Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/30/23 John Robb: Israel Has Lost the Moral High Ground Online

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

John Robb joins the show to discuss the battle for the moral high ground between Israel and the Palestinians. Robb, who has worked with and now writes about information warfare in the online space, argues that the pro-Israel movement has lost hold of the online narrative. He and Scott discuss these dynamics and try to anticipate how the conflict will be affected going forward.  Discussed on the show: “Israel's Online Front Collapses” (Global Guerrillas) “The Anti-Israel Swarm” (Global Guerrillas) John Robb is a former special operator who now writes the Global Guerrillas Report which examines the world at the intersection of war, technology and politics. Follow him on Twitter @johnrobb This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, introducing John Robb. he's the author of brave new war about iraq war two and he's got this very interesting and compelling even though that's the same thing substack called global gorillas it's at john rob with two bees there john rob dot substack dot com welcome back to the show how you doing hey how you doing scott doing good uh i'm doing great appreciate you joining us here okay um i like reading your stuff man it's very interesting you have such a unique take here can you talk to me at first a little bit about like your background with all this link analysis and network science and this and that how you got

all interested in all that stuff oh wow um yeah early background special ops pilot worked with steel team and um delta and stuff and did all that kind of thing for a while and got out and uh ended up at forester it was like the first internet analyst so he analyzed all that and got into how the internet works and then did some social networking stuff kicked that off in 2001 so i was into this how social networking works right at the very beginning because we built most of the kind of methods that we use today you know the stuff that you see on twitter and facebook look exactly like our stuff back in 2001 so when the rack war kicked off i you know i was reading the analysis and it was so

So, like, didn't match what I was seeing, and the difficulties they were facing were different than they anticipated, obviously. They were using the wrong model. So what I saw was there was kind of a connectedness to the entire insurgency. I mean, there was, like, instead of one group, there were 70, and there were, you know, the first infrastructure that went up in Iraq was cell phones. It was up within weeks. And there was a communications flow that I was able to work into something called an open source warfare.

And that's what I wrote about in Brave New War and what that meant for insurgency, what that meant for protest, what that now means for politics. And has a certain dynamic to it, a certain way it works, very counterintuitive, but it explained what was going on. in Iraq. And so after I wrote it, you know, all the people coming back, special operators and like started to, they had read it in the field and go, now this explains what I'm seeing, right? It's nice to get the kind of feedback from people who were actually out there, you know, in the trenches and seeing how it worked. And so what, you know, I'm doing recently is the Global Gorillas report, which is the focus on how this open source model, how network tribalism works, how the mechanisms by which everything makes sense and the models that allow you to, you know,

predict what's coming, at a high degree of predictability for, you know, what's coming in the global environment, what's coming in politics. And, you know, I've been applying it to the U.S. politics. I've been applying to the recent wars at the global level from Ukraine to now Israel. And it seems to work, makes sense of what's going on at a deeper level than you would get out of the news and out of the kind of reading that most people do. So when we talked before, it was about the Twitter swarm and how they had gone far beyond, well, I don't know far, but had gone, I think, in your assessment, beyond what the national security state really wanted with the war in Ukraine. and were demanding, they had a vision of the total evil of the other side and all of this in a way that, you know, Washington, D.C. had more nuanced plans, but essentially, what,

center-left liberals on Twitter, they had their own ideas of Putin as Trump and the two-minute hate of the year and that kind of thing? Yeah, yeah. You know, back in 2001, during 2021, I saw the similar patterns regarding Israel that I saw with BLM and the other open source movements out there. And I was talking to people at CIA and other places like, hey, you know, if this goes global, it could disconnect and take down a state pretty quickly. and my guess it would probably be Israel, given the movement I already saw on this. And, you know, I was wrong. I mean, Ukraine was kicked off, and the disconnection of Russia occurred.

And the dynamic we saw in response to that invasion was, you know, completely out of control. I mean, is that people saw Putin as the ultimate evil connected to Trump, and they kicked off a swarm that grew to a global level and disconnected Russia in the matter of weeks. And they're able to power through it, but, I mean, as a relatively disconnected state, I mean, there were people were, you know, companies were leaving, even people were kicked out of discussion groups. It was, I mean, it's very damaging long term for them. It's going to hurt their economic growth over the long term.

And, you know, I, I analyzed that dynamics of how the swarm works, how the swarm thinks, the network tribalism underneath that, and it seemed to be pretty explanatory for what was going on then and how dangerous it was when it comes to global warfare and war in peace because they kicked off this new Cold War with Russia. It didn't need to happen. I mean, it didn't have to end up that way, but here we are. And now, so is this the same Twitter swarm then that's anti-war when it comes to Israel-Palestine

that were such hawks on Ukraine? It has a similar origin. This swarm is, you know, I've been analyzing more from the perspective of kind of a network guerilla war, online guerrilla war. You know, in theory, you know, at a broad theoretical level, you know, when you conduct a terrorist attack, typically it's aimed at causing the, you know, you want to provoke the state into overreacting. And when they overreact, they do moral damage themselves, meaning they look bad, they look

on trustworthy, they look evil. And that moral damage serves as a spark or a tender for creating a guerrilla movement. So terrorism is a way to ignite a guerrilla movement based on moral damage to the state. That's largely self-inflicted. And what we're seeing in the online version of this is that the terrorist attack, Hamas, against Israel, kicked off an overreaction, was designed to. but the moral damage is adjudicated and accumulated and amplified in the online world. And that's where the guerrilla conflict is being fought, mostly in the moral realm.

And it's been escalating since then with the goal of eventually, you know, BDS in Israel and isolating them and forcing them into capitulation. yeah well it sounds good so i wanted to go to this thing uh is two essays ago here the anti-israel swarm and i get it how this is sort of some ab testing but it's also very decentralized uh kind of a b testing and you talk about the messages that don't work and then the messages that do and it seems pretty cut and dry but maybe not just intuitive right but we know you're right when we hear you say it so say it how'd it work oh what specifically are you looking at well just where you start out with um the the piece is called the

anti-israel swarm and you talk about how there were and this is true on the margin i you know it must be true that there were some people who were saying things that were expressly or at least implicitly pro hamas or in favor of what they had done um and and there were some people who had said explicitly anti-Semitic things or things that were explicitly against all the civilian population of Israel too. And then also I thought it was interesting that you said

pro-Palestinian as i.e. civilian, not Hamas, but pro-Palestinian people sentiment also was a failure. You say what the one that worked was against the Netanyahu government in Israel.

And so all the rest of these were A-B tested right out the window, even Frank Gluntz would agree that the one that works for the Palestinian side is focusing on what Netanyahu and his men have done and are doing. Is that correct? Yeah. You know, the swarm we're seeing on the anti-Israel side is open source and has open source dynamics. And the one thing about open source organizations, there's no leadership. There's no kind of hierarchy that says this is how this is the messaging that we're going to use.

It's well thought out or whatever. It develops through kind of experiences and throwing things against the wall and seeing what works. And I call it tinkering where, you know, we saw this in Iraq with, like, say, ways of developing IEDs. You know, when they came up with a methodology by, you know, putting it into play and seeing if it worked or seeing if it attacked work, then everyone would copy it. And in this case, it was trying different messaging strategies. the one that had the most, was most effective and had the lowest barriers to participation, meaning that every one of those other messages, you know, if you're pro-Hamas, you'd exclude a lot of people from participating. If you're anti-Israeli, the individuals, the citizens, you'd exclude a lot of people.

Anti-Jew exclude a lot of people. But anti-Israel seemed to be this broad tent, it became this broad. for widespread participation. And it's against the state and it's against the actions. So the cool part from a strategy perspective is that it doesn't force the people who are anti-Israel to defend the actions of Hamas or, you know, Palestinians in general or Muslims around the world. They're focused exclusively on Israel's actions.

And if you're pro-Israel, you're forced into defending everything Israel does, which is like a very, very hard thing to do when the bombing campaign is going on, and basically impossible. And it's interesting. These dynamics are pretty straightforward to me and pretty predictive, but I'm glad you liked that. Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting to me. And, you know, I'm a kind of an old paleo libertarian and pretty sympathetic with the Palestinian cause here. And I think you know that we became acquainted through our mutual friend, Daryl Cooper, who's one of the great experts on early Zionism and all of that. And he and I see eye to eye on a lot of this stuff. So on one hand, I'm interested in this, you know, just I guess in a sense, like what works, what could be useful.

for my own purposes, although I'm never dishonest. All I could ever just be as myself anyway, but I just like the way you the way you have it marked out at the top. Well, try this, cross that out. Try this, cross that out. And then what do you leave left? It's to me, it's not just, it has almost

nothing to do with what is effective in terms of PR. It's just to me what's right. Of course, we're talking about the men who control the state of Israel. That's not every Jew in Israel. it's the government and because I'm a libertarian like there's only two kinds of people in this world

government employees and everybody else so I don't look at it like Israelis and Palestinians I look at it like poor civilians being killed versus horrible groups of armed men killing them right is you know the dynamic the way I look at it the question mostly around who's aggressing against who and who's the stronger weaker party or you know might have a stronger obligation to be merciful or to offer to negotiate or some kind of thing. And so I guess what I'm really getting out here, John, is I'm very pleased to see, as you report here, that anti-Semitic stuff doesn't work. Like, it has worked in the past.

The history of the world includes a lot of anti-Semitism being very effective against innocent people in horrible ways. And what you're telling me here is, anti-Semitism just doesn't stick in terms of rallying people towards the Palestinian cause at all. It's really the right focus. The correct focus is the actions of the government of Israel here, which is, of course, what actually is at issue, you know, to me. Yeah, it's kind of one of the things that makes us a swarm a swarm is it has an open source movement, an open source movement. It has a very simple goal. And that goal is anti-Israel, anti-government, force it to change.

really simple thing to do and that that is what all of the participants are trying to you know achieve and they have their different reasons for achieving it you know you see some the outcome that that appeals most to you by forcing that change other people see other things but you know you all agree on the same what they call plausible premise and uh you And it's the best way to connect up a lot of disparate groups coming to the movement with their different motivations. Right. Yeah, very good point.

And like, for example, we can see we've been cultivating, try very hard to cultivate this America first, anti-war right over the last generation here as people are alienated from the Bush and McCain foreign policy of the past. and then with and they've been gone really since look the real anti-war left credit where it's due the core of them have stayed but the mass of the anti-war left has been AWOL since 06 before Obama even came to town just when Pelosi won the house and sent it back in 06 they climbed back in there on Cindy Sheehan's back and the anti-war left has been pretty silent now they come back waving Palestinian flags and tearing down American flags and this kind of thing and the anti-war right the American of First Right is so repelled by that, then now they're thinking about supporting foreign war again, just so that they're not a commie and not associated with people to their left, acting like such jackasses, blocking freeways and all of these things that make decent people so angry, you know? Yeah. Well, the networked, the networked right was largely sympathetic to Israel's cause for that reason, in particular. I mean, they had the similar enemies, the kind of the woke left

to the, you know, the people protesting in terms of raising, you know, Palestinian flags and African flags, all that stuff really triggered them. But what happened was is that the pro-Israeli faction saw any kind of delving into the kind of facts of the conflict or any kind of even, you know, lukewarm support and the networked right for Israel. As kind of, they start started labeling it as anti-semitism and started attacking them. If you look at Daryl's like threads, whenever he looks into anything, he's like he's attacked constantly as an anti-semi. So it's what, and they did that to, you know, Candace Owens, they did it to others and the reaction

on the networked right, the dissident right, is that, you know, they bristle when they're told they can't do something, they can't recognize facts or dig into the facts. They can't, they hate it when they're called names for no good reason other than to silence them. You know, like if you criticize BLM before, it would be racist. If you're criticized, you know, the vaccine mandates, then you were nuts and willing to kill us all. That kind of stuff is like the result was that the networked right just started breaking a away, kind of a non-cooperative center of gravity relative to Israel. In a moral war, you think of it kind of as gravitational attraction.

You have two planets, and they're pulling as much matter as they can from the surrounding environment as possible to become as big as they possibly can because their gravity will increase relative to the other planet and eventually become so large that it will absorb the other planet. And what happens is if one side, one of those planets, one of the participants in this war, starts acting in a kind of selfish or insular way and starts attacking portions of itself, allied or affiliated groups that are supporting them, they'll break away. You know, they'll start to drift away and drift towards the other side or drift away completely. And radical, those non-cooperative centers of gravity become more numerous as the pressure mounts. They start breaking away and eventually you lose as you lose the war. So, yeah, there was an unforced error on the right.

I, you know, I see it. And now, you know, they're doing it again with Elon. And, you know, rather than getting moderate concessions, went on the offensive and attacked him and then it made some conciliatory dashes even took a visit but the demands grew they obviously grew for more and more control over the content on X because Israel's losing the online war

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Well, you know, going back, John, I remember it was 2014 was the first time that the Palestinians won the PR war in America. Like 2008 and 9, this was Facebook was pretty much. brand new then and i don't know exactly what the poll said that i don't remember but the effect was less but i know for a fact that in 2014 the polls said the american people sympathized with the Palestinians which is unheard of because everybody knows that their savage ork Islamic suicide bomber barbarians from hell and that the Israelis are the perfect nicest little most wonderful allies of america who would never harm a fly and yet facebook and twitter showed the people

of the country otherwise. And there was nothing that the PBS News Hour and the NBC Nightly News could do about it. You just see the devastation in Gaza and these poor people living in such circumstances. And I remember then knowing that one, this is huge for us, but also two, boy, the State Department must be going completely nuts right now because this is not how it is supposed to be from their point of view. I think that probably has a lot to do with the the impetus behind the rise of the censorship industrial complex in the last decade was partially in reaction to them seeing what social media can do when it's not properly, from their point of view, controlled.

Yeah, well, TikTok and X now are completely outside of their control, the censorship machine, whether it's pro-Israel or the government. And also the educational kind of basis for the, anti-Israel movement has been in place in the U.S. educational and probably EU educational system for the last 20 to 30 years. So effectively, you know, every poll saying this is that, you know, people under 40 are, they don't excuse Israel. They don't see them as justified in their actions. They're largely anti-Israel. And that the control that the pro-Israel network, has over the U.S. traditional media isn't effective at all anymore because almost all,

you know, standard nightly newscast has, what, seven million people? Six of those million, or six out of those seven million people are over 55, right? And that means like only one million is under 55. And you go online, you go to, you know, one of the viral TikTok posts, like that that former State Department official from Bush Obama years who handled the Israel Palestine issue started doing these rants against this flophil guy, a street truck vendor. And over a course of several weeks, he was, you know, film doing it. He's working on a pro-Israel lobbying group. And they put it up on TikTok.

And I mean, it was just, you know, aggressively attacking this guy. I'm going to send you back to Egypt and your kids and you and everyone will, you know, be tortured in Egyptian prisons and, you know, I'll call my friends over an immigration to get this going right now, that kind of stuff. And he eventually got arrested, but that post, those videos, got seen by hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions. I mean, anyone under, you know, under 50 years old now gets most of their information, most of their news through online sources, and that's the kind of stuff they're saying.

seeing. And that, you know, that kind of post is, you know, just one of the many, many, many posts that are, you know, recharacterizing Israel as a state conducting genocide. That is an apartheid state. It's now becoming very common to see that, you know, they need BDS to handle it. All of these things are starting to grow. The narrative is shifting. And under 40, they've lost it. And I, you know, I found a, I don't know if this was a, I, I don't know, I think it was an accurate leaked audio of Jonathan Greenblet from ADL talking about this very issue. They thought they had got the left, right, locked. And they do in the standard political kind of center right, center left.

The political establishment is very, very pro-Israel. But the under 40s, they've lost it. And any kind of like, you know, push they've made in. In terms of controlling news coverage, I mean, the IDF soldiers that they had come on, the nightly news broadcasts, they were so arrogant and so heavy-handed. And, you know, I mean, sometimes giggling when they were talking about killing civilians and the like, and it was just like, any, under 40s that I've seen interact with it has been just brutal. They don't, they don't trust anything on the nightly news anymore. They make fun of the kind of the claims being made. And to a certain extent, I say it almost as a bad thing for the United States as well, is that these under 40s are seeing the U.S.

give unqualified and unconditional support to Israel. And Israel is doing such a bad job in terms of executing and justifying. And their policies are a mess right now. And that unqualified support for bombing civilians and killing kids is now transferring to the United States government. And it's losing legitimacy by proxy. Right. And that it's affecting the loyalty that these people have, these young folks. And we're talking majority, 60, 70 percent of anyone under 40, they're losing loyalty to the United States.

as a nation as and well would you go that far really there your time about the leftists upset about what Biden's doing or oh i don't know it's not just leftists i mean i it's it's it's the people who are saying yeah well there there are is going to be pushed back inside the democratic party but for four younger people in general seeing the u.s connected to it is a delegitimizing event for the united states well it's certainly you know crippling Joe Biden's electability here he is down

right off the bat he was down 11 points and it may be much more than that by the time he's done and then this one was maybe too good to be true I don't know it wasn't like the most deeply sourced poll had it at 56% but then a recent another poll I'm sorry I don't remember which one John but you

probably seen it has half five zero percent of American Republicans want a ceasefire. I mean, this is just incredible. I mean, their knee is supposed to be jerking for Lakud right now, and somehow it's malfunctioning. Yeah, going into this conflict, Israel had 80% support with people over 65. I mean, that's the most loyal cohort. And what happens even with the nightly news and in the traditional news that those folks are consuming is that the online

information flow is upstream of the traditional media's information flow. So what goes on online, what gets decided online, what gets unearthed and discovered and propagated online, eventually ends up dictating how the news covers those topics. From the language, from the information that's used, it's where they find stuff and they actually put it in, you know, how to kind of spin it and conjugate it and approach it and frame it. So if you win online, you win the traditional news, too. And that's having any effect on these older voters as well. It's just that at the current pace of events is that Israel is going to end up becoming isolated

and lose the support of the United States. And the squeeze on the senators and congressmen and others who are providing kind of defensive fire for them inside U.S. political machines is going to diminish very rapidly. And you know what happens with BDS? I mean, you know, I went to South Africa in the 80s and I saw the pressure they were under, justifiably so for their former government and being isolated to that extent with something that that's not survivable, particularly for a small country. Well, you know, I think for Israel, the threat that they'd really be cut off from global capital is very minimal, but it's still, regardless,

PDS is a huge public relations catastrophe for them, because it just raises the question. First of all, you're labeling it apartheid Israel, which is accurate and can't be just explained away. And also, it just raises huge questions of controversy in some neutral Joe's mind. Why would anyone want to boycott it? Israel. I thought we like Israel. And then the answer is, well, they're in hangs their tail, pal. Let me tell you about the occupation. Let me tell you what you don't know about why people indeed would

be so upset that they would have a campaign like this. And personally, I'm against sanctions of all kinds. But I'll take the B and the D, and I know a lot of libertarians who feel the same way about that. And it is, you know, nothing else. It's a way of adding more people to the swarm, as you would call it, I guess, right? Or maybe you would just say raising the level of consciousness of Americans and others as to who's occupying who over there? And what's the big controversy anyway? Well, yeah, I mean, this kind of perma crisis, perma war kind of situation that we're in is that none of these, you know, have to be decided in a single incident.

So, you know, if things die down from here, say this ceasefire just continues indefinitely and there's no more action and things just wind down, this will, you know, fall off. the radar of most people as the next event in the permit crisis pops up. But when the event, when events happen again there, it'll pulse away stronger than ever. I mean, it will surge, it'll trigger it and it just go push forward to, you know, a greater degree than what we've seen so far. And I do think it's very possible that we'll end up with a situation. I do think they can be cut off from global capital.

I mean, everything I've seen in finance and in corporate relations is that the pressure can become intense enough that they end up as disconnected as South Africa. Wow. Even Israel, huh? Yep. And, you know, prior to any of this kind of networked warfare and the like, it would have been impossible. But, you know, it's possible in the way things are going now. The thing is, for the pro-Israeli side, is that, you know, you just can't deny it's happening or try to force a censorship solution on the online space, which, you know, they're trying with Musk and putting pressure on them to, you know, censor and clamp down on any kind of anti-Israel messaging and virality is that the best and only solution is to find a way to, you know, when in in terms of the i mean improve your moral stance

in ways that you you weren't thinking about before well you know i mean uh there's ways to do that but it's just not going to be comfortable yeah i mean our buddy darrell pointed out that even despite the fact that hamas's atrocity of the seventh was unparalleled as far beyond anything they had ever done before hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people killed, civilians killed, never mind the IDF, but it was just this huge atrocity. And yet within a very short amount of time, it was not just the radical left or something, but it was consensus that you're on probation, Israel, don't go too far. And this kind of sentiment kind of right away, people were willing to question what they were

going to do, possibly even really before they started much of the bombing campaign. People were already looking very skeptically in spite of the horror of what had just happened. So in other words, the ball has moved very far down the field already, right? Yeah. No, I mean, that's the way tribalism works in the networks-sworn kind of context is that in tribal structures, the enemy isn't even a human. And in this instance, you know, what happens to them doesn't affect you personally. I mean, that's the whole thing. You're like, you know, go back to Apocalypse now, right? It's like what Colonel Kurtz was looking for is our tribal war. There's people that can go out and do all sorts of atrocities and have them morally impacted

by that. In the Swarm's case is that they're focused on anti-Israel and they don't have to excuse Hamas and their actions. But that separates it in their head. And, um, and, it's not part of the pattern by which they make sense of the world and they and parse the information flow they're getting from the online sources is that they don't even see the atrocities. In fact, it doesn't even register with them. I mean, they might glance at it and go, oh, that was terrible. And then they just just slides off them. I don't know, John. Are you sure that that's fair?

Because, you know, I was looking at it more like everybody was in a great. about what had happened on the 7th and the 8th. It was just some people were willing to say that defending themselves after that means they can do anything after that for as long as they want. And other people thought that defending yourself is actually a more limited definition, like, you know, and a reprisal is something else and that what they were doing was going much too far. As you say, the purpose of terrorism is provoking that overreaction in the first place in order to provoke the counterreactions, right? That debate didn't last line, though, did it? Well, I'm not sure. I mean, going back to something else that you said about sort of the demonization of anybody sticking up for the Palestinians,

is they want to say that anyone who has anything to say from the Palestinian, or, you know, just to describe the Palestinians' point of view at all or anything like that means that you're a horrible anti-Semite and a horrible Jew hater. Why won't you just admit that what you really mean to say is, you know, just like with the BLM calling everybody, a racist for no reason and that kind of thing and it seems like um so because that conversation is ongoing people are constantly being accused of being pro Hamas and pro terrorists so then we're constantly given opportunity to explain that no dummy it's benjamin Netanyahu that supported Hamas so we wouldn't have to deal in good faith over the west bank and there's no decent

civilized person that supports what Hamas did they're butchering innocent civilians humanity is agreed on our opposition to that. It's just whether you believe that that's a blank check for Israel to do what they want in reprisal. I understand what you're saying about tribal war, this, that, whatever. But when you're talking about American leftists, they don't not see Israeli Jewish civilians. You know what I mean? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, I think you misunderstand me. Okay, I did then. They saw it, but it didn't, it didn't register as like an event that they obsessed over it's like they could see the facts i mean it's um it's hard to describe is you know i mean for for you know pro-israel folks it was a seminal event it was the thing

that they focus on exclusively and um for those against israel they uh you know they would say okay they'd be asked okay do you think this was a horrible event you go sure of course it was It was terrible thing. Boom. It's gone. It disappears. Let's get focused on the issue that really matters right now. And so it's, that's the kind of sliding by.

I see. Well, it's not, you don't have to spend incredible months of, or they don't spend incredible amounts of time defending it or justifying it or, and if they do, you know, as that iteration that we were talking about earlier proves out is that that becomes, as a rabbit hole right right and and um the right kind of tribal mindset for for winning this conflict from their perspective is is that you acknowledge that it was horrible and you put it to bed and move it out of the way it's not the focus the focus israel um that's sweeping it away it's not a not a long drawn out discussion of it yeah hey y'all i got a new coffee sponsor

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You'll be glad you did. Well, so I guess I have my own take as a bit in between there. I actually have an extended family member of mine who was abducted and killed by Hamas. This is not someone that I had ever met before, but someone who is related to me, literally in my family, who was caught up in this. And I also am a student of yours, and I'm a student of William Norman Grigg, and even, dare I say, of Saul Olinsky, and I understand very well about how terrorism is all about provoking a reaction. So rather than just putting what Hamas did aside, I can put it and not just putting it in the context of, look, what Israel is doing with the occupation, but put it in the context of why would Hamas do such a thing other than just their horrible evil bastards, what was the strategy behind it? What was the point? And the point, of course, is to provoke a reaction and then counter reactions and counter reactions and counter reactions as we've seen. That was the, the point, to bring on Netanyahu's reprisal, to then put Hezbollah and the Ayatollah and the crown prince of Saudi and everybody else in a bind and force them to have to take a stand

or, you know, at the very least, raise public attention across the world, which they have succeeded in doing. So, you know, I think that's maybe a more useful thing because I don't dismiss as far as like the depth of the sin and what they did. And in fact, I think everybody needs to understand, as you put it, just what a seminal moment this was, just how deeply this hurt the people of Israel. You can't ignore that what it looked like to them and how they feel about it and the depth of vengeance that some of them feel and who knows whatever else comes with that. And of course, the thing was absolutely huge. But then I guess, to me, the lesson of September 11th and the rest of this is that when something horrible happens,

instead of getting really upset and doing something stupid, you're supposed to take a stiff drink and not do something stupid. But instead, be cold and careful and calculating. And instead of overreacting, which is what they're obviously trying to get you to do, you should underreact and reach out, touch these guys one at a time, and call the whole thing over by Christmas, etc. Yeah, no, I agree. I just, you know, for the rank and file of a lot of the anti-Israel swarm, they don't, you know, they don't lose a lot of sleep over the October 7th.

Well, they ought to. I mean, the damn thing was as horrible as could be. You know, I've just, this tribal, the way the tribal mind thinks, it's often, it's often very exclusionary. Yeah. Well, so to wrap up here, I, I want to wrap up here. wonder if we can get back a little bit to this, what we're just referring to there and that you talked about before about the accusations against the people who are sticking up for the Palestinians by

the Zionist side. And I just see this in my Twitter mentions all day. And it really is funny because it's, in a sense, because it is that Kathy Newman thing. Like they made a great meme out of her when that lady, she's from the BBC, I think it was, interviewed Jordan Peterson. And no matter what he said, she would say, so what you're saying is, and then she would say some completely cockamamie thing, and leave him going, what are you talking about, lady? I didn't say that. I said this. And I only said that, because you asked me and framed it this way, whatever. She was off on her thing. And that became like a running joke that, you know, the Kathy Newman's of the world, who all they can do is put words in your mouth. And yet anyone who's sticking up for the Palestinians at all

sees words put, I see in my mentions all day, people put direct quotes around things I'd never said, which is their interpretation of what I really mean to say in that Kathy Newman way, which is just preposterous. And it reminds me very much also of the NAFO trolls, who were the pro-Ukraine trolls, where not that I'm truly this much of a conspiracy kook, but just saying to make the point that, like, you could see the argument that the NAFO trolls and even all the pros, Zionist has baratrols on Twitter are actually all secret agents of the other side. Who could make, who

could remove your sympathy for the poor beaten bombed Ukrainians worse than a bunch of stupid dogs in your mentions telling you how you love getting raped by Vladimir Putin all day or whatever, which is how they came on so

strong. And it's just like, you know what? I don't give a damn about Ukraine. Like, what can I say? The more more they come at me like that, the less I sympathize, and which is very unfair for me to say, my wife is even from Ukraine. I do sympathize with the poor people of that terrible, poor, unfortunate land very much. But I'm just saying, that's how that works. And same thing here as you're talking about in this article.

You come at Candace Owens and call her an anti-Semite. She's going to be like, what? I'll show you, I'm going to interview Norman Finkelstein, the most leftist pro-Palestinian Jew I can find in the whole society. I'll show you. And the same thing, as he talked about with Martyr Made. My friend Dave Smith went on the Joe Rogan show and did a great job explaining a lot of this stuff. He's Jewish. He's from Brooklyn. And he's just saying, look, man, be fair. This isn't right what's happening here. And that kind of thing. And so I think, I just like to hear you go off about that, about the absolute counterproductive nature

of the Hasbara trolls and the Naifo trolls and the way that they go about what do they think they're doing? Intimidating me? And they're going to make me stop tweeting the more they tell me what a traitor I am to America because I don't want to risk war with Russia or because I don't want to support Israel bombing

at last count something like 14, 15,000 civilians to death and that doesn't include the few or more thousand buried in the rubble who will probably just be, you know, bulldozed by the Israelis and never even given a proper burial. Oh, yeah, I'm a big traitor. I love Hamas, and I hate Jews so much, they claim, because I'm not for this.

And it's as absurd to me as it must be to everybody else. And who is willing to stand for that? And by the way, I should say this too. I'm old enough that there was a time where if somebody called you an anti-Semite, man, those are fighting words. You better really mean it if you're going to accuse somebody of that.

because you could ruin their life. That's like calling somebody a commie during the Red Scare, or, you know, calling somebody a racist during the BLM movement or what have you. You can really hurt somebody with that. You don't abuse that and use that against people who actually didn't use the J-word at all and were, in fact, being much more specific. And so I think that's, I guess, another thing I'd ask you to comment on, is the risk of, like, really, as Peewey Herman would say,

wearing it out by overusing these kinds of accusations. Yeah, no, I mean, the whole relationship or the attacks on the right was, you know, enforced error. It was just, you know, and a lot of people's minds, too. I mean, I think a lot of these attackers were thinking that, you know, they convinced themselves like the Nafo guys did that, you know, these people were repeating Putin's talking points or something like that, some kind of weird conspiracy thing, whereas, you know, they were just actually making observations and they were attacked for it because I was attacked too and you know saying you know don't push us to nuclear war and the like yeah I it's also important

to understand that that words like anti-Semitism you know are moral weapons and you know that's been built up over time it's you know the strength of that moral weapon is accumulated over over generations to be used in defense of Jews around the world. And it's being, it's overuse, expends it, it diminishes it. It's misuse damages it. And it's being used in that way to defend a state's actions, right? And estates errors and administration's errors. And by using it that way, it puts,

it's every Jew around the world at risk in the future because of the diminishment of that term. It's a disaster in that regard. It, yeah, no, it, you know, this, this is a disaster all around. Yeah. All right. So one last one. I know that this is probably more harm than good from my side's point of view on this well my side my own point of view on this on the other hand I can really see a benefit in having that whiny

sniveling little brat Ben Shapiro put himself as the leader of all pro Zionist thought on the right because who could believe in that guy who would follow him into a fight who could

take him seriously I've heard his voice I don't know 10 or 15 times by now. I try not to pay any attention. But every time I hear it, I just want to die laughing. And I'm just thinking, if I'm the head of A-PAC, I'm going to tell that guy, you should be doing more writing and less podcasting.

Dude, the more you're out there talking, the more discredit you bring to what we're trying to do here. Am I, is that just too much wishful thinking? I know he has a huge following, but... Oh, yeah, it's like $6 million on Twitter. It's like, yeah, um, no, no, uh,

I put on my Twitter. He's just got a voice and a kind of attitude that make and face and everything. They just want to punch him in the face. He's got a punchable face. And I wrote that Twitter that Scott Adams blocked me as a result in defense of Shapiro. I don't understand his appeal. You know, and but he seems to have some. And it I don't know where he goes forward. from this is that you know is he going to be the voice of Israel online and what that does to his entire trajectory at this point right i don't think it's a good thing i think the guys uh i mean clearly caused the problem with candis and you know with others um and that uh that's doing more harm i mean Candace's thing, putting Norman and his arguments, it's very logical, methodical arguments in front of two million conservatives. Wow. Wow. That hadn't probably none of, except for a small minority had I ever seen him before. That's actually, I actually haven't had a chance to watch that yet. And I know that Finkelstein can actually be really dumb and horrible sometimes. So I'm glad to

hear that that went well. Oh, I mean, yeah, it's, you know, he was, it was pretty straightforward. That's great. That's great to hear. Yeah, so listen, this is so interesting. The way that you analyze this, in fact, I was reminded of Scott Adams because he has, you know, he has his interest, but his primary interest is persuasion, right? And he wrote these books from the point of view that he's almost like a BF Skinner guy, right? We're like, never mind your, your thoughts. you are a pile of meat performing behaviors. And I can determine your behaviors by pushing your wet meat buttons, he says.

You know, and all I got to do is I tell you this, and then I tell you this, and then I tell you this, in that order. And I'll get you to do what I want, et cetera. And he's like a master hypnotist and whatever. So his, I'm not saying he's right about everything, but I'm saying, well, I'll give him this credit. You know what happened to B.F. Skinner, right? I'm sorry? You know what happened to B.F. Skinner. Oh, no. In the end?

I don't. Oh, no, everyone hated him. I mean, because he was like, he was like everything is that, you know, I heard this described by Charlie Minder. He was like, he treated every problem in the psychological problem as as a kind of, amenable to kind of behavioral manipulation and using his model. And, you know, it doesn't work that way. There's lots of other, you know, ways. of which we work and he, you know, fought with everybody else in academia over. So you can't, you know, and there's also kind of a, when you, when you think of people as being, you know, so simplistic that all you have to do is say X, Y, and Z, that it sounds like those guys who were like the, those pickup scammers.

Yeah. You know what? You know what it is? I guess I just feel like this about everybody, John, that like there's always going to be bit of useful truth there, but most people are going to be so committed to their own presence that they go off track. So I think you're right that probably like on the average day or the average topic, he oversimplifies in ways that turn out to not pan out and that kind of thing. On the other hand, I'll tell you, I saw him, and I already kind of had been thinking some

things about the situation, but when I saw him on CNN in 2015, say that you got to understand what Trump does is he doesn't have insults. He has linguistic kill shots, which was his own term for an insult that sticks to you like one of them sticky bombs and saving private Ryan, and you just can't do a thing about it ever again. So when he says Jeb Bush is low energy, it sounds like kind of a weak insult. It's not much of an insult. But the problem is you can never look at Jeb Bush again without thinking about how low his energy is. And if he acts high energy, you'll be thinking to yourself at low energy trying to bake it. Right. And so it's just stuck to him like you'd put a tattoo all over his face. And he just, there's nothing he can do about it from now on. He's sunk.

And then according to his logic, which I thought was perfect at the time, if you understand that Jeb is out, low energy is a total kill shot and he's done. Well, that means Trump is the nominee. There's nobody else who could stand in his way. Who's going to stand his way? Ran Paul, Marco Rubio? Yeah, right. And then Hillary Clinton? Yeah, right. Nobody loves Hillary Clinton. Nobody. And just, it was clear to me that then in like the fall of 15, based on what I saw Scott Adams say, like, yep, Trump's going to be the president, all right. And so you got to give him some credit. He does have some real insight there into. Oh, most definitely. He has some very good points. I saw it in fall of 2015, too. I go, you know, that's the nominee. When they first announced, you know, the potential slate coming up and all the people, all the ex-military folks I was with, right? No. way. That's the dude. And, you know, I analyzed the election most more from an open source kind of framework and his use of maneuver warfare and the fact that he was the focus of the open source political movement behind him. They sent him to Washington to be a grenade, which meant that he wasn't judged like regular candidates. Anything that you threw, you know, you charged him with,

anything that he did, didn't matter. You know, he, sex scandal, no big deal. it wouldn't stick to them because they were sending them to wash and to disrupt things. Right. And that, you know, every time he changed topics, those fast transients, maneuver transients, it disrupted the thinking processes of the people that were opposing them. By the time they actually developed a cogent, you know, counterattack, they were on to the next topic. Well, so now, let me ask you, without the censorship regimes control over X,

Although, as you mentioned, Elon Musk has just made his pilgrimage over there to Netanyahu's Israel to find out his marching order. So we'll see exactly what happens. But you think that or do you think that Trump now stands a chance again because they're not going to be able to restrict him off of Twitter? Well, I mean, he was technologically powered by Twitter. So Twitter was, gave him the superpower to actually do these fast transients and these end runs and get those insults out. and repeated in the way that were propagated. Otherwise, he would have been filtered out and shut down by the mainstream media. But his effectiveness would have been substantially less.

So if he comes back to Twitter, he has a good chance of doing very well in this election. I don't see him getting any traction on any of the other platforms. They'll all be shut to him. And that the pressure that's going to be put on Musk, and this was kind of an early indication that he'll, you know, because White House is the one that picked up and chastised Musk about antisemitism as well. I mean, they picked up on that and started to attack him on that basis was more of a warning shot that, you know, he's going to be under pressure for this new election, this election coming up. I mean, it was clear in 2020 to me, even like in October when I was calling the election for Biden, is that, you know, the thing that actually was set in place and made it impossible for Trump to win was to what was going on in the social networks.

I mean, it, the velocity and the amplification that Trump got in 2016 was nowhere in evidence anymore. I mean, it was all suppressed and dampened. messaging was what couldn't couldn't accelerate you weren't getting the kind of medic traffic and other things that you used to get or we did get in 2016 it was pretty much locked in and we have we have the hard reporting now we have the hard reporting now where we know that they absolutely throttled all of the biggest pro-Trump conservatives at that time oh 100 percent yeah and and and that was actually the way the election was controlled

going into this, more so than anything done at the ballot box or whatever. That was like small potatoes in comparison to the, you know, the large percentages of voters that were swayed through online media. And, you know, it just, that's not going to go away except for maybe on X, but I don't know if X can withstand the kind of regulatory pressure and the pressure that they're going to come under. It's going to still be crazy for all of the rest of the media companies, even Facebook and whoever, when you quite literally.

You just can't deny it, John, you got tens of millions of people who support this guy. He's the frontrunner for one of the two credible major parties to be the nominee, to be the president of United States. And he already was the president of the United States before. And is this America or what the hell? How, you know what I mean? Like, in other words, in 2020, this time 2020, it was somehow kind of deniable, right? We're like, but going into this, you know, we still have a. year to go, they're going to really be able to persecute him that much when he clearly is the

choice of that much, when he obviously is, from their point of view, a danger to win. He has that much support that he could win the presidency. They can not just covertly, but now overtly, just kick him the hell off of Facebook and keep him off, going into an election season. That sounds to me like there's going to be a lot of pressure on Zuckerberg and the rest to resist the state and give in to the people, that there would just be too much pressure against them that just seems so incongruent to do that in America, you know?

Of course they're going to screw the libertarian and the green, but you're going to screw the Republican? Like that? Oh, yeah. It's crazy. And they'll have lots of the, you know, the kind of mainstream Republicans supporting them on it. And you could actually, you know,

still have the account, but you won't get the traction. So, you know, it's, there's, no way that this system, at least the people who are running these major platforms, certainly not with the major media, that it's going to favorably message their audiences, their viewers about Trump. He's not going to get a fair shake by it. The dethrumpification effort that I wrote about back in October 2020 hasn't really panned out fully because he's still around.

I mean, the lawfare, unrestricted lawfare against him and all of his associates, and the LICA hasn't really kept him down. Yeah. And knocked him out. And the disconnection that they initially did hasn't turned him into an afterthought. He's found ways around them. But, you know, the platforms that he's currently on, I definitely see them being kicked off the network at a base level. like we saw you know like with parlor parlor yeah no they're not going to exist going into this election they'll be gone man how rigged can you get just unbelievable they got they got a duopoly

on the app stores and that's it we will not allow you to have pro trump apps on your phone so say it some oligarchs under some pretended authority yeah they wouldn't even be able to get hosting yeah or internet connectivity they're gone uh email service uh anything they'll be disconnected it and then the pressure will all be on X and you know they've been building up for this i mean i mean that was a big part of why they you know uh Elon is under so much constant pressure is the fear that he will bring back Trump yeah i mean the ultimate evil it's something listen i'm so sorry we're out of time because i could ask you one last question for the rest of the afternoon here john but i got to run to my next guest i'm on such a time crunch you're busy man

but thank you so much for coming back on the show. Yeah, I really appreciate you a lot. Okay, guys, that is John Rob. He's at Global Gorillas. He's at John Rob on Twitter. Easy handle there. It's two Bs in Rob. And Global Gorillas on Substack is Johnrob.

Dotubstack.com. The latest is Israel's online front collapses. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.