True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 281: Next Year in Jerusalem
Aired: 2023-04-06
Duration: 01:18:55


=== Last Show Ever (02:36) ===

[00:00:00]  So before we get on with the episode, I need to jump in and let you know something that we forgot to record, which is we have one last live show coming up.
[00:00:11]  This is the last show ever on our year of the smile run.
[00:00:15]  We are going to be down in Austin, Texas, Austin, Tejas, on April 15th.
[00:00:22]  We're going to be at the Far Out Lounge.
[00:00:24]  Young Chomsky's performing.
[00:00:26]  You can get tickets at the link.
[00:00:28]  And this is going to be the last time we do this version of this show ever.
[00:00:32]  We're not doing it again.
[00:00:34]  And we're not recording.
[00:00:35]  We're not putting it out there.
[00:00:36]  This is it.
[00:00:37]  So if you want to see it, if you want to catch it before it's poof, like gone forever, forever, floating out into the morass of forgottenness, come on down and hang out with us in Austin, Texas at the Far Out Lounge, April 15th.
[00:00:51]  It's like in two weeks, which is crazy.
[00:00:54]  Or I don't know, maybe it's next week.
[00:00:56]  That's crazy too.
[00:00:58]  Unless you're listening to this in the future, in which case, damn, you fucked up.
[00:01:04]  You missed out.
[00:01:13]  So you know how we were doing the, like, we were listening back to our old episode?
[00:01:18]  Yeah.
[00:01:18]  We were talking about the old episode titles.
[00:01:20]  Yeah.
[00:01:21]  And then I remembered the first episode we did with Noah was called Jew Detective.
[00:01:25]  Jew Detective, yeah.
[00:01:26]  That's a great title.
[00:01:28]  I know.
[00:01:28]  And you know, we really brought back that ancient form of figuring out someone's race by the shape of their nose too.
[00:01:33]  That was, we pioneered, we repioneered that in that episode.
[00:01:36]  And look at how it's caught on.
[00:01:38]  It's huge now.
[00:01:39]  Well, that's the nose.
[00:01:40]  Yes.
[00:01:41]  Yes.
[00:01:41]  Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:01:44]  Hello.
[00:01:44]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:45]  My name is August Lil Brace.
[00:01:48]  We are, of course, joined by our beswaddled producer, Young Chomsky.
[00:01:54]  No, that's not that episode.
[00:01:56]  No, okay.
[00:01:56]  Fuck.
[00:01:57]  All right.
[00:01:57]  Well, actually, you know what?
[00:01:59]  No, don't even.
[00:02:00]  No.
[00:02:00]  Don't do it.
[00:02:01]  Brace.
[00:02:03]  There's a lot about adult baby diapers offers in the presentation.
[00:02:05]  This is Trunod. Happy Passover.
[00:02:31]  I had this crazy woman approach me on the way here, by the way.
[00:02:34]  Purple coat, purple pants, purple shoes, purple socks.

=== John Wick Meets Lydia Tarr (06:56) ===

[00:02:36]  Who's Barney?
[00:02:38]  And she was like, excuse me.
[00:02:40]  Is it Easter on Sunday?
[00:02:42]  And I was like, it is.
[00:02:43]  He's risen.
[00:02:44]  It is Easter.
[00:02:45]  What does she want?
[00:02:46]  What does she want?
[00:02:46]  Why is she wearing purple?
[00:02:47]  He's not here.
[00:02:49]  We did away with him.
[00:02:51]  If you live in the John Wick world, And listen, if somebody knows it, I've looked up for a brief minute, try to find out the answers to this.
[00:03:00]  I could not.
[00:03:00]  If you live in the John Wick world and you are a John Wick guy, like you're an assassin, who are you assassinating?
[00:03:08]  Who is your target?
[00:03:09]  So you're like obsessed with this problem, but only because you haven't seen the other people in the universe that could be targets.
[00:03:17]  Have I heard them mentioned?
[00:03:19]  Right, but you're saying like you're assuming that they don't it's just they're somewhere there's somebody there is an extraordinary amount of money of spiz flowing around in the John Wick universe.
[00:03:29]  I mean, these guys have have, I mean palaces, for Christ's sake.
[00:03:34]  And my question is like, so obviously they operate above the level of any government or international organization right, but where is the fund like?
[00:03:43]  Where are the funds coming from and who are they killing to get this powerful?
[00:03:46]  First of all, obviously one Bitcoin Bitcoin yeah, Bitcoin two I don't know man, it's a movie yeah, I know, but we're at the fourth one now and we really I have a question here is the John Wick Assassin Hotel.
[00:03:59]  So corny, you hate the assassin hotel.
[00:04:02]  I just like I think that I we were saying this before we started recording, but I'm gonna repeat myself because I think it's true and I want to share this with our listeners which is that John Wick, excluding the first one, because I think the first one is like very, very good yeah, and then second, third and fourth well, I haven't seen the fourth, but I assume it's like they sort of like live in what has what is now the called the John Wick universe, whereas the first one is like the standalone little movie right yeah yeah, of course it exists.
[00:04:28]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:04:29]  Yeah no no no, fully.
[00:04:30]  But so in the second and third one, the aesthetics of the movie are like walking this real fine line between or like.
[00:04:41]  Basically, what I would say is like some kind of like fashy, almost futuristic Euro vibe.
[00:04:48]  Yeah, it's very European.
[00:04:49]  It's like, welcome to Brussels in the future.
[00:04:53]  It rocks.
[00:04:54]  Are you bisexual?
[00:04:55]  Yeah, but then it's like you go to the hotel and it's like, oh, now it's cyber, it's like we're in the past.
[00:05:00]  Yeah, it's steampunk.
[00:05:02]  It's steampunk and I'm like I'm not here for that at all.
[00:05:06]  Something I noticed and I don't want to.
[00:05:07]  No spoilers for you guys okay, but for John Wick, a lot of pocket watch chains in there.
[00:05:13]  We don't see a lot of pocket watches come out, but there's a lot of guys wearing fully button vests with chains on their motherfuckers.
[00:05:18]  But is that a wallet chain or a watch?
[00:05:20]  You're not wearing the wallet right there.
[00:05:21]  First of all, they're all there.
[00:05:23]  Yeah, now a wallet chain in the John Wick universe wallet?
[00:05:28]  Probably RFID?
[00:05:30]  That would be sick as hell RFID.
[00:05:32]  I gotta say one of my most like Normy ass THE Ringer Podcast Network ass opinions about movies and I've held this for like 10 years and counting is that there should be a crossover between the Magic Mike universe and the Fast And Furious universe.
[00:05:50]  Magic Mike Stripper team teams up with the family to like fight car crime or whatever.
[00:06:00]  And there's some erotic dancing involved.
[00:06:02]  Car crime.
[00:06:03]  And I feel like that would make a lot of sense for everyone involved and it would be very fun.
[00:06:07]  I was thinking about this, whereas with John Wick, what I want to see is the John Wick crossover into the Lydia Tarr universe.
[00:06:17]  And that would be fucking awesome.
[00:06:18]  Yeah, you want to talk about who they're assassinating.
[00:06:20]  They kill Lydia Tar.
[00:06:21]  You want John Wick to kill Lydia Tarr?
[00:06:23]  No spoilers, no spoilers.
[00:06:25]  Okay.
[00:06:26]  I think John Wick in Lydia Tarr, but then Lydia Tarr and John Wick.
[00:06:31]  Oh, that's good.
[00:06:32]  Do you think John Wick could make Lydia Tarr straight?
[00:06:35]  Oh, no.
[00:06:35]  No.
[00:06:36]  Well, I haven't seen Tarr, but I get it.
[00:06:39]  My thing is what would be sick if John Wick, she's a concert lady, right?
[00:06:45]  Conductor?
[00:06:45]  Mystery.
[00:06:45]  Strained conductor.
[00:06:47]  She's a maestro.
[00:06:48]  Check this out.
[00:06:48]  John Wick, silenced pistol, right?
[00:06:52]  He sees the bad guy on the balcony, and John Wick is looking in the reflection of Lydia Tarr's podium, her conductor's podium, in the metal, because it's like a really, it's like a stainless steel because we're in Europe.
[00:07:07]  And he sees the reflection, the glint of a scope, and he goes back and goes, but see, here's the thing: is that in the John Wick universe, that scene would have like burgundy velvet drapes and a like Russian maestro with a ballerina.
[00:07:22]  Like it would be like so way too over-the-top theatrical.
[00:07:25]  Whereas if it were in my version of how the John Wick universe and ex-Lydia Tarr universe should be, it would be like in the UN.
[00:07:32]  You're like making it premium.
[00:07:33]  You know, you're talking like Deutsche Grammophone, John.
[00:07:36]  Yes.
[00:07:37]  I also, I think John Wick's lawyer, Michael Clayton.
[00:07:41]  That'd be sick.
[00:07:42]  We need to get Michael Clayton in there as his lawyer.
[00:07:44]  Do I look like I'm negotiating?
[00:07:47]  Yeah.
[00:07:47]  Now, that is a two having a conversation.
[00:07:51]  You could be.
[00:07:53]  Oh, I could easily be on.
[00:07:54]  I don't know what the ringer is, but I could easily be on.
[00:07:56]  You got to float that opinion on this.
[00:07:57]  Bill Simon is going to eat that shit.
[00:07:59]  My idea, though, before we get started, this actually segues us kind of nicely into the topic of today.
[00:08:03]  My idea for a completely, you know, how they try to make a Bob Odenkirk John Wick, one of my most hated movies I've ever seen in my life.
[00:08:09]  I've heard everyone in a row, you've mentioned it.
[00:08:10]  I know, but it really genuinely pissed me off.
[00:08:13]  I don't see many movies.
[00:08:14]  I saw that movie.
[00:08:15]  I did not like it.
[00:08:16]  You've seen more movies than I have this year.
[00:08:17]  They need to make John weak, like a little guy who really – I don't want to be doing this.
[00:08:23]  No, no, no.
[00:08:24]  Oh, this is terrible.
[00:08:25]  You know, John Wick throws the gun after he runs out of bullets.
[00:08:28]  This guy immediately throws the gun underhand at somebody to try to make them catch it.
[00:08:34]  And so that they get distracted.
[00:08:36]  And he's just like, no, you wouldn't hit a guy with glasses, would you?
[00:08:40]  And just running and John Weak.
[00:08:44]  It would really be because there's like a lot of people like myself who are physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, sexually weak.
[00:08:51]  And we need a role model of like a weak guy who's also not strong.
[00:08:55]  And just running.
[00:08:56]  What about Jared Leto?
[00:08:57]  Jared Leto, unfortunately, due to his sexual predilections, I can't look up to him.
[00:09:03]  However, I also, how tall is he?
[00:09:06]  I think he's a short guy, isn't he?
[00:09:07]  I don't know.
[00:09:08]  I'm sure.
[00:09:08]  He reads short.
[00:09:09]  Yeah, he reads short.
[00:09:10]  All famous people are short.
[00:09:11]  Yeah, he's short to me.
[00:09:12]  Yeah, except for famous women who are always tall.
[00:09:14]  Yeah.
[00:09:15]  That's cap.
[00:09:17]  Well, I'm thinking of just famous women are either tall or short.
[00:09:20]  Yeah.
[00:09:21]  But never middle.
[00:09:22]  Never middle.
[00:09:22]  Never middle.
[00:09:23]  You're either like what is middle height?
[00:09:24]  You're either like a 5'2 or you're a 5'10.
[00:09:28]  Or you're 6'3.
[00:09:29]  Yeah.
[00:09:30]  Yeah.
[00:09:30]  Brittany Griner.

=== Israel's Coalition and Constitutional Shifts (15:39) ===

[00:09:33]  Well, we've brought Noah Colwy in the studio, which is actually our bunker that we shelter in near Tel Aviv in case there's rocket attacks that come in at us.
[00:09:44]  Just playing.
[00:09:45]  We are here in the Brooklyn podcast food court right in the middle.
[00:09:50]  Microphone set up at the table to talk about a subject near and dear to our sparts.
[00:09:55]  I almost just said hearts.
[00:09:58]  Let's go with our spart.
[00:10:00]  I don't know what I was going to say with that.
[00:10:02]  I don't know what Brooklyn podcast lunch food hall means either, but just you know what I'm talking about with that, though.
[00:10:08]  Can you see?
[00:10:09]  No, no, spa.
[00:10:10]  No, I mean food hall like smorgasbord food hall.
[00:10:13]  Wow.
[00:10:14]  That's what our studio looks like.
[00:10:15]  Oh, yeah.
[00:10:16]  Yeah.
[00:10:16]  It's all it smells, it reeks of shellfish.
[00:10:19]  Famous Brooklyn barbecue.
[00:10:20]  We only serve clam sandwich, lobster sandwich, crab sandwich.
[00:10:24]  And we got a guy right over there making them and it stinks in here.
[00:10:27]  Noah, welcome to the show.
[00:10:28]  Thanks for having me.
[00:10:30]  Nice to have you back in person.
[00:10:32]  Yeah, much.
[00:10:33]  I am thrilled to be here in person.
[00:10:35]  The studio is lovely.
[00:10:36]  I wish you were wearing a shirt, but you know what?
[00:10:40]  Can't win everything.
[00:10:42]  Why are you here?
[00:10:43]  Israel.
[00:10:45]  And if memory serves and my eyes do not deceive me, there's been a couple of funky things going on in Israel in the last few months.
[00:10:56]  The Israeli government, which has the recently formed Israeli government, is led by the most right-wing people to ever lead a government in the history of Israel, which is, you know, hundreds of years old.
[00:11:14]  Yes, exactly.
[00:11:15]  Thousands of years old.
[00:11:16]  Yeah, it's actually thousands of years.
[00:11:17]  Excuse me.
[00:11:18]  This is the most right-wing leadership since Judah Maccabee.
[00:11:23]  I mean, so, and the inciting event, as it were, this time around for why people are paying attention to it at least, is because the Netanyahu-led government decided to push through legislation that would effectively make the courts within Israel answer to the legislature.
[00:11:44]  Yeah.
[00:11:44]  They would take away the court's right to have judicial review over legislation.
[00:11:52]  I think we need to back up here a little bit and go way back in time to Israel's founding in 1940.
[00:11:59]  So one thing Israel doesn't have, along with Britain and like four other countries, which I think mostly are other ex-common or commonwealth countries.
[00:12:07]  Yeah.
[00:12:07]  Sense of dignity.
[00:12:08]  Yes, and lacking a constitution.
[00:12:11]  Correct.
[00:12:12]  And, you know, I was always told in PE class when I was walking the mile that Jews do lack constitution.
[00:12:18]  I thought they were just talking about me, but in fact, they are talking about the very state that I hold citizenship to.
[00:12:22]  So Israel, as far as I understand it, Noah, you know probably much more about this than I do, but when Israel started, they were like, all right, we're going to do a constitution, but later.
[00:12:33]  Like, we'll get to it.
[00:12:34]  We'll get to it.
[00:12:35]  I swear, we're going to get to it.
[00:12:36]  Not everyone's here yet.
[00:12:37]  We've got to get way more guys over here until we can do a constitution.
[00:12:42]  They're like, we're going to do a constitution.
[00:12:44]  Swear on God.
[00:12:45]  Well, G hyphen D, but we're not going to do it right now.
[00:12:50]  It is now 2023 and there is still no constitution, right?
[00:12:53]  Because this constitution, to me, again, not a legal scholar here, seems pretty important for the formation of laws and stuff like that.
[00:13:02]  Yes.
[00:13:02]  I think in the case of Israel too, where you have a, you know, it's ostensibly a parliamentary democracy.
[00:13:10]  And we're talking, of course, only about, you know, within the state of Israel, we're not talking about the millions of people, millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza, which are under de facto Israeli military control and or bombardment.
[00:13:25]  And in the case of the Constitution in Israel, they decided, you know, like we're going to kick the can down the road, but we're going to have a stopgap.
[00:13:34]  And, you know, like many grand political compromises intended only to last a short while, it has instead lasted the entirety of the existence of the state, which is that there are five basic laws.
[00:13:44]  There's no need to know them individually.
[00:13:46]  The important thing to know, though, is that five basic laws a constitution do not make.
[00:13:50]  Yes.
[00:13:51]  And so there is, I would say, you know, as it relates to this current crisis, a little bit of, you know, overheated rhetoric about like how there is a, you know, like that this is stripping away the last vestiges of democracy within Israel.
[00:14:10]  Let's put glutes around that.
[00:14:12]  Yeah, you know, because it's a little bit, you know, it kind of ignores the, you know, premises on which Israel was set up in the first place and has continued to be, particularly since 1967, you know, on the premise on which the state has operated.
[00:14:29]  I think that the significance of this development, if it's not just about like, oh, it's democracy dying in Israel, what it is is that, you know, on a practical level, the courts within the Israeli political system are essentially the only thing that has kept the Israeli political system from going beyond what other countries, other governments, international bodies would consider the bright red lines.
[00:14:55]  Things like annexing Palestinian territory outright and making it part of Israel and demanding it to be internationally recognized as such.
[00:15:05]  Certain treatment of Palestinians even more harshly than they already are in terms of bringing back the death penalty.
[00:15:12]  There's a wide variety of things that come on the table that otherwise would not be if the courts are essentially castrated.
[00:15:24]  And that is, again, on a practical level, not a great outcome.
[00:15:29]  No.
[00:15:30]  But if we're really talking about what is happening, what is changing in the character of the Israeli state, I would argue that this coalition is in effect bringing out the, it's like sucking out the cum of Israel.
[00:15:44]  It's getting its true essence most, you know, purely.
[00:15:47]  You've got like a government that is actually really attempting to lead Israel toward a truer purpose of what the government is set up to do than what the government has been in before, which is, you know, has had, truthfully, you know, has been stopped from pursuing some of the most aggressive and genocidal policies against Palestinians.
[00:16:07]  Well, I think that's an important point because in the kind of classic, let's say, pro-democracy argument, when you start to see the kind of classic authoritarian slide or whatever, like these kind of like political science types like to talk about, what they're usually referring to is when like courts are emboldened or strengthened, right?
[00:16:28]  You know, in the classic, like Poland, for example, that happened.
[00:16:31]  Or, you know, in other countries in Brazil, right?
[00:16:35]  Where you're seeing kind of like sweeping use of the courts to kind of usurp sort of.
[00:16:43]  Hell in America.
[00:16:44]  Yeah.
[00:16:45]  Yeah.
[00:16:45]  I mean, but so that this is a sort of different formulation because the politics in Israel are quite different.
[00:16:51]  And also I would say that in the case of the courts, it's because the courts are secular.
[00:16:57]  Like they're a secular, you know, like they are like to some, like they have some intellectual and philosophical foundation and Jewish precepts, but like they're not religious courts.
[00:17:09]  The judges are not rabbis.
[00:17:10]  But the people who lead this government, many of them, if not most, want those people ultimately down the line to be rabbis.
[00:17:19]  Well, and like the elected leadership in parliament is quite right-wing.
[00:17:25]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:17:26]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:17:26]  So as Israel's political system overall, right, it's a unicameral parliament, meaning they just have one fucking house.
[00:17:35]  And the party that has the most seats and can gather a coalition gets to form the executive branch.
[00:17:42]  Correct.
[00:17:43]  And you have to form a coalition.
[00:17:45]  It's 60 plus one because there's 120 seats.
[00:17:48]  And traditionally, but not always, the party that comes in first will get the ability to form a coalition.
[00:17:57]  However, the way it works and this is, you know, again, like it's all of this stuff is basically, you know, you're describing like what's supposed to do.
[00:18:06]  There's no constitution.
[00:18:07]  There's not like a lot of formal practices or formal instructions that outline this.
[00:18:11]  The president, who is the formal head of state, but who really does not have powers beyond the specific function, he then invites somebody to form a government and he'll invite for whomever there is the most obvious path to form a majority coalition.
[00:18:27]  Now, 60 plus one is a very, you know, like in Weimar, Germany, for example, a notoriously stable government, you could form minority governments.
[00:18:36]  They had governments, you know, led by the Social Democrats, for example, that, you know, were able to rule and continue to hold power, even though they didn't make up a majority of the legislature.
[00:18:48]  In Israel, 60 plus one, if it's under that, the government falls, you know, you got issues.
[00:18:53]  Government falls.
[00:18:54]  You got to form a new government.
[00:18:55]  That's why Israel recently has gone to elections so many times.
[00:18:59]  And so if you already start from, okay, like, you know, you got 120.
[00:19:03]  If you are the right wing and, you know, there are, or you're, let's say, you know, like you're not going to form a coalition with Arabs.
[00:19:10]  And if you're the center and the left, you know, like, or if you're, you know, some parties are not going to be in coalition with others because they want different things.
[00:19:18]  And so you end up in the process of catering to smaller blocs that are just either not going to participate like Arab, like Arab-Israeli parties.
[00:19:26]  This is always the problem.
[00:19:27]  It's always the problem.
[00:19:28]  I think the issue, you know, now is they've got it, especially as it relates to this legislation, is that they are, you know, like, I mean, this to me is, you know, I mean, I brought up Weimar for a reason because I do think that this is, you know, like it's, this is part of the process of how you see like, you know, like an actual like authoritarian slide, you know, if not quite a one-party state, but like, you know, truly this unworkable parliamentary system, you know, widening inequality, an enormous amount of ethnic,
[00:19:58]  you know, like anxiety, to put it mildly, that's just clearly going to become genocidal for men.
[00:20:03]  Yeah.
[00:20:03]  You know, it's very, to me, you know, it's, it's, this law is very reminiscent of the emergency legislation to me that was passed in the years before, you know, Hitler ever became chancellor.
[00:20:13]  So like Bray said, let's back up for one second because we should talk about the election that put this coalition together.
[00:20:20]  Yeah.
[00:20:21]  Right.
[00:20:21]  That was just last year.
[00:20:22]  The Netanyahu government was sworn in in January, I think.
[00:20:26]  Yeah.
[00:20:27]  So it's only been a couple months.
[00:20:29]  There's basically been non-stop protests since then.
[00:20:32]  Yes.
[00:20:34]  And the Netanyahu coalition is basically Netanyahu himself, very famous, I would say, right-wing.
[00:20:41]  And yet his coalition, further right-wing.
[00:20:45]  I'd say ultra-nationalist, ultra-Orthodox, ultra-national.
[00:20:49]  Well, it's a mix of both.
[00:20:50]  Yeah.
[00:20:51]  I mean, it's a combination.
[00:20:52]  So there's secular nationalism in Israel is largely expressed through the Likud, which is Netanyahu's party.
[00:21:01]  And the other parties, you know, are varying degrees religious, are varying degrees nationalist.
[00:21:08]  But like the fusion, you know, some are, there really are, you know, let's say Shas is the most famous example, religious parties whose primary constituencies are other religious people as well as charity for the poor.
[00:21:21]  And I think that if you look at parties like that, like they have increasingly become more comfortable and open to a lot of what people would think of as like the excesses of Netanyahu because they have similar problems.
[00:21:33]  They have leaders who face serious corruption charges and investigations.
[00:21:37]  They have people who are also, you know, like they're dealing with the same kind, you know, like Netanyahu's not such an exceptional figure.
[00:21:45]  He's just the most exaggerated in terms of the, you know, like sort of political needs that are sort of forcing his hand, as he would say, in terms of, you know, trying to avoid prosecution and whatnot.
[00:21:58]  The other thing, as far as the nationalism goes, is that the settler movement and the religious settler movement is becoming increasingly powerful in ways that even a few years ago, I think people were not, you know, really starting to, you know, were not opening their eyes to.
[00:22:15]  People like Inumar Ben-Gavir, who is, you know, just like a, was, you know, somebody who was not allowed to participate in politics for many years because he was good by the, by the police, because he was too radical.
[00:22:26]  I want to pause on Ben Gavir for a second here because he's a pretty important part of this story, right?
[00:22:31]  So Inamar Ben-Gavir is the Minister of National Security, which I got to say followed the Trouanon rules there.
[00:22:38]  However, the way that Israel's government and police are set up, not fully.
[00:22:42]  It's not exactly the same as the interior minister position.
[00:22:45]  However, and not kudos to him, he's a bad guy, but he is following the rules here.
[00:22:50]  He is trying to create his own private police force.
[00:22:52]  I will say, Ben Gavir, it made some pretty big news that he was a member of government.
[00:22:59]  Like there were international news stories about it because his, I'm trying to think of the equivalent to Ben Gavir in like another country, but I will, and I'm kind of like Jail Groover.
[00:23:10]  Yeah.
[00:23:11]  Yeah, I mean, I'm kidding.
[00:23:12]  Not really, because he's a surveillance guy.
[00:23:13]  But it's like, but he's like, you know, he wants to be a force within the state that I don't think that there has been somebody who's attempted for many years because Israel, you know, as like a state where the military has primacy in every state, let's not kid ourselves.
[00:23:28]  But in Israel, it has extra primacy.
[00:23:30]  And, you know, and that means, you know, military traditions includes a fair amount of turnover, that people don't just stay in charge, et cetera.
[00:23:37]  Like the idea of somebody trying to set up an individual power center within the Israeli state, that's a fairly novel.
[00:23:43]  development, at least this overtly.
[00:23:45]  And in the case of Ben Gavir, he wants to create his own brown shirts.
[00:23:48]  He wants to, you know, and these are, by the way, these are all aspirations.
[00:23:51]  Like the same way with this law.
[00:23:52]  Like they kicked it out.
[00:23:53]  They announced, by the way, this has broken out into protest over the last month.
[00:23:56]  But because, as you were saying, Ben Gavir is so controversial, the process has been arrested somewhat because there is such a substantial backlash.
[00:24:07]  I will say though, just to give listeners who might not know who he is, a picture of Ben Gavir as a person for many years, up until I think it was just a couple of years ago, he had a picture of Baruch Goldstein above his desk, which without going too much into the details is the exact same thing, I think it's safe to say, as having a picture of the Christchurch mosque shooter on your desk.
[00:24:33]  Literally, it's a one-to-one comparison.
[00:24:34]  The guy did the exact same thing.
[00:24:35]  Yeah, the guy shot up like a...
[00:24:38]  A mass shooter.
[00:24:38]  Yeah, he went into the corner.
[00:24:40]  He went into the cave of the patriarchs in Hevron, a Muslim holy site that is today surrounded by the most rabid and extreme Israeli settlers.
[00:24:49]  Yeah.
[00:24:50]  And he shot, he killed 25 people praying, and he shot 125 other people, wounded them.
[00:24:57]  This is a mass murderer, a spree killer.
[00:25:00]  And Ben Gavir has a portrait of him hanging over his desk, pride of place over his desk.
[00:25:06]  I mean, Ben Gavir's politics, like you said, were so extreme that he was, they wouldn't even let him join the army.

=== Israeli Tech Sector Boom (15:35) ===

[00:25:12]  They said that we don't want people like that.
[00:25:14]  And this is also where, you know, now the army has over the last like 30 years been in a process of introducing more and more religious units.
[00:25:27]  They're trying because it was to them, they don't want people.
[00:25:32]  So there's like also, there's a couple things here, like, right?
[00:25:34]  Like, this is also a great illustration of like the dangers of having compulsory military service in a given country, which is that if you create this one institution that socializes everybody, and then you have a bunch of people who exist outside that institution, then how do you reach them?
[00:25:50]  And so in this case, it meant that, well, we're going to create these divisions and so on, brigades, that will let in these religious Zionists and nationalists.
[00:25:58]  In fact, if people have seen the movie or the series, The Boys, or Our Boys on HBO, One of the directors of that, Joseph Seder, he made a very good thriller movie in the 90s about a bunch of young religious settlers who planned a terrorist attack in Jerusalem.
[00:26:13]  And there's a, you know, like, like, these, which is only to say that these are not new issues and that religious infiltration of the army, in addition to like, you know, bourgeois government, is now, and you know, I don't mean to say religious in like such a catch-all way.
[00:26:25]  Like, I don't want to be glib there.
[00:26:27]  Like, like, I mean, like, you know, these like ultra-nationalist, ultra-religious figures, like in the same way that they have risen to prominence in the legislature, they have now acquired substantial purchase within Israel.
[00:26:38]  And the big thing within the military, and the big, you know, important point here, and the reason that the military in Israel can be conquered like this and cannot, you know, fend off some kind of ideological takeover from without is because the primary mission of the Israeli military is exactly the portfolio of the ministry that Ben Vir has given himself, national security, which, according to the Israeli military, means maintaining the occupation, military occupation of the West Bank and maintaining the blockade around Gaza.
[00:27:05]  And that mission basically means that their job is to protect settlers, maintain the area for them.
[00:27:12]  And while a lot of the soldiers hate this job and a lot of the military leaderships thinks that this is a disaster, et cetera, a lot of people, and you can see videos of senior Israeli officers getting lifted up by the same people who are launching pogroms in East Jerusalem or in Hawara, you see, I mean, truly, there's a reason that these pogroms were happening all the same recently just as well.
[00:27:35]  There is a real ferment, a real dangerous amount of power that has gone to the far right in this country.
[00:27:42]  And it's not just in the Knesset.
[00:27:44]  It's not just in the legislature.
[00:27:46]  It's among the military and it's among, you know, like the masses, among people who feel empowered to go, you know, like into Palestinian communities and fuck them up.
[00:28:02]  Well, on the flip side of that, then you have these quote unquote, and I'm going to say that a lot, probably pro-democracy, kind of liberal, progressive-ish protesters that are getting, you know, really like lionized, I'd say.
[00:28:17]  in the Western press.
[00:28:18]  There was so many glowing tweets and profiles and pieces all over the papers and the Twitters and whatever.
[00:28:27]  They're saving Israeli democracy.
[00:28:29]  Yeah, which, yeah, that's a hard word for me to say.
[00:28:32]  Well, they are technically for that.
[00:28:34]  I mean, listen, it's a good thing as long as we just say that Israeli democracy is just kind of like you can differentiate that from democracy.
[00:28:44]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:45]  It's like, you know, Israeli democracy.
[00:28:47]  It's like how a lieutenant general is not really a general.
[00:28:50]  He's kind of lower.
[00:28:51]  But I do want to talk about that a little bit because that is one of the big tensions within the country right now is that you have this kind of, I mean, for lack of a better word, like, I don't know, like metropolitan kind of.
[00:29:04]  Blake Flayton.
[00:29:05]  What?
[00:29:06]  Blake Flayton.
[00:29:07]  I mean, there is a lot of tech workers, right?
[00:29:10]  The tech sector in Tel Aviv is fucking massive, and we can talk about that for a little bit.
[00:29:15]  I mean, there's a lot of profiles about tech workers walking out of jobs of these kind of like very wealthy, you know, Tel Aviv residents going out in the streets to protest against these judicial reforms.
[00:29:29]  Listen, the startups that they're working for, they're for women, they're pussy startups.
[00:29:37]  They're terrible.
[00:29:38]  They're not doing the real money, the real money in Israel.
[00:29:41]  And like the macho Israeli thing is that like the tech industry there, it's not civilian.
[00:29:46]  It's not like these, you know, sort of, it's not like Facebook and stuff.
[00:29:50]  Like a substantial chunk of it, far more than in the U.S., is not just downstream.
[00:29:56]  Yeah, it's spy technology.
[00:29:58]  Yeah, it's part of the military.
[00:30:00]  Of course.
[00:30:00]  And so this is where it's like that degree of civilian protest is, you know, it's sort of like, okay, like will the workers at Krupp factories, you know, revolt against their Rhineland bosses?
[00:30:10]  Well, no, I mean, that's the whole point.
[00:30:11]  I mean, it's inherently limited, and I want to talk about that because it really fucking pisses me off.
[00:30:16]  The kind of coverage that this gets because it's like, okay, the entire Israeli tech sector, which really came into its own after, I mean, look, in the middle of the Second Intifada, right, Israel's in a huge depression, basically.
[00:30:29]  You had the huge blow up of the U.S. tech sector in 2000.
[00:30:34]  Tourism dies in Tel Aviv, basically, in the mid-2000s.
[00:30:39]  And when they're able to kind of resurrect in this tech sector, it's because they are building massive surveillance tools and weaponry that they're proving on Palestinians.
[00:30:51]  And they're able to sell them at such high prices because they're able to go to countries which are now like, shit, we got to, you know, we need weapons contracts now that we're, you know, there's a wake of 9-11, you know, and Israel's kind of rising in this moment to offer this because they can show you, hey, look, we've used this on the Palestinians.
[00:31:09]  This fucking works.
[00:31:10]  That's the legacy of the tech sector, right?
[00:31:12]  That's who built these people who are quote unquote pro-democracy protesters.
[00:31:17]  And so the limitation that's built into this, I'm sorry, it just like really makes me like.
[00:31:22]  No, I mean, it is.
[00:31:23]  It's really tough for me to fucking stomach this shit in the Western media when I see this kind of stuff.
[00:31:28]  Well, I think it's funny.
[00:31:30]  Without that context.
[00:31:31]  It's funny.
[00:31:31]  I will say, like, the past couple years, the Israeli sort of like spy tech sector, I think, has become so large that it's becoming basically impossible to ignore.
[00:31:43]  I mean, there's all those like long investigations.
[00:31:44]  There's a story that just came out that is really worth seeing about how there was a, I think it was in the New York Times Times, and it was about how even though the U.S. government parts is right now, its official position is that they are working to shut down NSO's Pegasus spyware, which allows, it's an Israeli product that allows governments to spy on people without them knowing.
[00:32:09]  It's the most, it's like the, you know, like the bleeding edge of international spyware.
[00:32:15]  There are shell companies that are being used to create and get licenses for Pegasus where we know that the end user is still the U.S. government.
[00:32:28]  So like, you know, there is a, you know, a truly, you know, there is a subterranean power network that is, you know, really what like binds the U.S. to the other to the leaderships of, you know, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and so forth.
[00:32:44]  And, you know, to your point, Liz, I think that in the case of Israel, like the bourgeois Jewish society in Israel is extremely, you know, it's, hurting.
[00:32:59]  Its numbers are declining.
[00:33:01]  Many of the people who can leave the country for decades, they have.
[00:33:04]  There is a real sense that this is, as they feel it, the last opportunity that they have to keep their country being, you know, as something like what they remember.
[00:33:18]  Yeah.
[00:33:18]  And of course, like, you know, I don't think that that's a fairly realistic proposition, but, you know, I think that there's not really like to be clear, when you say something like they remember the threat being like that it's taken over by religious, like crazy religious fundamentalism, not that it's because they let the Palestinians go.
[00:33:38]  Exactly.
[00:33:39]  Which means, you know, which is like, you know, and if Israelis were a, you know, if Israeli political life was a serious place, and it is not, but if Israeli political life were a serious place, then I think that the, you know,
[00:33:53]  the real basis of inquiry into how the fuck did this happen would obviously begin and end with, well, it's because like, you know, we've just sort of made the whole country on like, you know, like a burial ground for Palestinians.
[00:34:10]  And we have this, you know, aggressive, like like there is a, it is clearly linked that the forces of reaction, if far reaction, of high, you know, of the most aggressive and, you know, like, you know, retrograde forces imaginable have been empowered by the, you know, enhanced military propaganda, hypernationalism that has been required for Israel to maintain that state of subjugation against the Palestinians.
[00:34:36]  And, you know, that's discussion, like it's happening in parts.
[00:34:40]  Like I've seen the kids burning their draft cards and stuff at protests.
[00:34:43]  And there are like heroic individuals in small groups, but it's like they're just that.
[00:34:50]  They're not Leninist cadre small groups either.
[00:34:53]  Yeah.
[00:34:54]  Well, I think I want to actually talk about real quick what exactly Netanyahu and his coalition is trying to do to the courts.
[00:35:02]  So the government basically is like, you know, you have this unicameral parliament, you have the prime minister and his coalition, and then you have the courts.
[00:35:10]  And the court, the judges, as far as I know, are not, they're not nominated in the same way that they would be in like America, for instance.
[00:35:20]  We're all familiar with like Supreme Court judges being, but you know, this happens to federal judges on all levels, you know, being nominated and then like being interrogated and all this stuff, blah, blah, blah.
[00:35:33]  Not how it goes in Israel.
[00:35:36]  And so that was, you know, and this has been sort of a bugbear of the Israeli right for quite a long time.
[00:35:42]  I think there's a few factors that show why this is like really coming to the fore right now.
[00:35:47]  But one of them is that like some of Netanyahu's coalition partners, this is a really big issue for them.
[00:35:52]  And so in order for them to really have his back, he needed to make this like a basically a binding clause for getting into coalition and for coming into government.
[00:36:00]  Like we will pursue this and we will get this done.
[00:36:02]  And the Israeli courts are like, you know, in the same way.
[00:36:05]  I mean, and historically, you know, courts like in the American South, for example, like the federal courts were like, you know, the enemy for about a hundred, I mean, they probably still are in many respects.
[00:36:14]  Like, you know, consent decrees and all the like to enforce, you know, school enforcing school integration and things of that nature.
[00:36:21]  Obviously, not just in the South, but like that is the kind of antipathy that these figures have for the courts.
[00:36:27]  Because, you know, as Brace is saying, like, it's a more credentialed, professionalized thing.
[00:36:31]  People who get to be, who get to work in the Israeli high courts tend to be people who are, you know, secular Israelis who are, I mean, again, it's like, yes, you could like chalk it up, obviously, to cultural and ideological differences, but it really is a sort of like, it's a, I mean, I think unwittingly, perhaps, it was like a really effective like class barrier, like or static class position within the Israeli government, even as the Israeli government's, you know,
[00:36:59]  social majoritarian social base that constituted its parliamentary democracy changed over time.
[00:37:07]  So what's happening is Netanyahu is trying to basically make it so that judges, and this is really focused on the Supreme Court, are nominated by the government.
[00:37:16]  Yes.
[00:37:17]  And this has been not received very well.
[00:37:20]  Well, and there's also the like, like, like the idea is that like the plan or that like the legislation is in and of itself like a path toward, and this is clearly what they want, you know, ending judicial review.
[00:37:33]  Yes.
[00:37:34]  The courts, like it's, you know, there, there, there is a, like, the letter of the legislation is like, it's bad enough as it is.
[00:37:43]  But I think what is, you know, just as scary to, you know, like the, you know, your average, like, liberal is, you know, sort of, you know, quote-unquote democracy-minded Israeli is this idea that like the courts are going to cease to do anything other than like, you know, the most like perfunctory of details.
[00:38:02]  Yeah.
[00:38:03]  And, you know, I think that like that's a, it's, it's a very, it's a very real possibility because this reform, it has been stopped.
[00:38:12]  It has been delayed only a month basically because there has just been such outcry and because the protests in Israel right now are unprecedented.
[00:38:20]  So what led to these, these specific, huge outpouring of protests, I mean, there's been protests basically for the past few months, but what led to this like huge upsurge in protest is Netanyahu fired, but not really fired, said he was going to fire.
[00:38:36]  He said he was going to release it.
[00:38:38]  It was like a warning shot.
[00:38:39]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:38:40]  It's like, you're fired, but we're not actually, you don't know.
[00:38:43]  Defense Minister Galan, which I got to say, great name if you're going to be a defense minister.
[00:38:48]  Because let me tell you, when I don't want Goofus up there, I was about to say Goofus was horrible for Israel.
[00:38:54]  My God.
[00:38:55]  So Galant is a, he's not a, he's not a good guy.
[00:39:00]  No.
[00:39:01]  We don't like him.
[00:39:01]  You're saying the defense minister Israel isn't a good guy?
[00:39:04]  We don't like him.
[00:39:05]  No.
[00:39:06]  He's a bad guy.
[00:39:07]  And he is, you know, his firing, however, was sort of seen as like, so like, it's also funny.
[00:39:15]  It's one of these things where, like, it technically, like, Newsanyahu says, I'm going to fire him.
[00:39:21]  And Galan says, I don't accept.
[00:39:23]  And Galant is basically.
[00:39:24]  By the way, great move to say when you're not when you get fired.
[00:39:27]  Hold on, I don't accept.
[00:39:28]  You can say, like, oh, no, I'm good.
[00:39:30]  Yeah.
[00:39:31]  Thank you.
[00:39:32]  Or a George Costanza.
[00:39:34]  Just pretend he didn't quit.
[00:39:34]  Just go in and fire back in order.
[00:39:36]  Yeah, go back in a while.
[00:39:37]  Put that bed under your desk.
[00:39:39]  Live your best life.
[00:39:41]  And so in the case of Galan, it's like he is speaking for the army establishment, which is like, you know, again, another sign that you live in an amazing and healthy society is when the military is speaking through its civilian leadership and winks and nods to To say that they're not going to abide something further.
[00:40:00]  And, you know, this is like you've now seen a whole bunch of like leaders and high-ranking soldiers in the Israeli military, and all people say they're not going to do reserve duty and all this stuff.
[00:40:08]  The pilots.
[00:40:09]  Exactly.
[00:40:11]  We're not going to bomb Chinese.
[00:40:12]  And so Galant never actually got the formal paper or whatever.
[00:40:17]  So they've just basically, and Nick Nanyahu hasn't rescinded it.
[00:40:19]  So they've decided this true, like, I mean, this is such bullshit and animal republic crap, but like they've just decided that we're putting it on, we're putting the firing on hiatus, we're putting the judicial reform on hiatus, even though, you know, it's possible that like one could be undone and one won't, and you could probably guess which is which.
[00:40:37]  That like the judicial reform has a very strong chance, if not an outright likelihood, of succeeding.
[00:40:43]  Yeah.
[00:40:43]  Because there are not, it's not like there are tools that can stop it outside from public opprobrium.

=== Fake Compromise Contested (04:31) ===

[00:40:48]  And then the other thing is that, you know, the like Galant is if he can be convinced, if the army can be made convinced that, you know, there is some kind of, you know, fake compromise or something, they'll buy it.
[00:41:02]  So that's kind of what I assume is going to happen.
[00:41:04]  Yeah.
[00:41:05]  Is a fake compromise because that's what, you know, Netanyahu, after this entire, you know, this public outcry, you know, a lot of bad press for Israel here, Netanyahu comes out and says, like, listen, we're going to put it on hold, like you said, for a month, and, you know, we'll have some talks, right?
[00:41:21]  We'll come to a compromise.
[00:41:22]  But, and again, I'm speaking, this is, this isn't, I'm not saying this is morally good or whatever, but this is realpolitique.
[00:41:28]  If he's doing the thing that you should do if you are in his position, he will basically do a fake compromise because I'm sure they've already thought of this, that there are things that they're willing to take out or whatever that won't affect generally what would happen and would still please the people.
[00:41:44]  Or, you know, like we'll find out that like the Gulfs, like, because this is the other thing, like, America, which is also, again, like, we try to, you know, we maintain the position of sort of refereeing a lot of Israel shit in private and in public and also in conversations that don't involve Israel.
[00:42:03]  Meaning that like it's entirely conceivable to me that the Israeli government, you know, the Abraham Accords were considered Israel doing good and doing right.
[00:42:12]  Right.
[00:42:12]  That like, you know, not that like, which is fuca because obviously these Abraham Accords were a huge fucking dub for Israel that didn't have to give anything up and is now on a path towards normalizing trade relationships with the wealthiest countries that are surrounded.
[00:42:25]  And so, and that previously hated it.
[00:42:27]  And so, you know, like, and so on.
[00:42:29]  And so, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if they'll be like, okay, like, we'll also, like, you know, like, you know, just in the same way that like Israel, you know, Israel's like decades-long feud with Morocco, that's sarcasm, you know, was resolved through the majesty and of negotiation of the Americans.
[00:42:44]  They'll find some other bullshit to do it as well.
[00:42:47]  And they will try and put some lipstick on this pig and then hope that like, you know, what happens next won't be so bad, which I think is, you know, I'm not sure how that'll work out because it does seem like this will be pretty bad.
[00:42:58]  Well, I mean, you know, you said the protests were, I think you said this, but if you didn't, then I'm just going to pretend you did.
[00:43:04]  That they were pretty unprecedented and pretty serious.
[00:43:07]  And I mean, I will say, like, Netanyahu, when he backed out, he did seem spooked.
[00:43:11]  He said that, I mean, I think the government seemed a bit spooked at the reaction.
[00:43:16]  And they, I mean, they said they wanted to like prevent a civil war, like using those words, which is like a pretty, you know, that's pretty harsh language.
[00:43:23]  You don't want to be throwing that out there.
[00:43:24]  Like, you know, I do think that because I can get away with it and because I do think it's important and historically just, I do think that, like, again, like some of the Weimar and Nazi comparisons are important here because if we're talking about like, you know, a progressive drift of policy and government toward genocide, which is what I think is, you know, the case in Israel, like it's, it's, like, it is a, it is a, there's a genocidal intent to get rid of, to wipe out, to cleanse Palestinian populations.
[00:43:54]  I think that part of how it's going to get there is that, you know, these unprecedented people, in the same way that like, you know, people who wanted to ultimately seize the power of government to carry out those sorts of policies, they didn't want to do it in a, you know, a popular national revolution.
[00:44:10]  They wanted a legalistic means by which that could happen.
[00:44:13]  So again, like, what is the point of, let's say, they get a fake compromise on this bill, right?
[00:44:17]  And, you know, and to mollify the protesters, but just to mollify them, to maybe facilitate their brain drain out of the country, to facilitate their economic drain out of the country.
[00:44:26]  And, you know, that leaves room open for favored right-wing people to take their positions within the civil service and within the professional sphere.
[00:44:35]  Like, this is a, you know, there is a, like, the contradictions that compose Israeli society at the moment can only be resolved through their, you know, like a, like a, like an exertion of horrifically violent energy on the Palestinians around them.
[00:44:52]  And that is, you know, like the question to me.
[00:44:54]  But that's always been the case.
[00:44:55]  No, but what we are seeing now, what I'm saying is that like the like the fullest, most deadly capacity of that is like, that is what's up for debate.
[00:45:06]  That is what's being contested over right now.
[00:45:08]  And one of the ways that it can happen is because all of the people who we've just now seen in the streets are going to feel so politically marginalized because the country is so far gone that they're going to put up even less of a fight.

=== Syria's Negotiable Future (13:34) ===

[00:45:19]  It's going to become a very, like, I think that it could become a very, like, all of this, all of this freak out right now may end up being for naught.
[00:45:28]  And that's a, you know, I don't think that's a good, like, it's, I don't think that bodes well.
[00:45:39]  Well, you mentioned the U.S. and how we've always been the kind of, like, you know, I don't know.
[00:45:44]  Handlers is not the right word, but we always had our hands in there, I would say.
[00:45:48]  Yeah.
[00:45:48]  Mixing it up.
[00:45:49]  Yeah.
[00:45:49]  Messing around.
[00:45:50]  Yeah, we're always around.
[00:45:51]  Let's talk about our, I don't like saying our, let's talk about the U.S. and its relationship with Israel during all this, because we were talking before we started recording that, I mean, the relationship between the U.S. and Israel since, I guess it would be since the Obama admin has undergone lots of change.
[00:46:11]  Things have changed.
[00:46:12]  Yeah.
[00:46:12]  Well, I mean, over the past, whatever it's been, what, like 20 years?
[00:46:16]  Yeah.
[00:46:16]  Yeah.
[00:46:17]  That's crazy.
[00:46:18]  Like 50.
[00:46:18]  Well, 15.
[00:46:19]  15.
[00:46:20]  So, I mean, it's Netanyahu is, I mean, he is a meaningful, if not, he's not a transformative figure because I don't like in Israeli society or history, but he is like, you know, one of the things that he did auger was the way in which Israel became openly willing to play, like to get in the mix in domestic U.S. politics.
[00:46:40]  And what he figured out was that, like, we can always get more for ourselves, and I can shore up myself domestically if I dump on the Democrats and, in particular, Obama.
[00:46:53]  And that became, you know, that feature of Israeli political life has not gone away because no longer do Israel, you know, some of the people, many of the people protesting in the streets in Israel, I do believe, feel very strongly that, you know, Netanyahu has fucked up the relationship with Biden or something.
[00:47:10]  But the truth of the matter is that what he's really done is, you know, created this template for how people can get the most out of the United States government, how Israel can get the most out of the United States government with not having to concede a fucking inch on anything that it wants.
[00:47:25]  And so that at this moment, I think, you know, Netanyahu and Biden's in particular relationship has never been that strong, especially because Netanyahu picked on Obama so much and went and delivered an address to Congress basically shitting on the president, which is again fairly unprecedented stuff.
[00:47:42]  So Netanyahu is not winning any friends.
[00:47:46]  However, Obama negotiated and got like a 10-year, $38 billion military aid package for Israel.
[00:47:55]  I mean, that's the thing is, there's some things that are non-negotiable in politics.
[00:48:00]  One of those is, well, it is negotiable, but it's like, oh, it negotiates up, is how much money we're just going to give Israel.
[00:48:07]  Like, it doesn't really matter.
[00:48:08]  Like, Netanyahu could be like, yeah, Joe Biden is a pedophile.
[00:48:11]  And Joe Biden would have to be like, I'm sorry.
[00:48:14]  Here's $15 billion.
[00:48:15]  Well, it would be like, listen, I'm not, Bibi, he may say that, but I love Israel.
[00:48:23]  But I mean, Year Netanyahu, for instance, Bibi's beautiful son.
[00:48:28]  Immaculately behaved.
[00:48:30]  By the way, podcast, Gear Netanyahu and the Bolsonaro Boys, crazy would be great, crazy good podcast.
[00:48:36]  That's a ringer network podcast.
[00:48:38]  But Yer Netanyahu is like has – does actually have a podcast and he's been saying that Joe Biden is essentially behind this color revolution in Israel, which is like – but the White House released this like sort of very like – I mean it's the exact sort of statement you'd expect the White House to be put out.
[00:48:55]  We're watching these developments.
[00:48:57]  We're listening.
[00:48:58]  We believe in the strength of Israeli democracy.
[00:49:01]  And it is just like, the relationship is like, it's strained between like, you know, Netanyahu hasn't even met with Biden yet.
[00:49:10]  I mean, obviously, he hasn't been in power that whole time, but it's unlikely that he probably will.
[00:49:17]  At the core of it, though, it's, and I do believe this, is that like support for Israel is totally non-negotiable.
[00:49:24]  Like, we will continue giving them as much weaponry and as many resources as they want, essentially, no matter what.
[00:49:30]  Well, and part of, you know, it's like, look, like, there is, like, Israel is a nuke.
[00:49:34]  Like, there's a nuke.
[00:49:36]  There are like reasons beyond that.
[00:49:37]  Yeah, there's some limitations here.
[00:49:39]  Like, and there's a re and they have a nuke.
[00:49:43]  And, and what's more, you know, when they buy weapons, right?
[00:49:46]  Like, Israel, just like Saudi Arabia and Dubai and all these other places spending money on American weaponry and machinery, like, you know, like that is part of the system by which like the dollar gets to be the dollar.
[00:49:58]  Yeah.
[00:49:58]  And I think that like Israel in particular gets kind of discounted as part of like that, you know, what, you know, what other people have called like a dollar recycling mechanism because it's so small fry or whatever.
[00:50:09]  But when you really look at it, you actually do see that, no, these companies and the products they serve are just as much a part of like this defense value chain that is an essential part of like the American trade balance.
[00:50:21]  Yeah.
[00:50:21]  And there is, you know, a like that is going to be, I mean, look, I think that like the degree to which support for Israel is going to be non-negotiable will change for a number of reasons.
[00:50:32]  And, you know, the Palestinian issue will, I think, be, you know, remain the primary one.
[00:50:37]  But I also think that, you know, for example, like even if Israel does have a nuke, for example, and all this other stuff, are we going to want to continue to send them our highest weaponry, our most sensitive intelligence, and all these other things?
[00:50:48]  Will we, you know, will that, will, you know, the, will Israel continue to be a customer of U.S. intelligence, not just like in the private sector, but like to use, you know, like spy lingo, like will they continue to have this sort of a, you know, hand in glove U.S.-UK style relationship?
[00:51:07]  I mean, I, you know, don't take fucking anything for granted.
[00:51:11]  Like, you know, like, this is where we're living in fun times.
[00:51:14]  Like, there was like some diplomatic cables that were just like leaked recently where there was like some Israeli diplomat talking about the U.S. and saying how like weak leadership was and all of this stuff.
[00:51:24]  I mean, that relationship is really strange.
[00:51:27]  Yes.
[00:51:27]  And also it should be clear that like, you know, people, like a lot of the places like Israel and stuff that are knocking the U.S. for weak leadership and stuff, obviously, like Netanyahu is not a strong leader.
[00:51:37]  He's a, he, he's like, like Israeli state capacity, Israeli everything outside of the military is so fucked, is so, you know, like rotted, is so unable to actually like mobilize or have anything except for those like, you know, hyper-religious nationalist types as a social force.
[00:51:59]  And so the ability, I think, to, you know, really, I mean, it's, it's really, it just, it can't be overstated how much power and like organization and like capacity within Israel really just exists within this like gigantic, you know, and otherwise sluggish and fucked up bureaucracy that is the military.
[00:52:17]  Well, that's, I was about, I was about to say that, though, it's because like, yeah, okay, you might say it's negotiable like exactly how much intelligence or military stuff we're sharing with them, right?
[00:52:25]  But I do think that like the U.S. probably rightly recognizes the military in Israel as a countering political force to a perhaps destabilizing Orthodox minority who if they get power will cause more headaches for, I mean, America would like essentially the status quo that Israel has now where they join us in blowing up Soleimani or they can bomb Syria or, you know, Syria is the other, you bring that up because that's the other important thing here.
[00:52:52]  And Egypt, actually, because Egypt isn't almost Syria, which shouldn't be forgotten that from the perspective of Israel, which is that like Israel views its borders with Syria and Egypt as basically like gigantic potential problem areas if there is ever serious human catastrophe.
[00:53:09]  You know, like World War Z or.
[00:53:11]  Checking migrants.
[00:53:12]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:53:13]  Like, you know, like the World War Z, like stereotype of all the zombies flying over the separation barrier.
[00:53:18]  Like that is what Israeli politicians and leaders see when they think about Sudanese people and Eritreans fleeing some of the worst conditions imaginable through Egypt.
[00:53:30]  That is what they imagine.
[00:53:32]  And especially as a Syria, as that situation perhaps continues to stabilize now that Assad has reestablished relations with Saudi Arabia and so forth.
[00:53:43]  He's out walking about.
[00:53:44]  He's chilling.
[00:53:46]  He's going to Saudi Arabia.
[00:53:47]  Yeah, he's fine.
[00:53:48]  He's singing out.
[00:53:53]  I think that the Syrian consideration is if now that that is easing, basically, to me, what's sort of interesting is the important geopolitical thing that Israel is occupied in keeping those areas, managing those borders or whatever.
[00:54:09]  Will they continue to get to occupy that role?
[00:54:12]  Will Israel just continue bombing the shit out of Syria?
[00:54:14]  Will Israel continue to effectively act as a hardcore border guard in collaboration with Cece?
[00:54:20]  Well, CC, you know, like it's a very, like, the whole point of Israel for American policy is that in a region that has all of these valuable resources and unstable governments, that like Israel is the rock.
[00:54:32]  Yeah, we got our job.
[00:54:33]  Israel change and we got our guy.
[00:54:34]  Except, and so now if it turns out that like actually, you know, he's our guy, but like he's picked up a coke habit, then like, is he really our guy?
[00:54:42]  Yeah.
[00:54:42]  Well, it's also tough because the foreign policy establishment, you know, for the most part, DC, Europe, Germany, Brussels, you know, France, thinking about all that, really the liberal internationalist humanitarian blob, right?
[00:54:59]  And running up the the problem running up with Israel is you have this like far-right, hard-right, not the kind of right-wing government that can easily be handled or whatever, but like a far-right, ultra-Orthodox takeover.
[00:55:15]  That runs into, that makes it really difficult to kind of sell some stuff even to the public, right?
[00:55:20]  You have, look at the case with like Saudi Arabia and just how much like public perception has shifted in our peace partners in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, you know, from the Khashoggi incident being the kind of like inciting one among the public, but that relationship was very strained up until that point.
[00:55:39]  Yeah.
[00:55:39]  And it became too much.
[00:55:41]  It became way too much to ignore among the like progressive liberal orthodoxy.
[00:55:47]  And you can see the same thing shifting with Israel, which a lot of people have been applauding, but also, like you said, leads to, I mean, there's all these contradictions that are kind of coming to a head in a really explosive, volatile fucking, you know, situation on the ground.
[00:56:05]  And I do think as it relates to will we or will we not change our relationship with Israel and so on, you know, a big geopolitical question.
[00:56:14]  I do think that, you know, again, like the, and, you know, in the same way, will we or won't we with Saudi Arabia?
[00:56:22]  It will, you know, if there if there is some other crisis, you know, like if oil prices go back up really high, if, you know, like there's, because there's just a possibility that, you know, there are a whole bunch of other things that we haven't, you know, that are just like on the horizon.
[00:56:40]  I mean, OPEC Plus, for example, just voted to say that they're going to, you know, halt production on barrels Barrels of oil because Saudi Arabia needs more money against U.S. wishes.
[00:56:48]  This is a surprise barrel hike or a production cut and price hike.
[00:56:54]  And so what happens if for whatever reason, 1974 or 1979, those oil shocks, in addition, obviously to the Volcker interest rate shock, I mean, those are exogenous isn't the right word, but those were incredibly destabilizing political and monetary policies or whatever, that there could be some kind of thing that we're either not seeing or fundamentally a political decision,
[00:57:21]  like a choice made by policymakers and not just force majeure that will really push people to test these alliances.
[00:57:30]  MBS finally goes.
[00:57:31]  I'm seeing it, not even in the Middle East, like all throughout Europe.
[00:57:34]  Yes.
[00:57:34]  Everything is.
[00:57:35]  I mean, I was reading, I mean, yeah, what inflation is doing to Europe, what energy prices are going to do to Europe is unprecedented the amount of destabilizing energy I think we're feeling.
[00:57:47]  I mean, I saw like all these bakeries in France are closing because they cannot afford to buy the butter.
[00:57:53]  No.
[00:57:54]  Well, they use it.
[00:57:55]  Have you seen how they make a croissant?
[00:57:56]  There's a lot of butter in the world.
[00:57:57]  I know, jokes aside, but the price was like six Euro year over year, now up 12 euro.
[00:58:02]  I mean, it's impossible.
[00:58:03]  I mean, the only people that are still investigating who blew up the Nord Stream, evidently, are the Germans and the leads that the U.S. are feeding them are going nowhere.
[00:58:10]  They'll get to it someday.
[00:58:12]  They'll figure that out someday.
[00:58:13]  It's happened.
[00:58:15]  Yeah.
[00:58:16]  I mean, this is the thing, though, is right.
[00:58:18]  It's like, you know, Israelis and their American cousins have something in common, which is, you know, again, like, we are terrific at talking and saying one thing while we just do another.
[00:58:28]  Yeah.
[00:58:28]  And move, you know, and like the like, you know, the more and more the chasm between those two things, you know, gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
[00:58:38]  I mean, at least to me, you know, the more violent the rupture will feel when it becomes clear that like, oh, shit, we have pushed a relationship too far with one of these countries or we've brought them in too close.

=== End of the Day (10:40) ===

[00:58:54]  Right.
[00:58:54]  And we have, you know, and now we are co-signing something that like, you know, we have never, like, our government has never prepared the public for.
[00:59:01]  I mean, seriously, like, think about how crazy it'll be.
[00:59:04]  Like, if, you know, a government that has been telling, you know, that has been feeding the American public on stories of Exodus and Ari Ben Kanan and APAC and all this shit for decades suddenly has to go and tell the American public, so listen, there are riots in Medina, Riyadh, Mecca, Cairo, because a bunch of Israeli soldiers just decided to light up a bunch of Palestinian worshippers in the Dome of the Rock.
[00:59:27]  Like, there are, you know, I mean, this is to me one of the greatest tragedies of.
[00:59:32]  I don't know.
[00:59:32]  I mean, I think either they'll sell it fine or no one's going to pay attention anyway.
[00:59:36]  I think by, I mean, I think that there is a, to me, like a, a, a real, like, the more and more like that we, the further and further our government gets away from being able to transparently sell its geopolitics and is instead resorting to like this like, you know, crazy, like, you know, scattershot diplomatic game using exhausted Cold War, you know, like, you know, globalization rhetoric, then like the, you know, the tougher a spot it's going to find itself.
[01:00:05]  Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the trouble with like, I don't know, like when the rubber hits the road, right?
[01:00:11]  I mean, we joke about like the lion fake news media.
[01:00:16]  I love that turn of phrase, but I will say that like more and more you see the media saying one thing and the reality being like completely, utterly, absolutely the opposite.
[01:00:28]  And that can only be sustained for so long.
[01:00:30]  100 years.
[01:00:31]  In so many fucking cases.
[01:00:33]  And I mean, that's, you know, I think you see it very, very clearly in a lot of situations recently in Europe where just the description of events is the exact opposite of what happened.
[01:00:43]  I mean, it's like actually is like unreality speak.
[01:00:46]  And, you know, we see it more and more in America, but we're so isolated from the world in so many ways.
[01:00:53]  I mean, that's a lot of people by design a little bit.
[01:00:56]  No, totally.
[01:00:57]  There's this Lenin quote I think about all the time.
[01:00:58]  We mentioned it in Blowback once where he's like talking, he's like in the middle, it's like, right, it's like in the era of World War I, and he's talking about like on the entrance of America into the war.
[01:01:07]  And his whole point is to say that like, listen, it's not really a big deal right now.
[01:01:11]  There will, however, be a world war between Japan and the U.S. down the line because their imperial ambitions are going to collide.
[01:01:17]  You know, prescient Lenin as ever.
[01:01:19]  He also says that America will have a great deal of trouble summoning the kind of mobilization necessary for such a war because the people there do enjoy great personal freedom, which is true.
[01:01:29]  Americans have geographic regional, you know, we have all of these things that are, you know, not so unique or not so necessarily exceptional by themselves, but taken together create this way of life and this fair amount of detachment from global affairs that is, you know, I mean, as, you know, like it eventually will come home to Russia and the fuck knows when, but like, you can't deny that.
[01:01:51]  And I think that like to me, you know, to what you're saying, it's like, yeah, like the more and more we sort of accept this position of unreality and we just say that like, oh, people like it, places like Israel are just uncomplicated democracies that we should support to the hilt and that, you know, we should just keep sending untold amounts of weaponry to people who not all that long ago were killing Jews.
[01:02:09]  You know, I mean, to me, it's like, yeah, those are ultimately like it's, you know, I mean, look, you could say that like ultimately, however you want to say it went down, sending a bunch of guns and IMO into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union blew back on the U.S. in a certain way.
[01:02:25]  Look at that.
[01:02:26]  Just so smooth the way you look at that, the way he promotes the, you just slip it right in.
[01:02:33]  Well, you know, it seems like this El Chapo guy was running a trap house out of the city of Mexico.
[01:02:39]  Wait, that's the wrong guess.
[01:02:40]  You know what?
[01:02:41]  To me, Tel Aviv seems like a town full of cum.
[01:02:46]  So, no.
[01:02:48]  That one's pretty good.
[01:02:49]  That one's pretty good.
[01:02:51]  And I hope, you know.
[01:02:52]  You should give them that one.
[01:02:53]  That's okay.
[01:02:54]  But I think my – with Israel, I guess it's just – I have a hard time rapping, making myself care essentially about this.
[01:03:05]  I mean, I think that's the case for a lot of people.
[01:03:09]  It's interesting that these protests are happening.
[01:03:11]  It's funny that they're calling it a civil war.
[01:03:12]  But at the end of the day, the main issue that a lot of people have or the main thing that people know about or care about in regards to Israel isn't necessarily the ins and outs of Israeli parliamentary politics or the way that the judiciary acts as a force in society, but it's the treatment of Palestinians, which does actually have a lot to do with the makeup of the government now.
[01:03:35]  But at the end of the day, I guess the tension here for me, it's not really a tension actually at all, is that the protesters, like we said, are protesting for Israeli democracy, which is a democracy that is an apartheid democracy.
[01:03:48]  Yes.
[01:03:50]  Against a government that is more aggressive and has these out-and-out, open racists instead of the sort of coded racists of some of the liberal wing who believe in like forced, not at all like forced resettlement, but outright murder in the case of Ben Gavir and some of the other people in government of Palestinians.
[01:04:13]  At the end of the day, though, the status quo, even if the protesters get all of their, what they want, if they have a new, I mean, not even a liberal government, but if they get this judicial overhaul totally rescinded, there is still this insane military occupation.
[01:04:30]  There's still not only a blockade, but the encirclement of Gaza in this giant open-air concentration camp.
[01:04:37]  None of these things will fundamentally change in this.
[01:04:39]  And so for me, it's just like, and I feel sort of bad saying this in a way, but I just like that something kind of bad is happening to the Jews.
[01:04:49]  And I know that's sort of like probably a juvenile way to look at it, but like I couldn't give a fuck what some Israeli liberal wants for his government.
[01:04:58]  Well, I mean, look, to that point, I think that that gets to the heart of it, which is the question, or at least like I think what is the essential question, the question at the core of all of it, that a lot of people want to ask or would exasperatedly shout on Twitter, like, ugh, well, then what is a good Israeli to do?
[01:05:16]  And the answer to that is like, stand with Palestinians.
[01:05:18]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:05:18]  Because if there is a way that Israeli government and society is redeemed, it's not going to begin with shutting down the island highway in downtown Tel Aviv.
[01:05:27]  Like, that is a hell of a gesture, and it's not something that's ever happened in Israel before.
[01:05:31]  But until that there are Jews who are standing up for the rights of Palestinians that live in and are getting bloodied in Jenin and Hawara, then like this isn't owing to this isn't going to be a revolution in a positive direction.
[01:05:43]  Well, I will say there was a big outcry after we mentioned Hawara a couple times, right?
[01:05:49]  This made the news in a lot of places.
[01:05:50]  If you hadn't seen it, there was a pogrom.
[01:05:52]  Multiple, multiple pogroms in a few villages, this Palestinian town, Hawara, by settlers.
[01:05:58]  Two Israelis had been shot.
[01:06:01]  And then, you know, just hundreds of Israeli settlers descended on these Palestinian villages, burned hundreds of homes, killed a guy, beat the shit out of the people.
[01:06:10]  And to be clear, the person who used the word pogrom in the media that was most well known was a former Israeli military leader.
[01:06:16]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:17]  And to be clear also, the guy they shot wasn't the guy who shot these two guys.
[01:06:21]  It was just a random guy.
[01:06:22]  Israelis had already killed five people, including the gunman, they say, although, I mean, it's fucking Israel, so who the fuck knows, including the gunman, they say, in a different range.
[01:06:33]  So this was just purely retaliatory response against something that had already been, in these people's own logic, solved, but, you know, destroyed these towns.
[01:06:46]  And it was a finance minister came out and he said, like, oh, you know, he's a big settler leader.
[01:06:51]  He's like, you know, at first, you know, he was liking all these tweets, like basically celebrating this pogroms.
[01:06:57]  And then he came out and said, well, actually, I don't believe that I think these were bad.
[01:07:02]  I don't think that citizens should take this into their own hands.
[01:07:06]  I believe that the Israeli state should have done these pogroms.
[01:07:10]  And you sort of saw these Israeli liberals kind of decrying it and saying like, oh, no, you know, like, this is horrible.
[01:07:16]  This is right wing, blah, blah, blah.
[01:07:18]  But at the end of the day, you believe the precise same exact thing.
[01:07:24]  The state is doing the pogroms.
[01:07:25]  That's what I'm saying.
[01:07:26]  The state, well, though, if the state lets it happen, the state is doing it.
[01:07:29]  Yeah, there were, I mean, there's a soldier's leader.
[01:07:30]  Because that's also the mission of soldiers when a settler, like, you know, this is like breaking the silence, the group of former Israeli soldiers, they give a lot of tourists, heroic people.
[01:07:42]  I went on a tour with them years ago where, you know, I'd known the concept intellectually, but having it demonstrated was very helpful.
[01:07:48]  Where if you see Israeli settlers and Palestinians out, you know, and they're like, you know, let's say fighting over because the Israelis want the goats to be, Palestinian goats to be, you know, they're not allowed to eat where the Israelis want them to, whatever.
[01:08:00]  So if the settlers decide, all right, we're going to start wailing on these Palestinians and we're going to kill their goats, the job of the Israeli soldiers there, even though this would obviously, you know, the morality of the situation is pretty clear to anybody around, the job of the Israeli soldiers is to protect the settlers.
[01:08:13]  What does that mean?
[01:08:14]  You're basically giving these people an escort while they commit their beatdown.
[01:08:17]  Yeah, well, not only an escort, it's like if some guy, you're a Palestinian guy and some settler starts beating the shit out of you, you know, you start beating the shit out of him, you get shot.
[01:08:26]  Yes.
[01:08:27]  So essentially, like, it's extra muscle.
[01:08:29]  Yeah, it's extra muscle.
[01:08:30]  Someone pointing a gun at you while you get your ass kicked or your house burned down or your village burned down.
[01:08:34]  So, you know, it's again, like, Israelis understandably are like skeeved out by the rhetoric because, yeah, it's skeevy rhetoric, but like, brother, that's the reality.
[01:08:40]  Well, then, that's so.
[01:08:41]  I guess that's that's and we were talking about this before the episode started.
[01:08:44]  So, I guess that that sort of leads me to my view on this in that, like, you know, like, I mean, I don't really support the protesters, I guess you could say, in that, like, I am almost glad that like this government is in here and is doing this because you know, they are kind of giving lie to this Israeli democracy, right?
[01:09:06]  And this Israeli militarist ethos and this, like, this permanent state of exception, right?
[01:09:11]  Because they're putting like the thing is, like, I think at the end of the day, and again, I'm not speaking about everybody, but I'm speaking about sort of the really the mainstream here in Israeli society, the liberals, is that they're they're too vulgar about it.
[01:09:24]  You know, that's the thing they want that that's what they're really protesting for.
[01:09:27]  What they're trying to save is the mask, yeah, the mask, right?
[01:09:30]  They're like, We need to, you guys have to keep the mask.
[01:09:33]  I mean, we need to keep the bubble.

=== Voting Polities and Ugly Choices (04:30) ===

[01:09:35]  That's what it is.
[01:09:35]  And you know what?
[01:09:36]  The bubble needs to keep its hard.
[01:09:38]  And if you want to get rid of the mask, well, somebody's going to have to stop them.
[01:09:42]  But I think to your point about like why care about this, or like how, like, what's the kind of takeaway?
[01:09:52]  I mean, something that I've been kind of thinking about, there was this, like, recently, this Brazilian philosopher came out in an interview and was talking about how what he was seeing in the world was like the Israelification of the world.
[01:10:09]  It's a Brazilian to say that.
[01:10:10]  Well, no, that was the point.
[01:10:12]  I mean, he was saying it in like an obvious reference to the Brazilianization of the world and saying what we're actually seeing right now, possibly, is the Israelization of the world.
[01:10:21]  And you do see that actually in these like these, you know, kind of anti-liberal, anti-whatever movements all around in this moment of like extreme, I don't know, volatility, popular volatility, and like political uncertainty and institutions kind of flailing about.
[01:10:47]  You see it all over Europe.
[01:10:49]  You see, I mean, I don't want to sound like some kind of like New York Times person or something talking about like backsliding or whatever, but I do think that you see this kind of, I mean, you see it in the U.S. Florida is basically this.
[01:11:01]  I mean, Florida, Tennessee is apparently headed there too.
[01:11:05]  I think that as far as like the making like all of these places like Israel goes or something, or like whatever, like part of what is these share, right, is that like people aren't offered like a choice between like, oh, here's the good guys and the bad guys.
[01:11:20]  It's here's one kind of bad guy and another kind of bad guy.
[01:11:23]  And so what they end up voting on is really, do I want the status quo or do I want to change?
[01:11:28]  You know, and like that was the dynamic of like the Trump election in 2016.
[01:11:32]  And I think that the more and more we start putting, you know, especially voting polities like the Israeli, you know, like in Israel, start getting the option put before them of, you know, status quo or change.
[01:11:43]  And the status quo just continues to feel like this unbearable interregnum, the more and more we're going to find that these change votes are not going to come out to our liking because no option that could actually yield a better future is being allowed to be presented.
[01:11:55]  Yeah, I'll agree with that.
[01:11:56]  I mean, I think that's essentially what I'm saying with Israel, right?
[01:11:59]  I mean, the two things, the two things on option here are the status quo, which is de facto apartheid.
[01:12:05]  Correct.
[01:12:06]  Or a worse version of that.
[01:12:08]  Yes.
[01:12:09]  And I mean, that's really similar to, I think, how a lot of people felt, like you were saying in 2016 with Trump and Clinton, right?
[01:12:17]  It's like, okay, well, you can have more of this, but actually almost even a little worse.
[01:12:21]  Or you can have Trump, right?
[01:12:23]  And it's like, yeah, I mean, there's no positive offering on hand there.
[01:12:28]  But there's also no real indication that a lot of people, just like in America, really want that positive sovereign either.
[01:12:36]  The person whose analysis, sort of borrowing the formulation there from, was the late historian Marilyn Young, who talked mainly about the Vietnam War at NYU.
[01:12:45]  But in this collection where she's talking about the Korean War, she talks about how in 1952, basically the American public was presented with a status quo vote for the Democrats, in that case, Adelaide Stevenson, and who had taken up the Truman mantle, or Dwight Eisenhower.
[01:13:03]  And Dwight Eisenhower, even though he was like a fucking general or whatever, he represented change at that moment.
[01:13:10]  And so the vast majority, like this, you know, huge amount of Americans who voted for him, it's not like they were voting because they agreed with like the new look or massive retaliation or all of these other crazy Cold War policies.
[01:13:23]  They just wanted something that was different from what they viewed as the really horrible stagnation of those final Truman years.
[01:13:30]  And, you know, that is like the more and more, again, like I was just saying, like, yeah, like that ugly choice comes up, you know, the more and more we're just going to get ugly answers.
[01:13:38]  Yeah.
[01:13:40]  Which is what brings me to my solution.
[01:13:42]  And this is my solution.
[01:13:44]  No, no, this is my solution to the Ukraine war as well.
[01:13:46]  It's my solution to the Chinese-Indian border.
[01:13:48]  Not to be able to do it.
[01:13:49]  My solution to Indian and Pakistan, for that matter.
[01:13:51]  It's really my solution to any global problem involving just two parties.
[01:13:56]  Introduce a third one.
[01:13:59]  And for me, I think that third one should be South Korea.
[01:14:03]  I think South Korea should invade Israel.

=== What I'd Do In John Wick (04:49) ===

[01:14:05]  Kind of just see what happens.
[01:14:07]  They're spiritually, yeah, they got some spiritual similarities.
[01:14:10]  Yeah, okay, yes, but I feel, yeah, you know what?
[01:14:13]  They're homies.
[01:14:14]  What if we just hear maybe we could merge them?
[01:14:17]  Merge them?
[01:14:18]  Yeah.
[01:14:18]  Merge South Korea or just switch them.
[01:14:20]  But that's kind of what I'm saying, what this guy's talking about.
[01:14:23]  Yeah, fuck.
[01:14:23]  Well, who could invade Israel then?
[01:14:25]  Certainly not Australia.
[01:14:26]  Wait, fuck it.
[01:14:27]  Mexico.
[01:14:28]  Have Mexico invade Israel.
[01:14:30]  See what happens.
[01:14:31]  This is my same thing.
[01:14:32]  Ukraine, fuck it.
[01:14:34]  I don't know.
[01:14:35]  Put in Kenya.
[01:14:37]  Just sort of see what happens there.
[01:14:38]  You know, we've reached an impasse in so many of these global conflicts.
[01:14:42]  So we just need to throw in.
[01:14:43]  We just need to throw in a third guy.
[01:14:45]  You know?
[01:14:46]  It's like when you try to open up your marriage.
[01:14:49]  And oh, well, I guess that doesn't really matter.
[01:14:50]  I get it.
[01:14:51]  Yeah, no, I get it.
[01:14:52]  A lot of nations have been going at it solo poly and they need to be part of a cue.
[01:14:57]  I get it.
[01:14:59]  But my solutions to world problems aside.
[01:15:01]  We got to wrap up here.
[01:15:03]  Israel.
[01:15:05]  Best of luck.
[01:15:07]  Good luck, guys.
[01:15:23]  Bruce.
[01:15:24]  Yeah.
[01:15:24]  Real quick before we sign off.
[01:15:28]  Do you think you would survive in the John Wick universe?
[01:15:30]  Easily would survive in the John Wick universe.
[01:15:32]  You think?
[01:15:32]  Easily would survive.
[01:15:34]  Are you kidding me?
[01:15:35]  No, I'm not.
[01:15:36]  Have you seen?
[01:15:36]  Would you be the pigeon man?
[01:15:38]  The bum?
[01:15:40]  No.
[01:15:40]  No.
[01:15:41]  No, he was like fake bum.
[01:15:42]  Bum was costume.
[01:15:44]  Well, he is a, he's just, he's just, he's rich, but he lives in the sewer.
[01:15:48]  Morpheus, right?
[01:15:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:15:50]  Here's what I would do in the John Wick universe.
[01:15:51]  Well, there's several ways I would survive.
[01:15:53]  But if you've noticed, and this is very prominent in the last movie, they block getting shot by putting their suit jackets up because they have bulletproof suits.
[01:16:01]  Which, by the way, very sick.
[01:16:02]  Yeah.
[01:16:03]  My move whenever I'm going anywhere because of my natural cowardice is to kind of unzip my jacket and kind of go in it like you know, sort of cornjolio style.
[01:16:15]  And so I would simply do that.
[01:16:18]  My other thing, too, is there's a lot of guys.
[01:16:21]  So they're only going to get you from the back then.
[01:16:23]  So you're saying you're protected from the back, but not from the front.
[01:16:26]  No, yeah, not from the front, but I got, but my mooning smile will disarm people.
[01:16:30]  Okay.
[01:16:30]  The other thing, too, is I probably wouldn't be an assassin.
[01:16:34]  I would just try to have a regular job.
[01:16:36]  What would you be?
[01:16:37]  Like, I don't know.
[01:16:39]  I'd work at a brewery or like a florist or something.
[01:16:42]  Oh, you mean just like outside?
[01:16:43]  Yeah.
[01:16:44]  You're like, I'm not even in the movie.
[01:16:46]  And my whole thing is, I'd be like, what are these guys doing?
[01:16:48]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:16:49]  You're like, I'm just a sim.
[01:16:51]  John Wick killed like 80 people in a nightclub.
[01:16:54]  Like, isn't, shouldn't the police be here?
[01:16:56]  You're not even on the subway.
[01:16:58]  I know, but I'd be like, why isn't anyone arresting John Wick?
[01:17:01]  I get it.
[01:17:02]  The other guys are bad too, but he just murdered 80 people.
[01:17:05]  But he's so cool.
[01:17:06]  I understand that, but that's not.
[01:17:08]  But obviously, the government is extremely corrupt in the John Wick universe.
[01:17:12]  I know, but then I'm like, and I'm like trying to check into a hotel that's also the Flatiron Building.
[01:17:16]  And they're like, actually, we only serve assassins here.
[01:17:19]  And I get in lawsuit with them because I'm like, sorry, I'm a barista.
[01:17:24]  I need to stop.
[01:17:25]  That's not a protected class.
[01:17:26]  You don't have to do it.
[01:17:26]  No, but I'm like, right.
[01:17:28]  There's like a Title IX for assassins in the universe.
[01:17:33]  Listen, yeah.
[01:17:34]  The government system.
[01:17:36]  Or I, well, you know what job I would not have, and which seems to be the most common job of the John Wick universe?
[01:17:42]  Guys standing there, like in the headquarters.
[01:17:46]  Oh, yeah.
[01:17:47]  There are so many.
[01:17:48]  Well, there's security.
[01:17:50]  There's so many guys.
[01:17:51]  Yeah, that's security.
[01:17:53]  Who says you have your guys?
[01:17:55]  Do those guys have homes and families?
[01:17:58]  Of course.
[01:17:59]  Brace, part of being an adult is recognizing that other people have inner lives just like you do.
[01:18:03]  No, first of all, everyone else is fake.
[01:18:05]  It's like a video game, except for me.
[01:18:07]  But it's, I don't, I just don't understand why anyone lets this happen.
[01:18:12]  Are there wars in John Wick?
[01:18:14]  Do you know what I would be in the John Wick universe?
[01:18:16]  Who?
[01:18:16]  Stay at home wife.
[01:18:17]  Stay at home to John Wick, but that didn't.
[01:18:19]  Stay at home.
[01:18:21]  Me?
[01:18:21]  Stay at home.
[01:18:22]  Yeah, but would you be John Wick's stay-at-home wife?
[01:18:25]  No, I just mean a general.
[01:18:26]  I'm staying at home.
[01:18:27]  Neither of us would be John Wick.
[01:18:29]  You're not in.
[01:18:30]  There aren't really a lot of guys like me in John Wick Wick.
[01:18:32]  But you know what's great about the John Wick universe?
[01:18:33]  What?
[01:18:34]  Great homes.
[01:18:34]  So I'm like, I'm staying here.
[01:18:36]  Crazy houses.
[01:18:37]  Yeah.
[01:18:37]  Lives in the loop.
[01:18:38]  Let's stay at home.
[01:18:39]  Yeah.
[01:18:40]  I'm not going anywhere.
[01:18:41]  I'm Liz.
[01:18:41]  My name is Brace, the Maitre D at the John Wick Hotel.
[01:18:47]  We are, of course, joined by young Chomsky and the podcast is called Drunan.
[01:18:54]  We'll see you next time.