The Information War Against Israel

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "The Information War Against Israel" – Detailed Summary

Introduction and Context

In the episode titled "The Information War Against Israel," released on July 21, 2025, The Commentary Magazine Podcast delves into the multifaceted challenges Israel faces beyond its immediate military engagements. Hosted by John Podhoretz, along with executive editor Abe Greenwald, Washington columnist Matthew Continetti, and social columnist Christine Rosen, the discussion centers on the ongoing information warfare that undermines Israel's efforts to secure its interests in the region.

Israel's Military Success and Ongoing Conflicts

The conversation begins with a reflection on Israel's recent military achievements. Approximately a month after a highly successful joint strike by Israel and the United States against Iran, which was deemed a significant blow to Iran's regional ambitions, Israel finds itself in a precarious position. Despite eliminating major threats like Hezbollah and intervening in Syria to protect vulnerable populations such as the Druze, Israel is grappling with the aftermath of the 12-Day War and the persistent threat posed by Hamas.

John Podhoretz highlights the complexity of the current situation, stating:

"Israel would have won in Gaza by now were it not for the hostages. [...] It is being frozen in place at various moments during the calendar of this war by the deep concern of the body politic in Israel for those 20 people, by its humanity, by its very."
[32:20]

Information War and Media Portrayal

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the "information war" against Israel. Continetti criticizes mainstream media outlets like NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post for uncritically reporting Hamas-controlled sources, which perpetuate false narratives about Israeli actions in Gaza. He argues that these media organizations are complicit in disseminating misinformation, thereby damaging Israel's global reputation.

"The information war aspect of this is very important, because this is a similar dilemma that Israel faces with regard to the remaining hostages. [...] That's the information war that Israel might have to choose to lose because there is going to be no winning for them in terms of the optics of say, blowing up a house to get hostages out who are being held by private citizens."
[33:22]

Specific Incidents Affecting Israel's Image

The podcast addresses specific incidents that have exacerbated the information war. One such incident was an errant Israeli strike that severely damaged the only remaining Catholic church in Gaza. Podhoretz emphasizes that this was unintentional and underscores Israel's generally respectful treatment of Christian populations in the region.

"The attack was not Israel's intent to hit a Catholic church. But this nicely dovetails with another second front attack on Israel, which involves disruption and violence going on in the West Bank that is being caused by extremist settlers."
[08:19]

Additionally, the discussion touches on the visa dispute involving Christian groups, resolved swiftly by officials like Mike Huckabee and Netanyahu, highlighting attempts to portray Israel as antagonistic toward Christians—a narrative the hosts strongly contest.

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Western Media

Christine Rosen and Matthew Continetti delve into the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism in Western discourse. They argue that prominent media figures, such as Ezra Klein, perpetuate this narrative by labeling anti-Zionist sentiments as merely another facet of liberal ideology. This, they contend, shifts the Overton window, normalizing extreme anti-Israel positions within mainstream liberal thought.

"Poll after poll shows 80% support for Israel in the Jewish population. But there's 20%. [...] Debates about Israel often circle the same strangely posed question. Does Israel have the right to exist? [...] To unwrap this, October 7th took place in 2023."
[39:02]

Continentti further criticizes Klein's op-ed in The New York Times, arguing that Klein's claims are chronologically and factually flawed, thereby undermining the argument that Israel was not under existential threat prior to the October 7th attacks.

Internal Struggles and Political Dynamics

The hosts discuss internal political dynamics within the United States and Israel that impact the perception and support of Israel. They highlight the role of influential figures like Ron Dermer, Netanyahu aides, and Trump-aligned influencers who are contributing to a growing anti-Zionist sentiment within the U.S. administration and media.

"This is clearly a plant by the same folks inside the administration who were arguing against Operation Midnight Hammer [...] And the quotes are just dumb."
[14:03]

Moreover, the podcast examines Israel's strategic interventions in Syria to protect the Druze population, emphasizing Israel's role as a regional stabilizer, in contrast to the negative portrayal in Western media.

"Israel is intervening on behalf of a minority population to protect it from sectarian violence is very significant. And you don't see any other Arab governments doing that."
[20:15]

Conclusion and Future Implications

In wrapping up, Podhoretz underscores the critical choice Israel faces: to continue its multifaceted battle against both tangible military threats and intangible information warfare or to concede under mounting international criticism. The hosts express concern that the ongoing information war could not only compromise Israel's strategic objectives but also fuel a broader anti-Semitic backlash globally.

"The principle, ancient principle, that it is the obligation of the Jewish community to ransom hostages taken by non Jews [...] It's an ancient principle [...] It's being used against Israel as though to say that because it cannot deliver the coup de grace, it cannot deliver the final blow which any other country would have by now, that it is immoral and Genocidal and mean and horrible."
[38:59]

Notable Quotes

• John Podhoretz:
  "Israel would have won in Gaza by now were it not for the hostages."
  [32:20]

• Matthew Continetti:
  "The information war that Israel might have to choose to lose because there is going to be no winning for them in terms of the optics."
  [33:22]

• Christine Rosen:
  "The information war is always there and it's always rigged against Israel."
  [05:23]

Final Thoughts

"The Information War Against Israel" offers a comprehensive analysis of the subtle and overt challenges Israel faces in maintaining its security and international standing. By dissecting media narratives, highlighting specific incidents, and exploring internal political dynamics, the podcast provides listeners with a nuanced understanding of the complexities surrounding Israel's ongoing conflicts and the broader information warfare that shapes global perceptions.

Transcript

[Abe Greenwald]

Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.

[Matthew Continetti]

It'S going Hope for the best, Expect.

[Christine Rosen]

The worst, hope for the best.

[John Podhoretz]

Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, July 21, 2025. I'm John Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continenti. Hi, Matt.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

And social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Matthew Continetti]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

So, you know, we're about a month after Israel's and the United States is extraordinarily successful strike on Iran and the 12 Day War, which seems to have concluded, at least if you take the first month past the 12 day war with Iran very profoundly compromised at the very most that you can say. And yet we so that America and Israel have taken out an enormous irredentist threat, not only to Israel's existence, but to world stability, nuclear proliferation and the like. And yet here we are after a weekend of four weeks now of continuing negotiations between Israel and Hamas that seem to be taking place in Qatar that are frozen, sort of like the Greek army outside of the walls of Troy for 10 years. They're sort of frozen in place with proposals that are sitting waiting for Hamas and Gaza to respond while the Hamas nicks in Doha gutter are receiving certain Israeli moves apparently with some favor. And this ludicrous gavat in which this tiny remnant of Hamas inside Gaza is literally clinging on to power because it has, you know, 19 or 20 living Jewish hostages. And this is what is preventing Israel from delivering the final coup de grace is opening up space for new renewed attacks on Israel for the many crimes it is committing in Gaza, primarily among them, the task of helping to feed Gazans by the tens of thousands. And these false reports that come out every day that Israel is, for reasons that no one can explicate, firing wantonly on Gazans, waiting in line for food being distributed by the Gaza humanitarian organization. Why Israel would do this, why they would fire on unarmed Gazans while they're waiting on line, a line that Israel itself created to distribute food. Apparently it does not matter that there is no logic to the charge. The charge is biting. I hear it from people now, you know, two, three days who are not paying that close attention but are like, why is Israel shooting the Gazans? I don't understand. And if you say they're not shooting the Gazans, Hamas is shooting the Gazans, issuing press releases saying that Israel is shooting the Gazans. And those press releases are reported uncritically and as though they have been put directly into the queue to be have the button pushed at the printing plant to come out in the New York Times and on its website, as though the Gaza Health Ministry is speaking truth rather than lies. The longer that Israel cannot finish up in Gaza, the more we are sort of going back into the greatest hits of the efforts to discredit Israel's attempt to defend itself against the unwarranted attack of October 7 and to rebalance the politics of the region so that that sort of thing can never happen.

[Christine Rosen]

But, John, can I say, I think there is a storyline to the in terms of the why when people peddle this stuff? Because it doesn't make logical sense. It wouldn't make any tactical or strategic sense. The reason proffered is that Israelis are evil and view Palestinians as less than human and are doing it for the purpose of targeting and killing civilians. That that's the story. That that's that mean that's why it's so profoundly ugly, because the why is that Israelis are evil.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I think the lesson here is that as Israel has been winning the actual war, it is slipping in the virtual war, in the information war. And so you've had the remarkable success against Iran. You've had Israel demolishing Hamas. You have Israel essentially eliminating Hezbollah. You have Israel intervening in Syria, exercising its new status as a regional hegemon in order to protect the Druze population there, Israel fighting the Houthis continually. And yet the only story that's been coming out since that remarkable success in July has been these aid assaults without any context, without any curios for why this might be going on. I was struck also with complete credulity at the numbers. The numbers I heard in the headlines and on the radio this morning were hundreds of Palestinians shot and killed, again, accepting uncritically the issuance of the Gaza Health Ministry, which is Hamas. And on NPR this morning, which, you know, I know I beat up on it every day, but I can't stop.

[John Podhoretz]

It's very helpful. It's very helpful. It's a crystallizing broadcast, is a crystallizing moment in understanding where conventional liberal opinion is in the United States.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And it's much quicker than reading the whole New York Times, which I don't have time to do before we record the podcast, but I do have time to listen to NPR up first. And in the report on the latest story about the Gaza convoy, the anchor says, look, we know that there's dispute over this number. We know that Israel is challenging the events. But we have an eyewitness, we have a stringer who's been working for us since the beginning of the war in Gaza. Here's the thing, Stevens, keep the stringers are there at the pleasure of Hamas. All of the people, all of the people who are sending in these reports, not just npr, but also the New York Times and most egregiously, the Washington Post, they are there because Hamas wants them there. And so the information they're sending is cleared by Hamas. It's another front in this information campaign. And it's extremely frustrating to hear these lies repeat it over and over again because I think it's doing real damage. The. The way that this conflict is turning into a frozen conflict is not to Israel's strategic advantage.

[John Podhoretz]

No. Right, exactly. So let's move on, because there are a couple of other incidents we can talk about that that I think speak to Abe's point, which is, you know, an errant Israeli strike destroyed the remaining Catholic church in. In Gaza, I guess on Friday.

[Unnamed Speaker]

We're severely damaged.

[John Podhoretz]

Severely damaged, yeah. Clearly an act of errancy. Bibi, who called Pope Leo and apologized, expressed his heartfelt condolence. As it happens, I believe the number of Catholics remaining in Gaza stands at around 200. So Israel. It was not Israel's intent to hit a Catholic church. But this nicely dovetails with another second front attack on Israel, which involves disruption and violence going on in the west bank that is being caused by extremist settlers who seem to be attacking people. Though others will say that they were attacked first. It doesn't really matter. But there seems to be some question and idea that, you know, Christians are being targeted in some fashion and that visas are being denied to Christian groups. And so there's now this kind of third front, which is Israel's at war with Christianity. Israel, the only country, I believe, in the Middle east, with the exception of Lebanon, where it is even remotely safe to practice Christian belief, and in which the Christian populations of, you know, of Jerusalem and elsewhere are treated with respect. The visits of Christians to Israel are greeted by most Israelis as acts of friendship and kindness. I've seen it myself that Israelis are immensely grateful to evangelical Christians who come from the United States and elsewhere. I was once in. In the town of Caesaria during the second Intifada. And the only people who were coming through Caesarea, which is a. Is named after Caesar. Caesarea. The only people who were there, besides me and my wife in this amphitheater, were 300 Nigerian Christians who were coming on a pilgrimage to Israel during the second intifada. So this is a deep, deep connection that Israelis feel. And the idea of somehow trying to color Israel as an anti Christian country, taking discriminatory steps against Christians and trying to kill Christians and all of that is a bloodline, just. We're back. We're back. That is literally a blood libel. I mean, that is what the blood libel is, which is the Jews kill Christians out of their blood thirst or need for Christian blood. That is the thing there is.

[Matthew Continetti]

Well, the visa dispute was interesting because it arose and Mike Huckabee and Netanyahu worked it out very quickly. That was solved, it was resolved. But it is to speak to this earlier point that we were discussing that both Matt and Abe were making. The information ecosystem in which this conflict is discussed immediately takes a data point, such as that minor conflict which was immediately resolved, and turns it adds it to this sort of conspiratorial list of things that I think, John, you're absolutely right to point out, you know, that Candace Owens will be talking about this tomorrow, if she hasn't already. Right. As a list of things that she will point to and suggests, you know, the global conspiracy, the anti Semitic conspiracy. And so in that sense, similarly with the food distribution problems, there's very little context in how people consume these images and these little tiny data points. They don't read the full story. They don't recall the history just since October 7th of efforts to get aid to people in Gaza and the armed gangs that would first with the UN and now currently try to blockade those trucks, steal the stuff and sell it. The threats against, you know, just the regular civilians who are coming and lining up and waiting for food distribution. This is the context and the fact that the IDF has to protect its own troops who are in the area to try to maintain some sense of order and calm in a very chaotic situation. That nuance is lost, just as the nuance of what this means for Christians is lost. Now, I will say, because these were my people growing up, they go to Israel to proselytize. And that is a, that is a goal. That is, that is separate from. From it. But it is a charitable goal. It is a, it is an effort and a sense of friendship and comity between evangelical, particularly evangelical American Christians and Israel. So, but there is now this strain on, particularly on the right, the Candace Owen types who use their Christianity, the Christ is King signaling and dog whistling they do to further antisemitism.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I want to talk about the report that came out in Axios over the Weekend, which is another item in my catalog of the restrainer MAGA influencer, anti Semite crowd striking back after Trump aligned with Israel in the 12 Day War and Operation Midnight Hammer. Because it was a classic case of attack by anonymous sources. And it was an anonymous source.

[John Podhoretz]

I think literally the story is, there's one.

[Unnamed Speaker]

No, there's two officials.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay. But the six U.S. officials.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Okay, go ahead.

[John Podhoretz]

I'm sorry, this is just Barack Ravid is the Axios reporter, formerly, you know, of Marie or I can't remember what, what Israeli paper, who was basically a stenographer for the Biden administration's policies on Israel and has now moved to Axios and is now becoming the stenographer, oddly enough, of the anti Semitic restrainers inside the administration.

[Unnamed Speaker]

This is interesting because it's not just Barack Ravid, it's also Mark Caputo, who has, it seems to me, better sources. But none of the sources in this story are named. And this happens after. This story comes amidst the Israeli intervention in Syria last week, which has to do with the Druze population in Syria coming under attack through sectarian warfare. Again, a whole other story. We don't need to get into the details, but this is. This is the Axios. I quote. As smoke and debris swirled over the Syrian presidential palace, the chatter in the West Wing grew louder. Benjamin Netanyahu is out of control. What they're saying, Colon. Quote, bibi acted like a madman. He bombs everything all the time, one White House official told Axios, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. Quote, this could undermine what Trump is trying to do. A second senior US Official also pointed to the shelling of a church in Gaza this week, which led President Trump to call Netanyahu and demand an explanation. Quote, the feeling is that every day there is something new. What the fuck? Close quote. A third U.S. official said there's growing skepticism inside the Trump administration about Netanyahu. A sense that his trigger finger is too itchy and he's too disruptive. Quote, netanyahu is sometimes like a child who just won't behave. Now, this story infuriated me for a couple of reasons. The first is it's clearly a plant by the same folks inside the administration who were arguing against Operation Midnight Hammer and arguing against the US Israel alliance earlier in the spring. And they used the same outlet. They used also the Washington Post. So I'd expect another story coming up this week by the Washington Post. They speak anonymously. So that's the first thing that. It's just clearly a plant and there's no Skepticism on the part of the reporters. The second thing is the quotes are just dumb. Like it's, it's like a high schooler who just learned about the Israeli Palestinian conflict has decided to weigh in anonymously in one of the most read publications inside the Beltway, calling Bibi and Netanyahu, calling, not calling him Netanyahu, calling him a madman, saying he bombs everything all the time. Again, without any explanation, context, understanding of what's happening here. You know what the f. Using profanity. The. What this brings home is this fight inside the administration is not over. It's not over. And even if Trump's policy is pretty clear, support for Israel, support for the denuclearization of Iran, there are people around Trump with a media megaphone who are going to continue to wage the fight inside the administration and also contribute to this growing weight of anti Zionism and anti Semitism in the United States that we have to continue to fight every single day.

[John Podhoretz]

The Druze. I think we should talk a little bit about what's going on in Syria. It's very complicated. But there is now a new voice in the Middle Eastern conflict close to Trump who is complicating matters, and that is Tom Barrack, Trump's very close friend, who I think was the, Was he the chairman of the inaugural in 2017? Something like that, yeah. Barak is the ambassador to Turkey and has been somehow appointed, appointed as some kind of peace envoy in Syria. And Barak, like a certain element inside the administration, has decided that the good, interesting future for Syria resides in treating or believing that the new government in Syria, led by Mr. Jelani, formerly a ISIS, Al Qaeda operative, who has supposedly gotten religion taken off his Arab garb and put on a suit and is therefore going to throw in his hand with the west that, that we need to provide him with as much support as possible. Meanwhile, the government of Syria has decided, decided to take extraordinarily harsh measures against the Druze in Syria.

[Unnamed Speaker]

A.

[John Podhoretz]

It's a little hard. They're a sort of. They're an Arab tribe, sort of homogeneous Arab tribe in the Middle East. And nobody really knows why this started or how it happened or what the real purpose of going at the Druze is. Exactly. But Israel decided that it had to intervene for very practical internal reasons relating to the Israeli body politic. The Druze are loyal citizens. There are 150,000 Druze in Israel. They are loyal citizens of the Jewish state. They, unlike other, other Arab minorities, fight in the military. They vote. They are, you know, they are, they are.

[Unnamed Speaker]

They.

[John Podhoretz]

They consider themselves happy to live in Israel. They're Israeli patriots and their people, their relatives. They looked and said, our relatives are being massacred in Syria. And basically there was starting to be a movement for individual Druze to go grab their guns, cross the border into Syria and go help fight in this Suvida or Suwayda to help their brethren. And Bibi said, no, don't, don't involve yourself individually. We will take care of it. You are our friend. You are out. You are part of our body politic. We will go in and do what we can to protect the Druze of Syria. This was to prevent an entirely new kind of catastrophic chaos where individual Israeli citizens are going into Syria to fight against the Syrian government. That is the opposite of being a madman, that is actually escalating to de. Escalate, that is attempting to create normal conditions in which a government in Damascus that is very new and very fresh and very hard to understand has for some reason decided in classic Syrian tradition to train its guns on a Syrian minority group and that Israel has very important internal considerations to deal with relating to that group and made this decision.

[Unnamed Speaker]

So yeah, the, also the fact that Israel is intervening on behalf of a minority population to protect it from sectarian violence is very significant. And you don't see any other Arab, any other governments in the Middle east doing that in order to help preserve some type of sectarian ethnic balance in this state of Syria, which the real danger is it's becoming a failed state that will require further intervention and perhaps unfortunately not just intervention on the part of Israel on behalf of the Druze, but also Turkey, which is the other player here. But I just think the larger point is we need some resolution in Gaza pretty soon, not just in order to calm what's turning into a firestorm of anti Semitism. It's incredible to me. I don't follow these accounts on X, but my feed over the weekend was almost entirely anti Israel and I'm sure the algorithm was part of that, but it also was very alarming to me because I don't go, I don't follow anti Israel influencers even to do reporting on them. Yet somehow it's showing up in my feed. And if that's happening, that means it's much wider. And I think the second reason why we need some type of resolution in Gaza soon is in order to free up Israel in order to face not just what's happening in Syria, but also the Houthis which continue to attack Israel. And then the larger question of Iran, which says it's not one it doesn't want to talk over the weekend. What are they doing? The nuclear program? And how can we maintain that? And I just want to say one final thing about why there's no resolution here in Gaza. And that is it's not clear to me Hamas exists any longer. As we thought of it, we thought of Hamas as this political party, this offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that came to power in Gaza in 2007 through a violent couple and then spent about 16 years becoming a statelet, becoming a one party totalitarian regime in the Gaza Strip that created armed cadres, a military structure that not only was sending rockets into Israel and having these periodic conflicts with Israel, but building up the underground network, the tunnel network, and the arms caches that it would later use. On October 7, Israel's military operation, it seems to me, has essentially destroyed the state list. The armed cadres are broken up. The leaders of Hamas, the sinwar, the architects of October 7th have been killed. So the statelet doesn't exist. But there are these political flunkies still in Doha, Qatar who pretend to act and speak on the part of the statelet. And so there's this huge divergence between what the diplomats are talking about and what's happening with Hamas and Gaza. And the problem is, if the statelet doesn't exist in Gaza, then what is Hamas? Hamas turns out to be tribal leaders, kids, gangs trying to get food and resources, and ultimately the people who are holding the remaining living hostages. This says to this tells me why we haven't gotten the deal, even though Israelis have made some important concessions in recent days. And it also suggests to me that this is why Israel is beginning to lay the groundwork to go into a part of Gaza City which it has never gone into before, a part that Israel and the IDF has avoided because it believes that many hostages are there. And that says that again, one undercurrent threat this entire conflict has been it's not bring them home now. It is release them now or get them now.

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[Abe Greenwald]

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[John Podhoretz]

This is a very important point and it is the ultimate truth here, which is that Israel would have won in Gaza by now were it not for the hostages. And if there, if there were any genuine military threat from Hamas, all there is now, and it's not insignificant because of the nature of the Israeli body politic and the Israeli public, what there are are these, you know, rear guard essentially, you know, street actions of the sort that we saw in Iraq 20 years ago, you know, improvised IEDs, efforts to attack Israeli convoys. You can get them sort of like on a, on a, on a, the strip of road that isn't, where they're not where they're semi isolated, that kind of thing. And so, you know, Israelis have been dying in combat, in a combat that shouldn't be, it shouldn't exist any longer. And so Israel has two choices, one of which is to stop the war now. And which is what the sort of the left in Israel or what the people who are like consumed with the hostages, the exclusion of all else that are exhausted by 20 months of war and all sorts of reasons that are, you know, morally or emotionally sound would want or to say we have to end this now, among other things because of the information war. I mean, look at this Gaza humanitarian food effort. So this is now the second or third or fourth effort being made since October 7th for Israel to participate in the effort to feed Gazans who are supposedly starving, which they're not, but in any case, to feed them as they are starving. And this is by far from what we can tell, the most successful. I mean, according to them, millions and millions of meals are being distributed. Gazans are showing up, they're getting the food, they're going home, they're eating the food. One of the reasons it's had to happen this way way is that the trucks that were being brought in to Gaza through Israeli checkpoints in earlier stages of the war, they would then drive through a checkpoint. The food would be stolen by Hamas, either given to Hamas and its own people or fenced on the black market, and that that food aid was being used to prop up Hamas both nutritionally and in terms of broad dollars. So this now contains the control of the food is within, essentially within Israeli hands, given to a private organization that Israel is materially involved with. And they are, they are themselves distributing the food. And what's happening is that Israel is being defamed, slandered, libeled, and being called war criminals for the act of doing something that no other military in the history of mankind has ever been obliged or required to do, which is to feed the population of the country or the people or whatever it is that attacked it. And the more this happens and the more Israel gets attacked, it has this Hobson's choice one is to keep doing it and then to provide Hamas with these weird ability to control the conversation in which they're killing their own people and saying Israel is doing it and getting credulous attention from reportorial sources who are then retailing it out to the rest of the world or stopping and saying, you know what? We don't care. Starve, starve, starve. We're done with you all we do, all we're doing. We spend all this time trying to isolate our attacks solely and exclusively on Hamas targets. You not, not a single one of you has been of any help to us or is trying to overthrow your own government or do whatever, or tell us where the hostages are. To hell with all of you. They can't do it. They're civilized people. They don't want to see millions of people starve, you know, away from them. But this is the situation that they find themselves in. And at some point, if the Trump administration loses its patience, just as I've lost my patience or something and says, you know, What? Enough with this. Like there isn't going to be a deal, just finish them off.

[Matthew Continetti]

But this is, this is the challenge. This is why the information war aspect of this is very important, because this is a similar dilemma that Israel faces with regard to the remaining hostages. We know from the stories of the released hostages that civilians in Gaza were happy to keep them in their private homes. These were not members of Hamas. These are not active combatants. These are ordinary citizens, the same ones that, as you say, John, Israel is trying to prevent starvation from happening in large groups. So this question of why they're going in, as Matt said, to this particular part of Gaza right now makes me wonder whether there has been some decision made about getting those hostages out. Regardless of the optics. We, we, it would be surprising if some of those people are not being held in private homes. That's exactly how Hamas works. And that is the, that's, that's the information war that Israel might have to choose to lose because there is going to be no winning for them in terms of the optics of say, blowing up a house to get hostages out who are being held by private citizens. So the complicity of the citizenry of Gaza is the story that no one wants to tell in this propaganda war.

[Unnamed Speaker]

You know, I just think that's a great point, Christine. And it was made in a similar way by Ron Dermer, the Netanyahu aide, of course, extremely influential in the Israeli government, in Dermer's interview with Dan Seynour, which is a must listen, if anyone who watches us hasn't watched it, it's two parts. But Dan Seynor asked Ron Dermer about anti Semitism, in particular the anti Semitism we've been discussing in the west and most disturbingly in the United States and in our social media. And Dermer said, you know, I just take antisemitism as a constant and for me the most important thing is building up what you know, Jabotinsky called the Iron Wall, making sure that Israel and the Jewish population of the state of Israel are safe and secure. And this may be behind some of the recent moves in Gaza and the feeling that measures need to be taken now in order to get as many of the hostage living hostages out as possible and as soon as possible so that this can we can just say the war is over. Now. Just a final thing about the Gaza Humanitarian foundation, which is supplying the most of the aid. That of course is a political strategy as well, in order to separate Hamas from, from the mainstay of the population, because you have to be disarmed when you get these, get these meals and the meals are being distributed in places where the IDF has created essentially no Hamas zones. The incident over the weekend or the one yesterday that I woke up to, that happened in a different part of Gaza and it involved a UN convoy. The UN is still operating food convoys.

[Matthew Continetti]

And World Food Program, right?

[John Podhoretz]

Yes.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Which is separate from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And of course the UN we know has an interest in delegitimizing the State of Israel and delegitimizing Israel's attempt to defend itself. But I do think that in the interest of time, I want to talk about one.

[Christine Rosen]

Oh, go ahead, make one sort of general point because in listening to all this, I'm trying to think about what it is, why it is that the information war is now seems so much more tilted, so much worse for Israel right in this moment. Now. The information war is always there and it's always rigged against Israel, has been since October 7th and before. But I'm thinking that what happens is because whatever Israel does, it gets attacked. That when Israel is less on the offensive than it has been. In other words, now it's looking to feed Gazans, it's looking to protect Druze, it's looking for some sort of deal, some sort of hostageship. When it does things that are essentially less aggressive than it has been, that's when the anti Israel influencers and the anti Israel press make it worse on Israel because then they could say, look, even in these things, the Jews are being deadly and revealing their bloodlust and killing and so on. So I think it's kind of the old story that like fighting works. Nothing resolves this like a military resolution.

[John Podhoretz]

The bears repeating. Israel would have killed off Hamas and won this war and destroyed the tunnels with underground explosions and rezoned Gaza and move population and done all this. But there are 20 people, 20 people who are still alive and being held hostage. And the entire geopolitics of the Middle east and indeed the planet are being controlled by the fact that hamas is holding 20 people. This speaks to, I want to be sentimental about this speaks to the deep humanity of the Israeli people, the deep humanity of the Jewish faith. The principle, ancient principle, that it is the obligation of the Jewish community to ransom hostages taken by non Jews, which has been an element of Jewish civilization for, for millennia. And it's all being used against Israel as though to say that because it cannot deliver the coup de grace, it cannot deliver the final blow which any other country would have by now, that it is immoral and Genocidal and mean and horrible, when in fact it is. It is being frozen in place at various moments during the, you know, during the calendar of this war by the deep concern of the body politic in Israel for those 20 people, by its humanity, by its, by its very.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I mean, that is the inversion of anti Semitism.

[John Podhoretz]

I want to, I want to read. And then we should move on from this. But there was a really notorious, I mean, notorious in my circles, but long op ed by Ezra Klein line in the New York Times about young Jews and older Jews and mamdani and who, who thinks what and how. They're so confused about what to think about Israel and the Jewish population. There is very little confusion about how to think about Israel and the Jewish population. Poll after poll after poll after poll after poll shows 80% support, 80 to 90% support for Israel in the Jewish population. But there's 20%. Who, who are the people that Ezra Klein knows as they shop together at the Park Slope Co op and go to anti Zionist congregations like Beth Elohim in Park Slope, whose rabbi is quoted, you know, constantly in the course of this outrageous and filthy op ed that he has published here which says, you know, some Jews are this and some Jews are that. There are eight people quoted. One is Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust historian, and seven are anti Zionist, from Peter Beinart to the editor of Jewish Currents, which is a communist, anti Zionist, anti Semitic publication that uses the word Jew in its title as a means of misdirection. And I just read this paragraph. Okay. Debates about Israel often circle the same strangely posed question. Does Israel have the right to exist? The question is engineered to trap the conversation in the past rather than capture the urgency of the present. Israel does exist. It is a rich nuclear armed power with the strongest military in the region by far. It decapitated Hezbollah and humiliated Iran. Hamas could perpetrate the murders of October 7th only because Israel had become so certain of its strength that it allowed its attention to basic questions of security to lapse. But Hamas did not then and certainly does not now, threaten Israel's existence. So let's unpack this just for two seconds. October 7th took place in 2023. The beeper campaign, the beeper and pager campaign that happened against Hezbollah happens in September of 2024. And the humiliation of Iran happens in 2025. Did, did Israel, did the world know that Israel would have the strength to decapitate Hezbollah and humiliate Iran in 2023 before Hamas acted? Did Hamas know? No, it didn't. Know it had this plan to invade Israel on October 7th. The plan was to march, to have more people come through the fences, to move north from the Gaza envelope, to start actually having individual people and forces of Hamas threaten Israeli communities beyond the kibbutzim and move north. And that Hezbollah would then attack from the north of Israel on October 8th. And then, who knows, maybe Iran would start firing ballistic missiles on October 9th. Did Hamas threaten Israel's existence on October 7th? You bet it did.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Hold it. Did Ezra Klein support any of Israel's actions that he lists there in order to defend Israel against the existential threat that not only Hamas poses?

[John Podhoretz]

It's not an existent. It was not an existential threat is preposterous. There was a scenario in which, of course, Israel could have been destroyed the first week after Hamas's well.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And if the whole point of the ring of fire that Iran constructed using its proxies was to deny Israeli sovereignty to make Israel dangerous for the Jewish population. And once you, once you get into the heads of Israelis that the Jewish home is no longer safe, that does pose an existential threat on one level. And then of course, what he doesn't mention in that catalog you just read is the fact that the leaders of Iran wake up in the morning and chant death to Israel, death to the United States of America, and, and have made it clear over the, what, three decades now that the entire purpose of them having a nuclear program and they want eventually a nuclear bomb is, is to either hold it over Israel's head as an existential threat or if you're Mahmoud Binijad, use it. Right? To bring. Bring that 13th imam back. Right, so that's ridiculous. I focused on another line which I thought was really amazing and also revealing. Ezra Klein writes this. To call Zoran Mamdani an anti Zionist is accurate, but the power of his position is that it is thoroughly, even banali liberal. Okay, well, it's Klein who's being banal here. But I would also add that if that's the case, that if Zoran Mamdani is just simply a liberal like Ezra Klein, there is no greater indictment of modern progressivism and the Democratic Party, in which Ezra Klein is extremely influential, than that sentence. And even as Democratic politicians like Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, and Schomer Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, avoid endorsing Mamdani, you see right here, Ezra Klein say that there's no difference between Mamdani and just a liberal Democrat, even though Mamdani not only refuses to back away from the globalized intifada slogan, but is literally in, you know, one social media post after another, just revealing his communism. You know, it used to be the whole critique of the right back in the 50s and 60s was the Democrats are just creeping socialists. They want the same thing as the Soviet Union. They're just slower at it.

Right.

And you know, that can be an exaggeration, but apparently not. Apparently not. Because if Zoran Mohammedani is a liberal, well, then you see what they have in store.

[Matthew Continetti]

But they, but this is an effort, I think it's a concerted effort on the part of people like Ezra Klein, people who, as Matt is correct to say, have power not only within the media, but also within the Democratic Party to normalize that. To normalize the more extreme. You know, Mamdani is not a democrat. He's a socialist. He's a democratic socialist. He was welcomed with open arms over the weekend to a luncheon hosted by AOC and other members of the squad here in Washington, D.C. and you're right to point out that Hakeem and Schumer have so far kind of done the hands off, but he's already. There are the media in particular is already recycling this message because Mamdani has said, well, I would discourage people from saying globalize the intifada, but he didn't condemn it. And so they're already saying, look, look at this liberal haha position he's taking, which is to, to acknowledge that, you know, maybe it's not the best slogan, but not to condemn it. And this is all this effort. It's a, it's a shifting of the Overton window every time his statements and his true beliefs are covered.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, so if just to go back to the 1950s, say that. Walter, I don't know who's a. Who's a good liberal columnist from the 19. Max Lerner, I don't know. Somebody is writing a column.

[Unnamed Speaker]

John Kenneth Galbraith says that.

[John Podhoretz]

Alger Hiss, who is a senior State Department official who organized the Yalta conference and was then rightly outed as a communist by Whitaker Chambers. That Alger Hiss is a communist is true. That he is an agent of the Soviet Union is true, but that just means he's just like any other liberal. This is the proper analogy, as Klein is saying that American liberals now are anti Zionist. Now, in my, in my worst, most hysterical ranting, that is not something that I would be comfortable in saying. But he's more representative or more knowledgeable about where American liberalism is than I am.

[Unnamed Speaker]

He just Put it in the New York Times. It's saying it's banal to even think otherwise.

[John Podhoretz]

Banal to think that anti Zionism is not simply another form of liberal thinking. And if that is the case, then American liberalism is sunk. Anti Zionism, he says that the question does Israel have a right to exist? Is a way of living in the past rather than engaging with the present. That Israel does or does not have a right to exist is the formative question question of Mamdani, his people, Francesca Albanese and the entire anti Zionist, anti Israel movement. They are still laboring under the idea that something can happen to transform Israel from being the Jewish state into not being the Jewish state either. A binational state. Maybe it's not that it's going to be destroyed, but that it will somehow international opinion will wreak its magic and convert this nation of 9 million people, you know, 7 million of whom are Jews, into a country that is no longer a homeland for the Jewish people. But that is what back to Palestine.

[Unnamed Speaker]

That's what they want.

[Matthew Continetti]

This is actually what's the important thread here that you're pointing to, John, with the view that Ezra Klein is articulating. And also I think he looks a lot at younger people who self identify as democratic progressive, who are younger, and that's that liberalism. And we obviously talked about this a great deal over the last few years on the podcast. There is an authoritarian streak, a very much an idea that technocratic control is itself part baked into the cake of liberalism now. And during COVID we saw that absolutely demolished by the incompetence of just that form of control. However, internationally, that's still very popular idea. It's basically what drove the Biden administration's foreign policy. So when I hear what Ezra Klein is articulating, he does truly believe that's the liberal technocratic position. And that is what populism, I think, has quite vociferously and correctly been challenging over and over again, not just here in the United States, but in parts of Europe as well. But it's going to take a while to decouple what that message is from its application. Its applications are often highly illiberal.

[Donny Deutsch]

Hey, this is Donny Deutsch. I host the podcast on Brand that comes twice a week. We give you two for the price of one. One day a week we do our big interviews with our big personalities, some of the biggest names in politics, entertainment, culture and business. And on the second wave, we do what we call our brands of the Week. These are the brands that are shaping the Zeitgeist, who's up, who's down, and you can really enjoy both of them. So tune in twice a week to On Brand. You can get them anywhere. You get podcasts, Spotify, Apple, anyplace else. We look forward to seeing you and hearing from you.

[Mark Alper]

I'm Mark Alper and I want to let you know that Two Way Tonight, the destination for the best political news and analysis anywhere, is now available as an audio podcast. Each weekday I'll be joined by special guests from the worlds of news, politics and the media, along with members of the Two Way community for conversations like no other. It's the best way to stay informed at the end of your day or first thing in the morning every weekday. It's a show like no other because we involve the community. We hear from people from around the country, around the world. They're part of a conversation. There is no other platform like this and I hope you will find it to be not only different than everything else, but more meaningful as you become part of a special community around the program. So listen and follow two Way Tonight with Mark Alperin on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify or any other major streaming platform.

[John Podhoretz]

I need to quote one more thing which is from Eric Kaufman in Tablet. Eric Kaufman has done a report for the for fire, the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression about expressive freedom on elite college campuses involving Jews and conservatives, and he has two very interesting this long report, two very interesting observations that emerge from it, one of which is that conservatives on Ivy campuses in particular feel less constrained than they did before October 7th because all of the ire and efforts to shut people up and harass them and make it so that they feel as though they need to keep their mouths shut have moved to Jews. Whereas before October 7th it was all about being conservative and crushing conservative hopes for being able to express themselves freely on college campuses. Now here is the point that shows that Ezra Klein is living in the past, quoting Rachel Timiner, this repulsive rabbi in Brooklyn and Jewish Currents, which was started by a Stalinist named Maurice U. Shappies and is now returning to its strong Stalinist roots, some rich communist Jew paying for it as we speak. When the this is Eric Hoffman's discovery. When the encampments went up on elite campuses, Jewish students abandoned the far left in droves. The share of Jewish Ivy league students, meaning 2019, 2021 year olds today who identify as very Liberal on a seven point ideology scale, declined from 40% before the encampments to 13% after they appeared. The proportion of quote, strong Democrats unquote, tanked from 37% to 14%, while the Republican share rose from 12% to 18%. Ivy League Jews went from being well to the left of the median Ivy League student to leaning right of the average. So maybe what's going on here is the desperate effort to create a narrative according to which every Jew under 50 thinks that Israel is evil. So the Jews who are on the downward slope toward dwindling death may still like Israel, but the vanguard is all coming for the Jewish state. And you better watch it and be nice and say it's okay for Zoram Hamdani to become mayor and for, you know, Ilhan Omar to become, you know, pope and for everybody to become everybody. Because that's the. And this is not the truth. This is a big lie. The big lie is Israel's not threat. Israel was not under existential threat before October 7th. It was, it was from Hamas, which was a catamite of Iran, as was Hezbollah, as is Yemen, as was Syria, and as. And obviously Iran itself developing nuclear weapons with all those thousands of ballistic missiles that Israel, you know, had to take out and deal with and cope with. It was under existential threat. You're lying. Saying it was not. Either you're lying or you're an idiot, or you're blind or you're an embarrassing truculent fool. There's no other fifth choice. Like, well, that's an interesting interpretation. You're probably right. Israel was under existential threat. Maybe it was his own fault. Maybe it lost sight of the ball and lost sight of what it needed to do, which is certainly the case, and then exposed itself to the existence existential threat and allowed its enemies to move on it in a way that it never expected. But that's a distinction without a difference. They had means more of an opportunity and they took it. And unfortunately for Hamas, the two other elements that it hoped were going to jump in and like, deliver the blow stayed out or backed off or didn't quite do what they thought it was going to do. But that was certainly what was on there, that that was what they thought their dance card was, was going to be. And the experience of American Jews on college campuses has pushed them to the right, not to the left. And that's the truth. And Ezra Klein's 40 year old let's have lots of abundance and live however it is that we live. Those people are caught in the have been caught by history and are being shockwaved by history. Not Zionists, older and younger, who are experiencing what it is like to support a country that will defend itself and protect itself. The issue now is whether it has reached this moment of choosing where it is going to have to make a horribly tragic decision about how to defend itself and the competing values of saving the Jewish people and saving the hostages and whether they are really reaching an inflection point of which there is not much else that they can do. And that world opinion turning against them and is, and, and Hamas feeling emboldened and all of that is going to force their, their hand. Can we, can we move on to two things? Even though we don't have that much time. I want to just spend two minutes on something and particularly so this big story that came out of nowhere, that Coldplay is having this concert in the Boston Garden and says, you know, let's, let's do the kiss cam and you know, go pan around the stadium and then they hit this middle aged couple, he's got his arms around her and they're on the kiss cam. And then they realize that they're on the screen and they hide their heads and they, you know, they hide themselves in horror and terror. And Chris Martin says something interesting going on there that they would be hiding. Of course, as I think people now know, he was the CEO of a, of a, of some kind of a tech start of tech company and she was the HR director of the company. And they were caught in an adult moment of, you know, which they're both married to other people and caught in, you know, in public. And there's been this whole talk for days now about was this fair? Is it fair for them to be published? What did they do? They didn't choose to be on the kiss cam.

[Matthew Continetti]

They were shamelessly cheating on their spouses in public. I think that they're sort of like, you know, it's like your grandmother used to say, don't do something you don't want to see on the front page of the newspaper. So I'm not sympathetic to them. I'm sympathetic for their, for their, the wife and the husband and the children of either family who've been betrayed by these terrible people. Just I don't think it's more complicated than that. I mean, I'm wrong.

[John Podhoretz]

I don't know if they're terrible people or not. Like if you're going to have an affair, they're in a stadium, right? Okay, so maybe they're not going to be on camera on a giant camera, but they could certainly run into people who work for them who would have spotted them.

[Matthew Continetti]

They're like, he's the HR director, so who's going to enforce that rule? Right? It's kind of clever on his part.

[Unnamed Speaker]

You know, the worst thing about this story, and I agree with Christine, I feel really badly for the families. But the worst thing is that in a couple of reports over the weekend, I saw the. The woman referred to as the chief people officer of the company.

[John Podhoretz]

Oh, you didn't know this term?

[Unnamed Speaker]

I did not know. No. It has to be banned. I know that Trump is fixated on the Washington commanders right now, but he needs to have a true social post saying that this word chief people officer, cpo, that cannot exist, or else maybe he'll tariff companies more. I mean, really, that is, to me, the most egregious part of the story.

[John Podhoretz]

I just don't know where you've been. I don't know where I've been either. I've been around. I'm like people officer.

[Christine Rosen]

I'm alone here, I guess, in thinking that the. And I'm so surprised that Christine isn't on the same page here. I was so depressed the second I saw this thing streaming all over my social media. This collective pathology of coming out to focus on these people who betrayed their families. That's a horrible thing. We all agree with, with that. But to turn them into the focus of this massive scorn campaign and joking and I think it's very sick.

[Matthew Continetti]

Well, I do agree with you that it's like John Ronson's book now. So you've been publicly shamed. But this is a world that certainly an HR person, and definitely a CEO of a tech company should acknowledge to be the one we live in. I wish it were different. And I don't like what social media does as well. I think actually mocking them was an appropriate response. But it's the scale and speed with which all of. All of us could be mocked if we say one, you know, inappropriate thing while, you know, while we're in the grocery store, that all of us could be this. These people. So in that sense, I do share Abe's opinion that we should have some grace and sympathy. But in general, given the. And also the statement he made, the not apology. Apology letter that was issued, I don't think that they're very good people. So, you know, maybe the comeuppance was too harsh, but that is the world we live in, unfortunately.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, when Ronson wrote so you. So you've been shamed. It's a great book, but it is like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you know, socially or politically, which is that the publication of that book and the things that occasioned that book were instructive to the people who lived after that book was published, after that woman who got on the plane to South Africa, then found out that she'd become a worldwide phenomenon of racism and monstrosity while she was on a plane and unaware of the fact that 5 million people had commented on her drunken tweet that we all now live in the world since that happened and have to reckon with the possibility that can happen to anybody and being caught out publicly having an affair somewhere if it's not in a hotel lobby. As I said, they could have been no kiss cam, and they could have been spotted by, you know, his wife's best friend could have been in the seat next to them or something like that. You know, I mean, how would we. How would we ever know? Just makes this, I think, an interesting modern version of the adultery story that I'm not. I don't necessarily take a huge amount. I just think people were. I was being emailed by listeners who sort of said, you need to talk about this.

[Matthew Continetti]

Look, it is. It does speak to the unfortunate prediction which was given glibly by, I think it was Eric Schmidt when he was head of Google. You have nothing to hide. You have nothing to fear. In this new transparent world, there is no privacy. So this idea, I think what Abe is appealing to, and I agree with him on this, is that we do actually, human beings need some privacy. So even wrongdoers, although shamed within their community, should perhaps not be shamed globally. And that those norms have almost completely eroded and we haven't yet developed new ones, new privacy norms, new expectations.

[Unnamed Speaker]

I also think it's a nice reminder that the Puritan streak still exists in America.

[John Podhoretz]

Yes, right.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Because if we were those sophisticated, wine drinking, smoking French people, they would say, what is this? It's nothing. Right? But America still has that defense of monogamy and traditional family structure somewhere deep in its DNA. And so we saw this. And of course, it's not. It's the fact that they're having an affair and doing so so flagrantly that caught the world's attention.

[John Podhoretz]

Finally, I want to make note of the passing of Edwin J. Fullner. Ed Fullner. It's probably a lot. We could have done an entire podcast on the legacy of Ed Fullner, one of the most important figures in American politics of the last 50 years, co founder in 1974, I believe, of the Heritage Foundation. And Fuller had a very specific idea that transformed American Politics Heritage is usually called a think tank. And it's a think tank in the sense that it employs a lot of people who do reports on things and, you know, sort of study policy and that. But he had a very specific mandate in his mind, which is that he wanted to supply congressional offices. When he started congressional offices, House and Senate Republicans in particular, who are, of course, very deeply in the minority in the. In the House, with talking points and ideas about how to pursue conservative policies within the framework of the rules and procedures of the House and the Senate, and how to respond to, particularly to liberal bills, to left wing actions and what they could say. So he was providing them with what we would now call talking points, two page, three page memos that laid out what was wrong with a given piece of legislation, what to say about it that would be appealing to their constituents, and to explain why you would vote against it, or something like that. And that this then morphed five or six years later into a document, 2500 page document, that was work of instruction for the incoming, first really conservative administration elected in the United States, the Reagan administration, about how it could pursue conservative policies at the executive level. That was called Mandate for Leadership. And it was a remarkable document because people who had worked for the Nixon and Ford administrations, like William E. Simon and others, said when we came into office, we didn't really know what to do to advance our agendas because the only real briefings we ever got from anybody were from our predecessors, who were usually liberal or left about what, how our department worked, what it did, what it could do, how we could implement regulations and things like that. And we don't really have a guidebook on how to pursue conservatism within our cabinet departments and at the White House. And Mandate for Leadership was an effort to create a roadmap or a guidebook for this for them. It was remarkably successful. It was produced, I don't know, pretty much, you know, six or seven times in the decade since. And then, of course, most notoriously, became a campaign issue last year when Heritage's latest version, which was called, Called. What was it called? Something 20. Project 20, Project 25. Democrats desperately glommed onto to say, aha, we now have the. Here, here's the roadmap of the Trump administration. That's fascism and evil. And now, you know, we'll read from it like it's a fairy tale book. At the Democratic Convention, remember, people had this like, giant book which they were reading passages from Project 2025. Very success that really, you know, what Trump lost because of that, obviously in 2020. It was such a brilliant thing. But Fullmer created this institution that was a practical effort to deal with what it would mean to be a conservative, to be a governing force that participated in the government and didn't just say everything the government did was bad and how to. How to do it and how to. There are many problems with heritage and I'm not going to go into them now. And. But it wasn't like a I where you were. Matt and Christine were I just dollars their head. It was an effort to centralize and issue forth ideas about how to be practically conservative in government. And it was a. It was a brilliant conceit, a brilliant conception, wildly successful, desperate efforts to copy it on the part of liberals in the left ever since they started. No one's ever been able to because Ed was a man of great personal principle and did not trim his sail. Sometimes he made foolish mistakes.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Can I make a point on that?

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, please.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Because just briefly, Fullner was steeped in the conservative movement and in conservative thought. He was part of the Mont Pelerin Society. He was formative to the Philadelphia Society, which was a group of American conservative intellectuals that met regularly. He has, he used to send out essays about important conservative thinkers which were later collected into a book. So that kind of principled basis for his political interventions I think is extremely important part of his legacy. And the other thing we should mention is he was a. He was a true believer in the connection between economic freedom and political freedom and the connection between American leadership and engagement in the world and American interest and security at home. And so his last published piece, it was a co authored essay with former Vice President Mike Pence that leads the current issue of national affairs, the publication edited by Yuval Levin, which laments the contemporary rights shift away from support for free markets and support for American leadership abroad. And so I would just say that it would be a great way to remember Fullmer by picking up that national affairs essay and reading about his critique of some elements on the contemporary right today.

[John Podhoretz]

And if I could just also, just on a personal note, say that somewhat unique among institution creators, institution builders, particularly in Washington, who had great success, he was a lovely man. He was kind, he was temperate. He was, he was not a credit hog. He was civil, he was pleasant, he was amusing. He was, he was supportive of the people who worked for him.

[Unnamed Speaker]

And he listened to our podcast and.

[John Podhoretz]

He listened to our podcast. That's true. I hadn't even. I had he very much to our podcast. But, but But I I knew I've known new him for for 40 years. And as I said, I've known many people were kind of like very important intellectual, ideological, partisan political figures in the United States over the past four decades. And he was extraordinarily unusual in his personal modesty and sort of genuine bonhomie and goodwill and good humor. It's an unusual quality. Was an extremely unusual quality. And he will be remembered by the people who knew him, not only for his achievements, but for his personal grace and the good that he did for so many people whom he knew. And that's not something you can say about very many people. So we got to wrap up. Talk to you tomorrow. For Matt, Christine and Abe, I'm John Pothoritz. Keep the candle.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Bur.