Controversial Professor Norman Finkelstein on Israel, Wars, Identity Politics, and Failures of US Liberalism | Access Granted
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There's something I've noticed about people who launch new programs like this one, Perhaps you've noticed it too.
I've seen it many times over the years.
People launch a new show and they announce that this show is going to be devoted to airing voices and viewpoints you don't hear in other places.
And oftentimes, people mean that when they say it.
It's very well-intentioned and authentic.
But what ends up happening is either they end up having people and voices and viewpoints on that you can in fact hear in many other places, or the only people who end up on the show who might in some way be marginalized elsewhere are people who are fully aligned with the viewpoint of that show.
When we got System Update back in September, we vowed that we were going to be a show that aired viewpoints and views that aren't available elsewhere.
And I was very adamant, both to myself and to my colleagues, that we go out of our way to make certain that we make good on that pledge.
because the inertia is very easy to simply call on people who are otherwise available because that's the easiest course.
The most difficult course is to actually interview people who are genuinely banned or canceled or marginalized, whatever term you prefer, not people like, say, Dave Chappelle, who has $40 million deals with Netflix and was just invited to host Saturday Night Live He's widely criticized.
I wouldn't say he's been canceled.
People who are actually canceled, people who are rendered unemployable or who are not welcome on almost any media spaces by virtue of the expression of controversial political views.
Now, we obviously don't want to just interview people for the sake of interviewing them just because they happen to be reviled.
Some people deserve to be reviled.
Some people who are reviled or genuinely canceled don't actually have interesting things to say.
We want to confine ourselves to speaking with people who have been relegated to the margins because of their political views, but who are very substantive and thoughtful about how they express those views and the work that goes into forming them, even if they're people whose views are extremely inflammatory.
A few weeks ago, we interviewed one such person, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who has all sorts of quite polarizing and definitely radical views on things like race and how to think about various racial groups.
And those views have caused her to be very much at risk for being fired, losing her tenured position.
At the University of Pennsylvania Law School despite having among the most impressive academic and scholarly credentials of anyone in the country.
She not only graduated a top school and became a lawyer at Harvard but also for many years was a neurologist.
I believe she went to Harvard Medical School.
as well.
So when we interviewed Professor Wack, she was as candid and blunt as she typically is.
Some of her statements were shocking even to my audience that generally is receptive to those kinds of views.
But we also, as part of that show, put on Professor Norman Finkelstein, who himself had his own controversy with academic freedom.
He is a scholar who graduated with a PhD in political science from Princeton University.
He had written two or three very influential and well-regarded though controversial books primarily about his His critical analysis of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and his advocacy for Palestinian rights.
He has also very frequently spoken of what he regards as the tendency for American Jews to self-victimize and he contrasts it with the actual success and career success, the economic success that Jews in the United States have had.
Very similar to the way conservatives often claim that African Americans or Latinos or LGBTs or Muslims self victimized as well.
You just don't hear it said much about American Jews, Professor Finkelstein says it.
In 2007 when he was a professor at DePaul University, Alan Dershowitz led a campaign, a very vindictive campaign, to have Professor Finkelstein's tenure denied as a result of his criticism of Israel.
Alan Dershowitz is obviously a steadfast defender of Israel.
It wasn't so much a claim that Professor Finkelstein's scholarship was lacking or faulty.
I found him to be one of the most rigorous and fastidious scholars I've ever interviewed.
He just reads and reads and reads and has an amazing recollection.
It was the fact that his views is expressed in his books, not just being critical of Israel, but especially his argument that American Jews have exploited the Holocaust as an industry.
in order to not just extract money but shield Israel from critique and get other benefits, including enormous sums of money and reparations from Germany.
That is obviously something that is a very radical and for a lot of people offensive thing to say, but as I said, he says it in a way that is very scholarly, very based on all kinds of evidence.
And so when Alan Dursha was succeeded in destroying Norman Finkelstein's academic career, he's been unemployable ever since in any academic institution.
And so when Alan Dursha succeeded in destroying Norman Finkelstein's academic career, he's been unemployable ever since in any academic institution, it had a kind of ripple effect where he was in a way that is very scholarly, very based on all kinds of evidence.
It had a kind of ripple effect where he was also excluded from almost every major media outlet as well, except for some left-wing media venues where he was welcome, places like Democracy Now!
and a couple of left-wing YouTube shows or podcasts.
Those are pretty much the only places where he would be heard.
He now has a new book that he wrote in 2022.
It is entitled, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It, Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom.
And in that book, Professor Finkelstein offers a very emphatic and unflinching critique of left liberal politics.
So he's critiquing the political faction, the only one left really, that had still given him a platform in some ways by claiming that leftism in the United States has lost its radicalism, that it no longer risks anything, that it instead is about lending support to the Democratic Party, people that it instead is about lending support to the Democratic Party, people like Angela Davis or Judith Butler, and the only courageous things they do are things like change
And he really is not critiquing wokeism or identity politics for its own sake, but he's arguing that the obsession with things like the trans debate and other issues of that kind have distracted the left from what used to be their primary focus, things like opposing security state or engage in class politics on behalf of the working class.
And instead, they're now captive to the Democratic Party and obsessed with these culture war issues that have very little to do with how power is dispersed.
And as a result of that critique of the Democratic Party, and not just the Democratic Party, but the left wing of it, he's almost become persona non grata among the one faction he had left, hence the name of his book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It.
But I've always found him to be a very compelling thinker, somebody who is absolutely worth hearing, even if you don't agree with them or not.
We put him on the program with Professor Wax for him to give his views on the limits of academic freedom using his experience as somebody who was denied academic freedom.
And to talk about her case, But as part of that interview, we also conducted a wide-ranging interview with him on many topics.
Time constraints prevented us from finishing, so we finished this week.
Taping it, both are taped, and we begin by talking about his views on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, how it is that as the son of actual Holocaust survivors, both his parents were actually in German concentration camps, his father in Auschwitz, his mother and several others, and they came to the United States as immigrants fleeing when they were liberated from the camps.
Why, as a son of a Holocaust survivor who loved both of his parents, it wasn't some act of rebellion or self-hating pathology or anything, he came to these views academically and intellectually, why he made defense of Palestinian rights his cause, why he so vehemently opposed the idea of Jewish self-victimization and U.S.
support for Israel.
But we also spend a lot of time talking about his critique of the Democratic Party when it comes to the war in Ukraine, and militarism, and corporatism, and especially their fixation on these culture war issues as a way of distracting from the much harder challenges that the left used to take on of challenging military power, the intelligence agencies, and especially the way in which capital and wealth are distributed in the United States.
So I found this interview with him incredibly He's engaging at points.
It's very entertaining.
He is very aggressive in his rhetoric.
He has a lot to say about MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan, about the political left generally, its flirtation with the very ideas that it used to one stand against.
So I hope you'll listen to this interview with an open mind, even if you're somebody who believes in support of Israel, even if you believe someone who is on the side of Israel against the Palestinians, even if you're somebody who sympathizes with the left liberal view on culture war issues, he always has something to say that makes you think.
And it's in that spirit that we offer him tonight as an interview.
But also this will be an ongoing segment.
We intend to speak with people of this kind, people who have things to say but who have been genuinely relegated to the margins or the fringes or otherwise silenced by virtue of those views in the spirit that we think Rumble represents, that the show represents, of allowing a free flow of information and free inquiry and allowing you as the adults to decide what it is that you think.
So here's the interview we conducted with Professor Finkelstein.
We hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Norman, I'm excited to welcome you to your debut appearance on System Update.
I've been looking forward to talking to you for a long time, so thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Well, thank you for having me.
Absolutely.
So let me begin with a broad question that I know is broad, deliberately broad, but nonetheless interested in your answer for those who haven't encountered your work before for a while or haven't at all.
Obviously an important part of, I think, your biography and your work is that you were born to two parents who were Holocaust survivors in kind of the most literal sense of that term, meaning your parents were in actual Nazi concentration camps, walked out and immigrated to the United States, your father from the Warsaw Ghetto in Auschwitz, your mother from the Warsaw Ghetto to a different camp.
And yet rather than becoming kind of a vocal supporter of the State of Israel or devoting yourself to Zionism, as is the case for so many people with similar backgrounds, instead you've become one of the most vocal critics of the State of Israel, its comportment, its behavior, its treatment of the Palestinians.
Why do you think that happened?
Well, I can't claim to any epiphany when I was five or six years old, The apple didn't drop far from the tree.
My parents were on the left, but on the left in an unconventional sense.
It wasn't as if they were communists with a capital C, or members of the Communist Party, or frankly had very much to do with politics in the practical sense.
My parents felt a very deep debt to the Soviet Union for the defeat of Nazism.
It's a matter of historical fact, not Open to serious dispute that it was the Red Army that defeated the Nazis.
And in addition, my parents felt that the Soviet Union or the Soviet people understood what it meant to endure a war.
The closest analog to what my parents experienced during World War Two is what the Russian people experienced during World War Two.
Because the Nazis on the Eastern Front fought a war of extermination.
On the Western front, it was a fairly conventional war.
That's why in the 1960s, you could have a program like Hogan's Heroes.
Hogan's Heroes, for those of your viewers who don't know it, was a comedy, a comedy about Americans in a German or Nazi POW camp.
And it had these characters' names, a fellow named Schultz, Sergeant Schultz, And it was overall a quite amusing program.
That kind of program is unthinkable in the Soviet Union or then in Russia.
Because about 3.6 million Russians either starved to death or frozen to death in German Nazi POW camps.
It was a very different war on the Eastern Front.
About 27 million, that's the current estimate, 27 million Russians were killed.
And so my parents felt, with good reason, that the Soviet people understood war and that the Nazis defeated at great cost, great sacrifice, defeated the Nazis.
So my parents, I know it's going to sound odd to your listeners, my parents were probably the last Stalinists on Earth.
They ignored Khrushchev's speech.
They remain utterly loyal.
You couldn't say a single word critical of Stalin in my home.
It was unthinkable.
If you did, you were regarded as a traitor.
And I had to, as I got older, I learned more.
Of course, I had severe reservations about what happened under the Stalin regime, but it was impossible to utter such things in my home.
But Broadly speaking, that was my background and so it's unsurprising.
That even on the question of Israel, once Israel aligned itself with the United States during the Korean War in 1950, that was the moment where Israel decided, decisively shifted in favor of the United States.
My parents became very anti-Israel.
You couldn't say a good word about Israel in my home either, though with a qualification.
My parents strongly believed the Jews needed a refuge, not necessarily a Jewish state.
But that the experience of Jews during World War Two confirmed in their minds that in the moment of truth, nobody, they could rely on nobody except themselves.
And so they needed a place of refuge, if and when a similar catastrophe, I was going to say calamity, but that's grossly euphemistic, if and when another catastrophe emerged.
And I would say my parents did believe In some basic, so to speak, Zionist theses, they did believe that the so-called Gentile world or non-Jewish world harbored a deep-seated hatred for Jews and that they would never find safety over the long term in the non-Jewish milieu.
Let me just stick a little bit with that kind of post-World War II Soviet history, since Victor's Right history, the United States and the West, what's, say, in the crudest sense, won the Cold War in the sense we no longer have the Soviet Union.
People have forgotten a lot of that history that you just recounted, but also in terms of the Soviet relationship to the State of Israel and its creation and the international left's relationship to the state of Israel back in those decades.
You know, I think we find that a lot of kind of left wing critics of Israel of your generation early on had a lot of hope for Israel.
There were socialist and collectivist experiments with the kibitz and things like that.
What was the Soviet Union's position with regard to the creation of the state of Israel And did you share originally some of the hope that Israel could be a kind of very positive model for the world?
No, on the latter question, the answer is simply no, because I'm not as old as I look.
I was, I came of age, I was probably, I was 13 years old during the 1967 war.
And it's hard for people to understand now that you really have to understand what happened.
Up until 1967, Israel simply wasn't on the political map.
And I don't mean in general, I mean in particular among Jews.
Israel was a backwater.
It was very simple.
You might, the word is, let's just call it Spartan.
I was going to say primitive, but I changed that.
Let's just call it was a very Spartan place.
And no American Jew had any thought of emigrating there.
Remember, we're after World War II is the great breakthrough of American Jewry.
For the first time, most of the obstacles to access by American Jews into the uppermost regions of American political and economic life, the obstacles fell away.
They didn't completely disappear until the Civil Rights Movement, but that's a separate issue.
After World War II, Jews were very optimistic about the United States.
And they had good reason to be optimistic, because all sorts of opportunities opened up, and Jews were ready, willing, and able to take advantage of those opportunities.
Just to give you one example, and you'll forgive me if I'm repeating myself from things I've said elsewhere, I attended a public high school, James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York.
And the top students in the top classes were all Jewish.
Now, let me give you an indication of where those students ended up.
Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority Leader, went to my high school.
I was reasonably good friends, I won't say close friends, but I was reasonably friends with his sister Fran, absolutely brilliant woman, like her brother.
Brilliant, I'll say girl, because we're talking about high school.
Brilliant girl.
Her boyfriend was my best friend.
Bernie Sanders attended my high school.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended my high school.
Judge Judy attended my high school.
Now, believe it or not, not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, six, six Nobel laureates attended my high school.
What's my point?
Jews were now ready to make it They were confident, as it turned out to be justifiably, that they would make it, that they would occupy the top tier, T-I-E-R, the top tier of American society, which, as I said, is what happened.
So they didn't care about Israel.
Israel was like this backwater.
And it was, as I say, very simple, Spartan.
It was a nice place to spend a summer vacation on a kibbutz, but it was like summer camp.
And then you come back from the kibbutz, and now it's back to serious business.
You're sitting at home.
You're studying.
You have the eyes on the prize.
So up until 1967, and as I said, I'm only 13 in 1967, there was no discussion about Israel.
It was a very political time.
It's the 1960s, of course.
But we talked about the war in Vietnam.
We talked about the Civil Rights Movement.
Even Believe me, and I'm not trying to be a propagandist here.
I'm trying to simply be objective because there's no propaganda necessary here.
Even the 1967 war, it just went right by us.
It happened.
Remember, it was over in six days.
And so a week later or two weeks later, it's forgotten.
However, it did mark a major shift in American-Israeli relations at the political level and also, of course, at the military level.
And that did have significant consequences for American Jewish life.
And Israel now entered American Jewish life in a big way, for sure, but it didn't transform, it didn't redirect It didn't redirect the American Jewish trajectory towards physical relocation in Israel.
That was off the spectrum.
Yeah, a handful of Jews immigrate.
I'll tell you the truth.
Again, I'm not saying this necessarily in a pejorative way.
It was mostly Jews who were unsuccessful here.
The crude way to put it is losers.
Okay, I don't mean to call them losers, but the tier, the top tier, they stayed here.
It is also true to say, as you point out, again, old history.
The second biggest party in the Soviet Union, excuse me, the second biggest party in Israel, the biggest party was called the Mapai.
It was a labor party.
It was part of the Second International, for those of you who are familiar with those distinctions.
But the second biggest party, the Mapam, was totally pro-Israel, pro-Soviet Union.
It was blindly Pro-Soviet Union.
My father was in what was called Hashomer Hatzair.
It was a socialist Zionist organization.
It eventually became part of MAPOM.
You couldn't say a critical word about Israel if you were in the MAPOM.
About Soviet Union, excuse me.
I don't know why I'm confusing the two.
You couldn't say a critical word about the Soviet Union if you were in the MAPOM.
And the leaders of the Zionist movement, including Mapai, the Labour Party, under Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion, you'll know, is the founding premier of Israel, but also the most influential figure.
They used to call Ben-Gurion, not the Israeli, but the Zionist Lenin.
And they modeled themselves after the Bolsheviks.
They did model themselves after the Bolsheviks.
And it's true to say that at the political level, Israel was a very repressive place up until 1967.
It didn't, excuse me, up until 1977 when Menachem Begin and the right-wing Likud party came to power.
It was a very repressive, So there was what you could call a clear leftist trend in Israeli society.
And then one of those kinds of flukes comes along in history.
After World War II, the Cold War almost immediately breaks out.
A few years within the end of World War II, the so-called Cold War breaks out, and the question of Israel comes before the General Assembly.
And quite remarkably, both the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves on the same side.
That was sheer happenstance, sheer serendipity for the Israelis.
It was sheer serendipity.
And truth be told, the most moving speech, the most moving speech in the General Assembly in support of Israel's founding was delivered by the Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko.
That speech Had a deep impact on Jews, on my parents, because it was a very strange thing.
Remember, the Soviet Union lost about 27 million people during World War II.
Gromyko comes up to the podium and he says to the General Assembly, nobody suffered like the Jews suffered
During World War Two, it was a very noble, whatever you want to say about Kromnikov, yes, he's Stalin's foreign minister, he's a henchman, but at that moment, and I'm not one of those, I'm not Pollyannish about these things, but at that moment, a truth came forth from him, and it was a truth that he
As the foreign minister of a state that had suffered so horribly during World War II, he didn't have to utter, but he said, no one suffered like the Jews during World War II.
And he said, if they cannot find a modus vivendi, a way of living with the Arabs, if they can't figure that out, then He said the Soviet Union will support the founding of the state of a Jewish state.
Even to this day, when I reread that speech, I'm deeply moved by it.
And I know how moved my parents were.
Not Because of the founding of the State of Israel, which as I said my parents turned strongly, I won't say violently, strongly against after the line with the U.S.
in the Cold War, but because of the recognition of the Jewish suffering.
That they obviously personally experienced.
But let me focus in on that a little bit because If, you know, on this idea about whether Jews grew up in your generation and mine feeling oppressed or endangered in the United States, You know, there's this kind of discourse that happens on the right about the idea that America is an inherently white supremacist nation.
And one of the arguments proffered in refutation of that is that if you look at the highest earning income groups by wealth and by salary these days, you have to go down to the 11th or the 12th spot in order to find white Americans.
You have Indians and Koreans and every other kind of hyphenated American group before you get to white Americans.
Kind of an odd thing for a white supremacist country.
But certainly, for some reason, that argument isn't quite as accepted if you want to show people statistics about the success and the wealth and the income levels of American Jews in response to similar claims that American Jews are now persecuted in the that argument isn't quite as accepted if you want to show people statistics about You know, I grew up with a pretty conventional Jewish background.
My grandmother fled Germany in anticipation of Hitler's repression.
I was steeped in all of the same things most American Jews were about the history of repression in the Jews.
But I was never taught that American Jews were endangered in the United States other than a few stray kind of comments that high school or junior high kids make to one another of I never really experienced anything along those lines.
I did learn when I graduated NYU and went to work for the kind of most prestigious Wall Street firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, founded by four Jewish lawyers.
That they were for Jews in the 60s.
So kind of when you're talking about 1967, they graduated at the top of their class at NYU, but they couldn't get accepted to any of the kind of white shoe Wall Street law firms because they did have a almost explicit rule against hiring Jews.
So, you know, even with that, though, there's a lot of success.
of American Jews going back to the 30s and 40s and 50s in Hollywood, business, Wall Street, and it only gets more and more intense as we go along.
And those kind of things are now unthinkable that a law firm would have an overt policy against hiring Jews.
And yet to me it seems, Norman, that this narrative that Jews are more in danger than ever in the United States and in the West, is stronger than at least in my lifetime I've heard it.
What is it that you were describing how American Jews didn't care much for Israel, didn't think that Israel was really necessary, thought they had it made in the United States?
What is it that caused American Jews to start so aggressively identifying with Israel as this kind of necessity that they had to have in case they needed to flee again?
And do you agree that there's this kind of rejuvenation of this narrative that American Jews, Western Jews are more in danger than ever?
And why is that happening?
I wrote a book back in the 2000s.
I can't remember now what year, probably around 2006, probably.
Part of which was examination of what periodically is called, and it's literally periodic, it's called the New Antisemitism.
And you could see several waves of this literature, this alleged scholarship, all of which resurfaces, as I said, periodically, and invariably has the same title, the New Antisemitism.
If you look closely at the chronology of this literature, it almost perfectly coincides with new challenges that Israel faces in its foreign policy. it almost perfectly coincides with new challenges that Israel faces So you have one round in the mid-1970s, right after the 1973 war, sometimes called the Yom Kippur War,
where Israel was under a lot of pressure to withdraw from the Egyptian Sinai territory it had where Israel was under a lot of pressure to withdraw from the Egyptian Sinai territory it had occupied in the 1967 war Ultimately, it was Jimmy Carter who compelled Israel to withdraw from the Egyptian Sinai.
I don't want to go there right now.
The point is, the first round of what's called the new anti-Semitism coincided with Israel's need For some support from the Americans to resist the pressures on Israel to acquiesce in international law.
The second round is in 1982, right after Israel invaded Lebanon, killed the estimates are between 15 and 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, And that war climaxed in the Israeli massacres in Sabra and Shatila.
Israel took a huge public relations blow as a result of its carryings on in Lebanon.
And once again, Israel needed a propaganda victory And revitalize the new anti-Semitism claim with a slew of books, reportage, and so forth.
And you could see that pattern.
I won't go through it with you exhaustively, but it exists and it keeps recurring.
And then the background, the background for all of these claims of new anti-Semitism Is the systematic instrumentalization or weaponization of the Nazi Holocaust to drill into the heads of American Jews of, there but for the grace of God, go you!
And should you face the same calamity as Jews faced during World War II, you will need a refuge.
That refuge, of course, being the State of Israel.
So you could say there were these combined, one constant, one resurgent recurring periodic
Now, that would be a purely propagandistic claim, that is to say, it was all about propaganda.
Was there more to it?
Well, actually, I would say, I will acknowledge there was another element.
The other element is, as a factual matter, demographically, Jews are an infinitesimal minority.
In the United States today, they represent 2% of the American population.
And any minority is going to feel a little bit unmoored In any society, and given that history of the Jews, not a propagandistic one, a real one, given that history of the Jews, of course, there's going to be a certain amount of, let's just say, lack of peace about their futures.
So I would say that, by the way, in my opinion, accounts for the huge anomaly
That although Jews are by far and away the wealthiest religious ethnic group in the United States, they have since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when Jews were poor, what I'm talking about now, since then, even though the Jews in the 1930s were poor, the Jews in the 2020s are quite rich.
Nonetheless, they have remained steadfastly Democratic Party.
And the reason for that, in my opinion, there's a lot of debate about it, but in my opinion, the main reason is because the Democratic Party is seen as a party protective of minorities.
So even though Jews, given their wealth, should be in the Republican Party, But given their lack of sure-footedness in American society, they vote Democratic.
And that, to me, is part of the picture.
There's a propaganda element, but one shouldn't be blind to that other element.
Namely, any minority feels a little bit nervous, wherever they are.
Jews, given their history, will feel more nervous.
And that notwithstanding, the incredible success A secular success of Jews in the United States, such that, at least on paper, it seems so far-fetched that Jews would now or any time in the foreseeable future be facing an existential threat.
Mary Tyler Moore, America's sweetheart in the 1960s.
Who does she marry?
A Jew.
Chelsea Clinton, the apple of the eye of Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Who does she marry?
A Jew.
Biden.
Or I should say Donald Trump.
Ivanka, the apple of her of his eye.
Who does she marry?
A Jew.
My condolences to her who she married.
Um, Joe Biden, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, he has three daughters.
All three daughters married Jews.
All three.
Jews have social cachet in this country.
Jews have wealth in this country.
Jews have political power in this country.
And by the way, Jews carry with them a huge superiority complex.
They're confident they are superior to everyone.
Part of it comes from this kind of distortion of the chosenness notion about Jews, the chosen people.
But part of it, we have to be honest, the sense of superiority by Jews, it comes from their fantastic secular success.
Over the 20th century, beginning in the 19th, but particularly the 20th century.
Even I, even I, I came from an absolutely non-chauvinist home.
Believe me, believe me, I did not come from that Jews are special home, not at all.
But even I, as a kid, I used to say, Einstein, Jewish.
Marx, Jewish.
Freud, Jesus.
Yeah, then we'd throw in, even though we hated Christians, at least in my family, but we'd even throw in Jesus, Jewish.
It was a mark of pride.
So that part of that superiority complex, which is very real, which is very real, part of it comes from the spectacular secular success So much so now that it's a matter of pride and preference.
Pride and preference for the ruling elites to marry Jews.
Yeah.
All right.
So I think that's the perfect setup for us to start to delve into the part of your life that entails both your academic accomplishments and the trouble that arises from them.
I don't think anyone's going to have a lot of difficulty wondering, hey, why did this person not sail through academia with complete trouble-free paving of the road?
So before we get into some of those controversies, I want to just begin by asking you, you did start off your studies, your career with what seemed to be a very kind of promising start to your academic career.
You got a PhD from Princeton with a dissertation in Zionism.
You ended up teaching at some prestigious schools, including NYU and Rutgers.
And then you ended up going to DePaul, where you were on the faculty as well.
And we're going to get to what happened there in just a minute.
But before we do, let me just ask you, what is it about academia that attracted you to it?
Why did you want to devote yourself to it in the way that you did?
What were you hoping to get out of that?
Well, after the dissolution of the 1960s radical movements, There was a great flocking of ex-radicals into academia.
It seemed like a place where you could reach young people, and I don't like the word, and I've come to reject it, but also it came to be seen as a place where you can enlighten people.
So there was a choice between, and here I'm going to be very frank with you, I see no point to not be 100% candid, Because I'm coming to the end of my life and I would like to leave an accurate legacy.
There was a choice between as I was a Maoist for a large period of my life, a follower of Mao Zedong, dare to struggle, dare to win.
No, Mao Zedong lived like him, dare to struggle, dare to win.
And for a while, I worked for a radical newspaper, a Maoist newspaper called The Guardian.
And the idea back then was you were supposed to go into factories, you're supposed to industrialize and organize the working class.
I wasn't prepared to do that, and I'll say that frankly.
I did like The Life of the Mind.
I did like books.
I wasn't a great student, but I was certainly reasonably competent.
All of my friends were hugely successful in all the fields they entered.
They were all at the top of their field.
And I just, I'm going to say as a matter of pride, I couldn't imagine meeting them in the street because we no longer fraternize.
They were spectacular successes.
I couldn't imagine seeing them in the street and saying, I'm a factory worker.
And I'm not proud to say that.
I'm not proud to say I'm simply acknowledging facts.
And so I felt I could perform a useful, radical, radical activity if I went into academia, espoused my views, and fought the battle of ideas.
My dear, not so much my friend, my dear mentor, Paul Sweezy, the great Marxist economist of the generation from the 1950s till 1980s.
I was recently reading a biographical statement by him, and he said his biggest desire was to turn Marxism into a respectable academic discipline.
That up until the mid-1960s, there was only one tenured Marxist economist in the top schools.
That was Paul Baran at Stanford.
Otherwise, it was a very marginal discipline, a marginal aspect of the discipline, the discipline being economics.
He wanted to turn it into a respectable discipline.
Now, I remember when I read that, I only recently read that, I thought to myself, wait, but Paul, don't you want the dictatorship of the proletariat?
Don't you want socialist revolution?
Don't you want communism?
I said, that sounds like such a tame aspiration.
But now that you ask the question, I have to be honest with myself.
I too had that tame aspiration to enter academia and espouse my political ideas.
As you know, I've radically changed on that point of view.
I don't believe a classroom should be a podium for espousing one's political beliefs.
But that's what I thought back then.
OK, so that's an interesting answer.
I've heard part of that, but not all of that before.
You are not now a member of the Academy.
You don't have a position at a university or anywhere else in academia.
And in large part, that was because of a major controversy that happened in 2007 or 2008 when you were on what appeared to everyone, I think, to be a kind of tenure track at DePaul.
We'll get to that in a minute.
That wasn't true?
No, I want to get the facts right.
Glenn, I do too.
Too many people know my history and I don't want to in any way misrepresent it and be accused of misrepresentation.
When I came to the end of my dissertation, I should say the end of the writing of my dissertation, I had discovered this hoax in a major work which purported to be scholarship.
And I went on a kind of crusade.
That was his 1984 book that you're talking about, correct?
A book called For Time Immemorial, and it had been endorsed by all the leading lights in American Jewish intellectual life.
It had been endorsed by people like Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, the historian Lucy DeWittowich, and many others.
And I was then, you know, less than obscure, less than obscure graduate student, and for reasons which shouldn't detain us now, I was the one credited with having exposed this book as a hoax.
And just to interject, the reason this book was so important to so many of the people you named and made such an impact, was it because it was essentially An argument purportedly based in scholarship that there was no, basically no such thing as the Palestinian people.
They were kind of descendant from generalized Arab people or from Jordanians and others and so it kind of was designed to undermine the narrative that the Jews had expelled the Palestinians from their natural homeland by arguing essentially they had no real claim to that homeland and that was why it was so popular in the West and you took the very Okay, first of all, those ideas are now benefiting or enjoying a resurgence in the current Israeli government, where members of that government are saying the exact same thing again.
essentially fabricated or at least baseless?
Okay.
First of all, those ideas are now benefiting or enjoying a resurgence in the current Israeli government where members of that government are saying the exact same thing again.
But leaving that aside, I didn't, as it were, take a position.
What I did was, I was, you know the expression once bitten, twice shy.
Well, I had been a Maoist.
And when Mao died, and then shortly thereafter, the Gang of Four, what were called the Gang of Four, Mao's Confederates, they were overthrown.
That was, for me, a shattering experience, probably the most shattering personal experience, personal political experience of my life.
Because I had been so right, so righteous, self-righteous in my conviction that China was advancing as the posters said, and those posters were in my room, my bedroom.
Socialism is advancing from victory to victory.
And there were the happy workers and peasants marching from victory to victory into the horizon.
I believe that.
I did not believe it blindly.
I studied very hard.
I was so knowledgeable on the topic that I was the first undergraduate to be a teaching assistant in a course on modern China at my college because nobody knew as much as I did.
However, having studied hard, having reached the conclusions I did, I had to accept after Maoism was overthrown, I was wrong.
And it was not just being wrong, it was being humiliated.
Because all the people who told me that you're living in a dream world, and I dismissed them all as being, in the jargon of the day, bourgeois and petty bourgeois, well guess what?
They were right, and I was wrong.
So when I finished my dissertation in the theory of Zionism, And then suddenly this book comes along saying all the premises of my thesis are wrong.
That deeply shook me up, but unlike other people on the so-called pro-Palestine left, I was not prepared to dismiss it as, quote, Zionist propaganda.
Because not too long previously, I had dismissed all criticism of China as bourgeois propaganda.
Once bitten, twice shy.
So when that book came out, I came home from work every night, lie down on my bed.
I see it still.
I lived in like a Raskolnikov kind of apartment, one room apartment, studio apartment.
In the Washington Heights, not a pleasant place to live back then, believe me, between the drug dealers, the roaches, and the mice, I lie down on my bed.
I took out my pad and pencil because I didn't use calculators then.
I still don't use them now.
I'm not recommending it.
I'm just Describing it, and every night for weeks, I kept going over these tables, both in the text of the book and in the appendix, going over them, over them, over them, over them.
There's got to be something wrong here.
It can't be!
Now, those tables were confirmed by the head of population studies at the University of Chicago.
Philip Hauser was his name, and he had a letter appended at the end of the book saying her calculations, meaning the author's, Joan Peterses, were correct.
But I would not desist, because I felt like my whole reputation, not public reputation, my own, my whole understanding of myself, Either I was wrong, and I had to junk my thesis and junk all of my beliefs.
I first got involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict in 1982.
This is about 1985, so three years.
I had to junk all my beliefs.
Either I was wrong, or I had to prove, not to humankind, but to myself, that this book is false.
Well, at one night, 1.30 in the morning, I figured it out.
I found the wrong number.
The fake number.
And as Paul Sweezy, my mentor and friend, the Marxist economist, I told him the story and he said, Finding a fraud, I remember it well.
He said, discovering a fraud is every scholar's eureka.
And that was my eureka moment.
And from there on in, it was a disaster for me.
So just in the interest of kind of time and focusing on this, because this is This part of the discussion, for me, is the key.
What you're describing, when I asked you why you went into academia and what you ended up describing, to me, is the reason academic freedom exists, right?
That you have this ability to kind of spend the time introspectively examining your own foundational views, coming to the conclusion that they're misguided in terms of Maoism, and then taking this text that has an immense impact on discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and having the time And the courage and the freedom to kind of stand up and say this has been debunked.
And yet...
Despite the promises of academic freedom and what the academy is for, rather than having this kind of be the pinnacle of your academic success, it had the exact opposite effect.
It kind of destroyed it.
Noam Chomsky has this quote that I remember reading a few years ago in one of his books, I forget which, where you were talking to him about this early work that you were doing, and he recounts telling you the following, quote, I told him This is Chomsky talking about you.
I told him, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic.
But I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble.
Because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds.
And they're not going to like it.
And they're going to destroy you.
So I said, if you want to do it, go ahead.
But be aware of what you're getting into.
It's an important issue.
It makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population.
It's preparing the basis for some real horrors.
So a lot of people's lives can be at stake.
But your life is at stake, too.
I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.
Well, he didn't believe me.
We became very close friends after this.
I didn't know him before.
Now, I don't think there's much doubt that he was prescient in that warning.
And in addition to the problems you created with this kind of debunking of this very popular and well-regarded book in the West that...
Yeah.
You also ended up getting into a very public feud with Alan Dershowitz that had, in part, and I'm recounting the history for people who don't know, this is before kind of the rights obsession with cancel culture and academic freedom and the like that's kind of been renewed.
In part because of allegations he made about plagiarism with respect to his work, but obviously also because he's a very ardent, devoted loyalist to the State of Israel and disliked you immensely because of your critiques of the State of Israel, including the work that you did here.
It ended up basically getting you fired from DePaul or having to leave DePaul and never being able to really find a footing again in academia.
I'm just wondering, A, looking back on it, do you think that was all worth it, kind of the warning that Chomsky gave you in your decision to go ahead?
And B, given what the right now purports, the American right purports to be its steadfast devotion to free speech, free inquiry, an opposition to cancel culture, which is certainly what happened to you.
You became radioactive in lots of ways after all that.
Did you have any defenders, any people standing up on the American right and defending you at the time?
No.
The one person... First of all, there are many people on the American left who didn't defend me.
The Nation magazine joined my 10-year battle.
It ran an article saying, literally, I was no different than Alan Nershewitz.
That was a big help.
Matthew Rothschild, the editor of the Progressive magazine, he weighed in and said, I'm a Holocaust minimizer.
That was a big help.
Ruth Coniff, who was the political editor of the Progressive magazine, she went on Wisconsin Public Radio, and I was in the Midwest, where the Progressive and Wisconsin Public Radio, and I was in the liberal faculty.
They have an impact.
She went on and said, I'm a Holocaust minimizer.
That, too, was a very big help.
One person Who out of the blue came through for me, and it's something I'm internally in his debt for, even as he's passed into eternity, was a conservative Republican, Raoul Hilberg.
Raoul Hilberg was the founder of the field of Holocaust studies.
He's the author of the monumental work, the first major work in the Nazi Holocaust, really the only, the first major work, nothing, any work.
His was the foundation, the destruction of European Jewry.
And as I said, he was a conservative Republican.
He swore by the Wall Street Journal.
But at several crucial junctures, I had another major confrontation with this fellow named Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who had written this book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, which was also a national bestseller.
And I wrote a long critique saying it's complete nonsense.
And I came under quite severe attack.
Hilbert was the first one to rise to my defense.
And the same thing happened during my tenure battle.
He said that Finkelstein is a competent scholar.
Finkelstein knows what he's doing.
Unfortunately, Finkelstein has fallen victim to this assault.
And he said, but Finkelstein's place in the writing of history is secure.
And unfortunately, it was a great personal sacrifice for him.
So that, to me, was a kind of epiphanal moment A German friend of mine, a historian, her name is Ruth Bettina Byrne, with whom I co-authored a book on the Goldhagen case.
And she once said to me, Norman, a person's character provides much more insight into his or her virtue than their ideology.
And I learned that the hard way.
That it's a person's character, not their ideology, that gives you insight into that person's virtue or lack thereof.
I find that very profound, actually, and I just want to kind of process that, but I hope people will spend a little time pondering what that means in the current context of how we evaluate one another.
Let me, just as the last question on this particular topic, on the question of academic freedom, as I referenced earlier, there is kind of a new debate about academic freedom because there's a new debate about free speech and free inquiry in general.
One of the cases I mentioned to you in preparation for asking you to come on, Was the case of the University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who is a, you know, by all accounts a pretty brilliant person.
She has a remarkable resume of first having studied medicine and become a doctor and a scholar of medicine and then switched to law.
And yet she's also now most known for making some extraordinarily provocative, and I don't mind saying in my view, racist comments.
as part of her ideology.
There's also claims that she has made not just statements that are ideologically offensive as part of her advocacy, but also has had incidents where, involving inappropriate behavior with students, meaning she's been abusive to students based on this ideology.
If we can, she denies a lot of those claims.
After I asked you about this, you published an article with your views on the Amy Wax case that we're going to encourage our audience to read.
But if we could bracket out the issue of whether she actually behaved inappropriately with her students in terms of abusing them because of this ideology, something she denies that's under investigation.
If, If instead the only controversy about Amy Wax was that she espouses what most people now regard as an overtly racist ideology, Would that, in your view, make her outside of the limits of what academic freedom protects?
And I guess just more generally, what is your view of what academic freedom should and should not protect?
Academic freedom has many aspects to it.
I'm going to try to limit myself to the ones which I think are most pertinent.
Number one, What you should be allowed to say or what you should be allowed to teach.
And there I think there are two poles.
Anything that possesses what might be called ideational content.
There's an idea there.
If there's an idea there, if it's susceptible to rational inquiry, then that idea should be openly debated and there should be no taboos.
That's one pole.
At the other pole is speech, which, in my opinion, is devoid of any ideational content.
So, should a student be subject to being called a c***, a d***, or a c***?
That's speech.
But so far as I could tell, it's speech devoid of any ideational content.
And therefore, in a university, I'm not saying in the public, In the university, I think that kind of speech should be banned.
Now the ACLU disagrees with me on that.
I disagree with the ACLU on that.
Then there's a second consideration.
The second consideration is what you can say on campus versus what you can say off campus.
What's often said to be the distinction between the professor in his or her professional life Versus off-campus, what a professor is allowed to do in his or her personal life as a citizen protected by the First Amendment.
There, I think, not always, not always, but quite often, that distinction is artificial.
So, for example, if a professor in the privacy of his or her home off-campus, on his or her own Should he be, should he, assuming it's a he, should he be allowed to say that on his personal blog, as it were, off campus, and so on and so forth?
My answer is no, because it's impossible, even though it's speech exercised off campus in a personal blog, it's impossible for that sort of language not to seep into his interactions with his female students.
So I think this particular distinction is kind of, not in all instances, but in many instances, it's artificial.
The third consideration is civility.
Namely, a university is a community.
For some, it's a temporary community, namely students for four years.
For others, it's a very long community.
You know, professors don't leave until they're taken out in a box.
So it's 30 years that you have to live with somebody.
And there is a standard the American Association of University Professors call the standard of civility.
Without going into the fine points, there is some sort of mutual tolerance that has to exist, both broadly on the campus, but also within departments.
You know, a large part of department life is taken up with administrative concerns, faculty committees, And so forth.
So there has to be some modus vivendi among faculty, but also with students.
Okay?
So those are what you might call the three parameters or the three principles that have to be taken into account.
Now, let me be clear about this.
For me, the supreme responsibility of any professor is the students.
I don't care if you're at a Research One university, I don't care if you're at a Research Zero university, or in my case I was mostly at Research Minus One universities.
Regardless, your supreme responsibility is to nurture your students, bring out the best in them, prepare them for life, But at the same time to convey to them the joys, the exhilaration of the life of the mind.
Everything else to me is secondary.
Now I know in many universities research is primary and everything else is secondary.
Usually teaching is zero.
Because if you know the best professors, the top professors, they bargain and negotiate In order to bring down their teaching responsibility to zero.
That's the goal.
Let me just interject, because in the interest of time, too, we're running out of time, and I just want to... Let me just ask you, both in the case of MUX and yourself, using that framework you just laid out, couldn't the argument be made, and I think in fact the argument was made, that as a professor who wrote a book,
In which you argued that the Nazi extermination of Jews as part of the Holocaust is now exploited by an industry largely of Jewish advocates as a way of shielding Israel from criticism, that that kind of advocacy falls so extremely on the ears of many, perhaps most Jewish students, that it automatically
Even within the realm of the distinctions you drew, creates a kind of hostile or uncomfortable environment in which a civil affinity between yourself and your students becomes impossible.
In other words, doesn't that framework, once you leave the ACLU absolutist position, have the potential very quickly, both in your case and in Amy Wax's, and in lots of other professors who have suffered because of their views, I don't want to repeat myself, but I think I'll just have to at this point.
Your views are so offensive, so deeply and viscerally offensive to so many students that it prevents what you describe as the highest purpose of a professor from being fulfilled.
I don't want to repeat myself, but I think I'll just have to at this point.
If an idea has ideational content, it has to be open to rational inquiry.
In the case of Amy Waxman, overwhelmingly, Amy Wax, excuse me, I forget that she- No worries.
Yeah.
In the case of Amy Wax, I overwhelmingly said she had the right to teach or to state many of the statements that the dean of the law school found so offensive as to warrant taking some sort I overwhelmingly said she had the right to teach or to state many of the I I said, no, these statements have ideational content.
They should be allowed.
I do have some questions on whether her fellow faculty have an obligation to respect her.
Now that has been an issue.
Whether in the name of civility you have to respect your fellow faculty or at least respect their academic undertakings.
That case came up with Angela Davis and Jensen, Arthur Jensen at Harvard.
About who, by the way, I just have to mention one of my favorite lines you've ever uttered about Angela Davis, that she went from being on the top 10 most wanted FBI list to being among the top five most coveted invites on Martha's Vineyard.
First set of color.
And the question was, Arthur Jensen from the Harvard Educational School said that black people had basically the intelligence of baboons.
And that Angela Davis, who attended the Sorbonne, who studied under Adorno at the Free University in West Germany, who was teaching Kant at the age of 22 at the UCLA philosophy department, Whether she had the obligation to respect his research.
And in my book, even though I am squirrelly on the side of academic freedom, that to me was a bridge too far.
She had no obligation to respect him.
Now when it comes to Amy Wex, I said, most of what she said, in my opinion, was defensible.
However, When she said things like, and now I'm quoting her, if you go into medical schools, you'll see the Indians, South Asians, are now rising stars.
These diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now.
Well, Saying that about students, sorry, you lose me.
Bridge too far, get your behind out of academia.
You lost me.
That is a Nazi statement.
It's as obscene as any professor in Nazi Germany benefiting from the protections of the state Saying in a class with Jews that you see all the Jews in the medical profession, and there were a lot of Jews in the medical profession in Germany, they're poisoning the establishment.
No, you don't have a right to say that.
Not because, not because I am Amending my commitment to academic freedom, but because that statement has no ideational content.
It's simply a club to break the skull of students in the class.
That's unacceptable.
Personally, and I'm being dead serious with you, if a student told me that story, I'd make a beeline For Ms.
Wax's office.
And if she confirmed that she said that, I'd spit in her face.
There is no gray area with statements like that.
There is none.
And I will say one other thing.
We're dealing with a law school.
The dean is certainly sensitive to the prospect of lawsuits.
It's a law school, and Amy Wax is evidently a force to reckon with.
I do not believe that he made up statements like that.
I do not believe it.
He would have been ultra careful, checked it with a dozen university lawyers, checked it with the president, before on university stationary, he put in print statements like that, and that was one of several.
Which, to my thinking, went way over the line.
All right, so you are part of the show in which, at least for that academic freedom part, we're going to include her so people will be able to hear from her.
I do want to note at least some of those statements she denies making.
Obviously, a lot of the ones that are in controversy she admits making.
There's an investigation underway.
So more than having you arbitrate those disputes, I was very interested in hearing your principles about how we think about academic freedom, and you certainly laid that out as you always do.
With great candor and kind of unflinching honesty, and that's why I wanted to have you on.
Norman, thank you so much.
It was a super helpful contribution to the discussion.
I really appreciate.
Norman, welcome back.
It's great to see you for what will be part two of our interview.
Well, thank you for having me.
Yeah.
So just to remind us, and it's been a while in our audience as well, we had you on to talk about academic freedom in the context of your own trajectory, also the case of University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Amy Wax.
And we recorded back then what was intended to be a kind of a wide ranging interview, but due to time constraints, we didn't finish.
So we're back for part two.
And I want to focus as part of our discussion on your 2022 book, It's called I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It, Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom.
As the title suggests, it's kind of a critique of what I would say is left liberal politics on things like the culture war and just liberal politics in general.
So before we get to those specific topics I definitely want to delve into, I want to first start with the current war in Ukraine, given that this is a war being not just prosecuted by a Democratic president, but supported by Virtually the entire Democratic Party, at least on the national elected level.
President Biden himself, who's conducting this proxy war, says the world is closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any point since 1962 because of this war.
And yet, since he said that, he's continued to escalate the U.S.
role in that war.
I want to ask you about the domestic politics in a second.
But first, what about the war itself and the U.S.
role in it?
What do you make of that?
Well, I think the first thing to make of it is there's been an absolute collapse of what used to be called the left on the issue of war, U.S.
foreign policy, which to my recollection, at any rate, is unprecedented.
Nowadays, when you want to find out what's going on or hear an alternative point of view, I have to tune into this guy, Mr. McGregor, a former military person, or I have to tune into John Mearsheimer.
Who's only on Fox News?
Who's only on Fox News?
He's on quite a few, I think, right-wing news programs that I catch on YouTube.
Or I turn to John Mearsheimer, who's a wonderful guy.
Politically, he's a conventional realist political theorist.
Or several others, a couple of liberals, but absolutely nobody on the left has anything critical to say about the war.
That's very unusual.
I go back quite a long ways.
And to have no left criticism of a U.S.
war, maybe that hasn't happened since World War II, if you could believe that.
I think that's an accurate statement.
So, that's the first thing.
As to the war itself, there have been a certain number of voices on the left, including yourself, who have gone so far as to say that the war was provoked.
And you can hear statements like that from Professor Chomsky, from Professor Mearsheimer, Aaron Maté.
What's the fellow's name from Columbia?
His name is Jeffrey Sachs.
But there is always a limit to that criticism.
And the criticism always is, yes, he was the Russians.
I don't like to say Putin, because it's the entire political elite in Russia who are supporting the war.
And I think overwhelmingly the population, though you could say the population because they're manipulated by government propaganda.
So we'll set them aside for a moment.
The limit always is, yes, he was provoked, yes, he was provoked, yes, he could see a sequence of events beginning with the decomposition of the Soviet Union into Russia, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin to Medvedev.
Everybody will grant that.
There's a limit, and the limit is still the war was an act of aggression and the war has to be condemned.
I don't accept that limit.
I'm not going to squander your time now to going through my own reasoning, but I think the challenge is, in my opinion, of people like yourself.
At what point, at what point does a provocation become so severe So outrageous that a country has the right to react.
I remember just to give you a kind of analogy, not perfect, but an analogy.
You're too young, I think, to remember how it came about that the Black Panthers chose the Black Panther as their symbol.
And back then, I could be mistaken about this, but my memory is, because a Black Panther, if you attack it, it retreats.
If you attack it, it retreats.
If you attack it and it's back against the wall, it leaps out at you.
And for me, that metaphor worked quite well for Russia.
They gave 30 years, 30 years, not a trivial period of time, over to trying to resolve this issue diplomatically.
They made every possible effort to achieve a diplomatic settlement of the conflict.
Now, it was not hard to resolve.
In fact, it was very easy to resolve, and a resolution would not in the least have impinged On Ukrainian sovereignty, it required just two things.
Number one, NATO, not Ukraine.
NATO could simply have said, given the apparent provocation or seen as a provocation by Russia, Ukraine cannot join NATO now.
That's all.
That's all I have to say.
And secondly, to implement what's called the Minsk II agreement to grant local autonomy to the Donbass region, the Russian-speaking region of Ukraine.
If those two conditions were met, to my thinking, Absolutely reasonable.
Actually, I thought the most reasonable statement was made by your head of state before he became president, namely Lula.
Lula was asked by Time Magazine his opinion on the war in Ukraine.
He said this was not a difficult issue to resolve.
He was speaking then not about NATO, he said about the EU.
He said the EU could simply have said to Zelensky, not now.
Now is not the right time.
Now it's true that Lula also denounced- He did, I was about to say.
He did exactly the thing for which you're criticizing everyone else.
He said- Right.
But let me interject there then and kind of use it as an example, but also in kind of defense of my own position.
I'm not actually that very, I'm not that big on making a big melodramatic showing that I'm condemning Russia or think Russia was unjustified in its invasion.
Though if someone asked me specifically for an answer, I will ultimately conclude it was unjustified.
But I don't, you seem to be suggesting there's a kind of intellectual incoherence there.
And let me just suggest to you that, for example, I spent a lot of years saying, That the kind of official explanation for why 9-11 happened, namely they hate us for our freedoms, and all of that was preposterous.
But of course there was provocation there as well.
We had put troops in Saudi Arabia, which they regard as a heretical invasion of sacred land.
We had supported Israel and their occupation of Palestine.
Not that Osama bin Laden cared that much about that, but a lot of his supporters did.
And most of all, we imposed a sanction regime on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, et cetera, et cetera, that we have been infringing in that region for so many years in so many different ways that, of course, there was something provocative about that.
And even the CIA has a word called blowback, which is where if you interfere in other countries, it's eventually going to come back to U.S. soil.
But to note that doesn't mean you simultaneously have to say that 9-11 was morally justified, the attack was, or that it was legally or ethically justified as well.
You can see provocation in what the West was doing in that region while still objecting to the path that was chosen.
And in the case of Russia, it could easily say, if my argument was that the U.S. had no right to invade Iraq or Vietnam or whatever without international approval in violation of the UN Charter, that's also true of Russia.
But I just say that to say I understand what you're saying, that sometimes people want to stay within the bounds of decency by saying, I hate Russia, I condemn Russia, but I don't think it's intellectually inconsistent either to both see provocation and view it as unjustified.
The reaction?
Well, there are many things to say to that.
And obviously it's a fair point, but then you have to see whether the analogy works.
Did Osama bin Laden spend 30 years trying to negotiate a settlement with the West over the issue of the Middle East?
Did Osama bin Laden begin the war, as any war is begun, by targeting military targets?
Now, you could say at some point At some point, the war deteriorated.
And Russia, you know, predictably, but inexcusably, probably engaged in what are called, you know, violations of international humanitarian war crimes.
Yeah, yeah, you're correct.
Fine.
But that's not what happened.
What happened was 30 years of negotiations.
And It wasn't as if the situation on the ground was static.
Had it been static, you could say, give the negotiations more time.
But that's not what happened.
What happened was, at some point, arms were pouring into Ukraine from NATO.
At some point, NATO and Ukraine were engaging in joint military exercises.
At some point, a massive attack seemed to be looming against the Donbass region.
And then you have to ask yourself a simple question, though I admit the answer may not be simple.
The simple question is, at what point do these provocations reach a threshold such that Russia has the right to respond?
And I would want to emphasize that what happened there has to be seen In the broader context of the fact that the generation that's now ruling Russia, the Putin generation, he happens to be within one year of my age.
He's 70.
I'm going on 70.
That generation has very vivid memories of invasion and war.
Russia, in my opinion, had the right to say it would not tolerate nuclear-tipped missiles on its border.
Within five minutes range of Moscow.
Which was the American objection for the Cuban Missile Crisis, or very similar to it.
But Norman, hold on, let me just ask you.
So when I discuss this issue with supporters of the US proxy war in Ukraine, or people who are all draped in their blue and yellow flags and the like, I present to them the alternative hypothesis that imagine China or Russia in Mexico changing the government of Mexico to a more pro-Moscow or pro-Beijing government the way the U.S.
did in Kiev.
Imagine tons of Russian or Chinese arms flowing into Mexico right on the other side of the U.S.
border that are specifically designed to either deter U.S.
forces or be used against it I bet you most people who are saying that what Russia did is so unjustified would support U.S.
actions against such a provocation in Mexico.
They'd have no trouble seeing why that's very threatening behavior.
But let me ask you that question.
If China and Russia were as involved in Mexico in the same way as the U.S.
is in Ukraine, would you support U.S.
incursions, military incursions, into Mexico and then say it was a justifiable provocation?
The problem with these kinds of questions is, how well does the analogy hold?
Was the United States the victim of an invasion from either Mexico, or the other example that's commonly given, or Canada, in which a tenth of its population was exterminated?
The Nazis waged a war of extermination on the Eastern Front.
Did Mexico wage a war of extermination on the United States?
Did Canada wage a war of extermination on the United States?
But the U.S.
was allied with Russia.
I mean, you're basically molding, melding German history and American history and saying the Russians rightly feared Germany and therefore look at the U.S.
and kind of attach German crimes to the United States.
I don't want to go into the details now.
At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States was planning an invasion of Cuba.
It was at that point that the Russian stage station or stage missiles in Cuba to fend off the U.S.
invasion.
There was a very easy way to resolve that particular issue.
The issue was resolved by the United States agreeing to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, the nuclear-tipped missiles they had in Turkey aimed at Russia, and to agree not to invade Cuba.
There was a simple solution.
The U.S.
rejected it.
Russia now put forth a simple solution.
The neutrality of Ukraine, not to belong to an Eastern military bloc, not to belong to a Western military bloc, and to implement the accords that were reached to resolve the question of the Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.
That, to me, is not a complicated question.
It doesn't impinge in any way on Ukrainian sovereignty.
It was a decision for NATO to make.
Of course.
Thank you for the application, but we're rejecting that application.
Exactly.
The U.S.
is not duty-bound to defend every country.
Of course, every country would love to be defended in a pact where the U.S.
says, if anyone touches your soil, we will go to war in your defense.
Everybody would love that.
It doesn't mean we're required to give that commitment.
And of course, the fact, I mean, of course, I recognize all of these things the United States government has done in Ukraine.
I never thought I found myself in the position where I'm debating this war with somebody that wiggled into that side of me that you find yourself in.
But I totally understand the point you're making, which is, look, if you're saying that what the U.S.
has done is so provocative so repeatedly, as I agree, at some point you have to say, well, the Russians got provoked.
And I guess for me, You know, the framework is, as I said earlier, that we need some kind of consistent rules about when countries can just send their military across the border and wage war on another country.
But I think we went over that.
Let me just try and, in the name of time, switch gears just a little bit.
I do want to ask you, because you mentioned this at the start, and I was going to ask you it anyway because it relates to your book, about the domestic political component of it, which is that here we are kind of As I said, in agreement on what usually in mainstream discourse nobody will agree on, which is that this war was provoked, that the US at least, as Lula said, the West bears at least 50% of the blame.
That's something I would agree to.
And yet you won't find anyone in mainstream left-wing politics, by which I mean to say even a member of the House of Representatives on the left To oppose Biden's proxy war in Ukraine.
The last time there was a vote in Congress, it was last May, to authorize $40 billion more for the US to spend on the war in Ukraine.
Every single Democrat, Norman, every last one, Bernie, AOC, the Squad, the House Progressive Caucus, everyone unanimously voted yes.
The only no votes were about seven dozen from the kind of pro-Trump or populist wing of the Republican Party.
Why is that?
Why are Democrats united Unanimously, at least on that level, in support of this NATO-EU militarism and war.
Well, I want to just backtrack a half moment.
It's not that only that there are no dissidents, which would be bad enough.
There are not even any interest in querying what's happening.
You could have had House hearings.
You could have had Congressional hearings.
Okay, I don't agree with them, but let's bring in John Mearsheimer.
Let's bring in Jeffrey Sachs.
Let's hear what they have to say.
There's not even a willingness to hear, to contemplate, to consider The other side, or an other side, if it's not necessarily the other side, there are various opinions.
When Bernie Sanders, for whom I have to say in recent months my feelings about him have deeply soured, that Bernie Sanders when he was asked most recently about the Ukraine He says, well, I don't study it very much.
OK, fair enough.
He's an older gentleman and he can't master every field, you know, bearing on a U.S.
administration.
But then he said, I trust Biden.
I trust the Biden administration.
Has Biden showed such excellent judgment in foreign policy?
Was he an early critic of the war in Vietnam?
Did he oppose the attack on Iraq?
Where is this trust that now Bernie invests in Biden such that he doesn't even want to consider the possibility that maybe Biden might be wrong on this question?
What is the answer to that?
Where does that come from?
Where does that come from on the American left?
I think in his case, the answer is simple.
And I could understand the calculation.
His calculation is I'm going to focus on the domestic agenda of Biden and try to extract as much as I can on that domestic agenda.
And he recognizes that if he breaks ranks on Ukraine, he's going to lose Biden's ear.
That's a trade-off that he made.
He made that trade-off from the day after Biden was elected, because he had two options.
He had two options.
The first option was the one he articulated throughout his campaign, when he was repeatedly asked during his campaign, Bernie, how can you possibly believe that you can get your agenda through Congress?
Which was obviously a fair question.
His response was always the same.
He said that, of course, I can't get it through Congress unless I bring masses of people into the street.
That's how extra, as it used to be called, extra parliamentary pressure.
That's what leftist movements used to do.
That was the first option.
The second option is go to the back door or back room and try to whisper in Biden's ear and try to extract as much as you can in the back room, knowing full well that if you try to bring out masses of people into the streets, Committing civil disobedience, willing to get arrested in order to get that agenda through.
He knew full well he will lose Biden.
Because Biden doesn't like those tactics, especially when they're directed against him and his administration.
So he had a choice.
The back room or reach out to his mass constituency.
Which was real.
He chose the back room.
Which is particularly strange, Norman, because the success of Bernie's 2016 campaign was to promise a political revolution against the establishment wings of both parties.
And on top of that, this idea that you could extricate domestic policy over here and foreign policy over here as though they're not interconnected.
Martin Luther King, in his famous speech in the Riverside Church, I apologize for having mistakenly thought that you could do that and focusing on domestic policy.
And now I realize the war in Vietnam and U.S. imperialism is why we have these domestic policies in the United States.
And they're inextricably linked and you can't connect them.
But this kind of movement on Bernie's part to say, I'm going to play the backdoor game, the kind of insider game in Washington and this fantasy that you're going to push the Democrats and Biden left is accompanied by not just changes in the disappearance of the anti-war the kind of insider game in Washington and this fantasy that you're going to push the Democrats and Biden left is accompanied by not just changes in the disappearance of the anti-war sentiment on the left, but also the idea that the staple of liberal politics, but also the idea that the staple of liberal politics, especially left-wing politics in
This was a central formative view of left-wing politics in the United States.
And now polls show that the greatest support that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA gets is not from Republicans any longer, but there's a lot of skepticism, but from the left-wing or liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
And there was recently an episode that illustrated this, which was this story that Matt Taibbi and others did, revealing that the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, the US security state, is interfering in our politics, trying to censor the internet, This was a story that only got support among, again, the same kind of right-wing populist wing of the Republicans.
And Democrats and liberals were enraged by these revelations.
And it culminated last week with this liberal left MSNBC host, Mehdi Hassan, basically declaring the Twitter files to be fraudulent because he found two minor errors that weren't even errors, really, in Taibbi's reporting.
And everybody cheered and treated Mehdi Hassan like a hero.
Because they were apparently so angry about exposing the censorship and other nefarious acts of the CIA and FBI.
What happened here, Norman?
Why is it the American left and American liberals who now rise in defense of these U.S.
security state agencies?
Well, first of all, I want to say, I don't think it's a left.
I don't want to get bogged down definitions, but what's called the liberal left or the woke left.
The mainstream left.
Like the kind of elected officials, the Bernie AOC left.
I don't consider it a left.
And just allow me to develop one theme in the book and then get back to the Naftali Hassan, Matt Taibbi dust up.
One of the main arguments in my book is that the main function of identity politics, the main function of this woke politics, is to stop a left from forming and from fragmenting it.
Now, that's not a theory.
That's not speculation.
You saw that in action.
You saw how during the 2016 presidential campaign, Democratic primary, the 2020 Democratic primary, it was all of the woke left, the woke left, that formed a juggernaut to stop Bernie Sanders.
The most woke publication on earth right now is the New York Times.
And it's a very interesting fact about the New York Times.
The New York Times had two characteristics.
Number one, hyper-woke.
Number two, hyper-anti-Bernie.
Sydney Ember of the New York Times, she covered the Bernie beat.
And her main job was to stop Bernie.
When they mentioned him, it was to discredit him.
Now, It wasn't just organs like the New York Times.
It was the high priests and high priestesses of woke politics.
The Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Kimberly Crenshaw, the Wolfie Goldberg, the Joy Reid.
Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi, these are people you name in your book.
But these in particular, the ones I named, Angela Davis, Angela Davis, they kept attacking Bernie.
He's weak on the reparations question, said Ta-Nehisi Coates.
He's weak on the block question, says Angela Davis.
When are you going to drop out of the race, snarls Whoopi Goldberg on The View.
Joy Reid brings in a body language reader to prove that Bernie is a congenital liar.
At the moment of truth, at the moment of truth, the woke politics revealed its rotten, rancid core.
And now that brings us to Mehdi Hassan.
I know Mehdi only in passing.
I met him on a couple of occasions, so I can't claim any personal knowledge of him.
However, I have followed aspects of his career.
Before the Bernie Sanders campaign, its precursor was Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
And at a certain point, just like our ruling elite wanted to stop Bernie, The British ruling elite wanted to stop Jeremy Corbyn, who already was the head of the Labour Party.
Bernie was, you know, still in the primary stage.
What happened?
This huge, hysterical campaign, this hysterical campaign was whipped up, accusing the Labour Party under Corbyn's tutelage, and then Corbyn himself of being an anti-Semite and the party being riddled rife with the Labour Party anti-Semitism.
One of the first slime attacks on Bernie came from this fellow named Jonathan Friedland in the UK.
On Corbyn you mean?
On Bernie or Corbyn?
Yes.
On Corbyn.
On Corbyn.
Right.
Yes, with Jonathan Friedland in the UK.
And Friedland started to say that the Labour Party is rife with anti-Semitism.
Before you knew it, before you knew it, who joined in with Jonathan Friedland?
Who joined in?
Mehti Hassan.
They wrote a joint letter in which they said, and now I'm quoting us, both of us have condemned Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party for its failure to tackle anti-Jewish racism.
Subsequently, Mehdi Hassan, filled with torment, filled with pain, consumed by guilt, says, I reluctantly consumed by guilt, says, I reluctantly have to conclude.
I don't see how else I can conclude anything except that Corbyn is an anti-Semite.
Or, I'm paraphrasing him now, so I quote him, He cites a piece in one of the British periodicals which said, quote, I gave Corbyn the benefit of the doubt and anti-Semitism.
I can't anymore.
And then Mehdi Hassan says, who, like me, has defended Corbyn up until now, but like me, Struggles to defend his quote-unquote Zionist remarks that have emerged from 2013.
This sack of shit opportunist!
Because what could be more useful to the British as they try to discredit Corbyn as being an anti-Semite than to get a Muslim on board?
Because supposedly Jeremy was partial to Muslims, and here comes along a Muslim who says, I have to admit, I'm so reluctant to have to admit it, I have no choice.
Jeremy Corbyn, he's an anti-Semite.
That was so despicable that I went to my email and I sent Mehdi an email that just said, Et tu, Mehdi?
The moment of truth.
The moment of truth.
Et tu, Mehdi?
And he replied, he had no idea what I was talking about.
This Oxford graduate who prides himself on his mastery of English, he couldn't understand et tu?
Well, Norman, let me just interject here.
You know, in general, the hallmark of good careerists is they know their moment to strike.
That's what it means to be an opportunist.
They seize their opportunity.
And few people do it as better than he.
I don't know if you know this story, but about six or seven years earlier, He had written an email to the Daily Mail when he was trying to break into British media, offering himself up as sort of the House Muslim, saying, I'm a Muslim, I'm a critic of the war on terror, but I'd like to work for you and attack the left on gay rights and abortion, both of which I'm on your side over.
He's very, you know, crafty at going.
So put this into the context of what he just did with Matt Taibbi and the Twitter files.
I would like to get to that.
Go ahead.
Now he's become the woke avenger at MSNBC.
Now, you know and I know, because you're an experienced debater, everybody knows that they find two errors in what you wrote.
The standard line is, this book is replete with errors, but for reasons of space, I can only name two.
That's the standard tactic.
That's why everybody stays up nights terrified of making two errors, because they know that two will easily be turned by any hack, any hack interlocutor into rife replete with errors.
Now, I listened to Mehdi Hassan.
He said to Matt Taibbi, your reporting is filled with error, after error, after error.
That's what he said.
Now, I have a challenge to Mechdi.
When I went on Democracy Now!
in 2004 or 2005, I can't remember now, and I said that Alan Dershowitz's book was filled with false statements, errors, and lies.
When I walked out of that studio, And Alan Dershowitz denied my claim, as would be predictable.
I said, I have an obligation now.
I made that statement on the air.
I have an obligation to demonstrate it, to prove it, that I'm not playing this.
I found two errors.
And then, for reasons of space, I could only know.
I sat down and wrote a book.
Now, I'm saying to Mehdi Hassan, You said error after error after error after error.
Sit down and document that claim.
Not necessarily in a book, but even like a post, like a blog post.
I'm sure MSNBC will give you a leave of absence to document it.
And if you notice, he said at one point, We have found error after error after error, which means the hacks at MSNBC desperately tried to find something and then passed it over to him.
So I'm sure MSNBC will give him the hacks that supply those three errors.
You sit down and produce the document that shows error after error after error.
If you produce it, My hat's off to you.
If you don't, you're a blowhard.
And a fraud.
So, Norman, let me just ask you this question.
Let's rotate it.
Produce that document.
So here's the thing that I find so interesting about this is when I did the Snowden reporting and we exposed the activities of the NSA that were unconstitutional and illegal, spying on Americans en masse, Obviously, the people who set out to discredit the reporting and me were defenders of the NSA, the people who believed in the U.S.
security state.
That was totally predictable.
The U.S.
government, its kind of apparatchiks and media and the think tank world, those are the people who attacked me, which made sense.
They wanted to malign the reporting because the reporting exposed an agency they support, which is the NSA.
Matt Taibbi's reporting exposed the nefarious acts of the CIA, Homeland Security, the FBI.
Why is Mehdi Hassan, who still identifies, as he said in his op-ed, attacking Jeremy Corbyn, I, like him, am a man of the left.
Why is Mehdi Hassan so eager to malign reporting and reporters, which expose the CIA, the FBI, and Homeland Security?
Because that's their job.
That's why I think it's wrong to describe them as a left.
Their purpose is, there's basically three purposes.
Purpose number one of this woke left, this MSNBC left, is to provide a new base for the Democratic Party.
Large numbers of white workers, which used to be the base of the Democratic Party, have exited or have been, in effect, asked to leave.
So there is a vacuum there.
And the vacuum has to be filled.
A party needs a base.
It's not just who votes on Election Day.
It needs a mobilized, galvanized, committed base.
So identity politics has been conscripted to fill that void, that vacuum.
You're too young to remember.
I have to keep repeating that.
No, keep saying that.
That's important.
Okay, things changed very significantly.
You go back and listen in 1984 to Mario Cuomo's keynote address at the Democratic Party Convention.
It was all about supporting the working class.
And it was attacking the Republican Party for being the party of the rich.
And we, the Democratic Party, are the party of the working class.
You'll go, look, I did.
I sat down and I listened to the nights, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
It was either four nights or five nights, I think four nights, of the Democratic Convention.
The working class was barely mentioned.
It was literally barely mentioned.
There was one tiny segment devoted to four workers, and at Channel 13, it was cut.
They cut it.
So, to fill the void in the Democrat Party, number two, to create a juggernaut to stop a class struggle
And number three, the purpose of woke politics is to give a veneer, a patina, of being progressive to being cutting edge while at the same time not making any sacrifices.
What does it take for people in Martha's Vineyard to be woke?
Do they pay a price?
Do they have to give up any of their wealth?
There's no sacrifice nowadays to these woke politics.
You know, if you go back and you look at the history of the left, people are killed for being on the left.
They're in jail for being on the left.
That's what it meant to be a person of the left.
It meant making real, material, and mortal sacrifice for a cause.
What does it mean now?
You go and look at Judith Butler.
In 2020, there's a big announcement.
A big announcement.
Judith Butler is doing something world historic.
Right up there with the Paris Commune.
The Bolshevik Revolution.
The Spanish Civil War.
What does she do?
She announces that her new pronouns are they-them.
Her new pronouns are they-them.
Oh, that's a real act of martyrdom.
That's Christ being nailed to the cross.
It's so laughable what passes now for radical politics.
Radical politics is raking in tons and tons and tons of cash.
That's radical politics.
Ibram X. Kendi gets $10 million from Jack Dorsey.
Barack Obama gets $100 million from Jeff Bezos.
Van Jones gets $100 million from Jeff Bezos.
The Black Lives Matter so-called leadership, they collected $90 million in the year of the George Floyd demonstrations.
None of the activists saw one dime of it.
But Patrice Cullors, one of the so-called leaders, she goes out and purchases four homes.
Another of the leaders starts doing commercials for Cadillac.
This is a bonanza.
This is a bonanza.
This is not sacrifice.
This is not what the left used to stand for.
It's just making money grifters.
There are grifters making money off of the courts on the one hand and then there are all these fake radical people pretending they are so cutting edge and so woke because they changed their pronouns or they drool over trans people.
This is so You know, it's just, I sit down at night lately and I read the classic literature, you know, people like Rosa Luxemburg, and I watch how if you read their literature, you know, even Gandhi, Gandhi's actually another example, even though he never considered himself of the radical left, how they count every penny that they get for the cause
To make sure that every single dime is accounted for.
This is the people's money.
This is the people's cause.
And then I see people like, even after all the scandals with Patrisse Cullors, she's invited back to Democracy Now, which called itself the exception to the rulers.
After all the scandals, they didn't ask her, or the moderator didn't ask her a single question about all the allegations against her.
So many people's organizations, grassroots organizations, the mothers, the mothers of the kids who were killed, We're charging that they weren't seeing a dime of that $90 million that was connected.
And you don't hold the leaders accountable at all because they're woke, because they're part of the in crowd, because they hang out at Martha's Vineyard.
Because they show up at Sundance Film Festival?
You want me to call that the left?
It has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of left that I have ever known.
And it's certainly not a left with which I'm about to identify or to give a free pass In the name of solidarity.
Solidarity with whom?
Where are the sacrifices for the cause?
I don't see it.
Yeah, Norman.
So let me just say, that is the sort of scathing, I think, very well-informed critique you will get from Norman and that you get from your book as well.
I really want to encourage people to read it, especially if you found that last kind of bit cathartic.
There you see it on the screen, it's I'll burn that bridge.
When I get to it, some of those things you said were, you know, put into words better than I could have myself despite how I feel about it.
You just look at polling data and it is shocking to see, again, it's not conservative Democrats or, you know, a certain wing of Democrats.
It's Democrats in general, which has now swallowed up a good portion of that Bernie movement, unfortunately, because Bernie led them into the Democratic Party when he decided to go that route.
And it leaves very little space for dissent from views that have long been the province of nothing but the establishment, support for the CIA and the FBI and Biden's various militarism and war proxies.
It's remarkable the transformation that has happened.
Just go ahead with the last answer because we're out of time, but go ahead with ...
I don't expect everybody to agree with me with my opinions on the Ukraine.
The problem is, there's no questioning at all.
Just the other day, I recently reached Medicare age.
I tried to contact Medicare.
It's impossible to contact them on the phone.
It's absolutely impossible.
I challenge anybody to dispute me on that point.
Impossible.
I finally go down to the Social Security Agency.
I'm talking to one of the agents.
She said that you call Medicare.
I said, it's impossible.
I said, could you imagine?
We're in the 21st century.
We have a dozen different forms of communication.
We have telephone.
We have email.
We have fax.
We have Social media.
You can't contact a basic government agency.
I said to me, it nauseates me.
A hundred billion dollars for the Ukraine.
A hundred billion dollars for the Ukraine.
And you can't provide a phone service for senior citizens.
You can't provide a phone service.
And that's what I say to Bernie.
Yeah, and unfortunately you have to go to you or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Fox News or some, you know, to get that message.
I mean, that was Marjorie Taylor Greene's message was women don't have formula for milk and we're sending $100 million to Ukraine.
Norman, I gotta go.
We are out of time.
We will definitely have you back on.
It's always a pleasure.
I really encourage people to pick up that book.
Aside from it being colorful, it's also a very steady critique of what has become of liberal politics, Democratic Party politics.
In the United States.
Norman, always a pleasure.
Thanks so much.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As always, we are appreciative of those of you who watch.
We will be back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
