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April 15, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:07:23
20250415_hypocrite-dave-smith-on-douglas-murray-joe-rogan-d
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Living in Different Realities 00:09:19
I'm a free American.
I can talk about what I like to.
So I don't want to.
I noticed you can.
The point is, what are you pushing?
What am I pushing?
Yes.
Liberty, free markets, peace, prosperity.
I was surprised by how the debate itself went.
It does feel like people are living in different realities.
When you look at the aerial footage of Gaza, that does not describe every single strike Israel has launched.
When were you last there at all?
I've never been.
You've never been?
Well, am I not allowed to talk about it now?
You just don't know the information you need to know to make that judgment.
If someone were to do that, you would call it intentional murder, right?
That's not true.
You're not raising questions.
You're not asking questions.
You're telling people something.
I think there's a whole bunch of guys doing that.
I think Dave is doing that.
It's a shape-shifting thing.
Comedian or historian?
In part, the problem is that we haven't reconciled ourselves to the idea that we speak one way in front of the world, another way behind closed doors, and that this is actually natural and normal.
These things are always like Piers Morgany, which is fine.
You know, where everyone's screaming over each other.
Well, Joe Rogan's debate between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray has dominated conversation for days now.
Supporters have been spinning for both sides as if it was a presidential election debate.
And some felt the president himself picked a team when he posted a glowing endorsement of Douglas's new book the very next day.
Almost as interesting as the main debate were some of the issues it raised about the way that debate has transformed in the digital age.
First is so-called credentialism.
Should someone with old-fashioned qualifications get more of a say than someone who does a lot of research but ultimately has none?
Do you need to travel to a specific country or experience a war to have valid opinions about what's happening there?
And should the podcasters who now wield more influence than any TV network be more judicious about who they platform?
Or is that kind of censorious judgmental gatekeeping the very reason they got so popular in the first place?
Finally, who won?
Well, joining me to debate all this are two people with very different views on all of the above.
One is John Spencer, executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, who took issue with a number of Dave Smith's points and felt he was epically dismantled by Douglas Murray.
And the other is Dave Smith himself, host of Part of the Problem, who's a comedian, a libertarian commentator.
And he felt, of course, that he remained epically intact.
And we'll be joined a little later by Eric Weinstein.
So let me start.
First of all, Dave Smith.
Are you surprised, Dave, about the reaction to your showdown with Douglas Murray?
And do you believe you won?
I'm not surprised at all by the reaction.
I was surprised by how the debate itself went.
But as it was going that way, I knew exactly what the reaction was going to be.
I thought that was pretty clear.
I think that, you know, I would say this.
What I thought was kind of strange about it was, and I know probably both of you have, we could all think of examples like this.
Like there's been many times where people were challenged to a debate and they refused to debate them.
Hotez, Dr. Hotez with Bobby Kennedy comes to mind for me, but there's lots of examples like this.
And sometimes that's reasonable and sometimes it's not reasonable.
Like I think in the case of Hotez, he should have debated Bobby Kennedy.
But at the same time, I've been challenged to debate flat earthers and people with 150 followers.
And I'm not particularly interested in doing that.
So sometimes you'll see people who go, they'll take the path of like, look, this person's beneath me.
I'm not going to debate this issue.
I have no interest in doing this.
And then sometimes people will agree to debate.
I think Douglas Murray is the first person I've ever seen try to do both.
And it made for kind of an interesting spectacle.
If you're asking me if I think I won, I mean, you can let other people can have their opinion on that.
Obviously, I'm biased in saying that.
I think that the overwhelming reaction that I've seen is much more that Douglas Murray lost than I won.
I think I was there to debate Ukraine and Israel, and Douglas was there.
He made it more of a bigger kind of watershed moment about the experts versus the podcasters, which was not what I thought we were going to do.
But I think in doing that, it's hard to even say win or lose.
You're going into an environment where you couldn't have worked harder to turn the entire audience against you.
Obviously, by definition, the audience of the Joe Rogan experience are on the side of the podcasters being allowed to talk about these issues.
And as I said in the debate, I don't think the expert class has a very good track record.
Yeah, I mean, I've really enjoyed it for what it's worth.
I've heard you both on my show, of course, a lot, and I enjoy watching you go at each other.
I've seen lots of praise for you, Dave, indisputably, a lot.
I've also seen, and we've just got a little summary of some of the lack of praise for you.
Dave Smith was eviscerated by Douglas Murray, posted Henry Hobson.
This is what happens when bluster and shallow thinking go up against a considered intellect.
John Daly said watching someone like Douglas Murray absolutely crucify Dave Smith is a real treat.
And Con Tomlinson, Dave Smith is ignorant, Douglas Murray crushed him.
And the only reason I read those three out is it shows me that on social media in particular, when these kind of events happen, and I call them events because everybody watches them, when they do happen, there's very little middle ground.
There are very little people who pop up on social media and go, you know what?
On the one hand, I thought Dave made some good points.
On the other, Douglas made some good points.
And I really enjoyed the experience, which is probably what Joe Rogan thought.
But no, we're in a very tribal world where before you guys even sat down together with Joe Rogan, they'd already decided you were going to be disintegrated, dismantled, and crucified.
And similarly, a lot of people who like you and don't like Douglas Murray felt exactly the same way about what was going to happen to him.
What does that tell you about discourse today?
And what do we do about that?
If anything, well, for the record, I will say, I mean, and I try to not live my life in an internet comments, but for this one, I just could not help myself.
But if you look at the YouTube comments or the Spotify comments, I mean, it's overwhelmingly hostile toward Douglas.
It seems to me that there's, yeah, every account on Twitter with an Israeli flag and a Hebrew name in their bio certainly seem to think that I got my ass kicked.
I think what's even more fascinating is that there'd be specific moments that people draw 180 degree opposite conclusions from.
Like the one that I saw going super viral is him, you know, asking me if I've ever been to Israel and then kind of putting on a performance about how shocked he is that I haven't been there.
And it was interesting to me how different people could look at the exact same moment and one group of people could say, oh, this was Dave getting destroyed.
And the other group of people could say, I mean, like objectively, this is a non-argument.
This doesn't win you any points in a debate.
Like I obviously fall into the second group there, but it certainly does show you how dug in certain people are, of course, which I think is to be expected in this most of contentious issues.
But yeah, I don't know exactly what to take from that, but much like in the last five years, particularly, it does feel like people are living in different realities.
And even if you were to ask people to tell the story of COVID, I mean, like what just happened over the last five years with this global pandemic, it's amazing how much people could have completely diametrically opposed understandings of the reality we just lived through.
Now, I'm not being a relativist here.
I think one of those sides is wrong and the other one is right, but that is where we are.
Funny enough, I would say the COVID debate is a lot more nuanced in reality than the two extremities take it for what it's worth.
But let's bring in John Spencer because he certainly was not in the Dave Smith one camp.
You tweeted Dave Smith and Douglas Murray debated who qualifies as an expert and who should be making declarative statements about certain wars.
That question answers itself.
And that's being construed, John, to mean that you believe that Dave Smith was not the expert in the room.
Explain why you felt that Dave Smith lost this debate.
Sure.
I wouldn't say it had anything to do with Douglas.
I would have to say it was the statements that Dave Smith made during the podcast, which highlight, and I won't get into the credentialism as Dave's quoting four-star generals or who's an expert, who's not.
Nuance Beyond Extremes 00:02:35
I do research.
I think Dave tells jokes for a living.
I had problems with the statements you were made.
And then how do you come to that conclusion, which really does get to the podcaster world versus other individuals on how did you come to that opinion or that declarative statement, like Israel is intentionally killing civilians.
I mean, there's like 10 different ways you can do research.
You can do comparative case study.
And I think this is what Douglas was saying.
If you haven't been there, then how are you getting to your conclusion?
Ethnographic, you can go there and do interviews in Gaza, like both Douglas and I have done with soldiers.
What's going on?
How are you doing it?
You can do even historical archival data research.
That's not what it appears that Dave does.
And it seems to be more of a historical revisionism.
Take a piece of data that you got and then tell a really convincing narrative on how you got to your conclusion.
But as somebody who has students, I mean, correlation is not causation, is that famous phrase.
When that story is actually just a lot of correlation and inferences, how did you get to your conclusion?
How do you do that research?
Forget the expertise and the credentialism.
You're making a statement like it's true.
And I know Dave's anti-war and that's great, but you can't be anti-factual.
And Dave, without Douglas, just made a bunch of not true statements.
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Well, give some of the key examples of what you care to share.
Bombing Innocent Civilians 00:09:58
It's completely factually inaccurate.
Absolutely.
So, I mean, I think the overwhelm, which is what me and Dave were talking over X, is that Israel is intentionally killing civilians, especially children.
That's not a factual statement at all because it doesn't even include the base information.
So it's almost like, you know.
You just don't know the information you need to know to make that judgment.
And, you know, let's forget comparing it to a domestic situation like Dave continues to do on Joe Rogan, Lex Freeman, others.
Like, if somebody killed my kids and I know where he's at and I go to that apartment building, I kill everybody in it.
That's murder.
And that's what Israel is doing.
And that's not true.
Even you, peers, have commented about Israel striking something and saying, look, look at the number of civilians.
That's not acceptable.
That's not how war works.
It's not even how you would assess that situation because it completely rules out what the law of war says about proportionality, about assessing what is the target.
Who is that individual?
What's his value, concrete value?
And then which a lot of people leave out is what precautions did Israel take, like we just saw recently, of calling everybody in the building and saying, look, the terrorist is using this building for a military purpose.
You must leave.
You must get out of this area or all the other steps, these civilian harm mitigation measures.
So that one's a really huge one, but there are other ones, like when Dave said that there are more children to have died in this war than any modern war.
That's just, of course, Douglas called that out.
But there is a whole list of them from the blockade, from the occupation, like all of these things were just counterfactual and not a logic that leads to a conclusion, but he's really convincing.
And that's what I have a problem with.
All right, Dave, your response.
Sure.
Well, okay.
I mean, I do think that like you go, you do a lot of this, as Douglas did, a lot of this poisoning of the well stuff and saying you tell jokes and I do research.
And you could say this isn't credentialism all you want to, but it's really a lot before you start taking on an actual argument.
In fact, it wasn't until the follow-up question that you pointed anything out.
So to the analogy that I'm making, and you, you know, as you were quoting me on Twitter the other day, it's not, I'm not saying that I don't, I'm not familiar, although I'm not claiming to have your level of expertise with international humanitarian law, or you can assert that war works a different way.
I'm talking about something much more fundamental.
What I'm saying is that Douglas is making the claim, and many others are, that Israel's killing of civilians is unintentional.
And I'm talking about a very basic philosophical concept of morality, of intentionality, and that by what people mean when they say intentional, that if this was done domestically, we would consider it intentional.
The point is that war, yes, look, there's been the Geneva Convention.
There's international humanitarian law.
These are, it goes back to the mid-19th century, was codified into law after World War II.
I think that's a good thing.
I think it's a step in the right direction.
But this is all a politician or a group of politicians declaring a word and the fact that there are lines drawn on a map does not in any way magically transform morality or the basic philosophical concept of intent.
And even in your example there, if I were to give out pamphlets, give out a warning, tell everybody I'd really like you to leave, and then they didn't, and I blew up a building, we would consider that intentional murder.
Now, my point, I think a lot of times people object to almost what the implications of this way of looking at the world might be, but forget all of that for a second.
I'm just talking about how human beings think about these things.
And when you talk about an intentional killing, now, by the way, I should also stipulate that it's not as if that's the case in every single one of these strikes that Israel's taken.
And we've gotten all types of evidence about this.
And there's quite a number of cases, hundreds of cases, where they're waiting for terrorists to go back into a residential building and then attacking the building, suspected terrorists, I should say.
But regardless, none of this is even really the point.
The point is that on a very basic human level, and I would also think this is completely incompatible with Christianity, although I'm not trying to lecture anybody about that.
But there is no micro and macro morality.
There is no micro and macro intentionality.
These are human concepts.
And if you are dropping a bomb and you know that there are women and children on the receiving end of that bomb, then that was done intentionally.
And I think this is the reality of war.
And I think if we're going to have a conversation about this, we should deal with it in reality.
Yeah, and also, John, I'll get you to respond to that.
But it just seems to me, having done so many debates about this since October the 7th, I've never disputed that Israel had a right to defend itself.
In fact, a duty to defend itself and its people from any further attacks of that magnitude, given how horrific it was.
So let me just restate that again.
But there's a kind of unique battlefield in Gaza, I would argue, and maybe you would argue differently, that you've got 2 million people, 50% of whom are under 18, and that the enemy are all living in civilian areas amongst the civilians.
So you have a kind of horrific battleground, if you like, to attack if you're Israel in the sense that you can only kill, constantly kill a lot of civilians, including children, if you go after the enemy in those civilian areas.
And that's exactly what's happened.
And I can't think of a similar war.
And maybe you can.
You're more experienced of this, I accept than I am.
But can you think of another scenario where the proportion of children that is in the attack zone has been at 50% or higher?
And therefore, we're seeing so many children being killed.
So one, look, yeah, that's the case study or comparative model that you could do the research on.
How does this compare to anything else?
And it doesn't, right?
The 20 years of preparing Gaza for war, the 400 miles of tunnels, the human sacrifice strategy, because both sides actually have legal obligations.
And when Hamas says, I need the death of my women and children, that's not right.
So the data about what is the population.
So one, I don't want to be heartless about it.
And every death of a child is terrible.
But you're evaluating anybody who's below the 18 as a child.
As in, you know that Hamas has basically charged.
I joined the military at 17.
Am I a child?
And Hamas deploys, the average age of a Hamas recruit right now is 16 and a half.
We've seen them put weapons in hands of very young children.
You have combatant and you have non-combatant.
Is there any comparable status to the demographic of Gaza?
No.
Is there any comparison to where another country, Egypt, refuses to let even those that won out out from the combat areas and Israel who took weeks to evacuate the civilians from the areas they're going into?
So absolutely, there are so many cheer.
But back to Dave's comment, which it stands on itself, explaining what he doesn't know about war or the laws of war, about them being codified and when they went into effect.
Or this is a simple question of morality that war should be no killing of civilians.
That should just be it.
You two military should go find your place to fight and just have it out.
That's not the history of war from the creation, literally, of city-states going out and everything.
I think you want to be able to do that.
You want to get into the frameworks to judge.
No, no, the frameworks to judge war.
We as societies, all the societies of war, the Geneva Convention is one example, have decided here are the boundaries of brutality of war.
Like, we don't bomb innocent civilians.
And you cannot say, I don't care what your Horetz articles say.
You're not going to show me that Israel has targeted civilians, intentionally killing civilians.
When I can show you measures that Israel has taken that no military in the history of war have taken to get civilians out of harm's way so they can target that terrorist.
You once said on a podcast, if the terrorist is holding a baby and shooting at you, then of course you can kill the terrorist.
And unfortunately, what they're doing is wrong.
But then I understand that when we have cases of Hamas doing that, holding children so nobody will shoot at them, or going underneath a hospital, a school, a mosque, doing what we call law affair.
You have to have an understanding of the evolutions of the law of war, how it is adjudicated.
When you say evidence, I mean evidence, not TikTok videos.
I mean actual evidence of what did the person dropping the commander know, what did he do to prevent it, what time did he do it, what type of munition did he use.
Dave's statement stand on his own of showing that he doesn't know the foundations of war, even if it's what you call a just war execution of the war.
You're just not communicating that you know enough to make a statement like that.
I'm just philosophically talking about killing civilians is wrong.
That's what the law of war says.
It says don't target civilians.
What Hamas did on October 7th?
It doesn't say zero civilians will die in a war.
There's a precaution law of war.
There is the feasible things you do to prevent the civilian death.
But you can't say Israel hasn't done that.
And I'm saying, based on my research, not an appeal to expertise, going there, interviewing IDF soldiers, commanders, Netanyahu himself, I'm saying Israel is not targeting or intentionally trying to kill civilians.
Appeals to Morality 00:16:33
They're doing the opposite more than anybody else.
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Okay.
Okay.
I mean, Dave, that last point, that last point John made, and obviously respond to everything he said, but the last point about he's been there.
You know, one of Douglas Murray's attack lines with you was that unlike him, who regularly goes to Israel, he regularly goes to Ukraine, you don't go to these places that you then opine on.
You know, personally, I don't think you need to go to the sun to know it's hot.
But, you know, a lot of people agree with Douglas Murray.
And so, yeah, you know, actually, he's right.
If you don't actually go, how can you really know what you're talking about?
And John's kind of inferring that as well.
What do you say to that?
No, Piers, I'm not.
I'm not inferring that you have to go there.
I'm saying what research methodology are you?
If you're not doing the interviews of people involved in the actions, if you're not collecting data in a certain way, which you can get from going there, you can do ethnographic research by interviewing the people involved in the execution.
I'm not saying that stroll man of, well, Dave's not been there, so he can't talk.
If Dave did research, then absolutely, if Dave didn't have giant logical holes in what he's saying, like about the blockade or about the bombing or things like this, then you don't have to go there.
There are many ways to do research.
I'm saying Dave doesn't do that.
Okay, so I'll say, it's a both, I feel like both in this debate and in the debate with Douglas Murray, it almost kind of feels like the analogy I'd use is like if two fighters agreed to fight, you know, two guys in the UFC, they agree to fight.
And so they show up under the lights and you get into the cage and I put my hands up and then the other guy puts his hands down and starts telling me what a better fighter he is than me.
And you're like, okay, well then let's do it.
Like, I don't know.
Let's have the conversation.
Like instead of just telling me you're not going to speak his own.
Hold on, hold on.
Wait, wait, one second.
Let me finish my point since you had some time to talk there.
Look, all of this stuff about like whether you have to be there.
By the way, it's going viral online, but there's this great clip of Douglas Murray taking apart the lived experience argument from the left and making all these points about how people who were never in the Holocaust have written much more beautifully and accurate about the Holocaust than people who actually went through it themselves.
If you want to say that you gain some, if you want to say you have expertise or you want to say going there gives you some more expertise, then sure.
I mean, I wouldn't argue that.
No one's arguing that you can't learn about a place from going there.
But again, this is the fighter putting his hands down and going, I've trained so much harder than you.
I'm such a better boxer than you.
You could never hang with me.
It's like, okay, so let's get it going.
Anyway, in terms of, by the way, there is absolutely no chance, and I haven't examined Douglas Murray's passport, but there's no chance that he's not a hypocrite on this issue.
I guarantee he has not been to all of the places that he's commented on.
I don't know.
He's commented on every foreign country and what's going on geopolitically for 20 years.
I'm sure he hasn't visited all of those places.
Back to the point, because it seems like in these things we do everything except actually debate the issue.
You missed my entire point.
Once you're appealing to the law or appealing to how warfare actually works, you're missing the entire point that I was making.
My point is that this is not how the law works and this is not how war actually works.
I'm making a much more basic human point, a fundamental point.
Look, Pierce, the other day, okay, this is, and by the way, if you don't want to believe this story, it's fine.
It's just one firsthand account from Gaza.
But whether it's true or not, and there's no reason to suspect it's not true, but whether it's true or not, there's just been hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of examples like this.
But so there was a woman, a building collapsed.
She says as she's walking down the building, she can hear the little kids, not 16-year-old members of Hamas.
You're talking four and five-year-olds screaming for their mothers while they're buried underneath the rubble, screaming for help from their mommy.
And you know what, Pierce?
No help is coming because there's no bulldozers in Gaza.
Nobody's coming to get those kids out.
This is the reality of war.
And this is what I'm trying, this is the main point that I was trying to make to Douglas Murray, which he kept running away from.
If you're going to say that our goal here is to degrade Hamas, Murray conceded you probably can't eliminate them, but he feels like you can degrade them.
If you're going to degrade Hamas and the cost of it is those little children dying under rubble, screaming for their mother as their bones are crushed and no one's coming to help them, then fine, but at least say that you find that price acceptable.
And then we could have a real conversation about why people are going to view you as a monster and why the other side will never stop fighting and will always be against you.
Because I could tell you for sure, if that was my kids, and I know, Pierce, if those were your kids as well, you wouldn't want to hear anything about how, well, we've codified in international law that this is the norm of the way wars are allowed to be fought versus not allowed to be fought.
I'm making a very human point that this is the reality of war.
And you can say under international humanitarian law, it's not considered intentional.
We would consider this an intentional act in any other area.
That's the point.
It's a very basic human point that if anyone were to do this domestically and then tried to use the defense of like, no, but I dropped a leaflet.
No, I didn't really want to kill them.
I just wanted to kill them.
We'd go, I don't care.
You blew up a building knowing there were kids in there.
That's the essence of this whole thing.
And there's no amount, like, there's no amount of expertise that can really get you away from this basic fundamental moral logic.
Here's a question.
Dave, let me ask you a different question.
Hang on, John.
Hang on, John.
I will come to you.
I just wanted to ask you, like, let's go back to the end of World War II and the dropping of two atomic bombs in Japan, which obviously caused huge loss of life.
And I imagine by your criteria, that was a deliberate targeting of civilians.
The argument in favor of doing it was that it brought it.
Yeah, it brought an end to World War II and potentially saved millions more lives from being taken.
In other words, there's your moral argument right there: you do this to stop this.
You take this number of lives to stop many more lives being killed.
I mean, when you look at that, for example, what's your view of that moral debate?
So, okay, well, first of all, just on the specifics, and we have talked about this before, but I tend to agree with five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower that it was unnecessary and wrong for us to drop the nuclear weapons.
But regardless of that, even if five-star General Eisenhower is wrong about that and the other generals who supported it were right, this is exactly the point, Pierce, is that when you start to think about war for what it actually is, the overwhelming onus becomes clear.
And the onus is on you to demonstrate that we absolutely have to do this, that the standard for war, when you're talking about intentionally killing innocent civilians, the standard ought to be, the burden should always be on you to demonstrate that we absolutely have to do this.
I know this is horrible.
I know what the result of this is, but that we have to do this because so much more human suffering would come from us not doing this.
And this is to me the essence of the point of why I talk about war in this way is that when you, because if you don't think about it this way, it ends up being very easy to find other justifications, you know, justifications like Hamas must go.
You know, Hamas must go.
It's like, whoa, hold on, wait a second.
I think, I kind of think Hamas must go.
I kind of think the Likud party must go.
I definitely think Kim Jong-un must go.
I kind of think Vladimir Putin must go.
But that's not the standard for whether or not we're justified to just start slaughtering innocent people in the hope of achieving that end.
What the standard ought to be is simply: do you absolutely have to do this or there will be more human suffering?
That should be the standard.
And in the case of Israel-Gaza, I think that entirely changes the scope of things.
Because, look, as all of us know, right?
Gaza was before October 7th, the most surveilled area in the world.
Israel is the fortress of the world.
It was a monumental failure of both policy and security for October 7th to have happened in the first place.
And it's just not the case that there's going to be October 7th after October 7th if Israel just stops now and leaves Gaba in the rubble mess that it is.
And so that's exactly like, I'm not objecting.
I get your point, your point, Pierce, because you're almost going, wait, but if we follow this logic, then when could we ever fight a war?
And essentially, my point is that the onus should be on anybody who wants to fight a war ever.
The onus should be on them to demonstrate that it is absolutely necessary and that there's nothing else we could do in this situation.
Okay, John, your response.
Yeah, Pierce, two UFC fighters into a ring and one punches the other in the nose.
And Dave says, How dare he punches him in the nose in this fight?
That's the analogy.
He's not making an appeal to facts, how the law of war works, how war works, whether it's the theory underneath the war or the actual framework to understand it.
He doesn't like theory like just war theory, things like that.
But the framework that is there.
Now he just said that there has to be one side has to show that there is a military necessity.
He doesn't know these words, but that's what he's talking about to actually enter the war.
Hamas invaded Israel on October 7th.
I've never heard military necessity before.
You blew my mind with your expertise.
I know.
It's like you need, I'll give you war 101 offline.
That's fine.
Hamas invaded Israel on October 7th.
Israel invoked Article 51 a self-defense war in accordance with the United Nations, again, more frameworks that people need to know, and said Hamas will be destroyed, removed from political power, and the hostages return.
Now, Dave has said that's not necessary and that all Israel needs to do is put more men on the wall.
That's what Dave said.
His solution, because he also doesn't study military theory on how do you win a war.
He intermixes counterinsurgency theory with a war against removing a regime from power, defeating their military.
That's not doing factual.
You said that was exact words on Lex Freeman.
He's not making an appeal to facts.
I'm debating.
He's making an appeal to emotion and morals, not what the law is.
I'm making an appeal to logic and morals.
Hamas started a war on October 7th.
Hamas is going to lose a war and it's going to never be in power again.
It's never, and Hamas is the one that says they want to do October 7th.
But Dave says, just put the wall up.
They won't be able to do it on October 7th ever again, right?
You have this blockade, although there were 100 tunnels going from Egypt to Gaza to build this military that Hamas built.
And he'll say that Netanyahu sent him money.
He's not making an appeal to facts.
This is what we have a problem with Dave Smith.
He makes an appeal to emotion and does historical revisionism.
And he tells these narratives that aren't true.
So his nails.
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He's anti-war.
What's so funny about this, Pierce?
Okay, what's so funny about this, Pierce, is that after all of this, once again, all of this, I'm an expert.
You don't know this.
I'm an expert.
You haven't studied military 101.
Then after all of that, the substance of what we're left with is right, all right.
Okay, got it.
After all of that, the substance that we're left with is Hamas started the war on October 7th.
Yes, the most basic point that every pro-Israel person has made on this show forever.
That's what you've got here.
Okay.
I got a fact.
I don't want to debate the fact that you've been able to achieve that goal.
By the way, you also don't even know what an appeal, it's not an appeal to emotion, by the way.
That's not what it is.
Although you do seem to be flirting with an appeal to authority.
No, it's an appeal to morality.
For me to describe the actual human impact of what this policy is resulting in is not an appeal to emotion.
I mean, like, it's an appeal to morality and it's an appeal to logic.
It appeal to logic.
Look, you can't answer me this very simple question, okay?
Here's the very simple question.
Okay.
If what, which you'd have to admit, look, let's take the worst example, just not your example where there's a Hamas rocket firing at you.
Amigaza, don't give me a hypothetical and the war.
Give me a hypothesis.
I was about to say that.
You interrupted me.
I was on my way to.
Let's say Israel targets an area where there are two combatants and two civilians.
It's your one-to-one ratio, okay?
And they decide that's acceptable by the international laws of war, whatever.
By the way, in your appeal to the international laws, you didn't mention the ICC warrant for Netanyahu, which they don't seem to be respecting that much.
But anyway, you can still appeal to this framework, even though they never have to live up to it.
But let's just say, okay, the exact same action happened domestically.
If someone were to do that, you would call it intentional murder, right?
How does the concept of intentionality change because a politician uttered the word war, they declared it, and it's taking place in a foreign country without appealing to authority or appealing to law or appealing to what war normally is?
Can you as a human being explain to me how the concept of intentional changes magically because a politician uttered the phrase war?
Well, the thing about the politician, it's the framework.
So, yes, I can give you, and this is literally you're explaining in the question how you don't know how the framework of a war works.
The War Crime Debate 00:13:45
And the entire thing is, stop telling me I don't know.
Stop telling me I don't know and demonstrate it.
I didn't say you don't know your question.
I'll teach you something.
Your domestic law has a complete societal agreement on what those laws will be adjudicated and how they'll be determined.
No, it doesn't.
The Tyrrents, absolutely, American law.
Lots of people don't agree to the law.
If you kill somebody, then you'll be convicted of a crime based on a jury and a judge, all this.
Then you want to apply that on war, but then disregard what the laws of war, the things that all nations have agreed to on this is how we account for it.
You can't do it without making an appeal to the law.
You can't do it.
You can't explain it geologically.
The body of laws have accounted for how do you get over that intentionality thing.
If you use the same thing, which is the when somebody says there's a war crime, or when you say Israel has intentionally targeted a civilian, because look, there's a one, I know one, if you have to go to the statistical thing, we have issues unless you're doing a comparative analysis.
But if there's one combatant and one civilian, you don't know that, okay, what is that combatant?
Is he a commander?
Is he the commander?
Is he a regular soldier?
That accounts for what is the excessive collateral damage, and that's where intentionality gets into it.
But oh, by the way, what have you done to prevent it?
In the domestic situation, you'd send the police to go get that criminal and then try them.
In war, if you're a member of the other military in which I'm at war against, I don't have to have an excuse.
I can kill you on site.
Yeah, no, okay, very quickly before I let you get logistical differences.
Hang on, hang on, Dave.
Hang on, Dave.
Dave's going to stay with me when Eric wants.
Hang on, guys.
Hang on.
John, we're going to let you go, John.
Before we let you go, I want to ask you just one thing that also came out of the debate with Douglas and Dave, which was this issue of whether people who have what most people believe to be bad faith, deliberate conspiracy theory nonsense views.
For example, Darryl Cooper saying Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.
Whether people like Darryl Cooper should be platformed on gigantic podcasts like Joe Rogan or not, particularly if they're not going to be really vigorously challenged on what is something that to me is such an obviously untrue and offensive premise.
What's your quick view of that?
I think that we should not platform historical revisionists who go back in time and find a fact and then tell it in a certain way to spend the narrative of what we should know about events.
If you want to look at Darryl Cooper, look at the list of deleted tweets from Daryl Cooper.
I'm against intellectually.
Again, no expertise involved.
Anybody can research whatever they want.
And if they come out with a new finding, that's great.
Using evidence, using data, using a research methodology.
But no, you don't get to be a historical revisionist like Dave.
Actually, I did.
Okay, John Spencer, thank you very much indeed.
Well, Dave, Dave, I'm going to let you respond, but with Eric.
So I'm going to say goodbye to John.
John, thank you.
It was a riveting debate between you two.
I really appreciate it.
Well, joining us now for some final thoughts on the debate.
A man who can claim to be friends with Joe Rogan, with Dave Smith, and with Douglas Murray.
And I would like to think now with me, Harvard mathematician, a founder of the intellectual dark web, Dr. Eric Weinstein, has just returned from his own research trip to Israel.
And Dave is staying with us.
So, Eric, great to see you.
Just on that point, Eric, about platforming people.
It seems to me Darryl Cooper is one of those characters out there at the moment who are promoting something they know to be untrue.
It's a bit like Alex Jones when he went after the Sandy Hook families and said it was all a hoax.
They're promoting something that is deliberately untrue, but can be commercially very lucrative to them.
Should those people who are making good money from perpetrating, in my estimation, obvious lies, should they be given platforms?
That loads the question, but look, everybody's doing something different online.
I mean, somebody could say you're making good money from holding conflicts and shouting matches that play into the inguinal desire for combat.
And in a certain sense, we're all making money doing something, hopefully.
The problem is, what is anyone's intention?
And one of the problems of knowing Daryl Cooper is that the shitposting Daryl Cooper and the thoughtful Daryl Cooper are not always the same person, easily reconciled.
Many people talk about having sort of, yeah, this is the way I am online.
This is the way I am in a different place.
And, you know, the odd thing about that is that this mirrors a tradition in academics that is not much discussed, which is the esoteric exoteric tradition in which typically a scholar behaves one way in the seminar room and another way when his or her words might influence policy.
And so even if you're in the heterodox movement, I'm sure that Donald Trump is keeping his own counsel about what he intends to do with tariffs.
He's doing an esoteric exoteric routine.
And so in part, the problem is that we haven't reconciled ourselves to the idea that we speak one way in front of the world, another way behind closed doors, and that this is actually natural and normal.
And as a result, you know, what we're doing is we're hauling out different people.
We see that Fauci and Collins are, you know, behaving one way behind the scenes, a different way in Congress.
Daryl is the same way.
I no doubt have my own version of esoteric exoteric, and we're just not comfortable with it.
And so in a certain sense, we're all waking up on the same day to the reality that this is a natural and normal part of scholarship, governance, civics, and personal life.
Yeah, I mean, Dave, it's an interesting one because I had Dan Balzarian on, who was spewing repulsive anti-Semitic crap to me for about half an hour before I finally ended it.
But he has a big following and had been sort of going down slightly down that road.
And I felt it was right to challenge him.
And then there was a big debate afterwards about whether I should have given him the oxygen of being able to repeat this stuff on a big platform like Uncensored.
I would say it was slightly different to what I think, because I think he may genuinely believe what he was saying.
And it may be that Darryl Cooper does too.
I don't know him.
In Alex Jones' case, I mean, Elon Musk canceled an interview with me because he saw a clip of me criticizing him for reversing his decision about whether allowing Alex Jones onto X, for example.
His original position was he shouldn't be on X because he was dancing on the graves of children deliberately and was deliberately lying to make hundreds of millions of dollars out of making the grief of those poor families immeasurably worse.
And I felt it was wrong to give someone like that a platform again on X.
Now, it's an arguable point.
But I guess my question for you would be, you're a libertarian.
You clearly think Darryl Cooper should be platformed.
And I heard that strongly when you were talking to Douglas.
But is there anyone who shouldn't be platformed?
I mean, where is that line for a libertarian?
Well, I mean, the libertarian position would be that it's up to the people who own the platforms to decide who they want to platform and don't.
And our only red line would be that the government should never be in the business of deciding any of this.
Can I say, though, yes, I love Darrell Cooper.
He's a friend of mine, and I think his work is phenomenal.
I am really beginning to resent the fact that every show I go on, I get asked about Daryl Cooper, who somehow, I'm working as hard as I can to generate outrage and controversy.
I've been on Rogan like 15 times more than him.
And still when I'm on, all anyone wants to talk about is Darryl Cooper.
And by the, like, look, I think this in and of itself just says something that's so fascinating.
I mean, the guy had one almost throwaway line on the Tucker Carlson show, where, by the way, he caveated it in the beginning and the end.
Said, I just say this to get a rise out of my buddy.
I'm kind of ribbing him.
Also, I'm being hyperbolic.
And when I say Churchill's the villain, I don't mean that he committed the most atrocities or was the worst person.
And it's like, my God, this sentence, the reaction alone to it almost proves the point that, which ultimately is what Darrell Cooper was making, which is that World War II has become essentially our religion.
It is like down to the fact that if somebody were to say they're a devil worshiper, you wouldn't even bring them on your show, Pierce, because it's not that interesting.
No one's even going to want to watch that.
It's not.
But hang on, Dave.
But if you're if you're a Nazi.
I admire your defense, but let's be clear.
If someone is going to say that Churchill's the chief villain of World War II, they deserve all that's coming their way because Churchill tried to defend a genocidal maniac called Adolf Hitler.
I don't think there's any defense.
When you do that, you're challenging putting yourself in the fire.
Okay, fair enough.
Fair enough.
And maybe he could have been more precise in that comment.
But to your larger question, there's, look, I mean, all of this stuff is somewhat debatable and somewhat arbitrary.
I tend to err on the side of, I think you were right to have Dan on your show.
And I think that it's like, look, this is, if you think this stuff is bubbling up on the internet and it's very concerning to you.
Okay, well, like, look, we had a massive experiment between 2016 and then really culminating in 2020 and then kind of died down after Elon Musk bought Twitter.
We had a massive experiment in internet censorship and deplatforming.
Where did that get us?
I mean, I think it's much healthier to air these grievances out and give pushback where warranted.
And I just, I think I tend to lean in that direction.
But I will have the humility to admit, I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe that's not the best way to go.
I tend to be on the side of a free exchange of ideas.
Eric.
So the concern that I have is there's no real solution if we try to solve this problem in terms of platforming, free speech.
Who's an expert?
Who isn't?
What's the credential?
We're not even being genuine, in my opinion, about what it is that we're talking about.
Let's give a simple example.
I can essentially guarantee you that 6 million people on the nose of Jewish faith were not killed during the Holocaust.
I don't know what the number was, but the odds that it would have all of those round zeros and come in exactly where it does is negligible.
Every time I hear somebody make that point, I worry.
Right?
Because the idea is it's like somebody picking at the asbestos who isn't looking like a registered asbestos removal company.
There's a way in which World War II settled in a particular way, which is thank God we didn't appease infinitely.
We had an absolute monster on our hands.
There were extermination camps.
Genocide matters as a word.
We sat with Stalin despite our obvious differences because sometimes you have to do, there's a certain sort of story about it.
It's kind of directionally true, if imperfect, because it's too clean, it's too clear, et cetera, et cetera.
What you see now is this mania for, hey, I found out all of these interesting facts.
Did you know about the Rosenstrasse protest?
What was that?
Oh, where women married to half-Jewish men got their men back by protesting and Rosenstrasse is showing that the Nazis could be made to relent.
No, I didn't know that.
So now you're in a situation in which each kind of fact, whether it's the McCollum memo or the Rosenstrasse protest, is an opportunity to pick at the asbestos.
And partially, it's not really a religion.
And I talked to Dave about this this morning privately.
There's a French philosopher, I think his name is Renant, whose great quote is, a nation is a group of people who have agreed to forget something in common.
Unfortunately, we have a very simplistic notion at the moment that because we've been lied to by these elites, and boy, is that clear over the last several years, we are now deciding that we are going to pick at everything that might be a fiction, everything that might not be exactly true.
And by the way, we have a new problem with X, which was formerly Twitter, which is that you cannot walk a foot in it without being covered in anti-Semitic leeches if your last name sounds like mine.
And Dave, I've understood the same thing has been happening to you.
We are not finding the formula for a good life.
It's not coming about by censorship.
It's not coming about by false expertise.
And it's not coming about by an anonymous free-for-all where everybody's sharing everything at an equal level and we have no ability to discern what's going on.
Reality of Modern War 00:13:40
And it's not being settled through debate or combat, Dave.
And I agree with you on that.
And Eric, what did you make of the debate with Dave and Douglas?
I don't think it was a debate.
I don't think that's what happened.
My guess, and, you know, again, I haven't talked to Joe about this.
And if I had talked to Joe about it, I couldn't say because I don't transmit private conversations.
But if I had to make a guess, Douglas was trying to do something normal, which is that as an author, he was calling on a friend to say, hey, I have a new book and I'd like to be talking about it to generate some interest.
And my guess is that because the book involved Israel and because Joe was open at the beginning of this program and saying that he found barbarism in Israel's actions, my guess is that Joe was probably very comfortable with Douglas and very uncomfortable with the book.
And my belief is, is that he called in Dave because Dave, whether he's an expert or not, I will say he has a tremendous number of facts that go against the Israeli narrative and that whether or not he's considered to be a self-credentialed scholar, I haven't really looked at Dave's work enough to know.
I would say that what Joe was doing was to say, I want to make sure that Douglas is balanced because I, Joe, believe that barbarism is being defended and I'm not comfortable with that.
But because we don't have the backstory to it, we don't really realize what happened in the first opening moments of the exchange, which was very, very strange.
And you've just come back from Israel, Eric.
I mean, where do you think we are with this war?
And in terms of the moral debate that I had between Dave and John Spencer earlier about whether civilians are being deliberately targeted, what do you feel about that part of the debate about the war?
First of all, war is war.
And whatever Israel, that is the government's intention, I can assure you that when you put that many kids with guns into their first shooting war, bad stuff is going to happen at some level.
We always talk about, you know, what is the normal amount of friendly fire accidents?
Nobody wants it.
Is there any civilian that's being targeted?
I have no doubt that in every war, somebody with a gun does the wrong thing or who targets improperly because they're pissed off.
I don't know.
That's not my issue.
What I can tell you is the war is completely not portrayed accurately.
And I just went back to a clip that I recorded with Konstantin Kissen on October 14th.
So seven days after and before Israel went into Gaza.
And what I said was, this is Munkhausen by proxy.
Sinoir is the mother.
He's desperately trying to get his women and children killed.
This is not human shields, by the way.
This is an innovation that I would call not human shields, but subterranean crosshair strategy, where you put your military tunnels underneath mosques, orphanages, schools, et cetera, because the key in hybrid warfare is video.
And video is much more powerful than the kinetic war.
So Israel's winning the kinetic war, losing the hybrid war.
Sinoir is still controlling it from his grave.
And the only tell of this is that you still hold hostages in Gaza.
Hamas does.
And you're getting people to give a victory chant from the river to the sea, celebrating a genocide that has yet to happen.
The whole purpose is to keep the world supplied with video because none of us have the stomach.
I can hear that Dave doesn't.
I don't either for watching war video.
Because in part, Western Europe and North America has been at peace since 1945.
We just, we've lost the ability to watch war.
And Dave, I mean, it's interesting though, because I was talking to my kids about this, you know, they're from 31 to 13.
But, you know, when I was young, you couldn't follow war in the way that you can now through a phone with seeing every single thing that's happening in gruesome, uncensored detail beam straight to your face.
You know, when I was in my teens, the Falklands War happened, for example, when the UK went to war with Argentina over this small island, the Falkland Islands.
And my memory was a very sanitized coverage.
I mean, you saw, you know, quite long distance footage of bombs going off and stuff.
What you didn't see was what I see on my phone all day long, which is people's heads being blown off and horrific, terrible imagery, which I think is partly responsible for why so many young people are getting their brains fried by their phones, by the way, this constant, horrific dopamine that's coming their way.
But also, we just would, it was very sanitized, the coverage that you could see from newspapers, from the very few television news programs and so on.
We were really protected from the harsh reality of war in a way that is not applicable right now.
We see it all.
And I think that Israel can have all the arguments that it wants.
And I have a lot of sympathy with many of them.
But what they've lost, without any doubt to me at all, is they've lost the PR war through video coverage from the battlefield.
You know, that's what's horrified people the most.
Yeah, I mean, I just think that's exactly right, Pierce.
And I mean, I have a fairly early memory of George H.W. Bush announcing the invasion of Ukraine in the Persian Gulf War when I was like a little kid, like seven or eight or something like that.
But even when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, the images that we would see would be like these aerial views of a projectile going in and kind of an explosion in the distance.
And okay, that's a lot easier to root for than seeing the image of a baby with his arm blown off on this, which I mean, my God, all day long on Twitter.
I see that.
And I do, you know, like I agree with Eric.
I do see a lot of like Jew hatred on Twitter.
It's just hard for me to make that kind of at the top of my hierarchy of outrages when I'm also watching babies being blown apart every day on my Twitter.
And I agree with your assessment, Pierce.
I don't think it's very, very good for the soul.
But, you know, what's interesting as you say this is that I really think it gets to the point that I was trying to make in the first half of this program, which is that what's happening here is that people are being brought closer and closer to the reality of war.
And, you know, I do feel like for the first half of this show, it's almost like I was debating like an Aztec high priest about child sacrifice.
And I'm sitting here and saying, hey, this is murdering a child.
And he's sitting and saying, you don't even understand the doctrine.
You don't even understand what it is that we're doing here.
And it's like, no, look, the reality is, in effect, this is what's happening.
And I do think, I think Eric's right also.
We're just, we part of this has to do with the fact that we're wealthier than previous generations.
We have a different understanding of morality, but it is just not the case.
Also, I think it's part of the fact that in the West, we have less children.
We have less children and we value the lives of our children that we have more.
All of these things play a role.
But again, the essential point, which I've said several times on the show to you, Pierce here is right, is that this is the whole game.
Asymmetrical warfare.
The action is always in the reaction, right?
You could watch Osama bin Laden's son had a great article.
If you want to Google it, it's Osama bin Laden Dead and Loving It.
And he wrote it like two years after Osama bin Laden died.
And he was just talking about how, like, this is in my father's wildest dreams.
He couldn't have imagined you would invade Afghanistan and invade Iraq and overthrow Gaddafi and take all of these other steps.
The whole point of 9-11 wasn't to destroy America by bringing down our towers.
It was to lure us into a war where he could bankrupt the United States of America, just as our CIA had trained him to do with the Soviets.
And so the whole game here from Hamas was to get Israel to do exactly what Israel's doing now and turn the entire world against them.
And from that, obviously, it's a sick, it's a sick, disgusting game to play.
But from that perspective, they've been incredibly successful.
I mean, Eric, anyone who's watched the 45-minute film that Israel authorities produced of all the gruesome lowlights of what happened on October the 7th will feel the same sickening sense of utter revulsion that I felt when I watched it as I have done to the scenes I've seen from Gaza.
You know, it was utterly horrific what happened on that day.
And so I completely understand why so many Israelis and Jewish people around the world have felt so utterly determined to get rid of Hamas at all costs.
I totally get all this.
But in relation to what Dave said at the end there, just final word to you.
Where does that leave us, do you think?
I'm confused because I watch these videos and I hate it.
It scars my mind.
I will never be the same person after watching the gruesome nature of what's happened in Gaza.
Some of it is fake.
Some of it is real.
It doesn't matter.
What I don't understand, and I'm just completely at a loss, is this hardens one's heart against whom?
You know, my tweet that I keep reading from October 17th, before Israel went into North Gaza, IDF assisted suicide, Zugzwang, Munchausen by proxy.
I said, this is going to be horrific.
Innocent life is going to be lost in Gaza.
This is a plan.
And every time I see that and I see people holding hostages, I think, wow, how fascinating that the world can't put together the fact that Israel is in effect forced to move.
And this was clear before Israel ever went into Gaza.
Sinoar, one of the things I did when I was in Israel was to yell at the Israelis, saying, you had an evil genius who bested you.
You pride yourself on your intellectual achievement.
You lost.
You're still talking about human shields.
This guy's two moves, three moves ahead of you from the grave.
And the fact is, I feel what Dave feels.
I just feel it 100% towards Hamas.
I don't understand.
If people do not realize what war is, where it will be brought, whether it's Charlie Epto or the Baticlon or a parade in Nice, you are talking about a level of warfare that you cannot accept because it is predicated on a strategy of women and children being the biggest munition in war.
This is the great asset in hybrid war.
And what we are seeing is an innovation that has to be stopped.
Israel is so bad at this.
It hasn't figured out.
Imagine if they had the supposed imaging we have for under the pyramids to whap the tunnels of Gaza.
Imagine that they developed ingenious ways of getting down there to spare more life.
This is a call for Israel not to lose its soul.
But the fact is, is that it's being outplayed by a dead master strategist.
And, you know, my feeling is, is that when Israel speaks and tries to justify itself, it tends to lose me.
The way that I really shifted my sympathies in this whole thing was by listening to the Arabs and listening to Hamas.
And when they justify this, I just think, my God, as bad as I think Netanyahu has been in handling all of this, the absolute genius and complete evil of the Arab position here is something that has to be contested.
And Israel does not appear to have better means to do it.
Yeah, and let's not forget that the official spokesman for Hamas about two weeks after October the 7th on camera said that their intention was to do the same thing again and again and again, which I think is something that people often forget about in the mix of all this, which is Hamas is wedded to annihilating Israel.
And that's a very important cog.
And this is the only thing that's going to be annihilated.
Well, I think, oh, listen, there's no question that the scale of the retribution, one of the questions I asked repeatedly, as you know, Dave, throughout the months after October the 7th, was what is proportionate?
I don't know the answer.
I do know from relatives of mine who fought wars that once a war starts, it's very, very difficult to control it.
And it tends to be something that evolves in the way that it evolves.
And history will show that a lot of innocent people get killed in every war that's ever been conducted.
But what is happening in Gaza right now, I've never understood quite what Israel's end game is.
End Game for Gaza 00:01:30
I totally understand.
They want to have the hostages released and they should be.
But what happens after you have flattened Gaza, you know, short of what Trump is advocating of 2 million people migrating to neighboring Arab countries, which is a form of ethnic cleansing we haven't seen in modern times, in my estimation, by the definition of ethnic cleansing.
I don't know how this ends or what happens afterwards, but it's whatever it is, is going to be extremely messy to resolve.
I've got to leave it there, guys.
Dave, I thoroughly enjoyed your debate with Douglas.
I thoroughly enjoy you coming on uncensored.
I think you're what I would call you're a good faith actor.
I always believe with you, as I do with Douglas, actually, that I think you believe what you say.
People may take issue with it.
They may disagree with you.
But I think both of you come from a position of believing what you say.
And I obviously feel the same with you, Eric.
And that's why you're three of my favorite guests.
So thank you all very much.
Thank you, Piers.
Thank you, Eric.
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