Oh

... voter is a woman who does not have children, who has a degree or more, and is not financially strapped.

We know that people of means, people who make over $100,000 a year, $500,000 a year, are now the Democrats' base.

Those people really care about name changes because they are not suffering from the burden of crushing debt and bills they can't pay.

But the president's base is the working class.

It is people who don't know how they're gonna pay that next bill.

And so he really does have a responsibility to keep his eye on the prize because the left, their base loves this stuff.

It's another thing when they're getting, politicians are getting rich and Americans feel strapped.

Like, what is this?

Yeah.

Haley Stevens had this great line during their last debate where she said, Abdullah Syed is running to be a celebrity.

And that's just like obviously true.

Like this guy just wants to be famous.

The clip that's making the rounds right now is of him insulting a very kind of like, you know, classic Americana getaway in Michigan, an island where you can't drive cars.

And he's on the island saying, I I hate this place.

What separates the type of Marxism you aligned or lined with? I mean, tell us where you stand and them.

What exactly are they angry at?

Thank you so much for having me, Leland.

It's great to be here.

Um, people feel that they've been written out of the future of this country.

They feel that the gifts of the United States of America are still there, just not for them, that they're being given to everybody but them, which is infuriating because Americans work very, very, very hard.

And it's coming out, as you pointed out in your wonderful introduction, in many different ways.

Um, this data center, it's a moral panic, right? I mean, a lot of the data does not support the way that people feel about it.

the elites and the government conspiring to track all of the minions.

They want to tear apart the American social construct and fabric, but perhaps a realization that they want to repackage them.

Thanks so much for having me, Leland.

I'm very excited to hear what Dan thinks about this.

I totally agree with you.

I think WOKE 2.0 is the same as WOKE 1.0.

It is founded on the belief that everything that makes America exceptional is evil.

I don't see any evidence that they have ceased to have this kind of loathing of strength and power and independence, a hatred of white people, the belief that racism exists in the foundation of this nation.

Totally.

So how did we get there exactly? Explain this to me.

So what's interesting about the book is it begins with the first 300 years of American Jewish history that have been erased, in which Jews were not Democrats, right? In which Jews were deeply loyal to the United States.

They felt like most Americans felt that this was the promised land.

And sometimes they voted for Democrats, sometimes they voted for Republicans.

That changed at the turn of the century.

In the 1900s, there was about a million Jews moved here from the Pale of Settlement, from Eastern Europe.

to escape like rabid antisemitism, just violent, violent pogroms, may laws.

Yeah.

What stood out to you the most from this document, Delvin?

Well, I myself had asked Anthony Fauci the one time I got to interview him in 2023 if he did not regret recommending school closures.

At that point, we already knew how not endangered from COVID children were, and yet how much harm the school closures was causing children, especially disadvantaged children, children in blue cities and blue states who didn't have access to schools, as opposed to kids in red states where they did have access to them.

We could see at that point that there was no difference in the child mortality due to COVID, thank God, but a huge difference in learning loss.

So I asked Dr. Fauci, do you regret recommending closing down the schools? And he said to me, well, I never recommended closing down the schools.

This was the CDC, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, wouldn't you know it? There is an entry in his diary bragging about how he convinced Bill de Blasio and Gavin Newsom.

What does that tell us about the relationship between someone like Dr. Fauci and the legacy press?

Explain that to me.

It's funny because they call themselves socialists and they talk about themselves as if what they're pushing is an economic populist agenda.

But the beating heart of this movement is Free Palestine.

they're obsessed with israel they talk about medicare for all but the incumbents that they unseated also support medicare for all right so you can see how that's not the animating feature of their campaigns um they talk about abolish ice this is not a campaign message that resonates with working-class people and indeed the voters who gave them their victory in every case were white overeducated and on the wealthier side.

They won all the wealthier districts in some cases by 30 points while portraying themselves as these heroes of the working class.

So why is that? Why is it that these things go together? This free Palestine, this obsession with Israel and demonizing Jews and demonizing Zionism.

How has that become the litmus test for belonging on the left, the sine qua non, the most important feature? And why are all of these pretend socialists actually overeducated elites? And of course, it's two sides of the same coin.

Can you kind of break that down? Explain to me why you can say that, given, for example, the significant amount of deaths that have happened in Palestine over past years.

Everything that's going on with DSA, and you and I have been both outspoken against them, but you've brought up recently the irony that they're the working class representatives, but the voters are saying something quite different.

Yeah, exactly.

They're portraying themselves as this kind of like multiracial working class coalition.

They're on the side of the little guy against the oligarchs.

But in poll after poll after poll, it's like the oligarchs who are voting for them.

They're winning with the college educated.

They're winning high income areas.

A tight

Is that is there something I'm not picking up here? Because it's kind of weird to me because he gives off stay away from this guy and cover your drink with your hand

vibes.

I'm so glad you brought this up because this is like my most cancelable opinion currently, which is I noticed the same thing.

Like, look at all those women behind him, like gazing adoringly at him.

And that profile did not change after he was accused of roughing up his ex-girlfriend and locking her in a room and leaving bruises on her.

And I feel like all those ladies kind of read all of those stories and went, hmm, me too.

Oh, God.

Do you think the—I think he's one step away from going on with Tucker Carlson to, you know, capitalize on this by blaming it on the Jews.

Who do you think actually is to blame for a guy like this nearly making it to the US Senate?

I mean, every person for whom a Nazi tattoo was not a deal breaker, that's it.

I mean, for 10 years they called us Nazis and then they went and backed a guy with an actual Nazi tattoo.

Zero forgiveness.

I'm sorry, but it's like, Every person who defended him after the story about Lindsey Fifield came out that he had roughed her up, apparently it's me too, but only, believe all women, if they're Republicans.

I mean, every single one of their pieties that for decades they used to portray themselves as morally superior to conservatives, they threw in the dustbin for this guy.

And for what? Why? Because a bunch of rich, effeminate, overeducated nepo babies, looked at him and said, this is a real man.

Do you think there are any lessons that are gonna be learned here? Do you think that this causes the Democratic Party to sort of second guess propping up these kinds of radical candidates in the future? Or are they gonna view this as an anomaly and keep chugging that way?

We got to live that path.

Yeah, it's very much an America 250 book because it's not just about this beautiful history, but it's about the uniqueness of this nation.

America was seen as the promised land for centuries.

the Christians who came here and the Jews who came here.

And to me, it still is.

And, you know, of course, there is rising anti-Semitism, especially on the left.

There's a lot of that.

And you've got the guts to make this happen.

The plan might actually work.

I had not thought of that until you made that point, Leland.

And now I can't stop thinking about it.

You know, I just keep thinking to myself, if only there had been a sign that Graham Platner was capable of something like this.

I mean, if only he had posted something to Reddit blaming women for being sexually assaulted, you know, if only he had gotten a Nazi tattoo, we might have been able to foresee this.

If only another girlfriend had accused him of roughing her up.

But it came out of nowhere.

Is the swing voter now in Michigan and in Wisconsin going to accept an anti-semiterrorist adjacent member of the Senate because they hate Donald Trump? Or is this going to be like 2022 where Republicans pick some awful people, Doug Mastriano, Herschel Walker, et cetera, and they lose very winnable seats because of it?

... were Jewish.

And more than 50% of the Freedom Riders, and, um, of the six people, the six White people who were lynched during the civil rights movement, a third were Jews.

Two were Jews.

Um, wildly overrepresented.

Things started to shift in 1967, and here's where I get to the answer to your question.

I believe that the shift was a combination of the activist movement shifting in a different direction, uh, a new intellectual movement through the universities, but then also, there's a huge economic piece of this, which is how ideas that should have stayed in the hallowed hallways of the university ended up becoming utterly mainstream throughout the Democratic Party.

Um, so these three pieces come together, I think, to explain it, um, which is why I guess it's good that there's a 275-page book rather than just a two, two-sentence summary.

Yeah, yeah.

Batya, before we talk about current events, can we actually just go back in time a little bit? And I'm actually quite curious to understand how is it that American Jews came to traditionally align with the Democratic Party?

Yeah, it's a long story, and it's funny because people assume that there's some sort of inherent connection there, and there isn't.

Because there was, you know, three hundred years before the alliance between the Jews and the Democratic Party, and I, I cover a lot of that in the book.

Um, that alliance really started at the turn of the 20th century because there were about a million to two million Jewish refugees from Russia.

They were fleeing pogroms and May laws and just horrific, brutal, violent antisemitism.

And when they arrived here, they were just totally, totally destitute.

And most of them found their way into the needle trades because you didn't have to speak English and because the bosses were mostly Jews.

It was just simply opportunistic.

Things happen that-

Let me just push back on this for a second, okay? Um, uh, um, on this question of the inspectors, there were inspectors there as recently as Operation Midnight Hammer, right? These, these inspectors do absolutely nothing as far as I can tell, because they were able to keep enriching uranium.

But I think more importantly, the thing that I think is so horrifying to me about this MOU and what I think just happened is that Iran has moved the theater of war from the question of ballistics and nukes to the economic front.

It has realized that the Strait of Hormuz is even more powerful, dare I say it, than a nuclear weapon because there's no mutually assured destruction.

It has shown the world it can withstand that pressure 'cause it doesn't care about its schoolgirls and it doesn't care about its citizens and it doesn't care about economic collapse, but we do.

We can't even sustain a dollar more a gallon for gas.

And so it has moved the whole theater of war to the place where it has complete supremacy, and I just don't see, what do we have left to negotiate with? Because they don't care about being bombed.

I don't know.

You talked to, we talk about, you know, in the last 10 years, last 50, last 20, I mean, Was there a point in which it could have been otherwise or is this just kind of the deterioration, the kind of anti-Semitic norm reasserting itself over time?

The thing – it's a wonderfully put question because when I ask myself that question, that is when the rage starts, right? Because you could easily imagine a counterfactual scenario, right? where the left said, look, we're upset about Israel.

We're kind of on the side of the Palestinians.

They don't have civil rights in the West Bank.

We care about this a lot.

How can we come up with a way to talk about this that doesn't demonize our most loyal partners for 100 years? How can we find a way to advocate for the Palestinians in an effective way that doesn't make our 100-year-old partners who built this movement feel unwelcome.

But of course, they did the exact opposite, right? Which is infuriating.

You know, when do we go too far? When do we overcorrect and call Megyn Kelly an anti-Semite? Is she one, really, or anti-Israel? Are we making a mistake by suggesting that everybody who doesn't fulfill the pro-Israel community's entire agenda is therefore against us? How do you walk that line?

And toward that end, you share a story of which I'd been previously unaware, and that is the unusual circumstances in which the first Jewish settlers to New Amsterdam, now New York City, in 1654 arrived, what were those circumstances and what did the reception from early colonists reveal?

So 23 Jews arrived here.

In August of 1654, they were refugees from Recife from Brazil, which had been a Dutch colony and the Dutch had given Jews private rights to practice their religion.

They couldn't do it publicly, but they could do it privately.

But the Spanish Inquisition was on and Brazil was retaken by the Spanish and they gave the Jews three months to leave.

So 15 ships full of Jews left for Amsterdam to go back there.

14 arrived safely.

Why did Northern Jews play such an outsized role and how did their attitudes sometimes differ from those of Southern Jews? Wanted a different approach.

Uh, and I guess the bigger question from your perspective, not only does that have some weaknesses in it, but should we have gone to war in the first place, and is it going to potentially destroy the, uh, Trump presidency through the midterm?

It's a great question.

Um, [laughs] I think it's a very flawed MOU.

I think that we won the war, but Iran has clearly won the negotiations.

I think Iran came out of this stronger than they were when we went in, and it, it gives me no pleasure to say that.

It is so painful to me to admit that, but I think it's true, and so I have to say it.

That's my job.

Right

Batya, why did the left give up on the working class?

Um, all right, so [laughs] you're gonna expose my, uh, [laughs] my economic materialism early on in the conversation.

But, um, [laughs] m- in my view, it's sort of neo...

the answer is neoliberalism.

Um, th- they got rich off of a right-wing economic system that was very easily metabolized through Clinton and Obama, um, into creating a very diffuse elite out of the college-educated.

And this was something that, because they were leftists, they could not acknowledge, so they had to build up an entire worldview to mask this.

So all of their politics became an alibi for the fact that they were abandoning labor because it was very much in their financial interest to do so.

So to follow your logic, is he now i- uh, in transition to the left?

We got to live that path.

Yeah, it's very much an America 250 book because it's not just about this beautiful history, but it's about the uniqueness of this nation.

America was seen as the promised land for centuries.

the christians who came here and the jews who came here and to me it still is and you know of course there is rising anti-semitism especially on the left there's a lot of that i talk about it a lot in the book it's also a little bit on the right sadly there's um you know just this kind of tendency now to blame jews blame israel for whatever is going wrong and that is definitely there but i still feel so utterly optimistic about our future as american jews and our future as americans because From the minute the first Jews stepped foot on American soil in 1654, it was like the soil itself rejected Jew hate.

Because you would have people like Peter Stuyvesant, the first official that they encountered, a rank anti-Semite.

He tried to force the Jews to leave and they sued and won.

And again and again and again, he would try to inflict on them indignities and oppression and deprive them of the rights that the Christians had here.

And we need people to bring this forward like yourself.

And, uh, her family, uh, many of them were murdered during the Holocaust.

Jews, get off your knees and stop begging for acceptance from people who hate you.

Everyone knows it's a Nazi symbol.

It's a Totenkopf.

It is the insignia of the concentration camp guards.

Yeah.

And now you want to look me in the face and tell me it's not a Nazi tattoo.

He didn't know what it was.

But give us the thesis of how did the most oppressed people of the last century become the sort of left's villains of this one?

Thank you so much for having me.

It's so great to be here with you.

It's a really good question, and it's compounded by the fact that so many Jews in America stay with the Democratic Party.

And it's one of the questions that I get asked the most by Republicans, conservatives, Christians across the country.

They say to me, like, with real pain in their eyes, but why are the Jews Democrats? You know, because They know that they have the Jews back.

They're very pro-Israel.

How big is this, you know, sort of ultra-progressive, you know, university, college-educated, uber-liberal bloc? And, you know, is it big enough to hold a coalition together ever again?

Thank you.

Um, why are Jews Democrats? This is the question I get asked the most when I travel by Christians, by conservatives, by Republicans, and they ask it to me with real pain because they'll say to me, "Why are the Jews Democrats when the Democrats hate them? And we have their backs.

We love the Jews, but they're on the other side." And it is, it's a very fundamental question, I think.

Um, and so I decided ultimately, look, so many people have asked me this question, I'm gonna write a book about it.

Why did the Jews become Democrats in the first place? Why did they stay Democrats? And why did the left turn on them? [lips smack] Um, I think that today the main reason that two-thirds of American Jews remain Democrats is because they have convinced themselves that they are an oppressed minority in a country that has refused to treat them that way from the minute the first Jew stepped foot on American soil in 1654.

This was less than a decade after 50,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine by Cossacks.

Less than a decade later, a man named Asser Levy stepped foot on American soil.

Your thoughts on it?

Well, you know,

it's very interesting to me that Trump has not forced him to speak on it.

Like that Trump has not tried to force the issue and said, Rubio, go out there.

You're my secretary of state and give your stamp of approval on this.

Like Trump is kind of abiding the impression that this is unpopular even within his administration.

People are saying like, actually, Trump does this a lot.

Like he'll float something as a trial balloon to get feedback.

And Trump just had that shouting match with Netanyahu as well.

Mm.

But this is actually exactly the same [laughs] as the JCPOA, if not worse, because we're so close to victory.

I mean, there has never been a nation as strong as the United States is right now.

We are the world's greatest and only superpower, the strongest nation to ever exist, and we have been brought to our knees by a few mines.

And I, as an American, I cannot stand that.

I cannot stand saying that sentence, but it is utterly true.

And what's worse is, exactly as Ben pointed out, they will never be weaker than they are now.

[laughs]