The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - How Populism Fails: When Anti-Elite Movements Turn Against the Jews - The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion. Previously a senior writer at Tablet Magazine, he has also written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, and his work has received recognition from the Religion News Association and the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies.

This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy cellar, a podcast focusing on Yiddishkeit, Israel, and the Jewish world. People are going to turn it off. Don't say that. Rephrase. This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy cellar, and we are available wherever you get your podcasts. Available on YouTube, available on demand on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. This is Dan Natterman, here with Noam Dorman, the owner of the World Famous Comedy Cellar, the ever-expanding World Famous Comedy

Cellar, a new location coming, hopefully, this year or early 26 on the corner of West 3rd and 6th Avenue. We have Perry L. Ashenbrand here with us as well, writer, comedian, wife, mother, writer. Did I say that already?

And our guest today, Yair Rosenberg, an American journalist and staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics, culture, and religion and writes the Deep Shtetl newsletter. Formerly a senior writer at Tablet Magazine, a regular speaker and commentator on anti-Semitism in the modern era. Welcome, Yair, to our program. It's good to be here. Yeah, I'm very happy to meet you.

So before we, you know, started recording, turns out you and Perry all know each other from previous lives. Before I was at The Atlantic, I was at Tablet Magazine some years ago, and I used to guest edit their blog on the summer when the editor would take a much-deserving vacation, and she would recall, and it was a very easy edit, and so it was an easy part of my job. Now, I've heard firsthand, and I've also heard people discuss on shows, that a lot of writers that we read all the time hand in terrible

copy have you had this experience so not in this case right which was really helpful i think she wrote on fridays or something was like a friday column and uh it's really helpful on friday just know this is coming in i don't have to think much about it and it will look good um but there are absolutely i mean i think the most famous example was right like stephen glass right the fabulous at the new republic uh-huh um who people thought well how did he fool so many people for so long and one of the theories was he was just such a good vivid writer that people were drawn into it and they were fooled and then after it all came out the his co-workers like no no he was a terrible writer he had all these like great

anecdotes and things that he'd come up with that he claimed were true but he couldn't write at all and they would clean it up and make it sound the way you saw it. So that theory fell out the window. It's a great example of how it's a collaborative effort in journalism. And you see my name on an article. Like today, I wrote the Atlantic's Daily Newsletter. But there were like five people who edited that thing

before you even get to the copy editors. And they make everything sound better. Even if you gave good copy, it'll end up with that 5% better when the team is doing what it's supposed to do. Now, have you started to use like ChatGPT or Claude? I mean, I've spoken to some prominent journalists who already- What's Claude, you said?

Claude's another AI, but he's apparently very good at writing. And I use it. It's a helpful, not that I would publish something that it wrote for me, but I'll say, what do you think of this? How could you improve this? And usually there's something that it changes the word order or a better adjective or something like that. I use it more as like a better Google search

if I'm trying to find something that I know. For example, I know there's a quote about how stupid the vice presidency is for a piece that I was writing about J.D. Vance and how people hate being vice president. Like hallucinates quotes. Exactly. So you can't trust anything.

You can't trust anything it says. So one, it helps to ask something that you know is real, right? But you can't quite pin it down. And then it will tell you. And then you say, and what's your source for that? And then you go and check if it's real. Yeah. Right?

So there's a lot of steps. The other- Grok is less hallucinatory. Grok is less hallucinatory. That's what I found. Although it does. In this example, it totally did. Right?

And like, I have- So I will use it to say like, or I have like three examples in mind for something I want to argue in my piece. And I want to make sure i didn't miss any good other examples juicy other examples that back it up so i'll say here are three things that are examples of x do you have any can you think of any others that fit this set um and then again it will often like give you one that's real and three that are fake right so you have to like actually use your you know use your wits uh but it can be useful in that way uh the other thing i do is sometimes i'm like i'm lurking on an idea for a column i I know what I want it to say.

I even like basically know all the points. And I'll basically feed a bunch of that, including like some really helpful pointers for what I'm going to say to the AI and say, write this in the voice of Yair Rosenberg just to see how soon I will be replaced. And I have yet to get a column anywhere close to the one that I'm going to do.

That's not me to say that it won't get there, but it hasn't happened yet. Dude, ask it to write you. And ask Claude, it's very good, ask it to write you anything in the style of Christopher Hitchens. It is fucking remarkable. Yeah. The insight, the actual insight that these LLMs seem to show, I would not have thought it was possible.

I listened to a Yankees baseball podcast. You know, everyone's imperfect. My imperfect. I listened to a Yankees baseball podcast. Everyone's imperfect. My imperfection is I'm a Yankee fan. And so there's a wonderful Yankee podcast called Talking Yanks. And every episode, they recap the last Yankee series. And the guy plays on words and cultural references and just quickly goes through the game in a funny way. And the guy was out.

So they said, do it in this guy's voice. Do the recap. And then do it in each of the other hoists if they were the ones who did it because no, they wouldn't because they're not capable

and it would show them these ticks that they had that were genuine and they didn't realize they had them until because it had eaten all that stuff. I think the reason

why I find the AI can't do what I'm doing yet is that there's like elements of voice that maybe it can get from reading enough of you but what it can't do is like actually unspool

a really good argument. Yet, if you're writing really high-level arguments. Unfortunately, a lot of arguments that we make on social media elsewhere, they're not very – but if you're really doing a good job, it can't do that yet. In recent times, I'm beginning to differ on that point. I don't want to disclose the details, but I fed it some stuff. I did two things. There was a really softball interview

of I can't say it. Anyway, there was a real softball interview of a prominent figure by somebody that I can tell you off the mic. And I fed it. I said, read these three articles about this figure. Here's a transcript of the interview.

Tell me what was good or bad about the interview, what they should have asked. And this fucking AI, it asked exactly the right questions. And then I had a long conversation with somebody who had also written an article. I said, I fed it a transcript of the conversation. I said, here's our conversation compared to what he wrote and make arguments. And I was stunned at how insightful. That's all I can say. It's an amazing technology and it's in

its infancy. Well, something I found that it's good at that I find satisfying is, you know, the constant thing where you have someone writes an article and there's an argument and there's a bunch of links in it and the links purport to back up what they say and if you know enough, you click the links or you knew what they're talking about and you know they're mischaracterizing links. It's the bane of all journalists. When someone links to you and they don't quote you, almost always a tell.

And so I fed it a piece that I felt like had really mischaracterized a bunch of things and I said check each of these links and tell I fed it a piece that I felt like had really mischaracterized a bunch of things and I said check each of these links and tell me if it accurately represents the contents, if yes, why, and if not, not and I didn't bias it in one way or the other I just said check these for me

and it nailed like 9 out of 10 and it's like this is a useful tool if you can get people to do it they could use it to critically evaluate some of the stuff that they're being fed so yeah, it's constantly improving and as I i said that's why i check because i am curious when will it get to the point i do think that when it gets to the point that i can do some of the things that i do what it actually ends up doing is becoming a collaborator for many writers

where they can say okay here's a bunch of the things that i'm thinking about and the ideas and as you say help me make it better what are some of the counter arguments right or i'm trying to find the right phrase in my voice to do this sort of thing and it will enable people to be more productive without necessarily i don't know exploiting interns right as some you know people have done to like get much more work out there um and so it can like i've seen iis that do music it's a similar thing i you know it's not going to necessarily on the you know first 10 tries give you a great song but if you say compose a riff, it can help you elaborate that,

come up with harmonies, expand, try out different instrumentation styles. I do music, so this is like a hobby. I do too. And so it can be really valuable as a collaborator in a way it can't be as an originator yet. Yeah. But it's pretty friggin' amazing.

Anyway, where are you, before we get into other stuff, where are you on the Rogan-Murray-Smith debate? So I only watch clips because life is short and I was on vacation for Passover. And even then I wrote an article. So I really couldn't tell you like a really informed opinion on it. Or on the subject without the debate. I do get the sense from the things that I've seen that given my opinions on these issues,

that they were kind of set up and they were more polar extremes on this issue. And that's the kind of debate that people like on podcasts, people before that. It's not exclusive to podcasts. I've seen it happen on public radio and many other places. They want sharp contrast and that sort of thing. The people who try to introduce nuance and say that there's blame and harms in different directions and that this is not just like, oh, it's complicated, let's throw up our hands, but rather let's work through it in a difficult way. That sort of thing is much less likely

to make its way into these things. And you can have two people with those sorts of viewpoints who very strongly disagree, but they'd have a much more interesting conversation. So I didn't get drawn in by any of those clips because I looked at it and I said, I could write everyone's next lines, so to speak, because you know exactly what they're going to say.

Where are you on the general issue of the explosion of anti-Semitism on the far right? Not just anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories in general, and the welcoming reception they're getting on the biggest shows in the country. So the problem with being an anti-Semitism reporter is you get to say, I told you so a lot, and it doesn't really mean anything. So you may have seen, like, I wrote a piece in, like, you know, months before the election. It's like being a wife. Months before the election, I wrote a piece called The Anti-Semitic Revolution on the Rising American Right.

And it was a long piece that I've been working on for over a year. I started long before October 7th. This wasn't something October 7th created. And I've been talking on and off the record to a lot of people on the right, in the pro-Trump right, people who are seeing things that they did not like and seeing particularly on the young right and new media right and all these sorts of things, the rise of ways of thinking and talking about Jews that they had thought were sort of bygones, that were just not part of their coalition. And now they were coming back with a vengeance, first behind closed doors and then much more publicly. What specifically? you know, with a vengeance, first behind closed doors and then much more publicly. And so I wrote in the piece, you had people saying to me,

like people whose names you'd recognize saying, it's not that Trump is Hitler and that's a ridiculous comparison, but it's that Trump opens the door through the style of policy he does where he never has any enemies on his own side who praise him, will never criticize his own camp, right? He lets in a tremendous number of people who he doesn't police,

some of whom, right, bring an anti-Semitic way of thinking about Jews and they gain more and more power because they move closer and closer to center of power in a way they could never before Trump. And so then a generation from that, you have Karl Lueger, right, the mayor of Vienna,

who served as an inspiration for Hitler. And then after that, you have, and this was before October 7th, and I would argue social media in October 7th, which put the locus of focus on Jews, right, and Jewish power, and the state of Israel, and made them the constant topic of conversation, supercharged this, and social media, as it usually does,

accelerated this phenomenon. We've jumped through a lot of those hoops a lot faster than these people were warning me in, I don't know, late 2022, right, had expected. And again, these were people on the right telling me this. This was not me talking to, and not to say that left-wing critics were trenchant in seeing some of this

stuff. It's always easier to see it on the other side in a way. But people inside the right knew that this was going on, and they are fighting now more openly because October 7th, much as it created this split on the left and caused people to fight amongst themselves over anti-Semitism Jews and Israel, it did the same thing on the right. It's just that

people have less of a visibility and window into it. But it became really obvious. You see, you know, Chris Ruffo taking a stance over here, like fighting with these people, the Babylon Bee and their people are fighting with Tucker Carlson and they're fighting with Candace Owens, right?

This has come out into the open. And if you know where to look, you see it constantly. And it's only going to get more pitched, I think, as time goes on. Yeah, you know, my take on you, with all due respect, I shouldn't even say with all due respect because that sounds like it makes it worse than it is. I agree with you on a lot of stuff. I always have. But you lose me or I lose you when somehow trying to interpret it in the partisan way.

I don't see Trump that way. I see the right that way. And I give you something that I always think about in terms of the elusiveness of determining causation. You know, Trump was very keen on the vaccine for a long time. And but if Trump and even the accusation that he did, that he took the vaccine secretly at the time, actually that was because the papers were coiled to criticize him for jumping the line. So he kind of took it on the DL. But there were a number of times when he would go out there and talk about the vaccine. He was Operation Warp Speed. Anyway, but if Trump had been anti-vax, and I tried to convince you, and of course the right turned completely anti-vax, right?

And I tried to convince you, no, no, they're not anti-vax because of Trump. They would have been anti-vax anyway. You'd say, no, what are you talking about? Are you telling me that it's just a coincidence that President Trump is anti-vax and all his crazy followers are anti-vax? I would never be able to make that case. But the fact is that he wasn't anti-vax. He was pro-vax. He was so proud of the vaccine.

And he could not corral his followers. And whatever it is that makes them anti-vax, that is a very good indicator of people are going to fall for anti-Semitic ideas as well. And I think there's something about that right wing. Let's talk about those things. So yeah, so I don't think we're actually disagreeing. Yeah.

There's a whole bunch of factors that make people more susceptible to anti-Semitism. They're not necessarily political, although they might be found in particular parts of the right right now, but you find them everywhere. They're pre-political. And like, so just to take an obvious example,

populist politics maps very easily onto anti-Semitism. Yes. Which doesn't make populist politics illegitimate. In fact, today, populist politics maps very easily onto anti-Semitism, which doesn't make populist politics illegitimate. In fact, today, populist politics rose basically starting in 2016 on the left in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign, on the right in the form of Donald Trump, based on trenchant critiques of the failures of American elites, economic tremendous assaults on academia. But this doesn't mean that there aren't reasonable critiques of how the academy has conducted itself, not just on October 7th, but well before. And so you have all these failures of the elites. And then you have these movements that emerge on the left and on the right with varying degrees of justification, saying that the elites failed you. They messed you over. They didn't do the things they said they were going to do.

They betrayed the masses. And now we should rise up against it. That is, again, a well-attested form of politics. And America for a while was sort of didn't have that, and certainly not in the European sense. And then we now did have it. The problem with that kind of politics is that once you say that there's this shadowy cabal of elites who are screwing over the masses, is that it's a hop, skip, and a jump away from centuries of propaganda that says it's the Jews. Well, let's be honest. If there is a shadowy cabal of elites, it will be the Jews. I mean, I don't know.

Right? Like, I really find, I am, I'm a, because this is the thing, right? Like, it's fun to me. I used to do all these kinds of jokes too. But like Jews, have you ever like, like, like in a room like us and then expand the room and add more and more Jews? Can't agree on anything. They can't agree on anything.

They couldn't conspire their way out of a paper bag. I was just at a Passover program, trust me. Full of Jews. Right? agree on anything. They can't agree on anything. They couldn't conspire their way out of a paper bag. I was just at a Passover program, trust me. Full of Jews. That's just not how it works. Was there a comic performing, by the way?

Was there a comic performing? Yeah, Elon Gold. Elon. I was going to say the Modi or Elon Gold. I saw Modi another year. There's a certain group

of people who do the circuit and you can imagine it's not. It's Avi Lieberman if your budget's a little bit low. So, I guess, populist politics, your budget's a little bit low. But, so I guess, so populist politics, which

it's not, in and of itself, anti-Semitic is easily corrupted in that way, much like people would say, you know, the famous line is, socialism, like, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. Anti-Semitism is the failure mode of populism. Right? We have more populism, we get more anti-Semitism, it's a natural thing.

Right? We also changed how we communicate with each other we use this thing called social media instantaneous globalized conversation that has all sorts of bad incentives uh for how we think about the world and talk about it and like again that that what about inevitable inevitability yeah just return to the historical mean of anti-semitism the. The Holocaust is fading away as a memory. It was destined to happen. So let me tell you how I think about it, because I agree, but I think most people think of the Holocaust fading

as all of these Holocaust survivors are dying out. The Jews who are there to tell the story are gone. Exactly. I think a lot of people, I'm not saying this to you, but we hear this all the time, the last survivor is going to pass. I just saw another headline about this,

which is, of course, a tragedy and something that the Jewish community is losing. But it is not the reason why the memory fading is a non-Jewish phenomenon. And it's specifically about, if you look at the history of American attitudes towards Jews, they were not nearly as warm before the Holocaust. Ken Burns did a whole documentary, which is largely about this sort of thing, this forgotten history of American anti-Semitism. But of course, that's why Roosevelt was reticent to enter the war. Roosevelt was reticent to do things to help the Jews of Europe because he

could read a poll. They didn't want the Jewish refugees in here. When they asked them about them, you'd see things like, do you think they're German spies? And many people would say yes. The poll that I think is the most telling is after the Nuremberg laws, I think it was Gallup, polled the Americans and said, do you think the persecution or whatever is happening to the Jews is all their fault, somewhat their fault, not much their fault, or not at all their fault? That's sort of the classic question.

Majority of people said either some or all their fault. Thank God. For their own persecution. Persecution in America or in Europe? In Europe. What was happening to them in Europe, right? So this is what the general sense of it was in the United States. Then you end up, America ends up joining the Warpo Harbor, many other things,

and Americans go abroad, and we have tons of people who fight there, and they see the Nazis and what they did firsthand. They see the camps. They liberate the camps. Eisenhower has it filmed. All these people come back and tell the story. It becomes part of the American identity, the American story, that we're against the Nazis, we saved the Jews, we're against anti-Semitism. That is what it means to be a good American. And also evangelical Christians

also adopted the Jews as a pet. Which is a, but that becomes a separate, you know, a separate thing with the rise of the, you know, religious right. But did after the war,

wait, let him, let him, let him, but I have a question relevant to what he just said. Just to finish the, like one more sentence. And so,

it's really not about Holocaust survivors, it's about the American experience and all those people who had that experience and shared it. And that changed their sense of American identity. And all of them are passing away. And so now, as you say, we're reverting. And we have all these polls now. We're starting to have real data that shows you have an age curve on anti-Semitism.

You ask people, do you have an unfavorable opinion of Jews? David Shore asked this, right, the top Dem pollster. And he found, whether you're a Harris supporter or a Trump supporter, slight differences are basically, he found, whether you're a Harris supporter or a Trump supporter, slight differences, but basically he found an age curve. If you're younger, 25%, 20-25% will say openly, I have an unfavorable opinion of Jews and it just collapses as you get

older and older, which makes sense, again, because of this experience. After the war, when Americans looked back at what they had accomplished by defeating Hitler, did they see it primarily as a victory over fascism or as saving the Jews?

I would imagine, you know, saving the Jews was not prominent in how they grew up. It wasn't when they first went, right? It actually becomes bigger later. Exactly. It becomes part of the story, again, because they liberate the death.

They see these Jews who are emaciated. It leaves a deep, deep impression, right? And that becomes part of the American story. It's certainly not why they went. Right. They went because of Pearl Harbor. They went because they were sort of like, you know, pushed into it. That was never. And that's going to be true for any national interest country. They're very rarely. It's an unusual thing that we have an expectation, I think, that countries will go to war for minority populations that are being beleaguered or hurt or harmed in other places right that's very unusual it's actually quite something that we told the story for like there's this constant critique of roosevelt that he didn't bomb the railway tracks to auschwitz right that he didn't do more to save the jews i think that says something beautiful about america that there's this expectation that america should have done that but who's making that argument the jews i don't know that no no well i think there's much as jews right who have made it and ken burns made this documentary about like you know this know, this part of the past. And again, it's kind of very,

I think it's almost so incredibly idealistic, right? America has never really necessarily been like that. Most countries, no country's really ever been like that. But the idea that you can even ask the question like for a time was really something. I think we're moving away from that moment though. You don't think that looking back, you know, 20 years from now, that October 7th will have had that effect as well? Go on, explain the question further.

That once we see what really happened on October 7th to all of the people at the Nova Festival and to all the children. I mean, if this film just came out, I'm sure you're well aware, the children of October 7th, that opinions about Jews will be similarly sympathetic. I don't think so. I also just think that there's, that's something that happened somewhere else

and Americans weren't witness to it. Yeah, but so is not, I mean, so is the Holocaust something that happened. And there was very little, that's not why they intervened. It's only because they eventually intervened for other reasons and then experienced what the Holocaust did to Jews. But

things happen like October 7th, sadly, in different ways to all over the world, all the time. And we don't, it doesn't change how people fundamentally see the world. I've been telling Periel almost since October 8th of 2023 that all our focus on the atrocities gets us nowhere. Nobody, I used to call it atrocity porn.

Nobody is going to take Israel's side because we say, look what they did to us. They're going to take Israel's side if it's, they're not going to take Israel's side, but they would only take Israel's side if we had used the last year and a half to explain why we're in the right on the conflict itself. And we failed miserably to do that. We said, look, they raped. How could you support the Palestinian people after they raped? And people will say, yeah, they shouldn't have raped you,

but I think Israel's the oppressor in Palestine. So why, that doesn't stop because they raped you. And this kind of failure that, I mean, just like you were speaking before October 7th, I was speaking before October 7th, that we are failing to even educate our own children as to the important bullet points, and there's not many of them, of the Arab-Israeli conflict to equip them with the ability to defend Israel morally and intellectually should the shit ever hit the fan. And that's exactly the phrase I use, should the shit hit the fan. And now the shit has hit the fan, and we're impotent.

I mean, you ask the average U.R. Kipasa, your circles are more informed, but you ask the average secular Jew, they don't even know how the West Bank came into Israel's possession. They don't know Israel was attacked. They don't know nothing. They don't know nothing. And if we don't know it, the non-Jewish world is not going to know it. But Tiana knows it.

Tiana knows it now from sitting here. She's been sitting here. But let me say, you know, the other thing that worried me, and this is what always worried me about the partisan aspect of it, is that the left, and of course I was always very, I'm sure you were too concerned about anti-Semitism on the left, the left became anti-Semitic ideologically and maybe even, I hate to say it, racially.

Dennis Ross actually was the first person I read saying this, that people from non-European countries are already not disposed to be particularly pro-Jewish or pro-Israel to begin with. And then the intersectionality and all that. And I always felt, and I used to say that, the Jews are so comfortable among the Democrats, while the Republicans are the bulwark of Israel sentiment in the country. And I used to say that, God forbid, the level of Israel support in the Republican Party should ever fall to the level of Israel support in the Democratic Party, you're going

to see a total free fall of Israel support in the United States of America. And that's what I'm worried about now, that we might see that now. Because as you say, it's really about age. It used to be on the Republican side, on the Democrat side, it's all age. On the Republican side, it used to be ideology. Republican ideology used to favor freedom, the West. It used to be kind of anti-Islam, which benefited support for Israel. But all those old ideological principles are fading away in the new Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance era of the right. I don't think it's Trump. I think Trump is on our side on all these issues.

And it scares the shit out of me. And I don't know if there's anything we can do about it. Although I thought this Joe Rogan thing at least was at least somebody shouting alarms saying, listen, you're normalizing Candace Owens out there talking about Christian babies disappearing on Passover. And Tucker Carlson is saying she's fantastic, and Tucker Carlson sits one seat away from the president at the RNC, and we know he has J.D. Vance's ear, and President Trump is only 78 years old, and he could die tomorrow, and then you have President Vance and Tucker Carlson right by his side. Where does that leave us? It's a scary picture, right? I mean, I also would just-

I know I'm rambling, but it's all related. No, no, no. You're telling a very coherent story about sort of the trends in American support for Jews and for Israel, which have shifted, right? We talked about anti-Semitism being generational, right? And then anti-Israel sentiment tends to be much more so, at least what people will tell

pollsters, than whatever you see as anti-Jewish. So you have 25% of people saying they're anti-Semitic and happy to say that out loud, which is a real tell because there's always the people who won't say that, right? There's always going to be more people, right, sometimes with justification, who will say I'm anti-Israel, which is a different kind of conversation.

But it will also include all of the anti-Semites. And then suddenly you get to a critical mass, and then you have political leaders who have to ask themselves questions. Will I accept the support of anti-Semites if it's useful to me politically? Because I am critical of Israel, and I know that some of these people, I'm Jeremy Corbyn, right? And I know either I'm a real fool, or I know that a bunch of these people are actually quite anti-Semitic, and they got here for the wrong reasons. They

came to our party for criticizing Israel because they really don't like Jews, and this seemed like a good place to do it. Now you can decide you're going to card them at the door and not let them in, right? Or you can decide, well, it's democracy and we need everyone we can get, and we're not going to ask too many questions. And this happens, unfortunately, all the time in politics, not just to Jews, but to other minorities and to other groups. But the thing is, is that Jews aren't a lot of us, and they aren't going to be able to decide those things. Those are choices that non-Jews get to make, right? And they make it about themselves and what kind of societies and countries they want to be. And that's sort of the answer I have for you, which is not a pro or a con, right? In terms of like how America is going to go,

America is going to go the way Americans want it to go and what kind of America they want to see. The thing about America is that it changes its mind a lot, right? And there's a lot and like everything that seems to move so fast, like today, history moves on fast forward, a large part thanks to social media, but various other reasons, right? It seems like whatever the big giant cause of the day, like we move on from that. Trump almost gets assassinated. We move on from that pretty quick, right? All of those things.

So that can be really disorienting, but it also can be comforting because it means that we move through these epochs much faster. And it's possible there can be less damage and more enlightenment than we might get. So that would be my optimistic spin on it. Do you take anything pessimistic?

And then I say internationally, Israel has agency. The great success of the Zionist project was to give Jews actual agency with a country, with a government, with an army, right, with politicians, and they can make decisions in history in a way that the Jews never could as minorities subject to majority populations. I would argue that Israel's leaders have made many, many terrible decisions for quite some time, and I've written about these at length. But that doesn't have to be the case, right?

And there's always the possibility of renewal. And there's always, because they have that. Israel's made terrible decisions? Israel's leadership, right? Netanyahu being the basic, the leader of Israel. What difference could any decision have made? What difference could any decision have made? Like really, like, no, I'm always open to this.

I don't think, oh, like magic thing, there's like, you know, some sort of nonsense that if Israel just comported itself in the perfect possible way, that the anti-Semitism would fall away. Or that Hamas would make peace with Israel. Yeah, no, no, no. This sort of stuff is nonsense. There are always certain people who just want all Jews to be gone and to go away and the same true of Israel. But

the way you conduct your own country matters to whether you're going to have resilience to all of these sorts of threats and the way you're going to deal with them in healthier, unhealthy ways. And Israel is domestically governed, misgoverned horrifically. So let's talk about a piece I wrote where I said that Netanyahu essentially has become the prime minister for the 30%. This is totally corrosive to democracy on every issue that Israelis like them, that the future of their country depends on, right? Whether you're conscripting ultra-Orthodox Jews who don't serve in the army, but are the fastest growing demographic. Everyone wants that. The majority of Netanyahu's own voters want that, but he has no coalition and he doesn't stay in power if he

does that, right? Because he needs the ultra-Orthodox parties. And so he does anyway, even Batalas Motric kind of wants it, right? Like, and he's sort of not able to say it because he has to be in this coalition, but even But even like everybody wants that, can't do it. 70-30 issue, they would be willing to end the war with Hamas, even though they would like to eradicate Hamas to get the rest of the hostages back. That is just a fact. That has been a consistent finding of all the

polling. Netanyahu decides no. Now, there are reasonable arguments. And he has, I'm saying, and there are reasonable arguments. I don't agree with you about the analysis of the polls. So we'll continue continue but I'm saying one thing is one poll right but it's like you know

you know Harry Enten would tell you these polls tell you directionality is he downstairs say hi he would tell you I've talked to you

about these sorts of things because you have to know how much you can do but when it consistently shows up so ultra orthodox enlistment hostage deal right that's a charge room

but then we talk about the Supreme Court overhaul which again is something that had justification. Israel said, I've written about this. Israel is one of the most super-powered Supreme Courts on the planet. It was a left-right consensus

that it needed to be reformed, taken down a peg. But Netanyahu sort of outsourced it to the most right-wing people in his coalition, and then they sort of said, why don't we destroy the court? And then that became a 70-30 issue against it. Yeah, let me tell why I don't really agree with you.

Except for wanting the war to end which I don't think Israel wants the war to end if it means that Hamas could reconstitute. That is what the polls say. Sometimes the polls as we know can be wrong. But do you believe that they gave back a thousand people for just

Gilead Shalit and one of them was Yaqoob Sinwar. This is Israel's ethos whether you like it or not. It is actually the preference. And Tanyahu did that because he also could read polls. Yeah. But in general, any particular snapshot of any country at any time has some of the things that you're describing. We have our own 70-30. I mean, my goodness.

You can have always one or two. The problem is on every major issue. Haredi enlistment, the hostage deal, how to deal with the war, right? The Supreme Court. There's one more that I could give you. What's the other one? I'm trying to remember this from the piece. But like there's, I'm trying to remember the last one.

It will come back to me. But basically, if you go through every single one of the key issues on, you know, Israel's, you know, basic fundamental domestic and international politics, Israelis disagree with Netanyahu, but his coalition demands that he take those sides. And he's allowed. He's allowed. Hold on. You know. So, like, we had our 70-30 issues.

I mean, what's his name? Ray Tashara wrote a whole, 10 different 70-30 issues that our parties. The Democrats lost in Barge Park because they took the wrong side of 70-30 issues. The border issue. But I'm saying, my point is that there's, I think there are always, we don't have a coalition system, but we have, you know, a 49-51 majority in the Senate where

one, you know, Joe Manchin becomes a coalition, you know. And it's easy, I think there's always times when this stuff happens, and it's easy just to ignore all the good things the fact is that Israel was

thriving, its tech sector is the envy of the world the standard of living was higher than ever everybody told Netanyahu he was crazy to try to pursue separate peace with the Arab countries John Kerry arrogant, no, no, no it'll never happen, he was right about that Hezbollah is destroyed. Iran is prone. I mean, the outcome of this war has put Israel in a remarkable situation. And so the counterfactuals are just not known. agree with you on the especially about the far right uh drafting and i agree with you i went

about the uh judicial reform i don't know the details of it but i think that the it was they should tread very lightly about breaking that norm because you don't know where it can lead i also don't have that much fear about israel becoming a dictatorship for the reason that you said earlier i just can't imagine israel israelis abiding by some guy says, no, no free speech. They're more likely to have a civil war than to have a dictatorship. So, yeah. But we have in our country derangement syndromes in either direction, Trump derangement syndrome and Biden derangement syndrome. And Israel is the same. And we read

their papers and their papers are no more reliable on their political enemies as our papers are on our political enemies. So I pour cold water on a lot of it. I think it'd be great for Netanyahu to go, but I will predict here that when the next prime minister takes over, you're going to see all kinds of the same problems. You're going to see 70-30 issues. You're going to see the world turns out they didn't give a shit. They like to say it's not about the Jews, it's about Netanyahu. They're saying that

because they don't want to say it's about Israel. But when Barack was prime, if Barack were prime minister, he'd be... There are some people who are criticizing Israel and using Netanyahu's code, and they would just swap in the next one. All of them. Nobody really cares about that.

No, but there are a lot of Americans who really... No, because they fundamentally associate Netanyahu with the guy who came to the United States Congress in front of Barack Obama and went against his signature foreign policy thing. This was a formative moment for many people. They associate him as the guy who stood next to Trump, smiling and smirking over and over again.

These were choices that Netanyahu made because you can still do diplomacy and be friends with Trump without doing this. But Netanyahu put himself on billboards with Trump in Israel, right, saying that I'm in another league. That was the slogan he ran on for reelection. By the way, those posters are Biden. Those were Netanyahu with Trump, which hasn't worked out amazingly well in the long run, right? Netanyahu with Putin, which worked out terribly after October 7th, and Netanyahu with Modi, which, okay, for now, still working, right? So those posters, you know, they've curled and not aged so well. But no, so here's the thing. You can give Netanyahu tremendous credit, also one of the most agile and effective politicians and maneuvers, you know,

of our time. I think he's one of the most effective communicators and advocates for his own cause of anyone we've ever seen. So like, for example, you mentioned how everyone said you couldn't get a separate piece with the Arab countries. You had to do it through the Palestinian issue. And, you know, Bibi said no otherwise, and he gets the Aram Accords with Trump. But here's the thing. Tremendous accomplishment.

That only happens because of the Iran deal that he tried to stop, right? So we have all these WikiLeaks cables that show all the Arab countries are terrified of Iran getting nukes. And they go to America and say, cut off the head of the snake. That's the word. We want you to bomb Iran. Right? And of course, Obama's not going to do that.

Right? And so then they make the Iran deal. This freaks them out. Right? And so they're like, okay, we need some sort of bulwark in the region because the Americans are no longer reliable. Well, now suddenly Israel looks a lot more attractive. And plus, they're a better avenue to Washington at getting perhaps our concerns heard.

Right? And so then you get the Iran Accords. And Bibi takes advantage of this opening, but it only happens because of this thing that he tried to stop and failed to stop. But he saw it. But he saw it. But here's the thing.

Do you think other, like they were publishing op-eds in the newspaper saying we'd like to have peace with you, right? It wasn't like it was hidden, right? You think that Yair Lapid wouldn't have noticed it? I would say argue, by the way, that Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, there's a wide array of actually extremely talented Israeli politicians

who, if not for Netanyahu, would actually do a relatively good job. Look, I don't know the answer to that. It's a totally valid question. I wonder the same thing about Operation Warp Speed. I'm like, wouldn't any president know to do that? But I asked Tyler Cowen. No, I don't think so. I think, let's switch completely, right? Because it's a fun, interesting conversation and it's... No, but it's the same kind of argument.

It's so obvious wouldn't any president have done it. It's so obvious wouldn't any prime minister have done it. If you read like Abundance by my colleague Derek Thompson and Erick Klein, like the democratic affinity for government doesn't extend. It ends up becoming an affinity for process over results. And so you would have had so many of these like things in the way of getting Operation Warp Speed done, what Operation Warp Speed did and said, you don't actually have to do that. You can just cut through all the red tape because it's an emergency and it works. So that makes, that makes the Trump presidency, the first one worth, worth it?

Well, basically, so does it make it, does Operation Warp Speed make it worth it? I mean, this is a really like insane question that I'd have to do a tremendous amount of math, like how many lives? I mean, I think Trump used to say that this was one of his greatest accomplishments, but he no longer does. No, I'm saying if you could have Trump not have, if you could have had Hillary Clinton president. But she couldn't have done Operation War on the Street. But there'd be no vaccine.

Well, we would have gotten a vaccine. It would have taken longer. Yeah, now. Right? Of course you would have had it. The Times predicted 10 or 12 years. You know, so it's interesting. I can't know.

It's one of those, you know, counterfactuals that, you know, the great thing about being a reporter is, you know, you're a part of the present and not the past or the future. So I couldn't tell you. But I do think he deserved credit for it. I also think that there's a question of when that was run by Jared Kushner, why is Jared Kushner not in this administration? That's a good question. It often looks to me like politicians often get elected and they misread their mandates and they misunderstand what people liked about what they did. And then they say, well, now I have the mandate to do something completely different.

And that's not actually, they go just like a parody of Operation Warp Speed because it's just breaking things, but not actually doing something that people want when it breaks. Hold on. I heard from someone who knows that Kushner is involved behind the scenes. Well, I'm sure he talks to people. No, but that he's actually still in a kitchen cabinet. I don't know. But like, if you look, it just seems, and I wouldn't blame him.

It was a really insane tumultuous four years. And you have a growing family and people just don't. But it is very interesting to see. I wrote about this today in the Atlantic's newsletter that a tremendous number of the people who were part of the Trump first administration are just not there anymore. They're not there. The whole top line people and the people who work for them, they're not. It's a wholly different group of people. And many of them have different agendas.

It's much worse than we imagined it would be so far, right? The Trump presidency. Depends who you asked and who was imagining. Because, you know, my publication was I think often looked at to an extent as being a little bit alarmist.

We did an issue called If Trump Wins, which people can look up. And they'll say, look up If Trump Wins and start people can look up. Your publication, I mean, come on. And they'll say, look up If Trump Wins and start clicking the articles and tell me how well they're holding up. Right? And I think people would have looked at that at the time

and said, this is alarmist. Right? And now you look at it and you're like, okay, which of these is going to fall next? Okay, that's not just alarmist. After October 7th, Ann Applebaum had a column blaming Trump for October 7th. It was, it is so...

I didn't read, I couldn't say, but like, uh, I, I, cause you know, but like seriously, like now,

by the way, I should say, I, I'm good friends. Like I love Adrian LaFrance and I, Yasha, like I just, there's,

um, uh, Connor Friedersdorf. Like you guys have fantastic, some of my favorite writers ever. We have a lot of people and we have a lot of great people. We have a lot of great people who disagree with each other. And that's what I appreciate. And I know that I can write that thing that other people disagree with. And then I can do that and we have a lot of great people. We have a lot of great people who disagree with each other and that's what I appreciate and I know that I can

write that thing that other people disagree with and that I can do that and that's really important to me. I didn't mean to sound like I was bashing you. But like you know I can't um you know so as I said I can't like you say it's worse than it imagined right it really depends who was doing the imagining and in a certain sense I don't

know how much it's valuable to know who got it right because then maybe you can look and say that that person, Nate Silver would say to you, that person's a good person to look to as a forecaster in the future, because they have something of a track record, and they seem to have seen things you didn't. Of a track record over predicting for 10 years. But that being said, I don't want to, exactly, but that being said, I don't want to tell people, like, let's relitigate who got it right. It's more like saying, okay, this is going on, what do you do about it? And I think that's the more productive conversation.

But is it worse than you imagined it would be? In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. Because I had a more alarmist notion. My understanding of the Trump first administration was that he had a tremendous number of people around him who were Republican establishment or business people and other people he brought in, and they actually mitigated a tremendous amount of damage

and left to his own instincts with people who were there because he suborned the entire Republican Party. You're going to get full maximum Trump. And people are not going to like all of that. And I felt bad because instincts with people who were there because he's suborned the entire Republican Party, you're going to get full maximum Trump. And people are not going to like all of that. And I felt bad because I saw people who thought they were voting for some of the things they liked about Trump 1.0. What do you think his instincts are? And I knew he wasn't going to get it.

He thinks the tariffs are awesome in a way that was really reined in by the Gary Cohns and the Steve Mnuchins. And so there are people who knew how to run an economy. And those people are not there anymore. But because Trump felt that these people actually stopped me from doing this thing that I think is really important and this is how I understand the world to work. A year from now... And he has to run free election.

This is something that distinguishes him from Netanyahu. He really doesn't have to worry about that stuff. A year from now, you think we're going to have tariffs or we won't have tariffs? I think we will have tariffs. The question is what level they'll be. Every day it changes. We had them under Biden too. I can't say years time spent i think trump intends to put higher than what biden had um every day it changes the news that comes out like will they be

the ones that he's saying are they going to be half as much which would still be extraordinary um i don't know i think will he be on certain industries or not you know exactly so i don't think that you have to be clear i think think Trump is sensitive to public opinion. He's sensitive to markets. And that will do some mitigation. But like, you know, this't see it that way, of course, he's having a less successful presidency. He's sort of frittered away a tremendous amount of political capital, a tremendous amount of opportunity to sort of cement a certain realignment politically for the Republican Party. A whole bunch of things that I think if J.D. Vance had his druthers, he would be doing, but he can't. And so, you know, whether I agree with J.D. Vance or not, I think that he has a coherent theory of the case, whereas I think Trump sort of acts on instinct. some of those and if you like those instincts people vote for that

right if you don't like them well you're stuck with them i hate shady vance you know i i don't know enough about him personally uh to like you know give you a personal opinion well um but i i do feel like you know my reporting where i write about sort of the anti-semitism and conspiracy theories that have percolated on the right. You invariably butt up against people who are friends with him. And then when it comes to him, he never repeats that stuff. He never amplifies it. He said Alex Jones is right about a lot of stuff. But what he does is he refuses to repeat it.

He big-upped Alex Jones. When Tucker Carlson had – this is something you were engaged in, right? Tucker Carlson had Daryl Cooper on his show. and now we have this whole conversation about Holocaust revisionism and so forth. They asked, this was during the campaign, right, late in the campaign, they asked J.D. Vance, you know, Tucker Carlson, you're about to do an event with him next week on stage, right? He was instrumental in it, but he was instrumental in helping you get the vice presidency not. Do you have any criticism of his doing this? And his response was, the difference between us and them, right, is that in the Republican

Party, we're the party of free speech. Questionable considering some of the other things they're doing now. But he said that, we're the party of free speech, and that means we don't have to agree with each other on all the things, right, but we don't censor and shut those things down. Which is an extremely convenient way of not actually answering

the question, which is simply to say, because here's the thing, if you have free speech, you have the free speech to say, and I thought that was atrocious, right? And I thought it was wrong, right? And he didn't say that, which shows that you're not actually defending the principle of free speech. You're actually defending the thing that was said or trying not to condemn it. And by the way, we see this, of course, in certain senses, you know, on the other side

of this, when, you know, various pro-Palestinian activists are detained by this government and taken to, you know, this or that detention facility, and I'm against those things. But you know, it doesn't stop me from saying, when they did engage in misconduct, when they did support terrible causes, and their organization celebrated the murder of Jews, right, you should be able to say all those things and say, and still in a free country, in a free speech society, we don't lock people up for that. Right. And so you but the people who are only willing to say we shouldn't lock them up, but won't criticize what they say. They claim they're making a free speech argument, but they're showing they don't really think that speeches were protecting unless they agree with it.

Absolutely. You're right. Yeah, the the. The one thing I'll say about the Trump administration, I'll ask you a question about another article you wrote. I am worried that he might actually defy the Supreme Court in a meaningful way. I never had that worry before. I thought that that was not a legitimate worry. I'm not I don't think I still don't think it's likely. But that's that would be really, really really bad that would be a disaster the rest of this stuff although you know the idea that even one person is wrongly deported and finds himself

you know tortured in a foreign prison it's really not acceptable it's just fucking not acceptable although not although it was it was also not acceptable that we knew that Kamala Harris had done similar things by fighting to keep people in Conor Friedesdorf in the Atlantic Road and argue about this and at the time I couldn't understand why is she getting a pass we know that she kept

an innocent person in prison we also know that she fought to prevent a guy on death row from being able to take a DNA test. And I couldn't understand how this was, you know, just passable. And, and Conor Friedersdorf agreed with me. So I put that in, I put this in the same category of what I just think is unspeakably wrong. And I don't know why they're doing it. Trump could look like a million dollars if he said, oh God,

let's get this guy back over here. We'll give him his proper hearing and then we'll throw him out, right? He had nothing to lose by doing that except having to admit that he made a mistake. I mean, that's a big thing to lose. They don't, this is what we were talking about

earlier in the conversation. He will never criticize people who support him. He will not admit error. And one of the lessons that he learned from his first administration was after he fired michael flynn like 10 minutes in is that that didn't solve anything it actually just made me look weak that's what he thinks yeah um and so they will not fire pete hexeth they will not fire anyone over this signal chat right or anybody else you know who makes these sorts of high level mistakes because

especially if they came out in a publication like mine, because they see that as capitulation, and they see it as showing weakness. And you can agree or disagree with that read of it, but that is absolutely the case. And so I actually think when I look at this, I'm like, yeah, this is unfortunately, sadly, really predictable, because once they screw up,

you're really in trouble, because if it's the ego of the Trump administration and whether or not they're wrong, and your rights, right? I mean, I would not bet on that, you know, in a good way. I'm going to ask you about your story, Trump's Jewish cover story, before we go. But the way I've been thinking about things lately is inspired by my 13-year-old studying for her social studies test. I said this maybe a week before last, but I had the insight that in the end, every presidential administration gets reduced to four or five bullet points in a middle school textbook. And I think it's a helpful way of looking at it because there's a lot of noise, especially in the world we live in now, you know, with social media and just the 24-hour news cycle. I'm not yet convinced that the bullet points on Trump 2.0

will be bad. I think the bullet points on Trump 1.0 were good, except for January 6th, which will be one of the bullet points and we haven't had many things as bad as that. But if he redirects on these tariffs, and if the tariffs don't get into any kind of like foreign, I mean, it's totally not foreseeable, but you could imagine

that China says, fuck this guy, we're taking Taiwan. You can see the tariffs triggering a much more serious event than simply the markets being roiled, you know, and that would be really something. But I think because he wants to be loved, he will readjust. I worry about the collateral damage of his policies, but it has to be said that much of the reason there is almost no activity at the border anymore is because people are reading about what's going on in America.

And they say, oh, no, this is not a good time to try to get into America. So he's breaking a lot of eggs to make the omelet. We have to acknowledge it. I mean, I feel like he doesn't have to do it quite the way he's doing it. But I if you know, we also have to acknowledge that it's tremendously effective at the border in a way that enforcement or even the wall might not have been. So, you know, I don't know what that bullet point will be in my kids, my grandkids textbook on the border. I don't know. I don't know. But he's worse than I expected him to be. And but this has always been the problem with Trump. He's worse in the fact that he does things

that aren't even in his own self-interest. This is always the thing that gets me about the guy. After he won the nomination in 2016, the next day he's out there talking about how Ted Cruz's father killed Kennedy. Like, what are you doing? You won, you know? He can't help himself.

You mentioned your daughter's social studies class. Yeah. What the hell is social studies? Is it history? Basically it was history, but they call it social studies. When I was in elementary school, it was social studies, but it was clearly our history teacher. So I never understood that, and I was a rule follower,

so I didn't ask questions about it, which I really should have at the time. She was a great teacher, but I don't know. Even his Ukraine maneuvers, although some of them are hard to swallow, it's moving in a way that's better than I imagine it would be if Biden were president. We don't

trust Trump on it, but if he doesn't sell out Zelensky, the worst case scenario right now is that he's really exposing the Scott Horton, Dave Smith, right wing people that actually Putin really is the problem here. Because here, Zelensky's capitulated. He said he's ready to sit down. He said he's ready to make a deal. And Putin's like, fuck you. I'm not making a deal. That's good. So I'll ask you the question that you said about

Israel. Well, no matter what Israel does, a certain group of people are just never going to actually, you know, give it any sort of, you know, fair evaluation. Do you really think that there's anything that Vladimir Putin could do that some of these people that you just named would actually change their minds? Not those people, but the people who don't know, I mean, and this is valid. I'm one of them at times. Like the people, I don't know that much about Ukraine. Maybe they have a point. Maybe Mearsheimer is, I'm one of them at times. Like the people, I don't know that much about Ukraine. Maybe they have a point. Maybe Mearsheimer is, I'm not going to go full Mearsheimer,

but maybe he's right about being realistic about certain ways. Yeah, so I think in this we're agreeing, which is sort of to say that, you know, there are always the diehards, right, who have an ideological thing that can't be shifted. But whether it's Ukraine or in Israel, actually there's a large number of people

for whom the rest of it matters. And I might not agree on this particular thing, and you might not agree on my evaluation, but it is important that that can be real. And I think it can be depressing to think of everyone as hardened ideologues, and in my experience, that isn't the case. One thing is for sure on Ukraine is that the heady days of thinking that Ukraine might just pull this off, and maybe Putin's got pancreatcreatic cancer and maybe he's going to get assassinated. Those days are over.

And if we want to be realistic because we want the best outcome for Ukraine, I'm not at all convinced that if this goes on another year that Ukraine won't be fighting for 70% of its country as opposed to the 80% it's got now. And I likened it to an entrepreneur who doesn't close shop until he's maxed out every credit card, taken every personal loan, gone bankrupt. It's tough. It's very difficult to admit that you have to take a defeat or half a loaf or however you want to put it. And if somebody told me that Ukraine had a reasonable chance of winning or, or extricating, you know, kicking Russia out of the territories is taken. I'd say, yeah,

let's do it. But I don't think anybody feels that way anymore. So then, so then what, you know, anyway, one more question about Israel. I know,

I know, you know, I, you can guess, I hate questions about Israel. I never, I know, I know your answer, but I hate questions about Israel. I never talk about it. I know your answer, but I really think,

I wish points like this would be made more often. If God were to, do you get offended if I say this? If the Lord were to come down and remove every innocent Palestinian in Gaza and lift them up and deposit them in some safe area of Gaza, exposing only the Hamas fighters and the Hamas evil people, which side of the conflict would be thanking God

and which side of the conflict would be cursing God? Which is to say, it really, we don't do a good job of making clear to everybody that it would be Hamas that would be cursing God for removing the civilians and making them safe. And Israel would be saying, thank you, God, now we can just go in there and kill them all and get rid of our enemies that deserve it without having this around our neck. This somehow, this backwards view that everybody has, that somehow it's

Israel that wants the civilians killed, and that Hamas is just an innocent victim of this. It's enraging. But we want to talk about the Nova Festival. This is the problem. I mean, the Nova Festival, I get it. No, no, no. I thought that was actually an excellent question. I'm surprised

I haven't heard you ask it quite like that before. I've heard him say that before. Yair, you say what? He agrees with me. I think that if you give people a hypothetical where everything works out for them, then they'll say, yeah, I'll take it. But in reality, we live where you don't get those hypotheticals, and it's about the choices you make choices you make and you agree with noam that it would be hamas cursing hamas would be upset and most israelis would be happy there's a subset of israelis we have to acknowledge that actually we have said as well because they see the basically the idea is what if you had you said it was in gaza i'm

going really into your hypothetical that our palestinians remain in gaza they're just not with the hamas people so you go get hamas and then you would presumably get out right because that's done certain group of, I've written about this since the largely beginning of the war, right, who are represented well in Netanyahu's government, who saw October 7th as an opportunity to go into Gaza, take the land, and put in new settlements. They're very open about

this. I'm not, like, you know, some weird fear-mongering, reading hieroglyphics, or, like, reading between the lines on a tweet. They did a conference, you know, where they said, this is what we're going to do. They've tried to sneak into Gaza, right, to do this already. But this is a minority of Israelis. It's a minority of Israelis that exercises, as

we've discussed, outsized influence over Netanyahu's decision-making and his coalition, which is messed up, right? And so you end up with this thing where those people, that subset, would be mad because this screws it up for them because now you kill Hamas and now you got to go. You have no reasons to stay, right?

And it's actually, you know, so they, to them, as always, these sorts of extremists, they feed on each other and they benefit from each other. Well, we've always had our, you know. But most Israelis are not sharing that position. And Netanyahu used to say, I'd never sit with them. And then as soon as his political career depended on it, he changed his mind completely.

And not only did he sit with them, he made them ministers with importance. Absolutely right, sir. You're right. And so, that I feel is a complication that is important to introduce to this. Fair enough. But most I also feel like that having been said, it is also important to acknowledge that the vast majority

of Israelis do not feel that way. Within a few months, they all thought, like the general consensus in Israel after October 7th, we're going to go in, we're going to be home, so to speak, by Christmas. In a few months, we're going to go and root out Hamas. They did not realize how much, under Netanyahu, the security agencies, who are also culpable, had failed to surveil and

understand Hamas and its positions. Basically, to be fair to Netanyahu, what actually happened is he made a general evaluation of all the threats facing Israel and said, you know, Iran is the big bad. And the junior bad is Hezbollah, right? Which is their big heavy in the region near us, right? And the bitsy bitsy baby bad is the Hamas people, right? And then he took all their smartest and best people and all their smartest and best peepers, and he put them up the chain, right? And then suddenly, you weren't really paying attention

to Hamas at all. And you had some digital fences, and you thought it was going to be fine right and so it was a massive screw up but it's an understandable one from the perspective of what he was doing and it worked when you saw him fight he's like why couldn't they do this before it's because of exactly this um and so you had all of these people like like Israelis really thought it was going to be a much easier thing and they thought they would be able to like fight this quickly get Hamas done, and then be out. There was this minority that had other designs, and the longer the war has gone on, the more power they have had. I can't excuse it, because

it happened. He wasn't wrong that Iran and Hezbollah and who else did you name were the more dangerous threats. No, no, it was a perfectly reasonable objective analysis, but you do have, he took his eye off of the, no. It was a perfectly reasonable objective analysis, but you do have,

he took his eye off of the smaller. It was a miscalculation. The answer would not to have been to pay less attention to Hezbollah because. And I would say that we can go back. Let's do the relitigation,

of course, because then there's also the fact that he did the Ghilachali trade and he frees a thousand people, including Yasser Sinwar. And here's the thing. So if I would credit him so much more, if he came out and said,

I'm not going to do that again, I screwed up, right? I made that deal and look what happened. The mastermind of October 7th got released. It felt good in the moment. I understand it's a 70-30 issue, but here's the thing. It would be easy for me to do that

and go along with it. But in fact, I was wrong and I'm not going to make that mistake again. He won't say that. He never says he's wrong. He's never even said that he was responsible for anything October 7th. He said everybody but him has been. He's tried to fire everybody but himself. It is astounding. It is astounding.

I just have this, older and older I get, I'm just reluctant to conclude causation between facts. It really does seem like, yes, if he hadn't released Gilad Shalit, I mean, if he hadn't released Sinwar,

that October 7th would have happened. Maybe, or somebody else would have. Yeah, that's right. Or masterminded. Is it a great man of history theory versus the historical forces? I mean, there's a... I'm not saying it's the only reason.

I'm just saying that in this current political context, there's a very straightforward argument for him to make, which could allow to justify his current sort of minoritarian position, but he won't make it because he will not take responsibility for the choices that he did make. The bigger blunder was taking their eye off the ball. I think getting Gilad Shalit out,

it's tough to argue with that. It was not foreseeable that the hang gliders were going to come. I can't hold them accountable for that. And we talked about this once a long time ago. It's quite a price to pay to their soul for a nation to say, no, we're leaving them there.

Something would die inside the soul of the nation. Absolutely. Now you're making my argument for why it's a 70-30 issue. Yeah, yeah. It is genuinely a 70-30 issue, and it continues to be right now to end the war and get the hostages back, and Bibi's not doing it. But, well, the problem is that a wily guy like Bibi has to cheat it. He has to still allow Israel to feel

that it values life. At the same time, he has to deal with the real world, which is that we can't just capitulate because then every time they... I mean, it's hard. So there are other responses that one could do to try to mitigate this in the future.

You could say we won't do this again. You could also say that it's very unlikely to happen again because we're not going to let it because these were historic cascade of failures. And we'll say do an inquiry, a public inquiry into how we failed, except he's blocked the public inquiry. There's something else, by the way. I don't know if, they killed a lot of Palestinians.

And there's something that would disturb me about returning to the status quo only minus those innocent Palestinians. In other words, from the Jewish point of view, you say, listen, yes, we killed all those innocent people. But we

achieved this goal. We got rid of Hamas. They might have a better future. We will have a better, there's something to show for it. To kill all these people and say, eh, you know what? We're going to throw in the towel. We could have done,

we could have, I don't think Netanyahu though is motivated in any way by trying a positive, positive some future for both. He sees this as a zero sum game. I'm saying, I'm saying that I,

But you can't because you're relying, but he's the one making the decisions. I'm saying, it's a totally different... But you can't because you're relying, but he's the one making the decisions. I'm saying, I... It's a totally different... If Israel were to do that now, it would pain me on behalf of the Palestinian people too. It's like, we can't be that casual, killing that

many people and say, you know what, we had enough of this. Well, I'll tell you, this is probably why I'm not... We'll deal with the rockets again. Probably why I'm not cut out for this sort of thing. What stops them from making a deal, getting the hostages out, and then going back in and finishing the job with Hamas?

I mean, other than... Netanyahu is claiming that it wouldn't work. He's made all sorts of claims about UN resolutions and other stuff, but in point of fact, right,

I don't think there is anything that would stop, because just like there's nothing stopping, no piece of paper is going to stop Hamas, whatever remains of it, of saying we're still

going to destroy Israel. Right? Any ceasefire is a fake ceasefire. It is a temporary ceasefire, no matter what they say, no matter what words describe it. So in the end, Netanyahu is refusing to do it for reasons that aren't clear, unless you look at his political calculus, right? The best case defense of him is to say that he thinks if I put enough pressure, Hamas will give me the best possible deal, which, you know, might happen. I want to acknowledge that possibility. But until we see him actually try to make such a deal, not just a small deal for some hostages, like actually try to do it and actually say we will, like, get out for time. Right.

Even though we could always come back. Right. Until we see that, I don't believe it because I haven't seen any evidence of it. But I want to say you said, like, you know, what would it matter if, like, you know, all these people perished. Right. And there has to be something. I just think that there's no good that comes out of that. But I want to say, you said, what would it matter if all these people perished, and there has to be something. I just think that there's no good that comes out of that. You could say in the end that you look at history and then the Holocaust, and then you

got the State of Israel. It didn't make the Holocaust any better. But it's already happened. All these things have already happened. The engine of history and tons of people dying, and then we look back, and we who survived look back and say, well, at least this came out of it. I understand why we do that as a sort of survival mechanism,

but I look at it and I just see... I don't see... I just see tragedy and death. I don't see how Israel can go back to rockets coming in from Gaza. I think we've learned that... I think that if you... First of all, their capacity has been dramatically degraded. I think we've learned that I think that if you what you yeah I think first of all

their capacity has been dramatically degraded no but it can be built right back up that's the sort of thing that you can stop right

if you actually decided you can say we want this border policed in a real way and that can actually happen they chose to again send you can stop sending in

huge amounts of Qatari money right you don't have to do that they don't they'll smuggle in the. You don't have to do that. They'll smuggle in the money. Don't be naive. Who's naive now, Kay? I don't think so.

The oil for food program, they're always going to get money. They're always going to get rockets. If you're going to have a genocidal, even Dave Smith death cult, in charge of Gaza, they're going to rear their ugly head again. It has to be stopped. It has to be. I mean, that's my opinion. We want the same thing. I mean, it's not like, you know.

But I don't see any going on indefinitely. It's terrible for the Palestinians. Now, I don't know if it's feasible. This is where expertise matters. These are things I don't know enough. I don't know what the conversation is terrible for the palestinians i'm not sure that they would be in accord if you gave them the choice uh you know listen there are historic um there are there are historic um protests right now of the palestinian people

against hamas that have well but how many many, what percentage of the population does that truly represent? I don't know, but it's noteworthy. Okay, Trump's Jewish cover story. Just quick, we're out of time, aren't we? Okay. You wrote an article, do you remember it? Did you write so much? Vaguely.

It's like two articles ago. The administration claims to be protecting jews while advancing an agenda that most jews oppose this is about what is about deporting the students and stuff like that attacking higher education deporting the students right these things that have been done under the banner of fighting anti-semitism despite being the sorts of means that jews did not ask for and carried out by politicians that jews overwhelmingly did not vote for. And so that is the, you know, the general, very capsule summary of it.

Now, I have to tell you, I've heard a lot of, I'm very much due process and uncomfortable about these deportations for things that are expressed. But I'm hearing a lot of Jews that surprised me that are very squishy about this. They're like, eh, you know, they're so outraged by what's going on in the campuses. You know, with the 70-30 issue, right? That's still a 30, right? You know, so there's plenty of people who will be supportive, right?

But as a point of the piece, right, Jews overwhelmingly, three straight elections. Well, Jews didn't vote for it because it wasn't on the ballot. No, no, no. It was one of the very few planks of the Republican platform that he was going to deport pro-Humas radicals and make our campuses patriotic again.

He said it in speech after speech after speech. I didn't even know it. I went to a Trump rally. I didn't even know it. I think, I was just saying it was part of the stunt speech. He said it many, many times. Do you remember hearing that? This is not an example. He did not hide the ball, right? You have too much... It is always the case that as someone who covers these things professionally,

I know more than other people. Really? Nobody knew that. Wait a question, though. You have too much... It is always the case that as someone who covers these things professionally, I know more than other people. Really? Nobody knew that. Wait a second, though. But we're talking in very... I do think it relates to some of the people, you know, the folks in Dearborn, Michigan, who voted for this, not realizing that he was very explicitly promising

to do these sorts of things. But how would they not have known that if you're saying that he mentioned it so many times? Of course there are plenty of people who don't know things, right? But that being said, Jewish voters in general tend to be much more higher information election voters. They voted more elections. They who don't know things. But that being said, Jewish voters in general tend to be much

more higher information election voters. They voted more elections. They know more about these things. We have surveys and so on. So on average, they are going to know more. Well, even if they are aware of it, I don't know if people voted on it. They're certainly aware that Trump was a more pro-Israel candidate.

I don't want to limit this to Muslims because that would sound... I was worried about this issue before it was the Islam issue. I became worried about this just in hearing the way my employees were talking.

Just that... Even James Surowiecki, is that how you pronounce it? I can never pronounce his name. You know who I'm talking about. I read it just like you and I hope that I know what it is.

He tweeted out. He's like, he saw some... There were some Mexican immigrant protests, and they were carrying Mexican flags. He says, why aren't you carrying American flags? There is just something fundamentally different in the attitude that the current generations of immigrants have from our parents' generation of immigrants.

And it's not bigotry to notice it, and it's not unwise to spin it out. Well, where does this lead? Just because we worked out in the past doesn't mean it has to work out in the future. It would seem to me we'd all feel better about it if everybody was coming to America saying, God bless America.

Thank you, America, for taking me in. Of course, some things are not practical about that anymore. We have cell phones. People are texting for free to the motherland. My father came here. That's it. There wasn't even a long-distance phone call in those days. So you really had to plant roots in America.

You don't have to plant roots anywhere in the modern world. Anecdotally, just the second generation... That's not good for our country. The second generation of the immigrants you're speaking of... I'm not seeing, but to the extent that we're seeing it, take Mustafa, who used to work here.

He had children with an American non-Muslim... He's first generation. He's pro-American. He's an immigrant and he loves it. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of immigrants... Let me just say something about this is a thing that you described

seeing something on social media where I see these videos too where people are protesting Trump's policies and they're waving a Mexican flag. Or you're burning an American flag in more extreme cases. What is this message that you're sending? Of course, it's terrible politics. And it's the sort of thing that makes people actually push to the other end. I would submit that this stuff always happened. We just have cell phones and social media. And I think there's an element of

this that social media excels at feeding us the things about the other Americans we normally wouldn't have encountered, that the only people ever encountered were businessmen and politicians when they had to traverse the entire country. And now we see an entire, like, influencers and commentators and Tucker Carlson's and also Tucker, you know, it's not political, have created a business model. He is mentally ill. I have no idea. Again, you asked me about

the internal states of people. He said he's mauled by demons. You're a religious person. So, interesting, I'm reading Ross Dothitz's book on religion. Unconvincing. So, I don't agree with all of it. The thing that it's made me more considerate about is like the concept of demonic forces and thinking about it. And it's obviously not such a mainstream position in Judaism, but it exists. Like, you know what?

When I watch certain type of anti-Semitism that I have to expose myself to regularly, mass-marketed anti-Semitism to do my job, there's something demonic about that. There would be – I can understand how someone could come to look at that and believe that there are actually demonic forces acting in the world. Do I? No, but I get how people get there. Are the demons in the room with us right now? So the first question

is about what's going on the university campuses with this rabid anti-Semitism, which is not just free. Don't do that. I speak a little quickly. Which is not just this like freedom of speech and expression, but also seems to be inciting violence against Jews and harassing Jews and locking people in buildings. And something needs to be done about that, right?

Like, that can't just... I wrote about this in my article. There's a tremendous number of things that could be done. These schools set up anti-Semitism task force, some of which produced really good reports, which had very straightforward recommendations for how the schools could consistently enforce their policies on everybody,

or anti-Israel on any issue, and just saying, here's the policies on the book. But they're not doing that. But the thing is, they were moving towards that, and some of the schools were. They had the task force. It's a process. This is the process thing. I mean, tell that to the kids that are lost in it. And then Trump comes in with the Elon Musk chainsaw and says, we're going to do it this way.

And he's not really going after the issue in any way. He's like, we're going to fund Jewish cancer researchers at Columbia and solve anti-Semitism. I'm not saying that that's a good thing. No, no, no. I'm not agreeing with that. I'm saying that these task forces didn't seem to be doing what they were supposed to be doing.

And they won't. So, no, I think a task force alone can't. Then it becomes an administration. Will they make these decisions? But they were doing those things. I mean, Harvard's president, Alan Garber, was actually doing stuff. Listen, you're never going to get an organization to do what is not in its heart to do. That's utterly naive. These people don't believe in it and they will therefore never do it. That's my point. Snap out of it. It is not possible. That's it. It's just not going to

happen. It's never going to happen. I can't get my employees to do something. So then here's my question. So if you take that as given, then if you try to compel them to do it knowing that they won't, right, even if they were to do it, they would not believe it, and when you're out of power in 10 minutes later,

it will go away. What have you accomplished other than actually destroying a lot and turning people against the people you claim to be protecting because they will blame them

for the destruction? I am not defending Trump's policy. Yeah, neither am I, to be very clear. So, like, you could take the most pessimistic view of all of these administrations

and every single task force and I would then do my nuanced thing and say, well, this university I thought was doing a good job. This one I thought was not. Right? This task doing a job. This one I thought was not. This task force is serious.

This one I thought was not. This is what I'm saying. Any conversation, and you may not agree with me, any conversation has to be based on blocks that are real. In my opinion, the notion that we're going to implement some sort of change through a task force that the same people who left to their druthers gave us A are now going to give us B because we told them to is exactly why Ezra Klein wrote that book. This is nonsense. It's never going to happen. So either we're going to live

with it or yeah, get really, really frigging tough and reform the whole thing and bite the bullet and change. So I don't think the external, like what's being done is in any way responsive to it or going to work, but I do think is that there were other responses. You could look at this and say, and people were doing this, right,

that certain parts of higher education are failing, right? So then you can do all sorts of things. You can say, I'm going to set up competing institutions, which people were starting to do, right? It becomes easier as the number of college students are falling and suddenly institutions need to be rescued. You could rescue one of them and say, and now we're going to try it my way. So you don't even have to build it all new. It already has accreditation, things like that. You also can do what had been done by both Democratic

and Republican governors, which is getting rid of college degree requirements for a tremendous number of jobs that shouldn't need it. This is gatekeeping. You can reduce the salience of some of this stuff simply by doing things like that. As much as I agree with you, I am recalling now that Keanu... Keanu Reeves? No. Kalani... Keanu James. Yes.

Kamani James. Yeah. Who was interviewed by the Columbia faculty and he told them, I want to kill the Zionists. He said, okay, we'll go back to class. The only reason we found out is because he released the video. Yes. He said, I want to kill Zionists so people know. It was like any

killer's manifesto. Yes. If you had someone to do that about another group, you would look at this and say, you've got to get this guy out of the classrooms, even if it's just a possibility that you don't do that on a college campus today. Now, in our current climate, if black people were on the receiving end of the overt bigotry that we've been seeing towards jews and the winking at it by faculty members i think there'd be a lot of support for trump's policy

you know that wouldn't make it right either but I think it's worth saying that part of the reason people are outraged about, because they don't care about this the same way they'd care about it if it was a different bigotry. I think that's true. Again, that wouldn't make the policy right in the other case, but I think you'd have a lot of people ready to raise hell. I think it would be different people. Turn the place upside down if it was part of it.

We have a lot of sensitivity towards bigotry, towards ourselves and our group, and we see all the time... Nobody cares. ...that people don't care and they don't pick it up. But if you then have a conversation with... If we saw black people cowering... Many black friends will find it. They will say, this is the experience they often have when they are trying to

raise these sorts of things. If we saw black people... Except in very specific liberal contexts. Only those contexts. If we saw black people cowering in Ivy League universities, we'd say- No, because it was happening in a liberal institution that has particular sensitivity to its things, so you've just restricted it. Now, let's move it into the entire country, into many, many other realms of things. Then suddenly, many places, it wouldn't be cared about.

If we saw people who have particular tattoos and skin colors who were being treated, whether they were citizens or not, in all sorts of crazy ways- What I'm saying is if we who oppose Trump- People would just look the other way. they were citizens or not in all sorts of crazy ways. I'm saying is if we who oppose Trump, if we, the democratic party saw black people cowering at a university, getting hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money, we'd say not a fucking not a dollar of federal money until you clean that up once and for all. I have a question. That would be the reaction.

So I mean, you know, I have a question that I don't know, you know, I'm not informed enough on the, on the nuts and bolts of it. Now you, you're, you're, for those of us. Now, for those people not watching on YouTube,

you're wearing a kippah. Yes. That's a traditional Jewish garment. As my greatest anti-Semitic fans call it, a small hat. Well, that marks you as, I guess, Orthodox. So, religiously observant, I come from a modern Orthodox community. So, how confident are you, if at all, that God exists? How confident am I?

I mean, you're a very intelligent guy. This is what I was expecting to have some more conversations about this. It's way more interesting, and also, there's no good answers. I have more confidence in the existence of God than I do in the correctness of any individual Jewish tradition or interpretation of God. I think that like the existence of consciousness, when you open your eyes and something is here, the explicability of the universe, right? That it follows certain rules that our brain somehow evolved in a way that we can actually understand those, right? There's a lot of very, those sorts of things lead me to the idea that there is a design to these

things, right? But then a lot of people have a lot of different understandings of what their implications of that. And that becomes a much, much more complicated conversation. And this is the tradition I inherited. It speaks to me not just in a communal sort of horizontal way, but in a vertical way connecting me through centuries. But on any given day, do I theologically believe all of this stuff? Of course not.

But that's the modern condition and religion, I think. And as I said, I'm a modern Orthodox Jew, as opposed to like if i grew up in a different place it probably would be different um but that is sort of uh you know it's an extraordinarily meaningful i didn't want that for you right it's a great question right like uh but like this is i you know so you asked me about god god and judaism right god in particular versions of judaism like these are all very different questions so after you die I have a lot of things to take up with God what do you think happens? after I die what do I think happens?

I hope I will be surprised in a positive way I think that's a I'm just stealing that that's Marilyn Robinson you believe you'll have a consciousness after death I hope you hope or you believe? I hope, I don't know. You hope or you believe? I hope. I don't know. Believe doesn't mean you're

sure, but you... I mean, belief is also, I feel like in some senses, you know... I believe my wife is faithful. You hope. No, I believe. But if you're so unsure, what's with the hat? If I'm so unsure, what's with the hat? Well, there's, first of all, the hat has more significance than just about, you know,

specific philosophical questions. It's about's with the hat? Yeah. Well, first of all, the hat has more significance than just about, you know, specific philosophical questions. It's about identification with the community, right? And a commitment to a particular story and to being part of it, and especially a story that people have tried to end, right? And where people want to push people out of. Yeah. And it's also part of a meaningful membership of a community that I, you know, that matters

a lot to me. See, why don't you just start with this? This is so much. I didn't have the nerve. And you have tons of Trump supporters in your community I mean so the modern Orthodox community is more diverse than the broader Orthodox community

which is absolutely the case that the Orthodox community in general is more Trumpy than the rest of the Jewish community because they can't recognize the anti-Semite I think which makes me a better journalist because I constantly am talking to people who are seeing the world in a different way and that has given me a certain advantage and insight into stuff. Right?

And like I think that's valuable. Right? And like if I didn't have it, I would be worse at my job. Of course. We were talking about the argument that came up between Murray and Smith about whether you need to travel someplace to report on it and what the benefits are. Yes. It's similar to what you're saying. You don't have to but it's – It can and what the benefits are. And you're just similar to what you're saying. You don't have to, but it's...

It can be done the other way. And sometimes there... And I would say there are also advantages to distance, right? If you do it right. Like I report on Israeli politics while periodically visiting, but otherwise not being there. And that gives me benefits because I don't get sucked into the groupthink of every...

The sort of groupthink we have on our intellectual side, they've got it there too, right? But I have this distance, which enables me to put things together in a way that perhaps sometimes wouldn't be put together over there. I learned that lesson the hard way because I was there for the 2015 election and I fell for all the groupthink and then it didn't work out

the way that the groupthink said. And I was like, okay, so that's how this works. We all have that moment. We're way over time and we also did another to our podcast earlier or at least. I'm very happy to meet you. Likewise. By the way, one hour with Yair is about 10 hours.

Yeah, audio. Just think about the audio. With Finkelstein. I was like, you know. No, because you speak so quickly. At the speed that I'm saying. It's like one hour with me, but you've got like twice the amount of content. But the problem is I didn't announce at the beginning that if you're the sort of person

who listens to podcasts on double speed, you definitely need to slow it down. So they're just thinking something is wrong with their device. But Finkelstein speaks, he's the opposite of you. He speaks. Yes. Destiny speaks twice as fast as you. I debated Ben Shapiro about a whole bunch of Jewish issues and anti-Semitism sort of stuff, and it's a time capsule because it's before October 7th. It's really interesting. I think it's still a really really interesting to go back. We did it for two hours. I think we broke the land speed record for most words spoken per minute. So that in and of itself is fun to watch.

Do you speak with him off-grid? Do I speak, you know, like periodically with many different people because I'm reporting on this stuff. So if I have a question, I try to message everybody. I've tried to, you know, I have… But where is he on Trump? Do you know? Where is he on Trump? I mean, I have no special insight into Ben Shapiro and all this stuff. But what I'm saying is as I report on the conservative movement,

and so I will talk to everyone who will talk to me, I wish more of them would talk to me, quite frankly, if you're watching this podcast. My DMs are open. Because the only way, as I said, to understand what's really going on in any of these places, you have to talk to people and hear what they think is happening. Who are the conservatives?

I'm so disenchanted with every... I can't even name a politician I support. They're all awful. I think people should not put their faith in politicians. Politicians are there to do a job, and that's as much of it. We've invested a lot in our politicians that I don't think they could ever hold. None of them even pretend to stand for things that I believe in. What about that guy from Pennsylvania?

Shapiro? No. Fetterman? Yeah. I mean, I'm happy he's pro-Israel. I don't know how he is on other things. He's pretty good, I think. Maybe you need to get hit over the head. As a reporter, I maintain a very healthy dose of skepticism with a certain amount of appreciation for the humanity of people who are in

politics. Both of those things at the same time i worry that a lot of people especially early first-time voters very often give totemic significance to politicians that they don't deserve and that they could never deliver upon um and like that's why you see radical swings among young people in general on some of their politics and but other people do it too and it's as certain other like institutional religion other things have fallen away we've invested those energies in other things including politics and i don't think that's a pretty healthy dynamic it's just to like say politicians are there to work for you to do a job right and that's it now if you think like a basic mitt romney circa whatever uh 2012 yeah that guy would be a pretty solid guy for me right now. Kind of moderate, but savvy on foreign affairs, economically smart. There is no Mitt Romney.

There's no Mitt Romney in the Senate anymore, you notice? He left. even Hillary Clinton, like there's, I mean, it wasn't that long ago I was saying actually the people who voted for Hillary Clinton and the people who voted for Mitt Romney don't even remember what they disagreed about. Like, you know,

like it's not even like, because both parts of those parties were actually so close. I think it should be a $13 minimum wage. I think it should be a $14.50 minimum wage.

These were the kind of arguments, right? Yeah, so the critics would say that those were masking some fundamental failures in the society and those kind of arguments, right? Yeah, so the critics would say that those were masking some fundamental failures in the society, and those eventually come out. Right, but you could also say that if the system works as it should, some of those should get addressed

in part through populism, and then you get back to a new consensus. The question is, you know, has social media and various other phenomena sort of changed the game in a way where we can break things much worse rather than fix them? And I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the questions that I'm looking at, right, as a reporter. I chose Hillary.

He didn't run against Romney, but because Hillary was closer. Obama, I think people remember why they would vote for Romney over Obama. But Hillary, I don't think it mattered. All right. Thank you very much. Can we have you on again when something terrible happens in the world? That's the only time that anyone ever wants me on. So if you want to have me on

to talk to Yankees in movies and things like that, I'd appreciate it. You're from New York originally? From New York originally. Inherited Yankee fandom. Are you a godfather person? Am I a godfather person?

A bit young, perhaps. I enjoyed, but it came up recently on social media. You see this? Because Norman Finkelstein? No. Oh, yeah.

He said there was no Jewish... There are no Jewish gangsters in any of television and film. And even I, who is not a particular fan of this genre, knew that this was a lie. Hyman Roth. So the basic thing he reeled is that he doesn't watch movies, but he talks about them, which, you know. Well, Bugsy was about Bugsy Siegel, and Once Upon a Time in America was about Jewish gangsters.

There's so many. There's so many. I'll tell you a funny story before we go. I accompanied my friend Stephen Calabria on an interview of F. Lee Bailey, the attorney who defended O.J. shortly before he died. And he was telling us this story

about how he had written a script. He said O.J. was innocent. And I don't remember. I have a recording of it. I don't remember all the details. And it was an amazing story. And it implicated Ron Goldman was sleeping with Nicole.

And I said, this is a great story. Why didn't they make a movie of it? He goes, he looks at me like I'm an idiot. He goes, Goldman was a Jew. It's like the great F. Lee Bailey was shot off as the most anti-Semitic Jewish control. Hollywood's not going to make a movie where Goldman looks bad.

Goldman's a Jew. I thought it was a better story than it was. But it was just like, this is how people think. We could go on and on about ethnic stereotypes and why they adhere to different groups and stuff like that. I mean, it does make me think,

when you bring it back to your conspiracy theory point, what annoys me about conspiracy theories is that they're usually a bad answer to a good question. Yeah. And they short-circuit things. It's like, why is this group more represented or less represented in this area? Let's end with that.

Why are the Jews more represented in everything academic and intelligence? Well, you know, my tongue-in-cheek, this is not true. My tongue-in-cheek answer is like Jews in academia is that academia is just secularized kolel. If you know what kolel is, kolel is when people would study Talmud in perpetuity funded by

Jewish philanthropists. It's like what happens with the Haredim in Israel, except they're funded by the government, which is a little different. But it was like private philanthropy would fund young Jews who were engaged in esoteric texts of questionable practical value, right? So once you secularize that in the United States, you get graduate programs, right? So this is not really true.

This is not actually what happened. I have actually asked real historians, and they're like, this is wrong. But I think there are some impulses to that, which is the idea that Jews like to support education, right? Jews valued support education. Why is that? Jews valued literacy historically. Why is that? Why is that? Because they had all these texts that were so central to their tradition, which then leased the people into having to do that. Because Moses got the text at Sinai, right, if you believe that sort of thing.

But no, but it's like if you have a very text-based religion that's very focused on that rather than entirely on oral tradition. Well, it could be that the people that were into that stuck around, so the smarter people stuck around, and the dumber people said, I don't need this text-y religion. Well, there was a general, probably a very straightforward explanation for Jewish nerdiness or intellectualism is that back in the day, if you were in the shtetl and your kid was a particularly great Talmud student, it was tradition you would marry that person off

to the daughter of the wealthy merchant, and he would support you in your studies. And so that, in the end, creates a family that's more likely to have more intellectual kids. And you're privileging those people, and if you privilege that sort of thing, you will get more of it. And so we had that for quite a while,

and that probably served a lot of this sort of stuff, made sure that it was part of the culture. And also, so it's nature and nurture, basically. Dan, please. I'm sorry. That was funny. I thought we could not edit the episode. You got to cut something out. Let's say goodnight.

All right. There's always something you say that can be misinterpreted. There's no real, you know. Okay. Goodnight, everybody. Podcast at commieshow.com.