The Joe Rogan Experience - #1415 - Bari Weiss

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

Bari Weiss is an American opinion writer and editor. In 2017, Weiss joined The New York Times as a staff editor in the opinion section. Her new book "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" is now available. https://amzn.to/2Gh7WIL

Three, two, one. Hello, Barry. Hi, Joe. Great. Double guns. Good to see you. Great to see you, too. I'm enjoying my turmeric.

You are, right? Superfood. Laird Hamilton's on to something, right? Laird Hamilton and Gwyneth Paltrow, I guess. I've never done the turmeric thing. No, no, no. One is a world champion athlete, one of the greatest surfers the world has ever known. The other one is a wonderful actress who is Iron Man's girlfriend.

There's a difference. There's a big difference. And, you know, a major mogul who determines what people like me want to purchase, buy, and look like. She wants you to put vagina rocks in there, right? Yes. Jade stones? Jade stones, something like that. I don't know.

Maybe there's a placebo effect to that. So we were talking so well before the podcast rolled out that I just wanted to just start it. We don't have to talk about presidential candidates. We don't have to talk about all that. But we're in a weird time. And to speak to what we were talking about before, we were just talking about how people are so strange. And to speak to what we were talking about before, we were just talking about how people are so strange. There's just a big disconnect between what people actually think and what they actually say.

And I think this is, in my life, this is the first time that I've ever really experienced this at this level. There's a hysteria. Because people are being punished for their real beliefs. Instead of having the ability to express themselves and have other people disagree and have some sort of rational discussion, this is a strange time where you have to toe the status quo. You have to toe the line. And I've been trying to figure out what it is, but I think a big part of it is the opposition to Trump. I think people's opposition to Trump is so strong that— People have lost their minds. Yeah, it seems like the people that oppose him, they just want complete and total compliance with opposition, with this different way of thinking. Does that make sense? be on side and an active part of the resistance and if you deviate in any way it shows that you're a squish or that you're actually loyal to the other side and in fact what that side of things

is doing is that they're limiting the spectrum of what's allowed to say so so so narrowly that people i think are becoming kind of secretly radicalized because in the other way yes yes and honestly like you're great but i think one of the reasons you're so unbelievably popular is because you just say what you think and you bring other people on here to say what they think and the number of places where that actually happens is unbelievably small and getting smaller it's so straight and you get shit for it that's what's really crazy like you i'm i'm a nice person like my thoughts on these things that I discuss in the show are well thought out, and I only hope to do good, like legitimately. I mean, I mock things, and I'm a comedian.

But at the end of the day, I want everybody to be happy. I really genuinely do. I think that's possible. I think it's possible in small groups right i mean this is what the analogy i always use if it was just the three of us on earth i think we get along great we'd have our disagreements but there would be no war there's certainly none the three of us wouldn't kill each other right you me and jamie i don't know i don't think jamie's a good guy but but my point is like why can't we scale that out why can't we all just get

along in larger groups well a lot of it is a lack of communication a lot of it is uh you know greed and i mean there's there's so many different reasons why you can't scale that to millions and millions of people but it just seems like there's no no weirder time where things don't make sense and progress seems to be stalled socially than today and like the way that i think about it lately is i feel like normalcy is closeted like normal people i know that have just like very sensible beliefs are scared to even say those things out loud right and i think that that is just a sign of deeply unhealthy culture and it like it only contributes to this sort of polarization and extremes that we're that we're seeing yeah like you you were talking about the

denial of the biological differences between males and females like i just and we're this this is something that people openly want to support today. They want to pretend that there is no difference. Well, it's like you can both believe that there are two sexes and that there are biological differences between men and women, and also believe that if someone asks you to call them by a different pronoun than the one that they used to go by or whatever, that you want to respect that person and that life is so hard. And why wouldn't you just go along with that? Sure.

Those are two beliefs that many people I know hold. And yet to suggest that gender and sex are only a construct and is something that people don't feel like they can express right now. That it's only a construct? I know a lot of people who feel like they can only say that gender and sex are a construct. Oh, they're stuck. Okay. They're stuck saying that. The way you were phrasing it sounded like the other way. I'm saying that like two things are possible at once.

Sure. You can believe in biological difference and believe that people should be respected and that, you know, if someone wants to change their gender and that life becomes much more, you know, Sharon's gender is real and also sex differences are real. Yes. And those two things are possible at once. Yes. Yes. also sex differences are real. And those two things are possible at once. I think about that a lot with my book, with the case of someone like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. It's like Ilhan Omar is the subject of bigotry, not least from the president of the United States. And yet Ilhan Omar herself has said some things about Jews and Israel that are themselves bigoted. Both things are true at once. And yet we're living in a society where it seems like you can only choose one of those two sides. Yes, a binary society as opposed to a nuanced one. That's what's weird about today. It's like we're dealing with the same amount of intelligent people but they seem to be shackled in their their ability to express themselves honestly and so what are they scared of right repercussions right and because those are real right you look at

someone i think that one thing that's overlooked in this when we talk about cancel culture right and the social ostracism and the actual firings that can happen when you break with one another orthodoxy, is that the people who are inoculated from it are people that are already extremely successful and can take the risk. It's why Ricky Gervais can be Ricky Gervais. It's why J.K. Rowling can tweet what she tweeted a few months ago and survive it, because they've already accumulated enough capital. The people that I hear from that are completely screwed by it are people like artists and poets and untenured professors who aren't famous and no one knows about and are, you know, having to go with

a begging bowl on Patreon or Venmo or whatever to get support after they've, you know, made a bad joke or whatever it is. Yes, yes. That is exactly what's happening. Yeah, it's, I mean, I'm sure that this is because of social media. I'm sure this is the repercussions of having this new form of communication that people don't wield responsibly, that these attacks on people, you do them much more flippantly than you would if you were across from someone of course because there's no there's so little shame on the internet because people are disinhibited it's like people say things to me on the internet that are i

wouldn't even mention them here i mean they're so vile they're just they're disgusting and yet i've seen some of these people in real life and they would never even have the courage to approach me on the street. They're not real expressions. When they're doing that, they're just button pushing. They're throwing rocks at glass. And this is a good jump off point for your book on anti-Semitism. I reached out to you because anti-Semitism, you know, obviously I'm not Jewish. So it's something that has always baffled me.

There's still hope for you, Joe. Thank you. Can I convert? Yes. We'll hook you up to some LA rabbis. But I would have to go through like a lengthy thing. Like you can't just convert, right? My uncle converted.

It's a lengthy thing. My uncle Salvatore. Salvatore DiGilando. I love it. Yeah. Is he alive? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Is he alive? Oh, yeah. Yeah, he converted when we were kids.

That was when I first found out about Judaism. I was like, what is it? Like, I didn't understand what it was. You know, we were raised Catholic, and I was like, oh, God, I guess I was probably like five or six when he was converting. So he had to take all these classes and, you know and go through all the stuff that you have to do. Why did he convert? He married a woman who was Jewish

and she was like, crack that whip. My Aunt Jackie. She told him what's up. But when that was all going down, that was the first time I'd ever questioned religion because I was like, wait, wait, wait, what is that? What is Judaism? And they explained, I go, do they believe in God?

And they're like, yeah. Okay, but is it a's a different god no it's the same god jesus was a jew jill yeah but that's why i was confused i'm like well what is the difference like why why is there i i didn't know there was anything other than catholic i was five you know yeah i was baffled and i remember thinking like how many of these fucking things are there and then i was told there were hundreds i was like like, oh, Jesus, this is a mess. And then I went to Catholic school for a year, and that really cured me. Of? Oh, any idea of religion being legitimate.

Catholic school was so brutal and so horrible. What did you learn about the Jews in Catholic school? Nothing. Yeah, it wasn't that. It was just meanness. It was just compliance and fear, and we're going to make you sit in a closet on a bed of nails. What? Oh, my God. They used to whack kids in the head. And nuns are some of the meanest ladies.

There was a bed of nails? No, no, no. They would threaten you. Okay, okay. You're going to have to stay overnight and sleep on a bed of nails. Yeah, they would just try to scare you. And if you cried, they'd laugh at you. And, oh, my God, the meanest ladies. There's very few people whose name I remember from being six years old. But Sister Mary Josephine, that bitch. I'll remember that bitch to the day I die. She was so mean.

Like, I thought my parents were getting split up when I was little, when I was five years old. So I was really enthusiastic about God and religion because I felt like at least in that there's some sort of, there's structure, there's something that makes sense. And I remember just being in Catholic school for just a couple of weeks and I was like, well, obviously this is horseshit too. know my parents relationship is horseshit this is horseshit like what is real in this life but this it was good for me though it was very it was good at that time of my life to experience just the just the hypocrisy and the the meanness of it all the lack of love and the disdain for children like the whole thing it was it was an awful situation to find yourself in i'm sorry it wasn't that bad nobody sexually abused me i didn't get you know there was nothing horrible no one beat me up but it was enough of a nightmare where it kind of like

made me legitimately start questioning everything in life yeah Wow. Yeah. So you're raising your daughters with secular? Yes, 100% secular. My wife's secular too. But we talk about things. And one of the things that I think is important is that like, I tell them, if you live your life like God is real, it's better. Because you live your life by these universal principles that the core, the core good of almost all religions follow. Treat each other as if they are loved family members.

Treat people as if they're you. Treat them as if it's you living another life. The golden rule, like all those things. Don't steal. Don't murder. People are created in the image of God. And whether or not that God exists, if you believe that, you'll treat people really well. And if you do treat them –

You'll live a better life. Yeah. And if they treat you like that, like you live – the world is better. The world is a better place. And that's how we – and the other thing that I say – Well, I think this – sorry. That's okay. But honestly, I say honestly, no one knows.

Like if you say, I know there is a God, you're not being honest because you've – unless you know something that I don't, unless you've died and experienced it. And even then, we could chalk that up to a host of neurochemicals that your body releases when it thinks you're dying. And some of them I've actually taken before. So I know what the experience is like. And if you say there's no God, you don't know what you're talking about either. You really don't know if there's no God. No one knows. No one knows what even the concept of God is.

You're talking about thousands of years of trying to decipher experiences and things that are translated from one language to another, from different phonetic languages. And it just, it's very strange to try to tell people that you know something for a fact when you've never experienced it. And this is what we talk about. When I talk to my children, I don't say there's no God, God's bullshit, religion's bullshit, everyone's lying to you. I just say, no one really knows, but it gives people comfort. It makes people feel better. And then there's a lot of things that are really good about church. And one of the things that's really good about church is the community. Yes. I mean, this to me connects to the thing that we opened by talking about, which is polarization and tribal, you know, the tribal politics we're living in.

I think you've had Jonathan Haidt on the show and his book, The Righteous Mind, is brilliant about this, that we were evolved to be religious creatures in a certain way. And what happens when we lose religion? That impulse goes somewhere. And I think that impulse has gone into, you know, politics and the culture war. You know, it's like, why are the stakes of that so unbelievably high? Because that is sort of the operating system that people are organizing their life around more and more. I think you're 100% right. I think it's the Protestants versus the Catholics.

But it's like, what do we do, right? Because we're not going to go back to convince people that are unconvincible that they're, you know. I think fighting for the idea of God is sort of a losing argument in the culture. So how do we retain the good things that came from religious structures in a post-God age? I think that's a huge question. Well, what are people really wary of? One of the things they're wary of is the recluse, right? We're wary of the Unabomber. We're wary of that guy who lives in the woods and doesn't, the isolationist who doesn't need anybody else they're by themselves like well that person doesn't follow by the rules of our community what what are we comfortable about we're comfortable about friendly neighbors

we're comfortable like hey you need help you know you need me to help dig you out of the snow do you need this do you need that like that's what we love right because then and we love people that share our values, right? We like to live in a community of shared values because then we're all comforting each other. We're all saying we're all in this together. We're going to have hardships. We're going to have good times. But we'll have more good times.

We'll be able to get through the hardships if we operate together with similar values. operate together with similar values. Yeah, but we're kind of, we're not living in the age of the Unabomber, but we're certainly living in an age where people are completely isolated. You know, everyone on the campaign trail is talking about the diseases of despair and how the lifespan in this country has gone down for the past three, life expectancy has gone down in the past three years. Because of Trump? It must be.

Because of opioids, because people are out of work because because factories are closing because we're going through whatever andre yang calls it the fourth industrial revolution because of globalization because like we're living through an unbelievably trans what i think will be remembered is an unbelievably transformative time and trump is only one data point yes Like he's a symptom and he's a catalyst, but he's not the whole picture. And to see him as the whole picture, I think is just like completely missing the moment that we're in.

Well put. Very well put. Yeah. I think, I really think you just nailed it. I really think that's a lot of what's going on here. And I think, I mean,

what you said about people enjoying when people can speak their mind when people see someone like ricky gervais get up with the golden globes and say yes yes yes because or like chapelle's like chapelle's yes like that to me or bill burrs yeah but the chapelle one was so good because if you looked at rotten tomatoes right the critics rating of it was something like 20% favorable. No, it was zero at first. It was zero. Yeah. And then they opened it up to the public, but they only had like five woke critics.

But the public was like 99%. Exactly. And it's like we just keep living that out again and again and again. And I just wonder how that resolves itself. Or maybe it doesn't. It does. How? It resolves itself through conversation like this.

Yeah. That's really what it is. Where the people are, when you have- Where I come to meet the common man. Yeah, I'm the common man, basically. I mean, when we talk and people listen to reasonable discussion, then they feel more emboldened to have reasonable discussion of their own. Maybe perhaps in private.

Maybe they have to fucking put tinfoil over the windows and bolt the door shut and make sure that they can talk honestly. That's insane. Yeah, it is insane. Like we're living in the freest society in human history. And people are acting like the Stasi is looking over their shoulder. Yes, because it is. Because it is. The social media Stasi.

Yes. It is. Yeah. Yeah, that's real. Stay off social media, folks. No, for real look if i wasn't promoting comedy shows and podcasts and the like i don't think i'd be on it i would i would definitely be off of it i mean i'm on it now but i'm on it like a post it and leave it thing i don't pay attention to the luxury of that yes you know what i mean yeah i don't know i think about like

what would it look like if all the journalists at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal were banned from being on Twitter? No, for real. Because like what happens, right, is like it's this circular thing where we all know the landmines, right? Like the things we don't want to touch, like the hills we don't want to die on. want to touch, like the hills we don't want to die on. And it's what's scary about the Stasi-like atmosphere of it is like, my job is to write opinion columns and commission other people to do that. And yet I feel the self-censoring even before I've written, right? Where I'm like, wait, I don't want to die on that hill. I don't want to die on that. Is that really the battle I want to take on? I should probably just stick to this topic instead of that topic,

because I know if I do that topic, like I know what awaits me. Yes. Like why am I, why would I willingly go to the guillotine? Yes. You know, it's like, and people pretend like the reputational smears have no cost. Like they're insane. Well, that's what's weird about your position because you're an opinion writer. Right.

I mean, that's what you do. Correct. And you're not allowed to give your honest opinion in a lot of people's eyes. They want you to be compliant with woke culture. And I think one of the reasons that I get in a lot of trouble or I'm provocative or whatever the words that go before my name are whenever I'm mentioned now, controversial, is because I think more than other people, I refuse to follow the rule. Because what's the point? Like, we're all going to be in the crowd anyway.

Yes. Like, I'm not going to waste my life following some fake rule determined by random people on the internet. No, and this desire for you to comply i mean this is part of the game that's going on when people don't have control of their own lives they love to control other people's lives and one of the things that happens when you have an opinion that does not follow the you know whatever the path has been clearly grooved for us to when you you're supposed to have very specific ideas about these very

clearly defined subjects. When you deviate from those and people start attacking you, what they're trying to do in many, there's a lot of what they're trying to do. It's nuanced. But one of the things they're trying to do is they're trying to get you to listen to them so that they have some power. They feel powerless in the world. And if they can push your button, if they can break your glass, then they have some power. They feel powerless in the world. And if they can push your button, if they can break your glass, then they have some

power. But they're also trying to issue a warning, right? They're issuing a warning to the people in their group saying, if you deviate, we're going to do to you what we're doing to her right now. Yes. And it's going to be relentless. And, you know, and it's just like, what's sad about it is like the number of young people I know who are so talented and, you know, are heterodox or just independent minded people like liberals. They choose not to go into journalism, not to do comedy, not to do any number of things.

Because, like, why would you choose to, you know, be in that arena if this is what it means? You know, one of my favorite stories, to speak to this, is that woman who was in Canada, who was a trans woman who still has her penis and balls and went to a bunch of different waxing places. You don't know about this? No. Closed down these immigrant waxing places because they wouldn't wax her male genitalia. And- I miss this.

It wound up going to court and she wound up losing. But these people lost their businesses. Their businesses get- you know, Canada's very different than the United States. And they have- Like nicer? They're very nice like 20 nicer but they also have weird human rights laws like um they have you know this is what Jordan Peterson was rallying against with these compelled speech laws he was explaining it in a way that didn't make sense to us because we have freedom of speech in America but they don't have freedom of speech in canada it's not or in england yeah right it's different and with this woman when she went to these places and was saying hey you know you have to wax my my dick and balls and they were like no we we do brazilian wax on women and they're like you're a bigot and then she turned out to be a complete

fucking lunatic i mean if you follow her in the news now, like assaulting people and all sorts of other stuff, but still biologically a man and has all the parts. And they, this was, this was the line in the sand. This was like, okay, here's your case.

Now you've got one because this is not just about discrimination against a trans woman. And this is some new thing. This is the very real possibility that some trans people trans people are human right some trans people are fucking crazy you got one here here you got one now are you going to treat this like an abusive insane person or are you going to treat this like trans people have these undeniable rights and privilege because of the fact that they've been put in this marginalized

position by our society that you have to look at them in a very specific way and if you deviate at all you will be punished and that's what happened these poor immigrants they lost their business i completely missed this story oh it's a great story jessica yaneve i think is where did you read this oh my god it's not in the times well the times needs to step up you guys are covering bernie and andrew yang i missed it no we're barely covering those people even i don't yeah who do you like for president well i just i was just telling um jamie that i was in i spent new year's in new hampshire with andrew yang and the yang gang because i'm writing about him right and i have to tell you,

like, I'm really not just saying this, the power of the, like, what I'm calling, like, the Rogan effect, it was insane. Like, I went down the line waiting to get into this bar. It was snowing outside. And I just, like, asked everybody, how'd you hear about Andrew Yang?

Like, 80% of them was from your podcast. It was really unbelievable. I like his energy. I don't know if I agree with him. Like I don't have strong views about UBI or what he calls the freedom dividend, $1,000 a month. I don't know what I think about that. He's like against circumcision. He has like all these views about things.

I don't really know if I agree with him on most of his things. Against circumcision? You don't agree with that? No. Really? Yeah. You're cutting baby dicks? I'm not like passionate about that. Are you? Yeah. with him on most of his things against circumcision you don't agree with that no really yeah no i'm cutting baby dicks i'm not like passionate about that are you yeah people lose their dicks a lot of kids every year do you know children die from that they lose their dicks yes all the time it's very common really yes like multiple children per year lose their penis from an unnecessary antiquated operation

where you cut off their dicks to make it look different okay you're cutting skin off of their dick and they wind up getting infected and they lose their dicks it's i mean it doesn't happen all the time but it happens enough time where you go this should never happen this is a completely unnecessary operation robert baker estimates 229 deaths per year from circumcision in the united states bollinger estimates that apparently approximately 119 infant boys die from circumcision related each year in the u.s 1.3 percent of all male neonatal deaths from all causes there are several case reports of death in the medical literature. Yeah.

It's not simple. You're cutting skin. Skin is an organ. You have an unnecessary, and I'm circumcised, you have an unnecessary operation that you're doing to an infant, and it's decorative. And I had a joke about it. And you don't buy any of the studies about how it prevents STDs and- No, no, I don't. Wash your dick. I cannot believe we're joke about it. And you don't buy any of the studies about how it prevents STDs and... No, no, I don't.

Wash your dick. I cannot believe we're talking about this. We should be talking about it. Well, why not? Kids are dying. Like, it's like, how many of them have to die before we say this is a ancient, ridiculous ritual? It doesn't make any sense. Okay.

I've seen the arguments for and against, like, that it prevents STDs. Like, look, you know what prevents STDs? Condoms and abstinence. That's what prevents STDs. And in some cases, vaccinations. This is what prevents STDs. This circumcision is ridiculous. It doesn't even make any sense.

Okay. I cannot believe I stumbled into this because I was talking about Andrew Yang. You fucked up. I guess I did. I didn't this because I was talking about Andrew Yang. You fucked up. I guess I did. I didn't know this was like a strongly held. You're an intactivist. Is that what they're called? Yes.

Whatever. Intactivist. That's a good way to put it. I've never heard that expression, but that's exactly what I am. Yeah. Don't cut baby dicks. It's real simple. When you say it that way, people go, yeah, that sounds gross.

When you say, oh, circumcision, like, oh, what a wonderful ritual. And it's symbolic of your journey until the fuck out of here you're cutting baby dicks it's it doesn't make any sense i mean it's not as disgusting as what they do to women's clitorises and in certain that makes it impossible to like yes it's a different reason for doing it but it's you're mutilating a kid you're just doing it in a way that's okay like if you cut a piece of my earlobe off i'm gonna be all right i don't know i'm from a family of four daughters i have not thought deeply about i i did not know that statistic until you put it up there not good yeah most people don't know it and i've talked to people who have had immediate

family members who have had horrible illnesses or injuries from circumcision. It's terrible. It's an organ. Now I'm nervous to talk to you about vaccines. I hope you're for them. I'm for vaccines. Okay. A hundred percent.

Yeah. Why would you be nervous to talk to me about that? I don't know. Because I'm like, what am I stumbling into here? No. Look, vaccines are established. I had Dr. Peter Hotez on who is- Who's that?

He's out of the University of Texas, University of Houston. Is that where he's from? But what he's famous for is treating and making people aware of tropical illnesses and vaccine safety and vaccine health. just someone who uses education to dispel a lot of these anti-vax rumors and the the anti-vax movement to try to explain like this is why there's so many people this is why we're so healthy this is why there's no smallpox this is why we haven't had these fucking horrific diseases ravaged this is why measles is making a comeback because of ignorance so and because there's this unbelievably strange coalition of like lefty waldorf family homeschool people with like ultra orthodox jews who believe that they're like remnants of pigs in the vaccine and they're coming together to do what they just did in new jersey which is like they were i think new jersey was close to passing

a law to end the religious, you know, there's religious exemptions for vaccines in a bunch of states still. And New Jersey was very close to, which has had a bunch of outbreaks, to ending the religious exemption. And then you had these like very strange bedfellows come together and lobby against the law and it lost, which is really upsetting. Like I do not think there should be a religious exemption for vaccines. Yeah, vaccines are a strange one, right? It's like, should you force someone to put a chemical into their body? Yes, because it's protecting all of our lives. But that is why

it's an interesting one. It's a very unusual one, because it's a very rare time where you're talking about something that if you do put it in someone's body and it is effective it will stop a deadly pandemic from spreading yes so how do we act as a community how do we act as a culture when it comes to that and then there's also with everything there's people think there's conspiracies with every fucking thing that ever happens on this earth conor mcgregor just destroyed donald cerrone in 40 seconds there is an entire community of people on online right now thinking that that was a setup and that it was a fake fight and that they had planned it all in advance and this is just to make my i mean i'm talking about volumes of writing i mean people just page after page after page

talking about things that don't make sense about the fight. Like, this is just what people do. They look for conspiracies in everything, whether it's vaccines or politics or... Or Jews. Or Jews. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, presidential candidates, though? Yes, for sure.

Or you want to go Jews? Everything. Presidential candidates. I don't know. I love Yang's... I like him as a human being a lot. What I was going to say about Yang before we got into cutting off baby dicks. Yes.

Love his energy. Like him as a person a lot. He's like, he's real. You know, he's like, most politicians are aliens and he's not.

And it's so refreshing. Yeah. I like him a lot. I like him a lot. He also said that police officers should have a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu,

which I completely agree. He has a lot. Like, I went to look at the policies on his page. Like, who is this? Super rational.

He's great. And one of the things that his page. Like, who is this? Super rational. He's great. And one of the things that is so refreshing about him is that I don't know if I've been in a room in the past year with so many former Bernie and former Trump people, which are a lot of his supporters. You know, we're like disaffected, disappointed Trump people, and then people that supported Bernie in 2016. And there's just, I don't know, like when you hear him talk, the villain of his stump speech is not Donald Trump, even though he hates Donald Trump. The villain is Amazon and Big Pharma and, you know, automation, like the things that are actually transforming and decimating the country i just think it's refreshing but he's like a paul revere for

for automation he's like hey this is your fucking jobs are going away your jobs are going away yeah yeah he's a great guy liked him i don't know and then i also feel like i've gone on this emotional journey with biden where at first i'm like totally like i liked him then i'm like he's old he's kind of losing it no way he can win and now i feel like i've gone back to maybe like let me put you back on track because he's way too old it's not just that he's too old he's not coherent he's falling apart like hasn't he had a stroke or something i don't know if he's had a stroke. He's had a lot of plastic surgery, that's for sure. Has he? Look at his face.

He's like, yeah. Trying to look younger. And the caps and I don't know. But he has like blood pressure issues, right? I think the candidate, I will be very surprised if the candidate is not Bernie, both because of the fundraising and because of where he is in the polls and because, and this is the most fundamental thing, the energy in the country right now is a populist energy. And I just don't think that a moderate like the ones that I like, like a Klobuchar or a Biden, can capture that, the energy of the base. I think that energy is just really with Bernie.

You have more faith in the Democratic Party than I do. I think they're going to fuck up and put Elizabeth Warren in. I think Trump's going to chew her up. Don't you think Trump would? Okay, but if it's Bernie versus Trump, who wins? Because I think Trump still wins. I think you're always going to have a hard time when someone's the incumbent, right? You're always going to have a hard time when someone is the sitting president who is extremely controversial, extremely polarizing, but also we're in a great time economically.

That's hard for people to deviate from. It's hard for people to deviate from good economy. When you look at the stock market, when you look at – Yeah, but most people don't have stocks. No, it's true. Most people are like working through – It's perception though. It's a perception. You Most people are working through- It's perception, though. It's a perception.

You look at unemployment. Unemployment rates are very low. There's a lot of things that you could point to, the standard issues that you point to. And then you deal with all this looniness on the left that Trump is the complete opposite of. He's the antithesis of- He's the middle finger to all of it. Yes, exactly. complete opposite of if you he's the antithesis the middle finger to all of it exactly yeah the when i when he got in office i said political correctness just got hit with a missile to the dick that's what it was like when that guy got in office like what the fuck he just want after all

that grab the pussy stuff and all that all the craziness yeah the fact that he was able to weather that storm and it didn't even seem to shake him i mean like, like you said, you could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Kind of think he actually could. Yeah, well, as long as the person was a dick. As long as the person he shot was a real asshole. Like, well, you know, do we really need that guy? No. Well, we need Trump as president.

It's going to be hard. It's always hard to get someone out of office. I mean, what sunk George H.W. Bush was ross perot and a lot of people forget that ross perot this eccentric billionaire got on television and bought an entire half hour of regular prime time television and put on this display of why you're getting fucked and explain taxes to you and explain so is mike bloomberg going to be the ross of 2020? No, he's not as charismatic and he's not very well liked. And it doesn't make, he doesn't make sense. I don't think he's, he's wasting his time.

I just think he's the opposite of what people want right now. Yeah, they don't want a billionaire. No. No, they don't want that. They do not. What Bernie stands for is a guy who, well, look, you could, you could dig up dirt on every single human being that's ever existed. If you catch them in their worst moment and you magnify those moments and you cut out everything else and you only display those worst moments.

That said, you can't find very many with Bernie. He's been insanely consistent his entire life. He's basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from. Yeah. And he's addressing the thing that people are most obsessed with right now, which is economic inequality. And he's really consistent on it. Did you see him here? Did you see him? Yeah, of course I did. He was so normal. He's normal. He's so normal. Did you find him winning, though? Like, did you like him?

I liked him a lot. Because I feel like there's a huge division in people I know. Either they love him, or they really, really think that he's, like, gruff, obnoxious, all of that. Well, I know you don't like Tulsi. But I love her. I know you do. I love her. I love her.

I think she's awesome. I love her. I love Bernie. And I love Andrew Yang. And I talked about Tulsi and Bernie the other day, but I forgot to bring up Andrew Bernie. And I love Andrew Yang. And I talked about Tulsi and Bernie the other day, but I forgot to bring up Andrew Yang. I apologize for that. I said everybody else can eat shit. I didn't mean Andrew Yang. I really I do like him. I just it was just a mistake. What is the Tulsi appeal for you?

Well, I think she first of all, is someone who's served twice overseas been deployed twice, and understands the actual cost of war worked in you know medical units saw people murdered and shot down and and destroyed by war and she wants none of it she wants us to have less intervention interventionist foreign policy decisions that affect people's lives and send our young brothers and sisters over there to get killed that's one thing she's a person who served in Congress. She understands how it works. She's a very nice, friendly person.

I believe her. When I talk to her, she's very genuine. And if you want a woman president, that's what you want. You want a young woman who has served in Congress, who has overseas has been deployed she makes a lot of sense with a lot of things she's saying that's what i like about her got it okay klobuchar zero opinion on her okay yeah i like her zero charisma though yeah i haven't been paying attention like uh there's there's certain look there's only so much time you have in a day and only so many days in your life.

And until things start really popping where I have to pay attention to her, I'm just like, she ain't got a shot. But who are you going to vote for in the primary? I think, I think I'll probably vote for Bernie. Interesting. Yeah. Cause I, I think Bernie and Tulsi together would be a fucking devastating combination. I really do.

I don't know if they'd ever work out together. I don't know if that's possible. But I think them together might work. That might work. That might get enough people to go, you know what? This is all just too fucking crazy. Let's try something different. And what do you make of the people that are speculating that Tulsi's going to run as a third party or all that?

She's not going to. Okay. I don't think she's going to. I don't think she has any plans to do that. But that was the worry that, you know, she's a Russian asset. That was one of the things that Hillary Clinton had said. I found that very strange. And Hillary Clinton was calling her a Russian asset.

You found it strange that Hillary Clinton said that? I do. But, you know, I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton. I'm not a fan of that whole – they're a part of a different world, right? They're a part of a different world where corruption was open and accepted and it was a part of the program. If you pay attention to the Clinton Foundation, if you pay attention to the amount of money that they would get paid to speak to bankers and the fact that they wouldn't release the transcripts. That was the great thing about Bernie during the 2016 election. Release the transcripts.

Let's see those transcripts. When I watch him, I'm like looking at Larry David. It's so strange. Like I only see Larry David. Larry David does a fucking amazing job as him. It's like the meld. It's very weird. Like I was watching the weekly episode of when the Times endorsed the candidates or the two women.

And it was like, it was very strange. I was like thinking that I'm literally looking at Larry David. But him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe in him. I like him. I like him a lot. I know that. The like most scandalous thing about him, the Daily Mail just like was like, Bernie Sanders. He requests his junior suites in his hotels to be 65 degrees, and he asks his

staff to collect honey packets. Like, this is like for his tea. Like, cool. That's hilarious. That's all they got on him. Yeah. No, I mean, the thing to get him on is like, you know, his apologetics for Soviet Union, for Nicaragua.

I mean, his foreign policy stuff it's just a disaster and that's what the that is what trump will crush him on i mean trump wants bernie to be the candidate you think so yes i think you don't think he wants warren i mean warren would be great too because then he has pocahontas but like but i love the fact they said that it's racist when he calls her pocahontas it's I love the fact they said that it's racist. When he calls her Pocahontas, it's racist. It's a fucking Disney movie. A lot of people. Oh, yeah.

But also, I mean, the moment that I gave up on Elizabeth Warren's political judgment is when she decided to publicly go through the 23andMe or whatever it was to prove that she was, in fact partially native american it was like just dude back off from she had to she had to no she did not trump is going to attack her on it forever now he's going to attack her on it forever no matter what but now at least it's off the table she showed the slightest sliver of native american no joe it's not off the table you think that if elizabeth warren's not the candidate that's not going to be what he hits her with every single time? For sure.

But it would be more on the table if she had never taken the DNA test. He would be, oh, for sure. Really? Yes. Yes, because it would be this hidden thing. Like, no, no, no, he knows I'm lying about my ancestry. It's a big thing to lie about. Because, look, if you lie about being Dutch, okay,

it's like, you know, it's kind of a cool ethnicity, but it's not that look if you lie about being dutch okay it's like you know it's kind of a cool ethnicity but it's not that but you lie about being native american it's different because like they're one of the most maligned and repressed peoples ever in in recorded history i mean they were wiped off the face of the map and stuck into these little pockets of land that don't have strong natural resources. I mean, I've been, I'm on my fifth book in the last three months on Native Americans. Wow. Yeah, I became obsessed. What got you obsessed?

Empire of the Summer Moon. Okay. It's a book on the Comanches, and it is fucking incredible. It's incredible when you realize like that this was going on in this country just 150 years ago and that for hundreds of years the Comanches just dominated the west. They dominated the plains and until they invented a gun that could shoot more than one bullet the the white men were fucked. The Comanches would just dominate them because they could shoot arrow after arrow and they

were just a ferocious people. They didn't, no artwork, no beadwork. They just made teepees. Beadwork? Really? They weren't, they didn't have like illustrious like works of art and beautiful, what the Comanches were a war people. They raided, they hunted. They ate mostly meat.

All they ate was meat. They didn't farm. They didn't do any farming. They just roamed around and killed buffalo and just dominated the entire western half of this country for hundreds and hundreds of years. Because they were the first ones to figure out how to ride horses. They were the first ones to not just figure out how to ride horses But to raise horses Animal husbandry They figured out how to accumulate

Large stables of horses And ride them Better than anybody could I need to read this It's fucking amazing It's so good It's such a good book And horrific

Do you see the woman out there That's on the wall A Native American woman that's on the wall outside? The Native American woman that's breastfeeding a baby? Oh, my God. I thought you were talking about a real woman. No, no, no. A painting. No, it's a photograph of Cynthia Ann Parker.

Cynthia Ann Parker was, she was abducted by the Comanches when she was nine years old. And then became accepted as a part of the tribe. And then went on to be the wife of the major chief. One of the major Comanche chiefs. And then was kidnapped back by the United States when she was 30. But she didn't want to be in the United States. By the whatever, the pioneers, whatever the fuck you would call them. The Americans.

That's her right there. That's the photograph so far. How did you get in? Like, what started your interest in this uh read a book by my friend steven ranella um called the american buffalo and it's the the history of the bison in the united states and the native americans that would travel with the bison all these different tribes that would they basically coexisted with the bison just moving with the bison as they migrated and hunting the bison and i was just like

what a strange thing that these people lived in this stone age but fantastic way with all these myths and legends and stories and so much magic in their life and then all that's gone all that's gone and now we just like so when elizabeth warren piece of metal yeah so when elizabeth warren lies So when Elizabeth Warren lies about being that, that's a big deal. Because they're one of the most mythical cultures, one of the most magical cultures in a lot of ways. Because, look, they did horrific things to each other. There's no doubt about it. The Comanches were fucking ruthless to each other, to other Native American tribes. They went on war constantly.

They were raiding each other constantly, abducting murdering i mean there was this there's no like this idea of native americans being like the peaceable yeah horse horseshit 100 horseshit that's not how they lived but the way they lived was i don't want to say admirable, but fascinating. Fascinating and powerful. And they had their very strict rules and codes of operating that were very unlike the Western world. And they were invaded. They were invaded and dominated and killed off by disease. And then ultimately, I mean, they were shooting buffalo just to starve the indians out i mean there was a lot of crazy shit that went down so when she comes out and says

you know oh i'm i grew up native american the fuck you did the fuck you did and the more books i read now i'm on black elk speaks which is my favorite one so far, because Black Elk Speaks is an actual man named Black Elk, who is a Oglala Sioux medicine man, a Lakota medicine man, who in the 1930s told his story. So he was alive. He was there when Custer was murdered. Wow. Yeah, he was there when the Sioux were forced into reservations. He's telling the whole story of them going from living this nomadic life to being forced in these reservations and starving and alcoholism and all the the chaos that came

with it so and this one is the this one's the best because it's literally his words so you get a direct translation he's talking to his son his son is talking to the author and the book was written in the 1930s do you spend any time on reservations? No, I haven't, other than Indian casinos doing stand-up. Yeah. You should do a show with someone. Well, we're working on that right now. We're reaching out to a couple different Native American groups

to try to find a good representative to come in and talk about their grandparents and the stories that they had heard. Yeah. It's a crazy subject. And it's, to me, look, pretending you're anything is not good. But pretending you're Native American, to me, is like, whoa. Because that's one where everybody, there's like a spirituality aspect to Native Americans.

It's implied. Like you say you're Native American, people are like, oh, that guy fucking knows things. You're allowed to have feathers. You can have an unironic dreamcatcher on your wall. It's different. It's different. It's one thing to like cosplay is. Yeah.

I totally get that. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. It's a weird one. And maybe someone lied to her. People get the wrong information all the time from their great-grandparents and people they get.

And also the thing about Cynthia Ann Parker, right? Cynthia Ann Parker was 0% Native American, but she was 100% Indian. She still was a Native American because she was abducted when she was nine and lived their life. She wanted to go back. Yeah, I mean, she threw in her lot with them.

Yes. And that made her them. Well, she didn't like the Western world when she was forced to live in cities and live in towns, and she fucking hated it. And you get her words, you know, when she's describing the difference. Like, the Comanche world was filled with magic and gods. The water was a god. The water was a god. The sky was a god.

Everything was, there was magic. Like you would, there was rituals they would do to protect themselves in combat. And all these things made life fantastic. The hunting of the buffalo and the nomadic way of life. And then all of a sudden to be locked into these buildings and wearing these clothes and stuck within these rituals that the white men would live she didn't want to have any part of that so even though like you know if someone was cynthia and parker's if she had sex with a white man and made a white baby that is not a native american baby but it kind of is you know i mean I mean, in terms of culture, she was 100% all in Comanche

when they eventually abducted her back. Amazing stuff. So, fuck Elizabeth Warren. Fuck that crazy Native American talk. I mean, again, no disrespect to Mrs. Warren. Maybe someone lied to her. Maybe someone lied to her. Maybe she didn't know she was one

2,000th Native American. I don't know. I also just think, I don't know. She's an expert and she's clearly- Manipulative. I was going to say really smart and has, like, she knows what she's talking about. I just don't think that she sells to the American people in this moment. I just don't.

I don't see it. Yeah. I really don't. Well, that shit she pulled on Bernie, when she was saying that he had pulled her aside in private and said a woman can never be president. Okay. Okay, tell me how you saw that moment.

Well, the CNN moment was very interesting, right? When she walked up to him in this very public way and said, I think you just called me a liar on national TV. And he was like, hey, get into this. You want to get into this? Did you see the video where someone put the curb your enthusiasm? No. Oh my God.

Jamie, you need to pull. It's like Tom Steyer's there and it's like the intro music to Curb. It's incredible. It's perfect. Oh, that's funny. Because Tom Steyer's standing there like... Yeah. I don't...

I think it was a ploy. I don't buy it. He's been her ally forever, and to me it shows a sign of great disloyalty and great dishonesty. Like, the way she did it, she did it as a... It's a ploy.

Like, ideally, her and him could be allies, and she could be... But only one person can win. Right. But maybe she wins and he's her running mate. Like some. That is 100 percent possible.

Right. So if you're all in the DNC together, you should be allies. Right. He's a powerful force in the Democratic Party. She's a powerful force in the Democratic Party. Yes. Why are you attacking each other? And why are you attacking each other with some bullshit story from like many years ago where he said that a woman is never going to win i think what i i

don't know this is one thing where i can give them both a generous read i think it's very possible that they had the kind of conversation that people like you and i have all the time which is can a woman win right the presidency of the united states and i think bernie gave an answer that probably that a lot of people give in those conversations, which is maybe not. Maybe the American people are too sexist to elect a woman like that's possible. And she, you know, and he meant that in an observational way, not at any judgment on who she is or the capability of a woman to be president. And she heard it in the negative way of a woman can be president yes too generous that is possible that is possible i i agree that she that this was absolutely a strategy on her part that backfired that's why it's gross and it did backfire not a

question but i also think that you know i i have those conversations every day can a woman be president yes like people are really misogynistic. Sure. Well, they have these ideas about what a president is. And a president is an older male who is well-spoken and educated. And tall. Yeah. There's many factors.

That's why Pete Buttigieg has no chance. He's too short. Yeah. And a lot of other reasons. There's a lot of other things. Well, he's also a fucking mayor right now. Aren aren't you working what are you doing man andrew yang is like are you saying no government like lack of government experience are you saying no no no no he has a job that he's not doing right when he's out there running for president like andrew yang

is not he's not a mayor somewhere or he's ignoring his constituents. He's not ignoring his city. Like South Bend, Indiana, they're freaking out. They're like, what the fuck are you doing, man? You're supposed to be the mayor. Well, that's how New Yorkers felt about Bill de Blasio, which is like our feckless mayor is now running for president. I love that word. Feckless is one of my... I never use it.

Oh, it's so good. You got to use it. It's a great word. Feckless. He is. It is. It's ridiculous. Who called...

Someone called someone a feckless cunt. Who the's just ridiculous who called someone called um someone a feckless cunt who the hell was that i don't know god damn it i was i forget who it was someone on the show like maybe samantha b called someone a feckless cunt oh my god it was a trump it was samantha b yes i was like jesus but she was feckless and then cunt. I was like, woo! That's hard. She came hard. She went hard. She came hard. That was, I mean, came at her hard. Yeah.

I'm not good with language sometimes. But the Warren thing, the real problem with it was that it was obviously calculated. It didn't, when people are talking, if someone said, look, if he was like a closet misogynist. No, obviously he's not obviously he's not but i also think that he had a conversation with her where he said that a woman can't win and i don't think that maybe or maybe not i don't think she's making that up sure she could sure she could be making it up of course she could i don't think that she is and i think what bernie meant was not anything sexist or misogynist i say sometimes i ask out loud to my friends i don't know if a woman can

win for president well hillary won the popular vote right so a woman can win yes they can win yes the the idea that they can is nonsense but it's also talk right if you and i were just sitting around having a cup of coffee and we're just talking we just talk and then i went and weaponized that against you say this is a statement and like that's not what i'm i i don't know what the fuck i'm saying right now like right when i'm talking i don't know what my next word is going to be right everyone knows that we we all know that when we're talking it's one thing if you're reading a speech or if you have a very clear doctrine that you – this is my idea of the world.

I've thought this through very carefully. I've written it down, and I'd like to share it with you. Okay, well, then I'm going to hold you to that. And if you change that opinion, I'd like you to tell me why you changed it and tell me why you were wrong. But that's different if you talk. If you talk, like, fuck, a woman can't win. A woman can't win.

A woman can't win. Hey, a woman can't win. Maybe that's what he said. You know? Maybe he was upset. And then she's like, he privately told me a woman can never be president. He's like, that's not what I said. And he's all, fuck.

No, let's not do this now. Let's not do this now. Do you want to do this now? We can do this. Let's not do this now. Watch the clip with the curb music. It's so good. It was just, oh God, it was amazing.

Oh, is Bernie Jewish? Are you kidding? Sounds like it. Of course Bernie's Jewish. I pay so little attention to people's religion. Oh, but Bernie embodies the Brooklyn Jew. Oh, it certainly does. Come on.

Just the name, Bernie. And then Sanders. Bernie Sanders, yes. He's Jewish. Not religious. Not religious. Do mean, come on. Just the name, Bernie. And then Sanders. Bernie Sanders, yes. He's not religious. Do you think, going back to your book, do you think- Going back to my book. We haven't started on it, but sure. We touched it.

We touched it a couple times. We touched it a couple times. Do you think that that could be an issue? No, I don't. I think it might be- No, I just don't see that being an issue with him. I mean, it's not a fundamental part of his identity, unlike Elizabeth Warren's Native American roots. He's not running on it. He says he's a proud Jew, but he's not religious, really, at all. I just don't see it. I don't see it. You don't see it being an issue. not going to be a good ally of Israel, not serious on foreign policy, not hawkish. And they'll point to the fact that some of his surrogates are extremely problematic people like Linda Sarsour.

And I think in that sense, Bernie's Jewishness will be important because I think he'll use it to say, but I'm Jewish. You know, like, how dare you accuse me of X, Y, and Z thing. Right, right. But I don't think it's like if you're, I think you're asking, is it disqualifying for people? And I don't see it that way at all. Yeah, I was saying, would it be a factor that some people don't want a Jewish president? I see it being more of a factor with someone like a Mike Bloomberg that's like, do you want a Jewish billionaire?

That plays into a lot of stereotypes. Billionaires are a religion unto their own. Well, I don't know about that but in some ways the way people what i mean by that is like people look at them like a different thing yeah like oh they're mormons oh they're billionaires you know what i mean totally it's like a billionaire like that's a category someone has accumulated at least a thousand million dollars what the fuck yeah who are those aliens a thousand million dollars i've never i like the way you said that yeah yeah i don't i don't think it's gonna be a defining factor for bernie i don't but i don't

know but again i also think trump is gonna win yeah let's let's talk about your book okay unless you want more no i so want to talk about my book. I have to pee very bad. Sorry. No worries. No worries. Does it matter that for the... We'll be here. Don't worry. Don't worry.

We're good. We're good. That Bernie Elizabeth Warren stuff was started, I believe, as a report on CNN the day before they hosted that debate as just maybe a way to drum up ratings, which it did work. Could be. Because the ratings were higher than the previous two or three. Yeah. People love controversy, man. People people love it they get excited look half of this stuff is so

goddamn boring and so hard to follow when someone calls you a liar and though i'm not a liar like yes now we got something now we got something juicy we could sink our teeth into i was also gonna ask if you saw any of the curb stuff from last night no it was great yeah he's always great he's wearing a maga hat just to get rid of people so you have to like eat lunch with them and they realized it would work he's genius man i'd like to get him in here i love him i love larry david i mean he's the really one of the big reasons why Seinfeld was so successful. It was such a great show. He's a special character.

You know that guy really does fucking drive a Prius, apparently? He's probably worth $500 million. Yeah. Driving a fucking Prius. He's supposed to spend some money with Jerry and he has no Porsches. Yeah, Jerry has got probably 200 cars. And Larry David drives a fucking Prius. He might have a tesla now he might have changed it up who knows it was great though bridget fantasy made a little cameo in it really yeah yeah bridget was in it no shit oh that's awesome good for her good for her yeah he's

special you know that that show is special and it's like jeff garland on it and everything it's like it's so perfect all of them together he's getting accused of being weinstein the whole time episode like you're hanging out with weinstein it was great what do you think about weinstein using that walker like get the fuck out of here bitch you could walk i'm seeing him use that walker i'm like that looks so fake well you get extra like lawyer time or something right if you're if you're disabled if you're disabled in court or something i don't know i guess if you're in maybe if you're being held well what is it what what all of a sudden happened to him did he fall he needs surgery of some sort but it's new right his back hurts but it seems greasy

doesn't it seem greasy yeah for sure that's definitely a move That's definitely a move. Yeah. Someone told him to do. It's a greasy move. Yeah. It's like, I see what you're doing. Shut the door, please. I get it. I get it. Yeah.

We're just talking about Harvey Weinstein's Walker. I don't buy it. Oh, I didn't buy it for a second. Not a fucking second, right? Yeah, no, we haven't talked about that yet. Like, oh, sympathy. Yeah, we got to talk about that, too. Oh, my fucking God.

That's. Yeah. That's. Yeah, he didn't help jewish relations at all no this fucking the israeli flag painted mosque you know all that stuff remind me the israeli flag painted yeah i thought it was greek the temple no the temple yeah temple that's right oh god yeah you didn't see his temple temples paint the colors of the israeli flag But those are also The colors of the Greek flag Good point

But he's not Greek I don't know what The question was Did he work for the Mossad Did he work for the Mossad Did he work for the American government Right

Like Right Who did You know Can we just agree That he was murdered I If you had

Think that he was murdered If you had All your chips on the table like barry you gotta go all in what are you gonna do there are too many coincidences to make it plausible that jeffrey epstein like the video we could go down the line i'm sure you guys are like jeffrey epstein trucers in here you guys are deep. You guys are fucking deep. We're deep. I'm not even going to try. We're all in. It's something that I've followed not as closely as you have. Remind me after the show. The fact that I've followed it makes me incredibly suspicious of the official story. Remind me after the show. I could tell you off the air some crazy shit.

Why don't you tell me now? I can't. Why? Because I'll tell you after the show and you'll understand. Okay, I'm excited. But yeah, the thing is so it's so bizarre and it's like they're hoping that the news cycle somehow or another buries it and then just like oh he's gone he's gone let's get some iran is a problem we're going to war look at this well it is a problem it is a problem but yeah it's almost like we've stopped talking about Jeffrey Epstein, but he's clearly been murdered. He clearly was the guy who was in some way, shape, or form a part of a gigantic ring where you would get underage girls to these pedophiles or public figures who were interested in having sex with 16-year-old girls.

Well, that's the part that's known. Yes. That's public, right? We know the part that's known. Yes. That's public. Right. Right? Like, we know he was a pedophile. Yes. We know that there was some kind of pure curing that was happening for famous, wealthy, public men in his circles.

We know that Bill Clinton was on his plane. I don't know. You probably know that. 26 times. Not a lot of times. There you go. I mean, like. 26 times. Come on. What's the big deal? Come on. We know Trump knew. I don't know. You probably know that. 26 times. Not a lot of times. There you go. I mean, like. 26 times.

Come on. What's the big deal? Come on. We know Trump knew. I mean, like. Yeah. That's the part we know. The part I want to know is who was he actually working for?

Yes. Why did he have that home? Yes. How was he so wealthy when there was no. Hey. Right. Oh, that's right. He had a painting of Clinton in his house.

Oh, my God. It's sick. Wearing a dress. But just stop and think about what kind of guy... He's basically saying, Clinton's my bitch. I'm going to get a painting of him in a dress, and I'm going to put it in my house. Do you think he made Clinton dress like that at some point in time? Did Clinton do that for fun?

The thing is, it was like... If he posed for it? Like, what? Did Clinton do that for fun? The thing is, is it was like. If he posed for it. I watched. God, keep him alive. Let him talk. It's such a sick picture. How did they not let. I mean.

But it was completely. How did they not protect him? No. I mean, no one knows who he really worked for. Right? No, no one knows. No one knows that. But we don't know.

No, meaning. Someone must know. But what I was going to say is like, you know, I've talked to enough people that knew him, met him, went to parties at his house and said like, everyone knew this about him. It was like a Harvey Weinstein thing. Right. You know, in the sense of the young women. Yeah. You know.

Yeah. Or in the sense that everyone knew about Bill Cosby that came into contact with him. Like there were things that were just buried, agreed to never speak about, you know, it's like, it's just absolutely sick. I was,

when, when the story broke about him hanging himself, I was obsessed for like a few days, but then I had to move on. Of course. The world is a big place. That's what they're getting beaten in the streets. Yeah.

But it's also like, there actually are things that are more important to me than the story of Jeffrey Epstein. Right. And I hope that there's some investigative journalist digging into the truth of what happened there. I wonder how much there is to dig. I mean, how much dirt is there that you could actually get a shovel into? What are you talking about? Don't you think there's a ton?

I'm sure, but i think it's the the girls who are the victims yes and then the men who are shutting their fucking mouths right except for prince andrew which was like that was everybody everybody should go to jail just after that oh my god everybody he knows everybody get in jail well the royals are falling apart man yeah i know prince harry's moving on they're like becoming like instagram influencers like i don't understand this it's probably more money i don't know the whole thing is so well isn't being a royal basically being an instagram influencer sure but it's like i don't know this is this is a strategy question of if you really want like progress and all the things that you

talk about i could make the argument that yeah you're part of this crazy ridiculous retrograde institution but you can probably do more good in that role than you can, I don't know, like living in Canada. Well, Canada doesn't want them coming over there, apparently. They're not going to let them. Because apparently, if you're a part of a royal family, you're not allowed to actually live in Canada. What? Yeah. Yeah, there was some thing that they would pull up, they were, they were pull up Prince Harry.

It might be illegal for Prince Harry to move to Canada. It seems hard to believe. I think it's the idea is you don't want a monarch moving into this, you know, Canada is a colony of England, but they have their independence. So the idea would, if,

if a Royal from England moved into Canada, it's probably some ancient fucking rule but they would be able to set up shop and start running canada because they have power over the prime minister i get it in theory i just haven't heard of it yeah i mean in theory i'm on like season two of the crown i mean i gotta like catch up yeah so good well it's all weird um how do we get on that i don't know oh i know because epstein yes and prince andrew yeah that's right we started with epstein being really bad for jewish relations and gis gisling gillane how do you say that gillane gillane gislane nobody knows how to say i don't

know how to say anything but i think it's gillane like her whole thing like that whole photo op at the In-N-Out, reading that CIA, I mean. Yeah, people, death, CIA deaths. It's so good. It's crazy. So good. It's crazy. And where is she? I don't know.

She's at a base in Antarctica right now, fishing for penguins. Like the whole thing is crazy. It really is. I don't even think there are penguins in Antarctica, right? They're in the other pole. antarctica right they're in the other pole either way the the whole thing is it's gonna go away and we all kind of know it's gonna go away and that's one of the most disturbing aspects of this case like that they did murder this guy they did erase the film of his first suicide attempt oh so we erased it sorry they erased the film of that and then the cameras weren't working on the second one it's like everything and the security guards fell asleep yeah like yeah or they were not on

duty or something i know but the problem is right like you can see the world moving on as a kind of or the world the press as a conspiracy or you can just like the way i see it is there are so many things to cover in the world and the press is been so gutted that we need to decide like, yeah, is it more important to cover like Soleimani than Jeffrey Epstein? Right. Yeah, it is. Yes.

You know? Right, right, right. So it's not like I don't see it as malevolent in the way that you do maybe because I'm inside of it and I just see the way that it functions. Oh, no, I don't see it as malevolent i just see it as inevitable that but yeah it's not like once epstein died the world's gonna pause hey let's have no more news so we can sort this out that doesn't you know it doesn't work that way i don't think i don't think it's malevolent i just think it's just a function of life in general and just the insane amount of information that we have access to and the same

insane news cycle that we're operating under now everything gets buried including obvious murder yeah yeah have you had like who is the world's leading jeffrey epstein expert and if you had them probably bravo probably bravo he's my crazy friend yeah i don't know i don't know uh who is. I don't. Well, Eric Weinstein is definitely really into this. Yes. He knows a lot and he met him. He does a lot. He met him and, you know, Eric loves cloak and dagger stuff.

And so he told me right away he knew the guy was an actor. He was like, this guy's full of shit. He doesn't know anything about finance. He's like, this guy's not some financial wizard who's made billions of dollars. He's like, it's not. That's not who he is. Yeah. Like he's acting.

He said when he met him, he had a young girl that he was sitting uh that was sitting on his lap oh my god and while the girl was sitting on his lap the girl was like 21 years old and uh he would just kept jiggling his knee like bouncing her up and down her tits were jiggling while they were talking yeah like what imagine imagine having a conversation with a guy disgusting yeah and he's got a girl sitting he wants to talk disgusting. Yeah, and he's got a girl sitting, he wants to talk about like real stuff. And he's got a young girl sitting on his lap and he just keeps bouncing his knee up and down and her boobs are bouncing around. Why did all of these respectable people keep like going to parties at his house even after he'd been arrested for prostitution? Which is really good.

That's a very good question. Like that's really the sickness. Yes, right. The people that went after he was arrested, like, how'd that happen? Well, I think because the way Eric describes it, Eric thinks that there are people in these, look, these are enormously high profile people that have very buttoned down, respectable positions in life where you really can't get wild, right? But there are also still men

right so he thinks that there are people that provide services and i'm definitely uh paraphrasing how eric described it to me yeah because he'd have like 20 different like coinages to describe this but he thinks that there's people that procure these experiences for people that find it very difficult to get buck wild. And so they would do it. And this is probably why you had Fuck Island, right? Fly them out to this crazy island and it'd be easier to get away with it out there. Hey, no one's out here.

We're in the middle of nowhere. Every fucking picture has eyeballs that are cameras and you're following your own. You know, I mean, it's a crazy story. But of course, that's just practically true right like if you're an elon musk or someone at that level like a public figure eric schmidt or whatever you're not gonna like what are you gonna do go on like tinder or raya no you're gonna rely on like a a guy yeah a wrangler yeah yeah oh my god so sick s sick. Sasha Baron Cohen says he turned over disturbing Who Is America footage to the FBI. Oh, right.

Do you remember this? No. That's right. I don't. He exposed a pedophile ring in Vegas when he was undercover. Yeah, we're going to go down. I love him. I love him, too.

He's so wonderful. But I don't know. I missed this. Yeah. But wait, what happened? Well, they just turned it over to the FBI. They didn't look into it at all. Really?

They didn't look into it. No. It was a real weird story. Yeah. He was playing a fake billionaire character and asked for something like that. Yeah. And someone said they could help him. And he turned that video over and nothing happened.

Well, yeah. I don't know what that is. It could have been that the guy was like, yeah, I can help you. I'll help you by calling the fucking cops like we don't you don't really know what the guy said i mean unless we can watch the footage they have the footage or it's gone who knows but that's what you should have him have you had him on no i'd love to love him he's awesome he's awesome ali g in the house you ever see that uk film the old school uk film all of it is hilarious most people don't know about that film.

That film is fucking hilarious. He is. Well, throw the Jews down the well. I mean, that was like. Just pivoting. Just transitioning. He can get away with stuff because he's Jewish. You can get away with that.

Of course. Yeah. Throw the Jews down the well. So my country can be free. I mean, I was like watching this. I'm like, wow. It's characters, man. All of them.

They're so good. Yeah. I didn't love his new show as much. Whatever it was. What was it called? It was from this. Yeah. Samara.

He played like a funny, there was like a Jewish, like a self-defense Mossad instructor that was like getting, you know, that was fun. There were some parts that were funny, but it wasn't. Didn't he interview OJ in the new one? Yeah. That was the very, very, very end. Was it when he got admitted to?

No, he was that same billionaire character and he was trying to get him to admit to stuff. It was great. It was a great way to end it. Didn't Judith Regan already get him to admit to it? Remember when she got him, he was going to write that book, like, if I did it? Yeah. Yeah. Remember that?

Yeah. Somebody gave me a copy of that, and I just found it in my office. It's signed by O.J. Simpson. There he is. Whoa. There he is. That's right. That's right.

Oh, my God. Hey, hey, hey. Come on now. Yeah. Anyway, we should probably talk about your book. Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. The way it opens is very, so we should tell people that you are from-

We're like really transitioning. Yes, why not? No, I love it. We should tell people you're from Pittsburgh. Yeah. And you did your bat mitzvah at the temple where the pittsburgh shooter yeah and so that was like just tell people sure so i grew up in squirrel hill which is like pretty much down the street from mr rogers like it was quite literally Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. He's from there. And it

was an amazing place to grow up. I became a bat mitzvah in 1997. And it happened at Tree of Life. I actually was a member of a different synagogue called Beth Shalom, but there had been this fire. And so all of the kids who were becoming a bar bat mitzvah that year did it at Tree of Life. were becoming a bar mitzvah that year did it at Tree of Life. And, you know, in the same way that people think about 9-11 as a date, I think about also October 27, 2018. Because that morning, I was in Arizona to give a speech to a group. And I looked at my phone around 10 in the morning to like my family WhatsApp chat. And my youngest sister had just said, there's a shooter at Tree of Life. And my thought immediately went to my dad, because my dad is kind of what we think of as like a promiscuous Jew. Like,

he goes to different synagogues, he, you know, pays membership dues at various ones, he likes the sermons at one and the, you know, the scotch at another. And I thought that there was a good possibility that he was there. Thank God he was not there. But my mom wrote back, you know, we're going to know people there. My dad knew most of the people, 11 people were killed. It was the most lethal anti-Semitic attack in all of American history. I knew several of the people that were killed. And I ended up, I was supposed to actually go to Israel the next day on a reporting trip to report on this fascinating archaeological dig.

But I ended up putting that trip off, doing that story later and just spending the week to see what happened, what happens to a community when something like this goes down. Because, like, we read about mass shootings all the time, right? So much so that they become kind of an abstraction. And I, you know, I don't report on this stuff. So I had never borne witness to what unfolds. And it was a really transformative week. And I write this in the book, but I feel like in retrospect, I had spent my life on a kind of holiday from history, both because I was, you know, I'm a Jew of the post-war era, which is to say, I'm part of the luckiest diaspora in all of Jewish history. Like the Jews since the end of World War II in this country have had it better than we've ever

had it ever before. And all of the kind of mythology about what America could be, the idea that it's a shining city on a hill, the idea that it's a new Jerusalem, like I was raised on those ideas. And even though anti-Semitic things happened to me, like speaking of Catholic school, like I would wait for the school bus to my Jewish day school with my sister. And there was this Catholic school bus that would drive by and they would scream, you know, kikes and dirty Jews and wear your horns. And I remember in high school, someone telling me to pick up pennies, like things happened, but it all kind of like didn't register. It really rolled off my back because I saw those as like vestiges from an earlier and uglier time, like something that those people should be embarrassed about, not something that said anything about me.

Like something that those people should be embarrassed about, not something that said anything about me. And, you know, even after Pittsburgh, though, I was kind of like, you could still delude yourself into thinking like this is a one off. It shouldn't change, you know, the fundamental Jewish American assessment of our experience here and our place of belonging here. But then six months later to the day, there's another white supremacist attack on a synagogue in Poway, California. And then we've had, you know, we've had this rash of violent anti-Semitic attacks happening in the New York area, which I hope we'll talk about. But, you know, it's weird because I grew up in a very political family. Like my mom, my dad's a political conservative. My mom's a liberal.

We're obsessed with politics. We were always talking about politics and we're always talking about like Jews, right? Like we're really proudly Jewish family. And so it wasn't that I thought anti-Semitism had died. Like I was, you know, I watched antisemitism as it was sort of resurging in countries like France and England in Western Europe. But I sort of looked at all of that with some level of distance and maybe even a little condescension. Like we're sort of inoculated from that disease in America. America's singular. America is sort of separate from the tragedy of so much of Jewish history. And I have to say that like it sounds naive, but I was sort of shocked to see it, that it's here too, you know, and that we haven't escaped from it.

before Pittsburgh, which is, it happened, I think it was April 2017, you'll correct me, when was the Charlottesville march? Remember the Unite the Right march? Jamie, you'll find out. But I remember being shocked, right, when those people were marching and they were shouting blood and soil, like Blunden Boden, which is a Nazi slogan. And the Jew will not replace us. Exactly, right? And the Jew will not replace us. And when I heard the Jew, yeah, sorry, August 2017. When I heard the Jews will not replace us, right? I heard it in like the plain meaning of that phrase.

Like the Jew is not going to take my job. The Jew is not going to like take my job in the corner office or whatever. But in fact, it was like a reflection of this replacement theory ideology, which is that brown people and black people and Muslims and immigrants are coming to replace our white civilization. And the Jews job is basically to pass as a white person, but in fact, do the bidding of these people that we deem to be not pure. Pete Where does that come from?

That is a deeply, deeply ancient anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, right? It's the idea of, let's go back to the New Testament. Let's go back to Jesus, right? What happens in that story? go back to Jesus, right? What happens in that story? The story there is that the Jews go to Pontius Pilate and say, you know, like, this person's unacceptable to us. And in the mythology of that story, the Jews get what was then the most powerful empire in the world, the Roman Empire, to do their bidding. And you have this line in the book of Matthew that is so, so, I mean, the bloodiness of this line cannot be quantified where he says, you know, his blood be on us and on our children, which goes, you know, down through the centuries to justify the killing of, you know, untold numbers of Jews. But the idea of the Jew as sort of like the wily manipulator,

as the Jew as having proximity to power, not being in power, but being able to sort of be the puppet master pulling the levers of power, you see that play out in lots of different iterations through time, right? You see it, I'm trying to think about useful examples for your listeners, but that is sort of the trope, right? And it is an ancient one, but it's being utilized in really new ways. So it's not literally that the Jew is going to replace us, it's that the Jew in a way is sort of like the greatest trick the devil has ever played. And this is the language of Eric Ward, who wrote this amazing essay called Skin in the Game. And he talks, he's a black anti-racist activist. And he talks about figuring out how

anti-Semitism is kind of the linchpin of white supremacy, because the Jew appears to be white, but in fact, he's not white. I mean, this is all based on this lie that race is not a construct, right? Which it is. But they're saying that the Jew is not white, but he appears to be white, but in fact, he's loyal to these people who are coming to sully America. And so when you have someone like Congressman Steve King saying, we can't replace our civilization with someone else's babies, like, what does that mean? What is that idea? It is so deeply anti-American, because the idea of America, right, is the idea that American-ness is not about bloodline. American-ness is about a shared set of values and ideas and fealty to those ideas. So the idea that someone else is, what does that mean?

Well, it doesn't make any sense because this entire country is based on immigrants. Of course. And, you know, as we talked about with the Native Americans, I mean, we have replaced our country. We've taken over their country. It was theirs first. What we're talking about with anti-Semitism, one of the reasons why it's always been so confusing to me is because it

seems to be this there there's a lot of these white supremacists that they they they lean in that door they lean towards anti-semitism first like almost it's almost more acceptable it's almost more like they think they can get away with it. They'll find more support online. If you say online in a lot of these forums, like if you say, hey, we got to get rid of all these black people, you're going to, there's going to be so many more red flags than if you say we have to get rid of Jews.

That doesn't, I don't understand that one because when people look different from you, if you are an Asian person who is racist against black people or a black person who's racist against white people, or if someone's different than you, racism is always disgusting. It's always horrific and ignorant, Racism is always disgusting. It's always horrific and ignorant. But at least I can kind of see how you could be tricked into thinking that way.

I don't understand anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not just a normal bigotry. Right. It's a conspiracy theory. It's a way of understanding and making sense of the world, especially in times of economic and social upheaval. of the world, especially in times of economic and social upheaval. The reason that anti-Semitism is resurgent right now is because, I'm not justifying it, but it's because we're in, going back to our earlier conversation, a time where people are disoriented, they're disaffected, they're confused, they're shortchanged, and they're looking for an easy answer. So they're looking for a scapegoat.

Yes. But there's no lines that point to Jews. This is what's so confusing to me. It's like there's no clear thing. Do you know what I'm saying? Well, you have to wrap your mind around the idea, which is a huge, huge, huge idea, that anti-Semitism is built into the scaffolding of Western civilization.

Period. It's never going away. It's like, think about it like an intellectual disease that's built into the foundations of the civilization that we live in. And in times where that civilization or a given society is healthy, antis, along with xenophobia and racism and all kinds of other bigotry, are sort of kept in check. And when the society becomes unhealthy, and we're living in a deeply unhealthy society in many different ways right now, anti-Semitism is something that people reach for, right? It's like, if you want to understand the Nazi rise to power, you kind of can't understand it without looking to the fact that there was, you know, an incredible economic depression in Germany and there was a scapegoat. And if you look, it's not to justify it, but if you look throughout history, right, look at the bubonic plague.

The bubonic plague came because of rats to the European continent that were brought on ships from Crimea. But people did not at the time, they looked, who did they blame? They blamed the Jews. The Jews were dying at a lesser rate than their non-Jewish neighbors, probably because of religious rituals that Jews have, like washing your hands before you break bread and say a blessing, dunking in the ritual bath before the Sabbath, and all of these other things that probably kept them more protected against the plague than their neighbors. But rather than looking into it and saying, oh, maybe they're doing something right and something we should mimic, their neighbors said, kill the Jews,

literally like throw the Jews down the well. And it led to, you know, massive pogroms, killing Jews for, and the claim was that the jews literally poisoned the drinking water throughout europe so it's like it's this irrational hatred but it is so so deep because it goes back to the most important myth that western civilization is built on and that is the christian story jewish people are it's it's does that make any sense yes it makes a lot of sense but the fact that it still continues it doesn't make any sense the reason it's very hard to talk about this is because it's so enormous it's like accepting the fact that it's like you have to accept as a foundational principle that this is baked into the world that we live in. And we're never going to cure it, and it's never going to go completely away.

The best thing that we can do is build healthy cultures that protect certain virtues, like liberty, like freedom of the individual, like religious liberty. It's not a coincidence that America has been so good for the Jews. It's because so many of the ideas that protect minorities and religious minorities, like Jews, were sort of for all of their fault, for all of the founders' faults, right? And they had many, including owning people. But, you know, George Washington in his, he writes this letter to the first Jewish community of this country in Rhode Island. And he says something that was then

incredibly radical, which is pathetic that it was, but he says, you know, Jews in America are not just going to be tolerated. They're going to possess the same citizenship as everyone else. That at the time was a radical departure from history. In the Islamic world, the Jews had always lived as dhimis, as second-class citizens. And in the Christian world, it was worse. I mean, what people forget, right, is like right now radical Islam, when it comes to the religions, is the greatest threat to Jews. But for most of its history, Islam was much more tolerant of Jews than Christianity was, which is something that's kind of like has gotten lost to history. The phrase, it's never going to go away, bothers the shit out of me. But I'm being honest with you.

You don't think that it's possible that we can evolve past where we're at now? Yeah, in a utopian idea, yes. Not just in a utopian idea. If you scale where human beings used to be 100, 200 years from now, and you scale it up 100, 200 years from now, we're clearly moving. I mean, I think one of the reasons why all this social justice shit is going on right now, I think it's good. I think there's good signs. racism, to stamp out sexism, stamp out misogyny and homophobia and all those things that we know are a real problem in culture and society. It's the overcorrection, the overreaction, the virtue signaling that's driving people

nuts. But the trend is all moving towards an area where any rational, reasonable person thinks this is a good thing. It's a good thing to not be sexist. It's a good thing to not be homoph thing. It's a good thing to not be sexist. It's a good thing to not be homophobic. It's a good thing to not be racist. It's all moving in that direction. It's just doing so in this chaotic, virtue-signaling,

very obviously sort of manufactured way. I hope you're right. I think I am. But the thing that's strange again about this particular pathology is that some of the most anti-semitic countries in the world are countries with no jews right like egypt has less than 20 jews you know 20 20 do you know them no do you guys have a newsletter there's one in afghanistan, one person? Get out! One. Who are you? Hate Jew in Afghanistan. Bro.

He's there. There were two until recently, and of course they weren't talking to each other. Hop on a yak and fucking make your way over the mountain. No, but the point is, like, Egypt's one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world, and there are no Jews there. How do you explain that? Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Jews, Jewish people

are very unusual in that they are a culture, a race, and a religion. A peoplehood. A peoplehood. A tribe. We are a tribe. Yes. Like our categories don't fit modernity. Yes.

And that's what's so confusing about us. Yes. Right? Like we presaged all of those categories that you just laid out, which is what makes us so hard to categorize. The only thing that mirrors it in some way is Muslims. In some way, Muslims, they vary wildly in terms of how they look, in terms of what part of the world they're from, but they think of themselves as Muslims. Christians think of themselves as Christian. Yes and christians think of themselves as christian yes but it's not as tribal it's it's a minor i mean it's not a lot not a lot of difference but

enough difference that you could categorize it in a different way but the the difference right is you can't be an atheist christian or an atheist muslim right you can be an atheist jew that's where there's a million of them oh one of my best friends ari shafir be an atheist Jew. That's where – In fact, there's a million of them. Oh, one of my best friends, Ari Shaffir, is an atheist Jew. It's a strange group. And do you think that because of that, because when people are so loyal to their own people, which is one thing that I actually admire about Jewish people, I think it's – it would be nice if more people were like that, that they are profoundly pro-Jewish. There's not a lot of apathetic Jews towards Judaism or towards the tribe, I should say.

Well, there's a reason for that. There's like, you know, when you ask an average American how many Jews they think are in America or in the world, you get like this enormous number. What do they think it is? We're less than 2% of the population in America. And there's something like 13 million of us in the world you get like this enormous number we're less than two percent of the population in america and there's something like 13 million of us in the entire world less than two percent yes isn't that the same as transgender people i don't know you're the expert on that you know but jessica you need i don't know about i just know about crazy stories in the news whenever a guy wants to get his balls waxed and has a business closed down because of it but just this do you think that that might

have something to do with it that this people for whatever reason when they see someone who is in this sort of I mean I don't want to use the word isolated because they're not really Jewish folks in America are not really isolated unless maybe like you could say they're very

established community in brooklyn and in other parts of the country but that maybe people look at this community this trouble and they think they don't give a fuck about us they only care about jewish folks they might think that and that would be an anti-semitic idea. Yeah. In the same way, like, there's this really strange idea that people think that Jews cause anti-Semitism. Right? Like,

when the evil man who walked into the Walmart in El Paso talked about a Hispanic invasion and then went into

that Walmart and killed, I think, upwards of 20 people, no one thought, maybe he's right. Maybe there is a Hispanic invasion. invasion maybe that was like somehow justified because he saw them as insular or isolated or looking out for each other do you know what i mean like that would be a crazy idea right right and

yet when it comes to the jews people are like well you know they wear their funny hats well you know they seem to you know be looking out for one another. I mean, like. But do you think there were that kind of rationalizations after the Tree of Life horrific massacre? Do you think that people were saying that? Like, hey, they wear their funny hats. People just looked at it like this is horrible. This is disgusting.

In that case, yes, but not in the case of what's been going on in Brooklyn. case yes but not in the case of what's been going on in brooklyn there we keep hearing things like this is the result of communal friction as if you know disputes over zoning laws cause someone to pick up a machete the size of a broomstick walk into a rabbi's house and hack people up that was the story that i emailed you about yeah i don't want to it's just do you see what i'm saying so like the case of tree of life let's take that That's like a very, that's like a clean case in the sense of these are innocent, mostly elderly, two of the brothers who I knew who were killed were mentally disabled. Okay, it was the people that show up to services on time, which is a certain kind of person. you have this white supremacist who says all Jews must die. He's totally unequivocal about it. And he goes in and he tries to do that.

So you have just a case of someone who any reasonable person sees as evil, which is this neo-Nazi, and people who any reasonable person see as totally innocent, which is Jews in prayer. Was the guy, the shooter, killed? No, he's standing trial he's standing yeah did and there were and and he actually embodied this thing sorry should i stop no i just what the question was like do they when they have something like that do they extensively interview him and try to figure out what the fuck brought him to that i mean is he schizophrenic is he well a lot

of the people like the guy in the muncie case that we're going to talk about the machete guy he showed signs of mental illness i think that robert bowers in pittsburgh also did but you know but then so did dylan roof the guy that killed however many people he killed at the black church church in uh charleston south carolina But he was also a white supremacist. It's like these hateful ideologies, often they draw people that are deranged or young or somehow on the fringes of society. With the guy in Pittsburgh, he was deep into this replacement theory ideology. The reason that he selected Tree of Life as his synagogue is because Tree of Life, the previous weekend, had participated in this program called National Refugee Shabbat or Sabbath.

It was celebrating the idea of welcoming the stranger, which is a fundamental Jewish value. Do not oppress a stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. And he said specifically that HIAS, the group that was organizing this National Refugee Shabbat, it stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. It started in the 1800s as a way of resettling Eastern European Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, now works to resettle refugees, including Jews all over the world. And he specifically selected Tree of Life because of that, because he said the Jews are bringing in the dirty immigrants into the society. So he was like kind of the perfect embodiment of white supremacist replacement theory ideas. In Brooklyn, it's much harder cases because it's much harder for people to talk about because how do you talk about the fact that in many of these cases, and a lot of them have been caught on CCTV,

you know, that it's a young black man attacking a Hasidic guy walking down the street and who's visibly Jewish. It's much harder to talk about when someone is someone who we talk about as being rightly as being from a group that is himself victimized, a poor black kid in Brooklyn, is then going on to victimize another minority group. It's just much harder when the attacker is not a white supremacist to talk about it. That is a strange one. The Hasidic one is a strange one. But in some ways, I think it's easier for ignorant people to look at them as the other because of the way they clearly distinctly dress. They dress so much different. It's almost like if you had Amish people move in and they stuck to themselves and they lived in one sort of community, I think they would probably experience a similar level of hatred. But then you add into it this sort of acceptance of anti-Semitism in a lot of communities. It's like it's ramped up.

But there's this myth that the Jewish communities of Brooklyn are interlopers. They've been there for more than 100 years. They've been in Crown Heights and Borough Park than before Caribbeans, before lots of other communities. The mythology, like- The interloper mythology. Yeah, the interloper, the cultural vulture, the evil landlord, like these are themselves expressions of the anti-Semitic idea.

And people don't even realize it. Well, I think there's also a genuine jealousy in the accomplishments and achievements of Jewish people. You know, I mean, if you look at Nobel Prize winners from Europe in particular, I mean, how many of them are European Jews? It's fucking stunning. You know, it's stunning. When you look at the amount of lawyers, I mean, just joke around about my Jewish lawyer. You know, I mean, it's like a standard thing.

just joke around about my jewish lawyer yeah you know i mean it's it's like a standard thing you think doctors and how many successful and educated people are jewish and that's one of the things you actually touch touch on in in your book you you were talking about i mean it's how but then why successful jewish people have become in this country And there's got to be some sort of a resentment for that as well, especially by, again, we're talking about mentally deranged people, people with like severe- Some of them are mentally deranged, but some of them are young. Some of them are, that's what's really difficult about- Impressionable. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like the disease is sort of like unleashed. You know, it's like Dylan Roof was mentally ill, but he chose a black church. He didn't choose, you know, a white Mormon church. It's like the guy in Muncie, he was mentally ill by all accounts, but he Googled, you know, like, why did Hitler hate the Jews? And he Googled various synagogues. I mean, the really, and, you know, do you remember last time I was on here, the Covington video? Remember the Covington Catholic kids? That had just come out.

Right. Do you remember in the video, there were those two or three black men who were members of this sect, the black Hebrew Israelites? Yes. The Hebrew Israelites. And everyone kind of laughed them off as like, ha ha, they're just this obnoxious, weird sect. Well, their ha, they're just this obnoxious, weird sect. Well, their ideology, right, the idea that the Jews are not the real Jews, that we're pretenders to the faith, that the Jews are behind the slave trade, that the Jews are subhuman vermin, that was the ideology

that informed this recent attack in Jersey City. I don't know if you followed that one. That was the one where it was a couple and they were driving around. They wanted to target police officers and Jews. And they targeted- Police officers and Jews. Yes. Yes. They hated pigs and they hated Jews.

There were diary entries and Google searches. And think, I mean, it sounds horrible to say, but I went the next day to Jersey City to see the aftermath of it. And they had targeted specifically this kosher grocery store. And they ended up killing, I think, four people. But literally, right above the grocery store to the left, it's a grocery store and then a synagogue. And above the synagogue is a school where there were like 50 young children. And thank God they weren't murdered then they find comes to light a few a few like a week ago that they had a bomb in the u-haul

that had the range of five football fields that they wanted to deploy i mean and everyone was laughing ha ha ha like look at these crazy people that believe this crazy ideology well this crazy ideology is moving people to do very very violent. And there are things that haven't even made the news. You know, like, you know, if we believe this idea, right, that this, what's going on in Brooklyn is the result of communal friction. Well, how does that explain my friend's father-in-law who was walking on the Upper East Side wearing a yarmulke on his head and gets the shit kicked out of him. How does that explain my friend Avram, who is a progressive Jew, wears a rainbow yarmulke, is on the subway, and he's had several interactions with this group who scream at him. One of them held up a picture of Louis Farrakhan saying, you're not a real Jew, you're a faggot,

all of these horrible things. This is like creeping in everywhere. I had a friend on the Lower East Side that was visibly Jewish, not wearing a black hat, wearing a yarmulke, but looked like you were me, got punched. This was like two years ago. By a black Israelite? No, he was just a random guy. But that's, no, not all of these are black Israelites.

What I'm saying is that there's this kind of inchoate hate that's like been unleashed. And that's the thing that's most disturbing. Like if you look at the Anti-Defamation League statistics, only a small percentage of hate crimes committed against Jews, something like 15% last year, were committed by white supremacists. They're among the most violent and the most visible, but who's the rest of them? That's actually more alarming to me the fact that it's like coming from all of these different directions and how do you contain it once it's been unleashed

when you think about these social media sites um gab was one where this guy who shot up the Tree of Life was a member of. And is this, like, I'm not a, I'm clearly not a proponent of censorship, but do people, do you think they get radicalized in these, when you get to a forum where there's no restrictions whatsoever on language or ideology or behavior? You can say whatever you want as long as it you want as long as you're not saying something. I mean, Gab has rules like you can't do things that are illegal. You can't threaten someone. You can't put up their address. But you can say a lot of really fucked up shit, and they're not going to police you. Do you think that these places that do allow free speech,

that there's a catch-22 to it? In some ways, it's great to be able to express yourself freely. But in other ways, you can get radicalized, and it can lead to a lot of people forming these groups where they support each other in these fucked-up ideas. Yeah, I'll say two things. One of the reasons that I feel so strongly about keeping the spectrum of acceptable opinions so like as wide as possible is because

I think that the narrower it shrinks, like we're talking about normal ideas being closeted, then people go into these underground layers online and they become radicalized, right? Because they're like that, you know, the elites are in the mainstream media or whoever, they're not telling the truth. They're lying to me. So there's this secret world and this secret world has all of these actually bigoted ideas.

Do you know what I mean? So do I think that it is a catch 22? Yeah. Yes. I mean, the whole thing about the world we're living in is that you no longer have to like find a KKK meeting. You don't have to find a jihadist preacher.

You don't have to go down the line. You just have to find a Reddit chat or a 4chan chat or something on gab.com and you find your little online village like it no longer requires a real person or real interaction. Right. And there's no stakes because there no shame, because you can just be totally anonymous in these forums. So, I just, like, I think that social media is supercharging this in a way that, like, we can't even grasp. And it's very hard for those of us, like me and you, who want to protect free speech and liberty, to think about how to deal with it. You're right.

How do you deal with that? Like when you have someone like the Christchurch shooter who was live streaming this and making references to, you know, what did he do? I think he referenced the Tree of Life. I don't remember. Did he reference PewDiePie as well? Like, yeah.

I mean, he was like. It's like all in elaborate troll. Right. That's what's crazy. It's like he's shit posting and murdering at the same time. Yeah. And what is the, I mean, there's no, in my eyes, there's no clear solution to that. I don't want to restrict free speech.

I certainly don't want radicalized people to. But you also don't want someone to be free to yes live stream killing people on a platform right but how could you i mean they're they're managing at scale how could you possibly know when someone's live streaming that they're about to go and kill people right when the guy's never killed anybody before and then all of a sudden he's got this camera on and he walks in the synagogue and he starts shooting no it's i thought it was a mosque oh, I thought it was a mosque with him. Oh, that's right. It was a mosque with him. It was two mosques. He killed like 52 people.

Yeah, I mean, it's all insane. What, how do you, how do we manage that? I mean, what do we do? What do we do in that certain, I mean, there's no, in my mind, there's no clear answer here. mind. There's no clear answer here. There's not a clear answer. But I think that, look, the idea that a private company should be obligated to stream someone killing someone, or let's even go like take it less stakes than that, call Jews kikes. Why should a private company say yes to that? It's degrading what the platform is. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

The question is, where does that line get drawn? I know. You know, this is the real problem. I mean, there's people that get kicked off of certain social media sites for just not representing woke culture. For instance, Megan Markle. What is her name? Megan Murphy. Megan Murphy, that woman who got kicked off of Twitter because she said a man is never a woman.

And she got kicked off for life. Totally. But this is what I mean about when reasonable opinions, when the spectrum of what is reasonable becomes so narrow, people radicalize. And they go to these bigoted ideas yes and it's an enormous like it's like why do we need a healthy conversation about immigration and like in the the conversation about immigration is i think very very limited in what people say and you know what they what what is acceptable like it's like open borders or xenophobia, you know, and there has to be kind of reasonable middle and way to talk about it. Because if not,

people self radicalize. That's just, I just see that happening again and again and again on so many different topics. Yeah. The, the immigration angle is a perfect example of that. I mean,

it should be absolutely possible for hardworking people to make it to America and do better. It also should be possible for us to keep gang members and cartel members from crossing the border freely and shooting people and killing people and selling drugs in our communities and all the things that we're scared of when it comes to the open border policy idea. The thing about the social media thing in a lot of ways, it's this new experiment, right? There's something that we've never had before. Like you're saying about a KKK meeting, you used to have to go to one right right and now

you don't now you just have to go to stormfront or wherever you know whatever website you can find that supports your ideas and this is um this is a new challenge and there's a new challenge it hasn't really been mapped out nor has it been I don't know if it's been rationally dissected in terms of like, if we do this, this could happen. If we don't do to a lot of these people that are going to get radicalized and offer them some sort of a positive community as a possible alternative? Because this is what a lot of this stuff is. A lot of these people that get radicalized, one of the things that happens is you don't have anyone that cares about you or supports you, but you find people that very strongly believe in an idea.

They believe in an idea, an awful idea, so much so that they're willing to kill people for that idea. And then you find a bunch of them and then they reinforce each other's beliefs. Totally. With these positive affirmations and they're essentially, they're signaling to them, they're virtue signaling to these horrible people that they also agree with a lot of these ideas. And then you go out and you do something, you act the guy in charlottesville that ran over that girl this these these horrific acts are almost they're encouraged and supported by these tight-knit groups of people that all they're all they're all fucked up and fucked up people find each other and

hurt people hurt people right so they find this category of people, this group of people, whether it's online or whether they actually have to go to a KKK meeting. And they find support. This is a group that were just regarded up until like five years ago as the kind of lunatic fringe have made their way into mainstream politics like steve steve bannon proudly declared himself like and breitbart as the platform of the alt-right and then steve bannon was sitting down the hall from the president of the united states what was the alt-right in the beginning, though? See, the alt-right became something in the public eye.

In the beginning, I thought the alt-right was like young Republicans that were a little different. You don't think that's what the alt-right is? No, no, no, not now. Yeah. For sure. But I mean, in the beginning. But even then. My perceptions of the alt-right in the beginning was like what I thought Milo Yiannopoulos was when he first burst onto the scene. Sort of like, you know, a guy who's –

But the whole thing that Milo has revealed, right, is like it was an ironic posture that revealed – like if you're joking about, you know, fags and kikes, you're still saying the thing. Well, but he's gay and he's Jewish. And so the idea was that he could get away with these things. Provocateur was the word I was looking for. That's essentially what he's doing. And he's using that to build social currency, right? That social currency is developing this large group of people that follow him and talk to him. And he thinks that there's some merit to his idea.

group of people that follow him and talk to him and he thinks that there's some merit to his idea so he finds some sort of justification for having these provocative conversations in this stance where he's saying these things and and a big proponent of free speech and all these things are happening all at the same time that's what i thought the alt-right was initially what i thought the alt-right was initially was people that wanted a new, younger, more current take on what a Republican is. And then it became racist. And then it became, you know, all the things that we think of it now in terms of like public perceptions. Yeah. Who calls themselves alt-right now?

Who even says they're alt-right? I mean, it's almost like such a pejorative like the label has become so toxic but but but the law the don't misunderstand the fading of the label for the power of the movement it's just become kind of more normal republican now alt-right ideas have been subsumed by the trumpist republican Party to some extent. Like which ideas? I mean, look, like the idea that some Americans are less American than others, that is certainly an alt-right idea that I think is extremely dangerous.

I mean, you saw it when, here's a great example. When Trump went after the squad, okay, and remember when he said that they should go back to the totally broken, crime-infested places that they came from. Right. Ha, ha, ha. Those people were, three of them were born in America, one is a naturalized U.S. citizen. The idea there, right, as I heard it,

and maybe I'm hearing something you're not that some americans because of their skin color or their ideas sort of have provisional belonging here for me is a very very it's more than a dog whistle right something that is deeply un-american and deeply bigoted if he had said that about one person who had come here from somewhere else that was awful and was criticizing america then that would have been a more valid statement. And that would be like Ilhan Omar is not from America initially. No, Ilhan Omar, no. And I can't stand her ideas, but she's a naturalized citizen who was sworn to uphold the values of the Constitution.

She's just as American as me or Donald Trump or you. No, I agree. yes she's just as american as me or donald trump or you no i agree and i i also agree that this idea like go back to where you were that sucks is the response to someone criticizing the way things are here is pretty ridiculous you don't have to go back to where it sucks you're here and you're a united states citizen you just think that this place should be better yes and you can disagree with their ideas but that i that concept right that you're not entirely of a place right that is something that has been used against jews forever the idea that you're not fully iraqi because you're jewish or you're not fully american

because you're jewish or you're not fully french because you're Jewish. Like the idea of provisional belonging is something that I'm extremely sensitive to. So it's a toxic tribalism that's attached to the concept, the alt-right ideas. Well, but then the alt-right ideas, like, there's, I mean, look at who Steve Bannon has made common cause with, right? People like Nigel Farage, people like Marine Le Pen. I mean, there was a really good documentary about Steve Bannon where made common cause with, right? People like Nigel Farage, people like Marine Le Pen. I mean, there was a really good documentary about Steve Bannon where he's meeting with

people who really are not just like normal conservatives. Who's Marine Le Pen? Marine Le Pen, what is her party's name in France? She is a deeply xenophobic politician in France whose father was profoundly anti-Semitic. She claims that she's not, but she's someone that, you know, you say her name in any Jewish community. Yeah, she is. President of the National Front. Just that name, National Front, it sounds like Stormfront. It's really not pretty.

Marianne Anne Perrine, a a french politician lawyer serving as a president national rally political party since 2011 with a brief interruption 2017 she's been the member of the national doesn't say what she does doesn't say okay anyway so back to her and or jews or i mean you want to go to barrage yeah i mean just like i don't know i i see ideas getting expressed like there there are people that tucker carlson has had on his show who are like avowed white nationalists like who recently can you google that jamie there was a guy that he had on the other day um or even even these whistles right of like there's a way to criticize um did you find it sorry there's a way to criticize well i lost my train of thought oh no worries um there's there's a certain here goes list of

tucker carlson's guests who have links to white nationalism. But has he agreed with these people? Has he argued against their ideas? Roger Stone. Roger Stone's a white nationalist? No. He has links to white nationalism? Peter Dabrowski.

No, there was something more recently. Wasn't the first white nationalist tucker carlson as well so um okay that was 2018 anyway um i don't know i mean are you not alarmed by the turn that you see in the republican party towards sort of like i don't know the trumpist cult well i think one thing the republican party has done that's wise if you want to keep a solidified team is that they haven't come out against him and they've supported him and there's very little dissent and this is this is a good idea if you want your team to win right and there was a lot of people who were kind of never Trumpers

who softened their stance once they realized the power of his presidency, that he's really dominant. They're sometimes Trumpers. Sometimes Trumpers, yeah. Yeah, I'm alarmed. I'm alarmed by people. I'm alarmed whenever there's an outward lack of compassion and when there's an outward disdain for the other

because essentially this country is all the other the whole thing that's all we have is the other i mean that's that's the whole thing well in the whole thing that yeah yeah i mean there's just trump has just beyond the sort of like he said various things that are like he was speaking to a jewish group and he talked about your prime minister i mean he said so many things that are ridiculous but the big big thing that he's guilty of is he is like dismantled the guardrails of the keep society decent and civil and normal and like once you dismantle those things like it's very easy to reverse not very easy but you can reverse policies what's much harder to reverse is a culture and he has just

been gleefully making war on what i think of as very very important cultural norms like like not attacking the weakest people in our culture like not attacking gold star families like i mean he has attacked he has denigrated like the most heroic and the weakest people at our culture at every possible turn yeah the gold star family thing was very disturbing and weird how it just kind of went away i mean it didn't go that was i remember that moment remember when he people forget this when he said about um judgeonzo Curiel, who was born in this country, that he couldn't give a fair hearing to Trump University because he was born in Mexico? I mean, this is an American. Did he say that?

Yes. This, when was this, years ago? It was during the candidacy. Really, was it? Yeah, we just confirmed. Wow, Jesus Christ. Yeah, that was like. Didn't he say something about loyal Jews wouldn't vote Democrat as well?

Oh, yeah. That the Jews are disloyal because they don't vote Republican because look at all the great things he's done for Israel. Yeah. That if you're a loyal Jew to Israel, you would vote Republican. Yeah. Or that the Jews who don't vote for him are disloyal. I mean, yeah. That was.

Yeah. That was a high point but i mean just the main like i'm i feel like i haven't given you a satisfying answer about anti-semitism itself i think the way to think about it do you remember this it's too jarring to read um indiana born federal judge who president donald trump once said could not be impartial because he was Mexican cleared a major obstacle standing in the way of Trump's long-promised border wall with Mexico. Right, so I hear that and I'm like, oh, that's... Yeah. Yeah.

Crazy. It's all feeding this idea that there are some people who are more American than others, that are more belonging than others. Yes. And I think that idea is despicable. Right. It reinforces his tribe. Right. And that's one thing that Donald Trump has clearly done is cultivate a tribe.

You know, he has a tribe. I mean, they have a fucking, they have a hat. Yeah. Right. They have a slogan. And it's a weird slogan because it seems so positive. Make America great again. That seems positive.

But it's not. Like, if you, if you, look, people punch you if you have that hat on. It's so crazy. And we've gotten to a point in society that something that's a positive statement like make america great again is so polarizing that people will be violent towards you and feel like they need to they feel like they need to laugh like you're the enemy where this is again when when it comes to the idea of the tribe you know there's there's positive aspects of tribalism, right? There's positive aspects of community.

There's positive aspects of people supporting each other. And then there's negative aspects. The tribalism that we're experiencing in this country politically is very toxic. And we're all aware of it. And the tribalism that we're experiencing ideologically is very toxic, where is no nuance and you're not you know you're either with us or against us yeah and i think there's some parallels to anti-semitism there's some well yeah yeah well no i was going to say that like that is a culture the whole culture you just described is one that's deeply unhealthy for jews or any difference really and yeah, it's just not a coincidence that anti-Semitism is rising. Because there's such a small percentage of Jewish people also.

That club, that tribe, rather, even though there's millions of Jews, there's hundreds of millions of non-Jews. Yes. But it's also, we're a tribe, and anyone, like I said, you can join us. Yes. It takes a lot, we're a tribe that anyone, like I said, you can join us. Yes. You know,

it's not a lot of work though. Sure. But join the Mormons like that. Yes, you can. But you join the Mormons. Like you declare the faith, you put on the undergarments,

you're Mormon. But if you join the Muslims, they're allowed to kill you if you leave. Yes. Apostasy. Yeah. But I don't, yeah,

that's the look. I mean, it is or it isn't i met this amazing guy last night who um we were talking about he grew up in egypt hussein abu bakr is his name he's really incredible grew up in egypt and was you know he was like i was swimming in anti-semitism i just didn't even know it wasn't normal like the mosque i went to the school i went to it was like the jews were this super villain. And the whole message was like, become a superhero and go and kill and defeat the Jews. And he was like, I went to a normal mosque, normal school. This is what I was taught. And I never met

a Jew in my life. And he gets arrested during the Arab Spring because he starts learning Hebrew online. He's really curious about who the Jews are and he gets arrested. I think they're suspicious that he's a Zionist spy. Anyway, he ends up getting asylum. He lives here in L.A. He got arrested for learning Hebrew? Oh, yeah. Whoa.

Oh, yeah. You think I can like just go visit Egypt? I mean, no. These are. So if you wanted to visit the pyramids, you'd be fucked. I don't know. Well, I might specifically be fucked because I have a public profile as a Jew. Right.

You don't want to go looking online for my name in some of these forums. It's really scary. Do you look at it? No. No. There are people who look at it for me and tell me what I need to be aware of. And every synagogue I speak to, it's like people don't realize that I went to a synagogue Friday night in LA. Like there's armed

guards at every synagogue and Jewish function that I go to now. It's like going through TSA to go to, like imagine that if most Americans had to do that when they went into church, like we would think that's insane. But that is state of affairs for jews and jews that i know hide evidence of their identity everywhere they go i there was a woman who wrote me who was reading my book on the subway in new york and was like i'm nervous to be seen reading a book with this title in public and like hit it jesus but i understand why because it's it's become so regular and everyone else just is living their normal life and we're like sounding the alarm here. being discriminated against, persecuted against, nearly wiped off the map in Europe. Like, we understand and we smell danger sometimes before other people. Do you think that anti-Semitism is more prominent on the East Coast than the West Coast?

I think that's a good question. There are just more Jews on the East Coast than the West Coast. There's a lot of Jews out here. There are. Yeah, there are. I don't know. I don't live out here, so I'm not sure. I also think it's different, right? Like, there are different kinds are i don't know i don't live out here so i'm not sure i also think it's different right like there are different kinds of anti-semitisms like the kind that we've

talked about that comes on the far right expresses itself one way and there's also anti-semitism that comes smuggled into the mainstream through the political left that comes cloaked in language that is very seductive like the language of social justice and progress and if the political left that comes cloaked in language that is very seductive, like the language of social justice and progress. And if the right claims that the Jews are, you know, fake white people, the far left claims that the Jews are handmaidens to white supremacy. So whiteness plays like a really, really key role in the way that antisemitism functions, right? And here, let me explain it this way. Antisemitism is a shape-shifting conspiracy theory, except that, right? And that is how under Nazism, Jews are the race contaminators. How under communism, we are the arch capitalists, right? How under the idea of white supremacy,

we are these fake white people, right? We appear to be white people, but we're actually doing the bidding of these groups who white supremacists view to be lesser than black people, brown people, Muslims, immigrants. And how on the far left, the Jews are seen as sort of the great, what is the greatest evil right now to the far left? Whiteness and white privilege. And Jews are seen as sort of handmaidens to that. Why? Because of our success, because many of us are of Eastern European descent, 85% of American Jews are of Ashkenazi, which is of Eastern European descent. So we pass as white, so we have white privilege. And so in the intersectional view of the world, right, which reverses the caste system that we've been living in until now, where you have someone like Jon Hamm at the very top and black transgender disabled

people at the very bottom. Well, the intersectional worldview comes around and reverses that and says, no, Jon Hamm and cisgendered white men like Joe Rogan are now at the very bottom and at the very top are the transgender black disabled person. And so where are the Jews in that new intersectional caste system of the world? We're kind of like right above Jon Hamm. We're right near him because we have we enjoy all of the sort of privileges that he enjoys. It's a crazy thing, but that's sort of where we are. The handmaidens to white privilege or white supremacy is very strange. That's a very strange one.

And the anti israeli sentiment yes yeah no i understand what you're saying and while i see it with people where they openly express disdain for jewish people i've seen it from a lot of people that you would call activists you know of varying religious uh. You mean left-wing activists? Yes. Yeah. It's like, I think of it very crudely, if racism is the sin that's sort of acceptable on the far right, hating Jews is the sin that's acceptable on the far left.

The far left, because of support for Israel, they believe that Israel is dominating Palestine and that Hezbollah is misunderstood. And then there's all these different sentiments that get expressed openly in these left circles. Mm-hmm. That's right. And they're telling, you know, they're basically propagating, they're repeating without even realizing it, this Soviet propaganda line, which is that Zionism is racism, which is an unbelievable thing to say, because the majority of Jews who live in Israel are Jews of North African and Middle Eastern

descent. They are non-white people. They are Arabs. They are Arab Jews. And yet you have the far left basically exporting parochial domestic American racial politics onto a foreign conflict in place that they know absolutely nothing about you know these people are delusional they think that like all of the conflict in the middle east would be resolved if only we took care of this one tiny conflict between this tiny group of people uh and their, where in fact, it's like a tiny local conflict in this huge drama of the Middle East of which there are a zillion players. And, you know, the Jews of Israel are only one tiny part of it. The Zionist thing is, define the difference between Jewish and Zionist. Okay. Zionist is the idea of that the Jews have a right to national self-determination.

The Jewish, should I keep going? Yeah, please. You looked at me like I should stop. No, no, no. The Jewish longing to return to the land of Israel is something that's like inescapable if you read the Bible, right? Like it's all over there. The whole idea of, and you can discount it,

discount God, whatever. The fact is, is that the Jews are a people that were birthed sort of in this land, which we now call the land of Israel, and they somehow, and they were expelled by the Romans around 2,000 years ago, and then they came back to that land, right? It's like they defied the logic of history in doing that, because by all rights, they were an indigenous group to that land, they were kicked out and expelled, and then they went back 2,000 years later. Like, it's a crazy, extraordinary story. So, leave that to one part. Zionism, the way that I think is the simplest definition is the belief in the Jewish right to self-determination, and it's the Jewish liberation movement. And so let's go back to like pre-1948, which is the year that the state of Israel is

established. And you have Jews in Poland and know, Poland and all of these other places debating, like, what is the way that we can solve our constant, like the systemic oppression that we are constantly enduring? And there were all of these different responses to that problem. One argument was the socialist argument, you know, if we, or the, you know, the anti-capitalist argument, if the problem is capitalism, and if only we defeat capitalism, anti-Semitism will go away. Some argued that total assimilation was the right way to solve it. We just need to kind of disappear as Jews. That's the only way we'll be fully accepted. And another group, you know, which was not even the most popular group, is this idea of we need to be able to determine our own fate, and we will never be fully accepted. The only way that we can determine our own fate

is this idea of us having our own state and our own army where we can protect ourselves. And that is ultimately the idea that sort of wins out. So when you're having a debate about, you know, when people say today they're an anti-Zionist, the reason that that is so problematic is they're not making that argument in 1920s Eastern Europe when the state doesn't exist. It's one thing to be an anti-Zionist

in theory, right? It's the same, the analogy I like to make is if we're a couple and we want to have a baby and we're debating, should we have the baby? Can we afford the baby? Where are we going to send the baby to school? All this stuff. That's a totally moral argument to make. You can't make that argument of should we have the baby after the baby is born. The baby is born. It exists. Israel exists. It's a place. It's not an idea. It's not an abstraction. It is a place that contains the largest Jewish community on planet Earth. And so when people say that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, it's like, what are you talking about? It exists. So what do you want? So I asked the person that makes the anti-Zionist argument, what do you imagine will happen? Like, are you, do you think that you're advocating for genocide right away? Or like, you have to have no sense of Middle Eastern history or politics to make the argument that you can be a minority in that region

without protection. We know what that looks like. That looks like the story of the Yazidis. It looks like the story of the Kurds, the story of the Zoroastrians, the story, frankly, of Christians who are going to be completely expelled from the Middle East within the next decade, which is a story no one talks about so the anti-zionist sentiment when people start talking about zionists what they're essentially talking about is israel just existing yes they're anti-israel existing correct and jeremy corbin made this very plain where he actually said the words the bbc has a bias towards believing that israel has a right to exist. He said that? Yes. Yes.

So he's on the left. He epitomizes the sort of anti-Zionism which bleeds into anti-Semitism of the far left. Meaning, let me put it this way. Anti-Zionism has become such a plank of like normative political progressivism that if you're an 18 year old and you go onto a college campus and you're like, during the orientation week, you're signing up for like legalizing pot club and better rights for cafeteria workers. Oh, and by the way, you know, the boycott divest sanctions movement

against Israel, which is an anti-Zionist movement. You're not an anti-Semite. You don't hate Jews. You're just kind of like swimming along with progressive waters because that's how successful this movement has been. But if you step back and you're like, wait, hold on, there's a political movement gaining popularity in the West that was in fact embodied in the person of Jeremy Corbyn and what became of his labor party that believes that there's only one state in the world that doesn't have a right to exist. Like that's crazy. I can't believe he actually said that. He did. He said a lot of things apparently I'm trying to find. He definitely said it. He's a ridiculous person. One of my favorite things that he said was, I mean, he's, what is he like fucking 60? He's like, my pronouns are he, him, like shut the

fuck up like i see what you're doing i know what you're doing just i mean he got he got crushed yeah yeah i think the thing to like the analogy i make is like america has done horrible things we have you know the example everyone loves right now is children in cages at the border yeah it's a disgusting immoral thing that we're doing but no one goes from that horrible policy to say america shouldn't exist and we should just meld into canada or mexico right and by the way they're saying that they're making that argument in a context where they are literally surrounded by neighbors who want to murder as many jews and jewish israelis as possible like it's it's an immoral it's it's a like it's it's an argument that i really can't wrap my mind around like how people get away with making it well it's a strange concept to even say that it doesn't have the right

to exist when it does exist correct but so I could see how you could say... Did he say it? What does he say? Jeremy Corbyn accused of anti-Semitism over shocking 2011 video in which he questions Israel's right to exist and says the BBC is biased in favor of the Jewish state. Questions of right to exist. See, I could see how someone could say that there is evidence that some Israeli soldiers have done horrific things to Palestinian people. Of course they have.

Yes. Of course they have. Yes. I will never deny that. And I could see how you could look at where Palestine is and the state of the Palestinian people and saying there has to be a better way for them it has to be a better civilization for them it has to it has to improve these are human beings they have it has to be a better just a a better situation i mean they're not even recognized as a true state or as a true country by a lot of people i could see that see it i believe that yes i'm sure

you do that because that's important to distinguish right yes i i believe that because i'm a human being and i believe that also because i'm a zionist i don't want the state of israel and the state of that's supposed to be embodying jewish ideas to be occupying another people. Like that is a state like that is horrible. What can be done about? Well, here's the problem, right? We saw what happened in the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip. It pulled out completely all of the settlements from the Gaza Strip.

There's not a single Jew left there. It's completely Judenrein. Strip. There's not a single Jew left there. It's completely Judenrein. And yet, Hamas is still sending tons of rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. The occupation there is ended. It's over. And that's still going on. And so then you have to ask yourself, like, does the average Palestinian, like, I believe that the average Palestinian, I've spent time in the West Bank talking to Palestinians whose lives are immiserated by the Israeli occupation. Like, they just want to live a normal life, you know? And yet they are being held hostage. I spoke to this young mother in Gaza who fled, and she said to me on the phone, we're being sort of immiserated twice, you know, once was by Israel and now by our own leaders, by Hamas,

right? These are like kleptocratic authoritarian regimes that hate women, that hate gay people. I mean, it's horrible. Like life under these regimes is absolutely horrible. So the problem is Israel then sees what happens in Gaza and they're like, okay, we're in this situation where we want to be a liberal democracy and yet we're, you know, occupying another people. It's an untenable situation if you want to be a liberal democracy to occupy another people. The problem is, is literally geographically, if they pull out of the West Bank, they will likely have another situation like they had in Gaza. And now all of a sudden, not only do you have rockets going to the south of the country in places like Sderot from Gaza,

you have rockets capable of reaching Tel Aviv and the population centers of Israel. So what do you do? What do you do? I don't know. Does anyone know? Does anyone have a rational course? No, really no.

I mean, I think one of the places we've arrived to, right, is like, what does Palestinian nationalism really seek? Western liberals like me want, or for years, I told myself, and I think this was certainly like the view of lots of experts, that what Palestinian nationalism really wanted was a Palestinian state. Palestinians just want self-determination like everyone else in the world. And I am absolutely on board with that. The problem is, is that they're leaders. And then you look at some of these polls and the numbers are really disturbing and they say, no, the goal is not having our own state alongside Israel. The goal is erasing Israel. The goal is for Israel not to be there, right? And then you look at the evidence of all of these peace offers that were, you know, Oslo and Camp David, and we can go on and on, and they were all rejected. So it's like, is the goal your own land and having a place of

your own? Or is the national, or have we told ourselves, and I include myself in this, a lie about what Palestinian nationalism nationalism or at least parts of it seek and that's really really upsetting to confront so the hardcore position from people like from hezbollah is that israel is stolen from palestinian people yes yeah and so but hezbollah remembers in southern Lebanon, right? But they're all Iranian proxies. Hamas. Oh, yeah. Hezbollah. They're all Iranian proxies.

Hezbollah's an Iranian proxy, yeah. And Hamas as well, right? And all their position is that Israel shouldn't exist. Oh, absolutely. They do not want any Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. They believe that any Jewish presence in the Middle East is heretical. That's what they believe. That's probably also accentuated by our support for Israel. Because the United States is fully in support of Israel militarily, politically, socially. Yeah, I mean, that's like saying, you know, I'm trying to think of the right analogy here.

I mean, they're, they're not like these are, these are terrorist groups. they're not like these are these are terrorist groups unless you think terror like terrorism is rational i don't think that anything is accentuated by like i think they would think that about israel whether or not the u.s was supporting israel right yeah when you see a situation like that where there doesn't seem to be a solution it It's... Well, the solution is shrinking the conflict as much as possible, right? I do not believe right now you can resolve the conflict because Israelis who have lived through times where it was normal for buses and cafes to just blow up,

you know, the number of people I know who were touched by the second intifada, like I was there during times where, you know, a cafe would by the second intifada. Like I was there during times where, you know, a cafe would just blow up down the street. So like, they have been thoroughly disabused of the idea that I think that many of them have given up on the idea that there could be peace in the short term. So what can you do right now to make things a little bit better? You can improve the economic life for people, for Palestinians living in the West Bank. And you can try and shrink the conflict, meaning no settlement expansion.

And I would say pull out of some of these Jewish settlements that are like, you know, far flung and that the Israeli army is sort of protecting for no reason. But I think that's the best case scenario for right now. right there's a book i think it's called um catch 67 by mika goodman that i would recommend to people that's about how to shrink the conflict and that for now being the best case scenario but again it's like why does you have to ask yourself like why does everyone in the world obsessed about this particular conflict? Yeah. There's a weird obsession with it. Why do you think that is? I think it's inescapable that part of it is an obsession with the Jews. Like, there are 500,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon, most of whom live

in refugee camps, and by official Lebanese law are barred from being lawyers, from being doctors, from being accountants. It's a horrible situation. Do you think most people in the world know about the situation of the Palestinian immigration in Lebanon? They don't even know Palestinians are in Lebanon or in Jordan. They have no idea. The reason is because, you know, it's like Palestinian lives matter when the people that are hurting them are Jews. They don't seem to matter when the people that are hurting them are other Arabs. That's one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about. It's that this acceptance of antisemitism almost globally is unique. It's a weird racism or a weird

discrimination. It's weird. It doesn't parallel with any other sort of discrimination. Right. It's like people aren't sitting around thinking about how, you know, left-handed people or Koreans are uniquely evil. Like they're sitting around thinking about that with regard to the Jews. There's going to be a certain amount of population, a certain percentage of the population, no matter what, that's going to hold those beliefs. And these have been passed down for thousands of years yes and the challenge is to keep society as like healthy as possible to keep those forces at bay really i mean it's it's really

it's unbelievable the extent to which it's it's become accepted like unbelievable the extent to which it's it's become accepted like i'll give you an example like there was um and this is the way that anti-zionism presents itself the anti-zionism i think is the modern form one of the modern forms of anti-semitism because what else do you call a movement that says that the jewish state that already exists does not have a right to exist. Like, that sounds like, oh, that's like a cool theory, but it's like it exists. They live there. They are surrounded by people that want to murder them. So what are you suggesting?

That it just like goes away? Like the effect of it would be nothing less than unbelievable bloodshed. And yet lots of people in this world are going around calling themselves anti-Zionist. Do you think that they've, it seems like almost a sentiment that gets expressed that hasn't been really examined. Yes. So it's like a cursory- And it has nothing to do with criticism of Israel. Like people should be able, Israeli government is full of like lunatics, just like

our government, just like any other normal country. But it's like Israel's not treated like a normal country. It's treated in a way like this has these superpowers, both superpowers to like affect peace in the Middle East and superpowers to like, like a supervillain. It's both at once. People hate a country that doesn both at once people hate a country that doesn't exist and they love a country that doesn't exist they project themselves and their ideas of things onto this place and it's just like a normal country that's where it's it's so strange because that's where there really doesn't seem to be a way out of this because it's an idea that's not that hasn't been fully explored but has been expressed so frivolously almost well it's just it's like if you think

about think about if there was a movement in the world that suggested that you know the japanese weren't a real people and the and japan does not have a right to exist. Like, think about how crazy that sounds. But that's a normal thing that a lot of people believe, a lot of people that you and I know. Why did you write the book? What was your goal? Like, when you sat down and you decided you're going to write this book, How to Fight Antisemitism, what were you thinking? Well, first of all, I wrote, I was supposed to write another book that I'm still on the hook for. I went and begged my publisher to do this because after Pittsburgh, I just kind of couldn't stop seeing it everywhere I looked.

And honestly, like, yeah, I think if Pittsburgh hadn't happened, I wouldn't have written this first. But I just became so passionate about it and so passionate about –'s I think maybe the shortest answer for this when we talk about anti-semitism even you and I like we think about Jews like the Jews on the streets of Brooklyn or in Pittsburgh or in that synagogue in California as being the victims of it but the act and they are but the real bigger victim of it is the surrounding society. Like when antisemitism shows itself in a culture, it means that that culture is extremely broken or in some stage of death. And the reason that I think it's so important and the reason I ultimately wrote the book is I want people to understand that the fact

that antisemitism is rising in America says nothing about Jews. It says everything about America and where we are right now. Like, we don't want to become a place where antisemitism is normalized. Because guess what? Societies where antisemitism become normalized are societies that no longer exist on the face of the earth. I like how you described it in your book as a symptom like that we all have certain bacteria or we all have certain viruses. But our immune system keeps them at bay. When those viruses show themselves, it's a sign that the immune system is weak, that the body itself is weak. Yes, that's exactly right. Couldn't have said it better. That's how I said it. Yeah, I think that's true. And the question, right, is how do we rebuild back our immune system?

And one of the reasons that I'm alarmed by, I completely understand the populist moment, completely understand the populist moment but I'm also scared of it because populism often does not end well for Jews or for the political center and I think one of the reasons that we need to like how do we rebuild our immune system like those are the sort of things that I suggest in the last chapter of the book and I think I just I just hope we can do them because I'm really, really alarmed that we're living in an America in 2020 where people I know, you know, who wear a Jewish star, like put it inside their shirt when they walk down the street. That's crazy. Like that's crazy to me. Imagine if that was a crucifix. Exactly.

If it was the same fear. Yeah. to me imagine if that was a crucifix exactly same fear yeah i mean to say nothing by the way of like jews in france that have you know they've been hiding themselves for a very very long time that's normal there um you know a lot of jews i know are taking shooting lessons i just had a guy reach out to me that was like i read your book i've read your speeches i think you're great but none of them are going to help you if someone attacks you on the street let me teach you like krav maga self-defense so i'm going to do that are you really hell yeah of course i am krav maga is legit yeah i'm definitely doing it they basically take the best aspects of all martial arts and

combine them together striking grappling self-defense techniques i'm gonna do it you're gonna get a gun i can't i live in new york you to get a gun? I can't. I live in New York. You can get a gun in New York. I think it's hard to get a gun. Really? Yeah. It's not that hard. I have to tell you, I hate the few times that I've gone shooting.

I hate it. Yeah? I really do. Just go with me. It stresses me out. Okay, I'll go with you. You might enjoy it more. Okay, I'll do it.

Okay. Are you serious? Yeah, I'll take you for sure. Next time you're in town, I'll take you to Taron Tactical. Okay, the other thing. Light up some targets. Okay, let's do it okay are you serious yeah i'll take you for sure next time you're in town i'll take you to taryn tactical okay the other light up some targets okay let's do it okay i think i should know how to shoot yeah they'll teach you how to shoot right yeah um the other thing i was thinking about is like what would it look like if you got some like of your mma buddies to put on you know to dress like chassidic jews and walk around walk around Brooklyn in the next few months. Oh, God. They have things to do.

They can't go out vigilante style and act like superheroes and beat people up. It would go away. Seriously. It's like these guys are being preyed on because the people attacking them know they're not going to fight back. Right. I see what you're saying. What if they go with your bunch of guy and the guy just like wrecks him? Yeah. You know, you get enough of those and enough viral videos, maybe the whole thing will die down.

What do you think? I think that's a simplistic view. Yeah, it doesn't usually work that way. It works that way in comic books. Maybe. Yeah. Listen, Barry, thank you so much. Your book is out right now, How to Fight Antisemitism, available everywhere.

There's also an excellent audio book that I was listening to. You're really good narrating it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye everybody. Woo. It's so.