Supplementary Material 2: Dissident Dialogues, Bloodbaths, & Genocidal Debates
The adventure in formatting continues with the second Supplementary Material episode, in which we:lament we don't command the same level of loyalty as Sam's fanscommend a noted sycophant for warning about idolising herosassess the degree to which the "Dissident Dialogues" conference is anything other than bog-standard right-wing orthodoxy; andreveal the TRUTH about Norman Finkelstein's angry rantingas well as so many more opinionated meanderings, for those decent citizens who are willing to pay us the measly sum of $2 month so Chris doesn't have to do three jobs just to exist in this capitalist societyOn this episode:Sam Harris DevoteesDissident DialoguesLex's important message about not worshipping idolsTrumpian Bloodbath & Media CriticismLex Fridman's Israel-Palestine DebateFinkelstein vs. DestinyGenocidal Debates The full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1hr 14mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusLinksLex Fridman Podcast: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny MorrisDissident Dialogues – A PLACE FOR DANGEROUS IDEASGuardian News clips from the 'Bloodbath" speechJoe Rogan & Jonathan Haidt Disagree About Donald Trump BLOODBATH CommentLex's anti-Idol TweetGuardian Article (2015): Israel exonerates itself over Gaza beach killings of four children last yearUN investigation (2015) that covered the beach bombings and reached more critical conclusionsThe Globe and Mail (2015): Account from a reporter
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's supplemental material.
Episode 2, Matt, the second one of that.
He is a psychologist.
I am an anthropologist.
We are not decoding guru long-form content, but we are looking at what gurus have been up to.
We're trying to interpret the signs in the guru's sphere, the orbits and what's...
Happening in the celestial bodies there.
So, welcome.
Welcome, Matt, to this second inaugural episode.
Yes.
Good afternoon, Chris.
And you called it supplementary material, or I've been calling it supplemental materials or something like that.
Okay, I'm just going to get the terminology right.
Supplementary material.
We did ask people for suggestions, and we got a whole bunch of good suggestions.
Some might even say better.
Suggestions than supplementary materials.
But, you know, once you've done something that kind of like sticks in your head and I get it that, you know, a lot of people don't really understand what that means.
For those that don't understand, it is a thing which often comes with articles in academic journals where people put Additional material.
Sometimes it has very important material, which is crucial to understand to be an article, but they don't have space, so they have to put it in supplementary materials.
And, you know, our podcast is academically themed.
We're academics.
It kind of makes sense.
I think it makes sense.
Yeah, there were other suggestions, and I appreciate everybody offering them.
Yeah, unfortunately, it just stuck in my head.
So we're done with it.
Can't change it.
Can't change it.
No, that's fine.
And it makes sense because before we essentially put all our supplementary materials at the beginning of a guru decoding episode, make the episodes extremely long and tiring for us to create.
Now they're in their own little dedicated episode.
Yeah.
What's been going on, Chris?
Any updates on gurus?
Things grinding your gears on the internet?
Let's try not to make it an airing of grievances completely.
You may air one or two.
Grievance number one!
There has been things going on, though I do want to say just one aside on a previous episode.
You know, the interview with Sam Harris is on YouTube.
And whatever the settings are for our account there, I get email notifications when people comment.
Probably should turn that off.
But YouTube comments are, you know, there's kind of a unique thing, right?
Every social media has its own character.
Flavor and texture, yeah.
Yeah, you go to Reddit, you get a certain kind of thing.
You go to Twitter, you get a certain kind of thing.
And YouTube is its...
Very special kind of thing.
But, you know, it's fair to say that Sam is a bigger figure than us and has a quite devoted following.
And it is interesting to get notifications from his fans who come across the interview that we did with him.
So I'll just read two of them because I thought they were quite funny.
Well, oh, actually, this is one that I think you needed to hear, Matt.
It's an intervention.
Thankfully, neither of you will ever have to know what it's like to have a successful popularity campaign go to your head.
You'll be squealing like a chronic case of envy or hitting a vape on camera as an explicit lack of class instead.
The grammar, again, this is one of those cases where the grammar reflects the quality of the insight, but you're Matt and you're vaping.
Yeah.
It was demonstrating your lack of class.
Lack of class.
Well, you know, it's true.
I'm not that classy.
And I probably shouldn't be vaping while we're talking.
I'll try to be good.
Oh, you're fine.
You're fine.
You haven't developed the guru stare, you know, where you just stare directly by the lens of the camera.
It's very disconcerting.
I just wanted to make fun of you vaping.
But these are the two comments which highlight, I think, aspects of, you know, the devotional character that we sometimes notice in the communities that surround guru figures.
So one said, Sam was making an interesting point at the 44th minute and you idiots cut him off.
I think if you're a Sam Harris dad, you literally cannot get enough Sam Harris.
He could talk for two hours and you're still going to be hanging and go, what's he going to say next?
He needs to finish his place.
That point was, I believe, him discussing the You know, nature of self point, which he's discussed a lot on all our venues and had already discussed a lot with us when you suggested that we wouldn't get to the bottom of these issues,
right?
So that's unfortunate.
But the second comment that makes the point that you did, which was just somebody wrote, such a difficult listen every time it pans to anyone but Sam.
Yeah, well, it didn't pan to us very often.
They only had to put up with our stupid mugs like 5% of the time.
A bit more than that, but nonetheless, it's interesting because, you know, there's various other comments and there's, you know, idiot comments and nice comments and some critical comments about Tom and stuff as well.
But it's just that feeling which you just emphasized about, you know, they literally cannot get enough.
Of what Sam was saying.
And whenever one of our stupid points interrupts his flow or whatever, physically painful.
It's just we're interrupting the master at play.
So I'm not saying that's reflective of everybody that listens to Sam, but I think it is reflective of a particular attitude that develops around people like Sam and Jordan Peterson.
And, you know, Brett Weinstein and whatnot as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's on the audience as much.
Like, it's the particular character or personalities of the audience as much as the gurus in terms of them.
Like, I think wanting someone up there on the pedestal that can speak the, you know, the unvarnished truth to them.
Yeah.
Why don't we get this, Matt?
Why don't we get people saying, how dare you interrupt?
We hang up the goods, mate.
We do not have the goods, unfortunately.
Get up your game!
If you're fans of us, it's quite terrorizing people that they're saying that you just need more and more monologues and any interruption of it, it just makes you upset.
Don't do that.
Don't do that.
But yeah, that's interesting.
A slightly related topic, I think, Matt, a sentiment at least, which speaks against this kind of attitude, was voiced by our friend and AI researcher, Lex Friedman.
He tweeted out, don't idolize anyone.
We're all just flawed humans.
A week or so ago.
Oh, I just saw that.
I tried to check his tweets, but I'm blocked again.
I was unblocked for a while, but now I'm blocked again.
Yes, Lex, of course, famously not someone who idolizes anyone, except, of course, he does.
Elon Musk...
Yeah, he's the internet's number one sycophant.
Voicing this sentiment is what makes it notable.
But the sentiment is good, right?
It is correct.
You shouldn't idolize people.
You shouldn't put them up on pedestals.
And even people that are...
Making great achievements or whatever are, you know, just human with flaws inevitably.
So sentiment is valid, but it's the source of the sentiment which causes the slight twinge.
Well, in that, it's quite similar to the article we just reviewed for Decoding Academia.
Perfectly good article.
Nodded my head furiously at many of their points, but it was just the authors of it that raised one eyebrow.
Yes, and for those who are not privy to such discussions, this was an article by Vinay Prasad and John Ioannidis that was talking about obsessive criticism versus jadimic criticism and decrying the obsessive nature of online criticism and made a whole range of valid points.
But when you understand a bit more about the references that they are making and what they consider obsessive criticism...
And the fact that they are responsible for encouraging obsessive criticism of various people that they dislike, it does make the article read slightly differently.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's okay.
What about this conference then, Chris?
Oh, yeah.
There was a conference, the Dissident Dialogues, in partnership with UnHerd.
The magazine, online magazine, kind of Quillette-ish magazine, but sometimes has interesting contrarian articles, but also mad, batshit, crazy stuff on it, right?
And in any case, they have this event, Dissident Dialogues, taking place in New York.
And on the poster, you've got a whole bunch of people.
The headliners are Richard Dawkins, Ian Hirsi Ali.
John McWhorter and Steven Pinker.
But then slightly smaller font.
Constantine Kissin, Francis Foster, John Vervaki, Michael Schellenberger, Chris Williamson, Brianna Joy Gray.
And then the font continues to get smaller and you end up with people like Freddie Sowers from Unheard, Bridget Phetasy, Andrew Gold, Alex O 'Connor, Cosmic Skeptic, Michael Moynihan from The Fifth Column, Nathan Robinson from Current Affairs.
I made the reference online.
I posted this poster and said, somehow, the IDW has returned.
Do you get that reference, Matt?
I'm not sure.
What's the reference?
No, not really.
Oh, God.
Yeah, see?
Well, because in the new Star Wars movies, they brought back Emperor Palpatine, right?
But they just explained it in the opening crawl.
Oh, that's right.
Somehow, the Emperor has returned.
That's on you, Chris.
I think that's a well-known online reference.
I think that's a format that people get usually.
I'm not saying it's a classic movie or anything.
I just mean people are making fun of that lack of explanation.
Now, in this case, the issue is I invoked the specter of the IDW.
So I immediately get responses from people saying, well, it's not the exact people in the ID.
There's no Weinsteins and blah, blah.
And I know, I know.
I'm just making a kind of...
You know, it is a group of renegade intellectuals.
Yeah, dissident dialogues, come on.
And the IDW, it's kind of a still, I think, remains a useful fuzzy category label, right?
Because exactly this kind of thing is, like, it doesn't matter if the cast is rotating and what they call themselves, but there is always this role for, I don't know how to describe them, but they're like IDW type.
Independent commenters, you know, discussing the big ideas, you know, having the fierce debates that you're not going to hear on the mainstream media.
Yeah, well, you will, though.
This part of the issue is that, yes, so the way that they are characterized is often like this.
And I agree that the IDW was an interesting instantiation of that, but it's basically what people refer to as...
Heterodox.
That kind of perspective.
But the issue now and then is that often the diversity is overstated and that there are various issues that you can predict very consistent takes on.
Like, how many people on this lineup are what you would define as pro-woke?
Yeah, look, I mean, there are a couple, like Nathan J. Robinson's on the billing, right at the very bottom.
At the very bottom.
At the very bottom.
He is an interesting exception in some ways, but how many other people fit, like, non-critical of walkness being one of their primary things?
It's very theory.
I think my issue with this is not that they're heterodox or not even that they're predominantly anti-work liberals, perhaps?
Centrists, maybe?
I don't know.
Yeah, a mixture.
Yeah, but anyway, the point is it's not the political violence.
It's more that all of these people are currently professional influencers.
These are people that just spend all day, every week, influencing.
In some way, shape or form, you know, like recording conversations like this, like it's a full-time job.
It doesn't feel like there's a great deal.
I mean, yes, you know, Richard Dawkins is, at least in a prior life, a substantial figure.
John Bavacki is an academic.
I mean, like people do have day jobs, I suppose, but like they're all grinding, you know what I mean?
Like they're all interested in capturing, I don't know, online attention.
Yeah, I mean, I think so.
But I don't know that that's primarily...
I mean, there are people on that list that I would definitely highlight.
I mean, Constantine Kisson, we've documented his fixation.
And Francis Foster made the list.
He's actually in the second biggest font category.
So good on Francis.
But yeah, no, I would describe them in that way.
You can see Andrew Gold.
Who is somebody who presented as critical of cults and that kind of thing, but is very much, you know, trying to rise up the commentosphere ranking.
And people would say, you know, Alex O 'Connor and whatnot are similar to that.
But I also think, you know, Richard Dawkins, popular science writer, John McWhorter, columnist for the New York Times and academic, Steven Pinker, writer, John Favacki, academic, Chris Williamson, the forecaster.
You know, there are plenty of people there that have other mean outputs as opposed to just being pundits.
But there's a lot of pundity types there as well.
It's pundit heavy, I would say.
Even someone like Richard Dawkins is currently, I think, mainly involved in punditry, it seems.
He's not writing books at the moment.
I agree.
So the punditry thing is just, you know, when you have a conference that is...
Building itself as a big idea conference.
You're going to get...
You're going to get pundits.
But that's the thing.
I was looking through this website, Chris, and it's a place for dangerous ideas.
We know that.
There's going to be debate and discussion and creativity, disagreement and discovery.
It's all very vague.
There is no agenda.
What's the topic?
Well, it is kind of a, it looks like a music festival lineup, right?
That's kind of the way it's laid out, where, you know, people don't put their set lists and whatnot on, so it's just going to be an evening, or a couple of days, I guess, given the amount of people there, of just conversations.
It's like the challenging, heterodox conversations.
One half of Red Scare is there, and the full Trigonometry, together with the editor of Current Affairs, The Wild Card, David Robinson.
What fireworks could happen?
What happens if you put a Steven Pinker in conversation with a...
I'm trying to look at the list.
With a Winston Marshall of the Mumford& Sons or whatever band he was in.
Sparks were flying, Matt.
Yeah, who knows what exciting ideas will come out of those conversations.
I see the tickets for general admission are about $350, but there are VIP passes.
A bargain!
A bargain, but there are VIP passes where you get access to the green room.
You get to be in the same.
I bet you Eric Weinstein is going to be there.
In the background, introducing people.
Have you met this interesting young fellow?
Yeah, but it is that whole archetype of renegade intellectuals getting together to say the things that the mainstream won't allow them to.
And I want to emphasize that This shtick never seems to get old because you can say these.
There's outlets.
There's popular podcasts.
The right-wing ecosystem in particular is often roller-welcoming to people that want to have heterodox takes on particular liberal ideas, right?
But still, people are constantly able to present themselves as the besieged minority that need to have these special conferences where Dangerous ideas are floated.
I don't know.
It does seem rather indulgent.
But I bet there's a huge audience for this.
These kind of events, they do attract people.
But notable people missing.
No Jordan Peterson.
No.
Well, Brett and Eric are not there.
Brett and Eric are not there.
No Sam Harris.
I'm sure Sam Harris was invited.
I'm not so sure about the Weinstein brothers.
Yeah, well, I mean, when you say that, but I mean, they've got Michael Schellenberger.
They're, you know, the conspiracy-prone journalists.
So I'm not...
Francis Foster is high up on the billing.
So I don't know that they wouldn't have invited an Eric or Brett if they would have agreed.
But yeah, so anyway, IDW.
Somehow it has returned.
The cast of characters, this is a point that I made plenty of times, especially when talking to Aaron Rabinowitz, whenever we were discussing IDW things, that the cast of characters can change.
Like, there are people who spin off into overt, polemical, partisan discourse, right?
You know, Dave Rubin.
But that category of...
Renegade intellectuals having difficult conversations.
That is always an appealing thing.
The IDW was a particular instantiation of it.
And there will be other names given to it.
All of them cringe-inducing.
That's the way.
Dissident dialogues, Matt.
Dissident dialogues.
That's fine.
We won't be going, but if somebody does go, it would be interesting to get just a quick synopsis of what the general topics were.
We think we can guess, but...
Yeah, I'm sure they'll put talks online.
And somebody in our Patreon described it as a guru petting zoo.
Slightly unkind.
Slightly unkind.
And I don't think all of the people on the list...
One point I'd meet here is like, I don't expect that everybody will say just stupid, idiot things.
No, no.
I don't mean to imply that I hate all of these people and anything.
No!
You know, I know people don't like Pinker for various reasons, but I tend to find...
His book's interesting and like various parts of his academic work and so on.
And so it's not that.
It's just, you know, the whole collective vibe of the thing is what we're discussing.
And I think there are notable figures on that list who are wetting themselves about being presented as intellectual dissidents.
So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Especially the ones that are neither intellectual.
No dissidents.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
So, well, for your services to the Logos, we salute you all, you dissidents.
Speaking of intellectual dissidents, Matt, I was going to veer towards the debate which occurred on Lex Friedman's show recently with...
destiny and norman finkelstein and some other academics around israel and gaza but before that trump now trump we haven't covered him we we actually did discuss covering him because there are aspects of what
he does which fit very much into a guru template but he's more of a polemical partisan political politician
Yeah, like straight up politicians we tend to avoid, even though in many ways he is an archetypal Guru, but, you know, politicians are their own breed.
So, yes, we have avoided him, but, you know, he's in the news.
He manages to be on the news pretty regular.
Are you referring to something specific there, Chris?
Yeah, so Trump often serves, especially in the guru sphere, as a kind of catalyst for takes or responses.
What you will find in that heterodox sphere that we were just talking about is you will often find Criticism and condemnation of Trump, particularly some extreme thing that he's done or, you know, that they don't like.
But what you will also find is strong defenses on the claim that he's constantly being unfairly treated by the liberal media, that he's being taken out of constant, he's being presented as orange Hitler, and that these are,
you know, unwarranted, hyperventilating.
Due to the woke mind virus, right?
This is the kind of way that he's presented.
And the heterodox view likes to flatter itself that it is approaching him without those biases.
So it's able to recognize when he's saying things that are reasonable, when he's being treated unfairly, as well as, you know, harshly criticizing him when he needs it.
And we'll see how reasonable that is.
But the particular...
The thing which happened recently was he gave a campaign speech for his presidential campaign in America.
And during one part of the speech, he referenced a potential bloodbath.
Right now, here's the clip.
Let me tell you something to China.
If you're listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal.
Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now.
And you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans, and you're going to sell the cars to us now?
We're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those cars.
If I get elected...
Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole...
That's going to be the least of it.
It's going to be a bloodbath for the country.
That'll be the least of it.
But they're not going to sell those cars.
They're building massive factories.
A friend of mine...
All he does is build car manufacturing plants.
He's the biggest in the world.
I mean, honestly, I joke about it.
He can't walk across the street.
In that way, he's like Biden.
But for building a plant, he can do the greatest plants in the world, right?
That's all he cares about.
I said, I'd like to see one of your plants recently.
I said, I'd like to see where can we go?
Well, we have to travel to Mexico.
I said, why Mexico?
He said, because that's where the big plants are building.
China's building really big plants in Mexico.
Yes.
I don't listen to much Trump.
I tend to avoid it.
But I did listen to that online because of the discourse, Chris.
So that reference to a bloodbath.
Yeah.
So there was consternation and a bit of a tizzy.
Around that, and it's fair to say in liberal media sources, the emphasis about the reference to a bloodbath if he doesn't win, right?
Now, in that speech, some people complained that the clip was shown, so we played quite an extended clip there where you can hear him waffle on.
I would say that the straightforward interpretation of that is that he's...
He's waffling on about manufacturing going outside the U.S. and how he's going to do protective tariffs and whatnot to bring manufacturing back.
It's kind of protectionist, nationalist stuff.
And then he starts talking about what will happen if he doesn't win and that it's going to be a blubber.
And it's not clear, is he...
Talking about the broader consequences or specifically for manufacturing.
But I think the general interpretation would be that it's mostly related to what he was just talking about with manufacturing, right?
Yeah.
Well, what he says immediately before it is that, you know, if he's elected, he's going to put a stop to this American jobs going overseas and so on.
And if he's not elected, there's going to be a bloodbath.
So I think a reasonable interpretation is that he's referring to a...
Bloodbath or American jobs or the American economy, that kind of thing.
Now, I think, you know, obviously Trump is terrible generally and he almost certainly is deliberately ambiguous a lot of the time where there's an okay interpretation but there's also a sort of, you know, a red meat insightful interpretation as well.
And, you know, he's certainly guilty of using that kind of language.
Like, whatever the context, right?
It's not ideal to be talking about bloodbaths and stuff if you're not elected, even if it's in reference to, you know, the economy.
Yeah, like a bloodbath in the economy.
But still, I mean, the way, you know, I think a lot of people on the left side of things interpreted this, which is he's calling for an insurrection.
If he's not elected, then he's saying that there's going to be, you know, a bloody insurrection to...
To make him a dictator, which I think is just not a reasonable interpretation given that context.
Yeah, and so you see Constantine Kissin, for example, tweeted out, I see the mainstream media are lying about Trump and clipping him out of context again.
It's amazing how used they are to having a monopoly on information that even now when their lies are guaranteed to be immediately debunked, they carry on anyway.
Pure arrogance, right?
Yeah.
That's the thing that it kills me to be on the same side of an issue with Konstantin Kitsin.
But actually, this is why I think I personally kind of object to getting ahead of Yuskis in something.
Even if there is some interpretation that he's calling for an insurrection that is valid, you have to understand that to everyone on the right side of politics, it sounds like crazy talk.
And it fits into what their stereotypes and the kind of propaganda you see in MAGA circles that all liberals are basically delusional, right?
That they're just inventing things about Trump and they're living in an alternative fantasy land, getting all upset about things that literally didn't happen.
Now, lots of terrible and bad things associated with Trump did happen.
But when these sorts of issues crop up...
They can ignore all of that and just focus on these particular issues.
I remember the Covington Kids issue that was a couple of years ago now probably.
It was a similar kind of thing.
It got so much airplay.
People like Constantine Kisson, they dined out on that stuff for months or years.
And it just gets referred to all the time about how you can't trust.
Right.
It is true that, you know, the coverage was bad in some respects, right?
Usually when you go back and look, the coverage isn't as extreme as is presented.
The actual articles that are highlighted are not as bad, but, you know, some of the material around it, like the tweets or like secondary articles quoting things, are bad, but still could be avoided by just not...
Immediately leaping.
There was another recent example where there was a fan, a young kid, who was photographed from one side with like black paint on their face.
And this was presented for some reason as a kid engaging in blackface.
I think it was red skin.
It was like a red face paint, right?
But a slightly different angle showed that the other half of his face was painted a different color and it was like the colors of the team.
So it's an absolute insane thing to try and make into a racist issue.
And as it turned out, that person's family were also of Native American background and stuff.
But it doesn't matter.
But just why that even needs to be highlighted, some kid having face paint at an event.
But those issues become hyper-fixated to the point that they're taken as emblematic of everything.
All media, that's why you can't trust them.
They're always constantly lying and trying to twist everything in those directions.
And from that same speech, Matt, right, so this is the same speech that Trump was giving, a different section of it.
Just listen to this.
If this election, if this election isn't won, I'm not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country.
Does that make sense?
I don't think you're going to have another election in this country if we don't win this election.
I don't think you're going to have another election, or certainly not an election that's meaningful.
And we better get out, or we better...
I actually say that the date, remember this, November 5th, I believe it's going to be the most important date in the history of our country.
I believe it.
Yeah, so that's much worse.
That's...
Yeah, and you can, even if you interpret yourself...
Charitably, right?
And he's just trying to encourage people to get out to vote on that date.
And he's saying, you know, the democracy hangs in the balance or whatever, which is something that, you know, you do here.
But given the history of what has happened when he has called for that kind of action to be taken, you know, there are reasons to be concerned about what he's stoking up when he uses that kind of rhetoric, right?
So this, if he doesn't win, This will be the last election in America.
Like, hmm.
It's not clear to me what he's implying there, though.
Like, just could you make it explicit for a dummy?
Like, pretend I'm an idiot.
I think he's saying that essentially, you know, that that would be...
Like, he can't...
Like, he doesn't even think he lost the last election.
So if he is not elected, it shows that the democracy...
Well, because he has been sort of claiming that the election is going to be rigged, right?
Right.
So if it's rigged again and they can't win, when they're obviously going to win because, you know, Sleepy Joe is the opponent and whatnot, it just means that the democracy isn't functioning.
The Democrats have completely took the machine.
So that's what I would interpret him as saying.
Yeah, so that's bad.
That is bad.
See, that is worse because, you know, this is something that he's been doing a lot, which is doing his best to undermine confidence in the United States in their free and fair elections.
Like, really doing his best to convince everybody that...
Democracy doesn't work in the United States.
And any result where he doesn't win is an illegitimate one.
I mean, that's what he's been doing for years.
And yeah, that should be the clip that's doing the rounds.
Yeah.
But unfortunately, it's not.
And instead, it all gets caught up in this bloodbath thing.
And the funny thing is that I became aware of this section because Joe Rogan...
On his podcast, he was talking about this with Jonathan Haidt.
And he played this clip, I think it's from The Guardian originally, which had both sections.
It played the first bit about the bloodbath, but then it cut off and it played this part connected to it, right?
And Joe was prepared to say, look, they're taking them all out of context.
And then it got the second bit, which sounds much worse.
And he was, you know, then having to say...
Yeah, but, you know, he means that...
And then they find the clip where, you know, it's the longer part that we played the first time.
And that's obviously what he wanted to play.
But it just goes to show that the debate around it is very much just as a preset narrative, which is, oh, people are misrepresenting him.
They're trying to make him worse than he is.
And it is true that on the, you know, the liberal side, there's a fixation on that because he used the word bloodbath.
They can immediately focus on that.
But what he said outside of that is perhaps more damning than just a reference to bloodbath, which might have been related to economic things.
But all of it now is just swirling around the discourse of fear, debating what he meant by bloodbath.
That's it.
And it's going to be referenced probably for years, at least up to the election.
Another example where the liberal media lied about what Donald Trump said, and not the fact that he's still, in every one of his speeches and every one of his campaigns, essentially saying the election is illegitimate unless he wins.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, the things that go viral.
It's depressing.
Yes, the discourse is not good.
It's not good.
So, Chris, you mentioned something about a debate involving destiny.
Right.
Yes, I did.
So this was also the talk of the time.
And let me just let Lex do my work for me and introduce what this is in reference to.
The following is a debate on the topic of Israel and Palestine with Norman Fickenstein, Benny Morris, Wayne Rabbani, and Stephen Bunnell, also known online as Destiny.
Norm and Benny are historians.
When is a...
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