The Bulwark Podcast - Josh Kraushaar: The Pro-Hamas Left

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

The vast majority of Democrats support Israel, but a very loud, younger segment on the left is lending its support to the terrorist group Hamas—with marches on university campuses, extremist slogans, and outright hatred toward Jews. Josh Kraushaar joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod.

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Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. It's October 27, 2023. I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. Welcoming back one of our longtime friends and guest, Josh Kroschauer, who has a new job, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Insider. Also the author of Axios' Sunday Sneak Peek, which I always read every Sunday.

So, Josh, welcome back on the podcast. Charlie, it's great to be back with you. I have to give people a trigger warning. This is going to be one of the most disturbing podcasts that we have done in a very, very long time because I want to lean directly into, I think, the moral depravity of the pro-Hamas left, which my caveat, I am not confusing sympathy for Palestinians with being pro-Hamas. Those are two distinct things. I'm also not suggesting that all leftists and all progressives are embracing the kinds of things that we are talking about. But as I've learned, that caveat doesn't work with a lot of people because there's kind of a culture out there

that the sense that you're engaging in both sides ism or what about ism if you criticize anybody on the left but this is a huge problem and josh look you and i have been doing this long enough i am haunted by i think the worst mistake that people on the right made which was to not confront the crackpots of the extremists the people who are out on the fever swamp, because we never imagined that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz would be significant, that the bizarre YouTube freaks like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon, and yes, I am lumping them in, would in fact ever rise to a position of real influence. And then you wake up one day and you realize that

the Republican Party is not Mitt Romney. It's not Liz Cheney. You know, it is Donald Trump. It is these freaks that we all told ourselves were kind of the crazy uncle in the corner. And I guess I'm sensing on the left, and I can just feel the comment section exploding here, this sort of the sense that, okay, so there are some really extreme folks out there who are rationalizing Hamas, who are anti-Israel, but you know what? They don't represent most Democrats. They represent a very, very small minority. And it's true, Joe Biden has been solid on Israel. The vast majority of elected Democrats have been very solid on this issue. But I want to bounce this off you. How significant and how should we react to the fact that there is a large segment, not just on college campuses,

but obviously focused there, of people who have decided that three weeks after the atrocities of October 7th, that they are going to rationalize what Hamas did, minimize it. To that question, Charlie, I mean, first of all, it's shocking. I feel like we can't hit more rock bottom, but you always see a new development in either part, either extreme of either party that makes you just, your jaw drop. How is this degree of depravity, this degree of extremism celebrating the worst massacre of Jews in any given time since the Holocaust, a pogrom.

And you have days later, college campuses erupting in celebration. And this isn't just a few fringe people. You know, when you had in 2019, the awful spectacle at UVA of neo-Nazis marching on UVA's campus saying Jews will not replace us, that was bad enough. And Trump's reaction to that was bad enough. But that was one campus in one moment with a bunch of fringe figures.

What we saw, Charlie, this week, really the last couple weeks, is is on dozens, if not hundreds of college campuses across the country, student groups on the left, on the far left, marching and celebrating the massacre of Jews and putting out exterminationist slogans and cheering. I never thought I'd see that. What's an exterminationist slogan? Let's be precise here. So, I mean, free Palestine is- Yeah, I mean, from the river to the sea. That is wiping out the Jewish state completely. Yeah, and I never thought I would see... Yes, there's always crazies.

There are extremes. We've talked about campus culture, Charlie, on the show quite some time. But the degree to which both you would have the number of students celebrating and ripping down posters of hostages being held in Gaza by Hamas and these same protesters ripping them and tearing them apart and saying all kinds of insane things. I never thought I would, that would be like a hundred UVAs, right, in one day. And again, we're not saying that you have to support everything that the government of Israel is doing or not be critical of Israel, but what is happening now, I think, is at a different level.

You know, for example, you know, when you have students at George Washington University project onto the side of the library, glory to our martyrs and free Palestine from the river to the sea. These are Hamas slogans. But this is what really gets me, Josh. The one thing, I want to focus on one thing. We have had hundreds of Israeli civilians who were kidnapped or held hostage by Hamas, including children, little kids who've been taken away from their parents. And there has been this campaign around the world to call attention to the fate of the children. And so what they have done is they have put up posters. And again, these are not political posters. This is an

information campaign called Let the World Know. And there's no Israeli flag on the posters. There's no mention of politics. They're kind of like, you know, missing children, the kind of thing that used to appear on milk cartons. And I want to read this article from the Free Pass. And still, people all over the world, especially young, cool-looking people with nose rings and neon backpacks, are ripping them down. Across the internet, videos have emerged of people angrily tearing down those posters wherever they find them, in New York City, in Los Angeles, in San Diego, in Santa Cruz, in Richmond, in Miami, in Philadelphia, in Ontario, in Paris, in London. They're ripping the faces of real people who are missing, babies, children, teenagers, women,

elderly. They're ripping them to shreds. I have a real hard time getting my head around that. What would motivate someone to think that this is the way I'm going to express my political views. I'm going to go and I'm going to tear down these missing person signs. Just talk to me about this a bit, Josh, because to me, this is really embodies the moral depravity of the moment. This is Charlie, the equivalent of Holocaust denial. Some of the people who, when they've been interviewed or asked what, why are they tearing down the posters of hostages? They said, no, Hamas didn't kill 1,400 Jews. They didn't butcher 1,400 Jews. We talk about information bubbles. I mean, the degree of epistemological closure, they can't accept reality. And you're seeing this not just among a couple of random

people, but this is widespread among a lot of folks on college campuses. And we talk a lot about sort of, you know, the right wing and QAnon and some of the extreme factions on the far right. That's been a running theme in our politics for quite some time. We're now seeing sort of an emerging degree of extremism on the far left. And Charlie, this is really important. It's not among most of the Democratic Party, but it's concentrated among 18 to 25, 18 to 29-year-olds. There was a poll, Mark Penn, Clinton's former pollster, did a poll that got a lot of attention. It's consistent with other public surveys that have been done in recent weeks that 95% of people over the age of 60, 80% of people over the age of 35, they view Israel very favorably. They

condemn Hamas. Hamas is as popular as Vladimir Putin among most Democrats. That's the good news. But among 18 to 24-year-olds, college campuses, it's basically 50-50. There's just this dramatic change at the very youngest end of the progressive and left-wing spectrum, the youngest voters. I think we kind of shared anecdotes. We're like, yeah, boy these these kids are crazy like some of the stuff some of the things going on on college campuses on the activism there's real data showing but now we have hard data it's not just that one poll there are other polls that back that up that this one fringe this one you know faction young young the youngest

left-wing voters have a better view of hamas than they do of the the jewish state and that is something that has been a real wake-up you've seen Jewish Democrats, especially liberals. These are not like conservatives, these are liberal, progressive Jewish Democrats. We're wondering what the heck has happened to the movement. What has been going on on our college campuses? And we've seen so many examples, Charlie, of this at the leadership level, where it's not just the students, Charlie, but you have university presidents, university administrators that don't have a negative thing to say about Hamas. They can't muster the strength to speak with moral clarity about what happened in Israel on October 7th. And that's been a real wake-up call. I think a lot of folks on the center and on the right knew this was going on, and maybe they didn't realize the

scope of it, but it's been a real wake-up call to progressives that are pro-Israel that have seen just the rot that has been taking place at these left-wing institutions. I want to dive into this a little bit deeper, but I mean, obviously, the political implications ought to be obvious, and they are immediate. I know that you've tweeted about this, or whatever tweet is called these days. There's a new poll showing a really dramatic drop in support for Joe Biden among Democrats, I think 11 point drop. We don't have all of the crosstabs, but is your suspicion that that may reflect his strong position on Israel, that it is young people who disapprove of his full-throated support of Israel and his condemnation of Hamas terrorism?

Yeah, I mean, that's a Gallup poll that does show a notable drop off in the last couple of weeks among favorability of Biden among Democrats. So it was in the 80s, which is a good position for anyone to be in. And it went down to the 70s in this last week. I would love to see a test of Biden. They didn't test Biden versus Trump. And I think when you think about the broader politics, Charlie, Biden has shown stalwart support for Israel. I mean, I think that's in the long haul probably going to help him a lot more than showing weakness and equivocation when it comes to terrorism. base of young far left voters that are threatening to stay home or voting for cornell west or even voting for trump in some instances i don't see that happening but it's a threat that they're making right now but but i do think that if biden didn't speak out if he didn't show stalwart support for israel he would lose support among a lot of pro-israel democrats so that number would would also go down and he'd also lose support among moderates and swing voters, because overall support for Israel is as rock solid as it's ever been in the aftermath of October 7th.

So the challenge for Biden is to kind of, you know, he's dealing with, you know, a divided party. But it's important to note that it's a fringe of the party. It's like it's like when Republicans have to satisfy the MAGA wing. I will say that this is a smaller wing, at least right now, of the Democratic Party. And so far, Joe Biden has not allowed that fringe to hold the Democratic Party hostage in the way that the right-wing fringe has been holding the Republican Party hostage. So that right now is a very, very important distinction, isn't it? Correct. And you've had some of the most outspoken defenders of Israel, some of the clarion calls of moral leadership,

Richie Torres, Democrat from New York, Jackie Rosen up for re-election, Democrat from... Some of the most outspoken defenders of Israel are Democrats, and they're the ones, including President Biden and a lot of the leadership in the administration, have been stalwart and shown strong solidarity with Israel. But they're getting pressured, they're getting pressured from that far left. Richie Torres is a very young Democratic congressman from the Bronx, quite progressive, and has been as outspoken in criticizing, say, you know, the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, as anyone that I've seen out there. I mean, really calling them out for their extremism.

Now, look, critics are going to say, when we talk about the people tearing down the posters and these various other things, they're going to say that we're not picking, that we are taking a few random extremists and we are elevating them, that we're doing. Somebody said this is the foxification of the bulwark that we're even talking about this. But the fact is that there is data, that there's a real problem. I mean, your publication, Jewish Insider, wrote, in the two weeks since Hamas's massacre, Jewish students at American universities have expressed frustration and sadness at official university statements viewed as weak, in addition to being fearful of pro-Palestine student groups and faculty, some of whom have outright celebrated Hamas's attacks. And we have had these incidents. We had the incident at Cooper Union, where Jewish students were chased into the library, you know, where people were pounding on the door. Students

at NYU chanting, we want it all. We don't want no Jew state. We have John Podoretz writing about this today, that authorities are telling Jews in New York, in New York, that maybe they ought to kind of shelter in place, that there are these pro-Palestinian marches and it might not be safe. So there is this sense of fear And I'm trying to remember the last time there was this much overt anxiety and evidence of danger to American Jews. Yeah, Charlie, I've never seen this degree of open, naked anti-Semitism out in the open to the extent that we've seen in the last few weeks. And keep in mind, this happened after, after the worst atrocity against Jews in any time since the Holocaust. And look, I'm a fan of data, as you know. Like, anecdotes are fine, but let's look at the numbers.

The Anti-Defamation League tracks anti-Semitic incidents across the country. They keep a pretty thorough database. post-October 7th to October 27th to this year, post-October 7th, anti-Semitic incidents jumped 388% in that same period. So it's a year-by-year comparison. It's a huge, that's not just a spike, it's a surge. It's a staggering number. And we've seen the videos, we've seen the pro-Hamas marches on campuses from Harvard to UVA. So we can see it with our own eyes, but the data, which the Anti-Defamation League tracks pretty assiduously, backs it up as well. This data is important because, again, the blowback that I get is, well, it's just a few people here and there. You're blowing it out of proportion. Well, this 388% increase in

anti-Semitic incidents has occurred just since October 7th. A map of the incident shows clusters in various states in California and San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles featured high levels of anti-Israel rallies, some with support for terrorism. Numerous protests also took place around Detroit near the district represented by Representative Rashida Tlaib. I want to talk about her in just a moment. Also, you have, you know, incidents of overt advocacy for Hamas and outright hatred toward Jews in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. This is, again, Annie Deft-Machely. On October 8th, in Clifton, New Jersey, a car with individuals holding Palestinian flags appeared to intentionally swerve out of its lane, nearly hitting a visibly Jewish family. The next day, on October 9th, in Detroit, a Jewish student was

harassed, called a fucking Zionist, while painting a free speech rock with an Israeli flag on the campus of Wayne State University. On October 10th, in Los Angeles, an individual shouted, I am Hamas, and made death threats to Jewish individuals standing by a kosher restaurant. On October 12th, in Indianapolis, a man carrying an Israeli flag was assaulted by a pro-Palestinian protester. This goes just on and on. October 15th in New York, an individual allegedly punched a Jewish woman in the face at Grand Central Terminal when she was asked why he responded, because you are Jewish, on and on and on. Okay, so Josh, just step back from the politics of the moment. Why is this happening? Why is there this huge generation gap? As you pointed out, among older progressives and

Democrats, overwhelming support for Israel. When you get to this younger demographic, the hope, the future of the Democratic Party, much, much more divided. What has been going on that has caused this kind of a dramatic rift fall off of support for Israel to the point where we have a minority, but a sizable, significant minority willing to actually rationalize some of the worst atrocities in our lifetimes? Well, we could spend the whole podcast going into the origins of this anti-Semitism, but I'll bring up two big points. Number one, the universities have become rotten in many ways, where you have the standards have gone down, the kind of activism and far left propaganda being taught to students. There's been a lot of documentation of this, been more on the center, center right side of the aisle but it's been we

you know this is an ongoing theme and i think a lot of people are like well colleges are always like that and we kind of took it with a grain of salt and now you see the product of these professors these are not just students charlie you have you had a professor at cornell you know literally spouting proclamats slogans who was suspended for the time being who was uh being cheered on by his students. And you see, you know, professors all over the country giving leave and excused absences to their students so they can protest Israel and participate in some of the violence of anti-Israel. Okay, but is this really new? Let's go to this point. People will say, look, okay, you know, colleges have always been considered hotbeds of radicalism. They've always been

radical professors. I mean, you go back into the 1950s, and you see the same kinds of complaints. Is this just the same old, same old? I mean, isn't this like the 1960s? Or is there something new? Is there something distinctive happening now? I think there is something new. You know, the fact that you didn't see many university presidents condemn Hamas in the aftermath of, I mean, there's something different. That would not have happened 10 years ago, Charlie. 10 years? There's an ideology you call critical race theory, the wokeness, whatever you want to call it. I don't, I'm not an academic. I don't study these things closely, but people have been writing about it, that there's something different. There's a sickness going on at the university level where a lot of very extreme ideologies have been propagated.

And being anti-Israel is part and parcel of a lot. It's like buying the bundle. You can't be a true progressive in the eyes of a lot of these academics if you're not anti-Israel. So that's one part of it. The other big part, though, I think is important, which is social media. Jonathan Haidt has written about the changes in our politics after 2013 and 2014 when kids started using smartphones and the rise of extremism within the parties during that period of time. That tracks pretty closely with where this public opinion shifts when it comes to public opinion of Israel and even tolerating Hamas. There was a good analysis that was written yesterday looking at TikTok and how TikTok basically promotes all kinds of the most idiotic anti-Israel propaganda

to unsuspecting kids that just scroll on their phones. By the way, Charlie, there's been a lot of data from Pew that show that among 18 to 24 year olds, what's the main source of news? TikTok. It's not the Wall Street Journal. It's not the Bullwork. It's not. It is TikTok.

I'm a dinosaur. I'm 40. I'm kind of a dinosaur these days. But it's hard to imagine that you would actually get your news from a bunch of kids spouting off crazy things on these videos. The data is pretty clear that the youngest Americans, the college students, don't read newspapers. They don't read any real traditional news source. They don't even get their news from a digital news source. They get it from TikTok. They get it from these closed social media sites. Let's stick with this for a moment because for some of our listeners, why did it become part of the bundle that if you are left wing, you have to be anti-Israel?

I mean, that's not completely obvious, right? So what has happened here? I mean, I think there's been an escalation, but what is the left's objection to Israel, longstanding. There's this doctrine that propagates that Israel is a colonialist state and we're here to cleanse the world of colonialism. And there's been a lot of commentary in recent days about the origin of these ideologies, the revolutionary nature, Charlie, of some of these, how someone could actually defend the bloodthirsty murder of children and elderly and civilians, like what happened in southern Israel. Like, it's hard to get your head around it, but there are ideologies that kind of rationalize

these behaviors and they're percolating on college campuses. But I also think, Charlie, when you ask about the bundle, like, we've seen it on the right. We've seen, you know, how is like being against funding for Ukraine have anything to do with anti-wokeness, right? What do they have to do with each other? But in the social media age, when people are just, you know, not thinking, but they're just emoting, right? That is like the incentive to just kind of bundle all these ideas together. And you're part of this tribal group. And that's, we saw that a lot on the right in recent years. And we're certainly seeing it on the left. And dare I say, this is almost even more extreme when you rationalize the butchery of children and everyone. They're kind of in the bundle of people who are oppressed.

So we have to have solidarity among all of the oppressed peoples of the world, including the Palestinians. It does seem to be a leap, though. And I think this is what was really shocking to me and to others. It's a leap to say, okay, I may sympathize with you politically. Gaza is kind of a scandal for a long time. But then to watch what happened on October 7th and find ways to say, yeah, the Israelis had this coming. The lack of visceral, disgust, human reaction to what was done. Because it's hard to imagine more graphic atrocities than what took place here. And so you would think that, okay, people may have an ideology, but still have the capacity to be horrified. And I guess this is why I'm drawing this distinction between being sympathetic to Palestinians and just horrified by Hamas.

I can understand why people would be very disillusioned and very suspicious of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been very divisive among Israelis. So, you know, nobody's giving him a blank check right now. And yet, how do you read these stories of the rape and the murder of women and old people and children, and then decide that the next day you're going to go out and tear down posters with the kids' pictures on them? There's something about the callousness and the depravity that seems almost separable from the ideology. These far- left activists, Charlie, they view themselves as revolutionaries. We've seen this throughout world history, you know, the Jacobins or during the Russian Revolution. I mean, that's the model for a lot of them. And then you've seen, and again,

I'm no scholar of the intellectual history behind some of these ideas, but that's how they just, they think that, you know, you need a revolution and you need to have awful things to happen for a revolution to take place. And surely I also think a lot of these people are ignorant. They're following the mob. I mean, I think how many kids actually know anything about what they're doing? Or understand what they're chanting. You know, they're going through the high school halls going, you know, from the river to the sea. What percentage of those kids have any idea what that means?

Right. Right. The shock is that there's been sort of this alliance of like Islamist groups and far left campus activists. So what does an LGBT group have anything to do with Israel? But there are these alliances among certain communities on campus. I don't think anyone knows at all about what they're talking about. But there's a mob mentality where everyone kind of sees a video on social media and then all of a sudden they gather and it's a festival of rage and hate. prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. Let's go back to where we started, the need of every group to police its own. Give me your take on all of this. It seems that for the moment, the Biden administration has

been very solid, the vast majority of Democrats pushing back very hard. People like Rashida Tlaib seem very isolated in the party right now. How do you evaluate the pushback? I mean, yes, a lot of university presidents failed the moral test here, but at least in the political world, I am sensing a willingness to push back on it. And you, at the moral test here, but at least in the political world, I am sensing a willingness to push back on it. And you, at the Jewish Insider, you've done some reporting on this. So what's your take? How do you tally this up? Publicly, President Biden has been pretty rock solid on showing his support for Israel. In fact, I think a lot of people don't appreciate the differences between the last Democratic

president, Barack Obama, who, you know, engaged in some kind of some degree of normalization and diplomacy towards Iran and had a lot of top staffers that very, were much more hostile to Israel than the current administration. And I don't think you would hear like a President Obama say, Hamas is ISIS, as President Biden has said. Yeah, I think I think the degree of support that the reminder that, you know, Hamas, you know, started this war and Israel's defending itself, as John Kirby said at the White House briefing yesterday, those are important things to say. And the White House has been pretty strong when it comes to showing a moral clarity that you

haven't always seen on the Democratic Party. So look, I think Biden has done a great job in terms of his public messaging. There was a concern in Israel about, well, they call it the bear hug, where President Biden goes to Israel, meets with the families of hostages, shows an incredible amount of solidarity. Biden's approval in Israel has surged in the last few weeks. But there's also privately some urging that Israel should be more restrained in its ground invasion of Gaza, that maybe they shouldn't take out Hamas as aggressively as they want to. Maybe they shouldn't open up another front and try to take out Hezbollah. So there's this concern that privately they're kind of using the capital they've built up to sort of caution the Israelis

and not to go quite as tough against Hamas. You hope they are though, right? I mean, you hope that they are exercising restraint and saying, you know, if in fact you go in and there are massive civilian casualties, that you will squander a lot of goodwill and that you will have handed Hamas the kind of propaganda victory that perhaps they had hoped for. On the Israeli side, too, that there's a war cabinet in Israel. But Netanyahu and Gallant, his defense minister, and one of the opposition leaders who's now a part of this war cabinet, they need to figure it out. There are different views on how to prosecute this war. So I think that's just sort of a sidebar to the public displays of support that this White House has shown Israel. You mentioned Rashida Tlaib. And I think the one similarity I think you're seeing, and we've reported on this at Jewish Insider, between the

early years of Trump, when you asked Republican lawmakers, what do you think of this Trump tweet? What do you think of this crazy thing Trump said? And they claim not to hear it, or they would say, like, I don't believe that, but I don't know. You know, I'm not going to condemn Donald Trump. We heard, aside from a few Jewish Democrats that have been very, very strongly pro-Israel, like Richie Torres and Jared Moskowitz from Florida, a couple others. But the vast majority of House Democrats claim not to... Really? Hakeem Jeffries said he didn't know about Rashida Tlaib's tweet about basically falsely accusing Israel of bombing that hospital in Gaza and keeping it up even after it's been debunked.

We talked to at least, I think, about a half dozen additional House Democrats who condemned what Tlaib had to say, but would not criticize Tlaib herself. So you're seeing that same dynamic where it's like, I don't know the tweet. I haven't seen the tweet. I haven't seen what they're saying, or I don't agree with what they're saying, but I'm not going to criticize the extremists themselves. Okay, so this is actually a pretty good segue to our discussion of what's going on with Congress right now. One of the first things that's going to happen under the new speaker, the fifth string speaker, Mike Johnson, will be censures and votes on expulsion.

They're going to have an expulsion vote, apparently, on George Santos. They're also going to have a censure vote on Rashida Tlaib. What is your sense? I'm guessing that that will pass because the Republicans have the vote. How will Democrats vote on that? The censure of Rashida Tlaib? I don't think it was a smart first move to have Marjorie Taylor Greene be the person who wrote the legislation. I mean, that's just nobody's accused him of being political geniuses here. So, I mean, you're literally looking at the two extremes. I mean, that's where politics are these days, Charlie, that plead versus Marjorie Taylor Greene. Look, the resolution, I think, is generally sensible,

but there's some language about an insurrection. There were a bunch of proclamats, you know, people that gathered in a house office building. It wasn't January 6th, though. It wasn't. There were a lot of awful slogans, but it wasn't an insurrection. That's the language of that resolution. So essentially, Marjorie Taylor Gre green is giving democrats an out to vote against this resolution even though i think you would get if it was a more sensibly worded resolution calling for rashida talib censure i think you would get bipartisan support but everyone misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity that's the state of our politics these days exactly so yeah i i don't think that's gonna get much democratic support just because there's some poison language that was written in that resolution.

If it's a flat or a 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 a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. Let's talk about the other big story of the week. After three weeks without a speaker, we finally have a speaker. In my newsletter this

morning, I'm, with all due respect, you know, the NPR headline is something like, House Republicans end their infighting and elect a Speaker of the House. And I said, sorry, no, the infighting is not over. They still hate one another. The dysfunction is a pre-existing condition. So give me your sense of this ending where you end up with a guy that we all had to Google because nobody had ever heard of Mike Johnson. Guy has a very, shall we say, checkered, colorful record, apparently kind of a nice guy, but Adam Kinzinger describes him as Jim Jordan in drag. How is Mike Johnson going to do? I mean, how much rope is he going to get from the people who have shown a willingness to burn down the house if they don't get their way?

You're right. I had to go to my almanac of American politics to look at the Mike Johnson bio because he's not been a prominent member of the House Republican caucus. He's a very socially conservative Republican dating back to before he got into Congress. He has strong ties to the Christian conservative community in his district and across the country. Even Liz Cheney in her book, or in John Carl's book, actually, said he was a close friend of hers when they first were freshmen in Congress. But when he denied the results and sponsored efforts to overturn the election, that was a breaking point for Liz Cheney. On everything else, he's pretty much in the same space as Jim Jordan. But I will say that a lot of people do change. I mean, there is an evolution when you're in leadership. It's easy to throw

bombs when you're in the backbench or you're not in leadership. And it's going to be an interesting test to see if there's any evolution that takes place, because that was the problem. I mean, look, the best case scenario for Republicans is that he has credibility with the right. Maybe they listen to him more than they did with Kevin McCarthy. And if that's the case, then maybe he has, I mean, it's the Nixon goes to China dynamic. Maybe in a best case scenario, he can keep the right in line and actually forge a more pragmatic path. But I think as you laid out, Charlie, that's not going to be easy. The Republican Party is divided between the MAGA, But I think as you laid out, Charlie, that's not going to be easy. The Republican Party is divided between the MAGA, but I think the majority, it's fair to say,

is now in the MAGA camp, but you still do have a sizable share of rank and file Republicans. And then you have the eight Republicans who defenestrated Kevin McCarthy and are nihilists that really just destroyed the institution for three weeks. So it's not going to be easy for Mike Johnson. I guess the only thing you can say politically is I don't think anyone really knows who he is and may take some effort for Democrats to brand him negatively, even though he does have a pretty MAGA-oriented record. I think unless they're really, really bad, they will be able to brand him. But you look back on what happened and the day before he was elected, I think it was very much in doubt whether any Republican could get 217 votes. Steve Scalise couldn't.

Tom Emmer couldn't. Jim Jordan couldn't. Kevin McCarthy couldn't. And so it was kind of remarkable that he got unanimous support. So a couple of things happened. You had, you know, as I described it, the squishes, you know, did what squishes do. They, you know, one after another, they caved in. It just felt like that one of the underrated factors here was just simple exhaustion.

They just were sick of it. He was the next man up and all the people who like might have appeared to be taking principled stands or might have cared about some issue, the Ken Bucks of the world, the Michael Lawlers. It was like, okay, we're just done with it. It felt like an exhausted caucus that was just done with it. Look, Charlie, it was embarrassing. I mean, the Republican Party looked like the most dysfunctional governing body on the planet after the- And they knew it looked stupid. I mean, they defenestrated their leader. They couldn't find anyone else. Jordan, Scalise, no one was acceptable.

These ugly personal feuds, by the way, which continue to this day, are now out in the open. Which continue. I think it's fair to say there's a bigger, or at least as much of a divide between the MAGA wing of the Republican Party in the Congress and the McConnell wing in the Senate, which has a lot of different views on major policy issues, as there is between McConnell and Democrats, right? And on foreign policy, McConnell was actually echoing Joe Biden and supporting the foreign aid package for Ukraine and for Israel. We'll see what happens in the House, but I know a majority of the Republicans in that body are dead set against anything for

Ukraine. So we talk about different countries have coalition governments, right? Republicans essentially have a coalition party, right? They have two sides of the party that are increasingly at odds with each other on fundamental issues of what it means to be a conservative. And I think that the loyalty to Trump kind of papers over some of those really serious ideological divisions that are only growing. And this is what's so interesting about what Mike Johnson's going to do. It looks like the Gates caucus is going to give him a little bit of flexibility on not shutting down the government, going ahead with the CR for the next couple of weeks. But this is not a honeymoon. This is a reprieve because, again, as you mentioned, the math hasn't changed. The divisions

haven't changed. This is still Donald Trump's party. So I guess the immediate question was, will they shut down the government? Probably not. But what happens with Ukraine and Israel? Because that seems to be the one real breaking point, not just between Democrats and Republicans, but as you point out, between the Senate Republicans and now the magified House majority. What do you think is going to happen? How will this get resolved? Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell want to link Israel and Ukraine. Republicans in the House aren't going to go along with it. What happens? So I think you're right about on the government funding. I think there will be something of a reprieve. The Republicans don't want to go through the chaos of the last three weeks all over again.

You know, it's interesting. Mike Johnson was one of the Republicans who voted against Ukraine aid in the House beforehand. But he did give comments since being elected speaker, signaling maybe a little bit of a degree to compromise or have a larger discussion. So the mood in the caucus is to fund Israel, not Ukraine, or at least to separate the two, not bundle them together. And a lot has happened since McCarthy was ousted as Speaker. And I do wonder if the mood has changed a little bit in terms of trying to help Ukraine. A lot of Republicans in the Senate are linking the fight for freedom and the fight against totalitarianism and tyranny, and that Biden's doing the same. And it may be a tough

sell, but the mood may have shifted a little bit, and maybe Johnson has a little more running room than McCarthy would have on that front. Well, I mean, that's obviously, you know, urgently necessary. And again, we're in this situation where if there was an up or down vote on the floor of the House, I think Ukraine aid would pass overwhelmingly with a bipartisan majority. The question is whether or not he can allow that vote to take place, given all this. This feels like a footnote and maybe even an irrelevant footnote, but it is interesting in the far reaches of MAGA. And I've gotten used to now looking at things that, again, you might've ignored before, kind of the cloud on the horizon,

because we've seen how fast that cloud on the horizon comes here. The number of sort of right wing media influencers who are going after Johnson because of, and they're holding against him, comments that he made back in 2020 that were sympathetic to George Floyd, you know, the black man who was murdered in Minneapolis. And at the time, he had some sympathy for him. He said, yes, it was murdered. And he talked about, you know, the problem being black in America. And it's a very different Mike Johnson than we've seen more recently. Well, you have folks on the right who are now saying, you know, he can't really be MAGA if he in fact believed that Black lives actually mattered and showed sympathy and concern about racism. And so I don't know whether this is going anywhere, but anytime these things

percolate, you at least have to be aware that there are folks in the MAGA world who are already, you know, planning to, you know, cut them off at the knees. Well, look, the lesson from this whole conversation is that crazy ideas that bubble up online can suddenly become mainstream overnight. We've seen that lesson. Exactly. And we're seeing it all over and that, you know, you may joke about it or think it's marginal, but those are the types of ideas that can really metastasize. And one of the reasons, again, to repeat what we said before is this is the real danger of the tribalization, is that when you buy in, you have to buy the bundle and you have to buy all the allies. And some of those allies are going to take you into places you do not want to go. And trust me, I have lived this experience. So it's with a great deal of

history that I am urging people on the left, like, do not downplay what is happening right now, because the future comes at you really hard and fast in ways that you did not necessarily expect. Josh Kraschauer, thank you so much for joining us again. We're going to look forward to your Sunday newsletter from Axios. It comes out every Sunday. When should we get it in our mailbox? Every Sunday afternoon, just sign up at axios.com to sneak peek. And you can sign up at Jewish Insider, jewishinsider.com and get our daily kickoff newsletter every weekday, Monday through Friday. Which I do, Josh, of course, is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Insider. Thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday. We'll do this all over again.

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