The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Live From the Table: Michael Moynihan and Coleman Hughes

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

Campus Protests, Norman Finkelstein, Israel, The Atom Bomb, and More.

It's the Finkelstein files. Oh, God. This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy seller coming at you on SiriusXM 99. Rock comedy, babe. Also available as a podcast. And we're on YouTube as well for that multimedia experience. You get to see us.

You get to hear us. And we have with us today, well, first of all, Noam Dorman is here, as always. The owner and the proprietor of the world-famous comedy cellar, Perry L. Ashton Brand joins us. Hola. As always. And, of course, me. I am a comedy cellar regular. Not as regular as in years past, but you know what?

That's on me. I chose originality over the easy laugh. I assume that. My bad. We have with us two amazing guests, friends of the comedy seller, Coleman Hughes is with us. Hello. Coleman is the author of The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America. He's sick of talking about it, but maybe if we're very nice and ask nicely, he will talk about it with us tonight.

Fresh off his appearances on The View, where he skewered The View ladies, and on Joe Rogan. We also have with us a vape aficionado and host of the Fifth Column podcast, Michael Moynihan. M squared for his close friends. And I don't know what we're talking about, but Noam

has things in mind. Well, okay, so first of all, I just want to tell you, I've been drinking that Fernet lately. Yeah, you like that. But it hangs me over, whatever the... I had two of them, and I'm feeling very...

Today? Or last night? I had two last night, and I... It's five o'clock, and you're hungover? I wouldn't call it hungover. Like, I don't have a headache. Yeah. But I feel that kind of slightly dehydrated... Yeah, it's hungover? I wouldn't call it hungover. Like, I don't have a headache. Yeah. But I feel that kind of slightly dehydrated. Yeah, it's hungover. Slightly.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't like it. All right, then stop drinking it. I could do like five shots of vodka. What's that? What's Infernet? What is that? Well, it has no sugar.

Supposedly. Those are supposed to be worse for hangovers than clear liquors, I think, right? Yeah, it's a brown. But anyway, I don't Michael like that. I like it, yeah. So I'm a little sluggish. That's that. Second of all, I'm getting sued.

I just got served just before the show started. Is that a cease and desist? Desist? Cease and desist. Can you spell desist? Cease and desist. Oh, is it desist? Yeah. Wow. It's a law school. Well, we didn't talk about cease and desist. Can you spell desist? Cease and desist. Oh, is it desist? Yeah.

Wow. It's a law school. Well, we didn't talk about cease and desist. I was absent that day. Can you get a letter just to desist? Like if you've already ceased? He's going to keep going. He's going to, yeah.

It's a deceased and desist. Okay. All right. Anyway, so yeah. So I do this other podcast with Hatem. Yes. I do it because, you know, Hatem had a heart transplant, and he really wanted to do a show.

So I said, sure, of course, I'll do the podcast. Wait, hold on. You do a show with him because he had a heart transplant? Well, I didn't want to say no to him. Okay, so if anyone has an injury, they can come to you and get a show? And he's a good friend of mine, and he gets good guests. Yeah. And I let him put it on the Comedy Cellar website because it gets attention for him, whatever it is.

And no good deed goes unpunished, as the Jews say. So now I'm getting sued because he apparently used a copyrighted image for 20 seconds on something. I don't know how he used it. On a video. On a video. I think I got that on my podcast once. Similar situation. And he cut and pasted

an image. So now I'm getting sued. No, but typically don't they tell you to take it down and then they give you a little bit of leeway? Desist. You're not desisting. You cannot resist or desist. And they want $35,000.

What is the image of? It's an image of... This is the image. I don't want to show it. Do I have to pay if I look at it? What the fuck is that image? Nice tits, right? Yeah.

Can you describe the image? It looks like it's from a body camera or something I'm going to try to keep it together Here's the first thing There was a thing in the news yesterday apparently about We have a special guest today

Mr. Norman Finkelstein is here I'm not warmed up I heard that yesterday something went on at Emory University Something went on at Emory University is here. I'm not warmed up. I heard that yesterday there was some, something went on at Emory University. Something went on at Emory University and you walked out. What happened? Professor Dorman,

there was lying in Hamas supporting, I support Hamas too, but I had to lie and walk out. That's why he walked out, right? I saw this briefly, that there was a guy on stage who was praising the October 7th attacks, and I said, you know,

I have been in this very studio and heard that, but just in a different timber. Well, I'll tell you what Finkelstein said. He said that he didn't have it in him to condemn the attacks. And liking it to

Nat Turner's rebellion. His heart filled with joy. And it's resistance. condemn the attacks no no but yeah i'm liking it to nat liking it to nat turner's rebel his heart his heart filled with joy with joy yeah and it's resistance like uh but in emory uh i think another speaker started talking about the zionist control everything yeah one of the other ones was this guy who's come out of nowhere this very mysterious guy named jackson hinkle yeah do you know who this guy is oh he's the worst he's the worst he just is this guy who shows up and he you know who this guy is? Oh, he's the worst. He's the worst. He just is this guy who shows up and he, you know, he spoke. The funniest thing is I saw an image on Twitter of him speaking via video link to a conference of Houthis in Yemen. There's this picture of this guy who's like some guy, random guy from Southern California who loves Russia and, you know, Assad. But he refers to himself as a communist, I think.

A mega communist. A mega communist. That's right. How did you know that?, but he refers to himself as a communist, I think. A mega-communist. A mega-communist, that's right. How did you know that? I looked it up. Okay. That's a little too much information about Jackson Henkel. But he was up there with this other guy, and I didn't see, because I tried to find the speech online.

Nobody seemed to have posted it. But, you know, they came up there and said, yeah, that October 7th was glorious. Well, Norman, this is the thing. I don't know if you're aware of this, but online they're turning on you. Oh God, are they? So here are

some of the tweets that went out about you after you backed out of that thing. It says, so he's been a Zionist Jew all along. I have been a Jew. I live out in Brooklyn, and my parents were in the camps.

But a camp is like Gaza. It's very similar. Let's stick to the facts. You always have to throw that one in. Your imbecility. Yeah, your imbecility knows no boundaries. These non-Zionist Jews are showing their true colors now. Eventually,

these are each individual trees. Eventually, they take their own side. He's showing the real Jew. Their own side. Finkelstein was always playing the role of the Jewish gatekeeper. Finkelstein, huh? Jewish fragility. Surprise.

A Jew being Jewish. Well, he's Jewish. I've been suspicious of this guy ever since I found out 15 years ago he had a disagreement with John Mearsheimer over the cause of the Iraq War. Finkelstein contends that the Israel lobby was not behind the war. I mean, he's right about that, right? I mean, he

also made people angry a number of years ago for opposing BDS, the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement, but it wasn't for the reason that it's just stupid and immoral. I mean, he said the same thing. He went up to Colombia. Did you see the speech he gave on the campus of Colombia? And it was to like

a kind of cold and stony silence in which he was saying, you know, I think he was saying from the river to the sea is not going to win friends. He was advising people. He wasn't saying it was wrong. He wasn't saying, he's like, I love Israel. No, he was like, this is just bad for us. And everyone was just sitting there and said nothing.

No, but he actually doesn't believe from the river to the sea. He believes that the partition was correct. Yes. He told me that personally. He's made that clear elsewhere, too. Yes, yes, he absolutely does. So 48 is fine with him? Yes, 48 is fine with him.

Okay. What about, but 67 is not fine. The partition is fine with him. He believes the partition was the right thing to do. Yes. So. I try not to pay too much attention. But here's something interesting.

Then I have a bunch of things to talk about. Imperial wants to do something. There's like 10 nasty anti-Semitic tweets about Norman Finkelstein, which is probably the sum total of all the anti-Arabic tweets that become the corpus of the case against the Jews for their bigotry. And it's just a good illustration of how, in this day and age, you can literally find a critical mass to convince people that any people believe anything from any angle. And it's a kind of post-truth situation.

It's kind of like a pure test case, because Finkelstein is the paradigm case of a Jew who checks the box of every anti-Israel position, almost every anti-Israel position you can take, and yet still is subject in some corners to what must be pure, unfiltered, unmixed anti-Semitism, right? Yeah, yeah. It's almost as if you scratch the surface of these people. Yes, they might. Let's just very gently say the Overton window has shifted. It's moved a little bit towards the Goebbels end.

So I sent Finkelstein an email. About this? Yes, and I said, look at how these anti-Semites are talking about you. Did he respond? He didn't respond, but I know that he's opened it a number of times. As a journalist, always use an email tracker and always presume somebody has an email tracker too. And by the way, use an email pixel blocker on your Chrome.

When a friend of mine, this is a true story, a friend of mine told me recently that, and if he's listening to this, he'll know who he is, that an old email to a girlfriend who he had this horrible breakup with, he said, she's really into me. Because she keeps on reopening this email and realized that there was something that was like indexing his emails. And he thought that she was going back and being like, I really miss this guy. And it's like, no, no, no, that was the index. It could also have been that she was forwarding it to her friends. Yeah.

Hilariously forwarding it to her friends. Because it'll ping every time. All right. So before we get to the stuff. So Perrielle did a lot of work. She's never done any work for a show we've ever done before. And she did all this work because she wants you guys to do dueling Finkelsteins. No.

What I want to do. And I've highlighted... Table read. Jeez. It's in the realm of courtesy if somebody writes you an email and says, strict confidentiality.

Yeah. I believe I asked him somewhere in that pile, is it okay if I share these emails? And he answered, no. Okay, well, you know what? You don't get to call somebody

a, quote, sick sack of shit under the guise of strict confidentiality. Was that Noam that he was calling that? Who else? Yeah, no, I was going to say, that's my line. Before we just go full hog on this, I just want to say, I am still not anti-Norman Finkelstein. I understand that.

I compared him yesterday. I feel like him as Luke felt about Darth Vader. I feel there's good in him. I can feel it. Okay. You have been on... I want to point out quickly that Noam has been on this for a very long time.

No matter what he says, he's like, you know, you really want to be friends with him. He refused to take the stage with the people who were bashing Israel in a way that he didn't agree with. Khalidi wouldn't have done that. There is something about him

which does distinguish him in that way. Michael, are you in accord with that assessment that he has good in him? You know, when I met him very briefly, he had no interest in me. And by the way, I hadn't seen this, but the top email here, has my name in quotes followed by a question mark,

which is the funniest thing. I mean, I'll give you credit Finkelstein for that. He's like, who the fuck is this guy? I would like to direct everybody to page five. But I haven't got my answer from... No, I will say, and when I met him, you know, you usually try when you meet someone, even if you disagree with them on almost everything, try to find that common thing.

And I said that he wrote a book a long time ago that I enjoyed. And he looked at me, he's like, thank you. And that was it. It was not like an engagement at all. But so I think he's not a dumb guy, obviously. He's a talented guy. But I think that it's become a bit of a performance at this point. What about Mate and...

Hey, I'm just like Noam on this one. I know Aaron a little bit, and I like him. He's come on our podcast multiple times and really gone at it with me, and I respect the fact that he would do that. And so, look, you have terrible views. I'll debate you on the terrible views. I'm not going to say I'm not going to associate with you because of them. As long as you'll come on and talk to me about it, I'm fine.

Listen, on the question of these Mate guys, I know... How do I put this? I don't know how you guys feel about me on this. I've gotten some resistance over the last six months, but I think in a certain way I might have won the argument. These guys like Mate and Blumenthal, as much as we don't like them, we have to admit that they were the only ones

who got certain things right. And I think it's very unbecoming to not respect that in some way. Like, whatever's motivating them, whatever motivates me, whatever it is, on certain issues, if not for them, the general story would be inaccurate. And I have a certain respect for that,

which is more important than psychoanalyzing him or whatever it is. So I just hold my fire on guys like that, as opposed to guys who are lying or whatever it is. I mean, yes, they lied things. So do some of the very important advocates on my side of this issue. I see it all the time. I mean, it's part of the conversation.

I know Coleman's had this conversation a number of times. I think we've talked about it, of this idea of not platforming people. I mean, I've had this. I mean, I had somebody at my old company get angry, and not to me, but it got back to me, that when I interviewed Steve Bannon, they were uncomfortable. This was during the 2020 campaign,

to which I responded, number one, he ran Trump's campaign in 2016. This guy is a relevant person, a relevant voice in the MAGA world, and they were upset about platforming him. And as I pointed out, we used to call that interviewing them. We have to talk to you.

How do you know that this is a bad person? Because you've heard them. Somebody put them on air. Somebody debated them. You need to do that. You can't just presume somebody's a bad person. So I'm perfectly happy to talk to all these people. And one final thing is I don't, I think a really unfair thing to Finkelstein, despite

the fact that there's a sheaf of emails here insulting me, is that he has sometimes called a Holocaust denier, which I think is insane, and it's not true. But here's the thing, and I'm not comparing him, I'm not comparing Mata, any of these people to Holocaust deniers. David Irving, the very famous Holocaust denier historian, during the trial with Deborah Lipstadt and these people who, you know, he called him a Holocaust denier, which he is, there are all these historians who came and said, you know, he's actually made some contributions to history because Nazis trust him. He speaks German well, and he's kind of

ferreted out these documents that actually have broadened our knowledge of Nazism, but his conclusions are batshit crazy. So ultimately there is some utility in a guy like that. And so I think that's probably true. And again, not comparing these people. Irving's in my head now because I just saw some news story that he's apparently on death's door. But yeah, I think there's some utility in some of this stuff. I just think overall their analysis is very, very wildly wrong. I think what gets under people's skin is when you interview one of these people

and you seem like you guys are friends. You seem friendly. Hey, good. You know, you have a band that's friendly. People do hate that. Can I say one more thing about Mate? Because I don't want to let him totally off the hook. This thing about the

sexual assaults. They have dug in on this issue. Very odd. In a way which seems to me at this point to not be be grounded in reality seems to me you guys probably follow more closely just to let the listeners know aaron mate is a guy that has said numerous times that there was no sexual assault on october 7th that that has he said there was no sexual assault or it was there was not a pattern it wasn't systemic yeah it was not was not a weapon he said various things at various times and i do fault him again like people on my

own side i fault the same thing i fault him for as the evidence became more persuasive for not coming out and say you know what i think i was wrong about this but i'll just give you an example there was that story going around about the israel some pro-israel protester was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag. It turned out not to be true. And I know a number of people who talked about it. I think I might have casually repeated that too. I later realized, I mean later by being today, I actually saw something, a video of it this morning. So many people did that and I don't expect to see many of them correcting the record on that.

And I know I would. So it happens on both sides. So I don't want to let Mate off the hook. And clearly he does have some deep animosity for Israel and maybe even for... And to be clear, Mate is himself Jewish. Mate is Jewish and his dad too. But having said that, if I email Mate with something he got wrong,

he will read it. He will answer, yeah, you're right about that. How about this? Him and Finkelstein, they do stay within certain rules and I like that. You know what I'm talking about?

I can have a constructive conversation with him. With many people, I can't. You think that the things that he said in these emails are... You talking about Mati Finkelstein? I'm talking about Finkelstein. I want to read on page five. Michael, if you want to read it in... Please turn to page five.

We just had a Passover Seder. Your turn to read, Michael. It's at the bottom. Hold on, hold on. As for Mr. Coleman. Where is this? At the bottom of page five? Right there.

It's not highlighted on my copy. I didn't highlight it on yours. I highlighted it on mine. As for Mr. Coleman, he has carved out a lucrative niche in the podcast world as a black Shabbos goy pandering to Jewish supremacists. Wow, he's good. Was that Moynihan or Coleman? That was Coleman. Oh, I was looking this way.

That was Coleman. I thought that was Moynihan. He can rap. He can play trumpet. He can do a... If Hughes, please... Should I read the same line? No, no, if Hughes...

I'll try, but I'm not an impressionist. I write some... Some people have accused me of writing the best jokes in the business, but no one's ever accused me of being an impressionist. Your turn, Dan. Well, I do a better Jackie Mason. If Hughes' livelihood wasn't dependent on panddling himself, perhaps he would have funded how this Coleman Hughes makes a living. Now do it as Anthony Mason. All right, I'll try it as Finkelstein.

As for Mr. Coleman. Are we going back to the original? As for Mr. Coleman. We just did this part. Harrell's a terrible director. I thought you wanted him to reread the same thing. That's we just did this part. Are we competing? Periel's a terrible director. I thought you wanted him to reread the same thing. It's going to be very tough.

I got to get a running start. My parents were ridden by Danik. He has carved out a lucrative niche in the podcast world as a black Shabbos guy pandering to Jewish supremacists. Nah, it's not good. Not good.

Okay, okay. Can we get off this now? No, I want you to... All right, I think it. Nah, it's not good. Not good. Okay, okay. Can we get off this now? No, I want you to... All right, I think it's enough, Periel, though. I can hear the sponsors. Yeah. You have sponsors? I didn't think so.

I think what you're getting at with Mate and Blumenthal is we're always looking for people who we strongly disagree with, but who play by the rules of intellectual engagement, meaning what you have what you say has to be backed by evidence no ad hominems you know play by the rules that we we all try to play play by and i think you know i mean i also have seen norman as someone who generally does play by the rules even uh having an what is what many people see as an extreme point of view.

And so we expected to meet that person over email as well. You expect someone to play by the same set of rules privately and publicly. And so numerous times in this email chain, one being right here, he just showed himself to be a totally different person. So for example, I think I've done precisely three podcasts in the history of my podcast on the topic of Israel out of, you know, I don't know, 150 or something, right? So to say I've carved out a lucrative niche for myself as a black Shabbos goy, meaning like a black person that does the bidding of the Jews, does the dirty work of the Jews.

That's nice work if you can get it. Yeah, I'd be happy to do that if someone paid me for it. It's ad hominem, it's nasty, and there's actually no evidence for it. Right. I would say one of the things that I've noticed since October 7th, I mean, it's been happening for a couple of years now, longer than that,

but on the fifth column, we've had a bunch of guests who disagree with, you know, mostly myself and Matt on Israel. I mean, Camille's kind of generally on the same page too, but is not as invested, I guess, as the two of us are. And we've got a lot of really angry emails about it. Like, why are you, not platform, but why are you having this idiot on?

He's wrong about X, Y, and Z. And to have Finkelstein here, to have Khalidi here, to have Cornel West and Finkelstein do something at the Comedy Cellar, that strikes people as very odd these days, particularly when you see these campus protests and they're asking people when they come in, they're checkpoints, they have

checkpoints, and they're saying, well, you know, are you a Zionist? What do you believe? You can't come in here unless you believe the same thing as me. I saw a lot of protests when I was on campus, and people were crazy and people said stupid things, but they generally engaged with you. And it seems to be maybe a generational thing that engagement with people who really disagree with you or have, in my estimation, pretty crazy views is considered a radical act, which I don't think is a radical act. I think that's something that... Whatever you think of Piers Morgan and his act, which I don't think is a radical act. I think that's something that, you know, whatever you think of Piers Morgan and his show,

which is a bit shouty and a bit cable newsy for me, he does have like constantly has people on who are totally the opposite of him. Right. And it makes good television and occasionally very good debate too. I just, I see, we seem to have lost that in a way. Now, would you agree that part of what motivates people like us is that we're also extremely curious? Yes. Like part of the reason people like us is that we're also extremely curious. Yes.

Like part of the reason I want to talk to these people, even to see Cornel West, I'm actually enthralled, not just by their views. I'm in, I'm also enthralled by just seeing Cornel West, the performer. I'm amazed to see how fluid he is,

how, how, how he, how he off the top of his head recalls all these things and, and makes these comparisons clever, you know, very smart. And I just as a person who's always looking to be stimulated and have my curiosity satisfied and to be engaged, I'm drawn to these people because it's way more interesting than hearing

yet another Israeli guy I agree with, you know, blah, blah, blah about Israel. We all have that, right? I mean, I do. I mean, I'm at the age I am and I still think that I'm probably wrong about a lot of things and I'm constantly challenging those things and reading books of people I disagree with. That's why it's so disconcerting to see these young people

who literally know nothing. I mean, they're at university to learn. They're not there to teach me. They're trying to teach me on their microphone and with their kefias on. It's like, you have a lot to learn and you might not there to teach me. They're trying to teach me on their microphone and with their kefias on. It's like, you have a lot to learn and you might end up in the same place. That's totally fine. That's very, very possible. But, you know, assuming

that you know everything is just, you know, it's a worthless enterprise and boring, too. Can I ask you, Coleman, whoever wants to answer, are there any views that you hold that you would have a very, it would be very painful of you to abandon? Let Coleman go first on that one. Oh, well, yeah.

No, I was going to say, for me, it's less about seeing the performance, although that stuff is impressive, and more about just the worry that they may know something really important that I don't know. You only have one lifetime. We're not all Tyler Cowen.

So we can't read... The rest of us can't read every book. He's working his way through every book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's just... I think it's what... I think it's what Noam Chomsky said to Tyler Cowen when he asked, why do you respond to every email? I know you remember this.

And he said, I take people seriously. You should take people seriously, even if they're kind of clowns. Because actually, sometimes clowns are broken clocks that are right twice a day. And they might know something you don't. So that's the attitude I feel when I encounter someone that I strongly disagree with. I'm like, and they might know something you don't. So that's why, that's the attitude I feel when I encounter someone that I strongly disagree with. I'm like, I'm actually listening to you. I learned a lot from Finkelstein, actually,

and it's the old cliche that when you have to listen to someone you disagree with, you sharpen up your own arguments. What you actually believe, yeah. I mean, whatever arguments I can make about Israel now, it's in no small part from dealing with Norman Finkelstein, from checking his footnotes, not from Rashid Khalidi. You can't even check a Rashid Khalidi footnote.

You hit a brick wall. But Finkelstein and his footnotes are accurate. They're accurate, but they're not the full picture of certain things. He leaves stuff out. He leaves stuff out. And I think that, by the way, people's, people used to ask me all the time because I've done so many stories about plagiarism and plagiarists

and people would always say, well, what do you do? What program? This is, you know, 10, 15 years ago before these kind of plagiarism programs existed. And I would say, I don't do programs, but I check people's footnotes often, particularly when I'm reviewing books.

I'm like, wait, where did that? And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, they just stole that from me. That's typically how you find out that people are plagiarizing, is because you look at the footnotes. And I don't see, like, you know, people, you know, Ann Coulter is a funny example. She's like, you know, my book has 50,000 footnotes or whatever. It's like, well, are they good footnotes?

Do they go to somewhere that's actually respectable? Does it say what you're saying they say? Footnotes are meaningless. But when you actually chase those things down, whether it's Finkelstein or people like that, you do sometimes find out that they're bullshitting, and it leads you to different places that are oftentimes very interesting. I was, the assessor compulsive in me, tried to read through all the footnotes for the Oppenheimer biography.

Oh, the Kai Bird one? Yeah, because I like to finish books, I start, but there were so many footnotes I gave up. Anyway, can we get to my question? But also, don't ever finish a book that you don't like. People do that? I used to do that. Abandon books that suck. Same way with sex.

People usually abandon me halfway through. I want to ask a question about the protests. Well, my question about views that people dig into certain views because they have something in many cases they have a personal connection to a particular view. Pretty much any view, I'm agnostic.

If guns are good, guns are bad, you know, abortion, whatever. But if somebody presented me with irrefutable evidence that Israel was the bad guy, I would find it very difficult to deal with it. I don't know that I might resist it. So my question was, do you feel that you have any views like that? I think to some extent, any view you express publicly for long enough, there's a temptation to dig into it to save face. I don't think that can be avoided. But the question is, what do you do in the face of that? But in your public career, Hitchens always used to hate the phrase public intellectual. It's like, what are you, a private intellectual? But as a public intellectual, in that career,

is there anything that you have either abandoned or greatly modified? And particularly, I mean, you're writing your book. I mean, you're digging deep into stuff. Yeah. No, it's hard for me to answer in the abstract. I'm not really sure. Not one thing that sticks out. I mean, for a certain generation, it was always a rock. It was like, oh, we really fucked that one up. It might be easier to answer in five or ten years.

I've really only been doing it for five years. I know that when, I don't know if I'm going to get bogged down in this, when Benny Morris first came out with, like, righteous victims, when he unearthed all this evidence of bad things that Israel had done, which had been swept under the rug, people were, in real time, going through exactly what you described. People like my father, all through Israel. And it was a very difficult process for people to go through.

And it separated the men from the boys. People like my father, they bucked up and he said, yeah, that's true. I guess I got to admit that that's true. I guess I'm going to have to integrate that into how I see the whole picture. And some people refused to admit it and they faded away in some way. And what's interesting, of course, is that in the end, Benny Morris moved towards the people who had been most upset.

All right. Coleman, what is your take now? How would you wrap up, however you want to talk about it, this whole chapter of protests which seems to have come to an end today at Columbia, anyway? What's your big take on that? My take on it is that

the campus culture is precisely the same as it was when I left it. It's just that there was no major war. Yeah, you were at Columbia, right? Yeah, there was no major war going on at that time. So none of it has surprised me at Columbia. Just the tenor of it, the level of vitriol, the level of, you know, the tactics used. Most of the kids in question have close to zero real knowledge of the conflict. They have lots of confidence and lots, they're having fun. They're feeling that glow of righteous indignation that human beings love to feel, but mostly they're deeply ignorant of the conflict. They've been sold it as a simple story

of colonizer versus colonized people, which is the only moral language that they have. It's funny when you go back and, for instance, like read people that were on both sides of the slavery debate in 1840s and 50s, everyone frames their arguments in terms of Christian principles. It's like if the people that are for it are for it because it's, you know, it's what God wants and the people that are against it are against it because it's not what God wants. Similarly, the language that these kids have, the only moral framework they have is intersectionality, which is oppressor, oppressed, colonized, whiteness. That's all they have. That is what they, that's the tool they bring when they're deciding whether something is good or bad in the world. So that's how they

look at the Israel issue. This is why one of my, I think, disagreements with a lot of other people on Israel's side of the conflict is that I don't think anti-Semitism of the, you know, German style is the reason why these kids are siding so deeply. I think they have, though I think they may be developing anti-Semitism actually as a result of this whole chapter. It's really the colonizer colonized thing. And they believe that this is the fight of their generation on that axis. I agree with you that they're more turning a blind eye to the anti-Semitism of the people that they're getting into bed with than they are animated, many of them, by anti-Semitism.

There's no one explanation. Do you guys have a feel for this? After all we've been through with Stefanik and Claudine Gay and all the back and forth, is there some rule that we all understand, a line that protests are now not allowed to cross? Can they call for ethnic cleansing in Israel? Is there, what are we left with after all this last 10 months or however long? Yeah, I mean, it depends on who we are. I mean, the administration, I have no idea which each school has different sets of policies. I mean, people who are very, very obsessed with the concept of hate speech and have been for a very long time, which is, you know, not a category in American law, it is in

European law. But if they are following those things, I imagine that that would be the red line that you can't cross calling for. And again, when it's kind of calling for what? For, you know, something like from the river to the sea is it's that's usually brought up particularly in those stefanic hearings as a kind of back doorway of saying getting all the jews out of an area which would be ethnic cleansing and is that hate speech well i for me i don't think about things i i'm perfectly happy for them to expose exactly who they are and say exactly what they want. But let me tell you where I'm going with that. I agree with you. If that is the rule, then why did not the president of Colombia, hearing what was said and not being able in good faith to say that she understood what they meant,

why was it not her responsibility then to say, hold on, I want the leaders of the protests in my office. What do you mean when you say river to the sea? Because my responsibility is to know whether or not you're protesting for ethnic cleansing or not. Wouldn't that, if that is the rule, wasn't that what she was supposed to do? The problem with these people is that, you know, there's two things. The hypocrisy

of this, the things they're allowing people to get away with, provided they generally agree with their politics is always the case, right? If it was, Coleman had a great Twitter thread that was, it wasn't even a thread, it was a very, very long post about somebody on campus, and I'll let you explain that because you did it very well, who said something that they didn't disagree with and caused some pretty big chaos in this person's life. But the thing is, I don't want them to move things towards their mistakes.

So for instance, I Tweeted a long time ago during the Charlie Hebdo affair after those murders They put the post that the cover of the issue after the murders was a guy with a turban on No one ever said it was Muhammad that was that was not supposed to be on it and the Associated Press I think was you said a presser Reuters refused to run it on their their wire And so of course I had a, I had to log in. I went to their photo wire and I looked up Piss Christ. There's Piss Christ.

You can pay $250 and license it. That's a Serrano. Andre Serrano caused a huge controversy. A crucifix dunked in urine. All of the Catholics. Nobody said it was urine, by the way, but go ahead. Nobody said it was urine. Yeah, it might have been Gatorade.

Yeah. But I pointed this out in the wrong, they had the wrong response. They pulled that too. Yeah. No, no. I want you to include

the other one. And this is what happens in situations like this. When people say like, well, you know, as Coleman points out, and he can explain that that this happened in the past,

we should hold them to the same standards. I don't, I want all those standards to go away. I think these kids should learn and they should

say this stuff publicly, and hopefully be unmasked, like literally unmasked, and they can go out in public. Because I, Coleman, all of us have literal microphones, and we have to be careful what we say because that will affect us down the line, whether we're writing for somebody else or whether advertisers. This happens to everybody. If you want to cover your face and say the most horrible things if you're saying this in an uncovered way it's your right to be covered up and say it but i just think you should be able to say all this stuff and not have any effect with one exception the exception is when it is like incitement in the way that that protest leader um who said zionist killed. That, I mean, as a university, that is, you're saying that people who have certain ideas,

they should be met with death. That is a red line, I would say. Kenia James or something? Something like that, yeah. Kamani, Kamani. Kamani James, yeah. Yeah, so the point I made is that when I was at Columbia in December 2018, there was a white kid named Julian who was filmed going on a rant outside of Butler Library.

Obviously, the video starts mid-rant, so we don't know quite what happened, but presumably he was in some kind of conversation. Somebody, as happens every day on Columbia's campus, said something denigrating about white men. And he responds, he might have been drunk, and he goes on this rant about how much he about white men and he responds he might have been drunk and he goes on this rant about how much he loves white men white men invented civilization we invented science oh why do you think we're all so bad and then but he was careful to say i don't hate any any other group i just love white men and i'm not ashamed of it i'm proud of it blah blah blah white people are the best thing that ever happened to the world. We built the modern world. Who?

Europeans. Europeans. Built the modern world. So the campus, everyone sees it within 24 hours. It goes completely viral on campus, universally denounced. Nobody defends it. And in fact, he got banned from Barnard's campus, even though it didn't happen on Barnard's campus. It happened on Columbia's campus.

And nobody defended his right to say that. He didn't hurt anybody. He was just being annoying and I would say ethnocentric in a way that is... Did he get kicked out of school? I don't know that he got kicked out of school, but he certainly got banned from Barnard's campus, which is strange because most Columbia students take some classes on Barnard's campus.

I took many classes there. Anyway, the point I made was that when someone like me who defended him at the time says that I defend the activists today. I defend their right to say things like from the river to the sea, globalize the intifada, which to my ear strike me as violent ethnic cleansing at the very least, support for ethnic cleansing at the least. But to their ear may have different meanings or no clear meaning because they're so ignorant. You know, no one could call me a hypocrite, I think, for that defense. But the truth is, everyone was silent on this kid, Julian von Abelay, and a million other issues at the time. And so to think that they're suddenly discovering the virtues of unbridled free speech is absolutely the wrong understanding. They don't care about free speech. They haven't in a very long time. And what they care about is this Israel haven't in a very long time uh and they what they care about is this israel issue and they'll weaponize every liberal principle selectively and cynically

to further that aim yeah well i just hope that we don't end up carving out by never pinning it down to make them say what it is that they mean. I could just see a month from now, this dude says the same thing about white people and gets thrown off once again and say, how could you throw him off after what you let them say about Israel? No, they were just protesting against war. They never said anything bigoted.

What comes out of their mouth is irrelevant. I'm an extremist on the other end. What they're doing at the library and stuff, they should be kicked out. You have to have rules. But at're doing at the library and stuff, they should be kicked out. At minimum. Oh, no. I mean, you have to have rules. But at minimum, at least we should come out of this whole incident with some rules that these universities can be held to in the future. The next time they try to cancel a speaker or not allow a protest or all the shit they've been doing for years already.

I was looking it up today. Brennan, the former CIA guy, was disinvited or was thrown off. Like nobody was able to speak at universities. And he's the MSNBC CIA guy. And, you know, this notion we believe in free speech, but also our right to make sure that no speaker is invited to the campus that we disagree with. It's not, you know, they pretend like it's just about protests. No, protests are not the category.

Free expression is the category. Protests are within that. You can't just say, I believe in protests, but not, you understand what I'm saying? So they need to, this will all be worth it if it means that there's a change now about what we can expect that is allowed on campuses in terms of free expression. No more disinviting. No more heckler's veto. You made your point. Now you

got to live by it. But I don't think that's going to be the case at all. No, I don't think so either. In which case, they shouldn't allow the protests. And if the president invited the leader of the protests to define what they mean by it from the river to the sea, it wouldn't work because she would just chant from the river to the sea and like break something in her office. You know, the conversation can't be had.

But you. All right. So that's my feeling about it. I'm not I'm not satisfied that. This was well played. I mean, if it, just on an individual level, if it makes some of these people rethink this idea of safety and safetyism on campus, that it's coming after you now, then maybe it'll be worth it in some sense. But, you know, I said the library. It was not the library. You went to school.

There was the hall. Hamilton. Yeah, I think that's a philosophy building. Yeah, I mean, and good Lord. I mean, you see the result of that. You know, everything overturned. I mean, it completely trash, I mean, you see the result of that, you know, everything overturned. I mean, look, it completely trashed the place, broke all the windows, very kind of January 6th vibes in it. And it's like those people, particularly on a campus that is, what, 70, 80 grand a year, something like that?

I think it was 90. 90. I mean, these are the privileged of the privileged. Kick them out and give it to people more. And then, of course, asking for food, deliver. That was my favorite. Humanitarian aid. They also held a janitor hostage. I mean, in UCLA.

Not hostage. Well, UCLA, there was a Jewish student, there were a couple of them, and one they trapped there for an hour's video. I can't say that's exactly what happened because I didn't see the whole thing. And I'll credit this woman who's an Iranian woman. Do you see this woman? She's a very beautiful Iranian woman.

Oh, that's a whole other sub-genre I want to talk about. Did you go by Persian Jewess or something? No, it's a different one. L-L-L. Yeah, she's British. But she had a great post about after the woman was like, we need humanitarian aid, people are going to die of thirst in here, like in Morningside

Heights when you can just get Grubhub. And she just said, you know, what they're doing is, people all say they're LARPing, but they're actually LARPing as Palestinians now. What is LARPing? Like live-action role-playing, but they're pretending they're cosplaying as they themselves are the Palestinians

that we are going to dive home, we need humanitarian aid, we need to create an aid corridor it's amazing. It's worth dwelling on the details of that because, so where Hamilton Hall is, there's three food courts within a two minute walk probably a minute if you're booking it, right? You could just

walk out, go get the food that you've already paid for at any point in time. But they wouldn't let them back in, I don't think, right? Yeah, I guess not. But if you're hungry, it's so disanalogous. Oh, mom? Yeah. It's so disanalogous that you would frame it as

humanitarian aid or that you can have food delivered. But they were asking Columbia administration to deliver food or allow the delivery of food. Yeah, meal plan food. Yeah, yeah, which is, that's not a service that's provided in normal times,

much less to people who have occupied a building. It's like, you can't get food delivered from Columbia to your dorm on a normal day. You have to go there. So why would they then deliver it when you've occupied a building on campus? It doesn't make any sense. It's so insane.

The woman who said that is a PhD student, surprisingly. And this is amazing. She specializes in Marxist poetry. Yes, exactly right. Isn't her last name Slutsky? Slutsky, yeah, which was inspiring for a minute. Then I saw the speech and I was like, maybe not. But this is somebody who hates capitalism because they're always talking about capitalism.

And this is the ultimate kind of victory of capitalism that someone can spend $100,000 a year on this. This is one sentence from what her PhD dissertation is. My goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx's term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism, which is what we call in the business babble. Absolute useless babble. But this is what this person does. This is our generation, the people that are going to save the universe,

or people who can't write a fucking sentence in English. Well, it's a serious problem that people are taking her money. It's a scam. It's a scam, right? Amazing scam, yeah. Although most PhD students don't actually pay for their PhD, do they?

No, they get paid a little. They get paid a little stipend. This whole sub-genre of super hot girls who look into the camera and give political speeches about stuff, every one of them convinces me. Some of these people are so hot and they're so good

in the camera. I really want to globalize the intifada. I want to localize the intifada. You know what I'm talking about, right? There's a few Jewish ones, there's a few Arabic ones. They're awesome. I have to say that Megyn Kelly, I didn't see it, I didn't watch it. I'm going to be on Megyn Kelly's show tomorrow.

But on her show today, she took the brave decision to say it. At the record show, I said super hot and it triggered Megyn Kelly show tomorrow, but on her show today, she took the brave decision to say that the record show, I said super hot and it triggered Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly said on her show today, very bravely, because everyone thinks that no one wants to say it, and she's like, why are all these protesters so ugly?

And she did a whole bit on it, and I'm like, oh, I didn't watch it, so I don't know what she said, but... She made a good use of the word homely. Yeah, homely. Yes, right. Did you see this? Yeah. She said, why are they so homely? Like, we have to talk about why they're ugly. And I was like, wow. We need to talk about Kevin. I don't have an opinion on

that, because I... It's not like I noticed it naturally, but it might be true. I don't know. It seems... I don't know. I don't want to say anything about it. I don't want to get in trouble for that. I don't want to say that. What is with you guys? I'm kidding. Not a lot of models out there.

I'll just say that. Are we saying that there's some anger or needing a different route to acceptance? You really want to walk me into this cancellation, don't you? It was Megyn Kelly's argument. I would assume that's what's that's something you really want to walk me into this cancellation don't you i would assume that's what she said no she was saying yeah that there's some kind of psychological thing that if you're not attractive you go into this route where an attractive person wouldn't which i i don't know that that's true um i think in my memory as a columbia student i think there were a lot of attractive protesters and psychos and and so forth it might really be that the way uh the way they dress and and everything else is like sort of not to highlight not to dress in like a typically

attractive way it's like to like not shave your armpits and wear flannels and and stuff and that can create the impression of a crowd of not so attractive people. But it may not actually be true. I mean, every woman I've ever dated is a complete psycho. It's never political. There might well be a psychological profile that fits the protesters, but whether that has anything to do with physical attractiveness is a separate question. I doubt it.

Now, one more thing. The protests actually, despite the wishes of the Zionists, they really weren't very violent, right? These were mostly peaceful protests. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, ugly in a lot of ways is a lot of the rhetoric. I mean, you get into that game that I see.

Ugly or homely? Both. Apparently both. But with the Columbia stuff, you get into this, and I see people trying to parse this, are these students, are these people outside the gates of Columbia saying crazy things, are they within? I mean, it's troubling enough that there are people that gather there and say some of the shit, they like burn Tel Aviv to the ground kind of stuff, which was a chant that some people were chanting out in front of the gates. But yeah, I mean, mostly, I can't really tell that they've been super violent. So if I was in charge of the protest, I would say, listen, we're going to play it by the rules.

We're going to go out there every day, and then we're going to go back and sleep in our dorms. We're not going to have encampments. We're not going to give them anything that they can use as a pretext to end our protests. Why did they... I think intimidation is probably more appropriate than violent. I mean, people who disagree with them,

people trying to walk across campus, people who are on the other side of an issue, there's been a lot of that stuff you can't cross here, which is not for them to decide. But I didn't see violence. So let me ask you guys, this is what really worries me, and I am very worried, and I wanted to get your opinion on this.

I have three young... What's the matter, Dan? I'm just looking at what kind of computer that is. This seems like a great time for that. Well, I can multitask. I have three young children who are going to face the world as Jews. They're half Jewish, although they've been converted,

which is also ridiculous. Like a rabbi says the magic words and shoots to heaven, whatever. But I'm very afraid that they will have a tenuous connection to Judaism, and I'm worried about them facing a world where it's just easier psychologically for them to break from it. And I made a little list here, I'll try to get through quickly, of what I think the future holds, and I want to get your opinion about it, and then what you think maybe Israel's policy should be in light of it.

So, number one, the older generation that remembers Israel as a kind of miraculous underdog and lives like I did. I was born after the Holocaust, but I lived within kind of the half-life of the memory of the Holocaust. All that sympathy for the Jews is basically gone. Much of the country will soon be the immigrants or children of immigrants from cultures, brown cultures,

or yellow cultures, can you still say yellow? No. That have no... Asian, whatever. that have no particular affection for the Jews, and they might even have some cultural anti-Semitism. Further, they see themselves as the Palestinian underdog in that story, and in a superficial way. K-12 in America resembles more and more,

from what I'm hearing, kind of a West Bank education. They're really learning about Israel as being the bad guy, settler colonialism, all that stuff. Intersectionality, which basically teaches axiomatically that white people are the oppressors in any story. The Palestinians, I think it's safe to say, this people would agree, especially after this, will have absolutely zero interest in letting Israel off the hook and accepting any peace solution. They smell that they're winning, and if they didn't want it before, which I think

we agree they didn't want it before, they'd be crazy to want it now. So I'm imagining that 40, 50 years from now, Israel is still going to be ruling over an occupied people, probably encroaching more and more on their land because of the fucked up Israeli coalitional politics, harder and harder to defend. The images of that occupation will be a steady diet on TikTok and Instagram and everything 24-7 in a way that it wasn't years ago. It wasn't even just a few years ago. Israel may turn more and more to the right as they turn more and more against Israel. And I find it very unlikely that Jews will migrate to the more conservative political party, which will always probably be the Republican. They will want to stay with the Democrats all the way.

So what I'm seeing is that Jews will become Afrikaners, as South Africans were when we were younger during apartheid. If you met any South African white person in the 90s, where are you from? South Africa. What? South Africa. What? South Africa. They lived with shame.

And I feel like that will lead to American Jews basically separating from Israel and possibly Judaism. And I feel that Israeli policy needs to now, in a way that it didn't used to, take into consideration that it may damage the entire Jewish people if it doesn't figure out how to thread this needle. So that's a pessimistic view. But my pessimism has been right for a long time.

So I don't know if anybody... I don't know if there's a single word of that I disagree with. I think that is probably a likely scenario. I mean, someone posed it to me the other day. They said one of two things is going to happen. Either American Jews are going to move to the right as a result of the blooming anti-Semitism on the left, or the left-wing ideology is going to become less hypocritical,

become coherent by categorizing Jews as an oppressed group as well. I said there's no way that's going to happen. And I don't think that, I don't think either of those is actually the likely scenario. And I said to him very much what you said. I think probably what will happen is American Jews will increasingly detach themselves from solidarity with Israel and in order to make themselves acceptable to the American left, which is their immediate social surrounding. The social stakes for an average Jewish American on the left is whether they are accepted in broadly American liberal blue circles, right?

That's probably going to feel more real over the next 50 years than whether you have solidarity with Israel as that becomes increasingly difficult to stomach. In the case of your kids, it might manifest as, like if they're 20, they might, they'll say, oh, what are you? They might be like, I'm Puerto Rican. Yeah.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Not that there's anything wrong with that. They kind of have two halves to choose from, and to the extent that one half becomes... They're choosing Puerto Rican. To the extent one half becomes, like, unpalatable to the point where they don't want to have to whisper, oh, I'm Jewish.

They might just say, screw it. I don't think it's either or. Either Jews will move to the point where they don't want to have to whisper, oh, I'm Jewish. They might just say, screw it. Well, I don't think it's either or. Either Jews will move to the right or abandon Judaism to be more accepted on the left. Some Jews will move to the right. Yeah, but what would be the majority of the trend? We've already seen... Or would it be half and half?

I don't think so. We've already seen people we know, journalists, pretty mainstream Democratic-type journalists, who have just hid under the table during this entire Israel thing. They wouldn't even make a peep about the genocide charge. I wrote nasty emails to friends. I can you write a fucking column one time just about how ridiculous this genocide charges like just as a without getting to digress too much. It just seems to be very common sense that one thing, you correct me if I'm wrong, Michael, you're the expert,

that no victim of genocide has ever been able to do was to surrender. In other words, the Jews were going to get killed. They say, OK, well, give it to your demands, Nazis. No, the Tutsis were going to get killed. It's not a genocide if there's a war with a war aim where you're holding hostages and you've had an attack. And if you would surrender, the leadership would surrender. Immediately, everything stops. I mean, there's a million reasons why it's not genocide, aside from the fact that so few people comparatively have died. Right. Considering the power imbalance and all that.

But just the notion that it actually is a conflict that can be settled, where that's not what genocide is. Anyway, they wouldn't write a single, and it's only going to get worse. So do you have any other comments? No, it's interesting. I have another question, because my next question is, is it time for Israel to consider, fraught as it is, unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, even if it means more precarious security situation,

even if it means missiles from time to time from the West Bank and they have to go and mow the lawn, like Finkelstein says, right? As horrible as that sounds, and as horrible as that might be a way to live for the people in Tel Aviv, at least Israel will be out from under the label of occupier. By the way, just to clarify your question, does a unilateral withdrawal include the big settlements? Yes. A unilateral withdrawal along the lines of the 2007 proposals at Abbasid, we basically know what they are. Keeps the old city, give them a lock, so whatever it is.

Take that security risk because it's not just about Israel now. There is a danger to world Judaism, a psychological... I mean, I said this actually on October 8th. There was a war on the Jewish psyche. I don't know if you remember me saying it. I felt it right away, like, this is going to be very serious.

I wrote our friend Sam Harris on, like, October 10th, when everybody was very sympathetic to Israel. I said, nope. I said, by puts on the sympathy to Israel, we're about to see daily George Floyd videos and a worldwide defund the police reaction. As you know, I've reminded you 10 times already. But I'm like, I really did see where this is going,

and it's going exactly in that direction and getting worse. So what do you think about it? I mean, a couple things there is that I always advise people, if you have a certain vintage, you remember this, that America lost the sympathy of the world after 9-11. And it's usually cited this Le Monde editorial, we're all Americans now.

And I advise people to go and read the editorial, because if you read the whole editorial, it says we're all Americans now. And then about four paragraphs in, it's like, kind of like, you guys deserve this It's in the thing. It's like all this stuff that you heard in the future It's like it's always a kind of transitory thing that we're gonna be sympathetic to you for a minute You're actually right about the about the negotiating and genocide stuff

I mean, it's no coincidence that some of the crazier anti-zionist types are always pointing out You know these Zionist leaders that were negotiating with Nazis. But that was before the war. And the only other negotiation you had was at the end of the war of Himmler negotiating with giving away Jews because the Germans were losing. That was it. There was no negotiation. It was, as Daniel Goldhagen said, an exterminationist war, an eliminationist war. Because that's what genocide means.

That's what genocide means, is that the idea is to exterminate everyone. The only thing I would say about your original question is I'm a little darker than you, is that I wouldn't put it in the future tense. I would say it's all right now. Everything that you're saying is happening right now. You will notice that if you see people with an Israeli flag or the Star of David, you see them in groups of people and you say, okay, there's a protest, there's the pro-Israel side. If you see somebody in public with an Israeli flag patch on their backpack, it's jarring to people now. I mean, that's pretty astonishing to me. That is a country that's in the United Nations that is a, you know,

an ordinary country in so many ways and extraordinary in so many other ways. But when people see that, so another example is a friend of mine who's a very lefty lawyer in LA posted an image from a counter protest at UCLA that she attended. And I sent her a message. The fact that I even sent her a message saying like, oh, wow, I can't believe you posted this. And her response was, you wouldn't believe the response I got. If she or any of my friends, anybody else posted, you know, the sort of standard pro-Palestinian stuff, you don't get the response I got. If she or any of my friends, anybody else posted, you know, the sort of standard pro-Palestinian stuff, you don't get any response to that. People just expect it.

That's become the de rigueur position. So that kind of idea of, you know, associating with Judaism and Israel, and they are not two separate things in the sense that the flag and the symbol of Judaism are the same if you have it around your neck, like, you know, my friend Batya always wears it. I always see it, you know, and it's like between it's, you know, right here, a big Star of David.

I'm like, oh, wow, you're just you're going out there and saying, fuck it. And I'm like, wait, what? I don't say that about Christians that go out with the cross on. Nobody even notices it. But you're saying, go fuck it. I'm just going to just be brave about my Judaism. Is that a real thing? Yeah, I don't think they're going to get beaten up. Maybe they will, but I think people look askance at it in a way these days. And I think that's where we are, and I think that is depressing in a lot of ways.

We'd be lucky if we got beaten. The Jewish people would be lucky if they would start beating people up, because then you get some sympathy. I'm not worried about my kids getting beaten up. I'm worried about the psychological. I call it an acid rain. It's like an acid rain on their psyche. I think there's a direct conflict of interest between Jews outside

of Israel and Jews inside of Israel, because the Israeli government has a duty to people inside. It does have a duty to world Jewry in a sense, but that duty is mainly to ensure that world Jewry survives the threats, the physical violent threats, right? That's the reason for existing of the state of Israel. So someone inside Israel is just going to say, look, this accusation of this Afrikaner accusation of occupier, that has never killed my children. What kills my children are Hamas militants, rockets, and so forth. And that is the duty of my government to stop that. If that has as a trade-off that Jews around the world are going to be called occupiers, then who cares what they think about? But obviously the average American Jew has the precise opposite

incentive in the sense that your skin in the game is your social status and your, you know, the perception of you as a moral human being. You know, I think, I don't know, but the average Israeli might say, hey, then come here, then live in Israel. I mean, why should we be concerned with making your life easier in the diaspora when the whole point of our country is that you shouldn't be in the diaspora. They take Puerto Ricans in Israel? Very reluctantly. If their father is Jewish, of course they do. I think that's a little simplistic.

I think they have to take this into account. So it's like an interesting dynamic that they pulled out of Gaza and then actually the worst case scenario of what people warned did happen in Gaza, yet there was very little interest in retaking Gaza. People weren't saying the new status quo,

even with the worst-case scenario having come to be of the missiles and all the stuff coming from Gaza, was not enough to get Israelis to say, you know what, we shouldn't have done that, let's go occupy Gaza again. That's an interesting thing. It's like a status quo bias or whatever it is. So I could imagine... Are you saying you understand that psychology? It makes sense?

I'm saying that if they were actually out of the West Bank and there was some flare-ups, it wouldn't shock me that they still had the reaction, well, this is still better than a totally untenable situation. My sense is that I'm not a military expert by any means,

but leaving the West Bank would be far more consequential than leaving Gaza. Proximity to Tel Aviv, the sheer amount of landmass that... The popularity of Hamas, which is higher in West Bank than Gaza. Probably the even greater inability to prevent things from being smuggled into the West Bank as opposed to Gaza. I don't know that for a fact, but that would none of that would surprise me. No, it wouldn't surprise me either. I mean, it's nobody wants to be an occupation army. There's I mean, in the history

of occupations, very few people that say this is a tenable situation for a long period of time. And so, yeah, I mean, I can't imagine Israel wanting, I mean, this idea that they want to, you know, Judea and Samaria, they want to take it back. And that's popular amongst certain crazy people in Israel. And those people are, you know, more powerful than they've been. But when we talk about sort of consequentialism,

well, this is why this happened. You realize why they did this on October 7th. This is always unidirectional, right? Nobody understands why Israel, no one's there to say, well, you know what? The second intifada, before that, you could basically walk from the West Bank to the beach, or you get on a horse and go drive across. And that all happened as a result of the breakdown of the peace process and the second intifada, in which over a thousand Israelis were killed. And I don't think the people that say, you know, globalize the Intifada, understand, maybe they do.

If they do, they're psychopaths. But if they don't understand this, I've actually heard somebody say, well, the first Intifada wasn't violent. So that's the one I'm talking about, which is the most hilarious thing in the world. But this kind of idea that the Israelis want to be in this position, they don't want to be in this

position. You have to have this thing where, I mean, and you think I was talking about the, you know, Star of David and the Israeli flag and things like that, is that the creep of things like divestment, right? It used to be the woman there who did the ad, Scarlett Johansson did an ad for SodaStream. And the argument was, you shouldn't do this because they produce things in the occupied West Bank, right? That is now, you cannot have an association with an Israeli university. We're talking like 1948 lines, Israeli university.

Now it's the entire country that is toxic. And that has been pretty successful because you see that shift has not been noticed by a lot of people. It used to be, well, they're doing things in the occupied West Bank. I sent Noam a video a long time ago, and I'll try to find it. It had almost no views because the description was in Arabic.

It was on YouTube, and I don't know how I came across it, but there were a number... You're obsessed. I guess I'm obsessed because I'm mentally ill. You went through every single video. Yeah, I know that the protesters are mentally ill because I'm on the other side of mentally ill. But I see it was a bunch of Islamic Jihad or Hamas prisoners that were released in the West Bank.

They were released from Israeli prison. And I can't remember where they were, but they were driving. Like Ramallah or something? No, it wasn't in Ramallah. It was in Jenin, which is a very extreme kind of place within a mosque. And they're filming just this convoy of cars and trucks in the flap, and they're shooting in the air. I mean, they must have expended, I don't know where they're getting their munitions from.

There's thousands of bullets in the air constantly. And then they get to a huge place where the prisoners are there, and they're being celebrated, and they're shooting in the air and everything. And it's like, okay, well, that's a different type of occupation that I don't think people understand. Is it occupied? Yes. They will go in and they will do security operations, et cetera. No Israeli troop is going into Jenin on that day.

You cannot say that about Poland under the auspices of the Nazis, right? They're not having like, you know, get out of here because we might hurt you. It's an occupation for sure. and I'm not denying that. But it's a different type of occupation than I think that a lot of the protesters understand. I mean, there is a different kind of vibe to that. So when you see that as an Israeli leader, I think there's the idea, which is a very plausible one,

that if you pull out, that's going to be that everywhere. Do you agree with the following? As a purely strategic matter, the people on the Israel side need to de-emphasize, really stop as much as they can, the accusations of anti-Semitism. You have a lot of kids out there

who are, again, taught intersectionality or just have a superficial view of the conflict and they've concluded they're on the pro-Palestinian side. And then they express it. And then they're called anti-Semites. And they're like, fuck you. And then they dig in on it. 100%.

That's probably happened a million times in the past six months. And this gets to my earlier point. When I was at Columbia between 2016 and 2020, I don't know that I heard a single anti-Semitic comment, even in passing, even when someone was letting their guard down drunk, right? Whereas every week I heard anti-white comments, anti-white men comments, right? And it's those same kids who categorize Jews as white and only in virtue of that care about this conflict. Now, you can say it's like in a way, bigotries always have some story behind them.

So you can call it anti-Semitism, but I think it's imprecise. And I think it backfires because those kids understand that they hate white people or claim to or think that they do. But they don't understand themselves as having any particular animus towards Jews. And so I think it misses. I think it allows them to write off the arguments they're hearing. Everything after you hear you're called a racist, you basically don't hear. That applies to both sides. So I think that's a very important point.

The strategy has to be, and again, journalists need to pursue this. In my opinion, the strategy has to be exposing the fact that the other side, the Palestinian side, will not express any deal that they'd be willing to take. That is really, to me, the Achilles heel. And the occupation, okay, they will not ever answer the question this is what we want. Give us this and we're okay.

Unless it includes what everybody agrees is outrageous things. And that's the only way to expose this whole conflict in a quick way that I think people can understand i think that's right and as someone who has no identity based dog in the fight that is the issue that if it were if it went the other way would change my mind about the conflict yeah me too i think many people

have expressed what that many of the protesters have expressed as far as palestinian leadership and and the and the bulk of palest Palestinian society, they haven't expressed it. But if you ask the protesters, they would say probably many of them one state. One state is not a legitimate request. Israel is a country. You can't ask any country to end its... Demographically end its existence. I mean, it's a non-starter.

But on the anti-Semitism question, I think that I agree with Coleman. I think a lot of this stuff is people being accused the anti-Semitism question, I think that I agree with Coleman. I think it's a lot of this stuff is people being accused of anti-Semitism probably aren't and don't really understand these things. I mean, I have seen some people that I know tread close to that, particularly when it comes to money. I saw somebody who is somebody I know had a post on Instagram and the S in Israel's dollar sign. And I was like, okay, so where are you going with that? You know Ilhan Omar? Yeah, we went to college together. But that kind of stuff, it kind of treads that line.

But here's the thing that I think is the major material difference. They are sidling up next to a racist organization that is in its charter, in its founding, in its language, in its rhetoric, and in its actions is anti-semitic. They are, I mean it's classically anti-semitic in every possible way. It's expunging the Jews, the Jews are devious, they're money grubbers, they steal our land, they steal etc. So when you are sidling up next to those types of people... Responsible for World War One, responsible for...

Everyone, they're responsible for every war. I mean the Rothschilds, that kind of stuff. When it gets into that territory, you have to start wondering, and it's not surprising to me, I don't think they really understand it, but it's not surprising to me that somebody would be kind of liberal about their use of the word anti-Semitism when they are actively defending people who are anti-Semites.

That's kind of where you're like, okay, hold on. I get the reflex. I'm telling you purely strategically. We got to get smart here. There's a serious shit on the line for the Jewish people. But isn't it the same as negotiating with Hamas in the sense that you keep conceding things and it doesn't matter? I'm not trying to concede anything.

I'm saying like Jonathan Greenblatt needs to take, I think, a more intelligent view of his struggle. He needed that before October 7th, too. I think it goes beyond strategy. I think it also goes to the fairness that you extend to someone like Mate,

to do that same charity. It's also correct. It's also correct, yes. Which is also usually a good strategy. Before we get off Israel, now that we've lived with it for a while, Moynihan is usually on the right on this. Do we have to admit that Joe Biden was right about any of the things that he did to put pressure on Israel to change its behavior in any way? Was Israel holding up aid? Was Israel bombing too uncarefully?

What were, was the administration, in your view, because you followed closely, right about anything? Look, I don't think it's wrong to ever use your power to say, particularly, I mean, they're doing this for political reasons. I don't think they're looking at maps and looking at video evidence that's coming from the intelligence agency. They're doing this because there is a restless rump of a party that's very angry with it. And, you know, the Michigan stuff, et cetera. I think that's the reaction.

I don't think it's wrong to say. I mean, I think when it gets to Chuck Schumer level and you're saying the Israelis have to replace their government, that is crazy to me. And that is where you have to stop interfering in other, I don't care how much aid you give them that has never been contingent upon. We get to decide who your government is. I mean, if there was, I mean, it would take four months to call an election. I mean, it's in the middle of a war. I mean, this is a crazy thing to say, but putting pressure on, like, I don't know. I mean, you would have to show me some evidence that they have responded, particularly when it comes to bombing, things like that. I suspect it's probably true with RAFA. I suspect it's probably true not only

with the US, but with the UK, France, et cetera, when you have a ring of people saying, you know, it's not going to be good for you if you go into Rafa right now. But I think it's also, we won't know until sometime later that the Israelis are also very smart about this stuff. And they've also said, fuck you, to the Americans since 1948. Every war the Israelis have ever fought, the Americans have told them to stop at some point. In 1956, they didn't even get involved.

They said the Brits and the French, I mean, the Suez stuff, they didn't even get involved in. 67, they told them to stop. In 1973, et cetera. In 1983. And it must be said, when Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactors, the American government was very against it. Was very against it.

And everybody knows now that was the right thing to have done. Yeah. I mean, so it's not as if, I mean, that runs in the face of the kind of Mearsheimer-Steven-Walt thing that, you know, there's some, you know, puppeteering. The Israelis are always in conflict with the American government about this stuff. So I don't think there's anything new in it, number one. And number two, I don't think, no matter what Joe Biden said,

because I think they know that America's not going to cut off aid and cut off all this stuff. The British have threatened this, too. If they knew these are where the hostages are in Rafah, this is the tunnel entrance, we have to send a division in to do this, I don't think that would stop them. I think they probably also are a little, you know, tied up and they don't really know how to execute this at the moment. So I don't know. I mean, we'll see. I mean, we'll see. I think history will tell, I think. Yeah, I think history will tell. That would

be my short answer. My long answer is like, I don't know that it mean, we'll see. I mean, we'll see. I think history will tell, I think. Yeah, I think history will tell. That would be my short answer. My long answer is like, I don't know that it's a bad thing that there is the pressure because I know I'm pretty sure Israel will say no if the answer is no. Yeah. So it's not if if if the pressure is jeopardizing the war effort, I think Israel will tell Biden to fuck off. And so because of that, I don't think the pressure is a bad thing. I don't think it's a bad thing to have a little bit of pressure to go further than you might otherwise with humanitarian aid. Yeah, the whole aid thing really bothers me because to the extent that it's true

that people are hungry, it's hard for me to excuse. I don't know whether it was on purpose or not to make them, to make things difficult. We hear stories about people rising up or, you know, complaining about Hamas now maybe rising up. Maybe that was part of the Israeli strategy.

But however you slice it, somehow, if it wasn't their intention to have the Gazan people hungry, then they miscalculated because they had the resources to do it. And they certainly could have asked America for help as well. Listen, we we can't handle this. We're afraid people are going to be hungry.

Can you help? Right. So which they are doing. They're building that that just like they just reached to nowhere, just like Biden sent out the covid tests. They arrived at your door just we didn't need the covid tests. Right. But my understanding is that it was never a problem with the amount of food getting past the border. It was always a problem with, you know, tons of food sitting places where it's not getting to the people, which doesn't really make sense if it's a conscious effort to keep people starving. It's also, I think, part of the calculation, too. Lesson super devious.

It's part of the calculation, too, is that Hamas leadership has not only said this, but obviously shown it, too, that they have no interest in the well- part of the calculation too is that Hamas leadership has not only said this but obviously shown it too that they have no interest in the well-being of the people of Gaza so if that aid gets into the hands of Hamas and then becomes a tool for Hamas, they don't give a shit if the people of Gaza starve, they don't give a shit if the people of Gaza die.

They kind of want them to. And if people doubt this, you can just look at an Arabic language broadcaster saying, why don't you build bomb shelters? And they say, oh, that's not our responsibility. Is there underground stuff in Gaza? The entire fighting force of Hamas is underground.

Who isn't underground? The people of Gaza. Do they have that? So if the aid gets to people in the Hamas leadership, what are they going to do with it? They like using the people of Gaza as tools. So it wouldn't surprise me if distribution is one of the issues, too. Then I queue up that video, Max. It's very easy to say, yeah, the left part of the rump part of the Democratic Party was giving trouble for Biden in Michigan.

He's had a presidential election. So therefore, that's the reason he started putting pressure on Israel. It's easy to say that. It doesn't make it true. It doesn't make it true. I don't know if it's true. It could also be true. Yeah.

Guys, you know, this is a bit much. This is a bit much. And, you know, Biden, I mean, just the other day, a comment came out of the White House which criticized the use of the word intifada. I don't know if you saw that. I did. Intifada is a term of violence i'm like good for fucking joe biden like this administration the obama administration was never going to have israel's back like this this guy i know that that ehud barack said that joe biden was the greatest friend to israel of any american president ever that's what ehudak said. And he knows what he's talking

about. So it's important to me that the Jewish people be fair to Joe Biden. It's very unbecoming to have a guy who's done so much for you, and then when you find something that you disagree with him about, even if

he's wrong, just throw it all away. It never happened. Now, all that matters is this one thing that you disagree with him about. Even if he's wrong, just throw it all away. It never happened. Now, the only thing that matters is this one thing that we disagree with. Who gives a shit everything that you've done so far? That's what I sense what it looks like to the outside world sometimes. It's a very bad look. It's a very bad look. All right, speaking of Mearsheimer, can you play? Make sure the volume

is up, Max. We always have a thing where we... Civilians of Israel, the Holocaust. So a response is not necessarily murder, is it? It's effectively self-defense. Okay, can you pause it for a second here, Max. We always have a thing where we... Civilians, we saw the Holocaust. So a response is not necessarily murder, is it? It's effectively self-defense. Okay, can you pause it for a second here, Max? This was a discussion they were having about war crimes, killing of civilians, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Piers Morgan says, well, you know, how else can you fight a war?

Go ahead. Committing a war crime. I mean, if you categorize all civilian deaths in a war like that as murder, you're effectively saying that every one of those deaths is a crime. I would not argue that what the Allies did in response to what the Nazis and the Japanese were doing was a crime, necessarily. They were responding to an existential threat to the world, including mass murder of civilians as we saw with the Holocaust.

So a response is not necessarily murder, it's effectively self-defense. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you think because the Nazis were committing genocide, because the Nazis were committing mass murder in Europe, that that justifies bombing German cities and purposely killing huge numbers of civilians. Do you think that lets you off the hook? That's the argument you're making. You're saying that because the Germans were so horrible, we were allowed to be horrible ourselves, but we weren't as horrible as the Germans. And furthermore, we were doing this in self-defense. That's the argument you're making. And what I'm saying is I understand

that there are strategic imperatives for killing civilians, right? This is why we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. We thought that it made good strategic sense and that it would save American lives, especially those GIs who would have to invade the Japanese home islands. But I still think that that is a case of war crimes.

And I think that to use your rhetoric lets us off the hook. How does any country defend itself from an existential threat like the Nazis than by your categorization without committing war crimes? Well, if you look at how the Soviets, who were basically responsible for defeating the Nazis in World War II, they did not commit many war crimes in the process of defeating the Wehrmacht. It was basically a ground war where the Soviets, the Red Army,

rolled up the Wehrmacht. There were no bombing of cities, there were no dropping of nuclear weapons. Okay, that's enough facts. Let me just start and say that I don't know how this guy can profess to be an expert in anything. The reason the Soviets didn't bomb German cities, they didn't have long-range bombers. That is why they didn't bomb. You don't think the Soviets, who raped their way across Germany, there's many, many books about the mass rapes that were committed, which I think he mentions at some point there, too,

that they were not committing war crimes. I mean, the Katyn massacre in 1939 was taking 30,000 people from the Polish general staff and shooting them in the back of the head in the forest To say that they didn't commit war crimes or wouldn't commit war crimes is Absolutely bat shit crazy the question you have to ask yourself and this is the moral question and I did you know I have my answer It's different for everybody is that if you're Harry Truman and there's a you know an argument I think a pretty serious one that the atomic, that there was no decision to use them. It was just kind of forward motion after FDR died. I mean, Truman didn't even know about them. I mean, he was

informed after FDR died. But this was just going to happen. We had the arguments have been you should have had a test bomb. We only had two of them, etc. But if Operation Olympic, which is the invasion of the Japanese homeland, if you know that a thousand Americans are going to die and 140,000 Japanese people, 120,000 Japanese people will die in those two days of atomic bombs, what do you do? Do you say, well, it's a thousand of my guys. It's a lot of theirs. But I'd prefer the fewer number. But the few number are your guys. The few number, that's your job as the president of the United States, is to protect those people.

So what do you do? They're already killing them with conventional weapons anyway. Well, this is the other thing. The thing about the atomic bomb is it's an idea. It's actually not what happened. It's not what happened on the ground. It is an idea. When you see the number of people who died in Dresden,

the firebombing of Hamburg, I mean, more importantly, the firebombing of Tokyo, if you send incendiary bombs over a place where the buildings aren't made of brick, they're made of wooden paper, it's going to kill a lot of people. And I can look up the numbers. I think 100,000 plus died. No one really knows about that or cares about it.

It's the fact that it was an A-bomb. That was the issue. So when people say, well, you know, should we have done that? The other thing that you have to look at, and people don't look at this when they're talking about what's happening in Gaza, is what do the people, what does the Hamas leadership say when given offers? When given offers to negotiate, to surrender, to do anything, to release hostages? That's never talked about, but that's the most important thing. What were the big six, is what they called the people

within the war cabinet in Japan, what were they doing when threatened? They were not giving up. After the first atomic bomb, they didn't give up. That was three days difference. It was the 6th and the 9th. Were they given enough time to... They were given plenty of time when you see a city

that's just vaporized. You said you had your answer to the question, to the calculus. And so you're saying that 100,000 of theirs is preferable to 1,000 of ours. Yeah, that's not your responsibility. If you don't want the 100,000, don't start a war on December 7th. So I did some research on it, too. I tweeted about it so also stalin was conscripting minorities and uh prisoners which is i don't know if it's a war crime i didn't look up that i imagine it's a war crime but it's it's basically killing civilians

in a different way just taking them and force them as as into a meat grinder but let's say this would have been my follow-up to mirsheimer let's say russia uh did that as exactly as you said we should we should not commit a war crime and they began to lose the war and now the nazis are approaching moscow and bombing russian cities and if you don't change your strategy, there will be no more Russia. At that point, is it still a war crime, to answer in kind, would Mearsheimer say? It's like an impossible

philosophy question. I don't know if you have any... Probably it's not fair to not give a chance to think about it. What do you think Mearsheimer would say? I don't know, but the way that I think about wars in general is not just in terms of the actions of the armies, but in terms of what kind of society they're trying to build. And I think that that is a very key question. I'm always against war crimes.

I think international law is a good thing. If you can follow it and make, Like, if we could have beat the Nazis without firebombing Dresden, that would have been better. Absolutely. You're not going to get me to argue with that at all. You're not going to get me to argue it wasn't a war crime

if, in fact, it violated the... Well, I guess the Geneva Convention wasn't around then, but you get the point. But the deeper point is, like, what is East Side trying to do, right? South Korea committed horrible war crimes in the Korean War. Nobody even doubts that. But they had a different vision of society than North Korea.

And I think they were on the right side of that war as a result. And you can see the difference between North Korea and South Korea just justifies in some sense what it took to have there be a South Korea, to have it not just all be one communist hellscape. And so that's always a key question. I think Israel shows the kind of society it's trying to build by how it treats its Arab citizens who have the right to vote and sit on the Supreme Court and so forth. We know what Hamas is trying to do.

Is that the case that the war could not have been won without firebombing Dresden? You never know that in prospect. Hindsight is 20-20. So there's a lot of controversy about Dresden in particular, that it wasn't a military target. I mean, there was a railroad junction there that was important,

but was it as important as what ended up happening, which is anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 people that were killed. Holocaust deniers love this, but their favorite one, by the way. They have a march every year, the neo-Nazis in Germany, the NPD is the name of the party, and they memorialize the day of Dresden, and they refer to it as Candace Owen tweeted about Dresden recently,

which is funny. Which is true to a whole show about her. Yeah, but she said something that is the word that is used in German. If you see the signs from the Nazi march, it says, Bombenholocaust, the bomb holocaust. And she referred to it as a holocaust. She actually used that word when talking about it. So the question is, is area bombing,

this is why it's very weird that he brings this up, it's a very imprecise comparison, because when you look at the number of people that have died over seven months, and let's say it's 25,000. Hamas has revised their numbers down. And let's say that 6,000, I mean, the Israelis say 12,000, 13,000 Hamas fighters. But you get down into maybe 15,000, something like that.

That was an afternoon of bombing in World War II. That was not, I mean, this is over seven months. So area, it was literally called area bombing. And Arthur not, I mean, this is over seven months. So area, it was literally called area bombing and Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris and the RAF, that was the idea was just was to break their will. And that is true. There is some, I mean, Churchill actually questioned the strategy too. So was it moral? I have really different thoughts about this. And I watched a film recently, which I think is one of the better films I've seen in the past 10 years. And it's called A Natural History of Destruction.

And it's made by a Ukrainian filmmaker. And it's only, there's no voiceover. And it is only archival footage, beautifully constructed. And it starts on the ground in Hamburg in 1943, of just people going about their business. And then it goes to England, where they're making the bombs

and just in the factories making them. And then it cuts back and it goes until the city's destroyed. And when you're watching that, you're like, Jesus Christ, that was really an intense way of doing this. Do I know that that in particular was the best strategy, the best air strategy?

No, I don't actually. I have a lot of questions about that. But at the time, it's not as if there were other options. It's not as if softening up these cities was something you could do by drones or by some other means. So I think it's an interesting moral question. I think he's totally wrong to ask the question. I don't think it's appropriate in the Gaza discussion, though.

But in hindsight, is it generally thought that this was helpful, the bombing of Dresden, in hastening the end of the war? In particular, there's a book by a guy called Frederick Taylor who makes the argument that it kind of was. He's a British historian. You know, David Irving's first book in 1962 or 63, The Holocaust Denier, was about Dresden. And you see the horseshoe theory of the far right and the far left. Ulrika Meinhof, the head of the Badr Meinhof left-wing terrorist group, very pro-Palestinian, cites in her writing, David Irving, isn't that amazing? Like back then, she said, and she says 120, 130,000 people died in the bombing of Dresden because her argument was, of course, American imperialism and, you know, pro-Palestinian,

but was it a strategic necessity? I mean, I think that there's a lot of argument to be made that it wasn't. And I actually tend to kind of think that it probably wasn't a necessity. But the other bombing raids that killed an enormous number of people, and again, this is a reaction, remember the Battle of Britain, where not only in 1940, it was absolutely horrible for the people of Britain being bombed all the time, Coventry being bombed, et cetera. But at the end of the war you have the V-1 and the V-2 rockets being shot into, supposed to be the super weapon

which didn't end up that way, but just being shot into England and land as they will. But the British were doing the same thing. Because most of Dresden was a British operation. The Americans came in the next day and mopped up a little bit, but mowed the lawn, I suppose you could say. But yeah, it's a tough one.

It's a tough one. Yeah, I think there's no answer to these questions, and it bugs me when people say there is. Before I had Ken Roth on the show, I spent a lot of money buying these essays online, JSTOR, you know, people who had written like the definitive treatises on proportionality. And in the end, they're all like, well, you can't really define it. Like 50 pages, you

really just have to feel it as you go along. Well, this is really just... Because they say it's not one to one. So when people make that argument, am I going to kill... It has to be really, really important. How do you know it's really, really important? Well, you define that. What's the ratio of people? There's no answer. I also think it's a red herring in the following sense, which is I think you can go through every single war in history, be right about who the good guys were, and find war crimes done by the good guys.

100%. Of course. 100% with no exceptions. I mean, the question is. Yeah, go ahead. crimes done by the good guys. 100%. Of course. 100%, with no exceptions. I mean, the question is, if the crux of talking about this is to get at who is on the right side of the conflict, you're having the wrong conversation. The right conversation is what are the aims of each side? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to build? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, in back, you always see these things when you look at World War II, because all of those events are always brought up by the bad people by the David Irving's in the

world, you know, the Malmedy massacre, for instance, but, you know, they always bring up, I mean, think about this, you go to a concentration camp, the Americans went into Dachau in machine gun people, machine gun people that were left that were German, and executed them without trial and killed them in there's actually film of it, of them killing Germans who were operating the Dachau camp. I and you and nobody at this table has any sympathy for those people and actually cheers

for it in a way. But, you know, is that a war crime? I don't know. I suppose by definition it probably is. But it's not one that I'm going to lose a lot of sleep over, you know. So we're about out of time. I'm about out of bladder control. Go ahead, go ahead, Dan. Well, I'll stay to the end one that I'm going to lose a lot of sleep over. So we're about out of time. I'm about out of bladder control. Go ahead, Dan. Well, I'll stay to the end, but I'm just saying.

It's been two hours. Candace Owens. She is an anti-Semite, right? I mean, she's treading pretty close, I would say. Probably. I mean, I don't know to what extent any of her beliefs are deeply held and won't change flip flop again in the next five years if the winds blow the other direction

now this is a big credit to Coleman I guess I can speak freely Coleman and I but we were never Candace Owens fans even when she was saying things we very much agree with and that Coleman very much agreed with.

I was like, no, no, do not hitch your wagon to this woman. My thing with her is that there's people who used to like her but now don't, but she's always been this way. There's no change. It's just the issues she talks about have changed with the news, but the way she approaches

topics is identical for the past five, six years of her. We went to the same high school, by the way she approaches topics is identical for the past five, six years of her. We went to the same high school, by the way. Some years apart. Stanford High. Just before we go, Coleman has a new book, The End of Race Politics.

My family owns four copies already. Four? I own two. It's true. I own the audio book and the actual hard copy. Coleman reads the audio book. My friend, Bernie Fabricant, listened to it. He sent me an email. Mellifluous. Thank you.

And he had this viral appearance on The View, which made you a hero. You want to tell us how that was? It was... I didn't have too many expectations going into it. I was a little bit nervous because The View is not my audience, not an audience I would expect to receive me well,

except that they did. The audience perceived me very well. What was the demographic makeup of the audience mostly? Very diverse, maybe even half black. I don't know. That's a lot. Yeah, it was very. Overrepresented black. Yes. I don't know. That's a lot. Yeah, it was very... Overrepresented black.

Yes. I feel the same way when I perform in Jersey, like these people aren't going to get me. And yet those mooks seem to like me. Yeah, well, yeah. Did the black people in the audience feel to be on your side? Everyone in the audience seemed to be generally on my side. Maybe a couple pockets of dissent, but people in be generally on my side. Maybe a couple pockets of

dissent, but it was people in general were on my side of all races. And at TED. And at TED. Yeah, I mean, the vast majority of the audience at TED was on my side as well, including people of all races. It's really, really a small heckler's veto

of people that get upset when I speak. We don't really know, as white people, what black people really feel about all this stuff. Because a lot of black people that would privately agree with me or even come up to me in private wouldn't feel comfortable saying the very same thing they said to me to a white person. How often does that happen?

Very often. Very often. It even happened at TED. I had many black people, Hispanic people coming up to me to a white person. How often does that happen? Very often. Very often. It even happened at TED. I had many black people, Hispanic people coming up to me saying they love my talk, I agree with you. But I'm not sure those people signal that agreement publicly

where white people can hear, so to speak. And that was one of John McWhorter's points in his early book that I thought was very true, that there's an ethic of, I don't know if Jews are kind of similar in the culture of like,

there's things we can say to each other that we can't say to the outside world. But that was the attack on you from this person called Sunny Hostin, basically saying that you're being used by whites. A charlatan. She called him a charlatan. No, no, some people say that. Not me. Well, she called him the equivalent of a Black Shabbos guy. Yes, yes. But, you know. Right.

For the whites. Co-opted. Right. It was a word I didn't think she knew that really meant. Yeah. She's like, you've been co-opted. You were like, by who? I don't know.

It sounded good. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty much what happened. Before we go, John McWhorter deserves a medal. That guy is a fucking giant. And he gets bigger in my estimation every day. And I mean, I know people say, well, that's just because he's taking the side of Israel.

And of course, that does move me. But the way he does it is so... Like, that is the fucking column that I could tell you a number of the Steen and Berg's and people, friends of mine that write for, you know, many don't have the courage to write. What's the column, the article that you're referring to? In the New York Times op-ed, he's written a few very, very strong. He wrote one recently about the protests. And he's a professor at Columbia. And he's a professor at Columbia.

And he's a professor at Columbia. He's just fantastic. Brave and clear thinking and a tremendous And the bravery of McWhorter in saying these things, and you should really say that it's brave just to make sort of common points. I mean, they're not common points. I mean, he does it very, very well. But he has

been doing this since before he had tenure, when he was at Berkeley, when he was in different places. And he's always been just kind of straight up about what he believes. And you can tell someone that you really admire, and I really do admire John a lot. And I don't really know him. I've met him, I think, once or twice. He doesn't go on your show? Yeah, he's been

on with Camille. It was a Blacks Only show. I was not allowed. It was Lowry and Camille. The evergreen state of podcasting. Yeah, exactly. It was a Blacks Only show. I was not allowed. It was Lowry and Camille. The evergreen state of podcasting. Yeah, exactly. It was a day of disappearance for me. So Camille permitted you to call him black for that one day? Yeah, when I texted him. I wasn't live on the thing.

But no, even when I've disagreed with John, because, I mean, John is one of those guys that, you know, kind of your antenna go up when he says well you know actually I'm a liberal this is what people say all the time but he that's actually true with him I mean he is a liberal and he says a lot of things that I would disagree with and you know I'm liberal on certain things and we don't cross paths and I'm always interested in reading him because he always renders it so well and I just take him as an honest person we when

there's so much heat against you and you just don't give a fuck, I always take your opinion more seriously. Should I wrap it up? Yes. Thank you guys, my pals, for coming to the podcast. Thank you. Are you staying for Italian dinner now? I will. I will indeed. Coleman has a gig. Yes, Dan.

Yes, the end of race politics. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Mr. Finkelstein. Mr. Finkelstein, could you sign off for us, please? Make sure we know about Coleman's book and your podcast. Coleman's book, The End of Shabboskoy Politics, is available at Amazon and various other retailers who support the occupation. Dan Ademan is playing in New Jersey to those mooks. Go find him.

And thank you for joining us. Thanks, guys. Bye.