Live from New York, it's Get Off My Lawn with Gavin McGuinness.
Welcome to Get Off My Lawn.
I am here with Ron Coleman.
He's a well-known free speech attorney and also one of the poorest basketball players.
The poorest.
Say it.
The worst basketball player.
Certainly pound for pound.
How many baskets would you say you got in your life?
Oh, I got baskets, but no one else had to be anywhere near me and everyone else had to go home.
Right, that's logical.
You know, it's funny when you talk to baby boomers, Jewish baby boomers from Brooklyn.
You guys were obsessed with basketball in the 80s and the 70s.
Certainly in the 70s.
By the 80s, it was pretty clear the jig was up, that height was going to be an issue, and that wasn't the main thing we had to bring to the table.
And also, like, the whole urban Brooklyn Jewish experience was becoming a suburban thing.
And in the suburbs, there are other things to catch your attention.
Oh, that could be a whole documentary on the death of Jewish basketball.
Yeah, back at the end.
And it'd be as interesting as Great Jewish Sports Heroes, that pamphlet they give out an airport.
Right.
Or airplane.
It was airplane.
Yes, yes, yes.
I wanted to talk to you about a lot of things, the political climate today, obviously.
I also want to talk about God.
Why do I see you as such a God expert?
Because I must have done something proper and appropriate at some juncture during our relationship.
Yeah, you're not known as a theist.
Like, every time someone has an argument about God, I go, oh, you should talk to Ron Coleman.
But I'm realizing now, why do I imbue you with all this authority?
Because on the one hand, you know that I have some training as a rabbinical student.
And on the other hand, I'm a regular guy.
I see.
So you don't know too many people who offer you.
Actually, there's some that you just don't know.
You don't know that they are that person, but you know that I'm that person.
I know that you're that person.
The Yamaka just gives you so much information.
Ready?
Ready?
But let's start with the political climate today.
Yes, let's keep it profane.
I was talking to a friend this morning, and we were talking about, you know, George W. Bush.
We've had Republican presidents before, and people hated GW.
But this is different.
And it seems like every month it's even crazier.
I mean, now you have political violence everywhere, smashing windows, but we also have mainstream politicians saying, let's take it to the streets.
Maxime Waters said, let's take it to the streets.
I think there was a guy, was it Tim Kaine?
I just saw a guy recently saying, we need to take this fight to the streets.
Yeah, Tim Kaine, of all guys, I mean, there's a guy, I see him walking down the street with a lead pipe.
I think his son is in Antifa.
Yeah, that's right.
I think that's right.
So the line is blurred.
It used to be there's political violence, and those are the nut anarchists.
And then there's, of course, the normal politicians.
And then, of course, there's the media.
And now we have Don Lemon saying Antifa means anti-fascist.
You've got mainstream politicians endorsing them.
They're all one big mess now.
Yes.
Not surprising, because they're that much more desperate.
I mean, you can basically draw a chart showing Trump's, any politician's effectiveness as a conservative and plotted against the level of desperation displayed by the left.
They're losing the ability to win elections.
They thought they had a lock on it nonetheless by controlling the deep state and the judiciary.
And the narrative with the media.
So along comes social media, undercuts the official narrative.
Deep state may be getting rattled.
We don't really haven't seen it yet.
I mean, how many times can we wait for the slow rollout to take place?
But certainly cracks in the dam there.
And in terms of the judiciary, not going their way at all.
So they're getting desperate.
And the problem is that the irony is that the people we're talking about, these really soft pink, comfortable old Democrats who are encouraging radicalism, they're the first ones to get it in the back of the neck.
If true radicals, if there really are true radicals, and I'm going to say true radicals, I mean there are people who are truly reckless, there are people who are truly irresponsible and violent, but they're pretty well aware that there's not a great deal of accountability for what they do in most of the urban cities, not New York pretty much, but certainly out west and in Washington.
You know, you get a desk ticket, you get a slap on the wrist.
Lenin was a radical.
Lenin was absolutely prepared to kill or be killed.
These guys, you know, the old-style anarchy radicals were absolutely, Martin Luther King was a radical.
He absolutely put his life on the line.
These guys, it's a hobby.
Whether they're getting paid by George Soros or not, it's a fun thing to do.
I'll never forget when they were doing the die-ins, the black BLM, and they showed some university kids going out at night to some demonstration.
And not only were they taking selfies, but they're looking at it.
I'm dead.
Right.
And they're giggling at each other, knowing that, in other words, it was just a campus thing to do.
Like when I was in college, the campus thing to do was anti-apartheid and everybody did demonstration.
Not everybody.
Of course, Coleman was the odd man out, but it's just in style.
It's radical chic, teen vogue, that kind of thing.
No, I think you're totally right.
It's the mods and the rockers on Brighton Beach.
This is just two groups fighting.
This is punks and skinheads.
This is rockabillies and disco guys.
I mean, that's why they don't want to talk about it, because there's no substance behind it.
If you went up to the mods and the rockers on Brighton Beach and said, hey, mods, why do you hate rockers so much?
And it would be like, because they like rock and roll, and we like northern soul.
And you go, okay.
I'm glad, for no other reason, this is the perfect place and format for me to tell you this great story because it happened to me twice, once in New Jersey and once in Florida.
Same demographic.
Speaking to a woman around 70 years old who says to me, oh, I hate that Trump.
What don't you like about Trump?
He's terrible.
Okay, he's terrible.
Okay, but tell me what it is about his policies that you don't like.
Everything he says is a lie.
Oh, they always say that.
Okay, everything he says is a lie.
Let's not talk about Hillary Clinton because we're not talking about Hillary Clinton.
You're right.
He's an unusual politician.
lies a lot.
Now tell me about which policies Tell me which policies it is that you don't like that he actually did.
He's terrible with women.
Probably not first choice for anyone for their daughter to bring home, a CAD of that, except for that.
That's a good word.
But what's the policy that he's actually put in place as president of the United States of America that you're disapproving of?
I just hate.
He's just terrible.
They cannot enunciate.
I mean, at least, you know, if you go to a college, there are speaking points at least.
They're watching the view.
It's just an understanding that this is bad, Orange Cheeto Man.
Even when he does something good, then they make it bad.
Like with North Korea, when he was getting tough with Kim Jong-un, they go, he's going to start a world war.
And then it turns out that Kim Jong-un was kept in line and was well disciplined.
And that was coddling dictators.
That was coddling dictators.
Well, all of a sudden we're very offended by Saudi Arabia.
A killing of people.
A killing of people.
This is a new people in international affairs.
Brand new ballgame.
What's Trump going to do about this?
Oh, my.
It's all winning.
It's like Dungeons and Dragons for them.
And that's why we had Bill Maher saying, I want the economy to be bad.
You know, suicide goes up, child poverty goes up when the economy is bad.
let's not kid ourselves.
When Obama was in office and the job support would come out, were you rooting for the economy to...
Yes, I was.
No, no, but politically speaking, you don't want anyone to get hurt on the individual, on a humane basis.
But the fact is, you want to be able to say, you know, we're going to, I can't blame Marv.
The thing about Mars is that he'll say, he'll say it.
He'll say it.
He'll say it in the time and in the moment.
Listen, when the Iranians captured those U.S. sailors and humiliated them, no one was rooting for that.
That's bad.
That's bad for America.
And it's true as a political, you know, you're putting a check mark, boy, this will be handy in the next election.
Because someone tells me what a great foreign policy genius Obama was.
But obviously, something like that happens.
And the same thing goes with the economy.
It's amazing what's happening with the economy.
It's extraordinary to me.
You know, Jews also seem to have, they're in my sandwich, they're everywhere, seem to have this irrational hatred from.
And I did a video, 10 Things I Hate About the Goddamn Jews, which everyone takes literally.
It was clearly satirical.
But in it, I was talking about how I'm in Israel at the time.
Like all Jew haters, you're visiting Israel and spending Sadat.
Was that it called?
Sterat?
Sterot.
Stirot.
Stechot.
Stechot.
Where the Nazis, the right-wing alt-right guys, they go, oh yeah, if they're getting invaded all the time in Stehrot, why do we see no dead bodies if they're always getting bombed?
Then you go there and you see there's a bomb shelter every 50 feet.
The trash cans are this thick with cement.
So when you go there, you see what's really going up.
That's a tangent.
When I was there, I saw this animosity, and I think he hadn't quite moved the embassy to Jerusalem at that point, but all of his adult kids were dating Jews, and one of them had converted to Orthodox Judaism.
He's pro-free market.
He hates that an Israeli can't do a talk at a campus.
That's what the left, that's the left terrorism.
And it drove me insane because I go, he's the most pro-Israeli president we've ever had.
Why don't you like him?
Well, actually, most American Jews today are not interested in Israel.
They're Jewish because their last names are Jewish.
So a generation ago, they weren't religiously committed, but they were interested in the state of Israel.
Now they couldn't care less about the state of Israel.
It's a place to maybe vacation, probably not, because they're boycotting.
They're more interested in their social standing at home and on campus than they are about any particular issue, and they're offended by nationalism, and they're probably not married to a Jew, or their children are probably not married to Jews, so they don't want to get all that into it.
They're basically Unitarians with chopped liver.
I think you just hit the nail on the head.
It all comes down to dinner parties.
Howard Stern threw Alex Jones under the bus when Alex Jones was booted off of Twitter.
He said, you don't yell fire in a crowded theater, that old trope.
Howard Stern is Mr. Free Speech.
Why would he do that?
Dinner parties.
Absolutely.
They see what happens with Alan Dershowitz.
He's not invited to the Martha's Vineyard dinner parties anymore.
They already have enough money, so they go, from now on, everything that comes out of my mouth is to facilitate more dinner parties.
I imagine.
I've never been to that kind of dinner party, but they don't have kosher ones.
We've set our own.
We would have to be kosher, you know.
Outcast kosher dinner parties.
Outcast kosher doesn't.
I can think of a few people.
It would be quite an interesting crowd, actually.
But in general, though, yes, the social scene, I can only say it based on my understanding, because it's not something I've ever personally, you know, I went to an Ivy League school, but I didn't become any more Ivy League by virtue of it.
I got a good education.
But the people who were part of a network when we started school were part of a slightly bigger network when school was over.
They weren't inviting me into it.
That was fine.
They didn't owe me anything.
He sounds kind of mad.
Do you want to say something to the camera to them?
I'm still going to find you.
I'm still going to.
No, actually, they're not watching.
No offense.
No, I mean, they're actually on their yachts.
I mean, you know, it's no problem.
No, no complaints.
So I don't know about it firsthand.
I don't know about that scene firsthand, but that's the, it's hard not to get that impression.
I mean, James Terrell identified it as the Strange New Respect Award, you know, back in the, probably the early 80s.
You know, what do they call it?
Sorry, I don't know.
Strange New Respect Award.
A conservative comes to town and all of a sudden starts liking the experience of being part of the elite and getting invited to the right dinner parties and all of a sudden it becomes moderate.
And then an article comes out in the Times of the Post that says, there's a strange new respect now for Senator X. You know, people who thought of him as a firebrander now, you mentioned George W. Bush.
Why?
He wasn't as effect.
At the time, he was really, you know, looked like a Reagan-type conservative.
Turns out that he's kind of mushy in the middle.
He's a neocon who opened up the borders.
On the borders, he was disastrous.
I mean, I frankly blame his inner circle for that.
I mean, he relied on certain people to tell him what to do with certain things.
And that was one that he thought didn't think out very well, I think.
But Trump owes nothing to anyone, hardly listens to anyone.
Right.
Does it his way.
And the funny thing is, no one thought of him as a conservative 10 years ago.
He was a regular American.
That's what he is still.
And that's what the Democrats miss is that he's a regular American.
The positions that he holds about fundamental things like sovereignty, like the number of sexes that there are in the human race.
It's just dad politics.
People always ask me, when did you become radicalized or why did you go so far right?
I go, I don't have far-right politics.
I have dad politics.
I want to keep my money.
I want to be able to give it to my kids tax-free.
JFK would be pretty comfortable with these platforms.
Right.
Well, look at Obama and Hillary.
They were against gay marriage in 2004.
They talked about the borders.
They talked about not building a wall, but they talked about securing our borders.
I don't think either one of them ever was particularly enamored of any particular policy.
I think it was all about getting into office.
I think if you would have asked Hillary, if you had shaken her and woken her up from her slumber, right, at 3 in the morning 20 years ago and asked gay marriage yes or no, I think like most normal people, because I think she wasn't the Hillary that she is today, she would have given you an honest answer.
How do you understand?
It's a non-sequitur, a weak gay marriage.
She's not going to say go bother people, not going to say get into people's private lives, but of course not.
Well, the party moved left.
The Democrats are built on coalition.
Coalition model ultimately consumes itself.
These guys, these soft pink old people who are running the party, can't say no.
There's nowhere they can draw the line.
And it's so funny to read the comments on Twitter from people on the left who are always projecting their experiences onto the right.
They will never draw the line.
The Democratic Party, I mean, they have this debate in Florida, and they ask Gillem, well, would you, if you got a detainer from ICE, would you respect?
He couldn't answer.
Because he knows if he answers, of course I would, you know, it's the law of the land, I have to do it.
He's not going to lose votes because those votes aren't moving the other way, but he's going to lose donors.
she's going to lose enthusiasm.
Well, that's what I keep saying to the left.
I don't know what you want.
So we have the DNC saying we're going to abolish ICE.
What do you mean?
There's no borders?
There's no immigration?
So we're the only country in the world that doesn't have borders?
So they don't answer questions like that, and they're not asked by the people that they allow themselves to be exposed to.
You know what else is a remarkable thing to note?
If you just look at the quality of the people we're talking about, think of who represent who, look, the Senate in general is not exactly the world's greatest deliberative body, or maybe it is.
It's even scarier for either side.
But look at the people who are representing, you know, the hacks, the absolute party, you know, Kirsten Gillibrand, where did she come from?
I don't know how long you've been living in New York.
Not that long.
I've been here my whole life.
Person I never heard of, occupying, you know, the Senate seat that was Patrick Moynihan.
Just nothing.
Menendez from New Jersey, my state, a Gornish, a nothing.
These people are undistinguished people.
I think the DNC has never had less substance.
And the idea that hate has no home here, all their eggs are in that basket.
We're against Nazis.
And you go, wow, that's a brave stance.
Right, right.
You're against the German army in 1943?
So were we.
Then we won.
Right.
The only way to define, therefore you have to define anyone who disagrees with you as a Nazi.
Look, hate.
Disagreeing with you about a policy is hate.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
I figured it out.
I want to enforce mass egalitarianism across the country, right?
So more fat Jewish guys play basketball.
Not calling you fat.
Everyone, this pizza pie that represents the demographics of the country has to be represented in absolutely everything.
That's a very radical thing.
But they say if you have a problem with that, then that's hate.
So if you don't want every company to have at least one female CEO and that enforced by the government, then you hate women because you don't want them to be CEOs.
It's not quite.
You have to say it.
You don't have to actually do it.
Apple's board is, as far as I understand it, pretty much Lily White and pretty much male.
Companies like that, they are posturing.
They're doing what they have to do to make money and to play the corporate game, to be part of the appropriate boycotts.
Oh, NRA is out, fine.
We'll do three months of NRA is out.
Then we'll do our co-branding.
It's all situational.
The stuff comes and goes.
So they just put the female CEO in the window and pay her a random sign.
She doesn't have any authority?
The CEO part is a little bit more complicated than who's on the board.
At the end of the day, there are not that many of them running too many of these tech companies.
Right, I'm getting the story wrong, aren't I?
It's not they have to have a female CEO.
They just have to have at least one female on the board.
Is that it?
I don't know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, the California law, which it's obviously going to be attacked.
I'm not sure whether or not I don't know where it's going to go.
I don't know what the attack will look like.
People care about the bottom line.
You can make up a bunch of stuff.
You can say they've ruined comedy, they've started ruining movies, political correctness ruins a lot of fun.
But when it starts hitting the wallet, you start getting that.
And conversely, when you start giving people jobs, they go, Yeah, I don't care about what he said in a bus about a woman's genitalia.
I have a job now.
So the DNC is hurting themselves by threatening our wallets, and the GOP is helping themselves by throwing money around, not even throwing money, allowing money to prosper.
Well, I mean, hopefully what we're seeing, what we're experiencing and perceiving in the news, not only in our social media silo, or even the one you got kicked out of, and I'm sure you have no idea what's going on on Twitter now.
I don't.
But whatever, the point is, you know, you can fool yourself.
I think a lot of us fooled ourselves about Romney.
There's all of them.
There's all this enthusiasm.
Because people were angry then.
People were unhappy then.
Well, I think the right wants to work.
We want to appease them in a way.
We want everything to go smoothly.
So I think a lot of us saw that the left liked Jeb.
And for maybe a millisecond, I went, okay, maybe it's a compromise.
Will you shut up if we go down to the Jeb level?
Will you be nice to us?
Or with Mitt Romney, we went, okay, he's the squarest guy in the world.
I don't see any balls there, but you don't seem to hate him.
Can we do Romney?
And then you realize they're not interested in any kind of compromise.
So then we go, fine, we're getting Trump in.
Yeah, I mean, these are historic times.
I mean, this is unlike anything that, you know, politically that we've ever seen before.
I mean, when you have a guy like Lindsey Graham saying, you know, I'm taking over this committee next year, the Judiciary Committee, and this is going to be pre-Kavanaugh and post-Kavanaugh.
Lindsey Graham, the, I mean, he was like one of the standard punchlines that we had until 60 days ago was Lindsey Graham.
And now he's been turned into a hero of the beach.
It's a meme.
Like people use that picture and Photoshop it in to all kinds of different things.
The one where he's smiling.
The one where he's adjusting his tie.
That's kind of an unpopular meme.
The best one I saw for that was the Saturday Night Fever.
The opening shot for Saturday Night Fever.
They played the music for, what is it?
No, don't don't, don't, don't, don't.
Right.
Saturday Night.
Bee Gees.
Yeah, but what was the name of that song?
Saturday Night Fever.
My brain can only fit certain things.
I got Bee Gee's, Saturday Night Fever, we're done.
Can I change course a little bit here?
Staying alive.
Staying alive.
You knew that.
Yeah, let's change course.
What's your social life like?
Because I see you as very similar to Alan Dershowitz in that you're both academics, you're both very free speechy.
His social life's over.
He's not invited to dinner parties.
He won't be invited to a dinner party for two years, I would imagine.
You're saying has someone who has been conspicuously conservative and who will come on a show with Gavin McInnes.
Right, right.
How's that affected?
Most people that I deal with have very little to do with social media.
First of all, the Orthodox Church community I live in, people are really busy with their lives.
They have very big families.
We stay involved with our families throughout the life cycle so that children don't tend to move very far away.
We have lots of grandchildren.
We're very busy making a living, involved in worship, ritual stuff.
Can we do that?
And spitting out kids.
That's all about.
So people aren't all that busy tracking.
I'm not aware of anyone who I otherwise would be dealing with, other than perhaps on Facebook, which I...
No more than I have been conservative.
Because you've always been conservative.
I've always been conservative, and I've always been outspoken.
Look, I have family members who say to me, who said to me years ago, during the Reagan era, right, how could a Jewish person be a Republican?
I thought it was a stupid question then.
But I don't see now how a Jewish person could be a Democrat.
If you identify yourself as, I mean, I understand how a Jewish person could be anything.
Trotsky was a Jewish person.
But if you identify with Jewish values, if that has meaning to you and you look at the party that includes Larry Ellison and Keith Ellis.
Keith Ellis.
The guy holding the handbook.
Right.
I mean, this whole radicalization, I mean, listen, what's happening in the UK with Labor is simply a preview of where we're going with the Democrat Party.
The reason they don't crack down on anti-Semitism is because their base wants anti-Semitism.
And that's where we're going.
Nice bedfellows, Jews.
These guys, listen, so there's certain who throughout history, Jews show up in a country, get comfortable, demonstrate group excellence, get wealthy, get welcomed into elite, and leave the Jewishness on the table.
And you have last names hanging around, you know, and cultural preferences.
They're like ginos, Jews in name only.
Sometimes, well, you know, the rule is, you know, if you, at this point in history, if you meet a young person with a Jewish last name, that's the person in like a Hebrew school that you know is not Jewish.
Because the father, that means they have their father's name.
Oh, okay.
And intermarriage is higher than 50%.
So the one with the Jewish last name is the kid who actually is, because we do matrilineal descent.
So you know that that's the one whose mother is Asian or, you know, or you know, like this.
Can I ask you a dumb question?
So Orthodox.
This is the first dumb question you think you're asking?
Well, hold on to your hat.
Orthodox, is that where the women have to wear wigs?
They don't have to wear wigs, but they're supposed to cover their hair.
Your wife covers her hair?
Yeah, my wife does that.
Oh.
But she doesn't have to shave her head.
No, some Hasidim from Hungary do that with the shaving of the head, and we don't.
I see.
That's legal.
Is there sort of a.
Because I sense animosity from normal liberal Jews towards the Hasidim, because I lived in Williamsburg for 10 years, and there was some.
Well, Williamsburg is a complicated issue.
I mean, the Hasidim in Williamsburg are, they feel very much as if they have been under siege for a very long time.
They have been.
They have been.
This is what a community that grew out of the rump of survivors from World War II.
They've exploded.
They get married in their late teens.
They go right into having big families.
And then Robert Moses comes along, destroys the neighborhood, completely makes life intolerable there.
Some of them move to the suburbs.
Some of them stay in Williamsburg well before the hipsters discovered Williamsburg.
The conceding were manning, batting down the hatches there.
And so now the hipsters come in.
You did that, by the way.
Exactly.
I gentrified.
You're one of those guys.
I brought the hipsters like the Pied Piper.
You made a lot of money for a lot of people.
Yeah.
Well, we also, we didn't take over the Hasidic Jews are on the other side of the BQE.
This side was just warehouses and crackheads.
So it was easy to just explode.
And all those warehouses were owned by Jewish businesses.
And, you know, some of them still lived in Williamsburg.
Some of them lived in other neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
But they're not necessarily...
It's going to be much cooler with you than with a Jew who wants to start off with them.
They just don't want to hear about it.
Right.
It's amazing that that culture can be so phenomenally different than the rest of the country and survive.
I mean, they discourage women from reading.
They have the shaved head thing.
They have those strange fur hats and the jompers, whatever, the knee-high socks and all that stuff.
And you go, how the hell did not only you maintain your culture, but maintain the exact look?
I mean, it hasn't even changed in 100 years.
Yeah, I mean, to some extent, it's a bit of an artifice.
I mean, Hasinim in Europe didn't all look as uniform as they do now.
But part of the strategy that was decided on by some very important leaders after the war was to basically develop this sort of esprit de corps and a really insular focus.
You know, how are we going to survive the freedom of America?
Because for Europe, until they actually start actually killing Jews in Europe, which they were doing on a regular basis, but it had the advantage of the intolerance in Europe, had the advantage of keeping Jews more or less on the farm.
In America, anyone could be anything.
So the decision was made to make things really unsuitable.
You're either in or you're out.
People who are associated with my kind of part of the modern world's Orthodox Jewish, strictly Orthodox Jewish movement, are a little bit more integrated.
I'm really of two minds about it because when I lived in Quebec, it's very anti-English there.
And they literally have word police who go around and they take a picture of your sign.
And if it says Joe's shoes, bigger than Chausil de Joe, you get a fine.
And you have to close down your company.
They have big problems with McDonald's and all these other people, these chains.
And you have to send your kids to French school.
And, you know, you send your kids to French school, they start counting in French, these faint trends, caroms.
And the next thing you know, you've got in their brains.
So it's a form of thought control, all this language policing.
It's language policing.
And then I left, and I look back at now, we just visited Montreal recently, and I thought, I'm kind of impressed.
I mean, the accent that they have is a 400-year-old accent.
Like, they say thou and thus.
They sound like pompous sword fighters when you hear, like, they call a car a char, but it's not because it sounds like car.
It comes from chariot.
So if you find a 100-year-old French person in the mountains, you'll hear that same Quebec accent.
So I kind of admire it now that I'm distant.
But this goes to the whole question of nationalism.
To what extent should, let's say that no one's bothering anybody else.
We're talking entirely in a freedom.
How healthy is it for humankind for people to retain tribal modalities of life?
First of all, in order to do it, there's unquestioned that there's going to have to be some sense, some sort of coercion.
It could be mild, like, you know, talking about signs.
Right.
But at the end of the day, you know, you're going to choose to bring your children up in a certain way.
Well, with the Hasidic community, if you leave, that's your persona non grata.
Your persona non.
Well, you know, that's not necessarily true.
I know Hasidim who have families who've gone off the way, and those family members are welcome back.
What the book Unorthodox said.
Well, you can't believe everything you read.
I'm telling you from first-hand experience, there are different.
That's the first time you've ever been annoyed with me, I think.
That's a good one.
Time code that.
Make it a gif.
No, no, but listen, reading, well, Unorthodox is a book with an agenda.
And it's not the book Ron Coleman would write about the same community.
Fact is, what's more of a threat to Hasidim isn't the guy who becomes non-religious.
It's the guy who maintains that he's still being religious, but not the way they say.
That's more of a threat, because then you might mistake that for the real thing, as opposed to someone who just goes and does his own thing.
And, you know, what can you do?
He's lost it.
The ones who stick around are bad for the brand.
Yeah, that's right.
It's complex.
There are a lot of different Hasidic groups and a lot of different, you know, there are cooler Hasidim.
There are some Hasidim who run a lot of technology companies.
I saw Poblith one once.
I'm sure you.
He said it was in the Torah that God said you should try everything I provide for you.
Well, that is something that we find in the Talmud.
And it's not in and of itself an unreasonable position to take.
But I had a feeling he wasn't just trying it for the.
Well, no, no.
But he had all the gear.
He had the payas and everything.
No, no, I believe that he was for real.
I'm totally fascinated by this subject because, like, say the black community, for example.
I don't like names like Shaquan and Rashida, or maybe Rashida's not bad, but You look at Michelle Obama.
Her dad, south south of Chicago, handicapped guy, had those crutches that go up your arms, stuck by his family, gave her a normal name, made sure she had an education, provided for her.
He let out the path for her success.
You know, she's my classmate at Princeton.
Really?
Wow.
When you have kids with different names and they develop, you know, even here in the hood, you have a different accent.
And it's this self-segregation that ends up hindering the person because they don't want On the other hand, look at the message you're sending out, right?
You have an identity.
It's not a corporate identity.
It's not a look that would have been accepted in the 1950s America that supposedly conservatives want to go back to, right?
But I am saying f ⁇ off.
Like I am trying to.
And that's.
I'm saying get away from me.
So that's the thing.
So if you want to name your kid with an African name or a made-up African-sounding name or with some other kind of ethnic name, that's a call, right?
That's a decision that you're making.
And so in the case, for example, of Hasidim, and I think to a large extent in the black community, they are making that decision to say, we want to keep you here.
But with the Hasidic community, it seems to work, and with the black community, it doesn't seem to work.
Well, there are many variables besides the zip codes.
Well, let me give you an example.
I often say that racism is overblown and it's not really a thing, especially in 2018, just bust your ass and it'll work out.
And yes, there's examples of someone using a horrible racial epithet, but you'll also find the opposite.
So it all balances out.
We're all the same.
Just get to work and shut up.
And they say, oh, yeah, well, what about black applications, job applications?
They tend to get rejected more than white ones.
And there's even been people who have used the same application and they'll have Shaniqua Williams and she'll get picked up less.
And to that I say, Shaniqua Williams is very different from Michelle Obama.
When you read Michelle Obama, it sounds like someone who wants to work.
When you read Shaniqua, it says to the employer, I come from a culture where we're distancing ourselves from the mainstream.
Well, it is.
These are flags.
These are flags, especially when you're doing, when you're hiring, you are looking for shortcuts to telling you about how dependable that person is going to be, how acculturated that person is going to be, what the person's work ethic is.
And a decision was made by our judicial rulers that criteria such as those or ones like them that might align and correlate very closely with race could get you in trouble.
But they're rational, as to some extent IQ testing is rational.
Now, some people disagree about IQ testing, but in the free market, I should be able to be wrong about that if I want to.
I see.
But here we are.
I mean, you're right.
That's a decision that people are making, and it is a problem in our community to some extent, not so much the names, because I think because of what you're describing, there are lots of names out there.
In other words, there are all kinds of names.
There are a lot of Israelis and second generation Israeli immigrants who are not Jewishly observant at all, but who have funny Jewish-sounding names.
And they're all over the corporate world.
That's really not a thing.
In my experience, I've been on panels discussing intellectual property issues with very diverse panels, with people with very diverse numbers of consonants and vowels in their names.
I think that's much less of an issue.
You're right.
I'm using it as a microcosm to talk about a different thing.
I wish that Americans had more of the traits of Hasidic Jews or blacks, not that blacks aren't Americans, but or Quebecois.
I wish your average American was more arrogant and more protecting, but there's this self-hatred that you get from, especially from the left, where they go, America was never great.
It's guilt.
They feel guilt for some reason about being heirs to prosperity and freedom.
And rather than actually give away what they have or really make sacrifices, I'm not saying no one does, but the vast majority of these people who are living in Westchester, living in comfortable locations, they want to feel good about themselves.
Listen, the reason, in my view, why Obama was so successful as an electoral phenomenon was that here was a black guy that people with no particular political issues, he came across as a moderate, and he came across as a black guy you could vote for, and people wanted to, most people want to feel good about themselves, and they want to reassure themselves that they're not racist.
So you think he was an affirmative action president that we voted to feel better about ourselves?
No one with a resume that thin would otherwise ever have gotten to be.
You know, I remember when he was elected too, a relative of mine said, I was very surprised that a racist country like America would elect a black president.
And I felt, on behalf of America, I felt insulted.
And I went, what country do you think you're living in?
But here's the thing about these isolated self-segregators.
Canada is very anti-Canadian.
And I remember during the World Cup, you'd never have the Canadian flag on your car.
You'd have the Brazilian flag.
So you'd go back through your history and you'd find an Irish granddad or something that wasn't Canadian, and that was you.
I'm Brazilian.
That's my idea.
So my mother came from Cuba.
Her parents were Polish.
You know that.
Her parents were Polish immigrants, Jewish Poles who left in the 30s.
And people say, well, why Cuba?
I say, because it wasn't Poland.
That's good enough reason.
And this is post-revolution, of course.
No, they left right before Castro took her.
They were there for 20 years.
Oh.
35 to 56 or so.
Yes, real bad luck.
Yes, that's right.
Keep an eye on Coleman, because if you see me on a boat, get the hell out.
Fly New York.
Not as bad as the ones who stayed in Poland, though.
So we, or score Cuba.
My mother can't stand when people fly flags of other countries.
She says, I became an American.
I'm an American citizen.
I came here to be an American, not to fly.
I also don't like this, frankly, when Jewish people wave Israeli flags.
Okay, you want to go to the Israeli Day Parade?
That's a special segregated event for your rooting for your favorite team.
I'll be frankly.
Rooting for your favorite team is very different.
And Hasidic Jews, I'm just using them as an example, is a group that has isolated themselves, but they don't seem to affect anything around them.
So, okay, it seems weird.
Quebec has maintained a country within a country.
And that's a feat I now admire.
And I wish Americans did that more.
Black America, I'm frustrated by the lack of assimilation in certain areas.
And I wish that there was less animosity from a certain part of that black community.
But then you have a Muslim group.
And it's diametrically opposed to the Hasidic example, where when Muslims get to 10%, they start to want to alter the entire system and change the laws.
And we've got Linda Sarsour.
She's an advocate for Sharia law.
You look at Luton, where Tommy Robinson is.
He's going on trial tomorrow.
Luton, the police, the Muslims there live above the law.
It's got the smallest police force in Britain, and they are petrified of the Muslim.
If you bust a Muslim there, you're going to get the police station shut down.
Be like Mexico.
I don't know.
I never would have thought that England would fold so, so fast.
You know, if you told me the French, on the one hand, yes.
No, but on the other hand, the French are really rabid nationalists.
In some respects, they've pushed back in a way that the English do not seem to have the backbone to do.
No.
Well, you know, last time I was there, I was for Tommy's trial, and I just looked around and I thought, did you guys use up all your brave people in the war?
Because there's just the sort of blue collars, the soccer hooligans, are the only ones with any balls left.
The rest are happily handing over their country to grooming gangs.
They call them Asian.
Even the name is infuriating.
What, Chinese grooming gangs?
Can you be a little more specific?
It's called Pakistani.
Yeah, it's really something.
But I mean, they don't seem to be capable of being embarrassed.
Like, they're not embarrassed about it.
No.
It's the world that they're living in.
No, they're mad.
Well, I guess the answer to this conundrum is, I understand you want your culture.
That's great.
But can you have one foot next to the flag?
You know what I mean?
What?
Like, be segregated.
I understand that's what culture is.
It's tribes.
So have your tribe, but at least love the host country.
Start with gratitude.
Yes, great.
Start with gratitude.
Maimonides explained that a person's relationship with God should fundamentally be based on gratitude, and you learn how to be have gratitude towards God by the way you should have gratitude toward your parents.
And it's just all the more so.
Someone gives to you their entire life should be a healthy parent.
Not an entire life, but they make tremendous sacrifices so that you can A, exist and flourish and grow and have opportunity.
God does all this and makes the whole world for you.
You come to a country that isn't your country.
I remember my grandfather, blessed memory, he used to go out.
His name was Yonkel, which is a diminutive of the Jewish name Yaakov, which is Jacob Yonkel.
And he used to say, I'm Yankee Doodle.
I'm Yankee Doodle.
I'm a Yankee Doodle.
He was so proud to be an American.
Now, he was a member of the Jewish labor bond.
He was a democratic socialist.
It didn't go along with being, he was certainly no reactionary, far from it, but it was just a really basic understanding that patriotism wasn't something that only existed for the right wing.
And the fact that there might be things to apologize in American history, and there are, obviously there are, but we're all in this together.
We're all Native Americans.
Well, not you.
But I was born in Queens.
That makes me, I'm as a Native American like Donald Trump.
We were both born in Queens, okay?
Your ancestor being born, you know, you want to sit at the table and divvy up grievances based on the past?
I win every time.
I'm not busy with that.
I'm busy with building my community, contributing, doing what I can.
If I can go and win a case that helps everyone, that's fantastic for me.
If I win a case that just helps me pay the mortgage, that's fantastic for me too.
Well, I think we're getting to the point now where a lot of immigrants come here and they see this lack of gratitude and they want to assimilate.
So hating your host country is them assimilating.
Like there was this group, the Halifax Five, they were called, up in Canada.
And there was an anti-Canada Day thing on Canada Day.
And they had F Canada stickers all over the statue of Cornwallis.
And these military guys showed up and they said, what are you doing?
And there was some woman who called herself Chief Grizzly Mama.
She was there.
And they said, get out of here, you're disgusting.
And they had the Dominion flag, the flag of Canada previous to the Maple Leaf, and it's got a Union Jack on it and some other stuff.
And it's what Canadians wore to battle in World War I and World War II.
We only had the new one in 1979 or something.
So there was a guy there, and he's an African guy, and he said, take down that flag.
That flag is a flag of oppression and slavery.
And I could tell by his accent, he couldn't have been here for very long.
So he comes to Canada, and his first thing is, that's, I mean, he must have got it from someone.
But not only that, I mean, when you talk about oppression and slavery, there's no victim group, including the Jews, that didn't have its moment of oppressing and enslaving others.
World history, until just about 10 minutes ago, was about...
You can buy a slave for $400 today.
It's to our great credit, and it is to the credit of Western civilization, thank you, that slavery is not acceptable.
But that's world history.
And black slaves were sold to white slave traders by other blacks.
Let's start fresh.
Let's build on what we have now.
We all have our grievances.
We all have our history and our bones to pick.
But if we have something in common, I agree with you 100%.
It's a terrible thing.
This is why this self-hatred is dangerous.
And here's another example, by the way, just to stuff up my answer.
So there's the guy in, the African guy in Halifax, but then we had this woman climbing the Statue of Liberty.
And she made it to the toes, I believe, and She said she's against the human rights violations.
She's from the Congo.
In the Congo, children were being forced to rape their mothers at gunpoint.
They were making sculptures of human heads, these sort of pyramids of human heads.
And she comes here, and her first takeaway is: America sucks.
Because the social workers and the relief organizations and the institutionalized do-gooders have been inculcated with this.
Right.
So she's assimilating.
She's doing her best to be an American, and apparently being an American is being an ingrate.
Okay, I'm an ingrate.
And she gets tons of accolades, Lord.
She's a hero now.
But this is when it gets dangerous.
Because you have someone like the Sarnev brothers, right?
And they're in class, and their Marxist teacher goes, America sucks, America sucks, America sucks.
Slavery stole from the Indians, America sucks.
Then they go back to, I don't know whether they're from Chechnya, Georgia or something, and they go, and their uncles go, America sucks, it's great evil, you've got to join jihad.
And then the next thing you know, they go, well, my teacher did verify that.
America does suck.
And now we have the Boston bombing.
So all of this ethnomasochism and self-hatred isn't just a frivolous game.
It has really serious, dangerous consequences.
Well, you know, it didn't really until, frankly, the advent of an assertive Muslim population.
I mean, you want to use the Jews by contradistinction.
We're not historically aggressive as guests of native countries.
Not in that way.
There's a general principle in Judaism.
It's in Aramaic, Dina de Machusa Dinah.
The law of the land is the law.
So except to the extent that it impinges on your personal religious obligations.
Under to Caesar, what belongs to Caesar.
That's where that basically came from.
He went to yeshiva after all.
And that's the principle.
You've got to recognize the value of a stable society.
And that as a minority, a strong government and the rule of law are your best friend.
Because once that comes to an end, once you have mob rule, the only way that undermining social order is beneficial to a minority is if they intend to not be a minority for very long.
And if they are numerically a minority now, that process of not being a minority might not be very pretty.
I think.
I quite understand.
So you're saying when the team So the fact that the DNC is pushing mob rule and we're in it, I mean, we're seeing windows smashed all the time.
Kristallnacht just happened.
DNC is pushing political success.
Right now, the flavor of the month for them is mob rule.
They like their jobs.
They like their money.
They like their homes.
They like the way things work for them.
They like their protexia.
They're not interested in mob rule.
They're interested in the votes of people.
You're not going to get the votes.
The average American sees this behavior.
When Maxine Waters said that, she got the GOP a ton of votes.
Like, they're getting Trump re-elected.
I'm certainly hoping you're right.
But I think that they have no way out.
They cannot turn back.
They're at the end of a blind alley.
They cannot turn back.
And I do think that there is a school of thought in those circles that if it's true that what Coleman says and what a lot of other people say, that there's no way out, we will go down the radical path.
And it might not be so good for me personally, but I would rather bring down the whole thing.
This is George Soros.
I'll bring down the whole thing and go to my death feeling like a great hero rather than let people who I consider to be the bad guys win.
At that point, you become a true radical.
Couldn't have said it better myself, Ron.
Great interview, and I love the way you tied it back in a bow.