Bari Weiss and Joe Rogan debate how the "Make America Great Again" red hat became a symbol of racial backlash, exposing media’s rush to outrage without context—like the viral clip where a smirking teen faced mob fury despite prior slurs. Weiss critiques progressive antisemitism, from ignoring attacks on Hasidic Jews to Farrakhan’s influence at Women’s March events, while Rogan questions why systemic issues like child abuse in the Catholic Church or economic hardship are sidelined. They clash over media’s desensitization to violence, from mass shootings to Gab’s unchecked hate speech, and Weiss plans a trip to Israel’s West Bank to challenge simplistic narratives. Ultimately, their conversation reveals how ideological signaling drowns out truth, empathy, and real-world consequences in today’s polarized discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
Your timing comes right in the middle of this big hubbub about this Native American elder and this young boy with one of those stupid fucking red hats on.
They believe that wearing it, that a 16-year-old wearing that hat sort of carries intense moral weight that surely we know that a 16-year-old is not aware of all the implications of wearing that hat.
One of the things that was just so amazing about the whole brouhaha realm, I mean it was in a way like this perfect encapsulation of our outrage culture, right?
Because people saw a tiny clip of this video and it was like a Rorschach test.
You saw in it this morality play.
What it looked to be was a group of mostly white kids from Coventry Catholic School.
I think it's in Kentucky.
And it looked like at first glance that they were smirking and smug and had these sort of shit-eating grins on their faces and that they were surrounding this older Native American man.
And I have to tell you, I had a visceral reaction to it the second I saw it, like so many other people.
I did as well.
I was like, this is where we are in our broken culture and they're bullying this guy and here's the rise of the – I had all of those reactions.
The challenge of what it means to be a journalist is to not see people as signifiers or as stand-ins just based on their identity.
And that's what like 95 percent of the press corps did.
They sort of leapt to – they leaped to assume that our visceral reaction was accurate when in fact when you actually looked at like the two-hour video of the whole interaction, which also included this group of black Israelites or Hebrew Israelites they called themselves.
It was not that at all.
The Native American man had walked up to this group.
The four other guys had been heckling the group beforehand, calling them crackers, calling them Satan, calling the one black kid in the group things that can't even be said.
So it was just far more complicated.
And what was really, really disheartening is that the initial outrage was enough for the mainstream press to report on it.
Like Twitter has kind of become almost an assigning editor for places like The New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
And then when the actual truth of the thing comes out, when we move past the outrage cycle, they have to sort of write the follow up story to the fake outrage to begin with.
But one of the things that was so horrifying was that people that are supposed to be adults, you know, people with blue check marks on Twitter, were saying things like, this is the face of white patriarchy, this 16-year-old kid.
Yeah, or Reza Aslan said, have you ever seen a more punchable face?
Kathy Griffin was saying, I need names.
Shame him.
Dox him.
How do these people not understand the implications of that?
So what happened over the weekend was that the, you know, sleuthy detectives on Twitter found a kid who they thought was the kid in the video wasn't actually the kid.
So there's the actual kid who was doxxed, the family was harassed, everything that we now know happens in these outrage cycles.
But then there was another kid who looked suspiciously like him, who was not him at all, whose family, there was an amazing and heartbreaking Twitter thread about it, whose family was in the middle of a family wedding.
And they had to spend their whole weekend fighting off these mobs who were trying to destroy them.
And it wasn't even the kid in the video.
I mean, that is really horrifying to me, that that's where we are.
And the fact that adults who should know better are fomenting this and don't see how thin, like, it sounds heavy, but like, the veneer of civilization is.
Like, they're taking a pickaxe to it.
It's just, I just found the whole thing to be terrifying.
I felt exactly the same way and I think it's a very unique moment because it's so public and it's so prevalent in whether it's Twitter or Facebook it's everywhere and it sort of embodies everything that's wrong With a lack of nuance and with people taking one side versus the other and sticking with it,
with not confronting their own personal biases, with looking at these things through the eyes of this is the enemy, I'm on the good side, they're on the bad side, let's get them.
And also this distorted idea of what it takes to What it takes to be violent.
This idea of this is a punchable person.
Calling for violence.
You're hearing a lot of this.
This is one of the things that troubles me so much about the left.
My parents were hippies.
I grew up, when I was a little kid, we lived from the age of 7 to 11 in San Francisco during the Vietnam War.
While the Vietnam War was ending, I was living in the middle of the hippie world.
I always felt that people on the left were like these well-read, kind, compassionate people.
But somewhere along the line, within the last few years, people on the left are calling for violence.
This is very confusing to me.
And it's this frivolous social media call for violence.
It's not an in-person, be-there, boots-on-the-ground call for violence.
Okay, so if you mean punch actual Nazis that are putting Jews into concentration camps, I'm with you.
But when you call a guy with a MAGA hat on, he wears one of those red hats and he's just an asshole?
He's a Nazi now?
Some guy who maybe is not that educated, wants to be a contrarian, sees all these liberals that are complaining all the time, so he puts this red hat on, and now he's a white supremacist and a Nazi, and you want to punch him?
But that's what a lot of people in very high positions of power in this country, at least in the culture, actually believe.
And they don't understand the implications of hollowing out words like that.
I know this personally, right?
Because I'm called alt-right.
I'm called an apologist for rape culture.
I've been called everything.
I'm a centrist, okay?
I'm a Jewish center left on most things, person who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and, you know, is super socially liberal on pretty much any issue you want to choose.
If I'm alt-right, what words do we have left for people that actually are that?
What words do we have left for people who actually are part of a sort of racist blood and soil nativism that's rising in this country and around the world that should terrify people?
in the sloppiest of ways.
I really don't think they're seeing the implications of it.
I also think that when you're just a keyboard warrior and you're just tossing this stuff out, so much of it is about signaling to your tribe that you know that this thing is bad.
And I really don't think people are understanding the implications of this.
And I don't think it's a stretch to imagine something like this happening a week, two weeks, a month, two months from now, and someone actually getting killed.
This kind of, I mean, when that guy drove over those protesters, the ramping up of the dialogue on both sides, the rhetoric, the violent talk, it's so disturbing and so unnecessary, especially when it's disingenuous, like calling someone like you alt-right or me.
Yeah, I mean, but I do think that there should be some restrictions for gun use, just like I think there should be restrictions for car use.
I actually think there should be testing for guns, and you should have to go, look, you have to go through a fucking, you have to take driver's ed to get a car license.
How come you don't have to do any, you know, you don't have to do anything to get a gun?
Like, if you're not a criminal, you just get a gun.
Like, you don't have to know how to take care of it and clean it and safely handle it.
The thing also, one other thing that jumped out to me about the Catholic school boy incident, it kind of signifies something broader that's happening, which is the erasure of the individual, which is just, I think, a horrifying problem in our culture.
What actually happened was a one-hour incident on a random afternoon in January between a group of individuals, right?
And they had asked the teacher at one point, in order to drown out the heckling of the Hebrew Israelites, I hope I'm getting the name of that group right, could we do a school cheer to kind of ignore them?
And they did that, and I think they did that with permission from the teachers.
At one point early on, it was rumored that they were chanting, build the wall, but no one has surfaced any evidence of that whatsoever.
But my thing is like your initial reaction to something is not the truth.
It's your emotional reaction.
And anyone who calls themselves a journalist, like your job is to figure out the facts of the case, not to make this into a kind of identitarian morality play.
And the fact that so many people in so many publications did just that, and in fact, when the real facts surfaced, just sort of dug their heels in and were basically like, well, he's a stand-in for the white patriarchy.
Imagine if that was not the Catholic Church, if it was instead Scientology.
We would be going, oh, these kids are a part of a cult.
They went there.
They're a part of this weird cult that suppresses sexuality amongst its priests and encourages the placement of these pedophile priests in new places in order to get away from whatever crime they've committed in the area where they were initially established.
This is what the Catholic Church is, right?
And they travel all over the place.
But it also is good people.
This is where nuance comes into play.
It's good people.
There's a bunch of people that are Catholics because they want a better relationship with God or the universe or love or whatever.
They feel like it's a good moral framework for their children.
They take them there.
They believe in the Ten Commandments.
They believe in this moral structure for society that's laid down by what they believe is God.
There's great people that are involved in the Catholic Church, but it's also the number one kid-fucking organization in the world.
It's those two things, right?
So these kids are a part of something that's way worse than smirking at a Native American with a drum.
I think it's strange that we're covering it like it is.
And because of the internet, the fact that my timeline on Twitter and on Facebook and on everything, this was way bigger news than day whatever it is, 30-31 of the government shutdown where people are having to get on bread lines to feed their families.
And when these things that come up in opposition to what many people believe is a beneficial shift to a more progressive, more responsible culture, when these little hiccups, they get addressed, and they get addressed rapidly.
And I think it's because people are aware that things are changing in this almost, like, unprecedented way.
There's nothing you could find in the historical record for human beings has ever been what we've experienced over just the past 10 plus years of social networks and social media and the ability to spread information very quickly with a YouTube video or a tweet or whatever.
The way people are exchanging information is just very different.
And because of that, culture is shifting at a hyperspace speed.
It's just turbocharged, for sure.
So I think when something comes up that we think is like, ah, there's one, get it.
Or save your punch for a real one in Poland or in Hungary right now.
Not a 16-year-old kid who maybe has no idea what that hat signifies.
I mean there's a broader point which is like the very same people like one of the sort of wisdoms of criminal justice reform right is which I believe in is that we shouldn't try kids as adults and we should forgive.
We should have greater generosity and mercy and forgiveness for the crimes of a child even if they've committed them.
Those same people are the ones saying dox him and shame him generally politically.
And everyone wants to feel – like not being a part of one of the tribes is an extremely lonely position and you get called all the bad names because people want you to be a part of their tribe.
And people don't want to be called bad names and they want to feel like they're in an in-group.
People would still get mad at him because he was...
Like, I've seen people say when a native elder walks up to you and he's banging his drums, get the fuck out of the way.
I saw that.
Like...
Come on.
You can't expect that.
You can't just beat your drum.
First of all, he got right in the kid's face.
Like, inches from the kid's face.
Pretty amazing, the restraint this kid had to just smile.
And the idea that you're gonna judge this kid.
Millions and millions and millions of people are going over this right now.
That kid woke up that morning.
He had no fucking idea.
He was a kid in a cult, okay?
He's in a Catholic cult school.
And he's going to some weird thing, some march for life where people are trying to kill babies.
We've got to stop them from killing babies, right?
And he goes there and there's black Israelites calling them faggots and there's all these people calling them names and then all of a sudden this guy's beating a drum in front of his face.
And we're supposed to dox this kid now?
Because he smirked?
That's a crazy, an impossible lack of empathy.
It's impossible to defend.
Unless you hate boys, unless you hate all boys, because boys are dumb.
Like 16-year-old boys are almost universally dumb.
They all grow up to be men.
Some of those men will be your best friend.
Some of those men will be amazing.
Some of those men you'd be so happy to see.
When you see them, you give them a big hug.
Okay?
That's me!
That's me.
I was a stupid fucking 16-year-old.
And I'm a man now.
And I try to be as nice as I can to everybody.
I go way out of my way to be a kind person.
That could be that kid, too.
Like, what you're doing is not good for anybody.
It's not good for society to take this trend and run with it.
I don't think they do understand their implications.
When you have a spectrum, right, the far right and the far left, they have a very similar reaction as they drive a person to the other side.
The person that sees the far right and sees repulsive racism and bigotry You know, build that wall, fuck these Mexicans, fuck those little kids, they should have known better, they're all illegals.
That kind of person, that pushes people towards progressivism.
It pushes people towards much more liberal, even socialist ideologies.
Like, fuck that grossness.
And the same thing can be said for some...
I'm going to send you something, Jamie.
This is a real poster that Antifa is sending.
They were putting on...
On walls and fence posts and shit in the Pacific Northwest.
And it's actually kind of hilarious.
Because it's so stupid.
I'm going to send it to Jamie and Jamie's going to put it up on the screen here.
But it says...
Oops, wrong Jamie.
Sorry, Jamie Kilstein.
Here you go, buddy.
I just sent it.
It says, when you date a white, it's not alright.
And it's like, it's telling people to not date white people.
Someone pointed to me, and I'm just lucky that I looked at it because I normally don't even read comments, but somebody pointed out that I favored a really preposterous tweet that said, honest...
It said, the reply from the school was pathetic and impotent.
Name these kids...
Oh, that's Kathy Griffin.
Here's the one it said.
This guy said...
I can't find it.
He was basically saying no need to...
Here it is.
A face like that never changes.
This image will define his life.
No one need ever forgive him.
This is a person with a blue checkmark by their name.
I find myself fighting it because the basic virtues that used to be normal, like civility.
Civility has now become, for some people, a code word.
For, like, complicity with Nazism.
Like, if you're civil and you believe in civility and you believe in, you know, treating people decently and giving them the benefit of the doubt, like, that word itself has become a code or a signal in a negative way.
Empathy.
Like, doubt.
Even saying it, I don't know.
You know, just these basic virtues seem to have been, like, swept away.
Well, a key ingredient for sure, the thing that hardened the epoxy was Trump.
I think these trends are going in that direction anyway, but he capitalized on that.
You know, he's a very smart manipulator.
I mean, he knew how to capitalize on that.
I mean, this chant of build that wall, it's not an accident.
That's something that he concentrates on.
And it's not just that they're in a political battle right now because if they get him to back down off the wall, then he looks like a loser when 2020 comes around.
Well, I think both sides have to recognize that the other side has some points.
That's one thing.
And then I think we also have to treat ourselves like we're all a family and we're all on a big team.
Because that's what we really are.
If we really are the United States of America, I mean, what is a country?
I mean, if anything, we're supposed to be a team.
The idea that we're separated and we're two teams in this one team, the real differences in terms of who gets elected, how it's going to affect your life...
Involve business, involve some social policies, involve some things, but the way we interact with each other on a day-to-day doesn't involve that at all.
That has to be fixed first.
The way we think about each other on a day-to-day basis.
There used to be a time where you could have a conservative friend, and you could be a liberal, and you could be a fucking long-haired hippie guy, and as long as you're a good, hard-working person who didn't let their lawn go crazy, your next-door neighbor, who is like a Goldwater Republican, would talk to you.
Oh, you know, guys at the force are trying to put together this case and this and that.
And, you know, a professor could live right next to a cop and they would be friends and one would be conservative and one would be liberal and they would make fun of each other a little bit and rib each other a little bit.
And that would be the end of it.
That would be it.
It wouldn't be this civil war that we're experiencing right now.
Right now, just verbal.
And hopefully it stays that way.
But it's confusing.
It's confusing because there's a lack of – a frustrating lack of empathy that – when I look at human beings and when I look at people that aren't seeing what everyone else is seeing or they're not seeing things objectively and they're irrational and overly emotional, I always assume there's something else they're running from.
I always assume.
When I see someone lashing out and insulting everyone around them, I always assume it's not the people around them.
It's something internal.
There's something, maybe some existential angst they're fighting against, some realization of the futility of life, whatever the fuck it is.
Yeah, that fucking asshole uncle that has a couple of drinks in him and starts talking about the gays and this and that and all the things that are wrong with our culture, the sodomites.
Mostly talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson, but also critical thinking.
Also, realizing that I was fully committed to that idea without really exploring the possibility whether that idea was incorrect.
And that I had taken everything that I saw in that documentary, which is incredibly convincing, and with 100% confirmation bias, I only looked at that and I didn't look at all the contrary evidence.
There's some fucked up stuff about the moon landing, unfortunately.
And the fucked up stuff is mostly people that were involved in publicity that were doing stupid things with photographs.
This is a photo that they put out as an official photograph of Michael Collins doing a spacewalk.
But what it actually is, is a photo of them testing equipment, and they blacked out the background.
So he's in this suit that they were doing with testing, and And instead, because they really couldn't get good photos in space because no one's out there with him taking his pictures, right?
So they lied.
They faked it.
This is it.
So see, the one on the left, you see the real photograph.
And this is him in a studio where they're working on him, or warehouse rather, or some sort of a testing environment, working on how to control these harnesses that you would use when you're on a spacewalk.
Because that thing propels him forward and back, and he's learning how to use it.
What they did was they just blacked out the background and reversed it, and then they sold that as him actually being in space.
So this is probably an overzealous publicist.
And there's a bunch of these.
There's a bunch of these when it comes to different backgrounds in areas of the moon that are many, many miles apart from each other.
It shouldn't be the same background.
And more likely than not, what you're dealing with is overzealous publicists because photographs were incredibly difficult to get, I'm sure.
I don't want – like in an age in which people don't know, okay?
Like a 15-year-old clicking through their Roku doesn't necessarily know the difference between CNN and InfoWars and the New York Times and MSNBC and whatever.
And of course, some of those other ones have biases, obviously.
But InfoWars promotes conspiracy theories.
And do I want a 15-year-old kid stumbling into that and thinking that that information is on par on a level with – Actual facts.
I think we have to decide what is Twitter, what is Facebook, what is YouTube.
The position that most people have is these are private companies that can make their own rules.
This is just like CBS deciding that if you use, you know, if you drunkenly yell the N-word out at a black police officer that they don't want you...
As a newscaster anymore.
There's a private company that can make these distinctions.
If you take a position, an anti-Semitic position, publicly, they can decide, look, we don't want you on the air anymore.
And then there's other people that think, Freedom of speech in this form is so important and that the answer to bad ideas is not stopping those ideas.
It's good ideas.
It's good ideas confronting those ideas and you see it all work itself out.
That's the other side of the coin.
That's the other side of the argument.
The argument that we should treat, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or any of these social media platforms, as a public utility.
And that you should be able to distribute information.
The real problem is, with all of this, is that it's very messy.
This is a nuanced issue.
There's a lot going on.
Because when you do decide to de-platform someone for having an awful position and spreading a false conspiracy about that, most people are going to agree with you.
If you want to know, I'm not going to hide my positions on things from you.
I'm very open.
Obviously, I told people I used to believe the moon landing was fake.
I'll tell you all the stupid shit I believed.
But...
The question with this is, why do people want that?
Because it's simple and easy.
Just get rid of them.
Punch them.
Punch the Nazis.
It's lazy, stupid people thinking.
And they're thinking publicly.
And they represent.
A progressive viewpoint with their lazy, stupid thinking.
It's not that progressivism and that progressive viewpoints are bad.
It's that lazy, stupid thinking in applying a progressive viewpoint is bad.
It's not even that socialism is bad.
I've been thinking a lot about socialism lately.
In terms of like...
What is the point?
If we get to a certain point and then our heart stops beating and we die and you left behind 18 billion dollars to your kids because you were the ultimate capitalist and you went hog wild.
That's a fool's path.
That is a nonsense path.
Why did you do that?
Why didn't you try to use that money, this insane amount of wealth, and have this massive impact on the populace?
We have, you know, people that parks and recreation, people that are Department of Fish and Wildlife, and, you know, the sheriffs that patrol our national forests.
Well, one of the things that was so interesting about Australia is that in certain ways it's a more, you know, it's thought of as sort of a macho culture, maybe more masculine, a little bit more conservative than here generally.
And yet the left has won there on so many of the major issues that we're fighting, we're killing each other over now.
Well, you know, that is to be considered, but I think the United States, first of all, we have this momentum of innovation and of ass-kicking and getting things done and creating things that's so different than any other part of the world.
If we took that shit down a notch, I think we'd be okay.
You know, I mean, I think we definitely do have to worry about China.
And, you know, I've been really trying to closely follow all this Huawei stuff where these executives keep getting arrested.
And, you know, the close relationship between some tech companies and this communist government is very confusing.
But some people look at over—if you talk to people that are Chinese natives or who have been to China, they almost look at it as a positive.
There's less resistance.
It's more—even though the censorship is open, it's at least you know what you're dealing with over there as opposed to, you know, the NSA is spying on us but pretending you're not— Oh, but come on.
Well, I think when you're not a military mite, you're not like one of the big players, you're kind of like sitting back watching.
Because what are we going to do?
What if Australia decides to ramp up its defense budget by 5,000% over the next 10 years?
And develop a crazy arsenal of weapons and super soldiers and shoot them all up with steroids and give them exoskeletons and get ready to go to war and start building bunkers and freak the rest of the world out.
I mean, take this like North Korea with money approach to the world.
But that was a little bit to me related to what happened at the Lincoln Memorial, right?
Where you had these, you know, the leadership of the Women's March, which looked like a Shepard Fairey poster come to life.
Like they were just perfect.
You had Linda Sarsour in her hijab.
You had Tameka Mallory.
Well, what's going on is that back in August 2017, I wrote a column called When Progressives Embrace Hate.
And it was saying...
I was super moved by the Women's March as so many other women I know were.
But let's look at some of the very troubling ideas and associations that the people who are in charge, the leadership of the Women's March have.
Namely, the worst of the worst was Tamika Mallory, who had been a gun rights activist beforehand.
She called Louis Farrakhan the GOAT, the greatest of all time.
She took lots of Instagram pictures.
You should check this.
But she praised him.
It wasn't like a casual acquaintance.
She praised him as the greatest of all time.
And yet she was treated to glowing profiles in every women's magazine.
Her and the rest of the leadership.
And I basically said, like, let's look past, you know, the Benetton ad of these leaders and actually look at what they believe.
And what they believe, some of them, is extremely disturbing, especially when it comes to Jews.
So I write this column, and I'm like pilloried for it by the left.
One of the leaders of the Women's March, this woman, Bob Bland, wrote this letter to the New York Times where she calls me It was amazing.
I want to find what it was.
Oh, she calls me an apologist for the status quo, racist ideology and the white nationalist patriarchy.
Because you responded to someone who said the greatest of all time is a man who calls Judaism a gutter religion, who says that we should burn in ovens, and who, by the way, is a misogynist homophobe.
Also, the leaders of the Women's March are associating with this guy and had the Nation of Islam security protecting them.
I mean, this is like the most sort of retrograde hate group.
And yet for calling them out, I was called all of these things.
I think that part of it is the fact that in intersectional left-wing politics, Jews have been whitewashed.
Jews are viewed as sort of the white privileged power and part of the white patriarchy unless they genuflect and say, actually, no, we abhor our privilege and all of the other things that you're supposed to say.
And there's a blindness to the fact that, first of all, not all Jews are white.
Half of the Jews in the state of Israel, for example, are Arab and from Arab countries that they were kicked out of in 1948. I mean, the idea that Jews are white is this canard.
Although I'm an Ashkenazi Jew.
My family's from Eastern Europe.
I have white skin.
I have white privilege, but I don't think of myself as a white person.
I think of myself as a Jew, first and foremost.
So it's a complicated identity.
But I think that it's whitewashed by these people.
And I think that anti-Semitism just isn't taken seriously and doesn't rate because people perceive Jews as having privilege and power in this country, which largely they do.
But the fact is that the actual statistics show that That more hate crimes were committed against Jews in the past year than any other minority group.
The FBI is sounding the alarm every other day in Crown Heights and in other parts of Brooklyn.
Random Jews who look Jewish, who are Hasidic Jews, are just beaten up for being Jewish.
And yet everyone's ignoring that because they're the imperfect victim.
Sure, but imagine if any other minority group, someone, I mean, we're outraged when we see, at least I am, and you are when we see a police officer assaulting someone.
What I'm saying is that they don't make a big deal to go into the public about it.
They keep it almost insulated inside their environment and their community.
There's also, what I was going to say is, these people that are That you do hear saying anti-Semitic things.
They're equating American Jews living in America with the policies of Israel and what Israel's doing with Palestine.
And that somehow, if you're an American Jew, even if you're not even political, you're somehow or another complicit with atrocities that are going on between the Jewish people and the Palestinians.
Yes, but they also straw man it and say, criticism of Israel isn't anti-Semitic.
No one's saying that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
I criticize Israel all the time.
But there's an obsession on the state of Israel.
Like if you were an alien that landed from outer space, you would think that the greatest oppressor in the world is this tiny state that's the size of New Jersey.
These people say nothing about the genocide of Uighur Muslims in China.
They say nothing about any number of- I'm not even aware of that.
Oh, there's a genocide going on carried out by the government of China against Uighur Muslims.
They're literally being put into concentration camps.
So Uighur is spelled U-I-G-H-U-R. What is a good thing to read about this?
The New York Times.
We've reported on it.
It's an enormous story.
And it's like, the fact that that's getting, that you don't know about it, and that people obsessively talk about the state of Israel as if it's the, and by the way, the state of Israel does lots of things wrong.
But the idea that it's among the worst human rights tragedies of our time, are you kidding me?
What I do know from people that have gone there, like Abby Martin, who came back with some pretty horrific stories, I think there's a lot of terrible shit going on.
There's a lot of awful violence and there's a lot of despair on the side of the Palestinians.
And I don't know who's to blame for that.
But many people blame the Israelis.
They blame the Israelis for treating the Palestinians as if they're in this one area of the world that's essentially a large prison.
Well, lots to say about this, but I think one of the main problems that we have in the way that Israel is covered is that if you have a camera lens and you're only looking at a tiny piece of land, right?
You're only looking at Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel, to some extent, is the Goliath in that situation.
But if you zoom out your camera just a little, you see that Israel is literally surrounded on all sides by genocidal regimes, like in the form of Hamas in Gaza, whose charter Blames the Jews for fomenting the French revolutions, the Russian revolutions, both world wars, and says that it wants to kill all the Jews.
That's the government of Gaza right now.
I spoke to a mother who fled Gaza recently, and her family's house was just destroyed.
Who was it destroyed by?
Hamas, not Israel.
You never hear those stories.
So I'm just saying it is a very complicated situation.
Politics.
But when you see people obsessively focusing on this one state and the crimes of this one state to the exclusion of actual dictatorships in the world who are killing their own people, you have to be suspicious of that.
I mean, that is something that goes back to the New Testament.
Okay, the Jews were blamed in the book of John and Mark, I mean, we could go to Matthew, for the death of Jesus.
Their role in that story, at least according to some of the books, is that they convinced the most powerful empire at the time, the Roman Empire, in the form of the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, to kill the son of God.
That becomes sort of the template for the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
There's a confusion about what anti-Semitism is, right?
It's not just a hate.
It's not just like this hate of a group.
Racists perceive themselves as punching down against a group that's lesser.
Anti-Semites perceive themselves as punching up against the secret cabal of wily operators who secretly control the levers of power.
That is the canard of anti-Semitism.
And that begins with this group that's able somehow to get the Roman Empire to kill Jesus.
Now, the Catholic Church disavows this in 1965, which was, you know, an enormous historical event.
But that template is still there.
And you see it play out, right, in who led us into the war in Iraq?
Ah, it was the Jews of the Bush administration.
You can see it play itself out all over the place.
And right now, in the demonology of contemporary antisemitism, Israel has sort of been made into the Jew among the nations.
You're not allowed to say anymore, like the old school antisemitism, right?
Like I grew up in a place where there were some country clubs where Jews couldn't go into them.
That, frankly, that's not dangerous.
What's dangerous is the kind of anti-Semitism that says, you know, this one state in the world of all of the almost 200 states, that's the one that doesn't have the right to exist.
That's the one that should be dismantled.
That's actually dangerous to Jewish lives right now.
I just find it kind of astonishing, the blindness to this, because imagine a leader of the Women's March said something like, you know, I think Louis C.K. is the greatest comedian of all time, even though I disavow X, Y, and Z thing that he did.
How fast till that person was kicked out of the leadership of the Women's March?
It would be like minutes, hours.
Yes.
I think there are certain things that get people outraged and other much worse things that do not.
It is much harder when someone like Ilhan Omar, the new freshman congresswoman from Minnesota, who's like this incredible American dream story, comes here at 12 years old, refugee from Somalia, wears a hijab, is a mother, is the first woman of color representing Minnesota.
Like, obviously, I want to cheer her.
That's my reaction to her.
And yet, she has This tweet that she refused to apologize for, where she says, Israel has hypnotized the world.
May Allah awaken the world to the evil doings of Israel.
I'm sorry, that's a classically anti-Semitic trope, even if she said it unwittingly.
And by this point, she should educate herself.
So it's much harder to criticize that, but it's an untenable position to say that you can't criticize someone for their ideas because of their identity.
What do you think, if you want to be objective, step outside of your Jewish identity, what do you think is wrong with how Israel is dealing with the Palestinian situation?
Because this is the big criticism of Israel, the only criticism.
Well, I would say the untenable position that they're in is that they are occupying another people.
That is what is going on in the West Bank.
And I've been there many times, met with many Palestinians.
I've really educated myself on this.
The problem is that – and by the way, it's not all of Palestine.
There's – sorry, all of the West Bank.
There's areas A, B, and C. It's a really – like we have to pull up a map.
It's a pretty complicated thing.
There are places where it's much more autonomous and the PA is in charge and it really varies depending on the area.
So the big criticism, right, is that they're occupying another people and that is corrosive to the state of Israel sort of morally, like to occupy another people.
On the other hand, what happens if they pull out of the West Bank tomorrow, right?
I'm for a two-state solution, ultimately ending the occupation.
But if I'm real, I have to be honest about what that would look like.
Well, what it looked like in Gaza is that now you have a terrorist statelet right at the border, which is ruled by Hamas.
It is quite likely that that very same thing could happen in the West Bank.
Now, let's say – we actually should pull up a map.
Let's say Israel does that.
Then like the whole of Israel proper is something like, we have to look, two miles wide?
We actually, yeah, we should look at the distance between like Tulkarim or like the end of the West Bank and Netanya or Tel Aviv and you see how small that is.
If you're in charge of protecting the security of the people who live in places which, by the way, 10 years ago, when in the year after high school, when I was living there, there were suicide bombings blowing up in cafes around the corner from where I lived.
Are you going to subject those people to that risk?
I mean, that's the actual question facing the government of Israel, which, by the way, I'm extremely critical of.
And if I lived in Israel, I'd be voting, you know, center left in Israel for sure.
But that is what they're facing.
And then if you zoom out and you pull up a map of all of the countries around it, I just want, like, look.
No, it's okay.
Actually, the one you were on was good because it showed, if you zoomed out, it had everything.
So you have Egypt there, then you have Jordan, which is teetering, then you have Syria, then you have Lebanon, and Hezbollah's on the southern border of Lebanon, which is constantly...
So that's...
The real thing.
So when people talk about this fantasy of why can't it just look like America?
Why can't there just be a democratic one-state solution?
First of all, no one there wants it.
They poll people constantly.
But the second thing is like, is that really what that's going to look like if we dismantle the state of Israel?
Or is it going to look like enormous bloodshed, the likes of which we see in a lot of these countries surrounding it?
Like, Someone once said to me that if you want to know the word for, you know, a Jew without a military, it's the Yazidis.
Okay, it's the Yazidis.
It's the people, it's the minorities in the Middle East who have been absolutely...
I don't think when Americans talk about this part of the world, they fully appreciate the sort of absolutely painful and hard decisions and the grappling with violence, really.
You know, what happened to Jamal Khashoggi in that Saudi embassy?
That's like normative for this part of the world.
So the fact that Israel has somehow, with all of its flaws, managed to eke out a Western-style liberal democracy, frankly, the only place where you and I would feel happy and comfortable living, like, why are we never talking about that?
The solution right now is to do everything possible to build up the Palestinian economy, for Israel to build relationships.
Like right now it has very, very positive relationships with Egypt, which gave back the Sinai, which it had won in the Six-Day War, I believe.
Gave it back to Egypt for a cold peace, which it's had.
It has a good relationship, of all things, who would have thought with Saudi Arabia because of their common enemy, Iran.
I mean, things shift there rapidly.
But as for the Palestinians, the solution is to build up the economy, make life better, and support people and movements inside the West Bank that are genuinely nonviolent.
And those people exist.
It's just, frankly, oftentimes, they're murdered by groups like Hamas and their bodies are dragged through the streets.
If you're accused of being an Israeli collaborator in the West Bank, you know what happens to you?
No, because I think that, first of all, many people who talk about this issue have sort of exported American domestic politics to a foreign region of the world.
Like, in a way that this is talked about a lot, it's like the oppressor, the oppressed, the white, the black.
No, that's not what's going on.
I don't think people understand when they talk about Israeli Jews that half of them are Middle Eastern.
Like, half of Israeli Jews are Arab.
You know, there's no appreciation of that reality.
They think that Israel was just founded, you know, to save the remnant of the Jews who weren't destroyed in the Holocaust.
And yeah, it helped for those who survived.
But then once the state of Israel was established, there was a mass exodus of the Jews from all of the Arab countries where they had been living as second class citizens, where they were either self-deported because they were living as second class citizens or they were expelled.
Again, that exodus, that deportation never talked about.
I would be happy to talk about this with someone from the Women's March.
What is the current position that most people are taking about that woman and about the Women's March in general because of these things, because of these anti-Semitic statements?
I think a lot of people in the past few weeks, thanks in part to Meghan McCain, had five minutes on The View with Tamika Mallory and Bob Land, and she did an amazing job grilling them on this.
Because, frankly, because their image was so powerful in the same way that the image at the Lincoln Memorial was so powerful, journalists just sort of accepted it and didn't interrogate them.
But again, I wrote that column in August 2017 and it took until now.
Everything in that column is the thing people are talking about.
There was also an amazing 10,000-word expose in Tablet Magazine, a Jewish online magazine that did a lot of that work.
So I think it did reach a tipping point.
The thing that is – I see a lot of my friends on the left who are Jewish grappling with is that they so desperately want to be a part of these movements that they're willing to sort of check their identity at the door in order to gain entry.
And my thing is any progressive movement that's asking you to check your Jewish identity at the door, your full Jewish identity, which is acknowledging that we're not just a faith but we're a people.
We're not just people that, like, have matzo ball soup or something bigger than that.
Well, no, I think a lot of it goes back to what I was saying before, which is this misunderstanding.
If you see the world in an intersectional way, okay?
Not as intersectionality was originally meant to be, but how it functions in the world.
It functions as a caste system.
And the higher you are on the victim scale, at least on the left, and it's reverse on the right, right?
On the right, it's like white cisgendered men are at the top.
On the left, they're at the bottom.
And the Jews are somewhere close down to there, at least in the way that the left, the left, I mean, this part of the left we're talking about, the fringe, at least for now, perceive the Jews to be.
The Jews don't have a place in that victim scale because they've achieved so much success because they can pass as white because of any number of things.
And so I think that that's a huge reason for it, which is a huge reason why I think intersectionality is a dead end and why we need to be talking about Ideas
And so any politics that's insisting from the left or the right that know actually what we are is this warring set of groups competing for scarce resources, absolutely not.
I have tremendous pride, the most, in being a Jew.
Jonathan Haidt talks so brilliantly about good identity politics and bad identity politics that good identity politics says, walk with me in my shoes.
It's like a big tent sort of thing.
It says, come along with me while I explain to you my experience in the world.
Bad identity politics says, you can never escape the gender, the racial, the economic lane you were born into and don't even try and understand me because you couldn't possibly.
That's bad identity politics and I think that that's in force and rising right now in the country and I think that that's dangerous and I've been thinking about it a lot because it's Martin Luther King Day and he said this like unbelievable thing about – I think it's actually in the I Had a Dream speech but where he talks about the promissory note of the constitution and the declaration of independence, right?
That these people who wrote it, who were slave owners, didn't even know that in writing it that every American was going to fall heir to this promissory note.
And it's like he saw himself, even in documents that were written by people who would not have seen him as fully human, as a way of sort of using that common set of values, those common documents to like write himself into the story.
Like that is an example of inclusive identity politics.
I'm like calling on the thing that we have in common to widen the tent.
And I just don't see a lot of that happening these days.
I have to say, I loved Australia, but when I get off that plane and I land, as shitty as they are, JFK or LaGuardia, and I see every kind of human being on the planet.
I walk every day from...
I live in Manhattan and I walk to work there and back every day.
It just helps me decompress.
The diversity of people on the sidewalk of midtown Manhattan is...
It's amazing.
I find it to be the most exciting thing in the world.
And the fact that we're able to live among such difference and not kill each other is a miracle.
But New York, I love New York, but New York always makes me feel like when you have that many people slammed on top of each other, you're in this completely unnatural environment that literally has never existed in human nature up until a few hundred years ago.
It never happened like that.
And now it's unprecedented because there's more and more people there that are just buzzing And they're putting these buildings up where you've got 100 floors.
My friend Jim Norton talks about it all the time.
Because he lives in a building.
He goes, I don't know a fucking person in my building.
But the one thing I'll say is that, yeah, it's important for that and I find it so energizing, New York, all the reasons you said, but I also have to force myself to get out of the bubble.
I go home to Pittsburgh and I hear a lot more oftentimes political and intellectual diversity than I hear sometimes in a week in New York.
Because she – for her business, we live in like Squirrel Hill, my family.
I was bat mitzvahed in the synagogue that was shot up.
So that's where we live in Squirrel Hill in the Jewish neighborhood.
But my mom for her work has to drive like two or three hours out of the city and – During the campaign, everyone I knew thought Hillary was going to win, including me.
And she called me and said, Barry, you would not believe the homemade signs.
There are giant homemade signs on the side of people's houses and barns that are enormous, that took them many hours to make.
There's a passion for him that I don't think people are fully appreciating.
The people that are like, man, I don't like her, but he's such a piece of shit, I'm going to vote for her anyway.
That was more common.
The thing was, socially, people appreciate the Democrats and the left because they feel like socially.
Here's a perfect example.
When Barack Obama was a president, people can criticize his policies and the whistleblower, the fact that he cracked down on whistleblowers and the fact that there was more innocents killed by drone strikes and all that stuff.
It's an impossible job.
No one's perfect as a president.
But what he did do First of all, he represented the fact that a minority, an African-American who was born from a single mother, can somehow or another rise to be the President of the United States and be incredibly well-spoken and measured and calm and just seems to know how to carry himself and makes us feel like someone better than us is in a position of power.
And also, I feel like there was a lot of racism from horrible white people that looked at him in a terrible way.
And saw this black person trying to destroy America.
But way more people that aren't racist go, huh, look at that.
You can't have an African-American president.
Look at this.
Like, we're getting better.
Like, that's how I felt.
I felt like we're getting better.
Like, culturally, the way we communicate.
We don't have that right now.
And we didn't have that with her.
What she represented was the same old thing.
The thing that's been fucking you and the reason why your family lost the farm and the reason why...
And this Donald Trump's going to come in here and he's going to clean up the swamp.
And when he came out with that drain the swamp and lock her up, build that wall, he boiled it down so that...
The people that don't have the time or the inclination to really deep dive into their own personal biases, to their own objective reasoning and find out, why do I think the way I think?
The people that don't have that thought, all that build that wall shit was perfect.
Well, one thing I'm seeing – when I ask you about people telling you their secret thought crimes, I am noticing – and in a weird way, this gives me kind of a hope – there is a big gap between people's public personas of the politics that they preach – And then what they really think and what they'll say around a kitchen table.
And a lot of them are experiencing what I think about as like second woke.
Like they're seeing the poverty or the flaws in the woke worldview and that there are holes with it.
But they're kind of too scared to say that out loud because they know it'll be a loss of friends and social capital and everything else.
The only reason I'm sitting here is that I have slightly more courage than most people and that I'm willing to say what I think to hell with pissing some people off or losing some friends that weren't really my friends.
And like, I think it's really important to think about things issue by issue and not just be like, yep, signing up for this whole slew of policies and views on things when actually some of those things don't go together at all.
Well, one thing in the woke left you're not allowed to do is criticize the more repressive aspects of Islam.
You're not allowed to.
You don't do it.
If you bring up anything, it becomes Islamophobic.
Even if it's homophobic, if the ideas are homophobic, or if women have to wear restrictive clothing, any of the things that are incredibly commonplace.
You are not allowed to criticize those because those fall into a protected category.
I remember when I first ran into this in college when I was in a conversation with other feminists and I definitely consider myself a feminist about female genital mutilation.
And I encountered for the first time a species that I've come to know well, which is feminists who sort of defend female genital mutilation on the grounds of cultural relativism.
Why aren't we hearing the leaders of the women's march talk about, say, I don't know, honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriage for girls?
But even in terms of left versus right in these positions, I often talk to people about gun control.
And when people find out that I own guns and that I'm not entirely in favor of Second Amendment being repealed, One thing that drives me crazy is they want to always bring up school shootings, mass shootings, all these different things, which I agree are a horrific, terrible occurrence in our culture and is happening in this insanely frequent way, and it doesn't make sense.
What people don't want to talk about is that almost all those people are on psych medication.
Almost all of them.
Now, correlation does not equal causation.
Them being on the psych medicine might be the same reason why they're shooting up schools in the first place.
Not only do I think that you should – then here's the question.
Who is the person to decide?
And this is what the NRA would say, and this is what pro-Second Amendment people would say.
Who are you to decide whether or not someone is healthy enough or well enough to own a gun?
And does a person who is on antidepressants or a person who has psychological problems not have the ability to defend themselves if they have never exhibited violence?
So here's the problem.
A lot of these motherfuckers, they don't exhibit violence until they break.
Until they pop and then they go shoot up a school.
Sometimes there's threats like Adam Lanza or a couple other ones where the FBI comes and visits them and they talk to them.
Or the guy in Colorado where they knew he was like hanging on by a string.
The problem is when you have no restriction whatsoever, and you have restriction on all these other ones, right?
If you say something anti-Semitic or racist on Twitter, they will ban you.
If you do it on Facebook, they'll ban you.
And Gab is committed 100% to free speech.
I've read things the owners of Gab have said about this and that they're very steadfast in their support for freedom of speech because they think, what I said earlier, that the best way to ensure that good ideas get through is to not suppress bad ideas, but to combat them with better ideas.
All I was going to say is that the guy who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh was saying the most horrific things about the kike infestation in the country.
But this is, I mean, in terms of there being too much to talk about and cover, that's where I do think that things like the New York Times can make a real contribution.
Because we...
There are adults in the room deciding what the important news is that you should pay attention to, in theory at least.
You're going to learn about the genocide of the Uyghur Muslims in the New York Times.
If you really read the New York Times every day, you're going to know a lot about the world and you're going to understand that the government shutdown is a bigger deal than what happened at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
If you're just trolling through Twitter, which is how every person I know, or Twitter or Snapchat or whatever, like my youngest sister, how she gets her news, you're not going to necessarily know that.
That's a real problem.
I don't know how to solve it, other than tell people to subscribe to newspapers which still have some standards and which still, when they make a mistake, correct the mistake.
Yes, and I guess there's some people in the new media landscape that I see – and I don't know if it's because they want to sort of gin up their own audiences or what – like nihilistically getting on – like using Trumpist language to describe the press.
What they don't see, I think what they don't understand is that the loss of trust in the press is a symptom of the loss of trust in lots of public institutions.
The WHO, you know, the World Health Organization just came out with this terrifying report where like one of the top 10 threats to health in, I think, the country, we should look this up, is people who aren't getting vaccines.
People who think vaccines cause autism and are not getting vaccines.
The stakes of like loss of trust in public institutions doesn't just mean like you're going to like hurt the New York Times bottom line.
It's like a threat to all of our health, like quite literally.
You know, I see these things as being very, very connected.
So when I see people gleefully celebrating like the fake news of the New York Times, I'm like, do you have a better alternative right now?
The idea of socialists like Bernie Sanders gonna come along and take all your money.
We're struggling, hard-working Americans.
We gotta put America first.
Put America first.
It's just lack of understanding about the complexity of the entire landscape.
The entire landscape in terms of economics, the entire landscape in terms of international politics, all of it, all the above, the war machine, the lack of understanding about the military-industrial complex, the influence that it has, the lack of understanding about the bankers, about how few people went to jail after the fucking crazy economic collapse that we just recovered from.
It's from 2000, I want to say 10, 11, but it's so sobering when you have this guy who's an economics, a real true economics expert questioning these people who, in many cases, they're economics professors at major universities who give advice.
The whole premise is that there was a football- You can't spoiler alert Ace Ventura Peck Detective.
I had to spoiler alert myself because I forgot.
The whole premise was that this guy steals a dolphin, and when he steals a dolphin, Ace Ventura finds, because he's a pet detective, finds a tiny ruby that's at the bottom of this dolphin tank that is missing from a Miami Dolphins ring.
And he finds out through this exhaustive search that the one guy who he couldn't account for his ring was a kicker who fucked up the World Series.
So this guy that they found out is Sean Young in the movie, who's gorgeous.
And then in the movie...
Take that down, please.
So in the movie...
At the end of it, the reveal is that Sean Young is really this football player who wants to get back at Dan Marino because Dan Marino goes psycho because the world hates him because he blew the kick.
So he's a guy pretending to be a woman and Ace Ventura made out with him.
But what's fascinating to me about it is, first of all, I love exposing these little people to different parts of the world so they get to see what this is like.
Here we are.
Show them on the map.
This is America.
We're over here.
It took us 15 hours to get here in a plane that goes 500-plus miles an hour.
It's crazy.
And just to realize, like, human beings are the same, but different.
We're the same everywhere.
But there's a different way we choose to interact with each other.
And one of the things that happens is we fall into their way when we go there.
Like, if we go to Italy, we say grazie.
You know, we start, I try to, you try to start learning.
Yeah, at one point a car pulled up next to him and a guy with a gun had it like repped to his head and the cab driver thankfully knew what was happening and took off and he didn't die.
Killed by people that were doing it because of the United States involvement in Syria and they cut their heads off and did it on a cell phone camera and they put it on the internet and I watched it.
Yeah, well, that's why I've thought about this a lot.
Because right now, I think in most Americans' minds, it's like the shooting happens, then it becomes a hashtag, then it becomes a t-shirt, then it becomes a memorial thing, a memorial concert.
I mean, it's like actually sickening, like the choreography of it.
And I think what's lost is what it looks like.
And this rabbi in Pittsburgh, who's really amazing, described to me what he saw.
And I'll never forget just the description of what he told me.
And I've wondered a lot in the wake of that, and I'll think about it, when the next shooting happens, would that have made a difference at all in terms of waking people up?
The argument against that would be, look, the real crazies believe that these things are happening And that they're happening because of the fact the government wants to take away our guns.
That the worst aspects of our society, whatever, you know, fill in the blank with whatever left-wing conspiracy, that, you know, whatever person, whatever boogeyman, George Soros, whatever the fuck the boogeyman is, that whatever boogeyman or cabal of boogey people, That they are somehow or another either using like Manchurian candidate type influence, whatever the fuck they're doing.
They're getting people to do this and then even creating false flags where these things didn't happen so they can take away guns.
It's real in terms of the influence that it has, that people actually do believe that there are these false flag events that they're designing to get your guns, that people are training people to go out and kill a bunch of people so they can take away your guns.
So it makes them more rabid about their support of the Second Amendment, and they feel like they're being attacked on all sides.
Mick West is actually just as good or even better.
He runs Metabunk.
He's a fascinating guy.
I did this show for a while on SyFy called Joe Rogan Questions Everything.
And one of the things that we went into was why people believe in chemtrails.
why people believe that the heat of jet engines, which causes these artificial clouds when it interacts with condensation in the atmosphere and creates artificial clouds.
You see contrails.
Some people believe that these are, that someone's spraying something and that this weather control from these commercial jets that there are, you know, somehow there's this gigantic conspiracy of all these people involved and that this is in some way just... somehow there's this gigantic conspiracy of all these people involved They're either doing weather control or they're controlling us or mind control.
And one of the things that he said is this is like the training wheels for conspiracy theory because you see it in the sky.
Like, look, there it is.
I don't remember that.
You know, there's photographs from World War II where you can see, from the 1940s, you can see contrails in the sky that look just like the ones up here.
But people will say, I don't remember those when we were kids.
And people will go, yeah, yeah, I don't.
And then it starts fueling this paranoid idea that there's this program going on.
And then there are real programs that the government is considering to combat global warming.
They talked about this in the 70s and the 80s.
They talked about But why do people believe conspiracy theories?
When you see it from the outside, when you see something like the most horrific ones, like Sandy Hook, like Sandy Hook being a false flag, what would be the motivation for someone saying that?
The only thing I can, I mean, the most plausible, I guess, would be Capturing an audience, like getting people to believe in you as some seer behind the veil?
I think the reason people look to conspiracy theories is that the world is...
Deeply chaotic and seems to lack a logic and people are desperate for a system of understanding the world.
And conspiracy theories often seem to like offer a very, very actually like an incredibly simplistic explanation, which is there's this secret – like there's always a secret thing that is a plan that the public doesn't know about generally.
The real thing is that, I mean, haven't we learned that from the Trump presidency, right?
Like, institutions are just made up of people.
Like, they can fall apart if the people that take them over are irresponsible, crazy, venal, narcissistic, everything that we're seeing in the Trump administration.
But isn't that kind of, it's weirdly, I mean, it's both terrifying, but also comforting, I think.
Do you think that this constant conflict, this social conflict that we're involved in right now, the woke left and the alt-right and all this jazz, that the boiling of it right now will eventually boil down to something more rational?
Because it seems like if you read Steven Pinker's work and people that study...
Violence and danger and society over the course of history that we're certainly on an upward trend.
Like, there's one day I was at the beach and I was like, oh, I'm just like sitting here in a bathing suit.
No one's coming up to me.
No one's harassing me.
How many parts of the world could I do that in?
You know, like, I try and keep that in mind when I'm falling into despair about where we are as a country where I'm like, oh, actually in a lot of ways it's still like...
The best thing of the worst things.
It's the best thing in history so far, certainly for women.
So I try and kind of keep that in mind when I'm losing myself to feelings, to fears that things are going to get worse before they get better, which is what I think.
I have all daughters and I have friends that are women and I have a lot of friends that are women in the world of stand-up comedy and I often times see misogynist shit online that shocks me.
And one of the things that shocked me was there's a guy that I follow.
And he was talking about how his wife, it was a thread on Twitter, well thought out, very smart guy as a lawyer, and he was talking about how his wife's gas tank is always empty.
It's like every time he gets in his wife's car, she's always out of gas.
He's like, what the fuck?
Why do I always have to get gas for you?
And then she explained she doesn't like to park to get gas because she gets harassed and it creeps her out.
Because not only are they in denial that this could be a situation where their mother was in, or their wife, or their daughter.
Maybe they don't have a daughter.
Maybe they have a bad relationship with their mother.
Maybe they've had so many bad...
If a guy's had so many bad interactions with women and he's not very smart and he's just decided that women are evil and you see anything that's like saying, hey guys, maybe we should look at it in terms of like how the woman looks at it.
And I'm so nervous that I'm thinking of cutting my pump short.
I'm thinking of just don't get a full tank.
Just get five bucks and get the fuck out of here.
You know, don't run out of gas, but let's just get the fuck out of here.
We'll get the gas tomorrow during the daylight.
And I'm a man.
And I'm looking at these two guys and I'm saying, okay, if some shit goes down, if these guys don't have a weapon, if some shit goes down, I'm going to beat the fuck out of these two guys.
They look skinny.
They look like they don't exercise, but they're aggressive.
They're angry.
They're stupid.
I'm like, God damn it!
All my spidey senses are going, get out of here!
Go!
Get out of here!
And like an asshole, I decided to stay and pump my gas.
But when these guys were yelling at each other, I literally went around the front of the car instead of this back way because it was a shorter path from me being exposed to their view.
So I'm hiding behind my truck while I'm filling my tank, and I'm a man who could kill these two guys!
And also just raising babies, even if they were boys.
I realize that people are babies now.
I used to think of people as being in a static state.
How old are you?
34. I meet you, I go, oh, a 34-year-old person.
This is a 34-year-old person.
I didn't meet you and think, in the past, I would have met you and only thought of you as a 34-year-old person.
Now, I look at everyone.
By default, as a baby.
That's how I process things.
And it made me way more compassionate, way more understanding, and way more patient with people.
Because now I say, okay, when I meet this asshole at the gas station at 2 o'clock in the morning that's berating that guy, Well, why is he?
Well, because probably his dad's a fucking piece of shit.
His life probably sucks.
He's probably dumb.
He's probably been on drugs since he was young.
He doesn't have any smart friends.
They don't have any money to get gas.
It's two o'clock in the morning.
They're making poor life choices.
There's a lot wrong here.
He doesn't have any discipline in his life.
He's never gone through any sort of trials and tribulations that taught him about things.
He didn't receive life lessons, probably didn't get a good education.
Here we are, and I might have to kick this guy's ass because It's two o'clock in the morning and he's threatening.
He's loud and he's probably gonna be loud and other people look at him the wrong way.
He's just fucking toxically stupid.
But it was a baby.
He was a baby at one point in time.
So I don't want to go over there.
I don't want to create violence.
I'm thinking he's just gonna drive away and eventually he did.
And that poor guy who probably is probably making just a little bit more than ten dollars an hour is stuck in this fucking cubicle, this little glass box with this asshole berating him at two o'clock in the morning.
But that's a baby.
That guy was a baby.
My...
Not acceptance, but my curiosity with socialism.
My real curiosity with any socialist ideas is how do we recognize the fact that some people are dealt the shittiest of shitty hand of cards and that there's entire sections of cities where everyone has a shit hand of cards and some make it out through basketball and football and sports and rap music and whatever, but that whole spot sucks.
The whole spot sucks.
The aberrations, the few that make it out, that's not indicative of that this is a good place and these people just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
It's that some salmon make it up this crazy waterfall and the grizzly bears don't eat them.
It doesn't mean that the waterfall is safe for salmon and the salmon that get bit are a bunch of pussies.
This is chaos.
The fact that we don't address that and that our civilization just plows on with the same stupid path that we've had for decades, regardless of the fact that we have an absolute understanding of the complete inequality of the real ghettos of our country, whether it's the south side of Chicago or whether it's Baltimore, wherever it is, we have a real understanding of this.
This isn't guesswork.
We really know, and we don't do a goddamn thing about it.
That's what makes me want to embrace some aspects of socialism.
The fact that I know it's not fair.
It's not fair.
Look, I didn't have a great childhood, but it wasn't bad.
I got through.
I'm fine.
Nobody shot me.
Nobody raped me.
I got through.
Like, it could have been way worse, and it is way worse for many, many people.
So all these pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps assholes, the other thing I notice about them is they're rarely really successful.
They really rarely are these pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps people who have accomplished anything extraordinary.
It's just like an idea.
It's a simplistic ideology that they've sort of subscribed to.
Yeah, I don't know what that's about, but I do think that people do have this desire for a space daddy, a higher power, something that knows more than you, some...
Grand pattern to follow that leads to harmony.
I mean, I think everybody sort of has that thing because again what we're talking about before we we do realize if we are being honest that no one's at the wheel that we wake up We're almost like we're in a spaceship, and we wake up, and we were in hypersleep, and this thing has been flying for millions of years.
We're like, wait, who the fuck is flying this?
Do we know who's flying this?
You're not flying it.
I'm not flying it.
We're going to get together, and we're going to form a group that flies it.
Like, okay, okay, but it still moves.
It's still moving while we're trying to figure out who flies it, and there's no way to slow it down.
There's no brakes in this thing.
We are in an organic spaceship.
We are.
We are.
And we're flying through infinity.
We're spinning a thousand miles an hour.
And we're going through space.
That's real.
And you're going to die.
All those things are real.
All those things sort of make everything else sort of pale in comparison.
The reality of that is so bizarre.
And while we're avoiding those thoughts, we're concentrating on these very minor differences that we really have that are really framed by our teams.
You know, this team says you've got to do this.
This team says you've got to do that.
I can tell, if you tell me you're pro-life, I go, oh, you vote Republican.
In a world in which people live alone and stare down at their flashy screen and worship it like a god, these networks give you a sense of belonging and community.
You know, you catch yourself, like, I remember I was at a dinner party once, and I was, like, describing some Twitter fight I was in, and I was like, oh my god, I've become one of those people, and I'm not going to allow myself to be that person.
Because as things keep going further and further south, what about someone who is a centrist Democrat?
Doesn't that make more sense?
That someone who's a rational person who's on the right is going to look at this person who's maybe economically conservative but socially liberal and say, this is really where I'm leaning towards.
I know, and I'm worried that the Democrats are going to try and replicate that strategy and be like, we just need to make our base go apeshit crazy, rather than running someone that can win the center.
I see where you're going, but I think that – this is maybe my liberal bias, but I think that people on the left wouldn't fall for that the same way people on the right would.
I don't think people on the left who saw someone who went apeshit, full, woke, far left – I think there's a lot of people in the center who'd be like, well, I'm not just going to vote libertarian, man.
Well, my take on her was that I think as a person who's coming from the left, who's also a veteran and is very articulate and sensible and a woman, and in talking to her, we didn't get into Assad or any of those things, but talking to her about what she feels is wrong with the current administration and the way things are running and a direction she thinks things can go in, she has very promising ideas.
Rep Tulsi Gabbard in the early 2000s touted working for her father's anti-gay organization, which mobilized to pass the measure against same-sex marriage in Hawaii and promoted controversial conversion therapy.
They did it with a gay man while they were doing this.
This is in the 1970s.
There's a couple different studies that they did, but one of them they did with this gay guy where they tried to stimulate certain parts of his brain while they were showing him heterosexual porn, and they were trying to convert him into being heterosexual.
And apparently they had some meager amount of success with this where he engaged in sexual relationships with women and apparently even enjoyed it.
And they did something to literally stimulate a part of his brain that would excite arousal and tried to connect that with heterosexual porn.
And made him orgasm, made him masturbate to orgasm while they were doing this and showing him straight porn.
The idea was they were going to reprogram his mind.
If someone does something to you and imprints upon you arousal at a young age with gay experiences, sometimes even heterosexual men will get aroused by certain gay images and gay things because of their past.
But it's also speculative how much of that spectrum is influenced by your environment versus your genes.
And this is very taboo for some people to discuss, even though it's really fascinating.
Human sexuality is incredibly fascinating.
And there's some major...
Taboo areas of exploration and when you start looking at like what makes a person gay or straight Whether it's nature or nurture whether it's a combination of those things whether someone's just radically gay from the room or whether someone's radically straight from the womb these These studies where they were trying to they were trying to turn someone with science They were trying to turn someone straight.
You know, you ever talk to someone where, you know, because I have children and I do like to think of people as babies that become...
You know what they are I see them in front of me right now and this constant state of evolution But sometimes I'll run into someone that's depressingly stupid where I realize like god damn this guy's got a nine-volt brain They just do some people just do and no one wants to admit that and we're not talking about mental retardation or any sort of a disease down syndrome or something like that We're talking about people that are just toxically stupid and they do exist just like some people have big noses some people have little noses So when you were talking to Elon Musk,
I am that toxically stupid person talking to this guy who wants to create gigantic power stations in Australia to fix their grid and wants to shoot fucking rockets into space.
And they literally let him drill under LA. They're like, go ahead.
Well, that is the real, the only saving grace of the concept of white privilege, is that we do have to recognize that some people got a really good deal and some people got a really terrible deal.
But the only reason why white privilege is even something to consider is that racism is real.
White privilege is not, if the world was Barry Weiss or...
But if you look at that lawsuit and the language that the school used to sort of describe them as like – He's anti-social and robotic and all of these stereotypes.
When I learned and I was around so many Korean people, I was stunned by the work ethic that exists in these families and the humbleness and the way it was Almost expected that you never brag and that you work harder than anybody.
And I had a friend who was on the U.S. Taekwondo team to compete in the Olympic Games.
He was working on his schoolwork Oh my god.
He was going through medical school.
I mean, he had bags under his eyes you could stuff Christmas trees in.
It was fucking insane.
This guy was always tired.
But the work ethic that he had was just, I didn't have one-tenth of that work ethic.
It was impossible to ignore.
And he was so spread thin and so tired all the time.
But he kept working.
And he would talk about his culture.
And he would talk about his family and what his dad expected of him.
He's like, man, in my house like that, you just fucking did it.
There's not like, oh, I feel tired today.
Fuck you, get up, go to work.
But that attitude has allowed so many Asian people that discipline and just this culture of performance and of achievement where it's so cherished.
That has allowed so many Asian people to excel in academia.
And the fact that Harvard somehow or another steps in and says, well, we're going to make it more difficult for you because you work so hard.
That is so crazy and so weird.
It's so weird that they, as this, I mean, if you think about If you think about institutions of higher learning, Harvard is the first one you think about.
That they will be racist against the best performers because they're performing too well and there's a disproportionate number of them in the university.