The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Gen Z: Anti Americanism, Anti Semitism and Defending Luigi Mangione with Eyal Yakoby

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Eyal Yakoby is a twenty two year old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a student at MIT dedicated to combating anti-Americanism. He has been seen on CNN, FoxNews, Washington Post and more.

Let's let this siren pass. Don't let it pass. Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world-famous comedy cellar. I'm here with Noam Dwarman, the owner of the cellar. My name is Perrielle. I'm the producer of the show, Dan Natterman. Our co-host is gallivanting somewhere in Aruba. We have a very special guest today.

In case you were worried, Dan's in Aruba. Go ahead. Some of you may just want to turn it off now because Dan's not here. Go ahead. Well, Dan has a fan base. Our guest today is Eyal Yacobi. He's a 22-year-old UPenn graduate, incoming MIT student, and he is dedicated to combating anti-Americanism. He's been seen on CNN, Fox News, and Washington Post and more. Thank you for joining us

and welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. You went to UPenn undergraduate? Yes. You're graduated now? You're done? I'm done. I'm out. I went to Penn Law School, you know, where Amy Wax teaches. And I lived on Chestnut Street and Walnut Street. How do you like Philadelphia?

It's great. It's a great city. It was awful when I was there. I graduated in 87. What is it, Perrielle? Didn't that CEO killer go to UPenn? Oh, yes, he did. Yes. Luigi Mangione.

Can you turn up Ayala if you can? If you can't, I'll deal with it. Yeah, actually, before we get into Israel, as a Penn alumni, now that you're disgraced both by the fact that a Penn alumni did that and by the fact that so many kids your age or young people your age seem to think that he was a hero for shooting this executive. Where are you on this UnitedHealthcare murder thing?

I think it's absolutely ridiculous and also scary that a recent poll just found 41% of 18 to 29 year olds in this country support the murder of the United Healthcare CEO. On Sidechat, which is an anonymous social media platform specific to Penn students, the posts in the days after it was revealed that the killer was a Penn alum, were all supportive of him. And then you had professors going on TikTok and Twitter and saying that this was the first time as a professor they felt proud to be affiliated with UPenn. that's being exposed right now, post-Luigi Mangione being revealed, is actually a microcosm of a larger issue of universities becoming breeding grounds for this sort of extremism and worshiping death and murder. Well, you know, there's a lot of, I mean, maybe everything that can be said has been said about this. My friend Michael Moynihan did a great riff on this recently.

However, it does, it just, it just occurred to me just a second that, you know how it turns out that Hispanic people were much more in favor of controlling the border than the white liberals were. And black people were more inclined to think Trump wasn't a racist than a lot of white liberals were. And, you know, you can go on and on. Is it interesting that the young generation who has barely any health problems whatsoever and certainly haven't been the victims of this, you know, the horrible treatment of the healthcare industry, they're the ones thinking it's okay to murder this healthcare executive, while the old people, the ones who are dealing with this every day and certainly

many of them do have horrible stories about an industry which actually is very upsetting to deal with and does lead to what are facially uh prima facie cases of mistreatment and um decisions based on greed you know anybody who's dealt with the health care system has seen that. Yet they are the ones most outraged by the fact that this, I hear a sound kind of echo. They're the ones most outraged by the fact that this guy was gunned down. So we're seeing a disconnect. And it's obviously not related to the merits of these cases. There is something in the younger generation which has run amok, right? They just lost their minds.

And so you live with them. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to the healthcare industry because it's something that I haven't had, luckily, knock on wood, to interact with that much.

I mean, what's up with the young people that all of a sudden they think murder is okay? Like, they're the same people. They're upset about the Hezbollah beepers, but they're okay with it. What's going on? I think there's a sense among the younger generation

is that we are living in the best time to be an American. In every other generation, if you go back, there's been some sort of strife. And obviously we had COVID-19, but in terms of geopolitics or the economy, it's never been better. And I think there's this sort of self-flagellation of wanting to be victimized

because of this complex that's been pushed on us. I just gotta to stop you. I got to stop you one second. Flagellation is when they take this thing and they slap it their back. Go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. Periol needs.

Yeah. She thought you were talking about auto eroticism. Go ahead. No, that's going to be next. Go ahead. I shouldn't have interrupted you for that conversation. And I think there's this not only curiosity but yearning to be the victim of every

situation ever and whether that be guilt or wanting to be on this oppressor oppressed scale and wanting to be as low down the totem pole as possible, which somehow grants you more morality. And I think that's what it derives from is by cheering on Luigi and the murder of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, somehow my generation feels that they have more morality than everyone else. Their moral compass is totally broken. Of course, the other thing is that Luigi grew up in this incredibly privileged, wealthy household.

And the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was like this real like sort of american success story grew up with nothing in like the middle of the country somewhere and then like really worked his way up he made up for it with the 40 million dollar salary and turning a 10 million dollars 10 million dollar salary and turning all these poor people down for their for their i'm kidding no no i mean i think that the health care system is horrific there's no doubt about that. It may, you know what? It may not be as bad as we, we say that. No,

no, it is as bad. I mean, there are countless stories of greed and, I mean, their whole thing with the denied depose. And let me tell you a story about the healthcare system. And then we'll get to Israel.

Cause we always want to talk about Jewy things. But before you do that, can I just say, has nobody pointed out that you actually don't not look like Luigi a little bit? No one's pointed that out, and I hope it stays that way after this conversation. Let me see your abs. What are you saying? Cover half your face.

Do you have abs? By the way, two things. First of all, this Luigi guy, one thing is so funny. He saw the picture. He's got these bushy eyebrows. And you'd think that the first thing you'd do after you're on the lam, pluck your eyebrows, dye your hair. He apparently has a high IQ. He didn't take the most basic steps that my seven-year-old, if I said, hey, Benny, what do you think you should do after you commit a murder?

Dye my hair, pluck my eyebrows, you know. But he didn't do anything. Anyway, there's this comedian, Tom Green. He played the Chad in the Charlie's Angels movies. Like Tom Green, Tom Green? Yeah. I mean, you're saying him like he's like not super famous. Well, among people your age, but I don't think y'all know him.

Anyway, he came into the comedy cell. He was performing there sometimes. And he was, you know, he's a liberal guy. And he was talking all about how, you know, all a bunch of progressive politics and how the health care system in Canada, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, but I do have to admit that when my father, I think he has prostate cancer. So my father had prostate cancer. They told him he'd have to wait 11 months for the surgery. So we brought him right away to New York or to Michigan, whatever border state it was. Meaning that, you know, you think our system is bad, but we are so bad that we're still the relief valve.

We're the plan B for the good countries, right? The supposedly good systems. They're great unless you actually need something right away, in which case you could just come to America and get it, right? If you can afford it. If you can afford it or whatever. But let's just not pretend that everything is so terrible. Most people who say these things have almost no knowledge, comparative knowledge, of what things are like in other places.

They just repeat stuff they've heard. Okay, Eyal, anyway, you became well-known because you were fighting... Well, actually, can we start with, did you watch my interview with Scott Horton? Because this is up both our alleys. I didn't. I will watch it later tonight. I've been at work all day. Oh, okay. I wanted you to watch a clip of it because it's about this Ukraine thing, which is a which is an example, I think, of this kind of reflexive anti-Americanism, at least as it comes from the libertarian wing.

The Scott Horton's book, Dave Smith types. I feel like they have an ax to grind with the West and America. Do you follow that at all? Yeah, actually, this morning I had a big Twitter argument with Dave Smith. Oh, he won't even answer me anymore. What was the argument about? I fundamentally disagree with acting as though Jeffrey Sachs is any sort of moral compass or authenticity or principles. And Dave Smith disagrees. He was a liberal economist, I think, as I first knew him. But now he's heavily into kind of this libertarian version of events in Ukraine and a kind of revisionist history of Israel and Palestine. He even went on talking about how many Jews believe in from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is madness. The only time I ever heard that phrase, Nile to the Euphrates, was from the Egyptian guys

who were in the kitchen who would accuse us of saying, you want the Nile to the Euphrates. You're like, what are you talking about? Have you ever heard anybody say Nile to the Euphrates? Never, ever. Never, right? Okay, so go ahead, Eyal. So you were arguing with Dave Smith. This is Jeffrey Sacks. Go ahead. No, I was voicing how I fundamentally disagree that any sort of morality reason can be derived from someone who is an apologist for Putin. And every time you accuse them of being apologists, they step back and get all defensive and say,

no, no, no, I never said that. But at the end of the day, they get so much more animated about Ukraine doing something wrong than than Russia that it's kind of difficult not to not to accuse them of being an apologist for Russia, for Putin. Well, I agree with what you just said very much. And this was. My argument to Scott Horton, I said, look, Kissinger, you can find Kissinger in video and in words saying for the fact that we should go easy with Ukraine. This could be a red line for Putin. Ukraine should stay neutral. It would not be wise to have Ukraine in NATO. So Kissinger was saying a lot of the same things that Mearsheimer was saying. But once it happened, Kissinger was immediately congratulating Zelensky for his bravery and essentially saying our hearts are with the brave Ukrainian people. And that after they make whatever deal they make, he was I was hoping to avoid this, but now that we're in this, I think it would be very good for Ukraine

to join NATO, whatever's left of Ukraine, to join NATO after it's done. Which is the pro-American, pro-freedom point of view. Whereas the other people who started from that position, they went completely the other way to exactly what you're describing.

I mean, there is such a thing as sensing where somebody's heart is. And their heart really seems to be, if not with Putin, but extremely resentful of these Ukrainian people who, although the polls show them waning now, who were ready to go fight and die

for this cause. So obviously from their point of view, regardless of what strings we, or whatever strings we're pulling, it's not easy to get people to go fight and die, right? And the polls show they were in favor of this war. So they're fighting for what they perceive as their freedom or their future,

or to be out from under the Russian yoke and maybe to have a future for their kids or their grandkids, which more resembles what they see in their European neighbors. And I don't understand this level of resentment. But then sure enough, and this was my jumping off point with Horton, I saw Tucker Carlson, you know, who refers to zielinski as rat-like sweaty a persecutor of christians a friend of blackrock and him and glenn greenwald are talking and they kind of agree that well the primary motivation here is israel that you know russia has interests in syria and israel of course wants to see syria undercut. This is before Assad had fallen. And they say, well, the primary reason that we're defending Ukraine is on behalf of Israel. I'm like, what the hell is going on here? Have you heard that? I have not heard that. And I honestly,

I'll admit I'm not the most well versed on the different pundits and what they've said. I just hold a very strong belief that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, that Russia unlawfully annexed Crimea back in 2014, continued its expansionism with the Donbass and the Kursk regions, and I fundamentally disagree with Russia doing that. Now, with that being said, I also believe in a deal being struck between Russia and Ukraine, because I don't want to see Ukraine lose any more land. And right now, it doesn't seem like they can win it back, realistically speaking. But at the end of the day, every discussion in terms of coming to the table to reach a solution does need to be prefaced with the fact that Russia is 100% in the wrong in this conflict and they unlawfully and illegally invaded Ukraine.

Well, okay, just to kind of steel man, as they say, although that's already becoming a cliche. If you look into the history, Crimea, although, yes, it was a violation of like whatever it was, the Budapest Accords and Budapest Memorandum. And you're not supposed to take land by force in the modern world. Crimea is a tougher case in the sense that it was always actually Russian. And as Russian-speaking people, actually Russian people. And the only reason it ever wound up as part of Ukraine's geography was because Khrushchev had just kind of shifted it to Ukraine as opposed to Russia or wherever it was as a ceremonial gesture because he never expected the Soviet Union to fall. So I can't defend Putin on Crimea, but I can't ignore that from their point of view and the importance of their warm water port and the fact that Ukraine

looked like it could go either way. I could see why from the Mearsheimer point of view, and after all, he did turn out to be right that Ukraine was he said, we're leading Ukraine down the primrose path of destruction or something like that. So I can't dismiss that. What's happening now with, you know, it's quite different. The Donbass and the Kursk regions are obviously different, different conflicts. I think it's more about the idea of Russian expansionism at large and trying to create the Russian empire once again, which has to be fought against. That can't just be an accepted idea in political discussion that every how many years Russia will launch another war and

swallow up another piece of Eastern Europe. Yeah. Well, we, we, I wonder if they're really going to do that. I know that's the fear, but, um, even without our NATO deterrence, which is significant, right? Uh,

it's not going so, so well for him, uh, in you, in Ukraine, uh, where would he imagine it to go better? So I, I hope they make a deal.

They have to make a deal. Hopefully Trump will be able to do that. You know, without regards to whether you're pro-Trump or not, psychologically, it's often good just to have a fresh leader because it's the same way in business. Sometimes the resentment, it builds up so much with a particular person or a particular person begins to stand for certain things that it's very difficult to make concessions to that person or to move beyond that and feel like you're able to save face. And just the fact that someone

new comes into the picture just allows people a certain psychological latitude to agree to things that they otherwise wouldn't have. So why are you smiling at me, Periel? I'm just wondering if that's what it's like for us. All right. So, okay. Can I talk a little bit more about my Horton thing? Because it's happening.

It's what? Get to Israel. Yeah. We have time for Israel. But this is, so this is Get to Israel. We have time for Israel. This is related to Israel. I'm getting a lot of flack online because I really came at Horton not just about Ukraine

details, but I really did push him on these associations. And I feel I'm doing the right thing although some people who are generally supportive of me have been questioning my wisdom on this

and I'll just spell it out and then you can give me your comments on it because I think as I say it is related to things that you are arguing with Dave Smith about first of all it's important to say the following everybody should remember first of all, it's important to say the following. Everybody should remember that the hatred of Jews was in full bloom when we were a pathetic minority. The accusations of being behind wars and pulling all the strings

and all the protocols of all those Zion thing, these were all, and starting World War I, this was all in full blossom when there was no Israel and no prospect of Israel, when we were in shtetls, right? So Israel and Israel's misbehavior, this is very important,

and Jewish power, are not necessary for the world to have these feelings, to have terrible hatred of Jews. And we might think it would be, right? And of course, logically, that doesn't say anything about the nature of the accusations against Israel. American policy could be being influenced by Israel's interests, right?

It could be true or it might not be true. But I only say it to mean that one shouldn't be tempted to assume that the correlation of Israel and Israel's power, that that correlation is causation, and that the correlation should be considered an argument or significant, because we have a control of pre-Israel history. And it was no different then. Which again, doesn't mean that Israel isn't up to these things. But I think for young people who don't know that, it's very tempting to say, well, look at Israel. And they're having, of course people are,

of course anti-Semitism is blossoming. That's a very good point. Yeah. So, oh, I put some notes here. So Scott Horton's book on Ukraine is very good and very interesting. And there's plenty to talk about without me pressing him on what I see as anti and the anti-Semitism that seems to be in that clique that he's in of people who feel this way about Ukraine. And the click, as we've said, it extends from Dave Smith, who I know, and Dave's a good guy. You might find that hard to believe, but Dave is a good guy, to Candace Owens, to Alex Jones, to Nick Fuentes, to Tucker Carlson, all the way to like, what's that guy? Jews are the greatest at the planet, or Dan Bilzerian, Jake Shields. And some of these people get close to

the White House. J.D. Vance talks kindly about Alex Jones. Many of these people go on Joe Rogan. I'm sure Joe Rogan wouldn't allow the worst of them on. And I would never paint them all with the same brush, except you can't get them to say a bad word about each other, right?

You've noticed that. They will never, and it's like it's an unbroken chain, and every link says, you have to look it's an unbroken chain and every link says you have you have to look at me on my own and every link does deserve to be looked at on its own but they also want us to pretend that there's no chain the chain doesn't exist but the chain does exist right so and as i said before this chain kind of gives everybody an innocence by association. And I'm trying to break that chain because I find all this is dangerous. And it undermines the arguments that anybody is making.

So like in science, you have double-blind experiments. And we know why we have double-blind experiments, because we can't trust even a good-faith medical professional to be able to judge whether or not a patient has improved or not. That's how weak the human mind is. I wrote down this quote here. Warren Buffett said, what the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact. I love that. Right. Warren Buffett is amazing. So when Scott Horton was on last week, was on the Candace Owens show. Candace Owens went on this thing.

Now, I've been up in arms about Candace Owens for a long time now. Anybody can see he's saying that Jews are pedophiles and all kinds of crazy stuff. So she says to him in this interview, this thing about, you know, well, when AIPAC was, John F. Kennedy wanted to make AIPAC register as a foreign agent and and then bang, bang, he got killed, and she's made this act. And Scott Horton didn't say like, well, come on, that's crazy. He just lets it go. And I'm like, well, how do I trust the book of a guy? What is he able?

So I began to really look carefully into it more. And you should get the book, by the way. It's is he able? So I began to really look carefully into it more. And, you know, he has this, you should get the book, by the way. It's got like 6,000 footnotes there. It's a blizzard of facts. There's no way to know what's true or what's not true unless you're going to spend hours researching this subject.

So you begin to look for clues, little threads you can pull on. So that was a clue. He won't say anything bad. He won't contradict Candace Owens. And then I looked into some of his sources, and there's one as a 9-11 denier, another one that he calls in his book only a Cornell University organic chemistry professor. Cornell University organic chemistry professor. But then you look at the guy. He has about, I don't know,

two, three hundred tweets about Ukraine. And he's doing one conspiracy theory podcast after another. He says 9-11 was a conspiracy, that January 6th was a conspiracy by the CIA, that the Las Vegas shooter was a conspiracy with helicopters and multiple guns. I mean, the guy is just totally out to lunch.

Wait. So, and he said, and there's another quote there by this guy, George Friedman, who claims that Horton quotes him as saying that the Maidan coup was the most blatant coup in history. I'm like, look into that. That's a weird thing for this guy to say.

Sure enough, the guy has written two articles where he says that, no, I didn't say that. They took it out of context. The Russians took it out of context. He actually says it was Russian propaganda and Russian disinformation. And I confront Horton with all these things.

And somehow this guy who's done all this research, painstaking research, 6,000 footnotes, is unaware of a single one of these things that I've uncovered. He never saw that this first guy was a 9-11 denier. He never saw that this professor who's been on his podcast is a conspiracy nut. He never saw that Friedman denied it. He never knew that Candace Owens said this stuff about the Jews. He never knew that Tucker Carlson said that he was mauled by demons and bloodied in his bed. He never knew any of this stuff about the Jews. He never knew that Tucker Carlson said that he was mauled by demons and bloodied in his

bed. He never knew any of this stuff. And this all becomes reason, I think, to be skeptical of someone's work. And then you add in the anti-Americanism. So that's why I was challenging him on that. I just want to say that I think that also very telling was that when

he was presented with some of these videos, he had a complete breakdown and was like screaming. I mean, I think like he doth protest. I don't want to dump on it too much. Okay.

No, I mean, I'm not dumping on it. I'm just saying is like an observer of if it were on it, like, if you want to take it on its face, like, I just don't think he would have gotten that enraged about it.

Yeah. And I got two more things to say in the nail. You're going to, so then also, so when I played them all the Candace Owens quotes, and she says really crazy stuff that, that, uh, Kamala Harris is Jewish, that Stalin was Jewish,

that, who else did he say? I don't remember. She said he was Jewish, that Lyndon Baines Johnson was Jewish, that Theodore Herzl was not Jewish, but was a pedophile, and that Macron's wife,

Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, is a man. And I said to him, how can you explain? This is crazy. You want me to trust that you're going to write a book that will not lean in the favor of the things that you agree with. But can you say something about this person who leans also in your direction? And he says to me, well, that's because she was angry at Ben Shapiro and she was red-pilled.

Now, red-pilled is an analogy used to mean someone seeing reality, right? But he's using it in a different way here, I guess. I'm like, red-pilled? So you begin to think that Lyndon Johnson was Jewish and John F. Kennedy was shot by the Jews and Herzl was a pedophile and not even Jewish. It's so crazy.

I feel that it undercuts the credibility of the book. And I don't want to be unfair to the guy. So what was the pushback that you got that you said that people that were generally- Well, they said that I was trying to, I was using the tactic of guilt by association. And I'm like, no, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that, okay, I'll give you one more example. There was a comedian, very famous comedian, who got in big trouble like 10 years ago for saying some really vile racist shit. And you know what?

A lot of things that people say are racist are not. And nobody has an obligation to buckle. If they don't think something is racist, they don't have to say that it's racist. But I do think it's the moral obligation of everybody, let alone anybody who wants to be a public kind of intellectual, to stand up against racism and bigotry when it's out there, because so many of the great atrocities of the world are fueled by racism and bigotry.

It's not like it's not a serious thing. Even if we spent years overreacting and saying things that were not actually racism were racism does not mean we just say okay now from now on no racism matters so when this guy did this i cut him off i refused to let him do shows at the club anymore i was invited on a on his show i would not go i was i i stood up i don't want to give the details because I don't want his followers descending on me. And it was some personal problems

for me. And I don't think there's any kind of... Like if Eyal came out of his mouth now about Arabs being pedophiles or some sort of hateful thing about Arabs, you know me well enough to say, no, you're not going to say that on my show, and I wouldn't tolerate it.

But these people will tolerate it from each other, and I think it's dangerous as hell. This stuff spreads around social media in an unprecedented way. It winds up on my daughter's TikTok page. And you'd think that there would be a way to fight for your, you know, vision of how the world should be in an America first, somewhat isolationist policy, and still be able to call out your brethren, as it were, when they're saying that shit crazy and racist thing. given extra fuel, fueled with anti-Semitism, and they're bound together, and they won't break ranks, and they are powerful. You agree with all this? I've spoken enough.

This is really on my mind, but go ahead, Ariel. You speak now for 10 minutes. Go ahead. No, no, no. I think, look, with all the names you said, I think there's a huge difference between them in terms of what they espouse, in terms of how they think, how they believe, whether they're actually curious, whether it's willful ignorance, whether they're cowards and they just don't want to speak up because they don't want to offend some sort of overlap in terms of their following.

I think there's a lack of critical thinking that's happening these days, is we've never had more access to information, especially with how algorithms work, is you're constantly being reinforced with the same ideas that you already believe. And I think what's happening now, especially with some of these niche, outlandish conspiracy theories, number one is it's really hard to debate them

because they're so niche and not known that it would take so long. And there's this idea, the paradox of bullshit, that it takes way less time to actually say the most ridiculous absurd thing reference some niche facts from 40 years ago and then act as though it's true when it just doesn't fit the timeline you mentioned the the nile to the euphrates the conspiracy theory of greater israel i'm extremely pro-israel i don't know of many people that are more pro-Israel than me. Until you just said that, I've never even heard of that idea before. So clearly this isn't some mainstream thing, but because someone said it on some podcast and they said it was some sort of rigor referencing some niche unknown idea, people suddenly believe it. And that idea just continuously gets reinforced over time.

And where do you think Jeffrey Sachs got that from? Like, what kind of websites is he trafficking in? Like, they find these, I'll use your word, niche, obscure facts about Judaism, about some quote in the Talmud that said Jesus, or it's not clear whether it meant Jesus, would, you know, live in excrement in hell after he died. You know, you've heard that. This is one of the things that is going around Twitter. And there is some basis for it. But the really salient fact here is that none of us Jews have ever heard of any of this, right? I don't, like, they, forgive me, the goyim, right, the non-Jews, they know this stuff chapter and verse.

But we've never heard of any of this stuff. It's like, what do you, it's, what do you make of that? I think it's an obsession with trying to get like a catch-up on the Jews. And there's this notion, I think the best example is honestly when there's a headline from Israel of a specific Israeli, like a criminal doing something bad. And then rather than it being that individual doing something bad, it's the whole nation of Israel. It's all Jews across the world that are responsible from that one specific thing that occurred. Whereas we just don't see this in other cases. There was a tragic shooting that happened in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday, but all Americans

are not being blamed for it. If that had happened in Israel, all these anti-Semites would put it on their social media and say, look at how bloodthirsty the Jews are in Israel. It's an entire nation that is like this. And we just don't see those comparisons being made because they're just, again, unfounded in reality. The actions of one specific person do not reflect upon an entire people. And if there were some cabal or people working together, it's bizarre to me that I've never heard of half the things that they're saying until they just regurgitated out of their mouths because they

found it on some niche Wikipedia page that is impossible to find unless you're looking for it. Yeah. I think I agree with everything you said. I think we really have to triple our efforts and get people to be you know some like i have a friend who kind of said this to me he's like ah don't be so don't overreact don't be so sensitive and those are arguments that i'm quite capable of making but from time to time i feel other words and you know otherwiseacy theories have always been something that I intuited were very dangerous. I remember in 1991, I think it was,

when the movie JFK came out. Did you see the movie JFK? It's considered to be a very fine movie by Oliver Stone in terms of cinematic skill and various aspects of it. And it is good. And I remember when I saw it, this is in 91, I was young, I wasn't even 30 years old. I had a bad reaction to it.

And I remember saying, I don't like this because this, well, it was very, it had all kinds of weird JFK conspiracies and anti-American conspiracies and I don't even remember all the details, but I remember thinking this is going to pass into the national bloodstream as history. This is poisoning the well. And I liked that there should be history and then you can have whatever crazy stuff on the side. And I knew that Oliver Stone was influential enough and the pop culture was

strong enough and kids were dumb enough and little educated enough, that this would then begin to mold what they actually think had happened in the world. And then this would make them permeable, would make their minds more permeable from more and more things of this nature. And this was before the internet. And sure enough, we're at that point now where every previous thing which they believe is true, and you see all this kind of revisionist history, even about COVID, while some things in COVID

do deserve to be very much criticized, makes the next even more ridiculous fact just incremental. And if it's just incremental, that becomes very, very easy to swallow. And garbage in, garbage out. This is self-government we've got going on here. And a democracy will go very badly if the electorate starts making decisions based on things which are not true or the opposite of true. So it's quite urgent. And now we have all the headwinds of social media and the algorithms, it's quite urgent. And we will have to, as a society, figure out how to redirect in some way to get back to some rigor, some sort of a methodology that we respect, something that can approach the ideal of double-blind experiments in science. We can't do that, obviously,

in politics and social sciences, but it still can be an analogy, something that we can think about and use at least to help to guide us in principle to try to get to things that are closer to truth. And this is why, again, with this Scott Horton thing, but also with Ken Roth and all the whole cast of characters that are anti-Israel, we need to fight them tooth and nail. And I think that's what you've been doing, you've been trying to do, correct? To an extent.

I very much don't like arguing against their nonsense. I rather not be on the defensive and actually push out what is true. So I think the best example is Candace Owens' weird obsession with the USS Liberty, which was a completely tragic event that happened where Israel has compensated the families of the people. It was a U.S. spy ship in the middle of a war right off the coast of Egypt and Israel. And the obsession with an event, a tragic event, again, that happened 60 years ago, is bizarre. But to me, it's not that dangerous.

It's not dangerous enough to start spending all my time arguing against it because— I wish you hadn't mentioned the USS Liberty because Dennis Prager wrote this open letter to Candace Owens. And you know Dennis Prager is, right? Of course. He might be more pro-Israel than you. I mean, this is an uber Zionist. And he wrote in this letter something which shocked me. He said that he's looked into it and he now believes that it's more likely than not that Israel did do this intentionally.

He says, I can't imagine what would have caused them to do it. Anybody can look up the letter. Yeah, you can Google it now. Dennis Prager led us to Candace Owens. And I was gobsmacked that because for him to say that, for him to even think

it, required him to really feel that he's faced with overwhelming evidence. And for him to write it publicly, knowing that it would be taken as a huge admission against interest. First of all, it's a, it's an act of extreme intellectual

honesty, just in the sense that he believes it. So he felt he had to say it. I was going to say that is, is a principled thing to do. I'm, I'm saying that the USS Liberty, no matter what happened, was a tragic event and is a stain on the Israeli-U.S. relations. That has no resemblance to the modern day situation between Israel and the United States. If we want to talk about other countries who are now allied with, I would reference Japan, which bombed Pearl Harbor, which no one could ever argue was not an intentional thing that they did. And now Japan is one of our closest allies in the world. So I'm saying irrelevant discussion to have on what happened 60 years ago, because the families were compensated. Israel took responsibility for it. It is a tragic event. Nobody disagrees with that. And that's what I'm saying is rather

than going on the defensive and discussing that, it's, there's no point to me because American soldiers died that day and it's terrible. Well, I would, I would even like the current situation of the relationship between the United States and Israel. I would say it's interesting that I'm taking the other side, that number one, Japan was our enemy. So you can't really compare it to Israel, who was our ally at the time and being aided by us at the time. So there's, you know, it's one thing for Japan to attack us.

There's another thing altogether for our ally, who is, you know, I guess they were getting weapons from America at the time and intelligence and whatever else. For Israel to kill American sailors in that context is different, number one. Number two— Wait, sorry, different in what context? Let's take the most negative approach possible to what happened during the USS Liberty. What relevance does that have between the relationship today between the United States and Israel?

That was my number two. Number two is that if that is what happened, they should admit it. Or maybe that's naive. But for instance, to this day, the Koreans resent enormously the fact that the Japanese will not admit what they did to the Koreans when they invaded Korea with the comfort women and the atrocities that the Japanese committed against the Koreans, which everyone knows they committed. But the Japanese deny it, like the Turks deny the Armenian genocide. And this bothers people. And it would, of all the things, if this is true, yeah, I could see this as like, you know what? This is still a matter of honor between nations. And you should come clean and say what happened. And also, of course, it wasn't that long ago such that, you know, that generation has only just died and Netanyahu is, you know, coming up right behind that generation.

So it makes it easier for people to say, well, if they did it then, why wouldn't they do it now? So that's me kind of, um, taking the devil's advocate, but I think that I, and I could also make the reverse argument is that during the six day war, uh, sorry, not the six day war. Um, what was it? Uh, the Yom Kippur war is that America held up armed shipments to, to Israel because America felt like more Israelis had to die in order for America to support Israel because they didn't want to

piss off the Arab nations. That may be a tendentious version of events, but yes, we were holding up arms. I don't know if any Americans said, maybe they did, but I don't know if any Americans said, no, we need more Israelis to die. But, you know,

yeah, but that wasn't an act of treachery. It was out in the open. But anyway, go ahead. Sorry. I'm saying it wasn't an act of treachery, but again, it's just not, even during this, I think the U.S.'s liberty is being discussed too much because I don't think it has any, any, any,

there's no stretch to today, in my opinion. It doesn't have any bearing on the current relationship between the United States and Israel. We see the United States' relationships with our allies declining. We have less allies today than we did two decades ago. We see dictatorships in the world on the rise. Israel currently is a canary in the coal mine in the toughest neighborhood in the world.

And it is an ally that we know we can trust if U.S. interests are under attack, no matter where that be, whether it be in the Middle East or abroad. And in this current geopolitical climate, the U.S., while China's on the rise, it's important to keep allies on our side. And I think revisiting events that, again, are tragic and should have never happened has no sort of analysis-changing idea on today. It's a fair point. Yeah, it is a fair point. I just don't want to sweep it under the rug because, you know, we still bring up the fact that Haj Amin al-Husseini was, you know, a Nazi or, you know, collaborated with the Nazis. So I don't know.

I know the USS Liberty is a tough one, but I take your larger point that America does not have many allies like Israel. Here's the best example. Here's the best example. Is that let's take the, and I haven't heard of that ever before. I've heard a way different explanation of what happened to the USS Liberty, but let's just for a second too that's the first time i heard that go ahead in in prager's

letter yeah and to me that would be the worst possible case scenario at the end of the day right now or not anymore but israel is fighting hezbollah and absolutely obliterating Hezbollah. Hezbollah murdered 340 U.S. service members. That's right. Go ahead. Not too long ago. And Israel was the one fighting them. And in terms of Ukraine, Israel is, there's so much more of a incentive to back Israel than there is Ukraine.rael is directly fighting the people who have murdered u.s soldiers and and so in terms of what sort of whether your explanation of the or whatever prager said in his letter and i do want to read that letter is that it still has no bearing on whether for u.s foreign policy today in 2024 is it positive that israel is going after the people who murdered 340 U.S.

service members in Beirut? And in my opinion, I like that as an American. Now, tell us, I agree with you. Tell us a little more about what it's like for Jews on college campuses. If you were to, I mean, you're too young, but if I were to, let's say, I went to college in the 80s as a Jew, went to Tel Aviv University as an exchange student, not exchange, but as a semester abroad, wore my Tel Aviv University T-shirt.

You could even wear an IDF shirt with Hebrew letters. Nobody would care. If I were to go to sleep one night in 1984 and then wake up in 2024 in my same dorm room without knowing anything about a war, October 7th or whatever it is, what do you imagine the differences would be what

what would I notice right away atmospheric and otherwise in terms of how it life has changed for Jews in that time I think in general sorry wait I just want to make one more point on the last topic before we switch is the reason i also don't focus on these events that have happened in the past and granted this isn't that long ago but it it's still long it's enough time has passed that i don't think it has any bearing on modern day geopolitical policy but if we are going to start rehashing every single thing that an ally, and obviously enemies are different, but an ally has done, there's so many different events that we could look into and derive meaning from that I still don't think has any bearing on decision-making today. Because the world itself has changed it. The U.S. post-Cold War was an absolute hegemonic power in the world with no one even

close to them. Today, that is much different. And the U.S. has much more security concerns, much more geopolitical concerns in terms of our supply routes, in terms of our interests with our allies abroad, that it's more worth focusing on the position that the U.S. is in today than focusing on the past, which was a completely different geopolitical landscape in the world. And that was just the last thing I wanted to say on that. Well, I looked it up while you were talking. I'll just read you the paragraph of Dennis Prager because you'd probably,

you know, people would be interested. I'll just read the two paragraphs. He says, this is a long open letter to Candace Owens. Very good, by the way. It says,

you repeatedly mentioned Israel's real and alleged bad actions, specifically Israel's attack on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War in 1967, the American pedophiles who have found refuge in Israel and the recent charges of abuse of Palestinian prisoners. Terrible mistakes happen in every war. A few months ago, Israeli troops mistakenly killed three of their own hostages in Gaza, for example. And for a long time, I thought the Israeli attack on the Liberty might have been one. But I am persuaded that the strike on the Liberty was probably deliberate. For reasons I do not understand and wish I did, both the American and Israeli governments covered it up at the time and have never since explained

why it happened. If everything said about the attack on the Liberty is true, that attack seems to me to have been criminal. So that's what he said. And that's the only bad thing he says about Israel in the whole letter. But that hit me like a ton of bricks. I mean, if you know who Dennis Prager is, that's unbelievable. So go ahead. Again, there's no excuse for what happened during the uss liberty whether it was intentional or not and that's what my understanding of the uss liberty is that both

the united states and israel has divulged no information to it so i can't really draw a conclusion on what exactly happened my friend my friend did send me a few days ago that in 2003, I think, some recordings of what's purported to be Israeli helicopter pilots came out saying, you can't figure out the nationality. You got to figure out the nationality. I mean, the recordings really seem to back up the case that it was a mistake.

I suppose people say they're not the real recordings. Who knows what they'll say? But there is evidence out there to the contrary. That's why I really, I'd like to get Dennis Prager on this show to ask him about that. But go ahead. Sorry. No, I mean, what my understanding of it is that the U.S. intelligence told the ship or the U.S. had an agreement with Israel that no U.S. ships would be within 100 nautical miles of the Egyptian-Israeli. I want to get to life on campus. Tell me how life has changed for Jews. So you wake up in 2024.

I wake up 40 years later with the same morning erection. In a very cool vintage t-shirt. I think the main difference is that our universities have been corrupted by our faculty, where there's such a monolith in terms of belief system amongst our faculty. And they act more as activists than educators where they prioritize indoctrination over an education

that students are radicalized to become extremists from the day they walk in to, you know, whatever university they go to. And I think this applies to a broad spectrum of universities. Obviously, the Ivy League got the most attention because the Ivy League, but I think we see a similar trend happening across universities. And I think the best example is most recent beyond anti-Semitism is the Luigi Mangione killing. It is not normal that 41% of 18 to 29 year olds believe that it was acceptable that Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO was murdered. But, but I want to know about life as a Jew. I know, but I think it goes to that because what I think has happened is that DEI and the oppressor and someone else is the oppressed,

there's no sense of agency on the oppressed and all the agency falls on the oppressor. So for instance, when I was at Tufts, I remember Tracy Chapman, you know Tracy Chapman, the singer, she was there at the same time.

And I used to play with her sometimes. And the Jewish organization, Hillel, they did some event and I used to play with her sometimes and the the Jewish organization Hillel they did some event and she went to the Hillel thing and I wasn't actually a member of Hillel but I got invited by some Jewish girl I was trying to get with and and um and I wound up at the Hillel house playing the oud and the guitar and Tracy Chapman was there and it was all very warm, right? I don't imagine that Tracy Chapman, who's kind of like a progressive lesbian black woman, would have been just like warmly going to Hillel House

in, forget about, let's talk 2023, prior to October 7th, because even before October 7th, it was still already getting bad, right? Yeah, I mean the week leading up to October 7th we had a swastika spray painted within a

building on campus. We had the Chabad which is an international Jewish organization. The Sukkah was vandalized and we had someone breaking into hillel yelling fuck the jews and flipping over furniture and that was in one week leading up to october 7th now so it definitely did not start on october 7th now those are like uh incidents

and incidents can be caused by a um small group of people that feel they have license to do something emboldened. But what about the average, like the ambient level of feeling about Jews? Would you feel that it was warm? Like if you wanted to wear a Star of David around your neck, would you feel that people might look askance at it? It was Hillel. What was the atmosphere like? I wouldn't discount just a small group of people, though, especially when they're not held accountable, because 30% of Germany voted for Hitler. And so I don't think universities have gotten to 30 percent where they're vehemently anti-Semitic, but I'm saying that it can't just be discounted. And I think what the most important part is, is when those incidents do happen, you don't see the same outrage or uproar or the fist of the university falling down on that student like you would if it was any other protected class of people.

And so I think that's what leads, you know, however many people can embolden many more to act on their predispositions of anti-Semitism and bigotry and hate and hatred towards Israel, et cetera, et cetera. And so while it might be, you know, however much, let's call it five, 10% of universities, when that five to 10% is being normalized of, oh, we just had, I mean, three events happening in a single week is not a coincidence to me. And nothing happened to stop those three incidents from happening again. And we've seen swastika spray painted at universities long before October 7th. And so I think you can't just write off a minority of students who are perpetrating a majority of the anti-Semitism occurring. No, I don't mean to write it off.

But nevertheless, you know, like the Tree of Life synagogue was shot up and all those people died, it wasn't clear to me what conclusions to draw from that because, you know, a small group of people can do things and it may or may not represent a larger phenomenon. But what you're claiming is more significant is that the response to it, I don't think you'd call it sympathetic, but it wasn't, it was not outrage. Of course, it's a systemic problem on universities. It doesn't just fall on certain actors. It runs from the students up to the professors, up to the provost,

up to the administrators, all the way back down. And do you have any feeling why i think again it's because of the oppressor press complex that if jews are the oppressors they're unable to be under threat they're unable to to experience bigotry or feel unsafe or just want to go to class without mobs of people chanting in support of Hamas and intifadas across the world. And I genuinely think that's what it falls onto. But why isn't it just that people don't like the Jews? I mean, it seems very clear to me that October 7th was welcomed as an opportunity for people to just show the anti-Semitism that they've been feeling for, you know, years, decades, and then it's become normalized that this is okay to hate the Jews.

I mean, I don't think October 7th turned all these people into people who hate Jews. I don't know. No, I think they capitalized on an opportunity to express their bigotry. I fully agree. And I think what we saw with universities specifically is if on October 8th, when we saw across college campuses, before Israel even stepped a foot into Gaza, during all of those protests, chanting in support of Hamas, chanting in support of an intififada putting out statements saying Israel is fully to blame if the university came hard as they should have if they had a moral compass on those students we wouldn't have seen any of the events that have happened and there's this idea of

incremental radicalism that the human mind can't really process going zero to one one two two two to three etc but But we obviously can see a zero to 100 very, very clearly. That's exactly right. And explain to me how locking a bunch of Jews up in a library at Cooper Union College helps to do anything for the Palestinian people. I mean, you can't make those correlations in good faith because it's bullshit. I mean, you can see it very clearly if we just reflect, and it's tough because there's so much new information rolling in, but the pro-Palestinian movement went from ceasefire now

to intifada to full-blown public statements in support of the resistance, which is clearly a reference to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the IRGC, to now we see openly in the streets the chant, we don't want no two-state, we want 48, which is the most obvious non-statement of peace you could ever imagine. And so I think that's exactly the strategies. Incremental radicalism is if you keep tolerating that one next step, then everything else just gets normalized underneath it. And right now, I think the Overton window of what is acceptable on college campuses have shifted so much to a very dangerous place where certain universities will become just uninhabitable for Jewish students and Jewish faculty too,

which I think gets lost in the conversation a lot. Well, I guess we'll wrap it up soon. So Israel is not, there's not going to be peace in Israel for a long time unless something completely unexpected happens. And Israel will be occupying the West Bank for many years to come. And the people on the West Bank and Gaza are very skilled at finding, and listen, I don't want to, what I'm saying is actually not the extent of it

because they also have a legitimate cause. They actually are at times oppressed. They actually are living under occupation. But I was going to say, at the same time, they are also skilled at creating scenarios to put Israel in a bad light on the world stage. This is part of their strategy of resistance. So if this is going to go on for many years,

do you have any hopes or any ideas of how we might improve the view of Jews in this country? Or are we just on our way into a, into a winter time of uh attitudes about jews i think i think things are definitely improving in terms of where things are headed i don't think the universities have changed at all if anything i think they've gotten worse from last semester to this semester but i think in terms of more people waking up to things like DEI and how it's just an absolute ridiculous philosophy to actually ingrain in universities, and we see a lot of universities abolishing DEI. I think overall Jews themselves have become much more vocal and stand

much taller and prouder in terms of their Judaism and who they are and their love for Israel and their love for America. I don't think I've ever seen a group in America express more patriotism in the past year and a half than Jewish Americans have. And I would really go to bat for that in front of anyone. And I think in general, there's a huge distrust in universities right now beyond just anti-Semitism itself. I think people are starting to wake up that universities don't teach critical thinking. They teach one line of thought and reasoning. And if you go against the grain, then you're ostracized from the community. You get worse grades. You're expelled or suspended because someone was offended by something that you

said. And I think more people are actually waking up to the fact that universities can't just keep behaving with these billion dollar endowments while simultaneously receiving tax exempt status and not uphold American law or the values that America was was built and founded upon. And what I've said for a while, especially leading up to the election, is you want if you want to understand just how radical universities have become i would put a lot of money on the fact that more ivy league professors cast their votes for uh jill stein than they did kamala harris and that just shows you how do you know how do you know that there's a poll no i'm saying it's my it's my hypothesis i'm saying i would put money on on it on it being uh on it being true right uh and i

would definitely put i'd put more money on the fact that many of them just didn't vote for anyone at all in protest of kamala harris all right all right so let me tell you we gotta wrap it i would not i would i'll take that bet. There's no way more than voting for Jill Stein. They voted for Kamala Harris. If you look at polling, more professors at, I believe it was Harvard, Penn, and Columbia, more professors identified as far

left than center left on a poll that was conducted, I believe, two months ago. And Kamala Harris is not far left. By the way, the only reason you might be right is because they don't want to vote for her because she's Jewish. But anyway, so listen, I think that we have to go.

The answer has got to be the information fight. The only answer is the truth. The university is just one battlefield. Social media is another quite significant one. It's more significant

and has come up in its significance very, very, very quickly in a way that we haven't fully comprehended. The mainstream media is much less important than we ever realized people are getting their information from TikTok from Twitter, from wherever

it is, kids who don't know anything better and I know how powerful this is, not on the subject of Israel, I see my kids they'll believe anything they see on TikTok, right? Why are your kids on TikTok? Don't you remember Jonathan Haidt? Yeah, well, the kids are on TikTok.

But at the same time, just briefly, at the same time, if the book 1984 shows us anything, is that when you're so indoctrinated into believing one system and you're presented with even just a grain of doubt, that that can shatter everything you ever believed before. Do you remember how 1984... And so it also works against them. Do you remember how 1984 ends? He falls back in line. I think Winston Smith

falls back in line at the end. After being tortured in a jail. After getting the rats in his face or whatever. He says, do it to her. Is that Julia? Is that her name? Do it to her.

Anyway, listen, I got to go. I'm going out to a Korean restaurant tonight. Not kosher. You get to New York from time to time, right? Yeah. Yeah, you got to stop down and come to New York. I mean, you know, come to the cellar. I follow you on Twitter. I recommend that everybody does.

And you're fighting the good fight. Your tweets are very, very good. Maybe if you get down, I can even get Dave Smith to come down and meet you in person. But he's barely talking to me. I think he's had it up to here with me. I want to discuss Israel with Dave Smith if he watches this. Anytime on any platform, I am more than happy to. Issue a challenge.

Go ahead. Issue a challenge. Dave Smith, go ahead. Dave Smith, I'll debate you anytime on any platform about the current conflict happening between Israel and Hamas. Okay. Now do it again a little more alpha. Okay. He gets the message.. A little more alpha. Okay. I'll become more alpha

during the actual debate. Thank you very, very much for taking the time. We appreciate it.