The Unraveling of Debra Messing and “Liberal Zionism”

I mean, to say out loud, the same people who did 9-11 did October 7th is just so monumentally stupid and ignorant that the fact that she

continues to be a public figure that is sought after by anyone.

Not that she's that sought after, but you know, still.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein.

I'm so happy that you're here.

It's been a really weird week.

I don't know if you guys saw the White House thing.

Which White House thing?

Sorry, there's a lot of White House thing.

Ariana Grande like shared my Instagram post, and the White House got really mad.

Oh shit,

that was your post?

Yeah, that was my post.

Oh my God.

Which it's like, it's all good, but then it's like, you know, like my mom calls me and she's like, she, she, quote, asked me if the White House has me on a hit list.

More like a hit tweet list.

Right.

Hell yeah.

In all seriousness, seriousness, they may have you on a hit list.

They put, they had you on that list before, though.

So take comfort in that.

God, you know, I hope that people listen to this one.

It's not like Deborah Messing is like the most salient figure in our culture.

Like I'm really, I'm really aware of that.

And I think I just want people to know that I'm aware of that up front.

And that like, despite spending months and to a greater extent years in the depths of Deborah Messing's Instagram content.

Being the foremost messing scholar.

Yeah, I'm like, I'm a scholar of Deborah Messing's social media posting, which like it's actually kind of hard to do because she posts 50 times a day.

Oh my gosh.

Like literal?

Oh my gosh.

Like literal 50, sometimes actually oftentimes a lot more than 50.

After the Hannah Einbinder Free Palestine Emmys speech, she posted 66 Instagram stories.

Shout out to Hannah, who rocks.

But gotta say, why?

So you chose her on the basis of frequency of posting because there's a lot of crazy Zionists you could have culled from.

Like, I mean, Amy Schumer comes to mind.

I'm going to tell you why I picked Deborah Messing.

I'm going to tell you, and I'm actually going to start that argument right now because I do feel like this entire episode, like, I also need to be making the case for why I'm making it.

Like, again, like Deborah Messing, no shade to her for this, but it, you know, she's not like working that much.

Well, there was an article that came out in Quincy Institute yesterday.

Israel is paying TikTok and Instagram influencers $7,000 per post.

So I'm not sure messing is being paid to post.

It might just be for the love of the game.

I was literally about to say she is posing for the love of the game.

I know what paid posts look like, and these are not that.

Israel is not investing in this post.

It's just they're not.

Can I tell you guys where this all begins for me?

Like why this episode is happening?

happening this all goes back two years ago i'm going to send the two of you a post that was made by like a gay zionist instagram person disparaging me so this zionist gay instagram guy named blake flayton takes an old photograph of me and photoshops the words onto my chest that say the extent of my knowledge of the jewish people comes from the rugratz hanukkah special

like that was an unkind thing to post.

Yeah, not nice.

But then, hold on, I'm sending you a second screenshot.

Oh, no, the real Deborah Messing hearted it

straight up.

She hearted it.

Deborah Messing commented a heart on this post.

And I don't think I'm an extremely petty person, but like, well.

But I am about to talk about you for two hours, Deborah Messing.

I just remember, you know, look, I don't mean to like center, you know, in talking about genocide against Palestinians, I don't mean to center like the voices of Jewish podcasters as like anyone making the ultimate sacrifice here.

I'm aware that's not me, but you know, there is something to be said about like a certain portion of like liberal Zionist internet that really goes after prominent Jewish people who talk about Israel and genocide online because

you being a Jewish person against Israel kind of undermines the whole ideology.

It's why they go after Hannah Einbinder so hard.

So a lot of people were making these like really kind of just like mean posts about me.

I mean, they still do.

But it was affecting me a lot more like two years ago than it does now.

And when I saw this and then I saw that Deborah Messing had commented a heart on it, I was like, wait, like, but like we, we love Deborah Messing.

Like I'm a gay guy.

Like we love Deborah Messing.

And it really kind of just fucked with me, evidently, for a long time.

And so here we are.

Dude, that's an intense, like, personal betrayal.

I can understand that.

I mean, especially since the message itself is just so flagrantly mean-spirited that it's, there's no point being made other than this Jew isn't Jewish enough for me.

And Deborah agreeing with that, I could see having a lifelong vendetta after that.

I can understand it.

And also,

like, why are we denigrating the Rugrats Hanukkah special?

It's like one the most educational episodes of television ever made well deborah messing let's dance yeah you want to messing with me i'm messing with you right back should name this episode chill and grace

this is the most amount of minutes i've ever gone without getting into my official intro here we go

This podcast is nothing if not a way to explore political issues through stories about celebrities.

I think it's a slightly more fun and lightweight way to talk about things that suck and as a gay guy, you know.

Today I want to talk about liberal Zionism, which is, and we'll give it a more comprehensive definition later, the belief that your politics can be fundamentally liberal and that you can support Israel as a Jewish ethno-state.

Liberal Zionists might say things like, I support Israel, but I hate Netanyahu.

Or, Israel is the only place in the Middle East where you can have gay rights or women's rights, or you can fill in the blank with that one.

Or, and this is one I hear a lot, what Israel is doing is terrible.

The humanitarian crisis must end.

But this is ultimately, of course, the fault of Hamas, and we can't just abandon our ally, Israel.

Liberal Zionism is the style of Zionism adopted by the majority of the U.S.

Democratic Party.

Consider the line Kamala Harris repeated incessantly during her 2024 campaign.

Let me be clear.

I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.

At the same time, what has happened in Gaza is devastating, so many innocent lives lost.

The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.

Lots of passivity in that statement that she repeated over and over again, despite trying to lead the country.

Liberal Zionism is the attempt to reconcile humane beliefs with what I think are inhumane ones.

It's contradictory, and the many, many millions of people who identify as liberal Zionists, including celebrities like Amy Schumer and Mayim Bialik and Jerry Seinfeld and Galkadote and Jamie Lee Curtis, have been tying themselves into knots to hold on to that identity as Israel's genocide worsens.

How can one continue to be a liberal and support something so illiberal?

Nobody better represents the impossibility of a liberal Zionist more than Deborah Messing, the TV actor known for playing Grace in the early 2000s show Will and Grace, and who has more recently starred in Not A Lot,

Not A Lot.

Once a beloved figure in the gay community who famously feuded with Donald Trump on Twitter, Deborah has more recently become one of Israel's most vocal supporters, posting upwards of 50 Instagram stories a day.

And like I said, I have been watching them all for months.

And the rest of her politics have taken a pretty shocking turn from that, you know, liberal celebrity she once was.

Today, we're going to talk about why maybe it's actually not that shocking that Deborah Messing has become, among other things, sympathetic to Trump or to Benjamin Netanyahu.

and why liberal Zionists are finding it hard to stay,

well, liberal.

To do that, I am so excited to be joined by two people who have taught me so much about this topic and who I think are so smart.

Emma Vigeland from the Majority Report and Matt Lieb from the Bad Haspara podcast.

Welcome back to the show, you guys.

Thanks for having me.

Hell yeah.

Stoked to be back.

I love being invited to the liberal Zionist episodes because that is my lane.

They are my favorite type of Zionist because they are the most fake.

I will say that I'm excited for this episode because the conversations I've had with liberal Zionists have been among the most frustrating because it feels like this like Sisyphian,

if I'm saying that correctly, exercise where you have to be very careful.

You've got to hand hold a lot.

You've got to speak about things in a very particular context, but you push that boulder up the hill and as soon as you get up there, it's like, but hamas, and then it falls all the way down.

you've got to keep going back and there's very little historical examination of the apartheid of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine of 1948 of the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the rolling one state reality that Palestinians have been living under as second-class citizens for our entire lifetimes and double that

and it all starts for liberal Zionists on October 7th and apparently October 7th takes an outsized role in even that shortened timeframe.

We're going to get into all of this in greater depth.

And if you have no idea what we're talking about right now with liberal Zionism, you know, Deborah Messing's Instagram activity, we're going to make it all very clear.

And my goal is for you to walk away from this, understanding what our position on quote-unquote liberal Zionism is and why it's an untenable position to maintain as displayed very well by Deborah Messing.

But I think in my heart of hearts, I really just want to make this episode because there are so many people, like I said, like I grew up with in a Jewish community,

a mostly liberal Jewish community, who they're not, you know, Trump-type Zionists.

They're not, you know, cheering on, we got to build waterfront property on Gaza.

But they say something a lot softer.

You know, the humanitarian crisis is terrible.

We have to avoid civilian casualties.

But it's like there's not a lot of daylight between the actual policies they support and the ones that someone like Donald Trump is proposing and Viviana and Yahoo's proposing.

And also, on a very personal level, I've watched a lot of those supposed liberal Zionists do what Deborah Messing has done, which is just slide to the right.

You know, like the amount of people I went to Hebrew school with who were like going to like pride five years ago and whatever else.

And now they're liking the White House posts about, you know, flattening Gaza on Instagram.

It's, it's so jarring.

And it really does feel like a break from childhood reality, which, Matt, I don't know if you can relate to that, but.

Oh, 100%.

I mean, that to me is when we talk about gaslighting and the feeling of, I guess, mass hysteria, you know, during this time, a big portion of that is people I know personally who have abandoned every moral that they had.

made a firm part of their identity in order to support a genocide and just how that contrast between having beliefs and abandoning them is just so,

it's so apparent that it makes you feel like, you know, what is this, is this a bit?

Like, how can you go from being someone who, you know, made your whole thing white allyship during Black Lives Matter to I, as a Jewish person in America, am at more risk, if you think about it, than any black person has ever been historically.

Like, I've heard people make make that argument.

And these are people who, at one point, I considered to be thoughtful, intelligent people.

So, yeah, no, I feel you, man.

I know a lot of people who to this day are just, their mind is, they've melted from Zionism.

And I think it exposes the inherent contradiction of liberal Zionism, which I know we'll be talking about more in depth.

But the idea that liberal Zionists can, in a domestic context here, say, vote Democrat and speak about things like multiculturalism, and yet within the context of Israel, they support an ethno-state maintained by dominance and by force and now by genocide.

And in my view, I believe in multiculturalism as an ethic, not just as an ethic in terms of what's right and we shouldn't have segregation or apartheid, but because it engenders understanding.

And in part, the reason that we're here and the Israeli population is so deeply radicalized and brainwashed.

Let's not be Pollyannish about what's actually being said, even within supposed liberal Israeli circles within Israel.

It's because they are segregated from Palestinians.

And you can hear about ex-Zionists speaking about their experience.

Oh, I went to the West Bank or I interacted with this Palestinian person.

And that's what begins to shatter it for them.

And that's why the Israeli government relies so heavily on capitalizing on anti-Semitism, I would argue, fomenting it, and creating this

notion that the only place that's safe for Jews to go is the racially segregated ethnostate that is a glorified aircraft carrier for the United States and our intelligence outposts in the Middle East.

It functions as our colony.

We're going to ping pong a little bit back and forth between Deborah Messing and Israel, which as I say that, I realize like how jarring this outline that I've created is.

But nonetheless, shall we ping pong back to Deborah?

Let's do it.

We shall.

I want to give a little bit of biographical info on Deborah Messing so that I can really establish her to the listener as like this bastion of like liberal Hollywood type so that from there we can establish where she goes as she follows sort of this trail of Zionist breadcrumbs to a completely different place.

So Deborah Messing is born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents.

And long story short, again, because the specifics of her biography are not super relevant here, she breaks into the acting scene in the 90s and she has some smaller roles.

She eventually stars in the Fox sitcom Ned and Stacey, which was canceled after two seasons.

And then after that, stars as Grace on the TV show, Will and Grace.

I want to ask, do either of you have like parasocial relationships with Deborah Messing as a celebrity?

Because like I was a little bit too young to appreciate her at her peak.

Like I was born when Will and Grace started.

Oh, that's right.

You're really, you're really young.

In fact, both of you guys are really young.

I'm 40.

So I

knew Deborah Messing only from Will and Grace.

That is, that's how I knew her.

I had no interest in her.

I mean, the sitcom itself was not something that I watched.

I was more of a Drew Carey show fan.

Never watched Will and Grace, but I knew about her as a supporter of the LGBTQ community.

And for my money, that's really all I cared about.

So I had a positive view of her until finding out that she is a rabid anti-Palestinian racist.

But Deborah Messingen and I were once in the same room.

I love the plot thickens.

Okay, all right.

It does.

It does thicken a little bit.

I mean,

when I was in high school and then into college, I was an avid practitioner of photography.

And when I was 18, when I was a senior in high school, I was invited to the GLAAD Media Awards in New York City.

And I grew up in New Jersey, so I could just take the training.

And I was invited, not because I was like doing any sort of like LGBT work at the time, I was a high school student, but I was invited as a photographer.

And I photographed Deborah Messing on that red carpet because she was there being honored for like her like lifetime of allyship to the LGBTQ community.

Deborah Messing, I mean, she really did become a gay icon because

Will and Grace was one of the only mainstream representations of LGBT characters on cable TV at the time.

I think it's important to note that that isn't necessarily because the representation on Will and Grace was like good.

or complex or even kind.

It was criticized a lot for its stereotypical portrayals of gay men, but it was one of the only portrayals.

And just to contextualize that a little more, Ellen came out on her sitcom in April of 1997, which famously led to like so much backlash against her.

Her show was canceled and she was essentially blacklisted from Hollywood for a number of years.

Will and Grace aired one year after Ellen came out.

So it was like really just sort of a right place at the right time situation to be like positioned as a gay icon.

And in the show, her character, like she plays the gay guy's best friend.

So, sort of from that, she becomes an LGBT figure.

Uh, so much so that, like, have you guys ever seen her segments with Billy Eichner?

Yes, I have seen those.

Billy on the Street?

Yeah, yeah.

It's Deborah Messing, uh, you gays.

It's Deborah Messing, you gays.

Yeah, yeah.

See, this is where my like kind of very online nature developing in high school and slash college comes into focus.

She was so beloved, especially among gay men, that Billy Eichner, he had a recurring segment where he ran around with Deborah Messing and he would just like anyone he thought looked gay, he'd be like, It's Deborah Messing, you gays.

And he would film them being like, Oh, holy shit, it's Deborah Messing.

Like, are you ready, Deborah?

Let's do it.

Let's go.

This is Deborah Messing, you gays.

It's Deborah Messing.

Oh, hey.

It's Deborah Messing.

Hi.

Who are you?

Yes.

Scared me.

Yes, of course, it's Deborah Messing.

Yes.

Yes, it's Deborah Messing, you gay.

Oh, hi.

Yes, yes.

It's beginning to look a lot like Deborah Messing.

Oh, it's Deborah Messing.

Yes.

It's Deborah Messing.

Yes.

Yes, it's Deborah Messing.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes, it's Deborah Messing.

Oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

I was watching these when I was making the outline, and it's so sweet.

And I wish it had stayed here, you know?

Yeah, I think that that era of like cultural openness kind of in the late Obama era, even leading into the resistance of Donald Trump in his first term.

We are not there anymore.

We are not there.

We had problems then.

We got some bigger problems now.

Yeah.

And that actually leads me into just like a point that I wanted to make here, which was like, do you guys think that there's something to be said for the way people attach like the label of liberal or progressive to people in Hollywood?

I think oftentimes maybe because they came up during those Obama years where it was just like you were seen as liberal by default if you were a public figure.

And then also, I think when it comes to people in entertainment, like because of their proximity to queer people working in that industry, like Kristen Chenoweth comes to mind, who recently said that her heart broke for Charlie Kirk, who she said she, quote, appreciated some perspectives of.

No.

Oh, you didn't know about this?

I know.

This broke my heart.

I love Wicked, and me too.

That woman can sing like nobody's business.

That is, uh,

every day it's a new one.

Every day, another fallen hero.

That sucks.

Selma Blair also commented on like a Charlie Kirk tribute.

She said, This incredible man who would go into the cauldron of indoctrination and use logic to have dialogue.

I am sick for his family.

I'm sick for all of us.

The cauldron.

Kristen Chenoweth responded to her and said, What you said, Selma.

I mean, I think that Hollywood is always positioned itself as, or it's positioned its narrative as being on the forefront of things like civil rights,

just progress in general.

So, because of that, everything that comes out of Hollywood is looked at countrywide through the lens of like liberal politics, you know, whether it's integrating films, you know, or giving awards to

black actresses, you know, early, early on.

At least Hattie McDaniel won the first Academy Award that a black woman had had ever won.

And that was early.

You know, Hollywood likes to tout itself as liberal.

And so everyone kind of gets painted as a Hollywood liberal, quote unquote.

And we, of course, know anyone who lives, I live in LA and grew up here.

We know a lot of liberals.

And liberal doesn't mean the same thing to me

that it does to the rest of the country.

To me, I know a lot of liberal racists.

And

that is something that is supposed to be in conflict, but

it's actually not.

It just means that you have

some tolerance and you position yourself publicly as one thing, but behind closed doors, you're another thing.

Right.

And I would build off of that and say that there is an increasing contradiction as

we're in levels of untold income and wealth inequality that rival the Gilded Age and that we're, as a country, helping our what functions as our colony commit genocide.

Shout out to the Gilded Age, by the way.

It's a great show.

And Morgan Specter, Morgan Specter, anti-Zionist, CSA member, babe, total, total hottie.

But that was also a real period of history, man.

I know I'm teaching you things on this show today.

That's where we're at right now.

And liberalism is failing.

And liberalism is the idea, right, that people can be whoever they want to be, but liberalism also applies to markets.

So, free market liberalism, neoliberalism, as it has been discussed.

And that is inherently contradictory in this moment, where free markets have led us to a moment of fascism, and you see corporations capitulating to Donald Trump left and right.

And so, the people who are still liberals and not leftists are either kind of waiting around in some mild centrism that applies to nobody and is cancerous to the Democratic Party, but whatever,

or they're kind of flirting with the right wing at this moment because there are some liberals, I would say, that have been radicalized.

And even you see this with the Democratic Party base.

They're changing their minds on this, on this front.

But the liberals that we're speaking about here, they're siding with capital.

I want to talk a little bit about Deborah Messing's feud with Donald Trump.

First of all, it's important to note that Deborah Messing's relationship with Donald Trump starts back when she was on Will and Grace because Will and Grace aired on NBC back to back with The Apprentice,

which made Deborah Messing and Trump essentially colleagues.

In the 2024 book Apprentice in Wonderland by Ramin Saturday, Trump is described as having an obsessive crush on Deborah Messing, who was also friendly towards him and apparently thanked him for getting NBC's ratings so high, thereby increasing the popularity of her own show.

That's where his crush must have originated.

A ratings-based compliment is all he ever wants.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

This led Trump to be extremely vindictive towards Deborah when Deborah came out against him during his 2016 presidential run.

Famously, this is not famously.

This is just famously to people who have been like Googling Deborah Messing a lot over the last couple of weeks.

You can still keep saying famously.

I think it's funny.

It's like everybody knows the 34th Instagram story that Deborah Messing posted last Tuesday.

Famously.

It's famous.

Yeah, yeah.

So there's a whole Wikipedia entry about every single one of those Instagram stories.

And I wrote all of the entries.

When Trump held a Beverly Hills fundraiser for his 2016 run, Deborah called for a published list of every Hollywood actor who attended so that they could be blacklisted.

This like really set Trump off.

And we, and this makes sense to me.

I mean, this even like comports comports with this narrative that he had a crush on her right because there's like kind of very few things that I think make him more angry than like and and this is for like a frankly a lot of straight men.

Sorry, Matt Lieb, but uh, you know, like a woman that they fantasize about like wronging them in their eyes.

It makes men violent.

Yeah, I will say I've experienced that in my little corners of the internet.

I can't lie about that.

Yeah.

Well, hashtag not all men, obviously, first and foremost.

Matt Lieb, not on my, get that bullshit off my podcast.

So, you know, between this feud, which really like gets her going on social media with all of, you know, her kind of anti-Trump sentiment and the gay stuff, et cetera, et cetera, Deborah Messing really establishes herself as an outspoken capital L liberal celebrity.

She also, early on, way before October 7th, albeit not nearly in the way that she does now, she advocates for Israel.

And so now I want to bounce back to liberal Zionism.

And I think I want to start explaining liberal Zionism by saying that like growing up in a Zionist synagogue in a Zionist community, like I could have been described as a liberal Zionist.

This episode Very timely, in fact, is brought to you by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the FFRF.

As we we head back to school, a friendly reminder that Jesus is not your guidance counselor and your tax dollars should not be paying for a sermon during algebra.

And yet here we are.

States are forcing religious posters into classrooms, swapping mental health staff for unlicensed school chaplains, and shoveling public money into private religious schools through shady voucher schemes.

Sounds fake.

It's not.

Google it.

It is very end times.

Just, you know, not in the way that these people think.

Hee hee.

Haha.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation is not having it.

They are suing, educating, and fighting to keep religion out of government and off your kids' classroom wall.

Does anyone have a count of how many states now require the fucking 10 commandments poster to be put on the front of your childhood classroom?

It's ridiculous.

Like, it's actually fucking crazy.

It's not on my script.

It's just fucking crazy.

If you would like to get involved with the Freedom from Religion movement, you can do so very easily and for free by going to FFRF.us

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Thank you to the FFRF for sponsoring this show.

What a cool sponsor to have and what a timely one.

Now, let's get back to the show.

And I think, first and foremost, when I reflect on that time and that belief that I held of like, I am a liberal and also like Jews need Israel and whatever, because like that's what was instilled in me growing up, it almost feels like a waiting room of a belief system that you can only stay in as long as you don't think super hard about what any of it means.

Yes.

So, what does it mean?

That's a perfect way of describing it.

I think liberal Zionism, as someone who was also formerly a liberal Zionist, in America, at least, I can only speak for myself and

all the Jews of the West.

But liberalism and sort of progressivism and belief system.

I'm so stupid.

I am stupid.

Was something

that a good portion of Jews in America are quote-unquote liberal, meaning

things like,

you know, being pro-civil rights, again, you know, not just for people of color, but also for gay people, liberalism in general, being big in cities, right?

So Zionism was also a belief that a lot of us had, which is, you know, Israel, the state for the Jews being a net good thing.

The connectivity between liberal and Zionist happens

basically because you need a reason to believe in something that is inherently wrong.

Like I,

this is my feeling about it, but a liberal Zionist is essentially a shallow thinker when it comes to this one particular issue of Zionism.

It's someone who only wants to know enough about what Zionism is in order to justify it in a liberal way.

So it's using liberalism to justify inherently illiberal things.

And I think that's why the conflict, that contrast is so apparent.

A liberal Zionist is someone who believes in all of the same left-word-leaning schlock that anyone else believes in, whether it's representation politics, identity politics, again, civil rights.

But when it comes to Israel, there's an exceptionalism.

There's something exceptional about it.

It's not just that, like, people having liberty to be the person they are is a good thing, but that it is an inherently superior thing to the way that other people live in the East.

And so, liberal Zionists often will point out the fact that, like, in Israel, we have all of these liberal beliefs.

And it's one thing to say, yes, these beliefs are good.

It's another thing to say that

these liberal beliefs supersede ethical or moral principles that you may believe in with any other case.

It is a belief in Israel as an ethno-state, and it's a Jewish supremacist notion.

And in the explicitly American context, it's one that can fit into the idea that you should support the Democratic Party, where it's a notion of ethnic or religious supremacy that still can be reconciled with, you know, calls for civil rights here domestically.

And that contradiction is falling apart right now before our eyes.

I genuinely, I genuinely struggle to understand liberal Zionism because it's like, again, I think about like people I grew up around who are like, yeah, we hate Netanyahu, but.

Israel can function without the constant violence brought upon Palestinians by someone like Benjamin Netanyahu.

But I'm like, when has that ever been the case?

It has never been the case.

Israel was founded, I mean, 1948, the NACBA, the forcible violent displacement of 750,000 Palestinians.

Whenever I hear liberal Zionists talk about like, well, we need a liberal leader.

You know, Netanyahu is a far-right.

We need a more liberal person in charge of...

the Israeli government.

But I'm like, the project of Israel is an illiberal project.

I think I kind of,

this is not in my script, but like, I really run into problems with that logic and even people who think that the project of Israel is one that's separate from Netanyahu.

I mean, I see him as like a very authentic Zionist leader in that like all of Israel's

dehumanization of Palestinians for the last 70 odd years have led to this exact moment.

If Benjamin Netanyahu was gone today, there is very little that would change.

In fact, I would argue that outside of maybe his more belligerent actions of trying to stay in power by bombing a variety of different Middle Eastern countries, things would remain exactly the same.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who has stayed in power in a

parliamentary system in Israel that, again, is racially segregated, because despite what you'll hear about how Hamas is really the governing body in Gaza and that the West Bank is autonomous in any way.

It's not the case.

The Gaza Strip is

even prior to October 7th, the borders of this small strip of land that's around 141 square miles were controlled by Israel land and sea.

They would, over the years, repeatedly bomb the Gaza Strip to, quote, mow the lawn in order to make sure that any Palestinian resistance would be tamped down.

They could shut off their electricity.

They would, quote, keep Gazans on a diet because they could control the flow of food and water in and out, control their water sources, etc.

And this is all pre-October 7th?

All pre-October 7th, yes.

And it basically was the Warsaw Ghetto, and now it is an open-air concentration camp, is what I would liken to it to historically.

And so that project and the attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the land and remove them from the Gaza Strip, which is on the water, it's beachfront property, as you'll hear from the Trump administration over and over again.

It's important to Israel to try to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians so they can take it.

That would all be there without Benjamin Netanyahu.

And the problem, as you were both were saying, is the concept of Israel as an ethnostate, the concept of a state being defined by one's ethnicity or religion.

And what we talk about on my show and what leftists will say is that the only solution here is a one democratic state, truly from the river to the sea, where there is a United Nations say commission that comes in, oversees this so that it can reduce violence, and there are truth and reconciliation committees about the participants in this genocide.

And you bring Palestinians back and integrate them into Israel racially and ethnically so that they have full and equal rights and that they too have a right to return.

That is a left-wing, multicultural, truly even liberal vision of folks living amongst ones another and learning from each other.

And liberal Zionists don't believe in that.

And that is where we talk about the contradiction.

Snaps.

I also think it's important to point out what exactly liberal Zionists do believe in.

And it's actually, there's a lot of different levels.

If you're talking about someone like Deborah Messing, they might be, I mean, I think it's pretty clear that they are ideological Zionists.

They're Zionists first.

The liberal part is just window dressing.

For a lot of other liberal Zionists, or people who I label liberal Zionists, I think what that label to me means, at least for some of them, is they have a non-ideological and ignorance-based approach to talking about Israel and also dealing with it.

It's like liberalism is almost therapeutic.

For them, it's a deep need to still believe that they are on the right side and they are the good guys here.

And I think

some of them are doing whatever they can, whatever's possible in order to continue living in that ignorance.

I think it's so interesting talking about the ways in which liberal versus like sort of openly right-wing Zionists deal with the reality of like what has become of Zionism, which is obviously a genocide.

When you look at the right, when you look at the MAGA movement, for example, you see them being like, yeah, we're going to flatten it.

We're going to turn Gaza into a parking lot.

We're going to build waterfront property.

Whereas liberal Zionists will speak with a little bit of shame, like, oh, there, you know,

it's too much.

There's too much human suffering.

But also, this is what needs to be done.

Like, that's what I mean.

And you're so right.

It's window dressing.

And that's what I mean when I say, like, there's not a lot of daylight in the policy differences that both of these groups are pushing for, which is why when you look at the Democratic Party, which is made up almost entirely of liberal Zionists, and the Republican Party, which is made up of right-wing Zionists, like there's no major anti-Zionist party in the United States, which is also, I mean, largely because they're all bought out by APAC, but you know, that's another conversation.

MAGA Zionists will say they'll see the pictures of dead Palestinians and they'll be like, fuck them.

Right.

Whereas liberal Zionists, Democratic Zionists will see the pictures and say, oh, well, all casualties of war are tragedies.

It's a commitment to being sad publicly and doing nothing.

And it's about a hierarchy, too, of human life that is one of the more disturbing elements to me.

And you see how so many folks in America are much more easily able to identify with Israelis who are closer in proximity to whiteness than to Palestinians who are portrayed as savages by our media.

I mean, Islamophobia and what we have done to people's basic rights cracking down in this country in the wake of 9-11, the war on terror, what the Patriot Act meant, what the erosion of our privacy rights meant, what the militarization of our police meant, which was a lot of equipment that came back from Iraq and Afghanistan and resulted in increased brutality.

It's all led to this exact moment that we're in right now.

So it's really dark stuff.

And I also do think it's important to point out that liberal Zionists within the United States are entirely disconnected from, or at least are very much ignoring what liberal Israelis, so-called liberal Israelis, believe.

There was a poll in Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June.

I cite it all the time and I wanted to make sure I did on this show.

64% of Israelis agree that there are, quote, no innocent people in Gaza.

That 64% agrees to a large extent.

The poll published in Haaretz, they asked them to rate their level of agreement, and they agreed to a large extent.

69% say that CNN and the BBC are biased in favor of the Palestinians.

50% of Israelis say Fox News is biased in favor of the Palestinians.

Whoa.

I didn't know that.

I want people to sit with that for a second because when we talk about how this has to come from the outside,

that's why.

That's why.

This is a population that has been entirely radicalized by decades and decades of racial and ethnic supremacy and apartheid.

And it's not going to come from within Israel.

So, Netanyahu being gone, not solving anything.

Just look at those numbers.

I want to quote while we're here, and then I promise we'll get back to Deborah Messing because I know you, the listener, have been missing her.

Man, what have I become?

A podcaster.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what you have become.

I want to quote Ronnie Barkan, who calls himself an Israeli dissident.

He's someone who is an activist and he refused IDF service, among other things.

But here's what he said: quote, there is no Israeli left and it has never existed.

The political map among the privileged class of Israeli Jews is divided along a psychological line of self-perception, which essentially includes only right-wing politics.

While a so-called leftist discourse in Israel is usually perceived as revolving around liberal and humanistic values, no discussion exists concerning the deeply rooted supremacist character of the state, its inherent anti-democratic nature, nor the fate of those who have been disenfranchised, oppressed, subjugated, and terrorized for the past seven decades by Israel, the Palestinians.

Israel is definitely not a democratic state, but it is also not a Jewish state.

Israel is only Jewish in the same way that South Africa was white.

It is not Jewish by religion, but only by supremacy.

The so-called differences between the left and right in Israel are not a result of differing values, but are tactical and cosmetic.

For example, the way that the members of each group would like to portray themselves to the world.

While the right-wingers unapologetically claim supremacy and dominance over the land, and, like most supremacists, care very little about their perception of the world, the so-called left creates and maintains a false narrative in order to maintain an illusion that Israel is a humane democracy.

This is essential, both for outer appearances and self-perception.

Absolutely.

And if you listen to these protests that are happening in Tel Aviv, and you'll hear someone who identifies as an Israeli leftist speaking, They want the war to end.

They call it a war, obviously.

And then you ask, why?

Well, they want the hostages back, okay?

So a permanent ceasefire then?

No, no.

That's not the opinion of the Israeli left.

The opinion is we get the hostages back.

We trick Hamas, basically, into ceasefire terms.

And then we go back in there and we do the final solution.

Like, because when we're talking about what's happening right now, I want to make this abundantly clear for the audience.

You'll see these death numbers in the Western press.

Those are only the people they've been able to verify.

Those are only the people that have gone into the hospital and have been declared dead and have been identified.

I have spoken to multiple doctors on my show, and I know Matt, I'm sure Lieb has done similarly.

If a whole house is bombed, what's the point if you have 20 dead family members in front of you of going to the hospital and having them officially declared?

Part of why Israel is bulldozing the entire north is that they're ethnically cleansing it, yes, and trying to create a, quote, buffer zone, which just means taking the land.

But they are trying to destroy the evidence.

And we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands that are presumed dead right now, but are not accounted for in the death toll.

And that is currently, in my view, upholding a lot of this liberal Zionist Hasburgh BS

that is manufacturing consent for the continuation of the genocide.

Because if we saw these true death toll numbers, look, I don't have too much faith in humanity anymore.

I get it.

But it is an absolute destruction of the entire population.

And we are on our way there with the mass starvation as well.

And if there's anyone listening or watching who hears some of this and thinks it's like a bit harsh and maybe questions some of it, just Google Gaza mass graves.

Just do that.

And if you find articles about

the fact that mass graves have been found,

realize that there is no justification for it.

Like immediately, that should, I would hope so, that that might change the way in which you are viewing some of the way that we're talking about this.

Like, hopefully, you can start to like look at this and go, like,

any side that's doing the mass grave is, that's the bad guys.

We got to take the pin back out of Debra Messing.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

Simply because I have too much here to get through.

Yeah.

It should go without saying that nothing that we're describing here, nothing that you've been seeing in the news over the last few years that is being done by Israel to the Palestinians is liberal.

And the inherent contradictions to maintaining an identity as a liberal Zionist, quote unquote, the contradictions are too much.

It is too much for most people to hold on to.

And what we've seen, as I said, a lot of people do, is just become plain old right-wingers.

And to me, there's no better example than Deborah Messing.

So I started to really take an interest in Deborah Messing's social media content.

It felt to me that the political journey I saw her going down mirrored a lot of what I was seeing from like family and childhood friends.

And I want to start on this, what I've called in the outline, the Deborah Messing Doom Scroll, with what I also called here my oh no moment, which was this video that Deborah Messing made at this point almost two years ago with the Israel activist and propaganda artist Noah Tishbe.

And I'm going to play that video for you guys.

Why are you feel safer here?

Because you're home.

It really is.

It really is.

I don't want to go.

I don't want to leave.

I understand.

Another close friend and people from the people that are here in Israel this time is Deborah.

Thank you for being here as well.

Oh, it's it's a gift.

It's a gift to me and the people here are the most extraordinary people I've ever met in my entire life.

But the strength, the optimism,

the resilience,

the courage.

I mean I

literally have never seen anything like it in my life.

This is to contextualize, months after October 7th happened, months into the genocide that Israel is waging on Palestinians, Deborah Messing goes to Israel and she meets with this influencer named Noah Tishby.

She's like in tears in this video talking about like, I'm home.

I never want to leave.

And when I saw that, it was my oh no moment because Noah Tishby is another person that I've been tracking for a while whose content is just absolutely off the rails and incorporates as many celebrities as possible.

But there's something to me so, and I don't mean to be like a YouTuber who throws this word around so liberally, but like there's something cult-like.

That was the first word I was thinking of.

Go for it, go for it, go for it.

Just the indoctrination of it, the close talking, the idea that any experience of traveling to a different country can transform you in such a way.

I mean, we could go down a whole different conversation about tourism and how wealthy people use it as a substitute for spiritual experiences, but Israel is the

number one example of that, and then many, many more things.

Yeah, except for the difference being that like you know when you

stay at a resort in Maui as like a white person, it's not quite the same as

someone using your blood and ancestry to say that actually secretly you belong here.

So it's almost like more predatory.

It's a cult that actively recruits to a degree that I think a lot of us are still reckoning with.

In that video with Noah Tishby, one of the things that she is saying is like, you're here, you're home, and you're here to stand up for your identity.

And to me, that is the perfect encapsulation of the sort of the way in which liberal politics have been used to keep other liberals thinking, wait, is there like a woke way of doing an ethnostate?

Because standing up for your identity, when people talk about, you know, identity politics in general, we've mostly associated it with progressivism.

And you see the sleight of hand there where it's like, oh, but you can also use the very same politics to talk about your identity and your, you know, your, your, you're being proud of your ancestry as a way in order to create an ethnostate.

Deborah Messing strenuously opposes any sort of journalism happening in Gaza.

which is true of Zionists in general, because it, you know, any sort of just just like objective filming of what's going on there is an indictment of Israel.

So Motaz, a Palestinian, a Gazan man who really shot to Instagram fame for his journalism inside Gaza in the earlier months of the genocide, he was named GQ Middle East's Man of the Year, and he sometime later fled Gaza.

for his own safety, which like, I don't know, it doesn't take a lot of thinking to be like, yeah, you want want to get out of Gaza at some point, especially with like a target on his back by the Israeli government because he has millions of Instagram followers.

And so anyway, Deborah Messing posts, I don't know if you guys remember this, she posts a video of him leaving and she captions it, GQ Middle East man of the year and Gaza quote unquote journalist leaves for Qatar.

Very interesting decision, like skeptical emoji, basically like mocking this guy for leaving.

And I just remember seeing this and I

like, like, what, what Beverly Hills mansion are you typing this from?

You know, yeah.

Yes, slay girl.

I mean, this would be like if, you know, in the 1930s, when the United States used our racial quota, racist immigration system that was in place during that time to turn away boats of Jews who were coming to the United States and were fleeing the Nazis.

If she were posting around that time, she'd be like, hell yeah, USA, get these Jews out of here.

And why don't they even want to come here?

Don't they want to stick around with their own if things are so bad?

Don't you want to support your own people?

That's exactly what she'd be saying.

I think what makes it infuriating is that it's coming from somebody who like still gets to sit in Brentwood and collect will and grace residuals for the rest of her life.

Oh, you have to go to Qatar.

Hmm.

Seems like you were some sort of Gazan industry plant by hamas you know which is just such a disgusting thing to say from someone who is like so so clearly like rich and vying for more money deborah also has it out for bissan god this is so

she's so much worse than i knew that's great like i knew she was bad but fuck yeah well hold on to your hats so bissan if you don't know first of all you should definitely go follow her on instagram uh But she is a Gazan woman who has also been doing, you know, basically like social media journalism from inside Gaza since the genocide started.

And she was nominated for an Emmy, which she actually won for her documentary and work.

But before she won, at the time of her nomination, Deborah Messing, along with Selma Blair and 150 other entertainment industry leaders, signed a letter calling for her to be removed from the Emmy nomination list.

This girl, the Bissan, who is currently in Gaza City while Israel is doing a ground operation in Gaza City.

I mean,

this is someone who has braved genocide and reported it and,

like I mentioned, like put a target on her back for the Israeli government because she has millions of Instagram followers.

These are some of the most sort of formidable figures from inside Gaza.

And once again, Deborah Messing from wherever the fuck she lives in LA or Manhattan or wherever.

I mean, it is a perversion of humanity and certainly of liberalism to behave this way.

But where is it coming from?

And I think this is the interesting thing about this letter and all the other letters that you see.

Sorry to cut you off, but I'm like, I'm so excited for whatever you're about to say because I even made a joke on Twitter recently.

I was like, does Deborah Messing, like, does she still work or does she just sign open letters all day?

Because it feels like every single day there's a new like pro-Israel Hollywood letter, and it's always like Deborah Messing and a thousand other people you haven't heard of before.

Yes, I don't know of any other job she has other than signing these letters, but there's an organization that she is at least affiliated with, as she signed multiple letters from Creative Community for Peace.

What is Creative Community for Peace?

So, Creative Community for Peace was essentially, I think it was founded in 2011 as a direct response to the BDS movement.

BDS boycott divestment sanctions.

Yeah, BDS, which is a tactic that was used very successfully during, you know, apartheid in South Africa of, yeah, getting people to isolate an apartheid state, hoping to pressure.

their own government as well as the people of that state to be like, hey, no one's playing fucking rugby with us anymore.

This is bullshit.

So in 2011, as a response to the kind of growing popularity of BDS, they created Creative Community for Peace as a way to essentially be the counterpoint to any time someone wanted to publicly state that they were no longer going to be working with Israel.

They are the ones who are constantly doing letters to Hollywood whenever anything happens, whether it was the Jonathan Glazer wins the Academy Award for zone of interest

and gives his speech, you know, they come out and condemn him.

They condemned the Oscar Wynne for No Other Land.

It's anytime there's like a celebrity say something, Creative Community for Peace comes out and writes a letter saying, How dare you?

And this really hurt our feelings.

And if there's one thing you should care about more than anything, it is the feelings of Hollywood elites.

That is a hallmark of liberal Zionism:

putting the most privileged people's feelings ahead of like the literal bodies and safety of Palestinians.

It's also like a 1984 level of like perversion of language to call it Creative Community for Peace.

Oh, yeah.

That's your favorite thing.

If you, the listener, see that an open letter was released by Creative Community for Peace, what are you going to think that means?

Oh, well, these people want peace.

Like, this is a really random celebrity cameo, but they've gotten all sorts of really random celebrities to get involved with Creative Community for Peace.

One of whom, timely because I just made an episode about Dr.

Phil, was Bahad Bahabi.

You mean, is that bad baby?

Yeah, but I'm really committed to pronouncing the age.

Bahad Bahabi posted for Creative Community for Peace.

I don't know how they got her to do it.

I'm sure it was through a manager or whatever.

And the caption, because I'm sure she didn't think twice about what any of it meant, not to let her off the hook.

I'm just saying this is how this stuff goes, was, in all caps, Bahabi supports peace.

But, you know, of course, what these people are actually, what these people are actually advocating for every time they release an open letter signed by Deborah Messing, Maeem Bialik, and 1200 people you've never heard of is squashing any nonviolent resistance to genocide.

I mean, boycotting BDS, that's nonviolent resistance.

Yes, yes, it is.

It really shows that that is something that they're specifically afraid of.

You know, the idea that their peers in Hollywood, where everyone wears the mask of I'm a good person, I'm a liberal, I'm a progressive, whatnot, where all of the sudden they're going to be put to the test.

Because if all of their peers decide, oh, you know what, we are supporting an apartheid state, we should be boycotting it the same way we did with South Africa, then

they are forced to either agree

or be outed for the reactionary, right-wing, psychopathic, genocide-supporting monster that they are.

And I think that is what people like Deborah Messing probably fears the most: the fact that, you know, as long as Hollywood and her peers there all are in lockstep with the idea of like, it's complicated, it's sad, but we should support Israel, then she's fine.

But if that were to change,

I think for her, that is, that's, that's an attack on her identity.

Because then she's forced to reckon with the fact that like, well, a huge part of my politics isn't liberal the way that I thought I was.

Right.

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And now let's get back to it.

In August of this year, I decided to do a Deborah Messing check-in.

I checked her Instagram story and she had reposted a video from Kelly J.

Keene, aka Posey Parker, who is a British anti-transgender activist.

And immediately, this caught my attention because Posey Parker is rather famous in the world of anti-trans activism.

To be clear, this is different than Parker Posey, right?

This is, this is, could not be more different from Parker Posey.

I'm so sorry to Parker Posey for Posey Parker.

Yes, me too.

And I'm almost offended that Matt Lieb would ask such a question.

Well, I just found out Kristen Chenowitz weird.

Posey Parker, she has called trans people a pernicious cult.

She's compared them to serial killers.

She has for years been very active in like the British far right, which also is like a prototype for the way that the American far right now attacks trans people.

But I was like, what is Deborah Messing, Deborah Messing of 2017 Glad Awards, doing sharing Posey Parker?

This is when I realized that she was very explicitly going on this like personal journey to the right.

And it's like, you know, I talk a lot on this podcast about like grifters and people who are doing like audience capture.

That's like not what Deborah Messing is doing.

She's having like she doesn't need more money and she's clearly not trying to get any through this venture, in my opinion.

I think she's just having like a very evident crash out.

This makes itself ever more visible when Zoron wins the primary, the New York City Democratic primary for mayor.

And one of her first reactions to Zoron winning is.

I have nothing against socialism.

Don't know where you got that.

I voted against M because he celebrated 9-11.

Let that sink in.

I love my country.

My reasoning is not Islamophobia.

I've chosen to live in the most beautifully diverse city in the world.

The same people who did 9-11 did October 7th.

I just don't want a mayor who sides with terrorists.

Oh, and he wants to defund the police and he has no experience.

I will stop here.

I just want to ask, do you guys know how old Zoran Mamdani was?

on 9-11 when she, when Deborah Messing claims he was celebrating?

We are a similar age.

So I think he's like nine years old, right?

Yeah, he was 10.

10.

10 years old and celebrating 9-11.

Tisk, tisk, tisk, tisk, tisk.

I mean, to say out loud, the same people who did 9-11 did October 7th is just so monumentally stupid and ignorant that the fact that she

continues to be a public figure that is sought after by anyone.

Not that she's that sought after, but, you know, still, I mean, is insane to me.

She mentions here, like, Zoron wants to defund the police, and she's against that.

She elaborates on this a lot in her Instagram stories.

Uh, and by the way, I, I just, I just need a little credit from anyone watching, like, I just need a little credit because I've been watching these damn stories every day for so long.

And every time that there's a notable one, just to let you know, my process, I screenshot it and I sort it into different categories in this folder that I have of like Deborah Messing hates Zoron.

Deborah Messing loves the police.

Deborah Messing hates sex workers.

Like I have, I have these different folders.

So wow.

You really are a historian.

Are the folders attached by red yarn from across the room?

Yes.

I really shouldn't admit that I'm like losing it to this extent.

No, it's good.

Someone needs to do this, you know, data collection.

Well, but like I said, it's this is literally helping me make sense of what's what has happened to like my childhood friends.

Yeah, yeah.

Next screenshot.

Okay, so she reposted this.

So today we are calling on him to answer 10 simple questions.

Him being Zoron.

One, do you apologize for calling the NYPD anti-queer and a major threat to public safety?

Two, do you apologize for calling the NYPD wicked and corrupt?

Three, do you apologize for saying no negotiating with the NYPD and dismantle it?

And it goes on and on here.

You must apologize to the New York Police Department.

I am a liberal.

I mean, there's nothing, I think, more liberal than being like, you need to apologize to the police

because you said they were anti-queer.

Like,

just there's, who are you appealing to there?

You can only actually be appealing to the right wing.

But in her mind, there's still part of her that's holding on to the idea that she's an ally.

She's a queer ally, you know?

Mm-hmm.

But that is so crazy.

And that's why I selected this one screenshot out of the 50 she posted that day because the modern LGBT rights movement was born out of a struggle with anti-queer police.

That's what Stonewall was.

Yes.

Deborah Messing has had decades of being held up as a queer icon to learn that.

Now she's posting like repeatedly that like Zoran, I mean, she also posted that same day I have here, Zoran must apologize for calling the NYPD racist in 2020.

This was the same woman, Deborah Messing, who in 2021 was posting because yes, I scrolled down Deborah Messing's Instagram to 2021.

And in 2020, she was posting Black Squares.

Oh, hell yeah.

She was posting for Breonna Taylor, for George Floyd, for Elijah McLean, all people who died at the hands of racist police.

She was posting justice for all these people.

She has abandoned all of that because, frankly, I would say, because her adherence first and foremost to Zionism and to Israel has caused her to be so racist and specifically Islamophobic

towards Zoran Mamdani that now it's like that supersedes any other belief that she ever had or posted about.

Where it's like, no, now we actually love the police.

And now you can't say anything bad about the police.

You can't say that they're racist.

And if you do, you must publicly apologize.

Sorry, I like, I need to shut up and like let you two speak because you're smarter than me.

But like,

like this, when I say that, like, adhering to Zionism first and foremost as the most important part of your belief system will steer you right, this is what I mean.

Right.

And I should note that Zoran is from India.

His family originates from India and he grew up in Uganda for a part of his life and then moved to the United States.

Not from the Middle East.

I mean, just telling on themselves over and over again about this kind of thing.

And it's not unique, but it is interesting to me that many of these liberal Zionists use 9-11 in a similar way that they use October 7th, which tells the entire story where I'm sorry, but 9-11 was,

as somebody who grew up in New Jersey like yourself, Matt Bernstein, horrible, horrible, and so many people died.

But we know why 9-11 happened.

It was a blowback from our policy of waging constant war in the Middle East.

That is why there was a terrorist attack on our soil.

And they apply the very same non-logic or anti-logic, turn your brain off

mentality.

to October 7th, where you can't have a systemic conversation about it.

And let's just retreat into caveman-like hatred of others.

She continues.

Would you like to read out what the next screenshot is from the real Deborah Messing Instagram story?

Here is Unhinged Zoron Mamdani, the New York candidate for mayor, trying to push his way to Tom Holman.

How many more New Yorkers?

How many more New Yorkers will you contain?

How many more New Yorkers will not join?

Do you believe in the First Amendment?

Do you believe in the First Amendment, Tom Holman?

Which is amazing because that was Zoron before he ended up winning the primary, standing up as an assemblyman.

She talks about how he has no experience.

He was an assemblyman in Albany when he was yelling at Homan because he was standing up for New Yorkers who were being brutalized and their families ripped apart by ice.

Tom Homan, who is the Border Czar, and he's unhinged for like yelling at the Border Czar.

What is the right way to protest someone?

What happened to like liberal love is love, no human is illegal, dubber messing.

Now you can't even like yell at the person in charge of deportations.

Yeah, I mean, she's she's completely like lost the plot here.

I mean, at this point, she is just clearly publicly abandoning her liberal persona now.

I mean, I didn't know the depths of her rightward shift, but just posting from an account called Today in America.

Oh, that's better than a lot of the other accounts she posts from, I promise you.

I mean, that is, that is wild.

That is absolutely wild.

And isn't it funny how, and not funny, but it's just something to remark on, how you can have wealthy liberals in cities

who start to develop right-wing politics, but they'll still vote Democrat, but within the context of like a blue state, they function as Republicans.

And that's how I see Deborah messing here.

In keeping with this theme of the New York election, the next category of post that I was sorting a lot of my screenshots into was her strenuous campaign for Andrew Cuomo, which is ongoing at the time of this recording, which is just so interesting to me because Andrew Cuomo, if you're not super tapped into the New York election, the New York City mayoral election, which it does feel like the entire world is, Andrew Cuomo is not only a corrupt Nepo politician on so many levels, but he's also been accused of sexual harassment by 13 different former female employees of his.

And, you know, just a few years ago, Deborah Messing was part of the Times Up movement in Hollywood, which, among other things, demanded an end to workplace sexual harassment.

And now she's posting, I mean, furiously every single day.

Like this one, she wrote, for the sake of our city, we must elect Andrew Cuomo.

She goes from Times Up to actively campaigning for a pervert,

for a 13-time sexual harasser who literally left office in disgrace before first

explaining that, no, it's not harassment.

I'm just Italian.

Yeah.

He doesn't even live here.

He doesn't even live here.

He's been crashing at his daughter's like insanely expensive apartment to try to prove he has residency.

It is arguably the most pathetic campaign I have ever witnessed in my life.

Oh, there's so she's voting for the settler.

Surprise, surprise.

But again,

I have to use Israel and Zionism as a through line for this like major, major shift that this woman is exhibiting and espousing to her like 1.

I think 7 million followers.

Like this all stems from her belief in the ethnostate.

Yeah.

I don't even think she truly believes there are any direct consequences from Zaran being someone who is, let's say, going to defund the police, which I don't believe he's committed to doing necessarily, or that she even thinks there will necessarily be more anti-Semitic hate crimes.

What she's scared of is the normalization of a body politic and a political class that is openly critical of Israel, you know, in, I think, a realistic fashion, not in like a, oh, you know, Netanyahu bad, but in a, I will arrest Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York because that is the law in accordance with international law.

I think for her, this is her doing everything she can to stop her liberal safe havens from moving more left than she is, you know, from making her the outsider.

It's just an

ironic turn because you can't help but like see, yeah, didn't you, you're, you know, a time's up person,

you're posting black squares.

But when it comes to Israel, this is the one thing where you're you're willing to abandon all of it just so that you can remain at the vanguard of the most left word allowed possible in like liberal society because she doesn't want to be abandoned by it.

She's like Alan Dershowitz, you know, wanting to sue people at Martha's Vineyard for not letting him hang out.

Or any conservative.

Any conservative we've ever, you know, heard of is obsessed with the idea that the Hollywood liberals or that popular culture thinks they're lame.

You know, the Trump administration, the MAGA guys felt themselves for a little while because they have some podcasters on their side.

But that's falling apart too.

Because inevitably, any kind of cultural enlightenment involves understanding other people's perspectives.

And that is the death of right-wing thought.

And so, like Israel, like the state of Israel, and like honestly, this moment of fascism that we're living in right now in the Trump administration, the right-wingers, they want to fortify.

They don't want to expand.

They are in the lockdown bunker mode.

And that's how she clearly views like the threat of a political coalition in one of the most Jewish cities in the world, by the way, that voted for Zoron overwhelmingly, saying, F you to Israel and we'll arrest Netanyahu if he steps foot on our soil.

And I feel very proud that New York is hopefully heading in that direction.

Zoran Mamdani also supports decriminalizing prostitution and sex work.

You know, and I hope I'm not like too much in my own bubble when I say this, but like that's like a pretty popular

progressive policy.

Yes.

And there's like so much research and data to show that it is simply about keeping sex workers who are plentiful, regardless of what the law allows, by the way, to stay safe and to have recourse if they're in a violent situation or something like that.

Deborah Messing is, again, she strenuously opposes this and she posts a lot about like what's gonna happen to our city when Zoran Mamdani decriminalizes sex work.

She posts a video.

I watched a lot of fucking videos that she posted, guys.

And this, this one, this one kind of took it for me.

So I'm gonna play it for you.

And this was a video she posted in the wake of certain nations at the UN recognizing a Palestinian state.

I want you to remember today, September 21st, 2025.

I want you to remember today when

there comes a time that you cannot practice the religion that you want to practice.

I want you to remember today when women cannot go to school, when you cannot love who you want to love,

when

books are banned,

when women have no rights.

I want you to remember today.

And now, some of you aren't going to like that I'm saying this, but what I could be describing could be the extreme left or the extreme right.

And I realize that what I am describing today is the Free Palestine movement.

Well, look, you know,

it's liberal Zionism in a video.

She is right about the mandatory hijabs that I knew are being sent out.

I knew that whatever was about to come out of your mouth was going to be sarcastic.

I, that's a good bet.

When you start with, she is right.

You're like,

but when we have the calls to prayer mandated by Zoran, it's a good opportunity for a smoke break.

That's right.

But it's just wild to me that it's like, I want you to remember this day.

And it's like, you mean when some people recognized Palestine?

I want you to remember it as the day in which women lost their freedoms, in which, you know, or I want you to remember this day as is when we lost our religion.

Like, all of that stuff is still based on

a

purported liberal ideology, right?

She's not yelling at the camera, the dang Muslims are going to come in, the savage hordes that they are and destroy our women.

No, it's got this nice liberal sheen to it.

Like, remember this day as the day in which book burning became illegal.

Like, as if this person would not be leading a whole library of book burnings if it were in Palestine, if it were in Gaza, you know?

That's, to me, the core tenet of liberal Zionism is we must uphold the importance of women's rights, of gay rights, of a multiracial, multicultural society that includes everyone and values the lives of everyone except Palestinians.

Right.

They must die for said society to exist.

And like that, my friend, is not how liberalism works.

Well, they're betraying the truth there.

They're talking about so-called Western civilization.

Yes.

Western civilization versus the scary, scary Arabs.

It's a replication of capitalism.

The West exploits the global south, and particularly the Middle East has been exploited for the past hundred or so years for its oil resources.

And so we demonize the population there as savages.

Well, and in that sense, it is how liberalism works.

In that sense, it is almost a more true and reality-based definition of those values.

Because what we look at, you know, as like liberal values is most of the time very much economics-based.

So it's the idea of integration as being a good thing, not because on a moral level, but on an economic level.

You know, it's the idea that people should have more rights as to be, I guess, more free consumers.

It's the freedom to consume, right?

So, in a way, she's

mirroring any other liberal at any time since liberalism.

It's liberalism versus liberation is a pretty decent way, I think, to sum it up.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, I think this is the problem with the term liberal in general is we kind of do use it as a catch-all for the left or for progressivism.

But, you know, in truth, the same way we look at the Democratic Party in either New York state or California, we don't look at it as like, oh, they're got a D next to their name.

They must be a liberal.

It's like, no, it is all context-based.

Where are you from?

If it's a blue state, you got some far-right-wing Democrats.

You know, it's the same type of thing.

It's like liberalism is,

it's a badge when you're in the center of empire.

I'm a good emperor.

And it is collapsing upon itself.

And that's why there's the rise of fascism, but also hopefully leftism.

Yeah, those contradictions are not things that people, I think, can live with with for that long, which is why you're seeing people like Deborah Messing turn into open fascists.

And she's going to drop the pretense at some point, I assume.

I think it's dropping.

And in moving on with the Deborah Dooms spiral,

I love it.

I love it.

No, I'm very interested.

I'm like invested now.

We now reach the death of Charlie Kirk.

Oh, boy.

Which Deborah posts about.

I actually cannot tell you how many times she posts about it.

I lost count.

Oh my goodness.

I'm seeing just the sheer number here.

She was mourning this man within an inch of her own life.

Dude, it's like fucking Morse code.

Like, it's well, you know what?

I had a friend.

I had a friend.

And sometimes we would talk about when people would have crash outs on Instagram, we would call it grains of sand because

do you know where I'm going with that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The top bar that shows all the little dots for how many Instagram stories you've posted.

Each one would get so small that they'd look like grains of sand.

Yeah, that's why I'm saying it looks like fucking Morse code to me because I'm just like, it's like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

Save our ethnostate.

Oh, man.

Charlie Kirk dies and Deborah Messing.

She's posting every, you know, teary-eyed TikTok memorial that exists with like the slow piano in the background and the compilation slideshows of him and his wife and children.

She, among other things, this was really interesting to me.

She posted an explicitly anti-abortion memorial post from Live Action, which is an anti-choice organization.

But the thing that I really want to highlight here is the feed post that she dropped, a written carousel.

Emma, take it away.

I couldn't sleep last night.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is so horrifying and devastating.

The idea that disagreement could justify justify erasure.

Oh my God.

Can you imagine?

Is barbaric.

I know.

It's only in hypotheticals.

Only in hypotheticals.

And the fact that so many are celebrating it is horrifying.

Violence and murder can never be acts of virtue.

They can never be justified as violent resistance.

Those who commit killings may see themselves as heroes, as liberators, as resistors, as they chant resistance by any, all means necessary.

But they are not.

They are murderers.

This is terrorism.

I mean, it took like, what, three slides for this to become a

free Palestine parable.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but she's like, first of all, we're going to make this entirely about Israel.

But second of all, I'm going to condemn violence.

But

the violence that her quote-unquote side commits, I mean, you can't make it up how

hard she has to work to ignore that.

For her, violence against Palestinians is like natural.

It's the way tides go in and go out.

It's the way the sun sets.

Yeah.

No cause, no grievance, no politics, no arguments can make this assassination anything but barbaric.

I have always considered myself a liberal.

Today, I feel politically homeless.

Oh, my gosh, she admitted it.

She admit it.

She's politically homeless.

Down, down, down.

Which is the only class of homeless people that she cares about now.

Yep, yep.

Politically homeless.

Where have I heard that before?

I don't know.

I have to get a politically homeless buzzer for this podcast.

Every time someone who's like going down the right-wing, the right-wing spiral declares themselves politically homeless.

Like I need a I need a sound effect for that.

Yeah.

The majority report has a few we could send over to you.

I have always considered myself a liberal.

Today I feel politically homeless.

The far left protests and dehumanizes dehumanizes in the name of fighting against violence, yet here the same people are celebrating violence.

Something very wrong has happened to our society.

We no longer see humanity.

We have no tolerance for difference, no patience for conversation, no interest in facts.

I am praying for Charlie Kirk's family, his friends, and the students who witnessed his killing.

I am also praying for those who are celebrating that they wake up to the darkness they are endorsing.

We have to be better.

We have to be human.

And there there you go.

You see how whiteness and Zionism intersex right there.

Yeah, supremacy is supremacy.

I don't care to revisit the week of Charlie Kirk's death.

That was like the most miserable set of discourse I've participated in in a long time.

But as someone who has for months been following this woman's political journey in which she cannot admit what's actually happening to her entire political ideology as a result of her, you know, primary concern being Israel, for her to just come out and say, I'm not a part of the left anymore, it was gratifying.

Yeah, it is nice.

I mean, you, I feel like that's something you don't usually get,

which is

someone just openly saying, I am no longer liberal.

Like, I think, I feel like we got that with what, Dennis Miller after 9-11.

And like, you know, for the most part, it's like you get these like tortured why I left the left YouTube videos and whatnot.

But from a celebrity who, you know, is considering themselves to be a liberal, someone who's famous for being a liberal, you don't usually get them saying, I am not a liberal, but she is also hedging by saying I'm politically homeless.

You know, well, yeah, I should clarify that.

I mean, do one of you want to explain what it means literally every single time someone says they're politically homeless?

It just means they're right-wing.

Yeah.

It's like when people say, listen, I don't believe in labels.

I'm not left-wing.

I'm not right-wing.

But what I believe is, and then it's a bunch of right-wing shit, you know, or it's like, I believe in just enough progressivism, but also close the borders.

I should deport as many people as possible.

It always means I have a empathy holdout for one marginalized group or more.

That's always what it means.

And for political influencers, it means what Dave Rubin did, leaving so-called the left to go to the right, what Anna Kasparian is doing right now, politically homeless.

Oh, the trans people,

the activists are so crazy with their language.

I'm moving towards the right.

Usually happens around people's mid-40s when it's time to cash in.

Ezra Klein, I wouldn't say he's saying he's politically homeless, but he's right now playing footsie with the far right and is whitewashing Charlie Kirk's image in post.

Don't make me do my Ezra Klein voice again.

Please do it.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Bitfruity.

It's great.

It's great.

Nailed it.

So, yeah,

it's a branding exercise, and it is one that is quite lucrative because as I sit in the Majority Report Studio right now, I can tell you less money on the left.

There are no billionaires coming around and saying, hey, we want to fund this show.

When people get to a certain point in their careers, they become politically homeless very conveniently, and checks seem to follow.

Yeah.

And I want to reiterate: like, this is actually a rare instance on this podcast where I'm not accusing Deborah Messing of becoming a grifter.

I think we are watching someone

very authentically just lose their grip on like their own sort of self-perception as a progressive person.

And I think that's oftentimes like what politically homeless means too.

It's like, I am right-wing,

but I am struggling with my own self-perception as someone who isn't as progressive as I thought I was.

Yes, because this is the entire thing is like most people are quote politically homeless, not in like a

label way, but as in an ideological way.

They are just regular people.

Most people have a myriad of politics that go one way or the other and they like vote for, you know, I vote for Republicans because I always like Republicans.

I vote for Democrats.

But when you are someone who is like Deborah Messing, who their politics is very much identity-based, and not just, you know, in terms of her Jewish identity, I mean her identity as a Hollywood superstar celebrity where she's getting GLAD awards and, you know, she's held up as an icon.

For her to say she's politically homeless, what she is essentially saying is that the brand that I built up over all of these years

no longer really applies.

And it's, you can see that, like, so much of her politics is based on presentation.

It's based not on any inward morals or ethics, but on what exactly she's going to present to everybody.

Sounds like Israel.

Right.

It's the exact same thing.

It's the same thing.

It's just about how you look to polite Western society.

That's it.

I have one last Instagram story for you.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, we've, we've established that Deborah Messing has, as it were, left the left.

But she just posted one the other day that I could not spare from this outline, which was this.

Can anyone remember the last time a Jew or Christian stabbed, beheaded, shot, bombed, burned, blew himself up, or ran people down in a car or truck while yelling, Christ is king, or God is great?

I mean, yes is the answer.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Deborah Messing hates Muslims.

She's made this clear.

She often fixates on what she believes to be, you know, a violent nature inherent to Muslims, which is like a core tenet of Islamophobia.

But I'm also just like,

think with your head.

I'm sorry.

I don't usually like speak like this on my podcast, but I'm like, can you remember the last time?

a Jew or a Christian committed an act of violence in the name of their religion.

Like, yeah, that's the foundation for the state of Israel.

Yeah.

The vast majority of our

like mass shooters are Christian.

I'm sorry, Christian white men.

Are they doing it because they are Christian?

Many are straight up white nationalists.

I mean, what are we doing?

What are we pretending?

Where do you live?

But that's what's so important to hit on, too, is that her perception of Muslims is that they are basically barbaric and only driven by illiberal religious fundamentalism.

The Bush administration, when it invaded Iraq, was filled with Christian nationalists who spoke about this in religious terms.

The way our country operates, the party that is currently in power right now in the executive branch and in both chambers of Congress and dominates the Supreme Court is a fundamentally Christian nationalist party.

But because we are the richest country on the planet, Because we are a waning superpower, we get the ability to say, oh, we're doing all of this violence for legitimate reasons.

The Muslims, well, they're barbaric.

And that's the core of what she's saying there, because these governments that may have in majority Muslim countries, she grants them no legitimacy, even if they have a legitimate structure.

I mean, Hamas, for example, was elected.

and did provide services for people in Gaza, despite the fact that they are not the resistance group that I would like there.

The Israeli government liked them because they thought they could demonize them more because they were more expedient visions of the barbaric Muslim that they're trying to portray.

And Deborah Messing and the Zionists are more than willing to go along with it because that's truly how they feel.

And, you know, in terms of this like...

total revisionist history, I mean, it's not even history.

It's like, can I remember the last time a Jew stabbed, beheaded, shot, bombed, burned?

Like,

it's not even history.

Today that happened in Gaza today.

But what's worse is the fact that what she is aligning herself with is, I think, for her and for a lot of liberal Zionists, it is the idea of their identity being a separate and protected group.

And that needs to be maintained at all costs.

And she is going to find,

I think, a really brutal wake-up call.

The right wing in this country has only gone further, further right.

And that includes actual anti-Semites who want to see the downfall of Israel, but not because they give a shit about the Palestinians, but because they believe that Jews are inherently bad.

They view Jews in the same way that she views all Arabs, specifically Palestinians.

And I look at this and I go,

do you even see where this is going?

Do you understand where

you are leading not just yourself, but everyone else?

This ideology does not end with you living happily ever after.

No, it's going to be far worse.

So I want to round this out.

Sorry.

On that note.

It was a bummer ending.

No, no,

it was a powerful ending.

It was.

I want to round this out.

Look, I have not been chronicling the racist coke rants of an early 2000s television star for fun.

Certainly not for my health.

But I did this because, like I said, I think she's a really vivid and public, an extreme, but not uncommon example of how fervent Zionism, even the liberal flavor, and oftentimes I find especially the liberal flavor because it's sort of disguised itself, leads you down the path to MAGAhood.

Like I said up top, like I feel like liberal Zionism, it's like a waiting room of an ideology that, you know, you could say that Deborah Messing and Matt and myself sort of all started in the same place a long time ago, being raised in that ideology.

And I guess I just want to end by like, because I'm thinking again about like the people I grew up with and the people who are still clinging to this liberal Zionist identity, but no longer can explain it because it's, it's inexplicable.

And I want to give those people, if they happen to be listening to this, like an off-ramp that is not the Deborah messing route, but that is the anti-Zionist route, you know.

Obviously, I'm not speaking as a Jew here, but anti-Zionism is a belief in humanism and of shared multiculturalism.

It's a belief that the colonization of another land should be left in the dustbin of history.

It is a belief that the safety of all of us is intertwined and that we have a shared humanity, and that our collective spirituality is scarred by what, I mean, I honestly get emotional even just talking about what we have done there and what our tax dollars have gone towards.

And you can, it's not too late, wash your hands of this by educating yourself in a variety of different ways.

You can read from anyone from Rashid Khalidi's books to understand the true history here.

Other Jewish historians, I would highly recommend Avi Schlaim.

I would highly recommend the work of Ilan Pape.

And in terms of an American Jew who's been doing great work on this, you have Peter Beinart, who has a book that came out recently that I would encourage people to read.

There are not many white South Africans who admit openly these days that they were pro-apartheid.

And there will come a time when that's a very similar moment for Zionists in this country and in other parts of the West.

Don't be that person.

And just to piggyback on that, I do think that, you know, the reason you are, if you are a liberal Zionist listening to this and wondering if you're going down the wrong route, the reason why you are a liberal Zionist specifically is because you do, on some level, have the capacity for shame.

If you would like to avoid that shame, if you would like to avoid it, I think now would be a good time.

Now is a good off-ramp.

At this point, it is agreed upon by not just the UN, but by every

human rights organization inside and outside of Israel that Israel is an apartheid state.

The UN just

said that it's a genocide, what's going on.

And that is also something that Betsellam, an Israeli human rights group, has said as well.

You're not doing yourself any favors by staying ignorant to it.

And in fact, you are doing immense psychic harm to yourself.

Just look at Deborah Messing.

If you are afraid of the word anti-Zionism, just educate yourself.

And also, I think you're going to find the demons in your mind that you maybe picture who are going to these like pro-Palestine protests, whether they be Arab or anti-Zionist Jew, I think you'll find that they are

some of the most principled, ethical,

hot,

sexy

Jews and non-Jews you've ever met.

Yeah.

So

I think now is it's better late than never in some aspects.

And so there are other routes.

Just look at just look at their breath.

Don't you don't want that for yourself.

Don't look that much.

Don't look as much as Matt and you know, having to categorize it like that.

I don't wish that on my worst enemy.

My boyfriend's going to be so happy.

I'm done looking at these fucking Instagram stories.

I'm done.

Oh, good.

I do want to end this episode with a short clip that I'm going to insert of Susan Sarandon.

The context here being that in 2016, Susan Sarandon was a Bernie supporter and Deborah Messing was a Hillary supporter.

They went at each other pretty hard over that.

And this is what Susan Sarandon had to say on the matter.

Well, after a while, I just said, Deborah, come on, report me to the homeroom teacher and let's just let this go.

And, you know, and

think she kept going, but I don't know.

Is she not working?

What's going on with her?

Matt and Emma, thank you so much for joining me today.

Absolutely.

So happy to be back.

Thanks so much, Matt, for having me on.

I appreciate you both so much.

This was a treacherous but very necessary episode for me to make.

If you, the listener, have made it this far.

I so appreciate you.

I hope if nothing else, it was entertaining and that we could all learn something something together.

That I have been like, it's just been stewing.

I've been like stewing in this for so long, as you can tell.

I love you so much.

I can't wait to see you in the next episode.

And until then, stay fruity.