The Daily Signal - 'Civilizational Counter-Offensive': Josh Hammer's Recipe to Save the West From Woke Forces

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Western civilization faces a crisis of confidence, and Josh Hammer has a recipe to combat the three threats eroding its foundations.   His new book, "Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West," lays out the key civilizational challenge and finds wisdom from the Bible to combat it.   He joins The Daily Signal to talk about his book, the U.S. alliance with Israel, and the judicial insurrection against President Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Nothing else is Rees. This is Tyler O'Neill, senior editor at The Daily Signal. This is a special bonus podcast interview that I had with Josh Hammer, who is the senior editor at large over at Newsweek, and he's the author of the great new book, Israel and Civilization, the fate of the Jewish nation and the destiny of the West. Josh Hammer and I sat down and spoke about many different issues, including the U.S. alliance with Israel, the judicial insurrection, against President Trump, and the civilizational counteroffensive that he wants the West to have to save the West from the woke forces that are threatening our Judeo-Christian civilization. My interview with Josh Hammer is next. At Desjardin, we speak business.

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Business. This is Tyler O'Neill, a senior editor at The Daily Signal. I'm honored to be joined by Josh Hammer, who is the senior editor at large at Newsweek, host of Is It the Josh Hammer Show? and America on trial, and also author of the new book, Israel and Civilization. Josh, it's so great to have you with us. Tyler, I really appreciate you having me. Thank you. So I'd just like to dive right in.

Israel is pivotal to the history of the West from, you know, the foundations of Judaism and Christianity to the battles that it's facing now. But I think what is new, you know, you have a new member. message in this book. It's not just talking about history, it's also facing the threats that the West has. What do you think is the new strong message from your book? Yeah. So the easiest thing to say how this book is different, Tyler, is that this is not a typical quote unquote pro-Israel book. I mean, anyone who has seen the cover, I have this painting of Moses part in the Red Sea with the Israelites there. We deliberately did not choose kind of your typical blue and white

Star of David iconography because this isn't a book that is even necessarily first and foremost about the current state of Israel or about U.S. Israelations or anything like that. That's all in there. I have multiple chapters on that to be clear. And I give my very strong unvarned opinion on all those topics. So if you are very interested in that, then of course you too will be interested in Israel and civilization. But fundamentally, Tyler, this is a book that is written in the context of the post-October 7th Milu. I really wrote this, not just a in response to the horrific day of October 7, 2023, but really in response to just the eruption,

the eruption of not just Jew hatred anti-Semitism, although that is obviously part of it, but just the increasingly just bubbling to the surface of outright anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism. So to give you an example, this miscreate at Columbia University, Mahamuk Khalil was very involved with a group called CUAD, Columbia University apartheid Divest.

They literally have put up social media post calling for the eradication of Western civilization there. And I've seen all this. And I said, okay, you know what, it's time for someone to actually write the case that defends not just the Jewish people and the Jewish state, but defends our broader and Western civilizational inheritance, ultimately going back to the Bible. Because Tyler, that's really what I do in this book, is I basically argue that if you want to defend Western civilization, people say Western civilization is out of crossroads, we're at an inflection point. I agree with that. I am not downplaying that premise whatsoever. I totally agree with that there. And I identify at least three separate forces

that seek to subjugate us and destroy us, namely in no particular order. Wokism, Islamism, and what I call global neoliberalism, basically John Lennon's imagine playing out on a global stage. That's World Economic Forum, United Nations, basically the homogenizing imperative attempting to stamp out all of our differences. So I agree that we have to turn back the tide against these people there. But the question then, as a lawyer, I like to define terms. So Okay, we're saying Western civilization is out of crossroads. What is Western civilization? Funny you should ask, I have an answer.

I argue in the book that Western civilization is largely synonymous with the Bible, with the J.O. Christian tradition going back at least as far as God's revelation initially of his word to Moses and the Israelites standing there at Mount Sinai. And I have an extended argument that so much of what we take for granted today when it comes to basic day-to-day interactions, human interactions, when it comes to morality, ethics, law, politics, constitutional structure, so much that ultimately gets back, really, to the Hebrew scripture. Let's take something as prosaic as the golden rule.

Treat others as we like to be treated. Well, you know, Tile, I actually went to public school growing up. I think it became religious over the past, you know, X years or so. When I was in kindergarten in public school, I wasn't taught that the golden rule had any biblical origins there. Turns out it actually does. It's right there in Leviticus chapter 19. You shall treat the stranger as your fellow.

That's the golden rule, basically, in practice there. And the book of Leviticus, by the way, was well understood by the American founders. Look at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. What is inscribed on the outside the Liberty Bell? It's not a quote from Cicero or Aristotle. It's a quote from the Bible, from the book of Lovicus. You shall proclaim liberty unto the land and to all the inhabitants thereof. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,

famously wanted the National Seal of the United States to be Moses parting the Red Sea. Abraham Lincoln famously spoke of Americans as an almost chosen people using this covenantal language that he clearly learned from the Hebrew Bible. So if you want to stand for something, if you want to actually turn back the tide against wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism, is imperative that we be confident in who we are, because only when we are confident in our inheritance can we possibly project that strength and ultimately launch a successful civilizational counteroffensive. So the book, Tyler, is frankly nothing less than an audacious and ambitious call for Jews and Christians alike to link arms and stand shoulder to shoulder like never before

and to engage in the work of a joint ecumenical biblical restoration. Because without remembering and recovering that sense of who we are and what we stand for, we're not going to have any idea of where we're going and we will ultimately then be unsuccessful in turning back the enemies that Jews and Christians alike both share. I love that answer. I also think, you know, from your own experience, leading Jews against Soros, talking about two of those, and actually really involvement with all three of those major threats, you know, would you highlight it, and you probably discuss in the book, the forces behind these threats that Western civilization is facing? I mean, I think of not just George Soros, he's largely handed the reins over to

his son, Alex, but you also have people like Arabella advisors. You have, These big donors that are pushing this narrative. And of course, I think there is also a grassroots element of it, not to say that those on the left, you know, nobody actually believes this stuff. Some of them really do. It's not just money. But how do you define, you know, you mentioned those three radical Islam or Islamism, globalism, and Marxist neoliberalism? Yeah, so it's very similar. I mean, in my taxonomy, it's wokeism, Islamism, global neoliberalism, but basically the same thing there. I mean, none of these are necessarily more existential than the other.

They are all existential in their own various ways there. Look, the entire premise of woke neo-Marxism, this notion that society in classical Marxist fashion can basically be boiled down to this false dichotomy in the Wokarotti's case, that dichotomy ends up being oppressed versus oppressors. And we've seen how this plays out in practice. Basically, white people, Christians, Jews, Asians end up being quote unquote oppressors. That's news, frankly, to anyone who has ever read Jewish history, that the Jewish people could ever be oppressors. That's not typically how it's gone in human history.

But neither here nor there for present purposes there. But all of this, where you were getting into this arbitrary dividing of humanity into these classes based on something like skin color or religion there, you're rejecting the Bible because I argue in the book, Tyler, Israel and Civilization, that the single overarching ethical imperative for all of Western civilization is Genesis 127, one of the first verses in the entire Bible, where it says God made man in his image, male and female, he created them. Now, as a student of American history, you know, I've long kind of pondered whether or not in my heart of hearts I can actually bring myself to agree with

Thomas Jefferson's famous line in the Declaration that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. And the reason I struggle with that is because I've asked sometimes of myself, you know, would a Taliban goat herder in the mountains of Afghanistan truly actually find it self-evident as it applies to Afghanistan that all men are created equal? I'm not so sure that if I'm being intellectually honest, I can answer that question, yes, but here's what I can say, that the reason that men like Thomas Jefferson, like John Locke writing a century prior in England in his second treatise, then the reason, that these Enlightenment liberals were actually able to confidently say that we hold these

truths to be self-evident, the all men are created equal, is because they were writing in a certain tradition, in a certain milieu that they, like so many today, perhaps took a little bit for granted. Maybe not Locke. Locke actually was a religious Christian himself. But the point is that they were writing in a context, in a context where biblical truths, such as Genesis 1-27, were kind of just running through the entire body politic there. And this is kind of the extended argument the book is like you cannot take this for granted. It's important to recover this to understand where it comes from because only once you understand where it comes from can we have the spine and the confidence to turn back the tide there. On the global neoliberalism front, this is kind of where

the state of Israel ties in a little bit as well here. The state of Israel is basically the canary in the coal mine for the globalists, the same way that the Jewish people are the canary in the coal mine for the DEI, the cultural Marxists, obviously the Islamists as well. We saw that on October 7th, and we've seen it time and time again as well. But the reason that the global neoliberals go after the state of Israel in transnational four, like the United Nations, and to be clear, they ultimately want nothing less than the eradication of the nation state itself, people like Soros Open Society, Arabella, Tides Foundation, as you mentioned there, the reason that they start with the actual capitalist state of Israel, well, there are multiple

reasons for this. Perhaps most obviously, the current state of Israel is a very nationalist enterprise. Anyone who's their men in Israeli knows that they probably love flying their flag. There's all sorts of national flags. They have virtually no illegal immigration. They patrol their borders extraordinarily closely. There's mandatory conscription in the military. Basically all the metrics that you can be

a nationalist country, they fulfilled that. But the deeper, the deeper and really kind of, to their credit, they're intellectually honest, albeit diabolical reason for focusing so much on the state of Israel. I argue is that it's because Israel is

actually the world's first nation state. I mean, going back to ancient times, when King David unites the tribes of Israel, well, first in Hebron and ultimately in Jerusalem, that's really the first act of uniting tribes into what we might call a nation state. By the way, biblical Israel had no extraterritorial ambitions beyond its defined borders, because the borders were literally defined by God Almighty himself there. We might call that the ancient predecessor to the modern Westphalian post-1648 nation state. Interestingly, actually, in antiquity, you might even contrast the biblical nation state model for global affairs. You might contrast that with the Roman Empire.

That was actually the predecessor to the imperial model. So one of the things that I say in the book is that if you care about the nation state today, which you should, I am an American patriot, I'm a nationals, I care a lot about the nation state. I've been very active in national conservatism for years now. If you care about the nation state and you oppose the globalizing, homogenizing imperative, that I think that you should understand that the state of Israel is the nationalist canary in the globalist coal mine, the same way that the Jewish people for thousands and thousands of years have been the canary in the coal mine when it comes to a broader civilizational decay and broader civilizational rot. In that case, they come for the Saturday people first, then the Sunday people next.

That's the way it's been forever, basically as long as humans have lived on God's green earth. In current times where you have this metastasizing globalist imperative from people like sorrow, Tides Foundation, the United Nations, Klaus Schwab, and so forth there, they are choosing to start with the capitalist state of Israel for basically the exact same reason. It actually makes a lot of sense, albeit it's frankly just evil. Yeah, I mean, I like to delve into some of your historical claims here because I just went to Egypt last summer and seeing, you know, the normal palette, the uniting of north and south Egypt into one country. And then, of course, you know, Babylon and other places. You can talk about the...

imperial model versus the uniting tribes model. I really like the, there's an inherent appeal of going to the Bible. But how do you deal with some of these other, you know, historical? And I also think, you know, and this is maybe getting into too many theological debates, but, you know, as a Christian, you know, I know that there were multiple strands of Judaism in the first century. There are still different strands of Judaism today, although the ones that existed in the first century, are largely transformed today. Right. But, you know, the notion of expanding the circle, you know, you had the God fears,

even in first century Judaism, where some foreigners were welcomed into, you know, to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But you still had this division such that even in early Christian circles, it was a big move when Jesus, you know, was able to say to the woman, you know, even the dogs eat the table scraps from the children. And this slowly incorporating people from other backgrounds. And you see it throughout Judean, Israeli history with some of the people in Jesus' line. How does the synthesis work in your view? You know, you talk about the Judeo-Christian inheritance, rooting things in the Bible. I love that. The Bible is pretty complicated, though. It's essentially a library of 66

different books. Where is the bedrock that you build everything on? Yeah, but there are certain themes that emerge. I mean, this is this is kind of what I say when I get asked this question, Tyler, is that there are certain overarching themes that emerge. So for instance, I have an entire chapter, chapter three of the book on the philosophy of the Hebrew Bible. frankly on the philosophy actually of just of just Jewish law itself, which we, which you refer to as halakhah. And one of the things that that I talk about time and time again in chapter three, you know, especially since 2016, since Donald Trump came down the gilded escalator and won the election, I think a lot of people on the right today are asking questions like, what does it

mean to be a conservative? Maybe we had this kind of more classically liberal-inspired brand of conservatism of a Frank Myers fusionism, this notion that that individualism was to be exalted over any notion of community and the common good. You know, in reality, these are ancient questions that go back to the origins of men having political and legal thoughts there. So I talk actually in that very chapter, Chapter 3, a lot about reconciling individualism and to be clear individual moral dignity, individual self-worth. It is all rooted, as I said earlier, in Genesis 127.

Our Catholic friends would call it Imago Dei, for Jews we would say, Bissellim, that man is made in God's image there. That is the overall foundation of genuine human moral worth there. And really, it is that which must be defended today against the likes of the DEI and Woe Crowd who are seeking to effect we eradicate that in favor of a modern-day caste system. On the other hand, biblical thought has always been concerned deeply with the idea of the common good and the community and the notion of a nation. So to give one very concrete example, Exodus chapter 19, when God is standing there with Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. He famously says in this kind of world altering quid pro quo of sorts,

if you accept my covenant, then you will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. He's not saying each and every individually each and every one of you shall be holy. He's getting at a theme here of national holiness, of collective holiness there. I even cite the Talmud actually in this book, the Talmud which gets so utterly, completely bastardized by so many anti-Semites day in and day out. It's simply just a codification of the oral Torah. It's really nothing more than that. As someone who's been studying in Talmud for years now, I can tell you most of it is actually very dry legal material.

But there occasionally are some very, very interesting passages. And one of the passages that I quote in the book comes from the tractate called Shabbat, which is a tractate about the Jewish Sabbath. And there's this very, very interesting exchange here that really kind of is a searing rebuke of John Stewart-Mill-Live-style harm theory liberalism. And in this Talmudic tractate, it basically says that if, you are in a community and you have the opportunity to correct a moral sin of the community before metastasizes any greater than that, then the weight of the community falls on you.

Then you are ultimately to blame for the sins of the entire community. Similarly, on a global level, he who is so powerful that he has the opportunity to nip in the bud, some sort of sin that could engulf the entire world. If you fail to act in that moment there, then ultimately all the sins of the world come back to you. That's a very different, very different conception of how to balance individualism with the common good than we see in all sorts of enlightenment liberal thought here. So all this really kind of does get back to the Hebrew scriptures. That would just be kind of one example. Now, I think your point about ancient Egypt is very interesting, by the way. I have to confess that

you're the first deeply knowledgeable interviewer who's ever asked me this question. I've been to Egypt. I actually was there a little over two years ago. I saw the pyramids there. It was kind of a lifelong dream. I was very happy I did it. Cairo, not the world's cleanest city, but it was very far from it, in fact. But it was very cool to be there. So here's what I would say to that. So yes, there was this, this is very interesting uniting of the kingdoms there. But there was nothing compelling about ancient Egypt that necessarily would have precluded it from territorially expanding into what today we might call Libya or Sudan or Ethiopia. they didn't necessarily have defined borders. It was the uniting of separate kingdoms there, but there was not this kind of deep set notion

that we are set in our borders, we are content with it, we are humble there. The reason that I cited to King David's Uniting in the Tribes is because their borders were very set, and they were literally very set going all the way back to the book of Genesis there, because it ultimately comes from the divine source itself there. So if you're looking for some sort of parallel

from antiquity to the modern kind of internet, national Westphalia nation-state system there. I'm not saying that international lawyers are in any way the equivalent of God Almighty setting those boundaries. Very, very, very far from it there. But it seems to me like the more obvious parallel would be the Bible as opposed to Mesopotamia or Egypt or so forth. Yeah.

No, I really like that answer. I'd like to get into, you know, you talk about civilizational threats and why, you know, what we're seeing in America right now, we have this. very big battle between President Trump and Judge Bozberg, interesting juxtaposition there. But we have one after another of these leftist organizations that are filing these lawsuits, essentially engaging in judge shopping, finding the right venue where likely the judge is going to issue an order that's going to crack down on the administration moving in a direction that is protecting America from three.

both internal and external in some cases. You know, in this case, they're talking about deporting alleged members of Trendaaarauga. And, you know, I'd like to hear, you know, your book is delving into the civilizational threats of the West. How do you see those threats playing out concretely? And are we at, you know, a defining moment when we see these judges making these rulings holding Trump back, you know, if Trump doesn't ultimately prevail in some of these cases, does that spell something really horrible for our civilizational path going forward? So, Tyler, let me begin slightly different, then I'll get back to that.

So I, one thing that I found super interesting over the past, called a year and a half, two years, really, I guess two years now. Ever since Alvin Bragg in New York City became the first prosecutor to actually indict a foreign president of the United States. We hear this refrain over and over again from the left. No one is above the law. No one is above the law they shout there. Well, first of all, as I also explain in one of the chapters of the book, Chapter 4,

where do you guys say this notion that no one is about the law? In this case, the king is not above the law. Where do you think that comes from exactly? It literally comes from the book of Deuteronomy. I mean, that's actually exactly where it's from, this principle. In fact, John Fortiskew, who was a 14, to a 15th century English conservative, really kind of one of the godfathers, the forefathers of what today we would call the Anglo-American conservative tradition there. He actually

literally cites Deuteronomy for this very proposition that in this case, in the English legal system, even the monarch is not ultimately above the law there. So the liberals, you know, who are quoting this, this pithy statement time and time again there, I'm not sure, frankly, that they understand where it is coming from. Frankly, if they understood where it is coming from, they actually might start saying it less because the very last thing they want to do was actually favorably invoke scripture. So that kind of brings us then back to Judge Bozberg versus Donald Trump and kind of the separation of powers tiff that we are in here.

Look, a lot of people are saying that Donald Trump is fomenting a constitutional crisis there with calling for impeachment, with this, with that. First of all, let me just say that the Constitution is a very durable structure. The Constitution did not cease to exist during the Civil War of all time periods. The Constitution has been with us for a very long time. It has survived from deeply tumultuous times in American history there. Thomas Jefferson famously said back of the nation's origins that the Constitution would essentially have to be torn up

and rewritten every 20 years with the blood of patriots or some kind of very colorful expression like that. He was wrong, okay? I mean, he was very, very wrong about this because the Constitution has proven to be a lot more durable than Thomas Jefferson thought it was. So I'm really not worried about a so-called constitutional crisis. Frankly, to the extent that there is a constitutional crisis right now, it's not coming from the people who they think it's coming from.

They're saying that the left, the media, they're saying that's coming from Donald Trump, baloney. It's not coming from Donald Trump right now. There is a genuine separation of powers crisis at the moment. It is coming from these overweening district court judges who are trying to bring the entirety of the federal government to a halt. Frankly, Tyler, they tried to do this the first time around two. So by my math, during the first Trump administration, there were between 65 and 70, so-called. national-line injunctions. That's more than the first 44 presidents of the United States combined for a very simple reason, which is that there was no such thing as a so-called nationwide injunction

until the late 1960s. It was the Johnson or the Nixon presidency. And the reason in turn for that is because it's made up. There is no such thing as a legitimate exercise of the judicial power of which the Article III Vesting Clause speaks that allows you to actually bind everyone in the country. That's literally just not how it works. And one example historically, that that demonstrates how this actually works in practice as opposed to this judicial supremacist myth that we are currently living in, Abraham Lincoln, my favorite figure in American history there.

He understood the myth of judicial supremacy like no one else, frankly, in American history. After the Dred Scott case came down in 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney, the most infamous ruling in American history holds that black people were not or cannot be citizens. Lincoln says time and time again in his debates with Stephen Douglas,

because if I'm, if I become a public servant, at that time he was running for Senator or not president, but if I'm in a position of power to do so, I will respect this judgment as pertains to the parties to the suit, Mr. Scott, but beyond that, I'm not going to lift a finger to do that. And sure enough, when he was president, Abraham Lincoln issued passports to blacks in the Western territory of the U.S. in direct defiance, actually, of the Dred Scott case there. So this notion that that judge is going all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court have the ability to actually settle. the law of the land for all of us there. That's, that, that's just not our system of governance there.

And at some point, Scotus is going to have to take up the question, ideally, as to whether or not these nationwide injunctions exceed the legitimate boundaries of the judicial power of Article 3. Hint, hint, wink, wink, they do. Alternatively, the way this really should work out in practice, although my hopes are not up, Congress could actually legislate the abolition of this tomorrow. Congress has plenary power, essentially, applying the necessary and proper clause of Article in Section 8 to the judicial power. of Article 3, they have plenary full-scale scooping power to define federal courts remedies however they want to. So if they want to abolish this tomorrow, they easily could. Now, you have to attach

it to one of these so-called must-pass piece of legislation and some sort of funding bill, whatever, keep the government open. I guess good luck getting that passed the infamous Senate parliamentarian and perhaps majority leader John Thune. But certainly there are any number of remedies that could be used here. What the president definitely does have, and I'll stop after this. What the president definitely does have is the legitimate power of the executive power of Article 2. So when people say no one is above the law, I agree with that, but what is the law? Let's actually start with what the executive power actually is. Yeah. Well, and I think that definition, because you mentioned the Constitution surviving for this extended period of time, which I very much agree.

I'm a very big fan of the Constitution. But I have seen the growth of the administrative state. the way that this essentially fourth branch of government was created almost as, you know, it's the perfect solution to Congress's bind because Congress has all this authority and they have to answer to the voters. But Congress can shove that authority off onto these agencies, say you make the rules that are too unpopular. You know, the people say they want clean air. You EPA, you make the rules. We're going to stand back. Then the people can blame the EPA. Congress gets credit for making the law and everything's hunky dory. And then now we have this system where these agencies are considered independent of the president,

even though he has plenary power under Article 2, Section 1 to oversee the executive branch. So we've kind of been in, to some degree, a constitutional crisis. I would argue since FDR, if not before that, because we have this new system that undermines Congress. And there was this lefty, anyway, I'm interviewing you not talking about myself here, but there was this lefty thing that condemned me for saying, oh, he thinks Congress should have the authority. He doesn't believe that anymore because of, because of President Trump.

And I'm like, no, actually, I still believe that. I just want the president to rule the executive branch and Congress to have the ultimate authority, which it arguably does. I mean, there are checks and balances. But do you think that that, you know, when you're talking about civilizational threats, is there a civilizational threat there to the Constitution where the system, you know, this bureaucracy is effectively swallowed the founder's vision? Well, let me say at the outset that we've talked a lot about the Bible, and there's a lot of Bible quoted in my book. The Bible is somewhat agnostic when it comes to regime structure. I mean, to the extent that it's favorably inclined towards anything, it's certainly more

favorably inclined towards monarchy, but monarchy happens to be just the prevailing system of governance at that time there. There's nothing inherently anti-biblical about a Republican system of governance or anything like that there. So I'm not sure that this gets to the core of biblical principles. When it comes to political philosophy, the Bible seems to me to stand more for certain kind of paradigms when it comes to reconciling individualism with the common good, as we were discussing there. It comes to certain substantive paradigm such as individual moral self-worth, Genesis 127. The Ten Commandments, obviously, thou shalt not steal. So there is a political philosophy of the Bible, but it's not necessarily getting at the idea of regime

structure. Having said that, as a lawyer, as someone who clerk in the Fifth Circuit, as someone who's published legal scholarship and actually have another piece forthcoming later this spring in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. I care a lot about the U.S. Constitution because I think it's a very good one. I think it's actually a very, very good Constitution. I think the Federal papers are beautiful. I happen to be a big fan of them. And I do worry when there are serious attempts to undermine the constitutional order. And I think your point that we've basically been living in one extended constitutional crisis going back at least as far as the FDR presidency, quite possibly, frankly, going back even further

to the Woodrow Wilson presidency, maybe even further than that. I mean, it was frankly kind of, you know, the statutory impetus for the modern administrative state were these civil service acts from the late 1800s, actually, going back to the Gilded Age. So you argue we could go back even to like

the Rutherford-B-Hays presidency and President Harrison and Cleveland. But the point is that it's been a very long time. And FDR definitely takes this to a whole other level. Now, the independent agency point is a very astute one. There's potentially going to be a ripe opportunity for SCOTUS to rule here correctly. I thought the Hampton-Dellinger dispute was actually heading in that direction. He was the guy who was the special counsel of the office of special counsel, and that is one of these so-called independent agencies there. There's a similar ongoing

litigation at the National Labor Relations Board, another so-called independent agency involving the firing of a democratic appointee. So we could see that taken up directly there. This gets back to your point to an FDR-era New Deal case called Humphreys Executor from 1935. That was the first time that the court said that there can be such thing as a quote-unquote independent agency, as long as it has the right mix, the right ad mixture of legislative, judicial, and executive functioning. It's all made up. It's all terrible. I mean, I mean, properly speaking, if there an agency of the government and is not within Article 2, Article 1, or Article 3, then you're in no man's land. I mean, it literally has to exist in one to three.

So hopefully Skodas rules the right way on that, if slash when they get that case. I think they will. This court's typically pretty, pretty good when it comes to bread and butter structural constitutional questions. I get a little iffy when it comes to so-called cultural stuff, but on the very structural bread and butter stuff, I tend to be a little more confident there. So we are definitely in the throes, not just geopolitically and globally of this kind of grand civilizational standoff between what I describe as the Judeo-Christian inheritance and wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism. We've been in the midst of an internal divide over what our own republic looks like

for a very, very, very long time now. And, you know, one of the ironies, Tyler, and I think this is something that really even Trump's critics on the right really have to grapple with, is that for all the rhetoric that we hear about Donald Trump being a unique historical threat, he's a dictator, he's a fascist, he hates the Constitution, he's this, he's that there. you know, look at the actual lawsuits that are playing out now. The actual legal positions that his DOJ is taking basically day in and day out when it comes to restoring a proper conception of the judicial power, when it comes, frankly even, I would

argue, to birthright citizenship. I mean, on so many of these legal issues there, he is actually the one who is fighting day in and day out to restore the actual original meaning of the Constitution against those who seek to pervert it and distort it and against those who have indeed pervert. it and distorted it, again, going back at least as far as FDR, arguably going back, frankly, to the Gilded Age. So I want to kind of end where we begin, where, you know, the first word of your title is Israel. You know, I think I've been seeing some comparison.

We have two big wars going on that Americans are focusing on right now. One of them is in Ukraine and the other one is in Israel. and its surrounding environments after the October 7th pogrom. Those who would compare the two, who say that these conflicts are similar, they're waking us up to an era of great power conflict that we hadn't seen in a long time. And I'd like to hear you respond to that because I think that your response will be enlightening. Because I don't think you agree that the... issues are the same in these two conflicts?

I don't. I mean, Donald Trump certainly doesn't. He views them very differently, and I think he's correct to do so, actually. So look, Tyler, I have a whole chapter in the book, is Chapter 7, basically making the case for tight-knit U.S. Israelations on avowedly and explicitly foreign policy realist grounds, America First grounds, you might even call it there. You know, it's funny. We hear a lot of people say that the Israel issue, U.S. Israelians, a lot of people say, oh,

it's an old neo-con issue. It's a Bush administration issue. Well, you know, I think that's news to Donald Trump because Donald Trump is very much not a neo-conservative. He is Mr. America first, Mr. Maga. He's also the most pro-Israel president in American history. For a very clear... Who opened the embassy in Jerusalem.

Yeah. He opened the embassy in Jerusalem. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He pulled out of UNRWA. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. I mean, it would take us hours, frankly, to kind of talk about all the minutia that he did to bolster this relationship.

And frankly, what was the result of that bolstering of this relationship? The Abraham Accords. He showed actually that when you go all in for U.S. Israel relations, when you emboldened and empower Israel there, you actually make peace. The Middle East was quite quiet during those four years there. And part of this chapter, the book, Chapter 7 that I talk about Tyler, I talk about when Israel feels emboldened and empowered to act, they will act in a way virtually all the time.

Again, no two countries were literally every, like, like, we're talking to like 95 plus percent. time when it comes kind of sheer in the same interest there. No two countries will have a hundred percent vent diagram overlap. But to give you one very concrete example of how Israel will act when they feel emboldened or empowered to do so in a way there were downs to both of our interests there, I go to last summer. So last summer, Israel decided to kind of go on this Michael Corleone baptism scene-esque revenge killing spree against his enemies. And that killing spree ended in the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah in his bunker in Beiruts. After that, they actually got Yaya Sinwar. So, I mean, you know, pick your spot wherever you want to end it.

it. But before they got Nazrallah in Beirut, they took out other high-ranking Hasbullah jihadis as well. Two of these were named Fuad Shakur and Ibrahim Akil. Now, unless you're deep in the weeds of radical Islamic jihadism, you probably don't know who these two men are. So let me tell you. So Fuad Shakur was the mastermind of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings that slaughtered over 240 U.S. Marines there. Ibrahim Akil was the mastermind of the U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut that same year. 60 to 70 people were killed in that. The U.S. state. Department has had five and seven million dollar bounties on those two men's head for over four decades and nothing happened. They were alive for four decades. They were two of Nasrallah's top

ranking advisors within the Hezbollah organizational infrastructure. Israel took them out. So I hear this refrain from people. Oh, what does the United States get from U.S.S. relations? Okay. Well, you get a dead Fuajikor, you get a dead Ibrahimakil. And if that weren't good enough, you get a dead Hassan Nasrallah and a dead Yaya Sinwar as well. But the, the United States get a dead Israel issue more generally, Tyler, playing out on the geopolitical stage, it's really just the geopolitical equivalent of the fate of Jews and Christians going back thousands of years. For thousands and thousands of years, anti-Semites have understood that you go after the Jews first, you attack the Saturday people first, you attack the people that are called to be a light unto the nations in the

book of Isaiah, because your ultimate goal is the eradication of Christendom, of the Christians. Karl Marx is very explicit about this in his on the Jewish question anti-Semitic essay. He hates the Jews, but his actual goal is overthrowing Western capitalism and Western Christendom. Ditto, likewise, on the transnational states there, they're going after the state of Israel for all the reasons that we discuss when it comes to the nation state and so forth there. But really, really, they're really just picking on the group of people again that are the original people of the book, the Blighten to the Nations there, because their actual goal, again, as these miscreants on these campuses may clear, is overthrowing Western civilization there. So that's part of it there. Finally, just real quick, one thing I will add there, as a realist, I think that America has an overarching imperative of this entry to focus on China. I think that China is by far, America's

number one threat this entry there. And I actually agree with the premise of redeploying American resources from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. I would probably even expedite that. The relevant question, though, is how do we secure our very real interests, such as, I don't know, a free-move-C, free-fremum of navigation on the Red Sea? How do we secure all these interests, while allowing us to then redeploy these resources. The obvious answer, and Donald Trump gets this in his bones, is to embolden and empower your allies to patrol the region in a way that redounds to both of your interests there.

This is a very sober, clear-headed MAGA America First Realist case. I find that personally pretty compelling there, but I guess we'll see how people react to the book. Well, thank you so much, Josh, for joining us. Is there anything else we didn't get to that would be a good tease for the book that you want to mention? And where can people follow you? Yeah, so the book is called Israel and Civilization,

the fate of the Jewish nation and the destiny of the West. Praise be to God. It reached a high of number three on all of Amazon. Let last week. It was literally sold out on Amazon on publication day morning, but it's been restocked. So if you order it now, you should get it ASAP there. Clearly, there seems to be an appetite for this message.

So I hope that you'll pick up your copy today, whether it's at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books. As me personally, I'm on X, Josh underscore Hammer. I host two shows, the Josh Hammer Show, and America on trial. with Josh Hammer and Tyler, my friend, it's been great catching up with you. We're going to leave it there today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button

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