March 21, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Such things as a constitutional crisis, it does happen, right? | ||
| But the judiciary does not want to play this out. | ||
| I mean, Hamilton writes in Federalist 78 that they're the least dangerous branch because they depend upon the efficacy of the executive branch, even for the enforcement of their own judgments. | ||
| That's literally true. | ||
| I mean, people don't think about this. | ||
| I mean, how do you literally enforce a judgment? | ||
| Well, you actually get U.S. Marshals to do it. | ||
| But U.S. Marshals, who do they actually work for? | ||
| The president. | ||
| Yeah, they're in the DOJ. | ||
| The U.S. Marshals literally work for Pam Bondi. | ||
|
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*Music* | |
| All right, guys, we have a rare Friday sit-down for you. | ||
| Yes, it's true. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is The Rubin Report. | ||
| And joining me is a co-Florida man, the host of The Josh Hammer Show, the senior editor at large at Newsweek and the author of the new book, Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West. | ||
| Josh Hammer, welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, you're a dear friend. | ||
| I appreciate the opportunity, once again, to converse with you. | ||
| Josh, don't butter me up, but first... | ||
| Let's start, because I was glancing at the cover here, and every single person, from the cover of the book to the back of the book, is a Rubin Report refugee. | ||
| We've got Mark Levin on the front, Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck, Governor Ron DeSantis, Dana Loesch, Yoram Hazoni, and Liz Wheeler. | ||
| So you basically wrote this book using just old clips of my show, I assume. | ||
| Dave, it's almost as if you're going to appreciate this book when you start to dive into it. | ||
| It's almost as if this book was written for you and your audience. | ||
| I can probably retire after this. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Actually, before we get into... | ||
| I would almost rather talk about anything, actually, besides that. | ||
| I feel like if we talk about Jews a lot, it's probably not a great time or good things happening to the Jews. | ||
| But we will talk about that in just a sec. | ||
| But I want to talk about something else for a second, because you're also a lawyer. | ||
| And there's been a bit of an interesting thing happening as it relates to Trump and these deportations and now a lower circuit court basically trying to reverse the deportations, trying to literally turn a plane back from El Salvador. | ||
| I have seen a lot of people I respect on our side. | ||
| Sure. Yes, | ||
| yes, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, the Constitution is quite old. | ||
| So, look. | ||
| The real question here, from a legal perspective, is are these judges acting in line with the judicial power of which the Constitution speaks? | ||
| So Article I, Article II, Article III. | ||
| Article III establishes the federal courts there. | ||
| The very first clause is the vesting clause of Article III. | ||
| The judicial power is the phrase that is used to describe the actual, well, judicial power. | ||
| So what does it mean? | ||
| What does it not mean? | ||
| There has been a misconception in America for a very long time. | ||
| That the judicial power encompasses the ability of any judge from a lone judge up to and including the Supreme Court to basically bring an entire program, an entire government, if need be, to halt. | ||
| That is actually not what the judicial power means. | ||
| So that's sort of what the judges are trying to do right now. | ||
| You've got a lower district court saying, oh, I'm not on board these deportations. | ||
| I can put a stop to it because I'm a separate and equal branch. | ||
| Correct. And they're calling it sometimes a so-called temporary restraining order. | ||
| Sometimes it's a preliminary injunction. | ||
| Sometimes it's a nationwide injunction. | ||
| It's all getting at the same idea, which is that one little puny judge sitting in his chambers in Seattle, Hawaii, here in Florida, Maine, whatever, can just stop an entire government program there. | ||
| But in actuality, what the judicial power does, literally going back, we want to, to Marbury versus Madison, the 1803 case that established judicial review. | ||
| It applies to the parties to the suit. | ||
| So the actual judicial power is a judge issues a judgment that binds the litigants to the suit. | ||
| The notion that you can ever bind. | ||
| Of the case that he's presiding over. | ||
| Like, dude here, you're plaintiff. | ||
| Dude here, you're defendant. | ||
| I'm issuing a judgment in my fancy robe and my old wig that they used to wear back. | ||
| And they still wear that, I think, over in London in the UK, the old barrister wigs. | ||
| So I issue my judgment. | ||
| You're bound. | ||
| You're bound. | ||
| Beyond that... | ||
| No one is actually strictly bound. | ||
| By the way, the number one person in American history who most understood this, actually, is my hero in American history, Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| So after the Dred Scott case of 1857, the worst case in Supreme Court history, held black people are not citizens, they can never be citizens, Lincoln in his Lincoln-Douglas debates the next year basically said, I'm not going to follow this as it pertains to anyone other than Dred Scott. | ||
| And then when he was president, he literally just completely ignored it. | ||
| He defied Dred Scott. | ||
| He issued passports to blacks in Western territories in direct defiance of the ruling there because he understood that the judicial power just bound Mr. Dred Scott in that case there. | ||
| So, ultimately, Dave, the way that this has to end... | ||
| SCOTUS has to take a case where they rule once and for all that the notion that a judge can issue what lawyers would call injunctive relief, an injunction, a temporary restraining order, they have to rule that doing this on a national level is completely unconstitutional. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| Because basically you'd be completely unable to govern if that was the case. | ||
| Because in essence, any sitting judge could do anything as it relates to anything to kind of dumb it down for you. | ||
| So it would basically turn... | ||
| It would turn it into juristocracy, into rule by judges here. | ||
| And look, it depends how far you and I want to go down the rabbit hole here. | ||
| Part of this goes back to a somewhat obscure 1958 case called Cooper v. | ||
| Aaron, which was the very first time that the Supreme Court said that we are the law of the land, even a bare 5-4 majority. | ||
| That's not how it works. | ||
| All three branches have the legitimate... | ||
| Not just the right, but the actual duty obligation to faithfully interpret the Constitution and apply it as pertains to their own legitimate powers. | ||
| This is actually the beauty of the separation of powers. | ||
| When Madison said in Federalist 51, ambition must counteract ambition, this is actually what he was talking about. | ||
| Do you have any fear that if this works its way up to the Supreme Court that they would go the wrong way on it, so to speak? | ||
| Dave, I am always terrified of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. | ||
| I probably could have stopped at Always Terrified in general, but I mean, I'm totally always terrified of this Supreme Court. | ||
| I mean, ever since I was a law student, I've always been a consistent pessimist about all things judicial branch related, to be honest with you. | ||
| But honestly, on a bread and butter separation of powers case like this, I'm less pessimistic than most. | ||
| I think that they actually would rule the right way. | ||
| Right. Unless they just suddenly feel that they're like drunk with power and it's like, boy, we could in essence legislate from the bench, which then we're in a genuine constitutional crisis, right? | ||
| Yes. Look, such thing as a constitutional crisis, it does happen, right? | ||
| But the judiciary does not want to play this out. | ||
| I mean, Hamilton writes in Federalist 78 that they're the least dangerous branch because they depend upon the efficacy of the executive branch even for the enforcement of their own judgments. | ||
| That's literally true. | ||
| I mean, people don't think about this. | ||
| I mean, how do you literally enforce a judgment? | ||
| Well, you actually get U.S. Marshals to do it. | ||
| But U.S. Marshals, who do they actually work for? | ||
| The president. | ||
| Yeah, they're in the DOJ. | ||
| The U.S. Marshals literally work for Pam Bondi, right? | ||
| So like a month ago or whatever, this judge in Rhode Island, Judge McConnell. | ||
| He's threatening to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt unless they do XYZ thing. | ||
| And my response was... | ||
| Okay, let's literally play this out. | ||
| I mean, how is this going to work in practice? | ||
| You're going to hold someone in criminal contempt while the U.S. marshal just might not enforce the order. | ||
| Worst case scenario, you hold someone in contempt, well, then Trump just pardons him. | ||
| So one way or the other, the judiciary is not going to win this battle. | ||
| So just one more thing on this and then we can move on, which would be, so if we were really trying to steel man the other argument here, the other argument you think it basically just boils down to this sort of discrepancy between the lower court and the higher court, right? | ||
| Is that like the simplest way of saying it? | ||
| So that's part of it. | ||
| The other part here as pertains to this thing that Mark Levin and Hugh Hew were talking about, this Judge Boesburg-Trendi-Aragua thing. | ||
| You know, the planes were literally not even here in the U.S. So, I mean, even just conceding for the sake of argument that so-called nationwide injunctions are a thing, which they're not. | ||
| But even conceding that for the sake of argument, as lawyers do, you can't bind someone who's over international waters. | ||
| So even on the basic facts in this case... | ||
| It just doesn't pass any kind of muster here. | ||
| At some point, Donald Trump really had an imperative to stand up to one of these lawless punks. | ||
| And that really is what they are, is they are lawless punks. | ||
| I mean, this Judge Bosberg seems like he's got a daughter working for some kind of left-wing NGO. | ||
| I mean, it's a similar story for all of them, honestly. | ||
| So at some point, he had to stand up there. | ||
| I said one more, but let me give you one more bonus on this, which is, would you be worried at some point? | ||
| And I'm with you on this and I understand the legal rationalization. | ||
| Would you be worried at some point that if Trump goes after enough judges, that it does disintegrate the judicial branch at some level, that judges will be afraid to ever go against the president and something like that? | ||
| I mean, I guess you could argue the complete reverse right now, that that's what they're | ||
| Right, so it goes both ways, right? | ||
| The judiciary is kind of the ones who I think who are putting their own credibility at risk. | ||
| You know, there's actually a wonderful line on this. | ||
| So Anthony Scalia had a dissent back in 2015, and he had this blistering dissent. | ||
| And the final paragraph of this dissenting opinion is he says, With every instance that we go, with overstepping our legitimate boundaries—I'm paraphrasing, David. | ||
| It's a close paraphrase. | ||
| With every decision that we go, with overstepping our legitimate boundaries and exposing our own hubris, we get ever closer to being reminded of our own impotence. | ||
| And that's the key word, impotence. | ||
| That's kind of what I was saying a few minutes ago, is that they're not going to win this. | ||
| Now, here is where I will throw you a bum. | ||
| The instance that I personally actually start to get worried is if there is a Supreme Court judgment. | ||
| That binds, let's say, Donald Trump, because he could be a named party. | ||
| Trump versus Hawaii was a case from the first term. | ||
| If there's an actual party named Trump, and then Trump basically sticks to middle fingers, that's a problem. | ||
| There's a problem. | ||
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All right. | |
| I think we should probably put a pin in it there and we'll see how some of it shakes out. | ||
| It's a damn shame that this episode is not sponsored by Bluetooth because you just said impotence and it would have been perfect. | ||
| Okay, let's move on. | ||
| I started by saying that it's kind of better. | ||
| I think it's better for America and Jews and Israel and free people in general when people are not talking about Jews because when things are basically okay for the Jews, it's pretty much okay for everybody. | ||
| When things go sideways, Sideways for the Jews, it's usually bad pretty much for everybody. | ||
| I think that's largely what this book is about. | ||
| I know you've been working on this for years, and this is something that you care about very deeply. | ||
| What was the original idea of why you even wanted to write about this book? | ||
| Did you start writing this before October 7th? | ||
| After. It was after October 7th. | ||
| So was that really the thing that was like, I have to write something about this because you were seeing the hysterical reaction? | ||
| Yeah. You know, Dave, I've been a writer for a long time. | ||
| I mean, you and I, I think, first met when I was working for The Daily Wire. | ||
| I was a writer for them. | ||
| So I've been a writer for a long time. | ||
| I write a weekly syndicated column. | ||
| I mean, you and I just did the whole law thing. | ||
| I've written legal scholarship, right? | ||
| So I've done everything in writing that you can do other than write a book. | ||
| So I wanted to write a book. | ||
| So I started initially outlining a totally different book back in the summer of 2023. | ||
| Kind of like a... | ||
| Kind of like a more standard, kind of like, I'm a young conservative guy. | ||
| Here's my idea as to where we are and where we should go. | ||
| I'm not dismissing that. | ||
| I mean, for all I know, that could be my next book. | ||
| So I don't want to kind of bite off the hand that might feed me. | ||
| But October 7th did happen. | ||
| And I chose to write this not just because of October 7th, but because of the reaction to October 7th. | ||
| I mean, Dave, you and I are good friends, as this audience probably knows. | ||
| And I remember your show here on The Rubin Report on October 9th to the Monday afterwards. | ||
| I remember watching it vividly. | ||
| I mean, I felt you in that moment there. | ||
| We were in such pain, not just because of the Seven, but because within hours, within hours, people are trying to blame the victim. | ||
| They're trying to blame it on the Jews. | ||
| I mean, the world's had this moment here where you had this opportunity where the Holy Land, the Jewish people, a strong American ally, has just suffered its worst slaughter since literally Hitler and the Nazis. | ||
| On the one hand. | ||
| And then on the other hand, you have this medieval Islamist death cult trying to take us back to the 7th century. | ||
| And the world could have said, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to side with the former, not the latter. | ||
| But literally within hours, you know, the 33 Harvard groups or whatever it was there, the cacophony was real and it was deafening and it was beyond disturbing. | ||
| I mean, like jaw dropping to the floor. | ||
| So it was really the reaction to the 7th that I said, okay, someone here has to defend not just the state of Israel. | ||
| But someone frankly just has to defend the Jewish people. | ||
| Someone has to defend just... | ||
| Really just the West, because the Jewish people helped build the West, as I argued in this book. | ||
| Yeah, so make that argument a little bit. | ||
| And while you do that, I'm going to put up a map of the Middle East, because I always think people focus on Israel so much, and it's the size of Jersey, barely eight miles wide. | ||
| It's unfathomably small, and there's this endless focus on it. | ||
| And yet it is influential, and Jewish people obviously are influential. | ||
| So what is that connection there, or what is that thing? | ||
| So, we talk a lot about how Western civilization is at a crossroads, right? | ||
| We can go one way, we can go the other. | ||
| We're at an inflection point. | ||
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I totally agree with that. | |
| I totally agree. | ||
| But, again, because I'm a lawyer, I like to define terms. | ||
| So, what is the West? | ||
| I mean, what is Western civilization here? | ||
| We're defending the West against the barbarians, but what are we defending? | ||
| Who are we defending there? | ||
| So, in the book, I argue that Western civilization effectively begins... | ||
| I think a lot of people would start the modern West a little later with the Greeks and the Romans and Aristotle and all that. | ||
| But I think it's a total misreading of history. | ||
| I mean, when you look at the American founding, when you look at Europe and the English common law, I mean... | ||
| They cared about the Greeks and Romans. | ||
| They cared a lot about the Bible. | ||
| I mean, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia has a quote from the Book of Leviticus. | ||
| I mean, you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin famously wanted the National Seal of the United States to be Moses parting the Red Sea. | ||
| I mean, heck, even a century and a half before that, you know, when William Bradford was on the Mayflower sailing across the Atlantic. | ||
| William Bradford actually spoke about a thousand words of Hebrew because he was tutored by a scholar back in England on the Hebrew Bible and all that. | ||
| And when he got to Plymouth Colony, they actually briefly discussed even just ditching the English language and speaking Hebrew because they were so enamored by the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew Scripture. | ||
| So this is really deeply ingrained. | ||
| In the American conscience there, and just part of bringing that back to the surface really is what I'm trying to do here as well. | ||
| The Jewish state of Israel is kind of just the geopolitical outpost of this same dynamic there. | ||
| Just as he who wishes to destroy the West first goes after the Jewish people, he who seeks to destroy, let's call it the nation state, the nation state order, will first go after Israel for multiple reasons. | ||
| It happens to be the Jew of the nations, but even more than that. | ||
| I argue in the book, Israel is actually the world's first nation state. | ||
| I mean, when King David unites the tribes in Jerusalem there, that's a nation state. | ||
| They had no extraterritorial ambitions there. | ||
| Frankly, actually, biblical Israel was a nation state in contrast to the Roman Empire, which was more of an imperial model. | ||
| So if you want to defend the modern nation state system, and I'm a national, if you like the nation state, if you oppose the Soros, Globalist, Klaus Schwab agenda, you know, it makes a lot of sense to defend the state of Israel on... | ||
| Nation-state, nationalist grounds there. | ||
| By the way, that's one of the reasons why Israel is so targeted at the United Nations. | ||
| Another reason is, of course, just good old-fashioned Jew hatred. | ||
| But there's a lot here. | ||
| But the point, Dave, for your question is here, there, and everywhere. | ||
| If you have civilizational ambitions to crush a big swath of the West, then you always start with the Jews. | ||
| Always. So, okay, so what, if you give me the three sentences, so what is the West specifically? | ||
| Individual rights, liberty, like, give me like the, let's, Posit both those ideas. | ||
| So one is the West. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So it is to an extent kind of the classic Straussian formulation of Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation. | ||
| But I make a hard case in the book that of those two, revelation is actually a little more important. | ||
| I think a lot of people kind of overdo it with the reason thing there. | ||
| The problem is that unaided reason, I mean, if you just sit there and close your eyes and you're, you know, you're... | ||
| You're trying to kind of think about what is reasonable. | ||
| I mean, this can go off the rails very, very quickly. | ||
| As Elon tweeted at Sam Harris before he left Twitter, you can mindfully meditate your mind into Bush or something like that. | ||
| Exactly. Look, I mean, Dave, I keep at my desk at all times a rock that a rabbi gave me from the crematorium of Auschwitz, which is a little intense, but it grounds me every day. | ||
| The Nazis thought they were acting reasonable. | ||
| Germany was a very advanced society. | ||
| It was one of the most philosophically, culturally, musically advanced societies in the world. | ||
| I mean, they thought they were acting... | ||
| With reason there. | ||
| So you have to tether it to something there. | ||
| And that tethering, I think, really does go all the way back to the Ten Commandments. | ||
| So yes, the West is this balancing of individualism with the common good, with nationalism for sure there. | ||
| But even something as basic as nation-state versus empire, that's all there as well. | ||
| I mean, frankly, going back... | ||
| Literally, to the book of Genesis, the collapse of the Tower of Babel is actually the first rejection of empire in favor of the nation-state. | ||
| So there's so much rich political philosophy, morality, ethics. | ||
| Dave, something as simple and prosaic as the golden rule, you know, treat others as you'd like to be treated. | ||
| Well, where's that coming from? | ||
| It's actually coming from Leviticus chapter 19. I mean, treat the stranger as your fellow. | ||
| So it's just... | ||
| It's just so much that we take for granted is all right and wrong. | ||
| Right. So you don't think it just magically appeared out of the Enlightenment, which seemingly a lot of more liberal thinkers seem to think, okay, all right, so that's broadly what the West is. | ||
| Now, this is a civilizational battle. | ||
| So what's over here? | ||
| It's ogres. | ||
| It's whatever they had in—who were they fighting in Game of Thrones? | ||
| It's somebody coming at the wall or something. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I'm actually not in Game of Thrones. | ||
| I probably should be. | ||
| There's always somebody and they got bad teeth and they're attacking the wall. | ||
| It's those guys. | ||
| So what's going on over here? | ||
|
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All right. | |
| So I pick out three forces in particular. | ||
| You have wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism. | ||
| Now, that's probably not an exhaustive list. | ||
| I mean, we could probably kind of have a more complicated taxonomy and devise new categories. | ||
| But to dumb it down, those are the three broad buckets. | ||
| You should have just said Democrats. | ||
| We get it. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It's true, honestly, these days. | ||
| Tragically, it really is true. | ||
| So wokeism and Islamism are pretty self-explanatory. | ||
| I have a whole chapter in the book about the threat from the woke DEI anti-Semitism, as well as some of this kind of more neo-Nitian nihilist anti-Semitism. | ||
| That's in that chapter as well. | ||
| Islamism, self-explanatory, okay? | ||
| Why don't you explain what the second one is? | ||
| I think most people get, like, Jews are thought of as successful, so you're thrown out of the DEI calculator. | ||
| That's the first one. | ||
| What's the nihilist version of that? | ||
| So I'm thinking here of some of these online... | ||
| I mean, even the Tate brothers, that's a very kind of current example, right? | ||
| The Tates, to me, are kind of trying to do a lot of old pagan ideas that are very anti-biblical. | ||
| This notion that... | ||
| The top thing to value is brute strength and manliness, and you can spread your seed for as far as it goes there. | ||
| I mean, this is very anti-Judeo-Christian, very anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-Milical. | ||
| This is old pagan stuff there. | ||
| And we've seen this new paganism creep up over and over again, by the way. | ||
| I mean, you know, frankly, kind of the whole gender ideology thing, I mean, the notion of gender-affirming care for children there, it's kind of a resuscitation of this old paganism as well. | ||
| So the lines do blur a little bit there. | ||
| Right. Do you blame the rise in that, the sort of Tate version of this smacking a 15-year-old and then being a hero to the conservatives? | ||
| Do you blame that on wokeism? | ||
| Like it was going to sort of be a natural reaction of, oh, you know, you can't be a man, a man is a woman. | ||
| Well, eventually they're just going to be like this rubber band reaction and men are going to be like sort of the worst version of men or the pagan version of men. | ||
| That's probably part of it. | ||
| I mean, part of it is also, like, the war on men and that people like Matt Walsh talk a lot about. | ||
| He's totally right. | ||
| I mean, when you tell men that they are terrible and evil and toxic, then eventually you're going to want to just burst out and show, I'm not. | ||
| I can lift a lot of weights here. | ||
| I'm strong. | ||
| I mean, so part of it is definitely that. | ||
| Part of it, I mean, not to sound like a crotchety old crank, but I guess I will for a second. | ||
| I mean, part of it, I think, genuinely is the decline of the influence of the Bible and religion here. | ||
| Because if you have that strong foundation here in the schools, in private sector there. | ||
| You wouldn't necessarily end up at a place like Andrew Tate there. | ||
| So that's the wokeism and kind of like the woke... | ||
| I don't like the term woke right, but for purposes today, I guess we'll call it the woke right. | ||
| Okay, so then there's Islamism, which is sub-explanatory, and that's Hamas October 7th. | ||
| That's the Bourbon Street Massacre that happened just two and a half months ago, as if Americans needed another reminder that this can't... | ||
| 14 people killed basically on New Year's Day. | ||
| Nobody talks about it. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
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No one talks about it. | |
| In the United States. | ||
| No one. | ||
| I mean, that was just two and a half months ago. | ||
| It's insane, honestly. | ||
| And then you have global neoliberalism, which is kind of what I'm talking about here. | ||
| It's basically John Lennon's song, Imagine, playing out on a global chessboard. | ||
| I mean, in the book, I call it the homogenizing imperative, seeking to make everyone the same, to eradicate all the various distinctions that make us normal, you know, who we worship, how we worship. | ||
| Just generally kind of familial congregation or the tribal things that really kind of make humans humans in the first place, including, by the way, the nation-state itself. | ||
| That's really their ultimate goal there. | ||
| So those are our enemies. | ||
| And the point, Dave, is that Jews and Christians who share a biblical inheritance, we have the exact same enemies. | ||
| As you and I were saying, they always start with the Saturday people, but their goal is always the Sunday people. | ||
| So Karl Marx is actually a good example. | ||
| So Karl Marx... | ||
| In the 1840s, he has this infamously anti-Semitic essay called On the Jewish Question. | ||
| He wrote it a few years before the Communist Manifesto. | ||
| His thoughts on the Jews are very clear. | ||
| He himself was Jewish. | ||
| He was kind of one of the world's foremost self-hating Jews of the 19th century. | ||
| His final goal was not the Jews. | ||
| He's quite explicit that his final goal is to overthrow all of Western capitalism, all of Western Christendom, that which the Christian civilization has admirably built there. | ||
| But he understands that you start with the original people of the book, the people that are called by Isaiah to be a light unto the nations. | ||
| You start with them and then you can launch from there to a much bigger target. | ||
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| So is that really what the focus on... | ||
| I keep saying to people post-October 7th, I'm Jewish, I happen to care about Israel. | ||
| I think you've laid out plenty of reasons why people who aren't Jewish should care about Israel. | ||
| But to me, it's like, the number one reason that if you were a Christian, you should care about Israel, putting aside all of the religious stuff, is if they take out Israel, they kill every last Jew, guess who's next? | ||
| And that really, I don't want to make that argument. | ||
| It's not a fun argument to make, but like, it's... | ||
| It's fairly obvious. | ||
| They're not going to be like, okay, we're wrapping it up. | ||
| Right. Well, Hamas is pretty clear about this, too. | ||
| I mean, Dave, anti-Semites in history, one thing I give them credit for, they're actually shockingly clear about what they believe. | ||
| I mean, Karl Marx laid it all out there on the Jewish question. | ||
| Hitler, I mean, he had a whole book on this, Mein Kampf, but people had just done the reading, so to speak, there, right? | ||
| So similarly, Hamas in the 1987 charter, which you can find publicly available, they're not hiding the ball there. | ||
| They're very clear. | ||
| They want to kill all the Jews. | ||
| They want to kill people like you and me. | ||
| They also want to kill all... | ||
| They even want to kill Glenn Greenwald. | ||
| I mean, he's out there simping for them all day long. | ||
| They even want to kill him. | ||
| Honestly, in my heart of hearts, I suspect they would probably spare Glenn Greenwald. | ||
| If I had to guess. | ||
| Well, till he's not useful. | ||
| But they also want to kill all so-called infidels. | ||
| So all Christians, frankly, most Muslims, who don't subscribe to their own fanatical version of Islam as well. | ||
| So they're not high on the ball there at all, whatsoever. | ||
| So yes, Israel as a state, just like the children of Israel, the Jewish people, the state of Israel is always the canary in the coal mine. | ||
| Always, always, always. | ||
| But the state of Israel, Dave, I have a whole chapter in this book making basically the, let's call it the MAGA, America First, realist case for U.S.-Israelians. | ||
| This is, I think, a very crucial point because there are a lot of people these days, you and I both see them out there, trying to say, oh, Israel, that's an old Bush administration issue. | ||
| It's an old neocon issue. | ||
| And, you know, I've been criticizing neoconservatism longer than these punks have known what the word neoconservatism even means there. | ||
| Before the frog meme ever came out. | ||
| I mean, I have always been a hard-headed realist. | ||
| I mean, to me, I look around the world at every geopolitical issue and I say, What is in the U.S. national interest? | ||
| And then based on my answer to that, what, if anything, should we do about it? | ||
| So as a realist, I look at the geopolitical map and I say, well, America's number one threat this century is clearly China, the Chinese Communist Party, no doubt about that whatsoever. | ||
| And I agree that America can and should strategically redeploy a lot of resources and assets into the Indo-Pacific, especially as the Taiwan threat heats up. | ||
| The relevant question then, from a kind of grand strategy geopolitical chessboard perspective, How can America best safeguard its very real interests in this very volatile part of the world, the Middle East, this uniquely jihad-ridden part of the world? | ||
| How can we do that while moving resources to the Far East? | ||
| The obvious answer is you emboldening your allies on the ground to take care of the region, to secure it and patrol it in a way that redounds to both of your interests. | ||
| As the case may be, Israel has consistently demonstrated... | ||
| That we Americans and they Israelis have effectively the exact same interests in the region. | ||
| I'll give you just one very brief example there. | ||
| So last summer, Dave, you're a film guy, so my favorite film of all time is The Godfather. | ||
| So I love the Michael Corleone baptism scene at the end there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pretty good. | |
| It's pretty good. | ||
| I mean, Godfather 2 technically, but Godfather 1 is my second favorite. | ||
| Anyway, so there's this amazing Michael Corleone Baptist scene there. | ||
| So Israel went on kind of a Michael Corleone Baptist scene, Revenge on Our Enemies killing spree last summer. | ||
| the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah. | ||
| Well, I guess Sinwar was after that, but it partially culminates with Nasrallah cowardly hiding his bunker in Beirut. | ||
| Before they got Nasrallah, they took out two high-ranking Hezbollah jihadis by the name of Fuad Shakur and Ibrahim Akhil. | ||
| Fuad Shakur and Ibrahim Akhil are the men responsible for, respectively, the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings that slaughtered 240-plus Americans and the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut. | ||
| Those two men had a $5 and $7 million U.S. State Department bounty on their head, respectively. | ||
| Nothing happened for four decades. | ||
| Israel finishes the job. | ||
| So people were like, oh, what does the U.S. get out of U.S.-Israel relations? | ||
| Well, you get a dead... | ||
| Ibrahim Makhil, you get a dead Fuad Shakur, and as if that's not good enough, you get a dead Hasan Nasrallah on top of that. | ||
| Right. But dead, bad people aside, there's a lot of other things that they get that I think maybe aren't explained properly. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Look, I mean... | ||
| Israel is often referred to as the second Silicon Valley there. | ||
| I mean, there's so much technologically speaking when it comes to military sharing there. | ||
| I mean, Iron Dome, of course, which is a brilliant and incredible piece of military technology, that is an Israeli innovation there. | ||
| Intelligence, I mean, we rely more on Mossad than probably any other country other than the so-called Five Eyes countries, UK, New Zealand, Australia, and so forth there. | ||
| So we rely very heavily on them for that there. | ||
| And more generally speaking, especially as things are now heating up with the Houthis and the Red Sea there, Trump has said that he's going to step up on the Houthis, and that's all well and good, I think. | ||
| I mean, they've come after American ships, so America clearly has a demonstrated interest there. | ||
| But even if we were to pull out of the region, if we were to basically just say to the IDF, you guys take care of the business here, again, we can trust them to do what is best, not just for themselves, but in a way that redounds to both of our interests as well. | ||
| Do you think it's possible that in this civilizational war that some of the countries in the West will survive and some will not? | ||
| Like, to me, it's obvious. | ||
| America is riding the ship right now, and I think partially because of the First Amendment, definitely because of the Second Amendment, also because of the way we've done the melting pot for so long and put such a premium on freedom and we're born in revolution. | ||
| I think we have much better machinery and, like... | ||
| You know, granular stuff to get through this civilizational battle. | ||
| I think Israel has it for cultural reasons, and maybe being small in this case actually does help them, and military. | ||
| Where then I look, and I was just in Britain, and it's like, it's a freaking disaster, and everyone's whispering about it. | ||
| France has it, Germany has it, Belgium has it, Holland has it, etc., etc. | ||
| Do you sense that this civilization, like... | ||
| That we're going to just lose some countries and some will survive? | ||
| Like, what do you think the map actually looks like? | ||
| I mean, I am utterly terrified about the future of Europe. | ||
| Completely terrified. | ||
| Dave, I lived in Europe. | ||
| I did a semester living in London in the UK. | ||
| I traveled all throughout there. | ||
| I mean, London has, like, a very special place in my heart, but I've not been in, like, 15 years now. | ||
| It ain't the same. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And, like, honestly, I'm terrified to go back because I feel like all my memories will, frankly, just be ruined by what I see today. | ||
| They've done it to themselves. | ||
| I mean, they've totally 1,000% done it to themselves because partially of this homogenizing, you know, all human beings are as interchangeable as widgets or pencils or whatnot. | ||
| This logic that you can just import foreign cultures and just substitute them for your own. | ||
| So I'm terrified about Europe. | ||
| I mean, the entire kind of European Union Eurozone experiment is basically one. | ||
| It's not exactly going particularly well by any metric, including just European Central Bank, monetary policy. | ||
| I mean, whoever thought it was a good idea for Germany and Italy to be on the exact same currency clearly knows nothing about economics. | ||
| I mean, none of it makes sense whatsoever. | ||
| So I'm totally terrified about the future of Europe. | ||
| I could totally see a world in which some nation-states survive through this inflection point that we've identified and some kind of get subsumed into various types of blobs. | ||
| I mean, is there a day where France and Germany could cease to be France and Germany and just become Europe? | ||
| Like, literally, like, without any kind of finer distinction? | ||
| I think it's totally plausible. | ||
| I think it'd be closer that they'd become closer to Saudi Arabia or something than just brought Europe. | ||
| That's the real problem. | ||
| Yeah, no, totally. | ||
| And I've seen it for myself. | ||
| I mean, my wife and I went to a wedding. | ||
| It was actually a wedding between two Israelis. | ||
| So it was an Israeli couple that got married less than a week after October 7th in Lake Como in Italy of all places there. | ||
| And very emotional wedding, as you can imagine. | ||
| But we spent time in Lake Como, went down to Milan there. | ||
| And my God, I mean, that's my first time back in Italy in, I don't know, five, six, seven years, whatever there. | ||
| Holy moly. | ||
| I mean, you barely recognize the place. | ||
| I mean, it's absolutely nuts there. | ||
| So that could easily happen in our lifetime. | ||
| And that could easily happen in a lifetime where you start seeing, for instance, and I'm going to get called a, you know, a fear monger here, but I think it happens to be true. | ||
| I mean, you could you could literally start seeing some legislators in some of these European parliaments start introducing Sharia legislation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, Scotland was getting close to that. | |
| I think Ireland could be heading that way, which is the craziest of all of them. | ||
| So, how much of this is just a numbers game? | ||
| That there's just an awful lot of these people, they're reproducing like crazy, like it just is, and sort of... | ||
| More successful, liberal, I mean in the good sense of liberal-minded people, don't reproduce as much. | ||
| You have maybe 1.7 babies. | ||
| They have eight babies. | ||
| We got a problem there. | ||
| The number one name in the UK right now is Mohammed. | ||
| By the way, the number one name in Israel is Mohammed because they name most of their kids, the 20% population, name most of their kids Mohammed. | ||
| And obviously there's a lot of Israeli names. | ||
| But even that, that says something. | ||
| There's a numbers portion here that's tough. | ||
| So Israeli Jews, though, have a birth rate of around three. | ||
| Sometimes I see it even higher than three. | ||
| And, you know, contrary to what a lot of people say, it's actually not just due to the very religious people. | ||
| Even secular Israelis have well over two children per household, based on most studies I've seen there. | ||
| So something is actually different in the state of Israel when it comes to this as well. | ||
| There's no magic formula for trying to convince people to have children there. | ||
| But I think general rule, above all... | ||
| When people are happy and they are confident about the future, that's when you want to start dating, getting married, having children there. | ||
| Unfortunately, the West, more broadly speaking, certainly the United States, we're not very happy people anymore. | ||
| We've kind of forgotten what it's like to be happy in many respects. | ||
| I mean, all the polling on this, are you optimistic about the future? | ||
| Are you happy? | ||
| Are you depressed there? | ||
| Does your life have meaning? | ||
| I mean, it's all terrible. | ||
| I don't want to give out black pills there, but the point is, like, it can be better. | ||
| Yeah. Well, you know my take on all this, because we're texting a lot with a couple of friends, and I'm always trying to give the white pill version of everything, like, things will get better. | ||
| That's the story of humanity, and I know you're a little more on the skeptical side of that, let's say. | ||
| But it seems to me that one thing that I find interesting right now is that there's obviously so many good things happening with this Trump presidency. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's happening really fast, and that's why people are freaking out. | ||
| But to see a portion of people on the right that are hysterical about a million things, I'm like, guys, you got the president you want? | ||
| There's so many good things happening. | ||
| We're closing the border. | ||
| We're deporting. | ||
| But I think some people are just afraid of actual success in some sense. | ||
| And maybe that's what the West is largely afraid of. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Look, I mean, the Trump administration has been a smashing success as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| I mean, look, a couple of like... | ||
| Things that I could, like, maybe criticize if I'm feeling very... | ||
| What would even be if you were really trying? | ||
| If I were really trying... | ||
| Yeah, try. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
| I don't like the TikTok stuff. | ||
| I'm like a banned TikTok because, to me, it's not just about China. | ||
| It's also about... | ||
| It's, like, really bad for kids. | ||
| Like, there's, like, a mental health portion here, too. | ||
| It's not just a national security China concern. | ||
| But that's, like— All right. | ||
| I was just trying to get something out. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You don't like TikTok. | ||
| But that's really nitpicky, okay? | ||
| You strike me as a big TikToker. | ||
| Yeah. I believe it or not, I've actually never done it. | ||
| Now, my mother-in-law, by the way, is a huge TikToker, so she will be devastated. | ||
| Oh, so that's why you don't like TikTok. | ||
| She will be devastated if TikTok actually goes away there. | ||
| But the point, Dave, is that there are ways that Americans can increase their happiness. | ||
| And, look, I'm not going to— I mean, I can personally speak to this, | ||
| right? I mean, I grew up very secular. | ||
| Very psycho. | ||
| I've only become religious over the past few years there. | ||
| I'm not saying everyone has to do what I've done, obviously, but just a personal example. | ||
| I mean, I genuinely do find more value and meaning when I feel that I'm living a lifestyle in accord with a certain direction and ultimately serving a certain being here. | ||
| And, you know, that's coincided with getting married and having kids. | ||
| You got married, you're punching way above your pay grade over there. | ||
| Everybody loves sheer and you have a new baby girl. | ||
| So, yeah, you're living it. | ||
| So, what do you think? | ||
| Moving away from the broad strokes of the West in this fight, Israel at the moment, they are in an existential war. | ||
| It seems like some of it's gotten a bit better, as basically Hezbollah's been taken out, so the North will kind of calm down, but they're still hostages. | ||
| There's going to be a problem in Judea and Samaria at some point. | ||
| It's bubbling a little bit. | ||
| If there's day after, what does it actually look like? | ||
| How do you get to the other side of the civilization? | ||
| So, let's be honest here. | ||
| The Middle East is not going to be stable, maybe ever as long as Islam is Islam, but at a bare minimum until the Iranian regime goes. | ||
| And to be clear, Josh Hammer is not calling to send in the 101st Airborne and start bombing Tehran. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| This is the clip they're going to go for. | ||
| No, that's not my stance, though. | ||
| It's never been my stance, in fact. | ||
| I have a very similar stance, frankly, to what Trump did the first time around, which is you do this whole crippling sanctions, maximum pressure campaign, try to get the people to just uprise and throw off this horrific cancer, this horrific regime there. | ||
| Unless and until that regime goes, I'm not sure there's ever going to be true stability in any of these hotspots you're talking about, whether it's Judea and Samaria, where there's all these Iran-funded militia groups, whether it's Lebanon, where you still have a trace of Hezbollah. | ||
| Yes, they're not nearly as strong as they were recently. | ||
| The Houthis in Yemen. | ||
| It really does all come back to Iran. | ||
| So that's part of the answer here. | ||
| Now, when it comes to Gaza in particular there, Israel genuinely has to finish this job against Hamas for at least two reasons that I can identify. | ||
| The simpler reason is that Donald Trump is basically telling them finish the job. | ||
| He's talking about unleashing the gates of hell there. | ||
| That ceasefire is clearly off now. | ||
| So Bibi has, and that's Prime Minister Netanyahu, he has full-blown permission. | ||
| The problem is that if he doesn't finish the job from this perspective, Donald Trump's a leader, I think, who abhors weakness and respects strength. | ||
| So if he's telling you to do something, you better do it, especially if he thinks that it's in America's interest, which, oh, by the way, obliterating Hamas totally is. | ||
| So he has no choice, Netanyahu, from that perspective. | ||
| The other reason that he has no choice, because at the onset of this war, Israel announced two very clear war aims. | ||
| They said, we're bringing the hostages home, and we're going to destroy Hamas. | ||
| Now, there are some hostages left, but they've made admirable progress on that front. | ||
| But Hamas is still there. | ||
| We saw that with these hostage exchanges there. | ||
| And the lingua franca, the language of the Middle East, is strength. | ||
| If you don't show that you are going to actually kick some butt and to actually fulfill your word and your vows, you lose all credibility. | ||
| You lose all deterrent there. | ||
| So they actually genuinely have to finish this job in Gaza. | ||
| I don't know how long it's going to take. | ||
| Right. So it's the inherent problem, though, if you're trying to save those remaining, it's about 22 people, I think, including an American who's still, at least one American who's still down there, that that could become, could basically be in direct conflict with what Trump laid out, which I agree with, which is open the gates of hell and these people have to leave. | ||
| The Gazans have to leave. | ||
| Go to Somalia. | ||
| Go to Egypt. | ||
| I don't even care where they go. | ||
| But that's in conflict, perhaps, with saving those 22 people. | ||
| I think that's really why this has dragged on. | ||
| All right, so I'm going to sound like a heartless and callous bastard, but I'll say it anyway. | ||
| I actually think that Israel messed up at the beginning by announcing these two war aims as being on the same footing. | ||
| Look, if I had a loved one down there, of course I would be at the parliament every day pleading to do whatever you can. | ||
| But trying to think clear-eyed and sober for a second here, it does seem to me that one of these two aims, meaning the eradication of Hamas, is pretty clearly more important, actually, than the other. | ||
| I hate to think of them as being in tension at loggerheads. | ||
| No, it's a horrible, fascinating thing. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| It's been awful for a year and a half now. | ||
| But to the extent that they are in tension there, you really do have to prioritize actually getting Hamas out. | ||
| Now, Judean Samaria is a more complicated question, right? | ||
| You mentioned that earlier. | ||
| I care a lot about Judea and Samaria. | ||
| I care a lot about that. | ||
| I mean, that's the actual heartland. | ||
| I mean, frankly, going back to where the Bible was based. | ||
| I mean, the Bible was not in Tel Aviv. | ||
| The Bible was in towns like Jericho. | ||
| I mean, really throughout the hills of Judea and Samaria, right? | ||
| Jesus of? | ||
| Jesus of Judea. | ||
| I mean, Jesus was a Jew from Judea. | ||
| He was not this kafia-clad Hamasnik that these leftist propagandists portray him as or anything like that there. | ||
| I'm very eager to see what Donald Trump says about Judea and Samaria. | ||
| That's kind of one of my big questions at this moment that we're talking is, is he going to take the same approach to Judea and Samaria that he took to Gaza? | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| I think it's entirely possible. | ||
| What I definitely know is that the old Oslo Accord-style, quote-unquote, two-state solution for Judea and Samaria has obviously been a demonstrable failure. | ||
| And if there's anyone in America who was well-equipped to change the paradigm on that issue, it certainly is Donald Trump. | ||
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| Alright, so let's say... | ||
| Well, in some sense, okay, so the Israel portion is removed, meaning Israel does finish the job, or it's this protracted thing that kind of never ends, something like that. | ||
| Where does that leave the rest of the West in terms of the signaling, I suppose? | ||
| Like, if they can't finish Hamas, or they can't get the hostages out, I think what actually portends for the rest of us in America and across Europe is something unbelievably horrific, because we have these people at our borders now. | ||
| We know it. | ||
| If Israel cannot finish a job against Hamas, then it's unclear to me whether a Western nation state will ever be able to win a defensive war against an enemy again. | ||
| I mean, that basically is what this comes down to. | ||
| I mean, Israel is basically trying to teach the West how to fight an actual war. | ||
| The West has not fought—I mean, certainly we in the United States have not fought a true war against a true— Existential enemy to its fruition until World War II, right? | ||
| And that is what total war looks like. | ||
| I mean, the carpet bombing of Dresden. | ||
| I mean, the people talk about Israel committing genocide in Gaza there. | ||
| I mean, guys, go back and look at Dresden. | ||
| Go back and look at Hiroshima, okay? | ||
| I mean, that's what total war looks like. | ||
| That's not what's happening in Gaza for the past year and a half. | ||
| But unless Israel can finish a job and basically teach the West all over again how to actually win a war, It's not obvious to me that—I mean, let's play this out. | ||
| I mean, God forbid, God forbid if South Texas or the Sonoran Desert in Arizona had an October 7-style event from the Sinaloa cartel or Jalisco or one of these horrific drug cartels operating there in northern Mexico there. | ||
| We'd bomb Canada. | ||
| Right, with the current guy. | ||
| No, you're probably right, honestly, at least as long as Trudeau's liberal party is still in charge there. | ||
| But would America actually have the fortitude to go back in Pancho Villa style and actually go take out the cartels? | ||
| I don't know, honestly. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think under Trump, the answer is yes. | ||
| The question is, what would we do to protect our hostages and things of that nature? | ||
| I think in terms of just blowing shit up in Mexico, yeah, we would do it without even thinking twice. | ||
| And I think you're right about that, to be clear there. | ||
| But, you know, again, to kind of tie this transits conversation together. | ||
| One might argue that part of the whole, like, Isaiah, light unto the nations thing there is teaching the world how to do certain things there. | ||
| So if Israel can kind of, again, remind the world how to deal with a situation like this there, one might say it's morally incumbent upon them to do so from that perspective as well. | ||
| That's a little bit of a stretch when it comes to the analogy there. | ||
| I genuinely do worry about it. | ||
| Look, to your point as the fact that we are now filled with subversive actors, I mean, sadly, that's just demonstrably true. | ||
| I mean, the Bourbon Street guy was radicalized in a mosque in Houston, Texas there. | ||
| It's horrible stuff. | ||
| I mean, I've been to Michigan multiple times in recent months. | ||
| I mean, I've driven through Dearborn. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty terrifying, honestly. | ||
| And how long do you think a society can hold like that? | ||
| How long can a Western society that's trying to hold up to the ideals that you mentioned at the top can have, okay, I don't like Elon Musk because he's doing something with Doge, so I'm going to blow up a Tesla charger station, or I don't like Donald Trump because he seems to like Israel, | ||
| so I'm going to occupy Colombia. | ||
| How long do you think that sort of thing can hold? | ||
| I don't think it can hold much longer, actually. | ||
| So... | ||
| So, my argument in the book, and just kind of in general, Is that you have to affirmatively stand for something. | ||
| So values neutrality is here, there, everywhere, and non-option. | ||
| I mean, this is the whole national conservatism argument, right? | ||
| Is that you actually have to put forward a concrete vision as to what you stand for. | ||
| because when you do the whole liberalism marketplace of ideas thing and you say, oh, all ideas are created equal, whether it's Sharia law or whether it's, | ||
| Right. I mean, | ||
| we see that actually... | ||
| The liberals usually get beheaded is what you're trying to say. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, we see that actually in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, frankly, for years and years, the so-called pro-Israel side would just say, two states, two states, we just want peace. | ||
| I mean, that's not a substantive argument there. | ||
| That's a purely kind of relativistic procedural argument. | ||
| On the other side, the bad people, the students of justice in Palestine, their side... | ||
| They're putting forward a moral vision. | ||
| Now, it happens to be grossly immoral, but it's a moral vision rooted in kind of colonialism and oppression, all this DEI, neo-Marxist garbage there. | ||
| So values, neutral proceduralism is never, ever, ever going to get the better, I think, of a substantive vision there. | ||
| So here on the Home Fund, when you're dealing with folks like the Hezbollah apologists in Dearborn, I mean, one of my solutions to that is that – | ||
| All hands on deck, including but not limited to the actual government itself. | ||
| I mean, we've basically been trying this whole values neutrality thing since World War II. | ||
| I mean, America has been, one way or the other, kind of a left liberal or a right liberal experiment for going on, you know, six, seven, eight decades now. | ||
| It's not working. | ||
| It's literally not working. | ||
| Immigration is obviously a core piece of this puzzle, too. | ||
| But the point is, a lot of these folks So you have to do something. | ||
| And I think that trying to take a stand from the government on down and saying that we are this, while respecting First Amendment and everything there, but we stand for this. | ||
| This is what it means to be an American today. | ||
| That would be a strong start, I think. | ||
| And it seems like that's starting to happen. | ||
| I mean, Rubio, I think, has been particularly good at this, right? | ||
| So if this civilizational battle does not go completely sideways, what do you think America and the Western world look like in five years? | ||
| Maybe this is what the last few pages of the book are about, but I just got my copyright when you walked in. | ||
| So I am an optimist. | ||
| I mean, you know, Dave, you mentioned... | ||
| Some of these group chats that you and I are in together, and you're kind of the big white pill guy. | ||
| I'm just always trying to make sure not everybody's killing themselves. | ||
| I'm like a white, gray pill guy. | ||
| I'm somewhere in the murky middle. | ||
| I'm definitely not a black pill guy. | ||
| I do remain optimistic. | ||
| I really do remain optimistic because most Americans fundamentally in their core are very, very, very good people. | ||
| I mean, we chat offline about this. | ||
| I mean, the number of examples of just... | ||
| Salt-of-the-earth people that are standing for truth and righteousness, I mean, in the Israel issue, have come out in favor of a people that they don't know, of a tiny country they don't know because they just recognize that it is the right thing to do. | ||
| That's absolutely inspiring. | ||
| And, you know, even the younger generation, there's a lot of people who get very upset about how out of touch the younger generation is. | ||
| I mean, even when it comes to the 2024 election, though, I mean, the 18 to 29 demographic was basically a statistical margin of error between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris there. | ||
| I mean, to be clear, there's some work to be done there on, like, the Middle East stuff, but they're not as crazy as people make it out to be. | ||
| The future is actually overall in largely decent hands, from what I can tell there. | ||
| I mean, as long as TikTok doesn't get off the prowl, right? | ||
| But I do remain pretty optimistic overall about the future there. | ||
| And the United States still remains the... | ||
| The bastion of Western civilization. | ||
| We are the indispensable cog there. | ||
| We have very strong leadership. | ||
| I happen to love what Donald Trump is doing there. | ||
| We'll see what happens in 2028 there. | ||
| It's going to be an interesting primary at that time there. | ||
| But as long as this general trajectory continues there, and you have to issue strong executive orders and pass strong laws. | ||
| Donald Trump obviously does not shy away from the bold stuff. | ||
| For example, his anti-DEI executive order, literally one of the most transformative executive orders, I've seen it in my entire life. | ||
| I mean, essentially, largely winning the culture war overnight without firing a shot. | ||
| I mean, between that and some of the transgender stuff there. | ||
| I mean, that's how you gotta play ball. | ||
| That's how you play ball on all of these issues. | ||
| Until a judge jumps in and tries to stop you. | ||
| And then we're back to where we started this conversation, obviously. | ||
| Josh, I am told that the book, which just came out... | ||
| Like, a couple days ago, we're posting this on a Friday, so it came out like three days ago, has already sold out the first run, but the people can buy the book, and it will appear sometime. | ||
| Do we know when, if they buy it right now? | ||
| Do we know how long it's going to take to get the book? | ||
| Yeah, so we actually sold out on Amazon literally the morning of publication day, which is both a great thing and a frustrating thing. | ||
| But no, I mean, seriously, I mean, like, you know, thank you to everyone who's bought it. | ||
| It is being replenished on Amazon right now, so if you buy it on Amazon, it should get here, God willing, this coming week, so not a particularly long delay. | ||
| It's also available on Barnes& Noble, Books A Million, and other vendors. | ||
| And what are the chances that the New York Times, which is a far-left rag on the wrong side of all of these issues, will put you on the bestseller list? | ||
| I did note that Don't Burn This Country should have been number one by sales. | ||
| They did not put me on there at all. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I mean, you've got a lot of scary words in here. | ||
| Israel, they don't like that word. | ||
| Civilization. Jewish, they don't like that word. | ||
| Nation, civilization, hammer. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| Dave, based on the fact that... | ||
| Let's take a gentleman's bet. | ||
| Gentleman's bet. | ||
| I'll take what side of the bet do you want? | ||
| Are you going to get on the list or not? | ||
| I'm going to go on a limb and say that I'm going to make it, Dave, but only because they're not going to watch this episode. | ||
| If they watched this episode and they saw that I was with major thought criminal Dave Rubin, I honestly might be screwed. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| We're all counting on you. |
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