The Pete Quiñones Show - A Discussion of the 'Jewish Question' w/ Darryl Cooper

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

95 MinutesPG-13Darryl Cooper is the host of the Martyrmade podcast and the co-host of The Unraveling with Jocko Willink.Darryl joins Pete to talk about the historic Western phenomenon known as the "Jewish Question." This was Episode 1238.The Martyrmade PodcastThe Martyrmade SubstackThe Unraveling PodcastPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on Twitter

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinao show. I want to welcome back, Darrell Cooper. How are you doing, Darrell? What's up, man? I'm great. How are you? Doing well. Doing well.

All right. Let's jump into a topic that I ask you to come on and talk about. When the phrase, the Jewish question, and that is a capital J, capital Q, historic question, when someone raises that up, what do you think? Oh, somebody that I don't have any background on. You know, a lot of... No, no, I was saying when... No, no, if you just hear it, like, say an academic, what was it? Well, when you hear that term, like, historically, what do you go to?

What is your frame of reference? Well, I look at it. It's like part of the modern Jewish-European experience and, you know, having to do with the period of national uprisings across Europe. and how Jews fit into societies like post-post-national nationalist awakenings. I mean, it is kind of a thing that, you know, the themes that came out, that come out as people work through the Jewish question, the various European countries, you know, you see these themes all throughout history. You know, you read Tacitus, the Roman writing about them.

You read Manetho, various Greek writers writing about Jews. And you kind of see that there's a running theme that comes up, again in Europe, you know, that in a society like feudal Europe was in traditional, you know, traditionalist aristocracy, different estates with different rights and privileges, and everybody kind of, nobody really questioned that that was the way things ought to be put together, you know, the idea of universal human rights that apply to everybody equally was just not a thing. And so, you know, the fact that you had this sort of self-contained, semi-autonomous self-governing community of people who weren't really quite part of the community,

but they performed certain vital, that was okay in a society, you know, where you didn't, words like, things like the rule of law, like we're not, nobody really thought that something like that should be applicable to, you know, like a peasant should be able to bring a suit against a king or something. Nobody believed that. And so it worked when you, you know, you get to the French revolution. I think the Jewish question, the phrase, I believe, popped up in England in like the 1550s when they were debating like Jewish naturalization, but took on the form that we're most familiar with it after the French Revolution, I think, because, you know, it was a time where, you know, you had this group of people that was set apart in every way. Like they were basically

self-governing, had their own customs, they had their own laws. I mean, depending on where you were in Europe, and what time you're talking about. I mean, they could execute their own members for religious laws, you know? And like in the Polish, Lithuanian Commonwealth, the local authorities would sometimes enforce those rules for them. They would go arrest Jews who the rabbis, you know, request to be arrested, and they would bring them in for punishment, corporal or otherwise. And so when you have that, and all of a sudden, you know, you have a series of revolutions

in this nationalist idea that everybody is an equal citizen, the rule of law. and stuff, but you still have this group of people, you have to figure out what to do with them. Because, you know, it's, everybody has this idea that, like, the ghetto and the Steadel were places that the Jews were confined to, like concentration camps or something. There was some amount of that where the local societies were trying to, like, keep them, keep them away from the Christian population. But the majority of, like, the push for that came from within the leadership of those Jewish communities themselves.

They saw it as a way to protect their own people from the influences of the outside. And so when Jewish emancipation started getting underway after the French Revolution, first in western and central Europe and much later in the east, you know, you had this kind of push and pull where, you know, young Jews usually, just like young people usually want to do, you know, they want to leave the farm and go to the big city or something. And, you know, the rabbis are watching their Jewish communities, their villages kind of bleating. their young people as they want to go out to Paris they want to go to London you know learn the local language and read the local literature and poetry and become you know that thing because that spirit was in the air anyway everybody kind of wanted to be a part you know

and so it was sort of a crisis for uh for the jewish community in general and it became a crisis for the host societies you know themselves because uh you know you had a group of people who you know this was a this was a very um is a very capable group of people in many ways, well-organized and capable, in the sense that a lot of the vocations and skills and habits that we associate with modernity, that at this time, you know, as people are moving from the countryside into the European cities, like we're gradually sort of being introduced to, the Jews had already sort of been in that place for quite a while, kind of waiting for everybody else to catch up.

And so you have this very, like, capable group of people that perform functions that nobody else could really perform at the time, at least at the scale that was necessary, who had very often, you know, a, say, their relationship to the local commoners, you know, ranged from apathetic to hostile, but who had good relations with the local rulers or local lords who gave them the person. privileges and the protection they needed. And so, you know, when all of a sudden, you know, all of those commoners, that's the voting public who gets to decide what the government policies are and stuff now. Like, it's kind of a crisis on all sides that had to be navigated. So to answer your question in short, I mean, when I hear Jewish question, I think of the modern European experience during the nationalist era. But again, it is something that you can kind of trace the themes of going all the way back, at least to the Second Temple period, I think. It seems like in the modern day, it basically transformed a little bit. So Bruno Bauer in 1843 writes the Jewish question.

And it's, I guess, with all of those young people coming out, they're like, okay, the way Israel Shahok talks about it in his book, Jewish history, Jewish religion, is that a lot of the younger people, a lot of the people in the Stettles and in the villages were basically kept there. And with quote unquote democratization happening basically now it's legal they can actually make a legal plea to the government to be like we want we want to be separated from this we want to and you know Bauer basically was trying to answer the question oh how do you how does uh how can we make them free and he's like well a Christian society can't make them free because a Christian society can't be free Bruno Bauer was this weirdo secularist who was like, you got to get rid of religion.

The state is the only thing that can save you. Then six months, nine months later, Marx, in one of his most famous essays on the Jewish question, answers Bauer. And he takes it a step further. His essay has things in it like where he talks about religion being the opiate of the masses. That's from that essay. It's a much longer quote in context. it makes a lot more sense. Then he starts to describe from more of a left radical viewpoint

how he sees the Jew basically contributing by the way they are and by the way they operate to his, what he sees, he sees capitalism as a necessary function to de-rassinate all of humanity, so that humanity can come in and abandon the state, abandoned religion, except basically a Marxian, a Marxian like utopia, quote unquote. But as it goes forward, basically, it looks like, especially in Russia, the question really starts talking about assimilation.

Russia in the 1800s had the Dersavent Commission. there was like 11 conferences to how do these people, how does this nation within an Orthodox Christian nation operate? And I think that that's, you know, even if you bring it all the way up to today, basically it's like you have a people who consider themselves to be separate and have their own interests and how does a society that is maybe founded in orthodoxy or founded in Protestantism, how do you incorporate that into it? So it really seems like assimilation is the big question, right? Yeah, for sure. It became that. And it, you know, it sort of became the,

I guess the fly in the ointment that, you know, that's, that, that's, you know, that's sort of drove, I think, especially in the 20th century, that really, like, accelerated and drove the process of the secularization of European societies, you know? Because, you know, look, you know, European people and their descendants here in America and Australia and stuff, we're just, we're generally like open-hearted, tolerant people, you know, we don't like being, unjust without cause, you know? I mean, it's just, that's just generally the case. I mean, you read in like mind comf when Hitler's talking about his early years when he started thinking about the Jewish question how he was beset by fears that like he you know that he was being unjust and then he

was you know so even somebody who who broke through that and went all the way to the other side like still experience that because it's natural I think for us for Christians and you know so there was this like try the the attempt to answer that question of how you integrate these people, assimilate these people into a Christian society. You know, unfortunately, the answer kind of came to be stopping a Christian society. And that, you know, I don't think that was the solution that anybody at the time would have hoped for or planned for, but it's the one that we came to. I mean, one of the things that, and actually to flip that around, too, Jews kind of had their own answer to that question. You know, that's what

Reformed Judaism really is. You know, their answer is how do we assimilate? well, we got to stop being Jews. Christians, Christian countries kind of decided, well, we got to stop being Christian countries, you know. And so this was going on on both sides as they tried to solve that problem. You know, I think maybe the, you know, like a place like New York in the first half of the 20th century was probably like a good example of how this could operate in a more or less healthy way, you know, sort of a where you people maintain, they have their identities and their separateness, and yet they still have their enough of a collective identity with their neighbors that they can operate cooperatively in a city

government, you know, and you had a situation where, you know, it was kind of like it wasn't written into the New York, you know, Constitution or whatever they have or whatever, but it's kind of like Lebanon where in Lebanon, like you have a, you know, Christians fill certain government positions, Sunnis fill up, et cetera. And they do that because, you know, they, in a diverse society, you know, in a healthy diverse society, you know, such as it is, people are very open about the fact that it is diverse and that the people there have separate identities and separate interests. And the question is how do we, how do we get them to cooperate and work together and recognize that they have more in common than they do with people across the border? And, you know, I think a lot of the big cities in the U.S. like sort of did that fairly well for like up until the first half of the 20th century. And when you try to build a society based on denying those differences,

pretending that they don't exist at all. And there are any idea that there are separate communities with separate interests or anything like that, they take that as an accusation that like these people are not one of us or they're not loyal or something like. When you try to do that and you just deny reality like that, you know, reality persists. And your solutions become wackier and wackier as you. You try to solve for problems that aren't real, you know. So you mentioned that the Christian country, the Christian nation basically has to stop being Christian. And you mentioned the reform Jews who say that, you know, you have to stop basically being religiously Jewish.

But even when Jews stop being religiously Jewish, there's still a Jewish identity there. When Christians lose their Christianity, especially like in the United States, what's their identity? What's their? So basically what you have then is you have a group that has deracinated itself from something that held them together, especially through the founding. And now you have another group who's come in later. German Jews started coming in early 1800s. Very early, yeah. Sombart says that some of the, the cavaliers and the Puritans were probably Jewish.

There was a big group that had converted over the years. So you had people who are ethnically Jewish now calling themselves Christian who were here, but it's really the 1880s when you start seeing the Pala settlement, the Russian Jews come in. And that's when, I guess not too far after that, that's when really Christianity is starting, you start seeing it falling away. And when you have a group that is now really only, well, we're Americans, there's no metaph- there is a metaphysics to that if you really think about it, a historic metaphysics, but it's not as strong as metaphysics as being. like a Christian nation. But then you have another group that's come in who is cohesive, even if they're not religious,

they're cohesive in an identity and an ethnic identity. And it's a lot easier for a group that's cohesive like that to organize and for lack of a better term. And I don't think anyone's going to argue with, especially what we see with things that come out of Ted Cruz's mouth and things we've seen recently, that it's very easy for them to take over if you are organized. It's basically elite theory.

Yeah, and it's one of the things, like I try to drive this home to people on the right who, you know, they start reading about this stuff and it can get overwhelming. And they start to, they start to see like this big overwhelming kind of Jewish conspiracy, whether in the United States or World War, whatever it is. And what I try to get through to them is like, you know, the United States, I mean, Up until about the 60s and 70s, we had a recognizable, not official, but still a recognizable, like, ancestral ruling class in this country. You know, you had people who stretched back to the founders or at least to like, you know, like people like Rockefellers, Vanderbiltz, Harriman's, all of these people who, they had a sense of proprietorship over the country. And even they did a lot of things that we would look back on and say we're terrible and destructive and probably like let us down the road.

we are now, but they still had that sense of this is our country and this is going to be our great, great, great, great grandkids country and we need to operate with that in mind. In the 60s and 70s, like what was left of that class really got delegitimized by the Vietnam war and the cultural revolution. And then they just kind of stopped having kids or the kids they did have were they didn't pick up the torch, you know. I think the last, the last meaningful Rockefeller was probably Nelson. He died in 78, 79.

Who even knows what the Rockefeller's names are now? Nobody really knows. And I know one of them went to the South Pacific and got eaten by cannibals or something like that. But nobody even knows, you know, because their kids didn't pick up the torch. And so all of a sudden, you have this apparatus we call America, the system, American government, but also just sort of the corporate system and all the other institutions that kind of make it up. The controls were just floating through space and nobody was at the controls. And it turned out that once, you know, that old was.

elite had sort of vacated and abdicated their responsibility, anybody who, you know, who could, who could, who could, who could, who could, who could, who could, and, and, and, and, and, and, and take them in hand could, could do it. And so you see, like, other groups, they try to do what the Jews do in, in America. And they try to get the American system, American government to, like, bend to their ethnic interests. And some of them are more or less successful in various ways. And nobody's as successful as the Jews because the Jews are just really good at it, you know, they, they, they have been, And part of the reason for that, I think, I mean, part of it is that they've been an urban people for a lot longer than the rest of us have. And so they're literate, they're urban. This is kind of a part of their culture.

The other is that they're tight-knit. They're intelligent, you know, in general. And I think also, like the fact that, you know, they have a religion. And again, like, even Jews who aren't religious, like the culture is still in there. the same way if you're born in America, you know, you're a Christian in a certain way, regardless, you know, whether you like it or not, that, you know, they have a cultural tradition going back, I mean, thousands of years, at least, that is really based on, like, teaching them how to survive and thrive in host societies by endearing yourself to power and learning how to bend it to help and benefit your own people. You know, you have, like, um, You go back to the period of the exile when the Babylonians carted off the Jewish leadership cast to Babylon.

And within a generation, they had become very prosperous, economically powerful in the vicinity of Babylon, just through trade and tax collecting and money lending and a lot of those traditional vocations of theirs. And there's a lot of evidence. Heinrich Grites, the Jewish historian who wrote a great six-exam. volume history of history of the Jews back in the 1800s. Really, really good history, I think. You know, he kind of lays out why he believes that, and there are good reasons to think this, that the Jews who were there in Babylon probably were in touch with the Persians and kind of helped pave the way for the Persian invasion and destruction of Babylon. And that's why when the Persians

took over, the Jews were given a lot of privileges. They were given positions at court, you know, as you see in the book of Esther, for example. And, you know, of course, Ezra and Nehemiah and their clique were allowed to go back to Jerusalem and sort of subjugate the people who live there, who had been left behind, you know, after the exile and reimpose, quote-unquote, sort of Jewish government on those people on behalf of the Persians, right? And so, you know, and it was probably right during that time, right after the Persian liberation that like the stories of Joseph were probably added to the book of Genesis. The story of Daniel was probably written during that time.

The story of Esther was certainly written during that time. And all of these are stories that are built into the Old Testament. They are people, Jews who showed their devotion by getting close to the powerful people in a local society through their wit or charm or, you know, divine revelation and then using the positions that they're gained and the privileges they gain to help their own people. You know, and you see this in extreme form in like the book of Genesis with Joseph. It's something that when you read the story in Sunday School of Joseph and everything, and it's just kind of the coat of many colors and all the other kind of stuff. And you don't really pick up on what it's really describing, you know.

He becomes basically the grand bazaer of the Egypt, you know. He's in charge of putting aside all the grain and everything because there's a big famine coming and when Jacob and his sons bring their people to ask for, you know, some help because there is a famine all throughout the region. It goes through and talks about how now that Joseph had collected and put aside all the Egyptian grain, he started charging the Egyptian people for this grain, eventually expropriating like everything they had, you know, to get to, so that they could feed their families. And then when his, when his own people came, he just sort of, you know, he kind of brought them in sort of free of charge and set them up as, you know, on good land.

And so this is, and this is something that's looked at as an ultimate act of piety, you know, which, you know, you have to, it is in a way. I mean, I, you know, I'm not, I don't, a lot of people I think who, who talk about these subjects, they, they, they, they sort of begrudge the Jews this, this attitude of like this self-referential attitude. I don't at all. I mean, that good for them, you know, this is, it's, it's, it's, it's, far as they're concerned. This is their world and everybody else is living in it. And, you know, everybody should think that way to some degree. So I don't hold that against them necessarily in that

sense. But, you know, you have like the Jewish religion in general. I mean, you can take this all the way back even to like, you know, the dietary laws and things like that are, you know, the whole thing is sort of a survival guide for a people in exile. You know, it's a, it's a, How do you hold together, resist assimilation, and just sort of maintain your own sense of identity and safety and get all the things that you need from a host society over time? And that's what Judaism really is in a lot of ways. It's an instruction manual for doing that. And it's because, you know, that's the way that they've been living for at least the people who have sort of left the Jewish tradition as we know it. how they've been living for a very, very long time.

You know, the, you know, you go back to the time of Christ, for example, and, you know, something like, there were like 90% of all the Jews in the world lived outside of Judea. You know, they lived in Babylon. They lived in Alexandria. They lived in Rome. They lived in the Greek cities. All over the place. And this was already by the time of Christ.

Like, you know, most Jews lived outside of Judea. And, you know, Jerusalem didn't even have. have the largest Jewish population of the city in Alexandria had a larger Jewish population. So, you know, and you really had, even during, even during those days, you know, you had sort of separate Jewish power centers that sometimes were in competition with each other. And it was kind of a, you know, you had like the Jews of Alexandria and Rome and the Babylonian Jews who, you know, they kind of looked at the Jerusalem Jews, who were the descendants of the Ezra and Nehemiah, kind of they're sort of like the

they're actually it's probably a good way to put it they're like the they're like the extremist settlers that you see out in the West Bank today that's what like the people Ezra and Nehemiah brought back were right and so because I mean you know the Jews were prosperous in Babylon by this point they've been

there 70 years most of them had all been born there they didn't want to leave their businesses their friends and all those other kind of things and a small click of them went back when the Persians let them do it but those were like the hardcore Yahweh who wanted to go back and reimpose this really strict version that now has come down as just that's what Judaism is, you know, to us, because that's, you know, eventually, like,

what kind of won out. But even then, I mean, you know, the Babylonian Jews, the Alexandrians, a lot of the other more cosmopolitan types, they looked on the Jerusalem and Judean Jews sort of as a, kind of the way like a Muslim in Beirut, you know, when Beirut was still. still a, you know, really nice, would look at the Saudi Arabians, you know. They're like, yeah, they, you know, respect, whatever. They, uh, they take care of Mecca and Medina, and we defer to that, but can you guys please give it a rest, you know? Like, it's kind of ridiculous. And that's how they were kind of looked at. And so, um, you know, that, that whole sense of like having a

cultural tradition that is entirely dedicated for maintaining your separateness amidst other people at a time when the entire project, you get to get back up to the nationalist period in Europe, like it was not just a cultural drive or a movement. It was a political project that had policies that were enforced against not just Jews, but all kinds of people, to nationalize these peoples, to make all the different people here in Russia who had just been imperial subjects make them into Russians, you know? And this was something that was going on all around Europe,

as the nationalist period progressed. And you have this one group of people, which, you know, in most of Europe, outside the Russian empire, which is kind of a separate issue. But, you know, in Western and Central Europe, you know, the Jews were very often like pretty much the only minority that were there. So it's not as if there were a lot of different minorities that had to be managed. So you have this one minority that's there that, you know, again, as a cultural tradition, going back 2,500 years, that's entirely dedicated to resisting the nationalization progress.

that you're trying to now impose on everybody in your country, you know? And it was a recipe for trouble. And, you know, and that's obviously how it turned out. Well, I guess the question to ask is, is it good for the host population? So, in Spain, historically, not even, I know people want to talk about the gates of Toledo, 7-Eleven. I don't care about any of that. the Muslims, the Moors took over Spain and the Jews were given free reign. They ruled certain areas. They were allowed to take slaves. Bruce Bachrock's book on medieval Jewish policy in Western Europe is a really good source on that.

That is a very good book, yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, when it got to the point of the reconquista and you finished a reconquist. Kista, obviously, if there's been somebody there for 700 years who has been treating the native population, has not only been treating the native population like slaves, but also has been conspiring the whole time with Muslims. Surprise, that actually happened. Jews and Muslims get along very often. It's like, okay, well, now that we've taken the country back, these people have treated us the way they've treated us for 700 years. We're going to get rid of them. We're going to kick them out. So bring that all the way up to like, let's bring that up to 1900. So the Zionist project. Can I just jump in real quick on that point? Because it's important that people understand, like in 1492,

when the reconquista was sort of completed and the Jews were expelled from Spain, You have to remember, like they didn't have like an Ellis Island where like people showed up and you now a naturalized American citizen or whatever. They didn't have any of those concepts. There were no citizens. There were no any of those things. And so like how do you tell like after we just got done with a 700 year long war against people who are still right on the other side of Gibraltar over there? How do we make sure that like the people who are here are one of us? you know, you can't be like, well, he's a citizen.

There was none of them. And so the way that they did it was, you know, this was Christians versus Muslims and the Jews were on the side of the Muslims, and that's how you tell. And so they, you know, obviously everybody's listening to you for a while, knows that the Jews were, and Muslims, actually, like a lot of Muslims, not all of them, but they were given the opportunity to convert to Christianity and stick around it. They wanted to.

A lot of them did, you know, and just. sort of melted into the Christian population. A lot of them adopted Christianity kind of on the surface, you know, so that they could enjoy the legal privileges, business privileges and stuff that were sort of put aside for Christians. And, you know, that led to confusion and then eventually, you know, the Inquisition because you had, I mean, and again, like, you know, people who think, like, people think of the Inquisition as if it was just this, like, this religious madness, like the Salem,

which trials or something like that. But this was a real political problem. You know, you had these people who were here who had converted to your thing and were wearing your clothes and speaking your language and doing all these things who had just come over from the side that was helping the people we just conquered and threw out of here. And you really have to make sure that these people are on board with your with your program, you know, and there's a question of like, how do you do that? And the answer is that every solution, every answer is extremely difficult and probably going to lead to mistakes and problems and that's just how it is you know and so that part is really important to understand it like jews in the in the pre-modern european context it was not as if like you know you had a

like like you're just a minority living in an american city or something and you're just sort of a person who happens to look different or just whatever it wasn't like that i mean you had people who were separated communities who lived together who um had their own customs, often their own language, not so much in Spain. But, and so, you know, this idea of like universal citizenship and there's certain people that aren't being accorded their rights. It was just very, very, very different. Yeah, it's good to put that in there because a lot of people, I've done, covered de Maestra's

letters on the Inquisition. And it's not what a lot of people think it was. It was literally they wanted to find out if it was a genuine conversion to Christianity. and if it wasn't, they could convert or they could, they had to leave. And that's pretty much what it was. And then it turned into a system of a system, like a court system, actually. And you can read about that over the centuries. But I think it was like, even the inquisition numbers were like they found 60 to 70 percent had genuine conversions.

So it wasn't like they were like they were really going. I mean, you can pretty much go to someone's house and tell if they're Christian, they're Catholic at that point, you know, so. Yeah. Well, and anytime you're running a program like that from, you know, it could be in the Soviet Union, you know, where they're trying to find out if you're really a communist, back to back then you run into the problem of like perverse incentives, you know, where you had like, a lot of times you had Jews turning in other, you know, Christianized Jews to the authorities saying. that they were false Christians because there was a reward behind it if you know you if you turn someone in and like you create all these bad incentives that kind of become like a negative feedback loop and and that's just again like it's um you know the those are situations you want to try to avoid in any society but when you get into them i mean there's no easy way out of it so

well and another good thing to point out about the inquisition is is that it lasted about 325 years and roughly 3,000 people were put to death, not by the church, but by the Cortez, and the government did it. And then fast forward to the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the second half of 1936, over 4,000 priest, nuns, and seminarians were murdered in Spain. So, yeah. And I think, I believe, I can't remember where I was reading about this, but it was a while back, but about 50 years before the expulsion in 1492, it was in the 1400 sometime in Spain.

The Jewish communities there that were under the power of the Christians, they actually requested and received permission to do an inquisition of their own against their own people who were falling away and doing things. And that was allowed. And so, you know, this was just kind of, it was the way they tried to solve a very difficult problem back then. And, you know, I'm sure, look, there were probably people who got caught up in it who didn't deserve. it. But as you said, I mean, when you want to talk about the scale of it, you're talking about a few thousand people being, you know, being executed over the course of a few hundred years. And not to downplay that, if that was, you know, me or my mother or something, you know,

it would be a big deal to me, obviously. But when you start comparing it to, you know, just the mass casualty events that we start to see as time goes on, it really doesn't compare. Yeah. And in the 1420s, about 70 years before, before, you had the disputation of Tortosa, which was basically Jews and Christians coming together, having a conversation, talking about their beliefs. And there was a lot of conversions over that, actually. And it was very civil. This was when Spain was starting, you know, had almost at that point, they had gotten back most of the country. They just hadn't had it all. And they had this, this disputation. I did an episode on it with Paul Farronite. It was really good. I think people should

go check it out in a Spain, Golden Age of Spain series that we're in the process of still doing. Sort of like you. It's taken us. We're doing 12 episodes. It's taking us over a year. But, all right. So let's come forward a little bit. Okay.

So let's come forward to, you know, what I've been reading and what I was studying recently was, and I know you've already done the whole history of with fear and low. So when Zionism is really taking hold, it seems like it's really important for Jews who have embraced Zionism in the West to influence their countries as much as they can to try to support this project. So in the 1910s, Lewis Brandeis is, they're apparently will say, and wanted to have a, he's getting pushed to have a Jewish Supreme Court justice, the first one. So Brandeis is chosen, Louis Brandeis. I actually read a Philip Weiss article, Mondo Weiss article, claiming that he wasn't even a Zionist before that.

He actually became a Zionist because it was like a prerequisite, and then he just embraced it fully. But then you have something like the Parisham, which is a secret society based, in universities where Jews and Gentiles are taking secret oaths over their families, over their countries, that they are going to do everything that they possibly can so that they can push to the United States to push for a Palestinian homeland for the Jewish people. to the point where Brandeis does get appointed to the Supreme Court, he is a part of this secret society with Felix Frankfurter,

another Jew who will be elected to the Supreme Court as well. But basically when we've heard this story about how, when the Balfour Declaration was drawn up, it had been years, they had been drawing, this like three paragraphs they had been working on this for a couple of years when it's drawn up we get this story that oh well you know colonel house is is there and he's pushing because he's friendly and aligned with the Zionists in in Britain the whole story is get us into we'll give you this bow for declaration if you get the United States to join into the war into World War one

And apparently from other books, and I've done the research on this, I've read books of people who have been in the archives, as Douglas Murray would say. Have you been in the archives? And Brandeis was one of the people who went to Wilson and said, you know, we need to get in this war and we need to help save Europe. So. Well, and you also had, you had Zionists like Chaim Weizmann, who was kind of the leader of the movement at the time. He lived in England, and he was rubbing shoulders with people like Balfour, you know, Lord Balfour. And yeah, they openly were telling them, you know, if you do this for us, and this is in standard histories, it's not some conspiracy theory. They were telling them that if you do this for us, then we'll use all the influence and power that we have in the United States to,

to help make sure America is drawn into the war. You know, what the standard histories will say, and I think this is probably, this is probably at least partly justified, is that they were kind of overplaying their influence a little bit. You know, this is not post-1967, like Jewish America, you know, they, the mass migration of Jews had only started 40 years before, 30 years before, really, at this point.

And, you know, the level of influence they had, was growing for sure, but it wasn't, it wasn't overwhelming by any means. But, you know, you had guys like Louis Brandeis. And, you know, it's interesting because Zionism was a minority, was a, was a minority movement among Jews in the United States until the 1930s. And it was, you know, and it was for reasons that you're really seeing kind of manifest today, like in the modern days, like the question that other, well, a lot of them were just communists. And so they didn't like the idea of Jewish nationalism any more than any other. other kind, you know, and they didn't want to go that direction. But also there was just a more

question that was asked more in good faith and goodwill, which was, you know, once there's a Jewish state, wants to stop the people in these countries that were living in from saying, sounds like you got a country to go to, buddy, you know, like, why don't you go there? Or starting to look at us as if we're fifth columnist for this foreign state, you know, or starting to hold us collectively responsible for this Jewish state doing the kinds of things that states do, you know? And this was a fear that they had, and it kept a lot of American Jews from being from being Zionists up until the 30s. Yeah, so you have that kind of influence.

You also have the boats full of Jews that are coming to the United States when World War II was breaking out. and famously, and this is well documented, Zionists went to Roosevelt and said, no, turn them back. They either go to Palestine or they go back. So I guess what the question comes down to, and we can bring this up to the modern day, because what we're seeing and something you've already said post-1967, we're living in Jewish America. Is it good for us? Has this been good for us? Is this having this group who eventually do get their country in 1948 through means that are terroristic. Monoccombegan famously says, we brought terrorism to the Middle East and then he goes, and not only the Middle East to the

world, stern gang, Irgun, Haganah, all these groups, they get their own country. And then, like you said, okay, there's a lot of Jews that are not going to go there. They're not going to want to go there. So they stay in the United States. They stay in Europe. And not only are, so you have them in this country now, of their own country over here. But then you have them working. You have them in this country.

and in the West, basically after World War II, it would seem, especially if you look at the Nuremberg trials and the people who are behind that, all the thought leaders behind West Germany and the allies, basically it's Jewish power. So they not only got their, it seems like they not only got their country, but they also got ours. So it's like, okay, how am I, you know, the question needs to be, all right, here's a new Jewish question. How is this good for us? As, you know, I mean, I'm not a wasp, but I mean, I'm, this is the only country I know.

It's the only thing, the only place I feel like this is, I feel like an American. I live in the South. I chose to live in the South because I feel like this is America. And I'm like, well, I'm watching Ted Cruz talk about how my main goal to get elected was to be the number one representative for Israel. I watch Benjamin Netanyahu come and get his chair pushed in. I watch Trump bombing. How well, I have a new Jewish question. Is this good? How is this good for me? How is this good?

I don't think the Pete Cignoné's show's audience probably needs much convincing on that point. I mean, look, it's never good to, you're going to have minority government one way or another, like no matter, again, just go back to elite theory, no matter what. The question is, is there any sense of attachment to the people that they're ruling a sense of noblese, or anything like that? And when you when you have people wielding a tremendous amount of power who who are not just, I mean, it's not even, you know, it's not even, you know, like if it was, if it was the Jewish mob, you would almost be better raw. Because they're just trying to extract resources and get what they can get and, you know, take advantage of the system for their own ends or whatever. I've said I would rather live in a, I would rather, I've said this. in the past, I've given interviews saying this in the past, I would rather live in an Italian

mob neighborhood that's governed by the Italian mob than this government. Yeah, because there's not like a, you don't have like a deep-seated hostility to the society that, you know, that you're ruling over. I mean, you know, and that's something that, you know, I've made the point many times, and I'm certainly not the first one to do this, but that when you think about the Jewish question in Europe is very useful to look at other sort of commercial minorities and other parts of the world, whether the overseas Chinese, the Indians in East Africa, the Lebanese and like South and Central America. These are groups of people who were outsiders who came in as minorities and did a lot of the same things that Jews do. You know, they were

merchants, they engaged in trade, things like that, became very prosperous, especially later on when the global economy started picking up. They became the people who ran everything. go all the way up into the 2000s, and I think it's probably still like this. The last book I read about it was written in 2010, but pretty sure it's all still like this. You go to like Indonesia, the Philippines, all the airlines, all the conglomerates, all of those are owned by the tiny minority of Chinese people who live in those countries. And there's a lot of resentment from the local population who see that. You know, there's a lot of locals who work as servants for the overseas Chinese, there are no Chinese people working as servants for, you know, local wealthy people.

It just doesn't happen. And so, you know, you have these countries that are relatively poor and starting to try to develop and they see this minority that owns everything and is cozyed up to the rulers of the country because they provide benefits to each other and protection. And, you know, and you start, you know, they talk about like the overseas Chinese and the Indians in East Africa and the same terms you're familiar with from like European anti-Semitism. you know, they're greedy, they're materialistic, they're clannish and, you know, sort of off-putting to other people with their manners and the way they behave, all these kind of things that you're just kind of used to.

And so in that sense, like, it's a phenomenon that is not particularly unique. But the difference, you know, in the European Jewish context is that you have, like, the overseas Chinese, like they might look down on the local Filipinos or Indonesians, you know, or something like they might think they're more sophisticated. sophisticated and they are they're just but they don't have like any kind of a deep seated like hatred or resentment though you know it's not something it's just they just don't think of it that way whereas oh you know and people can talk about today being like a a different situation and I think it is to a degree but

you go through like most of European history you know they weren't just living in a random it wasn't like the overseas Chinese who decided to go to the Philippines and set up shop there to like run businesses these were people who were forced to live under the power and in the countries of people who were the religious descendants of a heretic that they had executed, you know, for high treason and heresy, that, you know, and his followers then went on to build the greatest civilization on the history of the world that the Jews themselves are now having to like pick up table scraps that fall down in order to make their way in the world. And that's something that like,

I mean, you see it in certain passages in the townhood, but also just Jewish writings. Like, in general, like, you see, like, that there's a deep-seated sort of, like, it's sort of like, you know, I've always found interesting, right? Like, if you would read, like, pre-civil rights era, if you would read African-American activist writers from the South, right, who lived under Jim Crow. all the anti-racist, this is unjust, all those other kind of things. But you don't detect the really hostile, violent, like anti-white hatred that you start to get later on from the northern cities and especially from the people who are educated in the universities, you know? And it's because, like, those people like who, you know, you go to Harvard, you're a first generation, you know, ever in the history of your entire lineage to, you know, go beyond. on sixth grade and now you're at Harvard or Columbia because, you know, they instituted lower standards to try to get the number of people, you know, from your group in there and you get there

and it is way too hard for you. And the people there, even when they're really nice to you, you suspect that they're really kind of patronizing you and like they're just, you start to get this sense of wounded pride that you didn't have when, you know, from the people who were just down at the bottom and they were the lower caste in society. And so, you know, because what was happening is, you know, you have a group of people and this, this happened very much with the Jews in, especially the, the Pala settlement Jews, because the Jewish emancipation there happened so much later, you know, and so European society had had more time to kind of develop that, like when Jewish emancipation started to kick off in, you know, in Western Europe, back in the

1700s, we were starting to develop, you know, but they weren't exactly leaving their villages and walking out and seeing this spectacular civilization that like overawes and almost shames them, you know? By the time you get up to like the later period, you have these people coming out of the Stettles and encountering, there's, you know, no other way to put it. In fact, a Jewish writer, I can't remember maybe Milton Himmelfar, but it was a Jewish writer who put it, a lot of the the problems that started to arise came out of this confrontation of the newly emancipated Jews with a clearly superior civilization, you know, and they would go out into it. You know, like, I grew up in the street.

Like, I grew up really poor, mostly in ghettos and barrios and stuff, really poor. And so, like, today, every once in a while, now that I'm a, you know, a podcaster and whatever, like, I'll get invited to like a conference, right? somebody's putting on when Claremont used to invite me to these things they don't anymore but like when they did they'd bring me right and it's all the stuff where like you have seven forks and 14 spoons and all that kind of stuff you know and I get there and even though I'm you know I might have the highest IQ of anybody at my table I might you know have done more interesting things in my life than maybe maybe less true I still feel this sense of like I don't belong here and that like I you know

I feel out of place and sort of self-competing And that's just, I think that's kind of a normal thing. Now, if you take that and say, okay, but that's not an event you're going to, that's the world you live in. Every day you're in, you encounter a society that is clearly more refined and more advanced than you're sort of, then you're competent to operate in successfully, you know, and you start, you, you, you run into the, you know, to these problems where you're sort of, um, you know, your, your, your, your lack of ritual competence to put it in like an Irving Goffman, you know, sociological framework, your lack of ritual competence. You know, and by ritual, I just mean like the little ways that like we are able to,

the little things that we do on a daily basis that make, that, that grease the skids, the social skids like in an urban world where we have to be confronted with and deal with strangers all the time, you know. There's just little rituals of how we make sure. that we respect the others dignity properly and we don't offend and do certain things. And if you come from, you know, if you're like the Beverly Hillbillies and you go out to Beverly Hills, like that's a comedic show. But the reality is we have sort of examples like that. My father's side were Oakeys who came out from Oklahoma and Alabama. And they came out and, you know, everybody who knows the history of the Okeys who came out to California, like it was a tough

transition, man, because you had these people coming from the country and coming into places that looked down on them that they were really not sort of knowledgeable enough or competent enough to operate in these societies successfully. And they were able to assimilate, but it took a generation or two, you know, even when I was a kid, when we would live and, you know, a lot of my friends who, you know, were sort of from the same lineage, you know, that Oki lineage, like one of the things that our parents would say when we would act up or just be, you know, start acting a fool, as they'd say, stop acting like a little okey, you know. And that was something that they were very conscious of,

even a couple generations on at this point. And so when that happens to a people who, to a people who have this strange, you know, this is sort of like the narcissist, on an individual psychological sense, it's the narcissist dilemma where, you know, narcissism is essentially defined by a personality that feels inferior to all the people around them,

and yet on some level knows, whether intellectually or emotionally or whatever, that they're actually superior to all the people around them. And so that feeling of superiority that's constantly rebuffed and constantly sort of sent back by your encounters with the real world, that's like the narcissist. That's the core problem of like the narcissistic personality.

And so when you have like, you know, you're the chosen people, you're going out into a society that has been constructed by people of a faith that your whole cultural and religious identity is really bait like the rejection of it is like what your cultural identity is you know and in recognizing every day that yeah we're the chosen people this is our world and they're just living in it but you look around and you realize that clearly like this is a superior civilization and I feel like a yokel every time I go outside. And it can create a sense of real resentment.

And so when you take people who kind of have that neurosis built in and you put them in charge of the people, you see this. This goes back all the way. You talk about like in Spain, but there are examples like in the Middle East and North Africa where the Muslims would come in and conquer and the Jews would support them. and they would put Jews in charge of like various areas. They would work as police. They would work as, you know, various things.

There were several examples where the Muslims had to come in and like tell the Jews, like you guys are out of, you got to cool it. Like you guys are making it impossible to manage these Christians because you're just brutalizing them so much. Like that's not what we're trying to do. And it's not like they were doing that out of like humanitarian concern. It was just they were trying to manage a budding empire. And so, you know, that's a problem that it goes back. very, very far. And, you know, and it's one, I think, that persists to this day. And again, like,

it's not something you want to, you know, it's a lot harder these days to even really, you know, Shlomo San makes the point that, like, you know, he says, like, tell me what a Jew is. Like, what is a Jew? And his answer is a Jew is a religious person who practices Judaism. Because other than that, like, tell me a thing that you can say about Jews that applies to all Jews. There's you cannot find it. Like there's atheist Jews, there's religious Jews, there's Zionist Jews, there's anti-Zionist Jews, there's

white Jews, just like you can't tell me anything that just is a characteristic that you can say this is a coherent group of people that you can describe as such. And so it's hard to even do that these days. And so you don't want to like when you say the Jews,

that meant something throughout most of history that today is like a little bit more nuanced, you know? And so you don't want to when we talk about these things, you know, it's always important to sort of remember. I try to always keep this in mind and make sure other people do when they're listening to me. You know, really what we're talking about, we're not talking about Jewish people. Obviously, everything is, you know, at the bottom of it, there are people. We're talking about organized Jewish power.

And that is a social and political phenomenon that is that you're, your neighbor, you know, who's an accountant down the hall, like may or may not have anything to do. Like, it's just, what we're talking about is like a corporate entity that is highly organized. I mean, you have like an organization, like the Council of Presidents of major American Jewish organizations that it's like 200, 250 organizations that have endowments and annual incomes of tens, probably hundreds of billions of dollars. And they get together twice, a year, the heads of all these organizations, their religious organizations,

you know, Zionist organizations, just Jewish charities, the ADL, the APAC, all, just all these kind of things. And a bunch you've never heard of. They get together just to make sure that they're all on the same page, that they're not spending resources in ways that are redundant and overlapping,

so that everybody knows, like, what this year's priorities are, and we're all kind of pushing toward this. And, you know, that's just a, that's a, that's, when you have a society like ours that is based theoretically on individualist democracy, you know, where everybody sort of listens to the guy give his stump speech and, you know, I vote my conscience and decide whether I agree or not, and that's kind of the liberal ideal, you know.

And then you have like a group of people that is very tightly organized that is acting as a group to, you know, benefit themselves to influence the system in ways that benefit their group to attack their enemies. You know, Americans have always been like very, very wary of just secret societies and of, you know, we spent a lot of time kind of breaking down the extended family connection of like, of Mediterranean and other like European immigrants who came from places with like strong extended families because we just have always looked at that as like kind of, it's like it's sort of an anti-liberal, anti-democratic, you know, thing that can really kind of poison the way the system works. Because when one group of people in a system that is comprised of individuals, when one group of

people starts banding together, well, now everybody kind of has to do that just to compete and stay afloat. And it sort of spoils the, you know, spoils the punch. And so, you know, it's a tough thing to do because, you know, if you take somebody like, I don't know, you probably know people in your personal life, I do, take somebody like Sam Harris, right, who his parents are Jewish as far as I know. But, you know, in what way is Sam Harris Jewish? I mean, he probably, like, him being Jewish probably does not play like an operative role in his identity, like on a daily basis, like ever, I doubt. Maybe a little more now because it's more of a thing that's in the news, whatever. But like, you go back 10 years ago. He probably,

like it's just not how he thought of himself. If you were to pluck him out of modern America and put him in, you know, in Munich in 1934, he would feel very Jewish very quickly, you know. And it's because, you know, these things start to play off each other. And you get this sort of this self-fulfilling cycle where, you know, the separation invites distrust and the distrust sort of hardens the boundaries of separation and so forth, you know. And, um, and so it's it, you know, and eventually, you know, when that starts happening and people start talking about this stuff, especially in a sloppy way, what it ends up doing is it pulls people who might just be that dude who happens to have Jewish parents and never thinks about this stuff,

to all of a sudden now having to clan up with his people. You know what I mean? Just kind of, because that's where that's where the society is driving them. And so, you know, I think it's hard for people who are on the right like we are, you know, on the, say, past, you know, beyond Republican right, where on one level, like, we're comfortable with, with different groups having group identities and self-interest of their own. And like, we all kind of think that that's how people ought to operate, you know, what the boundaries of the of the of the of the groups ought to be and you know how they should be defined and and whatever those can be up for uh up for negotiation but you know on our side of the right people are generally pretty comfortable with that um but the thing is like it's you know any any attempt by other groups to do that or well groups of white people different groups of white people and christians to do that are really attacked with the full force of the state and the system in general you know and so it it

There's an incongruity there that just inevitably invites the development of hostility between groups. And again, like it's also tough because it's like what you said. I mean, there's a certain way in which Zionism, which is like the predominant Jewish religion in 2025, I think, you know, really is Zionism. There's a way in which Zionism really needs anti-Semitism. It feeds off of it. You know, I mean, when you, you know, you read things like about how the young Israeli government in 1948 had agents setting bombs in Jewish centers and synagogues in Baghdad to frighten the Jews there and get them to flee to Israel. Like, you kind of, you kind of see that. You know, if you want every Jew in the world to move to Israel, then the last thing you want is for the world to be a welcoming place for the Jews, you know? And so there's a lot of these things that kind of feed off each other. and make a solution to the problem, like, very difficult. Well, what you're describing is, I mean, well, okay, let's take a look around the landscape. We have laws popping up that are anti-Semitism laws, talk of stripping people's citizenship if they,

and they're not, I haven't heard, yeah, I've heard citizenship, which means your family could have been Mayflower in that case. and you see people, when you see one group that is exercising so much power, then it's like, oh, okay, that's how they did it. They came together. So then eventually other groups are going to come together and they're going to not only seek to organize and seek to push back. But sometimes the pushback is just like, I'm. sure you've heard this and you're familiar with this troupe. You're just jealous of our success.

Well, can we define some terms here? First of all, what does jealousy mean? And second of all, what is success? Because I remember a, like, a secretary of state, an attorney general, a DHS, basically Biden's staff was 60 to 70% percent. Jewish. And then Doug Emhoff, the first man, first dude, he put out a picture saying, here is just some of the 457 Jews working in the Biden White House. And I'm like, okay, what metric of success am I supposed to be jealous of? Because people are telling me,

right-wing Jews are telling me that Biden was the worst. He had to be voted out. Yet the whole White House and like more than half of his cabinet are run by Jews. 2% of the population, by the way. So how am I, what exactly am I supposed, money? I've never been jealous of money. I mean, I've never been jealous of success. Asians, I've never had any problem with Asians.

and I've never had any problem with high IQ, with really, really high IQ people, like some of the Asians out there and even some of the Jews out there. I have a pretty high IQ myself. Never really been jealous of that. Never been jealous of money. Not really that important to me.

Security is a little more important. Money might be a part of that. But when you have laws that are being passed, when you have people who are just saying, oh, you're just, you know, Jordan Peterson, you're just jealous because Jews are so successful. I look at that. My metric of success is a lot different than most people.

I mean, that's an answer that people give who don't want to actually have to give an answer, you know? I mean, for the issue, the reason this issue again and again gains so much force is that it has something to do with that. I mean, what it has to do with is like there's a, it's almost, it's like it has to do with a sense of honor in the sense that like your your sense of honor is offended when you know that your country is serving the interests of people who are not you who are you know not your own so when people see the you know the u.s. government just being so obsequious to Israel I mean just to the point of where you almost think they're making fun of you I mean when it's you know is you have like this you saw the you mentioned ted cruz saying you went into the senate because he wanted to be the number one defender of israel that was why you went into the senate you have that state department spokesman not that long ago that said america is the greatest country in the world well except for israel you know like that woman should have been fired

from her position at the state department that day like how do you how do you say something like that and then um you know i i can't remember how many american politicians i heard call the idf the most army in the world, which as a veteran is incredibly offensive to me and totally untrue, obviously. But just when you see things like that again and again, you know, the people who are who these laws are being passed to control, you know, it's going to offend your basic sense of honor because you start to recognize that you don't have sovereignty. And that's what people want back. They want back sovereignty. And if it were a question of like, you know, look, Japanese Americans, very successful group of people, very well-integrated group of people.

Back in the Second World War era, there might have been a few, not nearly as many as probably the more paranoid people thought, that were still loyal, you know, ethnically to Japan or whatever. But in general, that's just not the case. Certainly not today. These are American citizens who are 100% American. if we went to war with Japan, they'd fly the bombers over there. Like, these are just, you know, these are American people. And if you have a group of people like that who become very successful and just by all signs, you know, they are not serving any interests other than the ones that you're aligned with.

They care about the things you care about. They are their primary point of reference for their identity and their future is the same as yours, this country, you know. Then it's just a, people don't get upset about that. You can be as rich as you want. gets upset about you know what people get upset about is when it becomes just unavoidably obvious unavoidably obvious you know especially in the last couple years since the gaza thing's been going on and really now i mean i mean like you said like the times of israel actually put out like a celebratory article that listed all of the high officials in the biden cabinet and uh his government that that were

jewish and i mean it's like people i think you're you know 70 percent like maybe it's a bunch of low-level people. It's like 70% of the cabinet. I mean, it is like secretary of state, I mean, just everything down the line. And the way to kind of think of that I always ask people to think about it is just imagine that those are all ethnic Chinese. It's like roughly the same number of them as there are Jews in the country. Just imagine 70% of Biden's cabinet was ethnically Chinese. Imagine that you're, we're in the run up to the Iraq war and you turn on Fox News, CNN, MSN, NBC and you have a panel of six people who are all telling you that we have to go over there and kill Saddam Hussein and, you know, or put it a different way, let's say that China's,

you know, we're talking about whether or not we should support Taiwan against China and you turn on all those channels and five out of the six people on the panel are all ethnic Chinese saying, you know, we should abandon Taiwan. People would notice that and obviously they would. They'd be crazy not to, you know? And this is, I mean, you got David Brooks, like writing in the New York Times about how we have to go to war with Iraq, and his son is serving the IDF, you know? And if you bring that up, that's supposed to be a problem. Like, it's something you're not supposed to talk about it, as if it has no, as if it has no attachment whatsoever to the discussion, you know, whereas if it was any other group of people, again, just imagine we're debating

going into the Iraq war and every channel you turn on. It's a panel of six people and five of them are Arabs. You would notice it and you should notice it. And we should be able to talk about it. And the thing is, if we could talk about it, honestly and openly, it wouldn't be that big of a problem. You know what I mean? Like it really wouldn't.

That's really like at the core of the issue. Look, I'm married to an Armenian woman. Armenian people are super American. At least, you know, the LA community that I know, which is most of them. But they all love Armenia. They all are not going to, they're not going to lose their attachment to the homeland,

and they love the culture, they love the country, they hate Azerbaijan, they still hate the Turks, you know, all that kind of stuff. It matters to them. And so I don't expect, like, you know,

like Jewish Americans to just, all of a sudden, just they don't care about Israel. Like, it's just, they're totally neutral. I'm an American, damn it, and Israel's just a foreign country to me. I don't expect that. We just have to be able to talk about it openly

so that when something like, like that happens, we can ask like whether, you know, Biden's cabinet being 70% Jewish is, does that have any, any role in our Mideast foreign policy? How did this happen? Like, what's the, what's the story there? You know, I mean, but you can't ask these questions. And so all there is, like one, I mean, when people tell you that you can't talk about something, if it's important enough to you, there's only one step after that, and that's to fight over it. You know, they're basically challenging you to a flight. When they, when someone tells you, you can't talk about that, they're basically challenging you to a fight. They're saying you can't talk about it.

If you keep talking about it, then there's going to be a problem. And that's where that kind of mentality just drives thing and inevitable, you know. And I think more and more people are kind of getting to a point where, you know, Americans are, we're civil people in general and we don't, you know, we don't want to entertain the idea of like hard solutions to these problems, but more and more people are starting to recognize that it's a problem that has to be solved one way or not. And, you know, I, I, maybe, you know, as I get older, I'm like, I'm really becoming kind of a softy. And so, like, I think a lot about just, you know, hoping that when, when this thing kind of comes to a head, that it doesn't go in a direction that, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to live in a world where, Dave Smith can't walk around without, you know, people calling them out for being a Jew and like that becoming a problem.

I don't want to live in that world, you know, and like figuring out how to solve this problem without allowing, allowing things to veer off in that direction. It really has to be like the primary, the primary concern, I think, because you don't want to lose your soul in the course of trying to, you know, to deal with a problem that, again, like is an unavoidable problem that has to be dealt with. And, you know, I'll say the last thing on it. I mean, you know, this is a, this is a thing that is really like global in scope, or at least, you know, it's like to the west, it's global. And, you know, you think about how in the 1990s when Russia fell apart. And by 1995, 96, you had seven oligarchs that owned 58% of the entire Russian economy, the entire economy, right? six out of those seven oligarchs were Jewish. Jews were like one and a half percent of the Russian population.

Over in Ukraine, the six wealthiest oligarchs in Ukraine were all Jewish. And like when you, and there was similar thing, or like 2% of the population. And so when you see something like that, you're like, well, how does that happen? And that the obvious answer and the correct answer is that when you're part of a group of people that transcends national borders, You know, when the opportunity came up, you had a second cousin in New York who worked at J.P. Morgan and confront you the money to buy up the steel industry in Europe or in Russia. And so it's like, you know, it's a large kind of transnational thing in a world that for better for worse is still made up of nation states.

And that's still like the primary point of identity reference that that most, you know, most Westerners have. and you know it's it's a you know it's funny because if you look at like um i coulda he wrote a whole book about it but you know things like uh marxism are are you know a lot of the like there's a reason that the that that jewish communists most jewish communists throughout the west um were trotskiists and and they didn't like Stalin and then even when the soviet union after khrushchev took over and they really kind of, you know, started taking the whole socialism in one country thing, like really seriously. And they all became Maoists, you know, because Mao was still the internationalist, you know, and it's because the dry, people think that they were all Trotsky is just

because Protsky was Jewish. And I mean, Protsky was the way he was because he was Jewish. It's not the other way. They didn't follow him because he was Jewish. He had the approach and the ideas he did because he was Jewish. It was another way out of the exile, you know. It was just break down all the countries, all the cultural differences, all the national differences, linguistic, break them all down, and then we're not in exile anymore, you know? And that's why, you know, Churchill makes this point in 1920 in his paper and is in the article he wrote Zionism versus Bolshevism. He basically says, look, we can have it one way or the other.

Like these people are either going to tear our continent and our civilization apart, trying to find a way for like them to fit in or burn it down on the way, or they can have their own country and they can just go, a normal people like everybody else. That was Churchill's idea, you know, and that was Balfour's idea. Balfour believes something kind of similar to that, you know, it's like a lot of people today point out that, oh, Balfour was an anti-Semite, how could he do that? It's like, well, he thought about it the way Churchill did, you know, that like, that living in, and all the Zionists did, really. I mean, you want to talk about like the most anti-Semitic writings that you can probably

find. Most of them were written by hardcore Zionists back in the early 20th century. These are all people who look at the state of the Jews throughout Europe and the West, and they say that the exile has just ruined us as a people, you know, not having soil, not having attachment to a place, always having to sort of like find a way to make our living, you know, underneath the table set by others has just, it's sort of spoiled our mindset in important ways. And that's why, you know, especially in the first, in the, say, probably first 50, 60 years of the Zionist project, it didn't matter if you were a banker if you were you know a merchant whatever it was you go to you go to you go to you know the the the the shuv before it was israel and you're getting your hands dirty

you're putting your hands in the dirt you're learning to farm you're going to sweat because they was like almost they they they talked about it as purging the people of the exile you know that uh and sort of correcting these these collective these national character defects that had collected over that kind of an experience that sort of very unnatural in organic kind of gypsy lifestyle that always led. And so, you know, I think that, you know, look, a right winger, it's, you can look at Israel and say, and I, and I do hear this sometimes from people who are even like far right, uh, will say like, hey, like, you can hate the game all you want, but like, you know, the Israelis like are, they're about

Israel. And yeah, like, it's bad for you because they're exerting influence over your government and causing you to do things that are against your interests and maybe harmful to you. But you kind of got to kind of respect the fact that, like, for them, it's all about them and that and that's that. And there's a lot of people that even on the right that kind of see it that way. And we want to talk about being jealous. That's really what I think a lot of people are jealous of. You know, they're jealous of a group of people who actually still have something that they can hold. on to collectively and you know and a a sense of cultural and religious continuity that they think at least goes back like thousands of years that kind of defines them as a people something really worth

preserving and i think a lot of people in the west are having especially in the united states it's very difficult today you know ever since the mid 20th century when everybody pushed out into the suburbs and lost that sort of corporate ethnic identity that they had in the cities and just became kind of white people, not even really white Protestants anymore. They're just kind of white people with a Jewish neighbor over here and an Italian neighbor over here and none of them go to church and like trying to figure out like, you know, and this is the problem I think that like white nationalism always runs into is like you're trying to construct something like ex nihilo. And yeah, like, you know, there's, you could say like Europe has a cultural tradition and stuff, but, you know, the idea that like everybody with white skin is somehow

part of a collective identity group, that's a new concept that like doesn't have like deep, deep historical roots that you can just pick up and, you know, sort of decorate the tree with. And so, you know, it's a, it's a tough problem on all sides. I mean, when you have a people who are very, very, very firm in their identity and their sense of collective interest, living among the people who are not just not like that, but like a really have been in a very short period of time, like stripped of all of that you know of even their neighborhood identities and are kind of casting around looking for something to build and in replacement of it um that you know it becomes it it becomes one of those things that uh that that that you know people start to look at

that as as if it's inherently inherently bad or inherently something to be suspicious of you know when again i think all of this stuff could mostly be solved the Jews wouldn't have to change anything they're actually doing for the most part. It could mostly be solved if everybody could just talk about it. Everybody could just talk about it. You know, nobody, I talked about like in the first half of the 20th century, like how New York operated with all the different ethnicities that lived there and the power sharing agreements in the local government and economy and things,

that people were just very open about there's that group and they have these interests, they want these things, and that's going to have to be balanced off this other. And being able to do that, like it really, lets off a lot of pressure, you know. Yeah, it's, it operates like a guild where, you know, an old European guild where one, one isn't going to outcompete the other, you know, to a great deal. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. When you, at a time when competition is considered not, you know, it's, it's rude. Competition to be rude. So you just figure out a way. And that's what I've always said is like, it would be great to just have a conversation about all this. You know, I've been studying the last 2,000 years of these people's history because I basically feel like they rule over, like they rule over this country. Like they control this country. And I'm trying to figure out exactly what, why, who, and how we get through this. You know, Thomas always says, he goes, there's no like third position right now.

It's like literally globalism, this globalist power, and then there's us, and there's everyone who opposes it. And I mean, if you're in power and more people are popping up to oppose it, I understand. You want to stay in power. But it's going to come to a head unless you can figure out exactly, you know, why it has to, why one group feels like It has to be this way. Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of, you know, the sort of steroids that are thrown into the mix are just the sense of, you know, the sense of paranoia and persecution that Jews have that a lot of minorities have.

But it's very different with Jews because, you know, like you might have like a black dude. who when he goes to order a coffee and the dude behind the counter is a jerk who thinks he's going to think he's being a jerk because I'm black and maybe he's not maybe the dude's just a jerk but he's going to take it that way you know um that's just kind of something that you deal with in a diverse society with you know that's just one of those things we have to we have to deal with um you know the the the the unique part of it and actually like Dennis Prager said this in his uh debate that he did with Dave Smith on the panel is he's said that Jew hatred is different because it's extermination. And so if I say something about Churchill

having some culpability for escalating, you know, the German-Polish war into the Second World War, that's not like an academic claim. It's not even just a claim that implies that I have something against Jews. It's that I want to kill you. Like that's the way they take it. Like if you, you know, if you question like tenants of the official narrative of the Second World War, it's not because you're a contrarian or because you want to, you know, look at some of those things because you hate us and want us all dead. Like that's,

and that's like a unique thing. Like a lot of minorities feel out of place and even threatened in a lot of societies. You know, again, I'm married to an Armenian. And Armenians, they had a genocide inflicted on them that was every bit and probably, I mean, as far as like the official documentation that we have of the events was more top down, directed, like intentional, just total genocide, then what happened to the Jews in the Second World War, just based on the documentations that we have.

And yet they don't have this sense of just pervasive universal threat wherever they go all the time. And if there's somebody there who doesn't like Armenians, you know, who live in Los Angeles, they can take that as like, well, yeah, because, you know, you live in. the other neighborhood over there and you compete with our businesses and we don't like each other or whatever. They don't take it as like essentially a death threat every time they run into intergroup confrontations. And so, you know, that adds an element to it that just brings like a level of panic to almost like any mention of these issues. The reason that we that we can't talk about them is not, you know, generally, up until very recently, there were no laws being passed. Nobody was getting deported or losing their citizenship or anything like that.

Those things weren't happening. It was that you know that bringing this up, even in the most roundabout, kind of civil way, even if it's like the most obvious thing that should be brought up, you know, people should be talking about the fact that David Brooks's son is in the IDF when he's advocating for U.S. to go over there and take out one of Israel's enemies.

That's an obvious thing that people should mention, right? But anything like that is met with just a level of panic, you know, that I think, most people are just like, I just don't, yeah, okay, okay, okay, fine. I don't want to deal with it, you know. But that opens up, again, you know, it opens up a lot of space for people to operate with impunity. And anytime you have that, I mean, look at Israel, has been able to do that now for 50 years. And you see what you get, you know, everybody knows what kids who are allowed to do anything they want, never discipline whatsoever, how they turn out. They turn out bad. And so, yeah,

I mean, again, a lot of times, like, when people ask, like, what could be done about these issues, they're looking for, like, political solutions or some kind of solution that, like, people always run away from it because they all sound like they're, you know, either step one or step two toward Nuremberg in 1935. But I always tell them, like, the solution to most of this is we just have to be able to talk about it. That's really all it is. Like, you know, the people on there telling you, we have to go to war with. with Iran are going to lose a lot of their influence the minute you can say, well, yeah, but like three of you are dual citizens of Israel. So, you know, maybe we should hear from somebody else.

Like if you could just say that without having the Trump administration deport you, you know, then a lot of this stuff would fix itself. They're still free to voice their opinions. They're free to make their case for why it's actually a good thing for America to intervene on Israel's behalf. They can do all that stuff. But we have to be able to be open about the motivations and the dynamics at play. Yeah, I was thinking about the gentleman that Scott Horton debated on Lex Friedman's show, is Dubowitz, Mark Dubowitz. And he's, yeah, he was trying to tell Scott, you know,

I was like, I've been an Iran expert for 22 years. I'm like, that's interesting. And then Scott, you know, was like, you know, I was born here. I'm a Texan. You know, you weren't even born here. And he goes, well, I've been living here for 22 years. And it's just things like that, where I go, are you been living here for 22 years? You've been an Iran expert for 22 years.

And you're basically pushing that Iran needs to be suppressed. You couldn't do that from Britain. You couldn't do that from South Africa. You couldn't do that from Israel. You had to come here and do it. It's like, can we just, why can't we have a conversation about that? Why can't, I mean, and then you read someone like Maurice Samuel and he says, well, we can't have a conversation. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, again, I keep using this as a reference point because I think it's a valuable one. But like the Armenians, man, like they want the U.S. to step in and rain in Azerbaijan. You know, they don't like the fact that we're so cozy with Turkey. but they'll say, I want the U.S. government to step in and reign in Azerbaijan because I'm Armenian and I care what happens in Armenia. And if that's fine, that's totally fine, you know what I mean? Like you go back to the first and second world wars, somebody's like, I'm Irish. I'm Irish American.

I don't want us ally with Britain to like go to war with Germany. Hell no, I don't want, that's totally fine. You know, if it's out in the open, we can actually discuss these things. But it's when, you know, everybody is sort of required to pretend that that element of it is not part of the equation at all, that you can't have any real conversations about anything because we're all just skirting the actual issue, you know. I've kept you long enough. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate the work you're doing.

I look forward to the rest of the work appearances. and the first real episode of the Germany series. But just, you know, the plug. Yeah, anytime, man. I always love talking to you, and I just appreciate the work you do very much. And so, yeah, I'll come on anytime you want. I always enjoy it.

So, yeah, you can find me the Martyr-made podcast, much more measured and probably coherent. than I am in an interview like this. We cover all kinds of historical topics. And I just started a new show with my buddy Scott Horton, who many of your audience probably know well, called Provoked, which is the name of the recent book he wrote on Russia, but I thought it would be a good name for our new podcast too.

So check that out. We've done two episodes. We're going to record the third one tomorrow. I think we're going to talk, well, I don't know if it'll be tomorrow for you guys anymore, but episode three, we're going to talk about Epstein. Yeah, that's all, man. And I really appreciate the work you're doing. I was telling you before off air, the series that you've done with Thomas, the one that you're

working through now with Dr. Johnson, are, I mean, really invaluable, like educational tools, especially for young people coming into the right and want to learn about this stuff. It's one of those things where, you know, it's crazy, right? Because you've got your podcaster. You've got the Piquionese show. You're not a professor at a big university or something like that. And so you would think like, you know, if I want to go right about World War I, it's like, okay, good luck, man. Like, because pretty much everything has been written on World War I.

Like, go knock yourself out. This stuff that you guys are talking about, it's like, dude, the entire culture has just been leaving this sitting here for somebody to pick up and actually deal with for 100, 100 years, you know? And it's just been sitting there. Nobody's been actually addressing it. So when somebody comes into the right and they want to educate the. themselves, they look around and there's just not a lot out there, like real good stuff out there and you're providing that service. And I hope that you know how much, I mean, not just me, but I think a lot of people out

there really appreciate it. Well, I hope you understand how much I appreciate the recommendations that you give and also the encouragement that you give. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate what you do. Now that we're done, now that we're done, stroke and stroke each other. Talk to you later, man.

Later.