Former President Donald Trump and commentator Destiny clash at the Conservative Party Action Conference, where Trump frames his candidacy as freedom from Biden's "fast track to hell," while Destiny counters that Biden's legislative record exposes Trump's 90-plus indictments. They debate Afghanistan's Doha agreement versus Biden's withdrawal, Ukraine aid ethics, and Prince Harry's potential deportation, ultimately arguing that the election hinges on contrasting foreign policy legacies and domestic border security failures rather than simple cognitive decline or criminal charges. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trump's Border Policy Dilemma00:14:41
Donald Trump's improbable return to the White House took another huge step forward at the weekend as he crushed Nikki Haley in the Republican primary in her home state of South Carolina.
The former president didn't even need to turn up for the results, choosing instead to give another one of his barnstorming rally speeches to the Conservative Party Action Conference.
And as usual, he didn't hold back.
A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom.
It's your passport out of tyranny.
And it's your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang's fast track to hell.
And in many ways, we're living in hell right now.
Well, nationwide polls suggest Trump is on track to beat President Biden in November's election.
So can anything stop him?
And what will Trump, the sequel, mean for America and the world?
Here's a debate with one of Trump's most vocal critics, hugely influential YouTube political commentator Destiny, and the host of Fearless on Outkick Tommy Lehren.
Okay, Destiny.
You voted for Joe Biden last time.
I think it's safe to assume you won't be voting for Donald Trump this time.
But are you comfortable voting for Biden given the state that he now appears to be in?
Every time somebody attacks Biden on his senility, I feel like that is a stronger indictment of Trump's own failure as a president.
I do agree that Biden definitely seems to have slowed down in his older age, but I mean, he passed so much more legislation than Trump.
I think our foreign policy aims are better than they were under Trump.
And I think the way that he manages the rhetoric and the overall attitude of the country is way more responsible than Trump as well.
And he's not facing 90-plus criminal indictments.
That may well be true.
But the reality is perception is often half the battle with an election campaign.
The perception is that Donald Trump is a little bit younger, but has twice the energy, twice the dynamism.
And all the stuff that's being thrown at him, far from defeating him, as is usually the case with politicians, has empowered him and made him stronger.
What are the Democrats going to do about that come November?
I think all Democrats can kind of hope for is that the perception of the economy continues to increase.
Consumer sentiment is starting to climb again.
I think that Trump is also stumbling into a few misspeaks on his own.
I think there was that clip of him mixing up Nikki Haley and Pelosi.
There was him talking about, I think it was the deserts of Vietnam.
Both of these guys are definitely, I'd say, hitting their older age, their golden years.
So I don't know if Trump is going to be free of any of the misspeaks that Biden has found himself stumbling into recently as well.
Well, Tommy, let's just play a clip.
This is of Trump doing his Biden impression the other day.
When I imitate Biden, who can't find the stairs ever.
He goes like this.
Thank you.
Where am I?
Thank you.
And then he goes.
Any points?
And then.
You see, Tommy, the interesting thing with me about Trump, I've done him a long time.
I look at him warts and all, good, bad, ugly.
There's plenty of all of that with Trump.
But his supporters love him.
And one of the reasons I think that he's so popular with so many Americans is because he makes them laugh.
And I watched that speech the other day.
He was very funny.
Not always, and some of it, as always with Trump, some of the hyperbolic rhetoric was a bit alarming.
But actually, he was an entertainer entertaining the crown.
That's why they like him.
That's why they vote for him.
They like him because he has charisma.
I like him because he has charisma.
I also like him because when Donald Trump was my president, the economy is doing well.
We ended endless wars.
We started no new wars.
There was relatively peace around the world with Donald Trump at the helm of the United States of America.
People didn't like what he tweeted.
People didn't like the way that he spoke.
Maybe they didn't like the way that he dressed or the way that his hairstyle was or his fake tan, but none of that mattered because the United States was doing well.
Our border was secure.
The world was a better place with Donald Trump at the helm.
And when Democrats talk about Joe Biden and they say, oh, you know, he's slipping a little bit.
My goodness, we know that they are obviously gaslighting us because we can clearly see that Joe Biden is not just slipping.
He was slipping in 2020.
He has slipped all the way now that we're in 2024.
And it's not just little misspeaks here and there.
Everybody has misspeaks.
They mix people up.
For Joe Biden, you have a special counsel report that quite plainly says we can't go after this man for his classified documents because he's a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.
That says it all right there.
Maybe we can indict him 96 times.
We can't charge him with 96 things because he simply is not cognitively there enough to be able to withstand it.
That's the leader of the United States.
That's the best the Democrats can do for their party.
I'm sorry.
You guys better be shaken in your boots if that's what you're going to go with in November.
I mean, Destiny, you know, I know your view of Trump, but it's hard to argue with all of what Tommy just said, isn't it?
I mean, the Democrats seem to me to be sleepwalking in to a complete disaster if they're not careful.
Biden does look from here across the pond anyway, like someone who can barely string a sentence together or stay on his own two feet.
How would anyone vote for someone given they have to do four years more from November as president of the United States?
The toughest job in the world.
I mean, it depends on what you're pushing for.
I mean, if you want to elect a comedian because he's got good charisma, then I agree that Trump definitely has better stage presence than Biden does.
I think if you're a Democrat, you want to support Biden.
You just have to try to stick in the realm of fact.
Republicans inhabit a totally separate world right now.
I just heard Tommy Lawrence say that we're doing better on the foreign policy front because Trump was better for being an endless war.
I mean, he bombed Syria.
He abandoned Kurdish allies.
He kicked the can down the road in Afghanistan.
He hid Yemen drone strikes from us.
He was still part of the Saudi lit coalition to bomb Yemen.
He didn't do anything about Russia's takeover of Crimea.
I mean, like, the idea that Trump was better on any of these areas of foreign policy is ridiculous.
The idea that he was better domestically than Obama, by the way.
That was a little bit more.
Obama's not my annoying friend.
That's great.
Trump still didn't do anything about it.
Even if you think that Trump does have good ideas for the country, he has just failed as a leader.
He's a failure of a businessman.
He's a failure of a leader.
He can't get people together to write legislation.
Joe Biden, in all his senility, was somehow able to pass the same infrastructure bill that Donald Trump said for four years he was going to get done.
He didn't.
Donald Trump couldn't even repeal or replace Obamacare, which is what a lot of Republicans literally voted in him to do.
The idea that Trump is a competent leader is anything more than just a comedian or a guy that does funny one-liners on Twitter is delusional.
I mean, you can blame him for many things, but as Tommy said, you can't blame him for the takeover of Crimea because that was years before Trump came into power.
No, no, I'm not blaming him for the takeover of Crimea.
I'm saying that Trump has never made a good but difficult foreign policy decision.
If you look at the Doha agreement that he made with the Taliban, he kicked the can down the road.
He says that he would be strong on Ukraine.
The only thing he cared about for Ukraine was trying to get information about Hunter Biden.
What about what Joe Biden did in Afghanistan, which was the most shameful and disgraceful overnight fleeing of a country and throwing millions of Afghan women back to Metaliban walls?
Now, you can blame Trump all you like for that, but the bottom line is it happened under Joe Biden on his watch.
He was president.
It was a catastrophic failure, that evacuation.
So many allies and friends of the Americans were left in its wake.
Many people died that day.
And women in Afghanistan have gone back to the medieval dark ages.
That's on Joe Biden, isn't it?
No.
Yeah, if you read the Special Inspector General report for Afghanistan, the whole reason why that pullout happened on that timetable because it was because of the Doha Agreements that Donald Trump signed.
He drew our troop levels down to historic lows in Afghanistan for when Biden came into office because Donald Trump put America on a timetable to leave that country.
If Biden wanted to, he could have come in and undone that.
So you're blaming Donald Trump for a decision that was taken eight months after he left office.
That decision was taken under Donald Trump.
The timetable was established under Donald Trump.
He didn't have to stick to it.
Joe Biden's a big boy.
He's the president of the United States.
I mean, Tommy, it seems to me that the desperate attempt...
Is he a big boy, Piers?
Is he a big boy?
I'm not so sure.
He has to use the kiddie stairs, but I just have to jump in here because I don't think anybody wanted to stay in Afghanistan.
That wasn't the point.
The timetable that Donald Trump negotiated, there was nothing wrong with the timetable.
Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan was catastrophic.
He didn't have the support that he needed.
He didn't have the strategy that he needed.
It wasn't about staying in Afghanistan in perpetuity.
Nobody wanted that.
I'm sure Democrats didn't want to be in an endless war in Afghanistan either.
It was the way that Biden handled it.
And every time since then, he has failed when it comes to foreign policy.
Now we've got Israel at war.
We've got Ukraine still heading into year, what, two and a half of war that we are still funding.
The world is a much more dangerous place.
And that doesn't even bring me to my southern border where we have 10 million illegal immigrants who have invaded on Biden's watch.
I'm sure my friend is going to tell me that that is Donald Trump's fault as well, even though he oversaw the most secure border that we believe in American history that we know of.
So there is no disputing the record.
You can say that Joe Biden was able to sit there as a shadow president while things got passed through Democrat chambers, but you can't sit here and tell me that the man is cognitively well or that he's done anything on his own, on his own accord, to better the world of the United States.
Well, let me ask Destiny.
Let me ask Destiny my favorite question of all my liberal friends, which is, do you know how many illegal immigrants Barack Obama deported in eight years?
How many illegal immigrants did he deport or did they have like contacts?
Did he have deported, thrown out of the country?
I don't know the number of that.
Have a guess.
When you say deport, you mean somebody that was already in the country and in the country and removed.
My guess is those numbers are always fairly low.
Probably less than a million.
I have no idea.
I've truly known.
Three million, which is the greatest number pro rata of any president in history and earned him the moniker in Mexico of deporter-in-chief.
And yet, oddly, whenever I talk to my liberal friends, they never know this.
They never made a fuss at the time.
They were quite comfortable about that happening.
And I look at what's going on on the southern border now.
Apparently, Biden's going down the same day as Trump on Thursday, which would be fascinating.
But he hasn't been there almost.
I don't think he may have been once before in his time as president, which is insane, given how obviously problematic the southern border has become.
Whichever side of the political divide you're on, would you accept that?
Would I accept that the border is a problem?
Well, not only a massive problem, but that President Biden to date, in his tenure, has done absolutely nothing but make it worse.
I don't know about absolutely nothing but make it worse.
I think one of the issues right now is Republicans are holding up funding to actually apportion more money to border security.
I think that there are definitely border problems that exist right now that definitely need attention.
But I think comparing it to Donald Trump, when he was able to utilize the emergency of COVID and the fact that the immigration numbers were at historic lows over the COVID period, and then to say that, well, look, he did a way better job than Biden did, where once COVID ends and then everything starts to open up again, you see a huge surge of immigrants.
It'sn't the most fair comparison.
But obviously, yes, something needs to be done with the border, of course.
And I hope the Republicans approve funding in Congress for something to actually be done.
Well, Tommy, that's an interesting point where I would be critical, I think, of your position on this, because I absolutely believe that Ukraine has got to be helped to defeat Putin, or at least hold him off, because the alternative for the West, it seems to me, is extremely dangerous and alarming, which is that Vladimir Putin seizes large chunks of a sovereign democratic country and is allowed to keep it.
And the idea that won't embolden him to just go and do the same elsewhere, I think is for the birds.
I also think it's for the birds that China looking at this won't then immediately think about invading and taking back Taiwan.
Well, I would also say this.
If Donald Trump were our president right now, Putin would have never done that because he didn't when Donald Trump was in office.
We mentioned earlier under Obama, they go in, take Crimea under Biden, go in and try to take Ukraine.
So Donald Trump will just say he started no new wars and the world was either respectful of Donald Trump or fearful, doesn't matter which.
I would also say this.
We don't, on my side, when I talk about not funding Ukraine anymore, it's not because we want Putin to take Ukraine.
It's because we understand that here in the United States of America, we have more problems that we have to attend to.
We've got homeless veterans.
We've got a border invasion of our own.
So the thought of Tony, I keep hearing this, but it's A, I find it really odd to hear any American conservatives almost saying Putin should be allowed to just take what he's taken.
That would never have happened 20 years ago in American political discourse.
So it's been a massive sea change in conservative mentality to how to deal with a Russian dictator.
But secondly, on the wider point about Ukraine, surely it comes down to this.
If we applied the same mentality to Adolf Hitler in World War II, we'd all be likely speaking German.
Why are we so weak about standing up to him in Ukraine?
It's the same as when Hitler invaded Poland.
Piers, it's not the same because Ukraine is a corrupt country.
So we also have to deal with that.
There are many Americans that you'll talk to that initially supported aiding and assisting Ukraine.
And then as we sent more and more money and as the Pentagon couldn't account for a billion dollars in weapons and as we're not really sure where the accounting is going for this, we have a lot of concerns as we should because we're sending our hard-earned tax dollars to a corruption.
Why can't you help?
I'm not saying that Russia is corrupt, but guess what's the number two?
Ukraine.
But why can't you help Ukraine and fix the southern border?
Why does it have to be one or the other?
America has the money to do this.
It has the military firepower to help Ukraine.
And it also has the ability if it really focuses to sort the southern border out.
Harry, Ukraine, and American Focus00:08:57
I don't understand this argument.
America can't do two things at once.
It's the number one superpower in the world, isn't it?
But it would be nice if we could do two things at once.
With a stroke of a pen, President Biden could help solve the border crisis.
He is not going to do that.
It's not a matter of can you?
It's a matter of are our leaders able to?
And unfortunately, they're not.
But when you look at Ukraine, which is a corrupt country, and we're sending our tax dollars over there for now going on over two years, it's problematic for a lot of Americans.
A lot of Americans don't know where our money is going.
We don't know how it's being accounted for.
We don't trust our government or theirs to tell us where it's going.
So that's where the problem lies.
I also believe if we really want to squeeze Putin and we want to squeeze Russia, but Piers, I want to say this.
We should be focusing also on American energy independence, because when you have strong American energy independence, that's another way of thinking about the US.
But America has broadly more energy independence than most countries in the world.
So that's not a big problem.
Your independence for energy is very strong, compared to most European countries.
Destiny, you've been listening patiently to this.
I want to play a clip.
This is Trump talking about foreign policy in his speech at the weekend.
Victor Orban, somebody I respect greatly.
A lot of people respect him.
Tough guy, smart guy.
He made the statement recently.
He said, you bring back Trump, it'll all stop.
They all listen to Trump.
They respected Trump.
He actually said it stronger than they said they were afraid of Trump.
I don't want people to be afraid of me.
But he said China was afraid, Russia was afraid.
They were all afraid of Trump.
Bring him back and it'll all go back.
What do you think, Decime?
I mean, there is an argument to say that Trump's erratic, unpredictable style on the global stage did make people think twice.
I mean, not much of any serious gravity happened on his watch.
He did not, as Tommy says, he didn't launch a new war anywhere.
Is there some merit to the madness, if you like?
No.
People seem to want to give Trump credit for some things, like people not starting wars or people not engaging in certain types of, I guess, international armed conflict decisions.
But the reality is that if you analyze any of the actual particular things that he did when it came to foreign policy, most of them were the precursors for the conflict that we are now blaming on Biden.
For instance, I brought up before the round of Doha talks that happened between the Taliban and the United States.
The Afghanistan government wasn't even included in those talks.
If you look at what's happening right now in Israel and Palestine, the whole Abraham Accords, where Donald Trump was heralded as having peace in the Middle East, the whole reason that was done in a way was to avoid Israel annexing the West Bank and to undermine the Palestinians there that wanted to negotiate with Israel for peace.
The whole Abraham Accords completely cut them out of the conversation.
It's one of the reasons why Hamas felt so slighted.
It was one of the reasons why Palestinians are engaging in more violent activity against Israel is because nobody's ever been negotiating with them.
So there's like this very superficial view that you can take where you can say, oh, Donald Trump was good for foreign policy because no new wars happened to start under this four-year time period.
But if you look at what he was actually setting up in any of the countries where the conflict was going on, all he was doing was setting the stage to kick the can down the road for future conflicts in Iraq, which it has.
All right, Destiny, what would you give Trump credit for?
Domestically or internationally?
Anything.
Give him some credit for something.
Let's see.
If I had to give Trump credit for anything, I mean, our economy was strong under Trump.
I do think sometimes that Democrats are too heavy-handed when it comes to things related to welfare or things related to taxation.
I don't like the idea of demonizing success.
I think that Republicans typically do a better job or did do a better job at things like patriotism or championing wealth or people that were making money.
So I guess I would give Trump, I guess, general credit for things like that.
I mean, I saved money on my taxes.
And Tommy, just to return the favor, can you think of something good to say about Joe Biden?
You know, when I look at my country right now, there's not a whole lot that I can say about Joe Biden.
I think he seems like a nice man.
He seems like perhaps a good husband, perhaps a good father, supporting, obviously, Hunter Biden.
So he seems like he is, I'll use the words of the special counsel, a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.
I don't think he's a bad person.
I think that he's uniquely bad at this job.
And I think it's time for someone to come and make America great again.
And that's the problem.
I have to say, I think Destiny wins in one of the most exploding economies in the history of the United States in the recovery from COVID.
In all of the foreign policy guidance we have related to Ukraine and Israel, there's not a single positive thing that we can say about Biden's presidency right now.
Well, no, here's what I would say to you.
Again, it comes down to perception, Destiny, which is you're not wrong to say that the economy is in pretty good shape in America comparative to most other countries.
The problem is people in America aren't giving Biden the credit because his approval ratings are in the tank because they basically see a guy who's senile and they don't want that person to carry on being president.
Two-thirds of Democrats don't want him to run again.
It's not even a Republican issue.
His own party don't want him to.
I definitely agree there's perception issues, but I mean, hey, listen, we're in the media.
The goal is to fight the perceptions because I think the perceptions are crafted here.
And again, I just question the authenticity of people that are calling Biden's job performance into question because of his senility when Donald Trump got almost no major legislation passed, when Donald Trump kicked the can down the road on every single large issue.
I also think that a lot of the perceptions of Americans right now in terms of voting for Biden and his favorability is having to do with the fact that apparently a lot of Americans aren't even sure who's going to be on the ballot.
I think a lot of Americans still have questions about Biden running because of his age.
A lot of Americans still have questions about Trump running because of the incoming indictments.
I think as the months start to creep forward, I think we might see sentiment change, especially if the special election history over the past few years in America has been any indication about where American sentiments are feeling in terms of supporting Democrats or Republicans.
All I would say in response to that is that if you look just at the Iowa caucus, he didn't even win that in 2016, but he won it this time by a landslide.
That says to me that support for Trump is increasing.
And remember, he got nearly 10 million more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016.
That was after four years of if you listen to Democrats, after four years of the most hellish presidency in history, 10 million more Americans went out and voted for him.
I just want to switch gears to Tommy.
I know you've got to go.
Quickly about Prince Harry and what Donald Trump said about him, saying that this is in relation to this court case where the Biden administration has been defending Harry over an attempt to try and have his visa immigration papers made public to see whether he admitted his drug abuse that he revealed in his book because that might disqualify him for his right to stay in the country.
And it seemed to me the Biden administration, through the immigration people they put up, went out of their way to defend Harry, saying that he may not have even meant what he wrote in the book.
It wasn't facts, almost basically saying, look, he probably lied, so we can't take it seriously, which is pretty damning given it was his autobiography.
But when Trump was asked about this, he said, I wouldn't protect him.
He betrayed the Queen.
That's unforgivable.
He would be on his own if it was down to me.
I would say that's quite ominous because if Trump was to win the election and win back the White House, given the way Harry and Megan have talked about Trump in a very disparaging manner, I could quite see Trump being petty enough to put Harry on the first boat out of China or out of America.
Well, I'll tell you this: there are a lot more people that need to be deported that have come to our country illegally.
A lot for Donald Trump to do on day one to get our country back on track.
But I will say this: Donald Trump is not somebody who coddles people.
He's not somebody who is going to coddle Prince Harry and Megan.
Obviously, they've said bad things about him.
And the Biden camp, the Democrats like Harry and Megan because they feel like maybe they're some kind of liberal superstars.
But, you know, I think Donald Trump is going to tell it like it is.
And he doesn't care how much money you have.
And he doesn't care how many books you've written or what your status is.
Donald Trump is going to do what Donald Trump's going to do.
And law and order is going to make a comeback.
If that unfortunately negatively impacts Prince Harry, I don't think I'll be crying myself to sleep at night.
I don't think you will either, Piers.
Well, we don't want him back here.
This is the problem.
This could be a nightmare for the Brits.
He's so unpopular here.
Tommy, you got to go.
Thank you very much indeed for joining us.
I appreciate it.
Good luck with your own show, which you're going to take now.
And thank you for joining us.
Destiny, you're going to stay with me because I want to talk to you about your response to last week's debate on Uncensored between Professor Norman Finkelstein and Rabbi Schmooley.
I think it's fair to say you weren't massively complimentary.
Let's take a look.
Oh my God.
Gaza Conflict and Civilian Tragedy00:10:45
Is there any debate?
Is this actually a real debate?
Or is it who the is this loser?
This is embarrassing.
Rabbi Shmolly?
Is he like a Twitter guy?
How am I going to survive in a real one-on-one debate?
This is his real talking speed.
This is just stupid debate.
Ugh.
I can do an interview.
Thank you.
I can't believe he's giving pushback to Norm on this debate.
And he let this guy yap on the most retarded ad homs for like 20 minutes.
Oh my God, but he's not going to answer it.
It's just like, it's a stupid argument on so many different levels.
I don't equivocate either with the other.
Sound the incorrect use of equivocate alarm.
Bro, oh my God.
These are the types of posts I banned from my subreddit.
We get it.
Oh my God.
Just on a technical point, I think I was using the word equivocate correctly there, unless I'm wrong.
I'd have to go back and analyze the use of the word equivocate.
Let me be clear.
The stuff we do on stream is obviously way more relaxed than this environment.
But the main criticism, yeah, the main criticism that I basically have with all with almost all of the Israel-Palestine debates is both sides have this hyper-specific narrative that tends to omit every single exculpatory thing from the other side.
And it drives me crazy.
So whether it's a rabbi on here that's talking about like the innocence of Israel or even the guy you had on right before saying like, well, Israel doesn't like to fight.
We don't like to do that.
It's like, really?
Because Israel has taken advantage of every single military opportunity they've had in the history to expand their territory.
So saying they don't want to fight is really silly.
But then on the other hand, you get pro-Palestinian people who would say things like, well, Hamas can be a partner for peace.
And October 7th was just in response to the horrible concentration camp-like conditions of a region of the world that really isn't even doing that bad compared to other places in the region.
So I just hate how hyperbolized both sides of the argument are.
I actually don't disagree with you.
And I thought Rabbi Shmooli's ad hominem attacks on the professor were completely over the top, but actually quite illuminating about him and his style of debating.
I don't think he played well with the audience at all.
And I had a lot of Israelis tweeting me saying, why do you keep having this guy on?
He talks in such an inflammatory manner that it doesn't make us look good.
So I think that he let himself down a bit there.
And on the wider point, I kind of agree.
I've had so many of these debates about Israel.
It's very hard to do anything that doesn't immediately get dragged to the extremities in terms of the debate.
Very hard to reach any point of consensus.
And I find that that's the dispiriting thing about that debate.
And it may explain why the whole conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine has been going 75 years and appears so completely intractable.
Nobody gives an inch.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's on the ground in Israel-Palestine, you have that issue where both sides have their basically their myths that Israel fashioned themselves as these poor people, these poor Jews that wandered into the Middle East and had to fight these impossibly huge Arab armies that had domineering and overwhelming force and power and coordination.
When in reality, post-48, Israel was always in a decent position to fight.
And that was pretty obvious in their performance in 48, in 67, in 73.
It was pretty obvious that they had the military capability to survive.
But then on the other hand, you get, you know, the Palestinian narrative of they were a poor, dispossessed people on their lands who only ever wanted peace.
I think I saw a tweet saying we welcomed Israelis with open arms.
That's absolutely not true.
I think that the on-the-ground narratives contribute to the conflict feeling intractable.
But unfortunately, I think internationally, I think we feed into the intractability as well because people are that conflict is so perfect for everybody to have a really strong opinion.
You've got brown people and white people.
You've got Jews and Muslims.
You've got oppressed and oppressors.
You've got Western colonial and Middle Eastern countries.
Like everybody can have an opinion about this conflict because of the different parties involved.
And people are so not level-headed when it comes to evaluating what's going on that they end up hyping up both sides and they elevate the expectations to unrealistic levels, which means neither side is really willing to actually settle for a realistic resolution that might make both sides feel a little bit good and a little bit unhappy.
What do you think a realistic resolution looks like?
I think it's a multi-faceted thing, but I would say that it has to be some kind of two-state solution.
And both sides need to be willing to negotiate for peace.
And this is the hard one, both sides probably need to be willing to sacrifice a little bit for peace.
That means that not every Palestinian is going to be happy with the final resolution.
It means that Abbas might have to suffer, you know, even more loss of his popularity, or whatever Palestinian leader rises might have to suffer more loss of popularity.
It might mean on the Israeli side, similar to Begin or Rabin, you know, negotiators for peace in the past, you might have to pay a political price for being a negotiator for peace because sometimes the Israeli people or your Knesset doesn't always support you when you're negotiating peace against either Arab states or Palestinians.
But you need the leadership has to be there that has to be willing to suffer a setback or some loss initially for the peace agreement.
And then both people need to have some kind of tolerance to say, hey, listen, we might not get everything we want on the old city.
That applies to Jews and Muslims, or that applies to Israelis and Palestinians.
Or, hey, we might have to do a lot of land swaps in the West Bank.
Hey, all of these settlements that are outside of directly near the green line, maybe these do need to be torn down.
But yeah, the conversation, we're not even a place we could start the conversation on that yet because people don't even know if Hamas should exist or not, or if Israel has a right to defend itself, or if maybe murdering 1,200 civilians is a reasonable response to the supposed concentration camp conditions that exist in Gaza.
Yeah, I mean, you did a debate with Jake Yuga, who's been on this show many times.
You said about deaths in Gaza that the ratio of Hamas to civilians killed were good ratios.
But I'm not sure about that.
I'll tell you why.
The problem I have with the whole death rate in Gaza, especially when there's a comparison made to World War II and how many German civilians were killed and so on, is that there is a unique population in Gaza of 50% children.
50% of the 2 million are under 18.
That's a million kids running around in Gaza.
And already we've seen 30,000 civilians killed with 70,000 more wounded, many, many of whom are children.
And that is something I've not seen in any recent conflict.
And that's what makes it uniquely horrific to people.
I agree that it makes it uniquely horrific to people.
I think it's really important to have a good understanding of why international humanitarian law, or more specifically, international law of armed conflict, exists.
I think that people have a really poor understanding that the law of armed conflict exists to make it so that the fight is even on both sides.
But that's not true.
It exists for two very important reasons.
One is to protect civilians.
And the second is to ensure that nations have a right to defend themselves.
If either one of these fail, nobody would care about the law of armed conflict.
I think the difficulty that Israel has right now in conducting their war against Hamas is that their cause for war, wanting to do something about Hamas, I think is undeniably righteous.
That if you've got an organization that comes in, they kill some 1100, 1200 citizens, and then they capture hostage 200 more, not only has Hamas not had a good cause for war, not only have they committed multiple war crimes in the actual commission of the October 7th attack, it gives Israel a justification to attack.
Now, Israel's conduct in war is a second question.
It's a very difficult question to answer.
When people try to evaluate if the conduct is good or bad, they oftentimes just look at the number of civilian deaths.
But when you're actually evaluating from a legal perspective on whether or not attacks are good or not, the obligation for the belligerent, for the attacking party, is just to try to do what they can to reduce civilian casualties.
Now, civilian casualties are tragic.
They absolutely are.
But Hamas also has a responsibility as the sole administrator in the region to shield their population, not use them as human shields, to make sure their population is allowed to flee, not tell them to stay in their homes when Israel roof knocks, when they make phone calls, when they drop leaflets, when they give advance notice, when they give whole region-wide text messages, right?
Israel's doing what they can more than any other country has in any type of armed conflict to try to warn the civilian population to flee.
But for a variety of reasons, they're not doing it.
Some due to Hamas, some maybe due to their fears of getting attacked anyway, because obviously there have been tons of places that have come under attack, even placed in the South.
But I just think it's important to note that when we're criticizing Israel, it can't be on the absolute number of deaths.
It has to be on things like when the three hostages came out and they were shot by the IDF.
Those are things where you're like, well, hold on.
These guys were wearing white flags.
Why are you shooting at these people?
That's not good.
It can't just be on the absolute number of casualties because if that's the fixation, then in the future, no nation is going to consider any laws of armed conflict when we're going to war because they're going to say, oh, well, they don't care what the ratios are.
They don't care our targeting decisions.
They're just upset that civilians are dying, which unfortunately and tragically always happens in the course of war.
If you were the parent of one of the 12,000 or so children who've been killed by Israeli airstrikes, would you willingly and quickly buy into a brave new world of living peacefully side by side with Israel?
Or would you be implacably determined to exact revenge for the slaughter of your child?
I feel like on a personal level, especially somebody that has a child, I feel like I would want to fight until the end of time.
Right.
And that's my point.
So that is the natural human reaction, which surely tens of thousands of Palestinian fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, they're going to have to this slaughter of the children.
And so I don't understand why Israel thinks it's not just building for itself a potentially even bigger problem down the line in terms of the radicalization through deaths of children of the people who love those kids.
I understand what you're saying, but after World War II, I mean, we all got along after that in a surprisingly short amount of time, given how horrific some of the Javanese crimes were in China, given how horrific Germany's crimes were around all of Europe or relating to concentration camps or death camps.
Like it is possible to mend those bridges.
I do agree right now that Israel might be contributing towards more hatred of them, of Jewish people, of Israeli citizens in the Gaza Strip.
That's undeniable.
But then the question becomes: well, who's responsible for managing Israeli public relations in the Gaza Strip?
If you ask an Israeli citizen, like, hey, aren't you worried that you're going to radicalize people in the Gaza Strip?
What Israeli citizens are thinking of is they're either thinking of watching the video of that girl go back on the back of the truck where everybody's like clapping and cheering and they're thinking, well, they hate us anyway.
Or they're thinking of the second intifada, where there are four or five years' worth of attacks from 2000 to 2004.
And Israel thinks, well, they already hate us anyway in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
They're thinking of the martyr fund.
They're thinking there are so many different aspects of this conflict that I agree.
Israel is giving Palestinians good cause to hate them, but Palestinians have given Israelis good cause to hate and not trust them either.
And this is one of the problems that we talked about at the very beginning.
The mythos runs so deep on both sides that they're both infinitely justified morally if they want to hate each other forever.
But obviously, that's not a conductive road forward towards anything peaceful.
Historical Knowledge in Debate00:00:55
Destiny, I know you've got a big debate coming up yourself with Professor Norman Finkelstein, hosted by Lex Freeman.
That is going to be huge.
You feeling ready for that?
The three people involved are all giants in this field.
I am definitely a newcomer.
I'm definitely like a YouTuber streamer person.
I hope that rhetorically I'm able to hang on to the conversation.
Obviously, I've done a decent amount of research and reading, but obviously the three of these figures involved have a much greater background than me in this issue.
So I'm not going in with any illusion that I'm the subject matter expert here.
My debate partner for this is Benny Morrison.
This guy knows more about anything related to 48 history and everything else here.
So I'm probably going to be leaning on his historical knowledge quite a bit.
Rest assured, I will be live commentating to return the favor.
I look forward to the back and forth videos and the reaction videos.