Loading summary
Transcript60 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:09]
B
Expect the worst Some drinks and pain
- [00:12]
C
Some die at first no way of
- [00:15]
B
knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, June 29, 2026. Hi, I'm Jon Pothorts, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
- [00:36]
D
Hi John.
- [00:37]
B
And senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
- [00:41]
E
Hi, John.
- [00:44]
B
So much to talk about. Not much has changed from the earthquake news last week of the victory primary victories of the Democratic Socialists of America aligned candidates here in New York and the victory a couple of weeks ago in the New Jersey primary of terrorist lover Adam Hammawi. Tomorrow in Colorado, Minat kiros is a 29 year old DSA Hamas loving, refusing to condemn the murder of Jews Lawyer in Denver is trying to unseat a 14 term incumbent progressive incumbent named Diana Deget almost entirely on the grounds that she is insufficiently hateful toward Israel. So all weekend, socially and personally, I have been fielding, I've been participating in conversations about what is going on and what do we do now and how big a store, how big is this? So Abe, how big is this?
- [02:08]
D
It's enormous. I feel as if it's broken through with the elections of a week or so ago. People like us have been on top of this as a sort of moving, rolling, gathering storm. And now normies and the mainstream are waking up to the reality. And what I still don't know is if or when the lunacy of what's happening penetrates to the mainstream. If they look at what's going on in the Democratic Party and say this can't last, this can't stand where you have totally committed, on record, far left progressives who are simply being pushed out of what the DSA considers polite company only because they aren't rageful enough toward Israel and the Jews.
- [03:32]
B
Okay, so when I say how big is this? I also mean. So you're saying that you think we are going to have a national conversation about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable views of Israel, Jews, the Jewish state and other matters. And one of the things that fascinates me, I mean, I think it's obviously not fascinating, horrifying is this realization that so much of this can turn on us. I mean, we're 2% of the population, we're 0.1% of the population on the planet Earth. Jews punch above their weight everywhere. It's a fact of income, educational achievement, professional achievement. But no matter whether we punch above our weight or not, and Israel is tiny country, 9, 10 million people, has now become a very prosperous country after being a very poor country. So there is all that. And so you can understand why people might feel resentful somehow that tiny people does so well while they're struggling or something like that. But the centrality, the centrality of Israel, or the centrality of this question about the Epstein class, which is just another way of talking not only about rich people, but about Jewish rich people without saying Jewish rich people. It's fascinating and unnerving. It's unnerving because that is what resonates with the Jewish past, where when the onslaughts come against Jews in other societies and you know, Germany and France in the 1890s, you know, dating back to Poland in the 1700s, Spain in the 1400s, it's always this thing where somehow Jews move from the periphery to the center of the attention of the societies that they're in. And it's never good news. It's never, ever, ever good news. America provides us with all kinds of protections, constitutional protections, religious protections, all of that that did not exist in these other fora. In these other places in these other times. But it's still the fact that we're 2% of the population. And I would say we take up about 20% of the oxygen of the daily convert. Some version of the Jewish question now takes up 10 to 20% of the daily oxygen of the national conversation.
- [06:31]
D
You know, John, you remind me of something that I've been thinking for a year or two, which is that everything that I previously read or heard discussed about past surges in antisemitism and. And pogroms and the show o. All of it, none of it actually captured what it feels like when people turn on its Jews. I feel as if there was sort of nothing in any of that that really drove home this extended horrible moment. The horrors of the, you know, end consequences of, you know, violent anti. Semitism, we know. But this feeling of the sort of encroachment and the sort of. The growing acceptability and enthusiasm for Jew hatred, it feels like something. And that has. I had never sort of gotten that from all the literature, all the coverage before. Do you know what I mean?
- [07:53]
B
I do. And I think we have an example of what it must have felt like on the streets of Berlin in the 1930s. Eli Lake pointed this out to me a couple of minutes ago on dm. This video that's widely circulated of this guy chasing the San Francisco politician Scott Wiener through a pride parade. It's three minutes, if you haven't seen it. If you're listening to me, go look it up. You can find it anywhere. Just type in Scott Wiener. He's walking through the pride parade. He's 56 years old, gay politician. Guy starts following him and saying, scott, I love you on trans rights. You've been just absolutely wonderful on trans rights. And I'm really, really thankful. And that's why it's so heartbreaking to me how you haven't stood forthrightly enough on the subject of Gaza. Now we should say that Scott Williams, politician, has, over the last year, once having claimed a run as a Zionist or as a proud Jew or something like that, has, in an effort to maintain his viability within the liberal radical political system, pulled away, said Gaza's genocide, whatever, made all the rhetorical moves that he was supposed to, but apparently not powerfully strongly enough or in a way that satisfied this person who is videotape whatever you call Iphoning him. And the guy just starts, it starts going and going, and he starts screaming at Weiner, what about Gaza? What kind of a person are you? You're so disgusting. And Wiener is walking, trying to keep his expression completely flat, Completely. You know, he's not going to be provoked. He's not going to respond. He is simply going to walk where he is walking. And it's the most horrifying thing you'll ever watch.
- [10:19]
D
But it's more than that because, I mean, it's such a fascist, fascinating document for a number of reasons. And the overarching thing that I got from it is it's like the past three years in microcosm because it starts out with this one LGBTQ activist saying, as you said, praising him for his pro queer policies or whatever, and then starts berating him for the Gaza stuff. But then others join in and the crowd cursing at him, telling him to get the F out of there, sticking their middle fingers in his face, swarming him gathers and becomes louder. And so the initial antagonist has to yell louder and louder. Everyone's yelling louder and louder. And you have this progressive Jew trying to navigate his way through. So to me it was, and it ends with this at the end, one of the pro, pro Gaza, pro Palestinian,
- [11:34]
B
anti anti Wiener, whatever, yeah.
- [11:37]
D
Says you stopped being queer the second you supported Israel.
- [11:46]
B
Right. So now, now we get to the point, seth, where after 40 years of being told, more than 40 years of being told that being gay is not a choice, you're, you're gay because you're, you're, you're born gay. It's genetic, it's hormonal, whatever it is. And so therefore there's no, you know, love is love. People have. Woohoo. They have whatever all of that. This moment is. Queerness is a. What would you call it? Is a status or is a. It's like when people said, when somebody said of Phyllis Schlafly, I don't consider her a woman because she didn't support the Equal Rights Amendment, that somehow now in this world in which you're marching, there you are, you're Scott Wiener, a proud queer Jew. And now you're no longer allowed to be queer. You don't count as queer because your politics don't what they claim to be. His politics don't conform, even though in fact he has paid obeisance to the correct politics, as this crowd that is screaming at him fails to acknowledge.
- [13:17]
E
Yeah, I mean, there's two parallel things happening here. One has to do with the Jews and one doesn't. The one that doesn't is ideologically. There have been a number of interesting articles over the past few years by white male gays who have written and said I've. I've basically been kicked out of. I'm, I'm. I, I'm CIS now. Right? Cis. The, the, the. Because I'm white or I'm male or whatever. And that the. They are being replaced. They, They've been saying this for, for a few years now by queer people who are not gay. Right. So gay people are getting kicked out of the Gay alliance despite being gay by people who are not gay but who consider themselves queer. The addition of the, of queer, of the Q has sort of given them a license to make it a way of thinking and a worldview rather than something you're born with and therefore, you know, should not be discriminated, discriminated against because of. So that's the one thing that's happening. I mean, Phoebe Maltz Bovey, who is the, the. An editor at the Canadian Jewish News, just wrote a book called the Last Straight Woman. It's very interesting, but something she's been talking about for a while where she talks about. If you look at, if you look at surveys, you see women identifying themselves as straight far less. But nothing structural about the population has changed. Right. In other words, the percentage of women marrying men hasn't changed. It's just people saying they're queer instead of, you know, whatever. So that's one thing that's happening is that is as it has turned into an ideology and a worldview has been subsumed into this. The second thing that's happening is that that ideology is part of what we call the Omni cause, or what I've referred to in the past as the Blob, which is the left takes one issue, makes that issue the only litmus test. The, the price of entry, the, the, the head cost, and, and everything is subsumed under that. So now the Omni Cause, the Blob, whatever you want to call it, is Israel anti Zionism. And which, and that is why you have situations where, you know, a couple years ago you had Randy Weingarten, who heads the second largest teachers union in the country, and a very powerful person was putting out statements about Bibi Netanyahu, and they had nothing to do with labor organizing, right? What was happening, teaching, teachers unions, education unions were getting pulled into the anti Zionism and, and Randy Weingarten was afraid of being left behind. So she, she turned her national union into a version of what these various state unions were doing. So that's, that's the thing is right now, that is the litmus test. So in this particular case, there are a couple details that are really interesting. One is that, and I'll, I'll read to you from the New York Times, actually, because as the Times describes it is even more interesting. But as Mr. Weiner was on his way to a Pride Shabbat service led by a trans rabbi, he was run out of San Francisco's annual Trans March by protesters accusing him of endorsing genocide in Gaza. That, to me is a crucial detail, too, because it's not just that he's Jewish, it's that he was part of turning everything into the Omni cause. Right. It's not, he's not going to a Shabbat service. He's going to Pride Shabbat. It's very important that you know that the rabbi at the service he's going to is trans. The synagogue, whatever it is, the institution, the Jewish prayer institution hosting him has joined the Omni cause. And so it's not all that shocking when you see it get turned around on them, but you can see this happening is that people are willingly folding their own communities into the Omni cause, and you're eventually going to get crushed by it. The other thing I would say about Scott Wiener is that in terms of the genocide thing, there's a really interesting detail here. On January 11th, the Atlantic came out with a long, interesting profile of Scott Wiener, and it contains this sentence. He does not characterize the bombing of Gaza as a genocide. A description that the San Francisco left insists upon. That same day, Weiner put out a video saying, I changed my mind. I now consider what Israel has done a genocide. I am now able to say it. And as I wrote in a post on this, you would have thought if you were the Atlantic, you were right to think that January 11, 2026, was a safe date to publish. Scott Wiener, not having called what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide because the war had been over for three months. And so, you know, it was a new year, the war had been over for months. You, you would think that, that there's no chance of that being turned upside down. And yet the day the article came out, Wiener flipped and that changed everything. So part of this is also a feeling of inevitability. You can't, you don't feel like you can write that this left wing Jew is holding the line on calling it a genocide because there's a feeling of inevitability that he's not going to hold the line, that nobody is going to hold the line, that nobody who is on the fence or in the middle is going to hold the line. And now that it's going to happen among leadership too, in the Democratic Party, that sense of inevitability hangs like a cloud over all of this and I think is leaving Jews wondering, okay, not if, but when. The next, you know, part of this turn,
- [20:01]
B
You know, when I go out and people who are listeners to the podcast see me on the street, they're always asking me, is that quince is what you're wearing Quince? And the answer is yes, it's usually quince. And why I keep coming back to quince is because they focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. Think breathable linen and soft organic cotton, particularly for summer well made basics but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still effortless. Quince European linen pants and shirts. Perfect warm weather upgrade to add to your rotation starting at just $34. Their tees are soft and easy to wear and their lightweight cotton sweaters are perfect for cooler summer nights. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quints.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's qu y n c e.com commentary for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com commentary.
- [21:08]
D
Can I say something about the omnicause framing? I I think it's a very brilliant coinage for the phenomenon that whereby if you are on the activist left one day. The hill you die on is environmentalism, then it's Black Lives Matter, then it's gay rights, then it's whatever. And it's true that you just, you shift. You could just go from one protest to another, you know, and it's all rolled into one. I'm starting to think it's losing its relevance in that Israel and the Jews is sort of subsuming all the other causes. I mean, it's becoming the dominant cause. It's got way more salience and organizing power than the others. So as Wiener being run out of the Pride Parade shows, in other words,
- [22:05]
E
it's not going to go back to be. In other words, the Omni cause, you're saying, is not going to change to be a new cause soon. It's too. The Jewish part of it is too powerful that it won't go back to being, you know, teachers unions or something.
- [22:19]
B
I think, I think the problem with that analysis is I don't think that it's as powerful as, say, the George Floyd moment was. I mean, the George Floyd moment was months riot, 25 million people protesting, you know, corporations spending $90 billion on DEI stuff to kind of, you know, for public relations reasons, changes in laws, all of that. That was, I think, the moment at which the Omni cause became a kind of like. I mean, that had a transformational quality that this does not yet have. But just like Jews punch above their weight, the anti Jewish issue is punching above its weight. It shouldn't have this quality to it. Like elections, even in New York, should not be turning on the question of whether or not you were insufficiently hostile to Israel simply because Israel is not that important an issue for American voters. Even evangelical voters who love Israel or who believe in a theology that says that it is very important eschatologically for the Jews to ingather in Israel so that. So that the final. You know, so that we can. We can achieve, you know, the return of the Messiah, all of that stuff. They got other problems. You know, they got inflation and they got gas prices and they have 10,000 other different things that are actually problems that they have to cope with every single day. And how they feel about Israel and Jews is not one of their daily quotidian problems. And they are being forced into a world in which how people think about that is given more weight and has more purchase than anything that they might actually have to say about the things that actually really matter.
- [24:37]
D
John, I take what you're saying, but
- [24:38]
B
I mean, they matter to me, like, I'm a believing Jew and I lead a Jewish life. Seth is even more committed than I am. They matter to me. But I am part of a. I am part of. I'm 10% of the 2% or I'm 20% of the 2% who sort of like keeps kosher and, you know, does stuff like that. So we make up what, like 0.8% of the population of the United States.
- [25:06]
D
Anyway, I have to say, unfortunately, I think the impact of the anti Jewish cause is somewhere near equal to the George Floyd moment. Different, but equal. It's changed the face of leadership in New York and it's bringing a whole slew of Democrats into office around the country and it's getting moderate politicians to vote against US Cooperation and aid with Israel. So it's changing policy, it's changing leadership. Not to mention the violence, if you want to. You know, I mean, there was George Floyd violence in there, but there's, you know, there's been attacks and deadly attacks in the name of this cause as well. So I. And it's maybe more menacing in that it's grown over a longer period of time than the George Floyd cause. But, you know, if this were three years after George Floyd was killed, we'd already be well into the stage where the politicians are walking away from defunding the police. They've now been pushed by three years of activism into big tectonic shifts.
- [26:36]
B
And we should talk about this kernel of what the activism is, right, which is will you say or will you not say that there is or was or has been or is going on a genocide in Gaza? And this is very important because there is, there was and there won't be again a genocide in Gaza. There is no such thing as a genocide in Gaza. There was a war in Gaza. The war was an urban war because Gaza is essentially a gigantic city. It was conducted with actually extraordinarily precise care to limit the number of civilian casualties. But a lot of civilians died, let's just say pick out a number now that now that people are getting more honest or the international organizations are starting to get more honest about who was a fighter and who wasn't a fighter killed in Gaza in the two and a half years of fighting. Say it's about 40,000 people killed in a war out of a population of two and a half million. There is no genocide in Gaza. There was no genocide in Gaza. It is a fact as immutable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. So it's Very important that this is the thing that you have to say precisely, in my view, because it is untrue. That is the pure Orwellian exercise of power. You force people to say things that they know are untrue and that you know are untrue. To prove that where your fealty lies is with the power that is threatening you and not with the truth or the facts or the reality of the world, you have to say two plus two equals five. You know, two plus two doesn't equal five. But if you don't say it, they're gonna put the helmet on you with the rat inside the helmet. And that's what happened to Scott Wiener on January 11th. And you know what? He did it, and they still put the helmet on with the rat inside it. So what explained that?
- [29:07]
E
And we can throw in to that. Yeah, I was just gonna say we could add to that, but we can add Brad Lander to that of who won his seat by, you know, saying what needed to be said. And then on the day of, the first lady of New York very infamously tweeted out who to vote for. And Brad Lander was excluded from the endorsements on the Mamdani slate, despite the fact that he was the third of the three that Mamdani had declared to be his team. And he actually did get endorsed. So we can. We can. We can throw him in there that basically, he was thrown under the bus on election day after being useful.
- [29:52]
B
Well, in the purges, not to. Not to go all full field. But of course, in the purges, you went. You confessed to the crime that you did not commit. You named people who committed other crimes that you know they didn't commit. You did what they made you do, and then they shot you. So it turned out that your effort to save your hide, they were like, well, you're of no use to us anymore anyway. And you're a weasel because you did what we told you to and admitted and confessed to crimes you didn't commit. So what use are you as a human being? And how many people were killed in that way in the Lubyanka? Tens of thousands of people. More than that. I mean, so. So that the nature of the Omni causes disciplinary power is. I think that it's of course, not about Scott Wiener. It's about everybody who isn't Scott Wiener. It's about. If you open up your mouth on any issue relating to Jews in Israel, you're going to get killed. Unless you start from the position that Gaza was a genocide and that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state or any kind of state as something else. And Jewish power in America is a net evil.
- [31:30]
D
But John, in response to your question about they got Weiner to say the lie he knows is a lie and yet they put the rat helmet on him anyway. What explains that? I think part of it is that if you're an ordinary citizen, all you have to do is say the lie they want you to say. You put up your Palestine flag on your social media and you're covered. If you are some sort of official elected official, that's not good enough. And you have to be punished for what they perceive as your past sins. I mean, that's the real and this, you know, as with the George Floyd moment and all these other moments, it's about punishing those who get it wrong, got it wrong, and so on. So they love that.
- [32:30]
A
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required Compatibility and availability Various 18
- [32:54]
C
I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind and that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.
- [33:28]
B
When you get momentum, you step on the gas.
- [33:31]
E
That's how you get separation from everybody else.
- [33:34]
B
I was at Harvard Law School. I was blah blah blah. I looked up, let me tell you something, there's kids in my neighborhood putting in Sheetrock that are smarter than you. AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff.
- [33:42]
D
It is never going to disrupt physical
- [33:44]
B
blue collar trade skill.
- [33:46]
E
And the guy just looked at me
- [33:47]
B
and he said it's bloody impossible. So I asked him this question, said it's impossible.
- [33:52]
C
Unless that's Podcast with me Matt ebert. Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [34:06]
E
Abe mentioned and I think what you were referring to before was when you said that it's causing moderate or non anti Israel Democrats to suddenly oppose cooperation with Israel. I think you were referring to Adam Smith who is the chairman of the arms House Armed Services Committee. Right. Who is, that's a very powerful position. And so they're in the position that committee, the, the defense bill goes through that committee. Right. Armed Services. And, and, and Adam Smith is the chair of that or you know, the ranking Democrat on that committee and he changed his mind over the weekend. From a Jewish insider has a report on this. There's a provision in the Defense Authorization act that streamlines US Israel cooperation on defense matters. I won't get into all the details, but just the basic thing is that it puts a coordinator in charge of all that stuff rather than having every single piece of the cooperation go through different committees in Congress. Right. So what critics say about that is oh well, they're not going through Congress anymore because they can't, because they're going against the will of the people and they're just going to do whatever Israel wants. And they're claiming that this is an integration of the U. S of US Israeli defense establishments and therefore, you know, Israel is worming its way in. You're not going to be able to separate them. They're like strands of DNA. Now that's, that's all complete nonsense. We have situations like this throughout the federal government because the federal government is huge. Defense spending is huge. It's not even the biggest. But if you look at the other agencies, federal agencies that, that you know, have major expenditures like this, they do the same thing. You have a coordinator, it goes through an office. In fact, liberals have spent a very long time defending the idea that unelected bureaucrats at an agency should be in charge of putting into force the regulations that Congress votes for and should not have to go back through Congress for approval for those. Whatever. Anyway, this is in the National Defense Authorization act because aid to Israel in the old model is no longer popular enough to get through. So instead of us, you know, instead of granting Israel money that Israel then has to use domestically in the American defense industry, there's going to be more cooperation on various things, missile defense and things like that. It's moving to a cooperative model. So this is already a concession, to be clear, this is already a concession to what we're, the politics of the moment that we're talking about. Aid is out because the left went nuts over aid. And so this is the new version and they don't want that either because they don't actually care about Aid to Israel, they just hate Israel. So the new model which doesn't give aid to Israel, they hate that too. So what Adam Smith did was he, he was, as the ranking member, he supported this because he said, you know, we were just cooperating with an ally who's very good at this stuff. We get access to Israeli tech and they, you know, they help us improve our. Blah, blah, blah. And, and now he's saying, I thought about it and I don't. I'm going to vote against it if it comes up. And I just want to, want to read to you that on, on the, on June 4th, so three weeks ago, ish, when this came up, it came before Adam Smith and his committee and they blocked the left from taking this provision out. Okay? So Adam Smith was, was the, was the, you know, the lead blocker, sort of the blocking back, as you would say, in, in football, for this to get through. And he said to Ro Khanna, look, I get your frustration with Netanyahu's leadership in Israel, but quote, the way this amendment was described is simply not accurate. In other words, we are not actually, you know, letting Israel take over our defense. This is not a new framework. He says to say, this is us bowing to the bidding of Israel. And this is completely inaccurate, et cetera, et cetera. Over the weekend, the Jewish insider has him saying, saying this to a letter to supporters. In the context of these ongoing conflicts, section 224 carries meaning beyond the plain text substance of the provision. I want to advocate for peace and pressure Israel to meaningfully work with partners in the region to bring these conflicts to an end. So again, we started with the plain text, and the substance of the provision is normal and totally above board. Two, the plain text doesn't matter. The substance doesn't matter. What matters is how we feel, how you feel. He's saying to them about Israel. And on that now, I'm with you.
- [39:32]
D
But this goes right back to the Orwell point. They got him to say the lie he knew was a lie. He's on record saying the way the provision is being portrayed is inaccurate. And then he goes, I'm on board with that now. I'm on board with that inaccuracy.
- [39:51]
B
And what is it that he is trying to stave off? Something. An attack on him two years from now. Not now, two years from now. The next election. He's already through this cycle. Next election. Leave me alone. I gotta protect myself down the road because you guys are the vanguard. I see a boulder is rolling down the hill. I don't want to get flattened by that boulder. So in that sense, it is worse than George Floyd, because, as you say, George Floyd was like an incandescent supernova of a moment that led to all kinds of policy changes that then people started backtracking from as soon as they could because they were gonna have extremely deleterious consequences in terms of criminal justice, whether you could fire anybody or how a corporation was gonna function, whether or not these DEI departments were going to have control over personnel, all of that. They were like, okay, we did what we had to do, and now we got to, like, come back to par. If this is a boulder that is continuing to roll down the hill, there's no stopping the boulder, right? There's no, you know, you can't, like, turn around and say, okay, five of us are going to turn around and catch the boulder. The boulder will roll over all five people. So maybe I was, you know, maybe I was too sanguine about this. But the. It's an interesting point that you're making about the. The shift. So if the shift is, look, most people in America don't like foreign aid. So if you characterize the money that Israel has gotten on defense matters from the United States as foreign aid, you're going to have a bipartisan consensus among the electorate that we'd rather not spend our money this way, that that money should go to the American people. So all foreign aid is like that. So in that sense, when you go and you say, you know what Israel's decided, we've decided we're not. No more money for Israel. Now, part of you don't want money for Israel because you hate Israel. Then others don't want it because we shouldn't be spending American taxpayer dollars in this way for years. People who support this aid say, no, no, no, no, that's ridiculous. That money isn't really money for Israel. It is a domestic price support for the defense industry in the United States. Basically, the government is transferring $3 billion to American defense contractors and then earmarking the money that it's spending for equipment that will then go to Israel. But the money never. Israel doesn't even touch the money. But that doesn't matter anymore. So no money for Israel. But we've just seen in the last three months that, as I talk about on Dan Sonor's podcast today, or as Dan really talks about on the podcast today, there has been in this war a level of integration and coordination between Israel and the United States in the air battles over Iran. And the decisions that are Being made over where to strike and whatever until the ceasefire happened. Unique and unprecedented in the annals of American warfare. Only maybe America and Britain during World War II and in the run up to D Day, have essentially integrated their armies and fought together as one. And this is what happened with America and Israel to America's benefit. Israel obviously wants to see if the regime in Iran can get knocked off to save it from the existential threat. But Trump wanted to go to war, and the American CENTCOM and our military establishment wanted to do the war in the best way. And they came together in this entirely new fashion that doesn't cost anybody anything, but, as turned out, was a multiplier effect for the competence and achievements of the American battle plan. And now they want to stand in the way of that, because Israel is a disease and America should not be. Should not allow itself to be compromised by having anything to do with this remarkable tiny military that, again, punches well above its weight. So this takes something that is a legitimate issue to talk about, which is, should American dollars be going to the defense industry to pay for Israeli. For weapons that Israel needs? A decision, by the way, that was made, and we should say the reason that that aid exists, Even though it's 47 years old, is that Israel conceded the Sinai to Egypt in the 1979 Camp David Accords. It had taken the Sinai in the Yom Kippur War, which was a war launched against it by Egypt. It prevailed. It took the Sinai. It had the Sinai since 67, whatever. But it has the Sinai and it agrees to Jimmy Carter's negotiating tactic, which was, you'll get peace with Egypt if you give up the Sinai. And in exchange, we will. In exchange for your loss of strategic depth. In other words, that exchange for the fact that Egypt will now be closer to your border. And, you know, if it wants to launch wars, it will be much easier for it to do so. We're going to give you defense aid. You're going to get money from us to protect yourselves. We're going to spend it here, but, you know, you're going to get the equipment from us that you need. Meanwhile, at the same time, Egypt got $3 billion, not military money. Egypt just got a sort of $3 million annual bribe for having signed the Camp David Accords. So this has a long provenance. It was deemed in the American national interest to create this aid structure for Israel, because it was deemed in our national interest that the Camp David Accords be struck and signed by an American president in 1979. And this was the net effect. And from the 90s onward, there has been a long debate about whether or not this was healthy for Israel to be in this relation to the United States, because it actually made Israel look like a vassal. It limited Israel's freedom of movement as a sovereign country. It limited its military options because America could cut it off or create tensions. And it's not good to be. It's like a welfare payment and welfare is not good for you and all of that. And Bibi Netanyahu has now or in the last year, year and a half, it has now become sort of Israeli policy that they are weaning themselves off of the American military assistance over the next two or three years and there will be none left. But what there could be is this integration where they're innovating in drone and missile defense technology that they will give to us and we will integrate with them. And these barbaric monsters who are seeking to destroy Israel and poison the relationship with Israel in part because of their hostility toward Jews, are now going to interfere with that, which is an unalloyed American good. Like there's no downside.
- [48:15]
E
And it's what Adam Smith said at that hearing too. Yeah, he said it doesn't make any sense to forfeit clear U.S. benefits.
- [48:27]
D
Right.
- [48:28]
E
Because you don't like the current Israeli government. And by the way, also fun fact about that, the, the Sinai giving back the land that Israel took it after that war was they gave back land that was three times the size of the current modern state of Israel. And just so people understand that, like it was, it wasn't like, oh, they, they, they had a, you know, a demilitarized zone or some sort of bumper, you know, over. They gave Israel is like 8,000 square miles. And they gave back an area that was like 24,000 square miles and had oil.
- [49:08]
B
So Israel was for five years in the course of its 80 year history, energy independent because it had oil from the Sinai that it gave back, that it had handed over this massive piece of territory that had pronounced economic benefits and strategic security benefits, particularly given the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s for it, that saved it from a kind of desperate ruin. And it gave it back also to show that one of the demonstrations that Israel, given the possibility of making a deal that was in its interest, Israel would surrender territory and would make peace with hostile nations that had been awarded for 30 years just to move on and become a normal country. But it's not allowed to move on to be a normal country and people won't allow it. To Zoran Mamdani went on this Week yesterday, I Believe on a Sunday show and in an effort to explain why he declines to recognize Israel's right to exist, said, well, he recognizes that there could be an Israel that is constituted differently under a different understanding of what it is, but that he will never support a state that privileges one religion over another, which is the biggest crock of bullshit that anybody has ever spoken. Does he boycott England, which has an official state church? Does he boycott Pakistan, which has Islam as its official religion in fact created to be a Muslim country so there could be separation between Muslims and Hindus in what was the Raj?
- [51:13]
E
Well, didn't he even march in the parade the Pakistan?
- [51:16]
B
He marches in the Pakistani Day parade. So I don't know whether he in this case is just out and out lying and using this and trying to trick people or whether he somehow has it in his head that Israel is a religiously defined state. But guess what, guess what? It isn't. Israel had a 20 year debate over whether or not how to define itself and they passed a basic law in 2017 or 2018 that describes Israel as the nation, state and homeland of the Jewish people, not of the Jewish faith, not of the Hebraic religion, not as the home of the temple, not as the land given to it by God, but as the homeland of the Jewish people, period. It can also be the homeland. It can also be a homeland for anybody. There are Christians, there are Arabs who live there. It is specifically the homeland of the Jewish people because the Jewish people have no other place to go.
- [52:33]
E
Well, that's the Balfour Declaration. Right? For declaration wasn't this whole thing has to be a state that closes on Shabbos. Yeah, the Balfour Declaration was. Well, I don't even know if it's going to be a state. Maybe it's going to be a couple states together. Maybe it's going to be, you know, whatever. But whatever it is, right, there has to be a place for the Jews to have their homeland here. The form is not really the point. The point is that it's the home. It has to be a homeland for the Jewish people.
- [53:02]
B
Yeah, Israel.
- [53:04]
D
I just want to say it's the one state in the region that doesn't privilege one religion over another.
- [53:12]
B
I mean that. And he did say in order to do the. Of course I accept that. He said, I also don't, I don't recognize Saudi Arabia, whatever the hell that means. But I mean, which is the other part of this? Let's just sort of like be honest here.
- [53:32]
D
So
- [53:34]
B
this is inexorably moving the Omni cause to the idea that one should not support Israel's existence as a Jewish state or Israel at all, unless it were to be transformed into some, you know, I don't know even what they call it. It's interesting, like, would you just say like just a democratic country where everybody, one man, one vote, and everybody. So the Arabs, the Christians, the Jews, all vote. I don't know what, by the way, what result you think would result from that, given the nature of the population that lives in Israel. Although of course, if there were the right of return, maybe people would move back and so there would be more Muslims, whatever. Okay. This is like wanting there to be, you know, that we should be able to breathe air on the moon. Israel next year will celebrate its 80th year in existence. It will have been a formally recognized. Not next year, actually, sorry, two years from now. I mean, it was two years from formally recognized as a sovereign nation on the planet earth. It is 80 years old, it is the 22nd wealthiest country on Earth and it has, as we now know, the best small army on earth and maybe that the world has ever seen and maybe one of the top five armies on the planet, given its battle readiness, its battle hardiness, its, you know, its innovations and all of that. Unless it is destroyed by a nuclear weapon and wiped from existence forcibly by a cataclysmic doomsday moment, Israel isn't going anywhere. And it is madness and folly to organize a political movement based on that idea. It's like the entire left is turning into heaven's gate or one of those millenarian cults that says we should all gather on this hilltop because on January 30, 2012, the world is going to come to an end. Israel isn't going anywhere unless it is destroyed by multiple strikes of a nuclear weapon that wipe out, you know, the. Wipe out the majority of the Jewish people on the planet Earth or plurality of the Jewish people on the planet Earth, which is why we're at war with Iran and which is why Israel has a nuclear weapon. Because if it gets to it, Israel is going to have to use the nuke against somebody else before it gets nuked. So all I'm saying here is they are organizing themselves around a thing that will never happen based on an unjust and untrue argument that Israel deserves not to exist because it is a committer of genocide. Which it is not that it is a religious, that it is a theocratic state, which it is not. It is the Only democracy in the Middle east that provides freedom of faith. How can a movement survive? I mean, doesn't it have to conform with reality? Even even if it is got bad policies and lunatic ideas? I mean it still has to conform with.
- [57:21]
E
Basically that's the beauty of what Abe was saying I think before about the Omni cause and the power of this as the Omni cause. Right, because we started out talking about gay rights and gay rights have changed dramatically over the course of the gay rights movement. Gay marriage is legal obviously and all that stuff. But that the situation that was being protested at the beginning of the movement has been more or less remedied legally. I'm not saying people don't face discrimination, but just it has had to adapt to its victories and become a victim of success, which many movements do. Right. You're a single minded thing. If you win your battle then people go, well why are you still around? And you have to sort of adapt and it's easy to get sucked into the Omni cause then because that's your lifeline. But if this thing will never happen, if Israel will never be destroyed, it's the perfect Omni cause because they will always be able to fundraise on the same thing and always be able to recruit on the same thing. And they need something they cannot win in order to be to live on in perpetuity.
- [58:41]
D
It's same with anti colonialism, which is a part of which they've rolled the anti Israel activism into anti colonialism ultimately wants. What every inhabitant of every country that whose lineage doesn't trace back to the first people there to return to some plane somewhere on the other side of the country and vice versa. It's beyond impossible. And so they've labeled Israel a colonialist project, obviously.
- [59:25]
B
I mean the whole thing that itself is. It's also that question of whether or not anything has ever dropped, by which I mean the anti colonialist movement of the 20th century was one of the most successful political movements in history. Massive transfer of wealth, power, sovereignty and all of that of a sort that people, countries before this have never willingly engaged in. They disassembled their empires, gave them independence based on the idea that colonialism was unfair. So it had this enormous effect from the 40s to the 80s and should have gone out of business. You know, it did it, you know, it'd be like having a, you know, an anti, sort of like anti Soviet Union, like my mother's Committee for the Free World still existing when the Soviet Union went away. So it transmutes itself into an anti colonialist project dealing with things that actually have nothing to do with colonizing. That's not what colonialism was. And in fact, maybe there are countries that are colonial in Africa where tribes claim they should have sovereignty and the central government will let them loose. And there are civil wars over that. And nobody cares about that. Nobody cares about. What about China? China literally has swallowed up at least two or three countries. Does Zoran Mamdani's father, Mahmoud, who is an anti colonialist scholar, does he write about China and Tibet?
- [61:25]
E
I think the largest, the reason China is in Africa is to mine for valuable minerals that are indigenous to Africa. It's like literally, you could not come up with a more literal example of modern colonialism than China's investment in Africa. Having Africans mine minerals for Chinese benefit.
- [61:51]
B
So things morph into other things, right? It's like you have ideas that outlive their utility or have been conclusively disproved, and yet people will never give up on them. Like the flat earth society or socialism for that matter. Which of course is the, which is of course the animating idea of the democratic socialists of America, but is not sufficiently jazzy to them, apparently, or didn't do enough for them. By 2024, the DSA membership had dropped to 6,000 people. It's now like, they now claim like 100,000 people. But that was because it was mostly about socialism then. Now it's turned into the Omni cause in Gaza. And that has a mass following, which is why we're at risk and at threat because if, you know, mass movements are now organizing, I mean, 100,000 isn't really a mass movement in the United States, but a country of 330 million people. But it's still a, you know, it's not, not chopped liver. And so, you know, but also it's,
- [63:01]
E
it's not, it's not about, you know, these movements are less about numbers than they are about power. Right? I mean, we, we had, when things happened on campuses, when campuses were shutting down free speech, when they were, you know, canceling speakers and stuff like that. Even remember Condi Rice was canceled at Rutgers. And you know, mainstream figures, when all that was at its height, if you polled students on campus, it came back with a pro free speech poll. Like the polling result was like, you know, 70% say they should let anybody speak or something like that. And people were like, look, see, it's not that bad. Everybody's freaking out over campus free speech. But really most of these kids, because it didn't matter. If there were five kids on campus who believed that you should cancel Condi Rice, they got Condi Rice canceled. The point is power. If the people in who make decisions are listening to that movement, that movement is a powerful movement. And as Adam Smith just showed and countless other, you know, examples in recent day, in recent months, the leaders and the people making the decisions at the top are listening to that movement. And the numbers become a lot less relevant once that starts happening.
- [64:21]
B
Right. Okay, I want to make a recommendation. It's been a long time. We've stopped. We've been sort of like pausing for some reason on the recommendations. I want to get back to them in part because I have an enthusiastic one. I found myself reading a novel published in 1978 called A Way of Life Like Any other by Darcy O'. Brien. It's a short comic novel about a 1415 year old kid in the 1950s whose parents were are like former movie stars, really silent stars, but also like former movie stars. And it's clearly an autobiographical novel and it's about being raised by crazy, irresponsible kids in this crazy, irresponsible atmosphere of Beverly Hills and Europe, traveling through Europe and all of that. And it is laugh out loud funny. Darcy o' Brien went on to write true crime books and various other things. This, I think, was his only novel. It won a big award. It won the PEN Hemingway Award the year that it came out. But for some reason I'd never even heard of it. And I'm pretty literate in the literature, American literature of my own time. I think New York Review Books re released it anyway. It is hilarious and short. So I don't know what better recommendation I can make for a piece of summer reading than something that is both hilarious and short. So that is A Way of Life Like Any Other by Darcy o'. Brien. I read it on the Kindle. You can apparently get a very attractive hard copy if you want, but. But it's a. It's a winner. So we'll be back tomorrow. For Seth and Abe, I'm John Pod Horitz. Keep the candle bur.