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A
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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Some drink champagne Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the.
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A
Worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Wednesday, December 10, 2025. I'm Jon Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine and today's show is brought to you by the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Because at a time when American higher education has lost its way, the Hamilton School at the University of Florida is setting a new standard, offering an elite education that's anything but elitist. Led by world class scholars, Hamilton is reviving the classical liberal arts traditional grounded in the great works of Western civilization and the founding principles of the American Republic. In small discussion based classes, students study history, philosophy, economics, literature and America's founding texts, developing the discipline, eloquence and moral confidence to lead with purpose in their careers, their communities and their lives. Learn more at Hamilton ufl.
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The Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Leading a revolution in higher education and leading a revolution in podcasting, we have TODAY executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
And joining us today, Commentary contributing editor and host of the Breaking History podcast at the Free Press, the not entirely well, Eli Lake. And I don't mean that psychologically, I mean that in terms of his health.
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B
It's just a touch of West Nile with a little sika.
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Great to be here, John. Thank you.
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A
It's great to have you, Eli. And I want to say that Eli's Breaking History podcast feed has re released his seminal podcast from last year on Christmas music and the role that my people, our people, the Jewish people, Jewish musicians and songwriters played in creating the seminal Christmas music that we hear incessantly from pretty much Halloween until the present. And Eli.
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Is such a great podcast. It's one of my favorite subjects.
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B
Thank you. Yeah, me too.
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A
And we have it draws fire every year that as people get more and more explicitly anti Semitic, as they have over the last three years, the idea somehow that Jews conspired to remove religion from Christmas through their venomous coalitions. Lyric writing.
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I see it pretty much once a day on Twitter.
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B
Yeah. Okay, couple points. One, if you're worried about the war on Christmas, take it up with the Puritans, who initially banned Christmas because the tradition of Christmas in Europe and early America was not a very religious holiday. Weirdly, it was, it was almost like a kind of proto class consciousness holiday where similar to the traditional Boxing Day where like, you know, the people who worked the land, the farmers, the peasant class got to go to the house and demand food, drink and money. And you know, in exchange they would sing often a bawdy carol, I would say. So this notion that it was always a very like, you know, there was always been that obviously in the church, but Christmas has always kind of had this secular tinge. And the way that I look at it, which is kind of. When I wrote it, it was about almost a conversation I had within my own family because my sister, who I love very much but is much more progressive than I.
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She takes the Christopher Hitchens view, which is that like, America becomes a one party state the day after Thanksgiving. And everybody gets. I just say Merry Christmas. And she would just rather people just say happy Holidays. And I'm like, no, Merry Christmas. Christmas is such an inclusive holiday. And I love the story of Irving Berlin, who talks about living in a slum in the Lower east side and having his Irish neighbors invite him in to see their very small tree and thinking that in his view, that tree was towering to heaven and he was just blown away about the sort of generosity of.
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American non Jews to Jews in this situation. It wasn't always the case, obviously, but. And there were plenty of examples of American anti Semitism. But the point is, is that we're an inclusive enough country that American Jews were able to write these timeless Christmas classics. And you know, most Americans just don't care. You know, it's just part of our culture. It's great.
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A
So the.
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Attack is that if you take White Christmas, right, the most famous of all Christmas songs, which is a very witty, quietly witty song, because it's actually about what it's like to celebrate Christmas in Los Angeles. That's the subject of White Christmas. Why? He says, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas just like the ones I used to know. Because he's in LA, it's December and of course there's. It's 70 degrees, right?
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B
Little did he know, right? He's writing it for a bad movie about all the holidays.
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A
Holiday Inn. That's right, that's right. Which, yes, I like that movie. I like it too. But it does have a horrible blackface number, so that's also true.
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B
But what's interesting is that that song then becomes the thing that all of our GIs fighting against the Axis powers, that is how they kind of connect to home. Even though he writes it, you know, kind of like I'm in LA and I miss the snow, but people connect because the music is so brilliant. You know, the blue note in. In the. In the chord is so perfect.
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And. But that's an example. And like, really? Are you gonna. Like, I. Because I saw the same account. He's like, by the way, there. This is the thing. The anti Semites are cribbing from a Jew, Philip Roth. Philip Roth is the one who first notices all of this and says, Irving Berlin has decristified Christmas and Easter with his song about the Easter. And I'm like, come on. I love Philip Roth. But like, they're. But that's the whole thing. They're taking it. The anti Semitism. Semites are taking their anti Semitism from another Jew. So what does that tell you?
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A
Right? Well, okay, so you got that deracinated song. You have Winter Wonderland, which doesn't even mention Christmas, right? Which is. It mentions.
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Sleigh Bells, but is also, you know, it's basically about the question of whether or not this couple is gonna get married. That's the subject of Winter Wonderland. Are we gonna face unafraid the plans that we made Walking into winter Wonderland? Or.
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The Christmas song written by Mel Torme, which doesn't mention Christmas at all.
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B
Right?
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A
But it mentions all the symbols of Christmas. Chestnuts roasting on open fire, Jack Frost and the big at your nose, all that. So there is truth in the idea that the great Christmas songs, with the exception of the Little Drummer Boy, which I loathe, and a couple of others, don't really mention the birth of. Are not about, you know, the coming to earth of, you know, of the Son or the. You know, the incarnation of the Son of God in a manger in Bethlehem. That's not what they're. That's not what they're about. But you could make the case that this is as ecumenical a Christian thing as you could possibly do. Because, of course, what Christmas means to different sects of Christianity or different denominations. What Christmas is for a Catholic is not the same as what Christmas is for a Baptist or for an Anabaptist or for a Mormon I know. Who don't really, you know, this complicated question of. They say they're Christians and other Christians say they're not Christians, but that Christmas marks the birth of Christ. But what. What that means, what faith, tradition, that. How Marian. It is. How, you know, whatever. These songs avoid.
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Anybody having to take a stand on the ultimate meaning of Christmas. And this dates back to. There's a really wonderful book called the man who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford, published, I think, I don't know, 15 years ago, which is About Dickens and A Christmas Carol, Right? Dickens writing a Christmas Carol. And that our understanding of what Christmas is and should be, the West's understanding derives largely from the traditions that this enormously popular tale published in 1843.
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B
Before that, there's the poem A Night Before Christmas.
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A
Right? That was.
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B
Which is crazy. Like, everybody loves it. Yeah, that's the first version of St. Nick.
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A
Right.
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B
And then. And like, there are versions of St. Nick where he's actually like a disciplinarian. And then it becomes this jolly guy, gives out gifts to everybody.
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A
Right.
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B
And so the people. Let me tell you, it wasn't the Jews or just the Jews. It was. Everybody wanted to kind of secularize Christmas and make it a nice holiday where.
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A
I mean, Dickens did not secularize anything. He was a very serious, believing Christian. He might, you might say, progressivized Christmas.
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B
Right?
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A
Because the message of the Christmas Carol is about how a rich man's heart is opened up to Christian charity and that the message is goodwill and, you know, peace, peace on earth and goodwill toward men and be nice to crippled children and give a lot of charity and provide people with food and let everybody have a good holiday and you know, welcome in neighbors and strangers and things like that. Our understanding of what Christmas is supposed to be spiritually derives way more from Charles Dickens than it does from Irving Berlin or Sammy Khan or Mel Torme or anybody like that.
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All of that said, it is one of the more fascinating cultural facts that we have that a lot of what we see as American, pro American mythology or pro, sort of like what the trends and traditions of living in a heartwarming idea of America come from immigrant Jews. Much of Hollywood derives from immigrant Jews. Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle. A couple of these guys who loved. Who had. They were on monsters and psychopaths personally, often, and were absolutely horrible people. But they looked at the United States and what it had done for them and what it had done for Jews. And their gratitude was expressed in a portrait of the United States that was unabashedly elevating and supportive and full of the glow of the glories of what it meant to be an American. And we come to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration coming up next July. And what is the ideological fight going to be in 2026 as it was in 1976, 50 years ago, when I was 15 and lived through the bicentennial? It's going to be, is the American Dream a nightmare?
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B
Well, that was a lot.
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A
Was there ever an American Dream? What is America. Okay, yeah.
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B
Can we take a moment? Because you're getting into something that is going to be in my bonnet. All the heritage Americans, the people who are talking about, you know, what happened to our country and everything like that. There's an element of it where it's like, with the excesses of wokeness, I kind of am with you. I kind of get it. Like, there was a lot of, you know, cultural multiculturalism that was sort of foisted upon people, especially in the last 15, 20 years or so. But if you're going to say America is a white Christian nation and serious people are now saying it, not just, you know, boobs on the Internet, I mean, come on, familiarize yourself with why the country was founded for various sects of Christians and others who were seeking religious freedom and that the real tradition is a kind of ecumenicism and tolerance of various kinds of Christianity because the Puritans and the Quakers and so forth were driven out of England and Europe. That's what's going on here. So I'm just kind of amazed when I hear this point about, I mean, if all you wish to say is the Scottish Enlightenment and the English Enlightenment, which were Christian people and their Christian ideas or Judeo Christian ideas that informed the Declaration, I agree.
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A
Yes.
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B
I acknowledge that. There is, of course, going back to the book of Genesis, all true. But the people who are trying to say, no, we've always been a Christian nation, like, what are you talking about? Also totally against that.
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A
It was like, it's very important.
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Before the 20th century, this understanding that there was something called.
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Christianity in which there were white people that had this faith in Jesus Christ in common masks. Centuries of religious war in Europe, all of which was about Christians fighting other Christians over their interpretation of what it meant to be a Christian. And here in the United States, the major nativist movement in the United states in the 19th century was an effort to keep Catholics out of the United States. The Ku Klux Klan, which we think of as the world's premier racist organization, began as an anti Catholic neighborhood watch terrorist group. There was no such thing as Christianity Christianity.
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D
The immigration restrictions, when they moved on from, you know, singling out specific people to, well, we're just cut immigration from certain geographic areas. You know, it's obviously widely recognized that, you know, they were Eastern European Jewish areas that they were targeting, but they were also Catholic areas. The geographic targeting in, you know, the 1920s was still targeting Catholics too.
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A
Very important to note when we talk about America being a white country. Right. White Christian nation this is 21st century identity politics being seized on by the right to misunderstand what the. What the. How the world divided itself or thought about itself until very recently, which is like, as I constantly say, my grandfather, the milkman in Brooklyn was not white. If. If John D. Rockefeller was white. He was not. Whatever he was, he was not of the same my, you know, from Galicia, from beyond the Pale immigrant, you know, spoke, yet came here when he was 17, spoke Yiddish.
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Never rose out of the working class, and had a thick accent all his life. And he had no cultural connection to the wasp. He had no cultural. Except for the Judeo Christian tradition, which itself.
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Is a construct also, but an effort not to play identity politics, but to destroy some version of identity politics by saying, there's a lot that joins everybody together.
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Intellectually or philosophically, over millennia, not just since 1776. But there was no such thing as whiteness except that there were black slaves and there were Native Americans, and then there were people who were not considered white foreigners in our nation with their own nations, which were the Native Americans or subhuman people who came here to be servile to everybody else. But Irish and Italians did not feel like they were the same people, and people from Northern Europe did not feel like they were the same as people from Southern Europe. And no one thought that they were the same as Jews. And that was America until World War II. In some ways. I mean, Eli mentioned sort of like the binding glue of the song White Christmas, but you never hear the term white ethnics anymore.
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C
Right, right. It's not really used, but that's sort of. Those are the kind of people we're talking about.
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A
Well, before we ever got to soccer moms and security moms and whatever. The white ethnic was the population that shifted in the United States from the Democratic Party into voting for Republicans. That was why we talked about the white ethnic Right. It was that they voted for Nixon over McGovern. They voted for Reagan over Carter, though they voted for Carter. And that they were this population in mostly, you know, focused in cities, working class with their kids who had jumped to the middle class. But they were traditionalists in terms of their. What would you call it, their practice of religion, their sense of their own communities, their defense of their own traditions. And they were the white ethnics, and they're largely gone in some way. I mean, this demographically makes sense, that they've intermarried and blended together, and they don't exist in the same way. I was just going to make the point about World War II that for the first time in American history, World War I, a little bit, but it was so short. 16 million people participated in World War II. People ended up, you know, it's the joke of World War II movies when you see movies about, you know, soldiers is, you know, Goldberg met Polanski, who met o'. Brien, you know.
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Guy from Appalachia is in the trenches next to a guy from the Bronx. And this wasn't. This was real. There was a draft in the United States until, you know, until 1969. Pretty, you know, uninterruptedly. And as my father says, when he went into the army in 1953, he met other Americans he had never met. He had never met anybody from Kentuck, from like the blue hills of Kentucky or whatever.
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That was what.
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D
That was partially behind Truman's, you know, belief that that was the time to integrate the military. When he did, because he. After the war, because he said, you know, you may be a racist, but you're going to have a hard time, you know, trying to keep out the guy who saved your life or whatever. Not. Although, you know, even. Even before integration. But the idea that they were all soldiers, it was like, that's come home from the war. And, you know, there was this band of brothers idea, even though the units were segregated, that it was just harder to look at other people and say that they were less than human in some way when they were the ones that, you know, fought for civilization.
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A
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- [22:54]
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B
You know who embodied this arc? Whose life embodied the arc is Frank Sinatra. Because Sinatra is kind of on the liberal side up until the early 60s and he represents the idea that America is for all of us. And you can keep your ethnic identity, you can keep your identity, but we're all still Americans and very pro assimilation as he did a great.
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Short film about prejudice where he shows up and these kids are like using whatever the racist.
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A
Hold on there buddy. Hold on a second. You're talking about the house I live in.
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B
Yes.
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A
Sings the House. The House I Live in is a song written, if you will excuse me, by.
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Abel Meeropol, Stalinist, the adopter of the Rosenberg children. So Roald Robinson, Communist, Albert Martin, House I Live In.
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B
John, are you really objecting to it? Come on. I mean.
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A
I'm saying.
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I don't need to be here. And he was a good liberal because he was performing a propaganda song written by.
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B
Literally, he was a supporter of Martin Luther King when it came.
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A
I know. No, Sinatra was a liberal.
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B
Yes.
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A
And then he can't praise House I Live in on this podcast that will not be praised.
- [25:52]
B
Okay, fair enough.
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A
People were supporters of Stalin.
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B
I'm against Stalin. Okay.
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A
I did.
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B
Okay. My point is, is that he changes. And when you're talking about that change among the white ethnics, it's because he's responding to the mishigos of the 60s and the identity politics. And he comes out of that, even though he loves Kennedy.
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C
He.
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B
He comes out of that and he basically becomes a Nixon guy and then is a big supporter of Ring.
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A
Well, he loves Kenny. One of the reasons he changes, that Kennedy mistreated him personally.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
So there's that too. But it's an important. The other important point to make, move on from this, is no rational person should deny the fact that America is a Christian nation. If you're going to look for a definition of America in a category like that, America remains 74% Christian. I mean, a lot of people don't believe, but I mean, however you want to call it in terms of, you know, their stock. So it's a country that's 3/4 Christian. It's a country that's 2% Jewish. I don't think that America is a Jewish nation. I think if you need to define it as such, you can define it as a Christian nation. And you know what if the Christians. It's up to the Christians to define how Christian a nation it is. We didn't do anything like, they're the ones who are falling away from religion. They're the ones who took their. You know who. The Protestants took their own moral code and their own understanding of personal responsibility and turned it into a woke soup. You know, Jews didn't do that. Jews didn't make the Episcopalians vanish to numbers smaller than the Jewish population of the United States. They did that to themselves. And so the weakness in Christianity is a weakness in Christianity. It's not a weakness.
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B
It's not a weakness.
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A
By others.
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B
If there is a revival, and I think there is right now among, after Charlie Kirk and so forth. I generally think that's a good thing because I think religion is generally a good thing and it is a bulwark against the nihilism which creates, you know, Nick Fuente's fans. And.
- [28:07]
A
What Eli brings up is an interesting point because, you know, they're Australia just bad, just basically banned social media and, and smartphones for, for kids under 16. Rahm Emanuel is showing signs that he is going to try to use this issue as his accelerant in his long shot bid to become the Democratic nominee for president. Said yesterday that he believes that no person under 16 should have a smartphone because it creates habits and behaviors that are terrible. And.
- [28:47]
What is our portrait of the dystopian America that is coming? No one's going to write because of AI. No one's going to do anything because of AI. Everyone's going to live in their basements and put virtual reality helmets on and live this solitary existence in which they don't get married, they don't have sex, they don't, they don't, you know, they don't do anything with human drive as we understand it. And if demolition men, if these aren't the conditions and circumstances for a fourth great awakening, I don't know that there will ever be, you know, that, that people cannot live without meaning. And all these efforts over the course of the last 25 years to give non religious meaning to life, you know, wokeism, you know, the conversion of politics into religion and all of that are clearly not sustaining anybody and are giving rise to these semi demonic figures like Nick Fuentes, like Candace Owens, like Tucker, who, like Curtis Yarvin and people like that who have this entirely negative effect. They are taking these people and saying, you're right that your lives stink. And I have absolutely no guide or way path for you forward to be healthy.
- [30:03]
B
But I can tell you who to blame.
- [30:06]
A
Yeah. And I can tell you who to blame. So us. Yeah.
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C
But you know, the nature of revivals in the US is that they're not.
- [30:21]
They dress up as tradition, but they're, they're quite radical.
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In their innovations.
- [30:31]
It's never about returning to a more staid sort of piety. It's about the mass outward showing of faith.
- [30:48]
This kind of concerns me because we see a lot of this in the Manhattan Institute poll that was recently done.
- [30:58]
The kids going around saying things like.
- [31:04]
Christian Zionism is a heresy. They're the ones less likely to actually go to church. So there is this sort of, there's a lot of outward manifestation of returning to faith. I'm not sure how much of an actual return to church pews we have seen yet.
- [31:31]
A
Well, there's also this weird thing that, you know, there have been.
- [31:38]
The massification of.
- [31:41]
What came to be the Moral Majority, or what we consider the religious right, all of which sprung.
- [31:49]
Several generations before. We saw this pop up, really, in the 1970s, as a major political force began with the revivalist movements of Billy Graham and others. These were tent revivals, which actually is an old form that's like traveling churches that set up in tents as opposed to going to your, you know, going to your weekly service at your Congregational church or your Presbyterian church or something like that. Mass groupings, fiery speeches, people finding faith as they're going on in the tents and all that. Billy Graham, the most popular person. Poll after poll after poll in the United States for decades with no cultural purchase whatsoever. Like nobody in New York media, which dominated the American cultural conversation, paid the slightest attention to Billy Graham. And then, lo and behold, in 1975, this politician from Georgia emerges, speaking a very odd argot that it turns out is a kind of sourced from Southern. The rise in Southern baptism and the moral revulsion at America's weakening moral standards, as evinced not only by Watergate and the behavior of the president, but also, generally speaking, the rise in pornography, dirty movies, the use of bad language, all of that. And Jimmy Carter runs the most conservative political campaign that has ever been run in the United States in 1976, and then betrays it the minute he gets into office and basically governs as an Eastern.
- [33:31]
As a metropolitan Eastern liberal, and then gets his hat handed to him by Reagan in 1980. So we don't even know what form revival takes it, or it may be happening now. We don't. And it's invisible to us. It's not going to be. People are going to church on Sunday morning and then going to, you know, have, you know, have Sunday dinner while they're dressed up in their finery and then watch football. It may be something that comes through a game.
- [34:02]
You know, or, you know, that's the.
- [34:05]
D
That's the. Well, that. See, that's the thing. Because. Right. The things take the form of their. Of their time. And so, you know, when you said we look at the, you know, the coming apocalypse, you know, as like social media and screens and all that stuff, there has been a performative revival on social media for a couple of years now. And, you know, the sort of. There's the tradwife phenomenon, right? That was, you know, the Big social media phenomenon. And then on Twitter it's, you know, the men pointing to a, you know, a farm, seven blonde children and a nice house with a picket fence and saying this is what they took from us, you know, and stuff like that. But it was really genuinely performative. Right? Because there was, you know, I don't know, last year one of these large accounts who was, you know, a trad wife account turned out to be nothing of the sort. And you know, they figured out who the person was and whatever they were just posing at it. It was, you know, so I, I think the revival, like we see what happens. If we see a social media inflected revival, it may just be this like sort of grotesque circus, these like caricatures and that may be it.
- [35:25]
B
Well, no, or this has this particular valence right now on Turning Point usa because the message from Erica Kirk, to a certain extent, Charlie, before the public message was I'm saving the lost boys. Go to church, find community, get married, have kids. All good by the way. But what is turning point in USA? It was a super PAC for JD Vance for 2028. So it was, there was a political thing and it was like this sort of. It was definitely a movement, you know, there was a political part of it. But the message was put down your phone, go to church, find meaning. And I have to say the put down your phone, find church, find meaning, I think will save America. I hope that that happens. I'm very much in favor of that. But there's an element of TP USA which is like, okay, so who are you? Like who's the real tpusa? Are you basically just a political operation to clear the field of any challengers to make sure that JD Vance is the nominee in 28? And what is JD Vance? What does that mean with JD Vance? I mean, is he. That's why he's in such a bond right now, because he doesn't know what to do with the nihilist elements of that coalition.
- [36:47]
A
Well, let's take your point here and try to filter through the controversies of the moment. So Charlie Kirk is assassinated and what has happened in the months since Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The non Charlie Kirks people who were. But were Charlie Kirk who was a very big tenter, right? He wanted Ben Shapiro on stage with Tucker Carlson. He want, you know, he wanted Nick Fuentes on stage with him and Candace Owens. No, he. No. No. Okay. Not, not really. Okay, but what kind of war? Okay, the war is. Right, the war is.
- [37:27]
Fuentes. Candace, There's a fight over, like, what was. What was the one true Charlie Kirk. But the version of this fight is. Has a genuinely demonic quality to it, which is that Charlie Kirk is gone. And according to Candace Owens and others. Right. Charlie Kirk.
- [37:48]
Was.
- [37:51]
Turning anti Semitic or Charlie Kirk. The organization is now betraying Charlie Kirk because it's not. It's not following the precepts of Candace Owens or Tucker or whatever. And the point here is they're fighting over the legacy of this guy whose message was quite anodyne. And it was get married, have children, be a person of faith, go do good things, get out of your basement. Very simple. Like, Jordan Peterson said the same thing.
- [38:20]
D
I think his posthumous book came out yesterday. Right. I think wasn't yesterday the release date for his book about basically universalizing, you know, the Jewish version of the Sabbath?
- [38:32]
A
Right. So why do I bring this up? And why is it. Because.
- [38:38]
The revival already has enemies. And Fuentes. What does Fuentes say? I don't want to get married. Women are very difficult. I'm a virgin. Because women stink.
- [38:51]
And are disgusting.
- [38:52]
B
Getting married to a woman who's gay is what he says.
- [38:55]
A
Yeah. And shouldn't have the vote. So you have this weird, literally, almost.
- [39:01]
It'S like kind of satanic shakerism, where the idea is you're a shaker. You become celibate because sex itself is.
- [39:12]
You know, creates drives, evil drives and lusts in you, so you need to keep yourself pure. That's not what this is. This is. Women are Eve, and they're evil, and so you stay away from them, and you sit in your basement and masturbate and play video games, and you'll be better off. And they shouldn't have the vote. So this fight is like a real fight. I mean, we're, you know, it's like so far removed from me. I don't even understand.
- [39:44]
B
No, but, but Fuentes never. He claims to be also in favor of, you know, white Christian America and all of that. I mean, he's a Catholic, but he. He claims to sort of. That he's also motivated by it, even though he's clearly not. It's a strange thing, is that the difference is that, you know, I think that Charlie, in his best moments, played on really trying to save souls and making yourself better. And it's obvious at this point that Tucker and Fuentes and Candace, the big three, they're just giving. They're just. They're just doing. They're stirring one's grievances and they're. They're. They're looking for Scapegoats, which surprise, it's us, you know, so yeah, and that's.
- [40:35]
A
An important, you know, it was like the two faces of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. So there was Jesse Jackson saying Jaime Town and it's all, you know, white people are oppressing black people and all that. But then he would go before black audiences and he would say, you are somebody, right? You go, be respectful of your, be respectful of your mother, be respectful of women, don't use drugs, don't gamble, be, you know, he was like a preacher. And the preachment was self improvement. And in a moral frame, it was a very schizophrenic message. Victimization and self actualization in one go at the same moment.
- [41:18]
B
And so I'm glad you brought up Jesse Jackson because Jesse Jackson changed his tune after I metown because of. And I think it's one of the great things that Abe Foxman did when he was the national director of adl, who privately met with him away from the cameras and just reached out to him as a person. And Jesse Jackson after, I would say like, you know, 85, 86, becomes, you know, drops all of that anti Semitism and becomes a voice against it. Now Jesse Jackson still did, you know, lots of other corrupt things did, shakedowns of corporations and things like that. But there was a kind of way in which reaching out personally over time to try to sort of say, wait a second, maybe you should look at another way, this is dangerous. With Jesse Jackson that worked. Now maybe it's because Jesse Jackson was a protege of Martin Luther King who never had animus towards Jews the way that Malcolm X did. So there was a seed there. But there is something to that, which is when you have somebody like that, can you turn their, can you turn them? And in that case, the point that.
- [42:32]
A
You were raising that brought this to mind is that revivalism is about saying to people, you are less than you could be. Your life is worse than it can be. Your soul is aching for something.
- [42:50]
That will not only make your life valuable, but that will make you feel better about yourself, about the world, about your country, about your family. This is all within your reach. But it requires focus and self discipline and it requires submission of a kind. I don't mean Islamic submission, but submission to a set of ideas that you then hew to. Even if at any given moment you don't feel like it, are you, you know.
- [43:21]
You want to sleep with another woman while you're married? That impulse is understandable. Don't do it. Restrain your impulse to Save your marriage short term pain for long term gain. Right? That's. Revivalism is all about telling people that there is a better future for them.
- [43:42]
C
But there is. There's another element.
- [43:45]
A
Fuentes and Tucker and Candace are about how there is no good future for you. Everything stinks. The Jews are doing it to you. So go kill Jews or something. And then I don't know what'll happen. But. But I don't see any. Where's the transcendence?
- [44:01]
C
But here's.
- [44:02]
A
Where is that you're going to be better off if you do things this way.
- [44:05]
C
I think here's part of the problem. Revivals also depend on.
- [44:12]
In person, face to face gatherings.
- [44:17]
That is a huge. Since going back to the, you know, the tent revivals and the. Whatever else is.
- [44:25]
An online version of a revival could be something very scary because if you don't have that element, maybe this is it.
- [44:37]
A
Well, I'm not sure. It has to be things literary.
- [44:42]
D
I feel like the thing we haven't really mentioned though is that we're describing what made Jordan Peterson massively popular.
- [44:50]
C
Right?
- [44:50]
D
I mean, and that was a sort of forerunner to, you know, I bet we can call it the manosphere. You know, not that Jordan Peterson shares their ideas, but there was this like, you know, pick yourself up and, you know, whatever. And. But Jordan Peterson also was based on, you know, like we mentioned that Charlie Kirk's ideas were kind of anodyne and simple. Peterson was too. Peterson was like, tuck in your shirt, set an alarm clock and wake up at a decent hour. Keep your room clean. Like, some of Jordan Peterson's principles were like, you know, things that people didn't used to need to be told or whatever. But it was basically like, okay, you have this enormous, this generational enormous population of adult males living alone. And what comes from that is a whole sea of bad habits and things like that. And so start with. It's like the broken windows theory of the manosphere almost. It's like, start by getting up in the morning, putting on your shoes, taking a walk, tucking your shirt in, doing this whatever, reading a book, stuff like that. And that made him massively successful because it was so accessible.
- [46:05]
A
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B
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A
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B
Or your money back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply and I want to add one more thing because there's another important part. The three sides. The three spokesmen for the kind of nihilism or the false prophecy. The.
- [48:07]
Grievance stokers are also, surprise, surprise, conspiracy theorists. Because when you believe in conspiracy theories, you are in some ways acknowledging that you do not have any kind of self empowerment. Because there is a kind of, you know, there is a hand behind the curtain and there are forces that are unseen and unknown that are determining reality, that are controlling the world. And that is if you believe that, then what's the point of getting up early? What's the point of tucking in your shirt and making your bed and trying to be a better person and not giving in to all of the base temptations that every human feels. That's why they are all Candace Nick Fuentes the bad side of that influencer world are all. The one thing they have in common is they're conspiracy theorists. And surprise surprise, they believe in the original conspiracy theory, which is anti Semitism. So that right there is a kind of tell and that the way out of it is, you're right, empowerment. Like you are in control of your life. You can make your life better.
- [49:19]
A
What do people who have religious. Who have genuine religious experiences describe. There is a completely common thing that people who have personal religious moments of revelation describe, right? Which is. Doesn't matter whether they were like, unhappy or happy or whatever. They describe a moment at which they feel bathed in something transcendent that is inexplicable, that is very large, that. That is abstract almost, but that has an altering experience. And this is just. Can be described by people as various. As Anna Marie Cox, who was wonket or whatever she was, you know, who was like a. Who was like a kind of savage, Washington mean girl journalist who had a religious. Who had. God came and spoke to her. There are people who go, you know, I'm only using her as an example because she's a kind of perfect secularist example of somebody who had this experience and then fought it. Like she was horrified by it once it took place. But it's sort of like once this happens, you can't let it go. The thing that was always missing from Jordan Peterson, though he adapted it in later times after he got somewhat less successful. He's obviously had a whole history of personal difficulties that have interfered with the continuation of his mission.
- [50:57]
But was this lack of transcendence, which is what revivalism, which is what religious revivalism. Because it's not just make your bed and do this and do that and you'll be better. You know, things will be better and your life will be better. It is.
- [51:14]
Somebody loves you. God loves you. There is a benevolent force in the universe that you can join in or feed off of or be, you know, be. Be.
- [51:29]
Lifted by or fed by or, you know, given sucker by. And that without that, it's very hard to tell people to live.
- [51:41]
Like an existence of meaning that confers all kinds of obligations on you. But, but.
- [51:48]
C
But the thing about that is that these various revivals are led by men who claim to have spoken to God and that and. And have been told that God wants people to do X, Y and Z. And, you know, sometimes these are new things. Don't eat. Don't eat flesh. Or. I mean, that's not new, but, you know, or.
- [52:16]
Live on a commune or, you know, I mean, there's. So that there is this. You need this sort of car. I mean, you don't know if you need it. But I mean, revivals have these charismatic, frankly, religious leadership figures.
- [52:32]
A
Well, sometimes, but. But, you know, Matt, like the, like the Great Awakenings, the American Great Awakenings that we're sort of making reference to were multifarious. And some of them had, you know, cultic aspects to them. I mean, the first Great Awakening also gave birth to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is, you can, is now is the most successful version of a modern religion we have. It's two centuries old. It has, I don't, no one really knows how many adherents it has, but, you know, it has millions and millions of adherents in the world. But it was a heresy, right? I mean, it was certainly treated as a heresy. Joseph, Joseph Smith was lynched.
- [53:17]
The founder of the faith was literally lynched by Christians who said that he was a heretic. So it could take lots of different forms. But, but generally speaking, a question of whether or not people place religion in the center of their lives or don't, that is what an awakening represents. The generation of an awakening is a generation that ends up putting religion, taking religion from the, from a side or something that's been ignored and moving it to the center. And that's what we don't have. We have. Our trend in America has been the opposite over the last 20 years. It's the rise of the nuns, right? It's the 30% of the population that says that they live with no, no religion whatsoever. That's a, that's a, that's a world historical first. Outside of communist countries that taught aggressive atheism, we've never seen numbers like this on the planet Earth, as far as I'm, I'm aware. So we, the conditions are right. Because you can't live without meaning.
- [54:24]
People cannot. You know, it's like living without oxygen over time. Like you cannot live without meaning. How are you going to get through, through, you know, that's where you get to like, oh, here's a great idea. Let's just, you know, I'm depressed, so I'm going to commit you. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to go to somewhere and medically have somebody euthanize me because I'm depressed and I don't know how to get out of depression. And then the country that has lost its way and lost its soul says, okay, we'll do that for you. Sure. One less mouth to feed. You know, you don't want to be here. You got human autonomy. Don't know. No, no problem there. You know, Canada is going in this direction, obviously. The Netherlands has gone radically in this direction. In Switzerland, you can go and have somebody, you know, put you to death.
- [55:16]
At will as long as you sign lots of documents to that effect. There are, there's talk about bringing this to the United States.
- [55:25]
All of this is what it means to live in a world without meaning.
- [55:29]
And so I just don't think it's sustainable. Like, people aren't. People can't live like this. Which is the only reason that I think that there will be a religious revival, because it's the only way out of the.
- [55:43]
One way street to nowhere, you know, down an alley to a brick wall to get people out. It's not that you have to be like a Hasidic, you know, you don't have to live so that like literally every day you say, you know, 2,000 brachot at every moment just to keep yourself, you know, going.
- [56:05]
C
Like to bring it back to the.
- [56:09]
Australian ban on social media for children under 16. I think part of the game here, part of trying to get through life without meaning now, is to amass as many distractions as possible. And the addictions really, I mean, everything from gaming to TikTok to AI, there's a, you know, there's AI addiction now, of course.
- [56:43]
Social media, politics, identity, identity, cults. So there's the AI will talk to.
- [56:52]
D
You, like, AI, you will, you will, you know, they'll create different personalities and you, you'll make AI friends.
- [56:58]
C
Yeah. And there's also religious AI. I mean, religious in quotes, AI, you know, there's like, you know, you know, where you can, you know, pray or do whatever, but this explosion of distractions, digital distractions, I think is getting in the way of. It's sort of helping to sustain the meaninglessness is my point.
- [57:25]
A
I think that's the challenge, right? I mean, so what were the great subjects of Revi, the great enemies or the, the enemies that revivalists in the past took on? They were human vices, right? They were gambling and drink. Right. 19th century. What was it that you were? The, you know, the temperance movement was a religious. Was a very radical religious movement. And the idea was that's essentially early addiction. Right? That is, that is. Drink is, you know, drink will destroy your family, you know, turn you violent, ruin your life, kill you.
- [58:07]
B
And I call that, by the way, the Volstead act ended up being the Mafia nationalization Act. So it's like the temperance people were like, we did it. We finally banned alcohol and little did they know. Yeah, they just hypercharged. Glucosinosium.
- [58:25]
A
Right, Exactly. So, but I'm just saying, like, you can't, you know, but those things are. That's a version of what we have now, except now we have 10,000 different versions of it. You know, you have a sexual perversion you go on Reddit, you can find a group of people who have exactly the same repulsive sexual habit or practice that you have, and you can find a weird community in them. Right? So maybe it's way harder. The other possibility is that the revulsion level, maybe the revulsion level will be twice as potent as in previous moments, simply because this thing that you have in your hand might come to seem itself diseased over. Over time. If I just. I don't know. It's very hard to see a world, and it's very hard to not see the world in a straight line projection. So the straight line projection is you're on your phone 18 hours a day. You'll be on your phone 24 hours a day. Use a little AI, you use more. Everything that we think is bad, you can only see getting worse. But things do get better, you know, I mean, just to give you an example, you know, 60% of people smoked, and now 15% of people smoke now. I don't know. That's not a moral, though. It was, I think, moral, morally framed. That's one of the things that happened was that people developed a.
- [59:49]
B
Goes back a while. Like, I like the Time magazine cover was 64 saying, God is dead.
- [59:56]
A
Yeah.
- [59:56]
B
And then there was in, you know, you talked about Jimmy Carter, but there was a whole movement in the 90s where you saw, you know, the rise of a kind of, you know, moralist intellectuals like your mother, you know, play Mother was very articulate on this. The idea of returning shame. And at a certain point, we've played out the experiment. And I hate to say this, but we should just say it. Look at the children of the secular intellectuals. They turn into like Kala Walsh. They're trans. All kinds of problems.
- [60:35]
A
Yeah.
- [60:36]
B
And at a certain point, it was always sort of seen as a. Wasn't that cute? You know, you know, it's. But. But there needs to be some confidence saying, finding meaning to a point through the old time, religion, building families, all these things which were seen as kind of ultra, you know, out of step, not modern, is the future. And that this other ethos is not sustainable because what it does is it creates people, childless women in their 40s and 50s who take on the urgency of these crazy causes like defunding the police or destroying Israel. And that's filling a hole that our ancestors for millennia understood how to fill in terms of meaning.
- [61:27]
A
Well, that's the nightmare. The nightmare is that politics becomes the new religion, and politics is the worst possible way to practice religion, which is literally about things that are beyond time. You know, I mean, I think religion can be harnessed in some sense if you need, if you need to deal with the phenomenon of trans. For example, the idea that the Bible says male and female created he them is a very important counterweight to people saying you can be born in the wrong body. It's the ultimate counterweight, really. I mean, you can go through evolutionary biology and genetics and all of that, but you say from the very fundament of civilization. You know, this, this was, this is, this was not the idea. And it's not even an idea to.
- [62:22]
C
Circle back to the. We were talking about the sort of anti Semitism at the top of the show. I have this in mind because we have a great upcoming.
- [62:31]
Column by Mayor Soloveitchik I'm not gonna say too much about, but I think a good deal of the anti Israel animus around the west in general is that these countries and polities that are just drained of meaning look at Israel and go, that's a people who still have a purpose and a meaning.
- [63:00]
A
Right? They don't know that that's what's animating them and driving them. But it's always been the, it's always been the nature of anti Semitism to look at the survival of the Jews and say, how on earth have they survived? What is going on here? They don't have a state. You know, the Romans destroyed their temple, Christ. You know, they're considered, you know, they're considered these sort of outlier, wandering j. Outliers from society allowed to live and not to be killed to remind you what it is to live outside of the world of Christ's love as a constant reminder of this, you know, terrible crime that Jews committed. And yet there they are and they don't go away. How is this happening? So we look at it and we say, well, something transcendent is going on here. And they look at it and say, yeah, there's something transcendent going on here maybe, and it's bad.
- [63:59]
They know things we don't know. They have secret knowledge to survive that we don't understand and that we better, so we better do something about it. And Israel, yeah, Israel now a purposeful nation. The only country in the west above replacement and birth rate and, and, and, and all of that is a very potent reminder, though I don't think people think of it that way.
- [64:25]
B
Can I offer some free advice to the anti Semites? If you want to destroy the Jewish people, Reacher Herzl, marry us, allow us into all of your universities and Clubs and just love us. And then that's the way to destroy the Jews. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but the more you try to destroy us, the more October 7th, the stronger the Jewish identity will become. It's just one of those little paradoxes of human history. Sorry. Anyway.
- [64:56]
I don't want anybody to destroy the Jewish people. But you know, it's like, you'd think they'd learn the lesson, we can't get rid of us after the Shoah. Come on.
- [65:07]
D
I once quoted in a piece, Ralph Philip Boas, who was, you know, like a sort of his times as a Jew, you know, in 1921 he wrote this piece for the Atlantic. And you know, it was basically like dismissing social anti Semitism and all this other stuff. And it was as a joing, you know, the whole thing. But the one thing he said was, you know, this is what he says. At the root of European anti Semitism undoubtedly lies the shuddering hatred that men always feel for that which they cannot kill. The amazing vitality of the Jew is sufficient reason for believing any tale that is whispered of him. His survival smells of the devil. And that's that line. His survival smells of the devil has always stuck with me. That was 1921. But that, you know, that that is like the idea that it's also like, well, anything is possible. Also they could be capable of anything because who knows? Because some. Something is going on here. Somebody made a deal with the devil. I don't know what it is, but this, it can't be right that they just can't be killed. So, you know, right now we're not.
- [66:10]
A
An example for most, again, 2% of the population, 0.1% of the population on the planet Earth. Very hard to look at that and say that. We provide a working example of how to, you know, like.
- [66:25]
We'Re just too unusual and we have a series of habits and behaviors. The more faith driven you are, that are frankly very hard to logically justify to anybody who doesn't live within the framework of Jewishness and Judaism.
- [66:47]
However.
- [66:50]
In some ways there's no arguing with the results, which is why, as I say, in a world that. Meaning you have two ways of looking at this, which is there are purpose driven people. We need to be a purpose driven people. How you do that from the outside is very hard. Now I'm going to have purpose, you know, it's like I'm starting my diet tomorrow, you know, that's what I'm gonna do. It's, you can't do it. That Way it has to come, has to be organic, right? But there are purpose driven people, so we need to follow their example. Or there are purpose driven people, we need to destroy them. I mean, those are the only two. Or you could say, leave them alone. They're a purpose driven people. They don't proselytize, they're not interested in territorial expansion, despite what the Palestinians say. They just want to be left alone. We'll leave them alone. And you know what? They'll give us good, they'll give us ways, you know, they'll help us develop our missile defenses. They'll be very helpful to us. Just leave them alone.
- [67:46]
B
Which is.
- [67:48]
Socialism and psychology.
- [67:50]
A
So.
- [67:51]
Fair enough.
- [67:52]
C
Okay, to, to Jordan Peterson's great credit.
- [67:58]
One thing he did as he rose.
- [68:01]
In popularity among young males was to say, because the turn, people think the sort of young white gentile turn on the Jews just happened since October 7th, it's been in the mix, it's been bubbling up for many years. And there was a lot of that happening. When Jordan Peterson rose and he would say, don't blame the Jews, emulate the Jews, he said this. I mean.
- [68:40]
He'S got his own very interesting sort of myth infused takes on.
- [68:50]
The Hebrew Bible, but.
- [68:54]
A
He'S a sort.
- [68:54]
C
Of Old Testament guy and says, you know, the Jews are successful for reasons.
- [69:04]
Go look into it and try to adopt some of those reasons.
- [69:09]
A
As I say, I think it's actually very hard if you take that, if you take it seriously. It's not really a path. I mean, you can say, you could take it apart and say Jews are very communitarian. We live in, we live in community, pray. We pray collectively. Well, collectively is maybe not the right word, but we need to pray in groups. You know, we spend, it's a day out of the week in which we literally remove ourselves from essentially the human calendar and live without conveniences or whatever. We eat separate, we eat in ways that other people don't eat in order to keep ourselves separate. So it's not duplicable entirely. However, you can say the Jewish commitment to family, like, you know, we say at the, at the moment, at a bris or at the moment of a baby naming for a girl or briss, what do we say? We say, may you grow to adulthood.
- [70:10]
To live a life of good deeds, charity, and come under the chuppah to get married and have children and participate in the continuance of life on earth. Like from the eighth day of a child's life, let's say he or she is assigned the Task of getting married and having children. And, you know, this isn't a faith whose religious history involves the unbelievable pain and difficulty that might be associated with the very acts of getting married and having children. The first Jew is the first two Jews have a barren marriage until. Until they are in their 90s. You know, there's the number of barren women in the Bible who pray to God to save them from their barrenness and all of that on the high holy days. Much of the high holy days is dedicated to paying tribute to women who have to live through the experience of not being able to have children. That's how central this idea is. And why is it central? Because that's the only way you go forward. So if we're living in a world in which we are now not replacing the people who are on earth, that alone, that's the one message you could take from the Jewish people is don't do that. But how an individual takes that message.
- [71:44]
D
I mean, we were just. Before we came to Israel, we spent a week in Greece and mostly in Athens. It was. We were like a traveling show. We were, everywhere we went, they counted us. I just mean people on the street, not like people sitting us out. We have six kids, right? So there's eight of us walking together. You know, looks like a duck, ducklings crossing the road or whatever with the ducks at the head. And literally people count. I would walk by and, you know, somebody would make a face and go and count in, you know, Greek, whatever, and go six, you know, and say, yeah, and go. God bless you. And other tourists from other countries, you know, that, you know, had, you know, low birth rates and stuff like that would say the same thing. But it was like, I don't. The, the interactions that I had with Greek speaking people always included God bless you. Because everybody to a man, nobody showed annoyance with the fact that there were these kids traipsing around. You know, Athens is not a very. It's not a stroller friendly city, right? So it's not made for. It's not built for people who have lots of kids or strollers or, you know, whatever. At one point we had a hard time finding a, you know, a cat, a like, there's no toddler carrier for purchase in Athens, you know, stuff like that. But they love it. It's not built for it. But every person, their eyes bulged out and they were just like. Because I think you get to a point when a society stops, you know, having all those kids and you, you miss it. And also everybody looks at kids I think, and sees, you know, the idea of vitality and renewal and all that stuff, they just sort of embody it so clearly that even if you don't realize what you're losing as a society along the way, when you see it, you're like, ah, man, that looks great.
- [73:34]
A
Well, two things on that point. One is, we were in Italy last Christmas time.
- [73:42]
And there. There are no children anywhere.
- [73:46]
Rome, Florence, there are no kids. No one has kids. I gather if you go to Japan, it's even creepier. Like, you go to Japan, there are no children on the streets in Tokyo, people don't have children. I. You know, that is not the American experience yet, though we may be heading in that direction. Go to Israel and there's only children everywhere. I mean, it is, you know, I mean, to be. To be. It's kind of striking. And it's striking.
- [74:19]
In that way that you don't realize what you're missing until it's gone. Right. So. But here, ideologically, of course, you know, and your wife Bethany has written eloquently about this for many years, that the act of having lots of children is greeted as an ideological assault on feminine and female autonomy. And she and you come under attack. And there's this idea that you're, you know, having one child. You know, there are these movies out now. We're Having Kids, My Love and all this, all of which are about how the act of having one child is so horribly, psychotically disruptive to your existence that you're a woman and you literally go insane at the fact that somebody else needs you. Like, it is a very, very strange cultural predilection because it's one that you're going to Greece. And they're like, wow, you're a miracle. Look, you're walking among us, a person with six children. But here in, you know, in the media elite, the idea is that you are doing something wrong. It's bad. You are set. You are setting a bad example for people who need to be as free as possible from constraint and obligation in order to practice human autonomy. And basically, human autonomy is the thing that revivalism really seeks, I think, to be the answer to. Because what is a faith community? It's a community of faith. It's not just radical. You and God together in a room forever.
- [76:00]
C
That was my point about the gathering.
- [76:03]
A
Right? Yeah.
- [76:04]
C
And the lack of it now.
- [76:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. Right.
- [76:08]
So we managed to go an entire show. We didn't talk about anything about politics. So I hope you enjoyed it. And we, you know, our search for meaning Commentary Search for meaning. So you should the recommendation, today's book recommendation, the Bible.
- [76:25]
B
Yes.
- [76:27]
A
Eli Lake, thank you for joining us. Eli, by the way, has the lead article in the next issue of Commentary, which is called the Palestine Firsters. I'm not going to, like, spoil it for you. You'll be able to read it probably next Monday on our website and we'll talk about it more then, along with Mayor Soloveitchik's advanced piece here about Europe and Israel and purposefulness and purposelessness. Seth has a wonderful piece about anti Semitism in America in that very issue review of Pamela Nadell's new book, and I'm very proud of it. But I'm talking about an issue you can't read yet. So I'm gonna stop now. And we've gone an hour and 11 minutes. So thank you, Eli, and for Seth and Abam, John Pot Hortz, keep the camp burning.
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