The Dispatch Podcast - Axis of A-Holes

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

It's day six since the massacre in Israel and Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David French are in it for a somber episode. They discuss: -Bad allies -Two-state solutionism -What is Hamas' goal? -Biden's Iran hostage deal -Anti-zionism vs. antisemitism -The left's cultural credibility -America's role -The ethics of sharing snuff videos -The House is a mess Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Steve, where are we now five days later? That's a good question. We're still learning about what took place. last weekend and learning in great harrowing detail all of the atrocities committed by these Hamas terrorists in Israel. And we've seen the beginning of what is surely going to be a strong and, I think, lengthy response from Israel. You know, we've, I think we've had some of the first word of questions answered.

If you look at the response from President Biden, his first public statement, I think it took a little too long. But when it came, I thought it was good. He made sort of an unapologetic and unqualified statement in support of Israel and said, the United States will be with you through no matter what. You had Israeli government leaders for praising Joe Biden up and down for the strength of the statement and the strength of the commitment. John Potahoritz, our friend over commentary, had a pretty terrific and very short review of the speech. And I think he said it was the strongest statement in support of the state of Israel from any American leader ever. I think Joe Biden did good job with the statement.

He had another appearance yesterday that wasn't as strong and where he ad-libbed a number of things and got himself into some trouble in a way that was foolish and unfortunate. But I think at least early, the Biden administration's policy responses have been or rhetorical responses have been strong. The big question as it relates to how the U.S. government reacts is what are the policy changes? What will we be doing differently? What exactly does it mean when we say that we will stand with Israel forever? What does it mean with respect to policies on Iran, who has been funding this kind of terror disputed reports about exactly how much the Iranian regime knew or directed this particular set of attacks, but no dispute about the Iranian regime's support for this kind of terror going back decades. Will we see policy changes there? I think so those are

some of the big questions five days in. I want to stay with Israel for a second here. And David, it appears, as sort of Steve alluded to, that there's more applause for Joe Biden than there is for beating that in Yahoo at this point in Israel, real questions over how this happened when, you know, the government of Israel exists really for exactly this nightmare scenario. Yeah, I mean, this is a situation, and this was discussed a bit in dispatch slack, about the difference between, say, 9-11 and the intelligence failures before 9-11 and intelligence failures before this because 9-11 in many ways was a failure of imagination.

In other words, people didn't think of this kind of attack. And in fact, our security system wasn't even primed to be able to detect the kind of attack that occurred on 9-11, whereas this was exactly the kind of attack that has been imagined for a long time, a vicious assault designed to kill as many civilians as humanly possible, as fast as humanly possible. I mean, this is the kind of thing the whole system was set up to respond to. And that way, it's a lot more like before the Yom Kippur War, where there was an anticipation. There was a whole line, the Bar-Lev line, I believe it was called, designed to stop the Egyptian army in its tracks if it came across the Suez Canal and it failed or at least failed in parts.

And here was a failure to respond to an anticipated threat, a known threat. And that is the kind of failure that should lead to resignations, to accountability. So you can, the one side, be legitimately furious at the failure of a government to stop and prevent a known threat and at the same time still rally as a nation, as a people to fight the war to come. And so those two things can happen at the same time. And I am no expert on Israeli politics, but from a distance, it appears that those two things are happening at the same time. One is this enormous national rallying to fight Hamas. And then the other

is burning anger and fury on the part of many, many people that this known threat was not addressed and prevented. And I mean, Hamas at this point, and I think we should take their boasting or, you know, statements even with a grain of salt, but they've claimed Iran helped them at various points. They've claimed they were preparing this for two years in secret, all sorts of things that probably should have sent off intelligence red flags all along the way here. Jonah, also on the Israel front, you know, Israel certainly is at sort of the peak of the world's sympathies right now. as they continue to have military operations though presumably that will come down how long is

israel's leash if you will both in time but also in intensity it's i i think it's unknowable how long it is you're right after every one of these i mean this this one is sort of unique but um after every one of these flare-ups hostilities breaking out whatever a shock clock goes on Already, if you watch any cable channel, they're almost doing it like sports scores, the number of Gazan, the Palestinians killed, Israelis killed. And that clock, you know, it begins the moment Israel decides it's going to retaliate for getting attacked. And I think it's going to be a little longer this time, partly because there are two. many statements basically endorsing this up front. So you need to come up with some, there need to be some event on the ground that we give permission to say the Biden administration

to backpedal on its unambiguous declarations of support. And as we're seeing, we'll probably talk about this a little bit, but like, like Biden's declaration of support creates a environment for Democrats generally where they're not going to be able to they're not going to be able to waver too much too soon but I don't know I mean at some point it's going to happen

you know I mean it's the way a lot of these institutions are set up it's the way a lot of these UN sort of NGO type institutions are set up is to basically you know when Israel gets punched in the nose they immediately start shouting de-escalate de-escalate, right?

And it's the equivalent of yelling, you know, the day after Pearl Harbor saying, look, retaliating against Japan is just going to perpetuate this cycle of violence. We really need to de-escalate. You can imagine the contempt the Israelis have for those kinds of calls, but they're coming. And it's why Israel needs its first and current one actually goes in to Gaza. It needs to be as effective as it possibly can be. Because it only has so many bites at the apple before the international community starts saying enough is enough.

Just if you look at President Biden's remarks, something like 24 hours apart on the first day, he gave this sort of unconditional support for Israel and didn't include in that any advice of restraint. We had seen this from the State Department very, very early in a statement. While the attack was still going on, just want to note that. Correct. The U.S. Palestinian Office put out a statement saying, you know, we urge Restrict. strain on on all sides. Biden didn't say that in his first statement, which I thought was notable. Undoubtedly, there were discussions about including such a warning, and it was not included. It was kept out. On the other hand, in his more extemporaneous remarks the next day,

I believe he said twice that he reminded Benjamin Nanyahu in those conversations that Israel has to comport itself according to the laws of war. So already in 24 hours, you're seeing a slightly different message from the White House. And I think that suggests, Sarah, that you're right. You know, the time is limited for Israel to act before you start to hear this from more people. Having said all that, I do wonder if the nature of what we've seen makes this a little bit different. I was having a conversation with somebody. to make it a difference in kind or simply a difference in the length of the leash, both by time or by intensity, which I think are different, by the way.

I don't know. But I don't think, I was talking to somebody yesterday who knows this, knows these issues very well. We're trying to remember a time when there was such a steady series of reports about, crimes this heinous. And neither one of us could remember. I mean, we could remember some of the videos of ISIS beheadings. You could remember various conflicts around the world. You have atrocities like this, to be sure, discovering mass graves. And to just underscore that for a second, you have also just polling that has come out. 40% of Americans say they have heard a lot about this, which is high for five days later. Yeah. I know that can sound low to some people,

but to have said your choices were, you know, heard a lot, heard some, not heard much, haven't heard anything. So for 40% to say they've heard a lot about this. I think... Although in fairness, a little feels like a lot when you're talking about butchering babies.

You know what I mean? It's like... Yeah. Yeah, just even the highest level stuff. Yeah. And you can't... If you've heard anything about this, you've heard that, right?

Right. And the videos of, you know, there's a new video that came across my screens this morning of a number of captives, really young men being beaten and poked and prodded by their Hamas antagonizers. I mean, these are the kinds of videos that people are seeing or, you know, Israeli mothers. recounting the loss of their daughters, that will, I think, have a lasting impact and I think probably gives Israel a longer hand in working on this. There was a segment on CNN last night where they interviewed an Israeli dad, originally from Ireland, which I thought was kind of cool, and it was so dark where he got word that his eight-year-old daughter had been killed. And he recounted in tears about how his response was a loud yes, because the only other option was that his eight-year-old daughter was being held by Hamas,

and the horror of what they would do to her plagued him a lot more. And so death was relief. And this was not some grim existential problem. black and white Swedish movie kind of thing. This was a guy who says what a crazy horrible world we're in where a father has to say he's relieved to find out his daughter was killed because the only other option was months or years of abuse of all types. And that kind of thing breaks through, you know?

I mean, it just haunts you. So, David, well, before I get to that, I will just note for those listening to this podcast, you know, I am almost six weeks postpartum and there are certain things in your brain that are simply different in those days and weeks after and you're, it's a little more, it's like tenderfooted, you know? And so some of these stories can be particularly, yeah, I don't know how else to describe it.

It's like a nerve that is exposed that can be touched very differently when you've just had a child some of it might be the sleep deprivation or just baby screaming at you a lot but I know for some other women who are in this position, for instance, like this has been very mentally difficult

to hear these stories and work through them and not to fixate on them and how to both have empathy but not allow it to you know, hurt your mental health and what, you know, how you're processing all of this. So anyway, if you're listening to this, we'll try to keep this less or not as graphic, just for my sake, if for nothing else. And at the same time, you know, you, those graphic things are important, like we just said, because it's what allows us to have a staying power. And humans work

through anecdotes, not through data. And I think, for instance, there was word from Israeli spokesperson that parents should delete social media apps off their children's phones because they believed that Hamas was going to torture and execute some of the hostages

with videos that they would put on social media. And there was a mixed reaction to that that I thought was interesting. On the one hand, of course, you don't want your children scrolling through and seeing that. And on the other hand, it is reality. This isn't some video game that they're watching. And so perhaps we should all be watching those to see, you know, let them show us who they are type thing. And how you balance that for yourself and for your family, I think is really hard right now.

So I just wanted to state that. David, I want to talk to you a little bit about sort of where Jonah and Steve were leaving off on this idea that it can sound really nice to say things like seek justice instead of revenge, reject violence, you know, Israel should pursue diplomacy and why that will feel so different if you are Israeli or if you are Jewish at this point

because, you know, this was, was an old phrase at this point, but if Hamas laid down its arms, there would be no more war. If Israel laid down its arms, there would be no more Israel. Like this idea that the two sides are pursuing something very different,

and I think people can sort of feel good saying, like, oh, I just want an end to the violence. Okay, but they took hostages. Those hostages are children. They are women. They are elderly. There's no, well, we just don't have violence. Like, they've got hostages.

That's not an option, right? right now. And so to tell Israel to reject violence, I find like you're missing the point. Yeah. I mean, look, just to be perfectly sort of blunt about it, I think what Hamas did is it recategorized itself as ISIS here. So, you know, for a long time, there's been sort of this view that the Palestinian struggle was a category. difference between, there's a category difference between the Palestinians in the West Bank in Gaza and Al-Qaeda, which did 9-11, and was responsible for some of the most horrific atrocities before, was just responsible for unmind-blowing atrocities during the Iraq War.

Or there was a difference between the Hamas and Fatah and ISIS, which, I mean, inflamed the entire world in 2014. And nobody was saying in 2017, when the battle for Mosul was winding down and ISIS was being routed out of Mosul, that this was somehow some big giant war crime that the Iraqis were retaking Mosul. And I'm going to leave Fatah to the side, but Hamas just recategorized itself as ISIS. And so this whole concept, I think it's just a total paradigm shift here. Because what do you do with ISIS? You beat it. You defeat it.

You route it. You clean it out. That's what you do with ISIS. You don't negotiate with ISIS. No, man. No, you form a coalition government with ISIS. Right. And so by recategorizing itself as ISIS, you know, it sort of reminds me of some of the ways in which

people talked about al-Qaeda after 9-11, there was this phrase catastrophic success. In other words, they accomplished something so huge that it ultimately was going to in the organization, at least as it existed prior to 9-11, which it did to a large degree. I think Hamas is in that same category right now. And the bottom line, I think, is right now there is an enormous, there is a greater permission structure for the government of Israel right now in responding to Hamas than has ever existed. for the government of Israel in any armed conflict

it's engaged in since its founding. Because if you look at the history of armed conflicts involving Israel, there's always been this ticking clock that the international community, the U.S. included, only has so much tolerance or so much patience for Israeli military success. And it has been a factor in and has distorted Israeli military thinking

throughout the entire history of the country. However, here, I do think there is a limit of tolerance, but that limit is a lot, there's a lot more room here than there's ever been, and quite simply because Hamas is now ISIS in people's minds and what do you do to ISIS? The last thing you do is negotiate with it. What you do to ISIS is you destroy it. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of

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This September, lease a 2026 X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Condition supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Jonah, I want to talk about what happens now. a little. And Steve, I want you to weigh in on this too, which is, I think before this for people who weren't paying attention, it was still like, look, we're heading towards a two-state solution. Yeah, it's going to take some time. And, you know, maybe some of the older generation are going to

need to die off or whatever else. But like, that's where we're going to end up. That feels very different today than it did a few years ago. And by different, I mean, a non-existent possibility in maybe my lifetime. You know, I had a friend, Liel Slifer, who you may have seen her on Fox or CNN. She's an American. Her cousins were in the kibbutz of one of the videos you might have seen

where their arms were all tied behind their backs as they were all being taken hostage. The grandmother, Hamas, has now posted videos of her dead body. The mother and father with their three-year-old daughter, who you might have seen, were put into the car.

Hamas then had to stop. The drivers had to stop because an IDF tank was nearby. They fled from the car. The mother, holding her daughter, couldn't run as fast with the daughter as the father could. So she handed the daughter to the father and they split up as people were chasing them. The father and the daughter hid for 24 hours in a field

and are alive. they've never heard from the mother again. And I mentioned all that because Liel on television, in describing this, said, they don't want a two-state solution. They want the final solution. So, Jonah, what happens now? Because Palestinians are still there.

Israel is still there. How did either side pursue anything other, then violence, then war at this point? You can't have a two-state solution when your neighbors don't believe. believe you should exist and make that clear and they're not changing and no pressure is helping. They want to kill you. They want to kill your grandmother. They want to kill three-year-olds. Yeah. So I think so there's the near-term issue is Israel literally has no choice but to do what

it can to eradicate Hamas specifically, right? And hopefully keep Hezbollah out of it. You know, I mean, there are all sorts of military challenges here. The bigger picture, I think that the only way out of this longer term is first recognizing that the Palestinian people, who I think have some very anti-Israel views, are not all Islamist whack jobs, right? I mean, this was a point that Adam was making when I had him on the remnant, gosh, feels like a million years ago,

but last Sunday, the Ghazans who escape from Gaza, they may not like Israel, but they're not running away from Israel. They're running away from Hamas. They don't want to live someplace where they're constantly, you know, Hamas is essentially an organized crime organization that dedicates itself to exterminating Jews. And so they exploit the businesses.

They shake them down. They take, they go to families and say, we need your 10-year-old son because we need to train them, up to be a suicide bomber or whatever, a lot of normal people don't want to live in a place like that. And I think one of the things that is worth sort of recognizing is that however much agency we assigned to Hamas and all of this, they are essentially still pawns of larger powers outside, whether it's the Iranians.

I personally think we're going to find out, at least in the history books, that this was a Russia instigated to Iran, to Hamas, kind of. chain of command kind of thing to distract the West from Ukraine. But I mean, okay, but that's then a true, like, access powers forming. And then you have China more and less involved with Russia at various points here. And maybe we're at sort of a lesser moment now. But if you have China and Russia and Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, I don't know what North Korea is up to, but... As someone was saying, it's an access of A-holes, right?

And it's like the crappiest countries. They have a common interest in finding allies. And the only people will be allies with them are other crappy countries. So if we have the Axis countries forming together, are the allies forming? Well, to certain things, yes, right? I mean, NATO is more self-aware and robust in its self-conception than it's been any time in our lifetimes, at least certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But more importantly, my point is that like people who say we need to get past this age of America is the policeman or America is a sole superpower or America is a hegemon or what all this kind of stuff, this is what, all this kind of stuff. This is what it looks like. When America retreats from being the leading superpower in the world that's protecting the world order, you get bad actors doing bad things. And I think that the way out of this in terms of Israel-Palestinian

conflict is, yeah, you'd probably need a different generation of Israeli leaders, but you also need an agreement among the powers in the region to stop using Palestinians, essentially the way that Hitler used Sudeten Germans as pawns for their own geopolitical ambitions. And if you could just simply put in responsible, normal, again, anti-Israel, to be sure, but like the kind of leaders who ran Ireland that finally got put an end to the troubles, where they actually want to live in relative peace and stability side by side with another country, that's the way out. And the only way to do that is to kill the current leaders who believe that they're in an existential struggle with worldwide jury and believe in the genocidal elimination

of Jews really everywhere, but particularly in Israel. And until the Palestinians are no longer, quote unquote represented by people who think those things, Israel has no choice but to respond accordingly when people say, you know, when all the people I know who think Maya Angelou is this incredible font of wisdom, right? Who say, when people

tell you who they are, believe them. Right? These are the same people who say, oh, you shouldn't pay attention to frigging, you know, Hamas's numerous statements about how they want to eliminate and liquidate all the Jews. Right? It's like, it seems to me if you're Israeli, if you're

of Israel, believing people when they say that is the only thing you can do. Steve, I want you to weigh on in this. I'm concerned about the Allies point because here's what the United Nations Human Rights Council had to say on October 9th. Yeah, but we're talking about allies. On Monday afternoon, the UN Human Rights Council observed a moment of silence for the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territories and elsewhere. Really?

Are the allies going to come together about this? So I don't view the U.N. as serious part of any alliance, and particularly the Human Rights Commission, which is a garbage organization. I mean, there's a longer discussion to be had about the United Nations. I mean, I'm an internationalist. I'm a multilateralist. The U.N. is a worthless organization that does more harm than good, period. And I think the United States participation in it probably should. I mean, talk about people telling you who they are. Yeah, no, exactly. But to Jonas' point, very specifically, there's very useful. peace in the Atlantic from Bruce Hoffman, long-time national security advisors worked in a variety of administrations and on these issues specifically.

And he reminds us of the language from the founding covenant of the Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, in which it is written, the day of judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, killing the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, oh, Muslims, O Abdullah, there's a Jew behind me. Come and kill him. It's explicit. You don't have to read into anything. This is the purpose.

This is the goal. And the longer we ignore that, I think, the more foolish we are. To Jonah's second point on the Russia thing, there's a lot to learn. There was a big New York Times report. First, There was a Wall Street Journal report later confirmed by the Washington Post about Iranian support for these attacks. That was later, I don't know if it was pushed back. There were leaks from U.S. intelligence officials to the New York Times suggesting that Iranian leadership was surprised by these attacks. There's a lot to learn about Iran's exact rule. We got into this a little bit on Dispatch Live on Tuesday, you know, it's important, I think, for the intelligence community and people who are engaged

and sort of fact-finding about this to make the distinctions between Iran's sort of long-term support for Hamas and related jihadist groups, Iran's potential foreknowledge of an attack like this, or Iran's direction command of an operation like this. And those will be, I think, important as we kind of try to think through what the policy response is here. But in the broader sense, those are distinctions that sort of we can get caught up in. Iran favors this. You had Iranian leaders, including the Supreme Leader, endorsing these attacks in the immediate aftermath and calling for more of them. The IRGC, with a budget of $6 billion

exists to do exactly this kind of thing. That's what they do. And they've been doing it for years. The IRGC has had a hand and the Quds Force had a hand and depending on what estimates you believe at a third of U.S. military fatalities in the Iraq War. This is

what they do. They're open about it. They talk about it plainly. And I think the biggest policy question as relates to the Biden administration is, Will we see a change? Biden administration came to office and they freed up all sorts of oil reserves for the Iranians. It was a deliberate policy choice. There's a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Said Ghasa Minidjad,

I think I'm saying that right, who wrote that he is estimated, Iran has exported somewhere between $81 and $90 billion of oil since Biden came to power. And he estimates that 26 to 30 billion of this is, in excess of what they would have gotten had the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign remained in place. Think about that. Just think about that. 30 billion dollars in additional oil revenue to a country that we have designated as the world's leading state sponsor of terror that has been openly challenging the United States, trying to assassinate its citizens on our soil, targeting U.S. interest, overseas. Are we going to be serious about this or not? The Biden administration came to office and had developed this new language about de-escalation. And when they used that language in public and then increasingly or regularly in private, they were not talking about one-way de-escalation.

This was not prescriptive. They were not saying to Iran, you need to de-escalate. They were saying, we need to de-escalate, this relationship, we need to take it down a notch. And what they were doing was contrasting their policies and their approach to the Trump administration's maximum pressure approach. And I think suggesting a policy, a follow-on policy for the Biden administration that was a lot more like what we saw from the Obama administration. But think about that. The United States was putting pressure on the Iranian regime for all the reasons I've just stated.

The Iranian regime is out spending, you know, depending on how you count the money, hundreds of millions of dollars, targeting people to kill, looking to exterminate Jews. This is not the same thing. And we shouldn't talk about de-escalation in sort of parallel ways. It's sort of shocking when you hear them talk about it that way. So the big question is whether the Biden administration will change policies. There was a briefing in the Senate last night. Biden administration and U.S. intelligence officials walked senators through the Biden administration's response and possible policy outcomes. And senators were told, according to Senator Mike Lee, who wrote about this publicly, that the Biden administration can still decide to withhold the $6 billion in funds that were frozen or that were unfrozen.

or that were unfrozen as part of this hostage deal that returned five hostages to the United States. If that is the case, that should have happened already. And all of these, and we should be doing everything we can possibly do to tighten the screws on the Iranian regime. Every financial tool, every rhetorical tool, building alliances, pressure on Iran in internal domestic, we can finally support in a way that we haven't really,

the women's movement inside of Iran who are fighting against these oppressive job measures. There's so much more that we can do if we decide that the Biden administration decides we should stop treating Iran like a would-be ally and start treating Iran like the enemy it has shown

itself to be. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a

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purchase of a website or domain. With the RBC Avion Visa, you can book any airline, any flight, anytime. So start taking off your travel list. Grand Canyon? Grand. Great Barrier Reef? Great. Galapagos? Galapagos? Switch and get up to 55,000 avion points that never expire. Your idea of never missing out happens here. Conditions apply. Visit rbc.com slash avion. David, uh, let's move to the U.S. and how this is working here among Americans. And I want to start just really broadly, sort of culturally, with kind of how we think about anti-Semitism versus anti-Israelism

and whether those two can be distinguished anymore this week. Because I think before this, there was a sense of like, oh, no, no, no. I'm not against Jewish people. I'm against the government of Israel or the state of Israel, Zionism versus anti-Semitism type thing, anti-Zionism versus anti-Semitism. Those two very much felt like they merged this week in a different way than we've seen in the past in the United States. Yeah, well, they were already mostly merged because to be clear, you know, one definition of anti-Semitism that is directly relevant to this is when you take the nation of Israel

and you hold it to a standard that you hold no other nation to, and then say, I'm just, it's just about the government. Oh, really? Well, there's a lot of governments and a lot of nations with a lot of ethnicities and histories that you don't hold to the same standard, but you are taking the world's only Jewish nation and holding it to a standard, you hold no other nation.

I mean, this has long been kind of, I see you, I see who you really are. For those who have eyes to see, it's been apparent for a really long time, which is not to say that you can't disagree with the Netanyahu administration, that you can't completely disagree, say, with his approach to the Israeli courts

or Israeli society or whatever. But this notion that we're going to hold Israel to this standard, you don't hold anyone else to. It's always been. Can I make a quick point on this? point here, because I wrote a G-File a couple of years ago on what I called structural anti-Semitism on essentially this point. So these stats are from 2021. And I wrote, according to the UN Watch database, since 2015 alone, the Human Rights Council, which we were just

talking about, has issued condemnations for Russia 12 times, North Korea six times, United States seven times, Syria, eight times, China zero times, Pakistan zero, Venezuela zero, Libya, Cuba, zero, Turkey, zero, Zimbabwe zero, Israel, 112 times. In 2020 alone, it received 73.9% of all condemnations by the UN General Assembly. Yeah. That's just some data. So that's anti-Semitism right there. So there's always been, I've always been very suspicious of this distinction unless there's real evidence of good faith here.

But you're right, Sarah, going forward after this attack, this kind of idea. and you're going to actually see some proof in the pudding here really soon, which is, do we treat Israel's response to Hamas and Gaza differently than we treated the American, British, French, Iraqi, Kurdish, Syrian response to ISIS in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi, Raqa, Ramadi, Raqa. It's because it's not like we haven't seen this movie before. And if we're going to see a completely different standard applied to Israel here versus us, ourselves in Mosul, in Raqa elsewhere, then you're going to see how the anti-Semitism, the double standard anti-Semitism of the international community continues to have a long reach. But I will say this, I have never seen in a shorter amount of time the far left.

light its cultural credibility on fire more decisively, more emphatically, more defiantly than we've seen in the last 72 to 96 hours here in the United States and abroad. The celebrations on college campuses that we've seen in Times Square that we've seen have absolutely torched. And it is very interesting to me, you don't even see the major figures in the Democratic Party, many of them other with a notorious exception of a very quickly deleted Gretchen Whitmer response, you don't see them even giving a side hug to the far left right now. You know, you want to talk about sister soldier moments. AOC, Jamal Bowman, you know, some of the people who you would be looking to to see what

they're going to do absolutely said that rally in New York was disgusting. despicable, like they've made no bones about it. There's no sidehug. Yeah, it's remarkable. And so you're seeing a far left that not too long ago, I mean, even as recent as 2020, perhaps had more raw cultural power than I've ever seen in my entire life, has just, in some cases, literally lit that in fire on fire with the riots in 2020. But it is absolutely just lit it on fire. And it will be a long time. before mainstream Americans listened to a lot of these figures

basically on anything again. So General, let's talk about the politics of that. Support for Israel has jumped substantially this week, according to polling. Almost all of that coming from Democrats, who, until this week, for the first time, had been more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis in polling.

It had really just switched. and that was driven by young people in the Democratic Party. That has obviously changed this week, support for Israel ticking up double digits among Democrats. However, it is still the case that Democrats certainly support Israel less than Republicans right now and that young people support Israel substantially less than older people and that young people tend to be Democrats, right? So, like, this is all sort of part of the whole.

However, I want you to weigh in on this too, which is Donald Trump this week calling Hezbollah very smart, quote unquote, for attacking Israel from the north, something that actually wasn't true, that had been known to not be true for about eight hours by the time he said it, also saying that he'll never forget that Israel didn't participate in the Soleimani operation, that Israel, quote, let us down. They need to straighten it out, called them weak, saying they should strengthen themselves up, I guess, let me just tell you my concern, right? That Donald Trump leads the Republican base in terms of who they support and what they should think. Also, in a negative polarization reaction to Donald Trump, he also leads what the Democratic base thinks. Whatever Donald Trump is for, the Republican base is for. And whatever Donald Trump is for, the Democratic base is against knee-jerk reaction. Doesn't matter if it's the color, you know, purple or puppies or, you know, grass.

So what am I about to see here with Israel if Donald Trump is now attacking Israel and calling them weak? And the politics of this, you know, we entered it the way we entered it. Yeah. And also the vague Ramoswami on this Tucker Carlson thing. Oh, yeah, I didn't mention Tucker Croson. Go for it. Oh, gosh. Vivek Wormizwamy basically said that the double the double standards where we care about what happens to Israel,

but not places like Nagorno-Karabakh, for which we all know of Vivek's longstanding passion for the plight of Nagorno-Kalras. It's been an issue for a decade. Can only be explained by certain financial interests being at play. And so that's going to be interesting. So, look, I think you're right. I mean, I think part of the explanation of Trump's position, people forget a couple weeks ago, a month ago, something like that, Trump had these weird series of posts where he attacked liberal Jews for not being more grateful to him for what he did for Israel. And it was pretty gross.

And I also seem to remember maybe I just got this wrong that he was pissed at BB Netanyahu for recognizing Biden as the president of the United States after the election. So, you know, I think he, because he's a personalist, right? I mean, in the political science sense, he thinks that countries are led by the people in charge of them and that they are absolutely the personification of those places. That's how he views himself when he was president. That's why he likes presidents like Xi and Putin because it's made clear that these are basically de facto monarchs who are the expressions of.

the people's will and all that kind of stuff. And so he's pissed at Israel because he's pissed at Bibi. And that's gross and stupid, but, you know, what chapter we are on that story. I agree that it could be a real problem if Trump decides to come up with some sort of clever, you know, strong man take about Israel. At the same time, it's not my biggest concern going forward on this. I mean, I just, my biggest concern is, that the inability of both sides to sort of lose the plot on what's going on in Israel.

And I have such contempt for the Republicans who want to use, who want to sort of use the issue of Israel to say, this is why we can't do anything for Ukraine, which I find to be logically, and morally kind of bizarre. But I think my real concern has to do with the question you've asked me at the beginning of this episode, which was how long is the shot clock before people start to say, all right, Israel cut it out? And the more we try to turn what's happening in Israel into a story about Joe Biden or Donald Trump or the speaker's race or any of these other things,

people are going to say, I'm sick of politics. This Israel thing is politics. It's not, you know, it's just another one of these things that gets through the grinder of culture war stuff. I don't want anything to do with it. Just make this TV show stop. That's what I'm mostly worried about. And I think Trump's role will contribute to that, but so will a lot of other people. Steve, is this the result of the end of American interest in being, you know, the quote unquote, World Police, Pax Americana, however you wanted to think about it, that the bad guys were afraid of American involvement. And then maybe it was the Iraq War. Maybe it's just this rising isolationism within the country. Maybe it's something else. That's no longer what's

controlling world events that we've had unprecedented peace on this planet. It doesn't mean everything's been peaceful. But if you look at, you know, deaths. caused by conflict, it has been incredibly low for the last 70 years when America became sort of the chief superpower. And certainly since the Cold War, when America was the only superpower, that feels like it's changing. Yeah, but at the same time, I mean, we've certainly seen, I mean, I don't know that we've ever seen attacks like this, but we've seen attacks of this kind before.

And throughout that time period when America was... But add in Ukraine, add in what's going to happen in Taiwan. I mean, right? Is there any question left at this point of what's going to happen in Taiwan? No. So like all of that together makes this feel like a tenuous moment to me. Yeah. So I agree with your broad point, but I think Jonah's point is very important.

I mean, there is this tendency to look at everything through an American prism and to assign causality where a causality. where causality may or may not exist. I mean, a lot of these things are going to happen no matter who's president and no matter what the policies are. Having said that, as I mentioned before, I do think some of this is a response to policy decisions, right? If Iran has 30 billion more dollars to make trouble in the neighborhood because of deliberate policy decisions the Biden administration,

we should be clear-eyed about that and we should judge the policies accordingly. Yeah, I mean, there is this, I mean, it's an interesting and unique moment. I think Donald Trump led us to it, to a certain extent, this eagerness on the part of some on the right to turn to turn inside, to look within and to sort of fortify our borders and hunker down and not deal with the world. And it's all easier because they are the troublemakers, that they, in quotes. There's no question that those views are more widely held today than they were 20, 30 years ago. And I think it's fair to infer that difficult foreign policy challenges like the Iraq War, like what we saw in Afghanistan. have given rise to those sentiments. I don't think there's really any doubt about that.

I guess the question is, as we see more elected Republicans articulating those views, is whether this is sort of an inexorable march to American retreat or whether, in my view, sanity can prevail because we have elected members of Congress, elected Republicans who understand that the world is complicated, it's messy, we're not always going to be able to determine outcomes of various situations, but that we should try to influence outcomes where we can and shape outcomes in a way that benefits the United States and to do so unapologetically. I think those are pretty important distinctions. And, you know, one of the things I don't quite have a handle on is how much of the articulation of this sort of retreatist mentality on the right is, you know, a function of long-held views or people who have given us a lot of thought or people who are pointing to specific policy decisions saying these were unwise, we should refocus.

And how much of it is just sort of the next wave of this kind of performative politics that we see on the right, the kind of tough guy Trump imitators who are taking what I think is mostly just Trump's, as Jonah said, you know, personalization of these international political, the role of the U.S., and trying to impose on it some broader worldview. I think there's a lot to that. I mean, I think every time somebody like J.D. Vance can say, I don't care what happens in Ukraine, you know, he gets off on being that kind of that guy. And I care about U.S. borders and not Ukrainian borders. You don't hear that many people saying, I care about U.S. borders and not Israeli borders anymore. There's, I think, a limit to how long those arguments can hang together or can appear to hang together. Can I also just jump on that for a second, sitting here in the heart of Maga Land?

The rhetoric online on the right is way different from, and getting weirder and more different from just the way normal people talk. Now, sadly, a lot of that real weirdness by the right online is sometimes a leading edge indicator that more normal folks will get there weeks, months, maybe, a year or two later, they'll sort of get into that mode. But I have just noticed an increasing gap between kind of the online rhetoric of the Charlie Kirk Wright, the sort of the J.D. Vance Wright, the Tucker Carlson Wright, from any, it's so far away from the normal experience of people.

It's kind of like hearing people who are just deep into like the DCEU or the you know, Marvel extended universe versus regular people. And so I don't know how that's going to cut over the long term, but I do think it is absolutely the case that the weirdness on the right is both narrowing and intensifying. And it is separating from the bulk of the right-leaning population in the U.S., and there has to be a way to exploit that. Okay, with a few minutes remaining, because I think we'll be talking about this issue,

including all the subjects that we didn't get to. And I know there's a zillion of them, the campus issue, the cancel culture issue, all of that. I think that can all wait for next week. Instead, let's just spend a few minutes on the speaker's race. So the Republicans in their closed-door conference where their phones were taken away, voted by a pretty narrow majority to back Steve Scalise as their nominee for speaker, Steve. and yet it doesn't feel like we're anywhere close to having a speaker because it's one thing to go with a majority vote in the Republican conference

and it's another thing to get the 217 votes that you'll need when you only have a 5-seat majority in the entire House of Representatives. So a couple questions here. One, are we going to have a speaker? Are we going to have 17 rounds to get to Steve's Gleas? Can we even do that in 17 rounds, whatever it is, voting? And is this now the new reality when you have just such a small majority? Like, is this just what it is? And we should just not really worry about the House of Representatives

until we have another election and the American people can be more clear on who they'd like running the government. And the consequences of not having a House of Representatives. On the one hand, it's not like they were legislating. On the other hand, you know, there's some stuff going on in the Middle East that we might want to weigh in on. I mean, the House has important legislative function. So we need to worry about the House of Representatives and it would be nice to have one that function. Look, I mean, the fundamentals here haven't changed, right? And this is a small majority, a small majority Republicans have and a group bigger than the number that makes up that majority or that gives them that majority

who don't want the House to function. That's the problem. And as long as that's the case, will be the case through the 2024 elections. This is what this will look like. And I think we're likely to see the Republicans in the House sort of stumble along, fits and starts. They'll, you know, we'll get some emergency funding when we absolutely need it, maybe on a bipartisan basis. They'll address problems late,

probably right before they reach crisis level. And then we'll have more of this stuff. I don't think we should assume that anything will change or change for the better in the near term absent, a change in the composition of the house. Hey, David, I'm going to come to you next on this question, but we've actually decided to have Jonah leave the podcast while we were recording because he has been hacked.

And while we obviously don't know who did that or the cause, I have a feeling it's not unrelated to the conversation we were previously having. So I wanted to mention it to people on the podcast. But let's stay on topic. Do you have any other thoughts on the speaker race? I mean, really minimal in that, look, you're dealing with a small group of people

who are beyond reason. And you're trying to reason with people who are beyond reason. And the Republicans don't have a plan for this. And the only thing they can really say at the moment is, well, Democrats, can you please bail us out? Assuming no big breaks or big changes in that small group of people, because, you know, look, the caucus votes for Scalise, and then they have to table the vote because already you start

to have these defections that rise, and they just, they don't have a plan. They don't have a means to deal with this. And then there's always a sort of right-wing infotainment world, sort of with Steve Bannon at the center of it that is that's a landing place for these guys to cast themselves as heroes while they continue to torch the Republican Party in the middle of an international crisis like the thoroughly and completely unserious people that they are and look this is what happens I'm just going to be the stand in for Jonah right now character is destiny and when you lie down with wrap your arms around some of the worst

people in American politics, this is what happens. And, you know, I think there's a discussion at some point to be had as to whether for the good of the country, there are some Democrats who should perhaps just vote present or whatever to get us from A to B. But I just find it unbelievable that we're in a position the Republican Party is so incapable of governing itself that now some of the anger is turning to Democrats for not bailing them out when we all know if the squad was holding Nancy Pelosi hostage, the last people in America who would bail out the Democratic Party would be Republicans. So it's just, I mean, what is, well, what is there to say you have horrible people in your coalition, some of the worst people in American politics, welcome to reality.

And just to add to that, I mean, it bears repeat. This has been sort of a theme on this podcast going back many, many months. These people who are sort of legislative nihilists would be legislative nihilists, regardless of whether they had support or regardless of whether people allowed their voices to be amplified. But Kevin McCarthy chose to empower them. He chose to elevate them. And, you know, I think it's responsible to some degree for what we've seen that they had the power to do what they did. They wouldn't have had the power to vacate the chair with a single move had McCarthy not agreed to that demand.

So in that case, quite literally we wouldn't be seeing what we're seeing. But it's also you have so many of the members of the leadership who are out for themselves. And Kevin McCarthy, I would say more than any of them. You know, he is booted from the speaker's chair and says he's done. He's never going to be speaker. He's not interested. He's stepping away. There were reports that were pretty quickly knocked down that he might even be leaving Congress.

And in the days since, he has seemed to mount a resurrection campaign. He has done all sorts of, he's acted like he's speaker. He's giving press conferences like he's speaker. He's said when asked if he's interested in being speaker again, this is a decision for the conference, you know, plainly making himself available to be speaker if they want him to be speaker. His team has apparently been whipping on behalf of Jim Jordan and against Steve Scalise, one of the least kept secrets in Washington. D.C. was this really antipathy between Steve Scalise and Kevin McCarthy as they shared leadership. And Mike Warren, our colleague, did a very good piece on this back in the spring. And of course, the McCarthy people denied this and Scalese people denied this.

But everybody understood that that was the case. There is news as we are talking right now that Kevin McCarthy is just given sort of an informal press conference and really take. making a shot at Steve Scalise, pointing out that Scalise may not be able to get to 16, which is the magic number. That is just an observation. That's not necessarily a shot. But then McCarthy said, it's possible, but it's a big hill. He, Scalise, told a lot of people that he was going to be at 150 and he wasn't there.

So, which is just like in this moment as you're trying to get this back together. Kevin McCarthy wants to position himself as a uniter, the fact that he's sort of playing out petty political differences in public, I think underscores just the chaotic moment that we're in. Okay. And with that, we're not going to do not worth your time today because right now this all seems a little bit too much worth our time. So thank you for joining us. We'll talk about some of this again next week and take care of yourselves. I don't know. Calling all Book Lovers.

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