The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Richard Hanania: Epstein, Israel, and Hot Physiognomy

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Social and political critic extraordinaire Richard Hanania joins us for a wide-ranging discussion on Israel, Epstein, and whatever else he's thinking about these days. 📖 Get his book The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics on Amazon: http://bit.ly/4lA4hH5 📰 Read his Substack: https://substack.com/@richardhanania 🐦 Follow him on X: https://x.com/RichardHanania

Okay, good evening, everybody. Welcome to Live from the Table. I'm here all alone today. Actually, I didn't even have Dan or Periel to introduce our guest. I think it's his third time on the show, Richard Hennani. What's your current intro, Richard? Yeah, I mean, I'm just a writer. I'm on Substack.

I'm on Twitter. People can Google my name or they can search in Substack or they can search in Twitter. I'm there. There's no, there's no, you know, fancy trimmings on it. And you're trying to get off Twitter, right? Are you on Blue Sky as well? No, I've never, I've never, I complain about Twitter. It probably sounds like I'm trying to get off Twitter.

I'd like to get to the point one day where I don't need it. I feel like it keeps me in the conversation. It still draws a lot of people to the more substantive work, which I appreciate. A lot of, you know, kind of discourse shaping things that I've said have started off on Twitter. So I don't feel like I can get off it, but I recognize it's a kind of terrible force on our society. it is um i uh i i thought i read somewhere that you said you were trying to try to build your substacks that you could get the hell off twitter because it's actually for what you just said um so let's just talk about a few things by the way i i would just add to the introduction

that i think you're one of the world's most interesting people with one of the most interesting and active minds you find something um like nuggets in almost any subject matter to talk about and at the same time you're not too highbrow for a man of your intellect you still will comment on an attractive woman on Twitter almost to finally you're married right how's your wife feel about all the

your ogling yeah it's a job she does she understands she understands do you get you get so Richard will tweet you know like hot women or he'll he'll tweet a hot woman like clever than that I don't just tweet hot women there's usually some kind of

common carry associated yeah you got you got you panicked you know let me finish like like some woman saying something like silly or something and uh well you could you want to describe what your what your angle is on the hot chicks well there's there's a few of them look it's it's it is good for kind of engagement so i'm not above you know as people sometimes are engagement farmers they're just lying or making things up or provoking people for no reason i'm against that but you know something that's relatively harmless or even has a point that gets engagement. I don't think there's, there's anything wrong with that. So the most famous thing, I just was once tweeted out when Sidney's Sweetie was on SNL, like three years ago, I tweeted

out, Wokeness is dead. I believe that was it, just those three words. It's still, I believe, the most viewed tweet of all time. It was like got like 67 million views. It was like a Super Bowl ad. It inspired like dozens of think pieces. And this was a precursor. to this latest jeans controversy with Sydney Sweeney. I started the whole Sydney Sweetie as a, you know, this right wing figure. So that's like one of those cases like that. There's, or other ones will be like a woman will be like giving dating advice or something like that and I'll comment on it or I'll comment on interactions between men and women,

which is fun. I did with my friend Rob Henderson. There was this video of this woman on like TikTok who went around and hit on men and said, you know, you're cute just as a kind of social experiment. see what would happen and we would watch how the men would react and this was fascinating i mean you know kids these days you've seen all the all the charts i'm sure they don't even go outside you know they don't drink they don't ask anyone on dates they don't hang out at the mall it's really really terrible um and so in addition to the political commentary i'm trying to you know reverse these

negative social trends well i did see this is obviously not what we're going to talk about but i did see for summary six of my mind. There was some Israeli woman, you know, doing some sort of video, and she had huge breaths. And I thought the reason you retweeted her was because of her. How do you pronounce it, physiognomy?

What's the word? No, physiognomy is the face. Oh, physiognomy is the face. Yeah, yeah, they say, like you look like something or other. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but yeah, we know what you're saying. Yeah, she was like selling cell phones.

It was in Hebrew. It wasn't subtitle. I had no idea what, you know, she was saying, probably by this nice, you know, cell phone. Yeah, and I think I tweeted. I don't remember what I tweeted. It might have been something like, protect our greatest ally or something like that. And, yeah, I mean, that's one of the lesser, less substantive ones. What I like about it is that you are puncturing the pretense that this isn't the intention,

like, like, we're all supposed to pretend we don't notice or that's not the reason she's on. You're like, come on, we're kidding here, right? Yeah, yeah, it'll be some, like, banal thing. some woman is doing and she's obviously trying to get attention there's this woman on tictock my god she she she has like this giant she has her breasts out like just completely like exposed and she's in her car and she's like writing she's talking about like what's it like picking up kids from the line at school and this is like her ticot and sometimes she'll be like well dads will like look at me and like like she's shocked right like a lot of like Twitter content is this stuff and it's it's kind of fun to make fun

of all right so let's let's take you know i just i just love to get your views on things lately i wanted to talk about israel but lately you've been um uh having michael tracy on your show who uh michael tracy who was a wrecking ball against russia gate years ago one of the first and most effective debunkers of that story and he is taking a reckon ball to the geoffrey epstein's story such that even the little bits of it that I did think I believed, I no longer believed. So what's your overall take on this? Like, what of that story do you think is even true? Yeah.

So the Epstein story has a series of things one can believe from the, you know, the crimes he was accused of to this idea that he was a Israeli spy or some kind of spy blackmailing. famous men by putting them in compromising situations with underage girls, you know, and I think that like that stuff, I didn't realize how thinly sourced the more extreme. Yeah, exactly. I didn't realize how thinly sourced. So the, the, they come from the basically the only idea that ever, the only person, I think, are one of the only people. There's a handful of people, but the main one that people rely on. And I learned all this from Michael, so this is credit to him. Virginia Goufrey, basically, you know, was a kind of mentally unstable person.

She, there's a lot of reasons to question her credibility. None of her claims, like, ever made it to a court. You know, she was even sued by Alan Dershowitz. So she had claimed she had been trafficked to multiple times. And I think she was actually like either 17 or over 18 when she's, which this particular woman. She makes, she makes Tara Reid seem like Jean Kirkpatrick. There's a lot of these. And she's the best of them.

the one who accused Biden of the sexual thing, but she was a little goofy too. Yeah. To dismiss her completely. Yeah. And this, and, you know, this, and, you know, she, by the way, Dershowitz sued her. She had to go to court.

She had to basically settle with him, right? And there's other things like Prince Andrews settled with her. Michael makes the, you know, plausible case that, like, Prince Andrew doesn't want to be dragged in an American court and just, you know, paid this woman off. There's a picture of her with Prince Andrew. That's all that we've ever seen. Oh, by the.

way, when she originally was talking to the press, she got paid by the Daily Mail around 2010 to talk about her having known Prince Andrew. I don't know if she hooked up with him or whatever, but at the time, like, did not mention, like, any kind of traffic or, like, victimizing status. So this story changed over time. Brought up just, like, kind of the financial incentives involved, like once you start accusing this guy of, you know, other people are going to come out the woodwork, again, usually with, usually with very little evidence, particularly for people having relations with people who are not Jeffrey Epstein, right, like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and all that other stuff. And then the idea that Epstein was intelligence, that's the other

kind of fascinating, you know, the thing that gets people, the idea that Alex Acosta said that we're going to go easy on him when he was originally charged with trafficking underage girls because he belongs to intelligence. That was like a journalist speaking to someone off the record and reporting it. There's no, there's nothing beyond that. And it's become like, well, the media has acknowledged this or that. It's completely an anonymous quote from a new source. He's also done a series of reporting. I mean, you talk about the accusers, talk about the journalists who got into this stuff.

Just very, very sloppy people. I mean, one Virginia Brown, he actually, or Julie Brown, he went, he read her book. She was inventing, she was using Virginia Goufrey's, you know, fictional, she wrote like a fictional memoir that she was going to sell that she later Eric Knowledge was fictional. And then Julie Brown, who's considered a serious journalist, who was like, I think she was on Ross Douthad. She uses it as like a factual source in her own book. And he goes through these journalists one by one.

And it's just a beautiful, just, you know, dissection. I was never interested. I mean, I became interested at Epstein because of all the talk about Trump and what's been going on recently. I hadn't realized just, you know, I thought like extreme conspiracy theories were probably made up, the people who were spread. writing this were not people that I thought were generally trustworthy, so I never looked into it. But, you know, but myself, I thought there was something at least there. And there really

wasn't. Yeah. Well, to me, the story is interesting, again, because of the cultural fuel of it, which clearly, to a large extent, is the fact that Epstein was Jewish and maybe involved with the Mossad. And as Ian Carroll famously said to Joe Rogan, it's a stain on the Jewish people. And the current cast of characters that's really into this story, Tucker, Daryl Cooper, people like that. Obviously, that's the catnip aspect of this story to them now. It's that Epstein is part of this Jewish conspiracy that is controlling basically every major story there is from Ukraine. You name it, right? I mean, Candice Owens, I don't know what your comment is. And that's what disturbs me right now. Yeah, it's partly the, it has,

It presses a lot of buttons. It's got the anti-Semitism thing. It's got the Israel thing. They're also just obsessed with kind of pedophilia and human trafficking. This goes back to like QAnon becoming of force in the, you know, sort of mega world. Even illegal immigration, which, you know, they don't like migration. They'll justify it in terms of, you know, human trafficking and like sex slavery and stuff like that, which I think is pretty, you know, I think that's overstated as a factor in immigration.

There was this movie, what was it, Sound of Freedom? which was about a guy who apparently went to Latin America and would like save children being trafficked. His story fell apart. I mean, there was a scandal surrounding this guy. But this is really, really kind of catnip, I think, for a lot of people in right-wing politics. Who was he said recently that the Wright always needs a pedophilia scandal?

Somebody, I heard this. And it's true. They always have Q&N. There's always some pedophilia ring. I don't know if you heard that. Maybe it was Michael Tracy made with somebody else. Yeah, I mean, me and Michael have touched on these ideas. Like, there is, the pedophile thing is a, like, deep concern.

I mean, the whole Q&M thing was, like, the world is run. Like, why would this be your theory of the world? It's like, they're all pedophiles and Trump is going to go execute them. I mean, so you have that aspect of it, too. You have rich guys. You have, like, you know, Democrats, like Bill Clinton. You know, you have Trump, too, was, like, closer to Epstein than any of them, but they just, they're just able to ignore that.

So, yeah, there's a lot here that I think people, you know, people were able to run with. So, okay, just one more thing about this that very much disturbs me. First of all, I never paid much attention to it because, you know, just certain circumstantial things. First of all, that the Biden administration had this information for four years and through a presidential election cycle never leaked anything. That seemed implausible to then imagine that Trump was implicated in this in any meaningful way. and I remember early on why I just don't imagine that like I could imagine that Epstein had this perversion if you want to call it to underage girls

but I just didn't imagine it's the kind of thing you can easily introduce into the world of Bill Clinton and like people say what the fuck are you doing dude I can imagine a rich guy hooking up his friends with adult prostitutes the ones he really trusts but I just don't imagine him broaching the subject of 14 or 15-year-old girls or whatever it was that was approached because these people would be horrified by that. Like that is not like a thing that behind closed doors every do is, oh, great, bring on the 15-year-old girls.

You know, it's just, I never believed it. But then now what is bothering me is that this aspect of the fact that Alexander Acosta, who I guess was the prosecutor, claimed that, or no, that somebody reported, Vicki Ward, is that her name, claimed that he said that he was told to lay off because Epstein's intelligence. Now, this is kind of the, no pun intended, the load-bearing fact of this story. And what's really bothering me, I'm sure you know this, is that there was an investigation into this by the Office of Professional Responsibility or something. They asked Acosta about this. he denied it he walked away from it they even offered him a classified room where he could discuss you know like top secret type information and he declined to do that and what's hugely upsetting

about this story to me is that even the more credible shows like the Megan Kelly show they talk about this claim that Epstein but don't laugh because she is more credible they talk about relative yes okay They talk about this claim about Acosta saying he was told, as he was intelligence, and they do not tell their viewers that this has been looked into, that Acosta denied it under oath, that he was given a classified setting. They obviously want to keep the story going

and do not want to share the obvious countervailing facts. So it's not journalism anymore. It's just the weekly world news. yeah yeah right i mean and uh you know the israel thing it's interesting because epstein did have a friendship with a former prime minister of israel uh heud barraq so it's that's that's i think the other thing that you know gives it gives it makes it interesting to people uh long after he had access to power like he's not like you know yeah he was friends with a lot i mean yeah he was a he was a guy who went out and had fun and people liked hanging out with him apparently that we can't

you know deny that um yeah yeah it's there it's there it's there it was a friend it was a friend it was a It's just thin. And it becomes like a, you know, it becomes like a game of telephone. Like I've seen people just get up and claim, you know, Acosta has testified to Congress that he was told Epstein was intelligence. Like, that's how it becomes. And then nobody goes back. And this is why Michael is so valuable.

I mean, so people rarely do this. All you do is just you try to follow the steps. Where do this originally come from? He has a theory that the person who said this was Steve Bannon because Vicki Ward was talking to Bannon at the time for some kind of project. And like if Steve Bannon was like, you know, not often considered the most credible or truth per person, if he just said this, you know, publicly like Epstein is intelligence, nobody would take that seriously. He launders it through a journalist. It gets into the Daily Beast. Suddenly it's just like literally a fact that we accept, everyone accepts forever without checking again. I mean, you really see how kind of how like, you know, just how bad a lot of the journalism around this is. Here's some of the other circumstantial facts that why would Trump, appoint these Epstein fanatics like Bongino and Cash Patel to be in charge of the Epstein files in his own administration knowing that this is like why would he put them in that position and why like in every I've said this on the show before in every like Hollywood blackmail movie the guy always says and if anything should happen to me there's an envelope in a safe deposit box like why would Epstein just leave himself out there to be murdered without making any contingency plan. to prevent his murder.

And then why is just Lane Maxwell or however, however you say her name, sitting at a minimum security prison, apparently not scared at all about anything happening to her, right? It's just nothing is as it would be if this was a real story. It's just she would. You agree with me, right? I agree with you completely. I mean, there is, like, if you wanted like a scandal,

I mean, the, you know, the closest thing to a scandal, which I don't think it is, is like, they moved her to, they obviously moved her to a minimum security prison because the Trump administration got something. So they ended up saying, I don't remember if they officially said this or unofficially, but they basically sent one of the top people in the Department of Justice, who was Trump's former lawyer, to go talk to her, and they absolved Trump. And then she gets moved to a minimum security prison. So, like, there is just, like, the common kind of corruption and, like, the kind of things that should be scandals, like, going on within the administration. The fact that, you know, it's reported that they, they sent agents just to, to comb through and find every mention of Trump because the entire, you know, the entire point of the FBI now is the DOJ is to protect Trump. I mean, this stuff is scandalous. Yeah. But no. That's an ethical

violation. He's not supposed to use the administer the levers of justice to. Yeah. These are longstanding norms. Like you don't, like you don't, like you don't even fire the FBI director. You appointed the FBI director used to be appointed every 10 years and it wouldn't even change with administration. So yeah, we're way beyond any of that. Well, look, Bill Barr, the much maligned Bill Barr, knew all the details of the Hunter Biden laptop all through that election cycle. And he held, he did the ethical thing. He kept his mouth shut. I thought that was pretty impressive of him.

I don't know, I don't think Eric Holder would have done that. I think Eric Holder would have found a way to leak it. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's hard to say. The Biden thing, I mean, there was embarrassing things about Trump in the Epstein files, right? So earlier you said, you know, Biden could have leaked it. Yeah, I mean, that note that, that, that note that. Trump wrote to that love letter he wrote to Epstein about how you never age and stuff like that.

You know, that was there. That's pretty damaging. Very clever that note. I mean, much more clever than we ever imagined Trump could be, right? Enigmas don't age, Jeffrey. It's very, like, I wonder. Right. It's just, that's, yeah, I may imagine if it was Clinton.

I mean, like the Michael Wolf tape, like, released a tape like, you know, in the final days of the 20, I think, 2020. or 2024 election, basically what Epstein said, you know, me and Trump were best. Imagine if it came out about, you know, Joe Biden or something. It's just kind of, it doesn't, it's all the conspiracy theorists are pro-Trump. So like the most conspiratorial stuff like doesn't get circulation because the pro-Trump and pro-conspiracy are the same people. That's why it has to be the Jewish thing fueling it because they want that even more than they want to defend Trump.

All right, leaving Epstein aside, I had written you, I think. that I sensed you were souring on Israel. Now, when, when, right after October 7th, you were outrageously defending Israel almost hyperbolicly. And, you know, like an apologist almost for almost any kind of major action that Israel intended. And now I feel that maybe you're having some second thoughts about Israel's behavior in the war. Are you making a face? If you're listening on audio, he's making a face, let the record show that he may not agree with what I've just said. So where are you on the Israel topic now?

And also, let me just mention because it's interesting, even though you might bristle at it, you have an Arabic background. You're a descendant of Palestinian Christians, right? Is that right? On the father side, yeah, mother's side, Jordanian, yeah. Okay, so that's, it's still interesting to know that, right? Yeah. So, yeah, no, I'm pretty, like, so I haven't, look, I wrote a series of articles when the war started, and the position hasn't really changed much. It's always been that Israel has a right to defend itself.

Hamas cannot be allowed to rule Gaza after October 7th. It's going to be bloody and terrible and things are going to happen, but, like, this is kind of the national security imperative for Israel. I think what you might be sensing is, like, I am, this isn't really Israel's fault, but I'm annoyed at the, I'm annoyed at how the anti-Semitism issue has been used by the Trump administration and the justification to kind of go after university. So I was always against, you know, this wokeness stuff. It was commonly what they would do is they would say, well, you know, Harvard or Princeton, you're discriminated against African Americans.

Why? Because some black person said they felt unsafe. And a lot of the civil rights, a lot of the kind of federal government mandates and pressures on the universities came from me. this idea that everyone needs a safe environment and even, you know, it infringed on some free speech concerns. On some things, on this wokeness stuff, the administration has been doing great things. At the same time, they've kind of taken that playbook and used it for anti-Semitism. And it's stuff like even trying to deport people for writing the wrong op-ed or going to the wrong protest. There was one

girl at Columbia from South Korea who had been in the United States like her whole life, but like protesting against Israel, which I'm not a fan of these. these college protesters who are protesting against Israel, but still, like, why are we doing this? Why is this that, like, why are we trying to really fringe free speech on ways that, like, conservatives were complaining about not that long ago? And so, yeah, I've been very kind of annoyed with what's been going on with the universities, despite the good stuff that has been done, but it's not, it doesn't directly reflect on the Israeli war effort, which is a separate question.

Yeah, I agree with you about the free. speech stuff. Although, I do have this thought from time to time, just as a matter of like, I don't know how to put it, but as a matter of like real world, expediency over principle, as it were, like with regard to immigration, let's say. Let's say you're in an administration and you know that it's very likely that the five things you propose to do are going to eventually get overturned by the courts. But you know that after you do those five things, even after it's overturned by the courts, you will accomplish this righteous agenda in a great way.

As we've seen with, I think many of the things we could both agree have been excessive in the way they're enforcing ICE and deporting and this guy to El Salvadorian prison. I mean horrible things. but somehow in the end the border crossings are almost at zero now, right? This is an accomplishment in the same way Jefferson bought Louisiana knowing full well

he probably had no authority to do so. It was an accomplishment that was a righteous accomplishment and controlling the border as a righteous accomplishment. Would you do that if you were president? Would you pursue policies that you know would eventually get overturned if you knew that the pot of gold would be the accomplishment

in that roundabout way you follow the question right yeah sure the i mean yeah i mean on principle i'm not opposed to it i think and the israeli war effort is one such case where it's like it's really you know terrible some of the things you have to do but it's it's there's a necessity of state so i'm not against jefferson byega louisiana even though it might not have been uh followed all the proper legal procedures that's that's true i you know by um there's you know he's playing hardball because one thing again i'm pretty sure we agree on is that the universities have been having a horrible double standard for years and years and years on the issues they support versus the issues they oppose and now this is a shot across the bow illegal an illegal shot across the

bow but it's going to leave them with a sting and they're they will clean up their act in some way going forward. And how else is he going to get them to do that, right? Yeah, well, I mean, you have a lot of, if you want to go after the universities for, like, discriminating based on race and contravention of what the Supreme Court recently rolled, you have a lot of ammunition to do that. I mean, I wonder whether you are actually just kind of diverting your attention

from things that are on stronger legal grounds. So you kind of have to check the premise. I think there's also been another problem where it's kind of nihilistic. it's like, you know, you discriminated based on race, therefore we're going to cut off your medical, you know, your medical research. That's, that's an overreaction. Even as someone who doesn't like wokeness and thinks it's a major problem, there are things you could do between nothing and we're going to defend, you know, Harvard science, right? And some of their demands are just kind of crazy. I mean, they had one where they were demanding at some point

diversity based on thought and like every department. So every department has to have affirmative action for Trump supporters. I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of, of nuts. So I don't know. I don't see it this stuff at the universities as the stuff that I don't like. I don't see it as necessarily helping leading to a better or long-term solution. Maybe it's like you're carpet bombing them and they're going to be so afraid of, you know, afraid of doing anything woke that they're never going to, you know, even go in that direction. Like maybe, but do you need like the kind of hysteria about anti-Semitism or do you need this? Do you need this? about intellectual diversity making these demands that are just impossible?

Does that help? I don't see it. You know, you have me in a disadvantage just because I don't know the details or the facts barely. I just this issue of, you know, the real world versus the academic drawing board always fascinates me. And as we know, every like Senator Obama gets behind the desk and does a thousand different things that President Obama does a thousand different things that Senator. Obama would have been outraged by.

Because somehow when you get behind the desk, you've got to get stuff done. And there is a world, which is hardball, especially when the law is so fucked up. I mean, I know as a business person, you know, Tyler Cowen, our friend, said something as an aside on a show one time that applies to a lot of things. He says, well, you know, you can't really follow all the rules of policing. and be an effective policeman, meaning that the system is set up that you really can't accomplish the goal if you really are going to be a stickler for all the rules.

And this is a problem in many different contexts. The rules are just so oppressive that, you know, to get things done requires a little cheating. Yes. I mean, maybe. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's, right. I don't mean to get bad things that. I mean, to get good things done.

So you have a couple different things going right you have like the goals and whether we think the goals are worthwhile like putting you know the universities i think just they want he wants them to be worshiping trump like i don't think that that's a good goal but there's the goals and then there's uh kind of there's the idea that regulations are too you know they're too restrictive so going after say regulations i mean that's some good thing unfortunately they've done it i think in a poor way which they've just tied it to firing government employees which is not the way to do it because sometimes like if you need permits or you need to reform the system you often need to need employees to actually do that. You just create more bottlenecks and more delays. And then you have the idea of like, is when Trump is breaking rules, you know, is he also breaking rules that are positive, like the norm that the Justice Department and the FBI are at arm's length from the president? They're not just toadies who just fought over him and do whatever he wants. I wrote an article not that long ago about people talk about the Biden administration, like how angry Biden was at Marrick Garland throughout the administration, you know, he puts his son on trial,

his son gets convicted, there's investigations into Biden, unthinkable under Trump, just unthinkable that like Don Jr. or Eric would be indicted while Trump is in office. Some of these norms are, you know, some of these norms are bad. Some of them are actually good. I think on foreign policy, you know, I think this is something I meant to write more about. The fact that the like we had this we had this way of doing things where you just would have talked to foreign leaders like you wouldn't you know you would just say whatever like we went north korea you know we went you know a half a century no american leader ever talked to a north korean leader not even high level contacts now trump just goes and says oh yeah i'll meet with kim junkgoon nothing really

came of that um but it isn't he didn't lose anything either right and so the fact that he's like he's willing to just go meet with Putin maybe you know maybe people are worried at right to be worried that he just likes Putin and will like sell him out. But actually, I don't think it's worked out that way. I think meeting with Putin and being exposed to his ideas has made him more anti-Pudin because he's like, oh, God, this guy really doesn't want peace. This guy really wants to dominate Ukraine. So the fact that Trump will like do the, like break these norms in some cases is actually good.

I think Jared Kushner, what they did with the Abraham Accords in the first administration is another example of this. But then you have like the norms that you don't be corrupt and just use government to enrich yourself and help out your buddies. that's also the kind of norm that needs to be protected. Yeah, I agree. And by the way, just for the listeners, I am actually offended by most of the things that Trump is doing when it comes to the speech on campus. I just try to check myself and make sure I'm not being too holier than now.

Because after all, Biden did decide to forgive all the student loans when he knew it certainly wasn't legal. And then Obama did legalize all the dreamers when he certainly knew it wasn't legal. many examples. This is not unprecedented for the president to just do something he knows he can't do. But this is, you know, this is a particular third rail of that kind of behavior. And Trump does everything.

The degree is different to. Trump is just more vulgar that we can imagine. And even those, even those, they weren't personal corruption. There was no evidence that Biden was profiting off of student loan forgiveness. They had these policy. You know, the speech.

So the corruption thing, there's no argument. Right. It's just. I still prefer him to Kamala Harris, I have to say, but, you know, those are the two choices. All right. Israel. Now, I had kind of gotten a little quiet about Israel. I'd be getting like DMs about it and people tweaking me on Twitter. And I'll explain myself why I got quiet. I kind of gathered my thoughts. So these are the things that have been going through my mind, and they're related in my mind. First of all, it's true in my mind that the hardliners, the Churchill types, are usually right.

The skeptics are usually right. Charles Krauthammer once said conservatism was the triumph of experience over hope. And so I tend to err on the side of the hardliners. However, and this is very important, they're not always right. And the dreamers are the ones who often move history forward. And a good example of this is that William F. Buckley, he had the failure of imagination to imagine that integration and civil rights could actually bring us this, you know, tremendous progress. And I, you know, so I'm always in my own mind, like, well, Well, I tend towards the hardliners, but am I missing it?

Am I going to be one of these idiots who couldn't imagine the dream? So that's one part of it. The other thing is that I'm becoming more and more concerned about the dehumanization. Now, the typical charge is that the genocide dare dehumanizes the people, softening the ground in order to commit genocide, right? That's like what the Nazis did. But I think there's something else that might be going on here that's concerned me as part of the reason I care quite,

which is that when the hardliners are correct in presenting the picture, that there's nothing we can do here that's going to be consistent with our fundamental interest that will not lead to a horrible number of deaths of women and children. Hamas is a treachery wrapped in

a you know, a treachery inside an atrocity wrapped in a war crime. I use that Churchill thing. And there is no way we're going to get rid of Hamas without them forcing us to kill many, many people. And we

have to get rid of Hamas because all the hardliners in the past warned us about where we were heading and here sure enough they turned out to be right and 10 years from now the way technology is going it'll only get worse and we have Iran and the Houthis so we have to do this and I feel I'm taking a long time to get to this

I feel that when decent people find themselves in a situation where they have to do unspeakable things that they have to have so much blood on their hands to kill innocent people the cognitive dissonance is so intense that that causes a dehumanization. They have to dehumanize the people they're killing

because they can't live with themselves. And then once that dehumanization sets in, the speed bump is gone. And then they will quite likely end up killing more people than they had to. And I worry, are they killing more people than they have to? And this is all one unit together in my mind. And I just became very quiet about it.

And yet, I don't, I still don't know that Israel has any choice but to do what it's doing. And I know people want to tell me that Netanyahu is keeping the war going because he's corrupt him because he's worried about prosecution and that's all plausible except when he then presents his arguments for why he needs to continue the war they make sense for the most part to me so that's a disjointed kind of exposition of what i've been thinking how does that jive with what you've been thinking yeah so the idea that you know like whether when people debate whether where Israel should be negotiating this way or doing this or doing that or fighting the war this way or that way, it's hard to know from the outside.

It's hard to know to micromatic these things. We don't know what they're saying when they're negotiating between them and Hamas. We don't know what efforts the Israelis are making. We don't know what's propaganda and what's real. So from the perspective of having an opinion on exactly what Israel is doing at any particular point or whether they're doing something counterproductive or doesn't make sense or the political considerations of Nanyahu, that's very, very hard to judge in real time from the outside. You know, more generally, there is, you know, there is a, there's a real tradeoff here.

And most people who are concerned about human rights issues in Gaza, as we all are, as we all should be, they're often not looking at the tradeoff. So I have a friend who was on the podcast a few times, Philippe Lemoine, a very smart guy. He basically has said from the beginning of the war that Hamas has to stay in power, because the only way to get rid of Hamas is, you know, doing something similar to what's going on right now. Very few people will take that position. Very few people will say, they'll just have some pie in the sky thing. Look, Hamas survived this war. If they survived this war, let's say they survived the wardens today. They're, they did not full. They did not step down under the most extreme pressure, one can imagine. The idea that they're

just going to give up their weapons and go back to normal in the period afterwards, it's, it's not credible. And so the people really have to explain or at least understand that Hamas is going to have a role here. It's going to be a political force going forward. Now, again, that said, we don't have all the details. Like, for all we know, Hamas has, I doubt this. I really doubt this. But like Hamas could have told Danja, we'll surrender, just stop bombing us for a day. I don't think anyone has said that. We just have no idea, right? But from the outside, it does look like Hamas thinks it can ride this out.

And the reason it thinks it can ride this out is it thinks human, the pressure over what Israel is doing is going to be enough that eventually they're going to buckle and they're going to come to some agreement where Hamas is still able to stay in power and stay in power to do what? Well, eventually the same thing again is that doing the Palestinian people. any favors. If Gaza still is ruled by Hamas, dedicated to destroying Israel, another 10, whatever, 15 years, whatever it takes, we start this thing all over again. I don't think that could be the outcome. I don't think Israel can allow that to be in the outcome. I don't think that's a good outcome for the Palestinians either. So, well, then, so then, so then you support, do you think Israel should reoccupy? Should they take territory? Yeah, the idea that it's, again, it's difficult to say from like the outside what the plans are. I mean, I think that that would be kind of hubris

to say exactly what it would be. I think that the end goal has to be something along the lines of Hamas does not rule Gaza, and there's a transition to something else. Now, the thing that I've always supported, and people are horrified by this, but I like the idea of Palestinians being allowed to leave as refugees. Even before the war, there was a poll where something like 40% of Gazans, you know, said they would like to immigrate. People would like to immigrate from third world countries, even when there isn't a war going on to, you know, to a large degree. And people will say, well, that's ethnic cleansing. I mean, it's, you know, it's every other conflict in the world, we think it's a good idea to get people who are in the midst of the war zone

out of it into a safer location. And so I've always wanted that to be part of the solution. I've wanted Palestinians to leave. I want Palestinians to have a better standard of living somewhere else, not to be under the control of Hamas, not to have to worry about the Jews. or the Jewish state or anything like that, they'd come to Europe. Maybe there would be problems there, but it wouldn't be the same problems to anywhere the same degree.

And so, yeah, I think some combination of subcombination of letting the Palestinians leave as refugees and then making sure Hamas doesn't remain in power, I think that has to be the end goal. Whether it's like occupy Gaza City or don't occupy Gaza City, I mean, these are kind of technical matters that I'm not qualified to talk about.

It's so upsetting. I mean, you know, I always say there's a moral obligation to the practical, a moral obligation to the possible. There is this argument. I heard an Israeli express it to me recently. He said, look, we want them to have a state. They can have a state. They can have a capital in East Jerusalem.

They can have Gaza. They can have whatever they want. He says, but if they won't accept it, they have to go. This is attitude. They won't accept that they have to go. And I'm not advocating this. But I understand the logic there because the Palestinians, after all, do have a path right before their eyes that they could follow to get a state and end this

conflict once and for all, which is to have a leader and say, listen, we offered us ABC. We'd also like this little change, but we basically know what the solution is, 98% of the land and land swaps and capital needs. Basically, everything that's already been offered, whatever tweaks, we don't even know whatever tweaks they want. And to say, Israel, that's what we want, if you give us that, then this will be over. they have that possible path the Israelis as far as i can imagine it they have no path to peace here there's nothing they can do is you know they can they can they can flail from left wing policies

to right wing policies but what we seem to be discovering over the last 25 years or 26 years since 1999 or something, is that there's no thirst for a two-state solution on the other side, at least not a critical mass enough to make it come true. And does Israel have to live this way, therefore, forever? Is that the moral outcome? The moral outcome of the world says, well, you can't ever throw people out. So what you have to do is live this way forever. and that doesn't seem fair either.

Yeah, I think that the idea of Palestinians being allowed to leave, that's something that has to happen only once, right? You just have to have somebody to take them at some point. The Trump administration has been talking about it. So it could potentially happen. It's actually, I think, even more, it's even more difficult than you say, because it's not like there's one guy, an Israeli, and a Palestinian, and they can just negotiate and come to a deal.

These are fractious communities or a state in the, in the case of Israel. There's not one person who represents the Palestinians. There's Hamas, there's Hamas, there's public opinion in Gaza, there's the West Bank, there's the Palestinian Authority. And even if one person among those, one party wants to make a deal, another party can come along and assassinate that person or do something else. Same thing with Israel. Israel has extremists who just don't want the Palestinians around. They have a lot of power in the government now. their influence is growing in American society.

So it's even like to sit there and be like, oh, well, the Israelis, you know, want peace and the Palestinians don't or vice versa. This is this is too optimistic because it's just like you're thinking of it as like one person can just change their mind and they can put their minds together and they can make a deal and everything can work out. When it's much more tragic than that, it's like factions that are like difficult and the Palestinians like don't even exist as a collective. They're not one country or one group.

And that's why I like the, that's why, again, to go back to the refugee thing, that's why I do think this is intractable. This is not, like, countries sometimes have civil wars that last decades. You have Palestinians, if you're going to have, like, who's going to run Palestine and this thing that's like Gaza and the West Bank and like, you know, we don't even know who's, there's not, like, you want to recognize a Palestinian state when there's not like one force in control these things. And then on top of that, you want to make peace with Israel, which has its own internal politics and all this stuff going on. on within it. This is, this is, this is a, this is a pipe group. This is a fantasy. I've always thought this was kind of hopeless from the beginning. And that's, that's where we are. Israel has to kind of take care of the threats that it faces. And we just have to kind of understand what a tragic situation this is. I don't fully agree with you because I don't think it's asking too much

to have one Palestinian leader from one of these factions express the want to make peace position. And on Israel's side, as I understand the Israeli – I mean, he could. I mean, one guy could express it. He might get assassinated. Like that, he might – I mean, it's a tough situation. But I'm saying – right. So if you look at a people say, you can't even have one guy who says publicly you want to make – he wants to make peace.

This is reason for tremendous pessimism. On the Israeli side, you have people who are, you know, ready for unilateral withdrawal. you have skeptics who say they'll never make peace with us. But one thing is for sure, definitely a majority of Israel would want to make peace if they saw another side, which was receptive to it. I have zero doubt about that. And even if that leader who made peace was assassinated, the peace stands in an actual nation that signs treaties, just like, you know, Saddam.

That was assassinated, but in the Palestinian state, who knows what that means? The piece of paper is worthless, probably. So it's a very bad situation, which leads me to, did you watch the Ezra Klein interview about genocide? I listened to like a quarter of it. All right. Do you have a feeling on the genocide issue? I think it's one of these, no, the genocide, I mean, I was kind of turned off by the whole

tone of the discussion because, you know, I know this. I studied law school, I took classes on international law. The definition that they have is kind of, it's like to cause, you know, I'm going to butcher it, but it's something along the lines of like to cause elimination or harm or mental anguish to a group in complete or in part. It's like, okay, causing mental. It's to destroy a people. It means physical destruction by the current president, current president to destroy a people

in Hall or in part. You have to kill them. No, no. I remember listening. maybe I was getting it wrong. Let me see definition of genocide. Will you mind if I Google it because I remember it was like much more. That definition that you're saying was actually rejected by the genocide.

Okay. It's a X by killing, causing deflecting conditions. Okay, so here's the, you know, here's the, so genocide, United Nations. Okay, so here's the UN, top source. Genocides is a crime of the definition of crime is contained Article 2. basically definition. Okay, so it says number one, in the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts.

This is Convention on the Prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy or in whole or in part. Okay, you have to be intending to destroy them. That's true. Okay, so, and then it's as such causing bodily or mentally harm. Okay, so you have to at least intend to destroy. Now, if I destroy you,

I'm destroying the Jewish people in part. Kalmas is part of the Palestinian people. So it is, you are trying to destroy Palestinians in part, right? So this is, these things are kind of, look, I think this kind of absoluteist approach to, it is kind of, even they talked about Nuremberg trial, victor's justice, you know, the Soviets, you know, committed atrocities in many cases as bad or worse than the Nazi Germany. It is, you know, it is, it is an argument that I think it's just kind of, it's like we have this sometimes about terrorism, like people will be, will be like, oh, this white person, you know, killed somebody, he was racist, um, leftists will complain, why don't they consider terrorism? And then some Islamists will do something. And conservatives will say it's terrorism. But it's like, it's just a crime and you should put that person in jail for whatever the sentences for, for killing people or whatever. You know, I feel the same way. Like, we have to discuss this in the context of like, you know, the rights of. people at what makes sense for Israel to do and national security considerations and all the

stuff we've been talking here. But like whether we have this kind of magic word that we all land on, I find those kind of debates less interesting. Less interesting, but, but no, I think it's very, very important. We live in an age of kind of mass psychosis and mass lathers, like working into a lather. And, you know, like, and you see tremendously large groups of people persuaded of truths which to the people who haven't been body snatched look like mental illness like Russia gate seemed like a psychosis to me the idea that more than half the country it seemed to think that there was nothing that Joe Biden was fine um you could probably think more examples but this notion that Israel is committing genocide is becoming fact and this is going to

stay on the Jewish people and on Israel forever and the flimsyness of it. So in this Ezra Klein interview, he interviews this guy, I have a clip here prepared, the one that says self-defense, Israel, oh, no, I'm sorry, would Israel stop? So in this interview, he interviews this guy, Philippe Sands, who was one of the, you know, genocide you don't play yeah i'll tell you what to play one of the genocide um mavens and as for klein asks him he's trying to play devil's advocate how much does that also extend to the arguments around self-defense which is to say that when you look at the history of genocide proceedings i think it is very hard to find one that does not claim on behalf of those who committed the genocide going

back to the Germans, that they were acting in self-defense, that they faced a threat from this group. It was sabotage from within. There was an attack. There was an assassination. And they had no choice. The only way to protect themselves was to destroy this group's capacity to be a group or capacity to act or capacity to exist utterly. How does genocide law balance the omnipresence of claims about self-defense? Well, it doesn't balance it well in relation to the, you know, single intent argument that seems to have merged, which, as I've explained, I'm deeply troubled by. Ezra Klein asks him, okay, Israelis would say, look, unlike other genocide,

Hamas has a choice here. Hamas can surrender. Hamas can give up the hostages. Hamas could leave Gaza and turn it over to someone else. The Jews never had that choice from the Nazis. The Tutsis never had that choice from the Hutus. How can it be intent to destroy a people

if the leadership of the people who are being killed has this easy option of capitulating? And Sands and. answer is, that's just a hypothetical. Meaning to me, and again, this is the load-bearing aspect of the argument, because if you do want to say, well, yes, of course, if Hamas would leave Gaza, that would be the end of it, then, well, how can you argue the intention here is to destroy the people? And what he said, I'm reading between lines now, he's saying, it's a hypothetical meaning, we don't know. Actually, if Hamas were.

to surrender and leave Gaza and release all the hostages, Israel might very well just continue to slaughter all the Palestinian people. And of course, Ezra Klein doesn't push back on that at all. And that to me, I think you'll agree, is delusional. Who could imagine that if Hamas were to surrender tomorrow and take safe passage out of Gaza, release all the hostages, that the IDF would continue to bomb civilians in Gaza. And the fact that somebody like Ezra Klein, line has moved so far towards the delusional that he's ready to entertain that as an argument not to be left out of court is very disheartening to me. And you see this kind of thing all around. There's nothing Israel is not capable of. I don't know how you feel about that.

Yeah. I mean, I agree with your, I agree with your intuition here, obviously, that this is kind of a crazy thing to allege and a crazy kind of, it reflects a, it reflects a poor model of the actors involved in this conflict and their motivations. I think that Israel could have launched this before October 7th, obviously, but they could have done something like this. They obviously did it. There's pressure, there's humanitarian pressures within Israeli societies. This is one of the discrepancies between Palestinian society and Israeli society. Israeli society actually cares when you violate human rights. Israel doesn't want anything, it left Gaza. It doesn't want anything to do with Gaza. It would be glad if Hamas ruled Gaza, you know, in these 15 years or

whatever it was that they ruled Gaza before October 7th, and they could have submitted some kind of petition for statehood and they could have put forward some requests or some demands. They didn't, they never did that. So there, you know, there's just, there's clearly no interest. There's maybe interest in West Bank. You can make that case, but there's no interest in Gaza. There's no interest in Lebanon, right? You know, Hasbalah was attacking Israel before Israel struck back. But there's clearly there's a religious or an ideological motivation here behind a lot of the anti-Israeli efforts. And Israel, there's some of that too. There's probably some ideological things around Jerusalem and so forth. But it's mostly a security issue, especially related to Gaza. And I think it's

kind of crazy not to recognize that. I'll play this other clip of Ezra Klein. Without setting it up so I can just get your reaction to it, see if it's the same as mine. Go ahead. Play that one, John. How much does that also extend to the arguments around self-defense, which is to say that when you look at the history of genocide proceedings, I think it is very hard to find one that does not claim on behalf of those who committed the genocide, going back to the Germans, that they were acting in self-defense, that they faced a threat from this group. It was sabotage from within, there was an attack, there was an assassination, and they had no choice. The only way to protect themselves was to destroy this group's capacity to be a group or capacity to act or capacity to exist utterly. How does genocide law balance the omnipresence of claims about self-defense? Well, it doesn't balance it well in relation to the, you know, single intent argument that seems to have merged, which, as I've explained, I'm deeply troubled by. All right. What do you take of him comparing the Nazi claims of self-defense to the Israeli claims of

self-defense? For Ezra, I think it was a little bit. So first of all, that clip where he said, you know, we don't know what Israel would do. I think a good follow-up question would have been, okay let's just assume the premise right you that's what you often do if is if hamas if you believe that if hamas laid down the arms israel you know israel would stop fighting would that be would that distinguish this from nazi germany that would be an interesting question and then we could we could kind of differentiate where we disagree and then how much depends on his his idea of like the nature of the israeli would you say that would be an obvious follow-up question uh for a smart person like Aswan, Razor maybe. I mean, I think it's the kind of question you ask if you want to

kind of get to what's important here. That's right. Hypothetical is the bread and butter of these conversations. You know, since when is a hypothetical, disqualify the what-if question. Anyway, and the second one, Ezra, he seems to be implying to me. I don't want to put words in mouth. What do you think about this self-defense comparison? So it is like, I mean, it's a good question. I mean, I don't know if the implication is there. But the idea is that everyone, I see it may be, I don't know, you have to listen to more in context, I'm not sure, but you could see this as kind of, he's skeptical, he's pushing, he's probing on these things, because, look, everyone has a self-defense claim. The Nazis thought that the Jews were, whatever, responsible for

international Bolshevism and destroying the society or whatever. And sometimes that's going to be true, and sometimes it's going to be false. Sometimes a country's going to be acting in self-defense, and sometimes not. And the question is, like, what are the genocide mavens, as you call them, What do they do with that? How do they balance this truth, this reality that countries have national security concerns? They have to defend themselves. They have threats coming from abroad with the idea that they shouldn't harm civilians or kill them or whole in part or whatever the genocide question. This is an interesting question because, you know, what is it? It's like they kill one person. You can kill one person. Like what is actually the rule here? Can you kill five people to get to one terrorist or two people? or three people, or what is kind of the rule here?

And I think that what Ezra may be getting at, you know, in the charitable interpretation of what he's doing here, is that they just don't have answers to this. These people, these genocide scholars, mavens, whatever, like want to sit there and, like, grandstand and morally preen and say it's so bad what this country is doing, but they really don't have any balance ability. It's like someone who just goes and looks at crime

and says the police mystery of this person, that person, don't have any appreciation of like the difficult situation police find themselves and why we have police, the legitimate concerns that people have for public safety. And so this genocide thing, it kind of just seems like it doesn't take into account these other things that you need to be worrying about when you're judging the conduct of a country. Yeah, well, I think if you go back and watch it in context, which I do recommend because it's very influential type of thought right now is that that's not what he was. He was not trying to poke holes in the genocide argument.

He was trying to poke holes in the Israeli notion, claim of self-defense. And I thought it was so dumb. I mean, every day in a courtroom, there's some dude who killed somebody who's claiming self-defense. And then the trier of fact has to decide, were you reasonably defending yourself? Or is this just a pretext, you know? And the idea that the Germans had to round up all their Jews to kill them in self-defense, they're German citizens, the shop owner, the people are comparing that to Hamas in October 7th and the rockets coming in and the promise to do it again and plans to divide up Israel into cantons.

I mean, and the, how could he possibly compare, I mean, does he think, but to be a self-defense is a pretext here? Go ahead, sorry. But the question he ends up asking is not about Israel. The question he ends up asking is how do genocide? scholars deal with this right so it is that's why that's the way i heard it was okay this is kind of a tension in your guys's world he could have asked well you know he could have had that question well what makes israel different or i don't know like why does israel get away with it or something like that he could have like focused on israel but he did focus it seemed

like a more kind of intellectual discussion of kind of what are you genocides you know genocide types doing here exactly if you get a chance listen to it i took it to mean listen everybody claims self-defense. So why are we going to, you know, we really have to be very skeptical about this excuse. I don't think it's a claim, though, that nobody has, like, ever a legitimate self-defense claim, right? I mean, he thought Israel had a right to self-defense at the beginning of the conflict. So it would be a kind of an unusual belief. He doesn't, he doesn't believe that what Israel is doing now can be characterized as self-defense. And one of the things they do is, um, and look, much of what I'm saying in this show, I find myself, it's like, I am

am of two minds of some of these things and I'm just expressing one of the minds. I was just this Israeli use of food as a as a weapon in the war. But, you know, if it were just Hamas and there was no Iran and no Hezbollah and no, you know, ring of adversaries, it would have to be a different consideration. Israel is not simply worried about Hamas. Israel is worried about a five-frontal, a five-front war that's funded with billions and billions of dollars and that can sneak in things. Like one of the things I've asked people and nobody really answers, like, okay, you think Israel should stop now. Now, years ago, Israel used to get criticized for this horribly draconian embargo that it,

had of goods coming into Gaza. But we know now that this embargo leaked like a sieve. We're two years into this war, and Hamas still has materials for rockets from time to time. So if they're going to leave Hamas in charge, obviously Israel's going to have to have a blockade that's three times as strict as the previous one was, if they're going to prevent, are you going to support Israel in this new blockade if you want Israel to leave Hamas in charge? And they all say, no, of course, of course not. So, you know, it's not a plausible position.

So, you know, it's not just Hamas. It's Hamas as the receiving ground for Iranian and Qatari weapons and money and technology and maybe someday enriched uranium. And that's, that's all the marbles that Israel's worried about here. And Ezra Klein would just never engage with that argument. just wants to pretend who are you telling me you're worried about this rag tag group of people the big is worried about this tiny little gaza that's not self-defense that's genocide right i don't know yeah yeah and it's not just like you said it's not just the leaking of the embargo a lot of the

stuff that was allowed came in and was put to dual use a lot of the things you could use to build schools and hospitals you could use to build tunnels to it we saw the extent of the tunnel network that Hamas built with things with material that was diverted from other uses. Yeah, I did the Ezra Klein, I think these people who just kind of changed their opinion on the war over time, I think that they just, they never, they never kind of grappled with it's bad, it looks bad, it's a bad situation within Gaza. They've never kind of grappled with what they want an alternative. They just want, I think it's something.

to be fair, they're like, you know, it's not this, whatever this is, whatever leads to this much death and destruction, do something else. And I guess that's one position. At the same time, I mean, you do, I think, have some obligation to think carefully about what comes next. And you just don't hear it. I mean, you just hear complaints about the current situation. And there has to be some kind of thought, put forward some assumptions of like what you think Hamas's motivations are, what their capabilities are, and what happens if Israel ends the war today. you just don't see it you know this this brings out again what i'm about the hardliners so liberals they tend to see the past as a black and white movie terrible things don't happen

anymore what what is israel doing people don't kill people like this anymore in in the modern day this is this is the way it was back then in black and white as i said but israel says we're living in 1939 this is this is real life you know and and and we don't want to want to do this, but as you said, but what do we do? Just kick the can down the road another 10 years. It's easy for you guys to say, where is your ire? Why are you not requiring of Hamas anything that you could make an easy checklist of things Hamas could do each one that would immediately reduce the number of innocent Gazans that would die? Wear uniforms. Send the innocent people to the shoreline. You know, stop booby-trapping. Why is all of Gaza destroyed?

You know, international law is a bitch because it actually says that when you start using things for military purposes, it becomes a military target. And that aspect of the law is very difficult for people to internalize. Gaza may be 75% destroyed because they turned 75% of it into military targets, including every single building that they booby trap. This is, you know, I, my heart is, is just raw about what's going on there, especially because of the close relationships I have for many, many reasons. I am not inclined to want to say this is the right thing to do. This is unbearable. But as you said, then what, what are they supposed to do? And what is Hamas's role in this?

Some fucking Palestinian leader to say some words. of peace, something that an Israeli leader could say, okay, I think we have beginnings of a solution here that will not require us to assume the worst yet again. I don't know. I ask Chat GBT. I know you have to go. I asked Chad GPT to give me 10 questions to ask Richard Hanania. I don't know how well does it know me. I don't know. It knows you very well. And I'll just read you the second one. I'll send you a link to all 10. You might find them interesting.

This is ChatGBTGP-T-5 Pro. I don't know if you're on to that yet. Of course. Yeah, it's very useful. It is unbelievable. But question two was, your U-turn on free speech absolutism. In that August 5th episode, you said Elon's X and the Trump movement convinced you, the internet needs, quote, responsible academics, curators of content.

to find the mechanism who appoints curators how are they audited and what guardrails prevent them from becoming the very censorship cartel you once attacked would you accept throttling your own posts under such a system that's a good that's a good question that's very recent did you get did you feed it anything did you just ask it about me the question was um did you give it any I'm interviewing Richard Hernania today based on his tweets, articles, and appearances from the last 30 days. Can you generate 10 of pocket questions that will interest a wide audience? Okay. Well, that's very good. Yeah. So you turn on free speech.

It's not a you turn. I mean, the government, I still think, doesn't have a role here. But what I used to complain about when a lot of people complained about was the idea of, like, private sector curation. Like, why does YouTube or Google or Twitter before Elon? Why do they say some people are, you know, de-platformed or their reaches is limited? And I think we got the kind of experiment of what happens when you have the free speech, you know, absolutism, not exactly perfect. I mean, Elon still puts a slum on the scale, but much closer to free speech than what we had before. And we've seen what the market wants.

It wants, you know, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories and anti-vax content. It's shocking. I discover all the time a new account that is just out of its mind, a person who would have no following, under a censorship regime has six figures, seven figure accounts. I discover these people all the time. And look, you use chat GPT. I like the fact that chat GPT does not work. Imagine if it worked the way Twitter was. It just, everything on the internet, it just considered equal. Like, no, it gives you reputable news sources. Google does this too. YouTube does this too. Before it gets to, you know, the crazy stuff. It's not just going off any random person's blog, whatever people are

typing, you know, typing, whatever the most common opinion is. And so, you know, X, is unusable. There was this woman who posted a picture of her, her and a white woman with her black husband. She had like 15,000 followers. I know. She's some Instagram influencer. It's like, I'm having a baby. And I'm like, oh, no. Like, she doesn't know what Twitter has to call. Like, you don't do this on Twitter. And you can look at the replies. It's completely like this. So, like, it's a place where if you have a multiracial family now, you cannot just post a family picture on Twitter. This is free speech. This is, there's people who are very aggressive and online who think like this. Is there anything wrong with a social media platform saying we don't want to be this and we're going to, you know, de-platform these people or put them at the very, very bottom?

No, there's nothing wrong with that. I think we've seen that that is necessary to make these, you know, to make this entire public discourse thing usable. Now, like, how does it get abused, this and that? This is an issue. You're right. Because, like, I had, like, BS suspensions under the old Twitter regime. You know, there's a, we all have seen examples. and we all remember examples of people who were saying reasonable things,

you know, they were getting banned. I think, you know, I think that maybe having some kind of diversity is good. Maybe it's good. I don't know, the Nazis take over Twitter and then YouTube is still kind of woke, like maybe something like that. But like the idea that like everything should become Twitter, I think that would be a dystopian. Maybe it's fine.

There's one Twitter, let all the Nazis gather in one place. But I'm glad that chat, GBT, and Google do not work the way Twitter does. I'm on the same wavelength as you. The government doesn't have a role in it, but I'm very worried. I might have been said to you the last time you were on. The truth did not turn out to be the weighty anchor that the free speech advocates always assumed it would be. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, marketplace of ideas. Actually, no, sunlight is not much of a disinfectant.

And the marketplace of ideas really needs. regulators. And, you know, maybe culturally will grow into it in some way. Maybe we need to start teaching kids. Like there's a lot of things that you, like maybe I'm fantasizing, that a curriculum in grammar school and high school might at least hedge some of these problems, how to read the internet. You know, just as I decide, this guy, Mom Donnie, like, would he be able to have the success he's having if our children were educated, just on the basic empirical evidence about how these ideas work. I don't even mean ideological, just like, here's some countries, here's capitalist countries.

You know, it's, there's very few economists who think like Mamdani from left to right, right? This is all really discredited stuff, but our citizens have no fucking idea about this stuff. That's part of our vulnerability. Yeah, I've thought about this. I've thought about kind of how we treat misinformation and like economic misinformation, how even though it's the most relevant thing for like being a voter or a smart citizen it's never treated as like oh my god people don't believe in climate change people don't believe in evolution it's like oh my god people believe in rent control it's not treated as anything is you know

as crazy uh yeah you're you're you're right i don't know like you know whether we can educate ourselves it's just people are online and it's just fun to be racist and to attack people and i don't know I think this kind of the free speech thing, it became too accessible. It was like, you know, it's like the answer to speech, you know, bad speech is more speech. I think this was like, you know, if you were 30 years ago, if you wanted to express your political opinion, you'd have to like start a magazine or get published by an editor or like become a TV pundit. Usually you had to be, I don't know, a professor, some kind of intellectual or something. Now any, you know, it's like the greatest geniuses in the world and like, you know, people with Alzheimer's and people with deep mental problems and stupid people and crazy people.

are all like in this, you know, one kind of, even though it's fragmented to certain extent, are coming together. And with that, you know, there's no, there's clearly no reason to expect that the smartest ideas or the most truthful ideas are going to win out because most people are not philosophers or careful intellectual thinkers about political matters. So, yeah, it might just be the technology has changed and kind of we need new thinking about public discourse as a result. You know, to make a guess the last thing, when I was a kid, I used to to joke or I observed that every new technology immediately became harnessed by porn. VHS, CDs, streaming,

you know, everything. And every new free speech technology gets harnessed by anti-Semites. And, you know, from a Jewish point of view, what we're experiencing now in terms of the kind of horseshoe of the left and the right, the right now exceeds the left in the crazy kind of general Jews control the world, Jews, Ukraine, Jews, everything, kind of the old school anti-Semitism, which has come back like overnight. Like who fucking knew this could come back in this way and Tucker Carlson and all these guys?

But then on the left, people like Ezra Klein, you know, impudent to even defend the charge that Israel wouldn't continue to slaughter the Palestinians, even if Hamas was gone and even if the hostages were released. I mean, what a bloodthirsty people these are. can't even say I really think it's unlike it's a hypothetical we have no way flip a coin Israel could go either way they might just continue to so so and they feed each other and um I used to say that the right was the bulwark I used to say that if the if the right ever starts thinking about Jews the way the left thing or about Israel the way the left has been thinking

about it if the Republicans ever joined it's just going to be like a tsunami and I think we're experiencing that tsunami. Who is thinking clearly about anything regarding the Jews right now? Yeah, I think this is an interesting aspect of Israeli behavior too, probably, that you talk about, well, the future of the future, you know, they're going to have to worry about maybe Hasbalah reconstituting itself, Iran, what's going to be the future with all these kind of hostile forces in the region? At the same time, maybe if you're looking at American politics, this might be the best Republican administration. going to have by far. The next generation, you know, the left and the right, it's very interesting. I've been looking at these like kind of trends of where the right is going. The anti-Israeli

perspective has, I think there's been a watershed in the last few months even. Two people, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Green, really going hard against Israel. This is not something you would have seen two or three years ago. Bannon, I think, has always been kind of ahead of these trends. And he's good at skating where the puck is going. And so I think that this is, Yeah, the long-term trends of cat of attitudes towards Israel and the right are concerning. I agree. I think J.D. Vance is one of them, the ban in types. I don't think Vance is going to stand up.

You know, I joke to a friend of my. Remember the quaint days when people were worried about Reverend Wright and Farrakhan that Obama might have had tea with Farrakhan and, you know, had some affection for Reverend Wright? That's nothing compared to the relationships that J.D. Vance is going to have to explain if he runs for president. the Tucker Carlson's the Alex Jones, the people that he's on record praising, and he's going to be asked to disassociate himself from, and he won't. Oh, any Republican is going to, I mean, it's going to bend the need to those people. That's what I think is the issue here.

I mean, it is kind of the, it's kind of we're in the situation where the left was in the mid-2000 tads, what crazy people on the internet were driving everything. That's what we're seeing on the right today. You see these, this post, I don't know if you saw this congressman who went to this like Indian festival and he posted it was nice to meet Indian Americans you could you could imagine how that goes even Tulsi Gabbard put out a message about some wishing people some happy you know holiday some Hindu holiday it's just completely completely crazy I mean so yeah I mean it is the internet is kind of where the energy is the left and the left has institutions the right

doesn't have institutions like the left has gatekeepers like the New York Times like Ezra Klein like you have to kind of go through these steps in the right all you have is like the politicians, Trump, events, whatever, and like the internet. It's just so direct. Isn't it you who always says the right doesn't read? Yeah, exactly. They don't read anything. Exactly.

There's no institutions. There's no kind of intellectual class that is between the politician and just like the unwashed masses on the internet. And that's why the unwashed masses are kind of driving this, driving this trade. And it's going to get worse after Trump is gone because Trump has this kind of leadership quality where they all follow what he does after this JD. vats, all these people, they're going to be completely, completely crap by the audience. Although I've got to tell you, the MAGA people that I know who I have had harsh words with,

they read. They're well-educated, high- IQ people. That's part of what astonishes me about them. Which is what you're talking about? I mean, like people, like, is there a crowd or people we know who are people who have done business with or gone to school with or had been friends with? they who are, you know, anti-vax and, like, like, you name it. They're anti-vax.

They don't believe Biden got that many votes. Like you, like basically every, everything you hear, provably false things. And as you said, and the Republicans have to bend the need to the guy who says that he was mauled by demons and that we're studying alien weapons systems and that MRNA vaccines are a menace. This is, and yet, and yet the policies of that side are still preferable to. to me, then the policies that Kamala Harris would likely impose on us. So flip a coin, Richard.

Yeah, I don't know. I think the trend is in bad direction. I do think that the policies of Republicans are still better than kind of where the discourse is hard to be as bad as a discourse is. But I have a feeling it's going to catch up. I don't think the stupidity stays bottled up. I think it's going to infect everything. Well, yeah, maybe it has to get worse before it gets better.

All right, sir, I meant what I said. You know, sometimes I also had on my list, but I'm not going to do it because we've been on too long. You talk about movies and music and basically any cultural current that there is. You really are among the most interesting minds I've ever known of in my 63 years. And I'm very happy to know you. I'm still anxious to meet you in person. Can I leave you with a story, a very pro-American story? Oh, after that, after all those compliments, so you can do whatever you want. Go ahead. And I really mean it. The last three or four weeks, I've been waking up in the middle of the night just for a second with a cough, like a cough I'd never experienced before.

And, you know, you start Googling, and of course, they tell you after three weeks of a new cough, it could be a symptom of lung cancer. And you've probably seen there's a lot of articles now about I don't smoke, I never smoke, but that the non-environmental or non-smoking related lung cancer is on the rise. I have two generations of lung cancer, my family. Anyway, so I decide I'm worried. Let me go attend to this. Early this morning, I made the first call to try to attend to this. By noon, I had a chest x-ray and a clean bill of health from the American health care system only through my health insurance, $50 copay.

I imagine, I know that people have bad mouth. is the American health system. I hear stories. This could be weeks, weeks in another first world country. And maybe my experience is not the same as someone else might have. But I was just astonished. I was buckling down for at least a week or two of the high stress waiting as the cancer grew inside me.

And I just thought, God bless America. It's amazing the service I got from, it was NYU Langone. I'm glad to hear that now. You know, I recently had an interesting medical experience. too, where I had this, I had this like psoriasis for my entire life. I went to a doctor who told me, now all you need is an injection every three months, and it's gone. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.

I've been putting creams on five times a day. You're telling me that's all I need. I did it. I saw that the list price of the medicine was like $20,000 per injection, literally free for me through the insurance. And yeah, one injection, you barely feel it, and it's completely gone. I've been struggling with this problem the whole life. It's just completely disappeared.

without the kind of massive profits you can make off of something like that you don't get that kind of innovation so yeah a lot of good things in america still i mean they're worth fighting for i i would bet on america uh over every other country in the world now uh in a heartbeat i don't i don't see i don't i don't imagine it china i think it'll collapse on its own weight in some way now that it's going disappear but i just don't believe the i think our diversity i hate to say it is our strength and I think our orneriness and our freedom and our system. And, you know, I just can't imagine another country really giving us a run for our money. And Europe is a basket case.

That's how I feel about it. We don't want to just beat Europe and China. I mean, we want a great future. It might be, if that's our goal, it might be easy, right? I think we want something even better than that. But you're absolutely right. I agree with the Senate. All right.

Richard, Hanania, thank you very, very much. you any plans to come to new york uh i'm going to the d um dc for the abundance conference in early september so i'll be i'll be close what's that yeah with azra klein yeah i could ask him i could ask him about your uh your concerns yeah if you come a bit north uh uh call me up absolutely well yeah i'll treat you tonight everybody thanks uh ezra thanks richard thanks richard thanks you know you know how to do it wait until it says you can you're not your first rodeo okay sure yeah you have to end it first yeah yeah so whoever's listening you've got to stop it now