Joe Rogan and Bari Weiss debate ideological conformity, from Trump-era economic benefits to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Democratic nomination bid, where Rogan praises Tulsi Gabbard’s anti-interventionism while dismissing Elizabeth Warren’s perceived dishonesty over Native American ancestry. They question Epstein’s death, linking it to erased footage and conspiracy theories, before Weiss highlights rising anti-Semitism—from Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life shooter to Brooklyn machete attacks—fueled by replacement theory and political tribalism. Weiss argues anti-Zionism mirrors historical anti-Semitic tropes, framing the issue as a symptom of societal decay where extremist rhetoric, even from mainstream figures like Trump, normalizes bigotry, ultimately calling for broader cultural solutions to bridge polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
So we were talking so well before the podcast rolled out that I just wanted to start it.
We don't have to talk about presidential candidates.
We don't have to talk about all that.
But we're in a weird time.
And to speak to what we were talking about before, we're just talking about how people are so strange.
There's so much.
So many people, there's just a big disconnect between what people actually think and what they actually say.
And I think this is, in my life, this is the first time that I've ever really experienced it at this level.
There's a hysteria because people are being punished for their real beliefs.
Instead of having the ability to express themselves and have other people disagree and have some sort of rational discussion, this is a strange time where you have to toe the status quo.
You have to toe the line.
And I've been trying to figure out what it is, but I think a big part of it is the opposition to Trump.
I think people's opposition to Trump is so strong that— Yeah, it seems like the people that oppose him, they just want complete and total compliance with opposition, with this different way of thinking.
Yeah, it's like the stakes are so high that everyone needs to be on side and an active part of the resistance.
And if you deviate in any way, it shows that you're a squish or that you're actually loyal to the other side.
And in fact, what that side of things is doing is that they're limiting the spectrum of what's allowed to say so, so, so narrowly that people I think are becoming kind of secretly radicalized because in the other way.
And honestly, like, you're great, but I think one of the reasons you're so unbelievably popular is because you just say what you think and you bring other people on here to say what they think.
And the number of places where that actually happens is unbelievably small and getting smaller.
Well, it's like you can both believe that there are two sexes and that there are biological differences between men and women and also believe that if someone asks you to call them by a different pronoun than the one that they used to go by or whatever, that you want to respect that person and that life is so hard and why wouldn't you just go along with that?
I'm saying that like two things are possible at once.
Sure.
You can believe in biological difference and believe that people should be respected and that, you know, if someone wants to change their gender and that life becomes much more, you know, transgender is real and also sex differences are real.
I think that one thing that's overlooked in this, when we talk about cancel culture, right, and the social ostracism and the actual firings that can happen when you break with one another orthodoxy is that the people who are inoculated from it are people that are already extremely successful and can take the risk.
It's why Ricky Gervais can be Ricky Gervais.
It's why J.K. Rowling can tweet what she tweeted a few months ago and survive it because they've already accumulated enough capital.
The people that I hear from that are completely screwed by it are people like artists and poets and untenured professors who aren't famous and no one knows about and are having to go with a begging bowl on Patreon or Venmo or whatever to get support after they've made a bad joke or whatever it is.
Like, if you say, I know there is a God, you're not being honest because you've never, unless you know something that I don't, unless you've died and experienced it.
And even then, we could chalk that up to a host of neurochemicals that your body releases when it thinks you're dying.
And some of them I've actually taken before.
So I know what the experience is like.
And if you say there's no God, you don't know what you're talking about either.
You really don't know if there's no God.
No one knows.
No one knows what even the concept of God is.
You're talking about thousands of years of trying to decipher experiences and things that are translated from one language to another, from different phonetic languages.
And it just, it's very strange to try to tell people that you know something for a fact when you've never experienced it.
And this is what we talk about.
When I talk to my children, I don't say there's no God, God's bullshit, religion's bullshit, everyone's lying to you.
I just say no one really knows, but it gives people comfort.
It makes people feel better.
And then there's a lot of things that are really good about church.
And one of the things that's really good about church is the community.
I mean, this to me connects to the thing that we open by talking about, which is polarization and tribal, you know, the tribal politics we're living in.
I think you've had Jonathan Haidt on the show, and his book, The Righteous Mind, is brilliant about this, that we were evolved to be religious creatures in a certain way.
And what happens when we lose religion?
That impulse goes somewhere.
And I think that impulse has gone into, you know, politics and the culture war.
Because we're not going to go back to convince people that are unconvincible that they're, you know, I think fighting for the idea of God is sort of a losing argument in the culture.
So how do we retain the good things that came from religious structures in a post-God age?
Yeah, but we're kind of living in the age of the unabomber, but we're certainly living in an age where people are completely isolated.
You know, everyone on the campaign trail is talking about the diseases of despair and how the lifespan in this country has gone down for the past three years.
Life expectancy has gone down in the past three years.
I think about like, what would it look like if all the journalists at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal were banned from being on Twitter?
No, for real.
Because like what happens, right, is like it's this circular thing where we all know the landmines, right?
Like the things we don't want to touch, like the hills we don't want to die on.
And it's what's scary about the Stasi-like atmosphere of it is like my job is to write opinion columns and commission other people to do that.
And yet I feel the self-censoring even before I've written, right?
Where I'm like, wait, I don't want to die on that hill.
I don't want to die on that.
Is that really the battle I want to take on?
I should probably just stick to this topic instead of that topic because I know if I do that topic, like I know what awaits me.
And I think one of the reasons that I get in a lot of trouble or I'm provocative or whatever the words that go before my name are whenever I'm mentioned now controversial is because I, you know, I think more than other people, I refuse to follow the rule.
When people don't have control of their own lives, they love to control other people's lives.
And one of the things that happens when you have an opinion that does not follow the, you know, whatever the path that's been clearly grooved for us to, when you're supposed to have very specific ideas about these very clearly defined subjects, when you deviate from those and people start attacking you, what they're trying to do in many, this is a lot of what they're trying to do.
It's nuanced, but one of the things they're trying to do is they're trying to get you to listen to them so that they have some power.
They feel powerless in the world.
And if they can push your button, if they can break your glass, then they have some power.
And, you know, and it just like, what's sad about it is like the number of young people I know who are so talented and are heterodox or just independent-minded people, like liberals, they choose not to become public people.
Like they decide not to go into journalism, not to do comedy, not to do any number of things because like, why would you choose to, you know, be in that arena if this is what it means?
You know, one of my favorite stories to speak to this is that woman who was in Canada, who was a trans woman who still has her penis and balls, and went to a bunch of different waxing places.
Closed down these immigrant waxing places because they wouldn't wax her male genitalia.
And I miss this.
They wound up going to court and she wound up losing.
But these people lost their businesses.
Their businesses get, you know, Canada is very different than the United States.
And they have these- They're very nice.
Like 20% nicer.
But they also have weird human rights laws.
Like they have, you know, this is what Jordan Peterson was rallying against with these compelled speech laws.
He was explaining it in a way that didn't make sense to us because we have freedom of speech in America, but they don't have freedom of speech in Canada.
And with this woman, when she went to these places and was saying, hey, you know, you have to wax my dick and balls.
And they were like, no, we do Brazilian wax on women.
And they're like, you're a bigot.
And then she turned out to be a complete fucking lunatic.
I mean, if you follow her in the news now, like assaulting people and all sorts of other stuff, but still biologically a man and has all the parts.
And this was the line in the sand.
This is like, okay, here's your case.
Now you've got one.
Because this is not just about discrimination against a trans woman.
And this is some new thing.
This is the very real possibility that some trans people, trans people are human, right?
Some trans people are fucking crazy.
You got one.
Here you got one.
Now, are you going to treat this like an abusive, insane person?
Or are you going to treat this like trans people have these undeniable rights and privilege because of the fact that they've been put in this marginalized position by our society that you have to look at them in a very specific way.
And if you deviate at all, you will be punished.
And that's what happened to these poor immigrants.
You're cutting skin off of their dick and they wind up getting infected and they lose their dicks.
It's, I mean, it doesn't happen all the time, but it happens enough time where you go, well, this should never happen.
This is a completely unnecessary operation.
Robert Baker estimates 229 deaths per year from circumcision in the United States.
Boeinger estimates that apparently approximately 119 infant boys die from circumcision related each year in the U.S. 1.3% of all male neonatal deaths from all causes.
There are several case reports of death in the medical literature.
Yeah.
It's not simple.
You're cutting skin.
Skin is an organ.
You have an unnecessary, I'm circumcised.
You have an unnecessary operation that you're doing to an infant and it's decorative.
And because there's this unbelievably strange coalition of like lefty Waldorf family homeschool people with like ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe that they're like remnants of pigs in the vaccine and they're coming together to do what they just did in New Jersey, which is like they were, I think New Jersey was close to passing a law to end the religious, you know, there's religious exemptions for vaccines in a bunch of states still.
And New Jersey was very close to, which has had a bunch of outbreaks to ending the religious exemption.
And then you had these like very strange bed fellows come together and lobby against the law and it lost, which is really upsetting.
Like I do not think there should be a religious exemption for vaccines.
It's a very unusual one, because it's a very rare time where you're talking about something that if you do put it in someone's body and it is effective, it will stop a deadly pandemic from spreading.
People think there's conspiracies with every fucking thing that ever happens on this earth.
Conor McGregor just destroyed Donald Ceroney in 40 seconds.
There is an entire community of people online right now thinking that that was a setup and that it was a fake fight and that they had planned it all in advance.
And this is just to make money.
I mean, I'm talking about volumes of writing.
I mean, people are just page after page after page talking about things that don't make sense about the fight.
Like, this is just what people do.
They look for conspiracies in everything, whether it's vaccines or politics or Jews.
And one of the things that is so like refreshing about him is that I don't know if I've been in a room in the past year with so many former Bernie and former Trump people, which are a lot of his supporters.
You know, are like disaffected, disappointed Trump people and then people that supported Bernie in 2016.
And there's just, I don't know, like when you hear him talk, the villain of his stump speech is not Donald Trump, even though he hates Donald Trump.
The villain is Amazon and Big Pharma and automation, like the things that are actually transforming and decimating the country.
I think the candidate, I will be very surprised if the candidate is not Bernie, both because of the fundraising and because of where he is in the polls, and because, and this is the most fundamental thing, the energy in the country right now is a populist energy.
And I just don't think that a moderate, like the ones that I like, like a Klobuchar or a Biden, can capture that, the energy of the base.
I think you're always going to have a hard time when someone's the incumbent, right?
You're always going to have a hard time when someone is the sitting president who is extremely controversial, extremely polarizing, but also we're in a great time economically.
That's hard for people to deviate from.
It's hard for people to deviate from good economy.
When you look at the stock market, when you look at the market.
When he got in office, I said political correctness just got hit with a missile to the dick.
That's what it was like when that guy got in office.
Like, what the fuck?
He just want after all that grab the pussy stuff and all that, all the craziness that the fact that he was able to weather that storm and it didn't even seem to shake him.
Yeah, well, as long as the person was a dick, as long as the person he shot was a real asshole, like, well, you know, we don't, do we really need that guy?
No, well, we need Trump as president.
It's going to be hard.
It's going to be, it's always hard to get someone out of office.
I mean, what sunk George H.W. Bush was Ross Perot.
And a lot of people forget that.
Ross Perot, this eccentric billionaire, got on television and bought an entire half hour of regular prime time television and put on this display of why you're getting fucked and explained taxes to you and explain.
What Bernie stands for is a guy who, well, look, you could dig up dirt on every single human being that's ever existed if you catch them in their worst moment and you magnify those moments and you cut out everything else and you only display those worst moments.
That said, you can't find very many with Bernie.
He's been insanely consistent his entire life.
He's basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life.
And that, in and of itself, is a very powerful structure to operate from.
Well, I think she, first of all, is someone who's served twice overseas, been deployed twice, and understands the actual cost of war, worked in medical units, saw people murdered and shot down and destroyed by war.
And she wants none of it.
And she wants us to have less interventionist foreign policy decisions that affect people's lives and send our young brothers and sisters over there to get killed.
That's one thing.
She's a person who served in Congress.
She understands how it works.
She's a very nice, friendly person.
I believe her.
When I talk to her, she's very genuine.
And if you want a woman president, that's what you want.
You want a young woman who has served in Congress, who has served overseas, who's been deployed.
She makes a lot of sense with a lot of things she's saying.
They're a part of a different world where corruption was open and accepted and it was a part of the program.
If you pay attention to the Clinton Foundation, you pay attention to the amount of money that they would get paid to speak to bankers and the fact that they wouldn't release the transcripts.
That was the great thing about Bernie during the 2016 election.
The like most scandalous thing about him, the Daily Mail just like was like, Bernie Sanders, he requests his junior suites in his hotels to be 65 degrees, and he asks his staff to collect honey packets.
Oh, yeah, but also, I mean, the moment that I, you know, gave up on Elizabeth Warren's political judgment is when she decided to publicly go through the DNA, the 23andMe or whatever it was, to prove that she was, in fact, partially Native American.
Really, they didn't have illustrious works of art and beautiful...
The Comanches were a war people.
They raided, they hunted, they ate mostly meat.
All they ate was meat.
They didn't farm.
They didn't do any farming.
They just roamed around and killed buffalo and just dominated the entire western half of this country for hundreds and hundreds of years because they were the first ones to figure out how to ride horses.
They were the first ones to not just figure out how to ride horses, but to raise horses, animal husbandry.
They figured out how to accumulate large stables of horses and ride them better than anybody could.
Cynthia Ann Parker was, she was abducted by the Comanches when she was nine years old and then became accepted as a part of the tribe and then went on to be the wife of the major chief, one of the major Comanche chiefs, and then was kidnapped back by the United States when she was 30.
But she didn't want to be in the United States because her whole life by the whatever, the pioneers, whatever the fuck they would call them, the Americans.
I read a book by my friend Stephen Ronella called The American Buffalo.
And it's the history of the bison in the United States and the Native Americans that would travel with the bison and all these different tribes that would they basically coexisted with the bison, just moving with the bison as they migrated and hunting the bison.
And I was just like, what a strange thing that these people lived in this stone age but fantastic way with all these myths and legends and stories and so much magic in their life.
So when Elizabeth Warren lies about being that, like, that's a big deal because they're one of the most mythical cultures, one of the most magical cultures in a lot of ways.
Because, look, they did horrific things to each other.
There's no doubt about the Comanches were fucking ruthless to each other, to other Native American tribes.
They went on war constantly.
They were raiding each other constantly, kidnapping, abducting, murdering.
I mean, there was this, there's no like this idea of Native Americans being like the peaceable horseshit, 100% horseshit.
That's not how they lived.
But the way they lived was, I don't want to say admirable, but fascinating, fascinating and powerful.
And they had their very strict rules and codes of operating that were very unlike the Western world.
And they were invaded.
They were invaded and dominated and killed off by disease.
And then ultimately, I mean, they were shooting buffalo just to starve the Indians out.
I mean, there was a lot of crazy shit that went down.
So when she comes out and says, you know, oh, I grew up Native American, the fuck you did.
The fuck you did.
And the more books I read, now I'm on Black Elk Speaks, which is my favorite one so far, because Black Elk Speaks is an actual man named Black Elk, who is a Oglala Sioux medicine man, a Lakota medicine man, who in the 1930s told his story.
So he was alive when he was there when Custer was murdered.
Yeah, he was there when the Sioux were forced into reservations.
He's telling the whole story of them going from living this nomadic life to being forced in these reservations and starving and alcoholism and all the chaos that came with it.
And this one's the best because it's literally his words.
So you get a direct translation.
He's talking to his son.
His son is talking to the author and the book was written in the 1930s.
We're reaching out to a couple of different Native American groups to try to find a good representative to come in and talk about their grandparents and the stories that they had heard.
Yeah.
It's a crazy subject.
And it's, to me, look, pretending you're anything is not good, but pretending you're Native American to me is like, whoa.
Because that's one where everybody, there's like a spirituality aspect to Native Americans that's implied.
Like you say you're Native American, people are like, oh, that guy fucking knows things.
You know, you're allowed to have feathers.
You can have an unironic dream catcher on your wall.
Like the Western world when she was forced to live in cities and live in towns and she fucking hated it.
And you get her words, you know, when she's describing the difference.
Like the Comanche world was filled with magic and gods.
The water was a god.
The sky was a god.
Everything was, there was magic.
Like you would, there was rituals they would do to protect themselves in combat.
And all these things made life fantastic.
The hunting of the buffalo and the nomadic way of life.
And then all of a sudden to be locked into these buildings and wearing these clothes and stuck within these rituals that the white men would live.
She didn't want to have any part of that.
So even though, like, you know, if someone was Cynthia Parker's, if she had sex with a white man and made a white baby, that is not a Native American baby, but it kind of is.
You know, I mean, in terms of culture, she was 100% all in Comanche when they eventually abducted her back.
Amazing stuff.
So fuck Elizabeth Warren.
Fuck, fuck, fuck that crazy, I'm Native American talk.
Again, no disrespect to Mrs. Warren.
Maybe someone lied to her.
Maybe someone lied to her.
Maybe she didn't know she was one 2,000th Native American.
I think what happened, I don't know, this is one thing where I can give them both a generous read.
I think it's very possible that they had the kind of conversation that people like you and I have all the time, which is, can a woman win the presidency of the United States?
And I think Bernie gave an answer that probably led a lot of people give in those conversations, which is maybe not.
Maybe the American people are too sexist to elect a woman.
Like, that's possible.
And she, you know, and he meant that in an observational way, not any judgment on who she is or the capability of a woman to be president.
And she heard it in the negative way of a woman can't be president.
I think he'll maybe use it as a way of, I think one of the things that people are going to say about Bernie, especially from the right, is they're going to attack him on his foreign policy credentials and they're going to say that he is not going to be a good ally of Israel, not serious on foreign policy, not hawkish.
And they'll point to the fact that some of his surrogates are extremely problematic people like Linda Sarsour.
And I think in that sense, Bernie's Jewishness will be important because I think he'll use it to say, but I'm Jewish.
You know, like, how dare you accuse me of X, Y, and Z thing.
That Bernie Elizabeth Warren stuff was started, I believe, as a report on CNN the day before they hosted that debate as just maybe a way to drum up ratings, which it did work.
Ratings were higher than like the previous two or three.
But it's almost like we've stopped talking about Jeffrey Epstein, but he's clearly been murdered.
He clearly was the guy who was in some way, shape, or form a part of a gigantic ring where you would get underage girls to these pedophiles or public figures who were interested in having sex with 16-year-old girls.
But what I was going to say is, like, you know, I've talked to enough people that knew him, met him, went to parties at his house, and said, like, everyone knew this about him.
This is a strategy question of if you really want progress and all the things that he talk about, I could make the argument that, yeah, you're part of this crazy, ridiculous, retrograde institution, but you can probably do more good in that role than you can, I don't know, like living in Canada.
I think it's the idea is you don't want a monarch moving into this, you know.
Canada is a colony of England, but they have their independence.
So the idea would, if a royal from England moved into Canada, this is probably some ancient fucking rule, but they would be able to set up shop and start running Canada because they have power over the prime minister.
I know, but the problem is, right, like you can see the world moving on as a kind of, or the world, the press as a conspiracy, or you can just, like, the way I see it is there are so many things to cover in the world, and the press has been so gutted that we need to decide, like, yeah, is it more important to cover like Suleimani than Jeffrey Epstein?
Well, I think because the way Eric describes it, Eric thinks that there are people in these, look, these are enormously high-profile people that have very buttoned-down, respectable positions in life where you really can't get wild, right?
But they're also, they're also still men, right?
So he thinks that there are people that provide services.
And I'm definitely paraphrasing how Eric described it to me.
But of course, that's just practically true, right?
Like, if you're an Elon Musk or someone at that level, like a public figure or Eric Schmidt or whatever, you're not going to like, what are you going to do?
So I grew up in Squirrel Hill, which is like pretty much down the street from Mr. Rogers, like it was quite literally Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.
He's from there.
And it was an amazing place to grow up.
I became a bat mitzvah in 1997 and it happened at Tree of Life.
I actually was a member of a different synagogue called Beth Shalom, but there had been this fire.
And so all of the kids who were becoming a bar of Bat Mitzvah that year did it at Tree of Life.
And, you know, in the same way that people think about 9-11 as a date, I think about also October 27, 2018, because that morning I was in Arizona to give a speech to a group.
And I looked at my phone around 10 in the morning to like my family WhatsApp chat.
And my youngest sister had just said, there's a shooter at Tree of Life.
And my thought immediately went to my dad because my dad is kind of what we think of as a promiscuous Jew.
Like he goes to different synagogues.
He pays membership dues at various ones.
He likes the sermons at one and the scotch at another.
And I thought that there was a good possibility that he was there.
Thank God he was not there.
But my mom wrote back, we're going to know people there.
And my dad knew most of the people.
11 people were killed.
It was the most lethal anti-Semitic attack in all of American history.
I knew several of the people that were killed.
And I ended up, I was supposed to actually go to Israel the next day on a reporting trip to report on this fascinating archaeological dig.
But I ended up putting that trip off, doing that story later, and just spending the week to see what happened, what happens to a community when something like this goes down.
Because we read about mass shootings all the time, right?
So much so that they become kind of an abstraction.
And I, you know, I don't report on this stuff, so I had never borne witness to what unfolds.
And it was a really transformative week.
And I write this in the book, but I feel like in retrospect, I had spent my life on a kind of holiday from history, both because I was, you know, I'm a Jew of the post-war era, which is to say, I'm part of the luckiest diaspora in all of Jewish history.
Like the Jews since the end of World War II in this country have had it better than we've ever had it ever before.
And all of the kind of mythology about what America could be, the idea that it's a shining city on a hill, the idea that it's a new Jerusalem, like I was raised on those ideas.
And even though anti-Semitic things happened to me, like speaking of Catholic school, like I would wait for the school bus to my Jewish day school with my sister, and there was this Catholic school bus that would drive by and they would scream, you know, kikes and dirty Jews and where are your horns.
And I remember in high school, someone telling me to pick up pennies.
Like things happened, but it all kind of like didn't register.
It really rolled off my back because I saw those as like vestiges from an earlier and uglier time, like something that those people should be embarrassed about, not something that said anything about me.
And, you know, even after Pittsburgh, though, I was kind of like, you could still delude yourself into thinking like this is a one-off.
It shouldn't change, you know, the fundamental Jewish American assessment of our experience here and our place of belonging here.
But then six months later to the day, there's another white supremacist attack on a synagogue in Powway, California.
And then we've had, you know, we've had this rash of violent anti-Semitic attacks happening in the New York area, which I hope we'll talk about.
But, you know, it's weird because I grew up in a very political family.
Like my mom, my dad's a political conservative.
My mom's a liberal.
We're obsessed with politics.
We were always talking about politics.
And we're always talking about Jews, right?
Like we're really proudly Jewish family.
And so it wasn't that I thought anti-Semitism had died.
Like I was, you know, I watched anti-Semitism as it was sort of resurging in countries like France and England in Western Europe.
But I sort of looked at all of that with some level of distance and maybe even a little condescension.
Like we're sort of inoculated from that disease in America.
America's singular.
America is sort of separate from the tragedy of so much of Jewish history.
And I have to say that like it sounds naive, but I was sort of shocked to see it that it's here too, you know, and that we haven't escaped from it.
And I mean that awakening happened a little bit before Pittsburgh, which is, it happened, I think it was April 2017, you'll correct me.
But I remember being shocked, right, when those people were marching and they were shouting blood and soil, like Blunten Boden, which is a Nazi slogan.
And when I heard the Jew, yeah, sorry, August 2017.
When I heard Jew, like the Jews will not replace us, right?
I heard it in like the plain meaning of that phrase.
Like the Jew is not going to take my job.
The Jew is not going to like take my job in the corner office or whatever.
But in fact, it was like a reflection of this replacement theory ideology, which is that brown people and black people and Muslims and immigrants are coming to replace our white civilization.
And the Jews' job is basically to pass as a white person, but in fact do the bidding of these people that we deem to be not pure.
That is a deeply, deeply ancient anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, right?
It's the idea of, well, let's go back to the New Testament.
Let's go back to Jesus, right?
What happens in that story?
The story there is that the Jews go to Pontius Pilate and say, you know, like this person's unacceptable to us.
And in the mythology of that story, the Jews get what was then the most powerful empire in the world, the Roman Empire, to do their bidding.
And you have this line in the book of Matthew that is so, so, I mean, the bloodiness of this line cannot be quantified, where he says, you know, his blood be on us and on our children, which goes, you know, down through the centuries to justify the killing of Jews, of, you know, untold numbers of Jews.
But the idea of the Jew as sort of like the wily manipulator, as the Jew as having proximity to power, not being in power, but being able to sort of be the puppet master, pulling the levers of power, you see that play out in lots of different iterations through time, right?
You see it, I'm trying to think about useful examples for your listeners, but that is sort of the trope, right?
And it is an ancient one, but it's being utilized in really new ways.
So it's not literally that the Jew is going to replace us, is that the Jew who, the Jew in a way, is sort of like the greatest trick the devil has ever played.
And this is the language of Eric Ward, who wrote this amazing essay called Skin in the Game.
And he talks, he's a black anti-racist activist.
And he talks about figuring out how anti-Semitism is kind of the linchpin of white supremacy because the Jew appears to be white, but in fact, he's not white.
I mean, this is all based on this lie that race is not a social con that race is not a construct, right?
It's, which it is.
But they're saying that the Jew is not white, but he appears to be white, but in fact, he's loyal to these people who are coming to sully America.
And so when you have someone like Congressman Steve King saying, we can't replace our civilization with someone else's babies, like what does that mean?
What is that idea?
It is so deeply anti-American because the idea of America, right, is the idea that American-ness is not about bloodline.
American-ness is about a shared set of values and ideas and fealty to those ideas.
So the idea that someone else is, what does that mean?
And as we talked about with the Native Americans, we have replaced our country.
We've taken over their country.
It was theirs first.
What we're talking about with anti-Semitism, one of the reasons why it's always been so confusing to me is because it seems to be this there's a lot of these white supremacists that they lean in that direction they lean towards anti-Semitism first.
Like almost it's almost more acceptable.
It's almost more like they think they can get away with it.
They'll find more support online.
If you say online in a lot of these forums, like if you say, hey, we got to get rid of all these black people, there's going to be so many more red flags than if you say we have to get rid of Jews.
Like that doesn't, I don't understand that one because it's when people look different from you, if you are an Asian person who is racist against black people or a black person who's racist against white people or if someone's different than you, that's at least racism is always disgusting.
It's always horrific and ignorant.
But at least I can kind of see how you could be tricked into thinking that way.
It's a way of understanding and making sense of the world, especially in times of economic and social upheaval.
The reason that anti-Semitism is resurgent right now is because, I'm not justifying it, but it's because we're in, going back to our earlier conversation, a time where people are disoriented, they're disaffected, they're confused, they're shortchanged, and they're looking for an easy answer.
Well, you have to wrap your mind around the idea, which is a huge, huge, huge idea, that anti-Semitism is built into the scaffolding of Western civilization.
Period.
It's never going away.
It's like, think about it like an intellectual disease that's built into the foundations of the civilization that we live in.
And in times where that civilization or a given society is healthy, anti-Semitism, along with xenophobia and racism and all kinds of other bigotry, are sort of kept in check.
And when the society becomes unhealthy, and we're living in a deeply unhealthy society in many different ways right now, anti-Semitism is something that people reach for, right?
It's like, if you want to understand like the Nazi rise to power, you kind of can't understand it without looking to the fact that there was an incredible economic depression in Germany and there was a scapegoat.
And if you look, it's not to justify it, but if you look throughout history, right?
Look at the bubonic plague.
The bubonic plague came because of rats to the European continent that were brought on ships from Crimea.
But people did not at the time, they looked, why, who did they blame?
They blamed the Jews.
The Jews were dying at a lesser rate than their non-Jewish neighbors, probably because of religious rituals that Jews have, like washing your hands before you break bread and say a blessing, dunking in the ritual bath before the Sabbath, and all of these other things that probably kept them more protected against the plague than their neighbors.
But rather than looking into it and saying, oh, maybe they're doing something right and something we should mimic, their neighbors said, kill the Jews, literally like throw the Jews down the well.
And it led to massive pogroms killing Jews for, and the claim was that the Jews literally poisoned the drinking water throughout Europe.
So it's like it's this irrational hatred, but it is so, so deep because it goes back to the most important myth that Western civilization is built on, and that is the Christian story.
The reason it's very hard to talk about this is because it's so enormous.
It's like accepting the fact that it's like you have to accept as a foundational principle that this is baked into the world that we live in.
And we're never going to cure it, and it's never going to go completely away.
The best thing that we can do is build healthy cultures that protect certain virtues, like liberty, like freedom of the individual, like religious liberty, all the things.
It's not a coincidence that America's been so good for the Jews.
It's because so many of the ideas that protect minorities and religious minorities, like Jews, were sort of for all of their fault, for all of the founders' faults, right?
And they had many, including owning people.
But, you know, George Washington, in his, he writes this letter to the first Jewish community of this country in Rhode Island.
And he says something that was then incredibly radical, which is pathetic that it was.
But he says, you know, Jews in America are not just going to be tolerated.
They're going to possess the same citizenship as everyone else.
That at the time was a radical departure from history.
In the Islamic world, the Jews had always lived as dhimmis, as second-class citizens.
And in the Christian world, it was worse.
I mean, what people forget, right, is like right now radical Islam, when it comes to the religions, is the greatest threat to Jews.
But for most of its history, Islam was much more tolerant of Jews than Christianity was, which is something that's kind of like has gotten lost to history.
If you scale where human beings used to be 100, 200 years from now, and you scale it up 100, 200 years from now, we're clearly moving.
I mean, I think one of the reasons why all this social justice war shit is going on right now, I think it's good.
I think there's good signs.
The sign is that all these things are moving to stamp out racism, to stamp out sexism, stamp out misogyny and homophobia and all those things that we know are a real problem in culture and society.
It's the over-correction, the overreaction, the virtue signaling that's driving people nuts.
But the trend is all moving towards an area where any rational, reasonable person thinks this is a good thing.
It's a good thing to not be sexist.
It's a good thing to not be homophobic.
It's a good thing to not be racist.
It's all moving in that direction.
It's just doing so in this chaotic, virtue-signaling, very obviously sort of manufactured way.
But the thing that's strange, again, about this particular pathology is that some of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world are countries with no Jews, right?
The only thing that mirrors it in some way is Muslims.
In some way, Muslims, they vary wildly in terms of how they look, in terms of what part of the world they're from, but they think of themselves as Muslims.
Oh, one of my best friends, Ari Shafir, is an atheist Jew.
It's a strange group.
And do you think that because of that, because when people are so loyal to their own people, which is one thing that I actually admire about Jewish people, I think it would be nice if more people were like that, that they are profoundly pro-Jewish.
There's not a lot of apathetic Jews towards Judaism or towards the tribe, I should say.
Whenever a guy wants to get his balls waxed and has a business closed down because of it.
But just that this, do you think that that might have something to do with it?
That this people, for whatever reason, when they see someone who is in this sort of, I mean, I don't want to use the word isolated because they're not really, Jewish folks in America are not really isolated, unless maybe like Hasidics.
You could say they're very in a very established community in Brooklyn and other parts of the country.
But that maybe people look at this community, this Trump, and they think they don't give a fuck about us.
In the same way, like, there's this really strange idea that people think that Jews cause anti-Semitism, right?
Like, when the evil man who walked into the Walmart in El Paso talked about a Hispanic invasion and then went into that Walmart and killed, I think, upwards of 20 people, no one thought maybe he's right.
Maybe there is a Hispanic invasion.
Maybe that was like somehow justified because he saw them as insular or isolated or looking out for each other.
In that case, yes, but not in the case of what's been going on in Brooklyn.
There, we keep hearing things like, this is the result of communal friction, as if, you know, disputes over zoning laws caused someone to pick up a machete the size of a broomstick, walk into a rabbi's house, and hack people up.
So, like, the case of Tree of Life, let's take that.
That's like a very what that's like a clean case in the sense of these are innocent, mostly elderly.
Two of the brothers who I knew who were killed were mentally disabled.
Okay, it was the people that show up to services on time, which is a certain kind of person.
And you have this white supremacist who says all Jews must die.
He's totally unequivocal about it.
And he goes in and he tries to do that.
So you have just a case of someone who any reasonable person sees as evil, which is this neo-Nazi, and people who any reasonable person see as totally innocent, which is, you know, Jews in prayer.
No, I just, the question was: like, do they, when they have someone like that, do they extensively interview him and try to figure out what the fuck brought him to that?
Well, a lot of the people, like the guy in the Muncie case that we're going to talk about, the machete guy, he showed signs of mental illness.
I think that Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh also did.
But, you know, but then so did Dylan Roof, the guy that killed however many people he killed at the Black Church church in Charleston, South Carolina.
But he was also a white supremacist.
It's like these hateful ideologies, often they draw people that are deranged or young or somehow on the fringes of society.
With the guy in Pittsburgh, he was deep into this replacement theory ideology.
The reason that he selected Tree of Life as his synagogue is because Tree of Life the previous weekend had participated in this program called National Refugee Shabbat or Sabbath.
It was celebrating the idea of welcoming the stranger, which is a fundamental Jewish value.
Do not oppress a stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
And he said specifically that, you know, Haias, the group that was organizing this National Refugee Shabbat, it stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
It started in the 1800s as a way of resettling Eastern European Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, now works to resettle refugees, including Jews all over the world.
And he specifically selected Tree of Life because of that, because he said the Jews are bringing in the dirty immigrants into this society.
So he was like kind of the perfect embodiment of white supremacist replacement theory ideas.
In Brooklyn, it's much harder cases because it's much harder for people to talk about.
Because how do you talk about the fact that in many of these cases, and a lot of them have been caught on CCTV, you know, that it's a young black man attacking a Hasidic guy walking down the street and who's visibly Jewish?
It's much harder to talk about when someone who we talk about as being rightly as being from a group that is himself victimized, a poor black kid in Brooklyn, is then going on to victimize another minority group.
It's just much harder when the attacker is not a white supremacist to talk about it.
The Hasidic one is a strange one, but in some ways, I think it's easier for ignorant people to look at them as the other because of the way they clearly, distinctly dress.
They dress so much different.
It's almost like if you had Amish people move in and they stuck to themselves and they lived in one sort of community, I think they would probably experience a similar level of hatred.
But then you add into it this sort of acceptance of anti-Semitism in a lot of communities.
Well, I think there's also a genuine jealousy in the accomplishments and achievements of Jewish people.
You know, I mean, if you look at Nobel Prize winners from Europe in particular, I mean, how many of them are European Jews?
It's fucking stunning.
You know, it's stunning when you look at the amount of lawyers.
I mean, we just joke around about my Jewish lawyer.
You know, I mean, it's like a standard thing.
You think doctors and how many successful and educated people are Jewish.
And that's one of the things you actually touch on in your book.
you were talking about, I mean, it's how successful Jewish people have become in this country.
And there's got to be some sort of a resentment for that as well, especially by, again, we're talking about mentally deranged people, people with like severe.
Do you remember in the video, there were those two or three black men who were members of this sect, the black Hebrew Israelites, the Hebrew Israelites, and everyone kind of laughed them off as like, haha, they're just this obnoxious, weird sect?
Well, their ideology, right, the idea that the Jews are not the real Jews, that we're pretenders to the faith, that the Jews are behind the slave trade, that the Jews are subhuman vermin, that was the ideology that informed this recent attack in Jersey City.
I don't know if you followed that one.
That was the one where it was a couple and they were driving around.
There were diary entries and Google searches and think, I mean, sounds horrible to say, but I went the next day to Jersey City to see the aftermath of it.
And they had targeted specifically this kosher grocery store.
And they ended up killing, I think, four people.
But literally, right above the grocery store to the left, it's a grocery store and then a synagogue.
And above the synagogue is a school where there were like 50 young children.
And thank God they weren't murdered.
Then they find comes to light a week ago that they had a bomb in the U-Haul that had the range of five football fields that they wanted to deploy.
Like, look at these crazy people that believe this crazy ideology.
Well, this crazy ideology is moving people to do very, very violent things.
And there are things that haven't even made the news.
You know, like, you know, if we believe this idea, right, that this, what's going on in Brooklyn is the result of communal friction.
Well, how does that explain my friend's father-in-law who's walking on the Upper East Side wearing a yarmulke on his head and gets the shit kicked out of him?
How does that explain my friend Avram, who is a progressive Jew, wears a rainbow yarmulke, is on the subway, and he's had several interactions with this group who scream at him.
One of them held up a picture of Louis Farrakhan saying, you're not a real Jew, you're a faggot, all of these horrible things.
This is like creeping in everywhere.
I had a friend on the Lower East Side that was visibly Jewish, not wearing a black hat, wearing a yarmulke, but looked like you or me, got punched.
But that's, no, not all of these are black Israelites.
What I'm saying is that there's this kind of inchoate hate that's like been unleashed.
And that's the thing that's most disturbing.
Like if you look at the Anti-Defamation League statistics, only a small percentage of hate crimes committed against Jews, something like 15% last year, were committed by white supremacists.
They're among the most violent and the most visible.
But who's the rest of them?
That's actually more alarming to me, the fact that it's like coming from all of these different directions.
And how do you contain it once it's been unleashed?
When you think about these social media sites, Gab was one where this guy who shot up the tree of life was a member of.
And is this like, I'm not a, I'm clearly not a proponent of censorship, but do people, do you think they get radicalized in these when you get to a forum where there's no restrictions whatsoever on language or ideology or behavior, you can say whatever you want as long as it's long as you're not saying something.
I mean, Gab has rules like you can't do things that are illegal.
You can't threaten someone.
You can't put up their address.
You can't, but you could say a lot of really fucked up shit and they're not going to police you.
Do you think that these places that do allow free speech, that there's a catch-22 to it?
In some ways, it's great to be able to express yourself freely.
But in other ways, you can get radicalized and it can lead to a lot of people forming these groups where they support each other in these fucked up ideas.
One of the reasons that I feel so strongly about keeping the spectrum of acceptable opinion so like as wide as possible is because I think that the narrower it shrinks, like we're talking about normal ideas being closeted, then people go into these underground lairs online and they become radicalized, right?
Because they're like, you know, the elites or the mainstream media or whoever, they're not telling the truth.
They're lying to me.
So there's this secret world and this secret world has all of these actually bigoted ideas.
Do you know what I mean?
Yes.
So do I think that it is a catch-22?
Yes.
I mean, the whole thing about the world we're living in is that you no longer have to like find a KKK meeting.
You don't have to find a jihadist preacher.
You don't have to find, you know, go down the line.
You just have to find a Reddit chat or a 4chan chat or something on Gab.com.
And you find your little online village.
Like it no longer requires a real person or real interaction.
And there's no stakes because there's no shame because you can just be totally anonymous in these forums.
Like when you have someone like the Christchurch shooter who was live streaming this and making references to, you know, what did he-I think he referenced the tree of life.
There's not a clear answer, but I think that, look, the idea that a private company should be obligated to stream someone, killing someone, or let's even go like take it less stakes than that, call Jews kikes.
But this is what I mean about when reasonable opinions, when the spectrum of what is reasonable becomes so narrow, people radicalize and they go to these bigoted ideas.
And it's an enormous, like it's like, why do we need a healthy conversation about immigration?
And like in the conversation about immigration is, I think, very, very limited in what people say and what is acceptable.
Yeah, the immigration angle is a perfect example of that.
I mean, it should be absolutely possible for hardworking people to make it to America and do better.
It also should be possible for us to keep gang members and cartel members from crossing the border freely and shooting people and killing people and selling drugs in our communities and all the things that we're scared of when it comes to the open border policy idea.
The thing about the social media thing in a lot of ways, it's this new experiment, right?
It's something that we've never had before.
Like if you, like you're saying about a KKK meeting, you used to have to go to one.
Now you just have to go to Stormfront or wherever, you know, whatever website you can find that supports your ideas.
And this is a new challenge, and this is a new challenge that hasn't really been mapped out, nor has it been.
I don't know if it's been rationally dissected in terms of like, if we do this, this could happen.
If we don't do this, this could happen.
Which is A or B better?
How do we stop A or B from happening?
How do we somehow or another educate and improve?
How do we reach out to a lot of these people that are going to get radicalized and offer them some sort of a positive community as a possible alternative?
Because this is what a lot of this stuff is.
A lot of these people that get radicalized, one of the things that happens is you don't have anyone that cares about you or supports you, but you find people that very strongly believe in an idea.
They believe in an idea, an awful idea, so much so that they're willing to kill people for that idea.
And then you find a bunch of them, and then they reinforce each other's beliefs with these positive affirmations.
And essentially, they're signaling to them.
They're virtue signaling to these horrible people that they also agree with a lot of these ideas.
And then you go out and you do something, you act, like the guy in Charlottesville that ran over that girl.
These horrific acts are almost, they're encouraged and supported by these tight-knit groups of people that all, they're all, they're all fucked up.
And fucked up people find each other and hurt people hurt people, right?
So they find this category of people, this group of people, whether it's online or whether they actually have to go to a KKK meeting.
And they find support.
This is a group that somehow or another gets them.
But what's I think one of the things that's alarming about our politics right now is like things that were just regarded up until like five years ago as the kind of lunatic fringe have made their way into mainstream politics.
Like Steve Bannon proudly declared himself like and Breitbart as the platform of the alt-right.
And then Steve Bannon was sitting down the hall from the president of the United States.
But I mean, in the end, my perceptions of the alt-right in the beginning was like what I thought Milo Ioianopoulos was when he first burst onto the scene.
Sort of like, you know, a guy who's the whole thing that Milo has revealed, right, is like it was an ironic posture that revealed, like, if you're joking about, you know, fags and kikes, you're still saying the thing.
And so the idea was that he could get away with these things.
Provocateur was the word I was looking for.
This is essentially what he's doing.
And he's using that to build social currency, right?
That social currency is developing this large group of people that follow him and talk to him.
And he thinks that there's some merit to his ideas.
So he finds some sort of justification for having these provocative conversations and this stance where he's saying these things and a big proponent of free speech.
And all these things are happening all at the same time.
That's what I thought the alt-right was initially.
What I thought the alt-right was initially was people that wanted a new, younger, more, more current take on what a Republican is.
And then it became racist.
And then it became all the things that we think of it now in terms of like public perception is what it became.
I mean, look, like the idea that some Americans are less American than others, that is certainly an alt-right idea that I think is extremely dangerous.
I mean, you saw it when, here's a great example.
When Trump went after the squad, okay, as, and remember when he said that they should go back to the totally broken, crime-infested places that they came from?
Those people were, three of them were born in America.
One is a naturalized Jewish citizen.
The idea there, right, as I heard it, and maybe I'm hearing something you're not, that some Americans, because of their skin color or their ideas, sort of have provisional belonging here, for me is a very, very, it's more than a dog whistle.
If he had said that about one person who had come here from somewhere else that was awful and was criticizing America, then that would have been a more valid statement.
And that would be like Ilian Omar is not from America initially from America.
And I also agree that this idea, like go back to where you were that sucks, is the response to someone criticizing the way things are here is pretty ridiculous.
But that concept, right, that you're not entirely of a place, that is something that has been used against Jews forever.
The idea that you're not fully Iraqi because you're Jewish, or you're not fully American because you're Jewish, or you're not fully French because you're Jewish.
Like the idea of provisional belonging is something that is, that I'm extremely sensitive to.
Marianne Anne Perrine, a French politician and lawyer, serving as president of the National Rally Political Party since 2011, with a brief interruption in 2017.
Well, I think one thing that the Republican Party has done that's wise, if you want to keep a solidified team, is that they haven't come out against him and they've supported him.
And there's very little dissent.
And this is a good idea if you want your team to win, right?
And there was a lot of people who were kind of never Trumpers who softened their stance once they realized the power of his presidency, that he's really prominent, sometimes Trumpers.
I mean, there's just Trump has just beyond the sort of like he said various things that are like he was speaking to a Jewish group and he talked about your prime minister.
I mean, he said so many things that are ridiculous.
But the big, big thing that he's guilty of is he has like dismantled the guardrails of the keep society decent and civil and normal.
And like once you dismantle those things, like it's very easy to reverse, not very easy, but you can reverse policies.
What's much harder to reverse is a culture.
And he has just been gleefully making war on what I think of as very, very important cultural norms.
Remember when he, people forget this, when he said about Judge Alonzo Curiel, who was born in this country, that he couldn't give a fair hearing to Trump University because he was born in Mexico?
Indiana-born federal judge who President Donald Trump once said could not be impartial because he was Mexican cleared a major obstacle standing in the way of Trump's long-promised border wall with Mexico.
And it's a weird slogan because it seems so positive.
Make America great again.
That seems positive.
But it's not.
Like if you, if you, like, people punch you if you have that hat on.
It's so crazy.
And we've gotten to a point in society that something that's a positive statement, like make America great again, is so polarizing that people will be violent towards you and feel like they need to.
They feel like they need to laugh, like you're the enemy.
This is again when it comes to the idea of the tribe, you know, there's positive aspects of tribalism, right?
There's positive aspects of community.
There's positive aspects of people supporting each other.
And then there's negative aspects.
The tribalism that we're experiencing in this country politically is very, it's very toxic.
And we're all aware of it.
And the tribalism that we're experiencing ideologically is very toxic, where there is no nuance and you're not, you know, you're either with us or against us.
There are people who look at it for me and tell me what I need to be aware of.
And every synagogue I speak to, it's like people don't realize it.
I went to a synagogue Friday night in LA.
Like there's armed guards at every synagogue and Jewish function that I go to now.
It's like going through TSA to go to like imagine that if most Americans had to do that when they went into church.
Like we would think that's insane.
But that is the state of affairs for Jews.
And Jews that I know hide evidence of their identity everywhere they go.
There was a woman who wrote me who was reading my book on the subway in New York and was like, I'm nervous to be seen reading a book with this title in public and like hid it.
Like the kind that we've talked about that comes on the far right expresses itself one way.
And there's also anti-Semitism that comes smuggled into the mainstream through the political left that comes cloaked in language that is very seductive, like the language of social justice and progress.
And if the right claims that the Jews are, you know, fake white people, the far left claims that the Jews are handmaidens to white supremacy.
So whiteness plays like a really, really key role in the way that anti-Semitism functions, right?
Let me explain it this way.
Anti-Semitism is a shape-shifting conspiracy theory.
Accept that, right?
And that is how under Nazism, Jews are the race contaminators.
How under communism, we are the arch capitalists, right?
How under the idea of white supremacy, we are these fake white people, right?
We appear to be white people, but we're actually doing the bidding of these groups who white supremacists view to be lesser than black people, brown people, Muslims, immigrants.
And how on the far left, the Jews are seen as sort of the great, what is the greatest evil right now to the far left?
Whiteness and white privilege.
And Jews are seen as sort of handmaidens to that.
Why?
Because of our success, because many of us are of Eastern European descent.
85% of American Jews are of Ashkenazi, which is of Eastern European descent.
So we pass as white, so we have white privilege.
And so in the intersectional view of the world, right, which reverses the caste system that we've been living in until now, where you have someone like John Hamm at the very top and black, transgender, disabled people at the very bottom.
Well, the intersectional worldview comes around and reverses that and says, no, John Ham and cisgendered white men like Joe Rogan are now at the very bottom.
And at the very top are the transgender, black, disabled person.
And so where are the Jews in that new intersectional caste system of the world?
We're kind of like right above John Ham.
We're right near him because we enjoy all of the sort of privileges that he enjoys.
It's a crazy thing, but that's sort of where we are.
The handmaidens to white privilege or white supremacy is very strange.
That's a very strange one.
And the anti-Israeli sentiment.
Yes.
Yeah, no, I understand what you're saying.
And while I see it with people where they openly express disdain for Jewish people, I've seen it from a lot of people that you would call activists, you know, of varying religious identities.
It's like, I think of it very crudely, if racism is the sin that's sort of acceptable on the far right, hating Jews is the sin that's acceptable on the far left.
And they're telling, you know, they're basically propagating, they're repeating without even realizing it this Soviet propaganda line, which is that Zionism is racism, which is an unbelievable thing to say, because the majority of Jews who live in Israel are Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent.
They are non-white people.
They are Arabs.
They are Arab Jews.
And yet you have the far left basically exporting parochial domestic American racial politics onto a foreign conflict and place that they know absolutely nothing about.
These people are delusional.
They think that all of the conflict in the Middle East would be resolved if only we took care of this one tiny conflict between this tiny group of people and their neighbors, where in fact it's like a tiny local conflict in this huge drama of the Middle East of which there are a zillion players.
And the Jews of Israel are only one tiny part of it.
The Jewish longing to return to the land of Israel is something that's inescapable if you read the Bible, right?
Like it's all over there.
The whole idea of and you can discount it, discount God, whatever.
The fact is, is that the Jews are a people that were birthed sort of in this land, which we now call the land of Israel.
And they somehow, and they were expelled by the Romans around 2,000 years ago.
And then they came back to that land, right?
It's like they defied the logic of history in doing that.
Because by all rights, they were an indigenous group to that land.
They were kicked out and expelled.
And then they went back 2,000 years later.
Like, it's a crazy, extraordinary story.
So leave that to one part.
Zionism, the way that I think is the simplest definition, is the belief in the Jewish right to self-determination.
And it's the Jewish liberation movement.
And so let's go back to like pre-1948, which is the year that the state of Israel is established.
And you have Jews in Poland and all of these other places debating, like, what is the way that we can solve our constant the systemic oppression that we are constantly enduring.
And there were all of these different responses to that problem.
One argument was the socialist argument, you know, if we, or the, you know, the anti-capitalist argument, if the problem is capitalism, and if only we defeat capitalism, anti-Semitism will go away.
Some argued that total assimilation was the right way to solve it.
We just need to kind of disappear as Jews.
That's the only way we'll be fully accepted.
And another group, which was not even the most popular group, is this idea of we need to be able to determine our own fate.
And we will never be fully accepted.
The only way that we can determine our own fate is this idea of us having our own state and our own army where we can protect ourselves.
And that is ultimately the idea that sort of wins out.
So when you're having a debate about, you know, when people say today they're an anti-Zionist, the reason that that is so problematic is they're not making that argument in 1920s Eastern Europe when the state doesn't exist.
It's one thing to be an anti-Zionist in theory, right?
It's the same, the analogy I like to make is if we're a couple and we want to have a baby and we're debating, should we have the baby?
Can we afford the baby?
Where are we going to send the baby to school?
All this stuff, that's a totally moral argument to make.
You can't make that argument of should we have the baby after the baby is born.
The baby is born.
It exists.
Israel exists.
It's a place.
It's not an idea.
It's not an abstraction.
It is a place that contains the largest Jewish community on planet Earth.
And so when people say that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, it's like, what are you talking about?
It exists.
So what do you want?
So I asked the person that makes the anti-Zionist argument, what do you imagine will happen?
Like, are you, do you think that you're advocating for genocide right away?
Or, like, you have to have no sense of Middle Eastern history or politics to make the argument that you can be a minority in that region without protection.
We know what that looks like.
That looks like the story of the Yazidis.
It looks like the story of the Kurds, the story of the Zoroastrians, the story, frankly, of Christians who are going to be completely expelled from the Middle East within the next decade, which is a story no one talks about.
He epitomizes the sort of anti-Zionism which bleeds into anti-Semitism of the far left.
Meaning, let me put it this way.
Anti-Zionism has become such a plank of like normative political progressivism that if you're an 18-year-old and you go onto a college campus and you're like during the orientation week, you're signing up for like legalizing pot club and better rights for cafeteria workers.
Oh, and by the way, you know, the boycott divest sanctions movement against Israel, which is an anti-Zionist movement.
You're not an anti-Semite.
You don't hate Jews.
You're just kind of like swimming along with progressive waters because that's how successful this movement has been.
But if you step back and you're like, wait, hold on.
There's a political movement gaining popularity in the West that was in fact embodied in the person of Jeremy Corbyn and what became of his Labor Party that believes that there's only one state in the world that doesn't have a right to exist.
Well, it's a strange concept to even say that it doesn't have the right to exist when it does exist.
So I could see how you could say...
Did he say it?
Jeremy Corbyn accused of anti-Semitism over shocking 2011 video in which he questions Israel's right to exist and says the BBC is biased in favor of the Jewish state.
Questions their right to exist.
See, I could see how someone could say that there is evidence that some Israeli soldiers have done horrific things to Palestinian people.
We saw what happened in the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip.
It pulled out completely all of the settlements from the Gaza Strip.
There's not a single Jew left there.
It's completely Udenrine.
And yet, Hamas is still sending tons of rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
The occupation there is ended.
It's over.
And that's still going on.
And so then you have to ask yourself, like, does the average Palestinian, like, I believe that the average Palestinian, I've spent time in the West Bank talking to Palestinians whose lives are immiserated by the Israeli occupation.
Like, they just want to live a normal life, you know?
And yet they are being held hostage.
I spoke to this young mother in Gaza who fled, and she said to me on the phone, we're being sort of immiserated twice.
You know, once was by Israel and now by our own leaders, by Hamas, right?
These are like kleptocratic authoritarian regimes that hate women, that hate gay people.
I mean, it's horrible.
Like, life under these regimes is absolutely horrible.
So the problem is Israel then sees what happens in Gaza and they're like, okay, we're in this situation where we want to be a liberal democracy and yet we're, you know, occupying another people.
It's an untenable situation if you want to be a liberal democracy to occupy another people.
The problem is, is literally geographically, if they pull out of the West Bank, they will likely have another situation like they had in Gaza.
And now all of a sudden, not only do you have rockets going to the south of the country, places like Steyrote from Gaza, you have rockets capable of reaching Tel Aviv and the population centers of Israel.
I mean, I think one of the places we've arrived to, right, is like, what does Palestinian nationalism really seek?
Western liberals like me want, or for years, I told myself, and I think this was certainly like the view of lots of experts, that what Palestinian nationalism really wanted was a Palestinian state.
Palestinians just want self-determination like everyone else in the world.
And I am absolutely on board with that.
The problem is, is that they're leaders, and then you look at some of these polls and the numbers are really disturbing and they say, no, the goal is not having our own state alongside Israel.
The goal is erasing Israel.
The goal is for Israel not to be there, right?
And then you look at the evidence of all of these peace offers that were, you know, Oslo and Camp David and we can go on and on.
And they were all rejected.
So it's like, is the goal your own land and having a place of your own?
Or is the national, or have we told ourselves, and I include myself in this, a lie about what Palestinian nationalism, or at least parts of it, seek?
Yeah, I mean, that's like saying, you know, I'm trying to think of the right analogy here.
I mean, they're not, like, these are terrorist groups.
Unless you think terrorism is rational, I don't think that anything is accentuated by, like, I think they would think that about Israel, whether or not the U.S. was supporting Israel.
When you see a situation like that where there doesn't seem to be a solution, it's… Well, the solution is shrinking the conflict as much as possible, right?
I do not believe right now you can resolve the conflict because Israelis who have lived through times where it was normal for buses and cafes to just blow up, you know, the number of people I know who were touched by the second intifada, like I was there during times where, you know, a cafe would just blow up down the street.
So like they have been thoroughly disabused of the idea that I think that many of them have given up on the idea that there could be peace in the short term.
So what can you do right now to make things a little bit better?
You can improve the economic life for people, for Palestinians living in the West Bank, and you can try and shrink the conflict, meaning no settlement expansion, and I would say pull out of some of these Jewish settlements that are like, you know, far-flung and that the Israeli army is sort of protecting for no reason.
But I think that's the best case scenario for right now.
And there's a book, I think it's called Catch 67 by Mika Goodman that I would recommend to people that's about how to shrink the conflict and that for now being the best case scenario.
But again, it's like, why does you have to ask yourself, like, why is everyone in the world obsessed about this particular conflict?
I think it's inescapable that part of it is an obsession with the Jews.
Like, there are 500,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon, most of whom live in refugee camps, and by official Lebanese law are barred from being lawyers, from being doctors, from being accountants.
It's a horrible situation.
Do you think most people in the world know about the situation of the Palestinian immiseration in Lebanon?
They don't even know Palestinians are in Lebanon or in Jordan.
They have no idea.
The reason is because, you know, it's like Palestinian lives matter when the people that are hurting them are Jews.
They don't seem to matter when the people that are hurting them are other Arabs.
Like people should be able, Israeli government is full of like lunatics, just like our government, just like any other normal country.
But it's like Israel's not treated like a normal country.
It's treated in a way like this has these superpowers, both superpowers to like affect peace in the Middle East and superpowers to like a super villain.
It's both at once.
People hate a country that doesn't exist and they love a country that doesn't exist.
They project themselves and their ideas of things onto this place.
Well, it's just, it's like if you think about, think about if there was a movement in the world that suggested that, you know, the Japanese weren't a real people and Japan does not have a right to exist.
Well, first of all, I wrote, I was supposed to write another book that I'm still on the hook for.
I went and begged my publisher to do this because after Pittsburgh, I just kind of couldn't stop seeing it everywhere I looked.
And honestly, like, yeah, I think if Pittsburgh hadn't happened, I wouldn't have written this first, but I just became so passionate about it and so passionate about here's, I think, maybe the shortest answer for this.
When we talk about anti-Semitism, even you and I, like we think about Jews, like the Jews on the streets of Brooklyn or in Pittsburgh or in that synagogue in California, as being the victims of it.
And they are.
But the real bigger victim of it is the surrounding society.
Like when anti-Semitism shows itself in a culture, it means that that culture is extremely broken or in some stage of death.
And the reason that I think it's so important and the reason I ultimately wrote the book is I want people to understand that the fact that anti-Semitism is rising in America says nothing about Jews.
It says everything about America and where we are right now.
Like we don't want to become a place where anti-Semitism is normalized because guess what?
Societies where anti-Semitism become normalized are societies that no longer exist on the face of the earth.
I like how you described it in your book as a symptom like that we all have certain bacteria or we all have certain viruses, but our immune system keeps them at bay.
When those viruses show themselves, it's a sign that the immune system is weak, that the body itself is weak.
And the question, right, is how do we rebuild back our immune system?
And one of the reasons that I'm alarmed by, I completely understand the populist moment, but I'm also scared of it because populism often does not end well for Jews or for the political center.
And I think one of the reasons that we need to, like, how do we rebuild our immune system?
Like, those are the sort of things that I suggest in the last chapter of the book.
And I think I just hope we can do them because I'm really, really alarmed that we're living in an America in 2020 where people I know, you know, who wear a Jewish star, like put it inside their shirt when they walk down the street.
The other thing I was thinking about is like, what would it look like if you got some like of your MMA buddies to put on, you know, to dress like Hasidic Jews and walk around Brooklyn in the next few months?