Transcript of Trump’s Nightmare Is Here

And as a Jewish person, Jason, talk about this weaponization of antisemitism and also this contradiction of the people who claim they're so worried about antisemitism from Abdul but they will go seek refuge with real anti-Semites. And this is just what I fundamentally have observed. Democrats are very critical of Israel. Real antisemitism exists on the right, a hatred of Jewish people.

What's your take on this?

That's why they love Israel so much, because they can say, "Look at that Jewish ethno-state." So that's why they live a certain vision of Israel. So we face Christian nationalism, white Christian nationalism. This is an existential threat. This is the existential threat to the safety of American Jews. I don't want my children to be second-class citizens in the country in which they are. That is their home. That is where they are citizens.

And Christian nationalism will make every American Jew into a second-class citizen. And so Muslims are our brothers and sisters. They are our allies. And what we are seeing is the worst burst of Islamophobia, the normalization of Islamophobia. Abdul Al-Sayed is the most American candidate who has ever run in an American election. This guy is America's dream.

He was captain of his football team, his lacrosse team, and his wrestling team. He is a bros bro. He was valedictorian of the University of Michigan. Go blue. I taught at Michigan for four years. Still a fan of the football team. So he is as Michigan as you can get. He was Rhodes scholar from the University of Michigan, a medical doctor, doctorate in public health, devoted his life to public service. This guy is as American as you can get.

And they are saying because he's Muslim, because he's Muslim, that he's not American. He is not bought by the international billionaire class. He is a Michigan guy. And so the normalization of Islamophobia is so intense that people can look at Al-Sayed, Dr. Al-Sayed, and say and normalize the thought that he's not as American as apple pie.

If that's not coming for Jews, that is precisely what they did to us in Europe. They said, "They may look German, they may look Polish, they may look French, but they can't be French or German or Polish." And that is exactly what they're doing to Muslims, what they did to Jews. And of course, they will do it to us next, because the goal is a Christian nationalist state. And it's the Christian nationalists who are pushing for America to be some subsidiary of Israel, to American foreign policy to be just a war machine for Israel.

So this is we, Jewish people, are a minority in the United States. We, American Jews. And what is happening to Muslims is the most frightening thing. I mean, obviously, America is racist. It's been anti-Black. What has happened to Black Americans has always been shows that fascism is always possible in our country because you can't constrain fascism to what's directed against one group.

And since the goal is to turn America into a Christian nationalist country, that excludes us. They want us all to go to Israel, and then they're happy to cheer as we depart.

And as an American, I've just had enough of it. I've just had enough. We talk about Russian interference, but Russian interference is nothing compared to the way Israel affects our politics. We are literally in a war for Israel with no other reason other than doing Israel's military bidding. We spend billions and billions of dollars. We just shipped $2.8 billion in bombs to Israel. So if you're American, your tax dollars are going to this genocide.

They're going to support the state that is not popular in the world. Linking ourselves to Israel is not popular. It's not safe for American Jews. We don't have anything to do with this. I mean, we don't have anything to do with Israel. Being linked with this is bad for us. It turns us into a political weapon. And the United States is obviously, we should criticize Saudi Arabia's influence in our politics, but it is nothing compared to Israel's influence on our politics.

And Saudi Arabia is committing human rights abuses. But what Israel is doing right now is really unconscionable and is viewed as such in the world. And the fact that and Dr. Al-Sayed didn't mention one other thing, which is that Israel says it's a democracy. And so that opens it up to a kind of criticism that Saudi Arabia doesn't face, because Saudi Arabia doesn't pretend to be a democracy.

Everyone knows it's an autocratic, human rights-abusing regime that is close to Trump and his family and enriches them. But Israel claims to be a democracy. If you claim to be a democracy, even though you've been run by the same leader for half my adult life, if you claim to be a democracy, you open yourself up to critique that autocratic, authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia don't face. Those are just the facts. If you claim to be there for liberalism, for human rights, for democratic values, you're going to get those critiques.

And let's face it, if you're American, you are deeply complicit in Israel's crimes.

And I share with you, I am sick to fucking death of Israel trying to censor our speech, whether it be college kids on campuses, me podcasting, you hear the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt talking about, "We're monitoring everybody all the time." What the fuck? I mean, I am sick to this is American. We get to criticize Israel. And here's a big news flash: criticize our government. I want you to criticize Donald Trump.

I don't take it personally.

Israel's politics are destroying our democracy. It's not just the United States. It's also Canada. It's also Europe. All over this politics, Israel basically, the politics of Israel are coming in and saying, "If you criticize our war crimes, you're antisemitic." And this is then being packaged as some kind of hate crime, even though the Trump regime is saying, "You can talk about Muslims all you want. You can be as Islamophobic as you want.

You can be as Islamophobic as you want. You can say that Muslims are not Americans. But if you criticize Israel, you're antisemitic, and you owe us $400 million." Think about that. You can say anything you want about Muslims.

And if it is a theocracy or only Jewish people there, then that would then deny others, Palestinians, the same right. So my question for you as a professor in this, as a philosopher, is Zionism racism?

So it's just luck. But Zionism, there's different there's many different senses of Zionism. And so I would not criticize the people who are fleeing the Holocaust to find some place, nor when people are kicked out of Middle Eastern countries, other Middle Eastern countries, the Mizrahi Jews, and end up in Israel. However, I think that when you build a state based on a single identity, you're risking turning people who are not of that identity into second-class citizens.

And that structure of first and second-class citizens, if we think of race if we think of race as power, as power relations, especially after Israel's 2017 nation-state law, it really looks like Israel is based on Israel is based on an ideology that is making non-Jewish people into second-class citizens. And if we think of race as a power relation, not a skin color, because obviously, there are plenty of Black Jewish Israelis, and many of them vote right-wing, but they face anti-Black racism in Israel, but it's a different structure.

Zionism is power relations. So Zionism is saying well, I would say because there's so many different versions of Zionism, I kind of and if you're a Zionist in the 1920s and you're saying we have to leave Europe, that seems to me a different situation than right now. So right now, I would say any structure that if you're building a nation around one identity, then you're making other identities into second-class citizens.

The more you lean into that, the worse the racism gets, the worse the power exploitation gets. But of course, there are many there's Beta Israel. There's many Black Jews living in Israel. They face anti-Black racism from White Jews in Israel. But I would say Israel, as it stands now, is a racist state. I avoid criticizing Zionism too core because I think there's too many meanings of the word.

And they're doing stuff like this. They're whitewashing history. And this was just crazy. Pop this up. Justin, Apple Maps has put all the buildings back in Gaza because the easiest solution to a genocide is to pretend it isn't happening. Image on the right is from Google showing what Gaza looks like. And on the left are the old images of it. And so we saw that the people at Google helped Trump rename Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico.

I won't even say what we renamed it to. Everybody knows. But speak to this really dangerous alliance of these techno-fascists with the governing fascists and how they have come together right now at this moment in history.

We need reparations. We need to give Palestinians equal rights. I mean, that's not exactly my view, but I just think we have to stop this immediately and get as many allies as possible across spectrums to make sure that this history isn't erased, that what has happened, which is one of the most horrific things in my lifetime, without a doubt, in Gaza, without any doubt at all, with this decades of background of brutality against Palestinians, to erase that history is itself a war crime.

So right now, what we've got I mean, I think that we've got Gaza is like a permission slip. It's a permission slip for mass atrocity. And the tech billionaires want to be unfettered. They want to be able to fire everyone. They want to do mass surveillance. They don't want any ethical boundaries. And what Israel has gotten away with is something that they seem to be getting away with something that you shouldn't get away with.

And if they can get away they can get away with that. And what the Trump regime is doing with immigrants we have concentration camps everywhere. We have untold horrors every second happening to hardworking immigrant families. We can do given what Gaza is a permission slip for genocide, mass atrocity, brutality everywhere. And so what we need to do is we need to make sure we need accountability. That's why this election is so important. We need to say, "No, you can't build concentration camps in America.

You can't commit genocide. You can't give billions and billions to a country that is committing genocide." All of these things are wrong, and we need accountability for them. And what the billionaires want to do is they want to destroy all sense of accountability. They want to destroy all ways in which we, the mass of humanity, can get accountability for their horrific exploitation of the rest of the world. And that's what's going on. And what we're going to do is we're going to win this election, and we're going to start the accountability process.