Israel: Past, Present, and Future

You know, you've got people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and unfortunately, Megyn Kelly.

You've got outright bizarre little trolls like Nick Fuentes and others, but a substantial online influence that has had a corrosive effect, particularly among young men, younger men.

who kind of hop, skipped, and jumped quickly over mainstream conservatism into this kind of very angry, isolationist, conspiratorial sort of trough.

And as a part of it, it seems that anti-Semitism is just one of the features.

It's not a bug.

It's a feature in this movement.

And It's difficult to watch because over the years, conservatives had gotten better and better about removing anti-Semitism from the movement, and it was becoming more of a feature of the political left, and it still is in a lot of ways.

But the vehemence of this movement, and it's showing up in some of the preachers who have aligned themselves with this movement, and I don't even want to say their names really, but those who are at all aware of what's going on, you know some of these guys who have YouTube channels and that sort of thing, and they're promoting really kind of vile anti-Semitism.

Carl, my question is, why are some of these movements so reflexively in favor of Jew hatred, which is what it is.

Why does it seem to be such a reflex among them?

I think there's no easy answer to that.

I had the privilege a few years ago of interviewing Rabbi Soli Soloveitchik, who's rabbi of the oldest synagogue in New York, and asking him exactly that question.

why anti-Semitism? And his answer was, because the Jews are still here.

You don't walk down New York Street and bump into Hittites or Babylonians.

You see Jewish people everywhere.

And his answer was, we're still here.

And people wonder why.

And that makes some of these crazy conspiracy theories plausible to the ignorant and the ill-informed.

I would add to that, we live in an age where transgression is rewarded.

And you pointed to YouTube.

When you think of social media, social media even provides, not only does it provide reputational rewards in terms of clicks and downloads, it can even be monetized these days.

And I think, OK, that's transgression.

Well, the thing about transgression is yesterday's transgression is today's orthodoxy.

So it keeps getting more and more extreme.

And for people of our generation, Todd, what was the last great taboo? Pretty much all the sexual taboos have been swept away.