“Harvard Shmarvard”

Welcome to beg to differ, the Bulwark weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to Center Wright. I’m Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars, Bill Goldstein of the Brookings institution in the Wall Street Journal, Damon Linker, who writes the Substack newsletter notes from the middle ground, and Linda Chavez, of the Nescannon Center. Before introducing this week’s guest, I just want to do a shout out. Thank you to AB Stoddard who sat in for me So ABley, last week, and to our wonderful producer Jim Swift, who also joined us.

Alright. Our special guest this week is Nicholas Grossman, professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, and a senior editor at Arc Digital. Well, let’s begin everyone with the Harvard Aganistis. The slow drip drip drip of revelations about Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that is the drip drip of accusations of plagiarism finally caused her to resign this week. And it has ignited a conflagration in the culture wars.

So naturally, some people on the right, like Christopher Ruffo and other sort of right wing culture warriors engaged in some unseemly crowing about getting scalp, and we can come back to AP’s kind of embarrassing description of where that term comes from. Maybe we’ll get to that later. But, you know, it was the typical thing where people on the left immediately rushed to say that her sins were trivial that everybody does this, that it was really a matter of duplicative language or academic sloppiness or technical attribution issues rather than acknowledging that there really was a problem with her scholarship. So I’m going to begin with our guest who is an academic himself and talk more about what your sense is here. Do you agree with me that this was an example of, do you agree with me that it was embarrassing to see people say that plagiarism is no problem if it’s committed by somebody that you like?

Well, when you phrase it that way, absolutely. People who reacted as circling the wagons and treated it as if there are these bad faith accusations or at least, I guess, accusations in some cases from bad faith actors on the right, that means that what everybody has to do is circle the wagons and ignore anything in the problem itself. From the specific plagiarism accusations that I saw. If I were a professor and you know I get these, sometimes from students, that there are broadly two types of plagiarism. One ends up being the type that I say to them.

You know, you really I can’t accept it like this. You have to reword it a bit into your own words. You have to put quotation marks around that. And but I’ll still accept the paper. And then there’s the type where it’s somebody who is trying to pass off someone else’s ideas or research as their own.

And that one, especially if they’re, you know, say trying to get one over on me and not do Bulwark, that one would just be a fail. And from at least the ones I saw of, the now former Harvard president and Claudine Gay’s, old academic Bulwark, it seemed more in the first category, which I would say is bad, something that is, you know, worthy of correction, but also not the biggest reason here. And I’m a bit torn because, I don’t care who is the the president at Harvard. I’m at the University of Illinois now. I was at the University of Iowa before that.

And I didn’t really care who the president of those schools, is or I guess currently are. I didn’t see them besides that orientation. But I have a a pretty strong distaste for outsiders demanding that somebody get fired and also think that when it comes to private organizations that if they wanna fire somebody that that’s up for them, up to them. So, I have no objections who have Harvard wants to fire gay, fine, or wants to push her out, fine by me as long as it’s, you know, a legal reason. And when she and the presidents of, U Pen and MIT came before Congress and were asked to point blank if they thought that open calls with the genocide of Jews would be against their university policies.

And instead of just saying, yes, of course, they instead sounded extremely loyard and really danced around that issue a lot and did not seem to approach it with maybe the gusto that they would if somebody asked about a different form of bigotry or discrimination. And so when the Penn president got fired for what amounted to basically failing at the PR aspects of her job, I also thought that was fine. So just on the academic part, yeah, I don’t think that people should be saying any of this plagiarism is is okay, is fine, but I also don’t think that that is close to the main issue of what’s going on here.

Linda Chavez, I’m gonna quote to you Nicole Hannah Jones, who is, of course, the, originator of the sixteen nineteen project She tweeted, let’s be real. This is an extension of what happened to me at unc, and it is a glimpse into the future to come American academic freedom is under attack, racial justice programs are under attack, black women will be made to pay, are so called allies to often lack any real courage and representative Jamal Bowman, added his own two cents saying, this isn’t about plagiarism or anti Semitism. This is about racism and intimidation. Your reaction.

Well, academic freedom, at least as I understand it, does not include the freedom to steal other people’s work or words, and that is what Doctor Gay was, accused of doing. And, you know, I don’t really understand, people who plagiarize in the way that she seems to have. You know, it’s it’s so easy to give credit where credit is due and to borrow the words or ideas of somebody else, but attributing it to them is an easy thing. You can use a quote. You can talk about, the person, you know, it doesn’t make you look less learned.

It makes you, I think, look like more of a scholar when you’re able to attribute, ideas or words to other people. So I don’t understand how she got in the mesh she did, but there’s no question in my mind that she was not picked as a, an eminent scholar in the first place. Whatever her other attributes are, she had published very few academic papers, during her her years. I don’t think she published any of book length works when, when she was, teaching. And so I, you know, I I think her pick had a great deal to do with the sense of social justice, wanting to have a black woman as the head of the America’s premier institution.

And so, you know, when she ended up finding herself in the hot water she did. First of all, the first thing she did was to hire a public relations consultant who did a miserable job crafting her testimony before Congress. And I think as is someone, wrote in an op ed. I think it was in the New York Times. The word that got her in trouble was context.

Somehow claiming that suggesting things that were anti Jewish or anti Israel needed to be put in their proper context to know whether or not they violated the, speech codes at Harvard it was essentially too clever by half, and I think ultimately it led to her downfall. I don’t think she is going to be missed and I hope that the corporation that runs Harvard University, is not going to fall into the same mistake of picking someone for reasons other than their administrative excellence and their academic excellence.

Damon, let me try something out on you. Gay’s defenders and and a number of people in the media who were, you know, saying things along the lines of what we heard from Hannah Nicole Jones, you know, this is an attack on racial justice and so on and so forth. You know, they reminded me so much of the Trump people because their attitude seemed to be that what matters is the bad motives of the people who pointed out that gay had a plagiarism problem, not whether the accusation was true or false. And that reminds me so much of the Trump people. They say, Well, yeah, he’s got ninety one indictments, but, you know, it was brought by democratic prosecutors, and and, a democratic administration.

And therefore, we don’t have to take it seriously whether he’s guilty or not. That’s not important. The important thing is we don’t wanna give them a victory.

Yeah. Sure. That is a big dynamic going on here, and it was distressing. I to me, at least, to see and hear people who should know better that you can’t defend a public figure against this kind of thing by basically just waving your hands around and saying, Well, but the person who brought up the fact that something bad happened had bad motives. That’s not the way this kind of thing works.

It can absolutely be the case that someone with terrible motives points out something wrong and that it’s it’s still true and bad despite. Those motives, and that’s a kind of elementary moral distinction. Although I would I would wanna add that the prominence of someone like Christopher Ruffo on the side of the accusers here, does really muddy waters in a way? I don’t think in in a way of, like, undermining or making disappear the accusations. Many of them verified of plagiarism on Gay’s part, but immediately afterward came down that she had in fact resigned, you know, Rufo’s there on Twitter, you know, doing an end zone dance.

And not only, like, as if he say, Yes. I I no longer care about those other things I was fighting for all those all those months and years, but actually my main goal in life is to prosecute those who commit acts of plagiarism. That’s now what I Christopher Ruffo care about in the world. No. He immediately made, I think, an entirely non secretor style jump to, yes, she committed plagiarism and she’s driven out.

And therefore, we will we will continue doing this and the result will be the end of DEAI in universities. And there is I would submit. There is literally no connection between these two things whatsoever. There is no connection between Claudine Gray, her academic scholarship the extent to which it had evidence of plagiarism in it, or at least some of it, and DEAI programs at Harvard or anywhere else It is true that Gay was a big champion of those programs, and because she’s black, that sort of you know, gives, I think, the right, a very nasty and bigoted, sort of winking, gestural implication that somehow she was made president of Harvard as a part of affirmative action program or something like this. But really, these are things that are are not really even entangled.

They don’t even have to be disentangled. There is no connection. If if Christopher Ruffa wants to keep up on his crusade to rid the country of DEAI programs, he can continue doing that. But, you know, sending conservative journalists out to kind of scour the writings of left leaning academics for examples of plagiarism is not going to advance that goal at all. So I I find that, like, the whole debate is is sort of all up in, if you will, trumpian assumptions.

I mean, you’re the one who made the connection to Trump with with the left’s, tendency here. To sort of wanna defend gay because her accusers are are on the bad team. But you also see it on the trumpian side itself, this kind of conflation of anything that makes anyone a left leaning academic look bad somehow advances my larger goals as a conservative days, and I I just don’t buy it.

Bill Galston, you have been an academic, or you’ve been in journalism for many years, Maybe I’m particularly sensitive about matters of plagiarism because it’s something that’s very close to my heart. I I’ve been published, I don’t know, for forty years at this point, and I am always extremely careful to give attribution to make sure if I quote something, I put quotation marks around it to make sure that if I am paraphrasing, somebody else’s point that I I give them credit, etcetera. That’s sort of a basic rule of being a professional in this business, and one would think, Fortiori, that it would be even more of a of an issue for someone at an academic institution like Harvard. What’s your sense of it? Am I making too much of the plagiarism?

No. I don’t think you’re making too much of it. But I hope that Harvard and other elite universities will seize this moment to think very hard about their policies, their governance structures, and their appropriate role in the life of the mind, as well as American society. I think it would be a real loss If the debate got so caught up in the specifics about individuals that the larger issues get lost in the shuffle. And, I do think that the universities, especially elite universities, for a mixture of good and not so good motives have gotten themselves into a position where a substantial portion of the country feels alienated from them.

And to be more specific, I don’t think it’s a good idea. You know, to have the Harvard Corporation made up of people of entirely like mind. Such that in the most recent period, ninety nine percent of their political contributions went to Democrats and the remaining one percent went to Adam Kinzinger. I don’t think it’s great when more than eighty percent of Harvard faculty say that they’re liberal or very liberal. And, I think this may be shocking to some of our listeners.

I think that the amount of Honest discussion across ideological lines in Washington, DC is substantially higher. Than it is at many American universities these days. A friend of mine, the late Amatai Ezzioni once said that Washington d DC doesn’t have a great university, but it is a great university. And there’s substantial truth to that And I’m afraid that lots of universities have lost sight of One of the most incontestable things that John Stewart mill ever said, namely that he who knows only his own side of the case doesn’t even know that. So it is it is time for free inquiry and the life of the mind.

At American universities, particularly elite research universities, to be given the pride of place. In the fundamental goals of the institution, and that goal should suffuse all of the means and all of policies. I spent thirty years of my life into large state universities, and I’m really pretty passionate about the need to protect freedom of inquiry, and I’m equally passionate about the proposition. That the fact that an opinion makes you feel uncomfortable or as the jargon now goes unsafe is no reason whatsoever to suppress that opinion. None zero.

Nick Grossman, let’s just spend another minute or two on this deI matter because, you know, even if it is Christopher Ruffo’s crusade, to NDEI. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a good idea. I mean, the fact is here are some examples, from a piece in the economist. In twenty eighteen, Berkeley launched a cluster search for five faculty to teach biology. From eight hundred and ninety four applications, it created a list based on diversity statements alone.

And by that method, it eliminated six hundred and eighty candidates without examining their research or other credentials. And then they pridefully said that this was great because it yielded significant increases in URL minority candidate. The URL candidates. That stands underrepresented minority candidates that went on to be on the on the short list, or the Harvard Law review, another example, encourages prospective editors to submit alongside their application a two hundred word statement to identify and describe aspects of your identity, including, but not limited to, racial, or ethnic identity, socioeconomic background, disability, physical intellectual, cognitive neurological psychiatric sensory developmental, or other gender identity, and the list goes on and on. Do you think that there is a problem with, DeI at in general in the US and specifically on campus?

In general, I I wouldn’t say so. I think it’s more, a case by case basis that there are some benefits to it that, in general, having a wide array of faculty is good for students to see people like them reflected in, that reflected in their teachers. And, I also see some, excesses, some potential downsides. One of the things I can tell you about being on the inside occasionally of academic hiring, at least say in, my department and a few others that I’ve seen. Of one of the aspects of it is everybody, just about everybody who applies or at least a large number of people who apply are solidly over the threshold in terms of academic performance.

And a lot of the hiring comes down to trying to indicate kind of differences between those or making judgment calls based on secondary or tertiary factors. I think also that with the comments that earlier that Damon was saying about drawing together with the arguments against A and the DI issue is that They are separate things, but the fact that activists have drawn them together makes them linked. And so one of the things that stood out to me with this was how we have a limited amount of national attention and, especially in the information age, with this cacophony of information and so much going on in the world. And this was a story that I thought was out of proportion in terms of the amount of attention it got. So for example, there was a scandal at Stanford where the president of Stanford had been caught doing decently worse academic misconduct as in, things like faking data, in published papers.

And he got fired rightly, but that was not a major national story or national scandal. Some people have, looked at Neil Gorsuch’s book. And found that there is at least as much of the, what defenders call sloppy attribution or things that are borrowed in his book and not in others, that is also not a national story. And so the fact that the gay story became a major controversy. It was, you know, headline news at places like say, the New York Times.

I was pretty floored the other day to see that they had two stories that they were doing live blog updates on. One was, Israel killing a Hamas leader in Beirut and how that could potentially widen the war, what was Hezbollah saying, what was Iran saying, what was Hamas saying, what was Israel doing, you know, what was the US doing, all these other potential problems, And that was a live update, and the other live update was on, Claudine Gay resigning, and that these were giving equal billing, or even if you looked at total coverage, The story about the president of Harvard was covered about as much as things like major war and US presidential and decently more than something like the Republican primary that is about to start and that that element of national attention at the expense of anything else expensive other things and treating it like this major national issue that deserved a lot of our time and concern was a lot more about the both media manipulations of activists. People mentioned Chris Ruffo, for example, and, also of media organizations desire to try to seem non biased or fair, which they sometimes define as Well, if we’re going to cover multiple scandals on the right, meaning US presidential candidate, Donald Trump, for example, and his various criminal cases, then we also have to give equal scrutiny to problems on the left, which means not Democratic politicians, but a university bureaucrat.

That so that’s an interesting perspective. I would add to it only this, that it seems to me that the, attention people, at the Atlantic and the New York Times and other elite publications, stems from, at least in part from their obsession with Harvard and, because, you know, fellow a leads. And the obsession on the right there’s no question is at least, you know, so part of it is there is a sense of grievance and hostility toward, elite universities, that they see as hostile to conservatives, not wrongly, although their reactions are often inappropriate, And then there’s also the element on the right where, you know, an opportunity to go after a prominent African American woman is something that they find a certain gives them a certain free solve.

Fred, that’s like an added bonus. But just on, also Bill’s comment about, with the the balance, and this is, related to yours also, is It depends on what you mean by conservative. And because you can find a whole lot of, for example, free market tiers, small government types and economics departments, What you can’t find a lot of at universities are people who embrace the anti intellectual trumpest project. And I can tell you a specific way that this changed my teaching, which was I teach about national security issues. And, when Trump declared, there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea when he was president.

And that put me in a position where I had to either tell my students something false. I mean, there is very much a nuclear threat from North Korea. Or I had to call the president a liar. And so, what I did, I didn’t say, you know, Donald Trump is a liar. I certainly wouldn’t say something like, don’t vote for him, but I had to say to them that some of them even asked me when this came up, and I had to say to them, no, he’s making that up.

That’s not true. And that could be interpreted as, so is that me being partisan in a way. Yes. But it was me being partisan because Trump’s lies forced me to, but me in a position where it would be against the business that I’m in of the, you know, intellectual pursuit of knowledge, the truth business, to then go along with the president’s lies, if I didn’t go along with the president’s lies, I would be partisan. And so part of the problem we have, and this is not one I know how to solve, But as the American Rights, the Republican Party, has increasingly embraced anti intellectualism, has increasingly built it’s project around things that are not just matters of opinion, not matters of ideology, but, flat out false matters of fact.

It becomes very difficult for people in university settings to appear nonpartisan in the same way unless their work touches on nothing having to do with politics at all.

Well, I accept that, and I also think there are a great many people of good faith in universities who are like you, who are attempting to be very, very careful about things like that. But I also think it’s true, and, that You may find some free marketeers in the economics departments and and some closet conservatives teaching chemistry, but you’d you’d be hard pressed to find one a somebody with a conservative sensibility in the English department, in the anthropology department god knows, in the political science department even. So it it really depends, but it seems certainly we have polling evidence from people in in universities who say that they feel that they can’t, you know, freely express themselves and so on and so forth. So it is Mhmm. It is a big problem, but we’re gonna have to leave there for this week because we have to discuss what’s happening in the world.

And I’m gonna stick with you, Nick Grossman, because you wrote a great piece in the daily beast this week, five big obstacles to Israel Palestine peace. So we had, of course, a lot of news. We had the assassination, as you just mentioned, of Salay al Aruri, who was a high ranking Hamas official, but the assassination was carried out in Beirut and you had a a terror attack inside Iran that killed scores of people, and that Iran initially blamed on Israel. But we then learned that, Isis claimed responsibility. So I’m gonna start with that.

I mean, I I act say, I when I saw that story about the attack in Iran, I really did a double take. You don’t often see stories about terrorist attacks inside Iran. Iran is certainly the the funder of major terrorism around the world, and it backs Hamas and Hezbollah and others. Iran itself, it’s not usually the victim, but in reading up on this, it turns out that when it is, guess who is perpetrating it? Isis.

I I’m sort of at a loss to understand why they would blame Israel when they must have known that the likely culprit with was ISIS, which has hit them before.

So best guess of why they would rush to blame Israel, is it’s good propaganda. It’s both a embarrassment for security services, a potential source of domestic unrest when there is a local terrorist attack, and Iran has been pretty good about clamping down on the threat of terrorism locally, but they have long been a target of Al Qaeda and even more so of ISIS because those groups are Johannes. They are SUNi extremists. Iran is, the world’s premier shia power, Hezbollah, Shia, one of the thing that’s stands out about Hamas and Iran working together is that Hamas, well, not quite being jihadist is very much SUNy, and, SUNy extremist. And so In that case, it’s more a enemy of my enemy as my friend, but it turned out that the ISIS attack, the one in Iran, was unrelated to anything specific.

It was also at the anything specifically associated with Israel associated with the United States. It was on the fourth anniversary of the US killing, Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, Iraq, And that was potentially something to do with it, but it looks like it was just Isis seeing it as a opportunity for a lot of civilians to be in a close area where they’re moving around so it’d be cover and a chance to maximize casualties. Ron DeSantis tends to oppose everybody who is in ISIS. The jihadists tends to target. Jihadist groups tend to target.

Shia Muslims and various, sometimes what they call apostate or secular Muslims, and especially, ones that they connect to, US, Israel or Europe. And then there are all the different overlapping dynamics in the Gaza war. And so just at one level, it’s another reminder about how complicated the Middle East is, how many overlapping conflicts and partnerships and alliances that exist there. But it shows that Iran is dealing with some of its own problems as well. And will much as they like to do about other problems.

They’re very quick to blame, the United States death to America, death to Israel is one of the ways that they try to distract their people from the various domestic problems that they have because they’ve also had large protest movements as they try to suppress people’s rights there and having a foreign scapegoat is handy.

Okay. Linda, we had illustrations this week of two aspects of Israel’s political nature. So on the one hand, you have the Israeli Supreme Court in the midst of a war coming out with the ruling, saying that the, reasonableness law standard will continue to apply in violation of Netanyahu’s wishes. And at the same time, you’ve got members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, basically calling for ethnic cleansing, or at least one member of cabinet calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So, complicated picture.

Yes. It is. But, you know, I think the ruling out of the Supreme Court and particularly, some of the those in Natin Yahoo’s Coalition their response to it, I think is sort of a good sign. It appears that there will not be a move to to move forward with the so called judicial reforms that Netanyahu was promoting. These were wildly unpopular there have been thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting the Netanyahu government prior to the October seventh attack.

So I think that is good. The question of what to do about Gaza after, obviously, the idea of ethnic cleansing the idea of removing Palestinians from Gaza. First of all, it’s not gonna happen. And secondly, I think it’s reprehensible. You know, there are Palestinians who are Israeli citizens living in Israel proper.

And even after the October seventh attack, there was one very moving op ed I I read by a, an Israeli Palestinian ethnic Palestinian who talked about, you know, how he identified with Israel, in the wake of that attack and how he sort of reversed. He no longer called himself a Palestinian Israeli, but now he was an Israeli of a a Palestinian Ron DeSantis. So, you know, I think this idea that we should ever look at somebody and decide because of their ethnic origin or their religion. That they are, you know, that we should eliminate them. I mean, that is the basis of antisemitism.

It’s the basis of racism. It’s the basis of all the kind of tribal hatreds that have infected the world, from literally the the beginning of of of time. So I think that it’s good that these ideas be slapped down. However, I think there is a more complicated problem that we’re gonna have to deal with going forward. And that is to try to figure out of the civilian population in Gaza.

How many were supportive of Hamas before the attack? How many supported the attack and how many supported I mean, the public opinion polls, I think, Bill, you know, has enlightened us on those, and we’ve read about them. They’re not very encouraging. And part of the problem is that children are literally indoctrinated in the kind of Jewish hatred and Israel hatred that has, infected much of of the Arab world, you know, since the the founding of the state of Israel. And so how you come up with peace, even if, you know, by a miracle, you could eliminate the entire Hamas leadership.

How you come up with a solution that gives, Palestinians living in Gaza, some autonomy allows them to have self rule, but ensures that they not continue to ferment a threat. Against their neighbors. This is gonna be the trick, and it’s not an easy one. And frankly, I don’t have an answer, and I’m not sure, anyone does.

So, Damon, this is a really difficult devilish problem. Right? It it does seem like something has to change. I mean, we it cannot be that generation after generation of Palestinians is inculcated with such passionate Jew hatred year after year and then expected to sit down at the peace table. On the other hand, I mean, who is going to run the schools?

Who is going to change the curriculum? Who’s going to be in charge? Who’s gonna do that? Who’s gonna change the political culture?

I have no idea. I certainly have no concrete suggestions along those lines. I mean, in fact, I’m inclined to say that the problem is far more complicated than even that because we also have to take the Israeli side into account. And that doesn’t at all require backing down and being disgusted and appalled at the October seventh terrorist invasion by Hamas and what, those people did inside of Israel, which deserves to be thoroughly condemned. But it is also the case that before that happened, Israeli public opinion was pretty firmly against any kind of deal or against making any kind of move that would kind of change the dynamic on the ground in either Gaza or the West Bank.

And after enduring the massacre of October seventh and then this bloody war sense where missiles continue to be lobbed at Israeli cities just about every day. You know, we hear all about the the terrible damage and death. That Israel’s inflicting on Gaza, which is true. But throughout the whole thing, even with the Hamas leadership that has been killed, missiles continue to be fired all the time. And if it weren’t for, the missile defense shield, the iron dome, that you would be seeing a lot more cash teas and destruction and is real proper.

So it’s not at all realistic, I think, to think that, well, a country that was quite content to not try to sit down at any peace negotiations with the Palestinians before. October seventh is not going to be more inclined to do so after this. And, you know, the reality of things is is pretty bleak for anyone who wants a kind of resolution to this conflict over there. The fact is that the settlement project has been going on now for a couple of generations. It has huge stakeholders in Israeli society and political system.

It parties that are devoted to the interests as they understand them of the settlers. You also have a lot of ultra orthodox Jews who are not technically settlers. They’re living in Israel proper, but they’re very far to the right and have their own parties and preferences. And then you have, a substantial Arab population, and the largest center right party. The Likud is hell bent on insisting it will never sit in a government with those arab parties.

And that means that in the very narrowly divided, parliamentary system that you have in Israel that basically, the natural position of Israeli public opinion, which is is right of center by this point very much. So If that block wins elections and it refuses to join in a coalition with the Arab parties, it immediately must tilt further right to find coalition partners, which is how we got the current Netanyahu government now, which has these extremists in it who say things like that Israeli policy should be ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So, I mean, All of that is about the Israelis. And of course, I concede everything you said about the the mess of Palestinian public opinion in Gaza, but also to some not quite as harshly, in the West Bank.

It’s actually the other way around, Damon. I think based on a public opinion poll, who knows how accurate it really was, and there’s a war on and so forth, but it was so interesting that Palestinians who lived in the West Bank were more supportive of Hamas than Palestinians who live in Gaza?

Well, you know, maybe that’s a function of, you know, not having to live with the devil.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yes.

You know, they they’ve been living under the PA, the Palestinian authority for Sarah Longwell time. The governance is not particularly, free of corruption or efficient or well organized.

And it’s run by an eighty eight year old man serving his, what, is it, seventeenth year in a four year term?

Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, a when that’s what your your entire, you know, last generation of experiences, you know, the the alternative might seem appealing Although I I hardly think the lived reality of it would end up being exactly that.

Yeah. Will Saletan, so Israel, assassinated this high ranking Hamas official. He said in the very recent past, quote, this is the guy who was killed. He said our job is to keep the Palestinians radicalized most would settle in a moment for peace. We need to keep them angry.

But, Israel has killed high ranking Hamas officials before And, doesn’t seem to slow them down, or is that too pessimistic? I don’t know.

The old image of the hydra comes to mind as a strategy for temporarily weakening, Hamas, it has some merit. As a strategy for undermining or destroying Hamas, I think it has much less merit, if

Could I ask you to elaborate on that just for a sec, Bill? I mean, you know, the the Israeli government has said its goal is to destroy Hamas. Now I think what they mean by that is the military capacity of hamas. Do you think that’s possible?

It depends on how you define it, but given the fact that most of Hamas’s military capacity is now pinned up in a small portion of the Gaza strip. It is conceivable to me that by the end of the operation, they will have either killed or arrested. The Hamas leadership, the military wing of Hamas in Gaza, and will have interned or killed most of the fighters. If that’s what they have in mind, and if they are if they are prepared to resist pressure from the outside world to stop the operation before they want to in that very narrow technical sense, I think they probably can do it or at least ninety five percent of it. What the morning after looks like is a different question altogether.

And as many commentators have pointed out, you can kill people, but you can’t kill an idea. You know, to which I would add you can’t kill passions with bullets.

In fact, you can’t blame them.

You you can. And in these circumstances, that’s almost certainly what’s happening. So let me divide the question. Is the goal attainable, as I said, in the narrow technical sense? I think probably yes.

Question two, if having attained your goal, you are any closer to long term security for the state of Israel, I think that’s a different question altogether.

Nick, let’s just close with this. You you have this piece, five big ops obstacles to Israel Palestine peace. And even though you call them big obstacles, the the tone of your peace was actually fairly up beat considering. I maybe that’s just because I’m so grim about all this, but you mentioned, I think you mentioned the possibility of holding elections in Gaza after the war, but just not permitting Hamas to participate.

I think that elections in, Israel Palace, I guess, among the Palestinians, so both West Mike and Gaza, you mentioned how, Mackamura Boss, who is in charge of Palestinian authority, is old, unpopular, and how supposed to leave office in two thousand and nine and just kept on staying. So he recently I saw had, it was eighty eight percent opposed, among Palestinians, and broadly defined. So they’re one of the obstacles that I identified after the first one being Hamas and where Hamas clearly does not want to negotiate with peace with Israel that they launch the October seventh attacks to try to get a massive Israel response and to, in their hopes, to try to spark a regional war, which has not happened in part because of US efforts to deter it, but they don’t want peace. They would actively prefer conflict, and a lot of the current Israeli government is also that case, that it was not only do you have some of the people that Netanyahu brought into the government, refer it from a, previously banned movement, previously banned party that got banned for supporting terrorism. The man who’s currently the national security minister, who is calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

Also celebrated the Israeli assassin who killed Gitzhak Rabin, who made the, Oslo Accord. So it was a first big step forward with peace with the Palestinians, and celebrated a Israeli terrorist named Brooke Goldstein, so they also do not want peace, but there is an easy way to get rid of them, which is Israeli elections. And Netanyahu seems to be at least currently unpopular and he’s managed to, survive politically before. So I can’t say that he’s definitely done. But he is widely blamed for not securing Israel and for failing at his most important duty.

But the third obstacle identified, and this is what I think that Bill was, partially getting at, is Palestinian hopelessness, Palestinian despair that if there is no possible glimmer of future hope for them, that that will make things much easier for recruitment of radicals for, Hamas, even if Hamas is destroyed, other groups like Islamic jihad or any successor organization to recruit new people and to rebuild their military capacity, even if Israel manages to severely degrade it now. But if they can remove Hamas, not as an idea, not as an organization, but the governing entity of Gaza, they could then potentially move towards something where there are Palestinian elections for both the West Bank and Gaza in which Hamas would not be allowed to run. Otherwise, I don’t know how the Israelis would agree to it, and we could easily end up back in the same situation. But there was that glimmer of Optims, because I also am very pessimistic about it, but I did try to include some optimism in my article because some of these obstacles looked very stuck, and they are now wobbling. So you had the netanyahu government, for example, wasn’t just was opposed to Hamas, of course, but also somewhat encouraged them that, for example, facilitated some money from Qatar getting to Hamas because then they could keep the Palestinians divided, and then they could argue that there was nobody to negotiate with.

And the Palestinians in Gaza, have been living under Hamas authoritarian rule since two thousand and seven when Hamas took over by force, and they have not allowed any sort of popular sentiment since. And while there have been some polls that show a lot of Palestinian support for Hamas now, one of the best ones of the region called Arab barometer happened to be doing surveys just before the October seventh attack and found that about two thirds of, Gaza said that they think Hamas is corrupt and almost three quarters, had a negative opinion about them, to the extent that the pollsters can get at it, can get at that question. And so while there is clearly a element of rally around the flag or I guess it’s when you’re being bombed, say that you support the only people who are actually shooting back. But that is not something that we should think of as permanent. So I am at least I’m very cautiously hopeful and this might very well not work because is an incredibly complicated situation, but that if, Hamas and the Netanyahu government are in different ways, obstacles to peace, that this could potentially lead to both of them being removed and then new opportunities for both Israeli and Palestinian leadership that will be more interested in moving forward with peace.

And for given the incredible destruction and the suffering of civilians in Gaza, the to the extent there’s a justification for Israel’s efforts. It is to remove Hamas and then after that, have something else that they could potentially work with, that they can potentially negotiate with, or one that wants to teach a elements of peaceful co existence, even if uneasily so rather than a one a vision committed to destroying all of Israel, as Hamas’s. But if the Palestinians are not given first a lot of reconstruction, so money from thinking especially, Gulf Arab oil states and, US Europe, but a lot of reconstruction money, and that’ll create a lot of jobs and to lead towards some sort of political opportunity for them where they can elevate people who would like to negotiate who are not like Hamas and who seek an element of peace and peaceful coexistence with Israel. And then there’s still the problem of the settlers in the West Bank, which there are now about four hundred fifty thousand And they have the West Bank divided where there are special roads that only they can go on, while I disagree with the claims of, all of Israel as using the word apartheid.

If you look at the West Bank, it looks awfully similar. To South African apartheid with Palestinians inside where basically Bantu stands having to cross checkpoints just to get from community to community, just to get to their jobs sometimes. And there have been a decent amount of violence by West Bank settlers, and the US has taken a small step towards, trying to address that by saying that, Westbank settlers who are involved in violence can’t get Visa’s to the US, but that is a very small move. So if, and this is a big if, but if Israel can remove Hamas’s the governing entity of Gaza, And then if Israelis vote in a government that would like to move forward towards peace, then we have to take on the incredibly difficult task of governing Gaza afterwards and hopefully Palestinian elections and also trying to deal with the problem of the settlers in the West Bank And while I’m still pessimistic that that can work out, there is at least this glimmer of opportunity that hasn’t been there for the last sixteen, seventeen years, really longer. But especially since Hamas took over, one thing, the way that I’ve been looking at it, that I think a lot of people prefer not to, but is that as long as Hamas is in control of Gaza, and the October seventh attack demonstrated that they prioritize killing Jews more than they prioritize the safety and security of the Palestinian people or economic advancement of the Palestinian people.

And so if that’s their priority, if they are As long as they’re there, there can’t be peace. But if they’re gone, then, there is a chance that it could return to another kind of bad situation with an Israeli Egypt blockade and is both of them doing the blockade, but a blockade that just then festers and keeps going. And That would lead us to a situation that is similar to what it was before the war or worse that led to the October seventh attacks and now here. But that will take a big international push because both the Israelis and, very, at least parts of the Israelis and parts of the Palestinians will be reluctant to do that, some of them will be outright resistant to it, and otherwise we end up in a similar situation or worse.

Well, after the months of terrible agonizing news from that part of the world, a glimmer of hope better than none, so we will take it. Thank you for that. We will move now to our final segment, the highlight or low light of the week, and let’s start this week with Damon Lincoln.

Well, I’m sort of notorious here, on the podcast for being a maximal skeptic about trying to get Trump through legal means. And the most recent, example of this is, of course, the, what I’ve been calling the fourteenth amendment gambit, which, it looks like, the Trump people have now asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on about the Colorado Supreme Court decision. And on that subject, I actually wanna point to something that I only, in the last few days, came across my desk, and it’s a sub stack post by someone who’s been a guest on the podcast here, Steve Vladock. University of Texas law professor who has a sub stack titled one first. I’m not exactly sure what the meaning of of the title is there.

But he wrote a very good post, on December twenty first titled the law and high politics of disqualifying president Trump. Which takes a a very good, and I think an unusually nuanced look at, how difficult this decision, assuming the court takes this case, which I can’t imagine they won’t. How difficult it’s gonna be for the court to kind of wind its way through this without it blowing up in one of about half a dozen ways. It’s a very I think even handed in fair analysis, and it ends up with Flatic taking the position that the court for its own institutional sake should probably punt on the question of whether Trump can be disqualified under the fourteenth amendment And he makes, I think, a very compelling, again, a compelling case, but then again, of course, I would think that since that tends to be where I come down though through a different series of arguments, but Vlad has has led me, to, to reconsider some of my thinking along these lines maybe in favor his. And in any case, I think, our listeners will, learn a lot and, appreciate the reasoning in that post by Steve Vladimir.

Okay. Thank you Linda Chavez.

Well, I’m gonna recommend a piece that is a very, very hard read. But I think it’s important for people to read it. It was actually in the New York Times this week, and it was by Jeffrey Getleman, Anott Schwartz, Adam Sela, who were the authors, and it’s called screams without words, how Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October seventh. It’s the result of a times investigation into the pattern of rape mutilation and extreme but brutality against women in the attacks on Israel. And I recommend that people read it because I think we do need to face this issue.

The attacks on Israel were not just, horrific for the killings that took place for the Jew hatred that Hamas exhibits, but also the hatred of women. And I really believe that we have to come to terms with that and what has been so distressing in terms of some of the American Left’s response to the attacks on October seventh was the willingness of so many to disregard the plain evidence that there was an unbelievable use, not just a rape, but of horrific mutilation of women, in this attack. And so, it’s sort of with a heavy heart. It’s certainly not the kind of thing you want to start the new year with, but I think until we come face to face with what was done on October seventh and the scar that this has left on the Israeli psyche. We can’t fully understand what’s taking place, in the war.

In Gaza right now.

Thanks, Linda. I have to confess that I saw, of course, saw the story, but I haven’t read it yet. I just every time I went to read it, I thought Well, now’s not a good time because I’ll get too upset, and I kept putting it off. But thank you. Alright, Will Saletan.

I don’t know whether these are highlights or lowlights, but they are developments that I think need to be underscored, one foreign, the other domestic. I wrote this week about testimony from frontline soldiers in Ukraine that they are literally running out of ammunition. We’re not talking about depleting stockpiles. We’re talking about soldiers who not only can’t go on offense, but really can’t adequately defend themselves because they don’t have They don’t have the missiles, they don’t have the howitzer shells to do the job. And meanwhile, while Keith Burns, Washington Fiddles, And, I personally think it’s a disgrace, but my disgrace plus a dollar fifty nine will get me a very small cup of coffee at seven eleven.

The other development that I want to highlight is what might be called the dog that didn’t bark at the Federal Reserve Board. The minutes of the December meeting were just released. A lot of optimists expected some indication of a timetable for rate cuts in twenty twenty four. There was nothing of the sort, and the report was much more cautionary in tone. Then I think a lot of the optimists in recent weeks had been expecting, and for good reason.

And if people were unduly pessimistic, about the economy in twenty twenty three. They may have gone over to the other end of of unreasonable optimism about twenty twenty four. We shall see, of course, but, you know, Alan Greenspan claimed a deathless phrase irrational exuberance and I think we got pretty close to it in the fall. And there will be a reckoning, I fear.

Bill, I think it’s safe to say that regular listeners to beg to differ do not, come here for irrational exuberance,

special

from Alright. Nicholas grossman.

Alright. So I realized when when I’ve been on the show before, I think I’ve recommended a a TV show. So my highlight is, the show slow horses on Apple Plus, which I think is great and is, also a great lead part for Gary Oldman, who it just it’s really a fantastic, and I don’t wanna recommend more, give anything away about it, spoil anything, except that. One thing I found so interesting cross culturally, is that it’s about m I five and it is very much a spy show, whereas a TV shows in America about the FBI are cop shows. And, that so I just thought that juxtaposition was interesting given that those two are, while not identical agencies are often discussed as kind of their equivalent of each other.

Can I interrupt you real quick? Because I have watched the show. And don’t you have the sense when your Gary Omen is brilliant? Of course, But don’t you have the sense when you’re watching it? Please just take a shower.

Oh, I mean, I can’t stand looking at you anymore.

Well, that’s that’s part of his show.

I know.

It is. The character is so gross in so many different ways and uses that to throw people off. Whereas, you know, the very kind of proper, formal, heads of MI five end up using a type of coldness to throw people off. And so it’s a kind of a different style. I think Bulwark really well for the character.

And then for, low light, I’m doing a similar one as Bill, which is that, the, I find the Ukraine thing extremely frustrating one because it the stakes are so high and the cost benefit has been so good to the United States, by which I mean, the Ukrainians are getting have been able to stop and partially push back the Russian military, with America’s contribution has been equipment that is worth a fraction of one year’s military budget. The total is about ten maybe fifteen percent of one year’s US military budget of the value of it. And it’s mostly old equipment that we kinda wanted to replace anyway. And the money for replacing it mostly goes to American companies. So a line I can’t take credit for it, but And I wish I remember who said it, but was that, the United States doesn’t really give people cash.

We give them credit cards. We give them gift cards to American companies. And I thought that was a really good way of thinking about it. So it’s economically beneficial too and has been extremely beneficial for the Ukrainians and has not required a, single, US military, single troops, single, US military personnel to be put into combat. And yet has been very successful and it seems like, such a, such a mistake and own goal and unforced error to not fund them.

And the reason especially why I find it so frustrating is because the discussion in Congress has been lumping this together, Ukraine together, with border security, Israel, and Taiwan, all of which are in America’s national interest, all of which are national security interests, and to see, so to the extent I’ll I’ll recommend a piece. I think David from in the Atlantic did a really good job with this, of the Republicans don’t seem to be at least in the house. Don’t seem to be trying to get things they want regarding the border in order to then get to yes on helping Ukraine Instead, they seem to mostly be using the border as an excuse to get to know when it comes to helping Ukraine. And so we are potentially heading into a situation where the United States makes it easier for, Russia to facilitate the strategy of bombing Ukrainian cities hitting civilian targets on purpose to try to exhaust Ukrainian air defense missiles and then to really try to pound them into submission. And the US can without much effort do a decent amount to counter that and also do quite a bit to handle the overwhelming numbers that are coming to the border and that we might end up in a situation where Republicans block that prevent the things, at least some of the things that would help the border that they supposedly care about and also, prevent it from helping Ukraine.

So we got this thing where we should have this consensus on major issues. Everybody gets something that they think is important and also maybe has to compromise on something that where they disagree on the approach or don’t think it’s important, and instead what it looks like we might be headed towards is getting neither. And that is both bad for the US in terms of various interests, bad for US partners, good for Russia, good for Putin, and that means I think overall bad and very frustratingly so.

Indeed, dysfunction by definition. Alright. Thank you for that. I want to take us all back This is a low light, but it requires going back to the year two thousand. When a man named Thabo Embecki won the presidency of South Africa and I remember watching this and being amazed that this elected leader of a major country denied that HIV causes AIDS.

And he stuck with this belief, and he cut support for programs, for example, that have provided antiviral medications that would prevent the, spread of the disease to newborns, and he suggested herbal cures like garlic, beet root, and lemon juice. And I remember thinking boy, you know, that that’s a shame that a that a country, would, have such a leader. And, of course, It was just a few short years later that the president of the United States presided over the completely shambolic response to COVID nineteen recommending that people take quack cures like hydroxychloroquine. Well, there was a new study that just came out this week that analyzed data from six countries over just a four month period in twenty twenty. And that concludes that the use of hydroxychloroquine was responsible for seventeen thousand deaths, unnecessary deaths, but also, that’s just not the end of it that, you know, you had Donald Trump standing up in front of cameras and suggesting that people inject bleach.

Nope. That wasn’t the end of it because Ron DeSantis in his bid, for the presidency, appointed as his as the surgeon general of Florida, a doctor, whose name is Joseph Ladapo. Who has issued a bulletin this week recommending against using mRNA vaccines. He says that the shots, it’s just a widely debunked conspiracy theory, that the shots could contaminate patients’ DNA. This has been described scientific nonsense by doctor Ashish Jia and others.

So here we are in twenty twenty four, a pivotal year, and, it isn’t just Trump, that the Republican Party has become a party that promotes Charlie Sykes, frauds, con men, quacks of every variety, and they cause actual deaths, and it is beyond belief. I think it is part of this general problem of how people are getting information. The information revolution that was ushered in by the smartphone, has had many bailful consequences, and, and this is this is part of it, the sense that people, that they can get information anywhere, and they see to get it from unreliable sources and then, act on it. So that is one of our challenges going forward is how to combat that kind of nonsense, that is so destructive and dangerous. With that, I would like to thank our guests Professor Nicholas Grossman, and our regular panel, our our producer is Jim Swift, and our sound engineer is Jonathan Last, And Beg to Differ will be back next week as every week.