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[on-hold music] You are listening to an Arc Media podcast.
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[upbeat music] Welcome to Inside Call Me Back, our members-only edition where we open the door and let you shape the conversation.
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Thank you for subscribing to the show and supporting the Call Me Back podcast and everything we do here at Arc. I want to encourage you to submit your questions on arcmedia.org.
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Today we have a special insider edition covering the recent US primary elections here in the New York area that were held this past week, and that comes with a special Inside Call Me Back guest, Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute.
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Reihan, who's been on this podcast before, not only leads the Manhattan Institute, but he's a prolific writer, the author and co-author of important books on US politics and US policy.
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He was the subject of a big profile in The Wall Street Journal recently, which we can link to in the show notes with his, I think, pretty trenchant analysis of what is going on in New York under Mamdani.
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So with that, Reihan, welcome to the Inside. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me, Dan.
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So Reihan, we asked our community to send us questions about this topic, but since we don't typically have you on for special insider editions, I also get a vote here and have some questions of my own.
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And I've been wanting to do a download with you, and I tracked you down yesterday when you were like at LaGuardia boarding a plane or something.
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And so I didn't have a chance to get into all the questions I would have liked to have asked you.
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So I'm actually using my prerogative here as the host and as an insider subscriber myself to jam in some of my questions as well. So let me just start. Our audience is very much a global audience.
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What do you think is the significance of this election for the Jewish community, Jewish community in the United States and outside the United States?
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If you were trying to explain what happened in New York this past week, how would you explain it? I want everyone to understand that what we're seeing in New York City is very much a transnational global movement.
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This is a movement that you see manifesting in many different places.
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But when you look at this ideology, when you look at the worldview of, for example, a figure like Zohra Mamdani, he really is a kind of post-national figure.
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This is actually a live debate when you're looking at the left. There are some folks on the left, uh, think about the Social Democrats of Denmark, let's say.
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There, there are many on the left who think we want to be left patriots. We are invested in the nation-state. We believe in the nation-state as a vehicle of a working class coalition.
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Then there are others who see their movement as transnational, and they see themselves as part of a global movement that is anti-imperialist, that is trying to unite workers around the world.
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And their sensibility is almost that the US war machine and the NATO alliance, that these are structures that are actually the bad guys rather than the good guys.
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The fixation on Israel, the Gaza cult, this is something that is not unique to the five boroughs of New York City, as your listeners know extremely well. So that's one thing people really need to understand.
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This is a transnational movement that happens to have a branch office in the United States responding to unique conditions in the United States, and their big fixation is foreign policy.
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Domestic policy, there's an agenda there. There's a big revolutionary radical agenda there. But the thing is that the mainstream Democratic Party has also moved left.
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The thing that's really different is where they stand on Cuba, on Venezuela, on Russia's war against Ukraine, and of course, on Israel. And that's been really galvanizing for them. But that's very much at their core.
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And we'll come back to the UK experience with this.
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But much like when Jeremy Corbyn took over the Labour Party in the UK and ran for prime minister in twenty seventeen, obviously the Jewish community was very focused on this election in the UK.
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The chief rabbi of the UK, in an almost unprecedented way, came out and spoke out against Corbyn and all but endorsed his opponent.
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This was an issue in the UK, but it was also, you know, communities around the world were following this election because it had a directional impact that went far beyond the UK.
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And I think what you're saying here is this is similar to that. No, no, Dan, Dan, I mean, the UK, I'm so glad you raised it. There is a magazine in the UK called Tribune.
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This is a magazine that's been around for decades, but it was recently rebooted some years ago. This was around the Corbyn energy and that phenomenon.
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It was rebooted by a group of folks who are also connected to Jacobin magazine in the United States. Literally, a lot of the talent is back and forth transatlantic.
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So actually, when you're looking at the DSA, the message that they want you to hear as a mainstream Democratic voter is that, "Hey, you know, we want America to be more like Denmark.
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We want America to be more like Sweden," right? But actually, you know, again, when you look at those social democratic parties, they have a very different posture and approach.
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Whereas if you look at the DSA, it's actually much more like Jeremy Corbyn. And Jeremy Corbyn eventually within the labor movement, you know, they were able to fight him off and marginalize him.
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That presence is still there, but momentum and what have you. Now he's in a separate party. Now you've got the Green Party.
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But here in the United States, you're still in a kind of earlier phase where a movement that has that Corbyn worldview.
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The Corbyn worldview, it is something that is certainly genuinely revolutionary Marxist in its orientation, but also vehemently anti-Israel, anti-imperial, anti-NATO down the line, and also very connected to Third World revolutionary movements.
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For example, like the Chávez, Maduro governments in Venez- uh, Venezuela. That is a really core conviction. It's not a sideshow.
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And then the way that they brought in Muslims and causes adjacent to radical Islam, this is an issue that you have to talk about carefully, but that has been rocket fuel in the UK for these movements to give them real grassroots presence, real voting blocks in kind of deep urban ethnic districts.
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Okay, so in the case of the elections in New York, with both socialism and antisemitism playing a role in the outcome of these elections, if I use the like chicken and egg structure, which is the egg and which is the chicken?
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In other words, is antisemitism the main dish, to mix a whole lot of metaphors here, or the spice that gets people to sign up for socialism?
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It's like an ideology that's hard to swallow, so antisemitism serves a purpose here. I'm j- I'm just trying to think, what is the driver?
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So the driver, one way to think about it is, if you embrace this style of socialist revolutionary politics, the whole idea is to find an adversary.
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You wanna organize, you want to actually get people out on the streets, you wanna get people knocking on doors. What is the cause that gets you to do that?
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So for millennial socialism, the clause was the so-called climate emergency. Okay?
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The thing with the climate emergency is that it actually proved an incredible electoral albatross because it raises the cost of living and was actually too abstract.
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It was drawing people in, "Oh, the world's gonna be destroyed by the year twenty thirty. We're all gonna be underwater. It's gonna be a kind of emergency."
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That didn't quite work because it didn't give you a clear, focused enough energy. You know, one energy was the fossil fuel industry, et cetera, but it just wasn't clear and focused enough.
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When you're looking at Israel, but you're also looking at Jewish power, that is something that becomes a much more vivid enemy to organize against.
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So if you look at a lot of these folks in the DSA, these are tenant organizers that are organizing against landlords.
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But then you have a geopolitical emotional issue as well that's connecting with many different constituents. So you have folks who are, you know-- Think of the hierarchy, the moral hierarchy, right?
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If you look at woke politics circle twenty twenty, the moral hierarchy was at the top were the Black victims of police violence and American racism and the legacy of slavery.
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With the omnicaus, the peak victims are the Palestinians who were dispossessed of their land. Then more broadly, it is the kind of global class that is oppressed by imperialism and also by Jewish finance capital.
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You call it Zionism, but this is this kind of new hierarchy and this new adversary, this new oppositionalism that is a very core part of the worldview.
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So in a way, this is something that gave rocket fuel to a movement where, you know, the climate emergency and the kind of psychological distress around that was one thing.
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But suddenly, October seventh, you could go back to two thousand eight and the kind of the crash. You go back to the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged when you're looking at twenty eleven.
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But then October seventh has been absolute rocket fuel, partly because you're discrediting a democratic establishment that wasn't quite willing to go there.
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They were willing to criticize Israel, willing to criticize Netanyahu, but they were not going to embrace conspiracy theories.
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They were not going to embrace this idea that Israel is the villain, you know, when it comes to the post-October seventh world, because it's a repellent, reprehensible worldview.
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But then that became a massive driver of organizing. And then, you know, look, there are some people who sincerely believe, "Hey, I'm just anti-Netanyahu."
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And there are other people who have a much more comprehensive, frankly antisemitic vision about Jewish power and the danger Jewish power it represents. But then you can kind of pretend to be one or the other.
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You can move from one to the next and kind of have that as an organizing principle.
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So let's just stay on that for one moment because I think it is relevant to all these jurisdictions and all these different countries, not just what happened in New York.
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One of my criticisms of the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, what I would call antisemitic protests and movement post-October seventh, is that some of my friends who are sympathetic to it in the United States will say, "No, no, no, no.
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What people are really protesting, it's not anti-Israel full stop. It's not anti-Zionist.
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It's against Israel policy or against specific policies of Israel or specific ministers in the government that are backed by the United States.
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It's US taxpayer dollars being used to fund a war that many critics in the United States view as unjust or immoral or not in the interest of the United States, and so that's what they're protesting against."
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And my response to that is, "Okay, first of all, I'm, I don't buy it, but let's just say I did. Why are there massive protests in Canada and the UK and Australia and France?"
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And, uh, you know, we can go on and on and on and on and, you know, Sweden and Denmark and Indonesia, and it's not like those countries, Spain of all countries.
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It's not like those countries are actually funding Israel's, quote-unquote, "war machine." So there's something much bigger going on that's global. And when I say that, then the response I get is, "Okay, fine."
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But you need to understand, part of the populist moment we are living in is a very anti-establishment across-the-board political moment in all these different countries.
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And to many of them, being pro-Israel or being at least for the status quo as it relates to Israel's role in the international system and its influence and its outsized power in the Middle East is an establishment position, and we, the populace, are gonna be against anything that's establishment.
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And Israel, sorry for you guys, they will say, is a product of that overall sentiment. Your response.
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Dan, so on the first point, and to get a, a tiny bit inside baseball, the mainstream Democratic position, Chuck Schumer says that, that, "I disagree with the Netanyahu policies."
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Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, is out there seeming to campaign [chuckles] against Benjamin Netanyahu. That is where the party is right now.
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The moderate position among Democrats is when a guy like Gavin Newsom, possible future president, is there with the Pod Save America guys, these American Democratic politicos, talking about apartheid in the West Bank.
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So at least Gavin Newsom is not saying Israel is an apartheid state, but the whole mainstream has moved.
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If you go to, you know, these Democrats who were defeated by the DSA, the so-called mainstream Democrats, they were very left when it comes to, "Oh, I'm not anti-Israel, I'm not anti-Zionist, but I am anti X, Y, and Z."
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Okay? So that's just the consensus view right now. What we're looking at is something quite different, and you're spot on. This is a global movement that is feeding in and feeding out. So it goes back to the double game.
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You do have someone like a Brad Lander, where you have some political figures.
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You know, Zach Polanski is not necessarily saying- Okay, just for our listeners to-- So Brad Lander is the Democratic socialist who defeated Congressman Dan Goldman, the incumbent Democrat in this district in Lower Manhattan and- Yeah...
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and Brooklyn. He-- That was one of the big, you know, Mondani-backed challengers to a sitting Democratic congressman, Jewish Democratic congressman, considered, quote-unquote, "moderate" on the Israel issue.
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Zach Polanski, Jewish leader of the Green Party in the UK- Yes... vehemently anti-Israel. I just, I just want to table set here what-- so people know who we're talking about.
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Dan, the reason I mention them both is that Lander doesn't literally call himself a Democratic socialist, but he's someone who's allied himself with this movement.
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Polanski is someone who used to be in the UK a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. You know, he's someone who used to describe himself as, you know, pro-Israel.
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But these are figures who've adapted to the moment, right? So think of that as the outer layer. Those are the people who are trying to win over your friends, Dan, or, you know, those out of the audience.
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Whether you're living in Sydney, whether you're living in Toronto, you know, kind of wherever it is, these are the folks who are trying to basically capitalize on this youth movement, right?
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They're not at the core of the movement. They're a little bit outside of it, but they're also a crucial shield. See what I mean, Dan? Because they're the ones who are creating the permission structure.
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So if I've got these guys, hey, you know, if a guy like Brad Lander calls himself a progressive Zionist, a liberal Zionist, if he's saying that Israel perpetrated a genocide in Gaza because his daughter told him that that was true, this is a very important figure, and that's how you actually bring it out more into the mainstream.
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That's how you say, "Well, actually, you're just an unreasonable person if you're not calling it a genocide." You see what I mean? It's this kind of gaslighting process- Yeah...
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where you actually need those figures to help actually drive this forward. Now, he literally said that he wasn't endorsing some of the, uh, Lander, that is, not endorsing one of the other DSA candidates.
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But the net effect is that they're all marching in the same direction. This is one area where the DSA in the US is brilliant. So they have a strategy for deep blue districts.
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Deep blue districts, not a lot of folks in these primaries. You bring some youth and energy, and you could win, and you're not afraid of losing to a Republican.
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So where the Democratic socialists of America, the DSA, that you keep referring to DSA, that's who it is, and that is a Mamdani, you know- Think of it as the Corbyn wing... the Corbyn wing of, of American politics.
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So where the Corbyn wing of American politics did well in these primaries is they took very heavily Democratic districts where the Democrat, no matter what- Yes... is going to win.
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In some of these districts, like I was looking at the, the Lander-Goldman race, something like 80 or 90% of those who turn out in a general election are Democrats.
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Just to give a sense, these are not competitive districts. These are overwhelmingly Democratic districts.
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And what the DSA does is they get very involved in the primary, where the voting pool is small already, much smaller than a general election, and then they don't need huge turnout to actually be successful, and that's how they get their preferred candidate to be the Democratic nominee.
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And because the district is overwhelmingly Democratic in the general election, they guarantee that their Democratic socialist wins the whole congressional seat and winds up in Congress. Exactly.
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That's how you build this farm team, and they start in the city council and the state legislature, and now you work your way up to Congress, and you build up this block that is totally loyal to you and to this ideology.
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What I wanted to mention is that then you have another universe of people in red states. You run someone in Nebraska. Nebraska is a red state, conservative, heavily Republican state. But you get a guy named Dan Osborne.
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But the idea is you have someone run as an independent, not as a Democrat. So you get someone to run in a place where the Democratic brand is toxic, and he's running as a prairie populist. He's suited to that district.
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The one area, Dan, where you've got to be sure he's completely on board is on Israel. You see what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. So you can get candidates in deep blue districts who are the full monty.
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Then this larger movement and this larger network of campaign strategists and organizers is thinking, "How do we actually penetrate to the right as well?"
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And it's not just politics and political parties, it's unions as well. In the United States, a big historic traditional union, our big blue collar union was the United Auto Workers.
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And in American history played a big role because they were the anti-communist union led by Walter Reuther. They were on the left, but they were anti-communists.
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So today, the UAW, the big historic blue collar union in America that has about 380,000 members, over 100,000 of those members work for colleges and universities, and virtually all of them are graduate students, or the large majority of them are graduate students.
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So the UAW, the United Auto Workers, were endorsing these DSA candidates. One of the candidates in this district across Brooklyn and Queens, she was the head of the Clerical Workers Union, a part of the UAW in Columbia.
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Right. So when you think about old school blue collar unions, they care about, they care about getting a better pay package from GM and Ford and what have you.
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Now, the real juice and momentum is with anti-Israel grad students and clerical worker. I'm... It's fascinating. So they're entering a bunch of different institutions that have been hollowed out.
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Think about the teachers unions, where you have the old guard that is being replaced by this new guard that is building power, and they're becoming the actual engine behind these hollowed out institutions.
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Okay, so I want to give you a counter take. There are some districts, and I'm thinking of New York 10, New York 7, New York 13.
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They have somewhere between, I don't know, five, 700,000, let's call it upwards of 700,000 constituents in these districts, but only tens of thousands of Democrats voted in each primary.
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So I guess my question is, 'cause the narrative is the, the socialists are taking over the Democratic Party on the one hand.
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On the other hand, you could say it's a highly motivated, well-organized minority, very narrow minority of the Democratic base, as you were just describing earlier, running up the score in low turnout races that most Democrats didn't show up for in the primary.
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So, you know, Mamdani's going around doing television interviews saying what you're watching is- This revolution of grassroots enthusiasm. Yep, the base. Yes... Right.
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And, and really, or is it just a very clever strategy to get narrow, intense participation from this group, and then try to project out that there's a much more broad and consensus a- among the Democratic Party going on that's not really reflective of reality?
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So here's what's happening. Basically, you have this resistance energy in the country that is extremely powerful, right? And the question is, who is going to channel resistance energy?
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If you look at 2018, what Democrats did was they found, let me find folks who were former FBI agents. Let me find people who were in the CIA. Let me find military veterans.
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Let me find those people to be the face of resistance. And now what's happening is that the Democratic Party, the establishment feels very discredited because, hey, Trump won twice, guys.
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You know, what are you actually doing here, right? So they're discredited. So then who comes in as the ones with charisma and energy and vehemence? You know, that's kind of one big thing.
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So yeah, on the one hand, these are candidates who would not do well in o- You know, one of them, Aviva Chevalier, she's nuts.
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I mean, genuinely, uh, really quite extreme when it comes to particularly foreign policy issues and whatever. But talking about abolishing the police, talking about ending all deportation, zero deportation.
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These are just very extreme views that a mainstream Democrat wouldn't hold. But the thing is that the level of atmospherics, what you see is a movement that is hacking the system.
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And what I mean by that is that we have two parties. The two parties are totally hollowed out. They're ballot lines that are there to be captured, okay?
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And then the thing is, they're smart enough to know that the person who can win in Upper Manhattan around Columbia and Morningside Heights is gonna be different from someone who can win in the suburbs.
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So basically you've got the places where the DSA believes they can win the full Corbyn candidates.
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But there are other places where they're influencing things, because basically, if you're looking at moderate Democrats right now, they don't feel that they have a charismatic figure who's capturing attention, but they're hacking the system because also, guess what?
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New York City is the media capital of America. It captures so much attention. Some have called it an attention black hole. So you can use that to generate enthusiasm and keep building your movement.
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So at every level, they're using the ways in which our elections are not very responsive. They're kind of broken. We have these low turnout primaries. You have these closed primaries.
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They're using that, and they're also using the way that media and attention works to grow their movement. All right. I've got some questions here from our community. We're not gonna get to all of them.
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But Abby from Toronto says, "For those of us living outside the United States, can you provide more details and context about the DSA?" So the Democratic Socialists of America.
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So you've talked a little bit about the DSA, maybe just a minute or two on, like, where it came from. Why does it appear to be coming at us now so fast? So this is an organization that was started a long time ago.
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Uh, it was started by a group of, call them social democrats, started by a guy named Michael Harrington, who was actually pro-Israel.
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You know, he was someone who was very critical of what he called a Third World romanticism.
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But this organization now is really a product of the post-2008 and then post-Bernie, post-Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign.
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It started emerging in the kind of post-crisis, twenty-twens era, and then every time you've had this big opportunity, like the Bernie Sanders campaign, it's grown. Then you have October 7th, then it's grown.
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Then you have Zohran Mamdani being really charismatic. Now this is another opportunity for it to grow. And this is an organization that is a, it's called a multi-tendency organization.
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It's a big tent group with some people who are much more revolutionary and radical, some people who call themselves Maoists who are in this organization, who are really out there.
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And then there are other people who are pretty radical by our standards, by the standards of folks like us who are center right or folks who are kind of center left, moderate Democrats, but they're focused on winning elections.
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So it's a big, sprawling organization where they also take their endorsements really, really seriously.
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They have local chapters that have a lot of autonomy, and in some big cities, they have local chapters down to the neighborhood level, where people meet every two weeks, and they knock on doors, and they really are operating between elections, building community, taking part in local neighborhood festivals, and trying to get involved in ethnic organizations.
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They take these folks who move to New York City to be a college student or a graduate student, and they try to enmesh them in community, and they try to train people who are real cadres, who are really dedicated to be people who work their way up, first as volunteers, then maybe you organize your union, then maybe you become a candidate.
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So it's a really impressive thing. It's a classic political party.
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It's really doing what a lot of the communist and other far left political parties have done in Europe and, you know, in other countries, bringing that technology to the United States.
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It's almost like, remember when you had little kids, and you were like, "Why am I getting colds all the time?" Because your immune system was too weak to the super viruses you were getting from daycare.
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The Democratic Party is immune because they weren't used to dealing with this kind of hardcore vanguard political party. And now we've got one, and they don't have the immunity to it.
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So they're coming down with a serious virus right now, and the question is, are they gonna be able to build up the antibodies to fight it? That's, I think, what Abby from Toronto needs to understand.
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It's, it's real-- These are guys who are-- They know what they're doing. Well, Abby, I'll, I'll put it in a-- I'll give you a context that I think you'll be able to relate to in, in terms of your own politics.
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Because in the US, we basically just have a two-party system,
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a party like the TS- DSA's best strategy is to build up a following and build up a grassroots organizing, uh, vehicle, and then use it to penetrate into the mainstream Democratic Party and kind of stage a, a hijacking of the Democratic Party.
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Whereas like in Canada, where you live, or specifically in Toronto and Ontario, you have the NDP, the New Democratic Party, which is the equivalent of the DSA today. It wasn't always, but today it is.
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So the NDP sits outside of the Liberal Party, of Mark Carney's Liberal Party, so they have a faction of the hard left that they can use to influence national politics, but they don't do it under the roof of the Liberal Party, or in the UK, the Green Party is doing the same thing as it relates to the Labour Party.
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In the US, the DSA is technically separate, but they are running candidates in Democratic parties rather than running outside of the mainstream center-left party.
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They are actually running candidates of their own in the Democratic primaries as a means to take over the main-- It would like-- It would be like the NDP running candidates in the Liberal Party or in the UK, the Green Party running candidates in the Labour Party.
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That is how the DSA is operating now. Another question for you, Reihan.
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Leo from Fair Lawn, New Jersey with the sweeping primary victories of these anti-Israel Democratic socialists, and he rattles a number of them off, as well as others outside of New York City, and he cites Adam, uh, Hamawi, who's this candidate in New Jersey who was, like, a counsel lawyer to the blind sheikh, Al-Qaeda figure, and this guy is the Democratic nominee for a district in New Jersey, and will most likely be the Democratic congressman.
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Leo asks, "Do Jews have a long-term future in the Tri-State Area?" Now, that's a big question, and it's probably we can dedicate a whole episode to that.
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Tri-State Area meaning New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, which has a large-- the largest concentration of Jews in the United States.
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And I guess without getting into what is the Jewish future in the Tri-State Area, which Reihan, you don't, you don't have to get into. Like I said, we could do a whole episode on that.
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I guess the question is maybe just going a layer deeper on Leo's question, how did this happen in an area which has the highest concentration of Jews in the country?
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And Hamawi isn't the only candidate, too, in New Jersey. It's really fascinating.
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These suburban congressional districts, in some cases you had an affluent suburban congressional district where you had a really extreme anti-Israel candidate, uh, who emerged, uh, through a Democratic primary.
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There are a lot of ways to think about this. One is that the demographic mix is changing, and there's a generational change as well.
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Dan, you and I remember 9/11 extremely well, and so for us to think that twenty-five years after 9/11, these are the people who are going to be elected to Congress from the Tri-State Area, that is something that is just very disorienting for us.
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But you have to think about an electorate where now millennials are outnumbering boomers in the electorate.
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These are people who've grown up, including, by the way, young Jews, who've grown up with a revisionist history of America.
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So for a lot of people, their history, what happened to this country after 9/11, is that Muslims were being oppressed and surveilled, and they were kind of-- All these kind of terrible things were happening.
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That is a narrative. That, to me, is not the full story about what happened. Uh, and we can, you know, go on that in kind of at greater length.
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But the big thing is this revisionist history that has emerged, um, really through elite higher education is a big part of it, and we can go on and on about that. But that's really shaped the rising generation.
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Uh, when you see parents and grandparents who didn't teach their kids and grandkids, they didn't actually kind of teach them those lessons, and when you had schools that didn't do that job, that's part of the story.
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And another part of the story is that people talk about AIPAC all the time, AIPAC's influence, this and that. We now have the anti-AIPAC.
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We have a group called American Priorities PAC, which is a group that is deploying tens of millions of dollars in campaigns.
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And a big driver of this group, it's the usual kind of left-wing funders, but you also have a group of people who are American Muslims who care very deeply about the war against Israel, the struggle against Israel.
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And now you've got some people like, you know, a guy named Saikat Chakrabarti.
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He's a, you know, of a Bengali Hindu origin, Indian American centimillionaire who ran for Congress in San Francisco, who fully embraces this kind of Corbynite anti-Israel agenda.
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And so you've got a group of talented people, just like you had talented young Jewish radicals in earlier generations, who are coming into American life, and they're providing a lot of the intellect, organizational energy, and some of the kind of capital as well.
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And, you know, I think in the Tri-State Area, that's part of what's happening. By the way, none of this happens without young Jews, who are really important foot soldiers of the DSA as well.
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So you've got the young Muslims, and you've got the kind of young ethnics, but you also have Jewish voices for peace, or you have the kind of people around a Brad Lander.
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You have the people who are around this whole network of kind of left-wing young Jews for whom they see this as a spiritual commitment as well. So there's a lot going on here. Okay.
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I want to, um-- We're running out of time, and I-- There, there's a question that we got that I'm gonna read 'cause it relates to what you just said, and we're gonna get more-- we're gonna get deeper into the-- with answers to this question in subsequent episodes, but I just want to read it.
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It's Neil from Boynton Beach. It's almost like, Reihan, like you anticipated Neil's question.
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Neil from Boynton Beach writes, "For decades, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has been amazing at organizing bipartisan support for Israel. Now, the Democrats view AIPAC as toxic.
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Should AIPAC reinvent itself, or should something completely different replace it to once again get bipartisan support for Israel?" Now, Neil, I'm not avoiding the question.
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Again, Reihan just addressed it to some degree. I do think we should get deeper into this in a subsequent, you know, episode or conversation.
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The one thing I would just say is, I think the challenge-- one of the challenges for AIPAC now is AIPAC has, as you say, has done a very good job at making the case for the US's relationship and including building a real consensus that historically has been bipartisan.
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That effort, the project to build and maintain a bipartisan consensus around the US-Israel relationship, that effort through, in this case, AIPAC, has become now an issue of division.
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The name AIPAC has become now at the ballot box. It's now like a ballot issue, has become a actual household name among certain parts of the Democratic Party and, and not in a positive context.
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However, I would say I think we all need to be very careful about saying, "Oh, if AIPAC just fixed itself," or, or "If Israel just got rid of Netanyahu." There are like these terms, AIPAC, Netanyahu.
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Once Netanyahu's gone, the whole situation will be dyna- the whole dynamic will be improved. Maybe.
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I'm skeptical, and the reason I'm skeptical is because if you look at the rhetoric around the DSA, if you look at the rhetoric around these that are being used by these candidates that are winning these elections, if you look at the rhetoric used by Mamdani, it's not about AIPAC at the end of the day.
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It's not about Netanyahu. It's about the existence of the state of Israel, right?
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Dara Lisa, the woman who toppled one of these incumbent Democrats backed by Mamdani, on October eighth, Neil, on October eighth, she was at a rally in Times Square defending Hamas, celebrating Hamas, celebrating the massacre of Jews, okay?
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She was doing this on October eighth, holding up a sign, you can see it, that says, "Zionism equals genocide."
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Now, if you would've told me or you or Reihan or anyone else listening that less than three years later she would topple an incumbent experienced congressional Democrat and be in a position to be the next congresswoman from that district, and this was-- this path was enabled, was empowered by a socialist mayor of New York City who also does not recognize Israel's right to exist, you recognize we have a much bigger problem than any one elected leader of Israel or any advocacy group in the United States.
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Again, go back to what her sign said, "Zionism equals genocide."
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Not this particular Israeli policy equals genocide, not this particular Israeli minister equals genocide, not this particular advocacy organization is supporting genocide.
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Zionism, the foundation of the state of Israel equals genocide.
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Ro Khanna, who's a congressman from Northern California, who's been a big backer of a number of these very anti-Israel progressive candidates, including in the New York area, including Graham Plattner in Maine, he just gave an interview the other day, like the day after the, these shocking election outcomes, and he basically said that the f-- in so many words, he said, "It doesn't matter who the next government of Israel is.
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Unless Israel..."
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And I forget what his prescription was, but it was basically, "Unless Israel changes its policies substantially, dramatically in a direction that I think is unacceptable to anyone running right now in, in Israel to succeed Netanyahu across the political spectrum, our policy, our views," Ro Khanna said, "don't change."
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So I just think it's important to take a step back and not overthink if we get rid of this organization or this politician, somehow things are gonna get better.
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What is driving this movement against the Jewish community, against the US-Israel relationship is much more comprehensive, and its objectives are, I think, much more ideological and sinister than just about tweaking this or that or some kind of rebranding.
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So I just had a little bit of a rant there. Reihan, I don't know if you have anything to add to that.
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No, I think you're spot on, and the main thing I want people to understand, whether you're here in the United States or you're overseas, the whole goal here is demoralization.
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The whole goal here is to get people to stop organizing, to retreat, to put their heads down. And, you know, look, there are times when you've got to be adroit and flexible and smart.
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Look at what the DSA and the broader far-left tendency is doing. They're running differently in Nebraska than they are in Morningside Heights.
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You know, they're kind of taking a different approach, and sometimes that means doing things that feel discomfiting. But I think that that's something that we need to understand.
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This is not about this institution, that institution. This is not about turf battles.
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This is about preserving these democracies, democratic institutions, preserving these alliances that have undergirded our prosperity, our success. This is about protecting the core values of the West.
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When you're looking at the assault that is happening in different countries, notice what's going on. What are the places that created a refuge for Jews and the Jewish community?
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These were places that did have these underlying values, so we're in the business of defending those values. And the point here is to get you demoralized. They're creating this momentum. "Nix, get a chip.
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Let's go out there. Let's organize. Let's, you know, kind of let's flood the zone. Let's do this."
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Because you create that momentum, then, hey, then you demoralize the people who might actually be a real challenge in twenty twenty-nine. It's not just about being the mayoral challenger in twenty twenty-nine.
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It's getting those folks to run for city council, getting those guys to build patiently.
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And the thing is, for the Jewish people, but also for the larger universe of people who care deeply about the West, it's playing the long game. It's building.
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It's remembering that actually we have a past that relates to a future that we want to build.
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And when you're looking at kind of the other side, these are people who sometimes have a very-- The DSA is powerful because they actually are building, too. They kind of have a long-term orientation.
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But which long-term orientation is going to win? Don't get demoralized. This is kind of my big thing.
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And actually, look at the world as it is, look at it clearly, but don't get demoralized because actually there are a lot of people who share our values.
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There are many people who share our values who don't know that they share our values because they haven't learned to articulate it.
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So I feel a lot of energy right now, Dan, and I, I want the insiders here to feel that too because this is when you-- pressure turns coal into diamonds, and I think that this is what we need.
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We need a generation of diamonds that are gonna be able to turn this around. So I, I won't rant any further, but that's what I truly believe. No, that's good.
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I, I, I try to end these conversations on an upbeat note, so that's about as upbeat a note as, as we could hope for. I thank you for that. Reihan, we will leave it there.
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As always, helping us kind of understand what's going on and bring some clarity. Look forward to having you back on soon. Okay, Dan. See you soon. It, it was a, such a pleasure to be here.
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[outro music]
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[on-hold music] You are listening to an Arc Media podcast.
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[upbeat music] Welcome to Inside Call Me Back, our members-only edition where we open the door and let you shape the conversation.
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Thank you for subscribing to the show and supporting the Call Me Back podcast and everything we do here at Arc. I want to encourage you to submit your questions on arcmedia.org.
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Today we have a special insider edition covering the recent US primary elections here in the New York area that were held this past week, and that comes with a special Inside Call Me Back guest, Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute.
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Reihan, who's been on this podcast before, not only leads the Manhattan Institute, but he's a prolific writer, the author and co-author of important books on US politics and US policy.
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He was the subject of a big profile in The Wall Street Journal recently, which we can link to in the show notes with his, I think, pretty trenchant analysis of what is going on in New York under Mamdani.
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So with that, Reihan, welcome to the Inside. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me, Dan.
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So Reihan, we asked our community to send us questions about this topic, but since we don't typically have you on for special insider editions, I also get a vote here and have some questions of my own.
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And I've been wanting to do a download with you, and I tracked you down yesterday when you were like at LaGuardia boarding a plane or something.
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And so I didn't have a chance to get into all the questions I would have liked to have asked you.
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So I'm actually using my prerogative here as the host and as an insider subscriber myself to jam in some of my questions as well. So let me just start. Our audience is very much a global audience.
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What do you think is the significance of this election for the Jewish community, Jewish community in the United States and outside the United States?
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If you were trying to explain what happened in New York this past week, how would you explain it? I want everyone to understand that what we're seeing in New York City is very much a transnational global movement.
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This is a movement that you see manifesting in many different places.
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But when you look at this ideology, when you look at the worldview of, for example, a figure like Zohra Mamdani, he really is a kind of post-national figure.
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This is actually a live debate when you're looking at the left. There are some folks on the left, uh, think about the Social Democrats of Denmark, let's say.
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There, there are many on the left who think we want to be left patriots. We are invested in the nation-state. We believe in the nation-state as a vehicle of a working class coalition.
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Then there are others who see their movement as transnational, and they see themselves as part of a global movement that is anti-imperialist, that is trying to unite workers around the world.
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And their sensibility is almost that the US war machine and the NATO alliance, that these are structures that are actually the bad guys rather than the good guys.
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The fixation on Israel, the Gaza cult, this is something that is not unique to the five boroughs of New York City, as your listeners know extremely well. So that's one thing people really need to understand.
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This is a transnational movement that happens to have a branch office in the United States responding to unique conditions in the United States, and their big fixation is foreign policy.
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Domestic policy, there's an agenda there. There's a big revolutionary radical agenda there. But the thing is that the mainstream Democratic Party has also moved left.
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The thing that's really different is where they stand on Cuba, on Venezuela, on Russia's war against Ukraine, and of course, on Israel. And that's been really galvanizing for them. But that's very much at their core.
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And we'll come back to the UK experience with this.
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But much like when Jeremy Corbyn took over the Labour Party in the UK and ran for prime minister in twenty seventeen, obviously the Jewish community was very focused on this election in the UK.
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The chief rabbi of the UK, in an almost unprecedented way, came out and spoke out against Corbyn and all but endorsed his opponent.
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This was an issue in the UK, but it was also, you know, communities around the world were following this election because it had a directional impact that went far beyond the UK.
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And I think what you're saying here is this is similar to that. No, no, Dan, Dan, I mean, the UK, I'm so glad you raised it. There is a magazine in the UK called Tribune.
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This is a magazine that's been around for decades, but it was recently rebooted some years ago. This was around the Corbyn energy and that phenomenon.
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It was rebooted by a group of folks who are also connected to Jacobin magazine in the United States. Literally, a lot of the talent is back and forth transatlantic.
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So actually, when you're looking at the DSA, the message that they want you to hear as a mainstream Democratic voter is that, "Hey, you know, we want America to be more like Denmark.
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We want America to be more like Sweden," right? But actually, you know, again, when you look at those social democratic parties, they have a very different posture and approach.
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Whereas if you look at the DSA, it's actually much more like Jeremy Corbyn. And Jeremy Corbyn eventually within the labor movement, you know, they were able to fight him off and marginalize him.
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That presence is still there, but momentum and what have you. Now he's in a separate party. Now you've got the Green Party.
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But here in the United States, you're still in a kind of earlier phase where a movement that has that Corbyn worldview.
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The Corbyn worldview, it is something that is certainly genuinely revolutionary Marxist in its orientation, but also vehemently anti-Israel, anti-imperial, anti-NATO down the line, and also very connected to Third World revolutionary movements.
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For example, like the Chávez, Maduro governments in Venez- uh, Venezuela. That is a really core conviction. It's not a sideshow.
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And then the way that they brought in Muslims and causes adjacent to radical Islam, this is an issue that you have to talk about carefully, but that has been rocket fuel in the UK for these movements to give them real grassroots presence, real voting blocks in kind of deep urban ethnic districts.
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Okay, so in the case of the elections in New York, with both socialism and antisemitism playing a role in the outcome of these elections, if I use the like chicken and egg structure, which is the egg and which is the chicken?
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In other words, is antisemitism the main dish, to mix a whole lot of metaphors here, or the spice that gets people to sign up for socialism?
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It's like an ideology that's hard to swallow, so antisemitism serves a purpose here. I'm j- I'm just trying to think, what is the driver?
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So the driver, one way to think about it is, if you embrace this style of socialist revolutionary politics, the whole idea is to find an adversary.
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You wanna organize, you want to actually get people out on the streets, you wanna get people knocking on doors. What is the cause that gets you to do that?
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So for millennial socialism, the clause was the so-called climate emergency. Okay?
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The thing with the climate emergency is that it actually proved an incredible electoral albatross because it raises the cost of living and was actually too abstract.
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It was drawing people in, "Oh, the world's gonna be destroyed by the year twenty thirty. We're all gonna be underwater. It's gonna be a kind of emergency."
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That didn't quite work because it didn't give you a clear, focused enough energy. You know, one energy was the fossil fuel industry, et cetera, but it just wasn't clear and focused enough.
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When you're looking at Israel, but you're also looking at Jewish power, that is something that becomes a much more vivid enemy to organize against.
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So if you look at a lot of these folks in the DSA, these are tenant organizers that are organizing against landlords.
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But then you have a geopolitical emotional issue as well that's connecting with many different constituents. So you have folks who are, you know-- Think of the hierarchy, the moral hierarchy, right?
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If you look at woke politics circle twenty twenty, the moral hierarchy was at the top were the Black victims of police violence and American racism and the legacy of slavery.
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With the omnicaus, the peak victims are the Palestinians who were dispossessed of their land. Then more broadly, it is the kind of global class that is oppressed by imperialism and also by Jewish finance capital.
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You call it Zionism, but this is this kind of new hierarchy and this new adversary, this new oppositionalism that is a very core part of the worldview.
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So in a way, this is something that gave rocket fuel to a movement where, you know, the climate emergency and the kind of psychological distress around that was one thing.
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But suddenly, October seventh, you could go back to two thousand eight and the kind of the crash. You go back to the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged when you're looking at twenty eleven.
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But then October seventh has been absolute rocket fuel, partly because you're discrediting a democratic establishment that wasn't quite willing to go there.
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They were willing to criticize Israel, willing to criticize Netanyahu, but they were not going to embrace conspiracy theories.
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They were not going to embrace this idea that Israel is the villain, you know, when it comes to the post-October seventh world, because it's a repellent, reprehensible worldview.
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But then that became a massive driver of organizing. And then, you know, look, there are some people who sincerely believe, "Hey, I'm just anti-Netanyahu."
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And there are other people who have a much more comprehensive, frankly antisemitic vision about Jewish power and the danger Jewish power it represents. But then you can kind of pretend to be one or the other.
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You can move from one to the next and kind of have that as an organizing principle.
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So let's just stay on that for one moment because I think it is relevant to all these jurisdictions and all these different countries, not just what happened in New York.
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One of my criticisms of the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, what I would call antisemitic protests and movement post-October seventh, is that some of my friends who are sympathetic to it in the United States will say, "No, no, no, no.
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What people are really protesting, it's not anti-Israel full stop. It's not anti-Zionist.
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It's against Israel policy or against specific policies of Israel or specific ministers in the government that are backed by the United States.
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It's US taxpayer dollars being used to fund a war that many critics in the United States view as unjust or immoral or not in the interest of the United States, and so that's what they're protesting against."
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And my response to that is, "Okay, first of all, I'm, I don't buy it, but let's just say I did. Why are there massive protests in Canada and the UK and Australia and France?"
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And, uh, you know, we can go on and on and on and on and, you know, Sweden and Denmark and Indonesia, and it's not like those countries, Spain of all countries.
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It's not like those countries are actually funding Israel's, quote-unquote, "war machine." So there's something much bigger going on that's global. And when I say that, then the response I get is, "Okay, fine."
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But you need to understand, part of the populist moment we are living in is a very anti-establishment across-the-board political moment in all these different countries.
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And to many of them, being pro-Israel or being at least for the status quo as it relates to Israel's role in the international system and its influence and its outsized power in the Middle East is an establishment position, and we, the populace, are gonna be against anything that's establishment.
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And Israel, sorry for you guys, they will say, is a product of that overall sentiment. Your response.
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Dan, so on the first point, and to get a, a tiny bit inside baseball, the mainstream Democratic position, Chuck Schumer says that, that, "I disagree with the Netanyahu policies."
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Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, is out there seeming to campaign [chuckles] against Benjamin Netanyahu. That is where the party is right now.
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The moderate position among Democrats is when a guy like Gavin Newsom, possible future president, is there with the Pod Save America guys, these American Democratic politicos, talking about apartheid in the West Bank.
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So at least Gavin Newsom is not saying Israel is an apartheid state, but the whole mainstream has moved.
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If you go to, you know, these Democrats who were defeated by the DSA, the so-called mainstream Democrats, they were very left when it comes to, "Oh, I'm not anti-Israel, I'm not anti-Zionist, but I am anti X, Y, and Z."
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Okay? So that's just the consensus view right now. What we're looking at is something quite different, and you're spot on. This is a global movement that is feeding in and feeding out. So it goes back to the double game.
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You do have someone like a Brad Lander, where you have some political figures.
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You know, Zach Polanski is not necessarily saying- Okay, just for our listeners to-- So Brad Lander is the Democratic socialist who defeated Congressman Dan Goldman, the incumbent Democrat in this district in Lower Manhattan and- Yeah...
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and Brooklyn. He-- That was one of the big, you know, Mondani-backed challengers to a sitting Democratic congressman, Jewish Democratic congressman, considered, quote-unquote, "moderate" on the Israel issue.
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Zach Polanski, Jewish leader of the Green Party in the UK- Yes... vehemently anti-Israel. I just, I just want to table set here what-- so people know who we're talking about.
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Dan, the reason I mention them both is that Lander doesn't literally call himself a Democratic socialist, but he's someone who's allied himself with this movement.
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Polanski is someone who used to be in the UK a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. You know, he's someone who used to describe himself as, you know, pro-Israel.
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But these are figures who've adapted to the moment, right? So think of that as the outer layer. Those are the people who are trying to win over your friends, Dan, or, you know, those out of the audience.
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Whether you're living in Sydney, whether you're living in Toronto, you know, kind of wherever it is, these are the folks who are trying to basically capitalize on this youth movement, right?
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They're not at the core of the movement. They're a little bit outside of it, but they're also a crucial shield. See what I mean, Dan? Because they're the ones who are creating the permission structure.
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So if I've got these guys, hey, you know, if a guy like Brad Lander calls himself a progressive Zionist, a liberal Zionist, if he's saying that Israel perpetrated a genocide in Gaza because his daughter told him that that was true, this is a very important figure, and that's how you actually bring it out more into the mainstream.
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That's how you say, "Well, actually, you're just an unreasonable person if you're not calling it a genocide." You see what I mean? It's this kind of gaslighting process- Yeah...
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where you actually need those figures to help actually drive this forward. Now, he literally said that he wasn't endorsing some of the, uh, Lander, that is, not endorsing one of the other DSA candidates.
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But the net effect is that they're all marching in the same direction. This is one area where the DSA in the US is brilliant. So they have a strategy for deep blue districts.
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Deep blue districts, not a lot of folks in these primaries. You bring some youth and energy, and you could win, and you're not afraid of losing to a Republican.
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So where the Democratic socialists of America, the DSA, that you keep referring to DSA, that's who it is, and that is a Mamdani, you know- Think of it as the Corbyn wing... the Corbyn wing of, of American politics.
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So where the Corbyn wing of American politics did well in these primaries is they took very heavily Democratic districts where the Democrat, no matter what- Yes... is going to win.
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In some of these districts, like I was looking at the, the Lander-Goldman race, something like 80 or 90% of those who turn out in a general election are Democrats.
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Just to give a sense, these are not competitive districts. These are overwhelmingly Democratic districts.
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And what the DSA does is they get very involved in the primary, where the voting pool is small already, much smaller than a general election, and then they don't need huge turnout to actually be successful, and that's how they get their preferred candidate to be the Democratic nominee.
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And because the district is overwhelmingly Democratic in the general election, they guarantee that their Democratic socialist wins the whole congressional seat and winds up in Congress. Exactly.
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That's how you build this farm team, and they start in the city council and the state legislature, and now you work your way up to Congress, and you build up this block that is totally loyal to you and to this ideology.
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What I wanted to mention is that then you have another universe of people in red states. You run someone in Nebraska. Nebraska is a red state, conservative, heavily Republican state. But you get a guy named Dan Osborne.
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But the idea is you have someone run as an independent, not as a Democrat. So you get someone to run in a place where the Democratic brand is toxic, and he's running as a prairie populist. He's suited to that district.
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The one area, Dan, where you've got to be sure he's completely on board is on Israel. You see what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. So you can get candidates in deep blue districts who are the full monty.
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Then this larger movement and this larger network of campaign strategists and organizers is thinking, "How do we actually penetrate to the right as well?"
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And it's not just politics and political parties, it's unions as well. In the United States, a big historic traditional union, our big blue collar union was the United Auto Workers.
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And in American history played a big role because they were the anti-communist union led by Walter Reuther. They were on the left, but they were anti-communists.
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So today, the UAW, the big historic blue collar union in America that has about 380,000 members, over 100,000 of those members work for colleges and universities, and virtually all of them are graduate students, or the large majority of them are graduate students.
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So the UAW, the United Auto Workers, were endorsing these DSA candidates. One of the candidates in this district across Brooklyn and Queens, she was the head of the Clerical Workers Union, a part of the UAW in Columbia.
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Right. So when you think about old school blue collar unions, they care about, they care about getting a better pay package from GM and Ford and what have you.
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Now, the real juice and momentum is with anti-Israel grad students and clerical worker. I'm... It's fascinating. So they're entering a bunch of different institutions that have been hollowed out.
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Think about the teachers unions, where you have the old guard that is being replaced by this new guard that is building power, and they're becoming the actual engine behind these hollowed out institutions.
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Okay, so I want to give you a counter take. There are some districts, and I'm thinking of New York 10, New York 7, New York 13.
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They have somewhere between, I don't know, five, 700,000, let's call it upwards of 700,000 constituents in these districts, but only tens of thousands of Democrats voted in each primary.
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So I guess my question is, 'cause the narrative is the, the socialists are taking over the Democratic Party on the one hand.
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On the other hand, you could say it's a highly motivated, well-organized minority, very narrow minority of the Democratic base, as you were just describing earlier, running up the score in low turnout races that most Democrats didn't show up for in the primary.
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So, you know, Mamdani's going around doing television interviews saying what you're watching is- This revolution of grassroots enthusiasm. Yep, the base. Yes... Right.
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And, and really, or is it just a very clever strategy to get narrow, intense participation from this group, and then try to project out that there's a much more broad and consensus a- among the Democratic Party going on that's not really reflective of reality?
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So here's what's happening. Basically, you have this resistance energy in the country that is extremely powerful, right? And the question is, who is going to channel resistance energy?
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If you look at 2018, what Democrats did was they found, let me find folks who were former FBI agents. Let me find people who were in the CIA. Let me find military veterans.
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Let me find those people to be the face of resistance. And now what's happening is that the Democratic Party, the establishment feels very discredited because, hey, Trump won twice, guys.
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You know, what are you actually doing here, right? So they're discredited. So then who comes in as the ones with charisma and energy and vehemence? You know, that's kind of one big thing.
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So yeah, on the one hand, these are candidates who would not do well in o- You know, one of them, Aviva Chevalier, she's nuts.
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I mean, genuinely, uh, really quite extreme when it comes to particularly foreign policy issues and whatever. But talking about abolishing the police, talking about ending all deportation, zero deportation.
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These are just very extreme views that a mainstream Democrat wouldn't hold. But the thing is that the level of atmospherics, what you see is a movement that is hacking the system.
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And what I mean by that is that we have two parties. The two parties are totally hollowed out. They're ballot lines that are there to be captured, okay?
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And then the thing is, they're smart enough to know that the person who can win in Upper Manhattan around Columbia and Morningside Heights is gonna be different from someone who can win in the suburbs.
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So basically you've got the places where the DSA believes they can win the full Corbyn candidates.
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But there are other places where they're influencing things, because basically, if you're looking at moderate Democrats right now, they don't feel that they have a charismatic figure who's capturing attention, but they're hacking the system because also, guess what?
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New York City is the media capital of America. It captures so much attention. Some have called it an attention black hole. So you can use that to generate enthusiasm and keep building your movement.
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So at every level, they're using the ways in which our elections are not very responsive. They're kind of broken. We have these low turnout primaries. You have these closed primaries.
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They're using that, and they're also using the way that media and attention works to grow their movement. All right. I've got some questions here from our community. We're not gonna get to all of them.
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But Abby from Toronto says, "For those of us living outside the United States, can you provide more details and context about the DSA?" So the Democratic Socialists of America.
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So you've talked a little bit about the DSA, maybe just a minute or two on, like, where it came from. Why does it appear to be coming at us now so fast? So this is an organization that was started a long time ago.
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Uh, it was started by a group of, call them social democrats, started by a guy named Michael Harrington, who was actually pro-Israel.
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You know, he was someone who was very critical of what he called a Third World romanticism.
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But this organization now is really a product of the post-2008 and then post-Bernie, post-Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign.
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It started emerging in the kind of post-crisis, twenty-twens era, and then every time you've had this big opportunity, like the Bernie Sanders campaign, it's grown. Then you have October 7th, then it's grown.
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Then you have Zohran Mamdani being really charismatic. Now this is another opportunity for it to grow. And this is an organization that is a, it's called a multi-tendency organization.
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It's a big tent group with some people who are much more revolutionary and radical, some people who call themselves Maoists who are in this organization, who are really out there.
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And then there are other people who are pretty radical by our standards, by the standards of folks like us who are center right or folks who are kind of center left, moderate Democrats, but they're focused on winning elections.
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So it's a big, sprawling organization where they also take their endorsements really, really seriously.
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They have local chapters that have a lot of autonomy, and in some big cities, they have local chapters down to the neighborhood level, where people meet every two weeks, and they knock on doors, and they really are operating between elections, building community, taking part in local neighborhood festivals, and trying to get involved in ethnic organizations.
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They take these folks who move to New York City to be a college student or a graduate student, and they try to enmesh them in community, and they try to train people who are real cadres, who are really dedicated to be people who work their way up, first as volunteers, then maybe you organize your union, then maybe you become a candidate.
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So it's a really impressive thing. It's a classic political party.
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It's really doing what a lot of the communist and other far left political parties have done in Europe and, you know, in other countries, bringing that technology to the United States.
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It's almost like, remember when you had little kids, and you were like, "Why am I getting colds all the time?" Because your immune system was too weak to the super viruses you were getting from daycare.
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The Democratic Party is immune because they weren't used to dealing with this kind of hardcore vanguard political party. And now we've got one, and they don't have the immunity to it.
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So they're coming down with a serious virus right now, and the question is, are they gonna be able to build up the antibodies to fight it? That's, I think, what Abby from Toronto needs to understand.
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It's, it's real-- These are guys who are-- They know what they're doing. Well, Abby, I'll, I'll put it in a-- I'll give you a context that I think you'll be able to relate to in, in terms of your own politics.
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Because in the US, we basically just have a two-party system,
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a party like the TS- DSA's best strategy is to build up a following and build up a grassroots organizing, uh, vehicle, and then use it to penetrate into the mainstream Democratic Party and kind of stage a, a hijacking of the Democratic Party.
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Whereas like in Canada, where you live, or specifically in Toronto and Ontario, you have the NDP, the New Democratic Party, which is the equivalent of the DSA today. It wasn't always, but today it is.
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So the NDP sits outside of the Liberal Party, of Mark Carney's Liberal Party, so they have a faction of the hard left that they can use to influence national politics, but they don't do it under the roof of the Liberal Party, or in the UK, the Green Party is doing the same thing as it relates to the Labour Party.
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In the US, the DSA is technically separate, but they are running candidates in Democratic parties rather than running outside of the mainstream center-left party.
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They are actually running candidates of their own in the Democratic primaries as a means to take over the main-- It would like-- It would be like the NDP running candidates in the Liberal Party or in the UK, the Green Party running candidates in the Labour Party.
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That is how the DSA is operating now. Another question for you, Reihan.
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Leo from Fair Lawn, New Jersey with the sweeping primary victories of these anti-Israel Democratic socialists, and he rattles a number of them off, as well as others outside of New York City, and he cites Adam, uh, Hamawi, who's this candidate in New Jersey who was, like, a counsel lawyer to the blind sheikh, Al-Qaeda figure, and this guy is the Democratic nominee for a district in New Jersey, and will most likely be the Democratic congressman.
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Leo asks, "Do Jews have a long-term future in the Tri-State Area?" Now, that's a big question, and it's probably we can dedicate a whole episode to that.
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Tri-State Area meaning New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, which has a large-- the largest concentration of Jews in the United States.
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And I guess without getting into what is the Jewish future in the Tri-State Area, which Reihan, you don't, you don't have to get into. Like I said, we could do a whole episode on that.
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I guess the question is maybe just going a layer deeper on Leo's question, how did this happen in an area which has the highest concentration of Jews in the country?
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And Hamawi isn't the only candidate, too, in New Jersey. It's really fascinating.
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These suburban congressional districts, in some cases you had an affluent suburban congressional district where you had a really extreme anti-Israel candidate, uh, who emerged, uh, through a Democratic primary.
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There are a lot of ways to think about this. One is that the demographic mix is changing, and there's a generational change as well.
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Dan, you and I remember 9/11 extremely well, and so for us to think that twenty-five years after 9/11, these are the people who are going to be elected to Congress from the Tri-State Area, that is something that is just very disorienting for us.
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But you have to think about an electorate where now millennials are outnumbering boomers in the electorate.
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These are people who've grown up, including, by the way, young Jews, who've grown up with a revisionist history of America.
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So for a lot of people, their history, what happened to this country after 9/11, is that Muslims were being oppressed and surveilled, and they were kind of-- All these kind of terrible things were happening.
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That is a narrative. That, to me, is not the full story about what happened. Uh, and we can, you know, go on that in kind of at greater length.
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But the big thing is this revisionist history that has emerged, um, really through elite higher education is a big part of it, and we can go on and on about that. But that's really shaped the rising generation.
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Uh, when you see parents and grandparents who didn't teach their kids and grandkids, they didn't actually kind of teach them those lessons, and when you had schools that didn't do that job, that's part of the story.
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And another part of the story is that people talk about AIPAC all the time, AIPAC's influence, this and that. We now have the anti-AIPAC.
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We have a group called American Priorities PAC, which is a group that is deploying tens of millions of dollars in campaigns.
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And a big driver of this group, it's the usual kind of left-wing funders, but you also have a group of people who are American Muslims who care very deeply about the war against Israel, the struggle against Israel.
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And now you've got some people like, you know, a guy named Saikat Chakrabarti.
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He's a, you know, of a Bengali Hindu origin, Indian American centimillionaire who ran for Congress in San Francisco, who fully embraces this kind of Corbynite anti-Israel agenda.
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And so you've got a group of talented people, just like you had talented young Jewish radicals in earlier generations, who are coming into American life, and they're providing a lot of the intellect, organizational energy, and some of the kind of capital as well.
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And, you know, I think in the Tri-State Area, that's part of what's happening. By the way, none of this happens without young Jews, who are really important foot soldiers of the DSA as well.
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So you've got the young Muslims, and you've got the kind of young ethnics, but you also have Jewish voices for peace, or you have the kind of people around a Brad Lander.
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You have the people who are around this whole network of kind of left-wing young Jews for whom they see this as a spiritual commitment as well. So there's a lot going on here. Okay.
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I want to, um-- We're running out of time, and I-- There, there's a question that we got that I'm gonna read 'cause it relates to what you just said, and we're gonna get more-- we're gonna get deeper into the-- with answers to this question in subsequent episodes, but I just want to read it.
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It's Neil from Boynton Beach. It's almost like, Reihan, like you anticipated Neil's question.
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Neil from Boynton Beach writes, "For decades, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has been amazing at organizing bipartisan support for Israel. Now, the Democrats view AIPAC as toxic.
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Should AIPAC reinvent itself, or should something completely different replace it to once again get bipartisan support for Israel?" Now, Neil, I'm not avoiding the question.
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Again, Reihan just addressed it to some degree. I do think we should get deeper into this in a subsequent, you know, episode or conversation.
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The one thing I would just say is, I think the challenge-- one of the challenges for AIPAC now is AIPAC has, as you say, has done a very good job at making the case for the US's relationship and including building a real consensus that historically has been bipartisan.
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That effort, the project to build and maintain a bipartisan consensus around the US-Israel relationship, that effort through, in this case, AIPAC, has become now an issue of division.
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The name AIPAC has become now at the ballot box. It's now like a ballot issue, has become a actual household name among certain parts of the Democratic Party and, and not in a positive context.
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However, I would say I think we all need to be very careful about saying, "Oh, if AIPAC just fixed itself," or, or "If Israel just got rid of Netanyahu." There are like these terms, AIPAC, Netanyahu.
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Once Netanyahu's gone, the whole situation will be dyna- the whole dynamic will be improved. Maybe.
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I'm skeptical, and the reason I'm skeptical is because if you look at the rhetoric around the DSA, if you look at the rhetoric around these that are being used by these candidates that are winning these elections, if you look at the rhetoric used by Mamdani, it's not about AIPAC at the end of the day.
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It's not about Netanyahu. It's about the existence of the state of Israel, right?
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Dara Lisa, the woman who toppled one of these incumbent Democrats backed by Mamdani, on October eighth, Neil, on October eighth, she was at a rally in Times Square defending Hamas, celebrating Hamas, celebrating the massacre of Jews, okay?
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She was doing this on October eighth, holding up a sign, you can see it, that says, "Zionism equals genocide."
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Now, if you would've told me or you or Reihan or anyone else listening that less than three years later she would topple an incumbent experienced congressional Democrat and be in a position to be the next congresswoman from that district, and this was-- this path was enabled, was empowered by a socialist mayor of New York City who also does not recognize Israel's right to exist, you recognize we have a much bigger problem than any one elected leader of Israel or any advocacy group in the United States.
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Again, go back to what her sign said, "Zionism equals genocide."
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Not this particular Israeli policy equals genocide, not this particular Israeli minister equals genocide, not this particular advocacy organization is supporting genocide.
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Zionism, the foundation of the state of Israel equals genocide.
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Ro Khanna, who's a congressman from Northern California, who's been a big backer of a number of these very anti-Israel progressive candidates, including in the New York area, including Graham Plattner in Maine, he just gave an interview the other day, like the day after the, these shocking election outcomes, and he basically said that the f-- in so many words, he said, "It doesn't matter who the next government of Israel is.
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Unless Israel..."
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And I forget what his prescription was, but it was basically, "Unless Israel changes its policies substantially, dramatically in a direction that I think is unacceptable to anyone running right now in, in Israel to succeed Netanyahu across the political spectrum, our policy, our views," Ro Khanna said, "don't change."
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So I just think it's important to take a step back and not overthink if we get rid of this organization or this politician, somehow things are gonna get better.
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What is driving this movement against the Jewish community, against the US-Israel relationship is much more comprehensive, and its objectives are, I think, much more ideological and sinister than just about tweaking this or that or some kind of rebranding.
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So I just had a little bit of a rant there. Reihan, I don't know if you have anything to add to that.
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No, I think you're spot on, and the main thing I want people to understand, whether you're here in the United States or you're overseas, the whole goal here is demoralization.
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The whole goal here is to get people to stop organizing, to retreat, to put their heads down. And, you know, look, there are times when you've got to be adroit and flexible and smart.
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Look at what the DSA and the broader far-left tendency is doing. They're running differently in Nebraska than they are in Morningside Heights.
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You know, they're kind of taking a different approach, and sometimes that means doing things that feel discomfiting. But I think that that's something that we need to understand.
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This is not about this institution, that institution. This is not about turf battles.
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This is about preserving these democracies, democratic institutions, preserving these alliances that have undergirded our prosperity, our success. This is about protecting the core values of the West.
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When you're looking at the assault that is happening in different countries, notice what's going on. What are the places that created a refuge for Jews and the Jewish community?
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These were places that did have these underlying values, so we're in the business of defending those values. And the point here is to get you demoralized. They're creating this momentum. "Nix, get a chip.
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Let's go out there. Let's organize. Let's, you know, kind of let's flood the zone. Let's do this."
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Because you create that momentum, then, hey, then you demoralize the people who might actually be a real challenge in twenty twenty-nine. It's not just about being the mayoral challenger in twenty twenty-nine.
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It's getting those folks to run for city council, getting those guys to build patiently.
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And the thing is, for the Jewish people, but also for the larger universe of people who care deeply about the West, it's playing the long game. It's building.
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It's remembering that actually we have a past that relates to a future that we want to build.
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And when you're looking at kind of the other side, these are people who sometimes have a very-- The DSA is powerful because they actually are building, too. They kind of have a long-term orientation.
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But which long-term orientation is going to win? Don't get demoralized. This is kind of my big thing.
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And actually, look at the world as it is, look at it clearly, but don't get demoralized because actually there are a lot of people who share our values.
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There are many people who share our values who don't know that they share our values because they haven't learned to articulate it.
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So I feel a lot of energy right now, Dan, and I, I want the insiders here to feel that too because this is when you-- pressure turns coal into diamonds, and I think that this is what we need.
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We need a generation of diamonds that are gonna be able to turn this around. So I, I won't rant any further, but that's what I truly believe. No, that's good.
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I, I, I try to end these conversations on an upbeat note, so that's about as upbeat a note as, as we could hope for. I thank you for that. Reihan, we will leave it there.
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As always, helping us kind of understand what's going on and bring some clarity. Look forward to having you back on soon. Okay, Dan. See you soon. It, it was a, such a pleasure to be here.
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