Happy Monday and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Peter Hamby.

A shorter preamble from me today as I head over to the Top of the Hay, overlooking the White House at The Hay-Adams hotel, where I’ll be interviewing former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain for Puck’s new event series, The Powers That Be: Live.

In tonight’s edition, a few thoughts and some fresh reporting on how the U.S. response to the Hamas terrorist attack is dividing the majority of the Democratic Party from the young, activist left—a key voting bloc, but one that’s notably out of step with the rest of the country on the Israel crisis. I spoke with a number of Democrats in Congress, who had some very interesting, and very blunt, things to say about it all.

But first, a quick dispatch from Abby Livingston on the speakers’ race….

• Emmer at Bat: Now it’s Tom Emmer’s turn. Even though the majority whip’s name is probably unfamiliar to those outside of the Capitol Hill bubble, he’s probably the best known of the nine-man roster lining up this week. The Minnesota congressman made his name following two successful cycles as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the most thankless job in Washington. Running one of these committees involves endless fundraising, exhaustive travel, and listening to an infinite stream of bitching and moaning from members, consultants, donors and lobbyists.

  Doing that job well (which is not easy to do) can set up a member for this kind of run for speaker. The gig requires strategy, commitment, and organizational skills, and most importantly, any members who are elected during that person’s chairmanship are often deeply loyal to the leader who got them into Congress. Emmer spent four years leading House Republicans back to the majority, albeit while falling short of expectations in 2022.

  But Emmer has a documented Trump problem, and it’s unclear what makes him more electable than, say, Steve Scalise—or why his speakership would be more sustainable than McCarthy’s. Still, he might be in a better position than the multiple low name ID Republicans also angling for the gavel. The contenders include Jack Bergman of Michigan, Byron Donalds of Florida, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, Gary Palmer of Alabama, Pete Sessions of Texas (who also put in two tours as N.R.C.C. chairman… 10 years ago) and Austin Scott of Georgia.

  It’s hard to see how most of these candidates are prepared for a job as complex as serving as House Speaker, but that might be a problem for another day. One plugged-in Republican consultant I spoke with this morning expressed optimism that one of these guys might be able to break through, believing that members are exhausted and desperate for a solution, and that perhaps the very dullness of these contenders might translate to a kind of strength in this environment. (Bland and low-profile members tend to have fewer enemies.) There’s a reason someone like Dennis Hastert won the speakership in 1998: Everyone else was too polarizing to win.

• The SNL Treatment: Unsurprisingly, the House drama led Saturday Night Live over the weekend, featuring impersonations of the now-felled Jim Jordan, alongside Lauren Boebert, George Santos and Trump. Except it was surprising. SNL has traditionally focused on presidents and presidential candidates, while occasionally skewering a controversial Supreme Court justice or senator. But an entire skit centered around House members not named Nancy Pelosi or Newt Gingrich? Rare.

  Granted, SNL has shifted toward niche politics over the years, but the biggest punch lines on Saturday night—Santos prancing around with a random baby in his arms, Boebert getting felt up—were real events. It seems SNL is picking up on what Democrats read-in on polling tell me: that these Republicans, while mostly backbenchers, increasingly are household names.

  The SNL cold open is one of the few remaining cultural mainstays, a network program that still pulls in eyeballs and double-dips with a YouTube audience on Sundays. Which is all to say: This is how the modern Republican party is being preserved in the zeitgeist—as an unruly and ungovernable circus—and transmitted to one of the last great broadcast audiences.

Pretty much everyone you know seems to have a take on who is to blame and what to do next—and those takes are saturating our feeds. Instagram right now reminds me of the summer of 2020, when supporters and opponents of the Black Lives Matter protests felt compelled to post their arguments, flags, and infographics, a mix of healthy argument, identity-driven posturing and plenty of obnoxious virtue-signaling. That moment changed public opinion for a few weeks—as I wrote about at the time—but the stridency of it all ultimately pushed people further into their political and cultural corners.

Something similar is playing out now. After the shock of Hamas brutally massacring more than 1,400 innocent people, it was only a matter of hours before familiar, decades-old arguments about Israel and Palestine began to resurface. But the current rhetoric seems to have a different cast than it did in 2006, before the iPhone existed, before people felt compelled to post about everything.

Michigan State University is one of those schools. The campus sits in the district of Michigan Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat now running for Senate in a state with a huge Arab and Muslim population. Slotkin has been meeting with leaders in both the Jewish and Muslim communities, she told me by phone on Monday, and tensions are running high. But she’s noticed in recent weeks that the rhetoric from students and younger activists has taken on a sharper and more dangerous edge.

“Campuses have become the epicenter of the debate. The younger people, their language is more loose,” Slotkin, 47, told me by phone. “Something I didn’t have in college was social media. Today, the cheapening of language is so profoundly different, so that people are saying outrageous things on all sides of this. In Michigan, we have populations who are deeply on edge right now. I’m asking leaders to be thoughtful about the language they’re using.”

Slotkin also told me about another dynamic she’s noticed, something validated by recent polling: While most Americans, including most Democrats, sympathize with Israel in the conflict, younger progressives are much more inclined to side with the Palestinians. “It seems to me the youngest generation has grown up a lot more on the Palestinian cause than previous generations. It’s causing more people to get involved who don’t have a personal connection to the Middle East and feel compassion and want to get into activism.”

The reactions and protests from the young, pro-Palestinian left—fueled and amplified by social media—are also the ones that have gained the most attention. A bunch of famous Harvard alumni—Larry Summers, Bill Ackman, and Ted Cruz among them—blasted the school’s leadership for not condemning pro-Palestinian student groups who swiftly blamed Israel for the Hamas murders. A law student at NYU had her job offer rescinded from Winston & Strawn after declaring in an online newsletter that Israel, too, was to blame, calling the attacks justified Palestinian resistance.

Major donors to the University of Pennsylvania—led by Marc Rowan and Jon Huntsman, Jr.—accused the school of tolerating antisemitic thought on campus and announced that they were closing their checkbooks. On the other side of the country, on the very day of the attacks, a group of Berkeley law students felt compelled to announce that the “apartheid regime” of Israel was “entirely responsible” for the attacks.

Last week, I saw a local news segment in Los Angeles that captured the zeitgeist of the young left. At a rally on UCLA’s campus organized by “Students for Justice for Palestine,” a female student, who did not provide her name on camera, explained the purpose of the gathering. “We are here to condemn the genocide happening in Gaza and to hold both our government and our university accountable for it.” But like many of those demonstrating right now in support of Gaza, the student had no answer when the reporter, Phil Shuman of FOX11, asked her a simple question: “What do you think about what Hamas has done?” The student dodged. “I think the focus is on the wrong thing. I think people are neglecting to see that prior to this week, prior to this happening, Gaza has been under a land, air and water siege.”

That might be a new discovery for people her age. But with respect to that UCLA student and her earnest passion, anyone with a passing interest in current events or history already understood the situation in Gaza to be an ugly one—along with the inconvenient fact that Egypt, not just Israel, has been enforcing the Gaza blockade because of their shared disdain for Hamas. Support for the Palestinian cause has, of course, been a cornerstone of leftist thought for as long as anyone can remember. That’s especially true on campuses, where students are just one Frantz Fanon book away from a cool new opinion.

But what I’ve become fascinated by in recent weeks is that the uncompromising politics of the young left—manifested in #FreePalestine posts and calls for an Israeli ceasefire—are no longer just confined to campuses and certain neighborhoods in big liberal cities. Strident anti-Israel beliefs have taken hold in a hugely important voting bloc for Democrats—Gen Z. Polls show that while most Americans and most Democrats are supportive of Israel’s right to respond, young Democrats are much more likely to support the Palestinans, as are young voters of color. A poll last week from NBC News and Generation Lab, which surveys college students, found that among self-identified Democrats on campuses, only half said Hamas was to blame for the terror attacks.

New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, a 35-year old Democrat who represents swaths of the Bronx, told me he’s been disgusted with some of the young left’s rhetoric on Israel. “There are young people who have been indoctrinated with a hatred for Israel so visceral and fanatical that it renders them indifferent to the barbaric butchering of Israeli civilians and children,” Torres told me. “Anti-Israel hate and hysteria is a virus that has been spread on social media and in academia. There is an element of naivete and utopia here. If Israel entered into a ceasefire with a terrorist organization that butchered its babies to death, what would happen? Would Hamas abide by the ceasefire? Or feel more emboldened than ever before? … Israel’s right to defend itself is no less sacred than America’s right to defend itself.”

“What I’m seeing on campuses is what I think of as illiberal leftism,” he told me. “I worry about Gen Z. Colleges are increasingly illiberal, and there is a rise of illiberal progressivism that is hostile to the concept of individual rights, free expression, free enterprise, free inquiry.” Too many young activists, he said, view the conflict through the academic lens of colonialism. “It collapses all of the context of and history of the Middle East into the binary of oppressor vs oppressed. So there is no patience or understanding of the long history and context of the region. The Jews are just the oppressors, and the Palenstinians oppressed.” That framework, he said, leaves no room for the idea that Hamas might actually be bad, or that Israeli hostages might need to be rescued, or that old man Biden might be actually trying his best. In my conversation with him, Auchincloss wasn’t afraid to call the tenor of the campus protests antisemitic.

The Democrat most caught in the left-wing buzzsaw right now is Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a staunch progressive and disciple of Bernie Sanders who has nevertheless rejected calls for a ceasefire. Fetterman made his support for Israel clear during his 2022 campaign, when he was a darling of the left. But his position now, as the war unfolds, is positively galling to many of his young fans.

Last Thursday morning, anti-war activists in Philadelphia were gathered at Fetterman’s local office, calling for a ceasefire agreement. One of the protesters, Arielle Cohen, posted from the demonstration—because do you even exist in politics these days if you don’t post?—that her group was “expelled” from Fetterman’s office “without warning.” Fetterman’s fiery chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, replied on Twitter/X with a dismissive fact-check: “Sorry if this does not fit the narrative,” he wrote, “but our state director heard these folks out until they had nothing more to say. then they hung out in the lobby for a while until other tenants complained (we share a building) and they were asked to leave by security. but hey you do you.” Like many social media warriors in the wake of the Hamas attacks, Cohen did not bother to correct her misleading observation when presented with contrary evidence, choosing instead to leave it up on social media as a cry for justice, with the added benefit of a like button.

Jentleson is an avowed progressive, just like his boss. But at the moment, online, they are apostates to the pro-Palestinian left. A good example: Fetterman appeared on the liberal podcast Pod Save America over the weekend, telling a live audience in Washington, D.C. that “Hamas doesn’t want peace and [don’t] want to be negotiated with.” He said Israel has a right to respond to the terror attacks that killed innocent men, women and children—a statement that elicited applause in the room. But when Crooked Media posted the clip on Instagram, the comments lit up in anger, with people attacking Fetterman for being “pro-war” and supporting genocide. Several commenters even said Pod Save America host Jon Favreau was also “complicit” in Israeli genocide for allowing Fetterman to express his views.

The Democrats in Congress I spoke to in recent days said they’re worried that younger progressives are making enemies in full view of the country, providing ammo for right-wing opponents, and generally hurting their cause. Slotkin, who opposes a ceasefire but is also working to help her Palestinian constituents evacuate relatives from Gaza, told me that “you have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time,” that reactionary us-versus-them tribalism isn’t helping anyone in this critical moment.

“Israel has the right to go after the leaders who carried out this attack,” she told me, “but that doesn’t mean I am going to always support whatever tactic is used by any military, and I don’t think they have carte blanche to block food and medicine from Gaza. You can feel deep empathy for the victims of a terrorist attack in Israel, and feel deep empathy for innocent civilians caught up in Gaza. I get that that might be difficult for some people to do. But that is my moral compass.”