Dave Smith dissects his debate with Douglas Murray, exposing Murray’s evasive tactics—dismissing NATO’s 2001 treaty with Putin and dodging Libya’s Pentagon-backed regime-change plans—while accusing him of weaponizing anti-Semitism smears to silence criticism of U.S. foreign policy. Smith links neoconservative wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria to failed democracy exports and warns that another Iran conflict could backfire, fueling global instability. His shift from atheism to faith after a near-traumatic birth experience reshaped his perspective, now grounding his defense of free speech against platforms like YouTube censoring dissent. The episode frames unchecked state violence as morally indefensible, urging humility in geopolitics and rejecting collective rights rhetoric that dehumanizes entire populations. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I mean, it was, you know, look, he was ridiculous.
And it was...
It was kind of strange to witness as it was happening.
I go, so you decided to open the debate by just chastising everyone as not being as good as you?
That the expert class ought to be the ones consulted?
I mean, you could argue what exactly he was saying.
But he was clearly saying that you guys on podcasts are simply not qualified to talk about these subjects.
Now, you're saying this on the Joe Rogan experience.
Of all places to go and deliver this message, this is the place guaranteed to turn the entire audience against you.
And, of course, I just think that it's a ridiculous non-argument that never would have made sense.
But coming off of the COVID years, the idea that you're going to convince people that you ought to kind of, they ought to trust your opinions, that your class ought to be trusted, was a ridiculous attempt.
I know Douglas, and I think that I've always gotten along with him, and I think that he's clever.
But he's clever in a boarding school way.
He went to boarding school, as I did, and you instantly recognize it in the way that he debates, which is by dropping references that suggest deep air edition that doesn't actually exist.
I think he's clever.
He's got a kind of bullshitty boarding school vibe to him, again, that I recognize, that I have sometimes.
So I'm not trying to be holier than thou, but the idea that he's an expert is absurd.
He's a journalist like the rest of us who's been taken on PR tours in various countries by their governments trying to win his support.
The analogy that I've used about it is that if you had two UFC fighters that are going to fight...
They've signed the contract, they've done their training camps, they show up to Madison Square Garden, they both get in the octagon, and one of them puts up his hands, and then the other one puts his hands down and goes, you know, I'm such a better fighter than you.
And this is ridiculous that me and you are even fighting.
We both accepted, we're both here, so if you are such a better fighter, if you have trained so much more, if you have all these advantages against me, Well, then you have to demonstrate that.
Take on the argument.
You should be able to then destroy me.
And so he weirdly opened with this thing where he was going to turn everybody off, turn everyone against it, because the style is bullshit.
And I've had lots of people who are pro-Israel reach out to me since then and be like, listen, I disagree with you on the issue, but that was ridiculous, the way he attempted to argue.
Because, weirdly, number one, you're turning everyone against you, and number two, you're just setting the bar so much higher for yourself.
Because now, once we start actually getting into the debate, you've already explained that you should be dominating me on every facet of this, and yet you're not.
And yet, actually, when it comes down to it, you have no answer for the points that I'm making.
And that was the theme of the entire— Yes, that's right.
But there was— There were two points in the debate that actually stuck out to me the most.
And it wasn't the, have you been, which was the funniest thing that everyone's making, that Douglas will be mocked for eternity for, but he made his own bed.
But the two points to me that really stuck out in the debate, because this is the way my mind works, is that I'm like...
Oh, if you, like, give me something.
Give me something to challenge me on.
That will actually keep me up at night, by the way.
If you were to be like, no, Dave, you got this completely wrong, and you need to read these three books to understand why you're missing all this information.
Can I interrupt and say, knowing you pretty well, I think, I mean this, I believe, I would take a lie detector test and pass, I believe that if you read those books and found that you were wrong, that you would admit it.
This was a private cable that later the heroic Julian Assange released.
It's the only reason we know it exists.
And he lays out in there that all this talk about Ukrainian entry to NATO is going to lead to a war.
And he specifically says that this is the brightest of all red lines for the Russians.
And if we keep moving forward, they fear this could result in civil war and then they might have to intervene.
In his words, quote, a choice the Russians do not want to have to make.
So it's like, hey, there's a pretty compelling situation.
And then number two, I said, uh...
Stoltenberg, I always say this name wrong, but the head of NATO, he said that Vladimir Putin in late 2001 put in writing, sent a draft treaty to NATO and said, if you just put into writing that you will not bring Ukraine into NATO, I will not invade the country.
This is the head of NATO.
So I give him these two points, okay?
I could talk a lot more about this, but I was like, let's focus on these two.
Seems to me that all the powerful people involved are admitting that this war was about Ukrainian entry into NATO.
And his response was, the war was not about Ukrainian entry into NATO.
It was about Vladimir Putin's desires to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
And I was like, yeah, but what's the response?
Like, what's the response to my point?
Like, I made a point.
You made nothing.
You just made an assertion.
So there was this one where it's like...
Once you actually get down to it, once you remove all this, like, you're an expert, you're not an expert, you've never been, what are you watering, you've got no actual argument here.
Well, okay, so then the other one, which some people did pick up on this, but this to me was like actually the biggest moment of the debate, I thought.
And it was sad in a way, because Douglas Murray is someone who I have some degree of respect for as a smart person.
And it was kind of sad that he was reduced to this.
But so he made the argument.
He said...
First off, he was dishonest.
And I didn't call him, I know this, but I let it slide.
But he goes, you know, I was very iffy about the war in Libya.
And it's like, I've read your columns.
At the time.
No, you fucking warrants.
Okay.
Anyway, but he goes, I was very iffy about the war in Libya, but the war in Libya was fought because there was this tremendous fear that Gaddafi was about to go genocidal, and it was a humanitarian intervention.
But forget even the point that, okay, maybe their argument is they thought he was going to go genocidal and they didn't realize it would be so much worse without him.
But I said, okay, Douglas, so riddle me this then.
If it was a humanitarian intervention, how come I have four-star General Wesley Clark telling me...
10 years prior that we had already made the plans to go overthrow Gaddafi.
Because he said this very clearly to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.
And then I mentioned that he later, actually very recently on Pierce Morgan, he clarified.
This is really interesting.
If people go watch Scott Horton, who is amazing, by the way, his book Provoked is the best book on Russia-US post...
Collapse of the Soviet Union Relations.
His book, Enough Already, is the best book that's been written on the terror wars.
So Scott Horton is debating Wesley Clark on Piers Morgan.
And this gets brought up.
You know, the fact that you said in 2001, you had already seen in the Pentagon that we were going to overthrow seven countries in five years.
And, okay.
So he says, he goes, well, actually, the plans go back to 1991.
And I saw them first from Paul Wolfowitz's office.
And then, basically, the plans got killed, and then they were revived by Richard Perl and a study paid for by the Israelis.
This was four-star General Wesley Clark's comments on it.
So I brought that up.
And I go, well, look, you're going to say that this is a humanitarian intervention, but that seems strange because the plans to overthrow Gaddafi were already written many years earlier.
And then they had their opportunity, and they did it.
I think it was more than just a humanitarian intervention.
And then his response is this thing about how Paul Wolfowitz's name starts with an animal and ends Jewish.
And it was kind of funny the way he said it.
But then he just, he went, be careful what you're watering there.
Because you can't, you know, a lot of people are going to hate Jews if you just start bringing up Paul Wolfowitz's name.
And I just could not believe.
By the way, the end result of that is he had no response to what I was saying.
But because Paul Wolfowitz has an identifiably Jewish name, you're abetting anti-Semitism by bringing it up, even though he's a government official who helped get us into this war that killed a million people?
I mean, told them to rise up against Saddam Hussein and overthrow him and then decided, ah, we're going to back off of that and just allowed them to get slaughtered, you know.
But, look, I mean, it was just kind of blatant.
It's like, I'm presenting an argument and you're responding with a pure woke tactic.
A pure woke tactic to say, which I, as I mentioned to him, I go, but wouldn't this apply to everything you stand for?
I mean, everything you stand for about how we shouldn't have so much Muslim immigration into the UK.
Okay, well, someone could take that, and that might lead to a rise in hatred of Muslim people.
But that's not a counter-argument.
That's not an argument.
That's like, well, okay, well, then maybe you could say, you should also add in there, I don't mean all Jewish people are guilty of some conspiracy, but that, first of all, I'm Jewish, and he's not.
I saw that and read the commentary after, and as someone who's always liked Douglas and known him for a while, my first instinct was, wow, he just destroyed his career like he's done.
No smart person will ever take Douglas seriously again.
And I don't know if he felt that way, but it was clear by a day or two after he realized he destroyed his career.
In response, rather than admitting that and admitting what he'd done wrong, he attacked you, really kind of doubled down in the New York Post.
I want to read this because I was offended by this.
He goes, the whole column's an attack on you, and I'm quoting, claiming some Jewish ancestry.
Smith has spent the last 18 months since October 7th being very unfunny.
Well, first of all, I'm not even the first because everyone made this joke already about the art, but he says I haven't been funny and Douglas has never been to one of my comedy shows.
He should come and check it out, and then he could tell me what he thinks.
I think I'm pretty damn funny in my shows, and the audience seems to think so.
Which is, in a way, you know, one of the things I thought was so interesting about the piece was that, and I couldn't imagine, man, I hope I'm never...
This person.
Because even now, there's so many shots I could take at Douglas.
But even when you ask me about the debate, my first instinct is to go like, well, look, here are the points I made that he didn't have counters to.
And it's tough for all of us because there is, as you know well, you've talked a lot about this, right?
But it's like...
In this kind of show business news world, where we're talking about events and things that matter, but also there's a camera on us, and we're talking on a microphone, and we're public people, and so it's kind of impossible to completely remove your ego and your own narcissistic tendencies from that.
But you've got to keep reminding yourself, yeah, but there's a fucking war going on.
That's what actually matters.
All of this is much less important than the actual policy.
You try to focus on that, but I could not imagine writing an article about a debate that I had just been in where the reaction was so unfavorable toward me.
And in the piece, what you might notice is he does not take on a single one of my arguments.
He does not point out something that I got wrong.
He does not say, Dave argued this, but this is so clearly a reflection of his lack of knowledge on this subject because he didn't account for X, Y, and Z. It's just like the actual debate.
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I don't think Douglas Murray destroyed his career.
I think he destroyed his reputation.
And so his reputation amongst the people.
But his career is actually going to be fine.
Much like Kamala Harris's career is actually going to be fine.
And I don't know.
You know, I'm speculating a little bit with this because there was not almost any interaction off the podcast.
Like Douglas Murray showed up.
Five minutes later, we were recording.
He left immediately afterward and me and Rogan hung out.
So, like, there's nothing more that the viewer didn't see that I saw, really.
Hellos and goodbyes.
But I think, number one, one of my guesses, I'm speculating here, is that he just didn't, wasn't really prepared for me, and it was like, oh, a comedian will be on there, and maybe he came in kind of confident that, like, he'll be able to handle.
I've had that happen a few times in my career.
I think it's happening less.
I can't imagine he didn't look into me before the debate, but maybe that's possible.
But the feeling that I got as it was going on was kind of...
Okay, do you remember...
I'm sure you do.
You remember very well when Kamala Harris was running for president.
I know that seems like a long time ago, but that actually happened, which is really crazy.
There's a power source that may be a little concerned about her, and she's trying to let them know, don't worry, I'm good for business, I've got Liz Cheney right here.
That's kind of my assumption.
It seemed to me with the Douglas Murray thing, he wasn't playing in the audience, he certainly wasn't trying to persuade Joe.
He perhaps was talking to a different audience, which will make sure that his career is just fine.
Well, again, look, there's two things that I really want to make sure I express.
Number one, with the thing where this claims some Jewish ancestry thing, which, by the way, would be, I think, if you were to ever do this, to say, like, A Jewish person who was on your side, you would be like, well, that's a pretty anti-Semitic thing to do, right?
To, like, challenge their Jewishness because they disagree with a policy.
Well, first of all, and this isn't even the most important point, but the American taxpayer is forced to pay for this stuff.
But even if he wasn't, even if you didn't have to pay for it.
If you're a human being, forget even an American, if you're a human being, you have a right to have an opinion on any issue you want to have an opinion on.
It was like, wait a second, it seems like this came, you're telling me it came from a pangolin in a wet market, a fish market, a mammal sold in a fish market, somehow, you know, was the genesis of this virus.
But there was this level 3 biolab, like a mile away, maybe that was a source that were like, ah, you hate Asians!
And they claimed racism, so you couldn't pursue that line of inquiry.
I see people like Douglas Murray, supposedly on the right, and there are a lot of others like Douglas Murray, saying the same thing.
Like, you can't express an opinion about where your tax dollars go or about people dying or else you're a bigot.
But then the other thing, which is really separate and secondary from that, but the argument that Douglas Murray is making is that if I call out Paul Wolfowitz, or even, you know...
More broadly speaking, if I call out the neoconservatives and how they hijacked American foreign policy and how they very much had Israel's interest in mind, which I get from reading the neoconservatives.
I don't get this from reading critics of them.
It's in their own words.
He's saying me calling that out is fertile ground for Jew hatred to rise.
And it's like, no.
What you're doing is fertile ground.
I agree with that.
You telling me I'm not allowed to call out the deputy defense secretary because his last name is Jewish?
That's actually what leads to a rise in people not liking Jews.
And I do think Douglass, though he's not an expert or a genius, is smart enough to understand that, but he did it anyway.
And I don't know his motive, but...
In the moment that I think made me actually turn it off, I had to stop watching, but it was most revealing of all, is when he was after Daryl Cooper, the historian, really one of the great historians in the United States, Daryl Cooper, and doesn't know his name.
Yeah.
But goes after him personally as like a Nazi or something.
And let me just parenthetically, and I'll shut up after this, but Daryl Cooper is one of the kindest, most reasonable, most fundamentally liberal.
I know.
Anti-Nazi people.
I know.
A guy who you could give your routing number to would never steal money.
Well, it's also, you know, If you're smearing people, and Daryl wasn't the only one, but if you're smearing people whose names you don't know, and who you admit you've never listened to any of their work...
Maybe don't put that right in the middle of an appeal to expertise.
Maybe have that in a different section than in the section where you're going, you really have to know what you're talking about in order to have an opinion on these things.
It is something, it's a comment on our time and on our society that the guy who, essentially, if you actually consume any of Daryl's work, because I have consumed a lot of it, basically, Daryl's whole kind of, his template, the way he operates, is he's, there's basically only, like, a couple rules.
And, like, number one is he has to read everything that's available on the subject.
So he reads everything.
The guy's a machine.
His depth of knowledge is like second to none.
He just knows everything.
And then number two is whenever you talk about history, basically his rule is that you have to understand that everyone involved is a human being.
Every one of them was a three-year-old at one point.
So like totally innocent, like good little boy, like my three-year-old that I have at home.
And that...
They grew up in real circumstances and real things happened to them.
And if you're going to do history, you have to constantly be doing your absolute best to put yourself in this person's shoes and then put yourself in this person's shoes.
And then put yourself on this side of the conflict and then put yourself on this side of the conflict.
That's basically it.
It's pure empathy.
And actually, as I've mentioned to you personally, and I've told Daryl this personally, he is...
Probably the best shot people have at de-radicalizing people in the worst form of being radicalized.
He's the guy, listen, for me personally, and I thought I was pretty well read on the history of Israel-Palestine, and he has this incredibly long series, like a 30-hour series, called Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.
And the thing is, I knew most of what I knew, not all of it, but most of what I had read about with the Israeli-Palestine conflict, like most people, It starts in 1947, 1948, and then goes up to today.
His series is about, it's like from the 1890s until 1947.
So he's talking about the creation of the state, from Zionism being created to the state being created.
That's basically the whole, you know, he has a little bit where he's talking about the pogroms that preceded the Zionists, but that's really the story.
It actually made me much more sympathetic to the Zionists.
You know, as somebody who grew up kind of in that propaganda, in the pro-Israel propaganda, then ultimately turned on it and became a critic of Israel.
Listening to his series, you understand.
It just puts you in the position, and you do understand, like, oh, okay, these were real men who were reacting to the circumstances of their day.
You can kind of understand why a lot of them wanted to do this.
By the way, it's pretty amazing that they pulled it off, however you feel.
However you feel about what the government of Israel is doing, it's amazing that they did this.
Yeah, look, and of course, for the one, this is why I say it's a comment on our time.
So there's one guy here who's going like, listen, you got to like really completely educate yourself on a subject and then you have to have empathy toward all sides.
Well, I mean, again, I just feel like I benefit in a way from us having this conversation like after COVID and after kind of all of these insane things.
Okay.
So, Sam Harris, what did I get wrong?
Like, I don't think...
If you're gonna smear me as being a misinformation artist, which, you know, I'll take that...
I should make t-shirts about misinformation artists.
He's the guy who defended the war in Iraq and torture and fell for the Russiagate bullshit, thought Trump was a Russian spy, fell for lockdowns and vaccine mandates and all this stuff.
So I'll put my misinformation track record up against Sam Harris's, you know...
Whatever.
I mean, I know he's got a meditation app or something like that.
Well, I mean, I would say that kind of ironically, although not really actually ironic, and this kind of goes to the conversation that you and Brett Weinstein were having the other day.
I really love Brett.
I think he's great.
I'm on your side of that.
But I think one of the fundamental flaws in atheism is that it doesn't really exist.
Listen, anytime, and this was one of, again, I really, really like Brett, but I think one of the areas where he failed kind of in that conversation with you, in that, you know, very friendly debate, is that...
He had to say several times throughout it, yes, yes, I live as if what you're saying is correct.
But I view things this way.
So, yes, I'd much rather live.
But if your thesis involves you having to engage in a performative contradiction, then something's not right with your theory.
And so Sam Harris will sit here and say, none of us have free will, but I'm still going to act as if all of us have free will.
You've got a major flaw in your theory.
This is just too much.
This is too far.
You can't do that.
That's not right.
And so, yes, again, with all of them.
The bottom line, I think, with a lot of these people, and some have adapted better than others.
I think Brett's one of the ones who's really adapted well from the old academia world to this new...
Podcast world that we're in now.
But I think the problem with a lot of them, like Sam Harris, and I think Douglas Murray, too, is that what they've worked their entire career on has been completely rejected.
There's something in people that, the lowest part of people, that instinctively accuses others of doing what they're doing.
And I've never really, man, that's one thing I don't want to be as a guy who does that.
But I remember Bill Crustle, who I worked for for years and really liked and was grateful to, and he was a great boss in the 90s, and came out against me and called me a Nazi and all this stuff, like without calling me.
But one of the criticisms against me, I'll never forget it when I realized this phenomenon was real, is when he accused me of advocating, and I'm quoting, for an ethnostate.
Now, I have a lot of flaws.
They're all on display.
I've never wanted an ethnostate.
And it's like, wait, one of us is for an ethnostate.
And it's not me.
But you just said that, like, of all the possible criticisms.
Look, obviously, like, we're living through something, you know, we're probably living through several things that are very profound, but one of the most profound things has been this revolution in information and the technology, and it's led to this, like, kind of mass decentralization of media, and where there's now, like, there's so many...
And it's not, again, you could be honest about it and kind of maintain some of your respect.
But the truth is that, like, look, even when they'll say these things, like if you accuse Ben Shapiro of having dual loyalty, they go, oh, that's an anti-Semitic trope.
That means you hate the Jews.
But then he'll sit there in his own words and say, I forget his exact quote, but it was something like, my favorite thing about the United States of America is that it protects Israel.
And so you're already saying you have loyalty to both of these countries.
In fact, I'm not so sure about them.
One of the loyalties, but I'm very sure about the other one.
And that is not, I'm sorry, that's not a statement against Jewish people.
I'm Jewish.
I love Jewish people.
You know, it's like I get called a self-hating Jew on Twitter or whatever.
It could not be further from the truth.
I actually really love Jewish people.
There's many things about Jewish culture that have, you know, had a huge impact on me, made me the person I am, made me a better person for their impact on me.
But this is a foreign government.
Like, I'm sorry.
We're allowed to talk about that.
If you, you know, I saw Glenn Beck the other day had Douglas Murray on.
And he wasn't like, Glenn Beck wasn't like mean to me personally, which I appreciated.
But he was just going, I mean, it was just so ridiculous.
But it's like you were sitting here, we're having a conversation about a foreign government.
You started crying on your show talking about this foreign government.
That's fucking weird.
That's weird.
We should not be doing that.
What the hell is going on here?
I don't even think you should cry about our own government, but if you're going to cry about one, it should be ours.
And if you don't, especially, and by the way, this is not my primary goal.
My primary goal is to tell the truth and to advocate for what's good for our country.
But...
If you're concerned about, like, the young men getting a little bit too radical and, you know, being too obsessed with the Jews or too against the Jews, which I do think is a legit concern.
Mark Levin, who I also know, I mean, I've been in right-wing world my whole life.
I know everybody.
I work with Mark.
I've always gotten along with Mark.
Always been nice to me.
But yeah, he just accused Trump, the Trump administration, of anti-Semitism.
For calling someone a neocon.
Well, what he did was he accused Steve Witkoff of anti-Semitism.
Right.
And I just want to say I think Steve Witkoff is, if there's anyone who is, you know, has the hand of God on him, it seems to me, I sort of overstate it, but I feel that way.
It's Witkoff who's a thoroughly decent man and who was running around the world trying to bring peace between nations.
And also, look, as anybody can read, I think we talked about this last time I was on, but anybody can read for themselves the Clean Break Memo.
It was written by Richard Perle and David Wormser to Benjamin Netanyahu that was like, look, here is our plan.
And the break was from the peace process.
The break was from Oslo.
And they go, look, here's the plan.
You know how Yitzhak Rabin and all these liberal Jews are saying, We'll have to make peace with the Palestinians so that we can then make peace with the broader Arab world.
Well, no.
We got a new plan.
We're going to break with all of that.
We're not doing this land swap thing.
We're not giving the Palestinians a state.
What we'll do is we'll have America overthrow all of these other governments.
That way you never have to make peace with the Palestinians.
And you can just enjoy.
Domination over the region.
And from my reading of it, it does seem to me that a lot of them believed it.
I think a lot of them hubris.
Yeah, we overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Democracy will sweep the region.
Then we'll overthrow Gaddafi.
Then we'll overthrow the mullahs in Iran.
And then the region will be way better.
Except every time they actually did it, it resulted in nothing but disaster, which really could have been very easily predicted and was predicted by wiser people than the neocons.
All these years later, you either have to, like, apologize for your role in this catastrophe or defend your role in this catastrophe and talk about how you still really believe it was the right thing to do.
But you can't sit here and say, you're not an expert and you're a Jew hater if you say the word neoconservative.
It's so bizarre to me that now that I'm at this level where I'm being lectured to by the leaders of Conservatism, Inc., and I have to explain to them that I don't believe in moral relativism.
As if this is a new thing for them to wrap their head around.
I remember, so when I, this is like, I want to say like 2014, 2015.
It was somewhere in there where I said, the first time I ever got on television, the first person who ever put me on TV was Kennedy, who I just adore and will for the rest of my days.
I found out pretty quickly by just doing shows at Fox News and then going to the bar afterward with some of the people there, you're like, oh, Conservatism Inc.
is not exactly what you thought.
They're actually pretty liberal when it comes down to the bar hang after the show.
By the way, all of these even debates today, the people on Twitter talking about the woke right, it just happens to be.
That everyone who's labeled woke right are the ones who are opposing American wars, and everybody who's throwing out the accusation all happen to support them.
But let me just, on the Fox News thing, so I remember then, and this is time, I was broke.
I mean, like, broke like...
Where they're like, hey, let's go grab a beer after the show.
I'm like, all right, are you buying?
Because if not, let's go grab a six-pack at the store and go back to my apartment.
Because I just had no money.
And I would have, at the time, when they said, they were like, look, they're thinking about you for one of these contributorships.
Whatever it is, it may give you like 100 grand a year or something like that if you get one.
It would have been like life-changing for me.
Life-changing.
And I remember consciously at the time thinking, you know, at a time when I'm making 25 grand a year, thinking, man, Maybe I just don't talk about the foreign policy stuff.
Maybe I just do that.
And then even in the moment I thought about it, just being like, nah, Ron Paul's my hero.
My hero are the people who tell the truth.
So I'm just not going to...
But so if I didn't sell out then, the idea that I'm going to sell out now, when I'm doing really well, it's like, no, that's ridiculous.
It's like, and not to brag, I knew this as I was watching it.
I was like, Dave is about to become way more famous, but not just famous, more authoritative, more respected, more closely listened to than ever before.
Well, it's not just, you know, one of the things that was interesting is that it's not just, so there was the debate.
There was the reaction to the debate.
But then what was really interesting is that then there was the reaction to, just because it became such a big thing, it ended up coming up on Rogan's podcast with other guests later on.
And they're all just kind of making fun of Douglas and how ridiculous he was, because he was ridiculous.
And then it's almost like you see the realization set in with those people that, oh shit, Joe was, what essentially happened here, right?
And this is, I think, for almost everyone to see, is that I've been debating all these guys on Israel-Palestine, and I've been beating all these guys in these debates.
And I'm not saying I'm beating, I'm just saying, like, the reaction, the Oxford-style voting is that I win dominantly.
And then Douglas Murray was almost brought in as the king boss.
Well, here's Douglas Murray, the guy who's just known for his...
He's known for.
He couldn't land a blow.
He couldn't take on one argument.
He had to just be resorted to like, it was like you were debating an anti-racist college professor who's just going to tell you the whole time that I'm not even allowed to have this opinion.
Yes, it was just that.
And so then what do you think the response to that was?
Here you have Joe Rogan, who has got some of these guys on his show, who clearly are making a case where he goes, all right, yeah, this is a pretty good argument that this guy's making.
And he brought, you know, as much as...
Douglas was complaining in his op-eds after the fact that it's so unfair that I couldn't just go on alone.
I had to go on with this guy who doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's like, yeah, but this was your opportunity, man.
You could have blown me out of the water and then had Rogan being like, ah, shit, maybe I should have more experts on.
Maybe I've got this comedian guy who I think is making really good points, but then this guy just came in and totally took him on, but he was unwilling or unable to do that.
That was the next freakout, is they realized that, like, oh, Joe just got pushed more in my direction, as his whole audience did.
I mean, you keep referring to this as a debate, but it wasn't, of course, it was not a debate.
It was Douglas trying to scold Joe into never having you or anyone like you on his show again.
It was basically, he was playing the heavy a little bit.
It was kind of threatening, I thought.
You know, you don't really know because you were a sitcom actor slash comedian slash bowhunter that actually you're playing with some pretty serious shit, Joe Rogan.
And we've been watching, and maybe you should stop having these people on.
We have, in this country right now, we have speech laws being passed.
In the name of students feeling not safe on college campuses, and you get the accusation of bigotry used to shut down real dissent and real conversations, and then they're going to turn around and say the other side is woke.
And isn't the most outrageous part of it, or at least to me, I mean, I guess it's all outrageous, but the crazy thing is that we've, and we've seen this in the last decade, where Hollywood types and big musicians would boycott red states?
Like if they tried to pass a six-week heartbeat bill for abortion?
Or the bathroom bill?
So you could boycott states in our own country, but you can't boycott a foreign country.
It's like the double standard there.
Again, this is why I said the thing about relativism.
Because in the same way that people will talk about...
And the same people who will harp on, you know, anti-Semitism on Twitter.
And like, I'm not denying it, something's going on there, clearly.
And it's not, as I've said, and again, this isn't necessarily the most important aspect to it, but...
Personally, one of the things that annoys me about that is like, it's not helping my argument.
It's an albatross around my neck.
And it's the reason why every goddamn debate that I'm in, the first thing they're going to bring up is, well, look at all these people on Twitter who are saying all this stuff.
So I wish those people would knock it off.
But you also, okay, we don't need two standards here.
One standard will do just fine.
Let's have one standard and apply this across the board.
Because the amount of anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-Palestinian bigotry, dehumanizing of the entire Palestinian people.
But also, I will say that, you know, Donald Trump, who I voted for and supported in this last election, I think has done some really good things in his first 100 days or so, and some not so good things.
But, you know, I mean, he...
He would turn in the debate and call Joe Biden a Palestinian.
He said this about Chuck Schumer, too.
He's basically a Palestinian.
You're like, whoa.
And for all the people who have been screaming bigotry for the last decade, no one ever thought to be like, "Hey, you know, that's not like an insult." I know.
It's not an insult to call someone a Palestinian.
I've met lots of Palestinians who are really great people.
There's nothing wrong with them.
And again, like if anyone, if a presidential candidate ever like stood up in the debate and went, "Oh, this guy's a real Jew." We'd all be like, "Whoa, what the hell is that?" I know.
You don't get to say that in a political debate.
I know.
And so there's this, there's a ton of this.
You have, you know, Nikki Haley going over and signing bombs?
Pull up the actual tweet on that, because I don't want to, like, misremember it, but it was something really egregious.
And he's, you know, there's just...
Look, there's a lot of this stuff.
It's how you get Nikki Haley signing bombs that are about to go get dropped on women and children.
You're like, I'm sorry, that's fucking sickening.
Like, what the hell is that?
Like, what are we, a part of some death cult or something?
I mean, this is, like, real...
And so, of course, then, you know...
Douglas Murray's book is like democracies and death cults or whatever, which is kind of funny in a way to be pro-democracies while you're also making the argument for expertise.
Because you would think, like, if you're for democracy, the whole point of this, the whole point of experts is to explain it to regular people who will ultimately have the authority of deciding which experts are in charge and which experts are not in charge.
You know, there's a little contradiction there.
But again, this is my issue.
And this is where I think, Tucker, in some way, we're really like kindred spirits.
In my soul, in my heart of hearts, I'm a crotchety old right-winger.
That's who I want to be.
I try my best.
I'm not just a Western chauvinist or whatever.
I think Western society is better than everything else.
I'm a libertarian, and I think it's one of the goofiest things about libertarians in general, that they kind of try to run away from that and be egalitarian to some degree.
That's ridiculous.
What do you tell you?
You believe in individual liberty?
Well, then you don't get to say every civilization is equal, because only one of them respects individual liberty, and that's the better one, okay?
And so you look at this dynamic where you go, okay, so part of...
So you look at Kamala Harris' campaign and say Joe Biden...
The same way.
And Joe Biden, specifically because he was senile.
You know, Joe Biden, younger Joe Biden, while he was never a very bright guy, maybe would have been a little bit different politically.
But Kamala Harris, so she kind of famously, infamously now, turned down the Joe Rogan experience.
She could have been on the show, but she didn't.
Now, a lot of people were saying, oh, what a stupid move.
Turning that down, I kind of disagree.
I go, eh, it probably was the right move.
For sure.
If you had no soul, and you're working for the Kamala Harris campaign, and your only objective in this world was to get her elected, and that invite came in, you're probably going, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You will be exposed.
You can't go do this.
The fact is that Kamala Harris, by the nature of who she is as a person, and by the nature of what she was running on, Is not built for a three-hour, unedited, unscripted conversation.
You can't do that.
Say whatever you will about Donald Trump.
The man's got a lot of flaws, but he is built for that.
And, you know, I don't want to be, like, too paranoid.
But I think some of the anger and the hate online is organic, and it's rooted in frustration and facts in some cases.
It's not all bad, but some of it is so clearly inorganic, it just obviously is, that you sort of wonder, like, is this all a pretext for shutting it down?
And certainly, I never know what is a pretext or what is not, but it's certainly like, oh, this is going to be used that way.
So that's another thing.
It's very short-sighted.
For anyone, it's kind of like nobody ever...
Which, I get it, it's a little bit difficult to do because it's like second or third order thinking, but no one ever kind of thinks about what the reaction is going to be to what they're doing.
It's just whether they can get away with it in the moment, but it's not the fact that it's like, hey, there is going to be a correction for this, and almost certainly an overcorrection.
Because that's always the case.
You know, it doesn't seem like any of those leftists ever thought about when they were pushing, like, all the trans and the kids stuff.
They'd be like, what do you think the result of this is going to be?
It was an interesting experience for me this last month or so because I've never really...
I think this has helped me in my career is that I didn't blow up out of nowhere.
I know other people who have.
In comedy, I know people who just exploded.
They were in open mics with me and then they got an audition for Saturday Night Live and then they got it.
And now they're world famous.
You know, you go literally from being a complete unknown, not even an established comedian, a newer comedian who can't even work the clubs, to being, like, world famous.
It was always like a logical progression, like one step more, one step more, my profile kind of rose.
But this thing was the biggest thing I've ever done in my career.
It was like the biggest reaction to any show or any debate that I've ever done, because it was on Rogan's podcast, and he doesn't usually do debates, and it was the most contentious issue of our day, so it became this big thing.
And now I'm at a place where, you know, I'm 42. I have a great wife.
I got two little kids that I play with every day.
I have a nice house.
My life is like set up.
I'm an adult.
But when the kind of hate attack, this coordinated attack, and everyone who's attacking me just happens to have their name written in Hebrew letters and a Jewish star in their bio, and they're all saying the most vicious stuff.
I've been sitting here, and I'm like, wow.
Dude, if I were 25 and I wasn't Jewish, I could very easily see my response to this just being like, man, screw these people.
Now, I'm not saying that would be correct, but it's just like you feel that because that's the impulse.
But what you just said, I think, is the key point, which is that believing in individualism...
It's like a grounding force.
It kind of inoculates you against collectivist nonsense.
And when I say that, one of the problems here now is that the left, which is what they do, is they attack terms and concepts.
And so whenever you think about something, you start thinking about the lefty version of it.
And it's like, no, no, no, not that at all.
So the left kind of made individualism.
They kind of mixed it together with this self-actualization type.
Of course.
That's not where you are.
That's the path to hell.
You don't want to go down that path.
No, it's not true that because you feel something, it therefore should be actualized, and that's terrible.
However, more old-school individualism, like in the classical liberal enlightenment tradition, is understanding that the individual is a unit of analysis, that individuals are how we exist.
And that collectivism, what collectivism used to mean, was the idea that the individual ought to be subservient to the larger group.
Not that groups don't exist.
Not that we shouldn't come together.
Of course, we create families, we create churches, communities.
All of these things are wonderful.
But when you do understand, like, true individualism, like that individuals ought to have rights, things like that, it does, it shields you from a lot of this nonsense.
You are fundamentally different, not just in your fingerprints and iris skin, but in your soul, this thing that we can't quite define, but that we know is real.
I remember I was watching, as I mentioned earlier, I was watching you and Brett Weinstein.
Yes.
So I was just, yesterday, was watching this.
And there was one point where Brett said, and I think he was completely right about this, and you guys kind of agreed, but he said, he goes, you know, the claim that Israel has a right to exist has always seemed a little bit strange to me.
And he was like, I mean, they do exist, but do they have a right to exist?
Where they apply things like, they'll say, does Israel have a right to defend itself?
You go, no, individuals have a right to defend themselves.
And by the way, when I defend myself, I don't have the right to aggress upon other innocent people who happen to be in the general vicinity of the person who I want to defend myself against.
But he was talking about, like, when you start to think about, you know, the people in Germany in World War II and how there were little three-year-old girls and eight-year-old boys and there were women and there were all that, you know.
And if you start to kind of humanize them, or if you start to dehumanize them, as many were making the attempt to do, he said, you...
You might find yourself having two competing voices in your head.
Like, on one level, you go, well, of course, there were innocent women and innocent children, and of course, these are people, just like anybody else.
And then you might have some other voice that goes, well, they were Germans, and it was World War II.
So what are you doing?
Trying to humanize anyone.
And he goes, okay, that second voice is not you.
That's not you.
That is a spirit outside of you acting on you.
And just so you know, it's the secret.
Exactly.
Dude, it's so funny for people trying to demonize this guy.
Like, this is who he actually is.
When he's talking to his audience and he's got a message to give them, this is the message he's giving them.
And man, he's just so right about that.
And it's the same thing as, like, when you see, like, some hardcore Israel supporter and then some hardcore, like, radical pro-Palestinian and, like, they're going, like, all the Jews.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then they're going, all the Arabs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you're like, you're the same person.
Both of you are the same person.
And I'm not trying to completely equate it because obviously the Palestinians have lost in this conflict.
They're the ones who have been, you know, they've been fucked over in a way that the Israelis haven't.
Anytime that you're, like, dehumanizing an entire group of people, setting the stage to then justify some type of brutal aggression that could not be justified without dehumanizing them first, you are participating in the same exercise that is the reason throughout all of human history that we've had genocides and wars and ethnic cleansing campaigns and just horrible atrocities.
Don't do that.
Whatever you do, if you ever find yourself doing that, don't do it.
And he was asking me, like, he started really getting into the detail of, like, what I believe a just war is and what an immoral war is and why is that.
And the example I used, which I think, like, I know because I've heard you talk about this stuff, too.
I think you'll agree with me.
But I was like, Okay, let's take World War II and let's say that, like, not only is the official narrative right, let's tweak some things here.
It's so much more right than, you know, the Nazis are...
If it's possible, they're even worse than the real Nazis were.
And if it's possible, they actually were going to take over the world.
And actually, we would all be speaking German.
Like, let's say not only were they going to take over England, they were going to cross the Atlantic and come take over North America also.
And the entire world would have fallen into Nazi totalitarianism had they won the war.
And let's say in order to stop the Nazis, we had a way where we could do it, where no innocent civilians were killed except one.
You know, we could...
Literally, we could take out the Nazis, save the entire world from totalitarianism.
By the way, in this model, there's no Joseph Stalin.
Joseph Stalin's a great guy, and the Soviets are a free country.
There's no moral questions about who we're working with.
All we had to do was we could take out the Nazis by dropping this one super bomb, but one six-year-old girl would be killed.
So I've made it the most clear-cut war in human history.
In that scenario...
I guess you'd go, look, we have to do this.
We have no choice.
The whole world will fall to totalitarianism or the whole world can be saved and one six-year-old girl is going to get killed.
Okay.
I can understand being like, we're making an impossible decision.
We have to do this.
Every year on the anniversary of that war, we should all, like, weep to ourselves.
We should all feel horrible that we had to do that.
Because a six-year-old girl got killed.
Like, I have a six-year-old girl.
This is the most horrible thing in the world that you would ever, like, kill a six-year-old girl.
I mean, my God, I would set the whole world on fire to stop someone from doing anything to my little girl.
And, like, so if that were, in this very clear-cut scenario, not the complexity of real history, in this scenario that I'm laying out.
We should still all be nothing but pity and sorrow that it ever came to that.
And we should rack our brains every day thinking, was there any alternative to that?
Was there any way that we could have done that without this little girl getting killed?
And, like, people could say that's kind of like pie in the sky or hippie-ish or whatever, but...
At the very least, dude, when you're talking about inflicting this level of human suffering on people, the onus is always on the people who are advocating for it to absolutely prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there's no other option, that we've exhausted everything else we could do.
It has to be this.
And if you come to the conclusion it has to be this, you should still be really sad and somber about it.
This spiking the football stuff, having a Bob Hope special after a war, this stuff that...
America got involved in after the Second World War.
It became kind of like this business of war.
We're spiking the football.
It's just like, it's disgusting.
And then you're telling me about how some other society is a death cult.
Well, also, again, like I said before, because this is always just my, it's the way my neurotic brain works or whatever, but I just like can't.
I have this consistency obsession or whatever, but I was listening to your show with Matt Walsh the other day, and I did appreciate some of the things he said about me and the debate with Douglas.
For a Daily Wire employee, I think that's about as nice, about as good a reaction as I'm going to get.
But he was at one point saying that he was like, well, you know, so then the real important, the good point that he said that Douglas Murray made was when he asked me, Well, then, how do you get rid of Hamas?
Like, what's your plan?
So, number one, it's not a point.
It's a question.
But then Matt Walsh was saying, like, well, look, I can understand you saying you're against what Israel is doing, but then what should they do to get rid of Hamas?
And it's just interesting to me to see any conservative going, wait a minute, so you're against these babies being killed?
And it's like, yes, yes, let's call this, I don't know, let me think of a term for it, the pro-life position.
Let's call it that.
Remember?
Remember the foundational principle that you've been talking about for your entire career?
But wait, hold on.
So, first of all, before, which, by the way, there are lots of other ways to deal with Hamas, obviously, but no, actually, I don't have to solve that problem before I can object to killing innocent children.
Right?
Like, no, it is not incumbent on the pro-life person to work out a plan for, like, the adoption.
You know, and like, so it's like, I have no argument against that.
But if you're in this world where we're talking about these things, then you don't get to just say, well, look, taking this opinion, which is the obvious logical conclusion of my stated principles, but if I take them to their conclusion, that will cause me grief.
Therefore, I'm going to say I don't really care about that.
Because, look, here's the thing.
If you do care about being America first, and you care about America not getting into another stupid, catastrophic war in the Middle East, well, who's pushing us in that direction?
And this is not a conspiracy theory.
This is, like, totally out in the open, right?
I mean, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history is Benjamin Netanyahu, okay?
Right?
Benjamin Netanyahu came...
To the U.S. Congress in 2002 and testified as a regional expert that we should go overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq because democracy will sweep the region.
He then also said in front of a congressional testimony that we should overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and that we should overthrow the mullahs in Iran.
Okay?
He's been advocating.
He's been John McCain.
He's been Dick Cheney this whole time advocating that we fight this next war and this next war and this next war.
They're right now.
What was it?
Three, four weeks ago, they drew up war plans, including us, to go to war with Iran.
It's only because Donald Trump, who seems to be willing to help them ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, but said, that's a bridge too far for me.
I'm not going to war here.
And so, thank God, now we're in negotiations with the Iranians.
But if you know this, then, like, for you to be a non-interventionist America first, it has to at least come with, and hey, we should cut Israel off.
And if I was sitting here and giving, like, these bravado, you know, infused speeches about all of the things that I can do, but really it relied on me borrowing the money from you in order to do it, you'd be like, hey, maybe stop giving this speech.
I just think it's getting too out in the open and I do, I mean, I guess I fret too much in general, but I do worry now that it's like super obvious what's going on that things will just devolve into like...
Well, that's why if you have any sense about you and you don't want to see things devolve into something ugly, that's why you want to make sure we don't get into another war right now.
I've really, you know, been focused on this stuff for a long time.
You know, I mean, I host, I do a show four days a week, and I'm always reading about this stuff, and I've done all the background reading.
I mean, I know a lot about, like, the neoconservatives and what motivates them, what their worldview was.
I will tell you the first thing that really surprised me, and I was genuinely surprised, and I hate the neoconservatives, like, I'm not, it's not that I don't understand how evil what they believe is.
I was really surprised that the Ukraine thing, the Nazis in Ukraine, didn't mess with them at all.
You know, I know why they support all the wars they have supported.
I thought that for the neoconservatives, real deal, not even neo-Nazis, Nazis, like the grandsons of the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust in Ukraine.
Proudly wearing swastikas, tattoos, and waving flags.
I mean, like, they threw their support behind the Azov battalion.
This was very strange.
Like, this was a line to me that I was like, oh, wow, they'll really go that far?
But I'll tell you, I am blown away by the fact that anybody who is out there shrieking about the rise in anti-Semitism is not wise enough.
To go, we cannot fight a war with Iran right now.
Because if we get into a war right now that's clearly on Israel's behalf, after 25 years of terror wars, which were pretty clearly, at least partially, on it.
I'm not going to go quite as far as Jeffrey Sachs, although he's an expert and I'm not, so I guess he's right and I'm not.
But I wouldn't quite say that we outsourced our foreign policy to Israel.
There's a lot of truth to that statement.
Was it Mearsheimer or Sachs who said, I view Benjamin Netanyahu as the worst U.S. president of the 21st century?
It's pretty hilarious.
And there's a lot of truth to that, but it's not like 100% true.
It's like, okay, but look, it's obviously, as I just said, Israel has been using its considerable influence to convince us to...
Go to war in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, in all of these places.
I think Yemen was more for the Saudis.
Afghanistan was our own thing.
But those wars, particularly, Israel was really on board with.
And if we were to go get into a war with Iran right now, which will be a much bigger disaster than any of the previous terror wars, there's really no argument about that.
But if we actually go to this war on behalf of Israel, I mean, what do you think that does to the level of anti-Semitism?
Now, by the way, that's not the number one reason not to do it.
That's like the number six reason not to do it.
But for these people who are so concerned, they're so concerned about the existential threat to Israel.
Well, here's the thing, right?
Hamas, while they did pull off October 7th, which was by far the biggest attack Hamas has ever pulled off, Hamas was never an existential threat to Israel.
But this actually is what they're doing right now in some sick, self-fulfilling prophecy.
This actually is creating an existential threat to them.
I think, just like I was saying, Douglas Murray, it's actually like, no, you're creating fertile ground for anti-Semitism by telling me I'm not allowed to criticize a guy with a Jewish last name.
Yeah, and like in an op-ed, after you lose a debate, or not even lose, after you refuse to debate and kind of beclown yourself, and then you're writing an op-ed and you don't take on one argument I made, but you do attack whether I'm really Jewish.
By the way, as he'll criticize the just asking questions people.
Well, you know what's so funny about it, too, is that there's, because there's all these different techniques for control, and one of them is just framing.
Like, how you frame a conversation, really, like, with the Israel thing, it's obvious, right?
Like, look, I mean, however you feel about the conflict, the fact is that Israel has occupied Palestine since 1967.
You know, okay, I know, no, we disengaged in 2005.
No, you didn't.
But, like, whatever.
I'm not even, like, I've had this debate enough times.
I'm just saying, this is the fact, is that Israel has occupied Palestine since 1967.
That's the fact.
And then the conversation, they go, Does Israel have a right to defend itself?
And you're like, well, that's a hell of a way to start, you know?
Like, you're the ones doing the occupying, and you want to start every debate with whether you have a right to defend yourself?
Okay.
But with all these things, there's kind of, you know, like, this is what was interesting to me about the conversation with you and Brett Weinstein about the, you know, about God versus atheism and all this stuff, is that, like, so people, it's very easy to have the framing of going, like, Oh, you're telling me you believe there's an invisible man up in the sky who created all things?
That's pretty goofy, right?
It's like, yeah, if you just frame it like that, sure, it's pretty goofy.
I'm sorry, you believe everything used to fit on the top of a pen and then it exploded into everything?
Everything came from nothing and then exploded into...
This is just as ridiculous as anything anyone's ever believed.
So, like, as soon as you look at both sides and apply the same standard to both...
And, you know, there's been a...
One thing that's a very interesting dynamic to me, because I've seen this a lot when people will try to attack you, where what they'll do is they'll pull, like, kind of the five things you've said that seem like almost the goofiest of all the things.
But look, even, yes, in itself, like, okay, that sounds like an outlandish claim, like, I'm not denying it, but then it's almost like they're trying to ignore the totality.
I see this a lot with Bobby Kennedy.
This has been one of the most interesting things about Bobby, is that the people who attack him, they pick on the five, you know...
Goofiest things they can find that they think he said.
He blamed the Wi-Fi for this, or he said something about whatever, the COVID targeting certain genetics and not other genetics.
And it's like, look, even if I grant you there are these five claims, which I don't know if I...
You know, Bobby said some things that I'm like, I don't know if he's right about that or not.
But they're trying to remove the central thing that he said.
And the central...
This is Trump in a nutshell, too, right?
The central thing that Bobby Kennedy said is that...
We spend more money than any other country on healthcare, and we're the sickest.
But I have to say, the thing that I have learned, really above all other things, is the only way to assess a claim is on the basis of whether or not it's true.
And once you realize that the Warren Commission really was...
I mean, it just was.
And on the basis of evidence, I've concluded that.
Then it's like, okay, if the U.S. government will hide details about the murder of a democratically elected U.S. president, then there's really nothing that they wouldn't do, right?
And then the Nixon one is a big one-two punch, you know, because you realize that, like, oh, the guy who became the villain, you know, like, the guy who was, like, supposed to be remembered as the most corrupt.
president was actually the most popular president ever who was totally set up was you know and you're like okay well then we're just not living in the country So I came to that independently, having known a lot of those people.
I know Bob Woodward personally, and I lived in that world for my whole life.
And Nixon had the highest popular vote percentage of any president in American history.
I didn't in 72. I just didn't even know that.
And when I found out that Bob Woodward...
Was a naval intelligence officer detailed to the Nixon White House, and then the next year gets the biggest story in journalism history, handed to him.
And I was like, I'm gonna spend the rest of my life with this woman.
And so then we, when she got pregnant, I was just very excited.
It was like, you know, I just got married.
I got a baby on the way.
I was just like, this is gonna be, this is the best.
Like, I'm really excited to do this.
And I was right.
It was the best thing I've ever done.
And so the day that was, well, she was over her due date.
So then they scheduled to come in to induce pregnancy because they don't let you go too long these days, which I guess is maybe they're right about that.
So we're at Lenox Hill Hospital in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
By the way, I should add, just leading into this story, I had been like a militant atheist when I was younger.
I had started to open up my mind a little bit to being like, I was seeing some of the holes in the atheist arguments, but I still was not like a believer in God.
And so we were at Lenox Hill Hospital, and this was the first one.
This is how it started, was the anesthesiologist came in to give my wife an epidural.
And at Lenox Hill, or at least this guy, They asked me to leave the room.
They said they ask the fathers to leave the room when they do it, you know, because they're putting a spinal thing in, and they have to be very, very precise.
She can't see, but she could see you seeing, and so they want people with a straight poker face who have seen this a lot of times and are not watching it happen to their wife and baby, you know?
So it's a reasonable ask.
But so I go out and I'm in the hallway in the maternity ward at Lenox Hill Hospital.
And it just hit me.
It was like for the first time, I guess I had not really thought about this.
I was just so excited to get my family started.
But for the first time, it hit me that something could go wrong and that I could leave here alone.
Something could go wrong that I could lose my wife and it's totally out of my control.
And as this started hitting, I started really getting emotional.
And it's like, I'm out there, and I'm crying in the hallway of this maternity ward.
And immediately, I just started talking to God.
And I just started not just talking to God, but negotiating with God.
And I was just like, dear Lord, if you make sure that they're okay, I'm going to do...
Like, I'm going to be the best husband and the best father and I will do this.
And, you know, like all the different things in your life.
And so this is almost like what intellectually, you know, converted me later, was I was like, hey, what the hell was that?
I mean, I can't look back and just ignore that.
And there was one, you know, like, again, I'm almost a little uncomfortable talking about these things because I like talking about things where I have like a real tight argument that I can prove is irrefutable.
But it was something where I was like, look, so in the moment when it was really all on the line and out of my control, I wasn't thinking, Maybe God exists.
I knew for a 100% certainty, unlike nothing I've ever known in my life, that not only did I know that God existed, but I knew what He wanted from me.
Like, I knew what my negotiating power in this was.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I could promise, I'll be a good person.
So not only did I know God existed, I knew that God wanted me to be a good person.
And look, this is something that people who have found God know, and people who don't believe in God maybe will not accept.
But there is something, too, when you open yourself up like that to God, you find out that he's real.
And it's not like he speaks to you or he hallucinates.
I don't see a fiery bush and the words of God started talking, but he...
It fills you.
Like, when you open yourself like that to it, you get filled by it, and there's no more debate in your mind over whether that's a real phenomenon or not.
You're like, any more than, like, if I were to leave here and someone were to be like, do you believe in Tucker Carlson?
And, like, I'd be like, no, I know for a certainty that Tucker Carlson exists.
I was just with him.
It's like that.
And so it was, and it's never, it's...
It changed my life, and ever since, I regularly pray to God.
Yeah, it's very, very good for you to constantly remind yourself how lucky you are, that you have all the things that you have.
It's very easy to get away from that, and that's where you ruin your inner happiness, your inner joy, is if you start taking the things you have for granted.
Because once you, like, you know...
When you think you could lose everything you already have and then you don't, that's when you really appreciate it.
Well, not to be too blunt or too personal, but you're on the cusp of change in your life on the basis of what's happened in the last month in your life.
And can I just say, by the way, just the last thing I'll say, and then we can end.
But I will say that, you know...
A big part of the reason why I'm able to do what I do and be kind of protected because I'm not vulnerable, at least I don't think, I hope I don't live to eat these words, but I don't think I'm going to be ruined or canceled or anything like that.
And a big part of it is that Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have my back.
And you kind of can't really cancel someone in today's world as long as those guys have your back.
And so, no, but I'm saying you're providing a lot of cover for people to be able to tell the truth.
And know that, like, oh, you're not going to be able to, like, shut this person out of the conversation for the crime of telling the truth.
So actually, you were talking about Matt Walsh, who I really do like, and I thought to the extent that he said what he said, kind of impressive considering he works at the Daily Wire.
He still works at the Daily Wire, however.
And I know I'm not mocking him at all.
I worked at Fox News for 15 years, and you do have in the back of your mind, like, oh, can I say that?
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
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