Hamas’s Propaganda Triumph
Episode Notes
Transcript
Yascha Mounk is the guest this week. Topics include the press’s credulity regarding the Gaza hospital story; the speakerless House; and Yascha’s new book The Identity Trap.
highlights / lowlights
Mona: Poland Shows That Autocracy Is Not Inevitable by Anne Applebaum
Yascha: The shift in media coverage about the hospital in Gaza.
Linda: How America’s Largest Socialist Organization Went from Supporting Israel to Boycotting It by Ron Radosh.
Bill: ‘The Most Disgraceful Behavior By Republicans In My Lifetime’: Gingrich Lets Loose on House GOP and Amir Tibon on How His Family Survived the Hamas Massacre.
Damon: Palestinian right of return matters by Matthew Yglesias.
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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Beg to Differ is sponsored by Better Help. Welcome to to differ, the Bulwark weekly roundtable discussion, featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Sharon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars. Will Saletan of the Brookings institution in the Wall Street Journal, Damon Linker, who writes the sub stack newsletter, notes from the middle ground, and Linda Chavez of the Scannon Center.
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Our special guest this week is Johns Hopkins professor and Atlantic contributor Yasha Munk. Yasha’s new book is titled The Identity Trap, and its arguments are incredibly timely. But before we turn to Yasha’s book, We’re going to first address the big news of the week, which is the Israel Gaza war. President Biden is planning to address the nation Thursday evening. You listeners will already be aware of what he said.
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We are taping before that event. Apparently, though he is going to ask Congress to appropriate hundred billion dollars in aid for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and our southern border. Now, before the Israel Gaza war has really gotten going, that is before the planned or at least expected ground invasion by Israeli forces We have seen an incredible example of the information war taking place. Just as president Biden was preparing to jet off to Israel, and he was also scheduled to stop in Jordan and meet with King Abdullah, and Egypt’s AlCCi, to discuss matters after his stop in Israel, that was canceled because of a story that appeared regarding what was called an Israeli air strike on a hospital in Gaza. And the denunciations of Israel, of course immediately Hamas blamed Israel and said it was an airstrike and many, many, many news organizations in the West, very prestigious and reliable ones, I would even say.
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Like the New York Times, like CNN, like the BBC, etcetera, all reported that there was an Israeli air strike on a hospital where refugees were sheltering, and that hundreds of people had been killed. So, Damon, I’m gonna toss it to you. It turned out that that was not true. And a lot of people are even now afraid to say that this was disinformation, that it was a lie, but it seems to me that it’s very obvious that the story that Israel told and that the US intelligence services have and Pentagon have confirmed is the true story that it was a misfire of a rocket by Palestinian Islamic jihad. But what did you make of the credulity that major news organizations offered to the health ministry of Gaza, which is an arm of Hamas.
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Well, you set it up. Such that, my answer will not be very surprising, and rightly so. This episode was really stomach turning. I was on online as I often am during the day when this was unfolding and watching this live on Twitter slash x. And I really could not believe that the willingness of major, not just like, the kind of far left activists who are kind of trained to just believe anything.
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The Hamas says and will repeat anything they say. But as you indicated, major news organizations that are read all over the world, simply taking Hamas’s assertion at face value when we’re in the middle of wartime. And there’s always the fog of war, which makes news broadcasts about facts on the ground, inherently dangerous, difficult needing a verification. But then you add in the dynamic of a world that’s networked with itself in all these ways on social media platforms where a headline put out by the New York Times can be viewed instantly everywhere. And it is just beyond belief that in that situation, where in fact, our editorial instincts need to be more finely honed than they used to be.
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Not less, what we instead get is this kind of jump on the story. And the trumpening of what Hamas asserts as truth when any awareness of the reality on the ground should teach any journalist that Hamas is not a legitimate government, it is a terrorist organization that has been in charge of the Gaza strip for all for a well over decade now. And its entire mode of waging war is to attempt to win public opinion around the world. By making Israel look as bad as possible. And, I mean, I didn’t know what to think when I first heard there was a bomb that went off in a hospital, five hundred dead.
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I remember thinking, wait a minute. This was just announced ten minutes ago, and they’ve counted bodies. That’s that seems incredibly efficient. How did they manage that? Well, I don’t know.
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Because, you know, maybe it happened actually two hours ago, and they only got word out now. I didn’t know what to think, and I actually tweeted myself something saying a version of what I just said here about the fog of war and how it’s even foggier in the world of social media with propaganda. Is it possible I thought to myself that Israel, you know, launched a missile and it went the wrong way, and it accidentally hit a hospital in killed a bunch of people. Yeah. I guess.
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I don’t know what to think, but it’s so easy if you’re the New York Times or CNN or Reuters or any of the other organizations to simply say that, to say reports of a hospital hit, many casualties, Hamas asserts that it was an Israeli missile investigations underway. Doing it way is just a slight adjustment in the headline language, but it leaves open the truth, which is that we don’t really know what going on here. You can say that Hamas is making a claim, but you don’t verify it rhetorically by acting like it’s actually true. And we saw within the hours after the story, there were violent protest throughout the Arab Muslim world. There was a large protest in Berlin that evening.
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Some fires set in in neighborhoods of the city.
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Synagogue was fire bombed in Berlin well.
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Yeah. This stuff is real. And if news organizations don’t take a real hard look at their practices in this situation, You know, we’re gonna accidentally end up blowing up the world by being sloppy. And, you know, we should expect far better from actual news organizations. They are not activists.
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Even if some of the people working for them think they are, they should be informed by the people in charge that they are not. And shown how to do their jobs or they should be shown the door.
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Linda, all governments lie, including the Israeli government, And so their pronouncements should not be taken at face value either. But the Israeli IDF spokesman came forward with a you know, series of proofs, including intercepts of the terrorists talking to one another and saying this is probably from Palestine jihad. Etcetera. And there is a an interpretation. I’d be curious to hear what you think of this.
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It goes like this. The vicious and horrible attack by Hamas on Israel civilians silenced for a time, the natural inclination of so many to think of Israel as the villain and the Palestinians as the virtuous victims in all stories regarding their conflict. And so people had quieted down that point of view in the wake of that horrific attack. And then when this story broke, it was like a coiled spring was unleashed. You know, it’s suddenly, this is it.
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This is it. Now we can do what we really want to do, which is to portray Israel. As the aggressor and the evil doer and so on. What do you make of that?
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Well, I would partly disagree with you because I think there was a lot of response right after the, vicious attack on, Israel, of people defending Hamas from the beginning, but you’re right in terms of the mainstream. I think the press, I think, you know, main mainstream institutions, were much more qualified in talking about, you know, occupying force or, you know, the Palestinian people as the victims of years long repression and oppression. So I think that was true. But, you know, one of the things that that struck me immediately. And I’m assuming like others on this podcast and many of our listeners, I was have been glued to the television to watch.
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Everything is it is unfolding. Particularly, you know, at times, in the evening when when I have more more time on my hand. And and when this attack happened, the response was so immediately from the Palestinian health ministry as it’s called. It might be better named the Palestinian disinformation center if if if in fact what happened looks like was not an attack, by Israel. The reports were of bombings The report was immediately that this was Israel.
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The report was hundreds. Man, I heard the figure five hundred thrown around. Five hundred people dead. And it was literally within minutes of it happening. In and of itself, that ought to have been suspicious.
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And the news media ought to have been more suspicious. And what was interesting to me was Israel’s response was the responsible response, which was we’re going to investigate. We’re looking into it. They didn’t immediately say no, but couldn’t possibly have been us. They said, you know, we’re gonna find out.
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You know, there is always the possibility in war particularly when there’s widespread bombing going on. That a bomb goes astray that it’s dropped in the wrong place. But the way in which the media was so gullible and, was engaging in, you know, just such a willing belief in in what was coming out of this Hamas authority, it was striking to me. And even as more evidence came out that, well, maybe it wasn’t quite what we thought it was, there have continued to be both sides presented in a way that doesn’t accept that we actually have hard evidence now. By the way, Alja Sierra Television was doing live filming at the time of the strike Avenue, and you could see it happening in the background.
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And even the al jazeera footage was not consistent with a bomb dropping out of the sky or a major rocket being shot in major artillery being shot in from Israel. But yet they’re, you know, all of the Bulwark, MSNBC, CNN with the exception, I think, of Fox News, frankly. They were also willing to accept what was coming out of the the health authority, which is not an independent. You know, it’s not the NIH. It’s not the Center for Disease Control.
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It’s you know, this is an arm of Hamas.
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So, yasha, most major news organizations, you know, quickly corrected the record. They didn’t say we made a mistake, but they did say, well, you know, the the Israelis strongly could test this, and they say x, y, and z, and But do you think there will be, a reevaluation? I mean, is there any chance that this will be a situation where they’ll say we’re not gonna trust things that come out of organs of Hamas in the future, and we’re gonna be more careful. I mean, You know, Biden had to cancel that summit. I mean, it had geopolitical consequences.
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It inflamed the our the so called Arab Street It’s no joke to get something like this so badly wrong.
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You know, I agree with what everybody has said, but I would actually go a step further. One of the things that I found shocking about the coverage of this event is how different it was from the playbook that those same newspapers followed after the initial Hamas attack on Israel eighties civilians. When even hours after world leaders, including Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron had condemned this terrorist attack. Their headline said in very vague ways you know, militant incursion into Israel or they said things like, you know, Israel responds to militant attack. At the time, if you spend five minutes looking at the headlines of the New York Times for Washington Post, the LA Times, the Guardian, you would understand far less about what was going on.
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Then if you spend five minutes following reasonable people on that much maligned social media network that used to be called Twitter and is now called X. And so after these outlets were so careful not to describe unconfirmed but clearly, accurate events in this Hamas Tara attack for them to turn around ten days later and blast with, push alerts to millions of people that in Israeli rocket had killed over five hundred people when we now know that it wasn’t an Israeli rocket, and it looks like Hamas certainly lied about being able to ascertain. So quickly how many people had died and probably according to the latest indications vastly overstated the number of people who were dead, that is not just incompetence where you’re getting into the realm of straightforward bias. I don’t see those media outlets apologizing. I don’t see them trying to, advertise to the readers in as prominent terms that they had been misled as they, pushed out that information in the first place.
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And I don’t see them learning from that. I just saw a tweet from NBC News, which was one of the people who acted the worst over the last forty eight hours. Citing Palestinian health authorities, the very authorities that lied about the hospital bombing in terms of the death toll. In Palestine over the last days. Once again failing to inform the readers, but what sounds like a serious and impartial source, health authorities, of a country or territory, in fact, simply boils down to a Hamas terrorist organization making this claim.
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Bill, first, I thought I’d mention. Two of the worst actors were, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, Rashita Tlaib tweeted. Israel just bombed the Baptist hospital, killing five hundred Palestinians, doctors, children, patients, just like that. At potus, this is what happens when you refuse to facilitate a ceasefire and help deescalate your war and destruction only approach has opened my eyes and many Palestinian American and Muslim Americans like me, we will remember where you stood. Okay.
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Well, that was Tuesday, and you might say, Alright. Well, she was misinformed by these very news organizations that we’ve been describing. No. On Wednesday afternoon, when the truth had been revealed. She was still saying that what’s been really painful, quote, is to see the people who say it’s okay to bomb a hospital, unquote, Bernie Sanders was scarcely any better.
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No, revisions from, from them either. And then, Bill, I’m going to just turn to you with this quote from The dispatch is Kevin Williamson. I’m just going to read this short paragraph. Every newspaper and every reporter makes mistakes. If you aren’t running regular corrections, you probably aren’t doing enough Bulwark, but genuine errors are random.
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When the errors follow a particular pattern, generally run-in the same way and almost always serve the political interests of one of the involved parties and the controversy being covered, that is bias.
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It’s bias. You know, Kevin is right. Josh is right. You’re right. Were alright.
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And unfortunately, it appears at least in the short term that there’s very little that can be done about it. There’s an old saying, you know, that the lie can circle the globe while the truth is getting out of bed. And, Sadly, that is perennially true. It’s true in this case. This is part of the war.
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And I think that the United States and Israel are going to have to proceed On the assumption that they’re not going to get a fair shake from certainly not the world media and a substantial portion of the US media, either, that’s gonna have to be one of the fixed points of calculation. One of many so to speak facts on the ground or facts in the air. And But
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doesn’t that let them off the hook too easily, Bill? I mean, shouldn’t shouldn’t they be, held to count somehow?
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Of course, they should be held to account, but my The point I’m making is that holding them to account as we’re doing right now is unlikely to change what we’re denouncing anytime soon. Some of the largest and most responsible news organizations, and here I include the New York times may well reflect on their errors. The rest won’t. And so I’m not relaxing my criticism But at the same time, I’m trying to take a realistic view of whether anything in the information space is going to ship significantly in Israel’s favor. While the war is going on or afterwards, my answer to that question is no.
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Okay. Can I ask you one other quick question? About, Biden.
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Sure.
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Do you think that his going to Israel, I’m showing the energy to do it, giving a primetime speech which we don’t know how that’s gonna go yet, but he has been kind of magnificent in this whole thing. And yet, so far, polls show that while people do want a vigorous defense of Israel in the United States, they are dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the situation. He doesn’t seem to be able to catch a break from the American voters.
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Well, you’re right. He doesn’t have a majority, but At least in the surveys that I’ve seen, his ratings for the handling of this crisis are significantly the higher than they are for his handling of most other issues that he’s been wrestling with over the past two and a half years. I do think that the vigor that he’s shown on this occasion, the clarity, the emotion, leading with his heart, but not at the expense of his head. I think that’s an example of the sort of thing that he’s gonna have to do pretty consistently from now through next November. In order to have a chance of dispelling the impression that regrettably has set in.
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I mean, the concrete, I think, hardened a long time ago, gonna have to blast it open. One episode, a major event, to be sure, is a good start, but it won’t get the job done. He’s gonna have to do this over and over and over. Again, I frequently quote the old Dale Carnegie saw that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And first impressions are very, very difficult to budge.
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Once they’ve settled in. Not impossible, but I hope I hope the president’s political team understands that this kind of figurine clarity is an example of what he’s gonna have to do very consistently day by day, week by week, month by month until next November.
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Look, I am not any sort of Joe Biden cheerleader, but I do think that the impression of him being senile is completely wrong, and I think he’s demonstrated that to any fair minded person’s satisfaction.
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And how many of those do you think are left in the American it at this point. I’m not I’m not being sarcastic, Laura.
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No. But it’s like it’s that old story about Adley Stevenson. Know, sir, you are every thinking man’s, candidate. Yes, sir, but I need a majority. Yeah.
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I know.
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And that’s and that’s a problem with the democratic party in general, right, but they have, doubled down on the educated and highly educated electorate, which makes them feel lovely, but unfortunately, but it’s not a majority of voters in the United States or in any other country or democracy. Right? I I have two other thoughts on on on these couple of things. Sure. The first is that I’m a little more skeptical about the impact of this conflict on Biden reelection chances because even for, I think, he has handled it very strongly.
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Trump is going to run with the argument that, during his terman office, the world was relatively stable. And during Biden’s term in office, we had the, humiliating retreat from Afghanistan. We had Russia attack on Ukraine and when we had this terrible Hamas terror attack in Israel. That is unfair and it is wrong, but I fear that it is an effective electoral argument. And the other thing I just wanted to say about the media is that one of the stakes here is the credibility of our institutions.
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Right? I think that Bill is right that Israel needs to reckon with the fact that its actions are going to be portrayed in an unfair way in much of a world’s media, certainly in the Middle East, very likely in Europe and increasingly in the United States. But for the American political scene, we should worry about how the real screw up of these institutions is going to further undermine their credibility. And it’s very hard for these news outlets to cry about the spread of misinformation in the world when for the last forty eight hours in one of the most consequential moments, they have been the purveyors of misinformed Mation. And that worries me because we need some trust in the mean.
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Yes. Absolutely. Such an excellent point. And, you know, look, there are many things that the New York times since we’ve been picking on them, justifiably. But we forgot to say that they ran a photo that was not of the hospital alongside that initial false story.
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But, you know, the New York Times does many things incredibly well. And the New York Times does need to guard its integrity more carefully. We need them to be reliable. We need reliable institutions. And, and, Joshua, you’re so right that for them to complain about disinformation and and fake news around the world and then fall for it themselves or purvey it themselves is, terrible, terrible setback.
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Let’s take a minute and talk about stress. We all deal with it in different ways. If you’re like me, the news itself can be very disturbing. Some of us get headaches, others get stomach upset or insomnia. And then add to that problems with relationships or habits that you know are bad for you, but you have trouble stopping.
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Therapy can help so much. It’s not just for people with serious trauma or mental illness. It can help you figure out how your own mind is holding you back. Sometimes we think we’re protecting ourselves by thinking certain ways only to discover that our defensiveness is actually adding to our stress. Therapy can show you how to get out of your own way.
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If you’re thinking of starting therapy, betterhelp is a great option. It’s incredibly convenient because it’s entirely online, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and get started. If that therapist isn’t a good fit, you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. So make your brain your friend with better help.
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Visit betterhelp dot com slash Beg to Differ today to get ten percent off your first month. That’s betterhelp h e l p dot com slash beg to differ. Alright. Let’s turn to Yasha’s new book, which is called the identity trap. Joshua, thank you for this book.
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It is so enlightening for people who are trying to get a handle on how Certain trends have accelerated over the last ten to fifteen years. You trace it very, very nicely back to the ideas that began to percolate the post colonialism, and structuralism, and the various isms that are popular on campus, and then you talk about how they made a a short march through the institutions, through places like the ACLU and, the Ford Foundation and Coca Cola. Tell us about the Coca Cola training guide.
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Well, the ideas I trace in in the identity trap, are generally novel ideology, but have reshaped how the left and much of the mainstream thing about the world and think about basic identity categories like race gender and sexual orientation. And in my intellectual history, I try to tray some of the more subtle versions of these ideas, understanding them before I critique them, but in the way in which they end up being applied to the world, there less than subtle. And that certainly was true of his particular training, designed and inspired by Robin De Angelo, the best selling offer, who is a diversity consultant, and, in this training, which was assigned Bulwark as a cook cola company, but also many other S and P five hundred companies, one of the slides was ways to be less white. And the ways to be less white turn out to be not reverse racist, but straightforwardly racist. It is things like caring less about perfectionism about punctuality, about the written word, in other words, in other words, this is implying that somehow non white people are less interested in reading or writing, less interested in, you know, being high achievers in being perfectionists, perfectionists, less interested in things like punctuality than white people.
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It is just repurposing, re clothing, the worst forms of prejudice, in seemingly progressive cloves.
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Y’all. And you also talk about the ways in which this basically triumph of identity politics. And and, the identity trap, it poisons the possibility for unity as a country. Because it it envisions the world in which we were we will all be ever more isolated in our different cocoons, whether we’re African American or lesbians or whatever it is, and give up on the idea that we can never understand one another, sympathize with one other or be devoted to something higher than those particular identity groups.
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Yeah. Part of the metaphor of a book or the identity trap is that a a good effective trap contains a lure. And I understand the lure of these ideas. They claim to be the most radical and compromising way to allow us to fight against injustices that do persist in the United States that are all too real, but the worry about it is that, not that sort of too radical going too far in the right direction. It’s that it’s actually turning us, taking us into the wrong direction, and that becomes really clear when you turn to some of those core commitments.
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Look, it is true that I might not naturally have the same experiences as some of my compatriots. But as a guy, I may not understand the worries that many women have taking the subway late at night. But the claim that, if I stand at a different intersection of identities from you, I’m not going to be able to understand you. Is misguided. And the inference that many people have drawn from it, saying that, the only path to political solidarity is for me to defer to your judgment since I won’t be able to understand you is even more wrong headed.
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It helps to explain some of the perverse thinking in the last few weeks, but more importantly, it sells short the ability of human beings to be in communion and to build towards more substantial forms of solidarity. What we should do when somebody tells us about an injustice is to listen with an open mind. Not to dismiss them just because we haven’t had that same experience. But then we can come to fight for a just for a better world on the basis of a shared understanding of what we want to accomplish. I can listen out, my friend and say, you know what, I don’t think it’s just for you to be more constrained in your mobility than me for you to have to worry about taking the subway when I don’t.
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Let’s fight together for a world in which we have remedied that injustice.
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Or if you’re particularly concerned about access for the handicap And I’m particularly concerned about the environment. Maybe I can give you some of what you want, and you can give me some of what I want, and we compromise.
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That’s right. You know, one of the real worries I have about the broad acceptance of these ideas is the way in which it encourages zero sum conflict between different identity groups. That is true at the level of a kind of social norms but many institutions have adopted over the course of the last ten years. It is really striking and worrying to me, but many elite private schools around the country now have compulsory, effectively compulsory affinity groups, in the third grade and the second grade and the first grade in which teachers come into classrooms and say the black kids are gonna go to that classroom and the Latino kids are gonna go to that classroom and the Asian American kids are gonna go to that classroom. And when the white kids go into the fourth classroom because if we’ve learned anything from history and social science, it’s that once you identify with a particular kind of identity group, you’re actually gonna fight on behalf of its interests.
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So even for this is meant to create, great, you know, white anti racist activists. I think it’s much more likely to produce racist in the white supremacists who are gonna be fighting on behalf of the interests of whites and that’s not gonna lead to a productive politics, but the same is true in the realm of public policy as well. You know, when the centers for disease control during the pandemic deviated from the guidance, adopted by every other country in the world pretty much to prioritize the elderly for scarce COVID vaccines when we finally had those life serving medications because as the key committee advising the CDC put it elderly Americans happen to be disproportionately white. And so even for, veering away from prioritizing them would increase the death toll by between zero point five six point five percent, we should give vaccines to a much broader category of essential workers instead. Well, what happened next is a fight over who gets to be defined an essential worker.
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And what happens in general when you make politics based on group in that way is that each group sees itself as being engaged with zero sum battle for. What do we get? And how can we make sure that we get more than you? Let us be opposite of how you can have compromise and as the opposite of how you can build a positive sum politics in which we’re actually able to cooperate with each
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Linda, I’m guessing you probably found Yasha’s book very, very,
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very welcome.
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Yes. They you?
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No. It’s a terrific book. And, of course, I’ve I’ve, read Yasha’s work now for years. And I I one of the things that I find interesting, and I he does talk about a little bit, but if I can have the privilege of maybe asking him a question about this, I’d like to get his response you talked to Yasha about the the fact that the Left has for many years and sociologists and others academics have said that race is a social construct. I’m actually quite sympathetic with that point of view.
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I think race as a biological phenomenon, lacks the kind of rigor that we usually associate with such categories. But there is something contradictory in this when particularly in a society like ours, which is multiracial and multi ethnic, to require people Essentially, if you’re, you know, the product of, black father and a white mother, the identity folks Don’t want you to identify as mixed race. They want you to identify as black. And so if you could just sort of talk that a little bit in in the kind of self contradictions that are inherent in identity politics in a society like ours, which is so multi racial and and multi ethnic.
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Yeah. I mean, you know, Visagiology talks a lot about the idea of intersectionality, about the complicated ways in which identities end up commingling, but in institutional practice, they always assume very simplistic notions of identity I’ll give you two striking examples of that. The first comes from Coleman Hughes, a great young writer whose father is African American and whose mother is Puerto Rican. And, on his first day at college at Columbia University, he was effectively forced to engage in this kind of affinity group And so on his first day in college, he had to choose between his Latino identity and his Bulwark identity. There wasn’t a group for Bulwark Latinos, right, and his You know?
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And so he had he was forced in this moment to say, alright. Do I go with my father’s heritage or my mother’s heritage? So so an institutional practice this ends up being really simplifying. I have another example which speaks to a concern I have about how easily we’ve accepted a general pool of suspicion over forms of mutual cultural exchange. How easily the accusation of cultural appropriation has allowed us to shut down forms of cultural activity, but I think are actually part of what makes America beautiful.
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The fact that we all have origins around the world and we’re able to influence other and learn from each other and co create. This comes from a student of mine who was an intern at the Art Museum of an Ivy University And, during the pandemic, they encourage the interns to recreate parts of the artwork of the museum. So she has a Chinese mother, was living at home because of a pandemic and recreated this portrait of a Chinese artist with her mother, a photograph commenting on beauty standards and so on. The director of Museum told her Wonderful. You did a beautiful job.
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It’ll go up on the website in a few days, but then she got an email from the Asian American curator at this museum saying you committed cultural creation. You did a terrible thing. You should have been aware that this is utterly offensive. You’re not true Chinese. So how can you do this.
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And she wrote back very confused saying I understand my mother is Chinese. You can see her in this photograph. I consider myself to be Asian American. Why am I not allowed to engage in this form of culture, and the response was that since her father is not Chinese. He’s Latino, I believe.
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This was not a, appropriate. In other words, this Ivy University had effectively applied a racial purity test to whether the student could engage in this form of art. And and and the problem here is a little bit institutions malfunctioning and doing stupid stuff. But it goes deeper than that because the moment in which you organize society around identity groups in this kind of way There’s always going to be people who are at the margins of them who have a complicated mix of identities or who belong to a minority within a minority. And is therefore maltreated within that group, you will always actually make life harder for a lot of people who do not neatly fit into the boxes that we I didn’t Tarians, want to use to, organize all of our society.
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Will Saletan, you are free to comment in any way you like. I just want to take this opportunity to note one of the, little nuggets that’s in Yasha’s book that Yale University speaking of the Ivy League Yale University employs more administrators than it has undergraduates. You’re up, Bill.
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I wanna ask myself What we can learn, you know, from the kind of analysis that Yasha has presented. And I have I have come up with two conclusions that I find, especially troubling. The first is a matter of self criticism. When I started noticing this stuff on college campuses, I poo pooed it. You know, I said to myself and to some others Well, this is all happening in the academic sandbox.
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And, you know, the kids are gonna throw sand and you know, and, move their buckets and shovels around, but it really doesn’t matter for the wider society. How long I was? And what this tells me is that grabbed she was right and that for modern radicals, the point is not to seize the commanding heights of industry so much as it is to seize the commanding heights of culture. And through that, You know, you can move the entire society, including the political system. And I find this to be a very dramatic example of that larger truth.
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And I hope I don’t make that mistake again, and I hope all of us will function as a kind of early warning system. Since people like us tend to spend more time thinking about what happens on on college campuses. The other question I wanna pose, and I find this one even more troubling is, why do so many people in positions of authority within institutions, both private sector institutions and academic institutions yield so easily To this, what are the internal weaknesses that render the leaders of these institutions, especially vulnerable? To doctrines like this. Yasha’s book made me think back to my time as a student at Cornell University, in the mid and late nineteen sixties when it became perfectly clear to me that academic administrators were unwilling to defend the integrity of their own institutions against efforts to silence Discent, anybody who wanted to speak, even mildly in favor of Vietnam war would probably be shouted down.
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Prevented from speaking. That was an earlier example of what we’ve seen more recently. And so we have to ask ourselves some hard questions About not the moral idiocy of students. I take that for granted, but the moral weakness of the leaders of these institutions that I don’t come up with very many encouraging, answers when I ask myself that question.
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Well, I have two thoughts about that bill. The first is that, you know, Mona Charen brained interest thing but ultimately misguided ideas that originate on campus, firmly stay on campus. And so to have the reaction in the first instance of saying, oh, well, you know, college kids are always up to something radical and you know, professors of comparative literature always have ideas for that a little strange. You know, how likely is this to suddenly inspire the CDC’s response to the COVID pandemic, not very, was, I think, a plausible instinct. But every now, but but when big ideological changes in society happen, they always originate from, seeming the obscure and radical ideas.
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And this turned out to be one of those cases. So I think, for people who dismissed this in twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen, I have a lot of sympathy. For people who continue to dismiss this now, but we have very strong evidence that this is reshaping a lot of how our society functions, how children are educated in schools. And, sometimes, how public health authorities act, in situations of medical emergency in triage, I I think they should face up to the fact that this is a real concern. Then on the second point, this is something that I’ve been really struck by.
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Just the moral cowardice of many institutional leaders in the United States. And it stands to mean contrast to the experience I’ve seen at least in some other countries. In somewhere like France, I have mixed feelings about what the French call Republican values. In some ways, I think they do defend the values of philosophical liberalism might agree with, and others, I think, they themselves can be a liberal in certain respects. But I see a really clear contrast where, people who are in charge of institutions in France are actually deeply believing these values and are willing to risk their personal interest to defend them because they have a sense of conviction and of mission.
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And that is something that the French educational system has helped to instill in them. I think we’ve realized in the last years how shallow the liberalism of a lot of liberals in the United States has been. I’m seeing signs of that improving and changing because as people are threatened by the rise of illiberal ideas, starting to rediscover the liberal faith, I think that the events of the last couple of weeks with some student groups actually celebrating and praising Hamas, chapters of Black Lives Matter sharing, posters with paragliders celebrating the people who killed over two hundred fifty innocents at that music festival in South Israel. And, of course, universities who have gotten into the habit commenting about everything under the sun, but somehow miraculously choosing to be silent for days upon end after the worst slaughter of Jewish civilians since World War two. I think a lot of people have started to realize hang on a second.
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This has gone too far. There’s a real problem here and we need to speak up. And my hope is that once they do speak up, once we’re sleeping liberals wake up to their convictions, things can change relatively rapidly because thank god, a majority of Americans, of all communities, firmly reject this idea.
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Damon, you could say that the last ten days have been sort of a truncation of this very point because when the atrocity first happened, and we saw that reaction from these student groups where they were Some of them were outright cheering from mass murder and rape. There were some comments, even from some people I like, who who said, oh, you know, this everything that’s going in the world right now. What what we really have to worry about is what a bunch of stupid undergraduates are saying as if that matters. And then you know, within the space of ten days, you see, it’s not just undergraduates. This kind of moral rot has has spread into major American institutions, including the press, where they are, willing to be useful idiots for Hamas in the matter of the of the hospital bombing.
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Am I putting it too simplistically?
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No. No. That’s certainly true, and it it distressing to see. I got someone who, who is on campuses a lot and works for one. I I see it around, and it it is distressing.
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It’s real. It’s in powerful institutions. Although, I I also liked seeing some polling data this week showing that about three quarters of the American people are firmly on Israel’s side here. And, among Republicans, it’s more like eighty five percent. But
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But, Damon, I’d be happy if they would just be against mass moving. You know, I don’t care if they’re on Israel’s side.
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That’s fine.
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They just, like, if they
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took just
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draw that It’s it’s
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a proxy. It’s they’re they’re against it in this particular case too. That’s good. But I did actually have a a related but a slightly different point, that I wanted to ask, yasha, about. Relating to the the book.
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And, you know, it’s a great book. I hope everyone buys it and reads it. It’s a really important contribution to this very important topic. Yasha and I share a background in intellectual history and political theory. So we kind of come at a very similar points of view, and I appreciate it very much.
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The kind of intellectual genealogies that he sketches in the book to explain kind of where these ideas came from. I do have a question though about the reception of the ideas why they’ve taken root, but I’ve been strong by noting in in, say, the last decade or so. The pervasiveness, not just in the United States, or even just in West in Europe, but around the entire world of symbolic identity gestures. I mean, the Claire example is probably the rainbow flag. You see rainbow flags in every country of the world.
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And everywhere you see it, it is understood universally that this is a symbolic identity express of homosexual and sometimes trans rights. And it becomes a flash point also for those within the those particular societies. Who oppose such rights. So the identity flag of the rainbow flag becomes this identity marker that everyone recognizes and that people either wrap around themselves or react to negatively in political terms. And you also have seen examples like, during when the George the George Floyd murder happened.
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Of course, that sparked massive unrested the United States, some of it peaceful, some of it violent, and it reverberated for months and had effects on domestic American politics, but the striking thing is that there were George Floyd related protests. All over the world. Now, these were not protests specifically about George Floyd and his fate. They were examples of people who would who took the death of George Floyd as an opportunity to then have a protest about some injustice in their own society, but it became a kind of viral identity expression that reverberated around the world on the back social media and other forms of media. So my question is, is there anything beyond the genealogy of of this writer writes this book that gets taught in this class and then the students hear it and say, oh my gosh.
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Those ideas are what I’m gonna believe now as I go out into the world, and I’m gonna, you know, make a stink at my at my job at, the this this magazine or in this corporation or this, other place. I’m gonna use those ideas to kind of change the world, and that’s something we need to push back with better ideas? Or is there a kind of sociological base that is making people all over the world receptive to viewing the world as through a kind of identity lens. And and if that is true, then what is it? What is it technology?
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Is it the the reality of of being a citizen and a mass democracy, is it something about education that isn’t just happening on American University campuses, but somehow everywhere, it could be any number of things. And as I said, I don’t have, like, a great answer. I it’s a mystery to me, but I’m I’m very curious to hear what you think about that.
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Yeah. That’s a great question. Let me say two things about that. I mean, the first is that identity politics as such as new, and I’m not opposed to all forms of identity politics. I think one of the proudest political traditions in the United States, which extends from people like Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Junior at IIB Barack Obama, was in part based.
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On a form of identity politics. But what distinguished it from the current tradition is the nature of its aspirations. Frederick Douglas called out the hypocrisy of his compatriots in his famous and lovely speech commemorating the fourth of July saying, How can you talk about all man being created equal when my brethren are being held in chains? But he didn’t say, the constitution of the declaration of independence. He said, let us live up to it.
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If you mean those values seriously, then by what virtue, by what justification, can you exclude me from the full enjoyment of these principles? He recognized that people were saying terribly racist and unpleasant things in his day and newspapers all around country. But he called free speech for dread of tyrants because he realized that it actually gives a voice to the marginalized and the oppressed. The tradition of identity politics that is now orthodox on university campuses explicitly rejects that tradition. Derek Bell, the founder of Critical Race Fury is a civil rights lawyer who comes to regret his activities as a civil rights lawyer.
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His efforts to desegregate schools for the American South saying that perhaps in some key ways, Brown versus board of education was a mistake, arguing that we should get rid of what he calls the defunct racial equality ideology of the civil rights movement. Kimberly Crenshaw, another key figure in this tradition ends up saying that the, philosophy and politics of Barack Obama is fundamentally at odds with the key tenets of critical race theory. And the key of their claim is that these universal values haven’t helped us make progress on the contrary they’re meant to pull the wool over people’s eyes. They have perpetuated discrimination. So to do better, we have to get rid of them and explicitly make how all of us treat each other in this conversation, and how the state treats us in something like a COVID emergency, explicitly depend on the racial groups.
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Of which you are a part. So the problem partially is just about the form, the model of identity politics that has won out in the last couple of decades. And that is an intellectual story. Now I agree with you. It’s not just an intellectual story.
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And in the first part of the book, I trace the intellectual origins of his novel ideology, but I do think has had a real influence on the world by providing a model for how people can and talk about for world that is appealing to a lot of people and that has shifted what the left believes in. But I also talk a lot about sociological and technological shifts of a kinds you talk about. And perhaps the key one here, does have to do with social media. When, we invented the internet and social media The idea was that people would go and communicate with people who are far away. Right?
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Suddenly it was costless to speak to somebody in Nigeria, and perhaps our spend all my time on the internet, chatting with somebody from Nigeria about the world and, seeing what we have in common. Instead as we know, the internet had something like the opposite effect. It made us seek out the people who are as like to us as similar to us as possible. I talk extensively in the book about the role of social networks like Tumblr, which really encouraged people to self define by new identity labels and made it possible for identity labels to proliferate right? When you think of the analog world or the offline world, you go to high school, you want to construct your own identity as a teenager There’s four or five of those on offer because you need a minimum number of people around you who share in that identity.
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And in an offline world, that is just going to be a somewhat limited number of people. So you have to choose between being a jock or a theater kit or, you know, whatever sort of populates the world of nineteen nineties high school movies. Right. In the online world of Tumblr, you can self create an identity label, like, demisexual, like, liberal gender. Find the twenty people on the world wide web who like to co create with you and suddenly you can say this is who I am and then to communicate with each other, we need this matter ideology that somehow brokers the piece that says if I offend you, it’s my fault even if I didn’t mean to.
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And so we have to be on the guard against microaggressions and so on. So I do think this technological shift is a large part of what has explained this strange doubling down on identity precisely facilitated by a technology that we once naively believed might accomplish the opposite.
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Well, ladies, gentlemen, I think you can see why you need to rush right out and get this book because it is full of incredibly interesting insights like the ones you just heard. With that, I want us to spend a little bit of time on the speakerless house. There is news as of today that Jim Jordan is not going to press his claim to be elected speaker after all. He’s not going to ask for a third vote, and he is going to at least until January support the idea of enhancing the powers of Patrick McHenry, who is the speaker pro tempore right now. Linda Chavez, the Republican Party in the ten months since they took control of the House of Representatives, The GOP has nominated three different people, Brendan Buck says, and to serve a speaker of the house, and not one of them currently holds the gavel.
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It’s really quite stunning and actually a little bit scary. We’re living. I mean, as we’ve been talking about during, much of this program in a very, very various time. We have major war going on in Europe, in Ukraine. We’ve got attacks in Israel and I think soon to be ground operation, in Gaza.
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We have, China trying to make inroads or, around the world and Africa and Latin America and elsewhere and gaining support there. We have a Vladimir Putin with a closer alliance to Iran and other places. And meanwhile, the Congress of the United States cannot function. I mean, when you do not have a speaker, you cannot do the ordinary business of the United States Congress. And, the fact that you have, you know, this happen is a result of Matt Gates of all people, basically bringing down Kevin McCarthy as speaker.
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And for what purpose? I mean, it was not as if there was this clamor that, you know, McCarthy needs to be replaced by ex kind of candidate. The conference itself can’t even really agree on who they want to support. And the Republicans are showing themselves to not be fit to govern. And I say that as a longtime Republican as somebody who on philosophical reasons agrees more with the Republican Party than the Democratic party.
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But the Republicans, as they are currently making themselves, clear to the American people aren’t fit for governing. And, you know, there is now supposedly a compromise, we’ll see. I mean, I hesitate to speak because at the time we’re recording these things could change, dramatically in the next twenty four hours. But empowering, mister McHenry to at least, preside over the House of Representatives so that, Congress can function is, I think, an important thing to do, but it looks like that won’t happen unless there is democratic support. And if there is democratic support for that idea, that there are some Republicans who won’t support it.
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So it’s a mess We have never in the history of this country seen anything like this where Congress itself ceased to be a functioning institution.
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Will Saletan, McHenry, compared to some other people in the GOP conference, is fairly sane in a normal person. He did not go along with two thirds of his colleagues in voting not to certify the twenty twenty election. He did vote to certify it. He is, not a bomb thrower. He has built alliances across the aisle, by the way, all of which would be the kiss of death.
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In this GOP one would think. There is an argument that some people make that, you know, this is the best of all possible outcomes. Just make him like temporary speaker and, kick the can down the road, but at least we’ll have a functioning congress. And other people say, no, you know what? That’s not who the Republican Party is anymore.
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The bomb throwers really are the soul of the party, and it would be better for all concerned If they did have a Jim Jordan or the equivalent as speaker, because then the voters would be getting the Republican voters would be getting what they asked for, good and hard.
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The argument that you just summarized, I think, is too clever by half. The fact of the matter is that There is urgent business and home and abroad. And failing to address the, the issues before us is not cost free. And the idea that Republicans can have their noses rubbed in their own, shall I say product? The idea that we would endure in effect another thirteen months of what we’ve seen for the past sixteen days just teach them in the country a lesson, which, by the way, I don’t think would be learned.
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That is very, very risky. We’ve already seen the consequences of not having a functioning house during the current crisis. The president wants to send and will almost certainly send a big package, the number a hundred billion dollars has been thrown around, to deal with a bunch of really burning issues. Ukraine is a burning issue. Israel is a burning issue.
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God knows the southern borders of burning issue and not to mention the fact that the government shutdown was deferred, but hardly denied. You know, it’s staring us in the face, and we’ve made absolutely no progress. The idea that we would somehow be able to do better on the budget crisis, if we had no functioning speaker at all, is preposterous. So I’m not one who says this is the best of all possible outcomes, but as an interim step, it’s infinitely preferable to anything else that could possibly happen between now and and time the government shuts down, which if memory serves is November seventeenth. Four weeks.
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Right. Yasha, there are so many shifting coalitions in the GOP at the moment. It it’s really difficult to sort of map out who’s who and who are the radicals and who are the moderates, because They are very shifting. Although some people did give a wry sort of look at the idea of Jim Jordan, bomb thrower extraordinaire, making an appeal to his colleagues to be team players and elect him speaker. But Say a word if you if you care to about the way this shows perhaps that the trumpian tactics that worked so well for Trump, don’t always work for everybody.
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So Jordan and his allies, apparently, were really trying to intimidate members. They were several members came forward and said publicly that they had received death threats, that they had received harassment, Don Bacon has noted sort of regular Republican moderate from Nebraska said that his wife was receiving messages saying your husband is destroying the Republican Party and threatening her. And he said it’s wrong that the folks have no boundaries anymore, and, you know, it makes you, you know, say, well, wait a minute, where have you been? That’s the, the party that became Trump’s party But it does seem that it has backfired at least on Jordan. Right?
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Yeah. You know, it’s funny with with with speaker stuff. I mean, every Republican house speaker or or minority that we’ve had in, you know, over the last years seems so much worse than the next And then by the time that the Republican hardliners are trying to get rid of a current one, you think, oh my god. I hope to keep him because he’s so much better than what’s gonna come after this. So it’s a it’s a very strange situation where you end up having sort of a Stockholm syndrome affection for the current, you know, Republican about to be ousted because even for you don’t share any ideological affinity with them and because infobey themselves have been, you know, responsible in a million ways.
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You know that it’s still better than the alternative that’s around the corner. But to speak to your point, you know, one of the things that I’ve slightly changed my mind about or I I think I’m changing my mind about, is how unique Donald Trump is. Now I’ve always tried to explain and warn about the threat of somebody like Donald Trump in the broader context of authoritarian populism around the world. And we’ve seen that as for various reasons, this sort of structural makings of this form of politics have been put in place in lots of countries. We’ve seen a similar threat to democratic institutions in many different places, from Ughashavas and Venezuela, from Narendra Modi in India, from Victor Arban in Hungary, from Raturban and Okay.
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And I continued to stand by that. But I used to think that there wasn’t anything that special about Trump. But as I said a few times, you know, in a rich raucous republic of three hundred million people, you’re always gonna be able to find somebody to voice and ventricate a certain set of positions. And so we should focus less on Trump individually than on the questions of why it is that his politics might now be so popular. And yet I think you’re right that it’s turning out to be true that it’s not so easy to find somebody to replace Trump.
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Now partially, that’s because Trump is still in the picture himself, and he’s the person who really commands the energy. But, you know, I don’t think Ron DeSantis is capable of replacing, trump. I don’t think Vivigram’s Wami is capable of replacing Trump, but it doesn’t look like Jim Jordan capable of replacing Trump either. And I guess the one slide silver lining for that is that, you know, once Trump leaves the political scene the energy behind him certainly Will Saletan, the mugger control over the Republican Party at least for a while will likely remain But it may be hard for that movement to substitute him, and that perhaps leaves some kind of opening for our political system to eventually get back to something distantly resembling some form of normality.
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Damon, a couple days ago, some of us were, you know, feeling that old familiar sense of depression and deflation at the number of moderate Republicans who were suddenly coming forward and saying they were actually going to find a way to support Jim Jordan and thinking here, we go again, you know, the moderates, they always cave, and, they always go along with the magas. And it looks like Today, that did not happen. Is this a good news story?
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It might be, but I I I hate to, you know, throw a wrench into, the very modest good mood that we’re all in about this because while we have been recording this, The latest news is that the McHenry resolution, is not really coming together. A quote from Jim Jordan from, I guess, a half hour ago, we’re recording this around three pm on, Thursday. Quote, we made the pitch to members on the resolution as a way to lower the temperature and get to Bulwark. We decided that wasn’t where we’re gonna go. I’m still running for speaker, and I plan to go to the floor and get the votes and win this race.
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And so it continues. Who knows? Like, by the time people can listen to this, he may have gone through, like, two more votes that he’s lost by even more. And he still won’t ref he still won’t go into the sunset. So I guess my my answer to your question is we’ll see.
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It looks like the moderates are gonna have to keep their spines in place for a little while longer as they try to figure out just what the heck they’re gonna do here I mean, I am pleased that they’ve gotten this far. But, you know, they are dealing with what Republicans all over this country have been having to deal with for the last number of years, which is the perennial threat that if they don’t align, go along with the ratcheting rightward of the party. And I don’t mean that just an ideology, but as we’ve all sort of indicated, in terms of tactics, willingness to just throw a wrench into the gears and stop government from doing anything just for the sake of making a stand. Of some kind, to show that they’re they’re passionate enough to do that. So whether these these twenty or so moderates come from districts where there are enough moderate voters and the configuration of things as such that they could survive a right wing challenge, and then maybe, or maybe they say, you know what?
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Maybe there will be a right wing challenge in a, you know, in the next election. But this is important enough securing funding, for Ukraine and Israel and other things is worth it. I’m gonna do the right thing in stick to my guns and not back down. And eventually, we will be able to pass the aid that is needed. And if it means that I’m torpedoed in in a few months, then, so be it.
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That’s if my constituents are so foolish that they would do that to me, then they can do it. I’m going to do what I can while I’m here. So that’s basically what we’re asking them to do, which is you know, greater believe me, a greater show of courage than Matt Gates or any of the others in making a calculation of what we’ll get them on newsmax tonight, for having, made more right wing headlines. That is, I think, more their motivation than it is for the moderates who actually, I think, wanna get something done.
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Thanks for sharing. But update, Damon, I I just wanna say I I retain full in the ability of a Republican party by the time that this podcast goes out to, have found a reasonable moderate compromise candidate, like, I don’t know, Madry Taylor Green or something.
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No doubt. No doubt. Every time.
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Yes. As you said earlier, it can always get worse. Arguably, the speaker of the house in the re with a Republican majority is the very worst possible job and what sane person would want such a job, which is why I thought Ken Buck of Colorado did have the best line of the week when, he was asked why, one of the votes in particular, he had chosen to vote for Tom Emma, and he said it’s because I don’t like Tom Emma. Alright. And now it is time for our final segment highlight or low light of the week, and we’ll start with our guest, yashar monk.
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You know, I I’m gonna go back to to to the low light we talked about at the beginning of the conversation. You know, we need functional institutions that aren’t caught by ideology that are fit for purpose. And so one of the lowlights of the week for me was the failure of a mainstream news outlets to report on this war in a responsible manner.
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Thank you. Damon Lincoln.
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Well, I, you know, have read a, a number of terrible things over the last week about the, Israel Hamas war. But I’ve also read, a handful of extremely good ones. So there’s some competition for a highlight this week, but I’m gonna fasten on to someone I’ve mentioned several times over the years here, and that’s Matthew Aglesias on Substack He’s written a couple of very good pieces, about events in Israel, but I’m gonna highlight the more recent one. Titled Palestinian right of return matters. And if you’re an expert on the Middle East, if you’ve watched it closely, for your whole life and studied its history.
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You probably won’t learn much factually new from this. But what’s really great about this piece is that Matt somehow manages to talk about this extremely divisive, controversial issue without really, I think displaying any any kind of noticeable bias. Now I’m sure people Well, then, you know, say that isn’t true. He’s clearly made has sub submerged premises that are actually anti Palestinian Pro Israeli, but I really think it’s a very admirably fair minded look at and dispassionate way of looking at just the the fact that the Palestinians continually over now seventy five years are insisting that the thing they want is a right of return to Israel he looks Matt looks at where that comes from and puts it in the the where it belongs, in the broader context of refugee claims and how unusual it is for people who are refugees from a war. To not seek to be resettled elsewhere, to find a new home for themselves, but to remain where they are in refugee camps or close to refugee camps and to insist for three quarters of a century that the only acceptable resolution is to go back to where they fled all those years ago and reclaim, their loss.
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And the fact that this is the difference between saying that if you’re pro Palestinian, that doesn’t really mean you’re in favor of what would make life better for the Palestinian people. What you’re saying is you’re in favor of advancing the Palestinian cause, which is distinct from what might be best for the Palestinian people. So if you’re interested in thinking through some of these issues, I can’t recommend Matt’s piece strongly enough. It’s very good.
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Thank you so much. Linda,
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Well, last week, we talked about the demonstration, in New York City that was organized by the Democratic socialists of America, and I said that I, you know, knew them from the seventies and, you know, gee. Now suddenly they’re very anti Israel and certainly didn’t start out that way. So I, heard from a friend of mine, who’s also a friend of this podcast. He’s been a guest, Ron Radosh, who is a historian, and he wrote a piece couple of years ago, so this is not a new piece I’m recommending, but I think it’s one worth reading because it does go into the history. Not just of the Democratic socialist of America, but really the move on the radical left to become anti Israel.
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The piece, appeared in Mosaic. It’s called how America’s largest socialist organization went from supporting Israel. To boycotting it and he says in the subtitle the Jewish State is the new litmus test for the American Left. And it was, written, published in, December of twenty twenty one in Mosaic. I’ll also note that he talks a lot about the two thousand and sixteen election and the way in which the Bernie Sanders campaign really speeded this along and expanded the influence of the DSA.
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It’s a a very good read and I recommend it highly.
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Thanks so much. Yeah, I think my own modest contribution to the intellectual history here. I I happen to hear a section of a speech by one of the squad this week, Corey Bush, who, was sort of she perfectly encapsulated, I think, some of this intellectual, shall we say, cultural appropriation? Because the terms that she was using about Israel, the apartheid regime, and the references to George Floyd, and so on. So clearly shows that some people on the left have mapped US history and our racial our history of racial injustice and so on onto an area of the world where it doesn’t apply at all, and it’s completely different history and a totally different story.
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And yet because of that sort of false, analogy, it has become a great cause, well, maybe for other reasons as well. But that’s part of it. I I do think.
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And, Mona, if you allow me the one, the the one plug for my own book, if you want to understand how and
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why that happened meet the identity trap. Yes. Agreed. Bill Galston.
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Well, I have a highlight and then an additional item that, listeners can categorize as they choose. My highlight Is the extraordinary number of retired senior Israeli military officials? Who upon hearing of the emergency took the weapons that they had in their houses, usually pistols and rushed to the front line and performed not only heroically but effectively. I think it says something about the nature of the IDF that the generals, the retired generals, and, you know, and colonels still see themselves as fighters. And I wonder how many senior US officials Military officials would be as effective in those moments of crisis.
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Just a speculation, but these stories parrowism, general zib, general t bone, many others, have really, struck me quite forcibly.
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Bill, before sorry. Before you get to your next point, can I just interject that Noam Thibon, one of the generals you are referencing? Is the father of Amir Tibon, who is a correspondent for her arts and has been a guest on this podcast. He had a harrowing experience. He was he lives on one of those Kibbutzim that are right on the border of Gaza, and he and his wife and his two tiny daughters, three, and I think eighteen months were trapped in their safe room for something like twelve hours, no light, you know, and and very little water and had to keep the girls quiet.
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So anyway, his is one of those stories, and I wanted our listeners to know that, yes, indeed, that was our former guest who experienced that.
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Yep. That was an extraordinary story. And Amir Tibon’s, your, your recitation of the story. Yo, where he hears his father’s voice. And he said, Abba.
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Abba. I just burst into this.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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Now for the now for something that creates in me, you know, quite something quite different from tears, except perhaps tears of laughter. But it certainly involves me in the exercise of the noblest of human vices, namely Shadden, Florida. The past week witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of Newt Gingrich. Yes, Newt Gingrich. Criticizing the radicalism of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and denouncing them as childish people who are getting in the way of governance.
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Now for those who know anything about newt gingrich’s ascent power, The ironies are delicious. This is my personal nomination for the funniest statement of the week.
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Thank you for that. Alright. I would like to highlight something that happened in the world that was not terrible. This past week. And namely that Poland held an election, and the ruling party that has proved itself to be nationalist, right wing authoritarian, and, possibly attempting to crush Polan’s young democracy, was defeated.
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So the law and justice party, got well, it did get the most number of votes by a narrow margin, but it was a multi party, parliamentary race, and therefore, coalition of center right and center left parties will probably almost certainly form a coalition government and, law and justice will be deposed I would refer everyone to, Ann Applebaum, so frequent guests on this podcast. Ann Applebaum has a p in the Atlantic, says Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable. And she points out that, first of all, there was tremendous voter turnout, seventy four percent of eligible voters, that they prevailed, even though the ruling party had controlled the major media and had altered the electoral laws to advantage itself and even, leaked top secret military documents, attempting to manipulate voters, and none of it worked. So it is, it is an encouraging thing. It’s a reminder that while democracy lasts, the the voters are still powerful, so maybe, a hopeful lesson for the world from Poland this week.
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With that, I want to thank our guest, Yasha Munk, whose book is the identity trap. And yasha, has it already been published, or is it about to be?
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It has been published a few weeks ago. It was temporarily out of stock, but if you go to Amazon or your favorite book seller right now, you can get the book within the next few days.
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Okay. Terrific. So and thanks to our regular panel as always. Our producer is Jim Swift. Our sound engineer is Jonathan Siri.
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We thank them as well. And of course, we thank all of our loyal listeners, and we will return next week as every week. I will be gone next week, but we will have a guest host. Thanks very much.
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