This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comThe gang discusses the recent Twitter space, hosted by Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire, and featuring many prominent voices in the Jewish community, in which Elon addresses censorship, his Jewish identity (!?), and “hate speech.” Later on, the group delves into so-called “pathological altruism” and the “high-trust society.”
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| So I would actually praise Alan Dershowitz for his commentary. | |
| So Dershowitz has dedicated his life to promoting Zionism. | |
| So he obviously has a dog in this fight, no question. | |
| But I would praise him first off. | |
| As just being the most clear and explicit. | |
| So all I heard before Alan got on was just a lot of platitudes that had some very strong built-in assumptions, I would say. | |
| And there was also some things that were pretty interesting that were revealed by seemingly throwaway comments. | |
| Maybe I'll just go into those just because those are... | |
| So, this notion of being aspirationally Jewish came up, and Elon was talking about this, and he said something to the effect of, well, I'm aware that all anti-Semites say that they have a Jewish friend, but I would say the majority of my friends are Jewish. | |
| That's whatever. | |
| I mean, that might be true for a lot of people. | |
| You're in Silicon Valley, you're in the world of finance, whatever. | |
| I don't care about that. | |
| But then he offered some interesting things, which he said that Elon is a very common name in Israel. | |
| And that is true. | |
| And that is pretty interesting. | |
| Although not... | |
| Definitive. | |
| And then he mentioned that his father sent him to Hebrew school when he was growing up in South Africa. | |
| So I would ask the question, you don't just casually go to Hebrew school. | |
| I mean, maybe... | |
| You might, in some circumstance, like, I've heard of plenty of people, including Jews, who, you know, they went to a Catholic school for whatever reason. | |
| It's better, it's close to their home, the public school sucks, etc. | |
| So, I mean, there's some plausible deniability about it. | |
| However, it just seems curious to be going to Hebrew school when you're young. | |
| He also said that his father took him to Israel when he was 13 and he saw the wall. | |
| So I presume he's referring to the wailing wall. | |
| Now, Elon's estranged from his father. | |
| I don't quite know what to make of it. | |
| There are all these curious suggestions about Elon's background that he's part Asian. | |
| I mean, to be honest, in terms of his physiognomy and even comparing it to his brothers, if you see some of those early childhood photos, there was a lot of these being passed around after the release of the recent book by Walter Isaacson. | |
| If someone said that he is half Asian or a quarter Asian, I would believe them. | |
| There's just something about it. | |
| Now, that doesn't kind of mean anything. | |
| Maybe his father isn't his father. | |
| Might mean that. | |
| But it's just there. | |
| But there does seem to be a suggestion that Elon's connection with Judaism goes deeper. | |
| All of these things are plausibly deniable, but... | |
| I don't know. | |
| Many, many Jews in South Africa got out of there at the end of apartheid time, and it would fit a pre-existing narrative, a kind of personal narrative of a lot of people. | |
| You meet many Russians who immigrated to the US or Canada or Europe in 1992 or 1996. | |
| It fits a narrative. | |
| I don't know, just saying. | |
| It was rather odd. | |
| I think it also would throw a lot of cold water on what seemed to be happening about two weeks ago, which was that there was this notion that Elon is just outright attacking the ADL. | |
| Yeah, I think it throws some cold water on that, or it kind of turns a fastball into a curveball, so to speak. | |
| I think it's worth looking into these things. | |
| At the very least, just to understand where he's coming from, because Elon says a lot of different things. | |
| And they're contradictory. | |
| There's, you know, I'm a free speech absolutist. | |
| And then there's also, oh, you have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. | |
| As Alan Dershowitz correctly pointed out, that is already, like, sliding rather fast, quickly into censorship land. | |
| Just saying that. | |
| It rhymes. | |
| It sounds better, I guess. | |
| But you're already kind of, like, surrendering the past before the battle. | |
| And I think it's worthwhile just knowing who he is. | |
| And I'm not sure Walter Isaacson would be the right person to reveal that, to be honest. | |
| But to go back, I'll just jump around a little bit and throw out some of my ideas. | |
| You guys can pick up on them and we can have a conversation. | |
| Alan Dershowitz, to his credit... | |
| Did not engage in platitudes. | |
| He did engage in kind of memorable visual metaphors, but I think those are actually really helpful. | |
| And he objected to something that I think Elon might have said or someone else on the call when they said, oh, we need to draw a line. | |
| And he's like, look, we're not drawing lines because a line, you're on either side of that. | |
| And instead, you should draw a circle, which is legal speech under the U.S. Constitution. | |
| And I guess in this case, this is a very American-centric discussion. | |
| Obviously, different lands have different laws. | |
| But he said, so you're going... | |
| There's what is legal, of course, and then there's what's permissible in a U.S. country that should, at the very least, be kind of inspired by the ideals of the U.S. Constitution and should reflect them and certainly be coherently connected to them. | |
| Everything is inside. | |
| Every ism is inside. | |
| So Zionism is in there, anti-Zionism, presumably white supremacism is in there, Buddhism, Islam, etc., etc. | |
| It's all in there outside of things that are quite obvious abrogations of law. | |
| Things where speech turns into crime. | |
| Because speech is an absolute, of course. | |
| And that is, you know, who knows? | |
| Sex trafficking, explicit death threats, selling illegal items on a platform, etc. | |
| It's actually kind of easy. | |
| But what he said is that because we're all in this one circle, you can't police. | |
| If you're going to police someone else, you're going to police yourself. | |
| So it's kind of self-reinforcing. | |
| And Alan, all of these esteemed Jewish leaders were on the program saying, oh, I'd love to talk with you offline, Elon, about this. | |
| They're like, you should come visit us. | |
| We should all go to Auschwitz. | |
| I know you know about this, but I want you to feel it. | |
| You need to feel what this means. | |
| All this stuff, they all wanted to kind of get with Elon. | |
| It was kind of embarrassing, almost. | |
| There were threats, implied threats, probably is more accurate. | |
| But there was also a kind of cloying bootlicking going on. | |
| It was strange. | |
| But anyway, Dershowitz offered something that was actually constructive. | |
| And so I would praise him for that. | |
| And he's... | |
| He offered the only thing that was tangible that could lead to some sort of policy. | |
| And I know a lot of people probably don't take him seriously because Dershowitz is as much a Zionist as Jonathan Greenblatt. | |
| He's more of a Zionist than most liberals in Congress, etc. | |
| I mean, he has a dog in the fight, but... | |
| He said this, and it's a tangible policy that would seem to work. | |
| He also noticed that this freedom of speech but not freedom of reach, it is choosing sides, and it kind of reminds me of the famous line by Antonin Scalia. | |
| I think he might have written this about the Westboro Baptist Church, or he might have written it. | |
| I think it might have been St. Paul, that Supreme Court case, which is, you can't declare that one side plays boxes. | |
| According to the Marquis of Queensbury rules, and the other side goes freestyle. | |
| So you can't, and I think if I'm correct, I mean, perhaps Chris can correct me here, but I think I'm right on this. | |
| You can't, like, you know, burning a cross in someone's front lawn, you are absolutely harassing them. | |
| But you can't create laws that make a differentiation between, say, In the sense that just engaging in arson is obviously criminal, but there's no kind of symbolism to it. | |
| You can't create a law prohibiting burning of crosses. |