York,

or that one will cost you 10 grand. It's another one to do something that seriously compromises his interests in some ways. And I think if you are Judge Chutkin, and frankly, if you're Jack Smith, who would probably bring the matter to her attention. You probably want to wait for Trump to put his foot clearly over the line. So my guess is he has a little bit of running room to play with that line. We don't know what would be quite considered over it as opposed to towing it or flirting with it. If I were Judge Chutkin, I would probably wait for either a combination of actions or a pretty flagrant violation, a la the Meadows one. And how disciplined is he about, will he be about this? I don't know. I don't think he's actually capable of restraining himself. So I think you're going to see a confrontation here. know, in connection with the arrest and prosecution of Donald Trump. So we do have these cases. There

is this mounting fear. And quite frankly, one of the lessons of January 6th is I think that Donald Trump actually is completely willing to use chaos and disruption and at least the threat of violence in order to score political points. So this is not like a one-off. This is part of the, if he thinks he's going down, chaos is his ladder back to what? To power, to be able to appeal to his bench. And I just think that's something we need to understand about him. That's right.

We need to understand it. And we also need to understand that the process of line drawing and of enforcing those lines is a process of managing Donald Trump, because he will test, he will push until something makes him stop. And, you know, the criminal justice process has tools to deal with that. How effectively they can be used in this instance is a complicated question, but they are there. So, okay, this is interesting to me because I have become increasingly

skeptical about the 14th Amendment Section 3 disqualification argument. I'm going to admit that I just think that's kind of hoping for a unicorn to come over the hill here. But in Colorado, this disqualification issue has actually gone to trial. Tuesday was the second day of the trial. Cases brought by a group of voters, four Republicans, two independents, who want to keep Trump offenting violence unrest, said Trump's speech on January 6th was unmistakably a call to violence. Lawyers, obviously, for Trump are arguing. The Democrats used similar language about this. Your colleague, Roger Parloff, is following the case. But how seriously should we take this? You should take it very seriously for a very simple reason, which is that sometime in the next few months, the Supreme Court is going to decide this issue. And here's the reason that's going to happen. And it doesn't take any prognostication skills. I'm not Nostradamus or anything.

But it's going to go to the Supreme Court, and it's going to go to the Supreme Court in a very dramatic fashion. And the reason is, this is an open question of con law. It's one of the rare open questions where you're actually interpreting the text of the Constitution without much intervening case law. And there are legitimate questions as to whether it requires that Trump be stricken from the ballot. But it is not a trivial argument that it requires that Trump be stricken from the ballot. hey, Supreme Court or highest court or secretary of state is going to decide that the body of opinion that says, hey, Trump can't appear on the ballot is right. And the moment one court does that, and it may be this court in Colorado, it may be in Minnesota, the moment the court does that,

the Supreme Court absolutely has to get involved. Has to. Because you can't have this resolved on the basis of some states he's allowed to appear on the ballot, some states he's not. So, you know, this case in Colorado is one of the ones where the lawyers who are pushing this theory think they have the best chance of prevailing. But there's a similar case in Minnesota. My colleague, Alan Rosenstein, who's a professor at the University of Minnesota, had a full-day conference on Section 3 litigation the other day, the video of which is all on Lawfare and the Lawfare podcast, ran some discussions from it. And one way or another, in some state,

they're going to rule for the majority opinion in academia. The serious academics who've looked at it, including some serious conservative scholars, Mike Paulson and Will Bode, you know, the body of academic authority is on the side of that this is self-executing and that Trump engaged in insurrection. And so some court is going to do it. And then you're going to add to the Trump trials, a major Supreme Court showdown over the next few months on the question of what this provision means. And that's, you know, the whole ballgame in terms of Trump's of, so look, I'm not saying- Okay, this is why I'm skeptical, because I don't, I just don't think this court is going to do this. Let me play devil's advocate with you for a moment on-

By the way, I don't think the Supreme Court will actually strike him. But I do think if you think there's a 20% chance that the Supreme Court will strike him, or a 10% chance, that's a huge wild card in an election year. Well, here's the other wild card, though. And again, this is a political question, not a legal or constitutional question. Trump will push back and say, this is anti-democratic. They are trying to throw me off the ballot. They're trying to take away your right to even vote for me. And by the way, that is not a trivial argument that he's going to be making. They're basically saying we do not trust the electoral system in the country to deal with Donald Trump. And so I'll turn that around and say there's probably an 80% or a 90% chance

that the Supreme Court will hand Donald Trump a huge legal win. And then he will politically try to leverage this and saying, these people claim they're fighting for democracy. They tried to destroy democracy by kicking me off the ballot. So I agree with that. I'm just afraid this is going to backfire. That's what I'm getting at here. I don't disagree with that, that the politics of this are not happy. There's no way to avoid it in the sense that, you know, the Constitution doesn't say a lot about who's eligible to be president. It says, you know, you have to be 35, you have to be a natural born citizen, and you have to have lived in the country for a certain amount of time. And by the way, you can't have engaged in an insurrection against the, like, and, you know, whatever. And by the way, yeah.

By the way. And there's that. And they had to add that. It actually doesn't specifically refer to the president. So one of the questions is, does the disqualification clause cover the presidency? That's an interesting question. But there's no way to avoid the question, once Donald Trump presided over January 6th, whether this provision bans people who engaged in insurrection from holding offices of

honor and trust, whether it does or doesn't apply to him. Now, how much does it change this case, whether or not he is convicted of the sedition case, the election overthrow case in Judge Shutkin's court? Because I can certainly see a much stronger case for invoking this if he's convicted. I guess in the absence of any court ruling that he engaged in insurrection, it seems highly problematic. Does this change everything? Okay, let's imagine that they don't take this up until after a jury has come back. He has been convicted in federal court in DC. Does that change the legal standing arguments of this case significantly? Yes and no. I think for exactly the reasons that you described, it changes their optical presentation. On the other hand, what's being litigated in Colorado is a factual question,

which is, did he engage in insurrection? Among other things, there are some other issues. And so there would be a judicial finding. It would be the judicial finding roughly equivalent to Charlie Sykes, you're running for president, but I have here your birth certificate and you're 34. You don't need to be convicted of being 34, right? You just need to be not qualified to be president. And so I think the question of whether you would need to resolve that as a criminal matter is one of the arguments that, you know, I have not been convicted of engaging in insurrection. But the counter argument is the language doesn't say anybody who was convicted of insurrection. The language says anybody who engaged in it, who took part in it. And so that's just a factual question. Well, courts resolve factual questions all the time.

Look, I would say there is a small chance that this is actually the nuclear bomb. There is a hundred percent chance that this is a big deal in the election year at the Supreme Court level or near a hundred percent. And so my argument is not that we should pay attention to this because this is going to save us. My argument is we should pay attention to it because it's going to be a big deal in some direction or other. And I don't resist your point that the direction that it may be a big deal is that it gives Trump a big legal win in the middle of the, I think the technical term is the mishegas. We'll wherever you go, you can get a pro at Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family.

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All right, I want to switch gears completely because I want to get to something else that is going on that you have written about extensively, that I have talked about extensively, which is the ongoing argument not just Ukraine, but about Israel and about Israel versus Hamas, Israel versus the Palestinians. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken testified before Congress yesterday. This is just one moment where he graphically described what happened on October 7th. I just want to play this and then we're going to segue into what you wrote in your newsletter yesterday. Because again, these stories recede so quickly. A family at its breakfast table at one of the kibbutzes. And by the way, the profound irony of attacks on

kibbutzes, the very people who most ardently believe and want a future of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, a future of two states, a family of four, a young boy and girl, six and eight years old, and their parents around the breakfast table. The father has eye-gouged out in front of his kids. The mother's breast cut off. The girl's foot amputated. The boy's fingers cut off before they were executed. And then their executioner sat down and had a meal.

I didn't play that, Ben, for the shock value. I play that because it continues to be amazing the number of people who have been willing to forget about that, gloss over it, and even celebrate what Hamas has done. And again, I want to make the distinction between being sympathetic toward Palestinian rights versus the actual celebration of what happened on October 7th, and the academics that sign letters that say that we shouldn't refer to that as terrorism. There's a disconnect there that I think has been profoundly disturbing to a lot of people who go, okay, we can have an argument about Israeli policy. We can also talk about how deplorable Benjamin Netanyahu's government has been. But how do you look at that

and not see that as a terrorist act and an act of profound evil? Yeah. I mean, so the dynamics of the anti-Semitism of the right and the anti-Semitism of the left are very different from one another. And the classic left anti-Semitism is the imputation of all things evil to Israel, and then the insistence that individual Jews are responsible for the behavior of the Israeli government. And the super quick, reflexive change of subject when the issue is violence against Jews to the evils that the Israeli government has perpetrated, some of them real, some of them imagined. The buts and the howevers that always show up.

Yes, and the evident discomfort with the simple statement that killing Jewish civilians or Israeli civilians, or both or either, is wrong, just uncomplicatedly wrong. And look, I have a friend who told me, this is an unorthodox friend who told me that a relative of hers who's a student at an Ivy League institution has started wearing a baseball cap to cover his kippah because the number of taunts and threats that he gets in the course of a day just from passers-by at an elite university is unmanageable. None of those people involved in those threats and taunts are people who know anything about this person's attitude toward the Middle East. This person isn't Israeli, not that it would be okay if he were. And may not even be a Zionist. Right. I mean, of course, there are wings of Judaism that are non-Zionist as well. And so

it's deeply bigoted. It's deeply ignorant. And for some reason, it is accepted on the left in a way that's persistent over time. Let's talk about this because we have, and I just want to just remind people that we have had dozens of podcasts and articles and written thousands of words about right-wing antisemitism, you know, spent a great deal of time, particularly after Charlottesville talking about this. But what I'm noticing is there's a lot of resistance to talking about left-wing anti-Semitism. There are people who don't believe it exists or who believe that it is minor, that it is simply fringe, that it's not something that we need to deal with. And you wrote this, and again, I strongly recommend your piece.

You have a checklist for people on the left because you say, look, this is a painful question for people on the left because they think of themselves as the good people, right? They believe in diversity, equity, inclusion, including of Jews. And we all know that anti-Semitism is not a thing that good people do, that it's not inclusive. And yet you keep saying things that create what seems to be a stricken look on the faces of Jews of your acquaintance. But then when you ask them whether it was okay to say the thing you just said, they all sound reassuring, but you're not sure. So as a public service, you created an, am I a left anti-Semite checklist? And there are 10 questions. Yes or no. Can we go through this somewhat briefly? Sure. Okay. So question number one, there are points at the end. So if you're playing along at home, go get a piece of paper

and a pen, write this down. Okay. Question number one, have you ever referred to Hamas fighters as our martyrs? If so, give yourself 10 points. I would say that's a 20, but if not, have you ever referred to a Palestinian killed in an Israeli fight against Hamas as our martyr in a context in which a reasonable person might understand you as referring to Hamas fighters as martyrs? If so, give yourself just two points. Okay, so the martyr language is a tell, isn't it? Why? Well, so it can be. So the specific reference here was to the Hamas fighters who have martyred themselves in battle with the Israelis. It could also theoretically refer to the civilians who've been killed. What I would say is, if you are saying the former, that's glorification of a massacre and an Islamist

fundamentalist movement that has openly genocidal aspirations toward Jews in the region. If you are merely being coy and you're talking about Palestinian civilians, but you use the language that gives rise to that question, you're playing with ugly stuff, and you need to be much more careful with your language. Okay. Question number two escalates the ugly stuff. Have you ever expressed the sentiment that Palestine must be free from the river to the sea or any similar slogan that calls for the destruction of any Jewish sovereign presence in Israel proper and that might reasonably be construed as a call to remove or kill Jews from that region from the river to the sea. If so, give yourself 10 points. Deduct two points if you cannot identify the river in the slogan. Deduct another three if you cannot identify the sea in question.

If either or both of these two conditions are met, you might be less of an anti-Semite than an ignorant idiot who has no idea of what they're saying. And I did say this to Mona Cherin yesterday, from the river to the sea is pretty clearly genocidal, but I do wonder how many of the high school students marching through their high school in San Francisco have any idea what they're actually talking about. Right. Can they visualize the geography in which the Jordan River frames the eastern and the Mediterranean Sea frames the western component of the territory now controlled one way or another by Israel? Look, if you are saying that Palestine needs to be free in that region, you're saying there can be no Israel. And that raises the question of what you propose to do with 7 million, 6 million Jews in that

region. And none of the answers are benign. And Hamas is not subtle about what its ambitions are. This is really important. People need to actually listen to what Hamas says. They are not subtle. They are not ambiguous. When they talk about ending the occupation, they don't mean the occupation of Gaza. They mean they are talking about the destruction of all of Israel. They've made it clear that this is what they're doing. So when you start chanting the Hamas slogan, you need to understand the context of it, don't you think? I would say you need to understand the meaning of it. When the PA says free Palestine, what they mean, they have a map that is the 67 borders of Israel and the additional land is Palestine. That is not antisemitism. It raises a lot of other issues, but certainly not antisemitism.

When you say there should be no Israel, you're talking about, at a minimum, ethnic cleansing, and in likelihood, as Hamas showed when they had the opportunity to murder 1,400 people and they just did it. That is a genocidal, eliminationist kind of anti-Semitism. And by the way, you know, the Germans had a word for that. The words in German were Judenrein, which means free of Jews. And so what's really the difference between saying from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free, i.e. not Israel and without Jews, and saying the area should be Judenrein. I mean, comparing people to Nazis, when you're talking about eliminationist antisemitism, the Germans had a pretty developed vocabulary for it. Interesting question, what is the real difference

between from the river to the sea rhetoric and rhetoric of Judenrein? Okay, so question number three. Do you find yourself radically more engaged by the plight of Palestinians displaced, injured, or killed in Gaza in response to a massacre of Israeli citizens than by the millions of Syrians who were displaced, wounded, or killed in the murderous war by the Syrian government against its own people, by the millions of Ukrainians who've been killed or made refugees by Russia, or by the brutality of the Taliban. If so, give yourself 10 points. This again goes to the question of selective outrage, the people who are passionate that we must stand up for these victims. Where were you with the Syrians? Where were you with the Ukrainians? Where were you

when the Taliban was doing it? This is the core of the issue from my point of view, the left issue, which is selective outrage that is artificially magnified by Israeli actions, some of them inappropriate, some of them I'm not fans of, but that take place in a genuinely defensive context versus truly outrageous war crimes at a very vast scale perpetrated in offensive contexts, sometimes very nearby. I mean, I've stood over at the Syrian border watching the war in Syria. You can do that in northern Israel. And there are five million or something refugees from that war. There are hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. And I don't know of anybody on campuses who cares very much. Why is it that in response to a genuinely novel massacre of civilians, we gin up this ferocious anxiety about Israeli defensive actions. Again, some of them are worth criticizing. I'm not making a

uniform case for the Israeli behavior, as people who've read my work know. If you're protesting that, and you're not protesting Ukraine, and I spend a huge amount of time protesting Ukraine, there are more refugees in Ukraine, there are 20,000 stolen children in Russia who've been literally stolen from Ukraine, and the city of Mariupol has been flattened. What is the excuse for being outraged in the streets and harassing individual Jews about these defensive actions, some of them very aggressive and some of them I will not vouch for, when you have lifted not a finger over 10 years of the Syrian civil war. Just explain that to me in some language other than, well, because I care a lot more when Israel does it than I do when somebody else does it.

All right. The next two don't require a great deal of explanation, I don't think. Question number four, do you have an urge to shout at or harass Orthodox Jews or others who are visibly Jewish or to protest at Jewish or kosher institutions because of your objections to Israeli policy? Give yourself 10 points if you have this urge. Give yourself 50 points if you've ever acted on it. Self-explanatory. Question number five. More generally, then this is more problematic, I think. Do you believe the rise in anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses and elsewhere around the country is understandable under the circumstances? Give yourself five to 15 points depending on how

understandable you think it is. And that's the stuff that I see a lot of, the intellectualizing it. Well, yes, this is happening and I deplore it, but if you understand how deeply these people care, how terrible Israel has been, if you make those rationalizations, that's a five to 15 point score. All right. So I thought of the five as it's terrible. I'm not going to say a word in defense of it. It's not surprising given the atmosphere. Right. That's the five point version.

Right, right, right. The 15 point version is the people who really can't understand that Jews are not a single consolidated entity ruled by the elders of Zion somewhere, and that one wing of them is killing Palestinians in Gaza, and another wing is here on campus. And so, you know, it's actually understandable and reasonable that if you don't like what the Jews are doing in Gaza, some of the Jews are over here too, and we can throw things at them. Look, the central anti-Semitic myth that binds a lot of left anti-Semitism to right anti-Semitism is this idea of Jews as a powerful international cabal. There's this sort of unitary international operation, right? This gives people a sense of license to retaliate against Jews here for things that Jews do elsewhere. And by the way, if you

just change the word Jew to black, and you just change the word Israel to Uganda, and you say Idi Amin, he was not called Africa's little Hitler for nothing. He killed an enormous number of people. The idea that somebody would retaliate against an American black institution that has nothing to do with Uganda, that's actually the appropriate analogy. And nobody would say if that happened, well, it's understandable under the circumstances. Like you wouldn't say that. You would say that's an outrageous bit of racial violence. Same thing with question number six, and we're going to go through these quickly now. When 1,400 Israeli civilians were massacred, did you have a strong urge to add a but to any statement of condemnation you may have issued on social media or elsewhere?

I would add in however. Yeah. Give yourself three points. If you had the instinct, give yourself five points if you, in fact, qualified whatever public statement you made. But there's a lot of that. There's a lot of, yes, this was bad, but however. But you have to understand that. Yes, you have to understand.

The question number seven, have you ever secretly wondered whether there was such a thing as an Israeli civilian? If so, give yourself 10 points because that's some dark shit. Give yourself an extra 10 points if you've had this thought about Israelis, but never had a similar thought about the nationals of any other country. And of course, this is the argument that there are no civilians, that any attack on any old lady, children is a military operation, that there are no innocent civilians. Number eight, was any part of you secretly relieved by the speed and ferocity of the

Israeli response to the October 7th massacre, because it allowed you to stop talking about the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and instead talk about Israeli policies and actions you can condemn. If so, give yourself five points, give yourself an extra five. If you never seriously contemplated what realistic alternative options Israel might have to protect its people other than the course, it is taking another five points if the first statement you made or protest you attended took place in response to Israeli action rather than Hamas's action. Question number nine, when you heard that a riot broke out at an airport in Dagestan in Russia the other day in which the rioters looked to attack passengers

on a flight from Tel Aviv, did you instinctively want more context or to understand the rioters look to attack passengers on a flight from Tel Aviv. Did you instinctively want more context or to understand the rioters' point of view? If so, give yourself five points. I would make that a 50, but it can be different. Well, but again, what you instinctively want and what you do, I'm trying to make, I think a lot of people have dark thoughts sometimes. I'm not going to penalize them too much for that. And number 10 is, do you attribute the Biden administration's support for Israel principally as evidence of Jewish political power in the United States? Give yourself five points for a soft yes, 10 points for a more emphatic yes. And boy, by the way, we see how often that comes through that it's Jewish money. So again, you can do this

online, zero to 10 points, not an anti-Semite, Ben Wittes absolves you of sin. So if you scored five, you're, you know, you're okay. Do some reading, but you're okay. 11 to 30 points, you have been infected with left anti-Semitism, but it's nothing a little reading on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of the left world cure. 31 to 50 points. You are dabbling in some serious anti-Semitic ideation. You clearly do not mind violence against Jews very much. 51 to 75 points. You've got a serious problem. 76 and above. You're a member of the raging bigot club. And by the way, I got 11th question should be just sort of separate. If you find yourself tearing down posters of little children who have been kidnapped, there's no question you're in the raging bigot club, right?

I think that's an automatic 75. I think that's right. I do want to say, by the way, and I said it in the piece, this piece actually represents the official position of the entire Jewish community. I speak for it. I'm a representative of the whole thing. So this is actually an official test of left antisemitism. And for those who say, why are you testing for left antisemitism right now and not right antisemitism now?

Let me just say, the test for right antisemitism is quite different. It involves words like race, and it involves conspiracies about bankers and George Soros and other things. It sounds completely different from this, but what it has in common is it's all the Jews' fault. And if people really want a right anti-Semitism checklist, I'm happy to make one, but it's a lot less subtle. It's stuff like, do you believe that the Jews are an inferior race? Do you believe Hitler had the right idea? Do you believe George Soros runs everything? It's a much less interesting checklist because the far right is less ideologically subtle and interesting than the far left. So I'm glad you clarified that this, in fact, had, that this checklist is, in fact, has been officially approved by the elders of Zion. Well, I'm one of them, increasingly elder. Because now we have a confluence of both right and left when it comes to this, that this is the work of the elders of Zion. Ben Wittes, thank you so much for the discussion of the Trump trials and for this, which, again, I have a link in my morning shots.

You should subscribe to Ben's newsletter, Dog Shirt Daily. The whole thing is there. Read it. Take the test. Share it with your college age children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, whatever. They could probably use it. Hey, Charlie, we will be back next week and we're going to do this all over again. All over again.

Thank you for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. I'll be back tomorrow, and I'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.