The Dispatch Podcast - Live from New York: Steve and Jonah Drink and React

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

In this inebriated live recording, Jonah and Steve take over a Manhattan bar to talk Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and the unhinged candidate making good on his promises. The two go back and forth on whether the GOP debates actually matter, and Steve gives Jonah a rare compliment. For the full discussion which include a Q/A portion with members, subscribe to The Skiff CLICK HERE to get your personal feed. How to subscribe to The Skiff: To follow The Skiff on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you catch your podcasts, please follow these instructions: Choose which device you prefer to listen on (Mac, iOS, Android…). Click here to get your personal feed. (Make sure you’re logged in as a Dispatch member!) Select The Skiff. Select your device and podcast player (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, etc.): this will let you subscribe to the feed for direct updates! Note: If your preferred podcast player asks you to subscribe by RSS feed you’ll need to copy and paste a URL link. To get that link, go back to the menu with all of the options to subscribe (the page with all of the player logos), scroll to the bottom, and copy the link you see there. Then, go back to your player and paste it in the field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Joined by Jonah Goldberg. You are correct, sir. I felt like Rhonda, I felt like Ronda Sanders to your Nikki Haley with that audience reaction there. At least you're not Vivek. Give me time. All right, let's do a few questions about the debate. And then we're going to move on to bigger stuff.

Jonah. Before the debate, Vivek Ramoswamy told ABC News that his goal for the debate was to, and I quote here, be unhinged. It's actually what he said, in quotes, ABC News reported it. Did he meet his objectives? Look, I personally feel in this. time of loss of faith and trust in institutions, that it's actually nice to see a politician follow through in a campaign promise. You know, I think Unhinged would have actually been better because Unhinged implies just sort of

letting your freak flag fly and, you know, sort of like Joe Biden, circa 1983, shouting, get these squirrels off of me or something. He seemed really focused and determined to be a dick. And he executed really, really well. I particularly liked him saying that Nikki Haley was a hypocrite and a failure because her married 25-year-old daughter is on TikTok, which was the thing that elicited the don't mention her name, or don't talk about it or you scum

which I thought the scum part of the quote was the most important part I think. Is that going to be the most played sound bite coming out of this debate you think? It's definitely going to be a GIF for a long time probably

I mean I'm trying to think sometimes you're kind of surprised but yeah no I think it's going to have to be oh the Dick Cheney and high heels thing and for the record I would vote for Dick Cheney in the high heels like five times. But, yeah, I think...

Would you call that a blessing of liberty? Easy, killer. So I mostly just ask that question to tee up to say something about Vivek Ramoswamy. But if I can try to make a semi-serious point about this, why would a Republican candidate in 2023 wants to be, the GOP nominees running for President of the United States offer in public that his goal is to be unhinged

so what does that tell us about this moment I think he's probably telling the truth like I think that action is what he was trying to do yeah so first of all I'm in the Nick Coteo Geo camp that thinks he's essentially stalking horse blocking tackle whatever for Donald Trump and so the strategy

that goes with that the strategy and tactics that goes with that aim and that purpose don't really fit normal politics, never mind Republican politics. I think there are all sorts of

all sorts of ways to think about it and it's essentially when he says I'm going to be unhinged it's kind of a dog whistle I'm against the Uniparty. I'm against I'm not going to play by the rules. You know,

his opening question, his opening answer was about how this debate should be moderated by Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan. And, you know, it's like, why do you leave out Colonel Sanders? I mean, it's just like, I think it's just sort of, I'm transgressive, I'm questioning everything. And there's a segment of a very online right that just likes that's, that sort of dataistic rejection of all the norms, rejection of all the expectations things. and thinks that it is a stand in for a courage or something. So for a good part of this debate,

almost a little more than an hour, if you exclude the first questions about the candidates differentiating themselves from Donald Trump, there was a semi-serious and rather substantive discussion about big global issues. And one could be forgiven, if you were listening to most of that debate among these five candidates

for thinking that this was a lot closer to the Republican Party of 2005 than it was of the Republican Party today, which seems sort of caught in this pitched debate

between, I would love to say between sort of principled non-interventionism and stronger, more assertive America on the global stage. I think, in fact, it's really stronger, more assertive America on the global stage and sort of knee-jerk isolationism without the principles,

unfortunately. What did you make of that discussion? Didn't it seem like a throwback for that hour? Yeah, but I think that's generally been true of the previous debates as well. I mean, the second debate for sure was, with the exception of Vivek, it was a bunch of people arguing in the general orbit of Reaganite politics, you know, with maybe DeSantis a little further out from, you know, the, you know, the sun than some of the others. But for the most part, I think that's one of the things that's encouraging to me is that, you know, my friend Charles. Cook, you know, recently was talking about how Trump is essentially this just giant electromagnet that is screwing with everybody's compasses. And when Donald Trump's not around, the sort of natural instinct to the Republican Party is to basically talk like Republicans, again, with the exception that I think of a vect.

And that's one of the reasons I haven't given up all hope long term. on the Republican Party because I think that's where its DNA still is. If you watch, you know, DeSantis' rollout advertising when he launched, it was very Reaganite. It's about freedom and liberty and liberty and freedom and strong America and a freaking eagle fighting a bear. And, you know, it was great. And so that's, I think, where the GOP wants to be.

And if voters want to hear it, it's just they also. also would prefer to be entertained by Donald Trump. And that's the weird dichotomy that we're in. So we, as we mentioned earlier, in one of the commercial breaks, I asked you about the first question, which was, in effect, tell us why you want to run with the Republican Party and how are you different than Donald Trump. Not many memorable answers given to that question. And I was struck for the rest of the two hours at the, uh,

lack of attention paid to Donald Trump. Like, this is somebody who's, depending on which poll you believe, is leading this field, these five candidates on stage between 40 and 51 points in Republican Party polling. Why are these candidates not talking more about Donald Trump? Well, you know the answer to this as well as I do. They all want to be the last one standing to then go after Trump and be the alternative to Trump. and it's the same belly and the cat problem with a slightly different game theory

that we saw in 2016. I personally think that the bickering between DeSantis, not just on the debate tonight, but just in general, the bickering between DeSantis and Nikki Haley is just kind of silly and unpersuasive. I don't think either of them have done anything as governors or as, you know,

anything else vis-a-vis China that says that they're not qualified to be tough with China. I don't, I don't, I think that China's buying farmland thing is sort of ridiculous. Fact check, if we go to war with China, we're not going to like still send them our soybeans. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't let them have land near military bases or sensitive national security things, but there's a certain amount of just sort of like, you, it's Chinese kind of talk with these guys. But generally speaking, I, I think that the, the, the, the, with the exception of effect, all these guys would be acceptable to me as alternatives to Trump.

And they just all think that they know, and we know this from focus groups and from polling, that the one thing even people who are open to not voting for Trump don't want to hear to large part is people attack Donald Trump. And so the old rules of like, go attack the guy you're trying to beat just don't work here. and it just seems weird and sometimes it's cowardly and sometimes it's smart and sometimes I can't tell the difference personally.

But I don't think, like, if these guys thought attacking Trump would actually work, they would attack Trump. But at the same time, we can say definitively without fear of any contradiction that not really attacking Trump

is not working. Yes. Nobody is gaining in the polls. Nikki Haley has added, she's doubled her standing the pole. roughly from 5% to 10% or 7% to 14%. So what they're currently doing...

And that way is not working. And that way is not working. I mean... How much of this is about 2020? Do you think some of these candidates are not really running with any hope of winning in 2024? Well, I mean, like most of me, most of my head thinks Vivek is not actually running for president.

But then there's like 10% of me that thinks, no, he's like who's that Stephen King movie where Charlie Sheen plays the president and he, yeah, he's kind of like this freaky dead zone guy that we're going to see on the cover of Newsweek holding up a baby to protect themselves

from a sniper. But, you know, look, do I think Tim Scott would be perfectly happy to be Trump's vice president? Maybe not perfectly happy, but he would say yes. So I don't know. What's your answer?

to this? I mean, there was one question tonight where Tim, I can't remember the topic or the subject, but Tim Scott was asked a general question, and went out of, I think it was about China, and went out of his way to defend Trump. I mean, it was not, nobody's pushing him to do this, the question, premise the question didn't involve Trump. And he said, well, Donald Trump tried to do this twice. What was the topic? Oh, banning TikTok. Banning TikTok. Donald Trump tried to do this twice, but there were federal... Which, by the way, Nikki Haley's daughter is on. I just want you to know that.

Yeah, it does seem like Tim Scott is going very much. Who I think it was fair to say was a Trump skept, was willing to be more critical than most other senators through a good chunk of the Trump administration, is now, seems to be looking for opportunities to play to Donald Trump, to talk up Donald Trump. I will say, I find Ron DeSantis is. campaign strategy utterly perplexing. If you look at the polling, we've talked about this before, look at the polling of Iowa, likely Iowa caucus goers. You've got 30 percent, I don't remember the exact numbers, but this is in the Anselaer Des Moines Register Poll, very good pollster, very good

poll. You got 30-ish percent of people who are hardcore Trump, they're only voting for Trump, that's the end of it. You've got another 35, 40 percent who say, look, I think Trump was a pretty good president and I love everything he did and I'm open to voting for alternatives. And then you've got another 25% who say, I don't want to vote for Trump. And DeSantis seems to be determined to go for the 30% who say that they're locked in to Donald Trump rather than the 70%, 70 plus percent, who say they're open to voting for somebody else. And increasingly it looks like, I mean, Chris Christie's sort of in his own category. And Nikki Haley, I think, has gotten a little bolder in the past couple weeks. But increasingly, it seems like the feel.

just running for second place. They're not actually running to beat Donald Trump. Well, I mean, it feels that way in part because that's what they're doing, right? It's like, I'm getting this sneaking suspicion that my dog wants to pee on that hydrant because it's being on the hydrant. You know, like these guys are running essentially for second place. And there is this thing. Look, it's deeply ingrained in a lot. lot of people that there is going to be this Deiasex Makina that is going to solve this, right?

That he's going to be convicted, that he is going to be, that one day he's going to say, does anyone smell burnt hair and just keel over? And then all of a sudden, they're going to be in this great place to solve everything. And, you know, it's funny. We've talked about this a bunch on the podcast. You know, one of the main reasons why Gavin Newsom or some other Democrat with important hair isn't running against Biden is that it's not so much

that they're afraid of being disloyal to Biden or punished for challenging a sitting president is they're terrified of being held accountable for getting Trump elected because that does just kill you in the Democratic Party, right? I think there's a similar thing among these guys is that they are hedging because they know that if they go full nuclear

against Trump, they get thrown in the list, Cheney, Chris Christie column, and they can never run for office again. And so they're just pulling their punches on a lot of this to keep their options open for another day. And, you know, I find it frustrating. But, and you combine that with this just sort of hope that, you know, God won't do this to us again, so I should keep my powder dry when Trump is taken off the board.

And that's how you get this sort of thing. I will say DeSantis has been going after Trump pretty hard lately on, and clearly on issues and in ways that are very, very targeted. I would be loved to see the focus group stuff about why they think certain criticisms work and other ones don't. But, you know, one of the big problems they've had now is that it, I mean, I still think Trump will have a hard time winning in 2024, but no one can say it's impossible anymore given, you know, just the way the polls and the situation looks right now.

So you mentioned Gavin Newsom. There's actually been a lot of news, or at least a lot of discussion over the past week, week and a half about Joe Biden in his electoral viability, polls out this weekend from the New York Times in Sienna, showing Donald Trump beating Joe Biden head-to-head in a number of very important swing states. Before that, you saw a Republican, I mean, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, Dean Phillips actually announced that he's running for president and do the things that presidential candidates are supposed to do. After this polling came out, David Axelrod, a former top advisor to Barack Obama, sent a series of tweets, in effect saying Joe Biden ought to think pretty hard about his viability.

because his age only goes in one direction and it's not going to be more positive for him. And it's lime jello day at the home. How much does this stuff matter? I think it could matter, right? So let me disagree with you about one thing. You said Dean Phillips is doing the things that you need to do to challenge Joe.

He's actually not. normally challenges in your own party to an incumbent president are always about an issue or a set of issues, right? I mean, Pap Buchanan challenging George H.W. Bush was about foreign policy. And it was sort of like that scene in Blues Brothers, you know, what kind of music you play here, both kinds, country and Western. You know, Buchanan's indictment of H.W. Bush was about just two things, foreign and domestic policy.

but Ross Perot was about I mean he wasn't a challenger from within the party but you know it's a third party thing it was about debt and deficits in trade you know Nader all these kinds of people they have issues about why they're challenging incumbents and that kind of thing

and Dean Films is just saying I agree with him on everything he's just too frigging old but he's speaking for a lot of people six in ten yeah yeah yeah I'm not saying he's wrong 74% of the country, six in 10, Democrats have said they would like to see a challenge. I agree.

I agree. My only point is that this is something actually new in modern politics to say, I agree entirely with the incumbent president. I just think he's too old. It's kind of a weird indictment because there are a lot of young people who don't agree with the president. And the young thing is kind of a euphemism for he's out of touch. He doesn't understand, you know, where young people are today or where, you know, people of color are today or how important it is to, you know, be supportive and empowering and nurturing of Hamas.

And, you know, so, like, it's just a, it's a weird kind of moment. That said, you know, there's a real non-trivial chance that Joe Biden is not the nominee, right? and it could be, again, because he falls down a flight of stairs, it could be for all sorts of things. I do think that neither of them, but wait, so we'll back up. I've been saying this for a while now. Both Trump and Biden should be viewed as weak incumbents. Joe Biden's poll numbers are classically those of a weak incumbent. And everyone understands that because he's the actual incumbent.

But Donald Trump is seen by a lot of Republicans as they de facto president, ahead of the party, robs, rigged election, all that kind of stuff. And his numbers are very much like that of a weak incumbent. Like an actual incumbent is supposed to have 90, 95% support of his own party. Donald Trump has half that, right? Joe Biden has half that. And but that's still historically more than enough to, win the nomination, it just makes you incredibly vulnerable.

And so I can talk to you to on blue in the face about how Donald Trump can't win, but I can also talk to you on blue in the face of how easy it would be for Joe Biden to lose. It's just a very weird situation. And just the last point on this, I had to correct some people on CNN about this yesterday. I never have to correct people in CNN. They're always so right. But they were talking about how Donald Trump is looking stronger than ever, and he's doing much better in the polls. He's not doing better in the polls.

It's so that Joe Biden is doing so much worse that by comparison he's doing better, it's a subtle point, but like Donald Trump has lost support from 2020 and 2016. He is not as strong as he once was, but Joe Biden is even weaker.

And that's the weird thing about the situation, because it's so hard to game out. And I don't know. How do you see it? I think the discussion about Biden not completing his run as a real one. What David Axelrod said, I think he was basically articulating the views of many rank and

file Democratic voters as reflected in polling about this, but also many very nervous Democratic elected officials. Some of them are, I think, primarily concerned that, you know, something could happen to Joe Biden between the time that he, you know, becomes the de facto Democratic nominee. And Election Day, I think others of them are worried that he can't campaign. We've got a year until Election Day, 363 days, I think. That's a long time. And the reality is Joe Biden doesn't look.

He knows it's 363 because he cuts a little hashtag in his thigh every morning. So, remind himself. I think there's a good reason to believe that he could be asking these questions of himself. He's had a number of people who have publicly, including people who are Joe Biden fans, admirers, supporters who have said, you should really rethink this. Yeah. This is the frustrating thing. Enormous amount of polls now. The vast majority, the significant majority of Americans don't want either of these guys to run again.

I mean, that is like established in the polls. And it is obvious, it is such a collective action problem, right? a generic Republican, this is one of the most glaring things that comes out of the New York Times Sienna numbers, a generic Republican would destroy Joe Biden. Like, you look at Nikki Haley's numbers against Joe Biden, she would destroy Joe Biden. To the extent these things are predictive and all that kind of stuff, but I have a really hard time seeing how they could go negative on Nikki Haley, or frankly, even Ron DeSantis, although it would be easier for Democrats, the way they could go after Trump. And I think that almost any other Democrat could destroy Donald Trump in the coming election. We are poised to have, for the second time in eight years, an election where both candidates are so unpopular, they each have a chance to lose to the other, right? Which is what happened in 2016.

My favorite poll finding from 2016 was that one in ten Republican voters said they would be very disappointed if Donald Trump, was elected, and they were going to vote for Donald Trump, right? I mean, it just shows it. But Hillary Clinton was so toxic that it was just one of these weird situations. And, like, that's what we're heading into. And I know I can't get into my Remnant-style rant about weak parties. But if either party actually had the power to protect its own interests and the interests of members of its party,

the party would go to Joe Biden and say, here is this fantastic watch. we're going to get you a smaller dog that won't bite anybody and you should go and play with your grandkids and you know isn't that what axelrod is doing i think that's what david axelot is doing so i haven't talked to him about it personally i know him pretty well i don't know that that's what he's doing but that's sure what it feels like

yeah i talk to some people in in biden world about this and they roll their eyes at it because the hostilities between Biden world and Obama world are serious and I was actually on air with Kate Bedinfield who was Biden's former communications director and she literally rolled her eyes on air

I actually had to pick up one of her eyes because it fell out of her head and she straight up compared you know like Axelrod to Doug Schone and said that this is just nothing and this is just what people every, every season people do this. And the thing is, the problem is, like,

this story that the Biden people are telling themselves that Biden knows how to beat Trump because he beat Trump once before is just nonsense to me, right? Joe Biden, first of all, you can tell he's lost steps just since 2020. But second of all, they talk about how he has the playbook to beat Trump.

And again, I don't, I think Biden can beat Trump. I just don't think it's a lot. But like the playbook from 2020 was he actually had a really good excuse to be in his basement because there was COVID and and he had people who wanted normalcy and people believed his promises of normalcy. Four years later, it doesn't feel normal, right? It doesn't feel like he delivered on the normalcy. It feels like he's not up to the challenges, you know, facing the country. you get a lot of New York Times sort of columnist types

who talk about, oh, these robs and flyover country, they don't understand how much better the economy is and how good the economy is. And they are right as a top line number kind of thing. But in actual, you know, like you tell people, oh, you don't understand how good the economy is,

and you're making too big a deal of the fact that eggs are $8 a carton and you can't get a home loan and then, you know, and they say, well, yeah, but the rate of increase of inflation is decreasing, which is sort of like saying, okay, I know yesterday it was 105 degrees, but today it's only 107. So the rate of increase of temperature increases is slowing down.

So don't you more comfortable, right? I mean, it doesn't make it. It's not how people live it. And I think my burger meat costs too much. Yeah, my burger meat costs right. And so like there's good signs in the economy. me, our colleague, Andrew Eggers, was making this point on an editorial meeting the other day about how when good things happen to people individually, they think it's because of them.

I got a good job, I got a promotion, I got a raise. When bad things happen, like my groceries cost $250, they think that's the system. So Biden's getting blamed for the bad things in the economy, and where there are good things in the economy, people are saying, I deserve all the credit for it. And I think that's actually pretty explanatory of a lot of this. 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

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I'd like to spend a moment on Israel, and then we're going to open it up for questions from the audience. September, I don't know what the day after Labor Day is next year, but it's the day after Labor Day someday early in September. Are Joe Biden and Donald Trump the nominees of their respective parties? I like this. I don't know when it is,

but I know that the day after Labor Day is the Day after Labor Day formulation. It's when most people start paying attention to Paul. Yeah, no, I know you're right. It's just like it's sort of axiomatic. It's like, do you know when the day after Labor Day is? That day after Labor Day. It's a trick question, Jonah. That's what I always assume.

I think one of them isn't. I'm not going to bet big on that. I want to put a thing to you about this. So everybody has been talking about how Donald Trump needs to be elected president so he can pardon himself, right? And then crush his enemies and see them driven before him and hear the lamentations of the women. But like, first and foremost, pardon himself, right?

And I think that's true. I think that's part of his head, right? I've also always thought that if he doesn't get the nomination, he will happily screw the party and do a Georgia again, right? That has been my baseline assumption because he's always said he would be rather, in word and deed, he said he'd rather be the king of a small Republican party than one power player among many and a large Republican party.

And then it dawned on me, if he's not the nominee he's still going to need a pardon right so like if he tanks it for DeSantis and gets Biden elected Biden's not going to pardon him so it actually is weird

if you can figure out how to deprive him the nomination maybe the fact that he's going to be in criminal jeopardy makes him be a loyal Republican for the first time am I crazy about that no you're not crazy I mean, I'll take it. You're not crazy about that. I do believe that he's worried, bordering on obsessed about the pardon question.

I think you're giving him too much credit for being strategic. I don't think he's likely to think this way. I think he's likely to have a fit. And what worries me, candidly, about this next year is, the arguments that he started making as the general election approached in 2020, that this was rigged, it was going to be stolen, it was cheated, he made sort of half-heartedly and haphazard. It wasn't a sustained case.

I think part because he thought he was going to win. He is making those arguments now. They're the core of the case that he's taking to Republican primary voters. If you watch any of his rally speeches, this is at the heart of the argument that he's making. Well, that and the, which would you rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted? So those are the two major framings. Two major arguments. But I think what he's doing is he's teeing up this broader argument that it's all rigged, that he's the rightful winner.

You know, whether he needs to raise that argument in a primary contest or in a general election, I think he's going to just stir shit up. And a lot of people are going to follow him. And the way that he's making those arguments that these prosecutions, all of them, are entirely politico and, you know, the sign of sort of deep corruption of the Biden Justice Department. People believe it. I think some of them are political. I think the one in New York is sort of demonstrably political if you have paid attention to her rhetoric. But that worries me.

I think he's far more likely to make that case kind of without regard to whether we actually can get a party. Your point, and again, the problem, one of the problems about co-founding the dispatch with Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg is neither of us say many things that we haven't heard each other say before. And I don't just mean about this stuff.

But part of your argument is what you're worried about is violence. You're worried about, you know, like social unrest, more than the punditry part of it. Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the arguments that each of the party is making to its own base, they're in total conflict. They live in different realities. And the likely outcome of that is one party base or the other that feels like this has been stolen. Yeah. And Donald Trump is priming the case for that right now.

So it worries me. Okay. Okay. Second political question. So it's been a month since the massacre. What have we learned about, for two different questions, world reaction to what's happened? Is anything surprised? and second, what do you make of the response from the left and the campus left?

Are we right to be as surprised as we have been by the levels of anti-Semitism that we've seen? Or was this obvious as if you've paid attention to what's happening on campus, should this have been obvious that we'd get to this point? Yeah. So on the surprise stuff, I mean, I had to say, I was legitimately shocked by the level of some of the barbarity. I mean, people wanting to kill Jews is not, sadly, that's not a new story in world history, and that Hamas wanted to kill Jews or civilians or Israelis. But some of the, if you actually dig into some of the actual specifics, the level of depravity and,

cruelty was just shocking. Other than that, I think there are a lot of interesting stories about the anger at BB Netanyahu in Israel, even from members of his own coalition. I think no one's going to topple him while the war is going on, but unless he, that's some really impressive Churchillian rehabilitation,

his political career in Israel is over once the immediate near chapter of the war is over. I get to say most of the surprises, the most pleasant surprises are weird ones. It's like the president of Portugal is a badass. He's just sort of like, you don't want Israel to bomb these people? Maybe you shouldn't have attacked them. You know, I mean, there's like, like, I had no idea that like the president of Israel, you know, So Portugal would say something like that. There have been a lot of those kinds of things.

The really depressing part and part of it is the campus thing, but it's broader than that. I thought there was a poll this week or the end of the last week. One in five Democrats are affirmatively pro-Hamas. And I'm totally fine with discounting that half of that are idiots who don't know what they're talking about. And they just think, well, being pro-Hamas means pro-Palestinian, and Israel is doing bad. things and occupied blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, I'm sure if you grilled some of these people and you said, so are you actually in favor of cutting off baby's heads or setting fire to families while they're alive or

killing kids in front of their parents or parents in front of their kids or gang rape or any of these things? They'd say, no, some of them, for sure, right? At the end of the day, though, some of them wouldn't. And I think one of the most fascinating psychological phenomena of this whole thing is that the number of people who on the one hand unapologetically, and they're informed, unapologetically defend Hamas while at the same time insisting that factual reporting of what Hamas did is propaganda. It's really weird. How dare you say that Hamas did these things, but if they did

them, it would be fine. It is a really kind of psychologically messed up argument, and it's all over the place once you start looking for it. I just wear the G-File today about some of this where I actually think that the, the, this anti, you know, this, this, this, this settler, colonial, colonial, colonial argument about, you know, Israel is pretextual. I think it gets the causality backwards. People were looking for a new argument to demonize Israel. that's what they came into the process with and they came up with this argument

as a way to rationalize their pre-existing positions in much the same way. Anti-Semitism was a term that was invented by the time Wilhelm Marr in the 19th century to come up with a scientific sounding name for Jew hatred because prior to Marr's Jew hatred was generally a theological thing and he wanted to come up with a scientific reason to hate Jews.

And similarly, I think the anti-Zion thing works the same way. It's like, we can't say we're anti-Semitic, so let's come up with a really interesting phrase that says, we just don't think, we just think Jewish countries and there's only one of them

should have a different standard than all of the others. And this is not to say you can't criticize Israel, but, you know, Adam gave me the idea for the G-File today because it is really weird. If I just said, you know,

freaking believes it just shouldn't exist. We should just erase that place. It was a mistake to make Belize. Right? I mean, look, Canada is a different issue. We shouldn't talk about Canada at a time. But like, you know, like Belgium, just get rid of Belgium. If you like Belgium, you're a bad person, right? And we need to teach kids of three years of highfalutin academic bullshit about why Belgium shouldn't exist. People would think you're strange. But you can say, not only that you're anti-Zionism means

you don't think Israel should exist right? Because Zionism boiled down to its basics says Israel should exist, right? It means that there should be a Jewish homeland for Jews and it should be where it is and so if you're anti that you mean it shouldn't exist.

And people cavalierly say it, they say it so often that in this debate about whether it's anti-Semitic misses erases, or races, the weirdness of just saying, hey, look, I don't hate Jews. I just think their country shouldn't exist, right?

I mean, it's like, I don't, it is, it is, it is, it, it gives a safe space for saying that we should just literally have, you know, a form of genocide. Genocide, according to the UN definition, I have, I hold a lot of receipts on this stuff because the Soviets screwed up the definition of genocide on purpose at the UN. But regardless, genocide isn't merely killing a bunch of people. It's also erasing a culture or erasing a nationality or erasing a religion. And anti-Zionism is, it's for some people it means killing all the Jews. But for a lot of people who insist they're not anti-Semitic, it just means getting rid of their country.

And the way in which that argument is so widespread, so deeply rooted, where you're the bad person if you're offended. That's the most shocking thing, and I'll stop because I could do this for a while. It'd be one thing. Israel from time to time does things that deserve serious criticism. And if you had people freaking out and attacking Jews in the streets and denouncing Israel and saying all sorts of terrible things about Jews and Israel and Zinnis and distrami sandwiches or whatever, because Israel had done something bad, I would disagree with a lot of it, but I kind of understand it. This stuff that we're seeing is in response to Jews objecting

to a wholesale slaughter of Jews the worst sense of the Holocaust. It's like, how dare you be offended by this? How dare you be upset when, you know, again, a lot of the Jews that were killed are like hippy, peacnic, you know, two-state solution, vegetable rights in peace, you know, like crazy left-wing Jews. Those are the ones that that concert. And they were the ones who were slaughtered,

and you see people with 10 years celebrating it, talking about it as if it's this thing that they felt personally liberated. That's what shocked, and what shocking is, like, they're angry at Jews who are angry about it. And that's the thing, I can't forgive, right? I was telling someone earlier tonight,

I'm a bad Jew, right? My deepest and almost abiding connection to Jewish culture is my intense and profound guilt about what a bad Jew I am, right? And it's serious. And I have never been more tempted to wear I'ma all the time

just because I want to become a helicopter of fists when someone of these people tries to do this kind of stuff to me. And that's not a healthy mental space to be in, right? But that's sort of where I am. and we should all have like a 10 second moment of silent appreciation for poor John Podorix who his rate I worry about him having a coronary with his rage he just got off Twitter again today because he just can't handle it um anyway that's sort of where my head is at on this well for those of you who followed the dispatch um followed me and or Jonah or me and me and Jonah together

you'll know how painful it is for me to offer him a public compliment. Oh, no, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. But I'm really glad I asked that question, and that was an amazing answer. So, thank you. You know what I'm going to be.