RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Aspirationally Jewish
Aired: 2023-09-29
Duration: 10:31


=== Elon's Jewish Friends (10:07) ===

[00:00:00]  So I would actually praise Alan Dershowitz for his commentary.
[00:00:08]  So Dershowitz has dedicated his life to promoting Zionism.
[00:00:17]  So he obviously has a dog in this fight, no question.
[00:00:22]  But I would praise him first off.
[00:00:26]  As just being the most clear and explicit.
[00:00:30]  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.
[00:00:43]  And there was also some things that were pretty interesting that were revealed by seemingly throwaway comments.
[00:00:51]  Maybe I'll just go into those just because those are...
[00:00:57]  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.
[00:01:19]  That's whatever.
[00:01:20]  I mean, that might be true for a lot of people.
[00:01:22]  You're in Silicon Valley, you're in the world of finance, whatever.
[00:01:27]  I don't care about that.
[00:01:28]  But then he offered some interesting things, which he said that Elon is a very common name in Israel.
[00:01:36]  And that is true.
[00:01:40]  And that is pretty interesting.
[00:01:44]  Although not...
[00:01:45]  Definitive.
[00:01:46]  And then he mentioned that his father sent him to Hebrew school when he was growing up in South Africa.
[00:01:53]  So I would ask the question, you don't just casually go to Hebrew school.
[00:02:01]  I mean, maybe...
[00:02:03]  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.
[00:02:12]  It's better, it's close to their home, the public school sucks, etc.
[00:02:17]  So, I mean, there's some plausible deniability about it.
[00:02:20]  However, it just seems curious to be going to Hebrew school when you're young.
[00:02:26]  He also said that his father took him to Israel when he was 13 and he saw the wall.
[00:02:32]  So I presume he's referring to the wailing wall.
[00:02:35]  Now, Elon's estranged from his father.
[00:02:58]  I don't quite know what to make of it.
[00:03:00]  There are all these curious suggestions about Elon's background that he's part Asian.
[00:03:06]  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.
[00:03:28]  If someone said that he is half Asian or a quarter Asian, I would believe them.
[00:03:34]  There's just something about it.
[00:03:36]  Now, that doesn't kind of mean anything.
[00:03:39]  Maybe his father isn't his father.
[00:03:42]  Might mean that.
[00:03:44]  But it's just there.
[00:03:45]  But there does seem to be a suggestion that Elon's connection with Judaism goes deeper.
[00:03:53]  All of these things are plausibly deniable, but...
[00:03:56]  I don't know.
[00:03:57]  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.
[00:04:11]  You meet many Russians who immigrated to the US or Canada or Europe in 1992 or 1996.
[00:04:20]  It fits a narrative.
[00:04:25]  I don't know, just saying.
[00:04:27]  It was rather odd.
[00:04:29]  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.
[00:04:49]  Yeah, I think it throws some cold water on that, or it kind of turns a fastball into a curveball, so to speak.
[00:04:56]  I think it's worth looking into these things.
[00:05:01]  At the very least, just to understand where he's coming from, because Elon says a lot of different things.
[00:05:07]  And they're contradictory.
[00:05:10]  There's, you know, I'm a free speech absolutist.
[00:05:13]  And then there's also, oh, you have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
[00:05:17]  As Alan Dershowitz correctly pointed out, that is already, like, sliding rather fast, quickly into censorship land.
[00:05:27]  Just saying that.
[00:05:28]  It rhymes.
[00:05:29]  It sounds better, I guess.
[00:05:30]  But you're already kind of, like, surrendering the past before the battle.
[00:05:36]  And I think it's worthwhile just knowing who he is.
[00:05:41]  And I'm not sure Walter Isaacson would be the right person to reveal that, to be honest.
[00:05:48]  But to go back, I'll just jump around a little bit and throw out some of my ideas.
[00:05:54]  You guys can pick up on them and we can have a conversation.
[00:05:58]  Alan Dershowitz, to his credit...
[00:06:01]  Did not engage in platitudes.
[00:06:04]  He did engage in kind of memorable visual metaphors, but I think those are actually really helpful.
[00:06:15]  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.
[00:06:24]  And he's like, look, we're not drawing lines because a line, you're on either side of that.
[00:06:32]  And instead, you should draw a circle, which is legal speech under the U.S. Constitution.
[00:06:37]  And I guess in this case, this is a very American-centric discussion.
[00:06:42]  Obviously, different lands have different laws.
[00:06:45]  But he said, so you're going...
[00:06:50]  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.
[00:07:11]  Everything is inside.
[00:07:13]  Every ism is inside.
[00:07:15]  So Zionism is in there, anti-Zionism, presumably white supremacism is in there, Buddhism, Islam, etc., etc.
[00:07:25]  It's all in there outside of things that are quite obvious abrogations of law.
[00:07:35]  Things where speech turns into crime.
[00:07:38]  Because speech is an absolute, of course.
[00:07:40]  And that is, you know, who knows?
[00:07:43]  Sex trafficking, explicit death threats, selling illegal items on a platform, etc.
[00:07:50]  It's actually kind of easy.
[00:07:52]  But what he said is that because we're all in this one circle, you can't police.
[00:07:57]  If you're going to police someone else, you're going to police yourself.
[00:08:00]  So it's kind of self-reinforcing.
[00:08:02]  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.
[00:08:12]  They're like, you should come visit us.
[00:08:13]  We should all go to Auschwitz.
[00:08:14]  I know you know about this, but I want you to feel it.
[00:08:17]  You need to feel what this means.
[00:08:19]  All this stuff, they all wanted to kind of get with Elon.
[00:08:23]  It was kind of embarrassing, almost.
[00:08:26]  There were threats, implied threats, probably is more accurate.
[00:08:31]  But there was also a kind of cloying bootlicking going on.
[00:08:36]  It was strange.
[00:08:38]  But anyway, Dershowitz offered something that was actually constructive.
[00:08:45]  And so I would praise him for that.
[00:08:48]  And he's...
[00:08:50]  He offered the only thing that was tangible that could lead to some sort of policy.
[00:08:57]  And I know a lot of people probably don't take him seriously because Dershowitz is as much a Zionist as Jonathan Greenblatt.
[00:09:07]  He's more of a Zionist than most liberals in Congress, etc.
[00:09:12]  I mean, he has a dog in the fight, but...
[00:09:17]  He said this, and it's a tangible policy that would seem to work.
[00:09:21]  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.
[00:09:33]  I think he might have written this about the Westboro Baptist Church, or he might have written it.
[00:09:38]  I think it might have been St. Paul, that Supreme Court case, which is, you can't declare that one side plays boxes.
[00:09:46]  According to the Marquis of Queensbury rules, and the other side goes freestyle.

=== Cannot Prohibit Symbolism (00:39) ===

[00:09:52]  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.
[00:09:59]  You can't, like, you know, burning a cross in someone's front lawn, you are absolutely harassing them.
[00:10:07]  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.
[00:10:27]  You can't create a law prohibiting burning of crosses.