Oct. 13, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
36:44
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
[Music] | |
| It is Friday. I'm Dave Rubin and we have two of my favorite guests. | ||
| We're just diving right in. | ||
| Host of the Michael Knowles Show over on The Daily Wire, Mr. Michael Knowles, and also from The Daily Wire, we have Andrew Klavan, whose new book, The House of Love and Death, A Cameron Winter Mystery, is out now. | ||
| Andrew, am I correct? | ||
| Is it out now, or did we, oh no, we get in a couple days, August 31st, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| October 31st, right? | ||
| Available to pre-order right this moment. | ||
| While we're talking, you could be pre-ordering. | ||
| October 31st. - You're wasting your time if you're not reordering them. | ||
| Guys, I don't know, it's been a very stressful week. | ||
| Even reading a teleprompter has become difficult at this point. | ||
| Anyway, it's a pleasure to have both of you on, obviously. | ||
| It's been a crazy week for everybody, and I wanted to have two people who are on the short list of kind of political talkers that haven't completely lost their minds, but there was actually another specific reason that I wanted to have you guys on, because Andrew, you are Christian, and Michael, you are Catholic, and I am Jewish, and I thought that would be an interesting little combination to discuss what is going on in the Holy Land right now. | ||
| So before we get to any kind of the specifics on the ground stuff and all the horrors and all that, I thought maybe we could talk for a moment about why the Holy Land either is or is not important to you. | ||
| Andrew, why don't I let you go first? | ||
| And you have a really interesting story related to your faith. | ||
| Yeah, I was born and raised a Jew and I became a Christian. | ||
| I was always a secular Jew and it was only through Christianity that I became deeply connected to my Jewishness, oddly enough. | ||
| But I've never lost my sense of pride being a Jew, and I've never lost my sense of connection to the Jewish people. | ||
| And the one time that I was actually in Israel, I was struck by just the reality of the gospel scenes. | ||
| I mean, one of the things that happens when you visit is you think, oh, those are the mountains that Jesus looked like. | ||
| These are the places where his footsteps actually were. | ||
| And one of the things that was very difficult for me to overcome was centuries of some Christians both philosophical and active anti-Semitism and I had to | ||
| come to understand how I could believe what I believed, which was in Christ crucified, how | ||
| I could believe that without abandoning my people, without abandoning my absolute sense | ||
| that these are God's people and that God has played out the drama of his interaction | ||
| with humanity through the history of the Jews, which I still believe is quite true. And a lot | ||
| of the things that people have falsely believed over the years that Christianity has somehow | ||
| replaced the Jews or that, you know, the stupidest thing that anyone has ever said, the Jews | ||
| killed Christ, are based on a misunderstanding The fact that this is the theater of God's relationship, the Jews are the theater of God's relationship, and when you see people who hate the Jews, and I don't care what anybody says, in each specific case of Jew hatred there's always some specific reason that people pull out. | ||
| It's always the hatred of God. | ||
| It's always the hatred of God underneath that. | ||
| It's the hatred of someone who wants us to be better than we feel we are, who wants us to deny some of our basic instincts and basic drives in order to reach for | ||
| something that is more like his image. | ||
| Those are the things that the Jews have imposed upon us to make us better and to make us more holy and we're ticked | ||
| off about it. | ||
| And you know, Nietzsche even said this. | ||
| Nietzsche basically said, you know, that the thing he hated about Christianity was that it was the slave religion of the Jews because it elevated not the winners, but the losers. | ||
| It elevated the people who loved instead of hated, who believed in love instead of power. | ||
| So all of these things, this relationship between Jews and Christians is unbroken. | ||
| It's an unbroken thread. | ||
| And at the best, I think Christians are able to say that they've been grafted on to this great history and have become a part of it. | ||
| And you can tell they've become a part of it because now they're persecuted too. | ||
| But I cannot look upon the things that are going on in Israel without believing that this is part of what's happening in our society. | ||
| I think we all have felt the evil rising. | ||
| We all have felt the madness and the lies and the self-deceptions and the "idolatry rising all around us in every country | ||
| "and that it should come out in bloodshed against the Jews "shouldn't be any surprise at all | ||
| "that has been happening now for centuries "and it will continue to happen, I think, | ||
| "until this history has its conclusion, "which we all believe is going to be a happy ending, | ||
| "but not for a while." | ||
| Michael, it's gonna be tough to top your colleague right there, | ||
| but I do wanna say one thing quickly first, which is, Andrew, it's interesting, | ||
| you said that about, that Jesus took these steps in these hills | ||
| because we were, I took my whole team to Israel about six months ago, and we were in Judea and Samaria, | ||
| which is what is now known, unfortunately, as the West Bank. | ||
| It's just the West Bank of the Jordan River, but it was Judea and Samaria, part of the The eternal nation of Israel where the Jews defended, the Maccabees defended their land against the Greek invaders. | ||
| It's the story of Hanukkah. | ||
| And we had this tour guide who was walking around showing us those hills right there. | ||
| And then I had this strange moment where I was like, wait a minute, this story of Hanukkah, we light the candles, you get some gifts, you eat something fried. | ||
| It's like that story has been told. | ||
| for thousands and thousands of years. | ||
| And you people seem to think that the Jews have nothing to do with this land. | ||
| It's rather extraordinary. | ||
| Knowles, now I'm gonna let you try to beat Clavin somehow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
(laughs) | |
| Sadly, I've never even been to the Holy Land, but I was trying to explain to some friends | ||
| why it is that we care about the Holy Land. | ||
| You know, we were previously talking about the war in Ukraine, and I don't really care that much about Ukraine. | ||
| I don't want innocent people to suffer, I don't want to see injustice, but I don't feel any connection to Ukraine. | ||
| I do feel a connection to the Holy Land, though I've never been there. | ||
| Everybody feels some kind of connection to the Holy Land, whether they're conscious of it or not, and so that's why these conflicts can have such global consequences. | ||
| Drew hit the nail on the head when he said that Christians view the story from the ancient Jews of the Old Testament up through today as a continuity. | ||
| And so the word that keeps cropping up in these debates is over Zionism. | ||
| You know, what is the nature of Zionism? | ||
| And the historical theological claim of Zionism is that because the Jews had the Holy Land Thousands of years ago, then they were kicked out by the Romans in 70 AD. | ||
| They still have a legal claim to the land. | ||
| That's kind of the hard theological historical claim of Zionism. | ||
| Christians generally do not believe that, because Christians view, and the Church has traditionally viewed herself, as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. | ||
| The New Testament fulfills the old, the old predicts the new, so the Church is the new Israel, Christ is the new Adam, Mary is the new Ark of the Covenant, you know, Mary is the new Eve. | ||
| So where does that leave the Jews? | ||
| As a historical matter, you know, in the 19th century you see the rise of Zionism as a movement among Jews with other nationalist movements. 1848. | ||
| was the year of revolutions. | ||
| You had nationalist revolutions in Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, all over the place, and you had the beginning of this nationalist movement among the Jewish people who wanted their own homeland. | ||
| And this takes form in 1897 with Theodor Herzl, who initially was going to bring the Jews to British East Africa, and then that kind of got shot down. | ||
| It'd be very strange to have Jews wandering around in East Africa. | ||
| So, you know, brings them back to the Holy Land after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, | ||
| and then the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, and here we are all fighting over this. | ||
| And the reason I bring up all of that long history is because it helps to explain why BLM | ||
| is echoing the talking points of Hamas, why we hear this decolonizer rhetoric, | ||
| and how we need to liberate the oppressed from the oppressors and all this. | ||
| The reason is because the modern nation state of Israel came to be in a very similar way | ||
| to which our own nation came to be, which is it came about as a result of the British Empire | ||
| because of a growth of nationalist feelings. | ||
| And that's why so many of our enemies seem to be the same enemies. | ||
| And so, when that question of Zionism comes up, people will say, can a Christian be a Zionist? | ||
| The Catholic Church hasn't answered that question directly, exactly, but the Church, viewing herself as the new Israel, could not Ascribed to a hard Zionism in principle, but in practice, I think we look around and we say first of all There's obviously no justification for the Hamas attacks on civilians There's obviously no justification for so much of what the Palestinian representatives have done So as a prudential matter now that we are where we are 70 years after the establishment of the state of Israel. | ||
| I Who do you feel better with looking after the Holy Land? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You know, the Jews or Hamas? | ||
| And I don't think that's a very difficult question. | ||
| You know, it's so interesting, because again, having just been there, the five days that we did in Jerusalem were our first five days, and I just, and I've been there before, but I just could not get over how peaceful it was in Jerusalem, and women in traditional Muslim garb on the same bus with Orthodox Jewish boys, and every combination of that that you can imagine. | ||
| And yes, Israel does defend the holy sites of all of the major religions, and the Baha'i, and everybody else, which it's a far cry from what was going on before Israel got control of Jerusalem. | ||
| But I want to start with a tweet from you, Michael, because you just mentioned BLM. | ||
| And one of the things I've been trying to unfurl all week is exactly what you just said, how these movements here are so connected. | ||
| That it does not surprise me that people who think boys are girls also can't make a moral stance on whether a woman being burned alive is okay or not. | ||
| You had a tweet about that. | ||
| You wrote, BLM would gleefully do to all of us what Hamas just did to the Jews. | ||
| That has always been the case, but some people couldn't see it. | ||
| Be sure to send these endorsements to all of your friends who posted that stupid black square on social media a few years ago. | ||
| I'm very proud to say that obviously no one on this panel fell for that nonsense, but Michael, I'll let you chime in again quick, because it was your tweet. | ||
| How much money, like the amount of money that probably got funded for Hamas on this stuff, it's just, it's so extraordinary. | ||
| Of course, this to me is the meaning of Israel's enemies or America's enemies, which literally is not true, but broadly is true. | ||
| There are big divergences between Israeli foreign policy and American foreign policy. | ||
| We saw this recently in Israel's support for Azerbaijan over the Armenians in the conflict in Azerbaijan. | ||
| But what the meaning of that phrase is, is that the arguments against the modern nation state of Israel, Are the arguments against America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Are the arguments against Western civilization broadly. | ||
| And so even if you don't, I care very much about the Holy Land and I like the Jews very much. | ||
| But even if you don't, even if you don't care about any of that stuff, do not think that this is going to be isolated over in the Middle East. | ||
| This exact argument, this battle is coming to a place near you. | ||
| In fact, it's already here. | ||
| Well, that's the crazy thing. | ||
| I mean, I'm watching these rallies. | ||
| If you guys saw the one that looked like a modern Nazi rally in Dearborn, Michigan, with thousands of Palestinian flags being waved and they're praising Hamas and all that. | ||
| It's like, do you guys think you're indigenous to the land that is the United States? | ||
| They're telling you what they're gonna do to the rest of us. | ||
| Andrew, I suppose that doesn't surprise you that a radical left movement was going to ultimately be siding with people who were burning babies alive. | ||
| You're a student of history, obviously. | ||
| No, it doesn't surprise me in the least, and it doesn't surprise me that it's centered on Israel. | ||
| All the rhetoric, the rhetoric is so interesting because they call Israel an apartheid state, which is hilarious in a place where a Muslim can become and has become over a hundred times a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, where Muslims serve in equal status throughout the country, where... Supreme Court! | ||
| The Supreme Court, when the hour of prayer shows up, if you're walking down the street in Jerusalem, Muslims lay out their prayer mats, you know, on the curb and start praying right there. | ||
| Compare that to Iran, where the few remaining Jews are clinging to life, too poor to leave, and just hopeful that they're not being persecuted out of existence. | ||
| Same thing is true of Christians in several Muslim countries. | ||
| And then this thing about colonialism. | ||
| There was a tweet, I'm sure you heard about, of a freelance writer sent out where she said, | ||
| well, you fools, what did you think? | ||
| Happily, in a celebratory tone, she said, what do you think anti-colonialism was gonna look like? | ||
| Did you think it was just gonna be a fun thing? | ||
| No, this is how we do anti-colonialism. | ||
| And it was retweeted by one of the top columnists at the Washington Post, Karen Adia. | ||
| And the thing about colonialism, Israel is not a colonial country. | ||
| You know, if you think about it, major powers have colonies in smaller places. | ||
| So France had colonies, England has colonies, you know, Germany had colonies. | ||
| Who are the colonizers in Israel? | ||
| The Jews are indigenous people of that region and the only people who have a written record | ||
| of having established a kingdom in that region. | ||
| And in coming home and declaring themselves, I mean, I differ with Michael on this. | ||
| I first don't think that the church is the new Israel. | ||
| I think that they are grafted on to Israel. | ||
| I think it is one and the same thing. | ||
| And I think that there's no replacement going on. | ||
| This is predicted in the book of Revelation that Israel was going to return. | ||
| It seems to me to be a major miracle, in which case Hamas is in big trouble because it's meant to be. | ||
| But I think that this idea, these terms that they use, these lying, dishonest terms, apartheid, And colonialism are meant to, the fact that they are used to define Israel is indicative of how dishonest this movement is. | ||
| That it's not really a movement in favor of indigenous people, because the Jews are indigenous to that region. | ||
| It's not really a movement against apartheid, because the true apartheid is really in some of the Muslim countries surrounding it. | ||
| It's a movement against Western liberty, against Western freedom, | ||
| which itself grows out of the Jewish Christian tradition. | ||
| It is the Jews and only the Jews who were told not to have a king because it was an offense to God. | ||
| It is the Christians and only the Christians who have talked about the sacredness of the individual. | ||
| These are things that come down to us. | ||
| These are precious legacies handed down to us by these faiths. | ||
| And it's that that they hate. | ||
| Isn't there a-- - Those are the things. | ||
| Isn't there a fast-talking Jew that I think works with you guys who wrote a book about that connection from Jerusalem to Athens? | ||
| I can't stand that guy. | ||
| I know Noah's just stupid. | ||
| Isn't that Walsh? | ||
| Was it Walsh? | ||
| I forget who it was. | ||
| Some fast-talking Jew. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Great point, obviously, Andrew. | ||
| I wanna bring up something that, Andrew, you found this video on Twitter, you saw this, and you wrote, succinct, eloquent, accurate. | ||
| So this is video of NBA legend Amare Stoudemire. | ||
| He's a multiple-time All-Star. | ||
| He actually converted to Judaism later in life, moved to Israel. | ||
| He was teaching, sorry, he was coaching one of the Israeli basketball teams. | ||
| I'm not sure if he's living in Israel at the moment, but he had a nice little video on what's going on and relating it to BLM and everything we're talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I woke up, man, this morning with some disturbing news out of Israel that Hamas is kidnapping children, putting them in cages, killing women, killing the elderly. | |
| That's some coward s***. | ||
| That's cowardly. | ||
| And for all y'all Black Lives Matter who ain't saying nothing, well, let me figure out exactly what happened before I say anything. | ||
| F*** you. | ||
| Figure out what? | ||
| It ain't never been cool to kidnap kids and put them in cages. | ||
| It ain't never been cool to kill women and elderly. | ||
| Never been. | ||
| No matter where you from, what you represent, what tribe you from, it don't matter. | ||
| Michael, is it such a sign of the times that I'm getting more astute political analysis and forget, I'm getting more basic truth, let's say, from Amari Stoudemire, who I used to watch play basketball, than, say, pretty much anyone on mainstream media and certainly on Hamas TV, which some people know as MSNBC? | ||
| And certainly from the New York Times, one of the editors of which was retweeting this defense of decolonization, meaning the kidnapping of kids and rape and murder of civilians. | ||
| our times, it's a sign of many times, but it's a sign of our times because we're living in a time | ||
| where our elite are extremely corrupt and ignorant and stupid. | ||
| So during times such as that, ordinary people are going to make a lot more sense. | ||
| And it's during times like that, that you see the proof of Bill Buckley's quote | ||
| from 60, 70 years ago, which was, "He would rather be governed by the first 2000 people | ||
| in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard College." | ||
| I mean, just look, Harvard had 30 plus student organizations signing a letter basically defending Hamas. | ||
| So if you want sense, Harvard would be the last place to look. | ||
| Andrew, do you think there's a silver lining here, like the horrors and the barbarity and the medieval-style killings, which we're still just finding out about, like, it's just off the charts, that they may, and the fact that they intentionally wanted people to see it, right? | ||
| The Nazis hid their stuff, they documented it, because they thought they were gonna be the winners and they wanted a record, not because they wanted the world to see, but because of the severity of this and the fact that they've gone ahead and put this out on social media and even now are threatening to kill some of the hostages and air that, that it has woken up some people in a way that maybe they wouldn't have been woken up otherwise. | ||
| Just us talking about sanity kind of doesn't hit with everybody. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I hesitate to call it a silver lining because while good does often come out of evil, the evil doesn't go away and none of those lives can be recovered and none of that tragedy will be erased by any good that comes out of it. | ||
| But yes, I do think that people looked at these things and saw these things and suddenly thought, wait a minute, wait a minute, you can't intellectualize this way. | ||
| That's why I retweeted that Stoudemire video because of its simplicity. | ||
| You know I thought I turned to a man you know it really only takes the slightest spark of human decency Flickering dimly inside you to look at the things that we have seen and think oh, those are the bad guys I get that those are the bad guys and anything else is better than that because this is evil so the fact that as Michael points out 30 Plus, organizations at Harvard did not have enough human | ||
| decency left to spot that. | ||
| Shows you that intellectualization can take you right through the truth into a very, very | ||
| dark place. | ||
| So this is a simple thing. | ||
| Once you see this, once you accept it, once you actually face what's happening, you realize | ||
| okay, there may be plenty of questions that have to be answered in the Middle East, but | ||
| one of them isn't whether or not we should exterminate an entire nation of people that | ||
| people have tried to exterminate many, many times before. | ||
| That's not an open question. | ||
| That's a closed question. | ||
| We know the answer to that. | ||
| The answer is no. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| That's evil. | ||
| So yes, I do think that the fact that... | ||
| that has now come down to this kind of kindergarten simplicity that even someone who goes to at | ||
| least a college below the level of the Ivy League would be able to see that this is a | ||
| bad thing. | ||
| I think the fact, one of the things that amused me in a grim way was that many of the people | ||
| who supported Hamas and these atrocities at Harvard took their names off that when they | ||
| realized it could cost them a job. | ||
| Not only have they signed on to evil, they don't even have the courage of their evil | ||
| convictions. They're actually wimpy evil people, which is the worst possible thing you can be. | ||
| I know, you'd think if you were so moral and so just in your cause and so against colonialism and everything, you'd want everyone to know, but apparently that's not the case. | ||
| Michael, I want to shift slightly to the protests that we've seen all over the world, and I do believe this is a loud, crazy minority. | ||
| I don't think it's most people. | ||
| I've actually been It's been sort of nice seeing so many people rally around Israel, but there's always gonna be this contingent. | ||
| But what do you think? | ||
| I mean, we're all free speech guys. | ||
| We're all First Amendment guys, obviously, and we believe in law and order. | ||
| But what do we do with a segment of the population, either in America or, just before we started, I heard that France is now banning pro-Palestinian rallies. | ||
| What do we do with segments of society that will gleefully cheer for genocide without shredding our founding documents? | ||
| You're speaking my language because while I'm a great defender of the First Amendment and the- I know what I'm asking you. | ||
| I know what I'm asking you. | ||
| You know, I mean, you sort of teed me up for it. | ||
| I think that the way to defend our First Amendment and free speech in the American tradition is to put a little emphasis on the tradition part and a little less emphasis on the abstract part. | ||
| Because free speech has come in recent years to mean something completely different than it did at the time of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| So today, the example I often go back to is Before the middle of the 20th century, if you were in a school, you could teach the Bible, but you couldn't teach pornography. | ||
| Today, if you're in a public school, you can teach pornography, but you're not allowed to teach the Bible. | ||
| And so, something has really shifted here, and what's shifted is our standards. | ||
| So, I'm not even suggesting that we pass a law against the pro-Hamas protesters in the streets. | ||
| Though similar laws have been passed and enforced in American history, but I'm not even suggesting that. | ||
| I'm suggesting that we recognize that an important question for a country that has free speech is not merely, can we say something, but what ought we to say? | ||
| Because free speech in the abstract doesn't mean anything to people who don't have something to say. | ||
| And so Rashida Tlaib to me is the perfect example of this. | ||
| Rashida Tlaib is the picture of the modern American left. | ||
| Outside of her official congressional office, she has four flags. | ||
| She has the Palestine flag, she has Michigan and Detroit flags, that's nice, and then she's got the LGBT rainbow flag. | ||
| Notice any flag that's missing there? | ||
| There's one that seems kind of important, the flag of... I can also see two with genocidal maniacs who love it. | ||
| And I'm not talking about Michigan and Detroit. | ||
| Yeah, although Detroit these days is not looking great either. | ||
| But I think it was Steny Hoyer, a very powerful Democrat in Congress, who said, well, Rashida Tlaib has every right to have that flag there. | ||
| It doesn't connote support for terrorism. | ||
| I'm talking about the Palestine flag. | ||
| It doesn't connote support for terrorism, and she herself is Palestinian. | ||
| And I guess he's right. | ||
| The Palestine flag does not necessarily connote support for terrorism. | ||
| It sure seems to very often, but it doesn't necessarily. | ||
| My issue is not that her flag in her office is Palestinian. | ||
| My issue is that a US politician is flying the flag of a foreign nation at a government office, at a non-diplomatic office. | ||
| That seems completely insane to me, especially to the exclusion of the American flag. | ||
| How should that be changed? | ||
| By passing a law? | ||
| I'm not saying we pass a law, but The Congress should not allow that. | ||
| Local communities should not remain neutral to important questions of expression, and specifically to pressing moral issues. | ||
| Because there's really no neutrality in the public square, and as we conservatives have pretended that there is, we've merely ceded the public square and the political order to the radicals. | ||
| By the way, I'll go a step further than you. | ||
| I mean, when we had Pride Month, which basically takes 364 days a year, I am completely against that invader flag being put up at any of our embassies or buildings or White House, which at the White House, they put it above the American flag, which also is a violation of certain codes, like it's just- Flag code, yeah? | ||
| Yeah, the flag, certain codes, the flag code. | ||
| Man, it's been a week. | ||
| Let's get to some of the political response on some of this stuff. | ||
| Tucker Carlson, who of course is no longer with Fox, and he's doing the show on ex-formerly Twitter, I suppose, he was very critical of Nikki Haley on some of her comments responding to these attacks. | ||
| So there's a lot at stake in how we encourage Israel to respond to the horrifying Hamas attacks. | ||
| Wisdom and long-term thinking are essential. | ||
| But you will not be surprised to learn that is not what we are getting. | ||
| Watch this person, for example, who happens to be the media's pick for President of the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is not just an attack on Israel. | |
| This is an attack on America, because they hate us just as much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what we have to understand is, this is the reason that we have to unite around making sure our enemies do not hurt our friends. | |
| America can never be so arrogant to think we don't need friends, just like we needed them on 9-11. | ||
| That's why Ukraine needs us when Russia's doing this. | ||
| That's why Israel needs us when Hamas and Iran are doing this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'll say this to This was an attack on America, she says, when in fact it was not. | |
| Moss did this, you know Iran's behind it, finish them. | ||
| They should have hell to pay for what they've just done. | ||
| This was an attack on America, she says, when in fact it was not. | ||
| And for that reason, we must "finish" Iran, a nation of nearly 90 million people. | ||
| What are we watching here? | ||
| This is not sober leadership. | ||
| She's a child, and this is the tantrum of a child. | ||
| Ignorant, cocksure, bloodthirsty. | ||
| Yet no one in Washington scolded her for it. | ||
| In fact, they aped her hysteria. | ||
| I have to say, and it slightly pains me to say this, I'm really disappointed in Tucker right now. | ||
| And Ben, that guy that we mentioned before over at Ear Network, he really went off on Tucker, and I shared it. | ||
| I think it was right. | ||
| Look, I'm with you, Michael, especially on this one, the Ukraine thing. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| We have poured money, and it's just insane. | ||
| This is a completely different situation. | ||
| But Tucker said a couple things there that make no sense to me. | ||
| First off, I have never heard anyone, anyone Say that Nikki Haley is the darling of the media. | ||
| I mean, just, I've never heard anyone say that, period. | ||
| And secondly, this wasn't an attack on America, except how many Americans were killed? | ||
| I think at least 11, and I think they have 22 American hostages right now, which as far as I know, we haven't even demanded back. | ||
| I mean, if you kill 11 Americans, is that not an attack on America at the very least? | ||
| That doesn't mean we just go in and bomb the place to high hell, but I think he's playing a bit of a duplicitous game here. | ||
| Andrew, what do you think? | ||
| Yeah, no, there's no question about it. | ||
| First of all, you could tell from what Nikki Haley was saying that she wasn't saying finish Iran. | ||
| She was saying finish Amash, who is backed by Iran. | ||
| So he willfully misunderstood her. | ||
| You know, the opposite of neoconservatism, this idea that we should fight every war everywhere, is isolationism. | ||
| And both of those are childish. | ||
| And the evidence that Tucker Carlson has subscribed to the childishness of isolationism is that | ||
| his argument against going into Ukraine was that Putin really wasn't as bad a guy as we | ||
| thought he was and he wasn't really our enemy. | ||
| That's the one argument you can't make for not going into Ukraine. | ||
| You can make all kinds of arguments, all kinds of good reasons to stay out of Ukraine or | ||
| limit the amount of support we give to Ukraine or be careful about Ukraine, all kinds of | ||
| arguments. | ||
| The fact that Putin is a sweetheart is not one of them. | ||
| The man is a gangster. | ||
| He's a genuine enemy of this country as well as anybody decent anywhere and he kills people | ||
| who disagree with him even if they live in other countries. | ||
| We have to oppose him, but how much is a fair question. | ||
| The same thing is true here. | ||
| Yes, of course, an attack on Israel is not an attack on America. | ||
| Sometimes Israel's interests and America's interests diverge, but an attack on our best ally in the Middle East is a moment for reflection and consideration of what we | ||
| should do. We don't have any other friends, any real friends in the Middle East except for Israel, and | ||
| it is an important wedge that we have gotten into a very, very troubled area from which a | ||
| lot of war tends to come. So I just thought, Tucker, that was just bad reasoning. It was drum beating, | ||
| and it was basically trying to stir up the America first crowd. I... | ||
| I really was not thrilled with it at all. | ||
| Yeah, and I think I can speak for all of us, but correct me if I'm wrong, like we all like Tucker. | ||
| I've played clips of him all the time. | ||
| I think he's right on like 95% of the stuff. | ||
| I just think there's this weird, and Michael, about the Americans that were killed, like what would be a declaration of war on America? | ||
| I'm not saying we should declare war on Iran. | ||
| I do agree with Nikki Haley that Israel has to do whatever it has to do. | ||
| Everyone else is allowed to win a war and they should win a war against the enemy that's trying to kill them. | ||
| But what do you make of the oddness of not mentioning that, yes, a whole bunch of Americans were killed and are still captive right now? | ||
| I'll go a little softer on Tucker Carlson, but I'll reframe it from from Nikki Haley's comments because it might well be the case she was talking about Hamas, not talking about finishing the Iranian regime. | ||
| But other people like Lindsey Graham are calling. | ||
| Yeah, we'll get to that. | ||
| We'll get to Lindsey in a second. | ||
| Why don't I play the clip? | ||
| Why don't I play the clip right now and then you can address that. | ||
| Okay, so here's Tucker talking about Lindsey Graham and Dan Crenshaw. | ||
| Here's fellow neocon Lindsey Graham just spelling it out and calling for the bombing of Iran. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I've been on the phone all day to the Mideast, and I've told our allies and people with connections to Iran what I would do. | |
| I would tell Iran that if Hezbollah attacks Israel, we're going to come after you, the Iranians, and have a coordinated effort between the United States and Israel to put Iran out of the oil business by destroying their refineries. | ||
| There are four major refineries in Iran. | ||
| They're fixed targets. | ||
| If Hezbollah attacks Israel, I would make Iran pay a heavy price. | ||
| What exactly would happen to the United States if we declared war on Iran and started blowing up their infrastructure? | ||
| Lindsey Graham has no clue what would happen. | ||
| He hasn't thought it through. | ||
| He's almost 70 years old and he has no children. | ||
| He doesn't care. | ||
| But neither amazingly do most of his colleagues in Washington. | ||
| They're as reckless as he is. | ||
| Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw took to social media to call for what he described as a war to end all wars. | ||
| As if there is such a thing. | ||
| But of course there isn't such a thing. | ||
| Wars beget more war. | ||
| The bigger the conflict, the uglier and longer lasting the consequences. | ||
| See World War I for details. | ||
| Knows I'm gonna let you chime in, but he's doing a couple things there. | ||
| Some wars do end things. | ||
| World War II ended horrible things. | ||
| It doesn't end all wars. | ||
| But also, yes, I'm completely in agreement that what Lindsey said there, but that's very different than what Nikki said. | ||
| Lindsey said something completely different. | ||
| Nikki was clearly saying take out Hamas. | ||
| That's very different than saying blow up Iran. | ||
| The connection between the two, I think, is why, in many ways, Lindsey Graham has the clearer argument on this. | ||
| And it's an argument that Israel's making, which is Iran is obviously behind the Hamas attacks. | ||
| And so if you want to take out the problem, you've really got to weaken Iran. | ||
| And so it's a case where regime change in Iran is clearly in Israel's interest. | ||
| Regime change in Iran might be in the American interest, but I'm not totally convinced of that, and I'm not necessarily convinced of that right now, where so many recent regime change wars have not been in America's interest. | ||
| Regime change in Iraq, regime change in Libya, regime change in Egypt, and especially when we're at this moment of... We were already on the brink of World War III. | ||
| I mean, the first major war in Europe since World War II. | ||
| It should give us all a little bit of pause, especially as that conflict In which the United States is effectively a belligerent, because we're the only reason Ukraine can keep fighting, has brought Russia and China, two of our enemies, closer together. | ||
| That's a little nerve-wracking. | ||
| You see Xi Jinping already starting to saber-rattle in the South China Sea and Taiwan. | ||
| What would it mean if the United States declared war on Iran right now? | ||
| You've already got Lebanon effectively entering into the war, because Hezbollah is entering Israel from the north. | ||
| You know, a regional conflict Coupled with another regional conflict could very quickly spiral out of control into a third world war, at which point China obviously goes into Taiwan. | ||
| So now you've got fighting basically all around the globe. | ||
| And it's why, without getting into the specifics on Tucker, maybe he's overstating it, maybe he's misrepresenting what Nikki Haley said, I do agree with the broad point, which is the American interest right now in Israel, and the facts are changing by the minute, is to contain the war, to keep this as a regional war that will end as quickly as possible. | ||
| Is that likely to happen? | ||
| I'm not so sure, but I don't think that it would be in the interest of the United States for us to escalate things. | ||
| By the way, for the record, I actually do agree with that, which is why I sort of agree with Nikki, which is that you go in there, you do whatever, I've said it a lot of times this week, so I'm gonna say it again, you gotta do whatever the fuck you gotta do. | ||
| Right now, after what has just happened. | ||
| And you eliminate Hamas, and if you have to deal with bombs in the north, and what that means with Hezbollah. | ||
| But yeah, the Iran thing I do view as a different thing, even though it's deeply connected. | ||
| Guys, I don't feel we can end the show this way. | ||
| How do we end a week like this? | ||
| How do we? | ||
| Clavin, what are you up to this weekend? | ||
| Well, I'll be visiting families and obviously dodging the jihad, the fight against jihad to visit family. | ||
| I'll be tweeting Knowles' address so they can find him and distract the terrorists and put them where they should be. | ||
| I'm pretty sure you just called your family jihadis. | ||
| I'm gonna be visiting family and dodging the jihadists. | ||
| Or maybe I'll be visiting jihadis and dodging my family. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| It all depends how things go. | ||
| I think the important thing you really are right about this day the important thing is that you know you enjoy every moment and enjoy the things that we have here which are so amazingly great even now at one of our lowest points in my lifetime this country is still a great place to be and and remember the values that made it that way and you know they'll move on listen there's always hope and I am actually very hopeful it will pull through this is just going to be ugly for a while and it's been set up to be this way by our Weak and reckless administration, but hopefully that too will pass. | ||
| Nulls, he makes it tough to follow, but I'm going to give you the final word before we head out for the weekend. | ||
| I want to follow it. | ||
| I want to follow it with, by linking my activities to Drew's, because look, Drew, I'm going up to New York. | ||
| I figured there's no better way to celebrate the day of Jihad than by being in the Big Apple. | ||
| And so I hope, That we all make it out safe. | ||
| But if not, if we all go up in a fiery blast from some jihadi, I hope that it happens while you and I are having martinis in Manhattan somewhere over the weekend. | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
| Look at you guys with your martinis. | ||
| Last time you both were at my house, I tried to make Clavin drink some fancy tequila. | ||
| He almost spit in my face. | ||
| He can't do it. | ||
| You conservatives with your brown liquor. | ||
| All right, guys, it was a pleasure as always. | ||
| Truly, I mean this, I'm proud to be in the fight with you guys. | ||
| I thank everybody for watching. | ||
| There's no post-game show today. | ||
| I've got a couple things that I have to take care of. | ||
| Part two with Megyn Kelly, who's also on that short list of talkers that make some sense, is up right now across platforms. | ||
| And we'll close you with something decent for the weekend. | ||
| I leave it up to my team. | ||
| All right, ciao. | ||
| I'm asked all the time, so Dennis, are you optimistic or pessimistic? | ||
| And this is my, not only the answer I give people, but it's what I believe. | ||
| But of course, I tell people what I believe, so I shouldn't have had to add that. | ||
| But in any event, I say, you know what? | ||
| I'm not particularly interested in either optimism or pessimism. | ||
| Because, ironically, they both conserve a negative purpose. | ||
| The optimist thinks everything will turn out well. | ||
| Why fight? | ||
| The pessimist thinks everything will turn out lousy. | ||
| Why fight? | ||
| I never ask if I'm optimistic or pessimistic. | ||
| I ask, what do I have to do? | ||
| And the answer is fight. |
Export Selection