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'OPPRESSOR MYTH!' How the Left TURNED on Israel, Jews and the West | Batya Ungar-Sargon
Jun 2, 2026
The American author and political commentator Batya Ungar-Sargon has argued that the modern Left’s hostility towards Israel stems from a broader ideological worldview that divides society into “oppressors” and “the oppressed”, leading many progressives to side instinctively against both Israel and the West. Speaking to GB News, she said anti-Zionism had become “as central a component of the Left as climate activism”, claiming the movement’s priorities had shifted away from working-class concerns and towards identity politics.
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Hello and welcome to Fire at Will. My guest today is one of my very favourite political
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commentators and the author of the new book, Jews and the Left, Bhatia Angasagon. Bhatia
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what a pleasure to see you again. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here
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It's great to chat to you again. We chatted about your previous book when I was with a less august media organization
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than GB News. And I was thinking, how can I be a tad clever, which is unusual for me
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And I was thinking, well, I'd like to connect your work with your previous book, which was
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Second Class Citizens, which looked at basically how the elites betrayed the working class
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of America and how that led to the rise of Donald Trump. with the focus that you have now on how the left has betrayed the Jewish people in America
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but I would add that it is a Western phenomenon more generally. Now, many people in that MAGA coalition, in the working class of America
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I imagine, look at the discourse around the Middle East, and they look at America's support for Israel
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And whilst the vast, vast majority of them are not anti-Semitic, they're good, decent people, they are sometimes confused when they say, well, why is there so much focus that is placed on a small country in the Middle East that has a small population
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and to your whole argument in your first book, why aren't we being put first as the American people
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Why is all of this conversation at the moment happening around Israel
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when really there should be a focus on what is going on closer to home
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How do you square that circle? And how do you think Donald Trump has gone trying to square that circle
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Actually, I've never heard that once. What you hear from MAGA people, working class MAGA people
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is it's very tough financially for them right now, but they really support what Trump is doing in Iran
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because they remember the Iran hostage crisis and they know that Iran hates America
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Most working class Americans are very pro-Israel and very supportive of their Jewish neighbors
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very protective of American Jews. I don't think they think that there's too much focus on Israel
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because there isn't a lot of focus on Israel. There is online and there is in the fever swamps
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of the far right and the far left. but average Americans don't experience it that way now among young conservatives you do see people
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wanting to end aid to Israel because they don't support foreign aid to anybody but that's okay I
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want to end aid to Israel I think that Israel has been harmed by it I think America has gotten a lot
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out of it but clearly we have not made the case to the younger generation and it's very normal for
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a young person to say why are we giving money to a foreign country when I can't buy a home
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so I really don't hear that a lot I think that that is a narrative
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that serves the left and then people who used to be on the far right in the podcast sphere
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who are now on the left because they've turned on the Jews
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and turned on Israel and turned on Trump but that's a one-way street in America
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at some point when you get far enough, deep enough into your anti-Zionism
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you end up podcasting with leftists and I think that's really what we've seen
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and there's a bunch of other podcasters as well I call them the podcast area you know or the
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influencers with no influence they it's so interesting how they turned on Israel and the
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Jews and Trump at the same time isn't it how you know you had them sort of being very skeptical
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of initially the operation in the Middle East operation Midnight Fury when he took out Fordow
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and Isfahan, and then very skeptical of this current Operation Epic Fury in Iran
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which they then blamed on Israel, which of course was ridiculous. Trump has been promising to do this for 40 years and is not exactly a person that you can manipulate to do what he doesn't want to do
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And that sort of went hand in hand. So they turned on Israel
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The reason for that is because the audience they're seeking is Muslim
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And this is something they will now freely admit. So in this effort to attract millions and millions of new Muslim viewers, they became very anti-Zionist. And because Trump is a very good friend of Israel and the Jews, they turned on Trump for refusing to be influenced by them and to turn his back on the Jewish people so that they could get more views on the Internet, you know, and better comments in the comment section on YouTube
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And now, basically, with their hatred of Israel, their hatred of Trump, they have much more in common with the far left podcasters and influencers and Congress people and senators and what have you than they do with anybody on the right because MAGA is still pretty united behind Donald Trump
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I mean, there's his approval ratings are really high among the MAGA base
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His grip of power is unmatched and unparalleled in American history. His ability to choose candidates and make the political winds go his way is so strong because he understands his voters and is still giving them what they want
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And so you had this mass exodus of these podcasters who, it turned out, had no influence either on Trump or on his voters
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And now you see them podcasting with leftists. I think that insight that this is really a matter of trying to appeal quite cynically to an Islamic online audience is very unnerving
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So I was on Megyn Kelly's show probably about a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, and it was on the topic of Islam
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And she said at the outset of that conversation, I do not want more Muslims in the country
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Very, very hardline stuff. and this feels like an incredibly sudden and incredibly dramatic change of tone and argument
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from someone like like Megan is this just a cynical matter of looking at a bigger online
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audience and trying to appeal to it or is there something greater and more ideological going on
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um you know I too was really disappointed with Megan she did a lot for me
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personally um she had me on her show many times i am on the radar of many people because i was on
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her show she was very very good to the jews after october 7th and um so the the this turn has been
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very shocking and dismaying to to me on a very personal level i still feel very grateful to her
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for everything she's done for me um i i don't want to um speculate about her motives but i will just
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say that she is the one who said about two weeks ago what I've been saying for two years now which
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is that um Tucker and Candace their Tucker's audience is Muslim this new audience that he's
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seeking these you know millions and millions of views are not coming from Americans because there's
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only three million Muslims in America they can't all be can't all be coming from there once you get
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to 10 million 50 million you know we're not talking about Americans anymore and honestly I
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found that to be the opposite of you like not chilling but actually very comforting because it turns out the American people are exactly who I think they are which is that when you go full anti as I believe Tucker has you cannot stay in the mainstream in the United States you become radioactive
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because the American people are the least anti-Semitic people on planet Earth to have
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ever walked planet Earth. And that's a lot of what my book is about, is about this love affair
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that America has always had with the Jews. And the way that a lot of that history has been hidden
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because American Jews are so associated with the Democratic Party that we as a community have erased the most important part of our history
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And honestly, what we owe this nation, what we owe this country, what we owe this people
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because from the minute Jews stepped foot on American soil, it was like the soil itself rejected Jew hate
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And I start the book in 1654 for a reason because no one is telling that story
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And, you know, we have a big birthday coming up. Apologies to the UK, you know, 250. And on this anniversary, this great anniversary, I think it's so important that we remember that history
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Well, I'm Australian, so perhaps I can act as a mediator in any of those historic arguments between the UK and the US
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But it is interesting how you just said that we perhaps had different responses or instinctive responses
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And that maybe reflects the fact that I am coming now from a European perspective and you're coming from an American perspective
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And I think the responses both to October 7, the infiltration of both Islam and then also a left, a progressive left that has become incredibly cozy with radical elements of Islam
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there are shades of the same story but they are being accelerated in Europe in a way where
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it is not the case in America yet we will get to that but just before we do the other thing which
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I noted when you were talking there was you did say that that those commentators that we were
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discussing have taken on an anti-Zionist tone and and the word anti-Zionism now is loaded in a way
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where it perhaps wasn't loaded in the past to the extent where our mutual friend Brendan O'Neill
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has got to the stage where he basically says, look, you know what, for too many people now
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or no, he would say, I consider anti-Zionism just to be another word for anti-Semitism
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He thinks that now there are an overwhelming amount of people who use it as a veil to be
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flat out anti-Semitic. Are you there yet? I love Brendan. I'm not there yet. I have
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Palestinian friends who are deeply anti-Zionist they wish Israel didn't exist they live in the
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West Bank and I think it's it's not right to call them bigots because they wish Israel didn't exist
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it came at their expense like that's not an act of bigotry on their part it's a political perspective
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that honestly it would be a bit of a chutzpah to expect you know people living under occupation in
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the West Bank to support Israel right like I so I understand that point of view and because I have
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those friends, I know that it is at least possible to be anti Zionist. And actually, one of them loves
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Jews. So so that is possible, right? Is it is it common? It is not common. It is much more common
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that people who really dislike Jews are anti Zionist. They don't want Israel to exist, and they
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can't stand the sight of Jewish power. So they're very comfortable being nice to powerless Jews in
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the diaspora you know like jews being attacked by white supremacists they love those kinds of jews
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you know but um they're very they hate power at all especially when it's wielded by people who are
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considered to be white which jews are in america so you know that that desire to make jews weaker
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to have jews be um you know to to exist at the beneficence of you know a left that actually
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thinks they don't deserve much that is anti-semitic because you're basically saying you want jews to
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be more at the mercy of people who hate them um there are people who believe there should be you
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know one state from the river to the sea um like okay i don't think american jews are oppressed i
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don't think we ever have been and i don't think we need any special catering to um but only half
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of the world's jews live here and we're the ones who won the jackpot you know there's also another
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8 million 10 million Jews you know in Israel in Europe where they're going to have to go to Israel
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pretty soon if things don't turn around dramatically very quickly and if you don't have an answer for
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how those Jews are supposed to pursue self-determination and safety and security if your
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answer to that is they should live under like a Muslim dictatorship of Sharia law in the Middle
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East like you're an anti-Semite in fact if not an intent like that is a bigoted view because they
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would not impose that standard on anybody else so you know the vast majority of people i think you
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know like random white irish people who have like this is their cause you know the palestinian flag
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you know it i feel that the onus is on them to prove to me that they don't have negative feelings
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about jews more generally but i do think it is possible to oppose you know the state of israel
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in a non-antisemitic way, if rare. Yeah, well, let's go to how this has become
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the cause du jour on the left side of politics. And you start your book by saying, and I quote
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anti-Zionism has become as central a component of the left as climate activism
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I would suggest probably now it's an even greater... Yeah, yeah, definitely. Celebrity climate activist Greta Thunberg herself
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now does more for the Palestinian cause than for the environment. In many ways, you wrote many pages to get to an answer to this question, but in short, how did we get here? How has it become the defining issue on left-wing politics today
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so because i'm a bit of a class reductionist i do think that a lot of it comes down to class
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um in the 60s in universities um you had the proliferation of this new french
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structuralist way of thinking foucault became just completely completely ubiquitous and in his
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worldview he sort of rejects the judeo-christian values that america was founded on that there's
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a sort of distinction between right versus wrong, you know, virtue versus vice, that we should try
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to be good, try not to be evil, you know, the building blocks of Western civilization. And he
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says none of that is real. There's no such thing as a fact. There's no such thing as something that
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is true versus false. There is only power. There is only institutions that create their truth
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which is just a way of controlling people, of manipulating them, of exerting power upon them
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there's the powerful versus the powerless there's the master and there's the slave
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there's no two human beings encountering each other and using their god-given free will to make
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choices about you know what is the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do there's only who is
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the oppressor and who is the oppressed and if you have that mindset it becomes determinative
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now it would have stayed in the university and this is why i say it a class story it would have just been one of these silly things that academics talk about amongst themselves in the hallowed grounds of the Ivy League But what happened was thanks to the Reagan revolution neoliberalism NAFTA mass migration at the same time as all of this crap was being imported into the university the American economy was restructuring itself such that having a college degree became the gatekeeper of a middle class life
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If you wanted to have that stability, if you wanted to have any influence in America, any power, have a good job, you had to get a college degree. And the longer you stayed in university, the more upwardly mobile you were
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So the longer you were exposed to Foucault, basically, the higher you would rise, whether it was in the media, whether it was in politics, whether it was in law, whether it was in medicine
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And so it became the lingua franca, not just of the elites in the academy, but the elites writ large, which we have a big elite in America
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You know, there's still some upward mobility. And because of that, it came to this way of thinking where there's only oppressor versus oppressed. There's this worship of weakness and the weak and the less powerful have no moral obligations because virtue is inherently inscribed in them because they have less power and the powerful have they're inherently evil
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and everyone white is on that side and every person of color is on that side
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this became the way every journalist was taught to think. This became the way that every professor taught
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This became the way that doctors started to think about things. Lawyers, you can look at the law and the way that it got written
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Of course, DEI, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, when you believe..
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Locketing manages and IHL manages and the corporates do this. Exactly, exactly. And if you believe that there is no right versus wrong
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that somebody with darker skin color has no moral responsibilities and someone with lighter skin color is always inherently oppressing them and thus deserving of punishment
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you will end up looking at October 7th and simply not being able to think your way out of seeing Hamas as the good guys
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it's it's how how does somebody who spent four years eight years 12 years in the academy imbibing
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this like mother's milk think their way out of this idea that because Hamas has less power than
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Israel they have no moral responsibilities and it is the fault of the Jews because they are the white
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oppressor colonists for being raped for having their babies kidnapped for having their elderly
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mass murdered. I think that is really at the heart of it. And what's what's funny is, in my view
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you know, this is just an extension of their anti white, anti American, anti Western view
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I see it less as sort of anti Semitism, although, of course, it is anti Semitic
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because it was so extreme and intensified as part of a much larger view. And this is where my gripe
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against liberal Jews comes in. We backed the wrong pony because they participated in it
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as leftists, as liberals in good standing when they thought they were
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on the side of the oppressed. And you have organizations like the ADL
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whose response to October 7th was simply, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
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You put us on the wrong side of the equation. Don't you realize we're the same
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as the trans and the black? And I think that that is a disastrous mistake
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and an utter betrayal of everything that made America great. It's very well said
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And of course, this very simplistic view of the world, the oppressor, oppressed paradigm has led to
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in this particular instance, some really bizarre perverted political alliances being formed
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And you know where I'm coming to, and that is basically this unholy alliance
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of radically socially progressive identity politics warriors on the left and radically socially conservative
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I'm not even going to say, you know, Islamic supporters, I'm going to say Islamists on the right
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I would suggest that this is, again, more accelerated in the United Kingdom and continental Europe
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You are certainly seeing it in the US as well. How have you reflected on that alliance, which now is reshaping British politics, particularly from my perspective
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How do you reflect on that? And do you think that basically having just one consistent goal, which is to tear down Western civilization effectively, is enough for that political alliance to endure
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I don't see that in America as much. I think it's because of our immigration system
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The Muslims who move here tend to be middle class. Yeah. And middle class people in America are pretty focused on the American dream
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Like, they really like what they see here. So when you get somebody who's Muslim who has this view, this Foucauldian view, it's someone like Mamdani who's, I'm sorry, obviously secular
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I mean, it seems to me, you know, his Muslimness is almost like cosplay, right
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AOC put on a hijab out of respect when she went to an event for a Muslim event earlier in the week
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And it's not very different her putting on the hijab from to me the way that he sort of wears his Muslim identity
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It's there to make white people think that he is part of the oppressed so that they can side with him and support him
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But his wife is clearly not religious. She does not wear a hijab
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I don't see so much of that. I mean, the closest you would get is someone like Linda Sarsour
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But that I think is very she was raised not wearing a hijab
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Right. She put it on because she wanted this kind of cosplay. Right. So to me, I think we just have a lot less of that in America, probably because of the First Amendment and the way that we treat religion here
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And and I so I and when I hear British people talking about this issue, it's it seems very alien to me
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I got it. I got into a bit of a dust up at a conference in the UK because the people that were talking about taking away people's citizenship because they were Muslims
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and to me that's like horrifying and I say that as somebody who believes there should be
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zero immigration I I think we need literally zero immigration and and and I'm very much sort of on
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that side of things but the idea that after you let somebody in a generation ago two generations
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ago you know my grandmother's from India she was a subject of the crown she moved to England because
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she was the best young violinist and a lot of Muslims made that journey this is three generations
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ago, you're going to take away somebody's citizenship because of their religion. This is very alien in America. And I think it's because we're much better at assimilating our immigrants
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And so it's just a very different scene. And it strikes me as a very different set of problems
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And when you do see Muslim politicians rising, they're not people who, you know, they're just
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not really Islamists so much. They are very much leftist Americans, and they have a problem with
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Jews. They hate Israel. They're very problematic. I'm fighting them, right? But the idea that this
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is somehow part of their religion I think it just really doesn feel like what we seeing here Yeah I would agree with that And I think your point around how America is fundamentally better at assimilation and
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also I think it's better at picking the right people to let into the country, means that
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there have been very different outcomes across the pond compared to what we're seeing here
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at the moment. And it's something which I'm very envious of in America
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At the same time, I want to hone in on, say, that AOC example where she would cosplay and she would put on, say, a hijab
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There are obviously strands within the Islamic faith which are, I would say, not in alignment with a Western liberal feminist worldview
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Now, again, religions are open to interpretation. I understand that. But I think amongst many members or many Islamic communities, you know, women are still considered to be second class citizens
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I do still think that, you know, the burqa is a symbol of female oppression in my view
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Now, someone like AOC, who would no doubt try and display her feminist credentials at every possible opportunity, how does she not see that, and maybe not just her, but I'm talking her ilk, how do they not see that fundamental tension between Western liberal feminism and some of the more unpalatable parts of particular Islamic communities
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it's obviously very hypocritical although i'm sure if she walked into an orthodox jewish synagogue
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she would put something on her head as well mamdani when he goes to synagogues puts on a yarmulke
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so i don't have a problem with people showing respect but i will tell you on the right in
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america there's a healthy skepticism about liberal western feminism right so it's true
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aoc is a bit of a hypocrite here and i think that that's very interesting we i guess have the luxury
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of having that conversation because you don't go downtown in America and see, you know
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100 women like with only their eyes showing. I think at that point, like that would cause me probably to lean in very heavily to the
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feminist narrative. But I could see somebody making the argument that, you know, a woman walking around basically
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almost completely naked and forced into that kind of a world, you know, the male gaze in
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that way is similar. And I think that the only thing that really matters is legally is the state protecting the freedom of these women to make that choice. Like, that's the most important thing. Could that Muslim woman, if she chose to, take that off and live as a full citizen and be protected by the state from repercussions by her society
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What I tried to say at this conference to the British people is they don't have a problem with Muslims. They have a problem with policing because your cops are too scared to go and police the law and the legislators are too afraid to enforce it and to say that there have to be laws on the books that you cannot rape little girls. You cannot marry little girls. You cannot beat them up if they don't want to wear the hijab
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So to me, it's sort of about like, is the state protecting those choices? If my neighbor decided that as part of her Muslim faith, she chose this, really chose it. You know, I don't know that that's so much worse, you know, than a woman, you know, sometimes you see little girls in just in clothing that's obviously designed to be sexy. And I'm very offended by that as well
25:52
Yeah, I think that's a fair point. And you're right in saying that in so many instances, there is duress that is behind putting that item of clothing on. And a lot of the time, it is not overt duress, as in a man saying, put this on every morning, but it is a more insidious form of duress that says, if you don't do this, you will be shunned by a particular community, you will be considered to be othered
26:20
Yeah. And I will just say also, I mean, British people hate when I bring this up, but I live in a neighborhood that's half Russian Jews, half Turkish immigrants. And so my neighborhood is kind of working class, middle high working class, middle class. And then if you drive like 20 blocks that way where my gym is, so I drive through it every day. You have an Afghan community that was resettled there where but the children already speak like perfect English
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they all go to the public school the little girls some of them wear the hijab but as they get older
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you see them year after year some of them take it off and by the time they become middle class
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enough to move into our neighborhood you can go to the turkish cafes and see families where
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the mom's wearing the hijab and the daughter isn't or the daughter's wearing the hijab and the mom
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isn't it's just like the american dream is very overpowering and it really does have this
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moderating impact on a community. Yeah, I don't think, and there will be several British viewers
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and listeners who will hear this conversation. I don't think they'll hate hearing that, but it will definitely be very, it will be very jarring to hear because the uncomfortable truth
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is that is not the experience of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom and particularly in parts
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of England today. Let's go to October 7 and its aftermath. Now, I think that I had both, I'm going to say the fortune of going
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to the Nova Festival, which has opened in London recently, and for people who aren't aware, the Nova Festival is an immersive
27:53
experience which tries to bring you closer to the events of October 7
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It's one of the most extraordinary, I guess, immersive experiences of Bank 2 in terms of how it was put together, and it's incredibly confronting and difficult
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to go through, but that is the point. It left me in no doubt that there is no moral equivalence between the horrors of October
28:16
7 and what I think is still a just war that followed. At the same time, Israel and the Jewish diaspora more generally have suffered a lot as a result
28:29
of the war that followed. When you reflect on how the war has been conducted
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when you reflect on kind of the global reputation of Israel and how in many quarters it has suffered
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and this is a difficult question to answer, do you think on net the war that Israel has waged
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has still been on net the right thing to do and a net benefit for Israel as a state
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given all of the accompanying consequences that have followed it i think it could have been the
29:04
right thing to do and also had an ultimately a negative impact right interesting um i i have a
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lot of criticisms of the way that the war was waged i agree with you i think it was a completely just
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war but i think that they because of netanyahu he's misread as a warmonger but actually he's
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very risk averse. And I think the combination of his risk averse nature and the Biden administration's
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equivocating meant that they would conquer territory and then leave and then have to
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conquer it again, which resulted in many casualties, foremost to Israeli soldiers
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I think ultimately the death toll to civilians was unbelievably low, like especially relative
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to the number of combatants. I think Hamas is now paying out 50,000 families, martyr payments
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which means less than a one-to-one ratio of combatant to civilian, unheard of in urban warfare
29:59
So it's not on that front that I have my, you know, criticisms of how they waged the war. But I do think it was the right thing to do. And that to a certain extent, if you think about Israel's reputation, Hamas ultimately did win
30:14
But you can't formulate your way of responding to things around like the sociopathy of the left. You just can't
30:25
Young Jewish students on college campuses were talking about, you know, there was a lot of discourse around how they were unsafe on college campuses
30:32
And I hated hearing that because I kept saying like, you're not actually unsafe. You're not physically endangered. Leftists are physical cowards
30:39
Like you are in danger of being unpopular with your sociopathic students, friends, people, you know, the other students in your university, your peers, your sociopathic peers
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That's a good thing. Like you should be unpopular with sociopaths. Like that's actually great
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And I think you look at someone like Donald Trump and like that is this is real leadership
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There is enormous pressure on him from both the far right and the left to turn on Israel, to abandon Israel, to turn on the Jews, to say nasty things about Benjamin Netanyahu
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And he will not do it, even though it would be massively beneficial to him because he doesn't believe it
31:20
And I think that kind of leadership is like, we just need more of that all around, like as a race, as a human race
31:28
Like we just need more leadership. So, yes, there are a lot of sociopaths. There's two billion Muslims in the world. There's a lot of pressure against Israel. But I don't think they should have allowed that to define whether or not they went after the mass raping, mass murdering, you know, dead baby parading psychopaths that did October 7th
31:49
Now, I will say, I will be surprised if Donald Trump leaves office without forcing Saudi Arabia into some kind of normalization with Israel
31:57
When that happens, and you're already seeing this now because of the war in Iran, you're already seeing Al Jazeera's tone shift because now they have a common enemy with Israel, which is Iran
32:08
Iran has lobbed more rockets at the UAE than it has at Israel
32:12
Everyone has seen this now. And I think that the myth of the Arab street that would march and take up the cause of the Palestinians, you know, I think that's just dead
32:21
Like Trump killed it, you know, like that's been actually a huge and unreported victory in the Middle East
32:28
Yeah, I agree with you entirely that the way that the Arab states have moved closer to the US and Israel, you're right, is probably the underreported story of this conflict along with the implications that this has in terms of global geopolitics and in terms of trying to further isolate China at the same time
32:47
I want to go though to the future of the left because again it is another theme that cuts across your book that is coming out and your previous book in that the increasing embrace of identity politics and this sort of overly simplistic childish oppressor oppressed paradigm that looks at the world in such a crude way has effectively replaced what the guiding mission of the left used to be about which is actually protecting and supporting the working classes and rebalancing power when it comes to a more economic
33:21
view of the world. Do you think that there is a chance that left-wing parties in the United States
33:29
and across the West can return to a more classical view of left-wing politics
33:38
or now are they so tied to this kind of progressive identity politics worldview that that is the lane
33:45
that they are taking and they're going to stick with it? What's the future of the left? I do think we've already turned the corner. This was a great week for moderate Democrats. They started to find their voice. They started calling out Graham Plattner, who has a Totenkopf Nazi tattoo on his chest running for Senate on the Democratic ticket in Maine
34:04
um a woman on the left who said zionists need to be interned and castrated was soundly repudiated
34:11
um aoc she's not anti-semitic and she's i mean she she says the stuff she's supposed to say about
34:20
israel but she only says half of it and only kind of half-heartedly like she's on israel specifically
34:26
she is much more moderate than everybody else on the left and she's like the future that she's a
34:31
standard bearer. And so I just feel that we've already turned that corner. They've realized that
34:37
they have to moderate on immigration. A lot of that was kind of about the border. And trying to
34:44
say that having a national border is racist. A lot of this is tied to Trump. And actually
34:49
the other day, Democrats said something really smart to me. He said, you think that the left
34:54
hates Trump because he likes Israel, but actually, they hate Israel because Trump likes it. Like
34:59
Like there's only one metric in American political life right now, and it's Donald Trump
35:05
He's literally the only thing that exists right now, the only thing. And so we have no idea what it's going to look like when he's no longer the only thing in American political life, but it's going to be very different
35:18
And so I think, you know, that and already, you know, they move on very quickly
35:21
Right. So, you know, you had the civil rights movement, which I talk about a lot in the book, a very noble and important cause
35:27
Jews were at the forefront of it. They then moved from that to the sort of separatist black power movement, a little bit less good
35:34
It was very anti-white. It was anti-Semitic. They then kind of moved on to the women's movement and women's rights and then gay rights
35:41
Very important. But then they got to the trans thing and then they got to illegal immigrants and then they
35:47
got to Gaza before that they had the environment which as you noted in the beginning they moved on from they they they a lot of this is very performative Because these are people who are very performative overeducated some quite privileged themselves
36:03
There's no real building of a coalition. The left is never growing. It's always shrinking
36:07
So I think that, you know, things could be very different very soon
36:12
And honestly, this is probably something you guys can't tell from Europe, but the most significant political figure right now in America, in the next generation, is Marco Rubio
36:25
A lot of Democrats would very happily vote for Marco Rubio. This is something I don't think is coming across because people who get their information from Twitter probably think J.D. Vance is the heir apparent
36:36
They probably think, you know, AOC is going to be on the left. But, you know, things are actually moving in a very different direction. People, I think, want like a much calmer next few years. And the Democrats really have not come up with much beyond just sort of their loathing of Trump. But the progressives, it does feel like, are especially bankrupt. So I think that, you know, things have already turned the corner
37:02
Yeah, interesting. And as a separate but related question, there isn't just the way that Trump has shifted the political contours from an ideological perspective. There's also the tone of politics. So for a long time, you heard the Democrats say, well, he is debasing our politics through the way that he speaks, through his rhetoric, through the fact that he is decidedly unpresidential
37:25
and I couldn't help but notice the tweet that you've no doubt seen from the official Democrats
37:30
account to Stephen Miller and I don't have the words in front of you in front of me but it was
37:36
something along the lines of shut up you ugly f dot dot dot dot and to me that just seemed to be
37:43
an acknowledgement that well Trump has won he's won the he's changed politics they can't play the
37:48
whole you know we go high when they go low card anymore what did you think when you saw the
37:53
democrats tweeting in that way i mean it's obviously appalling there's a new thing among
37:59
democrats where they swear a lot because they think that this is like a stand-in for authenticity
38:03
which is just hysterical like yeah like does it really i don't know what are we 12 like it's weird
38:09
gavin newsom is the king of this he's decided like the trolling trump is like the number one thing
38:14
um to do and it'll be interesting to see the republicans try to take that moral high ground
38:19
again you know trump doesn't really swear that much unless it's like very serious like he got
38:24
really mad when um he declared a ceasefire between israel and iran and then they each had to like
38:29
you know lob one more rocket he used the f word then um he's sometimes very undignified and
38:35
unprecedented you know when people who he doesn't like die he'll say good i'm glad they're dead or
38:40
some version of that you know it's not great it's it's beneath him it's beneath the office but
38:44
everybody understands that that is this flip side of just doing what you think is right for the working class I mean that how I see it That how his voters see it Like it not like this is all he has you know like it that most people are like he doing so much that we like can he
38:57
just stay off of Twitter? No, he can't. But with the Democrats, it seems like they're trying to use
39:03
that. Like they're trying to like, replace policy with aesthetics, you know, and it's
39:09
it's, I think it's embarrassing. And I don't think most people like it. I mean, the thing
39:14
that's so funny about it is like often it's like very privileged people um a lot of democrats are
39:20
extremely privileged and have this like homicidal rage towards trump that i will be honest i don't
39:26
really understand it and i remember when a friend told me after the first assassination attempt this
39:30
is a woman who like has a very nice home in a very nice neighborhood really cute kid like really nice
39:36
life good job she said i wish that um he had succeeded in killing trump and i remember just
39:42
looking at her and saying, what has he done to you? Like to make you feel that way? She said
39:48
oh, he took away abortion rights from women. And I was like, girl, you're 45 years old
39:54
you barely wanted that first kid, you're never gonna need an abortion. He didn't take that from
39:59
you. He what is that to you abortion? It's very weird. But it's it's it runs really, really
40:06
really deep. And when I try to psychoyze it, I think a lot of it is about, like the return of
40:12
the repressed like he was the the they thought they had buried the working class and that objection
40:17
to them their disinheritance you know from this economy we were talking about before this neoliberal
40:23
economy that like just funneled 60 percent of the gdp up into the pockets of the top 10 percent
40:29
these people with multiple degrees and then they came roaring back and said not so fast that's what
40:33
trump really represents to a lot of people who support him and and that's that could be very
40:37
angering when you went to college and you were told you're going to be wealthy, you know, spend
40:44
this money, take out these loans. You will be wealthier than all of the deplorables, the people
40:48
who work with their hands for a living. And now it turns out the plumber is making $250,000 a year
40:55
and you're making 75, you know, as a speechwriter for Mom Donnie, you know, like I think that could
41:01
make people really angry. Yeah, well, it's a very, very similar story with the loathing of Nigel
41:06
Farage here and more recently figures like Rupert Lowe. Coincidentally, there is a plumber who is
41:12
a reform candidate going for the reform in the by-election. So it'll be interesting to see if the plumbers have their
41:20
revenge there. But yeah, Jews and the Left is an incredibly important book at an incredibly
41:27
pivotal time in both American and Western civilizational history. It will be out by the
41:33
time this interview comes out. No doubt available in bookstores good and bad as well as amazon and all the usual places can't recommend
41:39
it more highly thank you so much for writing it and thanks for chatting again god bless you
41:44
and protect you thank you so much for having me
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