Thing is, I should really get rid of my habit of hate-watching Israeli podcasts. Recently, I watched one on the Youtube channel of the Times of Israel which tries to discuss recent political developments in the USA and what they mean for Jews, Israel, and antisemitism. It features one of their main contributors, Haviv Rettig Gur, who's also an employee of Bari Weiss' Free Press. If you're curious, look behind the cut:
More: show
The podcast in question is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baNHx4WOmX0
Now, based on what I've seen of Rettig Gur over the years, I don't think he's any kind of idiot. Which makes it all the more annoying that he talks so much nonsense.
He starts out by deeply lamenting the passing of Lindsey Graham, but I'll ignore that in this post.
The nonsense starts with a theory that left-wing activism used to be all about climate change, but is now all about Israel. The explanation Rettig Gur has for this is that supposedly, switching to renewables is very expensive, and would hurt the working class a lot.
Err, is it too much to ask that a journalist does some basic research before mouthing off with absolute confidence? The costs of renewables have been steadily falling for decades, and are now, in some contexts, below those of fossil fuels. Especially if you keep in mind how unreliable the costs of fossil fuels are these days.
As for, "hurts the working class", Haviv, you do know that increasing the use of a specific, very decentralized energy source involves installing a lot of new physical structures, right? What do you thinks who does all that installing? And then, once the stuff is installed, the maintenance work?
The only parts of the working class that might be seriously hurt by switching to renewables would be people who work in coal mining, oil rigging, or oil refining. And as a share of the entire working class, people like that simply aren't that big in the USA any more. Even West Virginia doesn't have that many coal miners left.
But I guess in the internal group chats of people who work for Bari Weiss, claims like these are universally assumed to be so obviously true by everyone as a matter of course that there's no need to check whether they actually are true.
Then, Rettig Gur talks about how central Israel, which he, of course, sees as a stand-in for Jews in general, supposedly is in Democratic primaries by now. In that context, he claims that the Democrats supposedly can't talk about anything else these days.
Which, of course, would come as a pretty big surprise to anyone who's actually paid attention to what supporters of the Democrats have been talking about recently.
First, the most talked-about topic among supporters of the Democrats for more than a year is clearly Donald Trump himself. After that, what supporters of the Democrats have talked about the most recently is probably the ongoing attempt by Trump and his Administration to re-structure (to put it politely) the constitutional and administrative makeup of the US Government. It's certainly interesting that someone from Israel of all places could look at another country, watch the internal arguments in that other country, and not notice that one of the main issues there is an attempt by political leadership to re-structure the government, and the opposition to that attempt.
At the last round of really big anti-Trump protests, the main motto was not "No Israel" or "No Zionism" or even "No Occupation" or "No Genocide". And it certainly wasn't "No Jews". No, it was "No Kings".
After that, the things the Democrats' supporters have most talked about recently are probably ICE and its murder spree. And then, there are all kinds of issues related to people's lives - health care, access to abortion and increasingly contraception, rejecting and worrying about the insistence of more and more right-wing influencers that everyone should either be a caveman or a tradwife, and so on.
There's the whole argument about "AI" in general, and the construction and maintenance of "AI" data centers in particular. And in many of the cities and areas near cities dominated by Democrats, there's the whole argument about housing and whether NIMBYs or YIMBYs are right.
You could look all of this up, Haviv. You could also look up what videos and written statements Mamdani has published since he became Mayor, and how many of them were about Israel. You could also look up his campaign ads from the mayoral election campaign, and how many of those were about Israel.
And on a more vague, abstract level, the "vibes" level, so to say, a lot of the arguments in the primaries are about many Democratic primary voters thinking that "traditional", "mainstream" leaders of the Democratic Party are too willing to accommodate Trump and Trumpism, and wanting leaders who are more willing to take the fight to Trump instead.
On a lighter note, not too long ago, many supporters of the Democrats, for a while, talked more about a collection of single-cell organisms than about Israel or Palestine.
But I guess that once you've been absorbed into the Bari Weiss Reality Distortion Field, it makes perfect sense to believe that the Democrats don't talk about anything else than Israel these days.
One possible response might be that supporters of the Democrats shouldn't talk about all these things listed above, or shouldn't have the positions they have on these topics. But that's different from the question of what they really are talking about.
And of course, you can find individual activists who rarely talk about anything else than Palestine. You can find the counterparts to that among activists specializing in all kinds of issues.
Later, when talking about rising antisemitism in the USA, Rettig Gur claims that US-born Jews don't really know how to handle it, because they've supposedly never experienced it. In order to make that claim look a bit less ridiculous than people might think at first, he comes up with a distinction between "anti-Jewish prejudice" and "antisemitism", and claims that US-born Jews have supposedly only experienced the former until very recently.
According to him, the distinguishing characteristic of antisemitism, as opposed to mere anti-Jewish prejudice, is that the latter is based on seeing "The Jew" as the antithesis of everything good in the world. You can, of course, quibble with that distinction, but in that context, he makes some interesting points about cultural prejudices and how they work as shortcuts in the human mind that I actually mostly agree with.
But even if you accept his distinction, his claims about the supposed historical lack of antisemitism are still pretty shaky. Was the lynching of Leo Frank an act of outright antisemitism, or just anti-Jewish prejudice? Did the Skokie marchers express outright antisemitism, or just anti-Jewish prejudice? Was the Tree of Life massacre antisemitic, or just influenced by anti-Jewish prejudice?
Ant what about all the lesser known acts of anti-Jewish violence over the years? I can guarantee you that most of the perpetrators of these crimes did very much see "The Jew" as the antithesis of everything good in the world.
Since so many of these aggressions came from the far right, it's interesting that Rettig Gur, although he does briefly mention rising right-wing antisemitism, never seems to get the idea that many American Jews might not be as obsessed with (real or supposed) left-wing antisemitism because historically, they were used to mainly facing threats from the far right, which has been rising for a while now.
Finally, he gets into discussing intellectual history, and claims that a reason for the success and Prosperity of the USA is that its culture has traditionally mostly rejected ideas, like, for instance, Marxism, which claim to know everything about everything, about how everything will definitely turn out, and about how history has to develop. He praises the greater humility about what people can generally know in US culture, and describes that as very important.
Interesting point, but it only makes sense if you restrict your analysis to secular thought. The USA has traditionally been one of the least secularized countries in the Western World. And among explicitly Christian thinkers in the USA, very absolute certainty about how history will develop and what God's plan is has long been fairly common. Some of the biggest best-sellers of recent generations were about that.
He also claims that all those political ideologies he doesn't like that are now prominent on US campuses were "imported" there from Europe, Asia, and Africa. But the general theoretical model of oppression and privilege, no matter how much you might love it or hate it, was, to a large extent, developed by academics from the USA.
Sorry, just had to get all that off my chest.
