The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Interview With Darryl Cooper (AKA Martyrmade) Part2 - Political Philosophy, Fascism, Tucker and More)

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Second of two parts. Intro is repeated on both

There he is. Hey, man. How's it going? I'm okay. Oh, wow. It's two minutes late. I was like, oh, shit. Is he not going to come? Is this...

Oh, I'm so happy you came. Oh, yeah, of course. How are you doing? I'm still a little bit sick. So if I have to cough every once in a while try to remember to hit the mute button no i can cut it out too because um i want to take it slow and um so if there's any like pauses and stuff like that i won't cut out anything anybody says but i'll i'll cut out like you know dude that's a pretty sick library you got back there oh that's that's a that's a green

screen oh okay i would have lied about i would have totally lied about it if I were you. But I do have a bookshelf pretty much like that in my living room, except that the books had been handed down, the books my father had. I didn't really become a reader or anything academic until my my 50s my whole early life i was i was a smart guy my whole early life was just guitar and you know trying to get women and um i was just i never could connect with my academic side until uh much much later in life which is well i think that's uh that's probably the path that a healthy person should follow. Yeah. Will you, will you always like this?

Yeah. Like I went to something like 35, maybe 40 different schools from kindergarten to 12th grade. So I was just moving sometimes every two, three months, just all the time. And so with the change of environment, I just ended up being kind of a bookworm. And that would be my continuity from place to place, you know. And, yeah, I've always been that way. You were a military brat? No, just single mother who had some problems. And, you know, we were poor, moving around, kind of shacking up with whoever we could for a few months until we got evicted and moving on again. Well, that's interesting. I mean, I didn't know that. And that's probably it's probably plays a part.

It must play a part in the way you see the world. Right. And also the emotional intelligence. So I'm probably going to talk a little too much at the top, but bear with me because I just think it's important. And also I want to be able to cut in a couple of not things like evidence of the prosecution, but like things of yours that you've said that I've liked and that have moved me that I've seen of yours. So I might refer to some of them, but I might then later go and replace them with an action in your own words, if that's okay. All right. Yeah, and I don't mind if you got to ask some hard questions, man.

I get it. I had this plan way back, this was like 2016, 2017, when I was first starting a podcast. And I had this great idea with all the political polarization and stuff going on. I was going to go out and I was going to, I knew these people so I could go do it, but I was going to interview a white nationalist, a black nationalist,

an Israeli settler, and a Palestinian activist, like a hardcore Palestinian activist, and just talk to him, right? And so the first one I was able to set up was the white nationalist dude. And he was like the most polite nice friendly person ever and i'm just having an agreeable personality that when somebody's nice to me i'm just nice to them and the whole thing came off like i was just his best friend and everything and people still give me shit about it so like uh i understand like you gotta you know i don't i don't mind you to do what you gotta do well okay um yeah I like you're kind of putting yourself as the, as the, you're the,

you're the white nationalist in that analogy, but I don't think you mean to do that. I think to some of your, to some of your viewers. Yeah. Yeah. The grief that I'll take. That's how they're going to see it. Yeah. And, um, um, I wanted to ask you about this. Greg Johnson says that's his name, Greg Johnson, right? Yeah. Oh, you know about that okay yeah yeah exactly but uh that was a lesson man that was like when i learned that interviewing is not just like oh you sit down and chat with somebody like it's

an actual skill that you have to develop and acquire yeah that was a hard lesson but yeah well i'm gonna ask you um i'm gonna ask you listen i'm not gonna i'm not i'm gonna ask you the questions that i've really spent a lot of time wondering about and i'm not well let me just start so i'm gonna start here by um reading something and maybe i'll actually get the actual version of you saying it that you said which i think nicely um uh sets up the interview with something that i uh listened to yesterday you said the following many of us have had experiences reading novels where we think that the author must have been writing this as a personal letter to us. It gets to us so well or some aspect of us. It may even be something that we didn't see or understand about ourselves before or something

we vaguely felt but hadn't been able to articulate well. Nietzsche had no problem articulating himself, but even the most clear thinking and articulate among us are often unclear and inarticulate when thinking or talking about ourselves, at least when we're trying to be honest. A good novel can give us deep insight into ourselves precisely because we're often not honest with ourselves about ourselves. Early in Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky writes that, quote, only in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself. And every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. But let me get over to Dostoevsky because, Jewish Question, he starts out by saying something which I would have also attributed to you should you have believed these things that I'm asking you about.

He says, it goes without saying that everything required by humaneness and justice, everything called for by compassion and the Christian law must be done for the Jews. Meaning that despite what God may feel about them, this way I took it, our obligation as Christians is to still treat them with humanity and treat them with Christian values. I'm curious what gave you the impression that you just mentioned them. Despite the fact that God feels this way about them or something, we as Christians, nevertheless, where'd you get the first part of that? I don't...

Oh, because, well, there's much more that he says here. Okay, so that's what I was wondering. So he says things like, thus it is not for nothing that over there the Jews are reigning everywhere over stock exchange. It is not for nothing that over there the Jews are reigning everywhere, over stock exchange. It is not for nothing that they control capital, that they are the masters of credit. And it is not for nothing, I repeat, that they are also the masters of international politics. And what is going to happen in the future is known to the Jews themselves, their reign, their complete reign is approaching. We are approaching the complete triumph of ideas before which sentiments of humanity, thirst for truth, Christian and national feelings, and even those of national

dignity must bow. On the contrary, we are approaching materialism, a blind carnivorous craving for personal material wealth, a craving for personal accumulation of money by any means. This is all that has been proclaimed as the supreme aim, as a reasonable thing, as liberty, in lieu of the Christian idea of salvation, only through the closest moral and brotherly fellowship of man. And he goes on, ask the native population in our border regions, what is propelling the Jew? Has been propelling him for centuries. You will receive a unanimous answer, mercilessness. Now, mercilessness has been something you already mentioned as something that the Jews didn't have a concept of mercy. And Dostoevsky talks about mercy.

At least, I think, outside the group. Certainly they have a well-developed concept of mercy. The last thing here, he has been prompted for so many centuries only by pitilessness for us, only by thirst for our sweat and blood." So he's laying a lot on the Jews there and so the natural reaction to that was, get rid of the Jews, kill the Jews, like how can you tolerate a people that believe all this stuff? And then he says, it goes without saying, everything required by humaneness and justice,

everything called for by compassion to Christian law must be done to the Jews. Now, you know, is he talking out of both sides of his mouth? I mean, is he just giving a disclaimer? I think what he's saying, and this is so hard to do, is, you know, he's trying to talk about a political problem, but then calling on people in their individual lives to treat others with kindness and respect you know and like um and that's a that's a tough thing that's a it's a hard line

to walk especially I mean he doesn't even walk it that well in some of those passages that you put that you just that you just mentioned so I mean I do think that it's like it's important to understand too like do you think he was an anti-semite uh i mean look if you took that guy who wrote those things and brought him up to 2024 america then yeah of course he's like a raging anti-semite right but i do think you have to put people in the context of their time and so that the language they use and the way they frame and talk about things a lot of times is not uh you know it this isn't a way of excusing people for past sins, you know, in different periods. But I'm very much like of the feeling that, you know, a person's, when you're looking at history, like a person's faults are often common with his era and his time and his people. And his virtues, you know, you should his people and uh his virtues you know you should

let him have to himself you know and um and so yeah look the thing is you go back to that period of time i assume i think he was probably writing that in the 1870s i can't remember but i think i'm pretty i think it was i mean there was a there was a lot going on, you know, socially and politically. You know, Jewish emancipation was was was just it was causing a confrontation similar, not not in detail, but like, you know, similar to how the great migration of blacks out of the south, like into the northern and western cities, like just the confrontation of these two different peoples who had like preconceptions about each other and had different ideas of uh you know of just just different customs and stuff it's going to create conflict and tension and the you know western russia was was just full of that at the time and they were having to deal with very real problems right like but daryl you know you had the jews who were confined to the pale of the Palis settlement. Jewish emancipation happens, and they go into the cities that they'd previously been

kept out of. And the Jews were, you know, these are people who were literate, numerate, had been for generations, were experienced in business, because it's not like they could own land and be a farmer or something like that. And so they had all this experience. They had networks that already existed that often went across borders, all these kind of things. And they were going into the cities and just out competing everybody. And like it was creating a lot of resentment among the lower classes, like the people who wanted to be the Russian middle class. And they're getting just completely out competed by, you know, the Jews who were coming, who were flooding into these cities. And if you're somebody who's trying to run an empire, or Dostoevsky's kind of writing on behalf of one, like, you know, at that point, you have to look at that and say, you know, they don't look at it just, again, this is an empire,

multi-ethnic empire, they don't just look at it in terms of you know civil rights or individual liberty or or whatever it is they say how are we going to manage these populations in a way that keeps conflict down and so he you know again this isn't a way of excusing it and saying you know in his time he wasn't an anti-salad or something it's just a way of saying it like it's hard for us to like understand where somebody like that's coming from at the time you know what i mean daryl i i i do understand and have often let me just close my door i do understand and i and i've often made time and place arguments to people on every subject there is because i believe them i've even made time and place arguments to forgiving us not forgiving to um to put in context to uh fundamentalist muslim anti-semitism today because yeah it's in 2024 but in their time and place it's no different than what you're describing

in in for dostoevsky but nevertheless you know that is a in the end, a dangerous argument to make. It is. What you're saying is that there could be no anti-Semitism in 19th century Russia, and therefore what he's saying is not anti-Semitism, and the pogroms that it led to were not anti-Semitic and that all judgment of people starts today at noon and everything else is a result of time and place. And it can't be. The guy hated the Jews at a time when hating the Jews was acceptable and he actually took a pen to paper to try to persuade people that the Jews were a terrible threat, that we controlled the future, we were pulling the strings on everything. And, and this is very important because this will get us into the Nazis,

this is not a dummy we're talking about. This is perhaps one of the top 10 most insightful people that's ever walked the face of the earth. in his within his time and place because he wasn't of his time and place mentally he was a superhuman when it came to insight he saw insight around corners and he had this huge blind spot when it came to the jews and that's best explained by anti-anti-semitism like like how else would a guy yeah i mean i don't i like yeah like i mean i don't uh you know anti-semitism like like how else would a guy yeah i mean i don't i like yeah like i mean i don't uh you know anti-semitism was a word that was used back then as like a you know it was a political and intellectual movement people would call themselves that you know it wasn't uh so yeah uh in in that sense but i don't know i guess like to me the interesting thing is like the like the dynamic that you're kind of demonstrating by reading those quotes and talking about the time period.

We could call it anti-Semitism and that's fine. I don't I don't know. I don't have a particular attachment to the word. Like to me, there was conflict. There was social conflict between the popular like as it as I want to tell you what the attachment to the populace, like as nationalists feeling rose throughout Europe. I'm gonna tell you what the attachment to the word is, because what he's saying there is the same thing, I mean, like when I say the same thing, I mean the same thing, almost like it's a paraphrase of what's in the Hamas charter,

what white nationalists say today, and we Jews are still dealing with these accusations. And to us, it's the same thing and it hasn't changed. So when is the line, okay, no, as of this date, there's no, we're not contorting ourselves to try to put context on what you're saying. What you're saying is unacceptable. It's hatred, it's anti-Semitism, and you are evil. You are evil. Now, you want to say Dostoevsky was not evil? I do struggle with it. Thomas Jefferson had slaves. Again, Thomas

Jefferson was not some knucklehead used to molest his race. Thomas Jefferson had slaves. Again, Thomas Jefferson was not some knuckleheads used to molest race. Thomas Jefferson was the guy who wrote beautifully about how slavery was wrong, right? So it's like, you can't, it's hard to give Jefferson a pass when he's even written about how slavery degraded the slave master and the slave master's psychology. You know, it's like, if you didn't know he owned slaves, you would read Thomas Jefferson and you'd be sure this guy was an abolitionist, right? This guy was a, so you can't really give him a pass. And yet somehow, of course, what we are seeing is his time and place.

So I don't, I can't, I don't want to be simplistic about it, but he's your favorite philosopher. So I'll just, let me just, let me just entertain the idea that maybe your, your your your attachment to him as the most important thing in your life is causing you to be a little easy on him here. Yeah. Yeah, that's entirely possible. I don't discount that at all. No doubt about it. But I do think I extend the same sort of maybe excessive, I don't know, but empathy to other people as well who, you know, who I don't feel that way about. There was this, actually, there's two things I want to say that will kind of illustrate where I'm coming from. You know, one has to do just with my background, right? Like I grew up, I grew up in the gutter. I grew up in California ghettos, Southside Stockton, South LA, uh, I grew up in the gutter. I grew up in, in California ghettos, South side, Stockton, South LA. Just, um, I grew up in places, um, where there's a lot of ugliness going,

going on around me, you know, a lot of violence, a lot of just, you know, social decay, all the, all the fallout of social decay in America. And I grew up with a lot of people who I knew well, good friends of mine, people I, I spent years, you know, just as friends, people who were just as smart as me. They were no less good hearted than me when they were 10 years old. They were no weaker than me. They didn't have any they didn't have any weaknesses that I didn't have. I don't have any particular strengths that they didn't have. Right.

They're just as they were just as good as me. And most of them ended up as drug addicts in prison, dead. And not only that, but the type of person that you would look at and you'd say, that's a that's fuck that person. Like, that's a bad person, you know, and they are they did become that. But I look at those situations and I just say like. That, you know, again, it wasn't my virtues or their particular deficiencies that made us different. It was the fact that like at this particular critical moment. You know, this cop decided not to arrest me after I got in a fight and let me go. Whereas if he had arrested me and like then the consequences of that would have played out. Who knows where I end

up? Or I had a coach, a wrestling coach who took an interest in me at like a critical period where I really needed somebody to do that. And they didn't have that, you know, just little things that happened. And I could be that guy and he could be me. And I really have always believed that. Right. So and maybe you can trace back even a little bit further like my father i don't know my father i never met he was out of the picture when i was two but he came out with his family or his parents came out with the okies during the dust bowl period right and people who were from california know that like it wasn't all giant john steinbeck stories and stuff like the okies were a holy terror. Everybody hated them. There was a

lot of drunkenness, fighting, eventually drug use, crime, all these kind of things. Not, again, to tar a whole population of people. It was my father's side of people, but a lot of social problems. My father was a criminal. He was in prison most of my life. He's dead now, but I never knew him. He was a bad guy you know he hurt people he robbed people he was a bad person um and he in like again he was not a part of my life at all and people have asked they used to ask me in the past like if i had any anger toward the man and i always told him the same thing like first of all like i don't i don't know him he never did anything like directly to hurt me, but like, I had heard stories from my mom and from my grandparents and stuff

of him being 11 years old and being taught to shoot heroin by his uncle and being 13 years old. And his mom throws him out of the house for like an entire six months. And he's sleeping on a park bench at 13 years old. And so I'm just like, I'm not going to judge that guy. Like, what do I know about any of that? You know what I mean? And so like, that's my, maybe the source of my general disposition when it comes to those kinds of things. Right. Um, well, go ahead. Yeah. Well, and so the second thing, and this is less personal, but like, there was this, there was this incident that's always stuck with me. I read about a while ago, I think in a Steven Pinker book, it was in the 1600s and it was in Germany and one of their periodic witch

hunts was going on. And there was this like a governor of a given area or something. And these two Jesuit priests went and told them there's this witch and we're going to, we're going to execute this witch. And we have these other warrants to execute or whatever. Well, this, this governor gets a little like, okay, well, how do you know she did it? Well, because this person, he's like, take me down to her. So they go down to the torture chamber, and you have these two priests there, and he looks at, you know, she's there, and she's tied up to the rack,

and he says, executioner, you know, get over here. Give her a few more turns on the rack and stretch her out some more, like make it really hurt. And so he does it. And then like as she's screaming, he says, these two priests over here, what do you know about them? They're in on this too, aren't they? And so, of course, she screams out, yes, yes, like awful, like they're the worst. They, you know, copulate with demons and have black masses and da-da- da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da that governor clearly had a strong moral sense that was uncommon at his time. And yet he called the executioner over and had him turn the wheel a few more times on this poor woman, right? That's one. But then these priests actually became like activists. Like they were, they wrote a book and

then went around talking to governors and other priests and stuff. And we're like the main force that put an end to witch hunts in Germany, right? So clearly these were men who, like, once they were presented with this, the immorality and injustice of what they were doing, they changed. These are good men who had been going around for the last however long rounding up innocent women, torturing and killing them, you know? But how can you say that those are not good men? You know, of course, like they demonstrated that when they when their eyes were open. And so it's not that you say the things that they did before that were were therefore good or that they're not to be blamed for those things. It's just to say that, like, you know, we're all thrown into this world. And by the time we open our eyes and shake the

cobwebs out and realize, like, oh, I'm a person who has to make my own decisions and find my way in this place. There's so much momentum built up behind you by that point that like your range of options is usually very, very narrow, like much narrower than we think. And it would take, it would like, you know, there's a reason we revere saints there's a reason we revere people who step wildly outside the current of their time to point out things that other people are not seeing you know and um and that's the standard that i think we we shouldn't hold people back into let me say where i agree with you and then get to you know a few other things um i i i made a similar point to you just about your last point i made a similar point to people about like they'll find some quote from abraham lincoln that by today's standards would be considered racist

yeah and i say look the great men in history were able to see a little bit above the heads of everyone else around them. That's what made them great. They stood on tippy toes and that's the progress. And that progress was what made them great. If you're going to say that there was no great man in history, unless they could intuit everything that we've come to decide today, then there were no great men in history. So, yeah, Lincoln has to be defined as great by how he saw above the heads of the people around him, not how he saw below our heads, because it's not realistic. That's how progress is made. But, Daryaryl you know listen um i'm against the death penalty because uh i believe that uh innocent people get convicted a lot and um it's just not worth it and um you've kind of been on trial of to to uh prove your character in certain quarters. And in the law, there's the concept

of certain evidence being prejudicial. And I've been struggling to figure out what's going on. And I would fault you, like honestly, I would fault you for not being clearer, but I could draw the through line between talking about Matthew and talking about the Jews in a leprous temple, the praise of Dostoevsky, which you know that he said these things about the Jews controlling international politics

and the masters of what will happen in the future to align to what you had said about Churchill and the Jews, the Jewish financiers installing him because they wanted the war. I mean, the, the, the, the themes that you are saying now are, if not anti-Semitic, um, you know, but there would be a raging anti-Semite today. Um, these themes are evoked in some of the positions that you've taken and not only by bad faith actors. They're kind of the plain meaning of things that you've taken and not only by bad faith actors they're kind of the plain meaning of things that you've said and then you you have retracted and and and clarified but you being so smart and so sophisticated it became very very hard for me

to to give you the full benefit of the doubt and i I think one tweet, I said, what is he up to here? And then, so let me just lay it out. Now, to be clear, you've written, sorry to disappoint readers on both the right and left, I am not a fascist. I distrust all mass movements, mobs, whether they march under the banner of fascism, communism, mass democracy, or whatever. But then you've also written, fascism is when enough normal people realize they can't take another step back without falling off a cliff. And fascism is just an autoimmune overreaction to the flesh-eating bacteria called the left. Then, you know, when there was this LGBT send up of the Last Supper, you tweeted, you took the tweet down, you tweeted a piece of a picture of the Nazi occupation in

Paris, juxtaposed to that LGBT trans Last Supper. And you said that the Nazi occupation of Paris was infinitely preferable in every way. You deleted it, but then like a month or two later, you kind of revisited the sentiment when somebody at Cambridge claimed that Jesus might have had a trans body. You wrote, must not post Hitler meme. That was more of a joke about the pre-Membership thing. I know, I know. But it was kind of like, it's kind of like toying the fact like, yeah, I took down this other tweet. I'll lay it all out um you have to your credit you've complained that nick fuentes is an anti-semite that jake shields is an anti-semite uh you've

you've disparaged uh people sitting down um uh with david duke you today earlier on you talked about your interview with greg johnson and what it was like to to be seen being so chummy with greg johnson and and you and you tweeted about anti-semitism i've seen it consume the lives of a few otherwise smart and well put together people but then you yourself tweet out good and morgan to this uh self-proclaimed nazi you have a mug with a nazi symbol on it um this is the same guy this is the same guy who says that hitler was a prophet uh he's crazy look yeah no i'm almost finished yeah i love it um one excerpt of his writing uh hitler was an armed prophet called to wage holy war in a monumental battle between good and evil. And then when somebody talked about when they tried to rise up against Hitler, you say,

I understand why the Allies glorify men who attempt to assassinate their country's popular leader, but I've never been able to share their enthusiasm, never been able to share their enthusiasm for the assassination of Hitler. The guy who did your logo, this guy, Arthur Kwan Lee, is a vicious anti-Semite, the assassination of Hitler. The guy who did your logo, this guy, Arthur Kwan Lee, is a vicious anti-Semite, the worst of all. Maybe you didn't know it at the time, but something about you attracted him to you, and the logo's still up there, so it's kind of like being chummy with him. When you interview Greg Johnson, a self-described white nationalist and another fan of Hitler, I don't begrudge you the interview. People should listen and decide for themselves. But it really seems like you were a like mind,

not about white nationalism, but about all the forces that were allied against him. So all of which is to say that it's tough to understand. And I want you to talk about your whatever sympathy you have for fascism and why it is that you you know are not sympathetic to people who wish hitler was assassinated i was making a more general statement well and and and why it is that you're comfortable like you you could text the guy good morning. You know, I take it that anytime you do something on Twitter, you're playing to the audience. And so what point, it's got to and why is somebody so sophisticated playing into the hands of the people who are going to assassinate your character um well uh where do you want me to start with that one because that's a this is very important

i want to give you every every opportunity to speak you know so um i guess the first thing to say is that uh you know i i don't use the internet in the most intelligent way all the time social media right i treat it like a group chat a lot of times like way too much and so when something happens like when i put up the thing about the trans last supper or whatever um like what i was the like the point of that post was this is the worst shit i've ever seen in my life right that's what i'm trying to say. Well, how do you do that in a way that is going to force people to, it's just the most provocative way possible it's going to do that.

We know what that is in our culture. It's a picture of Hitler. And if I were to put a picture of the devil looming over the Eiffel Tower, Satan himself looming over the Eiffel Tower and say, the picture on the right is preferable to what I'm seeing on the left here. It wouldn't have the same impact, right? That's sort of, it's sort of taken the place of that. So it's just like a way of, you know, expressing my outrage in the most extreme way I could think of. But then you should want the Allies to have assassinated Hitler.

Well, the Allies didn't assassinate him. No, you should have wanted the Germans to have assassinated Hitler. You should have been with the Allies. That's kind of my point. Look, I don't like what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing in Gaza right now, but if his defense minister betrayed him and killed him, like, I would think that guy was, you know, not a good guy. Like, I don't, it's like this, like, I ask people a lot of times, and I think you can divide pretty much all of humanity into, like, two different groups,

like, that are, that are, that are well grouped by their answer to the question of whether you think the Unabomber's brother was a hero or a villain. Because to me, he was just an unmitigated villain. He turned in his brother, you know, to the federal authorities. Other people look at it and say his brother was a murderer and he did the right thing. And neither of those answers are right or wrong. But I know how I feel about it is that he was a villain. He betrayed his brother. And so that's all I meant by that. But you also said Hiller wasn't the main villain in world war ii you said a lot daryl you know that i've explained myself on that one and i mean we can talk about that if you want like it's it's the sum total yeah okay look here's part of the issue right yeah yeah if you if you talk to a chinese person and say what

was world war ii what was it about tell me about world war ii they're going to give you a story japanese person you talk to you know you're going to get different stories if you talk to you if you talk to any jewish person what was world war ii about we know world war ii is about the holocaust yes it was about this guy named hitler who wanted to kill the jews and he went over to the east and and he did it. Like, that's 60 million dead, a world devastated, like, a war that reordered global, you know, geopolitics for maybe the next 500, all these things. This is what it was about. And that totally makes sense. You know, my wife's Armenian, and the First World War was about the Armenian genocide to her and her people.

You know what I mean? Yeah. genocide to her and her people you know what i mean uh but and and just because like it doesn't mean that to me or because it means more than that to me it's not an excuse to be flipping about these things you know and like when i took down that post not because you know there was some backlash to it or i don't care about that if it's not clear like i did it because of you because uh i know where you're coming from and that if you tell me like dude what the hell like that I should probably step back and ask myself that same question and so I did and I looked at it and I think I made a post about it afterwards about like because then all that you know the

anti-semites came into the thread and they're like you shouldn't have taken it down like you know don't don't back down from these people, whatever. And I was like, no, I was being an asshole. Like if I, you know, if I were in a room and something terrible happened, uh, you know, and I said, ah, this is worse than nine 11. And then I found out that actually there's somebody over here whose dad died in nine 11 in that room, then I'm going to feel like a, like, like a douchebag. And I'm going to take that back and apologize. And so you have an obligation to, like, be sensitive to the sort of elevated sacred meaning that symbols like that have to other people. But it doesn't, you know,

and I think it's probably hard for a lot of Jews to even imagine that, um, you know, to other people. And this is the case with me that the, that world war two, like that, the, that the Holocaust was, um, an episode in a gigantic conflict. Would you prefer fascism to what is going on now in western europe well look so i mean i don't want to get into a historical debate about like fascism but like i you know fascism to me is like a very bound time bounded and in circumstance bounded political phenomenon during the interwar period right so but if you want to talk about like fascism like it's used today and that's kind of what i was responding to and that you also you feel like it's kind of inevitable that that the the we're gonna get into something like that because people can't take the left anymore i think you i don't have yes yeah that's the kind of the point i was

trying to make and that would be preferable i think this point's been made by a lot of liberals like i listen to people like i've've heard Eric Weinstein say this. I've heard, like, people of his sort of general political outlook say, we've got to get the left under control because that's where it's heading. Like, this is inevitable unless this, you know, unless we get this under control. And I do believe that, yeah. But would it be preferable? You never know man like that you know the thing is like everybody think everybody wants a everybody wants a revolution because they think

that when it's all over the dust settles like they're going to end up on top and things are going to be the way they want but that's not how it goes you know people can you know like is there put a better way to put it would be like is there an impulse in me that wishes like when I see something like that Last Supper desecration that the French government, the French people would just elect the guy who's going to like round those people up and like deport them? Yeah, there's definitely that impulse in me when I see that. I 100% recognize that that might not, even if they do that one thing, that might not go away in a direction that I'm happy with. Okay, I gotta stop. But I mean, the impulse, of course, the entire constitution is kind of written because we understand how dangerous impulses are, and we try to create a system which can protect us from them but this is the rub is that everything that you fear about the mob is then facilitated through any kind of fascism that's what fascism is that's

what fascism means to me is that 100 rule so how could yes yes even how could you even hesitate about whether it would be because i think we have mob rule now i mean i that's all like it's not that um you know i i think we're already in that state i think we have mob rule now and so that's what i'm comparing it to but i mean look i don't hold forms of government like as as like sacred totems you know democracy like that i i don't if i were drawing up a government from scratch mass democracy media mediated by uh mass media is not the way i would draw it up um not to say that you know uh who am i to gainsay the people who put this system together but like it's not the way i would draw it up um but that's not ever how the world works how would you draw it up oh i mean uh

i would if i were starting from scratch you know i'd like to see a system of representation uh that sort of started more from the bottom up then and again this like is a very theoretical conversation but like you know i would like i think that people are not represented by like who feels represented by their government right now nobody nobody feels represented well you get to vote okay like do you feel represented by this government most people say no almost everybody says no and so what's really going on if most people don't feel represented by a representative government means that the system of mediating that representation is not functioning. Right. And I think that democracy, everybody goes to the poll and takes a vote on something is probably great for a New England township.

Maybe it's great for like, you know, a state. It's, you know, on some level. But I think when you get to a place like we have now where you're not talking about convincing individuals you're talking about moving masses of people in one direction or another that it boils down to lowest common denominator it just base ugly emotions and that's what the political system becomes consumed by and i mean i'm not it's not like i'm original pointing that out right but well you you said you said something to tucker along these lines and i mean i'm not it's not like i'm original pointing that out right but well you you said you said something to tucker along these lines and i'm going to get to it but i just want to say i like i don't feel i'm not sure what it means to feel represented by the government i

don't want to be represented by the government in in any kind of values uh there's too many too much when i say represented i just mean that you're i don't mean that like your values are being imposed on other people i just mean that um peop you and people who feel the way you do that you're being heard you know and and listen to like and and what i think is and again this is just an entirely theoretical but i want to ask you just let you i want to ask you a question because it relates to what we're saying. So however it is that you see a better system, you know, you don't have to figure it all out now. It's quite a homework assignment to figure out a new system of government. Would it preclude those LGBT people from doing what they did?

That's really the heart of the matter. You would have a better system. In your system of government, those LGBT people, one way or another, would not be allowed to do that Last Supper, that disrespectful Last Supper as they did. I agree it was disrespectful. It's not pleasant. On that stage?

In your system of government, anywhere. Right, right. They wouldn't be allowed to do it on that stage. Yeah. Yeah, probably not. Probably not. Yeah. I mean, I don't think they can.

How about privately or, you know, in a concert hall? I don't have the right or any particular interest in regulating, you know, that kind of thing. It's not even like a libertarian moral sense that makes me say that. It's just, you know, we have to be practical about the consequences of like, if we, it's like what you're saying, like once we start empowering the state or using the tools of power to regulate what people are doing in their private lives, then there's no end to that. Yeah. But I do think, yeah, absolutely. If I, you know, if I was king of the universe and they said, hey, we've got a 15 minute presentation, you know, 15 minutes to represent Paris to the entire world, the Olympic opening ceremony. We want to use six of those minutes to desecrate the Last Supper. I would be like, no. And you're lucky I don't arrest you.

Get out of my office. Yes, of course, I would not allow that. So this touches on what you said to Tucker. Now, my read on you, I don't think you're a white nationalist. I never heard you say anything like that. I've never heard you, never, not once. I think that you do have a kind of practical view of the world about what can work and what just can't work. And I'll read what you wrote, what you said to Tucker. Where does this start? He asks you, he talked, you know, Tucker's pointing out about how everything's terrible in the world. How do things go right in Japan, a country of self-respect and order and cleanliness?

And you say, well, I think we ran an experiment that tells us pretty well what that is. And we didn't know we were running the experiment at the time. But you had the Iron Curtain set up and all the countries behind it that were not exposed to the incessant American world order, Western propaganda for 70 years. They all don't have these same problems.

You go to Hungary, the people have no problem saying this is the heart of the matter. The people have no problem saying, no, this is a country. This is Hungary. This is a country for Hungarians. This is a Christian country.

This is our country. We don't have a problem saying that. That is not something that anybody west of the Iron Curtain, for the most part, is comfortable loosening up a little bit, thank God. But you know, the question is whether it's loosening up too late. So what you're saying is that we went wrong, they went right. They preserved for themselves the ability to say, this is Hungary, this is a country for Hungarians, and this is a Christian country. And that works. And that's what works in Japan. I mean, I would argue that, you know, you also call Israel an ethnostate, but, you know, that's not about that. I don't make a value judgment when I say that. I'm not making a value judgment.

No, the term ethnostate is a value judgment. But anyway, I think— Yeah, it's like, again, we travel in different circles. Well, it's like the word apartheid. It's a conclusion too. I mean, no other country is described as ethnostate. And I've never heard the word ethnostate used in any work that was not critical of whoever was being disguised as an ethnostate. Yeah, I agree with that for sure.

So that speaks for itself. But anyway, so you look favorably with the idea that people can say, this is Hungary, it's a country for Hungarians, and this is a country for Christians. Yeah. And not because I think... Obviously, you're not even Hungarian,

but because you understand that this works, and you don't think the alternative is going to work, that we're just going to tear each other apart eventually. Zionists understand this as well or better than anybody else. You know, Zionism grew not out of like a period of just unprecedented oppression in Europe. You know, there have been many, many periods of unprecedented oppression. You go back to like the Black Plague of the 14th century. I mean, it was a nightmare for Jews all over the place. That had happened before. It was the combination of the oppression with Jewish emancipation and this beginning of assimilation that was starting to happen and people starting to realize that unless we have our own little spot of land somewhere on this earth where our people, our culture can live out its destiny and we can work out our destiny among ourselves, we're not going to survive. And the Jewish people should survive. And I agree with that. The Hungarian people should survive. The Japanese people, all these people should survive. Now, we were talking about Europe at the time. And I would and I think I probably did talk about this in that. But the United States is very different from Europe.

You know, we've had demographic turnover literally from the moment we became a country. Right. The American Revolution happens and it's an Anglo country. But then literally within a generation, like the Anglos are like a minority in a lot of East Coast cities because the Irish and the Germans are moving in. A generation goes by, you have Jews and Italians, Southern and Eastern Europeans who are displacing the Irish. 1924, immigration from overseas mostly gets cut off, but then you have six or seven million African Americans coming out of the South and transforming the way the rest of the country looks.

And then 1965, the Great Migration peters out and you have the Hart-Celler Act and the mass immigration wave that we're now so we've constantly had to had to uh accommodate new people in our story like throughout our history it's really like who and what we are you know when like i get you know again this is the funny thing is like i get in trouble with anti-semites as much as i get in trouble with a lot of your audience and i get in trouble with white nationalists as much as I do with, like, anti-racist, like, leftists. But it's different. It's different. It's different. You get in trouble with anti-Semites because they feel you're betraying them because they think you're in the same cause.

OK, yeah. So we'll talk about that in a second because that's true. But we'll talk about it in a second because that's true but we'll talk about in a second um the the the uh when the left you know people on the left say we're a nation of immigrants i you know people hate that on the right it's obviously true and it's not just true that we've had wave after wave of immigrants and that's how we populated the continent it's a deep in our identity is built in this concept of openness that like if we didn't have this sense of openness, we wouldn't have been able to populate and settle the continent. It would have got taken over by Mexico and France and maybe China on the West coast or whatever, because we just wouldn't

have had the people. If we were going to have the people to do it, uh, we had to have this radical openness. You go back to the, to the first naturalization act in 1793, white nationalists love this because it says all free white persons of good character can be citizens of the United States. They say, see, 1793, there's already race consciousness and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I always point out to him, I'm like, dude, like, take yourself back to 1793. Europeans still have 200 years of just butchering each other. They hate each other. They don't think of each other as the same. And now you have this revolutionary country coming and saying, if you live in Europe and, you know, anywhere, like they didn't even imagine that, like, people were going to come from, you know, East Africa to the U.S.

That wasn't even in their minds. But they were saying anybody in Europe, if you come over here and you're of good character, you can become a citizen of our country, enjoying the full rights of like the richest person in this place, at least legally, radically revolutionarily open. Right. And that's it. That's a that is at the core of our identity as a people. Right. Is that sense of openness. And so I wouldn't say, or when you say like, does it work? When I'm talking about a place like Hungary, or the fact that the English people are on track to be a minority in England, you know, something that's not going to be reversed, it's not going to be changed, it's not going to go back to the way it was once it happens. To me, that's a moral crime and a historical tragedy, like,

that people would inflict that on their people, you know, after hundreds of years of these people holding themselves together and creating, like, a culture and identity to, you know, to then do that to them, I think, is a crime. In the United States, so, in other words, with them with them like it's not just a question of whether it works or not and it's not the primary question to me here in the united states to me the whole idea of like this is just we are this people and outsiders you know that that's never that's never been us and so um we we were different than the Hungarians and the English and like all the peoples here. We're just completely different. And so for us, it is a practical question.

Like over here, it's not a moral. I mean, there's there are moral aspects to it. Right. Like if I were to this is a democracy where theoretically we political power is wielded through the you know the ballot and so if you go to a people and say we're going to make a policy change that's going to make the descendants of all the people who live here right now a voting minority in this place in uh you know 100 years there's a moral aspect to that um but here like it really is about like what works and you know it it's just like you'll hear like austrian school like uh libertarian types who just read their first mises book will always want to talk about the inefficiencies that uh government state intervention in the economy creates right i got into actually a big argument one time with art laffer at this seminar that i went to about this and i finally kind of backed

him into a corner even though he's way smarter than me. Like I just had the correct point, I think, which is he would talk about all the inefficiencies. You do this, it's going to create an inefficiency over there. State intervenes here, it's going to create an inefficiency here. And I told him that, you know, that while it's going to create inefficiencies, like no question about that, there are costs on the other side that you're not accounting for. That was a digression. The point is, just like there are inefficiencies, state intervention in the economy that anybody who's going to talk about economics has to account for and understand. Multiculturalism, diversity, like all of these things. This is not to say that there are no benefits to these things.

There are costs and there are difficulties and there are problems that you have to deal with. Right. And it's not all evil nativists versus, you know the the innocent newcomer like that you know the way it kind of gets framed like in in that term or evil majority versus like innocent minorities it's just that these are real practical issues that have to be dealt with you know and i think we have to be honest about that and recognize that you know there are limits to how far we can push certain things before the costs start to outweigh the benefits. And we just don't do that because we take it as a straight moral question. We have to just continue to like,

with immigration, for example, it would be immoral to tell people that they can't come in. And of course it is like on some level, this is the hard part about it. I'm an immigration restrictionist when i go to the vote um if you put me at a table in a room and had a family come in and tell me their story and say this is where we're coming from like i'm gonna let that person in or i'm not gonna be able to think of myself as a human being when i go home you know um well

this is then you open it yeah as i say this is very very true what you're saying we're gonna run out of time i've said no i've said to many people i know who are um you know anti-immigration i said but you do know that your entire life you've been around illegal immigrants who you were close to who you know who helped you who helped you, who, you know, and, you know, how do you reconcile all that? It's, and like you, I focus on the, the conflict within the question and the hypocrisy within, you know, a vote, exactly what you're expressing. Like, I want to keep them all out, but I do understand on some level if they did get over the line i would never throw them out you know and and i also know it seems heartless but of course

you can't just let the entire world come here that so this is very difficult and the the heartlessness with which people talk about this issue is really really disturbs me you know what i think yeah i think um i think that uh that heartlessness partly comes from that uh that that moral struggle that you're kind of describing right now that we're talking about where, um, you know, you take people who are like, not evil people, you know, like in their just entire being or something. And I mean, they're good neighbors and they're good fathers and sons and whatever. Um, but they need to be able to tell that family, no, you're not coming in. I don't care if your kids are starving or whatever, like we're full in, in order to be able to do that

and still go home and sleep at night yeah you know one of the shortcuts is to tell yourself that those people are evil those people are bad those people don't deserve it or whatever well this is the thing this is the theme in your work yeah i'm sorry this is the theme yeah yeah no it is it's like it's a it's a means of like it's by which we, uh, like permit ourselves to do things that violate our moral sense, but which seem practically necessary, you know? And I, and I look, man, we have to guard against that all the time, you know? I mean, and, and I know we're running out of time, but there is one thing I want to like mention is, um, you know, all the, whether they're anti-Semites or whoever like that are followers of mine and who often get upset with me. But for the reason you said, I just think it's important. I've always thought this. myself here, but I, this is the way I think about it is that I think it's, I think it's important to maintain a bridge to those people, to everybody. Um, and that, whereas on one hand, like you might, there are probably people out there who are not political or not thinking

about this stuff at all, who maybe see something that I write on Twitter and then read the comments and follow that. And they end up down a rabbit hole that I wish they wouldn't have. I'm sure that happens. And I feel responsible for that. Um, even if I don't always act like it, like I do, but on the other hand, you know, there are people out there who the only the only people who are willing to tell them that like you know look yes uh the first biden administration cabinet was like 80 jewish the only people who are willing to tell them that are crazy anti-semites who hate jews and they want you to hate jews and that's why they're telling you it and so for those people to say that like well daryl knows that and he's not afraid to talk about that but he doesn't hate jews and he makes that clear like you know when he talks about it explicitly that that's i think that that's a that that's important they can look at it and say that there's a way to talk about

these things without falling into that trap but daryl this this and this is really where i where i you and i kind of i just can't come come't come there with you and I fear the worst sometimes is that for a guy who says what you're saying now, if I was in your shoes and I knew that I had a huge following, huge, of people who think that I'm an anti-Semite, that would not last long. I would make sure that they were disabused immediately. I would tell them, do not think I'm one of you guys. I would block them, but more than block them, I would ridicule them, and I would do everything to disassociate myself. Because I have people sometimes come to me with very anti-Arab stuff, very anti-Palestinian stuff.

And I'm like, go fuck yourself. I'm not one of you. As a matter of fact, one of the first things I got into Twitter on, the first, right, like on October 8th, there was some dumb idiot. It turns out later I found out he has mental illness. This kid in like at a protest, AOC retweeted it. And he was like, he had some ugly slogan on his T-shirt. He's like, kill the Arabs. Like he's saying the most outrageous things.

And I tweeted and said, not in my name. You know, and then I went about trying to find out. Because, you know, you can, it's a small community. To try to find out who this guy was. I wanted to make sure that somebody spoke to him. That's how I found out he had mental illness. It was so important to me to just drive this ugly sentiment into the ground because I don't want for 10 seconds to be associated with anybody who hates Arabs,

doesn't care about the fact that they're dying, doesn't understand the sorrow of a mother whose children are dying, and also doesn't understand that there's a certain limit psychologically to what you can expect in terms of, you know, disinterested understanding of international politics when they're suffering and dying and seeing this kind of, like, they're only human. So I really go out of my way and still i seem to fall short sometimes but but the most important thing to me is that if i want if i want to advocate for israel and for the jewish people and for our ethno state which i'm

happy i think you said that you're okay with the ethno state i don't want to ever be mistaken for one of these bigots for one of these haters and i and you know i wish i saw that in you because then i would say don't you talk about my daryl that way because look at all the trouble he goes through to make sure nobody misunderstands him this is something though that we just we see differently like this isn't a matter of like you know where it's in your self-interest too by the way it's in your self-interest, too, by the way. It's in your self-interest, too, but go ahead. I agree with that, 100%. But, like, to me, like, the people who are out there saying, kill all the Arabs,

who is going to walk them back from that cliff if not you? It's not going to be Ta-Nehisi Coates. They're not going to listen to him. They don't care what he has to say. They care what you have to say because they know what you have to say that's kind of my point like i think it's important to maintain a lifeline with all of these people you know that you're not you're not walking them back when you talk about church by jews i have huh you're not walking them back when you say

this stuff about about churchill and and the i mean i don't i don't think you're walking them back when you say this stuff about about churchill and and the i mean i don't i don't think you're walking them back respectfully look i think you like if i were to come out and say right uh something that they can go look up themselves right and that um and some you know uncle adolf 1488 in the comments section somewhere is going to give them links that can be verified, that they're going to be able to go look up. And they see me denying that because I don't, you know, because I just, because it's wrong to sort of talk about, then they're never going to listen to me again. They're never going to talk to me again. Like, you know, you have to be able to talk about things in the way that you see them and let you know so that people know

even if they disagree that this is that you're trying to do that i mean you can't deny the truth you can't deny the truth i get that right i don't know it's really 80 of the biden cabinet but like it was like there's a times of israel story like when it first came out it was obviously celebratory but like it was it was in a way that like, if they were all Arabs or they were all Han Chinese or something, it would have been the only thing people noticed about it. Right. It was like a massive, massive number of the top cabinet positions. And so you see that and you say, you know, again, all this stuff's so hard to talk about just because, uh, you know, there's this old joke I heard one time, or I read in a book, I'm going to butcher it, you know, there's this old joke I heard one time or I read in a

book. I'm going to butcher it, but like it's something to do with like it's a Soviet bread line. And there's this old Jewish guy who's like going up and down the line and he keeps asking, like, are there any Jews working at the counter up there? Are there any Jews? And people like, I don't know. I don't know. And after a while, he gets up to somebody, says, are there any Jews working in the counter up there and they go yeah i think two or three and then he steps back and goes and how do you know that you know what i mean and like um and so it's like it's it's tough to talk about any of these things for reasons that are entirely understandable especially now right when you onto Twitter, like anybody who goes on there, um, yeah, it's, it's hard to talk about any of these things. Um, but I think that like, you know,

yeah, I just, I think you have to be able to acknowledge like the things that like people don't go over and fall off into the anti-Semite like brain worm just because a Jewish person cut them off in traffic. It's just, it's an internet phenomenon, you know, these days where people go on and they're told information that they can't find anywhere else, except if they go to websites that, you know, are going to get them on a list somewhere. But then they find out somewhere, some old historical texts that like this thing is true it's only ever one side of the story and it leaves a whole bunch of context out that like you know would explain it a lot better but the biggest audience you ever had was you telling people that the reason the worst thing in human history happened was because the jews put hitler in

fair but like look i've told you before. First, I didn't know we were going to talk about World War II. I wasn't prepared to talk about that. I definitely didn't know we were going to talk about Churchill. And if you watched, and I know you watched it, if you watched the thing, and there were a couple instances like this, like you mentioned earlier, when he was like, well, what about Japan? Why is Japan doing fine fine and so forth where i felt like he's he was trying to draw me into like deep

waters that i was not comfortable with and you can i think you could see it in the interview where like i start to get a little shifty in my seat and less articulate because i'm a wry smile yeah yeah and that wry smile by the the way, was like, you know, it was sort of taken as like a knowing smile when, you know, really what it was a smile of like, like, what are you trying to do to me here, you know? And so by the time I got to the David Irving argument, which is where that comes from, you know, the stuff about Churchill being bailed out by financiers in 38 and 40, which did happen. You know, he had already asked me like twice, like, well, why would Churchill do this if it didn't make any sense to the British Empire? And I kind of walked around and gave like a meandering answer.

He said, well, why else? I did it again, kind of again off the top of my head because I wasn't planning on talking about this. He's like, well, why else? And I'm like, well, you you know people have written about this so what you're talking about is tucker's baiting you to blame the jews you you you realize he's setting the trap he says why else why else and you could have said tucker i'm not going there if you're implying that it was the jews uh no no well look uh yeah maybe um like there's a reason i don't do interviews very often you know um you talk about the the white nationalist i interviewed back in the day

and the reason that interview went so terribly like was not because we were ended up screaming at each other it was because i was totally friendly to him because he was completely friendly to me you know and that's just the pattern I fall into him. I I'm an agreeable person. And, um, and. That's a very confrontational thing to say. And if you're going to be in media and doing interviews and stuff, you should be able to do that. But you actually let him bait you. And I, and I, listen, I don't know.

I don't want to accuse him of baiting me. First of all, like, I want to, I want to be clear about that. I don't know. I don't, I don't know what he was doing. It it felt like you know um he was trying to like the like the explanations i was giving before like weren't that they weren't sufficient and i needed to like pull something else out like and so yeah like i don't want to i don't want to say he was baiting me i mean obviously tucker knows how to draw controversy out of a thing and and you know that's kind of his expertise so like uh maybe there was some of that but i don't want to i don't want to make that i mean i'll ask you then i didn't really if not for jewish um concerns about what was happening to the jews yeah would world war ii have happened 100

would have happened it would would have a hundred percent. Yeah, no question about it, man. Look, and this is like, again, like if I could do that whole interview over again. Like one of the just main things that I would not do, I just I wouldn't focus on Churchill because Churchill, you know, Churchill was a functionary of British imperial policy that was being carried out, you know, and if he was bailed out by people who were, who had, you know, ties and sympathies to the Zionist project, or to what was happening to the Jews in Germany, it wasn't that that didn't, you know, that wasn't a bribe that like made him disavow his previous beliefs and now go and behave like in accordance with their values he he always felt that way and this is a person maybe that they

just wanted to keep relevant in politics because he was an ally and that's fine that's politics um but yeah 100 world war ii would happen i mean that you could take you could have taken churchill out of the picture in 1940 and great Great Britain is not going to make peace with Germany at that point, which I think is wrong. I think it was wrong. Like, I think that was terrible. I don't think it's right to hold Churchill accountable for that. And so, therefore, you know, I think it's wrong to hold whoever it is, you know, people think financed him or whatever accountable for it, because I don think he himself was really accountable for that decision all right we have to wrap it up um so just to be clear so you you don't have a problem with israel as an ethno state is that

because i'm surprised that no yeah so so now you're gonna get in trouble with your with your followers again um i think the word ethno state is an ugly term because it implies that the the um it implies it erases the long history of being backed into the conclusion that the only way we can survive and live fulfilling lives is by having a state which is dedicated to our protection. That's as opposed to the ethno-state of the old South, which is we hate everybody else, and we don't want blacks here because we hate them. And this gets into the Arab-Israeli conflict. And maybe we will have that conversation someday. But that particular charge of ethnostate always, always bothers me because of— The people who have had control of that term for a long time have definitely put a lot of baggage onto it.

And I guess, like, I just kind of use it as a technical term. And, yeah, I have no problem with it. As opposed to homeland for the Jewish people. And, you know, I said recently somebody like, you know, this idea of a one state solution. And this goes to what you were saying about how you would reconstruct American or Western governments, can you imagine a single state solution where you had to find the common denominator of acceptable rights between the Israelis and Hamas? I mean, it would be, the equal rights would be barely any rights at all. I joked, you'd have equal rights at least for circumcision for men and women which is probably not fair because that's probably that doesn't even happen

that's that's a flippant thing to say but it was it's a way of illustrating the fact that the the conception of what rights there ought to be is so wildly different between the and it would it would be a muslim majority and and this kind of like basic argument like there's so many criticisms of Israel I can agree with or stipulate to but this notion that there could be a one state solution

I don't know but it's just so blatantly disingenuous to me that it makes it difficult for me to take everything that came before in the person's presentation. Yeah. I think people who are pushing for it, like, in an apparently, like, sincere way that that, like, I think that's disingenuous or ignorant in the extreme. But I do think it's a valuable, like, rhetorical device, you know what I mean, to just illustrate

like a counterpoint or something. Like people will bring up Native American reservations and stuff today, and then I point out to them, Native Americans are full citizens of our country. They have all political and civil rights than anybody else. If you want to do that in Israel, go for it, and then nobody will have anything to complain about. So it's a rhetorical device i guess in that sense and no i look if i was an israeli man there's a there's that little blow up going up on twitter right now because uh tani c coats in an interview was saying something yesterday about how he would if he'd grown up in gaza would find it hard not to participate in october 7th people going crazy about it i i mean look i don't like a lot of what he says, but like I entirely understand what he what he is saying, like not just on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level.

Because if I was an Israeli and I grew up in Israel, I guarantee you I would be like, you know, pushing to get into a special forces unit to go and fight in this war and kill the enemies of my people like like i think any you know anybody can understand that on some level if i was back in the 1960s and i was black living in watts i don't want to go march for peace i want to join the black panthers like i i get that but that's not the point go ahead go ahead i was going to say but you know the thing is to say something that, like you get back to that thing of like, dude, like people are watching. You're not talking about historical event. You're talking about something that people are watching this video whose daughter was killed. And you're not accounting for that.

And when you say things, you know, like this and again, it's a fine line, hard line sometimes to walk. But but it is an important one. But I would say about Ta-Nehisi, you can make the argument to me – even the stuff he said, I would disagree with a lot of it. But for the sake of brevity, I will stipulate to the oppression that he describes and i'll stipulate that the poverty he describes is only the fault of the israelis um i don't believe that obviously if i can stipulate all that you can make the argument that such oppression and poverty can lead somebody to commit murder but if you won't also admit that murder and suicide belts can't lead somebody to say, I think we ought to have checkpoints, then you're not a serious person. And this is where he's disqualified.

And this is where I have contempt for him. Like, fine, this isn't, this is, yeah, in the Warsaw Ghetto, like, would they kill some Nazi German babies? And what I understand is, at some point, people reach a breaking point and they do terrible things. Fine. But you can't also understand that when you're on the other side of it and they're blowing up your children in cafes and your government says, you know what? We need checkpoints here because we have to see. We know who the bad guys are. No, no.

That's awful. I don't even need yeah but is there a point is there a number of cafes that get blown up um that the practical argument i get but is there a number of cafes that get blown up that morally justify the nazi checkpoints no no that's that's where it gets an interest an interesting conversation that's kind of like a conversation we had about uh uh stop and frisk to fight crime. Is it, you know, fine. How many? You're going to check every black guy because you prevented 10 murders?

This is, these are difficult questions and you need a soulful, judicious, non-bigoted heart to approach these things. And that is in rare supply, especially these days. But what I'm saying is that for him to say, that's not even a question is even worth discussing. I'm not even going to devote a sentence in my book to it. It's wrong. It's like, I'm going to write a book

about how my wife keeps hitting me. She's beating me. Are you going to mention the fact that you were hitting her too? No, that's enough. Plenty of people told that story. I don't need to. I said, you're not a serious person, dude.

So that's where he loses me. He's not a fair-minded person. He's not even attempting. Anybody who thinks this is an easy conflict, including, obviously, this goes for the Jews, the Israelis. You remember, I don't know if you knew this, the first day after October 7th, when they were counting everything in nine 11s, I said, don't do that because they're going to start counting Gazans in nine 11s.

Like I, like, you know, and that kind of inability. And I mean, I took, I took it as like, you're a New Yorker. You know what I mean? Like you're, you don't just, you don't just throw things like that out there, you know? And, um, I'm just saying like the, the, the, the, the, the rare number of people who, who immediately make an argument and immediately try to apply it to the other side, through the eyes of the person on the other side, it's a very small number. And, um, like I said it's plenty of Jews like that but Ta-Nehisi is a one of the most vulgar examples I've ever seen of it and in a different political issue a guy who

is that brazen about not wanting to even entertain any conversation of the other side of a story would never find himself on cbs interviews the the intellectual community would not bother with a guy who was wearing proudly breaking all the rules of uh an intellectual consideration that has integrity he's just like no i don't i don't need to even consider this outside so that's where i'm at yeah i don't know just to be clear i don't know anything about him i know like read the book headline level like a headline level of what he's about. I've never read his book or any of his books. And by the way, he would never, ever, and this goes back to what we were saying before, he will never extend that allowance of psychology to anything done by a white person in the old south right he'll never

say well if i was white in the old south and only saw black people you know so beneath me and i i might not even realize that that we were all of the same level and i might not even realize that slavery was wrong no they get no time and place. Only one population on earth is supposed to be divinely accountable for every moral thing and no psychology is allowed to them whatsoever. And that's Israel. And that's what a guy like me has a beef with the way the world discusses Israel. All right, Daryl, I don't i i the reason i want to maintain our relationship is because there's a very small small number of people out there whatever have an argument with who can say no no no let's look it up and say no it says this and both people say oh no you're

right okay well you know i guess i gotta integrate that in some different way that is the that's the um only people you can really have constructive conversations with and though i don't agree with you obviously and i do i don't want to sugarcoat it i do worry that your views in your private dostoevsky heart are worse from my point of view than you're letting on because i think the um the uh the shadow that i'm seeing or is that uh if you felt 100 the way you're representing that i think you would lift more of a finger to really disabuse your flock as it were of the notion that you're a fellow traveler but having said all that um i do admire a lot of your work and i and i maybe over time you on me and me on you we will wear each other down uh in some way where um

where we both improve i don't know i don't know i don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. That's, yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a good way to end it. That's a good hope. Yeah.

I, I would like to continue the conversation sometime. Cause it's kind of disappointing that, you know, you think there's still something that needs to be dug out that I'm concealing, which I only, I only see it in the relief of like,

well, if he felt that why the hell doesn't he make sure these people don't misunderstand him i get your answer i take your answer well okay we'll talk about that part another time but i just um yeah it's something i mean like here's the thing like when i say i we could have that conversation privately it doesn't matter to me like it's important to me because I, I trust you and I consider you a friend. So it matters to me if you think something like that, you know, not like my broader perception, like, dude, I'm probably banned from six European countries

at this point after that Tucker interview. And like, you know, um, yeah, I like people are going to Google my name for the rest of my life and they're going to find that stuff. And so that's all done. And I really, honestly, like, I couldn't have told you this before it all happened, but now that it has happened, like, I just, I don't know. I don't really care just because I'm a person who's always been like focused on my family and my friends and then the family and friends of those people. And that's kind of my politics and my world. And as long as that's intact, I'm fine. But it does mean too, that like, you know, when there's somebody like you that I respect, you know, I want it's important to me that you understand that, you know, not that we agree on everything or even even on like things that are considered like deep emotional or moral issues to one or both of us or something, we agree on them so that we just, but just said, you know, that I'm, that I'm, that I'm coming from a, I'm coming from a good place, you know, or at least like a place that's,

you know, I'll end with this. And this is like a, this is, I, I, I've told myself a million times that I should quit Twitter. And the only reason I still do it is because I have a podcast to promote. So I do think it brings out the worst in us in a lot of ways. And people ask all the time, how is it that you're this way in your podcast and this way on Twitter? And I say the mediums, the message, you know, in a way which doesn't release me from accountability. But I think there's something to it.

So one of my an author I really like, American author John Gardner. He wrote that book, Grendel. I don't know if you read it. It one of my, an author I really like, American author, John Gardner, he wrote that book Grendel. I don't know if you've read it. It's a good book. But he's like a creative writing professor and he wrote creative writing books and stuff. And he was a great writer. And you read his other books, like besides Grendel, especially they're like just family novels and the level of emotional intelligence and just empathy that he has for all of these different range of characters, you know, men, women, old, young, everything is incredible. And he was a terrible person in real life. He beat his wife. He was an alcoholic. He was just a, he was just a bad guy. He did bad things. And somebody asked him one time, how is it possible that you can write these characters

with such moral sensitivity and then do those things. And he said that I'm a better person when I'm writing. And there's something like that with me when I go on Twitter, the old troll from like 1999 message boards comes out and that desire to provoke and start, you know, like that. And look, when you have an audience of 300,000 people on Twitter, like I do now, um, uh, do now, you know, it's a different world. You're not a, you're not, you're not having a relationship with your followers in the same way you're broadcasting to the world, you know, in a way. And I haven't really made that adaptation. I'm the first one to kind of say that. And I don't always account for those things. But again,

that's why I really value someone like you, because it's important to have people out there who you can trust or not coming at you in bad faith or with some other agenda when they tell you like, dude, you're being an asshole here that you can trust them, you know, when they say that. And so, yeah, I appreciate our relationship very much, man. All right. So I, I, I, I do appreciate our relationship. I have to tell you that, you know, you threw me for a loop, but, um, that's why, that's why I told people this too. That's why it, everything that's happened with you and the way you've responded to everything since that Tucker interview, as much as I

appreciate like people who have known me for years and just, they're never going to betray me or turn on me. And they're going out and just defending me with a full throat and everything. Cause I love Daryl or whatever, as much as I appreciate that, um, on some level, like I appreciate you a lot, even more just because, um, you know, those people weren't tested. Those people are like, they're attacking my friend. I'm going to go defend my friend. Um, you had to look at this and say, I don't really know what's going on here. I don't, you know, it's something that you've, you've struggled to explain to yourself. And, um, you know, I, I know you've taken heat for refusing to, you know, to come out and condemn me.

And, yeah, it means a lot to me that you have, you know, that you have not done so, but done it in a way where you make very, very clear to me, like, the things that you find objectionable or that you're, you know, that you're having trouble explaining. I just, I appreciate it. I really do. I appreciate you saying that. I mean, I'm happy that, that you think that I've been fair to you today. And then obviously I did speak my mind and that's some, that won't be enough for people either, but I did speak my mind. I haven't held anything back. And, and, and that's as it should be in conversations between people who take each other seriously. All right, Daryl. So, you know, we'll take this up again online and maybe we'll have, I hope we'll have future conversations. I have to take my daughter to the airport now. I'm taking for her birthday present,

my daughter and one of her friends to, for the long weekend in Los Angeles. And they get to choose the entire itinerary of the trip whatever so i'm looking forward to that so i'll i'll have this up in a couple of days um like i won't edit out a single word that you said um all right i appreciate it man thank you okay daryl take it easy