Latest / The Nation Podcasts / The American Right’s Civil War Over Israel w/ David Austin Walsh | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

Transcript

The American Right’s Civil War Over Israel w/ David Austin Walsh | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now is the time of monsters.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: With those words from Gramshee, I welcome you to the Time of Monsters Podcast.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Geet here of the Nation magazine.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is sponsored by the Nation.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and is widely available on all podcasting platforms and some radio stations as well.
• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this week, I want to talk about the sort of discussion or conversation about Israel and Aditya Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary Sanctuary San
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: on questionably, like with massive amounts of evidence, a neonatzy, a holocaust epologist, so one who does not see Jews as being part of America, as well as also a racist and a misogynist and an insell and any other things.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, that interview caused a lot of eyebrows theories.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Tucker Carlton has been flirting.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: with a far-right anti-Sammate for a long time now, but Nick Fuentes is to summarize a bridge too far, although I also mentioned that, you know, sitting president Donald Trump had dinner with Nick Fuentes in 2022, but this particular conversation argument.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Really spilled out over into the Heritage Foundation, the very influential ThinkPack, which is really the sort of engine behind Project 2025 and, you know, very instrumental in setting the agenda for the private administration.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The president of that organization Kevin Roberts, put out a video, you know, saying that he'll stand by his friend Tucker Carlson, who he said was being attacked by globalists.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this has caused a lot of controversy, a lot of donors starting to withdraw money and then
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Robert had to apologize, and then they had a meeting at Heritage, which turned out to be, you know, like, something people on the left might be familiar with, a kind of struggle such a, you know, where people are airing their grievances, including especially many young staffers, you know, might say they disadvantage point is, but also said that, you know, they're not very keen on Israel and that they have, you know, like legitimate reasons.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think, you know, coming, you know,
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: more than two years after the Hamas attack and the sort of violence that we've seen in Gaza, this is really an indication of how much the conversation has changed.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in some ways, there's also maybe a return to an older conversation.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: There has been a long history of both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, on the American right, as well as on the American left.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that history is not very well known, and it's worth exploring.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I can't think of anyone better to talk about it than I guess as a week, David Austin Walsh, author of an excellent book, Taking America Back, which is really about the relationship between the mainstream respectable right and the far right.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think anyone who wants to figure out where right wing anti-zynism comes from,
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the sort of debates that surround it, I think David's work is one of the very few places that it offers a sound grounding.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So first of all, welcome to the program.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, thank you for having me.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's just start with the, I rehearse this sort of debate at Heritage River.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's your sense of what's going on there and on the broader right like right now, coming out of, you know, this Nick Quintess into, into, into, into, into, into, into, into.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's so much to talk about here.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's so many different dimensions of it.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is a story that just keeps developing.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I've been looking, I just saw the headline, which I guess came out last night, but I'm just seeing it this morning now, that the anti-Semitism task force severes relationship with the heritage foundations in the New York Times.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the National Task Force to combat anti-Semitism said that it will no longer
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: apparently no longer wishes to be affiliated with the Heritage Foundation.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what I think is happening, maybe taking a broader step back, I wrote a piece in Boston review late last month, in which I kind of tried to think about where the emerging
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I spoke in the process of doing that piece to Kurt Mills, who is the CEO of the American Conservative Magazine, the Paleocon Magazine, and one of the things he told me, and I wrote a bit about this in the piece, is that he thought that Israel was going to be the major dividing line.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: He kept talking about how it would be a major factor in the sort of struggle for succession,
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that this would be a factor in the 2020 potential 2028 as of the primaries.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And lowered the hold within two weeks it explodes as the primary fight on the right.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been very much below the service, but only barely submerged for at least the past six months.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I suspect, maybe we will go too far down this road, but I suspect that the Charlie Kirkassassination kind of propelled this emerging fissure into kind of open warfare.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it's a very kind of unsettled time
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: on the right right now, and especially heritage, which is this incredibly important, very historically important.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's one of the first major conservative think tanks that's established in Washington, obviously remains incredibly influential into the 21st century, and it really is, has become, in the past 10 years, the kind of think tank institutional home for the Maga movement, for Maga world, obviously project 2025, and other things.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, basically being in the middle of a civil war within the heritage foundation.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a big deal.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a big story.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a reason why this has been, it's sort of moved just beyond the conservative media.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're now seeing front page articles in the Washington Post in the New York Times about these very issues, although one thing that I will say, and as somebody who is written a book on this subject,
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do get a little bit frustrated and I saw this framing in the times in their story yesterday You know that this is, you know, a time for choosing that these anti-semites who buckly purged from the party And the conservative movement of the 1960s are suddenly back and like, no, that's not
• 6:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's always been a myth.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's always largely been a myth.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is the exact wrong framing that takes the story that the conservative movement has told about itself over the years at face value.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because that's a remarkably powerful myth, especially in the so-called liberal or, you know, mainstream media.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is something that, you know, your book refused.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think Sam Kennan House is excellent, new biography of William Buckley.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like very strongly refutes and many other scholars, you know, I mentioned Ed Miller with his book on the John Bridge Society.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like there's a real disconnect here between what the, you know, the best scholarship on the American right shows and the way that this is presented.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is so maybe I mean, this is a good occasion to like sort of step back and like actually look at what is in the real history of the relationship.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also, you know,
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: going back to the early 20th century, and, you know, there's disputes about this, but I think a little one.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: way to think about the American right is, and it's current form, is to think that it really crystallized in the 1930s in the reaction to the new deal.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: There'd obviously been forms of conservativeism earlier, you know, big business conservatism, but in terms of like an actual reactionary counter-revolutionary movement, that wants to roll back, you know, significant social democratic gains.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can only have that once you have the new deal.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is really what brings together this movement, which combines a faction of, you know, like older, free market or capitalist right with sort of traditionalists who are upset about social liberalism and assertion foreign policy types who were very upset at the sort of anti-fascist direction of Roosevelt's foreign policy.
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the right, which I think scholars call the old right, really coalesced in the 1930s.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so so what can we say about those people and predict in this case how they felt about the Jews?
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, so, you know, obviously the 1930s this sort of new crystallization of it.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, one of the things that I've been thinking a lot more about is how to push this story back, trying to think through a new book project, push the story back to the 1890s and the kind of sort of right-wing dimensions of the American populist movement.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: But definitely there is something that happens in the 1930s, which, uh,
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: establishes what I call in in my book a kind of right-wing popular front dedicated to opposing you know the new deal coalition.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now it's interesting they don't really have a whole lot to say about Zionism per se in the 1930s precisely certainly anti-Semitism is common on the old right.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: and it's a very specific, it's expressed in very specific ways because of the specific political circumstances at the time.
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is a anti-Semitism which believes, which holds that, you know, one, it's the new deal, is secretly controlled by Jews, it's the Jew deal, you know, the more, I think, sophisticated version of this, which people like Merwood Hard to, I write about my book, among others, get into is that, well, actually,
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the new deal coalition is based on appealing to these new immigrant groups, especially Jews who have alien political traditions that are, you know, social democratic and socialist and nature.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's that dimension on the foreign policy side.
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is, the Jews are going to get us into World War II.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're going to get us into a fight with a Nazis.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: That this is not something that is in American national interest to get involved in.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this is even before the outbreak of World War II to get involved in any kind of
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: foreign commitment or overseas commitment, particularly on behalf of an ethnic constituency in the United States.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're not going to fight Hitler on behalf of Rabbi Stephen Weiss or the anti-deformation league, that kind of thing.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: That continues to be kind of the old rights stance, really until Pearl Harbor, and obviously this is most infamously expressed,
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: in Charles Lindbergh's speech in Des Moines, Iowa in September 1941, where he basically says that there's a couple of Jews who are trying to drive the United States into open war with the Nazis.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Lindbergh is obviously an anti-Semite, he's also a committed sort of white supremacist.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: The first thing he writes after the outbreak of war in 1939 is something for, I can remember if it's Reader's Digest or Life magazine, I think it might be Reader's Digest.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's basically an essay about how horrible it is that Europe is, the white race is fighting itself in Europe.
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so this is the dominant strain of anti-Semitic, or it's not even necessarily anti-Semitic.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is up to anti-Semitic, but the dominant strain of thinking about Jews on the American right
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and just to like put a, you know, give a sort of, put some names and faces to this, you know, the people who thought this way would include, each of them can, you know, who's one of the most influential political writers of the early 20th century, Albert J.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Knock, a hugely influential intellectual, you know, with mainstream audience, writing for the Atlantic.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: monthly and expressing like all these ideas that Bloomberg also shared and the other thing that I do I don't have to do it flag is that because I think it's relevant to separate debate.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: That foreign policy vision, which is at the white racialized view of the global politics, that the white race has to stick together and deal with what was called the rising tide of colored, the rising tide of non-white people.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That, you know, like it's not in really event occurring in your interest.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that is actually the sort of forced policy vision of a so-and-like Stephen Bannon, right?
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like there is a kind of long-continent, and then, you know, certain elements of the back of the world, where they basically want, you know, like a rapprochewant with Russia, you know, in Europe, because the real enemy is China.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as we now see, you know, Venezuela, you know, like this is a view of foreign policy that you, you want to have a settlement with whatever dictator you need to do in Europe so that the United States can take forward its proper task which is hemispheric domination and expansion into Asia.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I just wanted to flag that because, so listeners understand that this form policy, this world view, you know, has long continuity on the right and persists.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, actually, just to briefly add to that, I mean, one of the things that I think gets under-discussed when thinking about, you know, how Pearl Harbor changes everything and, like, the isolationist movement in the United States just evaporates after Pearl Harbor.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's not a coincidence that it is the racial war against Japan, that kind of leads to that.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, Bloomberg, I mean, he's not deployed in Europe because the Roosevelt administration doesn't trust his loyalty.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: But they do send him to the Pacific.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: He does fight in the Pacific.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, fighting the
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Japanese who are a racial enemy as well, and I mean, there's been any number of books written about this was famously John Dauer's War Without Mercy.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: That makes, yeah, no, it makes this possible.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is sort of shift possible as quickly as it happens.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in fact, I mean, in some ways that isolation is so called isolation is impulse, which is really impulse for hemispheric and Asian domination.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It persists, not just with Lindbergh going out to work, but with the Republican foreign policy during World War II, was Asia first, that the United States should be actually fighting in Japan, and that, you know, like fighting Hitler, you know, as always, it remains a kind of secondary thing.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, obviously there's my big
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: a variety of different motives for thinking in that way, but I mean like assuming the case of someone like Lindberg, it is the fact that like for him, Hitler being overlord of Europe is no bad thing.
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's actually a useful thing as a full work against communism.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: coming out of, so I mean, I think it's the important thing to underscore is that this, what we mistakenly call isolationists, but this are right-wing foreign policy, persisted during World War II.
• 15:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then it took on a kind of like new lease on life after the war.
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And do you want to kind of like, and we're actually the issue of Zionism becomes much more important because after the war, as a consequence of both the Holocaust,
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I would add, as a consequence of the unwillingness of the United States and other countries to take Jewish refugees, the issue of Israel becomes, the issue of Zionism and trying to create a Jewish state in the Middle East comes to the fore.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's two things that are happening on the old writer, however, we wanted to find them after World War II, but the old sort of
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: non-interventionist right that emerges very, very quickly in 1945.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: One is, as you pointed out, there is a real hostility towards admitting refugees from Europe, especially Jewish refugees.
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the Displaced Persons Act in 1948, which allows for the admission of some
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: The relaxation of some of the restrictionist quotas that are put in by the 1924 immigration act is explicitly done so in a way as to exclude Eastern European Jews in favor of the Volksdeutsch, the expelies from Sudan and Poland after the war.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's that dimension.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's one of the reasons why Robert Taffed, so I'm gonna head of myself.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: The other sort of concern is the way in which the United States may be kind of involved or in meshed with these emerging post-colonial conflicts in, you know, what is primarily so that a British fear of influence.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, I think that you can look at Robert Taft, the senator from Ohio, as a sort of useful figure here to understand how these tensions are emerging and how they're end up being resolved within these circles.
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, Taft is an isolationist.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's against American intervention in the war before Pearl Harbor.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, very, very anti-communist.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, he's the namesake of the Taft Hartley accent.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's very, very opposed to the new deal.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Ironically enough,
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: He is one of the sort of primary advocates for US recognition of Israel in 1948.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the reasons for this are complicated.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: On the one hand,
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: is the Senator from Ohio.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is a relatively large Jewish population among his constituents, most of whom resigned as to at least broadly supportive of US recognition of Israel.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But also, if you create a Jewish state, a Jewish ethno-state, a Jewish national home,
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Palestine.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: That solves the DP issue.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: It means that you don't have to admit these displaced persons to the US.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can instead shump them to, you know, the Middle East.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, the British, I think it was, yeah, it was Ernst Bevin, the
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: French Foreign Secretary complained about this repeatedly.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think at one point in public in 1946 that the United States is sort of by refusing to admit a displaced person's, you know, they're essentially making this a problem for the British and, you know, it's a fantastic sizing into the 48 war.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, there's that dimension.
• 18:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the other dimension is, and you see this with people like Merwin Hart, right
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: was at one point associated with Huey Long, by the mid-1940s, late 1940s, is sort of has become a more or less a professional anti-Semite.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: His primary concern is, well, if we recognize the state of Israel, then we are going to be caught in this endless series of wars between Jews and Arabs, and this is just going to extend American security commitments and also
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, this is also part of a Judeo Bolshevik plot driven from Moscow.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there is this, you know, the forties are interesting because you have this diminishing uh, uh, you have the Judeo Bolshevik conspiracy theory, this idea, the Jews are communists and you know, the Moscow's to move the communists.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: My sky was controlled by the Jews, diminishing, but it still has a purchase on the far right.
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so they look at the Soviet recognition of Israel as sort of evidence in this broader plot.
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, but there is also, especially in the less extreme circles, a genuine concern that U.S. support for Israel is going to lead to one, as I said, it's going to lead to all of these foreign policy commitments, which will undermine American power and prestige and cost American blood and treasure.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: But also, there are some who are genuinely concerned about the plight of Palestinian Arabs in this sort of new paradigm.
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Nakhba is not a secret in 1948.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: People are watching it across the world, and much as today, even people who are not particularly ideologically or religiously sympathetic to Arabic Muslims,
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: still nevertheless are looking at these at this as a as a atrocity on a massive scale instead of reacting accordingly.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, no, and I would actually mention, I mean, since you mentioned a religious angle, there are also a large number of Palestinian Christians who have had like, you know, longstanding historical ties with the United States through like missionary activity and through, you know, Christian interest in the, you know, so called Holy Land.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And who, like, you know, are bringing stories and some of these Palestinian Christians, our conservative, like our political conservative, our Republicans, and our also voices.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So like in the context of the late 40s and early 50s, the voices that you're the places where you're most likely to hear about Palestinian disposition, we're on the right in, you know, publications like human events.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: or as I mentioned in a recent column, Henry Regnery, you know, like a publisher with community all right, he starts a publishing company in the late 40s, publishes many of the leading conservatives, you know, the first publisher of Bluma Buckley, publishes games, burn-ham, Wilmore Kendall,
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: but also published has a strong line of books about Palestinian disposition and often like bringing a board writers that don't share politics otherwise.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ethel Mammam, a British anti-war anti-imperialist anti-fascist activist publishes a book with Regnery.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there is a very ideologically fluid time,
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were different strands of the right and they did like intertwined and overlap.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But just as there was this curly anti-Semitic, you know, uh, uh, uh, Gerald, uh, case myth, you know, We're even hard.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: type of anti-Semitism.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was also a strands of the right bad moral legitimate concerns.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would also emphasize like among the sort of foreign policy realist, you know, a belief that, you know, like this was going to alienate air populations and would create opportunities for Soviet communism.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think someone like James Bernham,
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, it was like very much a cold warrior former CIA analyst.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was this point of view and as a point of view shared like you know widely like in the CIA in the State Department and I mean people like George Tinnon, right?
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like this was like, yeah.
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Something that I think can often get lost in these, obviously not in this conversation, this is what we're having it, but lost in sort of the broader conversations about Israel, the sort of position of Israel on the American right, is that it's a, and really just the American politics writ large, is that it's a very different, almost a categorically different phenomenon before the 16th or before 1967.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's much more skepticism.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: But even in American Judaism, there's not the same degree of affinity for his real enzymeism in the 40s and 50s and into the 1960s.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, there's not the same, I mean Christian Zionism is not a mass phenomenon, really until after the 60s war.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Partly because of the strength of mainline Protestantism that lingers into the 1960s.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: You don't really see the displacement as the dominant form of Protestant Christianity by evangelicals until the 70s.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: But also because of these other factors.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I mean, some of the most sort of incisive critics of Israel on really an American life in the 1940s and 1950s are coming from mainline Protestant and Catholic publications.
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're not approaching it.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there obviously is our anti-Semitic traditions in those areas.
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But they're not approaching their analysis necessarily from that position.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're thinking through, okay, well, who basically is looking out for our Palestinian Christian sort of co-religionists?
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And obviously, as he pointed out, that there's a lot of different ties between these communities and sort of mainline Protestantism in the United States.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, it is a very, very different and much more, I think, critical period of time when it comes to sort of U.S. Israel relations.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And actually, you know, one of the, I mean, it might be relevant to, like, herded to particularly about, wasn't one of the founders of herded, sort of Lebanese Arab Brody.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I know that they were like sort of prominent Christians, like in that circle of the emerging conservative movement and around very cold water.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this, I mean, I think this is a national review, which plays a very big role in your book is kind of interesting because it is the kind of voice of the
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: with a right-wing popular front, and it is trying to bring together a lot of these different traditions.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: William F. Buckley, Jr., his father, William F. Buckley, senior, was very much a classic old-right figure, counter-revolutionary, admirer of Franco, admirer of Lindbergh, very vocal in
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, Buckley, you know, there's a debate to me had to what degree he was able to leave that tradition behind.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But clearly, you look at like the early national review.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, like they are publishing people, like Revello Oliver, you know, like you know, is unquestionably like an anti-Semite.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think in 1956, National Review described Israel as the first racist
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mentioned in the article, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: with Jim Crow, but it is, so that's the review very much, as you had those elements within it, but also had the more re-list foreign policy, and also I think some of the libertarian techniques.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think what you're seeing in National Review in the late 50s is, again, it is a popular front.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is a kind of coalition of these various different forces and factors, so you've got revealed all over on the one hand, who's a classic professor at the University of Illinois, who is a committed, really throughout his entire public life, and he later becomes obviously neo-nazzi.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: but he's a committed biological racist.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's the book review editor at National Review and he keeps complaining about how, you know, Jews like Ashley Montague, who's an anthropologist, I believe, are working, he writes this big book in the 50s sponsored by UNESCO, questioning the biological basis of race.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the beginning of that kind of Francois removing beyond.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, a summing that, a summing, like Lothram Stuttard, you mentioned the rising tide of color, that race is a biological reality.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for all of her races a biological reality, it is the driving force of history.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like Oswald Spangler type stuff.
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it is a Jewish plot to try to undermine this basic reality.
• 28:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: For somebody like Buckley on the other hand, especially in the late 1950s, I think that, and this is true for some of the other folks at National Review as a Catholic magazine,
• 28:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: less true for people like Burnham as a, you know, an ex-trotskyist, but there is a discomfort that I think you're seeing in precisely this way, like Israel is the first racist state.
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: A discomfort, they don't have a problem with racism per se.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is, you know, a year afterwards he writes the why the South must prevail.
• 28:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And also, which he also explicitly ties to the defense of the British Empire.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, he says, you know, they're defending against the Mao Mao and in Kenya.
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have to defend against the civil rights movement in Arkansas.
• 29:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what I think is, there is a discomfort with the idea of Jewish power coming from this kind of Catholic perspective.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not something that remains a through line necessarily through a, certainly not through the book, these entire sort of public life, but at that moment of time,
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm thinking, in particular, of a book by Magda Chetcher, Christian Supremacy, which was published two years ago, which is a sort of history of anti-Semitism and kind of legal thinking in Christian legal tradition in Europe.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think that's a big dimension of this.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: This discomfort with the idea that there is actual Jewish power, kind of for the first time,
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, really ever tied to Jewish statehood, but it's something that, you know, the that element of the right comes to terms with and again, I think the six day war has a lot to do with it also for the fact that the matter is is that.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Israel in 1948, in part because of the power of the Judo Bolshevik myth, and there are other things going on as well, is still seen by broad swaths of the right as, you know, this socialist state, you know, it's God computes his, it could very easily be, you know, an ally of the Soviet Union, right?
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, but politics in the eastern block shift pretty dramatically within the next five years to, you know, essentially state sanctioned anti-Semitism, and in ten anti-Semitism, particularly from Moscow, but not just from there.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, that allows for
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't happen overnight, it happens gradually over the next 20 years, but a reconfiguration of Israel as this pseudo-socialistic state run by Jews to this potential ally against Soviet influence in the Middle East.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that is the kind of realist transformation that happens.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I mean, it's very interesting to see the way that those debates played themselves out because I think one way that they had framed it was that they saw themselves as defending Western civilization and there's a science plan like is is you a part of Western civilization or is it the like outside of Christianism?
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even Sam Huntington couldn't make up his mind and I know we're jumping ahead of the 90s, but I was just re-reading clash of civilizations recently.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, he has his whole, you know, there's the Arab Civilization, Muslim Civilization, European Civilization, but there's a distinction between East and West.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, Latin America has its own Civilization.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he has in a footnote, you know, Israel is this interesting sort of exception, because on the one hand, it is very much tied into Western European Civilization.
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: on the other hand, it's distinct enough to make it its own distinctive Jewish civilization, but it's also more or less aligned with the West.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, Israel is always kind of occupied this liminal space in this kind of civilizational imagination.
• 32:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even Pat Buchanan in his book, I believe it was death of the West, the one where he talks about demographic breakdowns and whatnot.
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he writes,
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: particularly for him writes pretty sympathetically about Israel because he sees it as essentially having the same problems vis-a-vis Arab Muslims as the US does in the 90s and early odds with Hispanics.
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that does actually get to the sort of heart of it, and it is interesting.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, suicide in the West, where him has a very interesting sort of paragraph, where he's like, you know, how do we sort out this anomaly of Israel?
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it part of the West?
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it not?
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I would also mention there's a very interesting correspondence between the philosopher Leo Strauss, who's a sort of conservative, but a bit anomalous from this sort of Christian tradition.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, you know, like admiring the agents and being a religious skeptic and and with Wilmore Kendall of National Review, they had a correspondence with like 50s Where um, Strauss basically says, you know, like I really enjoy National Review, except that you guys are always attacking like it's Israel And like why are you doing this idea and Strauss's argument with Kendall is like, you know, like what you have to understand is that
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Israel is an outpost of Western civilization.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is spreading Western civilization in the Middle East, and is defending Western interest in the region, which I thought was a very shrewd argument to make.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is the case, and this brings us to the sort of six-day war,
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: where, you know, you have a bunch of different developments.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is that, you know, Israel shows its sort of military prowess.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it shows its military prowess at the time where, you know, the United States is bogged down in Vietnam, where, you know, like the, the, the, the, the, the spectacle of an American online nation, like being able to afford its enemies is like very much, you know, a shot in the arm.
• 34:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also, you know, as you said, reconfigures the Jewish feelings towards Israel in the diaspora where, you know, it's sort of solidifies the idea that, you know, this project can work and we have to be aligned with it.
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And more importantly, brings over one of the consequences is transforming a lot of former Cold War liberals.
• 34:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: into moving further on the rights of one of the ages of that.
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And many of those people were, you know, as it happens for more students or interested in the work of Leo Strauss.
• 34:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's always like, Lou, you know, the story we're telling you, like, it all kind of, you know, converges on that 67 moment.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is the moment.
• 34:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: where yeah, a lot of not the whole right, but the large elements of essentially the mainstream right do kind of think like yes Israel is a way to go and it reawakens Christian Zionism of
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: the dispensationist form like, you know, like, yes, you know, we're really going to see an apocalyptic war that will bring back Jesus Christ.
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only the provider I'd add to that is I do actually think like when we're thinking about Christian Zionism, I wish that there was like, you know, like, we need to map up more this sort of various strands of it.
• 35:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, there's like many,
• 35:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: older traditions that are just like to a providential view of history for seeing the holy land as we historically important.
• 35:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That has long had a role among not just evangelicals, but they're even like liberal Protestants who had that kind of Christian Zionism.
• 35:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the more controversial
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, which is this sort of, you know, dispensationalist, like, you know, like, yeah, we actually need the state so that, you know, like, you know, the world can end.
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and also added to that is that Christian Zionism and I'm not using that term just in the kind of narrow sense of contemporary politics.
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: When we think about Christian Zionism, you know, there's a way, there's a method of analysis of framework that we can push that back to the really the beginnings of
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: the American Republic in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you see this, you know, with Anglo-Israelism in Britain as well, this idea that, you know, the United States is the New Jerusalem, and that in some meaningful sense, what were, you know, Americans are the new Jews in this kind of new covenant with God.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, people who believe in that, people who are committed to that kind of vision in the early 19th century are also going to Palestine.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: They are going on, you know, trips to the Holy Land, you know, there's a tremendous amount of interest in the 19th century around travel logs to the Holy Land in for American audiences.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, there's been a lot of work on kind of the origins of American Islamophobia and, you know, a lot of that's tied into the encounter, not so much with Jews in the land of Palestine, but with Palestinian Muslims and even Palestinian Christians to a certain extent, but this kind of savage barbarian.
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this is all the the Saeed Orientalist approach, which I think is all true.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, that is also informing Christian Zionism as it emerges as a new political force after the six-day war.
• 37:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, I guess, to recommend listeners, I think one historian is really about this is Samuel Goldman.
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was about to say actually, his book is fantastic on this exchange.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, I was about to say, actually, I was about to say, actually, his book is fantastic on this exchange.
• 37:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was about to say, actually.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was about to say, actually.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was about to say, actually.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was about to say, actually.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was about to say, actually.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was about to say, actually.
• 37:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is a broader Christian Zionism, but I mean, I think Christian Zionism is a very Protestant phenomenon.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that they always, like, my Catholic circles, what that's, I was going to say, that's actually something that we can see emerging in real time right now on the right, because I was just reading a, I think it was a report by one of the,
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the report is a national review about the splits of the heritage foundation.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that's happening is that you have all of this pressure directed against Kevin Roberts by senior members of the heritage foundation by donors who tend to be older and wealthier on the one hand and junior staffers on the other who have been essentially supporting him and saying you know what Tucker said certainly what Tucker said I might do you know disavow Fuentes but what Tucker said should well be well within bounds which would be questioning the U.S. as a real relationship.
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And at least a couple of him framed this as I am a Catholic convertor, I am an orthodox Christian and I think that Christian Zionism is a heresy.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because there is not the same kind of dispensationalist tradition in Catholicism in the orthodoxy.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I mean,
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they're very low-old Christian communities inside Israel proper who tend to be Catholic and Orthodox who have had many problems with the Jewish state, you know, like a real oppression there.
• 39:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, yeah, I mean, I think what you're referencing is that I mean, there's a very interesting exchange between a young female staffer at this sort of struggle session at Heritage
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: sad like for her Christian Zionism is a heresy and also she mentioned the non-intervention us so you can definitely see it and I think part of this is also a place like you know there's has been this her trend towards Catholicism on the right like I don't know how much of it is a social media phenomenon but you'd really there is a lot more sort of talk of tradcats and
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I understand that some very prominent conversions, and in general, I mean, especially about the sort of more intellectual organization that carries it.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, Protestants just don't read books.
• 39:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'm not giving it to people or the more intellectual Catholics, the more intellectual Christians tend to be Catholics or an increasingly Orthodox.
• 40:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, you're baiting me who is a cultural Catholic into saying bad things about American Protestantism on this podcast, and I'm not going to take the bait.
• 40:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I do think that you're right.
• 40:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: That, yeah, you had evangelical Protestantism.
• 40:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I agree in theological terms, I mean, that they have their own theology, but I've never found it to be particularly sophisticated, basically, particularly the most
• 40:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, you do have, I think, in the driver's seat that has cultural cash air at the right now, traditional Catholicism, you know, various forms of orthodoxy.
• 40:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Not certainly a revival of mainline Protestantism, but even, but the other thing to sort of underline here as well is, and this is a point that Kurt Mills brought up with me, that if you actually look at the polling numbers, even among evangelical Christians, even among areas where Christian Zionism has been, you know, the absolute bedrock of the faith for, you know, 40, 50 years.
• 41:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Support for Israel is declining pretty precipitously there too.
• 41:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know, this is a broader phenomenon than just the Catholicization of the sort of intellectual right, which I do think is a real phenomenon is happening, but but it's not even among evangelicals this is this support is softening.
• 41:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely the case.
• 41:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think that for broader evangelicals, it was always, I think people who are outside their Protestantism over emphasized the theological commitment, and I think it was a more broadly cultural thing.
• 41:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like they read the Bible, and they obviously placed Jerusalem and Gaza are like resonating.
• 41:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: for these cultural reasons that they do see themselves as the inheritors of this tradition, and therefore are broadly sympathetic.
• 41:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that is not quite like thinking like this project of Israel, it's theologically necessary, which is really only
• 42:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: the belief of like, you know, the dispensation was to wear like a small minority and so, and any, you know, this is the bit of a digression, but there's like a hilarious dispensationist preacher who like I saw clipper on YouTube saying that well, you know, he does, he thinks that like, you know, God is responsible for the death of Charlie Kirk because Charlie Kirk was developing doubts about Israel.
• 42:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, God said in the public reserve, this is a van.
• 42:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think it's as much of a tangency as you might think, because this also gets into the Charlie Kirkacess in ancient years of theories, which are all about how the Masad took him out because he was softening on Israel.
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this actually is a perfect illustration of just how porous those boundaries are with Christian Zionism.
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know where you have on the one hand somebody saying well God took him out because God said what is the line that John Haji always says that you know God said I will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel it's in I believe Genesis one of the early books of the Bible and you know that is you know there's a very very fine line between saying God killed Charlie Kirk because he's against Israel and
• 43:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, the massade took him out because he's against Israel.
• 43:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, and, and, and, and I, I do think that that actually is part of the explanation for why uh, uh, young evangelicals are more open to the gripper stuff, to the Fuentes stuff, because that, you know, that there is already a language there that primes them for them.
• 43:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know, I mean, the rise of some of a conspirator of culture, you know, in the context of which is like very long standing, like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that are out there.
• 43:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, the river on this stuff like runs very deep.
• 43:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was actually just watching a video of Joseph Sober and they've been a national review editor in the, from the 70s to early 90s and who ran into,
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, was controversy because he became more vocal on more vocalally both anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist and on that video from the late 80s he is talking about, you know, various Christian Arabs that have been killed in the United States and you know, like
• 44:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: strongly implied that these might have been assassinations, so I feel like that strain of thinking has been there for a long time.
• 44:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now,
• 44:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm where when I'm maybe like end on this, I thought I was, I think we can talk about this for hours.
• 44:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think for the left in particular, there's some dilemmas here, some things that we have to grapple with, because on the one hand, for anyone who wants justice for the Palestinians, the breakup of that iron grip.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: of a blank check for Israel among both parties.
• 45:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, that's all to the good.
• 45:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as I mentioned before, it like strands within conservative thought on this issue that I think the left would be do well to attend to.
• 45:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I especially think that the arguments along the lines of national interest.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: which have been made by conservatives in the past have like some or, you know, like about the alienating effect that America somehow has like both it not just in the release now, but like all over the world.
• 45:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 45:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I mean, these are like really serious considerations.
• 45:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're engaging with.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But firstly, there's like, you know, like there are these other powerful strands, which are new Fuentes, which are, I think,
• 45:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: can be accurately and without a hysteria characterizes Neil and that's he thinking.
• 45:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's a couple with that.
• 45:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, so I mean, it's a really, really important question.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was just listening to, I think I wanted to mention the before.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was just listening to the on the nose podcast from Jewish currents.
• 46:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're grappling with this very question because Ariel Angel was saying on there that she was listening to the Fuentes interview.
• 46:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And to be clear for the listeners who have not actually sat down and listened to the Fuentes Tucker interview, which I mean, don't because it's two and a half hours
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But if one does come across as much more reasonable and much more rational than he does on his actual show, he doesn't talk, he doesn't make the kids comments about rape and how sex with women is gay and all of the other weird stuff that he says.
• 46:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can cut that out for broadcast purposes.
• 46:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but he does come across as much more sort of sobered reasonable.
• 46:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what Ariel Angel was saying is, well, you know, a lot of the stuff that he says about the U.S. Israel special relationship and about the way in which it is considered impolitic in sort of official dump to question it is not wrong.
• 46:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so the problem that becomes okay, well,
• 46:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do we attend to that critique without opening up space for this kind of, again, I think gutter neo-Naziism?
• 47:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for me, the way to do that, and this is something that the left is especially well positioned to do, is through the language of universalism.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the reason why Fuentez is an anti-Semite, at least in the context of the Tucker interview, is pretty clear cut.
• 47:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: He says that he believes in nationalism,
• 47:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: that he's a strong ethno-nationalist and kind of the basis of his grievance against Israel is that, well, it's a Jewish ethno-state that is exercising this influence over the United States.
• 47:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why do the Jews get their ethno-state and we white Christians don't get our ethno-state here?
• 47:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's only able to express himself and his politics through that kind of language.
• 47:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: The left, at least the vast majority of the left, and hopefully many liberals as well, I'd say this is a core conceit of liberalism as a political philosophy.
• 47:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know,ology is universalism.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is the principle that there is a universal human dignity, universal human equality.
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, there are groups.
• 48:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, there are differences between us.
• 48:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, but we are all entitled to fundamental universal rights.
• 48:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it is that language of universalism that I think is what separates left critiques of Israel from the sort of right wing at the ashes.
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I agree that the language of national interest,
• 48:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: is potentially useful, but it is something that I think the left needs to approach with some degree of caution for precisely this reason, because that language of national interest can be very easily co-opted into the language of particularism.
• 48:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, I mean, I think that's a good point.
• 48:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, when I said the language is just nice for interest.
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do actually mean that this is like a non, this is something that's outside the left.
• 48:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a non-left tradition.
• 48:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's something worth grappling with.
• 48:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a real serious view of the world that one has to take seriously.
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, yeah, you know, it is absolutely the case.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think universalism offers a way.
• 49:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in some ways, I think the Nick Fuente has
• 49:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also under scores the importance of acid talking about Israel and of making that universal case because unless you make that case You're leaving this like you know huge important issue which is tearing people apart You know, we out across the political spectrum You're leaving it to the next one.
• 49:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the world the capital lines on it which is a very dangerous situation
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's almost like imperative, but unless you present that left universal as a bezel and turn to them, then we're going to head to a very dark place.
• 49:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very quickly.
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I will add to this that I mean, I do think that that was what, because the other thing they talked about on the nose, and it's a podcast appearance that I've also listened to is
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: cast.
• 49:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I do think that that was an attempt to offer a kind of, obviously, thinklessly to the left-wing anti-zionist, a company that the child of Holocaust survivors himself, and was trying to do that.
• 50:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think Owens in particular, because of how, I mean, much more so than Fuentes, how unhinged she came across in that interview.
• 50:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was not, I would say,
• 50:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I do think that definitely the language of the National Interest being strategic about what the actual goals here are, which is, you know, I would say, I mean, you know, broadly speaking the cessation of violence in Gaza in the immediate sense.
• 50:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, obviously there's the ceasefire, but it's very tenuous.
• 50:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: a longer term, you know, the dismantling of obviously the apartheid state and some kind of restorative justice there that can be done, you know, through the language of national interests, it is in the American national interest, I think, to cease to give unqualified and unreserved support to Israel.
• 51:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that has to be tied to that sort of broader universalist and emancipatory vision.
• 51:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 51:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think we're very much in agreement.
• 51:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on that, I think I'd be very positive note.
• 51:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I went ahead and, in fact, my guest, David Austin, I'll watch for once a, for being on the program.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: All right, thank you so much, dude.
• 51:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been fun.