A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the news of the day, including GOP obstruction in the Senate, an upswell in violence against local government officials and the battle over a memo related to the Mueller report.

Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

As expected, Republicans are the main group of Americans who support some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories connected to the QAnon movement.

But a lot more Americans believe in some aspects of the far-right conspiracy theory than you’d think.

Over many years and in many contexts I have argued that in cases of great public corruption and wrongdoing we place far too much emphasis and priority on criminal investigations and too little on public investigations and accountings. Both kinds of inquiry have their place. Generally both can ride in their own lane and not interfere with each other. But to the extent they bump up against each other we should prioritize the public investigations.

Take the Mueller probe. Our public interest in this or that person serving a few months or years in prison is far less than our public interest in finding out what happened and who is responsible for it. Criminal investigations are, rightly, highly secretive. Their mandate is rightly limited. That leaves the public interest too often out in the cold.

As I said, this is a longstanding belief of one and one that applies in numerous cases. But it has a particular relevance to the controversy over a Jan 6th Insurrection. Republicans are using every argument they know to deny, diminish and ‘move on’ from what happened on January 6th. Because they did it. Opposing a commission is just one part of that.

But there’s more to it than that.

One of the complexities and anguishes that many American Jews feel about Israel today is not only that there is a growing cleavage between how American Jews and Israelis see the occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is also the increasing tendency, especially on the Israeli right, to say ‘who cares about American Jews?’, who make up only a tiny sliver of the US population, and focus rather on white evangelicals who make up a big chunk of the US population and have, albeit for very different reasons, a deep devotion to Israel. This fact came to the fore earlier this month, during the inter-communal violence in Israel and the fighting in Gaza, when Ron Dermer, former Ambassador to the US, said Israel should prioritize evangelicals over American Jews as the anchor of its relationship to the US. American Jews, Dermer reasoned, were in any case “disproportionately among our critics.”