Inside Call me Back SNEAK PEEK: Between Mamdani and Tucker, Are Jews Getting Squeezed? - with Jonah Goldberg

Speaker 1 You are listening to an art media podcast.

Speaker 2 The Bill of Rights is a classical liberal document. Once you reject that and you embrace illiberalism, then the differences between the far right and the far left kind of disappear.

Speaker 2 The illiberal left and the illiberal right, they all believe in speech codes, they all believe in punishing your enemies, they all believe in identity politics.

Speaker 2 So, there are a lot of things where it's really about power. And so, like, Zoro Mandami represents a kind of left-wing identitarian statism.

Speaker 2 And so do a lot of these Tucker Carlson wannabe guys who just basically want to use the government to reward our team and punish your enemies. And so there, the horseshoe theory stuff actually holds.

Speaker 2 Once you let go of the classically liberal dogma of that our rights come from God, not from government, we are citizens, not subjects, that the fruits of our labors belong to us.

Speaker 2 Once you give up that stuff, it's really just two different teams of illiberals.

Speaker 1 It's 2 p.m. on Friday, November 7th here in New York City.
It's 9 p.m. on Friday, November 7th in Israel.
Whether you are here or there, Shabbat Shalom.

Speaker 1 On Monday, Hamas returned three deceased hostages to Israel. They are Asaf Hammami, Oz Daniel, and Omer Nutra, who Omer also is an American citizen.

Speaker 1 On Wednesday, deceased hostage Itai Khen was also returned to Israel. And on Thursday, deceased hostage Joseph Loitu Molel, a Tanzanian national, was also returned.

Speaker 1 As of now, there are six deceased hostages still in Gaza. One of these hostages is Hadar Golden, who was killed and abducted by Hamas in 2014.

Speaker 1 Israel has assessed that the body of Hadar is trapped in an area of Rafah that is now on the Israeli-controlled side of the yellow line that was established by the recent ceasefire deal.

Speaker 1 In that same area, there are believed to be 150 Hamas operatives trapped in a tunnel and unable to access the Hamas-controlled part of the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 1 There is also an internal scandal unfolding in Israel that has to do with the former chief attorney of the IDF, Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi, who admitted last week to having approved the leak of footage that allegedly showed Israeli operatives at the Stay Tayman detention facility abusing a Gazan detainee.

Speaker 1 Tomer Yerushalmi was arrested Sunday night on suspicion of trying to obstruct the investigation into her case.

Speaker 1 Tomer Yerushalmi's phone, which was missing, was reportedly found in the sea on Thursday and is currently being examined by police investigators. She was released to house arrest Friday morning.

Speaker 1 One of our ARC media podcasts, For Heaven's Sake, co-hosted by Danielle Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi, delved into this saga in their most recent episode.

Speaker 1 So I highly recommend anyone who's interested in learning more to listen to that episode of For Heaven's Sake.

Speaker 1 In other news, on Wednesday, Turkey's intelligence agency chief met with the leader of Hamas's negotiating team, Khalil Al Haya, to discuss how Hamas should should approach the continued implementation of Trump's ceasefire deal.

Speaker 1 Also on Thursday, Israel launched a wave of strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, issuing evacuation warnings for five different areas.

Speaker 1 Prime Minister Netanyahu convened his security cabinet just a couple of hours ago to discuss the path forward both in Gaza and in Lebanon. Now on to today's episode.

Speaker 1 Late Tuesday night, Democratic candidate Zoran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, home to the largest number of Jews outside of Israel.

Speaker 1 Mamdani received around 50% of the vote, while his leading opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, got 41% of the vote.

Speaker 1 Mamdani is a 34-year-old self-proclaimed Democratic socialist and a self-proclaimed anti-Israel activist.

Speaker 1 So on the left, Mamdani's mayoral victory signaled a legitimization of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, we are also seeing a crackup on the right over anti-Semitism, as some podcasters with very large audiences have been saying some incendiary things about Israel and the Jews.

Speaker 1 The edges, both the left and the right, seem to be coalescing around anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, blood libels, and scapegoating. Have the far left and the far right found a common enemy?

Speaker 1 Are we seeing the horseshoe theory coming to life in the most ghoulish way and does the fringe of either the left or the right threaten to go mainstream on either the center left or the center right yesterday we published a special members only inside call me back episode today we are unlocking a good chunk of that episode to our free feed to the main call me back feed because of the importance of this conversation if you do find it interesting you might want to follow the link in the show notes and subscribe to inside call me back where you can hear the entirety of the conversation.

Speaker 1 And I should also mention that this episode was recorded well before Shabbat, and it's on an auto program release time.

Speaker 1 So it's being released on Saturday, but no human being is actually pressing a button and releasing it. And everyone should listen to it whenever they feel comfortable and appropriate doing so.

Speaker 1 Our guest today is Jonah Goldberg. Jonah is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, which is a very important publication.
I highly recommend it. I subscribe to it.

Speaker 1 I especially enjoy their morning newsletter, which I start with every day, one of the best coming out of Washington.

Speaker 1 He's also the author of multiple books that examine political history and the history of conservative ideas, including Suicide of the West and also liberal fascism.

Speaker 1 Jonah is also the host of the indispensable podcast called The Remnant. If you don't already listen to it, subscribe.
We'll link to that as well in the show notes.

Speaker 1 So Jonah, first, welcome to Call Me Back. It's great to be here.
So Jonah, I got to start by asking you, Suicide of the West came out in 2018.

Speaker 1 And I guess after this past seven to 10 days, exactly what stage of the suicide are we in right now?

Speaker 2 Well, not to dodge the question, but I think part of the problem is that suicide of which I speak is always on offer, right? Ronald Reagan said, we're not born with a love for liberty in our blood.

Speaker 2 Every generation is threatened because it only takes one generation to lose your commitment to these things.

Speaker 2 And so it's an ongoing process where you have to sort of remind people to have some gratitude for what a wonderful country this is and for the principles and values it was built on.

Speaker 2 And we're doing a really bad job of that right now. Let me put it this way, and we're going to get into a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 2 Some of the things Ben Shapiro has been saying about the neo-Nazi stuff on the right, I welcome it. I celebrate it.
He's right. It's good that he's doing it.

Speaker 2 But there were some of us who were saying, this stuff will not end well 10 years ago. You know, I was the subject, like the ADL did a study of the in the lead up to 2016, right?

Speaker 1 In the lead up to the presidential election,

Speaker 2 yeah. I came in like sixth or eighth on that list, and Ben came in first or second.

Speaker 2 And I was getting into arguments with these guys 10 years ago saying, you cannot have these people as allies in your coalition. You can't have them in your tent.

Speaker 2 You're inviting the scorpion to sting you.

Speaker 2 And so there's a certain amount of, you know, just, it's very hard to resist the I told you so's at a moment like this, but I told people so, you know, it's worth actually underlining this point.

Speaker 1 So you are, for our listeners who don't know you,

Speaker 1 you are a conservative. You would identify as a conservative.
You came of age with conservative leaders like Ronald Reagan and Phil Graham.

Speaker 1 Your intellectual heroes among them were Bill Buckley, who you work for at National Review. So when I say you're a conservative, that's not in the MAGA sense.

Speaker 1 This is the conservatism you came of age with. And you have also, as you said, been the target of anti-Semitism, coming from all sides, I guess, of the political spectrum.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Most of my life was from the left until the last 10 years. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 1 I want to start with a little bit of your origin story here because it's very relevant to the politics we're dealing with right now in New York City. You are from New York City.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyone who knows you knows that you're constantly making references to New York City and growing up in New York City.

Speaker 1 So New York City played a meaningful part in your life, formative years, and this city has now elected a self-described socialist and anti-Zionist mayor.

Speaker 1 Now, we can get into what that means because I know you're skeptical that it means what we all think it means, but let's just take Zor Mamdani at his own words, a socialist and anti-Zionist mayor.

Speaker 1 Just start as for New York Jews, the New York Jewish community. What do you think his election means or what should it mean?

Speaker 2 It's not great, Bob, because I think this is one of the few places I can say this with the maximum impact to explain to people how long I've been doing conservative stuff and how much I grew up in this stuff.

Speaker 2 You know, when I first met Pat Buchanan at my Briss.

Speaker 2 So I've been doing this for a while, right? I grew up in this. Was it National Review for 2019?

Speaker 1 No, I just want to be clear. You're not suggesting that Pat Buchanan was performing the Bris.

Speaker 2 He was not the Moyle. He was not the Moyle.

Speaker 1 He was a guest. He was a guest at the Bris.
But for our listeners, that gives you a sense of how long Jonah has been swimming in conservative political waters.

Speaker 2 And when he was introduced to my dad for the first time by my brother's godfather, this guy Victor Lasky, who's a big muck-raking conservative journalist of the 1960s, and he introduced Pat to my dad and he said, Sid, I want you to meet Pat Buchanan.

Speaker 2 He is a terrific red baiter. And he meant it totally as a compliment.
And my dad received it as a compliment. So that's like the milieu I grew up in.

Speaker 2 So there's a literary critic, Wayne Booth, who has this line that I'm going to butcher a little bit, but it goes something like this.

Speaker 2 Rhetoric is the art of figuring out what men believe they ought to believe.

Speaker 2 Right. It sets the rhetorical ideal, the parameters, the Overton window of what people should believe, right? Rhetoric is this thing.

Speaker 2 How we talk in our politics sets the framework for how we should think about things.

Speaker 2 And the fact that you've got a guy who has, you know, said that every time the NYPD puts its boot on your neck, it was laced by the IDF.

Speaker 2 When you have a guy who has got a rhetorical paper trail like that, a recent, because he's so young, all of it is recent, it's not great. And I have no...

Speaker 2 objection whatsoever for New York Jews to object and to worry about this.

Speaker 2 My oldest friend in Washington, Tevi Troy, just had a piece in the Wall Street Journal this week about how, you know, he wears a keepa, a yarmica in New York, and he's now worried that that's not going to be safe for him to do.

Speaker 2 And Tevi's a very level-headed guy. He's not crazy for feeling that way.
So, at that level, as a cultural thing, right?

Speaker 2 Part of the problem of our politics these days, particularly with the presidency, is we see candidates more as avatars of a culture war than as actual public servants being hired to fix certain problems and do certain things, right?

Speaker 2 And so, a big part of Mondami's success success was being this sort of transgressive avatar of a certain kind of left-wing politics that seduced a whole bunch of people.

Speaker 2 And he's very good at it, right? He's a charismatic guy. He knows how to use social media, smiles all the time.
He's very disciplined about how he can dodge certain questions and that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 And he ran against a weak field, both in the primary and in the general, and he won. And I personally think it's a bad sign for the country.

Speaker 2 Like, I want certain things to just be unacceptable in politics. This guy, Jay Jones, was the attorney general and ran for attorney general in Virginia.

Speaker 2 He was exposed, sent text messages and phone calls talking about how he wished to see some Republicans' children murdered in front of him. And he got elected.
And he got elected.

Speaker 2 Like, I want to live in a country where there are certain things. I'm not, this is not about cancel culture.
This is about decency in public life.

Speaker 2 There are certain things, there are certain rhetorical positions people take that should just make them outside of the realm of acceptable public officials.

Speaker 2 And I think Cuomo, you know, should have never run run either for all the me too ish stuff. But with Mandami in particular, it's very troubling.

Speaker 2 That said, I think some of the catastrophization about it is probably overdone, both on the, oh, he's going to make it a communist, you know, hellhole or the pogroms will start at dawn.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think there are people who will take bad inspiration from Mandami and do bad things to Jews, and that's terrible.

Speaker 2 And then Mandami will have a terrible test for himself about whether they're actually going to, you know, like punish that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 And I hate saying that that's a possibility, but I think it's a possibility. But I don't think it's open season on Jews in New York either.

Speaker 2 And I don't think Mandami has the ability to seize the means of production in New York City. He's going to have a rough time doing a lot of the things he says he's going to do.

Speaker 1 But okay, so the difference between someone like Jay Jones, and I'm familiar with it, I didn't follow it as closely as you did, but it seems to me like he got caught.

Speaker 1 saying something that he would not have wanted to advertise. And I think the difference with Mamdani is there's no getting caught.

Speaker 1 In other words, he has broadcast quite proudly his worldview long before October 7th, long before he ran for the state assembly, long when he was a student in college. He was talking about that.

Speaker 1 And then when he had the opportunity as a citywide candidate and ultimately the nominee of his party or what became his party, the Democrats, he had the opportunity to moderate and he actually didn't really moderate.

Speaker 1 I know Jewish leaders who met with him, who tried to meet with him, who, I mean, I thought it was foolish. I thought it was naive.

Speaker 1 They were trying to, like an olive branch, giving him ways to tone it down. And he didn't tone it down.

Speaker 1 He was talking about genocide and apartheid state and shutting down the Cornell-Technion partnership and shutting down the strategic response group, this unit and the NYPD that deals, has dealt with a lot of the violent anti-Semitic protests over the last couple of years.

Speaker 1 He was talking about those issues and about doing those things two weeks ago, not two years ago. And it was a feature of his campaign.

Speaker 1 It wasn't something that, ooh, I got caught and I got to now clean it up.

Speaker 2 I think that's a hugely important distinction. I think you're you're right.
It's the difference between bug and feature, right?

Speaker 2 This Jones guy screwed up in private and did something really evil and bad, and he didn't really do a good job of apologizing for it, but he didn't campaign, I'm going to murder my opponent's children, right?

Speaker 2 Right, right. Meanwhile, Mondami, his part of the package of who he is, is he is a sort of a trustiferian, campus, globalized the Intifada.

Speaker 2 kind of guy and that crap is really hot right now among a bunch of young people i don't think if he actually explicitly he the one distinction i would draw is that he didn't run away from it but he didn't lean into it and campaign on it the way he focused on the affordability thing which if he basically made his number one campaign promise to arrest bb netanyahu if he ever goes to the un or something the thing might have played out differently but in some ways i feel he's a little bit like a cheap hong kong knockoff of barack obama barack obama had a lot of crappy stuff that he didn't really distance himself from in his record, you know, his relationships with some really anti-Israel people.

Speaker 2 But the charisma of it and the sort of the really weird virtue signaling that appeals to people of how transgressive you are to vote for, you know, a guy named Zoran Mondami or Barack Hussein Obama.

Speaker 2 You know, it's, there's some of that faddish stuff going on there.

Speaker 2 But I love New York City's Jewish heritage, right? I mean, it's one of the things that makes New York City New York City, and there's no really getting around that.

Speaker 2 It's not just Jews, you know, it's like it's Italian. Its immigrant heritage is just huge and great and wonderful.
And I love all that stuff.

Speaker 2 At the same time, there's a reason why the East Germans had to build the Berlin Wall to keep people from voting with their feet.

Speaker 2 You cannot do many of the things that are his heart's desire without losing. very wealthy people, without losing a lot of Jews, without real political consequences.

Speaker 2 And And so I just think he's an intellectual lightweight when it comes to actual public policy.

Speaker 2 And I think the mayor, mayoralty in New York City is not that powerful a position to allow him to do all the things that he wants to do.

Speaker 2 He needs buy-in from the governor and from the state legislature and from the city council. And much like Barack Obama, Barack Obama was great at giving speeches to adoring crowds.

Speaker 2 He actually wasn't that great.

Speaker 2 at the nuts and bolts of governing and public policy. And he basically didn't do anything on the domestic agenda after he got Obamacare passed precisely because he swung for the fences on one thing.

Speaker 2 And then it cost him Congress.

Speaker 1 In 2010, the midterms.

Speaker 2 Yeah, most of his presidency after that was pen and phone, as he put it, and rhetoric.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's take a break to hear a word from our sponsor.

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Speaker 1 All right, so we're already seeing Democrats from around the country congratulating Mamdani, celebrating Mom Dani, while, you know, some pundits are saying Mom Dani is the future of the party, which is interesting, by the way, because there were two other big elections in New Jersey and in Virginia, gubernatorial races, where Democrats that are not Mamdani, don't represent Mamdani-ism,

Speaker 2 performed.

Speaker 1 quite well, but all the conversation is about Mamdani. And so now there's this debate.
Is Mom Momdani now like the future of the party? Is he effectively a national project?

Speaker 1 What's your reaction to that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it is really important to point out that on their liquidate the Kulaks tour or whatever it was that AOC and

Speaker 2 Bernie Sanders did, you know, their anti-billionaire thing,

Speaker 2 Mickey Sherroll, the gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey, did not invite them to come speak. They play really well in New York City and maybe in San Francisco and L.A.

Speaker 2 and that kind of stuff, but they did not campaign in purplish states or in swing districts or anything like that.

Speaker 2 It gets signal boosted by the media, by the national media, because they are much closer to Zoronandami than they are to Mickey Sherrill or Abigail Spamberger. And they're great copy, right?

Speaker 2 That's part of the problem of these times is that responsible politicians who just want to do the important, hard, boring work are terrible copy. They're not charismatic.
They don't get the headlines.

Speaker 2 They don't seek the headlines. And meanwhile, the splashier people get the headlines.

Speaker 2 If I had my druthers, I would have wanted, even though, like, if I were in New Jersey or Virginia, I might have voted for the Republicans. I might not have.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 I'm not that partisan a guy anymore.

Speaker 2 But in terms of what's best for America, what I would have wanted to see is Mondami lose and Jay Jones lose, but these more moderate Democrats win big like they did.

Speaker 2 And the Democratic Party is setting up itself for a big internal debate. You know, in public choice theory, there's this thing called Baptists and bootleggers.

Speaker 2 What it refers to is in dry states during the prohibition era or whatever, the two groups that were most in favor of prohibition were the Baptists, who were against drinking on religious reasons, and the bootleggers, because it kept the legal competition away from them and they could charge whatever prices they want on the black market.

Speaker 2 And so they kind of like there were bootleggers who funded Baptists and wanted to maintain prohibition kind of thing. There is a similar sort of dynamic going on between the GOP and the AOC wing.

Speaker 2 It helps the GOP if the face of the Democratic Party is Zoron Mondami.

Speaker 2 And it helps the Zoromandami wing of the Democratic Party if the GOP aims all its fire at them.

Speaker 2 Because in this climate right now of negative polarization, the more the people you hate hate you, the better off you are, right?

Speaker 2 And that's why Ted Cruz love and all these guys love to troll or Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 They love to troll the hardcore left because a lot of people love politicians these days for their enemies rather than for what they actually stand for.

Speaker 2 And that's a sick sort of dynamic, but it's a big part of our politics these days.

Speaker 1 All right. So I want to actually, before we move on, I actually want to define what we actually think Momdani really represents ideologically because it's confusing.
You just wrote this column.

Speaker 1 in the LA Times that we'll link to. You basically argued that whether Momdani is a socialist or not, you don't believe this is like a belt.

Speaker 1 This is not like a way way to measure whether or not socialism is in again. And I want to come back to that.
But I also want to quote from this piece in the free press by Zineb Rabua.

Speaker 1 And this piece tries to argue that, like, what we think Mamdani represents is not what it is. And I'm just going to read from it.
And Alan hates when I read from pieces, but I'm just going to do it.

Speaker 1 I won't read too much.

Speaker 1 He says, Mamdani in truth draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition, Third Worldism, a post-colonial moral project born in the mid-20th century that recasts politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.

Speaker 1 His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution's core belief that the oppressed occupy history's moral vanguard and their liberation redeems human dignity.

Speaker 1 And he goes on to say, you know, conservatives trained to debate policies and principles are unprepared for this kind of politics.

Speaker 1 Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage.

Speaker 1 He has turned this moral framework into political practice, carrying out beyond culture and identifies into economics and foreign affairs.

Speaker 1 And he basically argues because of the Gaza War, because of some other factors, Mamdani found this audience at a moment when decolonial rhetoric actually became prominent. We call him a socialist.

Speaker 1 What this piece is arguing is it's not really socialism. This is actually something new in mainstream American politics.

Speaker 2 Look, I mean, one of the things when I used to be in much better odor on the right, I used to point out to people is that the differences between nationalism and socialism as historical movements are incredibly minor to non-existent.

Speaker 2 There's a Marxist tradition that teaches people that nationalism and socialism are opposites. Let's put it this way.

Speaker 2 Take any speech by Fidel Castro, and every time you hear the word socialist or socialism, replace it with nationalist and nationalism, or vice versa.

Speaker 2 It doesn't change the meaning of the paragraphs at all.

Speaker 2 National liberation, which were all these socialist movements in the third world, the Bandung generation, all of these kinds of things, they were nationalist movements and they were socialist movements.

Speaker 2 To nationalize healthcare is to have socialized medicine.

Speaker 2 And there is this, you know, the third world Franz Fanon kind of tradition of hardcore left-wing stuff is a kind of, I don't mean necessarily in the Nazi sense, but it's a nationalist, socialist sort of way of seeing the world.

Speaker 2 And part of that is that there are oppressed peoples and the evil forces of Western civilization or the, you know, the pale penis people of patriarchy are out to get them and they're enemies and higher ed is full of this stuff

Speaker 2 has been for 50 years right i mean whether you want to make it howard zinn or you know richard delgato or whoever you want to point to it's that kind of identity politics is what they teach in a lot of universities and mandami where did he go he went to bowdoin

Speaker 2 right i mean it's a classic example of a rich kid who wants to lean into much like Barack Obama at Columbia, wants to lean into the sort of frisan of radicalism by claiming his sort of third world savior kind of status.

Speaker 2 And that's what he grew up in. That's the language he speaks.
So I agree that that's his comfort zone.

Speaker 2 This guy's comfort zone is to use this language of sort of this nationalistic identity politics language that uses socialism.

Speaker 2 I mean, let's remember, like the Soviet Union, for all its talk about international communism, very quickly Stalin's talking about the great patriotic war for mother Russia, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, like the going back and forth to grab this language where convenient is really obvious once you know to pay attention for it.

Speaker 2 And the left speaks it fluently, particularly the academic campus left, and that's what he's a creature of.

Speaker 2 I just don't look. I mean, let's put it this way.
I grew up in New York City. Where did you grow up? I can't remember.
You were like a Philly kid.

Speaker 1 Born in upstate New York, Utica. And then my father was working for the mayor of Utica.
He lost his election, Mayor Osaro.

Speaker 1 We moved to Canada because my dad got a job selling Israel bonds in Toronto and I basically grew up there, which also, by the way, has a crazy socialist mayor right now, Toronto, but that's a separate subject.

Speaker 2 With the possible exception of Chicago, there is no city in America, I think, that is more viciously punitive of politicians who failed to collect the snow after a big snowstorm.

Speaker 2 So by all means, talk all you want about the cleansing power of anti-colonial violence and drop as many Franz Fannin quotes on me as you want.

Speaker 2 If he doesn't clean up the snow after a big snowstorm, that's going to be a bigger political problem for him than all of this shtick.

Speaker 2 And I think a lot of it is shtick because he doesn't know anything else except how to speak this language at seminars and conferences.

Speaker 2 But mayor of New York City is like a real hands-on, you know, is the garbage union going to strike?

Speaker 2 If the number of people get pushed off of, heaven forbid, get pushed off subway platforms increases 5%

Speaker 2 once he is sworn in, in, his solidarity with the liberationist movements of the third world will mean nothing to the median New Yorker.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I want to now look at the right. So over the past couple of months, as you know well, you've been covering this for a while.
As you said you were covering it long before it was cool.

Speaker 1 Tucker Carlson and others have been practicing some form of, I don't know what to call it, Jew baiting, Israel baiting.

Speaker 1 And he recently, as has gotten a lot of coverage, had on his show a series of anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists.

Speaker 1 He's been basically almost every episode for the last year and a half has featured one of these guests, Holocaust revisionists. And then last week, he had.

Speaker 2 We should also just point out: just contrary to rumors in his own PR and things that people say in his defense about how he asks tough questions and he's a fearless guy who speaks truth to power, he asked virtually no difficult questions and offered no intellectual pushback to Holocaust deniers, to people who said Churchill is the real villain of World War II, and to this griper neo-Nazi guy, Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 2 He basically gave them softball, tell me more interviews.

Speaker 1 Compared to, for instance, when he interviewed Ted Cruz about his support for Israel, where he literally cut him off every sentence and just pounded him.

Speaker 1 Okay, so he has Nick Fuentes on last week, who is, again, by all accounts, a neo-Nazi or sympathizer of Hitler's. And as he said, Stalin's, I mean, the whole thing was kind of nuts.

Speaker 2 He tweeted he's on Team Hitler. So like that's a good heuristic.
It cuts through a lot of like, what should we call him? He's on Team Hitler, right? Okay.

Speaker 2 There you go.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 So I want to play a clip from that interview. So let's just play it and then we'll have you respond to it.

Speaker 3 You cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness.

Speaker 3 You say on your show that we need to treat Israel like any other country. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But Israel is unlike every other country in the sense that because the Jewish people are in a diaspora all over the world, they're a stateless people. they resist assimilation.

Speaker 3 Let's say in the United States, for example, somebody like Ishelden Adelson, he's not Israeli. His heart is in Israel.
And it's because he is a proud Jewish person.

Speaker 3 It's sort of a rational self-interest politically to say, this is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel, across borders, extremely organized.

Speaker 3 that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.

Speaker 2 What's happening here? There's a term from political science that I think is most apt. I think it's called horseshit.
This is, I mean, look, first of all, America is a country of immigrants.

Speaker 2 I think something like 50 million Americans right now are either immigrants or first-generation Americans. You know who else has a diaspora where they care about their home country?

Speaker 2 Pretty much every other group in America.

Speaker 1 Indians, Greeks, Poles, Ukrainians.

Speaker 2 I mean, the Irish, don't get me started, right? Not to do a whole John Belushi skit.

Speaker 2 My point is, is that

Speaker 2 it is a classic argument of anti-Semites to render invisible all the other examples that Jews fit and say, aha, see, Jews are all alone.

Speaker 2 It's why I argue that according to the logic of the left, the UN is structurally anti-Semitic because it excludes all other nations from a standard that they only apply to Israel, right?

Speaker 2 And we don't have to go all Hillel hillel neur on this and cite all the times it's singled out for stuff that often Israel didn't do, but even if it did do, it would make it no different than dozens of other countries.

Speaker 2 So, this Jewish exceptionalism argument is a rhetorical trick that I don't have a lot of patience for.

Speaker 2 One of the things that conspiracy theories are for, and why they're so successful these days, is that conspiracy theories are a way to pander to the intellectual vanity of stupid and ignorant people.

Speaker 2 It is a way to say, you don't actually have to read a book. You actually don't have to know the facts.

Speaker 2 Here is this elegant, subversive, transgressive, intuitively plausible thing if you didn't know anything else that lets you sound sophisticated.

Speaker 2 Like, oh, you believe all these experts who say we landed on the moon? You know, I've done my own research by listening to Candace Owens, and here's this other theory. It was a movie set, right?

Speaker 2 And it's, and that's what Tucker panders to. That's what Nick Fuentes panders to.

Speaker 2 Fuentes also, and to a certain extent, Tucker, panders to this obsession among a large, but not nearly as large as people think it is, cohort or demographic of alienated, bitter young men who are poorly socialized to one extent or another.

Speaker 2 Like we live in an age now where we celebrate people.

Speaker 2 This is a big part of my book, Suicide of the West, is that according to romanticism, the highest arbiter of moral truth or of any other truth is your gut or your instincts. Be true to yourself.

Speaker 2 Listen to your inner light, right? This kind of thing. And rebel against the system, rebel against the man.
And when I would point this out about this tradition on the left, I used to get applause.

Speaker 2 The problem is it's a thing on the right now, too. And on the right, what people want to do is get credit for questioning or challenging or violating taboos.

Speaker 2 The problem is we don't have a lot of taboos left in our society. And one of the taboos that is left, and it's deteriorating rapidly, is not saying you're on Team Hitler, right?

Speaker 2 It's not calling for, you know, like making jokes about, you know, putting people in ashtrays at Auschwitz, right? But that gets a rise out of people. And that's what these guys are trafficking in.

Speaker 2 And because it gets a rise out of people, it is seductive to a whole bunch of people who want to feel rebellious and transgressive and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 I think there are some truly horrific people who love Nick Fuentes who are horrible human beings.

Speaker 2 I also think they're just a bunch of confused, dopey people who would not beat a Jew in the street or any of that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 Actually, I think that kind of behavior is much more prevalent on the left because that has to do with the politics of Israel.

Speaker 2 And let's put it this way, a different diaspora that doesn't like the Jewish diaspora.

Speaker 2 Well, I'll put it this way.

Speaker 1 You said earlier about our friend Tevi Troy being uncomfortable wearing Yarmulka. That sentiment, I know know a lot of Jews.

Speaker 1 I have a colleague, a close friend of mine who three or four years ago was attacked for wearing a yarmulke. One of my rabbis, I have several rabbis.

Speaker 1 One of my rabbis says that he, obviously, you know, David Ingberry, I mean, he said it himself publicly, that he is often when he's walking around New York City, he has to think twice about wearing yarmulke.

Speaker 1 This is long before, this is this is a few years ago. So, and by the way, they don't feel that way.
I'm just going to say it when they're in Oklahoma or South Carolina or Texas.

Speaker 1 They feel it in New York City, and it's not like a bunch of Nit Fuentes acolytes that they're worried about being attacked by on a New York City subway.

Speaker 2 Right. That's my point: is that this is much more of an online phenomenon and also a sort of a campus politics kind of phenomenon.
That doesn't mean it's good. Let's put it this way.

Speaker 2 There are a lot of resistance types on the left, right, who really, really hate Trump. And I am not, I think we can all stipulate I'm not a big fan of Trump.

Speaker 2 But I'll say things like, Trump isn't Hitler. Hitler could have repealed Obamacare.
And they'll get mad at me, but oh, why are you making apologies for him?

Speaker 2 And like, I don't know, maybe again, because I grew up with the name Jonah Goldberg, you can figure out why.

Speaker 2 I think you can criticize someone and say they're doing bad things or say they have flawed character, but still saying they're better than Hitler, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, like, Hitler is supposed to be pretty much 10 out of 10 of badness. That doesn't mean if you're a six on a 10 on a scale of one to 10 of badness, that you're great, right?

Speaker 2 But in this era of negative polarization, people think that any sort of nuance about these things is ridiculous. And so I think that's a lot of what Fuentes is tapping into.
It's working.

Speaker 2 It's what Candace Owens is tapping into. Part of it, I think people need to understand as a matter of politics.

Speaker 2 Some of it is related in a certain way to like the Jeffrey Epstein stuff insofar as there are people who make their money online by basically monetizing dopamine hits, making people angry, putting thumbs in eyes and questioning taboos and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 And one of the reasons why Trump couldn't silence everybody about Jeffrey Epstein is a lot of people are looking for the era after Donald Trump, like post-Trump era.

Speaker 2 And one of the only business models that works for a lot of these people is like Jeffrey Epstein stuff or are going after the Jews and Israel.

Speaker 2 And it is a kind of a function of what is the next money play for a lot of these people? What is the next way to hold on to an audience now that MAGA is kind of entering its final stages?

Speaker 2 And the thing that, I mean, I don't want to hijack the podcast here, but the thing that drives me absolutely bat guano crazy about all of this, right, is, and I just wrote about this, is that you remember the Bush years and the war on terror and the Iraq war.

Speaker 2 There are all of these people who on the left who did this sort of what I call bravery on the cheap, this performative courage, where, you know, George Clooney would use his Oscar acceptance speech to denounce George W.

Speaker 2 Bush, and he'd get massive massive applause for his courage from an audience that agrees with him entirely and loves him, right? And like they

Speaker 2 preen as if they're these heroes. I know.

Speaker 2 And they would all go around saying Bush is Hitler. And it was precisely because Bush wasn't Hitler that they could get away with saying this.

Speaker 2 Because if Bush was Hitler, you wouldn't say it because you'd be thrown in a concentration camp, right? Martin Niemuller was thrown in a concentration camp.

Speaker 2 And so this sort of performative fake speaking truth to power thing drives me crazy. It's now a problem on the right.
Donald Trump, you can make an argument. I think you're probably sympathetic to it.

Speaker 2 I know John Pedoritz is our mutual friend, that with the possible exception of Harry Truman, Donald Trump is the best friend Israel has ever had in the Oval Office.

Speaker 2 I agree with that. It's open to criticisms.
Maybe like there are nuances and all of that. That's fine.
But I think as a top-line observation, it's perfectly defensible.

Speaker 2 And certainly a lot of Israelis believe that. You know what? Tucker Carlson doesn't spend a lot of time doing? Attacking Donald Trump for it.
Candace Owens, maybe a little bit more.

Speaker 2 Nick Fuentes, once in a blue moon what they do is they say oh he's being manipulated by the jews right or that he's a tool of the jews that he's being let down by his advisors there's a certain amount of like if only the czar knew kind of talk going on here and it's precisely because the jews don't control the weather and they don't have lasers that can take you out from orbit that they feel utterly safe in saying this this idea that you can't say anything about jews or israel without being canceled.

Speaker 2 You're a more granular student of the New York Times coverage of the last three years. Seems to me there was a lot of criticism of Israel in the New York Times.

Speaker 2 The UN is a professional anti-Israel organization. You have countries denouncing Israel right, left, and center.
You have books.

Speaker 2 You have courses at major universities that are all about denouncing Israel.

Speaker 1 It reminds me of when Peter Beinhart wrote his first piece where he broke with Israel, this piece he wrote eight, nine, ten years ago for the New York Review of Books, and it was a big break with Israel.

Speaker 1 Israel. I remember him saying at the time, this is the most difficult piece I've ever had to write.
He was saying, this is this, like, I'm putting it all out.

Speaker 1 You know, this could be the end of my, whatever, my career. And it was like preposterous.

Speaker 1 This was actually the easy, I mean, if you're just thinking it from a careerism standpoint, it was actually the easiest piece to write because suddenly he was caving to the conventional wisdom and the media, you know, establishment mindset about all these issues.

Speaker 1 So it actually wasn't brave at all.

Speaker 2 Well, that's my point. It's like the Masan is not sending ninjas out after any of these people.
And it is such a cheap, cheap claim of bravery that Tucker is trafficking here.

Speaker 2 And I do think Tucker is the, I'll hand the podcast back off to you and stop hijacking it, but like Tucker is the real malefactor here.

Speaker 2 He is in the Rube Goldberg machine, no relation, of what's going on on the right. He's the mouse spinning the wheel in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 I know it's derivative of Tucker, but I do want to spend a minute on the Heritage Foundation, which, you know, you look at the evolution, the modernization of the conservative movement, the Heritage Foundation played a very, I know you've always had your issues with the Heritage Foundation, but it played a very prominent role as a think tank.

Speaker 1 And now it's going through internal turmoil.

Speaker 1 So before we get to the internal turmoil, can you just briefly, you're a student of all of the various organs within the conservative movement and their history.

Speaker 1 So what is the Heritage Foundation pre-MAGA and why did it matter?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it mattered a lot. Most of my criticisms prior to 10, 15 years ago, the Heritage Foundation, were really wonky inside baseball think tank nerdery that we don't need to get into.

Speaker 2 And for listeners, just for context, I'm an American Enterprise Institute guy, so it's sort of like softball team rivalry kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 So it's Kevin Roberts. He comes out with a video a few days ago.
I think many of our listeners have seen it, where he refuses to condemn Tucker.

Speaker 1 He implies that platforming figures like Fuentes is within the realm of legitimate discourse.

Speaker 2 And then there's blowback.

Speaker 1 And then he issues, you know, another video where he gives some statement where he apologizes to his staff and to the broader MAGA community, I guess, for his response.

Speaker 1 So tell me what's going on there. So you explained Tucker, you explain heritage, and now we're dealing with the blowback.
So what is the blowback?

Speaker 1 And what does it tell us about where the right is today?

Speaker 2 So Roberts issues this video where he says, as you state, he says, you know, we don't cancel people. We believe in the.

Speaker 1 No enemies on the right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But also like we challenge bad ideas with free speech and all this kind of stuff.
And just for the record, as a matter of logic and legal argumentation, right?

Speaker 2 If you, if you strip it of the other bad things in that thing, his position is indistinguishable from Claudine Gay and the other university presidents who were hauled before Congress and got ripped by Elise Stefanik,

Speaker 2 where those college presidents said those universities were policing speech all over the place. Like if you said men can't get pregnant, you got sent to re-education or you got penalized or whatever.

Speaker 2 But if you said gas the Jews, they fall back into this,

Speaker 2 well, free speech, First Amendment, it's difficult. You have to have these rules.

Speaker 2 That's Kevin Roberts' position about Tucker having Nick Fuentes on is you have to make room in a free society and in our movement for the expression of virulently anti-Semitic ideas because we believe in arguments and free speech.

Speaker 2 That's, it was the exact same argument substantially as those university presidents.

Speaker 2 But he also said in his statement that the people who were going after Tucker and the Heritage Foundation were part of a, quote, venomous coalition that were fighting on behalf of other people's interests.

Speaker 2 It was dog whistle upon dog whistle about how the Jews are doing this. At least that's the way it was reasonably interpreted.
And it blew up in his face and lots of people condemned him.

Speaker 2 And now he's in cleanup mode. It's still ongoing.
Just yesterday, he did an all-hands meeting at the Heritage Foundation, which immediately leaked, even though it was great.

Speaker 2 People in the meeting are saying, we will fire anybody who leaks. And by the end of the day, the free beacon had the full video.
I had the entire thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, all two hours, not even quotes, just like the whole thing.

Speaker 2 And one of the more interesting things, and I guess we're going to get into this in a bit in terms of the history of this problem on the right.

Speaker 2 Robert Rector, who is a scholar at Heritage, who has been there for 47 years.

Speaker 2 And one of the points he makes, God bless him, is like, you guys don't understand. We've been here before.
This is all paraphrasing, but we've been here before. One of the things that William F.

Speaker 2 Buckley did in the early 1960s was say, we have to have zero tolerance for anti-Semitism, but also we have to have zero tolerance for crazy people because it undermines our non-crazy, non-bigoted work.

Speaker 2 And Richter was exactly right. And the problem that Heritage has is because it's addicted to small donors.

Speaker 2 They are convinced that the energy and excitement of these young Fuentes following people and the Tucker fans and all that are essential to the Trump coalition.

Speaker 2 They really don't want to excommunicate them. There's also an important, but we don't have to get deep in the weeds on it.

Speaker 2 There is an argument on both the pro and anti-Tucker, pro and anti-heritage sides that a lot of this is a proxy battle about J.D. Vance.

Speaker 2 Because J.D. Vance

Speaker 2 is clearly running cover for anti-Semitic Fuentes type people inside the Republican Party. When there was a chat, a group chat by these young officials, they weren't college kids, as Vance claimed.

Speaker 2 These were young officials. One of them was an elected representative in Maine.

Speaker 2 And their group chat talking about how they were, how based Hitler was, or how we're going to round up the Jews and, you know, all sorts of just garbage, horrible things.

Speaker 2 There was a big controversy about it. And Vance ran cover for them saying, I'm not going to get worked up about this.
Stop the pearl clutching. Young people make mistakes.

Speaker 2 Similarly, there are a lot of these kinds of people.

Speaker 2 This guy, Paul Angrazia, who was was nominated for a big position in the Justice Department, a different chat came out where he was talking about how he is, you know, he does have a Nazi streak to him.

Speaker 2 And Vance considers these people, to one extent or another, part of his base in some way.

Speaker 2 And so there are a lot of people who say, oh, by going after Tucker, you're really going after Vance, because the reason why Vance is vice president is because Tucker successfully lobbied for Vance to be vice president.

Speaker 2 The original plan was that Trump wanted to pick either Bergham or Marco Rubio.

Speaker 2 And the pro-Vance contingent, which included Trump's sons and Tucker Carlson, said, you can't do this.

Speaker 2 And according to reporting by Maggie Haberman, who's been a Trump watcher for a zillion years, and no one has refuted this reporting as far as I know, Tucker called Trump and said, you can't pick Rubio because he's a neocon who will want to start World War III and he'll have, I don't know if he said Israel, but he'll have you assassinated so he can be president.

Speaker 2 Say what you will, the fact that Trump listens to someone like Tucker is problematic.

Speaker 2 And so some people think that this is partly a stalking horse thing, getting back to my point earlier about the future of the GOP and the right, about which coalitions are going to be dominant, which ones are going to be exiled, right?

Speaker 2 This is one of the reasons why I have such contempt for these people who talk about we need to have a big tent and we need to have no enemies on the right and a broad coalition, but we must purge every last neocon in the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 We have no more room for Nikki Haley's in this party. Well, wait, I thought you just said it was supposed to be a big tent.
Do you mean it's just a big tent for Nazis, but not for like Nikki Haley?

Speaker 2 So there's a lot of bad faith in all of that, but that's one of the things that's going on in the background.

Speaker 1 Okay, Jonah, I want to bring together everything we just talked about and ask you about horseshoe theory and whether what we're seeing is the squeezing of the Jews from both the left and the right.

Speaker 1 But we'll pick this up on our inside edition of Call Me Back. That's it for our regular show.

Speaker 1 If you join us on Inside Call Me Back, our members only feed, you'll gain access to an extended version of this conversation where I asked Jonah whether we are truly seeing the manifestation of horseshoe theory and where we take a step back and look at historical precedents where both sides of the political spectrum united against the Jews.

Speaker 1 To become an Inside Call Me Back member, please follow the link in the show notes or go to arcmedia.org to get your own private feed. Jonah, thanks for being here.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me. Real pleasure.

Speaker 1 Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar. Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti.
Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Marianne Kalis Burgos.

Speaker 1 Our director of operations, Maya Rockoff. Research by Gabe Silverstein.
Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.