Live with Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro & Dan Senor

Speaker 1 You are listening to an art media podcast.

Speaker 1 The choice right now, and I hope this is now clear to everyone, it is not a choice between right and left. The bad people are everywhere.

Speaker 1 It's a choice between the politics of resentment, which gets you to anti-Semitism almost as the next step. And that's what you're seeing right now.

Speaker 1 And so it should be no surprise that in a moment of finger pointing and looking for the scapegoat who has left housing unaffordable or has left you, you know, in a city or in a town that has suffered from fentanyl addiction or deindustrialization, all these pathologies that are real and true, that people are looking to point the finger and they point the finger at the Jewish people.

Speaker 2 It's 6 p.m. on Sunday, November 23rd here in New York City.
It is 1 a.m.

Speaker 2 on Monday, November 24th in Israel, where Israelis are wondering whether to prepare for another escalation on their northern border.

Speaker 2 Earlier today, Sunday, the IDF carried out a strike on a building in Beirut, the first Israeli attack on the Lebanese capital in months. It's actually the first attack since July.

Speaker 2 The strike targeted Hezbollah's military chief, Hitham Ali Tabatai, who is the number two official in Hezbollah today, who the IDF later confirmed was successfully eliminated.

Speaker 2 For years, Tabatabai has been responsible for the bloodshed of Israelis and Americans. The strike comes after weeks of Israeli and U.S.

Speaker 2 concerns over the pace at which Hezbollah has been rearming itself. We are waiting to see if and how Hezbollah will respond.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, also today, IDF Chief of Staff Ayel Zamir dismissed several senior officers and censored others over over their roles in the failures of October 7th.

Speaker 2 Finally, a development, or rather, an escalation here in New York City. Last Wednesday evening, Park East Synagogue hosted an event with Nefesh B'Nefesh, which in English means soul to soul.

Speaker 2 It's a non-profit organization that operates throughout the diaspora, primarily here in North America, providing information to Jews in the diaspora that want to make aliyah or move to Israel.

Speaker 2 Nefesh B'Nefesh provides basic services for these new immigrants or those considering it like how to navigate the israeli government bureaucracy or take hebrew language classes or get support for travel and moving logistics but back to wednesday night in front of parki's synagogue there was a massive protest here was what some of the protesters were chanting quote from new york to gaza globalize the intifada or we need to make them scared a leader of the protest repeatedly instructed the protesters.

Speaker 2 How did our incoming mayor respond to this unnerving incident?

Speaker 2 Zoran Mamdani's spokesperson said, quote, the mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night's protest and will continue to do so, close quote. Let's just stay on that for a moment.

Speaker 2 A protest calling for violence against Jewish New Yorkers is just something our incoming mayor would gently discourage. But that wasn't all.

Speaker 2 The mayor-elect believes, his spokesperson continued, that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law. That's a quote.

Speaker 2 Throughout his campaign, Mamdani justified his discrimination against Jews by referring to international law. Which international law are Jewish New Yorkers violating?

Speaker 2 He's always vague on this question. And either way, what is City Hall's role in selectively choosing how to interpret and enforce international laws.
What's going on here? Sadly, nothing new.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's new for New Yorkers, but if you look at the long history of anti-Semitism in other parts of the world, there has often been an attempt to separate the, quote, good Jews from the bad Jews.

Speaker 2 One sorting has been to break Jews from Zionism.

Speaker 2 As historian Enut Wilf has pointed out, quote, the playbook carried out in the Arab world, Iran, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe has been to one, demonize Zionism, and then two, to charge Jews with the crime of Zionism.

Speaker 2 Well, before the election, I was worried about how a Mamdani administration would hug Jews and Jewish institutions that are assertively not Zionist.

Speaker 2 Jewish institutions will receive official visits from the mayor and municipal funding grants so long as they airbrush Zionism. from their Jewish identity.

Speaker 2 And along the way, Mamdani and his followers will be able to say, we're not anti-Semitic, we're just anti-Zionist because, wait for it, we are in compliance with international law.

Speaker 2 Which brings me to today's episode. Last week, Barry Weiss, Ben Shapiro, and I were awarded Tikva's 2025 Herzl Prize at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York City.

Speaker 2 To learn more about Tikva's work, you can find a link in the show notes.

Speaker 2 As part of the award ceremony, Ben, Barry, and I sat down for a long conversation with Tikva's Jonathan Silver to discuss a whole range of issues affecting the Jewish world with a specific focus on the American political landscape and what it means for Jews, the American political landscape on the left and on the right.

Speaker 2 Barry, Ben, and I didn't always agree with one another, but it was a spirited conversation. Here it is.

Speaker 3 So without further ado, Dan Senor, Barry Weiss, Ben Shapiro, please join us on the stage as we confer upon you the 2025 Herzl Pride.

Speaker 3 It's now my great privilege, and I want to use this occasion to thank him, to welcome my colleague, my friend, and our real intellectual leader, John Silver, to moderate this conversation.

Speaker 3 Eric, thank you. Everyone knows that on November 4th, Zoran Mandami won the New York Mural Race.

Speaker 3 A Democratic socialist and one of the most vocal anti-Israel voices in New York politics, he rode to victory in the most important Jewish city in America.

Speaker 3 Just before that, on October 27th, Tucker Carlson entertained Nick Fuentes, a Jew hating racist who hates Jewish Americans and African Americans and Indian Americans and women, who hates the people sitting in this room and gave him a gigantic national platform.

Speaker 3 When the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended Tucker, it provoked some real soul-searching on the right. And in the days and weeks since, the conflicts have broken out into the open.

Speaker 3 Now, one of our Herzl Prize laureates, Ben Shapiro, devoted an entire show to explaining why, in video clip after video clip, Tucker Carlson is, in Ben's words, if I can quote you to yourself, the most virulent super spreader of vile ideas in America.

Speaker 3 Now, just last weekend, the Christian author Rod Dreer spent some time in Washington, and he reported first in a blog post and then in a more refined and pointed piece that Barry published.

Speaker 3 He found significant numbers of young conservative staffers are attracted to the very civic poison that Fuentes represents.

Speaker 3 Now, I don't know how to dimension the scale exactly, but something real is happening. There's a generational problem where young people are being attracted to rage and nihilism.

Speaker 3 So Dan, Ben, Barry, we're going to face threats from every direction. We're going to discuss them this afternoon.
But what we're not going to do is whine and plead and complain.

Speaker 3 I want to start right in on conservatism. Ronald Reagan gave his famous time for choosing speech in 1964.

Speaker 3 The thing that we were choosing between then was, of course, freedom versus socialism, was civilizational renewal versus civilizational decline.

Speaker 3 He believed conservatism meant conserving the best of America. If this is a time for choosing, what's the the nature of the choice? Ben, I want to start with you.

Speaker 3 What would you say we're choosing between? So I think we're choosing between two separate visions of America.

Speaker 3 And that's why all attempts to reduce the sort of rift in the right to arguments over Israel, which I think is a lie. It's not just about Israel.
It's about a far broader issue.

Speaker 3 Because honestly, there are lots of disagreements we can all have about Israeli policy. That's not what's actually happening right now.

Speaker 3 And many of the people who say that it's about Israel, if they just wanted it to be about Israel, that wouldn't require them to, you know, fluff a Nazi on their show.

Speaker 3 The real question is, what is the nature of that rift? And so I think on the one side of conservatism, you have a sort of classically conservative vision of what America is.

Speaker 3 So a meritocracy, a place that's based in traditional biblical virtue, what we used to call Judeo-Christian virtue, based on both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and a belief that in America, you could get ahead if you tried, that there was, in fact, a logic to the universe.

Speaker 3 And if you followed the rules, then you would do well in America. Freedom, virtue, meritocracy, these were what American conservatism was built upon.

Speaker 3 The Constitution of the United States embeds these values in the systems by which we live and into our government. That's sort of the classical version.

Speaker 3 And then there's the new version, and it's not conservative, it's just reactionary.

Speaker 3 And in order to understand what's happening with the young people who are falling into nihilism, I think you first have to understand what they are reacting to.

Speaker 3 What they are reacting to is a perception that over the course of the last couple of decades, white Christian men in particular have been targeted by elite members of the media and of government for particular ire and possibly destruction.

Speaker 3 That is the feeling that has arisen among young white Christian men, particularly. The idea being that if you're white, you're victimized by DEI.
This arose to the top during 2020, during BLM summer.

Speaker 3 That if you're a man, that you've been targeted by the idea that masculinity is inherently bad and therefore men need to feminize themselves or they need to be written out of the social compact.

Speaker 3 They have to be treated as inherently toxic.

Speaker 3 And Christian, the idea being that Christians are a threat and Christianity is inherently bigotry and therefore Christianity has to be put to the side or crushed.

Speaker 3 Now, there's always a seed of truth in a lot of this, actually, but the reaction to that should be freedom of religion, traditional virtue, meritocracy. That's what, that's the normie response.

Speaker 3 The normie conservative response to that would be, yes, all of that's happening and it's bad. And the response to that should be that you should be, for example, a good Christian, right?

Speaker 3 If you're a young Christian man, you should be a good Christian who believes in Christian principles and then pursues those in accordance with traditional virtue.

Speaker 3 That if you don't like the treatment of some race above others, you should pursue a colorblind meritocracy.

Speaker 3 That if you're somebody who doesn't like being treated as lesser for being a man, you should actually act as a traditionally masculine man, meaning defend, protect, get married, have kids, build.

Speaker 1 Just like Andrew Tate, right?

Speaker 3 The Andrew Tate thing is a great comp for what's happening with Flint. This is the political version of Andrew Tate.
It's just to burn it all down, right? We hate all of this.

Speaker 3 All the institutions have been thoroughly destroyed. And so now we just have to get rid of whatever superstructure remains, just tear down the facade.

Speaker 3 And I think that's what you're seeing so much on the right. Now, that's deeply dangerous.

Speaker 3 It's also really seductive for young men who are now being told something that is the most seductive thing you can say in politics, which is it's not your fault and you have no responsibility to fix it.

Speaker 3 It's not your fault and you have no responsibility to fix it. Got you Zora Mamdani in New York.
Truly.

Speaker 3 Him going out and saying affordability over and over as though if he said it three times straight, like Betelgeuse, it would just appear.

Speaker 3 What he was really just saying was affordability, everything's too expensive. And don't worry, it's not your fault.
Give me more power and I will fix it for you by destroying everything.

Speaker 3 And that's a very seductive political message.

Speaker 3 I think that politicians on both sides of the aisle and political voices, people like Tucker Carlson, make a lot of money and do really well by pushing this particular perspective.

Speaker 3 I think that's the big rift that you're seeing on the right emerging right now. Barry, you are a student of anti-Semitism.
You're a teacher about anti-Semitism in your work.

Speaker 3 What Ben just described actually follows a classic anti-Semitic paradigm in which you identify this small group of people over there and it's their fault.

Speaker 3 And I wonder what role you think anti-Semitism is actually playing in the right battle.

Speaker 1 Well, Ben sort of articulated it, which is the choice right now, and I hope this is now clear to everyone, it is not a choice between right and left.

Speaker 1 There's no competing anymore between which side is worse, right?

Speaker 1 The bad people are everywhere, which is both the good news and obviously the bad news, because what it means is that the choice is not between which side you're caucusing with.

Speaker 1 It's between are you caucusing with the people that believe in the American project or not?

Speaker 1 It's not a coincidence that the people that are both trafficking in and koshering anti-Semitism are doing that alongside the trafficking and koshering of anti-Americanism.

Speaker 1 That is the choice right now. It's between people in this country who have given up on the idea of the American project and turned their back on it.

Speaker 1 And you see it in the way they're revising our heroes and our history and the heroes and history of Western civilization more broadly, Churchill being the obvious emblem of that, and the people who still believe in that.

Speaker 1 And the great news is that that's still the majority of Americans. That's at least what I believe.
And we'll get to that a little maybe when we talk about CBS.

Speaker 1 The other way to maybe articulate it is it's a choice between the politics of resentment, which gets you to anti-Semitism almost as the next step, and a politics of individual responsibility.

Speaker 1 And the politics of resentment. You know, the right and the left do not have exclusivity to that.
And that's what you're seeing right now.

Speaker 1 And so it should be no surprise that in a moment of finger pointing and looking for the scapegoat who has left housing unaffordable or has left you in a city or in a town that has suffered from fentanyl addiction or deindustrialization, all of these pathologies that are real and true, that people are looking to point the finger and they point the finger at the Jewish people.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 Dana, I want to ask you to comment on that, but there's another thing that I want to know from you in particular.

Speaker 3 You know, as I sort of very, as a casual observer, you know, when I look at someone like Tucker's numbers on YouTube, You see, like, you know, he'll have an episode on healthcare policy and like his numbers are here and then a number about how Ashkenazi Jews actually can't get COVID and his numbers are like way up here.

Speaker 3 And it makes you wonder if actually anti-Semitism as a business model has a kind of market and it is a market driver in media. Yeah, I think it does.

Speaker 3 It's just not clear yet how it translates into electoral politics and how it translates into policy. So I agree with Barry that what we've learned is there are bad people everywhere.

Speaker 3 But what we've also learned that on one side of this debate, those views are now the mainstream. And on the other side of the debate, it's the jury still out.
So on the right, there are bad people.

Speaker 3 It's not clear yet whether we hope, thankfully, Ben's heroic work these last couple of weeks. I mean, hopefully there will be a lot of pushback so those views don't become the mainstream.

Speaker 3 But we know that on the left, they are the mainstream. Okay.

Speaker 3 So just start with the right. I mean, this whole debate over the last few weeks has kind of forgotten that Donald Trump is still president of the United States.

Speaker 3 And oh, by the way, he's going to be president of the United States for over three more years.

Speaker 3 And despite all the stuff online that we're freaking out about, he has not apologized once or pulled back from perhaps the most muscular foreign policy and most pro-Israel foreign policy of our lifetime.

Speaker 3 Neither have Republican members of Congress. So again, you ask a Republican member of Congress these days, most of them are not worried about their prospects in a general election.

Speaker 3 Most of them live in fear of a primary challenge from the right. Most of them are in pretty safe red districts.

Speaker 3 And yet not a single one has come to the defense of Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes, except two, sorry. Tom Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Speaker 3 Marjorie Taylor Green, who lost her endorsement for re-election from Donald Trump. That's it.

Speaker 3 Speaker Johnson came out with a strong statement. Leaders like Ted Cruz have come out with strong statements.

Speaker 3 Even elected foot soldiers in the MAGA movement like Josh Hawley came out with strong statements.

Speaker 3 If you look at the institutions that are blowing up in the last couple weeks, it's the Heritage Foundation that's blowing up.

Speaker 3 It's not actually the institutions that we care about and that we're identified with. So I actually, I think the left has spoken, right?

Speaker 3 I think back to Obama's speech in 2004 at the Democratic Convention. Like if you think about that speech, it launched basically close to two decades of Obama defining the left and democratic politics.

Speaker 3 All right. That was like a project for a couple of decades.
I think we are at the beginning of Mamdaniism as a national project.

Speaker 3 I I think the Democratic Party is looking to Mamdani now as like the next, not that he can run, but just the idea that what he represents is where the Democratic Party is going, where the left is going.

Speaker 3 You talked about a time for choosing? Like, it is so clear if that's their mainstream, then they have chosen. Our mainstream yet, what is mainstream on our side, has not chosen.

Speaker 3 We've got a lot of work to do. I'm worried, but I'm not alarmed.

Speaker 1 You're not alarmed?

Speaker 3 I'm not alarmed because I obstruct that every leader that is under this pressure from this online mob is still standing strong. Who has fallen? No one has fallen.

Speaker 1 What does it mean that the vice president of the United States had Tucker Carlson on his show when he hosted Charlie Kirk's show? What does that mean?

Speaker 3 I am patiently waiting for the vice president to come out like a number of other leaders have come out in recent weeks.

Speaker 3 I do think that there's comfort to be had in the fact that elected leaders have acted in such a patriotic American way, rejecting the politics of scapegoating.

Speaker 3 That is something that should give us some hope.

Speaker 3 The thing that, at least as I read Rod's haunting reporting that he points us to is a danger among the young, Ben, you have been able to speak into the lives of young men in America as well as anybody.

Speaker 3 You started to tell us the attraction that they have to this nihilism, but tell us what we should understand, not about thank God we have Speaker Johnson, but about the 20-year-olds who are trying to find their way in this movement and in this country.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, I think there are a few factors that are playing into this.

Speaker 3 One of them I discussed already, which is sort of this reactionary reactionary backlash to a feeling that if you grew up under Barack Obamaism and followed by Mamdaniism, you're reacting to that and you react in the most nihilistic possible way.

Speaker 3 The other truth is that one of the things that distinguishes President Trump from other members of his administration, shall we say, is that President Trump is not too online.

Speaker 3 He's actually very not online. He doesn't actually follow what's going on in X at all.

Speaker 3 And so if you look at literal printouts of mainstream media outlets, people will print out actual online outlets like the free press and they will put it in front of him in order for him to read it.

Speaker 3 Because of that, he is disconnected from the insanity of the algorithmic nuttiness that's happening on, for example, X or TikTok. But that's not true for young people.

Speaker 3 Young people are immersed in this. They are immersed in it hours and hours a day.

Speaker 3 And so it's pretty easy to fake them into believing that when they are doing trolly memory about Hitler, that it has no real world effect and that it's not affecting their brain in any real way, that it's just a joke until it isn't actually a joke anymore.

Speaker 3 And it turns out that you're holding a lot of those beliefs. And so, you know, that online ecosystem is where a lot of this stuff is happening.

Speaker 3 I also think that, again, it's true that young people have been disserved by a political class that lies to them.

Speaker 3 And maybe this is just the nature of politics, which is that politicians have a stake in telling you that you have unsolvable problems that only they can solve if you give them enough power.

Speaker 3 But the problem is, if you say that to young men and you remove the agency from them, they get angry and they don't know what to do with that anger. They don't know where to go.

Speaker 3 What young men really want, right? I mean, having been one at one time, what young men really want to do is actually go build things.

Speaker 3 They actually want to go out and forge into the world and be useful and be productive. And this is why you'll hear complaints.
Oh, I can't get married anymore. I can't buy a house.

Speaker 3 I mean, you can, but that's a thing that you're being told over and over. You can't get married.
Why can't you get married? Right. I can't have, yes, you certainly can have kids.
I can't buy a house.

Speaker 3 No, you actually can. You just have to move out of New York.
I got so much crap for this last week. You just might have to move out of New York City and like go check out Texas.

Speaker 3 And again, there are things that you can do to make life more affordable in New York City.

Speaker 3 But I think that one of the things that I would love to see the right do with young men is actually do a little bit more tough talk with them.

Speaker 3 I think that the right is actually weirdly feminizing young men by giving them a victimology to buy into.

Speaker 3 So I was talking with a fairly famous soccer coach at one point who had coached both men and women. And he said, the difference between coaching a women's team and a men's team is pretty obvious.

Speaker 3 If you go into halftime or you go into whatever the break is, and I'm an American, I don't follow soccer. You go into the,

Speaker 3 you go into whenever the break is, and if the men are playing poorly, then the women are playing poorly.

Speaker 3 You go in and you have to say to them, listen, we didn't get it together, but we're really going to get it together now. You know, we're all going to unite as one.

Speaker 3 If you go in there and you yell at them and you tell them how much they suck, they'll absolutely collapse.

Speaker 3 But if you go into a bunch of men, you say, guys, we're going to, you know, that wasn't so bad. We're going to get it together.
The guys look at you like, what the hell's wrong with you?

Speaker 3 If you want the guys to go run through a wall for you, you go in there, you tell them how much they sucked. You tell them that they were awful during the first period.

Speaker 3 And now you're going to have to like pick up your game because you're a bunch of, right? And that's how you actually get men going.

Speaker 3 But weirdly enough, this is actually what Andrew Tate and Fuentes are doing in a weird way, right? Fuentes actually talks to his audience this way. He says, you guys are a bunch of cocks.

Speaker 3 And what you need to do is go and take out the Jews, basically. And Tate will say sort of the same thing about women.
But what the right needs to actually say, and again, it's politically unpopular.

Speaker 3 Listen, if you're failing in life, yes, we can get the obstacles out of your way, but kind of, it's a little your fault. It's a little your fault.

Speaker 3 You should actually pick your ass up and go out and do something useful. And this notion that you, as a Gen Z male, are facing these obstacles that no other human has faced for all of human history.

Speaker 3 Like read a book for once. Like seriously, like go talk to your grandfather.

Speaker 1 But I think the amount of penetration these characters who for certain people of a certain generation, you probably don't even know who, you vaguely know who we're talking about, just one tiny anecdote.

Speaker 1 I spoke at the Jewish high school in Pittsburgh, the Orthodox Jewish High School. This was five years ago.

Speaker 1 The number one person that all of the young men, this is an Orthodox school, wanted to talk to me about afterward was Andrew Tate. What do I think about Andrew Tate?

Speaker 1 They were all watching this guy who I had vaguely heard of at the time called Andrew Tate.

Speaker 1 And it just shouldn't be surprising that, you know, the past decade, they've lived through this movement that went by the name of wokeism that Ben was alluding to in the first answer that told them that, you know, everything was off limits.

Speaker 1 It tried to censor even the most normal viewpoints. And so the backlash that we're getting to it now is nothing is off limits.
Nothing is sacred.

Speaker 1 And if you try and tell me that, you know, going and screaming a racial epithet is bad and wrong objectively, I'm going to now tell you that that's cancel culture.

Speaker 1 And like, that is going to take a while to burn out because the power of the movement we have all just lived through that told us that, you know, the most normal things in the world, like there are differences between men and women, was somehow verboten.

Speaker 1 It shouldn't surprise us that we're now living through the backlash to that.

Speaker 3 But why hasn't this had political purchase? I mean, that's what I'm still struck by.

Speaker 3 I mean, Nick Fuentes endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024 because he didn't think that Trump would be serious about borders or whatever.

Speaker 3 Trump glosses over the top of it because Trump is transgressive in manner, but actually quite normally in his politics. And so he can kind of embrace both things at once, right?

Speaker 3 Young people like the fact that Trump is transgressive in the way that he approaches politics and he'll yell at people and he'll insult them.

Speaker 3 All the things that, you know, people who are older find insulting about him and annoying about him, young people actually really like that about him. So there's that.

Speaker 3 But beyond that, they haven't aged into the voting population yet.

Speaker 3 And so I think that one of the things that we have to be very careful of is trying to write that off as not a problem with the rise of the people.

Speaker 1 Do you think the great lesson of the left over the past 15 years that everything was downstream of online culture, absolutely everything. And so shouldn't the same lesson hold up?

Speaker 3 That was one lesson. The other lesson is the leadership of the left and the Democratic Party never confronted it.
That's true.

Speaker 3 And what I think you're seeing right now, and we'll see, is major players on the right confronting it.

Speaker 3 So the Democratic leadership and the left were like deer in the headlights when the squads got going and all that got going. And they were just like, don't make a big deal about it.

Speaker 3 It'll kind of, it'll burn out. And it didn't.
Obviously, it gained steam and now it is the left.

Speaker 3 And right now, so far, with some exceptions, I've been by and large encouraged by by those on the right who are willing to stare this stuff down and say, not only am I going to confront it, but I actually think there are some who think there's political purchase, political opportunity in confronting it in 2026 and 2028.

Speaker 3 I want to now take up Ben's challenge. I think you put your finger on something important.

Speaker 3 You say these people, Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, they are speaking into the lives of young men in a way that normie conservatives are not.

Speaker 3 So now let's ask ourselves the question, as Jews and as Americans, what actually could Jewish ideas leadership say to young men and to young women?

Speaker 3 What can Jewish ideas actually do to renew, replenish, revitalize this society that we care so much about?

Speaker 3 So I really think that biblical ideas, and here I say they're Jewish ideas, but they were extended through Christianity as well.

Speaker 3 But the sort of very Jewish idea that you have a role and a responsibility in the world and you need to go do that in a muscular way, that actually Judaism values the idea that you're supposed to forge force into the world and you have moral duties that you're supposed to do every single day.

Speaker 3 These are things that you are required to do every single day and that you're a loser if you don't. Really, you're a loser and you're making your life worse.
Okay, we shouldn't be shy about this.

Speaker 3 I think that we're all too shy about this sort of stuff with young men particularly. We say, oh, well, you know, well, if you choose not to, that's why if you shouldn't, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 Your life will be worse and you will be a loser if you don't do these things that are going to make your life better. And again, I speak to young men all the time.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 the reality is if they don't hear that message, then you're not speaking it proudly enough.

Speaker 3 And I think that's the mistake that, you you know, frankly, people in the pro-Israel community make all the times sort of an apologetic approach to the way that they're pro-Israel, or people in the Jewish community speak about anti-Semitism.

Speaker 3 It's almost an apology for, you know, can't we just be tolerated? Saying, no, there's an actual value system. That value system actually coincides with traditional Americanism.

Speaker 3 And that gives you something to do. If you listen to Nick Fuentes, you are likely to be a loser.
He is a loser.

Speaker 3 He is a basement dwelling, ridiculous loser who spends his days ranting on the internet to a bunch of other basement dwellers. Don't be one of those people.
You don't have to be that.

Speaker 3 You can actually go get a job. You can get married.
You can have a girlfriend. You can actually, you know, make something of yourself in this world.
And it was really funny.

Speaker 3 There's one point where actually Tucker made some sort of disparaging reference to Fuentes about this when he was doing an interview with another delightful person, Candace Owens.

Speaker 3 And in the middle of this interview, he sort of made a disparaging remark about Fuentes. And Fuentes went right back at him and said, you know, you're insulting the basement dwellers.

Speaker 3 Tucker, those are your people. Like you said they were your people, but actually you scorned them.
Here's the thing.

Speaker 3 Nobody should scorn people who are unsuccessful in life when they don't know better. But it's our job to teach them to know better.

Speaker 3 If you listen to Nick Fuentes, there is no way your life gets markedly better. In fact, it gets markedly worse.

Speaker 3 If you listen to the life prescriptions of Andrew Tate, your life will get worse, not better. You will end up alone, joyless, with no purpose in life.
You will end up not being very wealthy.

Speaker 3 You'll made him wealthy by giving him your money. by being grifted upon.

Speaker 3 And if we don't make that aggressive case on behalf of our own values, and yes, against those values, not in a shy way, then we deserve to lose. Barry, how do you see that?

Speaker 1 It's impossible to go after Ben. Like, this is just such a setup.
I hate my position in this panel. Can I just say?

Speaker 1 It's just to echo so much of what he said, but I'll say it in a slightly slower-paced way that makes hey seem smart.

Speaker 3 Make you sound more reflective. Exactly.

Speaker 1 You can just all like put it on double speed when you're walking back on your iPhone videos.

Speaker 1 Judaism to me, and I think I speak for many people in this room who, after October 7th felt a redoubling and a recommitment to our Judaisms, like specifically Judaism, and getting more and more connected to observance.

Speaker 1 To me, there's just no better recipe for a meaningful life. Now, is that recipe relevant to every young man that is, you know, getting attracted to Nick Fuentes?

Speaker 1 Maybe not, but maybe in their own flavor, it will be. And, you know, think about the kind of message that Charlie Kirk was trying to put out into the world.

Speaker 1 I think that was an enormously enormously effective message. I do think that our community, and I know I'm speaking to a group of incredibly like-minded people.

Speaker 1 Like, if I were going to belong to a club, it would be Tifa. I don't belong to any clubs, but it would be this.

Speaker 1 It's just so much of what everyone in this room is doing. We should have said this from the outset, is so admirable, so incredible.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.

Speaker 1 There are not enough adjectives to praise the kind of work that's going on in this room. We also need to get out of our own bubble and get out to speak to real Americans.

Speaker 1 Not that we're not real Americans. We are.
I'm not dismissing what Ben has said. Ben's right.
Other generations have had it much worse, but there are real problems in this country.

Speaker 1 And I think a lot of what's gone on in our community over the past few decades is a kind of huffing the fumes of, you know, certain old alliances that aren't really relevant today.

Speaker 1 certain old frameworks that aren't really relevant today, and really challenging ourselves to refresh our assumptions about who are the communities where we should really be investing our capital.

Speaker 1 I hate using this word, but our allyship in the real sense of that word.

Speaker 1 And I think the more that we can be thinking about that and kind of looking beyond the old paradigms, we will be in a much better place as a community.

Speaker 3 You think it's hard going after Ben. Imagine me having to have to go after Ben and you.
But you're saying all the hopeful things. I know.

Speaker 3 Someone here. I know.

Speaker 3 It's like you wrote this entire book, The Genius of Israel, in which you make the case that actually one of the very things that Americans can most learn is from this national example. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, you know, I'm thinking of Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, who said people respect Jews who are...

Speaker 1 Respect Judaism.

Speaker 3 Exactly. That if you're serious about your Judaism, let the rest speak for itself.
And that's important to keep in mind. And I think there's a story also here.

Speaker 3 You mentioned the book I wrote about Israel.

Speaker 3 I also think one of the great lessons of the last two years is the best message to the world, to our friends and to our critics, as it relates to what Israel is doing, is when Israel operates successfully from a position of strength.

Speaker 3 That is the single most important thing.

Speaker 3 If you look at the last two years, when Israel or allies of Israel or people that were hoping here that the world would understand shared values, shared history.

Speaker 3 No, when Israel is actually doing what Israel needs to do to survive with incredible strength and success, it is, by the way, point to me, any country in the world.

Speaker 3 like in modern military history that have faced the array of threats that was surrounding Israel and in two years,

Speaker 3 systematically took out all these threats in some dazzling ways. And oh, by the way, at the same time, had the most innovative parts of its economy grow, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, during the war, Google bought a company called Wiz, a cloud security company, for $32 billion.

Speaker 3 Not only was it the largest acquisition Google had made in its history, it's the largest acquisition that any company had made of a private tech company in history.

Speaker 3 And this happened in the middle of the war. NVIDIA just quadrupled the number of positions it's hiring in Israel.
All right. This is all during the war.

Speaker 3 There are more open positions for NVIDIA in Israel today than in all of Europe combined. So what Israel has just experienced is extraordinary.

Speaker 3 And at a time when the United States is, you know, through multiple administrations, has been more or less pulling back from the Middle East, to have this military and intelligence juggernaut in the heart of a region that matters a lot to the war and has now been a case study, a laboratory in the future of warfare.

Speaker 3 There are two laboratories in the future of warfare in the world today, Ukraine and Israel.

Speaker 3 The only thing is Israel has this extraordinary ecosystem that has been developing world-class technologies in terms of the future of warfare.

Speaker 3 And all these countries around the world, all these European countries that cut off arms sales to Israel, which is really amusing because how many of them actually sell to Israel?

Speaker 3 Most of them are importing from Israel, but whatever. All the defense budgets are going up, right, to meet those the NATO 5% number.
They're all going to be banging on Israel's door.

Speaker 3 At Startup Nation Central, we had the stat. Before the war, there was something like 160 defense tech startups in Israel, 160.

Speaker 3 Today, two years later, there's well over 400 defense tech startups in Israel. So

Speaker 3 the world will be rallying to Israeli strength and success, and we need to get out of the business of trying to explain to ourselves and beg for allies.

Speaker 3 This point is so important because it explains why the point that we started off with, which is that so much of the anti-Israel sentiment is rooted in anti-Americanism and anti-meritocracy.

Speaker 3 When Dan talks like this about how well Israel is doing, about how Israel has defeated an enormous array of enemies, which of course is true, how they've done all these unbelievable things, how the shekel is currently trading, I think, three to one.

Speaker 3 It's increased 25% over the course of the war. When you say this stuff, it doesn't alleviate the anti-Israel people's concerns.
It makes them more concerned, right?

Speaker 3 So this idea that it's just because Israel's a schnorr, Israel's dependent.

Speaker 3 Actually, the more Israel shows that it's not a schnorrh and not dependent and actually is individually strong, the more it is hated by the people who are grievancemongers on the right and the people who are grievancemongers on the left, which suggests that the opposition to Israel is not about Israel.

Speaker 3 It's opposition to a generalized meritocracy in which some rise and some fall, and people actually can control their own outcomes.

Speaker 3 And so, that general worldview, which is I'm not doing well, therefore I am oppressed, when you extend that to foreign policy, that turns into Mamdaniism, third worldism, and a Tucker-esque anti-Americanism.

Speaker 3 That's what it turns into. And all of that reaches its apotheosis with opposition to Israel.

Speaker 3 We've come into this question of Israel sort of on the side. I want to confront it head on.
And Barry, I'm going to ask you to go first.

Speaker 3 All three of you have critics who say Ben Shapiro, Dan Cener, Barry Weiss hijacked America for Jewish interests, that you only care about Israel, that that's your litmus test, that you care more about Jerusalem than Des Moines.

Speaker 3 You're not America first, you're Israel first. Make the case that support for Israel is in America's interest.

Speaker 1 Come on, I'm not going first on this. It's Dan.
That's a Dan question.

Speaker 3 Dan, what do you say?

Speaker 3 You know, Alexander Haig, a little over 40 years ago, described Israel as that unsinkable aircraft carrier, that unsinkable battleship in the heart of a region that matters a lot to America, except that aircraft carrier, that battleship, doesn't have any American lives on it and no American lives are at risk, which is that Israel in the heart of a region that is really messy and really dangerous has America's back.

Speaker 3 And Israel is not asking America to deploy young men to risk their lives to defend Israel.

Speaker 3 Israel is really asking for there to be no daylight between the United States and Israel when it comes to facing really mostly Israel's diplomatic threats and efforts to isolate Israel.

Speaker 3 That's what it wants from the United States, is no daylight. It doesn't mean there can't be disagreements behind closed doors.

Speaker 3 One of the great successes of the last couple of months was compare the track record of all these European countries that tried to end the war by going to the UN to recognize a Palestinian state, and look at their track record in winding down the war, where President Trump was was just like, Yeah, yeah, those kids over there, they're having their little experiment with the Palestinian state, while Trump was just systematically backing the Israeli government's decision to go into Gaza City.

Speaker 3 And the whole world was saying to the White House, you got to rein them in, you got to rein them in. And he's like, I'm not rein them in.
Like, let them do what they're going to do.

Speaker 3 There was no daylight. And so, Israel was not asking the United States to go fight in Gaza City.
Gaza City was key, it was the key stronghold for Hamas. It's like they're Berlin or they're Moscow.

Speaker 3 Israel was not asking U.S. forces to go into Gaza City.
It was just asking the U.S. to have Israel's back externally.
And I think that that's an incredible return on investment. Like what the U.S.

Speaker 3 gets out of this relationship in such a strategic part of the world to have Israel, which is now indisputably the most important geopolitical power in the Middle East, like bar none.

Speaker 3 And if you just go metric by metric in terms of what Israel provides to the U.S.

Speaker 3 from a security standpoint, from an intelligence standpoint, from a technology and innovation standpoint, I can't think of another country in the world whose alliance with the United States gives back more to the United States for this modest investment.

Speaker 3 Everyone in this room agrees with that.

Speaker 1 But why does that have no purchase right now among the kinds of people we've been talking about?

Speaker 3 That's a great question. So I think it does have purchase.

Speaker 3 I think it's really hard to make that case when we've just gone through two years of the most covered war in history from a journalism standpoint or a social media standpoint.

Speaker 3 Like, I mean, maybe the Vietnam War was heavily covered, but it was before, you know, cable news and social media and all the rest. So this is, imagine the Vietnam War with TikTok.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's what the war in Gaza was. It was like the Vietnam War, but with TikTok covering every single second.

Speaker 3 And I don't think anybody can, even the message I'm articulating here, as persuasive as you may think it is. I don't think it can compete with that.

Speaker 3 You know, like a billion people out there flooding the algorithms with these data against little old us, to quote George H.W. Bush.

Speaker 3 I think in this environment, that two-year frame, it would be impossible. I think now that the war is over, the temperature will come down.

Speaker 3 It will not be flashing across everyone's TikTok screens and television screens, or most television screens, with the exception of CBS News.

Speaker 3 And I think the temperature will come down, and now is the time to make that case. There's about to be this negotiation over a memorandum of understanding.

Speaker 3 This is like the third one, this decade or two-decade-long relationship security arrangement between the U.S. and Israel.
I think that's where it's going to come up.

Speaker 3 That's where the debate's going to be. And thank God it's going to be taking place, not against the backdrop, of the IDF storming into all these cities in Gaza.

Speaker 3 And do you have a particular point of view about the kind of aid that the United States should give to Israel? I mean, I would prefer that Israel get off of American aid as fast as humanly possible.

Speaker 3 This has also been my position for the last 20 years.

Speaker 3 I think that if you look at the beginnings of the MOU, people don't understand that the beginning of the MOU is essentially the United States government bribing Israel not to develop the LAV fighter.

Speaker 3 Israel was developing a jet fighter that was actually as sophisticated or more sophisticated than the F-16. And the American government looked at that and they said, we don't want you to do that.

Speaker 3 So instead, we will give you a defense subsidy. You will then spend much more than the amount of money that we give you for a defense subsidy on American technology.

Speaker 3 And we will give you F-16s and you can make upgrades to those F-16s instead of building your own jet.

Speaker 3 The MOU, I think, again, it provides a convenient talking point for people who don't understand geopolitics in any significant way.

Speaker 3 The reality is that in many ways, the MOU is significantly better for the United States than it is for Israel. It allows the United States to yank Israel's chain on matters of security.

Speaker 3 It allows America to hamper Israel's military-industrial complex in fairly significant ways.

Speaker 3 And so I think there's actually a fairly solid case to be made that the MOU is more beneficial to the United States government than it is to the Israeli government.

Speaker 3 I think for both governments, it would be better if they negotiated toward the end of an MOU.

Speaker 3 And I think that the prime minister would like to do that actually at some point in the very, very near future.

Speaker 3 As far as the argument that being pro-Israel generally means manipulating American policy in favor of Israel, I'll just point out that I know every major pro-Israel voice in the country.

Speaker 3 Not a single major pro-Israel voice in America was calling for a full-scale boots-on-ground invasion of Iran by the United States military. Now, that would certainly benefit Israel.

Speaker 3 It would certainly benefit Israel if the United States decided to dump 500,000 troops into the middle of Iran and take over Tehran. Nobody was arguing for that because it wouldn't help America.

Speaker 3 It would be terrible for America. It would be counterproductive for America.
Everybody that I know who's pro-Israel is pretty happy when President Trump decided to bomb Fordo and then call it a day.

Speaker 3 Very surgical, very targeted, and no risk to American lives. Exactly.
There was no blowback. Like those are all very pro-America.
points of view.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I think that it's worth noting that when we have these discussions, there's a high level of dishonesty about these discussions.

Speaker 3 So, there are people who I think are honest isolationists, misunderstanding the universe, but there are people who will say, We shouldn't give aid to Ukraine, and we shouldn't give aid to Israel and we shouldn't give aid to Egypt and we shouldn't give aid to Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 3 Fine. Okay, I think that's stupid.
I think that's poorly thought out.

Speaker 3 That vacuum will be filled by somebody who is anti-American, and then the world will essentially collapse into various spheres of influence. The freedom of the seas will be gone.

Speaker 3 All of your products get more expensive, all your businesses go under. It turns out the world is very interlinked.
But that's at least an honest point of view.

Speaker 3 What I find bizarre is when there's disproportionate focus on Israel at the expense of everything else, obviously.

Speaker 3 I mean, the United States spends six, seven billion dollars a year on military bases in Japan. In Japan, there's not an ongoing conflict to theoretically withdraw our troops from Japan.

Speaker 3 We spend a couple billion dollars a year on keeping our troops in South Korea. We spend something like $5 billion a year keeping our troops at Ramstein in Germany.

Speaker 1 And nobody that advocates for those things would be accused of being Germany first or South Korea first.

Speaker 1 The whole thing is just fundamentally anti-Semitic, and we have to call that out and reject it. The entire frame is despicable.

Speaker 3 Barry Dan's description of the American case for Israel.

Speaker 3 And one reason that it might not be so persuasive in the general public, as you pointed out, is not only, Dan, because it was one of the most reported on wars, but it was also one of the most misreported on wars.

Speaker 3 And so what I want to do is step into the media environment, Barry, that you're now in. You very publicly resigned from the New York Times.

Speaker 3 You wrote this galvanizing resignation letter about institutional capture there. You explained that you're leaving to build something new.
And you did. The free press has been an unbelievable success.

Speaker 3 You've now sold the free press. You're going on into CBS and I want to ask you why.
Why did you decide that was the right thing to do?

Speaker 3 After making such a clear, compelling statement about building something new, you've now made the decision to go back into a big media institution and to try to renew it.

Speaker 3 So tell us what you're thinking.

Speaker 1 What I'm thinking is, is now I'm not going in as a lowly sub-opinion editor trying to smuggle through heterodox pieces of mine in other people. I'm going in as the person trying to lead CBS News.

Speaker 1 So that's the fundamental

Speaker 1 difference.

Speaker 1 And I should say with the absolutely passionate backing of the people that are now running CBS News, which is Paramount Peace Guy, whatever the company is called, and people who fundamentally understand the moment that we're in.

Speaker 1 Look, I should say that founding the free press and building the free press along with my wife and my sister has been, I don't think anything is going to ever top it for me professionally.

Speaker 1 Just the joy of working with people that I admire and love so much, and the absolute joy of the culture of the free press, which continues on.

Speaker 1 And we're going to be making some really exciting announcements soon. It was just incredible.

Speaker 1 And the total freedom and independence of it, and the speed at which you can move when you're not part of a larger company. There's never been HR at the free press.
It's great.

Speaker 1 Why am I doing what I'm doing? Because of the kind of conversation that we're having here today. I think that we're at a very, very precarious moment in this country, in the West more generally.

Speaker 1 And as incredible as the work that we're doing every single day at the free press, we're going to hit 2 million subscribers, I hope, by the new year.

Speaker 1 It's 2 million people in a country of 330 million, right? This is an opportunity. to take the values and ethos that we have stood for, which is very old school, right?

Speaker 1 It's honest journalism, a very radical thing in America in the 21st century, a politically mixed newsroom in which a third of people voted for Trump, a third voted for Kamala, a third didn't vote at all.

Speaker 1 Like that doesn't exist in any other mainstream news organization in the country.

Speaker 1 And we are incredibly proud of that and incredibly proud of what it means to love and work with people that you disagree with. We think it leads to truly great journalism, truly great investigations.

Speaker 1 And this was an opportunity to take those values that we have stood for and worked so hard to stand up in the world and now take it to an audience of tens of millions, ultimately, I hope, more people.

Speaker 1 And so the reason isn't because I particularly, you know, came into the world thinking I'm going to be a great television executive. It's because all of us see the moment that we're in.

Speaker 1 And all of us see that the choices that it feels like we have sometimes, which is Hassan Piker and Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes and, you know, Andrew Tate, the kind of people that are rising in the podcast charts, those don't actually represent our values.

Speaker 1 And I don't think that they represent the values and the worldview of the vast majority of Americans.

Speaker 1 And so this is an opportunity to speak for the 75%, for the people that are on the center left and the center right, that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in, which is liberty and freedom and individual responsibility.

Speaker 1 And in the most basic level, the right to know what is actually going on in the world, not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what's actually going on in the world and in your community.

Speaker 1 So you can make decisions about where to send your kids to school, about where to live and about how to vote. That used to just be normal.

Speaker 1 And the goal of what we're trying to do at CBS is to get back to that normalcy.

Speaker 1 And I feel incredibly energized and enthusiastic because I think that is where the vast majority of Americans actually are.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that articulation of that set of goals to speak into the lives of the 75%,

Speaker 3 how are you going to do that? What's your strategy for success?

Speaker 1 So I think one of the problems is a lot of people have tried to do centrist news. I know this because I am like the target audience for those things.

Speaker 1 And the reason that they have all failed is it's like trying to force feed spinach down someone's throat, right? It's felt very like tofu, oatmeal.

Speaker 1 It's like centrist news is choosing the midpoint between every single topic. It's felt like an absence of charisma and identity.

Speaker 1 And as nostalgic as people might be for an era in which 30 million Americans every night watched Walter Cronkite and saw him as the voice of truth, and I understand why they're nostalgic for that, we're not going back to that.

Speaker 1 So how do you build trust in a moment of unbelievably low trust in all of our public institutions, especially the mainstream press?

Speaker 1 I don't think it's by pretending like we can go back to having a view from nowhere. I think it's about who's in the room, right?

Speaker 1 I think it's about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture. I don't mean that in like a censorious gatekeeping way.

Speaker 1 I mean having people that are clearly, identifiably on the center left and on the center right in conversation with each other. And we've been doing so much of this at the Free Press.

Speaker 1 I was in, where was I, Chicago last week, I think I've lost all track of time, where Dana Lash, former spokeswoman from the NRA, was debating Alan Dershowitz on guns.

Speaker 1 Now, these are people that have wildly different opinions on the Second Amendment, and yet showing that they can have good faith, very passionate, charismatic disagreement and still like each other at the end of the day, we think it's important.

Speaker 1 And so it's, for me, it's always about the curation, like who's in the room?

Speaker 1 How are you showing centurist news, not as the absence of disagreement and the absence of charisma, but explicitly charismatic and disagreeable, and yet doing it in good faith.

Speaker 1 And the other way you do it is, you know, by being really honest with your audience.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, there was that famous Andrew Yang line, this is like the thing he'll probably be remembered for in the way I'll be remembered for leaving the New York Times, where he stood on the stage in 2016, I think it was, at the presidential debate, and basically broke the fourth wall with the audience and was like, look at all of us up here in our caked on makeup, standing behind these podiums doing these like 30-second sound bites for you.

Speaker 1 People understand that like, that's not real.

Speaker 1 And being honest with your audience in the way that, you know, would have been great for public health authorities to be during COVID and say, we said this thing yesterday.

Speaker 1 Actually, you don't need to be spraying down your groceries and stripping off your clothes before you get into your house. And we're going to update it according to what we know today.

Speaker 1 So being able to do that in a really candid way with the audience and do very basic things that you need when you want to build trust, which is tell people the facts you know when you know them, admit when you make a mistake or get it wrong, correct the record, like that actually, I believe, still really matters.

Speaker 1 And you don't do that overnight. You do that story by story by story, decision by decision.
And that's what I'm going to be spending the foreseeable future doing.

Speaker 3 Ben, I want to ask you a similar kind of media question because, of course, you built the Daily Wire too as an independent institution that had a particular voice to speak into America.

Speaker 3 A lot of people go to the Daily Wire, of course, for news analysis and to understand what's happening in the world. And you and your colleagues explain it to us.

Speaker 3 But what I have found most interesting are Daily Wire experiments beyond the news. And I want to ask you, one of the things that we have discovered at TICFA, we work with hundreds of college students.

Speaker 3 Working with college students is great. But by the time you're in college, you have a worldview which is pretty well formed.

Speaker 3 And then working with high school students, and now we're working with seventh and eighth graders.

Speaker 3 I want to ask you how you decided to modulate beyond the news cycle, the other kinds of content you built. What's your strategy? What are you trying to achieve there?

Speaker 3 So, I think that our general strategy is to make the kinds of content that only we can make. For example, we started doing movies, a big series that's coming out at the end of January.

Speaker 3 It's sort of a big, fancy series. It's very costly.
We have a couple of movies that are in production right now.

Speaker 3 And the goal is that when you watch a movie that we make, you understand that it's not a Netflix movie because Netflix never would have made this.

Speaker 3 And that doesn't mean it has to be purposefully offensive or ridiculous, but it does mean that it has to embody values that you wouldn't normally see from a more legacy media outlet.

Speaker 3 And that's sort of been the way that we've approached all of our content is that we try to find things that are true and say the things that are true, but we're very open, obviously, about our conservative perspective.

Speaker 3 We have disagreements among ourselves inside the company with regard to all of that. But again, most people do not become political in a particular way because they watch the news.

Speaker 3 They watch the news in large part after they've become a little bit political. And the way that people mostly become political is through culture.

Speaker 3 It is through kind of the normal water cooler conversations they have day to day.

Speaker 3 And so one of our goals was once we had built up a big enough audience, could we start to broaden our mission to include things like entertainment content that was going to shape people's values from the time that they were young?

Speaker 3 So for example, we have a children's programming unit called Bentkey that has several hundred thousand subscribers and it embodies sort of classical Judeo-Christian values for kids where you're not worried that you're going to leave your five-year-old in front of the TV and suddenly Miss Rachel is going to be lecturing them about Palestine.

Speaker 3 It's not going to be a concern if you watch our sort of content. So we decided to expand in that way.
Hopefully that'll be justified by the audience and the audience will love what we're doing.

Speaker 3 If not, then we'll have to stick and move in other ways too. That's, That's, as Barry says, one of the nice things about independent media is that you can really move quickly.

Speaker 3 You can adjust on the fly.

Speaker 3 And I just want to take a second and say how courageous it is for Barry to move back into a legacy media space, which does have disproportionate power and weight in the conversation, disproportionate resources in being able to actually ferret out the news.

Speaker 3 The dirty sort of unspoken secret about independent media and legacy media is that independent media has always been at least a little bit parasitic on legacy media.

Speaker 3 They have to rely on the reporting of legacy media because they have so many resources.

Speaker 3 So for Barry to go back into legacy media and give up the freedom and fund that independent media represent in order to actually go and capture an institution and take it back for something like Sanity is an amazing thing.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Dan, we're speaking about your fabulous The Genius of Israel. I want to start to bring our conversation to a close by going to a different piece that you wrote.

Speaker 3 You gave a major speech at the 92nd Street Y

Speaker 3 and then published it in commentary, The Future of American Jewry, after October 7th. And you're in touch with major Jewish institutions, major Jewish decision makers.

Speaker 3 You explain in that speech and in that essay how Jewish philanthropic dollars built institutions that now hate us, universities, NGOs.

Speaker 3 You called for a recalibration of Jewish strategic giving to day schools and camps and gap years and new institutions. So what I want to ask, this is a room full of philanthropists.

Speaker 3 What's your advice? Where should they invest?

Speaker 3 Look, I talk, many of us talk about the phenomenon of October 8th Jews, which were all these Jews that sort of woke up after October 7th and said, okay, so Israel's under attack or Israel's at war, but we're under attack.

Speaker 3 That was like the wake-up call. And they all got in, they all went to go fight anti-Semitism and fight anti-Zionism.
And it was great.

Speaker 3 And they're yelling and screaming in their WhatsApp groups and their school. Like, I call them the Can You Believe WhatsApp groups.

Speaker 1 All the women got like a lot of necklaces.

Speaker 3 Talk about that. Would have been a business to invest in.

Speaker 3 So, so they, so they, no, the what's the can you believe WhatsApp groups are like someone sees an article by Tom Friedman or like a commentary by Christiane Amampur and they put it in the WhatsApp group and the only thing they say is, can you believe Christian Amampur?

Speaker 3 And then it flies, you know, through the WhatsApp.

Speaker 1 Oh yeah, all these comments, comments, comments.

Speaker 3 And then everyone takes it and puts in all their other WhatsApp groups. And it was like activism via WhatsApp groups, right? Which was great, by the way, because I think people were motivated.

Speaker 3 But at the end of the day, that was Jewish adrenaline. And it's not sustainable.
And so the real question is, I'm less concerned now about October 8th, Jews.

Speaker 3 I'm more concerned about October 2025 Jews because that's when the war really wound down, when all the hostages were coming back. Now what?

Speaker 3 And so maybe I gave that 92nd Street speech a few months early because now it's most relevant. You know, Israel's going to possibly have its own commission of inquiry.

Speaker 3 The diaspora should have a commission of inquiry about what went wrong and what we need to do. And the one lesson, we all want silver bullets.
We all want these like sci-fi solutions.

Speaker 3 I get all these questions all the time, like Israel needs to do a better job of getting TikTok, you know, that's all these, everyone wants these big solutions.

Speaker 3 And the reality is, there's some basic things that have worked throughout our history. There has been brutal anti-Semitism in every century.

Speaker 3 And you go back thousands of years, we got like a little break of it, sort of the past 80 years, but now we're getting it too.

Speaker 3 And the one thing that has worked, it sounds so provincial to say this, but it's like raise Jewish kids, like raise Jewish kids, and

Speaker 3 that is actually the best like technology solution you can find or best sci-fi or best WISMAM is raise Jewish kids. That is actually how you get Jewish continuity.

Speaker 3 So then how do you raise Jewish kids? Again, people want all these solutions.

Speaker 3 The reality is formative experiences, putting kids in actual bubbles, in Jewish bubbles during their formative years, because when they're in those Jewish bubbles, that's when Judaism comes alive.

Speaker 3 And that's also, oh, by the way, while they're forming all their key relationships with their closest friends, who despite what any of us think will have much more influence on these kids than any of us will, all right?

Speaker 3 Who the kids spend their time with. So, whether it is in a Jewish day school, and I think Jewish day school is like a no-brainer.
Just three data points. There have been a series of studies.

Speaker 3 One, alumni of Jewish day schools are two times more likely than their peers to be very proud and very public about their Jewish identity.

Speaker 3 They're four times as likely to proudly identify and support the state of Israel. Okay.
Today, some 5%

Speaker 3 of non-Orthodox Jewish kids in America are in Jewish day schools. That is a tragedy.

Speaker 3 And if there's one lesson we can take after these last two years is there should now be a Jewish renaissance in Jewish education and Jewish camping and just figure out that is like, and the challenge is that

Speaker 3 it's uninterest like when you tell people this like the big philanthropist They look at you like they only know of giving to the school that their kid went to or the kid the school they want their kid to go to we we should have like the challenge to our community and people in this room should be, how can we collectively make Jewish day school the price of Catholic school?

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 I remember actually after my 90 seconds through why you said that. So you said it should be the Catholic school model.

Speaker 1 I am a product of everything you say. All of the resources that my parents had went to Jewish day schools and Jewish camps.
Everything went to that.

Speaker 3 Everything. Right.

Speaker 1 Okay. And the idea though that it's the price that it is,

Speaker 1 given the amount of capital in our community, makes my blood boil.

Speaker 1 This is where all of the resources in our community should go without exception. This is it.

Speaker 3 What she said.

Speaker 3 Now, I want to say one other thing.

Speaker 3 I am concerned, just bringing this back to the beginning of our conversation, I am concerned, all this focus today about the CNN exit poll and these Jewish voters who voted for Mamdani and 30% of Jews, okay.

Speaker 3 First of all, I don't buy the CNN poll. I think there's going to be a lot of exit polling that shows the numbers significantly lower.

Speaker 3 But even if 30% of Jews in New York City voted for Mamdani, it means that 70% of Jews voted against the Democratic nominee in New York City, which is kind of extraordinary.

Speaker 3 So I'm actually not as worried about that. But what I am very worried about is I think there's going to be a serious effort now in the U.S.

Speaker 3 by the left to normalize a break between Jewish life and Zionism. And it's only been at the rhetorical level.
And I think you are going to start to see efforts now at the institutional level.

Speaker 3 I think Mamdani is going to go out of his way as mayor to show up at Jewish institutions, to provide city hall municipal government funding for Jewish institutions, but not ones where there's an Israeli flag at the front, not one where they say the prayer for the state of Israel at the end, not ones where they sing Hatikvah.

Speaker 3 And so I think we need to be very mindful. Almost the analogy I can think of is when J Street was on the rise and the Obama administration did a very, I say this sadly, good job.

Speaker 3 of normalizing J Street. So they would say, yeah, we're organizing a meeting of Jewish leaders.

Speaker 3 We'd bring the head of AIPAC, we bring the head of of the Conference of Presidents, and we bring Jeremy Bename from J Street to the meeting and to the White House.

Speaker 3 And it systematically, over time, established the normalization of J Street. I don't want to get into a debate about J Street now, but I do think this is the future.

Speaker 3 There are so many in this country that want to say the day after Mamdani got elected, there was some swastika and there was some vandalism, and Mamdani put out a statement about it. That's great.

Speaker 3 All these Jewish leaders were racing to praise him.

Speaker 3 I was like, don't ask me if he's going to do the same thing when he tries to shut down, you know, the Cornell-Technion partnership or does anything that is harmful.

Speaker 3 So I would caution that yes, I think we should be doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down on Jewish education. I'm all for that.

Speaker 3 I think we also now is the moment to be really, really discerning and we shouldn't be funding anything.

Speaker 1 Right. I should add, to me, Zionism, and this is a horrible mistake our community has made.

Speaker 1 Anytime I hear somebody say, Judaism is a religion, it is a flag for me me about where that conversation is going. In other words, Judaism is a peoplehood and a civilization.

Speaker 1 We do not adhere to modern categories because we're more ancient than all of those categories.

Speaker 1 And so, because we've done such a poor job of explaining what we are to people, to say, I have no problem with Judaism, amazing faith, amazing faith, incredible people.

Speaker 1 It's just Israel I have a problem with.

Speaker 1 We need to do a better job of explaining that our connection to Israel is a part of who we are as a peoplehood and a civilization.

Speaker 1 You need to start the framework that way.

Speaker 3 Here's my last question. At TICFA, we work with a lot of young people, and I'd like to ask you to speak to them.
All of you are patriotic Americans. You're proud Jews.
Those are not natural things.

Speaker 3 They're often the result of some kind of formative experience. Some teacher that you had, some text that you read, some experience that you had.

Speaker 3 And I want to ask if you could recommend something to the students who are listening to us.

Speaker 3 What's the most important thing you'd recommend that they try to read or teacher they try to seek out that can form them is American patriots and as proud Jews?

Speaker 3 So I would say that the first thing you need to do is inculcate this when your kids are like three or four years old. I'm dead serious.
It's not a thing that you read.

Speaker 3 You don't become pro-America because you read a book when you were 14 and you don't become pro-Jewish because you read a book when you were 14.

Speaker 3 You become pro-America because you went to a Fourth of July parade with your parents and had a hot dog when you were three years old.

Speaker 3 Or in my case, because you watched 1776, the musical on a loop when you were five. I know all the lyrics, right?

Speaker 3 And the reason that you're pro-Jewish is because you went to Shul with your parents from the time that you were a little kid and you made Kiddish on Friday nights with your parents.

Speaker 3 Then you traveled to Israel regularly with your parents, right? That's the reason you do this sort of stuff. People live through their experiences.

Speaker 3 I think we spend a lot of time, you know, with the life of the mind, a place like Tikfa. All of us on the stage are constantly engaging in the life of the mind.
But the truth is that...

Speaker 3 What Judaism really is, is a way of life. And that's Americanism too.
It's a way of life. It's a way you navigate the world world and act in the world.
And you don't pick that up from reading a book.

Speaker 3 You read the book, and then it strikes you as true that the thing that it's saying about the life that you live is real.

Speaker 3 But the way that you actually live in the world, the way you navigate the world is inculcated from the time you're very young.

Speaker 3 And so, what I would say is that all of our job is to take our kids, our grandkids, and put them in the experiences that are going to make them more pro-America and more pro-Jewish.

Speaker 3 And if you do that over and over and over, then the books are just going to feel like a confirmation of that stuff when they finally come across those books and they're able to understand those books at 14, 15, 16 years old.

Speaker 1 My parents grew up as once-a-year Shul Jews, both of whom grew up, you know, having bacon in their home.

Speaker 1 Mother's here. I know.
That's why I'm saying it because now I'm about to give her a huge compliment.

Speaker 1 My parents became, this is this testament to things like this. They were on the Wexner lay leadership program.
They became vegetarian, or at least my dad did. They started learning Hebrew.

Speaker 1 Their teachers were people like Joseph Talushkin and Pinchas Peli.

Speaker 1 They took us to Jerusalem when we were seven and nine years old, enrolled in Olplan, sent us to a socialist summer camp where they threw all the sandwiches in a garbage bag, pulled out another random sandwich, and handed you one that you didn't come with, which was an early lesson to me in socialism.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 other than that, it was incredible. Like I came with the Nutella sandwich and I left with like the tuna.
It was very depressing.

Speaker 1 But I say all of that to reaffirm what Ben said, which is that all of my like childhood experiences went to the formation of that that being fundamental to my identity.

Speaker 1 And, you know, at our Seders every year, we read from Sharansky and we also read about how one of the founders wanted to put Moses crossing the Red Sea on the seal.

Speaker 1 And Americanism and Judaism were just completely fused in my family. So much so that the idea of dual loyalty or being an Israel first Jew, it's like a foreign language to me.

Speaker 1 That is how it should feel to every young person in our community.

Speaker 1 I'll say one other thing, which is, you know, this past decade or so has called on those of us who maybe would not have imagined the lives that we are leading.

Speaker 1 Like history has called to us in particular ways.

Speaker 1 And I think that for me, reading the works and the testimony of people that had to play unusual roles in their own times has been incredibly affirming and strengthening for me.

Speaker 1 And we're sitting next to these three busts of one of the greatest of all Jewish heroes, a person, you know, who was basically spat upon when he would go to the Vienna Opera House and who did not know how to recite Kiddush before he wrote the Jewish State.

Speaker 1 And I don't think anything could be more of a an object lesson in what is possible from one single individual choosing to rise to meet their moment than that guy right there.

Speaker 1 And so for young people in this room, if you're looking for something to read tonight, I don't think you could look further than his writings.

Speaker 3 Part of what we were speaking about earlier in the 92nd Street Y speech I gave, part of what I'm expressing is my frustration is that so much of what we teach children about Judaism is all the negatives.

Speaker 3 It's the frustrations, it's the challenges, it's the friction.

Speaker 3 And we don't spend enough time, some of the stuff Ben was talking about and Barry was talking about, is the upside of Judaism, the joy, the ritual.

Speaker 3 the literacy, lifetime commitment to all of those things. It's like a beautiful thing.

Speaker 3 Like when we, in the Singer Foundation, we've supported taking a number of Christians, young Christian evangelicals to Israel over the years.

Speaker 3 And when you survey them after these trips to Israel, what they find absolutely the most moving, not the dazzling IDF bases, not the, you know, standing there at the Golan, like the most popular item on the surveys is when they're at a Shabbat dinner in the home of an Israeli watching the parents bless their children.

Speaker 3 That is what they remember. And so maintaining those rituals and being engaged.
And I'll just say, I lost my father at a young age.

Speaker 3 What Jewish community did for me when I lost my father, like on my 13th birthday, was I don't know what I would have done without Jewish community.

Speaker 3 When you think about like the upside of Judaism, the ritual and the literacy and how much joy and meaning that gives us and young people in our lives, the importance of community during difficult life cycle events.

Speaker 3 All of that is deeply Jewish. It's also deeply American.
It's traditional. It's local.
It's decentralized. And it's empowering to us as parents and it's empowering to our children.

Speaker 3 So I would just say make sure young people live as much of that as possible. possible.
My friends, Dan Senor,

Speaker 3 Barry Weiss, and Ben Shapiro.

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