Unholy War: A Conversation with Tucker Carlson on DarkHorse
Tucker Carlson and Brett McKay dissect accusations of anti-Semitism, arguing that conflating Israel with all Jews prevents legitimate policy criticism. They condemn "gaslighting by ricochet," where critics dismiss reasoned arguments to enforce tribalism, while warning that executive overreach and global ignorance threaten liberal democracy. The conversation critiques Benjamin Netanyahu's use of "Amalek" rhetoric to justify total war, contrasting it with secular Jewish values, and concludes that maintaining negotiation rights with adversaries like Iran and Russia is essential to avoid destructive Potemkin diplomacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail.
It's going to be a strange one.
You've probably noticed that this is not the usual set.
I'm of course sitting with Tucker Carlson, a friend of mine, in his set.
He has graciously agreed not only to talk to me today on Dark Horse, but also to let me use his studio.
So thank you for that and welcome to Dark Horse.
Oh, it's an honor.
We talk so much on the phone and I think of you as one of the world's wise and sane people.
It's just a blessing to have you here.
So thank you.
Well, thank you.
That's very nice of you to say.
I will say this is a mission for me.
And let me just say up front, I don't do interviews.
I'm not a journalist.
I'm a biologist, as you know.
And I have discussions with people who are worth having discussions with.
So I'll probably talk more than I would if I was interviewing you.
But let me tell you a little bit about what my mission is and why I decided to come here to talk to you.
I've known you for some time.
We met, you probably remember, in 2017 when Evergreen melted down, and you reached out.
You wanted to talk to me about the story.
And at the time, I thought, having been brought up as a liberal, that you were a terrible guy.
And I got your invitation and I thought long and hard about whether or not to accept it because I assumed that what you would do is you would make use of the fact that I, a liberal,
was being backed against the wall by other liberals, that as a professor at a radical college, that I got what I deserved and that it was a Faustian bargain I was making by coming on your show because I needed to get the story to a wider audience or they would succeed in doing to me what they attempted to do, but that it was going to be humiliating and costly.
And you and I had never met.
In fact, we didn't meet in person that day.
I was in a remote studio.
And when I got there, I was laid in traffic, got there.
I was literally sweaty.
We were late from the commute.
And they threaded the microphone down my shirt and plopped me in a chair.
I didn't get to brush my hair or wipe the sweat off my brow or any of these things.
And you and I started talking.
And what I was very surprised to encounter was that you were incensed on my behalf, that you were compassionate, and that you saw this as an unfair demonization of a fellow American who deserved better.
And it rocked my world because here I was faced with, you know, this arch conservative someone who'd been painted as a demon, and he was expressing compassion for me, and it was clearly genuine at the same moment that my colleagues who knew me and knew that the allegations against me were false completely abandoned me.
The Real Deal on Armor Colostrum00:03:12
With one exception, I will say.
There was one courageous person on the faculty, Mike Paros, a big animal vet who also happened to be a professor.
He was having none of it.
But the rest of the faculty abandoned me and Heather completely, and yet you stepped in.
So first of all, let me just say thank you for that.
And thank you for the friendship that has evolved since that time.
I really appreciate it.
Well, I always am with the man against the mob, period.
And I really appreciate, especially now, men of principle and bravery.
And I saw both of those.
And also, by the way, I agreed with you.
I don't think we should reduce people to their race.
Like, I've never thought that.
I never will think that, no matter how much pressure there is on me to think that.
I will never think that.
Me either.
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A Familiar Experience of Hatred00:15:06
So to the mission that brings me here today, I have watched you being raked over the coals in the last year, especially for bigotry.
That's the accusation against you.
And I will tell you, I have a complicated relationship with questions of anti-Semitism.
I grew up in LA.
I think you grew up in La Jolla, not terribly far apart.
I didn't experience much anti-Semitism of note growing up at all.
You know, the occasional joke about Nazis, but nobody meant it.
It wasn't an important issue on the playground where I grew up.
And then I did encounter some when I became a professor.
There's a kind of reflexive anti-Jewish sentiment amongst American academics.
But again, it was tolerable.
People, you know, when they know you, they look past it.
And, you know, it certainly doesn't afflict everybody, but it's definitely present on an American college campus.
But in recent years, the amount of anti-Semitism that I encounter is tremendous.
I believe it.
I don't know if it's bots.
Some of it surely is.
I don't know if it's paid shills who are either trying to gin up discord in the American populace or if anti-Semitism is politically useful.
I don't know what it is, but I do encounter a lot of it now.
It's a regular feature of my life.
And I will say that there's a wide spectrum of anti-Semites.
You know, there are flat-out gas to Jews people.
I run into them.
There are also people who have kind of a reflexive distrust of Jews, which frankly, you know, when I know somebody like that, I don't toss them out.
I try to model what I think Jewish values are, and hopefully that breaks through.
So in any case, as the accusations of anti-Semitism have been leveled at you, I've had a familiar experience.
It's the Tucker Carlson experience, right?
Somebody says, he's a bigot.
The evidence is out.
He's finally said the quiet part out loud.
And then you click through to the supposed evidence and you find Tucker Carlson talking about how terrible it is that we have an open southern border.
And you realize, okay, that's not bigotry.
That's just being rational.
So I've had that experience many times having nothing to do with Jews or anti-Semitism or anything like that.
And I'm having that experience again when I hear you accused of having bigotry against Jews.
When I click through to the evidence, it's not there.
And more importantly, when I listen to you, especially your monologues, which I want to get back to, but when I listen to your monologues, I hear a very thoughtful, careful presentation that does not show any evidence of bias against people based on what lineage they come from at all.
I hear an American patriot.
You and I disagree on some things.
I don't think it's all that many, but I know that we do.
I am a liberal.
You are a conservative.
But I don't find bigotry.
And lastly, let me just say that you and I had lunch together in Pennsylvania before the election.
Last September.
You had an event, I think it was in Lancaster, and I happened to be in Pennsylvania.
And, you know, it was a number of hours' drive.
It's like, look, okay, we're in close proximity.
I want to go talk to Tucker.
And when I did that, one of the things on my mind was that I wanted to have a conversation where there were no cameras present, you know, the stakes were low, and we could actually talk about the experience of being an American Jew, your experience of interacting with other Americans, and I could sort of gauge where you were and just see if there was anything lurking in you that I needed to know about.
And again, I wouldn't have abandoned you as a friend if I had found some sort of reflexive distrust, but I didn't find it.
It's not there, as far as I can tell.
So in any case, as you've been raked over the coals, I've felt that it was my obligation to actually give my perspective as a Jew, an American, and somebody who knows you personally, and just say, you know what?
That's a false accusation based on everything I can see from my personal experience.
I appreciate it.
I mean, there's so much to say, but I appreciate your saying that I've been called a bigot for so many years because I have been.
And it happened really for the first time around 2017 when I interviewed you.
And the core premise of that interview, and we both shared that assumption, we're exactly the same age from exactly the same part of the country.
So I do think the way we grew up informs our views.
But we're both Southern Californians in our mid-50s, was that you should not reduce someone to his race.
And the whole promise of America is that the individual matters and that you can kind of leave behind the sins or the triumphs for that matter of your ancestors.
You can kind of like be responsible for the choices that you make, which I have always believed that.
I think it's, by the way, I think it's a fundamentally Christian perspective.
I think it's the basis of Western civilization.
So I think it's worth defending, but it's also my default.
So anyway, I felt that way my whole life.
And they call me a bigot, you know, anti-black or whatever.
And I would, and it bothered me at first.
But the truth is, I don't have that many black friends.
You know, I had like two really close black, like, you know, come to your house for dinner type friends.
And both of them were like, please.
I also never was ever hassled, not one time by black people in public.
Never.
Black people always like hug me at the airport and be like, okay.
You know, it didn't have like personal effects on me.
I grew up in a very Jewish world.
I grew up in La John.
I went to Hawaii Country Day School.
I don't know what percent of Jewish it was.
It was a lot.
And I have a million Jewish friends.
I've been in the media my whole life.
Just a fact, lots of Jews in the media.
Lots of them are friends of mine.
So this round has been totally disruptive of my personal life in a way that I grieve over because in the end, I care about individual people, not all people care about like people I know and love.
And it's driven some of them away from me and in ways that are so painful.
I'm not whining, but I'm just saying like, I've thought a lot about this because it has been so painful.
And I would say two things.
I think the core problem about our, this whole discussion is the conflation of the nation state, the modern nation state of Israel with all Jews.
And for the record, I've never been, I said this a thousand times, it's true.
I've never been against Israel.
Took my family there on vacation.
So, I mean, I didn't, not an Israel hater.
But the second you say that the modern state of Israel is the same as global Jewry, and then you say that the United States has no divergent interests from Israel.
We're exactly the same country.
We have exactly the same interests.
You're on a collision course, man.
And it's going to hurt a lot of people on a personal level as well.
So you can't criticize Israel because that makes you an anti-Semite.
That has been the rule for a long time.
And I've just kind of lived with it because it wasn't worth it.
But the second we started moving toward a war with Iran, and I knew that we were because it's my job.
And I had a very clear picture of what that would mean for the United States.
And unfortunately, I think it's turning out to be true.
I feel sad about it.
But I made a conscious decision.
I know I'm going to take a lot of grief for this.
I didn't realize how much.
I have no idea.
But I was like, I'm going to say something because I don't want to go to war with Iran.
It's just kind of that simple.
And so that's the first thing.
This was all inevitable, unfortunately.
And the second thing is that there are people who seem to be trying to inspire hatred.
And it's no one I know really well personally, but it's a couple of very loud voices who are trying to make people hate them.
And I don't understand what that is.
And I'll, you know, I hate even to use their names, but I'll just name one because I sort of know him as Mark Levin.
And watching his attacks on me, I kind of get it.
Like I'm in the way of his agenda.
He wanted war with Iran.
I have the ear of Trump.
I had the ear of Trump.
He does too.
So, you know, turning me into a Nazi is helpful to getting to his goal.
I get it.
He's a goal-oriented guy, not mad about it.
I understand what's up.
Watching the way that he's responded to Megan Kelly has been a radicalizing experience for me because I know Megan Kelly, he does too.
And Megan Kelly is sincerely moderate on this question.
Most of her friends are Jewish.
She's always liked Israel.
She did show after show about how October 7th was terrible.
Great.
And she said, like, she refused to denounce me.
I think that's how it started.
Or something like that.
I mean, here's my friend.
I'm not going to denounce him, Candace Owens or something.
I'm not going to denounce her.
They have called her a Nazi, like actually a Nazi.
So, what's the effect of that?
And at some point, you realize like the effect of a system is what it does.
So, if you wind up doing something over and over and over, that's the point of what you're doing is to affect that outcome.
And they have not turned people to their side, to their cause.
They haven't convinced anybody.
They've instead inspired hatred.
And I feel like it's on purpose.
Like, what's the point of that?
And I don't know the answer.
I don't know why you would ever want to inspire hatred of yourself.
Levin is doing that, but he clearly wants it.
And I think there's a complicated psychology there, maybe.
Maybe there's a strategy that's so advanced I can't understand it.
Maybe there's spiritual elements at play.
I really don't know.
But if your goal was to turn down the temperature to make people more supportive of the Netanyahu government, which is a totally fine goal as far as I'm concerned, I disagree, but I don't think it's illegitimate to want people to like Netanyahu or something.
This is the opposite of what you would do.
So clearly, we've exceeded my intellectual capacity.
Like, I don't understand what this is, but I know it's not what they're claiming it is.
Or else, BB, and I've called these real, I know a lot of people in the Israeli government.
I've been there a number of times and I know them.
I've dealt with them for many decades.
And I've called over and been like, dude, this is not helping you.
I don't understand why you're allowing this.
They're controlling the message pretty directly, actually.
And this is the wrong message.
It's not going to help you in the end.
If you want allies in the United States, don't behave like this.
I've literally said that.
I said it to Danny Dannon, who is a longtime Israeli political figure ambassador to Israeli Ambassador of the United Nations.
I'm a reasonable guy, smart guy.
And I said this to him.
And he's like, Yeah, tough.
So clearly, there is a strategy here.
Again, I'll just stop with this that I don't understand.
And, but it's not, it's bad.
It's gonna, it's dividing our country.
You run into real anti-Semitism.
Yeah, I believe you.
I believe you.
And I'm very jaded about that.
Everyone's like, oh, people hate me.
I believe that you're running into real anti-Semitism.
In fact, one of the reasons I don't want to go on X, it's crazy.
Hatred of all kinds based on people's bloodlines.
And like we live in a country that has no majority of anything.
And so if that's the state of play where my tribe hates your tribe, I don't see a winning tribe.
And I don't see a place where my grandkids can live comfortably or yours or anybody's.
Like, that's just a total dead end.
Tribalism is a total dead end.
And I've spent a lot of my life abroad, as you have as well.
And you've seen it.
It's not resolved quickly.
It's resolved like in a thousand years, if you're lucky, and it leads to violence right away.
So don't have that.
Don't do that here.
But we're doing it.
We are doing it.
And among the things that we should talk about is the modern West.
You're describing the modern West.
You wouldn't do this if you wanted the modern West to survive.
Exactly.
The fundamental principle undergirding the modern West is that we put lineage aside and we collaborate as a people because collaboration is a good thing to do.
And you and I also remember, you know, the 80s and 90s, and it just wasn't like this.
It's not that there was no bigotry or anything, but we knew what direction we were heading.
It was totally unacceptable to act like this.
It was totally unacceptable.
And the idea that you would parse someone else's religious views in public.
I mean, the working assumption I grew up with as a Southern California wasp was our religious views are right.
That's what, I mean, that's our religion, so we think we're right.
But let's be honest, everyone's religious views sound pretty kooky when exposed to the light of day.
So how about we don't do that?
And how about if we have Mormon neighbors or Jewish neighbors, or in my case, Roman Catholic neighbors?
What's the point of like getting into how their doctrine differs from ours?
Like we're confident that ours is right and theirs is wrong, but we can also see them as really great people.
And the last thing we're going to do is sit down and be like, let's talk about transubstantiation.
That sounds really crazy.
It's like, why would you do that unless you wanted to permanently be at war with your neighbors?
And all of a sudden, I'm reading all this stuff online about various people's religious views.
And I have gotten into it myself with the Christian Zionists.
I have explained their religious views on camera.
I feel bad about doing that.
I knew what their views were.
I didn't want to talk about it until they were driving America's foreign policy.
Anyway, I just feel like this is not a good road to go down.
And we need to reestablish a little bit of Anglo-Saxon, sorry to brag about my culture, but restraint here, where there are certain things we don't talk about at dinner.
And one of them is your sex life.
And another is your religious beliefs.
And we've often been made fun of for that.
Like, oh, you know, you guys are so constipated.
You can never talk about anything real.
Yeah, not in public.
You don't actually, because it causes fractures that don't heal.
That's why we don't do that.
Let's get back to that soon.
A couple of points.
No, I mean, look, you're being cautious about something.
I think we've got a five-alarm fire on this front.
Yes.
There's a reason we don't do this.
And among the many strengths of your monologues, and I want to talk about them at some point, but among the many strengths, you're a guy with religious convictions.
Talking About Sex and Religion00:05:13
Yes.
You make no secret of that.
When you talk in your monologues, I hear you talking as a patriot, as a secular person.
I hear you talking in a way that I can completely relate to.
And it places your religious beliefs exactly where they should be relative to me.
I can respect those as your beliefs.
You're not asking me to accept them.
And they are not informing your beliefs about policy.
We're not allowed to.
We're not allowed to.
The founders were very clear about this.
And it's not that they didn't have religious beliefs of their own.
They were clear about it because it's a slippery slope to hell.
It's a slippery slope back into the past where the only thing that matters is what tribe you're from.
People haven't traveled enough.
I really think that's part of it.
They haven't.
And I used to always push back against, oh, Americans don't have a passport.
They've never been anywhere.
Because I love America and I hate to hear the ugly American stereotype repeated.
And I've always been really defensive of America and Americans.
I still am.
However, that is one criticism that's totally real.
And I know people who planned this disaster that we're in right now.
I know a lot of them.
And some of them are really well informed.
Some of them are not informed at all.
They have no idea.
Ted Cruz didn't know the population of Iran.
And he acted like it was like final round of jeopardy.
And I was asking an unfair question.
It's like you're trying to overthrow the government.
So you should know who lives there and how many of them there are.
And you didn't know anything.
And it's not just Ted Cruz.
I don't mean to beat up on Ted Cruz who has enough problems.
But I would say that's like very common.
And that ignorance fails to inform decision making and it fails to shape perceptions in ways that are super dangerous.
And one of them is a lot of people who are making decisions in this country have no experience of chaos, tribal conflict, protracted generational conflict.
They just haven't seen it.
They have no idea what that is.
They can't imagine not being able to get to the store.
They can't imagine a country in which ATMs don't work or currency is worthless.
Or in which, like, a 15-year-old with an automatic weapon controls their block.
They can't imagine that.
And because they can't, that's all real, by the way.
That's the state of play in a lot of the world most of the time.
But they just, they're so far removed from reality and they're so unbelievably ignorant that they can murder someone else's religious leader and expect that would cause the country to collapse.
Are you a drug son?
What?
Let's just murder the Ayatollah, the head of Shia Islam, and that will do what?
Tell me what that will do.
Well, the government will clash.
People will see that Shia Islam is invalid.
First of all, our job is to tell people their religion is invalid.
What are you doing?
You're dooming my grandchildren to terror attacks at the mall.
Yes, 100%.
What?
I mean, look, I think we have to paint with a broadbrush three choices about how to live.
We can live in a system of warlords where there's no order and order establishes itself based on who has power in your local environment.
We can live under some kind of totalitarian regime, or we can take the prototype that we have in the West and we can go back to improving it, right?
The West is the alternative to these other ways of living.
And if you've experienced those other ways, there is no way you would gamble on destabilizing what we've got.
So well put.
That is so well put.
Everyone should spend a year traveling the world.
We should subsidize it.
Fine.
Happy to.
I mean, it's much more productive than most things we subsidize, like drug addiction and college.
Or college.
Exactly.
So I'm not clever enough to have thought of that, but that is exactly right.
Just spend a year.
And by the way, rich people used to do that.
My great-grandmother and my wife's grandmother went to the same high school, amazingly, 120 years ago.
Both were rich girls, and both of them spent the next year, not in college, there was no question of that, but traveling the world with a nanny.
Now, I know that sounds like incredibly Victorian.
Well, it was the Victorian period for one thing, but for another, Edwardian.
But that was considered a true education.
And I actually knew my great-grandmother who survived the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, took their boat to Oakland in the middle of the fires, and she was a remarkable person.
And she was remarkable because she had wisdom born of seeing things.
She'd just been everywhere, seen everything.
She never had a job in her entire life.
She lived like 90, never had a job.
But everybody in the family went to her for advice because she had seen everything.
And part of it was because she'd been everywhere.
I think that really matters.
There's nothing more education.
Yes, it just isn't.
You know, you dive into another culture.
And the point is it's on every channel.
You're taking in actual real information about the world, not something that somebody believes is true.
And it transforms you.
And if you've seen the alternatives to what we have, I mean, look, I have no shortage of complaints about the way the West functions and how it falls down on its values.
Jews Feeling Like Blacks Did00:14:55
But wow do I not want to live under either of the alternatives?
And back to your earlier point about anti-Semitism and the strangeness of the activities that are causing it to rise and where they're coming from.
The very people who should be most terrified of anti-Semitism are behaving in exactly the way that is causing anti-Semitism.
It is, it is, and this is from my perspective.
I feel in a bind.
I am being asked to choose one of two teams.
I can either go with the vocal Jews of the moment, with a few notable exceptions, or I can effectively confront them and join the other team.
I don't want to have to choose.
I'm an American.
My being Jewish is not supposed to put me on a team.
And yet, I'm watching the exact preconditions that lead to an anti-Jewish genocide.
I'm watching that happen in real time in my own country.
And I'm being asked, which side are you on?
And my point is I am on the side that wouldn't do that.
I am on the side of every single other American that wants to put these things aside and figure out collectively, as we're supposed to, what is in our interest.
I'm happy to have that discussion.
It's a reasonable discussion to have.
But to accuse people of being anti-Semitic, or in my case, that's not quite going to work, is it?
So they're going to have to go to self-hating Jew or something like that.
Have you been called that?
Sure.
Oh, of course.
Of course.
And, you know, I've been called that in very close quarters, like friends and family.
And it's vile.
And I will point out.
It's hard to take it in person.
I got to say that in person is not the internet.
When someone comes up to you face to face and say, and it's happened to me recently from Jewish friends, former friends, I guess, get right in your face and say that, ooh, it hurts.
Because you know that they know or they don't.
They've either lost track of what they know or they know and they're saying it anyway.
And it stops you in your tracks when it happens.
I think they really mean it.
I think that I think I watched this.
I covered black politics 30 years ago.
I knew L. Sharpton really well.
And really well.
I travel with him a lot around the world.
And Sharpton had good qualities.
Very funny, but totally fraudulent.
I mean, truly, he's a criminal, right?
I mean, he was indicted.
He was a criminal.
But you would run into black people, like normal black people, smart, know what's up, and they would all say Sharpton.
They would never criticize Sharpton, ever, because they felt under attack and they felt they had nowhere to go.
Like Sharpton may be what he is, but he's on our side.
And there's no way I'm going to denounce him in public.
You saw this happen with whites in 2016 with Trump.
That's really a lot of this was about whites feeling totally threatened through affirmative action, DEI, the kind of thing that happened to you at Evergreen, where all of a sudden you could just say like, the whites shouldn't reproduce.
Like white people are bad.
Like they're at the bottom of the totem pole now.
And so much of that that whites are like, we feel really, really threatened.
Of course, being white, they didn't say it mostly, but they felt it for sure.
And here comes Trump.
And really the promise of Trump was to save white people.
Just a fact.
Sorry.
And working class people, who are you talking about?
You're talking about, you know, former Democrats, ethnic Democrats, but white people.
And they voted for Trump.
And, you know, of course, that didn't work.
But you see it now with Jews.
They feel totally threatened.
By the way, if we could turn on the temperature a little bit and you ask like some of the people who've called me names or said, I'm never talking to you again, are you really in favor of what Netanyahu's doing?
And he like Israel, great.
He's not helping Israel.
It got crushed last night in Tel Aviv.
Like, how is that helping?
It's not.
And they'd be like, you're right.
And Netanyahu's kind of an idiot, actually.
He's just a great tactician, politician, but he is not a strategist.
He has no long-term vision for Israel that's healthy or going to work.
He's a destructive force.
But they can't say that because they feel so under attack, partly because of people, maybe I'm answering my own question, because of people like Mark Levin who are like, the Nazis are coming.
And normal people, normal Jews are like, man, that's terrifying.
I better not say anything against Israel.
It's my only hope.
I think Jews are starting to feel strongly the way that a lot of blacks felt, a lot of whites felt.
And you can see where this is going.
Is that fair, do you think?
Oh, 100%.
And I think what's happened is that primordial features of human nature are being triggered by events that are causing this to unfold.
And that basically, you know, you and I will easily remember what it felt like to be an American in the aftermath of 9-11.
Yes.
Right.
I remember thinking that George W. Bush was a lightweight and an embarrassment as a president.
I think I was broad-minded enough to have been able to say before 9-11 that I think he's the kind of guy who you could really get along with at the barbecue, but that he had no place in the White House.
And after 9-11, there was just this sense from all sorts of people who felt as I did about him, that he shouldn't be in that position, that it was dangerous, that he was our leader and that we had been attacked.
And it galvanized us.
And I now think that story is a lot more complicated and not as presented than I thought at the beginning.
But nonetheless, the point is human beings, when they are being attacked, circle the wagons.
It's a natural phenomenon and it exists for obvious reasons.
And so to your earlier point about the amplifying of the very things that cause anti-Semitism, including leveling false accusations, which of course cause unbearable resentment amongst people who are falsely accused, these things create a scenario in which Jews are now threatened by a growing wave of anti-Semitism.
And they're hated.
And hated.
And so the point is the tendency to want to circle the wagons and just simply go to the people who are experiencing it too is overwhelming.
But if we do that, we will end the West.
And it can't be allowed to happen.
It's so obviously happening.
I was sitting in a meeting in 1995 with Bill Crystal, who I then worked for.
And in the meeting was a guy called J. Lefkowitz, who was later someone who helped Jeffrey Epstein, weirdly, but this was long before that, nine years before that.
But we're sitting there and I'll never forget Crystal, who was clever, not wise, but clever and nice to me.
I was grateful to have the job.
I remember him saying, and I'm quoting, a little anti-Semitism is good for the Jews.
It reminds them of who they are.
And I just didn't grow up in a world where anybody endorsed that kind of thing.
I was like, well, I'll never forget that as long as I live.
A little anti-Semitism is good for the Jews.
It reminds me of who they are.
And I remember thinking, hey, I just don't think that's actually true.
It's not good for the Jews or anyone else.
But he really believed that.
And clearly, you see it with, I saw it with Al Sharpton.
He was constantly telling audiences how much they were hated.
Why was he doing that?
Because it increased his power.
And I really believe that that is what's going on right now.
If you scare the crap out of people, and they really have, there are literally Nazis, not people who disagree with what's going on in Gaza or think like the West Bank should have its own government or like we shouldn't go to war with the RA.
You know, it's kind of where I am.
But people who are literally genocidal in their intent.
You know, people will follow you if you say that.
I mean, that's true demagoguery.
And I think it's like the craziest thing I've ever seen, ever.
Well, I will say one of the things that this is doing to me as I'm trying to review how we ended up here, a place I would not have imagined we could end up.
Oh, I know.
Is that I don't feel like the Judaism that is being represented in the world is familiar.
I know that it exists, but it's not what I grew up with.
I grew up in a secular Jewish home in which the values were decidedly Jewish and they were explicit.
And what we did was think through difficult issues very carefully.
And I will tell you, the Holocaust played a big role in my upbringing.
I'm sure.
Maybe you, I did not, at the point that I became cognizant, understand how recent it was.
I now, of course, do because I've lived for 57 years.
But the idea that this is something that can happen, yes, it can happen here.
And you need to understand what happened.
And you need to understand who lived.
The people who told themselves, it's bad.
It will pass.
They're resettling us to the East, whatever.
Those people died.
The people who saw it early didn't.
and people who understood it didn't so in any case my point is yes can i say as a as an episcopalian and this is not a compliment to the episcopal church but it not so different from reform judaism Reformed Judaism was actually kind of modeled on the Episcopal Churches.
You may or may not know, but it was.
Yeah, Temple Bethel is kind of like an Episcopal Church, sort of, or started that way.
German Jews, rationalists, you know, let's explain this.
Let's think through all the hard problems, you know, de-emphasis on the miraculous, emphasis on the rational, very similar.
The one lesson that I got from hearing about the Holocaust constantly growing up in a very Jewish school was exactly what you said right then, is that don't lie to yourself.
I'm not Jewish, so I wasn't thinking about it in those terms, but like the lesson is universally applicable.
Like if you see the leaves changing, it's probably fall.
Like don't tell yourself it's not.
And Hannah Arendt, who I was, you know, always loved Hannah Arendt, and I think Hannah Rent was like really a kind of a genius and a non-conventional thinker.
But that was kind of the lesson that I took from her books, not just Eichmann in Jerusalem, but she wrote a lot of magazine pieces which I read.
And she kept saying that, like, just don't lie to yourself.
And I have taken that my whole life.
And maybe to the extreme, like I'm probably too jumpy about certain things, but like look at the trend lines.
And I would say they are it.
We should be panicked, not just for Jews, though for Jews, but for all of us, because tribalism kills everybody in the end.
And we should be panicked about its rise.
Panicked.
Oh, absolutely.
We are looking at a return to an evolutionary mode of being.
And to give it its due, I will just say that the way history worked until five minutes ago, until the invention of the modern West, was that populations displace each other or they get displaced.
That's the game.
And unfortunately, I now see, first of all, I see myself being spoken for as a Jew.
I find Benjamin Netanyahu speaking for me.
And I don't know what I am supposed to resign from so that he no longer has that right.
I don't know where it comes from.
What's more, I want to know where the tradition that I grew up with, which I will defend, went.
I feel like, you know, I've been sort of looking into it.
I'm not, you know, deeply embedded in Judaism.
I have a good friend, an increasingly good friend who is a scholar of Jewish mysticism.
I learn a lot from him about these various things.
I also increasingly realize that my tradition emerges from Maimonides, who, you know, I barely knew who Maimonides was, but he was a 12th century philosopher, Jewish philosopher, and medical doctor in Spain.
And he had this hard-headed, very rigorous Jewish approach to thinking, and he was actually well respected outside of Judaism because he was so insightful.
And in any case, my point is, we are seeing a very, in my opinion, foolish version of this tradition and a very dangerous one because it sort of hybridizes these, I think most of the, and I don't like the term Zionism because it morphs on you, right?
Sometimes Zionism just means that you believe that the state of Israel should exist, in which case, okay, I'll sign up for that.
Sometimes it means that you want to see it expanded in some way.
And it's like, hey, hold on, wait a minute.
We've got a lot riding on not just overwhelming people because they come from a different branch of the tree.
So, no, I'm not signed up for that.
But my sense is we, here's what.
That's exactly, I'm just laughing at, I wish I could put it as crisply as you just did, that those are exactly my views.
It's crazy.
And so I think this is the thing that I haven't heard anybody else say it.
Maybe others have.
But the thing that is so confusing about what's going on in the present, what's now begun in Iran, is if I just look at it like an anthropologist, that's a holy war.
It's a holy war, but it's being led by secular Jews.
Forcing Us to Let Go00:04:02
Exactly.
And it is that secularness that cloaks it, that makes it look like something it isn't.
And I'm not saying, look, I am no fan of the Iranian theocracy, right?
I couldn't be more frightened by that structure for the same reason I don't want to see a holy war initiated by Israel.
Frankly, holy war has no place in a world where we should be moving towards the values of the modern West.
Because it's hard to resolve them.
Very hard.
Well, I mean, it gets resolved by one population displacing another period the end.
And the point is, you know, if you want to talk about the Holocaust, that's what it was, right?
It was a population taking advantage of the fact that there was another population that couldn't defend itself, that had some wealth.
And the point is you can create growth by exterminating those people and taking their stuff, right?
That's what it is.
And that's a go-to strategy.
So to the extent that anybody on earth is advocating for, hey, let's paint those people as demons, and then we'll exterminate them and take their stuff, right?
That is not a way the world can go on.
Now, it did go on that way, but it did not go on that way in the nuclear era.
We can't play that game anymore.
It has to end.
And I'm going to, I don't think that this discussion is going to be a win for me in the world.
I think I'm going to pay dearly for having had it.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I just live on another planet.
This seems like the most reasonable, moderate American conversation you could ever have.
That's the problem with it.
Yeah, I guess I don't understand the country as well as I thought I did.
Well, no, I think you and I understand a version of the country that works to an extent.
Again, it's a prototype.
It doesn't work brilliantly, but it works.
And we understand the aspiration of what it's supposed to do if it really works, right?
And of course, that's hard to let go of once you've seen it.
And we are being forced to let go of it.
And, you know, I will say I've been accused in very close quarters of having a martyr complex.
I do not.
My life is personally so good, I am not eager to leave it one instant sooner than I have to.
However, I'm also aware that what it is to be a man is to face the fact that there are hills worth dying for.
And I don't want to, but the point is we have to defend the hill that is the modern West, and we have to defend it from this impulse to view the world through a lens of what lineage do you come from and what are we entitled to and deeds to land that go back millennia or whatever it is.
That's not the way this can work if we are to continue as a species.
So I don't know how we can turn down the temperature and get people who have already chosen a team to rethink whether that was a reasonable thing to do, but they are signing us up for an unthinkable conflagration.
And, you know, to have Benjamin Netanyahu in a position to steer the United States, and I think that is what has happened.
You can tell that by what Marco Rubio has said.
And if we take the mild version, you know, where he says it was the timing that was forced by Israel, okay, that's still unacceptable.
If we take the more aggressive interpretation and the fact is we were forced into this because Israel wanted it, that is completely unacceptable.
And we cannot survive this way.
And I don't know how to say this delicately, but your sense that anti-Semitism is being amped up and it seems essentially deliberate.
Becoming What They Call You00:14:23
And you've heard, as you said, from Bill Kristol, the idea that must circulate somewhere that a bit of anti-Semitism is good because it reminds Jews of who they are.
We don't need that reminder.
We can be very academic.
We can understand these things based on patterns of history, and we do.
So we don't need this amped up.
But the question...
Can I just say, though, I understand I think it's poison.
I think Bill Kristol himself is poison.
I have a lot of thoughts about Bill Kristol, who I know intimately.
However, it's not strictly speaking false.
If you look at the coherent populations, like if your goal is to keep a genetic mix intact, if your goal is to keep religion intact, and you look around the world, like what groups have pulled that off, Jews, obviously top of the list, the Armenians.
The Armenians are really, I mean, in California, you grew up there when we were kids.
The Armenian, I mean, people didn't think.
Jews did not think, at least in the world I lived in.
They didn't think of, we're the Jews and everybody else.
It was like they were just kind of like everybody else, at least in the world I lived in, they were.
But the Armenians were definitely like distinct.
Like Armenians marry Armenians.
They go to Armenian church.
Why is that?
Because they got genocided by the Ottoman Turks.
And they were literally, they bombed the Turkish consulate in Los Angeles when I was a kid.
I'll never forget it.
Armenians did.
Because they were still so mad about this thing that happened at the tail end of the First World War, 70 years before, whatever it was.
And so it had the effect their suffering and their insistence on telling their children about that suffering had the effect, probably made their kids jumpy and paranoid, probably.
That's the downside, but it did have the effect of keeping them coherent as a group.
Just a fact.
So like it's not, like as an evolutionary strategy, it's not crazy.
Oh, I'm not saying that it is not logically true that a bit of anti-Semitism will cause that.
On the other hand, I think it very quickly gets to where we are.
Right, exactly.
No, you're right.
You see it as a logical filter for things, you know, a litmus test for the quality of someone's character.
And, you know, again, to go back to my own upbringing, the stories of various genocides, especially the Nazi genocide, was such an important feature of, I mean, it's at the core of my being, right?
And I will just say we are living in such an incoherent era that, you know, I watch Daryl Cooper being slandered much as you are.
And then I listen to his piece on Baba Yar.
And I think, what planet am I living on?
There's no way that somebody who harbors a deep bigotry against Jews could have made that piece.
And I would ask people to go listen to it.
No one will.
No one slandering him will.
Oh, no one slandering him will.
But I guess I'm worried about a different pattern.
Something that you've experienced and I've experienced is that there is a way people are driven away from hearing us.
I also agree that you and I are having a reasonable conversation.
And whether you're right or wrong, or I'm right or wrong, or we together are right or wrong, it would be valuable for people to hear this conversation.
At least it's an insight into how thinking people are parsing this moment and coming up with a different conclusion than you have.
It's worth it for that.
But they won't.
And the reason that they won't is that there's a particular strategy.
The strategy involves saying something along the lines of, I'll use the version that I get.
It's something like, if you don't understand that Brett is an intellectual lightweight who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, I can't help you.
Now, the effect of that, I call it gaslighting by ricochet.
And the idea is, if you actually listen to what I say, that's not the impression you're going to come up with.
You can disagree with me.
You may think I'm being stupid about something, but you're probably not going to come away with the idea that I'm just a pure faker or that I'm motivated by, you know, greed or whatever.
It's not consistent.
However, the person who doesn't know me, who thinks, well, that's interesting, I wonder, maybe I'll just take a listen.
And they go to listen to me and they find that actually sounds like a reasonable person.
Then they start to think, oh, wait, am I a sucker?
If I don't see the thing that I've been told is so obvious, I can't be helped if I don't see it.
And the point is, that will cause them not to want to listen because they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
If they hear what I have to say and it sounds reasonable, then they are opening themselves up to that ricochet landing on them.
So the point is, you at the moment, as I understand it, are resonating with young men, but you're losing our generation.
Our generation has accepted a slander about you without sitting down and listening to your monologues, right?
If they did sit down and listen to your monologues, They would have quite a moment because then they would have to say, well, wait a second.
This actually sounds like a reasoned, moderate, well-intentioned analysis of the moment.
Disagree with you or not.
It doesn't sound like zealotry or bigotry or anything like that.
So it is these strategies that are shaping our world.
The people who need to hear us aren't going to hear us because there's a booby trap that prevents them from getting there.
And, you know, I know my instinct is always to go listen to the people that I'm not supposed to get along with.
You've lived this yourself multiple times.
Here's the threat, though, that I think that is not often enough acknowledged, which is that you become what they call you.
I really feel that that's part of.
So if you accept that, you know, hatred, tribal hatred destroys societies, but it does empower some people.
Right.
So the incentive is just set up to make certain people demagogues want to increase hatred.
I think there's a spiritual principle there too.
I won't bore you with it, but I think evil feeds on hatred.
That's my view.
But whatever the motive, it's clearly baked in that they want people to hate.
And I think it works.
I think if you call someone something enough and you repeat it like an incantation, like a spell, no, you were getting very sleepy, Brett.
You were getting very sleepy.
No, you were an anti-Semite.
You're an anti-Semite.
And you're like, your first thought is, well, I'm not an anti-Semite.
Like, how, that's outrageous.
What a slander.
I have all these Jewish friends.
You know, it's like everyone goes through this, all literal people.
They'll be like, you hate black people.
Be like, actually, I like black people.
I've always kind of like black people.
But after a while, you're like, why are all the blacks calling me a racist?
It's outrageous.
And by the way, you don't see a lot of blacks standing up and like defending me.
I don't think I like the blacks anymore.
And you can actually become what they call you.
And that is a true risk, I think.
And luckily, it's baked into my religion.
You're not allowed to do that.
When Christians ask for forgiveness, they have to follow it with forgiveness of others.
So you are not allowed to hold hatred against people, period, or you won't be forgiven by God.
That is Christian doctrine.
So it can be, if you stick with that, it's self-correcting.
Like you're saved from hatred.
You're saved from becoming a Nazi.
But people who aren't disciplined about it, if you call them Nazis long enough, guess what happens?
They don't become less Nazi.
They become more Nazi.
Yeah, you actually, you lower the cost.
Yes, they become aware of that.
You grow into the slur.
Yeah.
And that's like, I sincerely believe as a religious person, that's soul imperiling.
Like, actually, you could go to hell for that, but it's certainly disabling in this life.
Like, if you start to think that way.
So I don't know.
I've said this a bunch of times.
I don't think anyone hears anything I say.
But I just want to say it again.
If you're being called names, the number one job you have, even before you defend yourself, is to make certain you don't become what they're calling you.
That's extremely wise.
I think it also leads to another principle I've been trying to formulate.
We have all of these instances in recent history of groups claiming victim status in order to gain power.
And I'm not arguing that there is no victim status worth designating in any of these cases.
But the point is it becomes an excuse for an offensive action.
Right.
When that happens, I am always on the lookout for people who could take advantage of this new status and don't, who challenge it.
So, for example, during the woke revolution, there were numerous prominent intellectual blacks who stood up against it.
And I stood shoulder to shoulder with them.
In fact, I did an episode of Dark Horse called the Intellectual Black Roundtable, where I gathered, I think it was five of them, and we talked.
And I just wanted the world to understand: A, this is not a universal belief amongst blacks.
B, there's an alternative.
C, the bench of black intellectuals is quite deep.
And you need to know all these things in order to know what's going on in the street when people are claiming white supremacy is everywhere, it accounts for everything, and the only solution is to topple the system and transfer all the wealth or whatever it was.
So I'm always on the lookout for the people who are in the category that could take advantage of these false portrayals and don't.
It's also the case when it comes to trans activism.
We have all of these people who have been using this idea of gender transition as a weapon.
And we have a small number of people who have gender dysphoria, have transitioned in whatever way, and have stood up against it.
And we should be standing shoulder to shoulder with that.
I totally agree.
So my point is I also feel an obligation as a Jew to stand up for the other set of values that I think are better and that really characterized Judaism, at least in America, much more so than today when we were growing up, right?
That careful tradition, the one that holds the values very deeply, would not create false portrayals in order to advance a political agenda, much less a military.
It was the world's, I'm very familiar with Reform Judaism is what I grew up around.
And I'm very familiar with it, certainly with the tone of it.
And it was always like, oh, it was like the least aggressive.
It was just very much in tone and spirit, like the church that I grew up in.
You like ask a question and be like, well, it's hard.
You know, it would always be like, it's hard.
Well, that's.
And you could make fun of that.
And I've certainly made fun of it a lot with my own church.
But you're not going to get a lot of extremists coming out of that.
Like, period.
It acknowledged the complexity of every human decision and of the human condition.
And I think there's something nice about that.
Well, this is uncomfortable.
I don't think I'm talking about Reform Judaism, though I think the thing I'm talking about would have been found in many.
Did you grow up going to temple?
No.
Oh, wow.
Well, I will tell you, I felt a little left out by that.
My family was secular, atheist, and, you know, decidedly scientific.
You were not bar mitzvah?
No, I wasn't.
Oh, wow.
But I wanted to be.
And what happened, I mean, this will tell you a lot about me.
What happened was I asked to go to Hebrew school for the purpose of being bar mitzvah.
I thought it seemed like a thing I should do, even though I wasn't a believer.
A lot of Jews aren't believers.
That's one of the strange things about Judaism.
It's not really about belief in that sense, or it's not about faith.
It can be.
For many, it is, but for many, it's not.
And you remain Jewish.
You don't lose your Jewishness just because you're secular.
So I asked, and my parents saw no reason not to, and signed me up, and I went.
And I remember asking questions about things that didn't add up in the portrayal that we were being given.
And I expected it to be like the family dinner table.
And the family dinner table, you could ask any question and it was taken seriously and that was not the response that I got.
I got a response that was basically designed to sort of, I mean, I now know what the response is because I've seen bad professors do it, right?
You know, the professor who doesn't really know their subject doesn't want to be asked questions that reveal that.
Parents are the same way.
Well, it's funny.
My house wasn't like this.
No, neither was mine.
My father would answer any question and never judged you for asking it.
Yeah, my family was like that, and my grandfather particularly so.
My grandfather was very good with kids.
My Grandfather Inspecting Factories00:03:16
He took them very seriously.
He was tremendously fun.
It wasn't like he was a super serious guy.
He was very fun, very adventurous, take you out into the climb mountains and stuff with him.
But anyway, you could ask him any question about anything, and he would answer it as well as he could.
And then you'd ask the next question.
And when you finally got to the place where he couldn't answer the question, he'd say, I don't know.
And here's what we might do to figure out the answer.
Anyway, it was like having the world's best personal tutor or mentor or something like that.
What a blessing.
What did he do for a living?
Well, he was kind of a, I mean, I hate to say it, but he was either a failure in the sense of doing things for a living.
He was too principled.
He got blacklisted for his political beliefs.
He was a chemist, went to college, but didn't finish it.
Got hired away, I think, by RCA records to develop, you know, the first vinyl to replace the lacquer records that had existed.
So anyway, you know, he worked in industry and eventually he got a job in pollution control.
He was an inspector inspecting factories.
He was a very committed environmentalist.
And so he was inspecting factories for pollution and things like that.
And then Proposition 13 happened and he got fired.
So he wasn't successful in the sense of a career.
However, I do think the real meaning, his name was Harry.
He's a great guy.
The real meaning of Harry is that he was very wise about many things.
He had seen a lot and he understood a lot and he was wicked smart.
And that he passed this on to any young person who would listen, especially me and Eric.
But my friends all remember him too, right?
I barely remember my friends' grandparents.
I met a bunch of them, but they were old and it was hard to relate to them and all of that.
But my grandfather made an impression on every friend of mine he ever met.
And they asked about him right up until his death.
How's Harry doing?
How old were you when he passed?
It was 2000.
Oh, he lived a long time.
Yeah, he did.
He made it to 94.
Wow.
Yeah.
But anyway, I've forgotten exactly why we were talking about Harry.
Oh, it was just a question of what the culture was in my house.
It was secular.
It was intellectually committed and rigorous.
And it, you know, it wasn't trying to be mild, right?
It was trying to do the right thing based on what the patterns of the world and the evidence suggested the right thing was.
And I don't see that in the culture at the moment.
And I don't understand how, you know, Netanyahuism or whatever it is has overwhelmed it.
Right.
Washington's Major Legislative Blow00:14:53
At the very least, look, you can do what you want.
That's, you know, our personal freedom is effectively sacred in the West as it should be.
But I feel entitled to continue that tradition and not be suspected of a moral defect for doing so.
Well, I couldn't agree more, of course.
In fact, it's the thing I feel most strongly.
And I think my right to express my views, my conscience, to defend myself.
I mean, I think the Bill of Rights, these are natural rights bestowed by God.
That's my opinion.
It's my deepest belief.
So I'm totally committed to everything you just said.
And I grew up weirdly in a non-Jewish household, but also secular household with exactly the same vibe.
My father was a wonderful man and very rigorous intellectually and also extremely open-minded, extremely.
It was never more like, I can't believe you think that.
Never.
And that was a massive advantage for me.
I do think that world is dying because I think the systems are played out and the systems that I love and support.
Liberal democracy.
I think it's not growing anywhere in the world.
And here's one measure of it.
There's no country that I'm aware of in which the legislative body is getting stronger.
They're all becoming weaker.
The legislative body, of course, is the most democratic of all bodies.
It is the voice of the people.
It's the people's house.
But that's true in every country with a system like ours or parliamentary system.
And in every country that I'm aware of, those systems are becoming superfluous.
They're becoming the Roman Senate.
And that is a measure of a bunch of different things.
Maybe it's the end of a life cycle.
Maybe it's an expression of people's frustration with the awkwardness of the democratic system.
It doesn't work very efficiently.
Whatever it is, it's a global trend where power is vesting in the executive, where people are less free to say what they think.
This is throughout the West.
It may have to do maybe most obviously with the rise of China.
The most successful country in the world is China.
And so why wouldn't the rest of the world ape its system?
I don't think that's crazy.
It's non-optimal.
It's the opposite of what I want, but I'm not in charge of history.
And that I think is happening.
There's no question about it.
When Rome rose, when Carthage rose, when Persia rose, Britain rose, when any global empire ascended, other regions, other cultures aped their system.
You imitate the successful.
And I think that we're seeing that.
And I think we're living downstream of that.
We think that we are the headquarters of the world from which all trends emanate, but actually we're not.
China is.
And I think it's been misread in the United States as some secret collusion between American business interests and the CCP, which is, of course, totally real.
They have been secretly colluding for sure, but it's much bigger than that.
It's not just that Apple makes its iPhones in the East.
It's that their system appears to be more successful than ours.
Therefore, our social system, our political system will, to some great extent, mirror theirs.
I don't think that I think that's just explicable.
Again, I'm going to spend the rest of my life fighting that, not because I hate the Chinese.
I don't hate the Chinese, by the way, at all.
But I'm not Chinese.
I'm American.
And I've been here my whole life and I'm not leaving.
And I plan to defend our system, even if it's dying.
But it is dying.
That's the point I'm making.
It is dying.
And so we shouldn't be surprised when many more people in Great Britain are arrested for Facebook posts than were arrested in Russia last year three times.
How can that be?
The country that wrote the Magna Carta, how can they be arresting people for their opinions?
Well, they're doing it more enthusiastically than this totalitarian hellhole under Vladimir Putin because the West, its systems are dying.
Well, I think there's another element to it.
And I don't think it's wholly incompatible with the model you just painted.
But I think I have a more cynical view of what's happening and that effectively we are witnessing an evolutionary dynamic where the founders built a system that had dynamism built into it that is necessary to protect that system from what they couldn't foresee, right?
They built a system that could modify itself so that it could change with the times.
But it's not dynamic enough.
What we need is an immune system that is capable of fending off the evolution of corrupting forces.
And the problem is we have an industrial strength constitution that protects rights which are fundamental to defending our individual liberty.
That is absolutely galling to people who wish to hoard power.
Oh, of course.
Of course it would be.
It was designed to be.
It's a middle finger in the face of tyrants.
Absolutely.
So the point is over time, tyranny is evolving.
And it's like a parasite that is breaking through the defenses of the republic.
Because at the end of the day, there are lots of people who would love to have asymmetric power over the rest of us.
Why wouldn't they?
Of course.
They're not deeply moral people.
Some of them have no moral sense whatsoever.
And in light of that, you can imagine looking at the American system and saying, you know, that First Amendment is a real problem, right?
They can talk about anything.
Like, who was crazy enough to give them that right?
And figuring out how you would target it.
What would the preconditions need to be in order for the public to agree to demand censorship of themselves or something like that?
Well, we've now seen multiple iterations of this, right?
Whether, you know, it's the war on terror or it's COVID or whatever.
You can get the population scared enough and wound up enough that they will actually sign up for being tyrannized.
And the problem is that the Constitution is good enough that the breakdown is slow, right?
They're chipping away at it.
The Patriot Act was a major blow.
The NDAA of 2012 was a major blow.
COVID was an incredibly major blow.
But, you know, it's slow going.
It's a multi-generation project.
But, you know, the tools are getting better.
The ability, you know, if you're itching to censor the population and you can leverage AI to do some job that the public believes needs to be done for the good of us all, well, it's pretty much game over.
If you can replace the currency with a central bank digital currency that can be turned off if you say things that displease the regime, it's game over.
So and your point about, you know, the legislative branch being the most democratic, of course it is.
It's also the biggest problem for that reason.
And if you want to control the system, you can do exactly what was done here, which was that the presidency, which was designed to be checked by the judiciary and the legislative branch, had extra powers tacked onto it rather rapidly in recent decades because the people who had a stranglehold on gaining access to that office didn't see any reason not to do it,
which is why I think they freaked out at the possibility of Trump being elected is because they'd loaded the powers of an emperor into this office and then suddenly somebody showed up who was possible to get there.
So real.
Yeah.
So real.
This office is too powerful for you.
It certainly can't be in the hands of somebody we don't have control over.
So that, I mean, that raises such an interesting question about 2028.
This has occurred to me.
And the office is even more powerful, much more powerful.
Venezuela, whatever that was, taking out Maduro operation proves it.
That was done without congressional notification, much less authorization.
And it was unprecedented for many reasons.
Whether you like it or don't like it, nothing like that has ever happened before.
And it was a decision made by one man.
And so that means the executive of the United States, the presidency, is more powerful than it's ever been.
It's also better funded than it's ever been.
And it has more technological power by far than it's ever had to control the population.
So at that point, if you're the permanent state, and you've made clearly some accommodation with the current president, obviously.
But the next guy, can you really pass it on to someone you can't control at this point?
I don't think you can.
They can't afford it.
Truly at this point.
Or the president of the United States at this stage, and things change, but right now can do basically whatever he wants for whatever reason without explaining himself.
And we know that because it's happened.
So I don't know.
It raises the stakes for the next election, whether or not you believe elections are real.
It raises them.
And I think they're maybe sort of real.
I don't really know the answer.
But they're probably more real than you suspect and less real than you hope.
Well said.
But however the next guy is chosen, like it can't be someone.
It just absolutely can't be someone.
You can't hand a toddler a gun.
It can't be someone who directly opposes the permanent government, the true stakeholders.
Can it?
Can it exist at multiple levels?
Let's put it this way.
What you need is a George Washington-like figure, somebody who will willingly limit his own power because it's the right thing to do.
And I think not enough of the population understands that that's what George Washington was, but George Washington could have been king.
It was the natural thing in the mind of the public with him having won the Revolutionary War, you know, a debonaire gentleman.
He was the king.
He could have been.
But he decided he didn't want that job, right?
So we need somebody with that strength of character.
And the problem is we have a system that for exactly the reasons you've just outlined will stop at nothing to prevent such a person from attaining the office because it will see that as an existential threat.
And so we can't get there, but we have to get there.
And, you know, sometimes that's the nature of history.
I do at this moment.
Oh, go ahead.
I think that's well put.
We can't get there, but we have to get there.
And I think we have to get there because the current arrangement can't continue.
You'll either have because the spread between what the people who own the government want, the voters want, the citizens want, and what the government actually does is just too wide.
It's just too wide.
It's too obvious that it's too wide.
And they're not getting what they pay for.
They're not getting what they're entitled to.
They're being ignored and humiliated.
Can I ask you something just to clarify that?
I think what you're saying is that the degree to which what the government does is not in the interests of the public and not intended to be.
Yeah, not intended to be.
We get an excuse.
You know, there's always a rationalization for why this policy is good for Americans, but let's face facts.
The leak in our system that allows forces to purchase policy that is not in the interest of the public is too great.
It's totalizing.
And, you know, anything that's in the interests of the outside special interests and the public would get done anyway.
You don't need to pay for that.
If it's in the interests of the public and the interests of the special interests, then nobody opposes it.
So what we get is a Congress that is effectively doing only that which will be paid for, which is inherently against the interests of the public.
That's why it's paid for.
Exactly.
That is exactly right.
And it's not, by the way, if you were to go through as someone who spent his whole life in Washington, I can tell you, if you're going to go through all the kind of perfidious influences on the government, you know, like what are those special interests?
What are they paying for?
How bad are the outcomes for average Americans?
It's a long list.
You know, and you know what the list is.
It's basically everyone who's paying to lobby Washington.
Israel's near the top.
Is it the top?
I don't know.
Kind of matter at pharma that I am at Israel, but that's just me.
But there are a lot.
There's a rivalry, right?
The difference in what makes the behavior of people like Mark Levin almost suicidal is that rather than just doing it, got to get out there and talk about it and rub everyone's noses in it.
And so the current war, which was led by Israel and our government, I know this for a fact, our government would not have done this except for pressure from Netanyahu.
Because everyone said that out loud, Netanyahu said it out loud to a lot of different people.
He's been caught saying it.
Our Secretary of State said it, whatever they're revising now.
He said it.
I watched it.
And the advocates are saying it.
It's like all of the frustration that Americans feel over the fact that their government doesn't serve them is now focused on one among a number of lobbies.
Why would you want that?
Basically, there's this deep reservoir of frustration.
Like, what the hell are they doing?
I'm not benefiting.
Why are the airports so crappy?
Why are the roads bad?
Why can't my kids get educated at public school?
Like all these different things, most of which aren't actually connected to Israel.
All of a sudden, this is the outlet for all of that frustration.
Are you kidding?
Are you on drugs?
What are you doing?
Why would you do this?
Why would you push the United States into something that most people don't want, which happens all the time?
Like the other day, the administration comes out and they're like, no, you can continue to spray poison over America.
The people who pushed for that didn't immediately go on Twitter and be like, yeah, America, you're getting more poison.
Frustration with Complex Systems00:02:44
They don't want to be known.
You know, whatever chemical lobby pushed for that, it's shameful, but they didn't brag about it.
Bragging about it is not a good idea for you or anyone else.
Like, again, I'm sorry, I'm going back to the same point, but it's like that's very self-destructive behavior, I think.
Well, I must tell you, what I do, my value in the world Comes from the same place.
I'm a biologist.
I think about complex systems.
And the thing about complex systems is they defy the normal toolkit.
They defy the toolkit that works for complicated systems.
And most of the people that we have trying to steer us in one way or another don't understand the distinction.
And they are constantly harming us because whatever they think is going to happen when they intervene in a complex system is guaranteed not to happen.
So what I try to do, and if you walk into a tropical forest, first thing you have to know is that we don't know how it works.
We just don't.
It actually immediately violates the first principle of ecology, which is that two species can't inhabit the same niche indefinitely.
It's not supposed to happen.
And yet you have 300 species of trees doing almost the identical thing without an explanation.
So you walk into the tropical forest.
You have to know, we don't know how this works.
Can I just interrupt you and say, whenever I hear an expert in a topic begin the explanation with, we don't really understand this, I trust you.
Well, everything you say after you say that, I listen to you carefully.
Everything you say, I take seriously and think about later.
That admission at the outset is the price of admission for me to trust you.
Well, I appreciate it.
Thank you.
And I think it's a good proxy.
And I will say that principle you just outlined to the 10th power when you're dealing with complex systems.
Oh, yes.
Complex systems are special and you'll harm yourself every time.
And this is, you know, all of modern medicine is us making this mistake.
Totally.
Right.
You're intervening in a human body, which is a layered system of complex systems, and you're going to have unintended consequences.
Unless you can tell me why people sleep, I'm not going to believe you when you say you understand the human body completely.
Yeah.
Well, we're starting to get a handle on that.
We know where they sleep.
I'm just saying, like, the beginning of, I'm trying not to swear this.
You're able to say it.
My father always said this.
He goes, the beginning of wisdom is knowing what an asshole you are.
He would always say that.
And I just, I think that's the wisest thing I've ever heard.
Just remember, I know nothing.
My field of vision is severely limited.
My time horizon is short.
I'm a human being.
I can't even understand my wife half the time.
Risks of the Trump Presidency00:15:25
Like, I don't understand this.
I'm doing my best.
If you start there, if you start with the epistemic humility, you've got a shot.
You do.
So, all right.
So, what I do is I look at a system that I know I don't know anything about, and I entertain a model.
And I say, does this model explain anything about this that I don't already know?
And if something explains things I don't know, I think, okay, that model might have some truth to it.
And then I see if there are predictions that might give me more confidence in it.
So, anyway, what I'm telling you is that there is a skill to approaching a system where you know you don't have, you know, a thousandth as much information as you'd like, and you know it doesn't work by rules that you can look up somewhere and trying to figure out what it is and why it works that way.
And you alluded to the posiwood principle: the purpose of a system is what it does, right?
That's a cybernetic principle.
It actually comes from complicated systems, not complex ones.
But nonetheless, these kinds of tools are very useful if you're trying to put together an explanation for historical events where all you have are the public narratives, which are mostly lies or rationalizations or whatever they are.
Incomplete at best.
Yeah, I mean, okay, they're lies incomplete, and there's a lot of false signal there.
So, here's the unsettling conclusion that's hard to escape with our current reckless adventure in Iran.
This was not in Trump's interest.
True.
This is actually existential for his presidency and fairly directly.
Not only might he lose the House, which he's likely to anyway, and the Senate, which would, of course, hobble him in his ability to do anything.
But if he loses the House and Senate, he will likely be impeached and convicted, which means there won't even be a remainder of this presidency.
I would expect that risk to loom prominently in his thinking and to have prevented him from doing this.
This is felt as a betrayal to many of us, including me, who supported him in part on the basis that he promised no new wars.
And this one was, of course, principal on the list of wars that those of us who were worried about it were fearing because it has, of course, been on the neocon agenda since 9-11 and presumably before.
So, okay, I have a mystery on my hands.
Why would a president who already had an uphill battle in the midterms, why would he engage in an action that seems very likely to end his presidency?
That's a paradox.
Similarly, why is the question, isn't it?
It's a good one.
Why would we agree to participate in something that has a strong possibility of ending in a military quagmire of a kind that we now have many familiar examples, a kind that traumatizes and angers the public and degrades our ability to have a functional society because it burns through resources like crazy?
Why would we do that?
And I don't know that the conclusion that I'm considering is true or could be true.
It seems impossible.
But I keep finding myself returned to this as the best explanation for these events simply because I haven't heard one that explains the evidence better.
This feels like someone wished to burn down the Trump presidency and hobble the United States.
And the problem is that that's hard to dispel because the first part of it, the burning down of the Trump presidency, feels like a natural response to whatever it was that threw everything at preventing Trump from being elected and failed.
In other words, you had, I don't know how many of the phenomena were the same entity, but there was every slander thrown at him.
There was massive lawfare.
He faced two assassination attempts that, as far as I can tell, were not seriously even investigated.
And he won in a convincing way.
The people who are pushing this war, the neocons, switched sides.
They actually became Democrats, which I didn't see that coming.
That did not seem possible.
And yet there they were.
So the question is, if you were in those meetings, whatever they sound like, and they were talking about the problem of Trump and I know what we'll do.
We'll do this.
We'll do that.
Nothing's working.
I bet there are a lot of contingency plans, right?
What do we do if the worst happens and he gets elected?
Well, A, the president, and I'm not, you know, I've never met the man.
But given what Marco Rubio said, given what I see on my feed, I feel like this president probably wouldn't have done this if he had had a real choice.
I think maybe that's wishful thinking.
I will tell you, given that the Democrats didn't run a candidate who was not a middle finger to the American public and the Constitution, I would vote for him again in the same circumstance.
But I definitely voted no new wars and specifically Iran.
That was high on my list of priorities.
And so I do feel like, well, wait a minute.
Did I just find out that my vote doesn't matter?
Because it doesn't matter who's in office because we're going to war with Iran anyway.
So the long-winded question that I'm trying to ask is: is there any chance that the purpose of this system is what it's just done?
And that really the idea is Trump beat them every step of the game to this point, but they weren't going to allow him to win in the end.
And burning down his presidency was a feature, not a bug.
Of course.
Of course.
Yeah.
You got it.
You got everything you said is true.
I wish it wasn't.
But it is.
Everything you said is true.
And he didn't want to do it.
Obvious to me.
And he didn't feel he had a choice.
And there are a lot of ways to read that.
I mean, he basically said not giving away any.
I talked to him a lot about this before it happened and not giving away anything that he didn't say in public.
It was obvious.
You know, well, I hope we can reach accommodation.
And there's, you know, there's so much lying about everything.
And you're hearing people say, well, the diplomacy was always fake in order to, you know, buy time and all that stuff.
And maybe there were elements of diplomacy that were fake.
I don't know the answer.
I hope that they weren't.
But big picture from the president's perspective, from what I can tell, just from his public statements, if they could have just hit Iran without any of this stuff, without any, they just surprise attack.
I mean, they didn't go through all this stuff.
And he wanted a peaceful resolution.
You could blame some of that on the Iranians.
It's talk about a complicated society, 86-year-old leader, divisions of power that are hard for non-Persians to understand.
I mean, there's a lot about Iran that was confusing.
There was a lot of turmoil within the country.
A lot of that was inspired by CIA and Mossad.
Some of it was totally real.
Like, it wasn't a great regime.
It was not only repressive, but it was corrupt and inefficient.
And it was also suffering under sanctions for 45 years.
So there, you know, a lot of factors, but there was a lot of unrest in the country.
That's totally real.
The Iranians kind of couldn't put their best case forward.
They retreat.
You know, there's a lot that's their fault too.
This is my read of it, informed read of it.
But fundamentally, no, this was not his first choice at all.
And so the question becomes, well, then why did he make that choice?
And it's clear to me that the Secretary of State wanted to convey, Secretary of State's a little smarter than people think.
This is my read of it.
A lot of people remember Rubio from 2016 when Trump humiliated him on stage and he looked like the definition of a beta.
And he's not very smart.
He's smart.
That's real.
And he's subtle in his thinking.
And he's just a lot.
This is my read from knowing him.
I think Marco Ruby is a lot smarter than people think that he is and a good guy, too, by the way.
I'll also say, funny and fun to be around.
But I don't believe for a second that he said that accidentally.
It's just no chance.
It was high-stakes stuff.
This is like days after the war starts.
How did this war start?
And you just accidentally say we had no choice.
Israel dragged us into it.
It's not something a Secretary of State says accidentally.
Period.
And so I do think there was resentment.
I don't know on his part, but I think there was.
I know there was resentment.
The administration wanted the public to know.
There's no question in my mind.
There's no question in my mind.
And but what really happened and what really made it impossible not to go?
Clearly, it was impossible not to go.
That was the calculation.
Obviously, just by its effects, we can see that.
You think the president doesn't understand macro energy policy?
You think he doesn't know that there's a strait at the end of the Persian Gulf called Hormuz through which a lot of the world's energy flows and Iran controls it effectively?
And that if it goes bad, the midterms are a loss.
Well, yeah, that they can stop shipping with drones.
You think he didn't know that?
Trump is not on some level.
Trump is very smart.
And I'm not guessing at all.
Like he understands this kind of stuff.
And there are lots of ways in which Trump is silly or seems buffoonish or whatever.
But on like the high-level stuff, like competitions for power, who's smarter than that?
He's really smart.
So yes, he understood all of that.
He understood the risks.
Not all the risks.
I do think he was sold on the idea that we could kill the Ayatollah.
It's one of the dumbest things this country's ever done.
But I do think he probably believed that.
But like big picture, the risks, all those bases, vulnerable, are weapons shortage, totally real, well-known, talked about in public.
These are not classified facts here.
He got it and he did it anyway.
So I don't know the answer.
I'm not hiding anything.
I don't have special knowledge.
But I think that your question, like, well, why did we do it despite the obvious risks to us?
And the people encouraging it also are not stupid.
They must have understood this.
And there are a lot of different explanations, some bigger than others.
I would say at the immediate level, I mean, I know this to be true.
Israel is growing in power.
It has a highly ambitious leader who is tactically gifted, but above all, willing to roll the dice.
Like, Netya was a bold man, and boldness is a huge component of leadership.
It's just, it just is.
And he's a historic figure.
And I don't like him, of course.
But if you're him, or if you're Erdogan or Xi or Putin or anybody who's managed to tame a country as complex as all countries are and want to expand, you do not want to be told what to do.
Period.
And so getting the United States out of the Middle East is, of course, a long-term objective of Israel.
I don't fault them for it.
By the way, maybe we should get out of the Middle East.
I don't know.
You could argue it both ways, but that was definitely an objective.
And it's working.
It's working for a bunch of, I mean, I could bore you for hours on the subject, but it's working.
So, but why would you want to destroy the U.S. economy, impoverish the American people, cause dissent and strife, potentially civil war?
I mean, if this doesn't slow down, that's where we're going at some point.
I pray it doesn't, but clearly we're on that trajectory.
Why would you want that?
And now we're getting into really deep waters, and I'm not confident enough in my view to express it, but I do agree with you wholeheartedly that the purpose of a system is what it does.
And the system has done this.
And it wasn't hard to predict.
I'm a man of middling IQ.
I've never had my IQ taken, but it's not 180 at all.
And this was super obvious to me, super obvious.
Like it couldn't be more obvious.
And not only was it obvious, I said it many times, versions of this in public, and not one time did anyone ever come back with, well, actually, I don't think you're seeing this right.
This is what could happen.
Not one time.
It was always shut up Nazi.
And we've discussed at length why people would say shut up Nazi, like there's a benefit to them from saying that.
But also at some point, you'd think some person would be like, actually, there is a geostrategic rationale here that you don't see.
And because I am interested in the topic and travel a lot, you'd think someone would call me aside and be like, you don't get it.
This is going to restrain China and preserve dollar dominance.
And not one person, despite spending, I spent all day talking about this stuff.
Not one person said that to me.
So as far as I know, there was never a real plan to benefit the United States that I heard.
Now, making sure Iran didn't become a nuclear-armed power, I get it.
Everyone gets that.
That's why that was the talking point.
But the truth is this greatly enhances the chances Iran becomes a nuclear-armed power.
Just buys one from Pakistan.
Of course, they don't need a nuclear program to have nuclear weapons.
Right.
Buy one.
What world are you living in?
All right.
I want to ask you about a couple things before we wrap up.
Hit me with it.
One of them is closely related to what we were just talking about.
The question of whether or not somebody's intent here is actually to burn down the Trump presidency and maybe to hobble the U.S. or drive them out of the Middle East or both.
There's something very conspicuous to me about us, our coalition, now having twice violated the most obvious international norms with respect to negotiations for peace.
Destroying Negotiation Concepts00:16:48
And this is such a provocative move.
The idea that you would destroy the concept of negotiation in order to tie your hands in the future.
I can't think of another reason to do it.
Well, I have a State Department.
You've got Twitter.
You can just issue your decrees.
Right.
But the idea of attacking Anpurim, having led the Iranians into the belief that we were honestly interested in seeking peace, or the prior instance of attacking, literally attacking a negotiation delegation, I believe it was in Qatar.
These things are so diabolical because they effectively take options that we must have off the table.
Why would you agree to negotiate if you knew that the negotiation itself might be a ruse or worse, that it would be used to literally target you for death?
So those things also seem like moves designed to force our hand in a way that should be intolerable to every American.
Yes.
Don't take our right to negotiate for peace off the table ever.
I don't care who we're dealing with and how unlikely it is that that will ever be useful to us.
We need that option every time, and only a fool eliminates it.
Yeah, I've seen it up close.
I mean, there's so much to say.
I don't want to be boring.
I will say that the part of the difficulty for me in analyzing it is I know Steve Witkoff well.
And I love Steve Witkoff.
Like he's just a great guy.
And so he is, sorry, just a fact.
I know his son, Zach, who's an excellent guy and very smart.
And so I just don't want to believe that he had knowledge of this.
And in fact, I don't believe it.
They'll just say it.
I know Wyckoff.
I just don't see him doing that.
And I could be completely wrong.
And the evidence suggests I am wrong.
But at this stage, I don't believe it.
And I think it's also possible that Witkoff kind of played no conscious role in that.
I know he was very enthusiastic.
I've talked to him a lot about this, about his efforts at resolving these two conflicts in Russia, Ukraine, and with Iran, and very enthusiastic about reaching a negotiated settlement.
As his boss, the president, was very genuinely, I think, enthusiastic.
But along the way, these things happened.
And I think if we do find out that the United States knowingly created like Potemkin diplomacy in order to lull its adversaries into defenselessness, people should go to prison for that.
That's disgusting.
It hurts all Americans.
It's not a defense of the Ayatollah or Putin or whatever.
It's like, as you just said, that is stripping from us one of our prerogatives as a sovereign nation, which is to reach a negotiated settlement if we so choose.
I do think the Israeli perspective is very different.
I think Israel is very different from the country I visited.
Maybe you visited a few years ago.
You've never been there?
Never been.
I'd love to go, although I must tell you, I would be afraid to go at this point.
For sure.
For sure.
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.
I was just there.
Israel's changed a ton.
Countries change and we're sort of ossified and caught in our previous understandings of things.
That's true everywhere.
It's true in our country.
It's true internationally.
And Israel is very different.
And you described Benjamin Netanyahu, who was a secular leader.
Of course, that's true.
He grew up in like Philadelphia.
He's not like a religious extremist.
However, for a lot of reasons, partly because of massive demographic change in Israel, massive demographic change in a lot of directions, but public sentiment there is less secular than it used to be, much less secular.
And the politics or system, the parliamentary system is influenced by minority coalitions more than ours is.
And one of his key minority coalitions believes in religious war.
I don't know if he does, but he's been using the phrase Amalek, which is a reference to the Amalekites, who were a historic enemy of Israel.
They're the ones that pursued the Hebrews through the Red Sea as they escaped slavery in Egypt.
And so it's a very well-known group.
And God prescribes in the Old Testament their total slaughter, men, women, children, infants, and animals.
And so to use that, and that's a feature of the Old Testament, that's fine.
But to use that in a modern context in the middle of a war, to describe your opponent as Amalek in the middle of a war, and to do it repeatedly, not just in the heat of the moment after September 7th, which I saw him do that.
I was like, ooh, that's heavy.
But then, you know, people get upset.
You know, we said a lot of stuff after 9-11.
Yeah.
You mean October 7th, right?
Did I say September?
Sorry.
Yeah.
October 7th.
The attacks in southern Israel from Gaza.
Yeah, I was like, you know, they're mad.
I get it.
You know, we were that way too.
But when he kept saying it, and when he said it the other day, I was like, ooh, this is a smart guy.
He doesn't say things by accident.
Amalek?
That's a different vision of war from the one we in the West are used to.
That's total war.
That's kill everything.
That's genocide.
It actually derives, I believe, from Moses' laws for war, which specify the conditions in which you obliterate everyone and replace them.
Well, yes.
And in the specific case of the Amalekites, you know, God, of course, this is a huge debate.
I think it's between Samuel in God and Samuel, did I get that right?
I think it's Samuel.
I've read it a couple of times, but God says, kill them all.
And he doesn't.
You know, he doesn't kill them all.
And he spares the animals, for example, and some of the children.
And God prevents him from becoming king.
And I think maybe mangling this slightly, but not too much, because he didn't follow God's instructions, which is a theme throughout the Bible.
Just follow God's instructions.
He's God, you're not.
And the instruction in this case was kill all of them.
That's God's command, not a product of human desire.
So, anyway, that's an extraordinary thing to say.
And I think it, I don't know that that's the actual Israeli plan is to kill every Persian.
I don't think it is, but it describes a mindset that's not that's different from ours.
And we are bound to this country in this war.
We've described them as a partner in the war.
It's a joint operation.
It's like whoever came up with that is really deserves punishment because that's crazy.
But it also means that they have different incentives and motives than we do.
And ending diplomacy would be one of them because if your opponent is Amalek, you're not going to negotiate with them.
Why would you?
It's the inverse of the exactly.
Exactly.
Yes.
And I will say, I'm no religious scholar, but the choice of an attack on Purim, Purim, I guess it's pronounced, is shocking in its own right.
Because as I understand the story of this holiday, one of the, I believe, 10 most major Jewish holidays, it is a story of Esther, who was Jewish and had married the king in Persia.
And there was some palace intrigue.
An advisor, I think a cousin of the king, is outraged at the Jews and orders them to be killed.
And Esther steps in and reveals that she is Jewish and prevents the genociding of the Jews in Persia.
This is correct.
That's exactly what it says.
And then the advisor who recommended the genociding of the Jews is himself impaled to death.
Esther is sent by her dad into the king's harem, and she's like total smokeshow and charming and basically subverts this plot against her people.
And she ends it.
She ends the plot.
And then, but the kicker is, and this is what the holiday celebrates, is the genocide of the people who might have attacked the Jews.
And 70,000 of them, it says, in the book, which is in the Christian Bible.
So I've read it.
And they only stop when their arms get tired from killing.
And so it's the only book of the Christian Bible, and I think of the Torah that doesn't mention God.
Hmm.
And its inclusion is a little confusing to me, but whatever.
I didn't stack the Bible, but it's there.
But what it describes is a killing of people who weren't actually posing an imminent threat and killing all of them.
So it's a different.
Look, I'm not even judging.
I'm just saying that's a different way of looking at conflict from the way that we do.
Well, I mean, I think you're being too generous.
I'm trying.
I don't like attacking other people's religions.
I just don't.
I'm sorry.
That's the thing I said up top.
It's very confusing to have the secular prosecution of a holy war.
That is so deep.
And I think we have to wrap our minds around this because you don't understand it.
Do you?
Well, this brings me to the other thing I wanted to talk about, which is Netanyahu himself.
Yeah.
Which I have a very uneasy feeling about this person, not just that I don't like what he's doing and what he stands for.
But there are a number of things here that I'm having trouble looking past.
One is that he was very unpopular before October 7th.
And that war caused his nation to rally around him, as is natural.
But I think it set the world up to my way of thinking.
I was as troubled by October 7th as anyone.
I mean, I'm not Israeli, so I didn't feel it in the personal way.
It was awful.
But I'm a student of history and specifically of genocide enough to have felt what that was, what its purpose was, and to be very troubled by the fact that it could possibly happen in Israel under those circumstances.
I was perplexed by it at the time.
I remained.
I'm still kids at a music concert, a rave.
Sorry.
Right, you can't, but how insane.
How could it have happened?
That troubled me, and I still don't know the answer.
Can I say one thing?
There's a lot of censorship in Israel more than we acknowledge.
It's a military state, obviously.
It's a heavily militarized state, but it's governed with the help of the military.
And there were a number of Israelis, patriotic Israelis who'd served in the IDF directly after that attack in October who said out loud, no, that's not possible.
This is one of the most heavily surveilled borders in the world.
Like, no.
One of them is called Efred Finnegson, who is an Israeli liberal.
I had her on Dark Horse.
Oh, was she good?
She was great.
I mean, I had her on right after October 7th.
Did she talk about this?
Oh, we talked about it extensively.
I don't think she's living in Israel anymore.
I've never met her, but I've just admired her.
She's a big Bitcoin person.
I don't think I agree with her, but I like her.
She's smart and she seems honest.
Yep.
She basically, I don't want to speak for her, I don't know her, but she basically stopped talking about that.
I don't even know if that video is still up.
Like, there was a concerted effort to censor anybody who said, wait, what?
Charlie Kirk said that.
What?
As a lover of Israel, he said, I don't think this doesn't make any sense.
Oh, he was very specific.
In fact, he highlighted something that I myself had in trying to figure out what had happened.
I had done the calculations myself about how you can't park an Apache helicopter, of which Israel has apparently 48, more than an hour from that border in Israel.
If you just take the top speed of it.
Yeah.
So there's a question about even if you got caught with your pants down somehow, which is almost unthinkable, what happened after?
It's a little hard to explain.
And Charlie said that on the Patrick Bett David podcast very famously.
And, you know, obviously a whole other thread is we had the very public, very brutal killing of Charlie Kirk, and it tells the same story as the assassination attempts against President Trump about the failure to properly investigate Jeffrey Epstein, which is that we don't have an FBI.
I know.
We have something that obstructs our investigations rather than conducts them.
So anyway, I don't know what to make of any of that.
And of course, it's not hard to imagine very dark things.
But nonetheless, what I thought was required after October 7th was that Netanyahu needed to step down or be removed from power and replaced with a leader who was not in part responsible for Hamas's power in Gaza.
And I must tell you, if there are Israelis listening to this, you have to understand how that looked from at least my vantage point here in the U.S. You cannot have this person conducting a major military operation in Gaza having been partially responsible for this in having cynically supported Hamas.
Whatever decision he made and for whatever reason he made the decision to support Hamas, to divide the Palestinians, he could not be a legitimate person to preside over that invasion.
So in light of that, I just want to, I've never met Netanyahu, but I have watched him for a long time, and I couldn't be more disturbed by the person that I see.
He looks to me, first of all, I think I detect when he discusses the United States and the relationship between our countries.
I hear the words that he says and I understand them, but I feel his disdain.
Exactly.
It's palpable.
I'm the only other person I know who's ever said that.
But I could not agree with you more.
I just feel it.
There is a resentment.
Because he's in a subordinate position.
He is undeniably a man of history.
He has shaped historic events.
He has moved borders.
He has moved populations.
You could say it's good or bad.
I think it's bad.
But whatever.
He's a man of history and he understands himself that way.
Yes.
And here he is like having to suck up to American donors, American members of Congress, get permission from the president of the United States.
Look at it from him.
I'm a big believer, even if I don't like someone.
Think about what he's thinking.
What's his perspective?
And Netanyahu's perspective is one of resentment as the subordinate partner always is resentful.
The subordinate partner who feels himself to be superior.
Yeah, exactly.
But diminished by this relationship.
Right.
Of course he has deep resentment toward the United States.
And it's very obvious.
And I've, you know, I know him and I've detected it in my conversations with him.
It's the most obvious thing ever.
And it is a kind of species of like, you see this with rich people.
They're all convinced that their household help love them.
I've always noticed this my whole life.
She loves me.
You know, I got her her green card.
She loves me.
I like, I doubt she loves you.
She's washing your underwear.
Like she's a human being.
I don't think she loves you actually.
She probably is grateful in some ways, resentful in others.
That's just the nature of those relationships.
And in his case, he's a hollow man who I don't think has deep beliefs other than in his destiny.
And I do think of the destiny of Israel.
I think he believes.
His father was a historian, wrote a lot about this.
His personal life is in total disarray.
His wife is a very famous, Sarah is a very famous person in Israel and reviled, and she's famously hostile to him.
And I, since we're just being honest, I'll just say I don't trust a man whose wife hates him.
And I don't, and I'm not even blaming him for that.
I don't know the dynamic.
I'm not in their marriage.
But I think that if you are making decisions on which the fate of nations hang, you need to have it buttoned down at home.
Netanyahu as a Hollow Man00:10:23
And if you don't, I think it's very difficult to make wise decisions.
And I think there is a kind of sweaty desperation to him.
Now, he's running a small country in the middle of hostile neighbors.
I get it.
However, I think a man like that is not strong.
He's fundamentally weak at the core.
And it's the weak men who are the most dangerous.
By far, strong men are never, they're very straightforward.
They don't lie.
Netanyahu lies a lot, including to U.S. officials who really dislike him for it.
Let me just say that.
They really dislike him for it.
And I often hear people say the U.S. government is controlled by Israel.
They do apply pressure points unduly.
They just got us into this war.
That's all true.
But if you actually, since I'm really from D.C. and you talk to people who work in the federal bureaucracies, including the Intel agencies, including the FBI, including the White House, they are hostile because the relations are so hostile on a personal level.
You talk to people depending on the IDF has an outpost in our Pentagon.
Tons of people I know who work there, they don't hate Israel.
They believe it has a right to exist, whatever that means.
They don't like the idea because they're high-handed, arrogant, nasty.
The relations between these countries on a personal level is bad.
You never hear that about the Spanish contingent to NATO or something.
Never.
So I think the relationship between the United States and Israel is a lot less healthy on every level, micro to macro.
I think Netanyahu both causes that and reflects it.
And I think he's a genuinely dangerous person.
The last thing I'll say, he's in his 70s.
And you notice this.
It's the older leaders who tend to make the really reckless decisions.
That's interesting.
I do think that.
I mean, we just had a face-off between a 79-year-old president of the United States and an 86-year-old Ayatollah of Iran, and it didn't end well.
I think there's a lot of evidence that men lose their capacity for wise decision-making in their age, certainly for quick decision-making.
And there does set into some men a kind of nihilism.
I'm going to be dead anyway.
I do think they think that.
I think Rupert, the ones I know, Rupert Murdoch, that absurd Mitch McConnell, guys like that, I mean, they're on their way out.
They're in their 90s.
And they both have, and I know them both, they have this kind of like, one last war.
It's like, what are you even thinking?
Well, I would, this is a strange thing for me to say, but I've, you know, I try to be a very careful thinker about these things.
And that is the kind of thing, a pattern that you would expect amongst non-believing older men.
Yeah.
Believing older men have a reason to keep reins on those instincts.
It depends on what you believe.
Well, if you believe in a higher power that is fundamentally about moral decency, you have a reason to maintain your moral posture.
I think there's evidence the Ayatollah was happy to be martyred.
Certainly there are reports to that effect that he stayed above ground and he knew he was going to hit prostate cancer and he knew he was going to die and he wanted to be martyred.
And I think there is strong, overwhelming evidence from Netanyahu's public statements that he sees this as his and his nation's destiny and that he believes God has signed off on this, approves of it.
And so I do think it, I mean, it really depends.
Like if you believe in a God that wants reconciliation between people, obviously these are grave sins.
But if you believe in a God that, you know, is a triumphalist God who wants you to subdue and eliminate your enemies, this is what God wants.
Well, this is also an uncomfortable topic for me, but one I've been thinking about for decades.
I would say this is also a distinction, which I don't think we in the West have grappled with properly between the Old Testament God and Jesus.
That the fundamental lesson of Jesus, as I see it, is the broadening of the in-group and the humanizing of the out-group.
And, you know, that is resonant in the golden rule.
It's resonant in the story of the Good Samaritan.
That's really the point.
And taken to its natural conclusion, that leads to this Western view of, hey, let's put the lineage stuff aside and make wealth by collaborating.
Exactly.
So I'm concerned, you know, again, I see the disdain from Netanyahu, but I also see trying to figure out how to phrase it, but a kind of Moses complex, but a godless Moses complex.
You know, the thing about Moses is that it's a partnership with God.
And, you know, God is pushing Moses around to do the right thing to get his people in line.
Against his will.
Right?
Very much so.
But Netanyahu, I think, clearly views himself.
Only is he a historic figure already, no matter what else he may do, but he views himself in that light and I think he is trying to do something transformative that will be his legacy.
There's no question, and the question is the what looks to me like expansionist tendencies that seem to be very much on his mind do not appear to me to be in the interest of the modern state of Israel, which does have this strong Western thread to it, but it's in competition with this, you know, thread that comes from lineage against lineage violence, as it's viewed in the Torah.
That's exactly right.
So I don't know what to do about that.
That seems to me very dangerous.
And I guess the last thing I will say is that I don't know if it is my mind playing tricks on me or not.
But given what I do know about Netanyahu and what I know about where he stood with respect to his own population prior to October 7th, I feel like I'm looking at a crime boss.
Yeah.
And that this is a person who has decided that they are entitled to do things that a normal person would not.
feel entitled to do, and literally to anyone who stands in his way.
I personally worry about this because, simply speaking my mind which is my right as an American and should be defended by every other American, even if you disagree with every single word I say the fact that I should be entitled to put my model on the table and tell you why I believe it and tell you where i'm worried about it, and all of that that shouldn't be controversial at all.
And yet, when looking at this person who sees the world in you know kill or be killed terms and may view anyone in the West who speaks in opposition to his view as a existential threat to his people if that's how he sees it, I worry about what he might do to anyone who stood in the way of what I think is an extremely reckless program that is not in the United States interest and not in Israel's interest.
Couldn't agree more, I think I everything you've said is just true and easy to prove, based on the last three years of behavior or more.
I mean, I first interviewed Netanyahu 25 years ago.
He's been.
I will give him points for endurance.
He's an amazing political figure.
I don't think that because someone disagrees with me or does something awful, that that person doesn't have remarkable strengths.
He clearly does.
He's highly intelligent, he's charismatic, he's hung around, he's hung around, he's young for his age.
No no no no, he's an amazing guy.
I mean there's, I think that you know, and I think it's fair to say that it's not an endorsement, obviously um, he's a huge threat to the United States and to his own country, but he's an amazing person and so I wouldn't underestimate him.
I mean, how do you take control of the United States military if you're not even American?
And you know there are all these theories about it, these dark theories.
He's doing this, he's doing that, but part of it, and I don't know if those are true or not, I wonder.
But what I do know is true is that his force of will is remarkable.
Yes Yes.
And by the way, that gets you more than we admit.
You can talk things into existence.
I've seen it many times.
I've known people in leadership who've done it.
And there is a kind of supernatural happen, in my opinion.
But even leaving that aside, it's just true.
If you speak something, it does tend to become real.
You can bend reality to your will.
I've seen it.
And he has done that.
And so you have to sort of say, wow, man.
You know, I disagree with everything.
I think it's evil, but, you know, props for imposing your will in the world.
He is a formidable human being.
Big time, big time.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, the last thing I want to say, I don't want to leave this conversation before I mention it.
I've been watching you for a long time since you had me on in 2017.
And I am a big fan of your monologues, not just their content, but the way you produce them, the way you deliver them.
And I've had this thought.
You know, I was a professor for 14 years.
And I think most professors aren't any good at the job at all.
They don't know their subjects very well.
You wouldn't expect them to.
They were trained narrowly and then they're expected to teach broadly and they don't know how.
They don't even know what it is they're supposed to be teaching.
So they teach in a defensive way that doesn't allow people to question them.
When I watch your monologues, and you've had some excellent ones of late, ones that go on for sometimes an hour, and it appears that you're not reading it off of anything.
No.
You're just talking.
And my thought is, actually, that Tucker's a guy.
I don't want to say you've missed your calling because I think you're doing what you need to be doing, but that you had another calling that you didn't follow, that you could have been an excellent professor, the kind of professor that you think about many years after the course is over, somebody who made things clear that were otherwise difficult to understand.
Paradoxes in Middle East Conflict00:03:38
And I will say in the recent context, this has been made even clearer for the following reason.
I look at the conflict in the Middle East, and I spend a huge fraction of my time trying to understand what could possibly explain the things that I'm seeing, right?
That's just what I do.
This is strange.
It has paradox after paradox in it.
What explains it?
And I haven't found anybody else who's putting a model on the table that even touches it.
I can't even figure out what most people think we are doing in Iraq.
What is the goal?
What is the victory condition?
But when I listen to you, two things happen.
One, you are presenting a model that I don't know if it's true or not, but I do know that it's a match for the stuff I can check independently.
That's a very strong sign that it is credible in some important way.
The other thing is that I learn things about the conflict that I didn't know already, right?
I hear you talk, and it is a regular occurrence that you will introduce some fact or observation that I wasn't paying attention to that fits.
That's another very strong sign that you're telling us something that has real currency under it.
So in any case, A, I wanted to say, look, I'm impressed at what you do.
It is very difficult to deliver.
In the last six weeks, I've been in places that are at the center of the news.
You know, I've been in Amman, Jordan, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Tel Aviv, Riyadh.
I've been in all those cities.
I have friends in all those cities.
I know the cities and I've been in and out of those cities since 9-11.
So it's this happens to be a topic.
I'm hardly an expert.
I don't speak Arabic or Hebrew, but I definitely have spent a lot of time in the Middle East, like a lot.
And I'm interested in it.
And I like the people.
I've always liked the people.
And even if I disagree with their governments.
And so it is weird to see all those cities like burning.
It's very upsetting to me.
So there's that.
And so, no, I don't use a teleprompter.
I just say what I think, but I know a lot about the subject, or I think I know a lot about the subject.
So that's easy.
I actually tried to be a teacher.
That was my goal, but I hadn't graduated from college.
I wanted to be a boarding school teacher because boarding school was so formative for me.
And I tried to teach at the American School in Marrakesh because I wanted to live abroad because my father was working abroad a lot.
So we always had an appreciation for travel.
But they were like, no, you're a loser.
But that was actually my goal.
I first applied to CIA because I wanted to live abroad and have an interesting life.
They're like, no, you did drugs.
We can't let them hire you.
And then I tried to work at the American School in Marrakesh and they were like so dismissive.
They're like, you're too dumb to teach in a boarding school.
I was like, okay, I'll go to journalism.
Luckily, I had a lot of children and a lot of nephews.
So there's always an audience for me to give my lectures.
Well, you're doing a great job.
And I will say I was pleased.
I don't know if you saw it, but my friend Jeffrey Tucker, you know, Jeffrey, Brownstone Institute.
So I'm a Brownstone fellow, a proud one.
I love Brownstone.
It's the only institution I know of any size that actually works at the moment.
It's a great place.
I love that.
But in any case, he posted on X a couple of days ago about your monologues.
Why Conversation Is Not Hard00:02:13
He said, look, I don't care if you disagree with Tucker or not.
You have to understand how difficult what he's pulling off is.
And he noted that you don't use a teleprompter and that you appear to be just speaking from.
It's actually way.
I mean, since you do a similar job, I'll just say what you probably already know, which is way easier than reading teleprompters.
Reading a teleprompter is really hard.
Reading a teleprompter sucks, no question.
To do it naturally, like you're just kind of talking is, I mean, I did it for 30 years.
I got pretty good at it, but like, no, that's super hard.
You know what's not hard is conversation.
Well, I hope I don't regret saying this because neither you nor I know if you're right.
But there's a principle that I adhere to, which is that the best asset you can have in delivering an argument is the luxury of being right.
Exactly.
If you're actually right, you have all kinds of leeway, and it doesn't really matter where the conversation goes.
That's so true.
And by the way, the beauty of giving monologues is you get to choose the topic.
Well, that's true.
We're talking about what I want to talk about.
So, you know, you don't hear me giving a lot of lectures on like women's fashion, you know what I mean?
Or American football or something.
Right.
It's only things I think I understand.
Well, in any case, you do a brilliant job of it.
I want to thank you for what you've been doing.
I think you have stayed very clear in your mission as a patriot.
It's obvious to me that that's what you are.
And you've been mercilessly punished for it, which I find despicable.
So I hope that what comes out of this is that people who think that they disagree with you or me or both of us will listen to what this conversation sounds like, even if only to understand what the mindset of other people is that have arrived at a very different conclusion.
Well, thank you.
I hope that's right.
All right.
And let's hope that this war ends quickly and with as little bloodshed as possible.