The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Has the War in Israel Become a War on Jews? | Bret Stephens, Coleman Hughes & Michael Moynihan

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Two years after October 7th, the Comedy Cellar hosts Bret Stephens (New York Times), Coleman Hughes (The Free Press), and Michael Moynihan (The Fifth Column) for a discussion of how the Hamas war against Israel ignited something larger — and perhaps more enduring. The panel explores: How sympathy for Israel inverted almost overnight into hostility toward Jews. The emergence of “October 8th Jews” and the new sense of isolation in America. The Plight of the Long Suffering Palestinians Double Standards The rise of conspiratorial right-wing rhetoric and the failure of moderates to confront it.

A trademark. What's wrong with the shirt? You look fine. You look fine. Nome's wearing a T-shirt. Correct. Yeah, but Nome has a certain... Geneseecois.

No. Non-reputation to live up. You're good. You're in a button-down. Wait, but now let me take the jacket off of the back-bo-old thing. All right. What was your white tape thing? It's good, Coleman.

If you guys can just be cognizant, not to, like, move. Correct. Thank you, Steve. Not to move too much. Okay. Oh, let's see if it works. Okay, let's see.

Steve, can I... Very fancy. You got two clips, right? Yes. It's driving me crazy. Don't do what? Thank you. Just, like, be cognizant not to totally move away from it

because it's centered on camera. The family there. Okay. I don't see white tape on my case, but that's... You're okay. You're on the head of the table. You've got to get those Sony's. the FS

one of the ones that Jason bought for the column. Incredible. Amazing. I sent you those. I'm pretty good at staying close to them. And they move with you in a very, not in like a dramatic way. It's very smooth, like steady camway. It works well. All righty.

Is it expensive? Very. Yeah, that's the problem. Get Farber to buy them for you. This construction we're doing is just killing you. Overruns are crazy. Well, that's construction. for you.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I thought I... Next time your wife says, let's buy the house around the corner. Just say no. I get a project going on.

I was such a fight with my wife today. Oh, God. Much better episode. Okay. Are we ready, Steve? Yeah, we're on. I'll do a brief introduction and probably say very little after that.

Are we ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. This is live from the table, the official podcast. Wait, but you got a volume control. Where's the volume? It's right next to...

Oh. Test, test, test. Try it now. Is that good? Better? Better? Better? Better?

Okay, go ahead. Take two, Dan. This is live from the table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy seller. Available wherever you get your podcasts. And in particular, available on YouTube, which is how it's done nowadays. And this way, you get a video and audio experience, which people appreciate. Dan Natterin here with Noam Dwarman, owner of the comedy seller.

a name for himself in the political realm. Is it sort of a... Anyway, well, no, I'm trying to drag this out because I'll probably say nothing afterwards. Periel is here. She produces the show. Hello. And we have not one, not two, but three guests. It's a full house. We got Michael Moynihan, former correspondent for Vice News, co-hosts the fifth column podcast.

Coleman News, host of the podcast, Conversations with Coleman, author of the End of Race Politics, Arguments for a colorblind America. And I think he makes some good arguments for it. And Brett Stevens, doesn't have a podcast. The only one, he's the guy, a New York Times columnist. Total loser here. And that's, those are our guests, and it should be an interesting discussion, although I'm not sure what we're discussing.

So, two years in a day after October 7th. By the way, everybody, talk close to your mics if you can. Dan, since you constantly fetch that you get left out of the conversation, let's start just before we get the heavy hitters. What's your take. What a nice intro. What's your feel? as a Jewish person or just as an American citizen, a citizen of the world, two years after

October 7th. Two years after October 7th, you know, I'm not much for anniversaries, you know, it was a tragic event, obviously, that it's the anniversary doesn't give me any special, you know, sentiments. you know, it's been, I've been upset about it since October 7th. Okay. And with no special increase in, in, uh, women must love you. After this, I'm very sorry that I haven't given you more airtime on the subject. All right.

Well, I don't know what, what do you want me to say? Yeah, I'm against October 7th. Okay. I don't know what else there's more to elaborate on. So listen, you guys are three of this. people that I think are, I'm not just saying this, are the smartest people there are, the most insightful. What about Tyler Cowen?

The Tyler Cowen is one of them as well. But who's smarter? I'm going to. I'll start by saying the smartest thing I ever said, and then I'm going to turn it over to you guys. The smartest thing I ever said was on like October 10th, I said that when everybody was thinking that Israel had sympathy, I said, wait, we're about to see daily George Floyd videos and a worldwide defund the police reaction. And that's clearly what we've seen. And so much so

that I think the big story to me at this point is in Israel, it's the place of the Jewish people in America. That's really the, that's my attitude about it. But that doesn't have to be where you start, but I just wanted to say that's the thing most at the top of my mind on this day. So, Brett? The way I think about the anniversary, I think there are two anniversaries, Noam, and there are two categories of people who I'm mindful of today. There are the people, most obviously the October 7th Israelis who were brutalized that day. People don't, people in the United States, I don't think sufficiently.

appreciate that in a country as small as Israel, there is not a single Israeli who doesn't know someone who was kidnapped, murdered, or injured that day. The scale of it was just vast. It was the equivalent of more than a dozen 9-11s happening on the same day. And October 7th was this dreadful wake-up call to Israel, that they were never going to be, could never hope to be the normal state accepted in its neighborhood that they thought they might become, especially after the Abraham Accords. But there's a second anniversary, and that's today, and a second category of people, and that's October 8th, and the people I call October 8th Jews. and the October 8th Jews are the Jews here in America and Canada, elsewhere in the diaspora,

who woke up right after the greatest tragedy in our history since the Holocaust to images of democratic socialists in Times Square cheering the massacre. Chearing the massacre, they woke up to news of Harvard students signing petition, denouncing the victim as the perpetrator. And we've lived, I think, ever since then, as Jews in the diaspora, or Jew-friendly people in the diaspora, at least, as this October 8th generation, I think it's similar to what the Dreyfusards in France experienced during the Dreyfus trial,

and the revelations about his innocence, this shock that a society, never mind a society, that neighbors and colleagues and friends who we thought would be able to extend the same humane sympathy to Israelis as you would to any other group of people who had been brutalized had ice-cold hearts when it came to Israel's suffering. It's been an awakening for American Jews that we are not so assimilated, we are not so loved, we are not so American as we thought we were just two years and a day ago. And do you feel, just before we get to other people, do you, we surprised by that? Did you see that, was that your take?

I actually have some of our old clips, but I remember what you said about that. Were you more optimistic on October 7, 2012, 23 about how it was going to turn out, how the attitudes about Jews would pan out? Look, I was not surprised that the DSA would be where it was on the 8th, although I watched that demonstration unfold on the sidelines as a journalist, and I was nonetheless struck by the euphoria that they were experiencing. They reminded me of Argentine celebrating,

the World Cup. Like something fantastic had just happened. And I wasn't surprised by demonstrations and manifestos at elite schools. What has surprised me is the extent to which what I thought was a movement and a sentiment confined to essentially urban radicals or urban so-called intellectuals is now spreading throughout the United States. It surprised me to see more and more of this take root not only on the political left but in the Tucker Carlson wing of the political right

and that I think has come as a great shock and I think by the way even if we get a ceasefire or an end of the war this week this trend is only going to continue this avalanche has not reached the bottom of the valley yeah I know this scares the hell out of you too Michael yeah it scared me for a while

I said in a conversation this morning about this with somebody on the subway who doesn't pay close attention to this stuff. And it's clearly heard kind of snatches of conversation about why people are out on the streets protesting on behalf of Hamas. And it was the usual argument that, you know, we're involved in this. We give money, so therefore we're responsible. And that's why people are upset. And I said, I don't think that's it. And if you're, you know, my friend Jake Siegel, who with Leo Leibovitz wrote a piece, like, you know, let's stop giving money and support to Israel. The argument of that piece is not because people will change their minds about this in America.

And the reason I had that argument this morning is I said, look, I lived in Sweden for, God knows, five years. And if you looked at Sweden last night when the always entertaining Greta Thunberg came back to the, main square there in Stockholm, and the number of people braying like a mob of lunatics, Sweden's not involved in this. Most places in Western Europe, and this is, you know, accepting the recent influx of immigrants into Sweden, it's always been that way. Sweden's been obsessed with Israel for a very long time, and that's a question that's very hard for people in Sweden to answer. So I was not that surprised by it, but I am surprised by the coverage of this stuff. The coverage of this, a good example, this is yesterday.

I went to the so-called protest in the days after the massacre on October 7th. And it's interesting to think back and think of the number of times I heard the word genocide before a single bomb had been dropped from the Israelis. It was baked in. It was going to happen. That's what people were going to say. But the fact, again, two years hence, that the name of this protest, is flood New York. One would imagine if you were doing some sort of protest

and you're invoking, you know, Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski in the name of the protest to emulate what happened, and it actually said glory to our martyrs, which is what they said that day too. So keeping in mind that before the Gaza Ministry of Health was telling us these very, very high numbers immediately,

this is before really anyone, who were the martyrs then? the martyrs of October 7th. Using the words martyrdom and flood in the name of this protest, and no one points this out. No one in the media points this out. They don't say, oh, by the way,

it is named after the genocidal operation, the actual genocidal operation, kill as many Jews as we can, the young, the old, the infirm, it's, you know, IDF, who cares? We'll get anyone. And to name it after that in New York City, and as Brett had pointed out before we started,

people actually flying Hamas flags, I guess there's a part of that that does surprise me, that it's that blatant. But one final thing on this is, is you always know this is going to happen if you have a memory of 9-11. Because after 9-11, there was a very famous editorial in Le Mans. It said, we are all Americans now.

And I say, oh, yeah, no, we pissed away all of that support with Iraq, et cetera. If you actually read the entire editorial, it's exactly what you would expect from a liberal French daily. It says, we're all Americans. are now, and about halfway through, it's like, oh, and by the way, they kind of deserve this. This is what happens when you meddle in the Middle East.

It's the exact argument. And I had somebody here, I was in New York on 9-11, saying to me, that very day, an Irish guy, surprising, by the way, that I don't know why my people are such a, just disgrace when it comes to Middle Eastern politics, but made the argument that day that, you know, what do you expect? And so it's always going to happen. We create these kind of, sometimes academic and sometimes sort of just, you know, political arguments that you see

from pundits that we squandered this and that it's always baked in. It's always been baked in. It happened after 9-11, and it happened on days after October 7th. The largest, I hate the fact that we have to say this, add infinitum, the largest single-day

massacre of Jews since the second World War since the Holocaust. It is a distant second. I mean, it is a distant second, but it is astonishing that that... But hang on a second, just to be clear. it's not such a distant second because this was one day

and if it had not been for the IDF there would have been a day two of the master and the day three and on and on until Hamas had achieved its stated objective of killing as many Jews as possible using

others for a kind of slave labor and kicking out the rest and to say that their goal was to do one of these anytime they could a million October 7th. That should be a wake-up call to everybody. And I'll tell you, it's one final thing about today. I was having lunch in Soho, and I was sitting next to these four people, and there were four Israelis. And I said, I wonder, you know, what the average American, do they hear,

do they understand that someone speaking Hebrew? And I had this, like, sense of worry for them in a way. And I realized that if there were four people next to me speaking Arabic and headscarves, I would never have that feeling. In the time when I thought, it was brave. Brave when I saw somebody with an Israel t-shirt on the subway, I was like, that's an act of bravery to wear a nation's flag that they clearly were, you know, had an affinity for it were from, that I was kind of worried for them. How is that happened two years after this slaughter? The slaughter precipitates even more Jew hatred, which is something that is astonishing to me to this day. So before we finish this episode, I want to spend some time being devil's

advocate to some of the arguments that I'm sure some people are yelling at the, you know, screen when they're hearing this, you know, but, you know, I had a thought, and I got to call me, what was, John O'Sullivan was a former editor of National Review, and he had, I wrote that he had O'Sullivan's rule, yeah, any organization that is not explicitly right wing will become left wing over time. Remember you used to say that? That was, you said it. And I had a thought recently that any culture that is not explicitly oppose anti-Semitism becomes anti-Semitic over time. And I think that's what we're seeing now,

this kind of, as we said two years ago, reversion to the mean, outside the forces of the memory of the Holocaust, and we're seeing deep, I don't know what it is, world currents, risk of certain themselves. I will say one thing about the anti-Semitism. There's a particular type of anti-Semitism. There's the anti-Semitism where, of the country club anti-Semitism,

but what I'm seeing now increasingly is really dehumanizing anti-Semitism. There was a video of a woman who got off this flotilla, and she is a British woman, Sarah Wilker, or something like that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, she is a known Holocaust denier, but she was welcomed into this crowd of these nutcases on the far Corbinite left, in the UK. And if you watch this video, and I encourage everyone to watch the video, she came off this boat, wrapped in a kaffir, this is when she'd wrapped, I think, in Turkey.

And she said, they're not human. They might look human. They might have hands. They might have ears, but these are not humans. And this person is a Holocaust denier also. But she's on this boat. Nobody said, you know what? Let's let Greta on, but maybe not this sociopath and this anti-sum. But it's, no one, barely, anyone noticed this. I saw it on Twitter, but that's about it. So, Coleman, you know, you're of the younger generation. You're, you're black so you can kind of pass. People may assume that, you know, they can say certain things in front of you that they can't say in front of somebody looks like Dan. So, I don't know, Norm, are you exempting yourself from the... Yes, I guess I am, actually. I was being, I was kidding.

So, you know, give us some instance. here. How much of all this is actually anti-Semitism? How much of it is just like lemmings being trendy? How much of it is just ignorance? How much of it is wokeness? Like how do you, and from your experience at Columbia, and otherwise? So my

experience at Columbia, I was there from 2016 to 2020. On the Israel-Palestine issue, the campus was as crazy then as it was today. It's just that there was no major war in Israel at the time to bring it to the surface. But

every year there would be a week where the first of all when you get when you get there you go to your dorm freshman year and people knock door to door handing out flyers did you know there's a there's an apartheid in in in israel just like there was in south africa you probably heard your parents talk about that there well there's another one going on and wouldn't you like to get involved um obviously there's no analogous operation on the on the very small pro-jewish group on campus but every year you had a week where the BDS people would take over half of campus and there would be like a lot of them like at least 100. And then the very small pro-Jewish group would be like 10 kids at a table on the other. I remember one, I was friends with one of the kids in the Jewish group and someone came

over, opened their laptop and just had it read in a mechanical voice, the word shame a thousand times in a row. Like that was the tenor of the conversation at the time. Now what I think is interesting about it, and I've had some disagreements with people that are in the pro-Israel camp, as I consider myself to be, about what is the psychological source of this? Is it anti-Semitism proper in the way that it is when the far right does it? Or is it anti-Semitism arrived at through, on the train stop of basically oppressor, oppressive? Basically, the only thing that my people, years that Columbia cared about or knew about about the world was like white people are bad, everyone else is good and is oppressed by white people. And then...

The Japanese, did I get a free pass? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, they do actually. You know, no one talked about the Japanese killing 20 million people in Asia. So that really, it actually is that simple, that that was the moral software that they had on their brains. and when they learn about Israel-Palestine, they learn about it as a case of white people oppressing brown people. And that's what it is. And the reason I felt, I know that's what it is,

is because if it were anti-Semitism of the country club variety or whatever, then I would have expected to hear the occasional dismissive comment about Jews in general, which I never heard in my four years at Columbia. I never heard someone make a little anti-Jewish comment. Oh, that guy's a Jew. What I heard was a constant stream of verbal abuse directed at white people, white men, whiteness, and that's how they view the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Never mind, a million ways it's disanalogous to that, but they don't know that, right? Yeah, you know, I think there are two categories of anti-Semites. There's a relatively small group of what I'd call the bad faith anti-Semites who at some level know what they're engaging in. is bigotry and they might masquerade it but basically they just hate the Jews like this Holocaust denier

that you were referring to Michael but then there's a much broader category of good faith anti-Semites they think they're actually serving a cause of justice there's a great line I think in Huck Finn where one of the characters I forgot who it was but one of the characters says

once you got all the fools in town you practice one. Do you remember that? And what the BDS movement has been so successful in doing, BDS, SJP, you know, the whole kind of the leadership, the anti-Semitic vanguard of this movement has been so successful in doing is basically collecting all the fools in town who very earnestly think, I'm not anti-Jewish. I'm, as Coleman put it, I'm anti-apartheid, I'm anti-indjustice, I'm against colonialism. They have never been, and this is the tragedy of their education, they have never been contradicted intellectually.

You know, not long after October 7th, I had a great conversation with Paul Berman, who's an intellectual historian. I think at City College, maybe he's retired by now, but he was an eminent intellectual historian. He was one of the young protesters in 1968, student at Columbia, who took Hamilton Hall way back went. And so he was sent to jail, spent a night in the tombs.

And he told me that when he got back to campus, he was accosted by some of his professors who had lived through the 1930s and had living memories of, say, the way what had unfolded at German universities before the rise of the third rite with all the radicalism in the universities, and they push back at him.

They didn't say, you shouldn't have taken Hamilton Hall or, you know, you're wrong to oppose the administration in the Vietnam War. They didn't say any of that, but they did push back. I don't think this generation of students at Columbia, unless they've making the effort to educate themselves or they came to the school with a certain kind of background, I don't think they've ever had someone tell them, actually the said, Colonialist is you. You, white guy or non-Native American guy

at Columbia, your land acknowledgement statement does not, in fact, absolve you of the reality that you are a settler colonialist speaking a European language, the beneficiary of an explicitly

colonial enterprise, and that, in fact, what you your shallow understanding of Zionism ignores the fact that Zionism properly understood is the oldest anti-colonial struggle in history, that the language that the Jews in Israel are speaking now is an ancient one, not a European language, and that there is an unquestionable and incontrovertible link between the Jews and that land,

and that they have been fighting Babylonians, Romans, or Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Mamluks, Ottomans, and Brits to get back to their land. And so your opposition to settler colonialism is actually an indictment of yourself and an acquittal of the very Israelis you seek to indict. Now, we could presumably have an argument about that, but I think that would blow their minds because at no point in their education or the broader education, the broader kind of zeitgeist about Israel, does that thought come across their radar? And that's why I think, you know, Coleman is right. These are people who in a million years

wouldn't say, oh, yeah, you know, I hate the Jews, you know, but they will engage and participate in an entire discourse, which they aren't even clever enough. to realize is traveling alongside some of the oldest bigotries and gravest liables made against the Jewish people. Does it matter whether they hate the Jews or whether they hate the Zionists? Both are ideologies based on ignorance of history, ignorance in general. I think that argument... Yeah, I think that's an important point.

Let's imagine. Let's just for the sake of argument to play devil's advocate. it like, no, I'm here. Let's just say, yeah, totally right. Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. They're intellectually separable. Zionism intended as a political movement represents one set of things, and you can point to ultra-Orthodox, observant Jews who are themselves anti-Zionist or progressive Jews who are anti-Zionists. Okay, so say that. That's true. I can think of only, I can think of no other country that is explicitly targeted for elimination as a state. Nobody says, oh, you know, Russia is doing terrible things in Ukraine. Let's get rid of Russia. They might say get

rid of Putin, okay, stop the war, whatever, but no one says get rid of Russia. I mean, it is engaging in a war, the brutality of which is, on a vastly greater scale than what Israel is doing in Gaza, but nobody actually says that. There's only one state in the world that I can think of where people, in a fashionable sense,

say, this state should not exist. And it's not Iran. Again, not Russia, not North Korea. Name any number of states that are committing undoubted atrocities on a vastly greater scale. And yet it's this one. And so why is anti-Zionism, even if it's separable from anti-Semitism, a more respectable point of view?

Then you get, and I'm sure someone listening to this will say, well, I can be, you know, I'm free to criticize Israel. And it's like the dumbest argument in human history. I mean, literally, it's a statement about your IQ, the moment you say that. Yes, of course you can criticize Israeli policy. You can criticize Israeli leaders. if you're an American and you criticize Donald Trump, you're not anti-American. You're not calling for the destruction of the United States. But anti-Zionism means something very specific.

You're against the idea of a Jewish state in any territory in that land. That's what it is. I am against the ideology that created the state of Israel. And so this is the other thing that annoys me. People, not only do they not understand just how malicious anti-Zionism is, but half the time, they don't even understand what they're saying when they say anti-Zionism. Yeah, this lack of precision for a bunch of people on their ways to getting PhDs.

If you ask them, what outcome do you actually want from this movement? They don't know. Do you want the end of Israel? They won't say yes. When we say river to the sea, we just mean it aspirationally. We don't really mean where would the Jews go? I don't know. You have all these other things that actually you people really care about in terms

of progressive causes for LGBT and all sorts of rights and trans and all that stuff. What's the impact going to be on these causes? You can't undo the injustices of 1948. That's done. What kind of injustices are you now advocating for if you want Israel gone and you want an extension of the culture in the world, which stands most against the things you claim to believe in more than any other culture on earth, right? Why is that the outcome? Have you even thought about this stuff? There seems to be no engagement, no deep thinking, no introspection. So when you put it that way, it's easier to believe the source is a hatred of the people themselves. Although, I mean, Coleman and I have a very good friend in common who believes all this anti-Israel stuff. And he's not an anti-Semite, right?

No, absolutely not, right? Yeah, definitely not. but his mind is distorted on this stuff. Well, I think, like I said, there's multiple ways to arrive at a biased concern about Israel that you wouldn't have for any other country. Anti-Semitism is one way of arriving there. That's one road to being crazy about Israel. But I think it's a more popular road, certainly for liberal Americans, is that simply that white-black framing of the issue. like if it were the case that you know I'm just like entertain the hypothetical to humor me imagine the Chinese were like European looking and the Uyghur Muslims were brown right

imagine they looked different and there was a skin color difference campuses would be going crazy over that issue that that's that is what my argument is and the only reason you never hear about it is because we can't really tell Han Chinese apart from Uighur Muslims and neither one is white and neither one is brown, and that's what we care about. And the way in which people are being made to be dupes on this issue is because Hamas has one set of concerns that has nothing to do with the stuff Westerners care about. We don't like the settlements in the West Bank because arguably they violate international law and they violate our sensibility that we don't like the idea of military occupation. We don't like the idea of apartheid.

has no problem with any of those things in principle. They have a totally separate set of concerns around the humiliation, reversing the humiliation of a Jewish state existing period. But their message has, in a way, been translated for a Western audience into language and concepts that we care about. But then we end up mistaking our concerns for their concerns. And those are not the same thing. But how come the people who supposedly care so much about these things have conveniently ignored the fact that LGBT rights, trans rights, the slaves that are being held and treatment of black people. Like, Hamas is horrible, like their record is not good on any of those things.

You dispense with that with a phrase, right? That's when I first heard pink washing. If you ever say that there's an enormous and very popular gay pride parade in Tel Aviv, the only one for quite a number of miles. And people are like, oh, you're engaged in pink washing. But I think Brett's point is the one that needs to be repeated over and over again. And I didn't realize it had to be at the beginning of this phase of the conflict. And I did a very raucous debate with my dear friend, Eli Lake,

against somebody else who shall remain in us publicly. And it was a couple hundred people there. and there was this kind of mob yelling. Do you do an impression of the person? Yeah, no, it wasn't Finkelstein. Oh, wasn't it? You were a liar, Michael. No, that didn't happen.

Fingleston, by the way, who's opposed to BDS and was shouted out at Columbia for saying this. He said, to say to the river to the sea, maybe he shouldn't do this. And they were like, get out of here, Norman Finkelstein, who is so moderate now that he's posting racist tweets about Coleman. So congratulations.

And Van Jones. He called Van Jones. far as well so but he didn't really I actually you know I defended he called him an uncle Tom too and uncle Tom did you see the video that someone surfaced of him on this person who I debated show um when he was saying that uh it was Breonna Joy Gray and he said Brianna when I was younger we didn't use the unword and he actually said it and then said we said Schwarzza which was just as offensive and then you then that clip next to his tweet was quite funny but to Brad's point because I said during that debate

in a kind of mystified way as it was being called a Zionist and I was like, I'm being called a Zionist this is a question that has been solved. I mean, are we talking about this? And I said this in this kind of incredulous way. And now I get it. It took me a bit to realize that these

people were not so interested in Israel being a state. But to the point of what people don't understand this kind of black, white paradigm, I saw it yet again. And you can find this. It was an October 7th protest, quote unquote, But in London, and someone was doing these, you know, man on the street interviews,

and had a woman, this woman in the headscarf in London. And it's always the question, there's a million versions of this, and you've all seen them. So you don't want any Jews in the neighborhood. And it's like, well, where are they going to go? And what do they say every time? Poland. Every time. They can go to Poland.

They can go back to where they came from in Poland. These are people who clearly have never been to Israel. Because if you go around Israel, not a lot of Polish-looking people, there are some. There's not a ton. You know, there's here, there. But it's this idea that there's white people and black people, and you can get rid of the white people and tell them to go back to Poland, where they were so wonderfully treated in the past.

A case in point, Harry Anton, I thought he was from India when I met him. Did you really? Yes. And our booker Esty, that's not a white woman by any, by any, and she's Ashkenazi. She's from Poland. Yeah, she is from Poland, right? Yeah. Yeah.

But that idea that go back to Poland was something I'd never heard. I heard that after October. Yeah, they never say go back to Morocco, go back to Iraq, go back to Iran. You know, I went to a overgrown synagogue, which is still there, by the way, in the middle of Tripoli. During the Gaddafi, the last year of Gaddafi's horrible reign, I was there. And we escaped from our handlers, my friend Matt Labash and I, who some of you probably know. And we walked by... Tucker's friend.

Well, we'll see. And we walked by this building and it was a synagogue and went back and... Oh, I mean, I was one of the most moving experiences of my life is visiting the Jewish cemetery of Addis Ababa and then going to a synagogue in Addis and praying with Ethiopian Jews. People who visit Israel are always astounded. Yeah. Who are these black people here? And you kind of have to, these are the same people who make confident pronouncements about the future of the Middle East with next to zero knowledge about the actual nature of

Israeli society, no knowledge that a majority of Israelis are quote unquote brown because they have, they're of Middle Eastern descent rather than of Ashkenazi descent. But I do think Coleman made such an important point about this, you know, this hypothetical if all Chinese had white skin and they were imposing themselves the way the Chinese are on Xinjiang, there would be a huge protest. It is the case that it is, I think, a mystery to your average Columbia undergrad. Sorry for constantly picking on Colombia. Yeah, we deserve it. Other universities, too. That brown people do bad things, too.

People who are non-white do bad things. Coleman certainly does. Coleman all the time, right? Absolutely the worst. Right? I mean, the Arab slave trade, right? The trading of African slaves, not through Senegal, but through Zanzibar, was every bit as massive as the,

the European slave trade. Where is Zanzibar? It's on the eastern... That's where Freddie Mercury's people are from, I believe. It is true. Zanzibar has many claims to distinction, none greater than... No, that's probably true. It is the greatest.

Apparently, it's quite beautiful. I've never... Zanzibar is Tanzania. It's off the coast of Tanzania. Yeah, so it's on the eastern side of Africa. Those slaves were not being traded out to the Western Hemisphere or to Europe. They were going to destinations. elsewhere in the world.

Anyway, I mean, this only says that bad people exist in all cultures throughout history and have done terrible things. And you pointed out the Japanese depredations in China. I mean, you can go sort of throughout the globe. But that history is, I think, really obscure and has been almost deliberately obscured. in the textbooks that most supposedly educated students grow up with. And I think you can trace an intellectual history to Franz Fanon and this kind of, you know, this fetishization of what do we call it,

the global South, the third world, whatever you want to call it. But, you know, the anti-Semitism we're seeing is all a product of this miseducation. The way I think we've arrived at this moment is not that anti-Semitism has taken over too much of America. I think what happened was that a set of anti-Semitic adjacent ideas became ubiquitous throughout much of the country in Europe and in the United States. And so then it's just a very short step to anti-Semitism. I mean, basically, you know, take this idea of privilege. We used to have this concept in America that was called success. You know, you know, Noam Dorman came from nothing and nowhere.

Actually, I have no idea. He didn't come from nothing. But go ahead. And he, you know, established this, like, thriving hub of comedy and conversation in the village, success. Or you can say, Noam Dorman has this gorgeous studio. I mean, I'm sitting in the plushest leather seat I've ever experienced, and he's privileged. So this word privilege became a buzzword. Your privilege, why do you have privilege?

And it's typically used about white privilege or male privilege. But talk to a David Duke, and he'll say, no, no, no, the real privilege is Jewish privilege. So when you take a lot of Jewish Americans who rose from very little, and became very successful, instead of looking at these people and saying, oh, you know, what a success, living the American dream, you say, he's privileged, he doesn't deserve it, he took it from someone, it deserves to be taken out of his hands. So the idea of privilege is not anti-Semitism, but it leads to it. By the same token, by the way, I would say on the right, especially on the right,

once you're a conspiracy theorist on any number of subjects, you're going to light on the greatest conspiracy of all, which is anti-Semitism. What is anti-Semitism? It's not a bigotry about the Jews. It's a conspiracy theory about the Jews who controls the media. Well, it's actually the Jews, finance, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, when you live in a country where people will believe anything about anything, they'll ultimately believe anything about the Jews. Look, in defense of the people that think we control the media, we are pretty overrepresented in the media. We're not?

No, absolutely. Well, compared to our 2% of the population. Look, in many ways, we're overrepresented in all kinds of things. And that, by the way, is like, again, what is this term overrepresented? I don't know exactly what it means. You know, Asians are overrepresented at Stuyvesant High School. I used to live right next to it. Is that overrepresentation or is that like very studious Asian kids who are made?

Well, yeah, it's very studious. but were I to not know better, I would be astounded by the number of Jewish people in the public eye compared to their, you know, sometimes I go to a place and there's no Jews there, and I forget, yeah, we barely exist. Because you're just one one small point. Yeah. People forget that admiration and envy exist on the same coin. You can either look at a successful group or a successful person and feel admiration. how did they get there? Or why do they have what I don't have? They're very close. And we used to have a society in America where success was met with admiration. And now we have a society in which privilege is met by envy. Yeah. So this is where I think Thomas Sowell's entire career is a great resource because we do have this strange intuition that society should roughly match, achievement in various domains should match the census. If you've got 13% of the country is black,

you should see roughly 13% of black people in various places, right? In the NBA. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Well, like, for some reason, people have this intuition. But then when you actually test it against any of the facts of any multi-ethnic society for the past 500 years, you find that not only is it not true, actually the opposite is true. Even in cases where there is no discrimination, you see massive specialization. Just like you have chain migration, you have like chain businesses, right? So there's these crazy fact toys

about how Cambodians controlled, to use this word, right? Three quarters of the donut shops in California because people follow what their cousin do. Greek diners. I don't know if you're old enough to be a Greek diner. When I lived in Harlem and Hamilton Heights, every single deli, I used to ask where you

from, it's always Yemen. Why? Because why is the wrong question? Junker donuts franchises in these coasts are Indians. In a way, like, the more you look into this, the more you realize, the more you realize, actually, what you should expect is not equal results from very different cultures. You should expect different results from different cultures. And so there actually is nothing strange about the fact that 2% of the population is overrepresented. Just to, I imagine Jews are overrepresented in the media. But every group is overrepresented and underrepresented in in virtually every single domain. You can't even find an example where people aren't.

There's always a reason. There's always a reason. Because they couldn't get, after they moved after the Holocaust, they couldn't get jobs anyplace else. And so they started Hollywood. No, I mean, that's true. No, that is actually true. But not after the Holocaust.

There are lots of Jews in the media. Well, before the Holocaust. But I do remember when I worked for the Wall Street Journal, I had a delegation of journalists from Gulf states. And I was asked to sort of present what the Wall Street Journal was. I said, you know, the Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corporation, who's led by Rupert Murdoch. And one person in Arabic said, ah, Murdoch al-Jahud, Murdoch the Jew. And I said, no, no, no, no, just so you know, Mr. Murdoch is not Jewish. He's a Christian. And I often am told.

that the Salzberger family was, is, you know, my boss is at the New York Times. It's ancestrally a Jewish family, but it's no longer a Jewish family. The name is an old Jewish name, but it's not a Jewish family. People make these assumptions about Jewish-controlled media,

and I'm like, huh, like, really? Like, I mean, yeah, there are some Jews who own newspapers. There are many Christians who own newspapers, but there's an anti-Semitic stereotype that is the Jews control the media and therefore what is supposed to be common knowledge is actually a giant

lie. I mean, all the conversation that I've seen about the free press being purchased by Skydance and Barry Weiss becoming the editor-in-chief of CBS News is about quote-unquote Zionism. I mean, you've seen this and these are mainstream, relatively mainstream people that are having this conversation, which that is why, because obviously CBS, needs to become pro-Israel and therefore they hire Barry and give them $150 million. But to Coleman's point,

the kind of racialized view of everything has destroyed so much. And you get these people and they feel handcuffed by arguments they don't understand when you're talking about representation is you've heard the phrase, I could probably just ask you, Coleman,

what is the phrase for Asian people who are very successful? Model minorities. Model minority and white adjacent. white adjacent Google that if you think I'm So Stuyvesant I do this trick with friends

I mean the truth is right now white people are white adjacent The most successful people Indies adjacent Yeah Indian adjacent But you mentioned Stuyvesant And I always do this with Friends when I say I know

Stuyvesant and these people like Mamdani who want to destroy these public schools that are you know test only gifted and talented type things And it's only 5% 4% 5% and six percent black, and the presumption is that it's 90 percent wide. And I think the percentage

of white might actually be lower than six percent, because it's 88 percent Asian or something else. I mean, I used to live by Brooklyn Tech, and the bell rang, and it was just only Asian kids coming out. But those kids do not come from quote-unquote privilege. Most of those kids that you talk to have parents that are outworking at the bodega three in the morning, are in Jackson Heights and Queens and torture their children to make sure they do well. This is a cultural thing, and it's not, and it scrambles the brain when people see things only through this prism of privilege and race, and also race pride of like this thing of like, you know, I think you and I have talked about this, of saying, you know, you have

to take on all the terrible things of your race, too, when you're saying, you know, Arabs to have been involved in slavery. You know, we as, you know, when we were kings, you know, it's a named for a great movie about Muhammad. Muhammad Ali. Yeah, it's like, you're not going to say when we were slavers, but you have to take on all of those things if it is my group. And you don't get to just take the good things. You can take the bad things, too, but you're saying,

Kilman, sorry. I was going to say it. So, well, Muhammad Ali is an interesting point, because I have noticed that African Americans and Americans in general are so ignorant of the global history of slavery that several famous people have accidentally renamed themselves after in slavers. in the rest of the world in an effort to reject whiteness.

That film Woman King. Yeah, Woman King was based on a tribe that was a slave produced selling prep. Can we get back to October 7? Yeah, we can. Oh, my God. Always about you. Okay, so let's spend some time on... What's the joke?

You people always thinking about October 7. Yeah, all you people think about. A tremendous number of people, Palestinians, have died. I don't know where the number is these days, the Gaza Health Ministry number, 60,70,000 or something? And let's say what percentage does it, do reasonable people think are civilians? They don't disaggregate the Hamas fighters, so we don't know. I'm pessimistic or I don't know which one you want to call it, but I'm afraid that the actual numbers are going to be worse than some people say they are. I think we'll never know.

And it's an issue that has deeply bothered me for a variety of reasons. First of all, the total failure to disaggregate in any meaningful way, combatants and non-combatants, obviously that's a morally important distinction. The Israelis, I think, I don't know how out of date these numbers are, but talk about 20 or so. or they were talking about 20,000 combatant deaths at the time when there were about 40,000,

which would make a one-to-one ratio, which would actually suggest an astonishingly, by historical standards, an astonishingly good performance by Israel in not, in trying to avoid civilians. And there is no historical context because there's never been a war

where people had their civilians in the battle. Well, but there have been wars where civilians have been in the way, and when the allies invaded Normandy in 1944 and they needed to take the port of Lahav, they absolutely raised the city. When America, or Iraqis with American help, decided to get ISIS out of Mosul, this is only six or seven years ago. Let's see, that was 2017, 16, 17, so eight years ago, nine years ago, the city was completely obliterated, completely obliterated. So there are plenty of examples of this. And I also, there are two other things that I have to point out. When Russia produces casualty figures, we take them with a grain

of salt, right? Because we know that they have political interests in massaging the numbers. but this country and reporters who I think should be more scrupulous basically accept these weirdly precise casualty counts from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which everyone knows is actually Hamas Ministry of Health, which has every interest in inflating numbers. How is it that we can say on the one hand, Israel has completely destroyed Gaza,

all the infrastructure of Gaza. And yet somehow this statistical, Bureau is keeping the most astoundingly precise count of casualties in history. And again, I have no idea what the casualty figures are. You may well be right. They may be higher or they may be lower. But what I object to is the complete lack of skepticism or scrutiny about numbers being produced at the behest of a terrorist organization with every interest in inflating casualty

figures and massaging the numbers to look like there's a greater civilian count. And there's no pushback on our sides, on the part of the media saying, we have to consider these numbers as tentative at best. So I'm pessimistic because not only they have an incentive to inflate the numbers, they have an incentive to actually create the numbers. And I feel that, and we've seen the communications, that ringing up the civilian deaths is part of how they think, think they can win the war. They said we have the Israelis right where we want them. That's what Sinwar said. And that was only meant to mean the civilian deaths. So anyway, whatever it is, it's a large, large number of people. I don't know how many 9-11s it is for them.

By the way, I should emphasize because I'm sure this conversation is to be scrutinized by bad faith people. It is important to state that the death of so many Palestinian civilians, whatever the number is, is a heartbreaking tragedy. But it is equally important to state that the responsibility for that tragedy lies with a terrorist organization, which started a grotesque war, knowing full well that it would invite retaliation, and that fights between behind and beneath its own civilian population. Well, that's exactly what I want to get. So I want you to, all of you, to speak to the people that you're referring to now,

make the case as best you can as to why these deaths were necessary and acknowledge, if you feel it, mistakes that were made in retrospect, with 2020 hindsight. Well, we probably shouldn't have done, or Israel probably shouldn't have done this or that. Some fewer casualties could have been achieved just to acknowledge the point so that they can have their due. You must have given thought of this. Yeah, I would object to the word necessary. I never want to say that deaths are necessary. It's just, it gives me a kind of chill to say that.

However you are. Inevitable in some way because of the... Well, that's not. I mean that the cause was just, therefore, it was... Well, sure, yeah. I mean, it was, in that case, yeah. You know, we talked soon after October 7th, and I think, I don't know who sent it to who, but it was an interview with one of these knuckle-draggers in Hamas

that was on some Egyptian television program or something. And the interviewer was being pretty tough on them. this guy and said, you know, I mean, we all know this. If you go to Israel and you look on Google Maps, you can toggle a switch and there's a bomb shelter on every corner. How come there is no such thing in Gaza, then rather than saying, well, there is such thing, blah, blah, blah, because they've built some of the most impressive underground infrastructure in modern history considering what they had to work with. I mean, Noam and I went into tunnels that Hezbollah dug into Israel, and it was astonishing how.

how impressive they had done. And as they were telling us, they were done with hand tools. You could see how they were done, like little hand tools that you would get. A circle. Yeah, little circles on it that they would get at whatever the Beirut version of Home Depot was. And they made this, it only took them many, many years to do so. But they want to keep 20 hostages alive. They're going to keep them alive because they're underground. And notice that in Ukraine and Kiev, when the Russian missiles hit, the civilians go underground.

In Gaza, when Israeli bombs fall, the Hamas goes underground. Yeah. And again, that is such an obvious distinction. Well, that was my point before, that there's actually no historical context. You were talking about Operation Pied Piper in England. Well, that's when they send all the children. There should never this term, I think I agree with Michael, this term, necessary deaths, God forbid. There are no necessary deaths. But I think it is important to say to Israel's critics that while what has happened and unfolded in Gaza is a tragedy,

and while I am sure, as in any army in war, you can point to war crimes committed by Israeli soldiers or terrible mistakes, sloppy mistakes, which led to civilian deaths, Israel ought to be judged in comparison to other democracies facing existential crises. You know, one of the things I point out, you should read Ron Chernow's great biography of Grant if you haven't. You know how Grant won our greatest victory after Gettysburg, the Battle of Vicksburg. He starved Vicksburg. Now, I'm not saying that's a great thing, but I don't see American school students lining up to burn $50 bills because our hero, Ulysses Grant, buried up there on 120-whatever 5th Street, is being memorialized despite the fact that the North committed undoubted war crimes.

crimes in its righteous effort to destroy the Confederacy and rid the country of slavery. We killed at least 2,500 French civilians on the first day of D-Day. This is a sacred day in American history, June 6, 1944. I don't see people now saying, you know, our boys who went ashore on that morning were actually war criminals. There was just a Masters in the Air series featuring the heroism of the B-24 bombers going over German skies, they're dropping bombs. Those bombs are falling almost indiscriminately

on civilian targets. So if you agree that Israel believed and was fighting an existential war against a death cult, as Douglas Murray likes to put it correctly, bent on its annihilation, then you should judge Israel's actions and you should judge the results in Gaza by the standards of America, say, in the Second World War.

It is true, by the way, that people now do say that Hiroshima Nagasaki were wrong, but they never say, but they never say genocide. Thank you. But they never say they were genocide. They say they were wrong at worst, but I've never heard the word genocide applied to Hiroshima Nagasaki, even when spoken of today. You would say something? Yeah, so I think everyone would agree that Israel had a right to try to go get its hostages back, right? So the real question for the skeptic becomes, well, why don't they make a deal to get the hostages back and leave Hamas in power with, you know, if it's whatever it is, a hundred people getting killed a day or over whatever time span it is, this cost is too much, just end the war, leave Hamas and power. Here's the reason I don't agree with that.

If Israel were able to turn this into a frozen conflict, in other words, like North and South Korea, they hate each other, they, you know, they saber-rattle, but it's essentially been a frozen conflict since the 1950s, if Israel was able to engineer that situation with Hamas in Gaza, so that Hamas would be in power, they'd be able to say, some saber-rattling stuff, but they would have actually, in practice, basically given up on the immediate efforts to constantly attack Israel, then I would say Israel has a moral obligation to go for that. Sure. Because the human toll is too much, and you can actually have a frozen conflict on your hand where basically you'll have no deaths for the next hundred years, and eventually you'll get used to peace, and you never have to kill your sacred cows linguistically, but you'll, you know,

you'll tolerate each other. But here's the reason. Hamas is incapable, psychologically, given their ideology, of accepting a frozen conflict. The moment this war ends with Hamas still in power is the moment Hamas starts scheming to find the next chink in the armor, which they will find because it's always found. There's no such thing as perfect defense. That wall that they hacked had been updated with a billion dollars just in 2021. And it will happen again, and there will be a war again. So I would make to them the practical case that with an enemy like Hamas, and here's the crucial part, the reason we know Hamas is not a deterrable enemy is because not only did they do October 7th, but after this huge humanitarian costs they've suffered, they are still wanting to do it again. Not even this is enough to deter them. So we know that they're not, they're undeterred by any, this makes them unlike most typical war enemies. Like there's no ending this forever war until Hamas is gone. And they're replaced by the more modest. are at Palestinians. To Nome's point and to yours, too, about this, the people who have that thought are me. I mean, I have that thought quite frequently. I mean, I see these horrible

images, and you cannot help but be affected by them, because it kind of pulls you out of the politics of it when you see them, right? And you say, is there no way of making some deal and then having a forever operation wrath of God, which is a high cost, obviously, to Israel, very different than, you know, killing people in Paris who were the head of the PFLP or something. And I know that that's not logical, but I think it and I

want it to be true. Because I'm desperate for this to be true because I don't want this to keep going. And I don't want this keep going because I don't want people to die, not because I want Israel to be in this horrible situation. But to Brad's point, too, is that the historical ignorance that people have is why so many

people that are friends of mine, people that I consider good friends, because they see images. and they don't know anything about war. And I should, you know, make people do this. There is an incredible film that is very hard to get in the U.S., a guy named Sergei Luznitsa, who's a Ukrainian filmmaker. He's done these incredible historical films where there's no voiceover, no narrative,

and it's called a natural history of destruction. And it is about the bombing campaign over Germany. It's between, you know, it has people making bombs in the factory in the UK. It's just archival footage. I could pull out the footage from the bombing raids in 1943 of Hamburg and make people feel the exact same way because it is a gruesome, hideous thing to see. Considering, as, you know, as Brett points out,

there's almost no precision here. They're incendiary bombs designed to burn the city to the ground. And bomber Harris, who has, you know, fairly recently become a bit of a villain, and the same thing is true with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is that if you look at this stuff, disconnected from the Holocaust, disconnected from the actual goal of Nazism, you could say, fuck, man, you got to stop this. How do you end this? And how they ended that was doing the exact same thing until the Germans put their hands up very reluctantly after sending

15 years out, 15 year old, 65 year old people. But also... And Omar Bartov wrote an article about how just it was to destroy Germany. And we had to destroy Germany before we could You know, my father, my late father-in-law was a nine-year-old German child in Hamburg in 1943. Oh, dear. And so he died just a few years ago. I know a great deal about this and what happened. His father ended up being sent as a political prisoner to Bookenwald and being killed there.

Even the Nazi regime, which epitomizes evil, sent German civilians into the countryside, certainly German children into the countryside because they worried they might about future hamburgs. Hamas, by contrast, makes every effort to corral Palestinian civilians into areas where they believe Israeli bombs will fall. That's right.

So this is a level of cynicism in eastern civilians, and evil that, and it's hardly, it's difficult to even imagine this actually exceeds that of the Nazis who at the very least wanted to preserve you know, German, Aryan life even as they were

slaughtering so many others. I think I think some people, at least some say college undergraduates, even I actually, have a hard time wrapping my head around the evil nihilistic cynicism

that Hamas represents. So when people say this suffering is terrible, but it certainly is. But Hamas is responsible, and it only ends when Hamas ends. Because to Coleman's point, which is so important, a group that started four previous wars

and that continually announces at every stage in the war we intend to do October 7th again, is going to do it again. get. Now, this is the Maya Angelou quote that I cited in my column yesterday. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Yeah. So, no, just to say that the hideousness of this I take as a separate issue for the responsibility of who, because I understand a lot of people who don't really know Hamas from, you know, what the, the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, the PFLP, it's all the

exact same thing to them. They don't understand the genocidal ideology, which, you know, if you're me and you've been watching videos on memory for 25 years. You get this stuff. So I understand just a visceral response to it. But as far as responsibility, I know exactly it is responsible for this. Let me wrap two kind of things together. And Brett, I think you're the table expert on Israeli domestic politics. For years, two years already, we've been hearing about how Ben-Gavir and Smotrich and people like this are corrupting the Netanyahu government and forcing him into decisions that he likely wouldn't have otherwise made prolonging the war. We've heard all this stuff. I think you even have written a column on those lines. So my question is, if Netanyahu had

had a coalition with the moderates, how would the war have been fought differently? And if this Trump plan actually produces results, will it show that everyone who wanted to to end the war earlier was 100% wrong, that they would have just locked in this conflict and kicked the can down the road, and this may actually be vindication of Netanyahu keeping the war going. I think, look, I think Ben-Govir is a disgrace,

and I think there's no doubt that in his role, he has probably, well, let me say, I just said no doubt. So I think in his role, there is evidence that he is responsible for the mistreatment, Palestinian prisoners, which is a serious issue. But had, say, the coalition been not with Ben-Givir and Smotrich, but with some constellation of more moderate leaders, Benigants, for instance, or Yair Lapid, the war would have been fought pretty much precisely the same way.

I have no doubt that at the margins you might have seen tactical differences here and there, but what the West fails to understand is that in this war, at least, Bibi, who's not everyone's cup of tea, is not my cup of tea, has prosecuted the war more or less as any Israeli leader would, given the circumstances that he has faced. I think he's made some mistakes.

I also think he's made some astonishingly bold and correct decisions. We now take for granted that His Bola is not a power. We now take for granted that 50 years of the most heinous abuses that came from the Assad regime and killing on a scale, I don't think it meets the technical definition of a genocide, but genocidal scaled killing in Syria, that's over thanks to his. Israel, that the Iranian threat is at least vastly diminished. These were decisions that Netanyahu made. I suspect, by the way, that if Naftali Bennett, his predecessor, had been in power, it would have been the same deal. Now, you know, how exactly would Israel have gone into Gaza?

I think maybe they would have done better because I think there's a reasonable case to be made that the strategy for dealing with Gaza was bad, and it's why Netanyahu kept saying we're on the cusp of victory month after month after month, and it never actually arrived. So I think people just have this kind of misapprehension that BB for better or worse, or, you know, BB was the stumbling block towards a more successful resolution. And if this plan actually succeeds, it's a vindication. for Trump. But you're right. It would also be a vindication, at least for BB, at least for not calling a ceasefire when Israel was on the losing side of the war. And also that America may have

been the stumbling block because it's the international cooperation, the fact that every country is on board, which I think really has some us on the defensive here. And I can't, you know, BB wasn't able to do that, only the American president. I mean, if Joe Biden, instead of constantly telling Israelis, don't go into Rafah or don't use these bombs. It simply said at an earlier moment to the Qataris, you are going to produce a deal by Hamas, or I expect all of those people to end up in one of your charming prisons. And if you don't do that, we're withdrawing our forces from our airbase. Good luck. And we're going to tell our friends the Saudis what we really think of you. Why is it only now that the Qatari's are suddenly putting sufficient pressure on Hamas that they're somewhat more pliable?

That's a question worth asking. Why was the pressure only exerted on the Israeli side and so rarely, why was no pressure put on, by the way, Abdel Fattah Sisi in Egypt? Open your border. In any other war, when there was a war in Syria, Turkey and Jordan opened its borders to millions of desperate Syrian refugees. Egypt opened its border to Libyan refugees. This is what typically happens. But when it came to Gaza, those borders were sealed.

And this passes comment in the media that we allowed this to happen, especially given that the CC government is massively indebted to Western financial institutions. Can I say the other thing about the peace plan? So the ceasefire now crowd, I've always had some sympathy with them on the assumption that they're scrolling through TikTok every day seeing videos of maimed children. Some of these videos we know now are propaganda and fake, but many were real. And regardless of which avenue they saw, I can understand just on a human level, there's a war going on, you're seeing pictures of maimed children, you want the war to stop, right?

And then we'll figure it all out later, but let's stop the bleeding now, right? And what makes that sympathetic is because that kind of person does not care whether Hamas stays in power. That kind of person, on the margin, they should be happy to see Hamas go, but they really just want the war to stop. They're not pro Hamas. And I thought that it was wrong to just assume that that kind of a person was pro Hamas, unless they said other things that proved it. But then Trump releases a peace plan, which prohibits all the stuff that the far right in Israel want. Like there's, every Ghazan is going to have to, they have the right to stay in the strip. If nobody's getting kicked out, unless they want to leave, you can leave.

But nobody's getting kicked out. There's no ethnic cleansing. There's going to be no occupation. The war is going to end. The hostages are going to be returned. Massive investment. Massive investment. And yet, you still had some people saying, reject the deal.

Other people just curiously silent. Like all more blocks off. Go ahead. And the weirdest part about it is like, all the Arab countries are on board. Saudi's like, yeah, let's do it. Qatar is like, yeah, let's do it. Jordan, Egypt, but the liberals in America are like, I don't know about this deal, guys. The Guardian had an unsigned editorial, not explicitly saying reject the deal, but basically saying that.

But then what is that except? You know, from days before. It's insane. What is that except pro Hamas? Because the only, the only problem one could have, one could have two problems with this deal. One is that Trump's name is on the title. So if you're a partisan American, I guess, anything Trump does is bad. even though Anthony Blinken came out on a podcast and said, this is the exact deal Biden and I were preparing, right? And then the second problem you could have is that Hamas loses the war, right?

So that makes you just pro-Hamas. If that's what makes you uncomfortable about the deal, then you are on Hamas' side. Yep. All right. Should we end with, and by way, I appreciate you guys coming. I don't know, I don't know what I'm trying to say,

but I'm always very appreciated whenever Brett Stevens comes to, to join us. Like, I'm friends with Michael. I'm friends with Coleman. That's why I'm here. I'm not here for you. You're not friendly, but you're not part of my regular. I don't live in the city, so this is a real song. No, you know, I'm like, I hang out with these guys. You know, we're drinking buddies and all that stuff. I don't with you.

And, you know, you're a New York Times columnist. And I'm always like, ask Brett Stevens, maybe he'll want to come in. And then you always, you never let us down. And I, from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate it. And it's one. Well, I come for the free food. Yeah. Is there Il Milino tonight?

Chris is a regular seller menu. And it's one of the aspects of my own personal luckiness in life at the stage of my life that I'm able to speak to people like you guys. So anyway, I really mean that, Brett. Are you going to Dubai for the dialogue thing? Oh, I'm not supposed to talk. We'll cut that out. Steve, make a note, I got to cut that out.

Anyway, all right. Before we go home, how serious is this Candice always? right wing thing going on i i see it on twitter it scares the shit out of me on twitter i see the numbers of followers it's in the millions on the other hand i speak to some people who aren't on twitter and they have no idea about it so i don't know how to gauge it yeah i felt like there's a lot of people who could be considered like jenga blocks in this who are refusing to remove themselves out and allow or to hasten the toppling of this edifice, including including Megan Kelly, but even I hear Ben Shapiro kind of like, you know, I don't see

him taking the full-throated position. Well, on Candice, he can't. I don't think he can't legally. No, legally he can't. I assume. It was part of the separation agreement. Yes, on Candice. But he's also not blasting the people who are looking the other way on all this.

He goes after Tucker. Does he? But he's still going to appear. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about Ben Shapiro. But clearly, Megan, I mean, she could have really brought about a full-blown civil war within MAGA if she had just said, saying that Christian babies disappear on Passover because Jews kill them is too far. And I don't want to be part of any movement that makes room for somebody who says things like that.

As she said about Farrakhan, but she wouldn't do that. And she's not the only one. So is this as serious as I feel it is? Well, I'll say I can't, I won't reveal private conversations. I think I've said to you in private that I have a defense of Megan on this front. I mean, we all handle these things differently. I know her position on this. And I do not think she's a Candace Owens sympathizer.

Nor an anti-Semite. I don't think that at all. Of course not. No, no. But do I think it's serious? Yeah. When anybody, anybody who has this many millions of followers, whether that's this psychopath Ian Carroll, who has been elevated by Rogan, I think Rogan has a responsibility when you have somebody like that out of nowhere, elevating people out of nowhere. There's not like some academic who's gone crazy over time like Finkelstein or something.

I think he was probably already crazy. But can I just stop? Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Megan's just the latest one. Prior to that, I was blasting Rogan. I even at one point got into it with Constantine kissing at one time. I mean, he's come around because he was kind of holding his fire on people. This goes back a couple of years already with me.

So, yeah, she's just the latest one that's gotten under my skin. Yeah, friendships are always hard on these things. But I will say that I think it is very serious. Particularly because the numbers that you see, it's not as if there's a few people here and there. And when you look at Candace Owens, and unfortunately I've been talking about this a bit, so I have to watch her stuff.

I've been, this is only recently that I've actually started watching her stuff. And it's absolutely crackers. It's completely been on it. It's not like on the edges. here. It is full on bananas conspiracy theory. TPSA was involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk and they were the Israeli cutouts and just total crazy stuff. And as you point out, it's all the classic anti-Semitic stuff. She's engaged in blood libel. I mean, it's not somebody who knows who Mendel Bellis is. I don't think she knows what a blood

libel is in that sense, but she repeats all this stuff because she gets a lot of her stuff. You can trace it back to some of these anti-Semitic sources. So I think it's incredibly important to push back on it because it is so popular. The thing that really worries me is that there was something the other day where she put at this screenshot from Charlie Kirk, and there were some people that I know that told me I thought was very credible of where did this come from? Where did this? Because it turned out to be a real screenshot, shorn of context.

But somebody who I know who said, I'm pretty sure it came from so-and-so in the administration. That somebody close, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Green, these people, they're in governments, all right? We've always had these. If you look back to the 1930s, something I'm writing about now, you have some of these America Firsters who are like legitimate anti-Semites. It's not new in American government. But the fact that you have people within this administration,

and there is that fight within the administration, of getting rid of the neocons and these purges, and who's going to win this struggle between the kind of Buchananite conservatives, and they talk about neoconservatives, that's not a real thing within the Trump administration, but people that are more sort of, I would say more mainstream when it comes to American foreign policy, particularly when it comes to Israel.

I mean, you and I were in Israel, and we went up into the Golan, and there was a little village named after Donald Trump. And it's like, this is a man who's very popular in Israel, and that drives the Tucker types crazy. And I think that, so it's important in the sense that I think there's that internal struggle within conservatism, but there's some pretty sinister characters

who have some very, very sinister. ideas. And in the past, you had the Josso Brands of the world, you had the Pap Buchanans and Buckley's purge of them, and I wish there were a Buckley-like character to purge them, and had that sort of moral authority. But keeping in

mind, Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith, who you recently debated, a fantastic debate, you should listen to it, said that William F. Buckley was one of the great evils of the 20th century when it came to conservatism. And Tucker said, I totally

agree. And I was trying to figure out exactly why that was. Because he purged the Semites. Correct. And that's why, right? It was the Buchanan stuff that they objected to. And I was like, oh, you know, they mentioned CIA. He was in the CIA for like an afternoon in before he found a National Review in the early 50s. So what is it? It's clearly that. And those people really, really want to get a hold of the party. So I just think, do they have a chance of doing so? I don't think so at the moment, but I don't want to take that risk. You know, I think I think it's a truism. Well, it's not a true. because I think I coined this phrase, that in a healthy democracy, the fringe has bent to the center,

and then an unhealthy one, the center bends to the fringe. I think that's very good. And I think what really worries me is, well, two things. The center is constantly bending to the fringe, which is Megan, Kelly, vis-a-vis Candice Owens,

and Tucker. But the other thing is, it used to be the case that each side, at least tried to police its worst elements. George H.W. Bush campaigned against David Duke

when he won a surprise victory in Louisiana Republican gubernatorial primary. The Democrats were always aware they wanted to keep the Farrakhanites out of the party. There was a sense that a certain kind of political hygiene

had to be maintained. And inevitably, there'd always be a craft pot, you know, who made it into Congress or a state legislator or something like that. The Dana Roerbuckers of the world. Right. But on the whole, party leaders made the effort to say, this guy's not on. And it's happening on both sides.

Kathy Hochel's objections to Zoran, her, quote, differences of opinion with Zoran Mamdani didn't prevent her from endorsing him. And I consider that every bit of. is disgraceful, but at the same time, the right is not policing itself. And that is, that, that's, when I kind of stay awake at night thinking, you know, are we or are we not screwed, that's what makes me think we're really screwed because we are each side moving towards, the center of gravity has moved like that. And everyone else, because they're attracted to power, are moving in those directions.

think that is? Why is there no Buckley now and why is there no one conducting that hygiene experiment with the crazier people in the party? Well, I mean, that's a whole other podcast. Yeah, I know. Is part of it, just occurs to me, is part of it because so many of the never-Trumpers who left the party were the sober minds and kind of left the party with rudderless to these less rigorous? And in some cases, fully left the party. I mean, the Bill crystals of the world who say I'm a Democrat now. Yeah. I'm of no party, but I'm no longer think of myself as a Republican,

even though if you kind of went down the list of my positions from on a whole number of subjects, you would think I'm classically Republican. I'm a Reaganite Republican, which makes me unsuitable for the Trump party, but I'm certainly no Democrat. Is it because these loons have so much power now from social media? Millions of people, you can't ignore them? I think, look, I think it's in some ways a technological revolution that has amped up the voices of previously marginal figures. I think there's a loss of kind of the authority of the center, in part because the center is seen to some extent correctly as having failed America.

In some part, it's because charisma rarely resides within moderate-minded people. A charismatic person almost always takes more extreme positions. And that's just kind of the nature of human society that charismatic leaders are reactionaries or revolutionaries, not, you know, kind of middle of the rotors. Yeah, one final point in this is you cannot under-emphasize or over-emphasize enough technology. When you wanted to get the Ron Paul survival report,

you first had to know about it, and you had to send a self-address stamped envelope to some small town in Texas. And you got that mimeograph sheet once every two months. Now, YouTube, my YouTube anyway, maybe it's because I, like, research this stuff. It really favors that stuff. I open it in this just endless numbers of Ron Paul survival reports

and people out there that are... Look, Americans, we're all conspiratorial people. I mean, the middle has failed, the number of people who told me they don't think, that any of my arguments about tariffs, for instance, are convincing when I say there's barely an economist that you can find that thinks this is a net positive and they say, well, look at COVID, we don't believe experts.

They didn't know about masking. How the hell are they going to know about the economy? And that total collapse of any belief in any sort of expertise brings people to this weirdo Ian Carroll who, God knows where he comes from, but he's in his basement telling you the answer to everything. Yeah, there's one aspect of it.

I just can't process, maybe just an outlier event in terms of what's possible, you know, a monkey to typewriter event. But Alex Jones, who abused those parents in Newtown, we all know it. Yeah. This is the most vanilla case of an evil act. You'd think there'd be zero constituency in any political party to want to bring this guy back into the form. And yet Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and even J.D. Vance seemed to have said about reviving resuscitating this guy's reputation and and it's how could that possibly be happening while this

guy is not only just did this evil things he's all so crazy and then Tucker Carlson says that he's a divinely inspired prophet. Did he prophesize 9-11? They prophesize 9-11 and other things. You know, we've seen these people throughout history. They're prophets. The supernatural is real. This is what he says about Alex Jones. And then he sits one seat away from J.D. Vance at the Republican convention. If it was a movie script, I'd say no one's going to believe that. It doesn't, it doesn't compute. We are, we are much, we are far more gone than we realized.

Do you see JFK is an exception to the moderate people don't have charisma or the most charisma? RFK, you mean, yeah. Well, no, JFK, I'm going. JFK, yeah. Oh, oh. I mean, it is true. And Reagan was a charismatic. figure who, you know, I will shock some people listening to this. Although I guess the people

listening to this will not be shocked. Reagan was a charismatic centrist. Lincoln in his way was a charismatic centrist. But on the whole, it's easier to be charismatic when the things you say are shocking. And I think that has been amplified by the algorithms of social media. I think it has been accelerated by the collapse of belief at any form of authority. And I think it's been, I'm now looking for my verbs, but facilitated massively by the basically three generations of really bad education in this country that have left so many Americans intellectually incapable of noticing a, a logical fallacy, of seeing, of understanding the historical illiteracy of so many arguments.

So these things have finally all come together. I remember in 1984 when I was a kid or so, there was some big, important report about how bad the educational system in America had become. Now, by comparison to today, the American public school system in 1984 was a paragon of intellectual excellence. Yeah. And so we're producing these kids. who are literally have never finished an entire book by the time they graduate high school. There's social promotion from start to finish.

I was reading today in the New York Times, their social promotion and ramping grade inflation at Harvard University. Again, I'm not totally surprised, but it's endemic, it's ubiquitous. And so why should we be surprised when people say have these conversations about the evils of settler colonialism,

and are given a two-bit argument, which sounds halfway persuasive, and they believe it. And they believe it with fervor, because we have substituted logic with fervor. We've substituted evidence with fervor. So here we are. Hey, Stephen, bring up that short clip, not the one that says Brett, the other one. Brother, can ask you, do you get stage fright? Never. I mean, I don't want to say never, but no, why do you ask?

Because I see it in you and you and you. You guys are just unflappable. You're never... Totally untrue for me. Untrue for you. You get stage fright. If I do Bill Mars show, if there's an audience, particularly when you know that what they do is pick out a wrestling villain.

So that always gives me a stage fright because, you know, live to tape, a bunch of people that are going to yell at you and boo you and stuff. And I've been on the other side of that. It gives me a bit of stage fright, yeah. I like it. It's better when you're booed. If you're not booed, who are you? I mean, the way stress degrades my...

Because I know when I just sit down to write an email, I'm fluent and words come to me and names come to me. Like, there's literally no problem. When I'm, you know, when the lights go on, sometimes I'm at Ruge. Yeah. And sometimes, oh, yeah. I don't know. You, you're. I get mild stage fright, but I usually, it makes me lock in and focus harder.

And then the, then it goes away. Not with music. You never got stage. Yeah, I would get stage fright with music too. But when I'm arguing, it disappears. So I'm kidding to an argument. Interesting. But a calm discussion.

So anyway, this is just before we go, this is an, you know, oldie but goody. But I think it really does, it's Israel, I mean, we all agree. The Jewish people and Israel have failed for years, and especially in the last two years, to make the most elementary logical points of why their cause is just and, you know, as the jingo blocks. So I just, somebody sent this to me, our friend Andy sent this to me. And I said, this is actually short. It really is, it's crazy to consider that you. have done more to explain

the Israeli side of this than the whole country of Israel. That's when I realized we're absolutely fucked. Actually, I appreciate that because I think I have done a lot. But go ahead. Start it from the beginning. Make sure it's not a thing. It's very short.

There is an Arab people that has 20 independent countries with thousands and thousands and thousands of kilometers, square kilometers. and we have about 1% of that entire territory. If Hussein hadn't gone to war in 67, when he shouldn't have, when Eshkel asked him not to go to war,

the West Bank would have been in his hands. If Assad hadn't gone to war, the Golan Heights would have been in Syria. If Nasser hadn't gone to war in 67, the Sinai Desert, and the Gaza Strip were in his hands where were the Palestinians and why do people good people tell us

if you had only gone back to the 67 borders after the war then I always ask a foolish question but I haven't heard one single wise answer if the 67 borders are so holy

why was there a war in 67 I like how she's smoking a cigarette the best of you smoking that's the best part of Yeah, but it's as simple as that in a way, right? Yeah. Sometimes a simple argument is, you repeat this. There's a problem, by the way, in the text, when they mention Hussein, they don't mean the Iraqi.

Yeah, that's right. They mean Jordanian, King Hussein. Oh, I didn't. Yes, King of Satan, Jordan. All right, anyway, unless anybody has any last words of wisdom, pearls of wisdom, feelings that you want to express. No, I just, Brett said, I think it's worse than we suspect, and I fear that he's right. That's what I'm walking away from this, Ron. just particularly talking about all these crazy people.

Alia Kazan was right. I mean, there's a million lonesome roads now who are scamming their public and filling them with a lot of horrible, disgusting, harmful information that isn't true. And it's our job to push back against that, but it's a thankless job.

Yeah, I had prepared the clip. When Brett came on our show like October 9th or whatever, something very close to that, and I had said to him at that thing, and I had the clip, but I'll just tag it on at the end here, that I felt that this was going to be a war on the Jewish people in the world. I didn't see how, I didn't expect the right wing.

I didn't see that coming, I mean, as it did. But I did see it coming that my kids. The only argument that might help the Jews, but it's a long shot that this argument succeeds. Is that every society that has become supersaturated by anti-Semitism, has suffered even more than the Jews. Eventually. Eventually.

The Arab world kicked out its Jews, and the Arab world is not doing well. Europe lost most of its Jews, and Europe is in a state of crisis in one country after another. I think one of the reasons why the United States did well wasn't simply because it was a good home for Jews, but any good home for the Jews would be a good home for so many others. And as this wave of anti-Semitism sweeps the United States, it is that telling symptom of some really bad cancer in our social fabric. Why do you think it's a long shot? Because people have a hard time thinking historically.

people as common I hear all the time from people who are younger than I am is something to the effect well that happened long before I was born so most things happen before you were born it doesn't acquit you from the responsibility of of knowing them but it's hard to make look I've I'm in the business of persuasion and it is a kind of a depressing time to be in this business because I know that people who are disposed to agree with me will feel their views are being reinforced and people who are disposed to hate me will just dismiss me. But what I think is becoming more difficult is reaching the reasonable person on just the other side of the argument and pulling them an inch or two in your direction. And I don't know why that's happened. Maybe the

reasons we mentioned previously, but I do sense that it's happening. I think we have cultivated instead of cultivating kind of like habits of an open mind, we have instead cultivated the habits of closed-mindedness. And that's an astounding fact in the land of the free, and in an era where every technology allows you to have an argument, and where everyone's screaming, but nobody's listening and that's that's i think our civilizational challenge that's somebody who writes a column by that's like the end of a column that's exactly

perfect that's a column this brain right there all right thank you very much everybody good night thank you know hey guys Steve we just got to kind of that one little thing where I said something about the dialogue that's so great you know we should hang first rule of dialogue you're not in the city

no I live in Westchester in Westchester but you're down a lot come down a lot let's yeah he's You need to come hang out with us. Yeah, we, it's... You guys actually do that? We do, we do.

Pretty regularly. I'll start emailing you if you want. You know, by the way, Coleman, I did a Zoom call with him for my little magazine, Sapir. And, like, your numbers were... Oh, his numbers are crazy. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, when you're sinking, you get Coleman on.

He raises him a little bit. Coleman, I think I have your number, but what is there at 9-7-8? I think he