Why Do Radical U.S. Politicians Blame Jews? - with Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz

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Over the past couple of years, CallMeBack has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected, a place for clarity, context, and honest conversations at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what ARC Media is all about, building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it. To help support our rapidly expanding operations, we created Inside Call Me Back our Members Only feed. If Call Me Back has been meaningful to you and you want to be part of what we're building, I hope you'll join us. You can subscribe@arc media.org or through the link in the show Notes and to our insiders. Thank you. You are listening to an art media podcast.

B

The vast majority of Americans hate the choices both parties are presenting to them. There's no external force to get them to sort of say, hey, you know what makes sense. Don't nominate for the Democratic Party in New York somebody who hates America, somebody who thinks Western civilization has gotta go, that thinks that Hamas was right on October 7th. And you go down an incredibly long list of things that some of these candidates who won in New York believe.

C

What we're seeing here is the complete break from any conventional understanding of what a Washington politician is supposed to do, which is represent their district. The only way to make change is to force change through a hostile takeover. The form that this is taking is radicalization.

A

It's 11am on Wednesday, July 1, in New York City. It's 6pm on Wednesday, July first, in Israel. Earlier this week you heard part one of my conversation with Jonah Goldberg and John Pot Hors on the autopsy of the Iran war. Now heading into the July 4th weekend and the 250th anniversary of our independence. We are releasing part two of our conversation, which is not an autopsy, but rather a state of play of these extraordinary times we are living through right now in in American politics, in American civic life, and in American history, especially as our politics appear to be, well, cracking up. And as if the Mamdani and Democratic Socialists of America victories in New York City last week were not enough to make this conversation spicy, since we recorded there was another such election outcome in Colorado this week, where a longtime Democratic incumbent congresswoman was defeated by an insurgent primary challenger who had all but rationalized the 911 attacks, the October 7 massacre, and even the firebombing of a free hostages protest in Colorado. Jonah Goldberg is editor in chief of the Dispatch and the host of the Remnant podcast. He's also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a number of books, including Suicide of the West, John Pot Horiz is editor in chief of Commentary magazine and is host of the Commentary Magazine podcast and author of the book Hell of a Ride. Jonah Goldberg and John Pod Hortz on why do Radical US Politicians blame Jews. This is Call Me Back. Hi, it's Dan Sonor. Israel is heading into one of its most consequential elections, and this time the whole world is watching closely. Hot takes and daily Noise are pretty much guaranteed to populate your media diet. But as with any election, there's a deeper story about identity, religion, democracy, and what kind of country Israelis want to live in. That's why Ark Media launched Israel Votes, a special initiative across Call Me Back For Heaven's Sake and Ark News Daily. You'll hear from the leading candidates shaping the race along with analysis and reporting from two of Israel's leading political analysts, ARC Media contributors Nadavael and Amit Segal. Join us for Israel Votes, your front row seat to the election that could define Israel's Future. Go to arkmedia.org votes to watch and listen. See you there. Welcome to Part two of my conversation with John Pot Horizon Jonah Goldberg so a decade ago we saw a dramatic shift in Republican politics. Probably started before a decade ago, but it really became visible in ways that I think the three of us certainly didn't expect. Now we're seeing something similar in the Democratic Party. Although, John, you argue in a piece you have coming out this week that the shift occurred a long time ago again, just wasn't like as concretely visible as it may be to us right now. So I guess, Jonah, let me start with you. What is your macro read of American politics at this point? Is what we're watching this crack up that occurred on the right and now it looks like there's a crack up on the left. Or maybe we're over interpreting the crack up on the left. How would you stitch all this together into a snapshot of where we are right now?

B

So I think almost all of our problems in politics are downstream of a couple institutional failures. You can go a bunch of different directions, but just the fact is is we have incredibly weak political parties. We are the only advanced industrialized democracy whose parties have voluntarily given up the ability to pick their own candidates through the primary system. And the primary system is dominated by the most extreme, the most radical, the most committed people there are. There are good people in there too, but like they are not reflective of the median voter in significant ways. And it is not a particularly democratic system to do it this way. The other problem is that Congress ceases to do its job. Congress is an institutionally failed place and it is where politics is supposed to happen. And so instead what you now get is all of these institutions doing party work by proxy. Fox News is essentially a party organ at this point. Mississippi now is a party organ at this point. But because they're not actually part of a real party infrastructure, there's no external force to temporize, to control, to shape them, to get them to sort of say, hey, you know what makes sense, don't nominate the Democratic Party in New York. Somebody who hates America. And like, I'm not joking or exaggerating about that, says they think America is a disgrace. That somebody who thinks Western civilization has got to go, that thinks that Hamas was right. On October 7, you can go down the long, incredibly long list of things that some of these candidates who won in New York believe wants to get

A

rid of borders, wants to get rid of police. I mean, right, right.

B

Just incredibly stupid things that are bad for the party, bad for the brand. And there is no institutional grown up anywhere to say that's not what we believe. We gotta keep these people out from destroying our brand. We've seen that happening on the Republican Party in 2016. My friend Ross, our friend Ross Douthat said both parties are essentially fully fueled jetliners waiting to be hijacked. And that's sort of where we are because the parties are so weak, because of campaign finance forum, because of the primaries. And in this environment, when Congress doesn't do the job, when it doesn't soak up politics, we end up expecting presidents to behave like prime ministers, if not outright authoritarians, and talk about things they're going to do on day one. The old rule about all politics is local. The Tip o' Neill thing is dead. It's just deader than Marley's ghost. And so, like now you have this thing where everybody's running on nationalized issues. My colleague Steve Hayes did this piece about the primary race in Florida a while back. It was in Matt Gaetz's district. And every single candidate's strategy was simply to say, I'm the Trumpiest, Trump loves me the most, all that kind of stuff. Like 10 candidates. You have a similar dynamic now, which is disturbing, at least in very blue places, meaning very Democratic, for international listeners, where the issue is who can say they are most opposed to Israeli genocide? And don't tell me people are voting their interests. Don't people just care about their economic interest or any of that kind of crap. Everything has basically been reified into these national culture war issues, variously defined. For the right, Trump is the avatar. If you have to be with Trump, Trump is representative, although that's starting to fade now that he's getting to be a lame D. And on the ascendant left, it is basically Israel. And it is not in either party's interest that this had happened. But the parties institutionally are incapable of policing and preventing this from happening.

A

Okay, I generally agree with you about the parties, and I do think campaign finance reform, which is for our listeners to understand. What Jonah's referring to is that a series of reforms occurred in the U.S. primarily McCain Feingold, which made it harder and harder to make donations, to make large donations to political parties. And the argument that Jonah makes is the idea was to get money out of politics. And it didn't get money out of politics, as he often says. It got money out of the big national parties. And therefore, politicians still need to raise money for campaigns. And entrepreneurial, creative people who want to give money to politicians to donate to political causes can find ways to do it outside of the parties. And the net out of it is then the parties, the leaders of the parties are just weaker. They just don't have the influence over politics, over the members of their party, over the way their parties nominate candidates, the way they don't have the same influence over their own caucuses. The parties become weaker. In 2016, Bernie Sanders, who is. He is like the OG of what we're seeing right now on the socialism front. Right. If you look at all these candidates, they're all children or grandchildren of the Bernie Sanders movement. And Bernie Sanders kind of loomed large in our national politics versus the gadfly. Then it's sort of like this insurgent. And then all of a sudden, my gosh, he could beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary. He really gave her a run for money. He could have been the Democratic nominee against Trump, and he wasn't. And it wasn't because he didn't perform well in primaries and caucuses. It was because the Democratic National Committee, the National Party, had the system, which we don't have to get into details, superdelegates, they gave the party establishment outsized power, which was used to stop Bernie Sanders. So is that a counter to what you were saying? Did the system work?

B

Yes, the system worked insofar as that this was the last vestige of the party's institutional mechanisms. People forget the Democratic Party historically is the populist party. Going back to William Jennings Bryan or Huey Long, you know, and they had institutional mechanisms to prevent hostile takeovers by populists. Those mechanisms also came into play in the ousting of Joe Biden, but they failed to actually do what all the insiders I talked to at the time wanted, which was to actually have an open contest. Instead, Kamala Harris just said, it's mine. And for understandable reasons, she won that fight. But look at what Chuck Schumer is. Chuck Schumer came to power, came to. Won his first Senate seat by accusing Al d' Amato of being an anti Semite for calling him a putz or something.

A

Right?

C

Schmuckhead.

B

Schmuckhead, right. And now that guy who used to be very, you know, willing to sort of play the anti Semitism card is mute when, you know, these people are talking about the perfidious, bagel, snarfing warmonger Israelis committing genocide all over the place and controlling Congress. And he's like, oh, I understand your passion. There are still those mechanisms that you're talking about, and that's a fair point. But their ability to use them and their willingness to use them has just been atrophying and shrinking over time because of these larger forces that I'm talking about. That.

C

John, I think that's all a very good description of the problem, but the problem, looked at that way, is not solvable. Once an institution loses its institutional grip, that institution will basically degrade and cease to exist, and other institutions will rise to take its place. Institutions are very weird things because they rely upon everybody who uses them believing that they are powerful and strong and necessary. And when people start looking at them and seeing that the emperor might have no clothes, the institution crumbles away. And I think what we're seeing here with the radicalization of the Democratic Party's congressional races and maybe senatorial races, and this is the first cycle of this, in this way is the death knell of exactly the Democratic institutions that you're talking about that could maybe assert themselves in the future. By which I mean, I really do believe people are right when they say that the phalanx of protection around the infirm and senile Joe Biden that bled into the simple imposition of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. Those two things taken in tandem, were the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the Democratic Party's leaders had the best interests of the country or even the party at heart, and that it was time now for others to take over. That's partially the Republican story. Also this is also partially a literally an age story. American politics, like a lot of American life at the senior level, is dominated by people who will not get off the stage and retire and make room for younger people. And so we have an 80 year old president who followed an 80 year old president. We have a 79 year old Senate majority leader. The Senate minority leader is 83. Bernie Sanders is 85 years old. Half the Senate is like over 70. Nobody gets out of the way anymore. And so the only way in is to claw your way in. The only way to make change is to force change through a hostile takeover that happened with the Republican Party in 2010 and it is happening now with the Democratic Party in 2026. That's the larger cultural picture. The more important or the more nerve wracking or the more enduring problem here is that the form that this is taking is radicalization, which is also the case in the Republican Party. Rather than you guys all stink, you don't know what you're doing. We're going to bring in some people who know what they're doing. Now it's like, let's play 52 pickup. Like we just throw all the cards in the air, see what happens. And the one principle, and this is so weird, aside from being evil, is the one binding glue of these candidates who have shocked the system. From Zoram Hamdani last November to these three victorious challengers of incumbents, New York's congressional races last week, to the races that will happen.

A

Two challengers of incumbents, two challengers of incumbents and one open seat.

C

Two challenges of commons and an open seat, but all three of them radical. And then we have a Senate race in Michigan and a House race in Colorado, also involving very radical Muslim candidates who are offering apologia for murders of Jews for 9, 11 and for Hamas. So they're going in the burn it all down direction. And those people's views, which is a much larger and deeper problem, are a feature and not a bug. It's not like you say, you know what this guy Abdul Al said, he's fantastic for our listeners.

A

He's the front runner for the Democratic primary in Michigan for the U.S. senate. And the reason he's, I mean, I think he's particularly interesting, although terrifying, is that we have a situation in New York, you could say these are deep blue districts. The Democratic Socialists of America are very well organized here on these urban congressional primaries. Whereas Michigan is a different, I mean it's different in that it's the Midwest, it's a swing State. It's a state. Trump won. The whole idea of this cancer, not just living here in New York, but actually existing elsewhere in the country, would be very revealing of something.

C

Right. So the binding glue that these people have, which Jonah has alluded to, even though they call themselves Democratic socialists, isn't socialism. Right. Classic socialism is what Michael Harrington, who started the Democratic Socialists of America, called Coalition of the Dispossessed, meaning the economically dispossessed, meaning people who did not have property, didn't have control of the means of production, all of that, and that the dispossessed needed to rise up and sort of take economic control of the country. This is an alliance of the intersectionally dispossessed. So they are followers of intersectionality, this academic theory that says that all oppression stems from a single root, their oppressors and the oppressed. And the oppressors have power, and the oppressed don't have power. And amazingly, the oppressors always look white and Jewish and male, and the oppressed look not white, female, and not Jewish, and often Muslim. And they're calling themselves Democratic socialists. They are actually social revolutionaries who are trying to impose a new vision of our society that seems to operate remarkably around the idea of extirpating Jews. Not extirpating them like Hitler, but extirpating the Jewish state and dealing death blows to Jewish power in the United States. However that can be done. If that's seizing people's money, if it's figuring out ways to throw them in jail. The great fear, I guess, is that it also involves actual murder, terrorist bombings, all of that. And when the Republicans went through this in 2010, which was a revolt against the standard issue Republican Party, they couched it in very highfalutin terms that it turned out they didn't believe in. Right. They couched it in. We worship the Constitution. We love the Constitution. Barack Obama is defaming the Constitution. He's using presidential authority in a way that's wrong.

A

But, John, I just want to clear. Just because you're saying when the Republicans did that, you're referring to the Tea Party.

C

So you're basically the Tea Party, right?

A

The insurgency against the Republican establishment in 2010. But it wasn't about Jews couched in the Constitution. It wasn't. I just want to make that clear. You're saying it was.

C

No, no, I'm saying in 2009, 2010, there was this idea that Barack Obama was seizing powers in a way that a president had never done before.

B

Right.

C

And they were going to represent and uphold The Constitution and ordinary run of the mill Republicans who didn't know how to fight this way had to be gotten rid of in favor of these people who claimed this highfalutin, as I say like principle that they were the constitutional vanguard. Yeah, the idea was we need to restore America to its original purpose. And these people want to replace America with a new America. I don't know how else to describe it. Now there aren't that many of them. There's the squad, there's Mamdani, there's a couple of other people. So they're not that numerous. But if they're a vanguard, they're gonna be a lot more numerous. The regular politicians, the regular go along to get along. Glad handing. We'll do anything to stay in power. We'll say whatever you want, whatever you need, are gonna fall in line behind the radicals in hopes that they are not eaten, that they will be allowed to live and survive. As long as they play the game.

B

Yeah.

C

What we're seeing here is the complete break from any conventional understanding of what a Washington polit is supposed to do, which is represent their district. What do they need? Do you need a highway? You need a road? I'll get you a road. Do you need somebody to help you with your visa? I'll help you with your visa. Do we need to make some kind of big deal so that we can get an energy plant in our state and you get one in your state? They're all, and this is true of the Republicans as well, they're all about weird abstract giant issues and cultural fights.

A

It's worse than that. Before Jonah comes in is that Donnie, if you think about the mayor of New York, if you're the mayor of New York and you're trying to run this city, what's like the number one thing you want from members of Congress from the New York delegation? Right. You want them to be competent, experienced members who have seniority that can help you get resources from Washington appropriators. Right. That you need. So what you don't do is start knocking out incumbent Democrats who have seniority, especially when your party is about to most likely win the majority. It just seems so counter to his interest.

B

I agree with all of that and I think a lot of that sort of reinforces my point about politics as local is done. And I think one way to think about this is that the center of gravity of the Democratic Party has moved from basically being labor unions, nevermind private sector labor unions, but almost to a certain extent public sector unions, to universities. The Sort of the permanent student class. That is where the idea is, that is where the energy, that is where the passion comes from. And we saw that in this 32 year old PhD student, Chevalier, who just won, you know, her race. And the worldview that they bring to that is this highly, not just abstract, but sort of postmodern, what John is calling intersectionality, which says any disparate impact, any outperformance by a group, group, by an institution, by anything that rubs up against the egalitarian theories of our group is inherently illegitimate, that the system is rigged. That if whites overperform blacks in some institution, that is ipso facto proof of institutional racism, which it sometimes might be, but not always. That any institution and any group that outperforms another group, a member of the coalition of the oppressed, that is proof that they are manipulating the system for their own benefit. Our friend Cliff Asness did a good piece for Commentary a while back on this exact point. You don't have to buy into medieval antisemitism to understand why this worldview will have you looking at the Jews suspiciously. Because Jews overperform on all sorts of things. I would argue it's because of deep seated notions of cultural capital and other forms of intangible capital. But they start from the presumption that it's illegitimate. They also have this exact same worldview at scale in their post colonial nonsense. And so they look at some place like Israel that, you know, this startup nation, as someone might call it, that punches way above its weight in all sorts of ways. And they assume the first assumption is that this is unjust, this is wrong, it is coming at the expense of exploited people. And this whole thing just comes together in this blob of a cultural argument that they think is this monocausal explanation for everything that is wrong in the world. And it's the only thing that that could actually sound persuasive and serious in a frigging City University seminar room up until about five minutes ago. But it is spilled out, it's broke the containment vessels. It's a China syndrome kind of thing where it has just gotten into the groundwater in places like New York. And the last point I just simply make is that the dsa, the Democratic Socialists of America, John's right, it was founded by Michael Harrington. It is turned into a golem as far as Michael Harrington would be concerned, because by their own terms, there's a clip that's going around on social media. I can send you the audio if you want, where one of the heads of The DSA in New York simply says, look, we are not part of the Democratic Party. We align with the Democratic Party purely for ballot access reasons. But then once in the party, we want to take on the establishment and change it. This is a very old story going back to the 1960s. Radicals hate liberals more than they hate conservatives just in the same way crazy right wing freakazoid new right guys hate neocons and MeToo Republicans far more than they hate leftists. And it's because it's a contest of power about taking over your own side. And the DSA represents a desire to take over. Not just a desire, an agenda, because they're succeeding of taking over the Democratic Party. And the stupidity and weakness and fecklessness of the Democratic Party is that with the exception of a few people, you know, Rahm Emanuel sees the threat, James Carville all of a sudden sees the threat. But basically they don't know how to argue against these kinds of takeovers. In the same way that the Republican Party, going back to the Tea Party moment that John was talking about, everyone now works on this assumption that if the populists are for it, you have to make peace with it rather than fight back against it. And that's what I mean about both parties being fully fueled jets waiting for a takeover. If you get the populace on your side, the institutions don't have the means or mechanisms to fight back against it, to prevent it, and they end up getting co opted by these populist movements.

A

We'll be right back after this break. I'm Deborah Pardes, the host of Ark News Daily. What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters, but it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all. That's why we started ArkNews Daily. Every weekday morning I walk you through the most important news, give you the context you need and let you know what to look out for for next. I don't try to convince you of anything and I don't waste your time. On most days I'll be in your ears for about 10 minutes or less. Then you can move on with your day, hopefully a little bit smarter than before. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the show notes. I hope to see you tomorrow. And I'm back with John Pod Hortz and Jonah Goldberg. Okay, so let me ask you something, Jonah. So you mentioned Ross Douthat earlier about the fully fueled jet airliners. Ross argued on my podcast and I've heard him elsewhere and he's written about this, that this reaction to Israel that we're seeing on the left, that's fueling so much of the energy on the left and exists somewhere on the right too. This reaction to Israel, though, it's not the same and we can get into the difference, but there's this reaction to anything that has been done in any kind of consensus way on any kind of bipartisan basis in the past. So whatever that is, we the radicals, quote, unquote, are against. And there was this consensus issue on Israel where there was bipartisan support for going back decades. And it was just part of the way the foreign policy establishment, the foreign policy system worked. It was almost like de facto, no matter who was in power, but generally speaking, a foreign aid package was passed, you know, every year for in that supported Israel, there was close defense cooperation between the US and Israel, et cetera, et cetera, etc. Etc. Politicians from both parties would travel to Israel and talk about shared values and shared interests. And so there's a rejection against anything that fits that criteria and Israel just happens to fit the criteria. In other words, could you make the case that there is some antisemitism, as Ross says, but it's not all antisemitism. There's something bigger going on.

B

Sure. So first of all, this whole idea of a big chunk of the people freaking out about Elon Musk being a trillionaire. Right. I mean you can go down a long list institutions that, that work, that haven't been politicized. Piss off. X percent of you. Don't have to call them radicals of the just sort of populace. The Supreme Court, when it upholds the law, is somehow violating the sort of popular front mentality that says our side needs to win every argument regardless of the merits. Right? And that sort of attitude is inherent to populist movements going back forever. My favorite line about this is William Jennings Bryan, the most famous populist in the 19th century. He said, look, the people of Nebraska are for free silver, therefore I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later. That is the spirit of this time. So the caveat I would have for Ross's position is the second you have this argument specifically about Israel or about Jews, you start getting the logic of coalition building and big tentism. And that's the danger is because you start getting people who say, look, I'm not anti Semitic, but I don't like this or I don't like that or I'm not anti Israel, but I don't like this and I don't like that. But we need these people in the tent who are anti Semitic. We need these people in our movement because they're right about this, even if for the wrong reasons. And you start selling off little bits of your soul and your integrity for people who agree with you, but for bigoted reasons. And that we've seen this with JD Vance, we see this with the Democratic Party, where, like, Chuck Schumer is not anti Semitic. Chuck Schumer is not anti Israel. But Chuck Schumer, because of the necessities of coalition politics, needs to give breathing room to people who are anti Israel and who are anti Semitic. JD Vance has a theory of the GOP electorate that says you need to have room for people who love Nick Fuentes. Right. I don't think Vance is an anti Semite yet, but I do think that J.D. vance, it's sort of like, you know, the whole anti anti Trump thing. He is anti anti Nazi. He's like, we need these people in our coalition. We need people who actually hate Israel and have conspiracy theories about Israel. Tucker Carlson's we need them. We need their energy. We need them. They're the future. Let's have them in the tent. And so you end up being a willing accomplice to those sorts of things, even though you may in fact not be an anti Semite or not virulently anti Israel. And that's the problem. This is the problem that Ross gets into. It's a problem that a lot of people get into when they think explanations are synonymous with excuses. And I'm not trying to call out Ross. I'm not saying that he condones this stuff. I'm just saying that it can sound like when you explain these things, that, oh, well, that makes sense. It's in their interest to do this and that. And that's why Trump is doing this, or that's why whoever's doing that. The explanation why I beat up an old lady may be interesting. It's not an excuse for beating up an old lady, John.

C

I think that if you pull back and you look at the United States and the world, jews make up 2% of the population of the United States, and they make up 0.1% of the population of the planet Earth. Having a major political party or a major movement or the vanguard of a major political party focus itself on this tiny minority that admittedly punches above its weight. But we are a footnote of a footnote of a footnote. And the emergence of the Jewish issue as a central salient fact in 2026 bespeaks a terrible illness. It's like a terrible disease. Because if you think things are wrong in America, you're looking in the wrong place. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And so therefore, something's going on that is different from trying to find a ready explanation or dealing with the problem of Israel' role in the world. Or are they? The reason that the Middle east is so chaotic is because there's this little country there that shouldn't be there. Whatever. Again, like, if you don't have a job or you're like, your kid's on fentanyl or you're worried about AI or something like that, thinking about the Jews isn't going to get you anywhere. That's where politics starts getting weird, because people are being elected to deal with something that will not change anybody's lives except yours and mine and my sisters and my kids and my. So the one positive takeaway that I have is that the last time that America had politics this terrible was the last quarter of the 19th century. Last quarter of the 19th century, American politics was a disaster. It was incredibly corrupt. You actually had severe income inequality. You had assassinations, you had the president who got elected, got thrown out, came back. You had huge economic dislocations, a giant depression in the 1890s. And from 1875 to 1900, while all of that was going on in American politics, America became the richest and most powerful country in the world because everything that was really happening was happening somewhere else. And to analogize this to Israel, oddly enough, it was the very fact that the political class in Israel did not foresee the rise of tech culture and therefore did not interfere with its growth until it was too late for it to intervene.

A

It's the craziest thing, by the way, because everything else about the Israeli economy is it's highly centralized, it's highly taxed, it's highly regulated. Every part of the Israeli economy except the tech sector, which is undertaxed, under regulated, and not centralized at all.

C

So my story about this, which gets to the point that I'll get back to, is in 1990 or 1991 or something, I went to Israel for a month, and people were walking around with these Nokia cell phones, and my sister had one, and she was like, you know, this is really great. The way it works is you want a phone, you go to a store and you get a phone. I was like, how is that so great? She's like, do you know that if you want a phone through Bezec, which

A

was the yeah, through Bezec.

C

It took three months for them to come and install a phone in your house if you needed another phone line.

A

Right.

C

Nokia came to the phone company in Israel and said, let's work together. And they're like, eh, I don't know what you're talking about. By the time Bezek realized that Nokia and that the cell phone business was a gigantic threat to this monopoly, 80% of Israelis had cell phones and they were not going to give them up.

A

Yeah, it was over.

C

And so this happened while nobody was looking. I don't understand AI. I'm frightened by AI. I don't know what it is. Something is happening there that is probably going to be the most important thing of the 21st century. You can see how insanely incompetent the government, government officials, people like that are at trying to get their hands or minds around what it is so they can control it. And assuming for the moment that it does not destroy life on earth as we know it, who the people were, who were the elected officials of 2026 are not going to matter. Maybe we're in a third industrial revolution and the politics can't keep up. And so they're fracturing and fraying and doing all kinds of things and it's not going to matter except for people who somehow end up in the line of fire.

A

Do you say it's not going to matter? You mean these politics won't be able to keep up?

C

Yeah, the politics won't keep up in what people will remember. What will matter in 2100 will be what happened outside of government. Right. What happened in the late 19th century? The railroads were built. So that's my optimistic take. Unless of course AI is going to blow up life on Earth.

A

Yeah, it's very optimistic, let me tell you. Okay. I mean it's interesting. You look at the period in the late 1800s. I get these questions, you know, people submit questions that are inside. Call me back where we take questions. And there's always these questions about trying to understand if we're going through, are we seeing early stages of, you know, know 1920s Europe? Is this socialism like what that was or was there? If you're hyper freaked out about what's happening on the right, is this like early stages fascism? Is liberalism as we know it over like, are we watching really this unfolding of America that should be, if we study history, very obvious to us. Right. So you guys are both serious students of history. Jonah, your book Suicide of the west, which I reference a lot, deals with a lot of these issues, how do you respond to people who are asking for a reference point? And their reference points are all very dark places.

C

Yeah.

B

So one of the few areas where I've kind of changed my mind is I think that technology changes culture a lot more than just raw ideas do. There's a tendency among intellectuals to want to do this, you know, begats thing, and you connect the dots and, aha, here's this German idea that escapes a lab, mutates in France and comes to America. And that's why we can't have nice things and all that kind of stuff. And Frankfurt school Marxists are responsible for everything and all that kind of stuff. And sometimes that has merit. Sometimes there's, you know, ideas do matter. Ideas have consequences. As Richard Weaver argued in ideas have consequences. But the simple fact is, is like the automobile changed American society vastly more than any idea that escaped Europe. Right from front porch to back seat. The social mores, the ability to be away from prying eyes, the mobility that that brought a telephone change, society. Radio.

A

Right.

B

So one of the lessons of history is that innovations in mass communication tend to create huge populist upheavals, starting with the printing press. You do not get the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion and all the iconoclasm and all of things that happen. You don't eventually get nationalism. But for that. Now, I'm not saying that there weren't other things going on. Obviously there were other things going on, but the printing press really drove a lot of it. Radio Telegram have brought huge populist upheavals. You don't get the 1960s protests unless you have people being able to say, the whole world is watching when they protest. What is amazing about the period that we've grown up in the last 25 years is that it's not just that we've had these massive revolutions in communications technology. It's that the pace of innovation will not let up. We had time to process the radio. We had time to process tv. We certainly had time to process the printing press. But between the introduction of the iPhone 20 years ago to AI, we're literally like, on my for you tab, I cannot believe a single video is authentic because it's so good at faking stuff that's scrambling with people's heads in all sorts of ways that I take John's point. This is happening outside of the realm of government. Government is playing catch up with an enormous number of these things. But at the same time, one of the reasons we're a mess and one of the reasons why our politics are so messy and becoming nationalized is that that we are experiencing politics intermediated through screens more than anything else. And when you watch things through screens, you start following things as if they're forms of entertainment. And that's one of the reasons why our politics are so stupid, is we care more about our team winning, quote, unquote, right. Getting the McGuffin or whatever, than we actually care about providing good social services. When Barack Obama said, we cannot do DACA because I'm not a kid King,

A

that's an acronym for.

B

It was an immigration Legalizing illegal immigrants. Here are the children of illegal immigrants. Right, right, right, right. And you can agree or disagree with the policy. That's not the point. Right. But Congress wasn't doing his job. He tried to get Congress to do its job. He tried to force legislation through. Congress wouldn't do its job because Congress doesn't do its job. That's what it thinks its frigging job is now. So this thing that he'd spent a year saying would be an authoritarian, monarchical, unconstitutional act, he did anyway. And. And the mainstream liberal press cheered because Obama was their hero and he owned the conservatives. The exact same thing happens all the time with Trump. Trump does non constitutional, illegal, anti constitutional things, but because the right people complain about it and he wins in the daily soap opera that people consume politics as, they think it's great. And this is the kind of thing that you try to tell people. Israel didn't attack Lebanon, it responded to an attack from Hezbollah based in Lebanon. And people don't care. Right, because that's not the narrative. People are just drenched in these entertainment narratives and they pick their heroes. And then for definitionally, anybody who gets in their hero's way is a villain. And I think we can get past this. Nature will heal, we'll figure out. We'll develop muscle memory to deal with it. But it's gonna take time. And the problem is the pace of technological acceleration is so fast that every time you feel like you sort of processed it, oh, we're gonna ban phones from schools. Great. I wish they'd done that when my daughter was at that age. But the thing is, we've moved on from the problems just generated by social media to other problems created by the fact that you can now have pure AI porn and you can do revenge porn against people by making it up, because you don't even need to show the actual videos of them. This is really discombobulating. And it's gonna take our lifetimes for institutions to catch up to it.

C

But you're right that the printing press is very much like the early Industrial revolution was like this, right? The entire English countryside depopulated. Everybody moved to work in factories. Children were working at the age of 6 for 12. You know, all these rules had to be written after we watched a generation of people suffer terribly from the social dislocation and transformation that took place then.

B

That was the debate over the social question for the last half of the 19th century. The so called social question was, how are we going to reorganize how everybody lives in the era of the Industrial revolution? And DSA was one answer to that argument.

C

Well, that's exactly. See, so this was the point. The thing I wanted to bring up is we had 911 in 2001, the financial meltdown in 2008, and Covid in 2020 and 2021, each of these dislocations. So 911 changed our posture toward the world and involved us in two wars that we fought for decades, decades. The financial meltdown. It took 10 years for us to get to par, back to par from the losses. Massive numbers of people lost their homes, were living in a state of incredible anxiety, had no savings, had no future. Then Covid came and screwed with everybody's heads because we were told the wrong things about it. Some in innocence and some really falsely. And every political leader who had to deal with these problems failed. Why should anybody believe that the American political system works for them? And why not throw all the cards in the air and see what happens now? I think Republicans have done this with Trump and they've done it twice. And Trump's gonna leave the scene and there's gonna be this reckoning about whether or not it was good or bad. And I look at the dsa, I'm terrified for my kids. I don't like that this is happening. This woman in Colorado whose name I keep blocking on, literally would not condemn the murder of an 82 year old woman at a rally to support hostages who were in a tunnel, kidnapped from their homes and living underground in Gaza under conditions of torture. Somebody comes out to support them, is murdered. She won't say a word about it.

A

Just for our listeners, again, who aren't following this. So it's Kiros, right?

C

Kiros, yeah. Melot Kiros, yeah.

A

Who's running against. I just. There's an incumbent Democrat, Diana Dejet, who is a left wing Democrat, by the way. It's not like she's some quote unquote, squishy moderate and she's being challenged.

C

But she's been there for 30 years. Like that. That's another thing. Like, that's why I say about getting out of the way, right? Like if Diana De Jet had like gotten out of the way and the party of Colorado found a respectable person who was in the state Senate, who was compelling and whatever and had served in the military, maybe then this wouldn't be the case, that this monster is probably gonna win her primary. Or El Sayed is gonna win the senatorial primary in Michigan supporting Hamas and saying that the guy who drove into a synagogue with his truck with guns, intending to mow down children in a daycare center her before he was killed.

A

That is the synagogue in West Bloomfield in metro Detroit.

C

The synagogue in West Bloomfield, yeah.

A

In Michigan. Right. And Abdul El Sayed wouldn't condemn it.

C

Sayed's response was hurt people hurt people.

A

Right.

C

So he was hurt because he's a Lebanese immigrant or something. And so, you know, Israel treated him badly or something like that. It's terrible. Like the long range consequences of this are very frightening. My synagogue rebuilt its lobby. Like security guards everywhere. All of the, this $700 million a year is now being spent by Jews in the United States on security, private security.

A

Not to digress, because I want to try desperately to wrap this up on an upbeat note, but maybe that's foolish. There was this letter that our friend David Ingber, Rabbi Ingber, helped organize last week. I don't know if you saw this letter where 700 plus rabbis signed this letter. I was surprised by it. It was across the religious spectrum, it was across the political spectrum. It was. Rabbis signed it. I mean, Orthodox right wing rabbis, more liberal kind of Reform rabbis, and even some rabbis who have been pretty strong critics of Israel over the years. And yet they signed the letter too. And the letter was a letter to Mamdani and it said, cut it out. I mean, we can link to the letter in the show notes, but basically it said in so many words, you're playing a dangerous game here. And you think you're just criticizing AIPAC and you think you're just criticizing this, but people are gonna hear what they're gonna want to hear and it's dangerous. And I guess my question is, do you think there are any responsible actors in the system being overwhelmed, as you guys are saying, by technology and by this unsettling, this post 911 global financial crisis and Covid like it's. We're in one of those moments where everything's unsettled, everyone's scrambled and nobody can think sanely. Do you think there are, like, responsible actors that just say, like. Like mamdani says, I gotta cool things down.

C

We're about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. People think that we're young. We're not young. We are old. And so can I name the rational actors? I mean, I'm sure there are a thousand elected politicians in America who are just fine or great or would be great if they were somehow let loose or whatever. And I think the system will hold. I don't even think I know the system will hold. But as Jonah loves to say, quote that thing that there's a lot of ruin in a nation, meaning the nation survives ruin. But of course, you then have to live through the ruin. And if the ruin is that my people, our people, are going to be at terrible risk. That's really bad ruin. It's like the survival of this ancient people who. We don't deserve being treated this way. But it is this question of whether or not the DSA represents an antinomian. Just like we were worried about this with the Trumpians, who arose in 2015, 2016, and did in fact, of course, lead an insurrection on the Capitol building building. Like, are they cut loose from all restraint and can our authorities deal with them? Or are terrible things going to happen before the society rears in disgust and horror? And the one thing I'll say without monologizing is there is this weird thing about the last half of the 20th century, which is that there was this wave of political violence and assassinations. Right? Wait. Not only here, but elsewhere. Right. Kennedys, Martin Luther King, George Wallace, two assassination attempts on Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and then the Pope. Something happened, and the period of political assassination just ended. It stopped somehow. There was something about the fact that the Pope got shot that was like, well, now where are we gonna go? Like, who are we gonna shoot now? Or I don't even know what. But it was like 17, 18 years and then it ended. And the crime wave in the United states was a 30 year crime wave and it ended in 94, partially largely due to policies, but maybe due to exhaustion. And maybe this period of insane political instability and ugliness on the part of both parties will come to an end out of exhaustion.

A

It just bleeds out.

C

Yeah.

A

Okay, so Jonah, I'll give you the last word here, and I'll preface this by saying John made the reference to this. The. We're going to be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. So, A, respond to John and B, in the context of your response, are you optimistic? Is this whole crazy period going to kind of exhaust itself?

B

I don't like slippery slope arguments. Not because there's nothing that ever looks like a slippery slope, but that there's a certain kind of Marxist twang to it that just says once this ball starts rolling downhill, there's no stopping it. When in fact the way you stop the ball is stopping the ball. The way you make a slippery slope, not slippery is say, this far and no farther. Edmund Burke has this line where he says, example is the school of mankind and he will learn it no other. Which, in other words, is sometimes you have to show people, not tell people, right? People have to go through, do the thing. But Ed Koch said it better. Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, Jewish mayor. He ran twice, won, ran for a third time, lost. Asked if he was ever gonna run again, he said, no, the people of New York fired me and now they must be punished. And we're getting a lot of punishment these days, right? But the thing is, I think people are learning from it. You're seeing, you know, like, I have a lot of criticisms of Ezra Klein and the abundance movement and all this stuff that's going on on the left of center, but it's progress that these people are realizing that they messed up up, that some of their ideas were bad and they're looking to fix them. The number of people on the left who are appalled at Mamdami's rent control, rent freeze move is very heartening to me. At the end of the day, forget the gargoyles and villains that you see on cable news and on Twitter. This is a really good and decent country. And I think like, the World cup tourists discovered that, right? And I think that's one of the reasons why Americans love the story of the World cup tourists loving America. Because it's pre political, it's not partisan. It's just like, yeah, it turns out like, this country's frigging awesome and like air conditioning is Great and Buc EE's is super cool. And you go down this really long list, right? Like, this country actually is incredibly highly functioning and good and decent. And I think there's this vast reservoir of decency in the American people. And the optimistic or hopeful thing is simply, this is. That's why I focused at the beginning of this conversation about these institutional problems. Congress isn't working, Parties aren't working. I can list a whole bunch of other Things that aren't working. The nice thing is you can fix these things. You can fix these institutions in a way that empowers good and decent people. One of the reasons you get all these people retiring from Congress is because they're serious people who want to do serious things and Congress won't let them. You fix these institutions so that, you know, when we were all growing up, politicians ran a little bit to the right in the primary. Not to win the base, but to get enough of the base, which was actually meant a different thing back then, meant the most reliable voters, not necessarily the most right wing or most left wing voters, but to get enough of them that you could add to your coalition. And then once they got the nomination, they ran to the center because that's where elections were contested. The vast majority of Americans hate the choices both parties are presenting to them. They end up voting on lesser of two evils. That can be fixed. Change some party rules, change some election laws like these things can be fixed. There are all sorts of low hanging fruit things that if serious, responsible people act seriously and responsibly, they can fix. And I think that this country.

C

Can I give you an example?

B

Sure.

C

There's a real world example. What happened in Florida after the 2000 election.

B

Yeah, they fixed it.

C

Florida blew the 2000 election. That election will remain a point of contention for as long as there is American history. And by 2004 Florida had the most efficient election system system in the United States and remains so to this day. And it is foolproof and fraud is not even possible and they have results in 10 minutes or whatever it is. We saw it happen because it had to happen because we couldn't have Florida again. We were not going to survive another Florida. So that's one tiny example.

B

On the more macro level, populism politically is the equivalent of bubbles in markets and bubbles always population pop and when bubbles pop, there's a flight to quality. And I don't want to be a Leninist here, right. And say the worse the better, but we're going to have a bumpy road. I'm long term optimistic, I'm short term pessimistic, but I'm optimistic that we can contain the bad stuff that we're going to go through to tolerable levels. And then I think there's going to be a real rush to learn from the lessons of the last decade or so. And there are going to be people who are going to say it doesn't have to be this way, that we don't have to have this drama. There's gonna be someone who says, hey, you know what would be great? If political parties tried to be majority parties trying to win over the center. And there are people out there who have a hungering desire for that. I'm not sure if ranked choice voting fix all the problems people think it does, but the fact that people want those fixes is a sign that people want fixes. And I think this country is too practical, it's too decent to say, say we're just gonna live in this banana stand nonsense in perpetuity so we'll get out of it.

C

Okay, one last final point. So a lot of people hate Big Pharma, right? Meanwhile, some guy figures out 15 years ago that they should look at the secretions, the digestive secretions of the Gila monster. Cause something's going on there. The Gila monster only eats twice a year. What the hell is going on there? This is really weird. Fifteen years later, we have the GLP1s and they are going to cure obesity and may have good effects on addiction, may have good effects on depression. Has this gut changing, life changing effect. All that is going on. While all this terrible stuff is going on. We have a private space shuttle space exploration industry, because we had a public space exploration business and it stank. It was a government kludge and it didn't work well. And these guys decided that they were gonna see what they could do to make it work as a market mechanism. It's amazing. And you know, even Trump ends up ultimately being a sideshow to the actual glories of the American innovative culture and spirit and all of that. And we've already been through years of trouble and bumpy roads and rocky roads and maybe there are always bumpy rocky roads. I think it's amazing to be alive now. It's just nerve wracking.

A

Yeah.

C

And there is this, as I say, this kind of sidelight question of why are you doing this to my people? We never did anything to you except give you the movies. Irving Berlin. We did all this good stuff. We wrote God Bless America and with the American musical and mel Brooks turned 100 this week. And what do we do to you? Leave us alone. Leave us the hell alone. And leave our little country alone. Over there. They sat there, they had no money. Now they're the 22nd richest country on earth. They're giving everybody ways and cable set top boxes and, I don't know, whatever the hell else they're doing ways. John, let us be.

A

All right, gentlemen, we will leave it there. I didn't expect it. And my upbeat note was not that. That the Jews gave you ways, but.

C

But Waze is the greatest thing ever. I know, but, John, the ways.

A

Do you know when Waze was sold to Google? Do you know?

C

Yeah, like 2000.

B

Dan, are you saying, like, what have you done for me lately to the Jews? Yeah.

A

I mean, we've got better, more recent examples than Waze. I love ways. I'm just saying it's like.

B

It's unbelievable.

C

Whatever. I. I'm just saying. I'm just.

A

Okay. All right, gentlemen, I wish you Both a happy July 4th. Thank you. And to our listeners. Thank you. This was a spirited conversation that was at times incredibly depressing, but we did manage sort of to end on an upbeat note. And I know that's out of character, at least for you, John, but I

C

wish you guys a good fourth, and you, too.

B

Happy Independence Day. Foreign.

C

Hi, I'm Daniel Hartman, president of the Sholem Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. And I'm Yossi Klein Halevi, senior Fellow at the Sholem Hartman Institute. What's more important? To be feared by your enemies or morally true to yourself? Should Israel strive to be a nation among nations? Or should it accept the fact that it is now a fortress apart? What do Israelis and Diaspora Jews owe each other? If you're Jewish or a friend, an ally, these questions have been gnawing at you these past few years. For some of you, like for us, these questions have been keeping you up at night. And for some, they've been simmering in the background, waiting for answers. But dilemmas don't always have clear answers. What they do deserve is are honest and respectful debates. And as it happens, Yossi and I love to challenge each other to get to the bottom of things. We look at current events through a lens that speaks to us most deeply, a Jewish lens. So if today's Jewish dilemmas are on your mind, tune in to our conversation on For Heaven's Sake, a partnership between ARC Media and the Sholem Hartman Institute. You can find For Heaven's Sake on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you.