Dave Smith and Joe Rogan dismantle Governor Hochul’s outdated tech stereotype, linking it to liberal dismissal of discipline while conservatives overemphasize it. They critique media bias during COVID-19, where vaccine mandates silenced dissent but mainstream figures like Cuomo avoided accountability despite later admitting errors. The Israel-Gaza conflict is framed as a cycle of violence, with Smith citing Irgun’s pre-statehood terrorism and Netanyahu’s 1996 A Clean Break strategy, while Rogan highlights the ICJ’s plausible genocide ruling. Both argue systemic corruption—from Santos’ fraud to Clinton/Obama foundations—undermines trust in institutions, exposing media’s superficial focus on outliers like Lazar’s claims or Carlson’s firing over deeper critiques of power structures. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh my god, and all these dudes did these hilarious videos where, uh, these young black guys, like, got around a computer and they stared at it and bit it and took it...
Weak people that don't like strength are dangerous.
They're dangerous because they want to suppress everything.
That's what's spooky about it.
Weak people scare the shit out of me, more than even totalitarians do sometimes.
Because they eventually become totalitarian.
It's like the bullied become the bullies.
They want payback.
But it's just that weak, liberal men are, to me, they're so detestable.
The weak ones.
I mean, there's some intelligent, brilliant, liberal men.
That's their philosophy.
And I think if you're not exposed to the pitfalls of liberalism, if you don't see what happens to your state when those policies get enacted, specifically when things go south, if everything was going great, no one gave a shit who the mayor of Los Angeles was in 2015. Because everything was great.
Well, there's something on that topic of the weakness of modern liberals.
I was in, like, late last year, I was in San Diego.
And I haven't been to...
I mean, I've been to L.A. a couple times, but much less than I used to go, like, when you were out there.
And I haven't been to San Francisco in years.
But I was in San Diego, and it's like, you know, you've been there.
It's like a beautiful city downtown, and where we were, it was a great comedy club, the American Comedy Company down there.
Great club.
Great club.
Love that place.
And I'm like downtown, and me and my buddy Rob Bernstein, a very funny comedian who's with me on the trip, we're like walking around.
Great restaurants, really nice little downtown.
But then there's just blocks that are taken over by these homeless encampments.
And right next to them, it's like all these young professionals and these nice restaurants in this nice city.
And I was just thinking about that.
Like, how are all of the men here so weak that they won't just kind of like put their foot down and be like, hey, no, we're not going to put up with this.
Like, we're not just—it's almost like this, like, niceness.
Has taken over to the point that you can't even defend this cool city that you have here.
And I'm not saying, like, bash the homeless people with clubs or anything like that.
I'm just saying, like, why are you allowing this to happen?
And it is, like, a profound weakness that, well, we'd feel like bad people if we were to say, we don't want junkies covered in shit right next to our outdoor dining.
And you're like, no, that would just be reasonable.
Because if I had grown up in a very conservative environment with my sensibilities, my hard work ethic, and my belief that You know, you get very fortunate in life in, like, how you're gifted things.
Like, how you get lucky.
Like, if you're beautiful, for instance.
If you're a beautiful woman or man, what a roll of the dice.
I mean, good lord.
Good lord did you kill it in the fucking genetic lottery.
I mean, you can't do anything about that.
You can't earn that.
You can't go out and get beauty, you know?
But after that, whatever hand you've given, you've been given...
A lot of it is on you.
A lot of it is on you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Terrible things happen to people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Violence happens.
Crime happens.
Disease happens.
Yes, 100%.
Misfortune happens 100%.
Anyone listening to this right now is lucky you can hear.
There's people that can't hear, right?
But put that aside.
And there's a factor that we need to take into consideration.
That factor is discipline.
That factor is hard work.
That factor is focus.
And we should cherish that.
And we shouldn't think of it only as negative because it always...
People always think it manifests itself in greed and in callous disregard for other people's lives.
That's not necessarily true.
They're not mutually exclusive.
Like, you can have discipline and be a kind person and be a compassionate person and be a liberal person.
But so often, liberals in this country, they do not want to take that into consideration, that discipline is a factor.
Conservatives always value discipline.
They value hard work.
That's why when they want to sell shit to those people, what do they do?
They show a guy on a farm cracking open a beer, a guy who's just been working his fucking ass off for 10 hours a day, cracking up here, around here, it's all just about hard work, and the guy's just throwing back a cold one.
You know, I mean, that's what they're selling you.
They're selling you hard work.
They're not selling you, you know, this poor farmer, you know, who's born into farming life and it's not equitable or fair while there's billionaires out there just make money trading money and it's bullshit and we need to distribute wealth and like, no.
No, that's not the answer either, stupid.
Like, that's not the answer.
But you do need programs to get these people out of homelessness.
And anybody who's successful has learned how to conquer that and not just sit here and feel bad for yourself and to say, nope, I'm going to take control of this.
No matter what happened to me, I'm going to not focus on that.
I'm going to focus on what I can control.
And the problem is that on either side, if you dismiss one of them, you...
Like, you could actually see on his face as he's asking the questions, and he's like, uh, Well, if you lower standards, then you're going to get more incompetence.
And Don Lemon's like, so you're saying black people aren't competent?
He's like, no.
And he slowly starts to realize, like, oh, I have 80 IQ points on this guy.
But more importantly, you shouldn't do it because it's not good for you.
Just be a human.
Don't be this thing, this journalistic probing bullshit thing that's trying to spin a narrative.
Actually have a conversation with this human.
You will probably agree with a lot of the things he says.
You will understand his perspective even if you disagree.
You could see how an intelligent person would come to this conclusion.
This is how we can talk to each other now.
We don't have to be confined by these five-minute segments where you have producers and executives that are pushing an agenda that's on a network that's run by a bunch of Huge fucking corporations that have a vested interest in swaying the narrative one way or the other.
Oh, dude, I mean, I've done a fair amount of cable news shows, and they'll do these things where it's like a panel, and there'll be three people on the panel and the person hosting the show.
There's some people who I really like who I've been on their shows, but it's like you're trying to talk about the most important topics, and everyone gets 20 seconds.
Imagine a scenario where COVID breaks out, And for whatever reason, the mainstream media is saying that we should be very careful about experimental drugs.
And they start, these journalists, start bringing up all these stories about different drugs where you could see how they chose very specific tests and that some of their tests, some of their studies didn't go well at all and they buried those and they're allowed to do so.
And about how they've killed thousands and thousands of people with these drugs they knew were bad for them.
And if the journalists were saying this, but the podcasters were all going, you need to trust the science.
Everyone should be vaccinated.
Be vaccinated or you're a fucking plague rat.
Imagine if the podcasters were calling the unvaccinated plague rats.
Imagine if the podcasters were encouraging medical misinformation.
Doesn't it seem...
But my point is, imagine the backlash right now where there's none coming their way.
Listen, I don't want to go too hard right now because I want him to show up.
But the fact that, and I will make sure to bring this up to him, but the fact that what he said, and if you listen to it, he literally goes, as he's explaining that he is on Ivermectin, he goes, now a lot of people are going to say Joe Rogan is right, and then he has a moment where he pauses, realizes he can't even come up with anything.
And he goes, all right, Joe Rogan was right.
And then goes on to say exactly what you've been saying for years now, that just the most basic thing that anyone who did five minutes of research could have figured out, which there's no controversy in any of this, that ivermectin has been given to humans billions of times, that it's a safe drug, and that there were some indications that it might help.
With COVID. And that it's not horse dewormer.
But the fact that that's not attached to a profuse apology.
I couldn't imagine a scenario where I had viciously smeared someone for something, then realized he was 100% right and I was 100% wrong.
And when acknowledging that, I wouldn't also go, hey, I'm really sorry about that.
My guess, and this is just a guess, but I have been in that world a little bit.
Like, I worked for CNN for a year, and I've done a lot of shows on Fox News, and I've met a lot of people, you know, and talked to a lot of people who work at CNN and Fox News.
And my...
My guess on it is that, number one, he had a book.
So they want to sell copies of the book and they know you have the biggest show.
And so they're like, oh, this will be really good.
And then I also think there's this thing where they all really do feel like we're the experts.
And they know they're the experts because, I mean, I just got off the phone with, you know...
The chief of staff of the White House.
And I know that, you know, they're very into that kind of like that world where I've talked to everyone with status.
And I think there's hubris involved where they're like, you'll be able to handle whatever a comedian throws at you.
Like you're a medical expert and he's not.
But then you would just ask really basic questions, which my favorite was when he goes, so are you going to get the vaccine?
And you were like, well, no, I just had COVID. I have natural immunity.
And you were like, why should I get the vaccine?
And he had no answer.
And this was at a time when they were rolling out vaccine passports.
And the whole line was just, you have to get the vaccine or you're a bad person.
This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
And then he just demonstrated on your show that there was this huge category of people, people who have had COVID already, who he had no argument for why they should get the thing.
Not only that, there had already been research that showed that natural immunity from previous infection was up to seven times better at preventing new cases of COVID. Which is consistent across viruses.
In my limited looking at this, I was like, something's wrong here.
There's this mass societal push.
People are trapped in like a mind virus of this one particular solution.
And Dr. Robert Malone laid what that is, like psychologically what happens when one thing is offered That seems to be the solution out of this existential crisis.
Horrible situation that we're in.
And anybody who opposes that opposes getting out.
And you got to be on that side, all in.
And you got to believe even in the pharmaceutical drug companies.
So the experiment was kind of like, basically they come in and they're like, okay, you're here for some type of scientific experiment.
I forget exactly how they describe it to them, but they're testing, you know, like negative reinforcement within learning or something like that.
And so they have a guy in a white coat and he tells you every time a guy gets an answer wrong or something like this, you're supposed to push the button and it zaps him.
And they keep pushing the button and the person, you can't see them but they're like behind a wall or something, keeps hollering in pain and it gets worse and worse and worse.
And for the experiment, I think there were a few people who like refused after a while, but the overwhelming majority of people would keep zapping them until they seemingly died.
Yeah, because they stopped hollering in pain and then they would tell him to do it again and they would just keep doing it because there's like an authority figure here and this guy's got a white coat on and they kind of in these corporate media environments and I don't want to discount I'm not discounting the conspiracy aspect of this because I also think there are people within these agencies who are straight up like Intelligence assets and know exactly what they're doing.
But I think for the most part, it's like they create this culture of like, well, all the wise people who, by the way, you get to go to a cocktail party with this really, like this guy with all this status and he's the leading expert in this.
And they all say this.
So are you a respectable person or are you like an outcast?
Who doesn't agree with this conventional wisdom right and people fall in line with that shit man like it's They really do even people who really really should know better Yeah, but it's become socially their group too and then you get influenced by the group socially Well one of this one of the things I'm really interested to talk to Chris Cuomo about and by the way that's on Patrick Bitt David's show on the 31st but You know,
these guys, I'm kind of fascinated by the people in the corporate press, as much contempt as I have for them, because it's amazing to be working.
You're working in this industry where, okay, before COVID, the corporate media had the lowest approval numbers since they've been keeping track of them.
I mean, I would say the backdrop is the war on terror, the terror wars, getting all of that wrong, the financial crisis, not seeing that coming and kind Yeah, that's all that stuff.
Iraq and Afghanistan being disasters.
So that's kind of in the backdrop.
And then you have the worst financial crisis in 100 years.
So that happened.
But then there's no question, I mean, and particularly not just the war with Donald Trump, but particularly the...
Allegation of a conspiracy with Russia that they said every single day, all day, for three years long.
I mean, if you think about it, it's the big...
If true, it's the biggest news story in the history of the United States of America.
They're claiming that the current sitting president is guilty of treason.
He was installed by a hostile foreign power who overthrew our elections in order to install him.
It was quite a claim to run with 24-7.
And then to find out after three years that we have nothing...
Not like there's nothing, no evidence pointing toward this conspiracy even existing.
There's not even evidence that Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election.
The best they have is, like, there are some bot farms that they can trace to Russian IP addresses, which is like, I'm not a tech guy.
Jamie, you know this better than me, but they say it's the easiest thing to fake, is an IP address.
The fact that an IP address traces to Russia is, like, almost more indicative that someone's trying to frame Russia than it is that Russia was involved.
Well, I mean, look, even if they were all from Vladimir Putin, they were fairly insignificant in terms of interfering in elections with other countries and how it works.
Dude, there was a segment, I remember watching this, it was in the 2016 election and it was on Joy Reid's show on MSNBC, her show at the time, whatever it was, and she had a whole segment I'm about like how sexist the coverage of Hillary Clinton was and it was you know every time they'll say she's shrill or she's this but if a man was like that it'd be this and she went through all these words that have been used to cover Hillary Clinton and how they're loaded sexist phrases
and all this and then at the end of her show she has this segment called who won the week And all the guests on the panel get to pick their own, like, what happened this week.
And her choice, not one of the people on the panel, her choice of who won the week was this guy in Union Square who made a naked statue of Donald Trump with a micropenis.
And was just, like, literally, like, just making a thing like, aha, he's got a little dick.
And after, literally, her last segment was on the sexist coverage of Hillary Clinton, and then her next pick for who won the week was a guy mocking Trump for having a micropenis that he just made up and made a statue of.
And she did not even, like, seem to see the contradiction in any of that.
And when you're dealing with something like this, just the depth of it all is just so perplexing.
You know when you just lay out like when Mike Baker's on and he lays out the history Of, like, Palestine and Israel and the conflicts in Egypt and this and that and Hamas and Hezbollah and you lay it all, you're like, Jesus Christ!
Yeah, dude, I know, I think there's a thing, I don't know if I could word this exactly right, but I think there's, for some reason, I think comedians have this thing that they're kind of able to go to these places.
Do you remember, you remember when you had Bill Burr on your show, and you played this video, I don't know why I just loved this moment so much, but you played this video of a dude ripping something out of a little girl's hand, And it was something like, the guy, she had a piece of paper or something, and he was way aggressive.
Yeah, well that particularly, but I just, it's just very easy for me, I don't know why, this always just came very natural to me, whereas I think some people have so much trouble with this, but it's very easy for me to do this on both sides of this conflict, to just go, okay, like I got two little kids,
I could just just start to imagine if somebody did something in one of my little kids and I wasn't able to protect them and what I'd be willing to do like how dark a place I could go to and It's just like immediately very easy to me to see how anyone in Israel after October 7th would support fucking flatten Gaza and how anyone in Palestine after what's going on the last 50 years there would be like Yeah, I'll sign up for Hamas.
I'll support these guys who are going to do this shit now I do think Both sides.
And that's why it's gotten to such a bad point, right?
Because this is the cycle that keeps going.
But I do think, and this is what Daryl Cooper, who I brought him up last time I was on, he has that fantastic series called A Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.
And he's just totally brilliant.
I love that guy.
But he...
And I think this is right, is that he's like, okay, so you can totally see where if you're on either side there, you'd just be like, I don't care.
I see red.
I want to kill as many of the other side as I can.
But for us as Americans who are not in that situation, it's kind of incumbent on us to be like, okay, let's try to kind of have a sober analysis of this and not do what so many people seem to do, which is like...
Almost try to just like egg on the other side and cheer on their side.
Yeah.
And then this total like demonization of either all of the Palestinians, like they're all just human garbage or all Jews are whatever evil or something like this.
This episode of Joe Rogan Questions Everything where I was talking to religious people of a bunch of different religious sects and religious scholars and I was talking to this one guy who was a rabbi and there was a woman there that was converting to Judaism and I got to ask her questions about like how she's doing it and like how hard it is and like it's fucking it's like getting your pilot's license or something.
It's like the way citizenship is, where like when you're born Jewish, like I am, or born an American like I am, and you're like, oh man, I couldn't have passed that test.
Dude, which is- By the way, it sums up everything about modern-day America.
Anarcho-tyranny.
It's like you have the worst of anarchism and tyranny all in one, where if you follow the rules, you get totally fucked, and if you just ignore the rules, you get rewarded.
That might be the thing that saves us and ruins us at the same time, is President AI. President AI? President AI will be logical, and if it's on the blockchain, we'll know exactly if President AI is being influenced by money.
I do think, like, I mean, look, obviously, like, I'm biased on the...
Like, I have my own opinions on these things.
But I do just think that one of the things that I've found kind of amazing, and I've thought this with some of the people who have come on your show since the last time I was here, is the...
The way that people can defend what Israel's doing in Gaza does kind of blow my mind.
Because it reminds you that it's like, you're like, oh, okay, look, throughout all of human history, right, I'm not saying there's anything unique to Israel, like they're the only ones to ever commit atrocities or that they're not dealing with atrocities committed to them.
If you compare it to the worst things that have ever happened in the history of the world.
But I'm just saying throughout all of human history there's been atrocities and there's been genocides and ethnic cleansing campaigns and slavery and all.
But at every single point there was someone there willing to rationalize it.
You know, like someone there who would be like, no, no, no, listen, this is what we have to do, because otherwise this, and it's amazing the mental gymnastics that people can come up with to justify something that is so clearly on its face, just heartbreaking.
It was, and then when you find out they were right, at the end of it all, when you find out many, many years later the Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag, you're like, what?
Because if I was the government, and I was willing, just imagine if Eisenhower's correct, which is insane, how could he be?
And that there was a real influence of military-industrial complex.
If I was the military-industrial complex, and I was willing to fucking start a war with North Vietnam for no fucking reason.
For no reason.
So 100%, I'm going to kill X amount of people and a bunch of Americans, and then you're going to actually make these people, these Americans, you're going to draft them and force them to go because they don't want to go.
This is of what percentage of the world's heroin supply?
And then when you see the same trick played out in Afghanistan, My favorite was Geraldo Rivera interviewing the troops, rationalizing why they had to guard the poppy fields.
It was responsible for most of the global supply of heroin.
And the production went up after we invaded.
So opium poppy, which grows extensively in Afghanistan and southern fields, contains main opium ingredient used to manufacture heroin.
Afghanistan was previously the world's top opium producer, responsible for over 80% of the global supply and a major source of heroin in Europe and Asia.
I was listening to the Mike Baker podcast you had on where you were talking about the money in Ukraine and where it went, and even he was like, ah, yeah, no, we don't really know where the...
I thought one of the funniest things about that was that...
If you're advocating that heroin should be legal, and this is your full perspective, okay, now I'll accept it.
But if you really think that heroin is a scourge, and if you really do appreciate that 100,000 people died last year of opioid overdoses, 100,000, it's a real fucking crisis.
If there was a disease killing 100,000 people, we would freak the fuck out.
Well, look, I mean, I do think there's a strong argument for legalization, but there's also a difference between that and the government kind of like sponsoring the trade of it.
The thing that's so wild to me is that after, and I know I've talked about this, I'm sure, on previous episodes, but just after 20 years of the terror wars and what a disaster those were, and to the point that everyone...
John McCain wrote in his memoir that the war in Iraq was a mistake.
That's how universally agreed upon it is.
Which is hilarious.
John McCain would acknowledge we got that one wrong.
And it's not like anyone else is defending any of the other terror wars at this point.
But then as soon as we kind of get out of them, we're not even fully out, but we're mostly out, we just get into these proxy wars in Ukraine and now in Israel that are clearly wars of choice for America.
Like, we don't have to be involved in these.
We're just still deciding to continue this war machine going.
Anyway, man, I will say that I think a lot of the defense of the war in Gaza, which I kind of feel we are even calling a war, because it doesn't exactly feel like that's what the term should be.
Well, I mean, but in the case of Gaza, it's not even like there's not even a government.
I mean, there are stateless people who have been captive by the Israelis since 1967. And then they're captive politically in their own country by Hamas.
Yeah, I think it's certainly exaggerated at times by the Israelis, but there is no question that they are, look, they're in this, Gaza is, dude, it's five miles wide.
I know, it's crazy.
So little.
You could jog from one side to the other without taking a break.
No, look, so I'm just saying part of this, and this isn't, I'm not, like, making any excuses.
I mean, there's no question there have been incidents of Hamas, like, embedding themselves in civilian locations.
But also, it's not as if They have a military or a government.
It's not as if there's going to be two armies that meet themselves on the battlefield here.
Hamas is essentially a gang in an Israeli prison that rose up as the toughest gang there.
And yeah, in such a densely populated area, that's the way, as they call it, asymmetric warfare is going to work.
Look, man, I took issue with a few things that some of the guests you've had on recently have said.
I know, I think all of this, a lot of times it comes down to framing, like how you want to look at an issue, and particularly the people who are way behind Israel on this, I feel like always rely on this very strange framing, so they don't have to confront exactly what's going on, and they can kind of look at it in more of an abstract, removed way.
Like when you had a, I'm sorry if I'm saying his name wrong, but Gad, how do you say his last name?
I've read his stuff before, but I always butcher names.
But so one of the things he said, which I know I've heard this in every debate I've done on the topic so far, but he said the same thing Dennis Prager said to me when we debated, was he was like, well, look, if Israel laid down all their arms, there'd be a genocide.
If Hamas laid down all their arms, there'd be peace.
And forget the fact that I will say I don't agree with the second part of that.
I don't think that's clear at all.
I think if Hamas laid down all their arms, which essentially the Palestinians Are as close to have laid down all their arms as could be?
Well, I remember when you had, um, anyway, just the point I was making about Gad's thing is that it's also this, like, I just hate when people retreat to almost these hypotheticals.
It reminds me of Sam Harris's argument about why you were really wrong with the, uh, at least eight times.
So eight times Israeli forces have attacked humanitarian aid convoys.
And buildings in the Gaza Strip at least eight times since October, despite being given coordinates to ensure their protection, Human Rights Watch has set in a new report.
So they're targeting these people.
So you've got some members of the Israeli military that don't give a fuck, and they want to stop these people from getting food.
However, for all the scrutiny there'll be over what these 20-year-olds are hollering at Columbia, when Benjamin Netanyahu is saying they're Amalek, As you're going into this area, which, you know, the story from the Bible is that you're supposed to kill the women and the children.
And the story is that they fucked up by not killing all the women and the children.
And then, like, they came back.
Now, even if you could argue he doesn't mean it that way, it's like, okay, but you're saying that— The story from the Bible?
The ICJ basically said that Israel is plausibly committing a genocide.
They haven't yet determined that it is or isn't, but they said it's plausible.
But anyway, my point that I'm making about what Saad was saying is that it reminds me of Sam Harris, where he sits here and he goes, well, imagine this hypothetical.
Imagine COVID was 100 times as deadly and the vaccine was perfect against stopping transmission and there were no vaccine injuries.
Well, hey.
Now, you don't look so good anymore, do you, Joe Rogan?
He was saying you could, when someone's saying you could never mandate a vaccine or argue for a mandate, and he was saying if there was a vaccine, you could, he was making an intellectual argument, he's correct, that you could argue that if there was a vaccine that had zero side effects and was 100% effective, and if everybody took it, the disease stops.
Right, but if you could flip it around, the opposite would be true.
Like, if Hamas did lay down all their weapons, and if they did completely give up, You're going to have some Israeli soldiers that do not give a fuck that still want to shoot them.
But for the most part, if there was nothing, if they completely gave up, which is also not going to happen, but if that did happen, you couldn't see a situation where Israel just continues bombing.
Back to the status quo of just being a stateless people of permanent refugees with no natural rights whatsoever, no ability to trade with the world, no ability to come and leave.
You can't have an airport.
You can't have a seaport.
You can't go out fishing past where some IDF guy decides you're not allowed to.
So, like, yeah, if Hamas laid down all their arms, perhaps Israel would stop the bombing campaign, and they would just continue...
Subjugation forever, which has been the Likud Party official policy since they were created by the terrorist Menachem Begin.
Like, literally since this party, that is the ruling party in Israel, was created, their goal has been that the Palestinian people never get their own state, they never get their own freedom, and that's resulted in this.
Well, in a way it is, and then in another way, it's kind of not.
It's kind of like, there's this weird, you know, hurt people hurt people type thing.
Like, when you kind of suffer this trauma, and we're speaking collectively here, so it's not exactly the same as an individual, but like, you suffer this trauma, and then you use that to justify doing whatever the hell you gotta do so that you never suffer that trauma again.
And then you weirdly end up kind of like inflicting something on another group of people and kind of in a weird way holding them responsible for the trauma you suffered even though they really, really had very little, nothing to do with the actual trauma.
The Israel-Palestine is very ancient in the fact that it's like the hate between them is so strong and they're right next door to each other, which is how people used to rock it back in the day.
That was the fear of neighboring tribes, that people from the other side were going to come over and rape the women and children and kill your babies and slaughter the men.
The other thing, though, is that, and that's all true, but the other thing is that, you know, there are these examples, right, like where there's Ireland and England, and they're right next to each other, and, like, things are just cool now.
And France and Germany are right next to each other, and they're just cool now.
And we talked a bunch about the history of this last time I was on, but I don't think I mentioned this.
Maybe I did.
But...
The craziest part of all of it is that the Israelis, I shouldn't say the Israelis, the Israelis five seconds before they became Israelis, like right before the creation of the State of Israel, they embraced terrorism.
And by the way, these terrorists who were the leaders of these terrorist organizations, like Menachem Begin and Yisak Shamir, they went on to be prime ministers of Israel, but they were terrorists.
And I'm not like, I don't mean this as a pejorative, like self-described, like they embraced terrorism.
And then there was the Haganah, who was like the biggest one.
And they were not quite as terroristic, but they also were involved in a bunch of it.
And their justification for it was to drive out the occupying force, which was the British at the time.
After World War II, the Zionists who were in Palestine had enough of the British occupying the area, and they were very angry because they had limited Jewish migration during the run-up to the Holocaust.
So they had a real beef with the British at this point, even though the British had kind of allowed them to...
Have a chance to establish a Jewish homeland there.
But so they embraced terrorism to drive them out.
You can go look up the King David Hotel.
Killed a whole bunch of innocent people, including Jews, in the hotel because they just wanted to use terrorism to drive out an occupying force.
And they actually introduced terrorism into that region.
And many of the same tactics that the Palestinians went on to embrace were stuff that they picked up from the Jewish terrorists at that time.
But then the same Israelis will turn around and be like, well, I don't know why these Palestinians have embraced terrorism.
And, like, they're telling you it's for the same reason.
It's to drive out an occupying force.
Now, of course, the major difference there is that Israelis came to stay, whereas the British were there.
You know, they had their—this was a satellite.
They had their home country back in Europe, and they could be driven out.
It's a whole different thing to try to drive someone out who's like, no, we're setting up our homes here.
They've been giving, basically, I mean, what's really going on is that Joe Biden, this is a disaster politically for Joe Biden, and something like, looking at the polls recently, 50% of his base?
Why would they send you to Detroit to deal with COVID? Now, I saw someone saying that perhaps it was the H1N1 pandemic, which did happen during the Biden administration or during the Obama administration when he was vice president.
I don't think I don't think I think he was talking about he would have probably said a previous pandemic yeah 2009 he's out of his fucking mind if it wasn't if it was occasional people would let this stuff go yeah but anyway just to that look I also thought, because some of these guys, by the way, you've had on your show, like, I like them.
I'm not even like, you know, like Coleman Hughes.
I don't know him personally, but I like him.
He's great.
He seems really smart, and I haven't read his book, but I bet I would love it.
Well, I would love to have a – because I think he's a good faith guy and I think – and he's very smart.
But he also kind of – there were two things that kind of rubbed me the wrong way when he was on the show.
Number one was that he started by kind of getting into this argument about – which I see a lot of people who are supporting this conflict doing – Okay, well, here are the number of total civilians dead, and here are the number of Hamas militants dead, and let's look at that ratio, and then is that ratio that far off from what you find in a typical war?
And there's a few problems with this.
Number one, The numbers are totally unreliable.
And so you're having this conversation.
On both sides, right?
Yes, on both sides.
I mean, both sides are totally incentivized to exaggerate the numbers.
And also in the fog of war, it's very hard to keep up with these numbers.
We never really know the numbers of dead in war until like years later when the excess mortality is calculated and then you get a better idea of what was really going on there.
The Israeli government talking about the number of Hamas militants they've killed seems to be them just pulling numbers out of their ass.
Like, they dropped these bombs.
unidentified
They don't know how many, who got who, and who was a part of— Are they going in there and checking dog tags?
But anyway, even if the numbers were right, it's like— Look, dude, if you look at the population density, and you just look at the number of bombs that Israel has dropped, and you just see a lot of the footage that we've seen, and you just listen to stories that doctors are telling.
I literally just saw an interview a couple weeks ago with a doctor who just got back from Gaza, and he was talking about how they have a major anesthesia shortage.
So just think about the implications of that, like what that means.
It means they're operating on kids without anesthesia, you know what I mean?
So the point is that if you're talking about, okay, well this many Hamas people are dying compared to this many innocent babies are dying, That's not the question.
When you're inflicting this level of human suffering on people, the question for any decent civilized person is, is this absolutely necessary?
And as soon as you frame the question that way, you realize that, oh yeah, there actually is.
And that it's not true that Israel...
There will just be October 7th after October 7th if Israel stops doing this.
The fact is that...
Of course, Netanyahu's never allowed a real investigation into October 7th to happen.
But everybody pretty much concludes that Israel dropped the ball in a massive way, in a massive way, that their security was just in shambles, and all they really needed to do was not rely so much on these, you know, machine gun robots and have actual soldiers at the border.
Basically, they had—so, I think as a result of the protests against Netanyahu, he had started to ally with some even further right-wing groups than he normally would have, and to appease them, he was pulling soldiers off of the Gaza border and putting them over toward the West Bank, which is what the religious Jews on the right really care about.
And yes, they basically got caught with their pants down.
But I'm just saying, they could just stop doing this.
It's not they all die or they keep doing this.
They could stop, and Israel can still protect itself.
In fact, I'd argue their security would be enhanced if they stopped doing this.
But the other thing, which you brought up to Coleman Hughes, was that you mentioned to him, you said, what about, didn't Israel prop up Hamas?
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and maybe he just doesn't know about that detail of this as much, because if not, he was kind of being dishonest.
But maybe he just wasn't familiar with all of this stuff.
But he kind of went, you said that, and then he kind of dismissed it by saying, well, there's a quote that's attributed to Netanyahu, but it wasn't on videotape.
Essentially being like, we don't really know if Netanyahu said this or not.
And then just kind of moved on to the conversation away from that.
But I find this, I found this in all of my debates that I've done on this, and I've done like eight debates on this since the war broke out.
Everybody on the pro-Israeli side does not want to grapple with that point because it really is like a, it's a narrative shattering point once you acknowledge it.
Well, here, well, let me, okay, so here's the deal, right?
So the quote that he's referring to was a quote by Benjamin Netanyahu.
It was something along the lines of, anybody who wants to thwart the Palestinians having their own state needs to support propping up Hamas, bolstering Hamas, transferring money to them.
So Hamas maintains power so that we never have to give them a state because we can look to the international community.
We can look to liberal Jews in Israel and say, look, we have no partner for peace.
They're a crazy terrorist group.
So we never have to make a deal.
We don't have to Fulfill our promise and that we would give this attributed to him so basically this quote particularly Okay, this was at a closed-door meeting with the Likud party So this is Benjamin Netanyahu's political party his far-right party that's in power right now in Israel So it's true that this was a closed-door meeting and that it's not on tape So what happened is, as far as I could tell, the first person who reported this, I believe, was a lady who's a reporter for the Jerusalem Post.
And then it's been run in a bunch of other newspapers since then.
So what basically what happened is an eyewitness who was there at the meeting.
So another Likud party member in Benjamin Netanyahu's political party came and told her that he said this.
And then she went and checked with somebody else who was there.
And he also confirmed that, like, yes, Benjamin Netanyahu said this.
And then a third person who was also at the meeting came out and wrote about it in his book or wrote about it in another newspaper article or something like that.
So you had three eyewitnesses from within his own political party who confirmed that he said this.
Now, take that for what it's worth.
I think that's reasonably strong, that three eyewitnesses all in his political party.
Coleman acted as if that's what the entire case is built off of, which is just not true at all.
It's not just this one Benjamin Netanyahu quote.
It's dozens and dozens of quotes from Israeli leaders all throughout the political spectrum.
There's been reporting on this done by almost every major Israeli newspaper.
Haaretz, Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel on October 8th had a piece by Tal Schneider, which was how Bin Laden, excuse me, How Netanyahu's support for Hamas just blew up in his face.
It was the next day.
And because even critics like Ehud Barak, who was the former prime minister, he's a labor party.
He's a critic of Benjamin Netanyahu.
So he was a critic of this plan to prop up Hamas.
But it's totally uncontroversial that this was their plan.
The New York Times just ran a piece, I think it was late last year, It might have been early this year, where they talked about how two weeks before October 7th, Benjamin Netanyahu sent the head of the Mossad to Qatar because funds going into Hamas had slowed down.
And he sent them in there to make sure the funds continued.
Yeah, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month to Gaza's trip, money that helped prop up the Hamas government there.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.
According to Times, Israeli intelligence agents traveled to Gaza With a Qatari official carrying suitcases filled with cash, suitcases, like a mafia movie, to disperse money.
Retired Israeli General Shlomo Brahm described the logic of Netanyahu's position.
One effective way to present a two-state solution is to divide...
Prevent.
Prevent a two-state solution is to divide between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
If the extremist Hamas ruled Gaza, then the Palestinian Authority, a compromise, comprador, comprador government?
Is that how you say it?
Comprador?
I don't even know what that is.
Comprador government with a tenuous hold on the West Bank would be further weakened.
This, according to Brahm, would allow Netanyahu to say, I have no partner.
That he can say, I have no partner for peace, which is the Israeli line that they like to use.
So basically, Okay, in 1979, the Egyptians and the Israelis met at Camp David, and that's when they worked out their peace.
Now, their peace also just involved, basically, that the US would pay them both off.
We'd give them both $3 billion a year in perpetuity if they stopped going to war with each other, basically.
And part of that was that Israel promised that they would eventually Give the Palestinians a state.
Like, it was recognized by D.C. at the time, this Jimmy Carter, that, like, you gotta give them a state, because otherwise this fighting's gonna continue on and on and on forever.
But then, in the 80s, Yasser Arafat basically rejected terrorism.
He had been He was involved in terrorism before that.
He rejected terrorism and he recognized Israel.
I think it was in 1988. He recognized Israel's right to exist under 1967 borders.
So basically, Israel has the right to exist, but we have the right to Gaza and the West Bank.
The ultimate of compromises from the Palestinian perspective.
Because, you know, a lot of their more hardcore guys are like, no, all of this was ours.
We shouldn't have lost any of it.
And now even the original U.S. partition plan, which was rejected by the Arabs for, you know, fairly good reasons.
They rejected it because it gave 55 percent to the Jews and only for 56 percent to the Jews and only 44 percent to the Palestinians.
And they were like, but we're like 90 percent of the population here, like or 90 percent of the landowners here or whatever.
And it's like this doesn't this isn't fair.
But now at this point, they're talking about 78 percent versus 22 percent.
So they're accepting 22%.
And so that's Yasser Arafat in the late 80s.
And then this is what set the stage for the Oslo Accords in the early 90s.
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat over and they shake hands and they sign these deals.
And the promise again from Israel was that we're starting the peace process to eventually give the Palestinians their state.
This is the process.
And there were steps along this process.
Okay?
Now, in 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu becomes prime minister.
Now, the same year in 1996, there's this letter, you can find this on the internet, it's called, A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.
And it was written by Richard Perle and David Wormser and a couple other people.
Of course, Richard Perle and David Wormser both went on to be very influential neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration.
So they write this letter not to President Bill Clinton and not to Bob Dole, who was running for president on the Republican ticket that year.
They write this letter to Benjamin Netanyahu, the new prime minister of Israel.
And basically, if you read it, what they say is that they're like, look, look, you guys are all caught up in this peace process thing where you're talking about giving the Palestinians land.
We need a clean break from that strategy.
And we're going to have a whole new strategy.
And what it's going to involve is you making agreements with the broader Arab world so that you don't have to make this agreement with the Palestinians.
You see, the old way of thinking was always that Israel will never be able to make peace with the broader Muslim world because they're furious about what you're doing to the Palestinians.
But the clean break strategy was like, no, no, no.
You're going to...
Embark on what ultimately became the Netanyahu doctrine, that we'll make deals with the rest of the Arab world, so we don't have to give up this land.
And you know what they recommended?
These two neoconservatives in 1996, and I bet you'll never guess this, Joe, regime change in Iraq.
For the security of Israel.
That was in 1996. And these people got in George W. Bush's government.
And after 9-11, those same people decided that they believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he was involved in 9-11.
Israel can shape its strategic environment in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.
This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions.
And here's where it gets crazy.
How much of a...
What a great job the Mossad did in compromising people, by the way.
I mean, how much of an effect did that have in everything?
You know, you can go full Eddie Bravo and think everything that's happening is because of Epstein's island.
And I used to dismiss that a lot more easy than I do now.
And I'm not saying that Epstein is the sole reason for this type of stuff.
There's several different reasons.
But you see this all over the political sphere.
And especially amongst conservative commentators.
Where as soon as Israel's mentioned...
Whatever their principles were that they were just rolling with are, like, gone.
Like, it's a totally different thing.
And I get that.
I get there's a reason for that, too.
Of course, like, what Jewish people have been through in the 20th century, in the 19th and 18th century, like, that plays a part in that, too.
But there's no question that...
Look, it's not just...
It's not just Epstein.
It's also, and I highly recommend people read, John Mearsheimer has a great book called The Israeli Lobby.
There's also this lobby, APEC, which is a very, very powerful lobby.
The truth is that every U.S. president since, with perhaps the exception of Trump, I'm actually not sure about that, but every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, I know for sure, excluding Trump, every one of them wanted a two-state solution.
Every single one of them.
None of them were able to get it done, even though we bankroll Israel.
You'd think it'd be fairly easy for us to, like, put pressure on the country that's relying on us.
Like, okay, we'll keep supporting you, but you gotta do this.
Nope.
Even when they go over and say, we wanna do this, they're not able to do that.
And part of that is because of the lobby.
Part of that is because there's, like, tens of millions of evangelical Christians in this country who believe that That the Jews have to control Israel, like in some religious view that Jesus can't come back unless the Jews control him or something like that.
Well, and they also, and the Israeli government's well aware of that, and they're well aware of how much they benefit from that, so they do everything they can to facilitate that belief.
It's been translated by a whole bunch of different people.
And he's bragging about how he put all of these poison pills into the peace agreement.
He was like, oh yeah, sure, we'll...
I agreed to grant them a state, but only after it was determined that Israel could control important military areas.
And then he was like, I also snuck it in that only Israel gets to define what the military important areas are.
And I decided that a third of the West Bank is that.
And like he's bragging about and he's bragging about how he tricked Bill Clinton and how easy it is to move the Americans.
It's wild.
Like there's there's a lot of power plays at work here.
And the only other thing I'll say about this, and it's not just like the neoconservative, the clean break, the strategy that they wrote for Netanyahu.
It's that.
So in 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu comes and testifies before Congress as a as a regional expert.
And he testifies that like, oh, yeah, no, if you guys overthrow Saddam Hussein, democracy will sweep the region.
Let me tell you, I know something, because I know this region better than anyone else.
And at one point, Dennis Kucinich actually grilled him and got him on record, and he goes, is there anybody else that you're advocating that we preemptively attack?
And Netanyahu goes, yeah, Iran.
I don't hate Israel.
I think Israel is a cool country.
I think what they do to the Palestinians is fucked up and it's inexcusable and they should stop.
But I think Israel is a cool country.
There's a lot of great things about them.
But like Netanyahu, this guy who's the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history, has been trying to get America into wars that are in his interest, that are very clearly not in ours.
And the fact that we have to like unconditionally support Israel, even when our own democratically elected president doesn't like the policies that they're enacting, and yet they still get all of this support.
Even now, you know, Joe Biden doesn't know what he's saying because he's got dementia, but there's people in his ear who are telling him to, like, say, don't invade Rafa.
And he's like, don't invade Rafa.
And then Benjamin Netanyahu's like, OK, we're going to invade Rafa.
And it's just like, OK, well, fine, fine.
If we have no influence over what you're going to do and you'll just wag the middle finger at us and brag about how you tricked Bill Clinton and defy what our presidents want you to do, like, OK, fine.
But then you don't get our money and our weapons, right?
But Abby Martin also follows in a tradition of left-wing thought, like Noam Chomsky and people like this, who have always been very critical of the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians.
So basically, I think what really changed things...
During the 90s, there's no question, there was tremendous support for making a deal for a two-state solution, particularly amongst, like, liberal Israelis.
And there...
Basically, so Yitzhak Rabin got assassinated by a right-wing Israeli who was furious that he was a traitor for making a deal with the Palestinians.
And that took him out.
And then when Netanyahu came in, and then ultimately, I guess it was Sharon who was in the year 2000, and there was another meeting at Camp David where...
You know, what people will say, which is just not true, but what a lot of the people of the pro-Israeli side will say is that they offered them everything.
They offered the Palestinians everything they wanted, and they just turned it down.
And this is their...
It's all slogans.
It's like, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
But if you actually look into the details of all of it, even Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was the acting foreign minister at the time involved in these negotiations, he even said in his book, and he said it in a Democracy Now!
interview, that he would have turned down the deal, too, if he was Arafat.
Because Dale was just so, it was so removed from actually giving him his own state that it was like, this is just, it was an insulting offer, essentially.
But when those negotiations broke down, and then it was after Sharon had this visit to the Temple Mount, which really inflamed tensions, when the negotiations broke down, then the Second Intifada started, and there was a big wave of terrorist attacks.
And that, you know, in the same cycle we were talking about at the beginning, that did a lot to turn a lot of liberal Israelis off of the idea that, like, well, there's no negotiating apiece.
But it is worth noting that whenever there were negotiations going on, the support for terrorism, the support for Hamas and groups like that always plummeted.
And then whenever the negotiations broke down, the support for those terrorist groups picked back up again.
Because the big problem here is that you're just, when you...
Essentially, when you take away the dangling carrot in front of an oppressed people like it, you let them know that there's no hope that you're going to live in subjugation for eternity.
That's a very dangerous situation that that's when people will turn to really, really dark means.
And that's, you know, essentially, look, Netanyahu's like what became the Netanyahu doctrine.
And a lot of this culminated in the Abraham Accords, which a lot of Trump supporters will brag about.
They'll be like, look at all these peace deals that Donald Trump worked out in the Middle East, except the problem is that there was no war between any of the countries that he worked out these deals.
It was just kind of like normalizing relations between Israel and these other Arab countries around them.
But what was the reason why Relations weren't normalized.
It was because they were pissed off about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
So basically, Jared Kushner's brilliant idea, along with Netanyahu's, was that, oh, well, if we just bribe all of these countries with US taxpayer dollars or weapons, we can get them to look the other way.
And say, screw the Palestinians.
We'll make a deal with the US and with Israel.
So they did that.
And Netanyahu was bragging about this.
And Netanyahu, just a couple weeks before September 11th, right around the time that he sent the head of Mossad into Qatar to make sure the money kept going to Hamas, he went to the UN with a map.
Of Greater Israel, and it was all Israel.
Gaza, the West Bank, and what is Israel proper?
All Israel in his map.
Like, they were just bragging to them, like, haha, you guys lost.
This is, you know, as much as people will point to the Hamas founding charter, and it says from the river to the sea or whatever, and that's true, at least the original one, But that's in the Likud founding documents also.
In different words, but it's basically from the river to the sea will be all Israel, which is what it has been, you know, since 1967. And again, by the way, I'm not trying to make...
Okay, so because Netanyahu was supporting Hamas...
And because he was using them kind of as, you know what I mean?
Like, oh good, we'll keep these terrorists over here so that they're not linked up with the people in the West Bank over here.
And then I have no, I get a, you know, a certificate, I forget the exact phrase, but it was, I have a, I think he said at one point, I have a no partner for peace certificate signed by the president in both houses of Congress.
Because look, I don't have to ever do a two state deal.
But then people will jump to the next level, which is that like, oh, He won at October 7th.
At least I haven't seen convincing evidence that it is.
From everything I've read about it, it actually seems a lot more like if you remember, I know we talked about the same thing on the podcast years ago when I was on.
But if you remember when, OK, so in 2012, when Obama decided that they were going to start arming all of the anti-Assad rebels.
And there's actually a hot mic of John Kerry talking about this.
And because they were doing it through 2013, 2014.
And he goes, he goes, yeah, look, we saw the rise of ISIS coming.
And we knew the weapons were getting into their hands.
But we thought, okay, that might put pressure on Assad to have to step down.
So, like, we could use this group in order to get the regime change that we wanted.
But then they turned around and invaded Iraq.
And, like, that wasn't part of the plan.
You know what I mean?
Like, they weren't supposed to do that.
Then we had to reinvade Iraq to get rid of ISIS. You know what I mean?
And so, if you remember, during that time, there was one point when Obama called ISIS JV. It was kind of like insulting them.
And you could kind of see where Obama was coming from.
He's like, I don't know.
I'm the commander-in-chief of the United States of America's military.
I'm worried about ISIS. These guys are nothing compared to the power that we have.
And there's a lot of people at the highest level of the Israeli government who spoke exactly the same way about Hamas.
That's the Benjamin Netanyahu quote that he says, we can control the height of the flame when he's talking about, you know, propping up Hamas.
He goes, don't worry, we can control what they're able to do and what they're not able to do.
What if they decided on a two-state solution as it currently stands and they just let the people run it however they want and Hamas takes over the whole Palestine.
If Palestine becomes a country controlled by Hamas and then they start doing trading with other countries and then they start acquiring weapons like real sophisticated weapons like Israel has where the Iron Dome is no longer successful.
Right, so this is kind of the counterfactual that a lot of Israelis will rely on to say, well, look, we can't give them their own state, because what if, when they get their own state, they decide to do this with it?
So, alright, there's an old Thomas Jefferson quote about slavery, and I'll butcher this, as I always do, but I like bringing it up.
But it's something along the lines of, he goes, we have the wolf by the ear, And we can neither afford to hold on to it, nor to safely let it go.
And essentially what he was saying was, like, this was a major concern of people, even people who were kind of sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, who were like, yeah, look, but we've, like, enslaved these people for so long.
So what are we going to do?
Free them and make them citizens who are allowed to get guns?
Like, they're going to be so furious at us, they're going to come kill all of us.
Well, the way Daryl Cooper says it, which I actually think is a reasonable way to put it, is he goes like, I heard someone ask him that question once, and he goes, okay, well, if that happened, then we're having a different conversation.
You know?
But that's not the conversation right now.
The conversation right now is about Israel dominating these people in perpetuity.
But I also do think that I don't...
Listen, I think that groups like Hamas get their strength from the fact that there are so many people who want to resist this total domination by the Israelis.
You know, it was General McChrystal...
He's not a libertarian dove like me, not like some comic idiot like me, who's just like, I'm against war.
General McChrystal, who was running the war in Afghanistan before he got caught saying bad things about Obama and got kicked out of there.
But General McChrystal, this tough, hard-nosed general, he was the one who coined the term insurgent math.
And he said, what's 10 minus 2?
A lot of you might think it's 8, but the answer's 20. When we're talking about insurgents, 10 minus 2 equals 20. Because you kill two insurgents, and each one of them had brothers and uncles and nephews and friends, and now they all join up the resistance movement.
by the fact that you just killed someone they loved.
And this has been the nature of this dynamic from the beginning of it.
And so, yeah, it's like just saying that to the concern that if Israel was to grant the Palestinians their freedom, that what if then this led to like some swelling in Hamas?
I think the truth is that doing what you're doing now is much more likely to increase Hamas or Hamas-like organizations.
But again, like I will say that the one nice example or the one silver lining to all of this is that there are so many examples throughout the world where things were so off.
I mean, you just never could have imagined that like Germany could live right there in Europe next to all these countries.
I went to London, and then you get on a 45-minute flight.
And you go over to Ireland and you're just like, oh, you guys are right next to each other.
Everyone's just coming out to the shows and we're having fun and it's just cool.
And so there is something beautiful about that where in the moment it seems like this could never be solved.
But that's not necessarily true.
The truth is that most human beings are...
They're incentivized by wanting to live their life and wanting to take care of their family and wanting to...
You know what I mean?
And if given an option to do that rather than losing their sons in war, a lot of times they'll choose that.
But in order for that to happen, look, Israel has all of the power.
And the Palestinian people have virtually none.
The only thing they have the power to do is to, you know, I guess support these acts of terrorism, which are essentially like celebrating losing.
It's so sick and dark that you're like, aha, we'll kill a few of your people and then get way more of our people killed.
Then it's just like, that's the only thing they have.
Aside from that, every peaceful effort that they make ends up being violently suppressed.
And Israel has all of the power.
And in order to get to that step, the ones with the power have to make some concessions.
And the only way to get there is for Israel to at least get back on some path toward like, hey, we are going to give you your sovereignty at some point.
Oh, there's money to be made in the destruction, there's money to be made in the rebuilding, and people will make that money.
But I think that the truth is that Israel has not at all laid out what the endgame of this is, other than this assertion that we must get rid of Hamas entirely, even though U.S. and Israeli intelligence have both said that that's impossible.
It's not an achievable task.
Hamas is popping back up in the areas that they've already leveled.
And they go into Rafa.
I'm sure they can kill some Hamas militants in there, but Hamas or Hamas-like groups are coming back.
I saw at one point they said they've killed 8,000, then they said 10,000, then 14,000.
I don't know.
Honestly, I have no idea what the real number is, and I don't think the Israeli government knows, and I think probably the Gazan Health Ministry doesn't know either.
It's like very difficult work to, while this is all going on, identify bodies and figure out how many of them are dead and how many of them were joined up with Hamas or weren't.
You know, Hamas is also not like it's not a government.
It's not like as if there's like, you know, it's not like, OK, if you were like, say, tracking like in America, there was a big, you know, like explosion.
A bunch of people died and you could look at like DNA records and who was enlisted in the military and you could just like match them up against each other.
It's not scientific like that, or at least it's much more primitive than that.
So I really wouldn't venture to guess.
And I also don't know how accurate the numbers when they say 35,000 people have died.
Yeah, well, they said the most recent figures that they put out, again, this is the Gaza Health Ministry, which is overseen by Hamas, so take that with a grain of salt or whatever.
But they said there's like, I think, 10,000 who they weren't able to identify.
No, and then imagine, like, imagine, you know, and there's constantly, like, the defenders of this military campaign will say, oh, they drop warning bombs, and they drop leaflets, and they tell you, no problem, just leave.
But you're talking about people who are, like, first of all, they live at least...
A large percentage of them live in a level of poverty that none of us have ever experienced.
Just telling people, just leave and head out to the, you know, and people almost have, like, in their mind that, like, what is there, like, some sophisticated refugee camp waiting for them with tents and water and food?
Like, no.
They're just telling them, like, go.
Go out into the desert.
Go out into this other place.
You have nothing.
It's not that easy.
Like, you might have little children with you or old people with you.
It's not that easy to just leave.
And then when they leave and they go into Rafa, which was supposed to be safe, they go, oh, yeah, now we're...
Now we're invading Rafa.
So leave again.
Where do you go exactly?
Who knows?
And again, like, look, dude, it's just, again, I just think that whenever you're talking about these things, when you're talking about, like, inflicting this level of human suffering on a group of people, Like, whoever's defending that man, the onus is on you to demonstrate that there's absolutely no other way to do it.
And the other reason why I bring up this point all the time about Israel propping up Hamas as this strategy is that doesn't that at least change the narrative?
Because if you just go, which a lot of people are, they'll just be like, well, look, look what happened on October 7th.
Look how horrible that is.
Nobody could stand for anybody doing that.
And therefore, Hamas has to go.
And so whatever happens in that process...
Hey, that's on Hamas.
I guess on some superficial level I can understand that.
But once you know that they were propping up Hamas specifically so that they wouldn't have to give the innocent Palestinians their own state, and now they get to use that group that they propped up as the excuse why they're allowed to just slaughter these people, that's just like, that's a whole different level of...
That's just, no, that's fucked up, man.
That's just not, and all these terms get conflated.
They'll be like, doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself?
And you're like, yeah, but see, now you're like manipulating this idea of self-defense, which is a natural right.
You could argue the most natural human right is the right to, you know, the right to life and then the right to defend your life.
But the right to defense is like, so imagine like me and you were hanging out at your house and someone like broke into your house and Kills me and then points the gun at you and you grab your gun and you kill that guy.
You'd be like, well, yeah, you had the right to defend yourself.
You know what I mean?
He's on your property.
He broke into your property.
He just killed your friend.
He's trying to kill you and you're like, no, you have the right to defend yourself.
No question.
Or you could even argue, right?
Say like in the human shield example, he's holding a little baby as he's shooting at me and you shoot and you hit the baby and him.
You could say, hey, that...
That's horrible, but that was on him.
But now you're talking about like a guy breaks into your house, shoots and kills me, runs and leaves, retreats back to his house where you know his wife and his five kids are.
And so you blow up the house.
And you're like, well, look, I have a right to defend myself.
You're like, okay, but this is a slightly different concept than just like the right of self-defense as we all understand it.
This is more like the right to revenge, the right to justice, which, okay, I believe in justice, and I think all of the people involved in October 7th Should face justice for what they did.
Horrific terrorist attack.
But there's a very different question between, like, defending the country of Israel and enacting justice against those people if it means, like, babies get crushed to death in rubble and parents get killed in front of their children and all of the, you know, horror that's been going on.
I think Hamas doesn't care about Palestinian life.
I think the goal in asymmetric warfare is almost always to provoke an overreaction.
Out of your opponent, right?
So like, Osama Bin Laden never thought he could destroy America by taking down the Twin Towers, but he thought he could lure us into a war in Afghanistan that could bankrupt our country, just like he was trained by the CIA to do with the Soviet Union, right?
Like, that was kind of the plan.
And likewise, I think that Hamas knew that Israel would overreact in this way.
And look, I mean, look what's happening.
Totally turn global opinion against them and put themselves in more jeopardy than they've ever been in.
There's almost nothing that anyone else could have done to Israel that would have put that country in more jeopardy than what they've just done to Gaza.
This is like never going away for them.
I don't think I don't think a lot of Israelis or pro-Israeli Americans have really grappled Like, you could get into the semantics of arguing whether this is a genocide or not a genocide, which I never get into.
By the way, I just don't care about, you know, whether you call it that term or call it a different term.
But the fact that the International Court of Justice ruled that this is a plausible genocide is so wild that they ruled that the Jewish state is committing a genocide.
Like that's just such a different way of looking at things than all of us grew up with like, no, the Jews were the victims of genocide, not the perpetrators of it.
And I am Jewish and I do resent like that.
They've kind of like put that.
You know what I mean?
Like into the public mind and to some degree, you know, because there's a case to be made for it.
But Israel is really playing with fire here.
And I think they're in a more precarious position than they've ever been in my lifetime, for sure.
I just feel like helicopter-less life has been going pretty good for me, and I'm just gonna keep riding down this path where you don't go on helicopters.
I don't know why I was already scared of the idea of flying in a helicopter, but flying in a helicopter that's being piloted by Bill Burr is just the scariest thing in the world to me.
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Like, you just get pissed off at something in the middle of it, and he's like yelling, and you're like, dude!
And then, like, he's just reading their question, and then it just launches him into this thing that, like, you know, he wasn't even planning on talking about none of this.
Challenging Pelosi's position in the debate about populism.
Winston Marshall, a musician who was once part of Memford& Sons, now hosts the Marshall Matters podcast for The Spectator, spoke in opposition to the Oxford Union motion that this house believes populism is a threat to democracy.
That is a crazy argument, that populism is a threat to democracy.
I swear to God, whenever you hear people like Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton or any of them use the term democracy, just in your mind, substitute what they mean by democracy is our rule over you.
In a sense, that's what they mean.
It's like, oh yeah, populism is a threat to you guys ruling us.
But what is the guy who masterminded Trump's 2016 campaign?
Yeah, Steve Bannon.
So Steve Bannon and David Frum.
David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush.
And Steve Bannon debated populism.
And the crowd was so hostile to Bannon.
And he actually did a very good job in the debate.
I highly recommend everyone listen to it if you're interested in this stuff.
The whole Trumpist populist movement is a result of your failures.
Like, who are you, George W. Bush speechwriter, to look at us and say like, why is there this populism?
Gee, I wonder why.
Maybe it's because the elites mismanaged everything.
And so then there was a movement that rose up like, hey, these elites are screwing you over.
Populism is not a sign that you have a healthy society.
It's a symptom of a cause.
I know me and you have talked about this a bunch before, but in the same ways when all these people will be like, we need to have trust in our institutions.
I think there's been a pretty significant shift towards people being very skeptical.
About bullshit now where it's just there's gonna be a ton of people and some of these people by the way are paid and this is what I've talked to people recently that are they either stream or their YouTube personalities or their Instagram social media personalities and they have a certain number of followers and they offer them thousands of dollars to do political posts Yeah.
Thousands of dollars to talk about specific political issues.
And I'm sure there's also, like, there's probably, like, a few...
It's not like a campaign is directly paying you.
It's like a super PAC or a group that was funded by that super PAC. And then you could, with a straight face, say, I've never taken any money from the Biden campaign.
What they're amazing at, and I've kind of marveled at it over the last few years, especially when I do this show.
There's some other shows that I do that are pretty big shows, but there's just nothing like that.
This show like the the response to it that you get especially for me because I come say like Controversial things on the show and like the the response that you get be accurate.
I mean it's bonkers, dude Okay, so the the probably the biggest one up until I don't know.
But maybe the biggest one was that when we were talking about the war in Ukraine.
So this was like a couple years ago, I guess, was the first time I came on and we were really talking about it.
Beginning-ish of the war.
And I basically made this whole case for how NATO expansion is basically what provoked this war and that that was Vladimir Putin's big...
I mean, I thought I totally backed it up with, like, listen, this is what all of these experts themselves said.
You know, not Russian experts.
I'm saying American experts, heads at NATO, all of this stuff.
And, I mean, the reaction I got from blue-check journalists back when that meant you were a corporate journalist.
Joe Scarborough was furious at me.
He goes, this guy is saying that NATO provoked Vladimir Putin's invasion.
Because, of course, the New York Times and CNN and their favorite term was unprovoked.
And I don't know, by the way, if you caught this, and I don't say this just to run a victory lap, but kind of, 50% for that reason, but just late last year, the head of NATO, Jens Strasenberg or something like that, Norwegian guy, but he just came out and said...
And he almost said it like so nonchalantly.
He said that Vladimir Putin, before he invaded, asked NATO, he said, if you just put in writing that you won't ever put Ukraine in NATO, I won't invade.
But if you don't do that, I'm going to invade.
And then he was bragging.
He goes, and we refused.
We refused to agree to that.
And then he was kind of going, and look, now NATO's going to expand even more.
So see how stupid Vladimir Putin is?
But like, number one, he just totally admitted that all that thing that everyone was saying was such a controversial statement two years ago that this had anything to do with NATO expansion.
It's like, well, the head of NATO just said that's what the whole thing was about and that he wouldn't have invaded if he had just agreed to not expand NATO more.
And then number two, you're like, oh, so you're just bragging that you didn't do that?
So what?
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died now.
We could have just made an agreement that Ukraine won't be in NATO and not done any of this.
That seems better.
But when you say it, when I said it two years ago, everyone, like, anyway, my point is just that they really act like you're crazy.
They act like you're an insane person.
When you're saying something that you're like, no, this is like very common sense and clearly true.
I sent you this months ago, but this really was kind of eye-opening to me.
So there's this guy, Liam Crossgrove, and he works for Greyzone.
He's a reporter over there.
And so he made he basically did like this guerrilla journalism type thing where he was going up and asking congressman questions.
And then he made like a video where he kind of spliced it together.
And there was like there was some stuff of me on this podcast in the video and some stuff of my guy, Scott Horton, who, by the way, is great over at antiwar dot com.
His whole team over there is incredible.
But so he made this video where he goes up to all these these congressmen and congresswomen and he asks them what they think about Netanyahu's propping up Hamas for all of these years.
And to a man, to a woman, All of them just have this deer-in-headlights look, and they're like, uh, sorry, what report are you referring to?
I'm sorry, I haven't seen that.
I'd be interested to see that, but I haven't seen that.
What?
What are you talking about?
And you just, right away, none of them know.
None of them even have the foggiest idea what you're talking about.
And you almost realize that, weirdly, it was even eye-opening to me, and I talk about this stuff all the time, but you just kind of realize where it's like, oh, like, yeah, that's not their job.
Their job isn't to, like, read books about this stuff and read newspaper articles and keep up with what's going on.
Their job is to fundraise for their next election that they have and to whip votes for this thing that this lobbyist wanted.
And if I get what this lobbyist wanted, he's going to contribute to my campaign.
And if I did, it's like they're in a different world.
They're not in the world of, like, actually thinking about this conflict and knowing things.
But there's also this weird thing in corporate media where there's almost...
Like an unspoken, unwritten agreement that like, look, if you just have a few talking points, you can get through an interview and sound really confident in yourself and sound like, hey, that guy knows what he's talking about, you know?
And as long as, say, like if I'm interviewing you, as long as I kind of agree that I'm just going to let you say your talking points, then you can come out looking really good.
But as soon as one...
Like, interviewer like this one decides, like, no, I'm gonna make an example out of you now.
I'm just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach-blind, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?
Yeah, so push them towards the you know, just someone who just gets cut the fucking shit or even if not running I do think there's things like look like Elon Musk buying Twitter I do think was kind of like a move of kind of like okay, he's not gonna run for office That's probably not his calling in life, but he was like okay, you can't be president.
Well, that's right Well, he couldn't be president, but he could run for something else, but that's not Elon Musk's best use of his abilities.
But to buy Twitter and just be like, hey, look, I see what's going on here.
We're going to make this one social media platform that isn't in lockstep with all of the other progressive ones.
But then if you did that, the thing is, like, this is what all the conspiracy theorists are fearing about these people coming into the country.
They're fearing that the people coming into the country, what they're going to do is offer them citizenship in replacement of military service.
So they'll serve the military, then become citizens, and then if there's like some sort of a crazy thing breaks out, well then you have your immigrant army against the original people that were here when they got here.
She's saying that she kind of did this on purpose to derail the actual hearing they were having, because after that happened and they went into chaos, they stopped...
Doing what they were there to do, actually, and just had a vote without having any amendments or any more discussion.
Yeah, but at the same time, if you were her, and then someone came up to her and was like, hey, I need you to mess this up and draw it out, she'd be like, no problem.
It wasn't even lies with a political benefit to it or something.
It was just a lie.
It was like, you know, as captain of the volleyball team at Harvard, and they were like, not only did you not play volleyball, you never went to Harvard.
Stealing people's identities and making charges on his own donors' credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC, and by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign.
So Santos falsely inflated the campaign's reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen.
So he's just making up numbers about how much money they had, stealing people's money.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have, since I was a little kid, maybe since I was four or five years old, when he was governor in Arkansas, their entire career is they were public servants and they ran a charity.
And they're worth like $100 million or something like that.
Like, wait a minute, huh?
You guys haven't been practicing law any of this time?
You haven't been working in some industry where you've made tons of money?
You were public servants who make, you know, healthy salaries, but not like that's going to put you in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
And you ran a charity.
The Clinton Foundation.
And now somehow you're...
Barack and Michelle Obama.
They just...
He goes into the White House.
Look at the house he lives in now.
It's like...
There is almost something where everyone turns at Santos because obviously that's such a cartoonish, easy version of it.
But it is kind of wild that there's so much outrage against this guy.
And it's in the same sense where there'll be corruption...
In, say, some Eastern European countries, there's corruption where the level of corruption is like, if you get pulled over by the cop, you could slip him some money and he'll let you go.
Now, we don't have that in America, right?
You can't really ever slip a cop money When he pulls you over in America, you may wish you could in certain situations, but you can't really do that.
I'm not saying it's never happened, but you really can't do that in America.
But we have like the prison guard union lobbying to keep mandatory minimums on marijuana.
So, like, okay, you could look down your nose at this primitive form of corruption, but think about how fucked up that is.
You know what I mean?
And that's just, all it is is just corruption on a much, much bigger level.
And that's one of the things that people loved about Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter, to the end, really just maintained a very simple lifestyle and just never chased money.
He never was that guy.
He didn't do those crazy speeches where he talks to bankers and makes half a million dollars for some strange reason.
Those speeches are wonderful, because those are the cutest.
Those are the cutest ones.
It's like, wait a minute, your policies benefited these corporations, and then, surprise, surprise, those people after you leave office want to hear you talk so badly.
They're willing to fuck the market up.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you- They want to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars to come talk.
Okay, so this is- Maybe one of the reasons why I'm a libertarian and not a progressive.
I mean, there's many reasons, but one of the things that I think a lot of progressives who I think are, like, well-intentioned, their big thing will be, like, we got to get the money out of politics.
And what they mean by that is that we can't let, you know, say, corporations contribute to political campaigns or something like that, because then, of course, they're just basically buying, you know, corruption.
But I think, like...
The flaw, like Cenk Uygur and people like that, that's like his big issue, you know, is get the money out of politics.
I think the flaw in that is that, yeah, but they always find a way to get, because look, those speeches, that's not contributing to anyone's campaign.
And that's not technically rewarding you for bailing out the big banks.
It's just you happen to bail out the big banks and then they happen to really want to listen to what you have to say after that.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not the expert on that or anything else, really, but I know that they certainly get a whole bunch of tax breaks that you wouldn't get if you just started a business.
But if you also think about it, the hundreds of millions of dollars that these guys make off of that is nothing because the legislation that they're passing or the policy that they're pushing is making these special interests hundreds of billions of dollars.
So if you buy off a politician for 20 million bucks and you get a no-bid contract that's going to be worth $200 billion to you, that's a pretty good return on investment.
There was an article about this particular area of Virginia that's like the most expensive real estate in the country, and it's all where the lobbyists live.
And I think, is it Blinken whose house that they're picketing in front of, that they've been essentially there since, see if you can find it.
I think it's Blinken's home that he has some crime.
Crazy fucking set up there some fucking dope ass old-school mansion and They're all camping out in front of his house.
It's the Palestine free Palestine people And so they've decided to constantly protest in front of his house Yeah, Anthony Blinken's family is the latest target of Washington's ugliest protest trend So they just camp out in front of his house.
They're pouring blood on the ground.
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It's a little weird to do with your baby Stop the genocide in Gaza.
I like this better than just blocking the road It's definitely better than Blockin' the Road.
It's all just kind of like, oh, how much money can I extract from this pot and get myself wealthy?
You don't feel like any sense of...
And I will say...
The one who I like kind of personally resent the most, which maybe is unfair, but is Obama.
Because so many of us did kind of buy into, at least to some degree, the thing he was selling in 2008. And you're like, wait, but you don't feel like you should...
Also known as Northern Virginia's Gold Coast, the road features opulent homes on large properties perched high above the Potomac with sweeping views.
Such estates sell for tens of millions of dollars, as was the case when AOL co-founder Steve Case sold his estate to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for $43 million in 2018. Those must be dope views.
Find us a view.
Find us a view.
Northern Virginia Gold Coast real estate.
Let's see what we can get for $50 million.
See if you can get for all the fucking Instagram ads that they want you to run for this political party.
They're old-school mansions on these giant properties and they They all do drugs and fucking fuck each other's wives and go crazy Spend all their fucking their Real estate holding money and all their Stocks and bond money.
Some fucking dude who owns a sub shop chain or something like that.
You're kind of lucked out.
You know, all of a sudden you're hanging around with these guys and they get comfortable with you, sort of like they did with McChrystal, like with that embedded reporter.
Well, I just mean that there could be generals who are just, like, you know, in their private time being like, ah, dude, fuck this guy and his bullshit commands, you know what I mean?
The one in New York, though, apparently they thought was the most flimsy, like a lot of legal experts thought it was the most flimsy going into it, but now it's completely falling apart.
They have contradictory statements that she made to Bill Maher.
And then they also have Michael Cohen just admitted he stole like $30,000 from the Trump campaign.
Well, it seems that the FBI, you know, when you see the pictures of them on the ground there with all the classified, it's like, oh, that was put there by the FBI. So it's not as if, like, it was presented as if, oh, look, this is what Donald Trump was doing.
And look, it's just very clearly, for anybody who's being honest and paying attention, it's just very clear that there's a political motivation involved here.
That these guys are trying to hurt Donald Trump's re-election or election campaign.
They got fined $113,000 to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether they violated campaign finance law by misreporting spending on research that eventually became the infamous Steele dossier.
I swear to God, this is always, especially now, because we've been doing these shows together for so many years, that you can go back and look at the things that were so wildly controversial to say then, and And are 100% accurate.
And they were totally accurate.
And now it's not even controversial at all to say.
Look, one of the big ones to go back to what they do.
They were trying to do this with the reorganization of CNN. They were trying to get back to hardcore objective journalism without some sort of editorial bias because they said, listen, this is the only way out of this.
It was like, hey, let's not be so blatantly anti-Trump and let's get back to just, you know...
Reporting on the news.
Yeah, but still protecting all the powerful people.
It's not like there was ever really going to be...
Look, you're never going to see a discussion on CNN about how, like, you know, you have these think tanks in Washington, D.C. who advocate for war and they're funded by weapons companies.
And look, it's not even, again, take the example of, say, even Chris Cuomo, right?
Who now, he's over with Valuetainment with Patrick David, our boy, and all of a sudden he's talking about Vaccine injuries and ivermectin and all this.
It's like, well, why is it when you're at CNN, which is, you know, sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies, you don't talk about this.
But as soon as you're over here, now it's okay to talk about this.
You know, you just you kind of see it like happen that it's like, oh, yeah, no, there are there are There's humongous power centers in America.
There's, like, the pharmaceutical industry.
There's the banking industry.
There's the war industry.
There's all these big ones.
And none of them ever get really questioned in the corporate media.
Like, one little action might be questioned every now and then.
But the whole system as a whole never gets questioned.
You'll never see, like, a real...
You'll never see a piece on CNN about like do we really need a central bank?
Does the Federal Reserve do more good for the American people or does it do more good for Wall Street?
And I don't know, I don't really understand much about it.
I also haven't talked to Tucker about that, and I would be interested to, because he will allude to, at points like that, he's had people inside the government kind of confirm things.
See, I almost want to ask him, not even on air, just like off air, like, okay, so what exactly was...
It's one of the craziest things that Bob Lazar said.
And he said this way back in the 1980s.
He said there's a very bizarre religious aspect to it.
And see if you can find him saying this, because I don't want to paraphrase this.
But he said that what they were, he said it's gonna sound crazy to say, but the way they have it described is that human beings are vessels for souls, that we're containers.
And that that's why they're interested in us, that we're containers of souls.
Now I want you to imagine a scenario where A.I. is ubiquitous in the universe and that this is where intelligent creatures they get to a certain point in their evolution where they create an artificial intelligence and that artificial intelligence is far superior.
But in order to do it again on another planet, you kind of have to start the same way you did it on Earth.
You gotta start with biological organisms that have souls.
So if you want to make intelligent life, you gotta start out with souls.
Because you have to have these creatures that have like these human reward systems about breeding and controlling resources and controlling real estate and territory and that those are the ones that are like scrambled to innovate and then they give birth to this superior life form.
But the only way to do it again somewhere else is you got to do the same thing.
So, like, if you believe that life exists in a similar form all throughout the cosmos, that there's kind of similar fish and kind of similar things, I don't know if that's the case.
We have no evidence.
But if that's how, if what we're seeing in these different galaxies, what we're seeing in these different solar systems that we observe is planets in these Goldilocks zones, if that was the case, That the way to get these things to keep doing, you need to get, it's the soul.
It's the thing inside the living organism that's causing biological evolution, the actually essence of the creature.
That this thing is what's going to determine whether or not it hits the innovation level required to achieve artificial intelligence, and then that's what they are.
So what we are to them is like these little soul containers, because you don't have souls anymore.
I mean, it is an interesting, it is such an interesting thing.
But on the point of containers, isn't there something, and I'm literally just kind of thinking out loud as I say this, but there is kind of something where we all do accept to some degree that that's true, that we're kind of container.
They're so lovable and he's so enthusiastic like we went swimming yesterday and this fucking dog will not because he's not hot if he's swimming So he's got crazy endurance.
So he just keeps going for an hour and 15 minutes.
I threw the ball into the water and he fucking leaps off the deck into the water and gets the ball and comes back out, drops it at your feet.
But there's something about, like, because dogs are, I think, essentially, right, like, we bred them to be kind of like babyish wolves.
Like, they're wolves that are kind of kept in a perpetual state of immaturity.
Almost in a way.
Some of them, yeah.
But basically, I think the qualities that you see in baby wolves, like a baby wolf will be almost indistinguishable in terms of how they could be domesticated from a puppy.
But it's as they grow older that you're going to...
Through breeding and natural selection, meaning shooting in the fucking head.
So whenever a fox was aggressive in any way, shape, or form towards humans, bang, dead.
Next one.
They can't breed.
So the only ones that breed are like, don't shoot me.
And so they probably are pretty aware, you know, through the zeitgeist that these fucking foxes are getting shot.
You know, there's like something in the air.
There's probably some psychic in the, you know, morphic resonance, something in the field that lets them know, hey, people are getting shot out here.
Like, you gotta be nice to these fucking humans.
See that thing he's got in his hand?
That thing will kill you with a squeeze of his finger.
And so they, over a very short period of time, turned them into completely different animals that had big eyes, fluffy ears, ears that fell down and soft.
I remember seeing one of those famous documentaries about dogs, but I thought this was always very interesting to me, is that one of the major differences between wolves and dogs Is that they do this experiment where they'll put a piece of meat and it's in a cage.
And the wolf or dog can't get to it.
And the wolf will bang against the cage and try to get it over and over and over again.
We'll just never stop.
We'll just never stop doing it.
But the dog will try to get it a couple times and then looks to the person.
And that's like one of the differences is that it's like been ingrained in dogs that you're also their partner You know like they'll look to you and be like hey, buddy I know you got a few IQ points on me Any idea how to get this meat out of this here cage and like that's so deep in them Well not only that the wolf would never think dogs look to you as the leader right wolf never thinks you're the leader Yeah, yeah, especially an unfixed male wolf shut the fuck up sit you say sit Who the fuck are you talking to, bitch?
They had, in the same documentary, I can't remember what it's called, but they did, they had this experiment where people were just trying to raise wolves, like, domesticate them from puppies and raise them, and it was interesting to see, like, it's as they start to get into, like, adolescence and stuff, and the wolves would be attached to them, because they had raised them since they were little puppies, but you can't train them the way you can train a dog.
I think, like, I think, you know, my guess, and this is a totally, like, just, like, just keep in mind I'm an idiot, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but...
I think, like, if you're making an argument, would a German Shepherd?
Would eventually, like, if they were just left out of the...
Would it just breed, like, the harshest and toughest and most survivors?
Maybe not wolf, but you'd get some wolf-like creature.
That Yorkie isn't going to make it to Generation 2. I've seen Yorkies.