RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - The Impossibility of Jewish Nationalism

May 16, 2021 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:15:41

The Impossibility of Jewish Nationalism

Ed and Richard discuss the latest crisis in the Middle East, the impossibility of the "two-state solution," and why Jews and "blood-and-soil" nationalism don't mix. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	All right.
	Good morning, good afternoon, good night, wherever you are.
	Welcome to Radix Live with me, Richard Spencer, and Ed Dutton.
	First off, let me apologize.
	Having a bit of technical difficulties with my computer, so I'm going phone.
	It probably won't bother you too much.
	Ed, how are you doing?
	Yeah.
	I'm okay, yes.
	I've had a fun weekend.
	My wife was at her mother's, so I took the kids swimming at a spa hotel, which was fun.
	We went on our bikes through the spring, which was fun.
	And then today I was listening to this new band I've discovered called Blink 182.
	Blink 182, yeah.
	Blink 182.
	And their album, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.
	So I was just listening to that.
	Quite subtle.
	I'm now a fan of Blink-182.
	182, I believe, is how you pronounce it.
	Blink-182.
	So that's what's been going on with my weekend.
	You?
	Yeah, I did similar things.
	I took the kids on a paddleboard trip up the river.
	It was pretty fascinating.
	My son was very concerned that sharks might attack our boat.
	But I told him, this is fresh water, there are no sharks.
	And I said, you know, sharks live in salt water and so on.
	And then he decided that it would be fun to get salt and put it into the river.
	And then all the sharks would come.
	Did you mention to him the realistic possibility of alligators?
	No alligators out here in Montana, but that is true.
	If you're down in Louisiana or Florida, yes, that's the leading cause of death, is brutal alligator attacks.
	What dangerous animals do you have in Montana?
	Bears.
	We have more dangerous mammals.
	We don't have any poisonous snakes, at least in the Pacific Northwest.
	You'll occasionally hear about bear attacks or cougar attacks, but you know...
	Those hikers had it coming, in my opinion.
	I mean, get between a bear and her cubs and, well, I hope you lived a fun life.
	In Grand Theft Auto V, you have mountain lions.
	Yeah, very similar to kind of cougars and mountain lions.
	They call them mountain lions up here, yeah.
	They can attack.
	You know, the animal that kills the most people are basically deer and moose.
	Not that they will attack you, but it may cause car accidents and so on.
	And there are occasions, moose in particular, every once in a while, a moose will just hooves someone to death, basically.
	They will brutally kick them with their hooves.
	I had a friend at university and his friend was stag hunting during rutting season and a stag mounted him and had sex with him.
	Are you serious?
	Yeah, he ejaculated over his back.
	Apparently stags produce quite a lot of semen.
	And it's green.
	Green.
	Green.
	It's green.
	This sounds just...
	A little bit too prosperous.
	No, no, I believe the person in question.
	He went to Eton.
	He had honestly beaten into him.
	Well, yeah, but there are a lot of people who I'm not sure I believe that story.
	That's just a bit much.
	It was a bit much, yeah.
	It was a bit much.
	And it was green.
	So you've got to be careful with these deer, that's for sure.
	But yeah, but anyway, some stuff's been happening in the world.
	Last May, George Floyd.
	This May...
	Israel.
	Yeah, well, it seems like every year and a half there's some war between Israel and Palestine.
	It seems there's some kind of hot controversy.
	This one is involving real estate and basically removing people from homes and so on.
	I actually think that we should take a step back and...
	Talk about what the whole thing is and certain problems with that.
	And the question of Jewish nationalism, the question of Palestinian nationalism, the question of Israel, I think we should kind of take a bird's eye view of this situation and not get lost in the details because I think other people can get lost in the details and they probably know more of the details than we do.
	I was reading last night, just before going to bed, Jared Kushner had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in March 15th of 2021, so about two months ago.
	And although everyone is guilty of making incorrect predictions, This one was a whopper.
	It was basically, how dare you question me and the Abraham Accords.
	We don't need the Palestinians to agree.
	We can actually reach all of this great peace with other countries surrounding the region, and we will solve the issue that way.
	I am the best, Trump's awesome, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, two months later, we have...
	A very hot conflict going on over the Palestinian territory.
	Now, I think it's important to kind of look at the, again, the bigger picture.
	Because there always seems to be a...
	Problem in the Middle East.
	I think I heard an anecdote from some neoconservatives, I believe it was Jean Kirkpatrick, and she was hosting a conference that she had to plan a year in advance.
	And so they ran into this problem of what should we talk about?
	And she said, oh, the theme of the conference will be the crisis in the Middle East.
	And someone said, well, what are you talking about?
	There'll be one, trust me.
	It will be very timely.
	So there's something true to that.
	And I think there's a lot of people who kind of...
	Take this, I don't know, rather cynical or sarcastic view that they've been fighting for thousands of years, we can't do anything, just let, you know, let them kill each other, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, I kind of understand that sentiment, and there probably is some truth to that sentiment, but they haven't actually been fighting like this for thousands of years.
	These conflicts...
	Have come up precisely because of Zionism.
	You could say a certain kind of Jewish nationalism.
	And the asymmetry that is involved with this.
	The state of Israel was of course created in 1948.
	It was sanctified.
	You could say its sovereignty was granted to it by the United Nations.
	Even though Americans...
	It was your president really that gave it its...
	Gave it its wings, wasn't it?
	They couldn't have gone ahead and declared independence if they hadn't had the backing of Truman.
	Certainly not.
	And the UN could not have had...
	The UN would not exist without an American-led war.
	It was created in San Francisco.
	Why did Truman do that?
	Why?
	Well, there are a lot of stories about this.
	What I was gesturing towards was that he was a bit ambivalent about it.
	Previously to the Second World War, there were serious Jewish terror campaigns going on, bombing of hotels.
	Attacking politicians.
	Again, before America screwed up the Middle East, you guys did that.
	So the original mandate for a Jewish homeland in Israel was, of course, given to them in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
	That came...
	That was subsequent to the Balfour Declaration.
	Was he a foreign minister, Balfour?
	He was prime minister as well.
	A prime minister as well.
	I think he did it while he was foreign.
	Details, details.
	But that was also basically...
	An expression that the British Empire would support a Jewish homeland.
	Obviously, the history of Zionism itself as a concept stretches back in the 19th century.
	Some people might say that Spencer is ridiculous and warping when I say things like we should be thinking about a Neo-Roman Empire, an ethnostate, and so on.
	I am...
	Taking my cues from other intellectuals who imagined it and then it came into being.
	If you dream it, they will come, so to speak, to take that line from Field of Dreams.
	So Zionism was an intellectual movement before it was a political movement, before it was supported by very wealthy, mostly Jewish families, and before it was supported by the British Empire.
	Jews turned on the British Empire.
	There were certain segments of them that were engaging in terror against the British.
	They wanted independence.
	I mean, to the extent, the level of vindictiveness was such that, for example, there were soldiers stationed in Britain during and after the war who, let's say, they were involved in...
	Not even a major way, in some battle against the Jewish militants.
	And they would find out where they lived in Britain after they'd been demobbed from the army and send them letter bombs, killing their servants and things like this.
	We think that seems bad now.
	That's really bad.
	Yes, it did happen.
	There is a certain ruthlessness and even viciousness.
	There's unwillingness to lose that seems to be at the heart of a great deal of Zionists, and I guess you can lament it, but I guess you can ultimately only admire it.
	Yeah, and learn from that.
	We are not promoting letter bombs on this podcast.
	The point was that the British withdrew, having brought about a situation where there were these two...
	For the Palestinians, one of whom was ruled by Egyptians, and one of whom was administered by Jordan, and in which a significant percentage of the population of the Israeli state were themselves Palestinian people, who you might legitimately expect to be treated equally to the rest of the...
	And then we withdrew.
	And that's perfectly reasonable.
	And then, of course, all hell was let loose.
	And you have the Israelis invading the other territories and Sinai.
	Which was part of Egypt, of course, which eventually they gave back.
	And then you have these two territories which are just now completely under their rule.
	They control everything in these places, everything that is significant, the electricity, the computer networks, everything.
	Yeah, I mean, the cliche you hear among leftists mostly, because liberals are pretty much on board with Zionism, is it's an open-air prison.
	And I don't think that that is incorrect, to be honest.
	Well, it's kind of worse than that, because...
	We've got the West Bank and then Gaza.
	Gaza voted for Hamas, which is more extreme than the PLO, so they're blockaded.
	They're like 40% unemployment, nothing is there.
	The West Bank is not quite as bad, but then, of course, they're invading the West Bank.
	The Jews are invading the West Bank, occupying the West Bank, deliberately building settlements between Palestinian settlements so the settlements can't grow.
	And then you can't move into the Jewish settlements.
	That's not allowed.
	So, of course, you're economically messed up and messed about with.
	They also control most of the infrastructure in the West Bank anyway.
	And if you can't leave, you can't leave.
	If you leave, if you go, they won't let you back.
	There's no right of return.
	There's a right of return for Jews.
	You can find a Jewish house hundreds of years ago, and you can go and live there.
	There's no right of return for Palestinians.
	If you leave, that's it.
	You're out.
	And also, if you as a Palestinian, because 20% of the Israeli population, of the actual Israeli population in Israel proper, are Palestinians, and if they leave, I believe they're out.
	If they marry somebody from the West Bank or from Gaza, That person can't become Israeli.
	It doesn't pass on.
	I mean, they're second-class citizens.
	And then if you look at the administration of the money within Israel, they make up 20%, the Palestinians, of the population of Israel proper, not including Gaza, not including the West Bank, and not including East Jerusalem and the parts that the Israelis have invaded.
	And they get 1.7% of the national budget to their areas.
	Well, also, to the degree that I understand it properly, the all land, or most all land, it's probably 95%, is owned by a government agency, effectively, or a not-for-profit, you could say.
	So you don't have land rights.
	In the way that you do in the United States, all of the land is ultimately owned by this agency.
	And they make sure that this land maintains Jewish control effectively.
	So there are deep, structural, you know, ethnocentric Jewish supremacist institutions, not just ideas.
	Within the constitution, the only people that have the right to that state are the Jews.
	So if you are a Palestinian Israeli citizen and you are elected to the Knesset, you can't look out for the interests of your people.
	It's literally unconstitutional.
	So there's basically nothing you can do.
	You're like a token member of parliament.
	That can do nothing.
	This gets me to the bigger issue, which is the two-state solution.
	So since I have been alive or been a young adult, let's say, for the last 30, 25, 30 years, I have heard about the two-state solution.
	And there's actually remarkable consensus on the two-state solution.
	So you'll hear John Kerry.
	A elite liberal talk about, we need a two-state solution.
	You'll hear sometimes leftist activists talk about, we want a two-state solution.
	You'll also hear Bibi Netanyahu talk about a two-state solution.
	When you hear some liberal journalist who is radically leftist on most social issues in America that is, for some reason, I don't know why.
	fanatically Zionist when it comes to Israel and is defending their bombing of buildings with the AP and Al Jazeera in it and all this kind of stuff.
	They also talk, well, we ultimately want a two-state solution.
	I have come to the conclusion that the two-state solution is total bullshit.
	First off, it does appeal to a certain fairness, let's say, a kind of 19th century nationalism of, you know, every people Deserves their own country.
	And you can see this in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
	That was the primary paradigm, in fact.
	I think that even though people are skeptical of nationalism when it's done by Germans or Americans or English sometimes, people kind of like that idea.
	It seems fair.
	And they see the problem as irreconcilable and terrible.
	Okay, let's just divide them by the states.
	Well, the fact is, that ideal of a two-state solution is happening alongside everything which you discussed earlier, which is the settlement process, the extreme asymmetry of Israel and Palestine in terms of military weaponry, nuclear weapons, which Israel of course has, even though they won't quite admit to it, and just the backing of the United States.
	Now, the United States will give...
	The Palestinians' money, no question.
	But in terms of which side are they really on?
	I don't remember there being a Palestinian-American political activism conference in Washington, D.C. that got nearly the amount of support by both sides of the aisle.
	I don't remember that, but I of course know that AIPAC is there.
	So what is happening is a kind of weird pincer movement, you could say, if that's the right metaphor, where you're, you're, you're expand, I'll finish real quick.
	We want a two-state solution.
	We want to deal with the Palestinians.
	We wish they'd just give up terrorism, but we want to deal with them.
	You expand, expand, expand to a point where the two-state solution is meaningless.
	To a point where the two states are a greater Israel that includes the West Bank.
	Right.
	Those are the two states.
	That's what they're aiming for, I think.
	So you have a situation where they expand and expand and expand in the West Bank to such an extent now that there's Jewish settlements peppered all over the place that separate.
	The Palestinian settlements are deliberately placed in that way.
	And so the result of that is it's impossible.
	The only way you could have a two-state solution, you'd have to remove all of the settlers from the West Bank and from Jerusalem, because let's be fair, that was mandated as an international city because it's holy to three religions.
	And that's not going to happen.
	So what they ultimately want is a two-state solution will be West Bank.
	And all of the Palestinians that live there get out and either go to other countries or go to Gaza, which would be this ridiculous non-state that can't do anything, even though it tries its best.
	But what's it going to do?
	Completely at the mercy.
	It's going to be like Estonia at the mercy of Russia or something.
	It's going to be just nothing.
	Right.
	And Kushner, he was, again, fanning his own balls in the Wall Street Journal about the brilliance of his plan.
	He basically presented it to the Palestinians as a fait accompli and just saying, you're welcome, folks.
	Here is this plan where we are going to basically We should have a word for it.
	Well, and I don't mean to insult your adopted homeland, but it's a kind of Finlandization.
	Of the Palestinians.
	Although Finland is a great place.
	Gaza won't be that nice.
	But you're basically putting them, you're creating this little statelet that has no military power, that is kind of the little, the bastard stepchild of the big kahuna, America, in the region.
	They'll throw it some money, but they're not going to bring it back.
	It's worse than that.
	It might be worse than that, but what I'm saying is it's bullshit.
	Finland is physically connected to Western Europe and has borders with Sweden and Norway and such like.
	There's nothing like that.
	You're a little speck of dust by the sea on the edge of Israel.
	It's like being Gibraltar.
	That's what it's like.
	It's like being Gibraltar.
	That's probably a better comparison.
	Which actually is English territory in Spain.
	Yes.
	A really underrated James Bond movie, Living Daylights, took place in Gibraltar.
	That was awesome.
	They jumped out of a helicopter, jumped out of a plane, had his office in a plane, and then they just opened up the back of it and they jumped out, parachuted, and yeah, it was great.
	But anyway, it wouldn't work because they're unbelievably poor, these people in Gaza, so therefore the Palestinians would just have to leave and go to other places in the Middle East or other countries.
	Which brings me to an actual solution.
	I support a one-state solution.
	I think, basically, this situation is unworkable.
	To go back to the anecdote that I said 20 minutes ago, there's always a crisis in the Middle East.
	This is just unworkable.
	It's extremely unfair.
	There is a kind of passive aggression that you see among Israelis where they have created this horrible situation.
	Lo and behold, Palestinians will engage in some kind of terrorism or violent activism, and they'll be like, well, see, we can't trust them now.
	It's putting them in the worst possible situation and then being shocked and appalled when they engage in violence.
	It's nonsense.
	And of course, earlier Zionists engaged in just as much violence.
	I think the Zionist project, as it is currently conceived, is not workable.
	Now, people will often say, I'll hear this from kind of Americans who are kind of checked out.
	I understand why you're checked out.
	These people are checked out.
	It's messy.
	It's nasty.
	They're checked out and they say they've been fighting for a thousand years.
	They haven't been fighting for a thousand years.
	Jerusalem was once under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire.
	The Ottoman Empire, of course, slowly collapsed.
	Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, there was no vicious, horrible fighting.
	There were certainly Jews who lived in the Holy Land.
	It was under the sovereignty of a larger imperial body.
	And indeed, Israel itself could never have become a state if it weren't for the United States and the United Nations, and the British Empire previously, which granted them sovereignty.
	In other words, Israel always needs a big kahuna.
	Israel needs to be a little brother.
	It's not actual nationalism in the sense that you could coherently say that there is a form of British nationalism or French nationalism or German nationalism That is a real country that can claim...
	We have to use these overarching structures to solve the problem.
	I think there should be a one-state solution.
	Jews in general and Israelis are always telling us about how it's a multicultural state.
	They support multiculturalism in our homeland, so I don't see what could possibly be the problem if we allowed there to be a kind of American-style constitution across Palestine, and basically there to be a multicultural, multiracial state, and for the holy sites, which are clearly religious, have tremendous religious significance that I don't...
	That is sincerely held, religious beliefs, and that these can be administered by an international body, like whether it's the United Nations, that might be the best choice.
	And that you have, that everyone who cares deeply about these holy sites will be given access to these sites.
	There has to be a one-state solution.
	I cannot think of a problem because nationalism is not going to work.
	And their descendants should obviously have right of return.
	That goes that way.
	They might not get their exact land back.
	They might not get the house.
	But they have right of return.
	That seems fair.
	Not just Jews.
	If Israelites that left the country in 700 BC have right of return, and they do, they do, and they've taken it, 700 BC.
	Right.
	Then I see no reason why Palestinians and their descendants that left the country in 1947 do not have the right to return.
	So obviously they have the right to return.
	And if the result of that is that the country becomes only 48% Jewish or something, well, that's, I mean, multiculturalism is a richness and a diversity and it's the essence of all that is good.
	And so I don't see how anyone would possibly oppose it if they do their racism.
	I agree.
	I mean, because we know the only reason why multicultural societies are conflict-ridden is not because of genetic differences or evolution to group orientation or anything like that, or trust between groups.
	It's to do with racism.
	And if you take structural racism, particularly, and if you take structural racism away, which you can do easily because things go down like thunderbolts and they can be drawn back again, then everybody will just get on.
	All they have to do is just put their differences aside and realise that they're all human.
	Right.
	And that Judaism and Arabism and Islam are just social constructs.
	Well, okay, Ed, I know you're being, you're trolling a bit, okay?
	No, no.
	Okay.
	But let's, well, you, come on, you are.
	Let's also be kind of honest here, all right?
	So America and Britain have advanced multicultural societies, and they...
	Obviously lead to huge amounts of problems, and they're not what you and I would want.
	That being said, I'm not being bombed.
	I don't peer a missile to be launched into my living room anytime soon.
	I understand that multiculturalism and a liberal democracy is going to be an affront to many Israeli nationalists.
	They're going to have to deal with that.
	First off, if they're going to promote that everywhere.
	And second off, if they are going to create a just clearly unworkable situation in their region.
	They're just going to have to have someone come in and offer a solution which isn't like Israeli nationalism and increased settlements.
	There's just going to have to be something besides that because we cannot...
	Do this endlessly.
	I mean, well, we can, of course, and it's going to be blood and tears.
	It's just going to be awful.
	And someone, an adult, has to enter the room, I'm sorry, a third party, and solve this problem for them.
	It might solve itself in the sense that the people that are doing all the breeding in Israel, and they've increased in size from 5% to one-third of the population over the period of...
	of Israel's existence are the Haredi Jews.
	And the Haredi Jews are fiercely anti-Zionist, ironically anti-Israel and anti-existence of the state of Israel, although they choose to live there.
	And they're seeing it as like a blasphemy in geopolitical form.
	It is.
	We can talk about this now.
	And they refuse to serve in the army, and so they're basically kind of parasitic off everybody else, insisting that they're the cultural core of the nation and they have to be allowed to spend their two years that other Israelis spend in the army reading Hebrew and stuff, reading old texts and so on.
	And those people are just growing and growing and growing.
	And people forget how secularized a lot of Israelis are, how the demographic transition happened to Israelis ages ago, in many cases before they even got to Israel, and how the Zionists, although the Zionists probably are, I mean, they're highly religious people, so I assume they have quite a reasonable birth rate.
	It's nowhere near that of the Haredi.
	So what one would expect you all end up with is the hollowing out of secular Israel.
	It'll just die off.
	Very religious Israelis, the Zionists on the one hand and the Haredi on the other, who hate each other.
	Sounds wonderful.
	So you'll get a division within the Israeli state.
	So that's another thing that has to take into account.
	I would imagine you'll get polarisation within Israel over what to do.
	Right.
	I'd also mention this bigger issue which interests me, which is whether Jewish nationalism is even possible.
	And when I say nationalism, I mean blood and soil nationalism.
	Whether that actually fits them as a people that has evolved across the millennia and fits them in terms of their religious understanding.
	Obviously, there's a tremendous amount of mythology.
	Surrounding the Kingdom of David and the kind of badass era of the Jews and there's a great deal of mythology around the taking of Canaan and so on.
	That being said, there's probably more mythology and more history and lived experience around being a diasporic people more recently but also being Effectively a kind of slave caste people that are tricking and undermining and escaping from established blood and soil states.
	Egypt and the figure of the pharaoh, whether that's the pharaoh vis-a-vis Abraham or the pharaoh vis-a-vis Moses, that seems to be a more primary mythos.
	If we fast forward to the age of Christ, You know, there are problematic figures like Herod, who are basically Jewish nationalists on some level, but are also Romans and are subservient to the Roman state.
	And whenever there are Jewish revolts in which they attempt to, you know, have a piece of land that's their own, they attempt to attack the empire.
	And so on.
	This leads to absolute destruction and the catastrophe, at least from the Jewish perspective.
	I think that's a very good point.
	I mean, I think it's so long ago.
	We're talking such ridiculous amounts of time in the past, back in the Bronze Age, the early Bronze Age.
	I mean, just after the Bronze Age.
	Early Iron Age, fall of the Northern Kingdom, 722 BC.
	Roughly, isn't it?
	722 BC.
	So that's where you've got the vast majority of the Israelite tribes, not the Jews, but most of the other ones.
	Off they go.
	Around, all over the shop.
	Ethiopia, India, and Iraq, and all over.
	Cyprus, all over the place.
	Some of those are now taking up right to return.
	And then you have the fall of the Southern Kingdom in 587 BC, I think it is.
	And then again, off they go.
	And some of them come back.
	They're in exile for however long it was.
	I can't remember.
	At least 50 years.
	And they come back.
	And, of course, the place has been settled by all these different people under the Greek Empire, you know, Samaritans and all these different sorts of people.
	And then eventually you have the collapse, 70 BC, and then off they go wandering.
	And you have theologies that have developed since then based around being in exile.
	Based around portraying God as being an exile.
	I think it was called Zingzum or something.
	Zingzum.
	And the idea is that God exiled part of himself and that part of himself was the Jews or something like that.
	So you actually have developments of something like that.
	Developments of Jewish theology that are based around being exiled, an identity whereby you are an exiled people and that is God's.
	It's a choice for you as a Jew.
	To be a Jew is to be exiled.
	And that is, I think, part of what the attitude of the Heredis is.
	Israel is something that comes at the end of time.
	Israel is not something that happens within time.
	Jews are an exiled people, and at the end of time they will be restored to Israel, not before.
	And so, yeah, I can see the point.
	And this leads weird Christians to...
	Basically have this bizarre support for Zionism where they want the Jews to be in control of Jerusalem so that the end time will come.
	So, you know, and all Jews will either die or convert or something like this.
	It's this bizarre thing, which I think a lot of, let's say, liberal secular Jews treat as radically anti-Semitic, which I guess they have a point.
	Which is ultimately radically philo-Semitic, but it is about bringing about that messianic age.
	And this is not some obscure thing.
	This is actually something that motivates hundreds of thousands of fundamentalist Christians.
	Sorry.
	Sorry, Zimzum.
	He was a rabbi called Luria.
	The creative process begins with an act of voluntary exile.
	It starts asking the world, how could the world exist if God's omnipresent?
	The answer is the doctrine of Zimzum, withdrawal.
	The infinite and inaccessible Godhead had to shrink into itself, evacuating itself to make room for the world.
	So God exiled part of himself to make room for the world, and that's how creation began, according to this Sephardic Jewish...
	Theologian.
	So the globe is inherently an exile and the Jews are the people of the globe.
	I have never heard that before, but yeah.
	So if you give a charitable representation of Herzl, and this was a man who was atheistic.
	He was a contemporary late 19th century Intellectual, who was very similar to many of his contemporaneous figures.
	He was secular.
	He recognized the issue of anti-Semitism and how Jews were kind of a people apart within the nations.
	And that even after liberation throughout the Napoleonic era and so on, that they were going to always be this kind of unassimilable.
	You know, people.
	And if they did assimilate, that would mean a kind of slow dilution of Jews as an ethnicity and as an identity.
	And so he was a kind of, Herzl was a kind of identitarian activist.
	He was a secular nationalist who imagined that we could have a blood and soil Jewish state.
	Well, he's a fascinating figure, and I think there's a lot to learn from him.
	But you could...
	Plausibly say that he was simply wrong, that that just can't work.
	And whenever it is tried, in some kind of moment of fervor, whenever blood and soil Jewish nationalism is attempted, it leads either to getting their asses kicked by the Romans, it leads to this endless...
	It's an unsolvable, painful situation that we've seen since the creation of the Jewish state.
	It's not in their DNA, and maybe quite literally it's not in their DNA.
	That's perfectly possible.
	Why wouldn't that be the case?
	Having left Israel, they have had to fill a niche, and that niche, in the case of every Jewish group in the world, has been to be a...
	A small minority of various degrees of smallness that is tolerated or not tolerated or semi-tolerated at the various degrees depending on the time period by a larger group of people.
	That's been the nature of most Jewish people for all of history.
	And so you could argue that that would be a niche towards which they would be selected.
	And that is why there are certain things that they have been selected.
	If you look at the intelligence profile of Jewish people, they're high in linguistic intelligence, mathematical intelligence, not so high in spatial intelligence, because the jobs that they were permitted to do, the niche they found, was things like banking and money lending and also to some extent writing.
	And things like that.
	Farming and things that involve spatial intelligence.
	That was done by the Gentiles.
	That was done by everybody else.
	And so you would have an expectation that this is a product of selection.
	These differences, and their high intelligence as well, at least among the Ashkenazi.
	This is a product of a selection to a specific kind of niche.
	And so you would expect when they're taken out of that niche, it would be what you would call an evolutionary mismatch, to which they wouldn't be involved, and therefore it would go wrong.
	I would take this further.
	I think there's an impossibility of nationalism at the very heart.
	Of the Jewish religion, which is about resisting idolatry.
	You know, there's one phrase that almost every smart liberal knows from the Jewish tradition.
	It is tikkun olam.
	It's usually translated as heal the world.
	This beautiful phrase.
	Well, it doesn't actually mean heal the world.
	It is about resisting.
	It's about idolatry and it is about setting up time, you could say.
	It is about the destruction of all other idols around the world in the face and for there to be ultimately supplanted by Yahweh.
	This nationalism, if it is a real ideology, it has to have a sense of recognition.
	So if you're a Welsh nationalist, you could say, well, I recognize the English nationalism.
	Nationalism for everyone.
	There's Russian nationalism.
	There's American nationalism.
	And we can kind of keep to ourselves, have borders.
	Hang on, hang on.
	I don't recognize American nationalism.
	Well, I think American nationalism might have similar problems, actually, maybe even owing to a kind of Judaic founding population.
	But I'll leave that aside for the moment.
	That type of recognition just cannot work with Jews because that goes against the core of their religion.
	Yes, they're an exiled people and so on, but there is ultimately one God and that God is Yahweh.
	And all other idols must be at the very least resisted, but they should ultimately be destroyed.
	This is a type, it's a, you could say, a kind of monoltery.
	Well, I don't mean to, but the nature of it is that if you recognize other national, if you have, as you say, if you have this belief where you are a nationalist state.
	Finland or Estonia or whatever, and you recognise other nations and their right to be nationalist states.
	The fundamental problem with Israel is that, or it wouldn't be the only, and there would be other examples of this, but is that the Chinese minority in Southeast Asia, for example, or the Indian minority in various African countries, or the white minority in Zimbabwe or whatever, but the point is that they have their own nation, their own ethno-state, but then they want to be...
	A people in other nations influencing those nations and how those nations operate.
	And that's where things become complicated.
	I mean, even in Finland, I noticed this when true Finns in 2011 went from being a tiny little party with about seven members of parliament to being very nearly the second largest party in the Finnish parliament.
	The Swedish press, the Swedish press, were appalled by this.
	How can this happen?
	And the mainstream parties in Finland at that time were perfectly accepting of true Finns.
	But the Swedish person, what will this do to the Swedish minority, the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland?
	Suddenly their ethno-nationalistic instincts in Sweden came out.
	Yeah, we're Sweden, but we've got our people in Finland and we want to protect them.
	And so you can see that that is a bit of a problem for the...
	I agree with that.
	I totally agree with what you're saying.
	It's a weird situation.
	Herzl, to his credit, recognized this problem.
	But you want to be a Jewish American or a Jewish Brit.
	But then also we're loyal to Israel.
	That is dual loyalty.
	There is a kind of reality to that.
	Weibel, so to speak.
	And that is a big problem.
	It's just not going to really work because, again, it's not functioning on the blood and soil level.
	But I'm actually taking it deeper than that in the sense that Judaism isn't just some religion out there that is, oh, yeah, you've got your religion, I've got mine, we can tolerate each other.
	No.
	You must resist idolatry of all kinds for all people.
	It is a fundamentally kind of supremacist faith.
	Now, Christianity, which is a continuation of Judaism, picks up on all this.
	Now, it does it in a kind of different form.
	But there is one way to salvation, and that is through Jesus Christ, a believing Jew.
	So it's just nationalism, as we know it, can kind of only exist in a secular...
	In the sense that, you know, what it means to be a fan is to go run around the maypole and eat funny, foul-smelling fish dishes and blah, blah, blah.
	It's all this kind of secular, high-mont-like stuff.
	When you create a state based on Judaism, or you create a...
	I could say the same thing.
	If you create a Jesus state, a state based on Christianity.
	You're going to eventually run into this issue because it is deeply embedded in the very nature and structure of the religion.
	It just does not work.
	You cannot say we're just one little people here in the Middle East called the Jews and we just want our little happy homeland when your entire religion is based on destroying idols of other peoples.
	Well, it was in the early stages.
	It was conversionist, but the way that the mainstream...
	And that's the thing with Christianity.
	Christianity remains conversionist, and of course its heresies like multiculturalism and communism are conversionist.
	But that's why it's been suggested that's possibly why the Ethiopian Jews exist.
	It's not because there were Israelites that fled to Ethiopia, but they just went in there and converted them.
	And then we'll mix into the population.
	But now, the Orthodox Judaism is not conversionist.
	You cannot convert.
	It's only to certainly...
	You can, and it's very rare, yes.
	It's only to certain strands of Judaism that you can convert.
	So that's slightly different.
	But I think the more pertinent point which we've brought to the fore is the possibility that, as you say, the niche that has been the niche for most humans has been living in a country and that's their land.
	And that's theirs, and they control it.
	And they exclude all others, and that's their niche.
	That's been the niche of most people's ever.
	And there are certain exceptions to that.
	And once that hasn't been their niche, like the gypsies or the Jews, and once that hasn't been their niche for a very, very long time, and we're talking thousands and thousands of years, then you would expect them to have evolved.
	Towards a different niche, and that would have interesting consequences when they try and transplant themselves into a homeland.
	And then within Israel itself, we should note that it's not homogenous.
	Itself is not homogenous.
	You've got different Jewish groups that are quite distinct from each other, such as the Ashkenazi, the Sephardi, the Mizrahim, and of course the Ethiopian, who make up an underclass in Israel.
	Yeah.
	Bag carriers and things like that.
	And then the other various obscure Israelite groups and Samaritans and whatever that are allowed.
	So it's not that united.
	This actually is good for them in the sense that there's nothing that's going to unite a people more than being at war.
	So there's nothing that's going to play down their internal frictions over readies and whatever, than war.
	So that might be quite good for them.
	What fascinates me, though, is that it's happening now.
	It's like a...
	Is this going to become a May thing, like a May ritual in our world for the foreseeable future that we go into lockdown every spring, every winter to spring, and then May we come out and there's some kind of war somewhere?
	I do think that we'll get over the lockdown thing.
	I think that's the idea that they're going to keep us locked down forever.
	It's a bit much, but I do agree with you.
	I mean, there is a May thing where...
	It's winter, people are just calmer, sleeping more, don't want to go outside, it's colder, and May comes about and we all start attacking each other, whether it's BLM protests and riots or now just a full-on war between Muslims and Jews.
	But yeah, I think in some ways it's also, much like with BLM, You have to kind of extract yourself from it to be able to see it straight.
	Because it is so hyper-polarized that everyone feels like they need to take a side.
	And they tell themselves that they're going to gain something by taking a side.
	We need to support the state of Israel.
	Oh, they're under attack.
	You know, oh, one struggle, you know, we're leaving the Palestinian flag and this will somehow help us and our love will be reciprocated and whatever.
	I think the real challenge is to extract yourself from that.
	You mean the real psychological challenge is to just not give a fuck?
	Well, you can say that.
	I don't blame anyone who doesn't give a fuck on some level.
	But it's hard not to give a fuck because we're all connected to it.
	As an American, I am part of this whether I like it or not.
	That sales tax that I paid buying a candy bar, a little fraction of that went to the Iron Dome system.
	It did.
	So you're kind of part of it whether you like it or not.
	I think you do have to give a fuck, but I think you have to see it straight.
	And not just get into these kind of moralizing, polemical battles of good versus evil and so on.
	I think there are actual solutions to this problem, but solutions are impossible if you're just, you know, the Jews are all good and the Palestinians are all evil or vice versa.
	You have to kind of look at the situation, understand the structural and kind of endemic, essential problems.
	I've only met one Jewish person in Finland.
	And that was that I was at, I went to Moomin World, which is in southern Finland, in Nantali, Moomin of the Moomins, the Moomin cartoon from the 90s.
	And that was made by the Japanese people, but it was commissioned and set up by one of the few Finnish Jews, a guy called Dennis Livson.
	And I went to Moomin World and it's not like a theme park.
	It's like just being in the Moomin cartoons.
	It's like you're literally there.
	It's like built like it.
	And the kids love it.
	And there's people dressed up as the Moomins.
	They can hug and stuff.
	Who are the Moomins?
	The Moomins.
	The Moomins.
	I don't know.
	What do they look like?
	They look like sort of hippopotamuses.
	Like white hippos.
	Weird.
	Never heard of the Moomins.
	No.
	Like Tommy Janssen.
	No.
	My God!
	I'm deprived, yeah.
	My childhood is deprived.
	They might.
	The Moomins, anyway.
	Are they as terrifying as Teletubbies?
	That's like a nightmare, basically.
	No, they're not.
	It's much more complicated.
	The British inflicted on the world.
	You know, it's much more complicated than television.
	It's much more nuanced.
	And they live in this Moomin Valley and all kinds of sort of profound things happen to them.
	And the cartoons are influenced by sort of Japanese weirdness.
	But anyway, there's a guy called Dennis Livson.
	And it was the celebration of, I don't know, the 10th or 20th anniversary of this place.
	And he was there and I got chided to him.
	And he was crippled.
	And I asked him about that.
	And he said, yeah, he fought in the Six-Day War.
	And he was hit by shrapnel.
	And that was the only Jewish person I've ever met in Finland.
	But, yeah, the other thing we were going to note, though, weren't we, is Nicholas Wade's article.
	Oh, yeah.
	We can put a bookmark in the Israel-Palestine conversation.
	Speaking of hot polemical issues, Nicholas Wade came out with a very interesting piece.
	It was very long.
	And he published it on Medium, so it's open to the public, and that's good.
	And I've noticed many other papers and websites have picked up on it.
	And it was picked up by some Republican politicians who were raking Dr. Fauci over the coals with it.
	I think rightly to a certain degree, actually, because it raises tremendous questions.
	But Nicholas Wade's a fascinating guy.
	He actually wrote for the New York Times for, I don't know, maybe even like...
	20 years or something.
	He was there for a long time, and he usually wrote good stuff.
	He would actually even go after Glenn Gould, or Stephen Jay Gould.
	Glenn Gould's a pianist.
	Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote The Mismeasure of Man and kind of Race Denier and so on.
	And he wrote a book on race called The Troublesome Inheritance, which was kind of disappointing, but I would say pretty good.
	You don't need to read it.
	I would go read Ed's book, Making Sense of Brace.
	I'd love to be able to read it myself, but of course it's been sent to me from America and it takes about a year to get to me.
	I haven't ever read it.
	But yeah, anyway...
	You could go on if you want to represent the paper.
	Well, I just think it's a very interesting point that he makes, which I didn't know this.
	When it first came out, it came from Wuhan, it was...
	Supposedly from this wet market, bats and whatever.
	And a load of scientists, very quickly and before they could possibly have known what the reality was, wrote an article in a very important scientific journal in which they asserted that...
	There's this conspiracy that it's come from a lab in Wuhan or whatever, and we want to say this is absolutely not true, and there's no evidence for this, and it's clearly from the wet market.
	And it turned out that one of the people, one of the academics that was one of the writers of that academic piece worked, or at least was affiliated in some way, to that lab.
	Right.
	And didn't declare that.
	There was no conflict of interest declared.
	I thought it was absolutely extraordinary.
	And then there was another academic article.
	It was also a bit of a lady to protest too much, me thinks, by writing that so early.
	When we first heard about it, look, it might have actually come from a wet market.
	We aren't making hard conclusions here, and it's somewhat plausible.
	But I have to say, I think Nicholas Wade made a very compelling case.
	That it came from the Wuhan lab.
	But again, to come out so quickly and be like, you know, it was almost like that Matt Gaetz thing where he admitted to a crime while denying it.
	You're like, no, I was not the murderer.
	I did not poison my enemy who died recently.
	They're like, what?
	Your enemy died recently?
	You're like, yes, and I didn't do it.
	You know, it's just kind of like, what do you mean?
	It seems suspicious.
	I'm not familiar with that reference.
	I've been spending too much of the weekend listening to Blink-182.
	But even so...
	It clearly says 182.
	And so I thought that...
	Then there was another piece that came out which asserted that there was no way, because of some complex genetic analysis, that this could be from a lab, that this could not be natural, to which it was counted.
	No, there are some methods which can be so-called seamless methods, and so therefore it can be synthesized.
	And then, of course, you've got the evidence that you've got this virology place in Wuhan.
	They do make viruses like this.
	With gain of function, basically.
	I think that's the real issue, where they are making a virus more potentially dangerous.
	Not necessarily for malign, due to malign motives, but they are doing that.
	And the other issue was that there are these huge bat caves with bat guano all over the place.
	And it wasn't coming from those areas.
	It came right at the doorstep of the Wuhan lab.
	So I think he makes a fairly compelling case.
	And there were people that were arguing this back at the time.
	OK, they were speculating, of course, more than he's doing.
	But they were, like, thrown off social media or something, as I understand it, for saying this thing, which may well...
	Well, I say...
	He says you can't know either way.
	But it strikes me that if you haven't read Nicholas Wade's article, folks, go and read it.
	It strikes me that he cautiously...
	The most parsimonious case is that it did somehow come out of that lab, whether deliberately or not.
	But it somehow did.
	And so I think that's...
	Well, I think it also raises the issue.
	To get political, the issue is that some money was going towards that lab from the CDC.
	Now, Dr. Fauci vehemently...
	He emphatically claimed that the CDC was not giving money to gain-of-function experimentation.
	Now, whether there might be some kind of equivocation going on, we'll see.
	But he was emphatic about that.
	But nevertheless, there was some support for that lab.
	Obama, perhaps to his credit, banned gain-of-function experimentation.
	In the United States, and so they kind of had to go somewhere else.
	I mean, I would say pretty definitively, whether we should be doing gain-of-function experiments as a community, I kind of won't have an opinion on that, because this is not my field, and I can understand how some things that can be potentially dangerous have a greater good, so I won't have a firm opinion on that.
	But I do have a firm opinion that the idea that the United States should be giving grants to Chinese laboratories creating these things, I mean, that seems to be a no-no.
	So we will see.
	But one thing I would say is that...
	As you say, very early on, this thing was so polemicized and there was politicized and polemicized and there was all of these bannings from social media.
	Anthony Fauci said, we don't know, but there, you know, one could make a case that this did emerge from a lab.
	So he equivocally, you know, this god of the liberals, opened up space, I think, unquestionably.
	For the discussion of this matter.
	And that's a good thing.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Yeah.
	But, yeah, it's...
	Anyway, do we have any of the old Super Chats?
	Let me see if my computer's working.
	There's a reason why I'm holding my phone this whole time.
	Oh, yeah, I forgot you were doing it.
	Yeah.
	I didn't announce the Super Chats.
	I had to reboot my entire computer.
	Let's see how we're doing here.
	And I didn't announce it, so only true diehards.
	Someone said in the normal chat, they said, Ed has never read Troubles from Inheritance.
	Ed has read a fair bit of Troubles from Inheritance.
	Yes, not all of it.
	I got bored in the end because it wasn't saying anything new.
	I got bored and he did this big chapter denouncing racialism and he talked about Wagner.
	It was just all this stuff I know and it seemed like he was just...
	Kind of setting himself up as a good liberal before he went into...
	A good liberal, but a bit of a bravery signaler.
	It's a niche, isn't it?
	It's a heterodox academy type person.
	You have to get that balance right.
	Get your niche right.
	Right.
	I won't say anything that will actually affect the population.
	But I'm brave nevertheless.
	And we should just pursue the truth, even though I'm going to affirm all of the values of my enemies.
	And then Daffy Space says Ed is mad.
	Well, great wits close to madness lies.
	And that's about it.
	Let's see if we got it here.
	Oh yeah, we did get some.
	Sorry about this.
	Yeah, we have about 30 bucks or so here.
	Okay.
	Richard, this is Yehuda Finkelstein, basically our greatest superfan.
	Richard, your son was right about river sharks, and you were wrong, but sharks can live in rivers and freshwater lakes.
	They were repeated bull shark attacks in Philadelphia along the Delaware River in 1916.
	Fascinating.
	I actually watched, you know that fun reality show called River Monsters?
	Have you ever seen that?
	With Nicholas Wade?
	He's this kind of grizzled, older gentleman who's real healthy and strong, but then has wrinkles.
	He's like an Indiana Jones type, and he became a sex symbol of sorts.
	I think he's a cool guy as well.
	Not Nicholas Wade.
	Something Wade.
	He might be Nicholas Wade.
	His other is twin brother.
	Yeah, I learned about this.
	Sharks can swim upriver when the water is brackish.
	That is salty.
	And so these things can't happen.
	Right, I didn't contradict my son.
	I said, well, that would be fun.
	But I don't think pouring salt from a salt shaker into the river in Montana would, sharks would emerge.
	I don't think there would be enough salt.
	Yeah.
	Okay, Yehuda Finkelstein, who is the bigger boomer when it comes to tech, Richard or Ed?
	Richard can't figure out how to livestream on Odyssey, and Ed can't fix his damn microphone.
	Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
	I've worked out.
	Can I show you?
	I've worked out an exact place where to put the microphone.
	I buggered up my last two videos.
	The mic was too far or too close.
	I've been lucky for many videos since Christmas.
	I've worked out the exact place.
	And there won't be any BoomerTech issues on the next video, I can assure you of that.
	So I am less BoomerTech than Richard, who needs to reboot his computer and reload his operating system or something.
	I know what that means, but he has to do that.
	That's very BoomerTech.
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry about Odyssey.
	I need to look into this because we had it going there for a while.
	I want to basically use the system where I have where we can record the video and stream labs and then...
	Promote it to Odyssey.
	I'll figure that out this week.
	Okay, Mike.
	What can we do to combat white supremacy?
	Would you consider working with a joint task force to help combat white supremacy for the right price?
	That seems kind of like a weird question.
	I don't think...
	The problem with Ed and myself, I don't think we could gain...
	Riches and fame by becoming anti-racist, like we would confess our sins and try to help people overcome their racism.
	I don't think anyone would buy it from us if we did, like if we cynically, you know, went on television and denounced ourselves and said we're, I don't think anyone would believe us.
	Like you kind of have to be kind of stupid.
	You know, like Christian Piccolini or whatever, like you kind of have to be like dumb.
	And then people are like, well, yeah, I bet he was duped and, you know, he had his life ruined or something.
	When it's Ed and myself and we're on there and we're saying, oh, yes, I just want to help people.
	You can donate to my foundation.
	No one would believe us.
	They know we're not going to just, like, change our minds.
	We didn't come to this because we had a bad teenage years.
	You have to be more extreme and, like, silly extreme, like an actual Nazi LARPer.
	And then you can convert from that.
	Then it's alright.
	You can't convert if you come to this for kind of spiritual and intellectual reasons.
	Like, yeah, if you were into black metal or something and you were, you know, sacrificing goats on stage and screaming about Hitler, then yeah, you probably could just kind of join the left, you know?
	Yeah, if you had borderline personality disorder.
	Yeah.
	Okay, Yehuda Finkelstein again for five.
	Ed, don't Christian rapture in times prophecies involving Zionism, the Holy Land, have their apotheosis in World War I era?
	Yes, they did, which was also the time when Zionism received recognition from the British in the Balfour Declaration.
	Yeah.
	Do you want me to go on in that?
	The second edition of the Schofield Bible was published in 1917, and there was a...
	Tremendous amount of things that would seem like they were happening in the late 90s in the United States.
	I remember being in college and I was home for Christmas.
	And so this was like 1999 or something.
	And I was just working out at the gym and there was this cute girl.
	Who's had all these books under her arms.
	And of course, I went over.
	I was like, oh, interesting.
	What are you reading?
	And she was reading these end time prophecy books that were hugely popular.
	So I decided to go on to other pastors.
	But she this was really popular.
	This girl was middle class, popular among.
	More fundamentalist types as well.
	But it was out there.
	I think it probably is waning a little bit.
	I think waning in the sense that those people are going to QAnon, are going to kind of trump prophecies.
	And there's a huge amount of overlap.
	There are a lot of these trump prophecies done by people who are probably into end times prophecies.
	But we actually did a podcast, Mark Rahman and I, on the movie 1917.
	Directed by, oh, forgetting his name, Mendes, Sam Mendes, who's an interesting director, directed a James Bond movie, directed a Best Picture winner that everyone hates now called American Beauty.
	But that, I do believe, was a kind of coded reference to the Schofield Bible.
	In fact, one of the main characters is named Schofield.
	But yes, the Schofield Bible was this...
	Kind of Judaization of Christianity, connecting it back to the Jewish people and seeing Zionism as a necessary step for bringing about the end times.
	And the end times were all around them in the form of the First World War.
	And even that character played by Benedict Cumberbatch at the end, who basically, he ultimately, I mean, spoiler alert here, I guess, he ultimately does call off the attack, but he basically is an unrepentant nihilist.
	Whether it's today, whether it's tomorrow, whether it's in an hour, whether it's in 10 years, we know how this is going to end.
	And that kind of drive towards death, I think, is something that you do see in many of these Christian groups.
	That desire for the Armageddon.
	You're not just warning about possible dangers.
	You absolutely desire Ragnarok to take place.
	That's a very serious issue.
	It's a psychological issue, among other things.
	But I think it's also deeply rooted in Judaism and Christianity.
	Jesus himself was clearly an apocalyptic preacher.
	It wasn't all about love and puppies, by the way.
	No, he got very angry sometimes.
	Yes.
	At least according to Bart Ehrman, this is not my field of study, but Bart Ehrman pretty coherently...
	Using textual analysis, it looks at what is consistent across the Gospels and what was consistent with the time.
	And it is a kind of, the end is nigh, kind of immediate end times.
	And that would go for Paul as well.
	But again, I think this is a psychological thing.
	Maybe even Freud got it right.
	We have an erotic drive.
	Libido, but we might also have a certain kind of death drive.
	The ultimate form of control is to end it all.
	Who said that?
	Well, it's Freud.
	Sigmund Freud.
	George Floyd?
	The other Freud.
	Sigmund Freud.
	Sigmund Freud.
	Sigmund Freud, yes.
	He wasn't nearly as intelligent as George Floyd, but he did have some good opinions.
	Okay.
	Here's Bartomeu.
	The two-state solution...
	I'm just reloading it just to make sure.
	Oh, we have a couple more coming here.
	The two-state solution is a Zionist psyop.
	It justified the West Bank and Gaza's de facto colonial status.
	If it was part of Israel proper, they have to develop it and give the Palestinians the same rights as Israeli Arabs.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I think we were actually saying as much in our conversation.
	I said it.
	I mean, you could call it a PSYOP.
	I said the two-state solution is just bullshit.
	They are going to develop these settlements and ruin actual Palestinian areas.
	And then they'll either say, look, we've got a two-state solution.
	Here you go.
	You're welcome.
	Or they'll say, too much terrorism.
	We can't have a two-state solution.
	It's group selection in action, and the Jews are determined to win.
	In a sense, why wouldn't they be?
	Why shouldn't they be?
	You would be if you were them.
	It's group selection in action.
	We should be shocked about it.
	The current IS, I guess that's Israel, the current Israel-Palestine conflict has seen violence between Israeli citizens and the two ethnicity.
	Will this be an irreversible shift in the region or will it go back to normal in the coming months?
	Okay, a bit garbled there, but I'll try to make sense of that.
	I do think that this will probably go back to, quote, normal in the next few months.
	I've seen probably half a dozen or a dozen of these type scenarios throughout my adult lifetime.
	I can remember them every few years.
	You have this.
	It hasn't been as bad as this for a while.
	It hasn't been as bad as this for...
	Not for a while, that's true.
	Right.
	But I do think that it will...
	Go back to normal.
	That would be my prediction, just seeing past his prologue.
	I think we're going to have this endless pain forever.
	I know.
	If I'm wrong, and there is a kind of new status quo that emerges from this, that would be interesting.
	I'll have to think about it and look into it.
	All right.
	I had one question from Robert of Canada about the concept of the Islamic evil false messiah.
	To Jill or whatever it is.
	So thank you for that.
	I shall think about that.
	Yes.
	Okay, so as opposed to buying Nicholas Wade's book, everyone should go, we love Nicholas Wade.
	He's a great guy.
	But the book isn't that great.
	Go read his article.
	Go buy Ed's Making Sense of Race book.
	You know, there was this myth in the contemporary sense of the word on Twitter yesterday.
	I was really busy yesterday, but I was just with...
	Taking care of kids, but I was just glancing at Twitter occasionally, that all these books were getting banned from search results so that they were still there, but they would kind of not show up when you searched on the website.
	And in the morning, I got a little worried, and I went and I searched Ed Dutton, Making Sense of Race, and your book wasn't showing up.
	And so I thought, oh, God, this is the day of the ban.
	And they also banned that guy who...
	He was cancelled from Apple.
	He wrote Chaos Monkeys, which is a kind of right-wing...
	Hang on.
	It's on Amazon.
	It is on Amazon.
	I checked earlier.
	It is.
	It's all fine.
	And then also a guy named...
	I'm forgetting his name.
	Oh, guy.
	I'm forgetting his name at the moment.
	He has a new book called The Unbroken Thread, which is this kind of...
	So what's going on then this morning?
	I don't know.
	I have two...
	Understandings of it, but these are all speculation.
	One of them might have been that they decided to do a shadow ban, and then they got a little pushback, and maybe someone overruled them.
	Because there were a number of books, there were probably like 20 books that are kind of right-wing-ish, or trad, or other things like that.
	I think his name is Amani Sohan Amar.
	I feel a little bit bad because he follows me on Twitter.
	I follow him, too.
	But he writes in the New York Post.
	He's a generally good guy.
	But he was complaining about books getting banned.
	But it seemed to go away.
	So either it was an actual mistake, an honest mistake, or the whole search function was screwed up for like three hours yesterday.
	Or they were practicing shadow banning and pulled back.
	But...
	As of right now, no shadow banning in effect.
	No, it's happened before that I've noticed that stuff by mine has been shadow banned and then come back.
	So it sounds probably more like a sort of cock-up.
	But I do think that the only solution to Amazon is for it to be taken to public ownership.
	All these things, I agree.
	Anything that becomes too powerful, anything that has more than 50% of the market should be taken to public ownership.
	Anything that becomes the public square, it needs to be public.
	Yeah, I agree.
	More than 50% of the market, it's banned.
	Public ownership.
	Anyway.
	All right, gents.
	Free Palestine.
	All right.
	Good conversation.
	Thank you, Ed.
	Thank you, everyone, who watched.
	Thank you, especially everyone who gave Super Chats.
	We will see you next week.
	Same bat time, same bat channel.
	And we'll talk about another subject that is equally fascinating.
	Bye bye.

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