Filed with Sources, Books & Media (MOC) · Related: 60.1 Israel-Palestine · Key Arguments (MOC)
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joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan Experience train by day joe Rogan
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podcast by night all day all right we’re up ladies and gentlemen
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good to see you guys what’s happening are you going no headphones oh keep the do i’ll do I’m not quite sure what they
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add but yeah there we go all right uh the goal of this is every time I see
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people that disagree with anything that’s happening any gigantic world events it’s one of these [ __ ] shows
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where there are screaming there’s the word again we brought it we were just talking about that the word [ __ ] is
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back and it’s one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on probably by
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podcast but um these things are always like Pierce Morgan which is fine you know where
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everyone’s screaming over each other and you know there’s five different people talking over each other there’s never
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just rational conversations where you discuss things and um I respect both of
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you i think both of you are brilliant and I thought I bet you agree on a lot of things and I bet you disagree on a
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lot of things and it’d be fascinating to see your perspectives on these things so that’s why you’re here together okay and
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tell us can I ask you something yes sir since the war in Israel began and since
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the war in Ukraine began you’ve had quite a lot of people who are very against both in different ways yes do
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you think you’ve had enough people on who are supportive of either war i don’t
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know that word enough if that’s a good word um let’s say on let’s say enough
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people who are on the side of Israel instead of wild critics of Israel well I’ve had a few i mean I believe God Sad
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is is on the side of Israel um for sure jordan is on the side of Israel um you had uh Mike Baker Coleman Hughes
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coleman did it for like 20 minutes it wasn’t why he was here no I mean none of them and none of them is why they’re
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here you know it’s a good question do you think you’ve tilted one way um me
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personally no no no just with the guest the guest yeah probably more tilted
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towards the idea that perhaps the way they’ve done it is barbaric mhm but why
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do you think that is just out of I just interested in your selection of guests because you’re like the world’s number one podcast yeah it’s not I
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don’t I don’t think about it that way i just think I’d like to talk to this
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person but can I just Sorry it’s your show sure if you’re going to interview
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historians of the conflict or historians in general Mhm why would you get somebody like Ian Carol or Yeah but Ian
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Carol I didn’t bring him on for that purpose i brought him on because I want to find out like how’s one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business
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cuz his whole thing is just conspiracies sure you know but do you have any uh I
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mean there’s been a tilt in the conversation in both conversations in the last couple of years and it’s
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largely to do with people who have appointed themselves experts who are not
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experts you mean like Ian i don’t think he appoints himself an expert in anything who’s that other dude who
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thinks he’s an expert on Churchill daryl oh Daryl Cooper does not think he’s an expert in fact I think it’s everybody
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else is always calling him an expert and he’s like I’m just a history have you ever absorbed any of his material have
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you ever consumed any of his podcasts or anything like that i tried it’s pretty hard to listen to somebody
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who says “I don’t know what I’m talking about but now I’m going to talk or I
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don’t know about this or I’m not capable of debating this historian but I’m going to just tell you what I think.” Yeah but
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that’s not exactly that’s not exactly what Daryl was saying i mean Daryl’s point of view however you feel about this Daryl what Daryl is saying is he
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doesn’t really like doing debates he likes to do long format stuff where he can really explain his position if you
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throw a lot of [ __ ] out there there’s some point at which I’m just raising questions is not a valid thing you’re
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not raising questions you’re not asking questions you’re telling people something do you think Daryl’s doing that i think there’s a whole bunch of
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guys doing that i think Dave is doing that very obviously dave’s a comedian
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but he’s now mainly talking about Israel no I don’t
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know if I’m mainly talking about Israel that’s all I see yeah but that’s Well that might be what you’ve seen i don’t
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think that’s But that is also your stick now isn’t it well what do you mean by that’s my shtick well you’re not a
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geopolitics guy in general are you i don’t even know exactly what you’re asking i’m saying you’ve decided being a
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comedian you’ve decided now to become somebody who talks about Israel i don’t I think you’re incorrect i don’t think
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it’s a decision i just think you have long form conversations multiple of them it’s a huge event that’s in the news so
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it comes up i don’t think it’s a thing i think if you’re on the outside you’d say “Oh look they’re trying to get attention
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by talking about this very polarizing issue publicly.” That’s they do you do get attention from that if you’d spent
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the last year speaking about Myanmar you would not be on my lips yeah but he does
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talk about Yemen constantly he talks about a lot of things that aren’t in the news well I tend I tend to talk about
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the conflicts that my government is directly involved in which I think is reasonable to me but I don’t quite get
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like what’s all the appeal to authority stuff i mean what you have to be an expert or I think authority matters i
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think authority matters and I think that if you just throw a lot of [ __ ] out there and then say I’m I’m not
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interested in the alternative views on this and particularly when it’s a counternarrative that is wildly off and
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when you get people with this look I I just feel we should get it out straight away i feel you’ve opened the door to
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quite a lot of people who’ve now got a big platform who have been throwing out counterhistorical stuff of a very
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dangerous kind you mean Daryl are you talking about Daryl daryl who’s the other one i don’t think Daryl
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has anything dangerous what’s the other guy derek uh what’s his name cooper is
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it which one is it darylary who’s the other one uh there was one I just
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checked before on the way here daryl Cooper and then Oh yeah daryl Cooper Ian
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Carol look the these guys are not historians they’re not knowledgeable about anything no one’s calling Ian
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Carol no but then why listen to their views on Churchill daryl is incredibly knowledgeable it’s just not he’s not
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he’s wildly several reasons one is when he was
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offered to debate the current greatest living biographer of Churchill he said
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“I can’t because he knows much more than me and I admire his work and I’ve learned from it but I I can’t possibly
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debate him.” That’s Andrew Roberts but you don’t have to be able to debate
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people to have opinions no no you don’t have to debate people if it’s not your thing but if you for instance Well okay
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but if you say “I’ve decided that Churchill is the bad guy in the It’s not
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what he said.” It’s not what he said neither Carol nor Cooper have said that well listen I don’t know what Carol said but Daryl Cooper has not said that what
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he said was he he jokes with his friend Jo who’s an Anglo-Saxon he jokes with
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him you know I think that Churchill was the secret villain of World War II and
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what what he’s saying is by Churchill’s actions the war escalated he’s not he’s
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not he’s not saying anything he’s not just asking questions then is he no but the claim isn’t that he’s just asking
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questions yeah he has a point of view you can explain this better he literally says he said in the comment he goes
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“Listen I’m being hyperbolic.” And then he once again uh uh disclaimed he goes “And I’m not claiming Church Hill
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committed the most atrocities or was the worst part but in many ways I do view view him as the chief villain is my
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hyperbolic provocative statement.” But but the point of that well okay but Pat Buchanan wrote an entire book on this is
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he not allowed is he not an expert is he not allowed to be He’s certainly not an expert he can be interviewed i’ve watched Pat Buchanan debate I watched
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Pat Buchanan debate against Churchill historians and he was absolutely leveled because he doesn’t know what he’s
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talking about when did he when did Pat Buchanan debate and get leveled about 20 years ago i’m just he debated against Andrew Roberts and several other
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historians at the intelligence squ in London i was there he didn’t know what he was talking about he had a contrary
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view and it was interesting and stimulating to hear but if you only get the contrary view which is isn’t it fun
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if we all pretend Churchill was the bad guy of the 20th century at some point you’re going to lead people down a path
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where they think that’s the view and that’s horseshit of the most profound
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kind i don’t think that’s what he’s trying to do i think that’s exactly what they’re doing and the problem is is that because
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you I mean your own platform has come about because you’re a very successful comedian and much more and you do ask
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questions and you are interested but there are a lot of people who have come along partly I think because they’ve
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come on this show who have come along and they’ve decided I can play this double game on the one hand I’m going to
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push really edgy and frankly sometimes horrific opinions and then if you
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say that’s wrong they say I’m a comedian but wait a minute what do I what am I what how can you tell me I’m just a
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comedian i’m just throwing stuff out what horrific opinions that’s wrong are you talking about specifically once guys
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like this get into very obvious stuff which is guys like Daryl the ones I’m describing you need to listen to Daryl
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to really understand what he’s saying if you take his Daryl’s words out of context Daryl has some of the most
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nuanced balanced and charitable views on all the figures in in in history well
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particularly Hitler it seems no no you’re wrong you’re wrong he doesn’t he
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has a What did he call him how did he describe him i think he compared him to a a methout psychopath who was holding
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an entire nation of people hostage I believe was the word he also said on here that that uh he wasn’t anti-Semitic
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until the Holocaust there were no speeches of of Hitler’s in the ‘9s no no
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no no he said he was not public about it he said he was downplaying it to win over He said there was a period where he
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was downplaying it to win over popular support in Germany it was his argument there is no historian of World War II
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who thinks that Hitler was downplaying anti-semitism in the 1930s that was what he was doing he wrote a book about it in
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the 1920s he got to power on it and he grew his power on the back of it the
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idea that you can argue that in the 1930s Adolf Hitler was downplaying the
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anti-semitism like there’s no historian who would agree with that so why would
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you throw out the idea that in the 1930s Hitler was not being anti-Semitic in
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public that was what he was doing in public he announces to the German Parliament what he wants to do so when
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you’re throwing out claims like he was keeping it down in the 1930s first of
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all what are you doing and secondly why okay i mean I think that it’s kind of
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hard because I don’t even know exactly what Daryl’s point on that was and so I’m not really in a position to argue
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what he was saying there i don’t think you’re giving him the most charitable interpretation i don’t need to give him
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the most charitable interpretation to be able to see i think you’re stronging him i should say look anyone can look up
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what he said on this show and others what these two guys in particular have said on repeated podcasts with both of
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you it’s an attempt to downplay Hitler and always to do down church i don’t
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think you ever play no I said in conversations with you and others this
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is thetick of these guys they’ve decided it’s edgy and funny and I think this is very very interesting and also very
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dangerous because we live in an in an era now that the right has got some mojo
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back in America we saw years of crazy left overreach where they tried to make
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us all say the craziest things and completely predictably there are now
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figures on the right playing with really dark and ugly stuff on their side i
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agree with they are mainstreaming this i think it’s partly being mainstreamed by the two people I just described and both
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of you have kept speaking to these people and you don’t get on the historians who know about this and that
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that that’s just alarming to me well can I just say so because I I kind of do agree with part of what you said there
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like I do think it is true that almost as a reaction to like the woke insanity
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that we’ve seen on the left and I think literally I think nobody’s been a more effective critic of that than you i do
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think there has kind of been a right-wing reaction that has embraced uh racialism and is is dangerous and not a
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good path to and now they’re flirting with Holocaust denial and Hitler and absolving Hitler i think you’re wrong to include
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Daryl in that group now the other thing is I I’m sorry cuz maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying you’re saying people that I’ve had
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conversations with have downplayed the Holocaust well who are the two guys daryl Cooper Cooper and uh and the other
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Ian Carolan I’ve never uh podcasted with Ian Carol i have podcasted with Daryl
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Cooper once and there he absolutely did not downplay any of the Nazi atrocities
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at all and I would also I would I think that if we’re zooming out here a little bit maybe this is kind of part of the
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disconnect broadly speaking in American culture the idea that it has not been
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driven into people enough that the Nazis were bad and that Adolf Hitler was a He
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is literally the modern devil he is much more so than the actual devil adolf
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Hitler is what’s viewed as the most evil thing to the point that I mean just my
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entire life growing up if there was a guy who sold soup on Seinfeld who was like authoritarian he’s a soup Nazi
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everyone was Hitler the left called George Bush Hitler and they called Obama Hitler and they called Trump Hitler
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every single enemy that we’ve gone to war with in uh always called Hitler saddam Hussein’s the new Hitler mahm
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Gaddafi is the new Hitler putin’s the new Hitler it is so so the idea that like we haven’t driven into people
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enough that Adolf Hitler was a really bad I’m not saying that at all i’m not saying that at all i’m saying just as
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the left likes to play with very dark ugly stuff and they’ve done it for
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decades they have done they have played down Chairman Mao’s murder of the
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Chinese throughout his era in power they played down Stalin they still march on
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occasions with posters of Lenin they they’ve spent decades trying to do down
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evils that were done on their side and I would suggest that one of the things that is going on at the moment is
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despite or maybe because of what you just described there are movements now on the right in America subcultures
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including people who follow both of you who are very interested in playing with
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this absolute uh beyond the pale thing why somebody like Jake Shields wants to
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play around with Holocaust denial why i I can’t answer for Jake
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Shields i I don’t know i would have no idea i have no idea i think a lot of people get captured by this by audience
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capture captured by their audience yeah i think that’s that’s a thing you get a lot of positive reinforcement from a
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bunch of twisted people well it’s also I mean it’s there’s something about um you know Michael Malice had that great line
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he goes uh when you take the red pill you’re supposed to take one and not swallow the whole bottle and I think there’s like this dynamic what happens
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is and and of course people know the red pill is the analogy from the Matrix the idea that you wake up to realizing that
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so much of the stuff you believed was [ __ ] propaganda and is all lies and
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th this is a real danger when the establishment and the institutions are
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all caught with their pants down having sold a bunch of very consequential policies based on lies and then once
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people realize that they go “Well what else have they been lying to me about?” And then they almost want to look into
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every single thing and go “Yeah I think the whole thing was lies.” Now I agree with you there’s danger in that and I
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think that there are some things that then people jump to conclusions that are totally wrong but I guess I tend to look
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at that and go “Well then maybe the people with power not random podcasters
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but like the people with real power should do a better job of not lying through their [ __ ] teeth about
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everything.” Well maybe you have power maybe you have power both of you
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we live in an era where podcasters have a lot of power if you go on a podcast with Jake Shields and Jake Shields goes
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onto another podcast and says he doesn’t think six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust what do you think’s happening
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there that’s an exercise of power okay okay a a um and I agree with you about
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the breakdown of trust absolutely we have lived through an era where in real
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time we saw something called a conspiracy the lab leak which turns out to be true as you and others said it
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might be from the beginning i find that to be very racist and Joe both of you it used to be racist
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when we were saying that the it was likely that the CO variant had come out from the place making co
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especially since the exact seemed like it seemed like it was possible to us but
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the point ask yourself this who has access to your medical history in theory it’s just you and your doctor but in
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reality hundreds of shady companies called data brokers are keeping tabs on every symptom you Google every treatment
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scanning the QR code on screen or by clicking the link in the description i
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was I was referencing the New York Times calling the lab racist which is just the funniest thing ever that they go “It’s
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racist to think that there was a sophisticated lab where they were developing like gain of function
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research.” And they go “No what happened is these freaks were eating battheads.” And you’re like “Wait that’s not racist
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the other one was racist pengalins [Laughter] but that one fell apart in front of our
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eyes well it took four years and I’ve said repeatedly it’s kind of inevitable
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to me that if you see something that is called a racist conspiracy theory fall apart and become also what we used to
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call true in a few years it’s likely to blow a lot of people’s minds but the
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question then is do you help those minds that have been blown blow themselves out
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some more by doing a whole load of other conspiracy stuff do you decide to go hey
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what else have we been lied to maybe Churchill wasn’t a great guy maybe Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy maybe the
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Holocaust etc no one is saying maybe Hitler wasn’t
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such a bad guy you are saying that in the 1930s Hitler kept the anti-semitism down
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no no no no that’s not what he’s saying what what he was saying is that he didn’t do it as publicly he was doing it
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in meetings because he the support for that kind of thinking wasn’t as
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ubiquitous as it was is I’ve seen this i’ve seen this before i know exactly what these guys are drinking they’re
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drinking a couple of very very discredited historians like David Irving
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and they are just regurgitating it and it was always been the same thing it is
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always an attempt to minimize Hitler’s anti-semitism actions eventually down
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the road you get to minimizing his actual involvement in the Holocaust and then you can go to say that about Daryl
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what you’re what you’re guilty of here is kind of similar to I think something that the woke left has done which is
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this concept creep where you’re talking about some people online who are doing this thing and then you’re lumping in
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other people with them listen I I’ll just say this right now daryl Cooper is currently I believe almost finished or
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he’s working on a big World War II uh series and when this comes out it gonna be on we can see we Yeah he does long
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form podcasts when when this comes out I am quite confident to say beforehand
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that if you’re going into it expecting him to be downplaying the atrocities of the Nazis or downplaying the evil things
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that Adolf Hitler did you’re going to be disappointed my point is why are we even talking about this guy cuz you brought him up he’s Yes because he comes on
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podcasts like this my point is this is not a serious historian he’s not a historian no he’s been he never claims
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to be he’s been doing these long form podcasts on these subjects for over a decade and if you go back to 2015 and
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listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem it’s an incredible piece and
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it’s how many hours long 30 something m and he he it literally starts from the
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persecution of the Jews where they’re being driven out of Europe it’s like this horrific account of what happens to
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these people it’s what he’s trying to do is paint a picture of how the world goes
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mad and how the world goes sideways and he’s doing it from the perspective
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initially of these Jewish people that are living in Europe that all of a sudden their neighbors are turning on
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them and they’re they’re being attacked like it the it’s incredibly charitable
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but what he’s trying to do is show what happens to human beings when they’re
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confronted with unbelievable atrocities and how things go so incredibly sideways
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lots of people have written and spoken about that so why is he not allowed to i I don’t understand he is allowed to he
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is allowed to i’m saying that there is a there’s a weird way in which figures like him whose ideas are not being
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countered when they are raised are given platform after platform to spread their their views they are welcome to those
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platforms i’m not saying they shouldn’t be platformed i’m saying these are very very fringe figures who are pushing
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ideas that are either debunked now have been debunked before or they will not stand up against somebody who disagrees
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with them okay i I would just say maybe this is the disconnect here when you say there’s like not push back daryl’s one
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line on Tucker Carlson this one line where he himself said he was being hyperbolic and kind of says this to prod
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his buddy got more push back than any one line I’ve ever heard on a podcast
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there were numerous articles written by historians numerous shows that covered it people went through there were
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Twitter threads about it so I don’t exactly get your point like there was lots of push back if you’re saying he
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should go and debate somebody who’s giving him push back on that okay maybe i also think it’s reasonable for him to
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say “I don’t really do debates.” Yeah i think it’s weird to mainstream very fringe views constantly and not give
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another side i think that’s weird well I mean okay I think there’s a little bit of a contradiction here you’re saying
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now that there these are fringe views but then you’re also saying that these are enormously powerful no no there’s no
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contradiction let me clear it up if you think there is I think there are very fringe views that have become
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mainstreamed on the right but then aren’t they not fringe by definition sure you can play an epistemological
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game with No I’m just No I’m just saying what’s behind you do understand the concept don’t you that fringe ideas become mainstreamed okay sure so that’s
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it okay i still I’m not exactly sure so you’re saying that what Joe shouldn’t
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have Daryl Cooper on i’m saying that that there will have that if you mainstream very very fringe views which
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are easily able to be debunked if you if you if you mainstream them at some point
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that view that was so fringe will be what eager very uh um disconnected
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unhappy people are going to start playing with too and if if these people are such experts in how you see a
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society go weird they can look at what is happening to a portion of the right
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everywhere on this stuff there is a portion of the right across the West that is playing this very dark game and
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they’re doing it deliberately and you can’t not be aware of that i agree with that i don’t think Daryl Cooper is doing
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that but I do agree with your your characterization i think it’s a pretty important distinction there you’re just taking this one statement and then this
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where he’s trying to joke around with his buddy this this Churchill statement and this is this is the basis of this he
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and these other guys are all doing the anti-churchial stuff now but he’s not doing an anti-churchial stuff he and the
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other in the orbit was the author of this whole operation unthinkable right where they wanted to use the Nazis to
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invade Russia wasn’t that Churchill
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is that not true we’re going to have to get into the weeds on Churchill there is always going to be a corner which you
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can get me on on a bit of Churchill but you have you’d have to say which a
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comprehensive view of Yeah churchill was never working with the Germans to invade
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Russia no no no this is a plan that was drawn up do you do you know about operation think pull it up Jamie um
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Operation Unthinkable was at the end of the war I believe Churchill was concerned about the rise of of Russia in
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in the rise of the Soviet Union and the the idea was and we’ll find out what the
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historical facts are about this Operation Unthinkable a name given to two related possible future war plans
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developed by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee against the Soviet Union during 1945 the plans were never
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implemented the creation of the plans was ordered by the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on May 1945
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and developed by the British armed forces joint planning staff in May 1945 the end of World War II in Europe one
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plan assumed a surprise attack on the Soviet forces stationed in Germany to oppose the will of the United States
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impose rather the will of the United States and the British Empire upon Russia the will was qualified as a
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square deal for Poland but added that that does not necessarily limit the military commitment the assessment
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signed by the chief of army staff on 9 June 1945 concluded it would be beyond
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our power to win a quick but limited success and we would be committed to a protracted war against heavy odds the
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code was Yeah this is okay first of all I never do Wikipedia okay we don’t do
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Wikipedia that’s okay that’s okay this is just what Jamie pulled up okay but first of all yes at the end of the war
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an a plan requested that wasn’t seen through that suggests that after the
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defeat of Nazism communism of the Soviet form is also going to be a threat to Europe was simply an evidence that I
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mean it’s obvious true it’s what Churchel worried about throughout the the 40s he worried about it in Yaltta he
28:32
worried about it everywhere i’m sorry but I have to return to this point that this man manages to do one of the
28:40
most heroic things in human history in standing alone against evil in its most
28:46
concentrate form and he does about as much as any human being can do to save
28:51
the civilized world if you just park that and you go on to a
29:01
plan in 1945 to try to counter Soviet domination of Europe you see what I’m
29:08
saying this is this is not doing something in the round yeah it’s also look I mean the look I I’m not even like
29:15
the ex I’m not at all the expert on World War II um and I’m not like going to debate with you about World War II
29:21
but I would say that like that is there’s a lot of room for nuance and
29:26
disagreement with what you just said you know in the 20th century we had two world wars they’re the worst thing
29:33
objectively speaking the worst thing that’s ever happened in the history of the world and the Second World War is
29:39
the biggest blood bath in human history and it ended with handing the man who you just mentioned Joseph Stalin half of
29:45
Europe so listen if you want to argue I’m I’m Jewish in my of German descent so like I’m not against the argument
29:52
that it was the Nazis had to be defeated and that was the most important thing but there still is just the basic facts
29:58
that it was a it almost couldn’t have gone worse it was like just a nightmare
30:03
for civilization and if people want to look back at that and go man was there any other way this could have been
30:09
handled was there any other way were there blunders that were made here now personally what I feel much more uh
30:14
comfortable arguing would be that I try to blame everything I can on Woodro Wilson as much as I can because also he
30:20
created the income tax on the Federal Reserve and did so much to damage my country but I think American entry into
30:26
World War I was really a disaster and imposing the Treaty of Versailles on
30:31
Germany was a disaster i also think that’s kind of um fairly mainstream history like that’s not a particularly
30:38
controversial view that like imposing the Treaty of Versailles on Germany ended up in disaster well no except as
30:44
Martin Amos said the only way to not get to the Treaty of Versailles would be for Germany to win World War I but yeah yeah
30:50
but we’re not talking about the Nazis winning the war we’re talking about you know listen I think that but but
30:56
secondly sorry I just have to address that fundamental you say uh the the
31:02
outcome of World War II and everything that happened and it was the worst thing that’s ever happened and worst thing imaginable worst possible outcome you
31:08
said just you said worst possible outcome let me give you a much worst possible outcome hitler wins right okay
31:15
sure okay so it’s not the worst possible outcome listen but okay hitler Yes okay i’m not saying you can’t dream up a
31:21
worse outcome i’m saying what you had dreaming up that’s just what my country and others went through what did end up
31:26
happening was the what 60 million people died including the Holocaust and then Joseph Stalin takes half of Europe so
31:33
okay fine i’m I should I’ll correct that there is a worse outcome right but
31:38
that’s not a great one no nobody said it was this is like there’s a very weird argument that you now hear about this
31:44
the this attempt to revision this and I know why it’s happening i don’t think I don’t think there’s anything revisionist
31:50
i think there is this this attempt to sort of say look you know at the end of World War II what have we got stalin has
31:56
half of Europe what was the point and so on that’s that’s going on that’s going on and uh there are people who are
32:02
feeding it uh that argument is very similar this this this particular school
32:08
of as it were history is doing something that I’ve seen happen with American history as well particularly with
32:13
Lincoln lincoln’s an interesting comparison to make with Churchill on this uh there are people who will
32:20
criticize Churchill for mistakes made not hard to do quite hard not to make mistakes while fighting at a war of
32:26
total annihilation against your country um people will say “Oh he didn’t sort
32:33
this out in 1945 you know it’s rather like Lincoln he didn’t solve every
32:38
problem in the world for all time but he solved a hell of a big problem for his time and that requires some kind of
32:46
generosity of spirit and understanding in hindsight as opposed to I will find
32:53
something that he did that I wouldn’t have done because if I’d have been running the uh the British Empire in 19
32:59
1939 I’d have known exactly how to do it and I’d have known how to hold the whole thing together and I’d have kept Stalin back and he’d have been great at Yaltta
33:05
and like this is but I don’t think anybody’s saying that yeah I I I agree with you i think there is a tendency of
33:10
like woke left kids to do this but I I don’t think that’s what what certainly not what I’m saying and I don’t think
33:16
what Daryl’s saying i do also think that one of the bigger um kind of the bigger picture dynamics to all of this is that
33:24
we have um at least since 9/11 been in a state of perpetual war and all of these
33:32
wars have been disasters there have been so many lies involved in selling all of
33:38
them i mean oh the whole Iraq war the whole war in Afghanistan just lying the
33:43
whole way through i mean I remember literally having conversations with Green Berets in the middle of the war in
33:49
Afghanistan and they’re like “George W bush is telling you that the army we’re building up there is really successful
33:54
this thing’s going to fall in a week without us.” And then all through the Obama administration it’s just like lie
34:00
after lie after lie with disastrous wars and so this does create a fertile ground
34:05
for people to say “I wonder if they were lying about all these wars.” Sure again I’m not really trying to argue with you about World War II i’d rather argue
34:11
about these wars i think the interesting question is whether you’re busy watering it well should you not talk about
34:17
mistakes that were made overall absolutely okay you should absolutely i have all four going back and looking at
34:23
mistakes so what are you what is your argument then it’s a very weird thing to go back zone in on a man say this one
34:29
thing is a mistake and should characterize him and you ignore everything else you’re taking him out of
34:35
context when he’s when you’re talking about Daryl who’s done what was it 30 plus hours so what 30 plus hours of
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36:07
i’m very different he’s not doing a podcast like talking to people okay nor
36:13
is he doing scholarly work nor is he working in the archives clearly come on i mean this is he is not the historian
36:19
of our era he’s not complaining to be this is the thing Joe this is like punching jelly no but you don’t you
36:25
don’t consume but you don’t consume his work what I’m saying because I don’t need to consume endless versions of a
36:32
revisionist history i understand revisionist history if you listen to his work it’s not revisionist
36:39
history he’s basing it on historical Yeah I know but okay so this is my point
36:44
about Jelly it’s a shape-shifting thing comedian or historian he’s not a
36:50
comedian historian or podcast he would be historian or actual historian you say
36:56
he doesn’t claim to be a historian but he’s pumping out tens of hours of neither does Dan Carlin he doesn’t claim
37:02
to be historian either you see my point about the move it’s like some weird jiu-jitsu move where you say “Hang on
37:09
you know all about this as well you say “I’m not a historian but I’m going to
37:15
spend my time talking about history i’m not a journalist but I’m going to spend my time talking about this thing
37:20
i’m not an expert on this but I’m going to spend my time talking about this thing it’s a weird move yeah no you
37:26
don’t think no i’m a free American i can talk about what I like to notice you can But
37:34
the point is what are you pushing what are you watering what am I pushing yes
37:39
uh liberty free markets peace prosperity not getting in another stupid catastrophic war which we’re on the
37:45
precipice of right now that’s what I’m pushing what are we on the precipice of well I think you Weren’t you just talking about it the other day everyone
37:51
I hear on the inside says we’re the about to attack Iran i think you just said something about
37:57
that the other day am I wrong about that i thought I saw in one of your interviews that you did possibly no um that doesn’t mean we are on the verge of
38:03
a war i mean you keep referring to we being in wars there’s a very big difference between a country having a
38:09
military that’s engaged and a country being at war this country has not been at war for 25 years
38:17
you have not been fighting for the American homeland for 25 years yes we haven’t that’s true we haven’t had a war on our shores we’ve been picking on
38:23
third world countries halfway around the world well you haven’t been randomly picking on them i mean Afghanistan you
38:28
went I didn’t say it was random yeah right okay it wasn’t like you suddenly decided to bomb again or something you
38:35
we went to Afghanistan to find Bin Laden and take revenge for 911 and stop an
38:41
attack like that happening again on the American homeland that is very different from a country being at war yeah but
38:47
that’s a total mischaracterization of the war in Afghanistan it’s one thing to say that might be an accurate characterization of the special
38:53
operations mission in late 2001 but then we fought then we fought a 20-year regime change war against the Taliban
38:59
plus you got dragged into the quick sand of war oh okay fine but I thought it
39:04
wasn’t a war like what i don’t get your argument you said it was a war it’s your It’s your use of we as if you’re
39:10
personally like suffering this war yeah when I say we taxi so we pay for it okay fine would you go if I went back and
39:16
corrected you on every time you’ve used the term we to refer to your government or something like that like if I were to say “Oh we just imposed tariffs on
39:23
China.” Would you point out that I didn’t and it was the Trump administration i’m saying you take it obviously very personally and that
39:28
that’s you’re right to do so of course i’m just trying to make sure we’re accurate here what do you I’m taking
39:33
personally that the American wars sure yeah i think they’ve they’ve killed
39:39
hundreds of thousands of people and cost my country 8 trillion dollars and and degraded my country very much and
39:45
there’s a very good argument to make on that i’m still slightly beused about this move from I’m an expert on this and
39:54
I have views to I’m a comedian i’ve never claimed to be an expert on anything this is the problem Joe i mean
40:02
if if if if somebody says you have to claim to be an expert on something to have an opinion on something you don’t
40:07
have to be you don’t have to be but this is like I’m not a historian but I’m pumping out history i’m not an expert
40:14
but I’m talking all the time about this but you’re not even talking about specifically on what he just said no I’m saying this is my point about this he
40:21
You say I’m not an expert so what’s the solution to not talk about it no it’s to
40:27
have more experts around well the expert class hasn’t done a great job this is follow the science
40:33
yeah but you know what fine so during I just said to you I agree with you right i know so during all of co I I will put
40:40
my track record against any of the expert class on CO i’m glad to do that
40:46
so should I have just shut up should I have shut up by opposing lockdowns and opposing vaccine
40:51
mandates you really That’s the entire argument that you’re making let the experts handle this you’re not an expert
40:57
wildly you’re wildly mis uh not listening to what I’m saying i think you
41:03
have to take I think we should agree perhaps on the following that one major
41:09
thing can break down in front of your eyes or many major things and it does not mean that every single one of the
41:15
sewer gates should be lifted okay yeah I I I get that point who’s who’s saying it
41:20
should be i’m saying this is a chatter on what is part of our side at the
41:26
moment is that a lot of the sewer gates are being lifted sometimes by people who
41:31
know that they’re doing it sometimes by people who don’t sometimes by people who say “I don’t know i’m just throwing it
41:38
out there.” But at the very least there’s some damn hygiene that should be required isn’t there
41:45
yeah i’m not sure exactly what you’re asking but sure just that let’s have a bit of hygiene on our own side not lift
41:52
every sewer gate and when you say our own side you mean the right-wing broadly speaking broadly speaking and I’m sort of funny about libertarians i’m never
41:59
quite sure i always think I always say I think libertarians are essentially the bisexuals of politics they should just
42:05
choose Joe they should choose it’s kind of They just want everything buffet
42:10
that’s very funny well I think we want some things i don’t know okay that’s a that’s a weird way to put it but I I get
42:15
your point um All right well I I mean I don’t know look I I mean essentially I just don’t Maybe there’s something I’m
42:21
missing here but if your argument is that like you’re you’re saying I claim to be an expert but then I have like a
42:26
parachute to get out of it by being like hey I’m just a comedian who’s just saying this but I don’t think I’ve ever like really claimed to be an expert i
42:34
I know well well but I’m interested in these topics yeah I know but isn’t it weird to go around for instance I mean
42:41
let’s get to the the last year and a half it’s It’s a bit weird to be simultaneously saying I’m not an expert
42:47
on a conflict and talking about it everywhere i don’t think so not really i mean I don’t know i don’t think like I I
42:54
don’t see how you have these things which things all these things that we’re talking about some of them yeah are you
43:00
an expert i am on some yes on some but you talk about some that you’re not an expert on you’ll notice what I should do
43:05
what should you do if those subjects get breached well I think that you educate yourself as much as you can shouldn’t you say I’m not an expert and then give
43:12
your opinion if you’re in the middle of a conversation i think it’s as I say I think that it’s a weird move to say I’m
43:17
not an expert on this but I’m going to talk about it non-stop i think that is true listen I will certainly concede that I am weird so I’m not disagreeing
43:24
with you it’s weird that I’m as obsessed with all this stuff as I am i mean like okay I’m a weird guy i do I tell jokes
43:30
at nightclubs and then get obsessed with politics and monetary policy and like okay fine but I just like fundamentally
43:37
disagree with this idea that which I really do think is um quite anti-democratic in spirit and quite um
43:45
um you know elitist that there’s an expert class they can have opinions on all of these things it’s weird for any
43:52
regular person who’s just read about it not my view not my view seems like it’s what you’re saying i I conceded already
43:58
i said a long time ago that I believe much of the expert class let itself and us all down very badly and I think that
44:04
happened in foreign policy in areas not every area but it happened in some areas i think it happened with COVID in many
44:11
areas but that does not mean that it’s just a free-for-all now there are some
44:17
things we can still verify to be true and can still agree on as baseline
44:22
levels of agreement in a free society and that and yes everyone is free to air
44:28
their views but it does not mean that everyone who sounds off on an issue
44:33
whether it’s World War II the war in the Middle East the war in Ukraine has an
44:39
equally valid point of view no I certainly wouldn’t argue I mean I that to me is just batting down a straw man i
44:45
mean I certainly wouldn’t argue that everyone has an equally valid point of view and I certainly wouldn’t argue that there shouldn’t be some standards of
44:52
like who you would want to find interesting and talk to and who you wouldn’t but also it’s like so let’s
44:58
have the conversation that like I I don’t know like if there’s um if if there is uh if there are experts out
45:05
there who can smack all of this stuff down or just destroy every point that I I make over the years or whatever like
45:11
okay so then do it and then let’s see yeah i remember well that’s a bit weird cuz also then then it’s like the debate
45:18
me bro thing but but you just you just criticize Daryl for not debating it’s fine it’s fine yeah I know let me just
45:24
make the main point i think what I’m trying to get at Joe is that it’s a bit like the Twitter algorithm thing which
45:30
is yes everyone is and should be free to say what they like on Twitter apart from
45:36
whatever the I mean the very fringe things of like immediate incitement to violence and all that kind of thing but
45:43
uh we all know that one of the oddities of Twitter including since Elon took over is that what you hope is a restored
45:50
marketplace of ideas ends up pushing you really crazy [ __ ] yes and that is what
45:56
I’m suggesting is happening on a podcast level and maybe on a wider level beyond that i get stuff on Twitter that I just
46:04
do not want i do not want a guy with one and a half thousand followers who’s got some zany new view on something who
46:11
isn’t an expert but is an expert to be pushed at me and effectively what is happening with the Twitter algorithm is
46:18
happening everywhere else as well and we’re all for the open marketplace of ideas i want that i thrive in it but it
46:26
is it is different once you get into the thing of is something manipulating the algorithm behind is the algorithm being
46:33
pushed on me why am I being given this why am I not being given that why am I being constantly pushed this view and I
46:41
think that the answer to a great degree is the same thing in your world as it is in the Twitter world which is if you go
46:49
straight online and you say you know JFK file drops uh watch live stream of
46:56
Kennedy historians reading the papers live you’re not going to get any views
47:02
no one’s going to watch it that’s what kind of what’s needed is for the people who know the documents to go through the
47:07
documents but you and I know that if as there was some guy who did immediately you do something like uh live stream
47:15
Mossad involvement in JFK you’re going to milk it you’re going to cream it online the money comes in
47:22
i’m saying that there’s a similar algorithm in all of our lives that we’re not as aware of as we should be which is
47:28
that we because we all know this at some level that there are certain things that
47:34
uh get your a bit of your base going or get people going interesting and crazy
47:40
and then they start debating it and all that sort of thing and that algorithm of online seems to me to be spilling into
47:46
the real world i I don’t disagree that there’s certainly more sensationalist stuff will
47:53
get you more clicks i I also don’t think that’s a it’s not really unique to social media or podcasting i mean this
47:59
is right for the tabloids yeah right this has always been true right so yeah
48:04
okay so it’s kind of one of the problems arguing against that you know um it’s
48:10
certainly never my intention when I talk to someone to try to get more views it sounds crazy but I’m only talking to
48:16
people that I’m interested in talking to and in Daryl’s case it’s because I’ve been a listener of his podcast for years
48:26
that’s it this is like genuinely how I pursue things that’s why you’re here i’m
48:33
genuinely interested in your views as well even though you completely disagree with him
48:40
that’s I mean this is the marketplace of ideas in real time i agree although as I say I think you’ve
48:47
massively underrepresented the pro- Ukraine argument and the
48:52
pro-Israel argument in the last two years um I don’t know i mean well that’s my
49:00
observation okay you’re totally allowed to have that observation what is the what’s the pro-
49:07
Ukraine argument that you think is not being represented enough
49:12
well my broad view is that again something to do with the algorithm that
49:17
uh anything that is uh conspiratorial about Zalinski or the
49:24
Ukrainians in the conflict does very well anything that says actually the
49:31
Ukrainian army is fighting to try to retain as much of their country as they can doesn’t do as well i think that
49:38
everything that is pushing the idea that for instance the Americans caused it or something
49:46
like that does well i think everything that says actually in February 2022
49:53
Vladimir Putin’s tanks invaded Ukraine and they shouldn’t have done doesn’t do as well i don’t think I’ve ever heard
49:59
anyone say that what Vladimir Putin did wasn’t horrific that’s not my point the
50:06
point is that after that you there’s a whole set of things let’s look at for instance the issue of corruption okay
50:13
Ukraine is a pretty corrupt country by EU standards by the uh by World Bank
50:20
standards um and it’s been a problem as it is in that neck of the woods and it’s
50:26
understandable that if the US is one of the countries putting money and arms into Ukraine then it’s going to be a
50:33
subject of legitimate interest to the American people and others the European taxpayers
50:39
nevertheless you end up in this and I know this because the same it’s the same thing in the old media you end up on
50:44
like the new bit of the story and there’s always a risk that you will lose sight of the beginning of the story for
50:52
instance I mean Putin’s corruption is legendary
50:59
gargantuan and not as interesting it seems to me the algorithm doesn’t push
51:06
that and I think that’s to a greater extent the case with the Israel Hamas
51:13
war as well well isn’t there a little bit of a concern like I would say a couple things here number one I’m not
51:19
denying I don’t know how the algorithm works or what it’s pushing and there and it’s an interesting thing that we
51:25
probably should all know more about but I think there’s a danger when you’re to just c uh classify everything as well
51:30
the algorithm pushes this and doesn’t push this it’s like it could also be that some ideas are just resonating more and some ideas are more popular than
51:36
other ideas and there’s probably probably both of those things are at work in that dynamic but I also think that something like the reason why say
51:44
talking about Ukrainian corruption is more interesting in in a lot of ways than talking about Russian corruption is
51:51
obviously because like well one of these countries is an enemy and the other one is one that we’re sending tens of
51:56
billions of dollars to so yes well debating on between Zalinsky and the
52:01
weapons companies i don’t know he says he only got 70 billion dollars of it but we’ve spent closer to 170 so whatever
52:08
but the the point is that obviously if there is a country that we are propping
52:13
up funding arming and they’re corrupt I I would say my starting point would
52:19
always be to be more concerned with that corruption than an enemy country which it’s almost kind of a given is a corrupt
52:26
country like I I don’t know i’m sure there are fringes of the right uh uh who might say like Vladimir Putin’s some
52:31
great guy or something like that but that is I really do not think that is the argument that most people who are
52:36
critical of this of Biden’s policy are are making sure i I I mean I think that one of the I think one of the
52:42
interesting things that happens in this is the old cliche of losing the wood for the trees uh it just happens an awful
52:48
lot and it’s the n it’s the nature of the the old news cycle let alone the current one the social media era
52:55
um actually I remember that uh so I would don’t go back to World War II let
53:00
me just very quickly I remember this debate with Pat Buchanan when he was debating much more learned historians on
53:05
the subject of the origins of World War II and the whole thing got lost in all of this sort of mad puzzle of views
53:12
about iron ore production in the Bavarian forest and and this sort of thing and I remember everyone was all
53:17
over the place and the moderator turned to the historian Andrew Robertson and said “Andrew Roberts why did World War II begin?” and he said World War II
53:25
began because Hitler invaded Poland and those moments come along
53:32
quite often at the moment which is yes there’s an awful lot of very interesting
53:37
things to look into there’s a lot of very interesting things going on which we should all be able to talk about and do talk about
53:43
but sometimes you have to remember the origin causes of things as well and you
53:49
have to stick to keeping that in mind yeah yeah well and I think that a lot of people are pretty bad at the moment of
53:55
keeping that in mind like you can there you can concede Ukrainian corruption you
54:01
can concede uh all sorts of things and still not lose sight of the thing
54:07
of if Russia rolls tanks into neighboring countries it can’t be
54:12
allowed oh well listen okay so on that I think we have an area of agreement and I do think like even um while I much
54:19
prefer uh the the path that Donald Trump is pursuing to the path that Joe Biden
54:24
pursued when it comes to the the war in Ukraine and of course this is you know Donald Trump’s thing is once you piss
54:30
him off he’s going to call you every bad nickname that there is but when he and sometimes when you don’t piss him off
54:35
well sure but when he’s like come to mind what I I believe he said uh that Zalinsky started the war or something
54:42
like that which is like okay all right that’s a little bit ridiculous he said started the war and Zalinski was the dictator yes okay so Trump said that yes
54:50
he’s a but it was after Zilinski started the war yeah but it was this is how Donald Trump is love
54:57
him or hate him for better or for worse donald Trump it’s like if if you he feels that you disrespected him or come
55:03
came at him he’s going to be 10 times more vicious by the way this happened two weeks before the uh uh disastrous
55:09
Oval Office meeting yeah and I wrote the next day the cover in the New York Post which was a big picture of Vladimir
55:15
Putin with the headline this is a dictator just again as I say not to lose track in
55:22
all of the mele not to lose track of the basic facts well look I I will say this
55:28
as somebody who is I’m I’m very anti-war broadly speaking and I do I do agree
55:34
with you that it should like we should be able to have conversations about all
55:39
the things that led up to the war and all the different you know like blunders that that were made and also still
55:45
recognize that Vladimir Putin invaded a country and is responsible for you know at least hundreds of thousands of of
55:51
people dying and you know my uh um uh Scott Horton who I always try to promote on here he just wrote this book called
55:57
Provoked i think it’s the best book that’s been written on the uh history leading up to uh um the the war between
56:03
is basically takes you from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the war in Ukraine and even in that book the book
56:08
is called Provoked and the argument is that that Western policy was very provocative toward Vladimir Putin and
56:15
there were a lot of uh uh off-ramps that could have been explored and should have been explored but he has an entire
56:20
chapter in the book where he is saying like look these are Putin had a lot of other options he didn’t have to do this
56:27
it’s not as if any of that justifies his invasion and so I do agree with you that
56:32
whenever we’re talking about a war particularly a war of aggression um that should always be in the front of
56:38
people’s minds i mean you can criticize uh you know I I would say I think I’m consistent on this across the board you
56:44
can criticize uh lots of things about the insurgency in Iraq um certainly but
56:50
you should remember that George W bush invaded the country when he shouldn’t have and based off lies so I I’ll I say
56:56
that when my government does it i’ll say it when the Russian government does it also that being said there’s a very
57:02
strong argument that there were many policies that the US you know NATO and
57:08
Europe as well but mostly the US pursued that were just
57:13
almost like if you wanted to come to this inevitable conflict this would have been the policy to pursue to give you
57:19
the best chance to end up there one of the you know um I was with a British military friend recently and somebody
57:25
asked uh what does the fog of war mean and uh he gave a brilliant example of
57:31
what it means on the battlefield which a lot of people don’t understand there’s a version of the fog of war in history as
57:37
well uh the great Czech writer Milan Candera had this beautiful phrase in a
57:44
book of his from the ‘9s called testaments betrayed where he said the odd thing about mankind is he said we
57:50
walk through life in a fog and we stumble along a path and we create the path as we stumble along it so that’s
57:58
not the interesting thing the interesting thing is that when we look back we see the man and we see the path
58:04
but we don’t see the fog everything looks inevitable when you’re
58:10
standing in the present everything looks like it was going to happen this way and
58:15
you have these endless often fascinating often futile
58:21
explorations of what might have been but it doesn’t take into account the fog
58:26
it’s a very good point and the fog of Russia after the fall of the Soviet
58:31
Union was pretty considerable the efforts in the 1990s to bring them into
58:37
a more obvious part of the international order failed and my own view has always
58:42
been that in part we missed an opportunity uh to pay a kind of civilizational
58:49
respect to the Russians which they deserved um but not but also throughout
58:56
the period that people now say there are all of these offramps and now so many people claim
59:02
that NATO went around the region desperately trying to provoke the Russians into into some kind of war or
59:08
inevitably leading them that way because of NATO expansionism they never take into account what was in my memory and
59:17
experience very clear which was NATO didn’t go to go around recruiting People
59:22
came to NATO countries came to NATO wanting to join precisely because they
59:28
feared the aggression that Ukrainians have suffered since February 2022 and indeed before I was in Georgia just
59:34
after the uh 2008 war began the country not the state um always has to be
59:40
confirmed otherwise people like when who invaded Georgia they’re bastards uh but I was in the
59:47
country of Georgia and um uh Putin had tried to invade them and had seized south and abcasia and uh they were
59:56
desperate to join NATO in fact they’re desperate to join the European Union i rather frivolously said to a Georgian
1:00:01
friend uh if you want we can swap you can take our British membership of the EU but um in the NATO thing they were
1:00:09
desperate for it and they were desperate for it precisely for the reason that so many of the Ukrainians were desperate
1:00:14
for it which was only way to stop Putin expansionism so you know in the whole
1:00:21
fog of the posts Soviet era that is one of the many things that gets left out of
1:00:27
the conversation and by the way Putin’s actions in February 2022 and since
1:00:34
uh all he’s done is provoke two new countries to join NATO and his borders with NATO have grown finland and Sweden
1:00:42
wanted to join and the only reason Finland and Sweden wanted to join was because they too are scared it’s it’s
1:00:48
it’s a heck of a thing to get the Swedish to join a military alliance it doesn’t come easy to them it doesn’t come natural uh and these uh these
1:00:56
countries joined because like Georgia like Ukraine they desperately feared
1:01:02
Putinist expansionism and they weren’t wrong okay but I I get your point um
1:01:08
first off the the war in in Georgia in 2008 actually came what was it 2 or 3
1:01:14
months after the Bucharest summit where NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine would be entering uh NATO so just making
1:01:20
that point that that the NATO aspirations came first but listen I don’t think you’re wrong i don’t think anybody is ever implying that like we’ve
1:01:27
expanded NATO through force and that the countries who were joining or at least the governments of the countries who
1:01:32
were joining didn’t want it although in the case of Ukraine there was a great piece in the Washington Post about this
1:01:37
in 2006 where joining NATO was actually very unpopular and there was a lot done
1:01:43
and largely because they just didn’t want to take on the headache of the conflict that this might provoke but you
1:01:49
know the question I think isn’t necessarily like do these countries wish to join NATO of course I think most
1:01:55
countries in the world would like to join NATO i think mo most countries in the world would like the most powerful government in the history of the world
1:02:01
to guarantee their defense and subsidize their defense the question is is that in America’s interest and in terms of your
1:02:07
point of seeing through the fog I mean look there was as you know well in the ‘9s in the late ’90s during the first
1:02:14
round of NATO expansion there was a lively debate amongst this and I don’t mean a debate amongst outsiders or
1:02:21
non-expert experts or or whatever i mean within the real deal experts the wisest gray beers in the national security
1:02:27
apparatus there was a real debate with at least three secretaries of defense who warned against this uh Robert Gates
1:02:33
Robert McNamar William Perry the secretary of defense at the time almost resigned said his biggest regret in life is that he didn’t resign over it george
1:02:40
Kennan was able to see right through that fog he literally said the cold warrior founder of the containment strategy saw right through that fog and
1:02:47
goes “This will inevitably lead to a conflict with Russia.” and his exact words were and then when there’s a
1:02:52
Russian response everybody will say look this is why we needed to expand uh NATO but the the point here is okay even
1:02:59
within that deep debate which there were lively debates about even the people who were on the pro-expansionist side of
1:03:06
things uh like Henry Kissinger even he said Ukraine would have to be a special
1:03:12
arrangement Ukraine will not come into NATO because obviously that’s leading to a war with with Russia and so I don’t
1:03:19
think It’s unreasonable and I think this is a fair thing that we should do in all conflicts is like to have as as uh
1:03:28
Mirshimer puts it to have strategic empathy to say like hey listen let’s let’s reasonably place ourselves in the
1:03:34
other person’s shoes and say how would we react if somebody was expanding their military alliance that is explicitly
1:03:42
anti- US and is bringing it up to our borders and now is openly for years and
1:03:47
years and years saying that we are going to bring your largest neighbor where you have very important strategic interests
1:03:53
from your point of view into our military alliance and you are saying over and over again this is our
1:04:00
brightest red line do not do this and then they keep flirting with doing this over and over then they back a street
1:04:06
push that overthrows the government there don’t you think maybe that would be a provocation
1:04:12
first of all two things the if you want that strategic empathy that I’m I’m not
1:04:19
an admirer of um but if you want to do that um you can do it the other way round as well surely i mean do the same
1:04:27
thing with the Ukrainians do the Latvians and others yeah but I would never Douglas but my response to you was
1:04:33
never I can’t understand why the Latians or or the Lithuanians would want to be in NATO i understand yes right and I can
1:04:40
understand why Russia thought that Ukrainian membership in NATO was a red line i can understand that but that
1:04:46
wasn’t why Putin invaded in 2022 he uh and I think that and I think there’s an oddity if I can say so maybe
1:04:52
this particular comes across on the libertarian bisexual side but the I think there’s an oddity of the uh Let
1:04:59
the record show him a happily married heterosexual man um they all say that
1:05:06
um I think there’s an oddity that sometimes particularly happens on the libertarian side which is which is a presumption that things only really
1:05:13
happen in the world because we make them so and you know Russia invades Ukraine
1:05:20
because of American policy in Eastern Europe post 1989 1990
1:05:25
uh something happens in the Middle East because of American policy and I think it’s a very blinkered and parochial view
1:05:33
of things because my experience in countries around the world is that
1:05:39
there’s a heck of a lot going on that America is frankly not really involved in well that that’s certainly a straw
1:05:46
man of my position i am not what I’m saying no no no but what I’m saying is it is very in fact it’s partly since you
1:05:52
very kindly raised the issue Joe your book it’s one of the things democracies and death cults it’s it’s one of the
1:05:58
things I find very interesting about this with democracies which is that it’s one of the things in the nature of a liberal democracy that because we have
1:06:06
the right to air our opinion because we have the right to criticize our government and much more we end up doing
1:06:15
all of that and there is a misapprehension people can come to I don’t know if you do but they can come
1:06:21
to which is effectively we are the only force that causes action in the world and there’s a reason for that which is
1:06:27
We have thank God a say in how liberal democracies are run and how we’re governed and we can chew over all of the
1:06:35
disagreements that we have but when a liberal democracy comes
1:06:40
against a kind of rock like a death cult a totalitarian regime a
1:06:47
dictatorship like Russia or the Iranian revolutionary government there’s always
1:06:54
this temptation to say to to to focus our attention on our own side because we
1:06:59
can’t do a darn thing about the other one it’s a version of you know the great late senator Daniel Patrick Mohan said
1:07:07
when he was ambassador to the UN he had this great rule uh sort of known among
1:07:12
those who want to know about it as Mohan’s rule which is he said if you sit at the UN or the UN human rights council
1:07:17
or any of these bodies you would come away with the belief that the most abused people with the fewest rights in
1:07:24
the world live in America and other western liberal societies
1:07:30
and he came because we’re the ones that talk about it you know if there’s one incident of racism in America the whole
1:07:37
world knows about it everyone reads it is there’ll be protests everywhere if there’s one incident of racism in North
1:07:44
Korea it’s not going to make any news and then you have on top of that the fact that uh the the the way in which
1:07:52
desperatisms and death cults and dictatorships work the information just doesn’t come out and Moy has rule ended
1:07:58
up being that the uh it’s an interesting point he said he said uh that his rule
1:08:04
by the end of his time at the UN was that the number of human rights violations that occur in a country
1:08:09
happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of claims of human right
1:08:15
violations because only only the countries which care about it and which such things can be aired in are ever
1:08:21
going to get it out but the the the point of Moyahan’s law and the warning of it is be careful not to come away
1:08:29
with the mistaken idea that the freest and most liberal societies are the worst
1:08:35
and I think there’s a version of Moyahan’s law that applies whether it’s to the Middle East to Ukraine and Russia
1:08:42
which is we come away with this people may come away with the impression that
1:08:48
the bad things in the world effectively all come from here and there is quite a
1:08:54
lot to be said for some of that but there’s not everything to be said and much of the world runs on a dynamic and
1:09:00
a dynamo which you can’t do a darn thing about other than to try to understand it
1:09:06
yeah okay so I I mean again I certainly there there there is truth to
1:09:12
a lot of that and I think that is a fascinating kind of uh dynamic where there is something about kind of like you know I noticed this even um just
1:09:19
with my own kids like it’s like and people when you have kids and you raise them really you know like you’re really
1:09:24
sweet to them and you don’t hit them and you give them a good life small things end up becoming huge in like things in
1:09:30
their mind like someone pushed me at the playground and it’s like whoa this is whereas like the way I grew up that
1:09:35
would have just been kind of like a a non-event but anyway I think it would be
1:09:40
certainly incorrect to assume that um everything that happens bad in the world is somehow a consequence of US meddling
1:09:48
i also think that there’s people on the other side here maybe the people who are more uh neoconleaning more war uh hockey
1:09:55
leaning um they have a tendency to only focus on the bad things that everybody
1:10:00
else does and act like our uh policies have no impact on this ridiculous right
1:10:05
so very specifically you know with the uh Russian invasion of Ukraine and I’ll just get two like bullet points on this
1:10:12
and there’s we could talk about a lot of this but look number one in in 2008 as as you well know right the Joe Biden CIA
1:10:20
director who was the CIA director for the entire war up until Donald Trump just came back in he wrote the net means
1:10:26
net memo to Condisa Rice a private cable to the then secretary of state when he was ambassador to Russia to let her know
1:10:33
that this flirting with bringing Ukraine Ukraine into NATO is going to end up in a war and by the way the Russians don’t
1:10:40
want to do it his words exactly if you keep pushing with this the Russians are going to have they are going to have to
1:10:46
make a decision that they don’t want to make which is whether they intervene or not and number two uh Straw Strottenberg
1:10:52
uh if I might be butchering that again but the the head of NATO he he himself said that Vladimir Putin sent him a
1:10:59
draft treaty in late 2021 and said “Look if you just put into writing that you
1:11:06
will not bring Ukraine into NATO I won’t invade.” Now if you want to argue that
1:11:11
um this this pre you I admire your appeal to authority to the head of the CIA i
1:11:18
just Well how is that an appeal to authority you you you regard the the the view of
1:11:23
the CIA director on that occasion as being useful for your argument but secondly secondly there’s an
1:11:31
oddity to believing what Vladimir Putin says no wait hold on you didn’t let me
1:11:36
finish my point so so don’t believe what he says i I’m not going to pretend to read his heart and mind or something like that but at the very least you
1:11:43
handed him the giant excuse in order to do it i mean maybe he doesn’t really believe it but this is his argument to
1:11:49
his own people and to the world that it’s like look and and we put him in a position if you know if you hate
1:11:55
Vladimir Putin he’s such a terrible guy well we put him in this position where he gets to now very plausibly say to the
1:12:01
international community in the same way that if the Soviet Union had survived and a and the United States had he
1:12:08
doesn’t very plausibly have the opportunity to do that he invaded Ukraine because he wanted to annex the
1:12:13
whole country because he was trying to pretend that the whole place had been run by Nazis well I mean okay the whole
1:12:18
place wasn’t run by Nazis there certain certainly were Nazis this is what he told the Russian people um oh he also
1:12:25
brought up listen when he you can lie an awful lot when you’re a dictator and you have the ability not just to run all of
1:12:31
the media but to kill your political opponents i mean you can do an awful lot sure
1:12:36
um none of none of this you know I just got back from Ukraine again the other
1:12:42
week and it’s so weird i I saw the the Oval Office meeting as it happened from
1:12:47
a trench in the front line between the Russian and Ukrainian positions in the east of the country and it was so weird
1:12:53
seeing the way in which this country’s territory was being talked about by
1:13:00
outsiders and particularly by America
1:13:06
because there’s there’s so many oddities about it but the people who are fighting
1:13:11
there the soldiers on the front lines like the ones I was with they’re not fighting against Putin
1:13:19
forces because of NATO expansion or anything they’re they’re fighting because
1:13:25
he lied to his own army he lied to his own people he lies to the world and he
1:13:30
decided he wanted to gobble up Ukraine because he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union and as a result these young
1:13:38
men are in dugouts in the middle of winter um fighting Russian soldiers
1:13:43
because the Ukrainians homes are 30 kilometers behind them and I just I
1:13:50
think among much else that’s stuff that cannot be forgotten about none of this is simply about NATO expansion or this
1:13:57
or that it’s about a country whose people are suffering in their third year of war and it’s almost total war it’s
1:14:07
total war as we’ve got in the modern age and um but that’s not but that’s not I’m
1:14:14
not disagreeing with any of that i’m not saying the Ukrainian people were fighting because they wanted to keep their country people don’t very much
1:14:19
like being invaded by foreign countries i I understand that completely and I’ve also always said throughout this whole
1:14:25
thing that is their right they have a right to do that we as Americans have a right to you know have an opinion on
1:14:30
whether our government ought to be funding and arming the thing but all I’m saying is that it’s I’m not making an appeal to authority here i’m just saying
1:14:37
that you have the the top people at the in the Russian government all unanimously saying like this is our red
1:14:44
line you keep flirting with NATO expansion into Ukraine and then you have all the people at the top of NATO and at
1:14:50
the top of the US government admitting it too and going like yeah this is the whole beef so why is it like these two
1:14:56
things aren’t mutually exclusive no they aren’t they aren’t but I mean they weren’t going to expand NATO to Ukraine
1:15:02
well they kept flirting with it and you know this no that the Ukrainians wanted membership and it was very unwise
1:15:08
whenever anyone from the rest of the West even flirted with it didn’t Kla Harris openly say that NATO was going to
1:15:14
join you yeah shortly before Ukraine was going to join NATO yeah I I never saw her as the Kissinger of our era which I
1:15:21
agreed now there’s an there’s some area of agreement douglas can come he’s the
1:15:26
guy for that well obviously that guy’s the future uh but but okay but it is the still the vice president of the United
1:15:33
States of America and it’s listen it’s not just again that’s not why Putin invaded but you can he invaded because
1:15:39
he because of the thing he’s dreamt of since he falling down of the Soviet Union is you know how he dreams we know
1:15:45
a lot from what he said and what he’s done since the fall of the Soviet Union
1:15:50
and his statements certainly very early on in his presence right but if he does have a red line and you violate that red
1:15:56
line is that because he’s following his dreams or it’s because He’s his dream is as is said many times is the
1:16:02
reconstitution of the Soviet Union’s territory i don’t think that’s exactly what he’s said he’s he’s alluded many
1:16:08
times to like how great the Soviet Union was and what a tragedy it is that it it collapsed and things like that but
1:16:15
regardless something we can agree is a fiction on his part i mean oh I think
1:16:20
the Soviet Union collapsing is one of the greatest things that’s ever happened in the history of the world one of the most evil regimes if not the most evil
1:16:27
the result of American action uh sure there’s there were a lot of factors in there but throw in some pro-American
1:16:33
views i want I will certainly concede that um uh US uh luring them into
1:16:40
Afghanistan uh was played a huge role in weakening the Soviet Union it came with the minor little price tag of 911 but
1:16:47
okay that’s uh but you know that’s the Soviet Union did not fall just because of Afghanistan no I didn’t say I said it
1:16:53
played a role i didn’t say it was just because of Afghanistan of European troops also because communism as an economic model
1:16:59
just doesn’t work and it was a disaster and it was destined to collapse like all centrally planned totally socialist
1:17:05
economies are are destined to for bad results i don’t like the word destined in that because I mean in my experience
1:17:10
things that don’t work can go on an awfully long time well look the Soviet Union went on an awfully long time i mean it was I thought when I went to
1:17:16
North Korea some years ago that couldn’t go on for much longer and on it goes yeah no okay so fair point there but
1:17:22
certainly it’s going to be you know it’s it’s a much different uh dynamic for a
1:17:27
communist uh country like North Korea who is a relatively small and um not
1:17:33
expansionist whereas the Soviet Union was trying to maintain an empire which is a much tougher thing to do look the
1:17:39
United States of America is going broke trying to do it so it was pretty tough for them to do all I’m saying here is
1:17:44
that like if you I if the dynamic again it’s not just that like first off in
1:17:50
2008 at the Bucharest summit we announced we were doing it and we didn’t give them a map plan but we announced
1:17:55
they are coming into NATO over and over not just uh um the Camala Harris comment
1:18:01
over and over and over again through the years people at the highest level of the US government asserted that this is going to happen that it’s a matter of
1:18:07
time and then the 2014 this was a major major uh um provocation toward the
1:18:14
Russians that we backed this street protest against the democratically elected government there and and that’s
1:18:20
that’s again it’s tricky because the Maidan uh protests were genuine students
1:18:26
in the center of the city who were uprising against a corrupt government i’m not even arguing that Ukraine’s a
1:18:32
correct you know and that again it’s like it’s the people of Ukraine like
1:18:38
other countries I mean they do have agency beyond what Washington Yeah i’m not claiming any of those people don’t
1:18:43
have agency i’m just claiming that Washington poured hundred million dollars into the thing and sent our politicians over there our politicians
1:18:50
openly saying “We’re on your side you have the backing of America.” Look but
1:18:55
historically historically you know America does like to be has liked to be on the side of people who desire freedom
1:19:01
over autocracy yeah when it’s convenient not so much when it’s not well not in
1:19:06
Saudi Arabia not in Egypt i’m glad you joined me in my dislike of the House of S okay fine but no but I’m but look it
1:19:13
does attack worried from him in that yeah but it does attack your central point there that it’s like no I’m sorry like see this is my be my beef isn’t
1:19:20
ever with talking about the corruption or the evil things that other other governments do what I don’t like is this
1:19:26
whitewashing over our own corruption and the evil things that are the idea that America we we have a history of just
1:19:31
standing with the people because we love democracy so much no we use that as an excuse when we think it’s in our
1:19:37
strategic advantage we will overthrow democratically elected governments with no problem which by the way uh
1:19:42
Yanukovich was democratically elected with elections verified by the EU but I’m not denying any of those kids had
1:19:48
agency and I’m sure a lot of them were protesting against their own corrupt government but the point is that like look imagine on uh I think it Jeffrey
1:19:56
Sachs came up with this isn’t mine but imagine on January 6th if like uh
1:20:02
Chinese politicians were coming over and handing out sandwiches to the the
1:20:08
rioters and saying “We have your back we have I mean listen we would lose our collective minds if another country came
1:20:14
in and did something like that.” Okay and but I mean we lost our collective minds about Vladimir Putin installing
1:20:20
Donald Trump and it was all just completely made up it wasn’t even a real thing but so to think okay we did lose
1:20:26
our minds on that a certain subset of the main lost their minds wasn’t even a
1:20:31
subset for me being mainet for for me being the bisexual libertarian here you have uh you have
1:20:37
corrected me on my collectivism several times here and you are right yes we didn’t lose our mind i am speak but others many other people here did but
1:20:44
you look I mean you’re pouring $100 million into a street protest against a
1:20:51
democratically elected uh president of Ukraine and the whole issue is over essentially whether he’s going to tilt
1:20:57
toward an economic deal with Europe or tilt toward an economic deal with Vladimir Putin i mean Douglas like if
1:21:03
anyone did that in our region of the world we would DC would overthrow that
1:21:09
government invade in a moment if China poured $100 million into Mexican
1:21:15
protests and was able to overthrow the democratically elected government what do you think DC would change the uh
1:21:21
subject maybe but um Qatar pours hundreds of millions of
1:21:26
dollars into this country billions indeed and tries to change policy in this country and uh nobody’s trying to
1:21:32
overthrow Qatar nobody’s trying to throw the overthrow the Amir or his family and they are they’ve been poisoning American
1:21:39
universities American institutions buying up American politicians they pour billions into this country i think I
1:21:45
just sent you something about that this morning yes i mean well okay but that is a little bit different than overthrowing
1:21:50
our neighbor government and trying to you’re saying that like we’d lose our
1:21:55
mind if anyone tried to interfere here there are lots of people saying and the most obvious one is kata uh which which
1:22:03
has poured money into DC and into elite institutions and universities in this
1:22:08
country and I don’t find from one week to the next anyone who’s particularly riled up about it well so they’ve been I
1:22:16
mean so they’re pouring money into DC uh and so do you think that they are
1:22:21
influencing US policy through doing that i think they’re trying to yeah maybe maybe they are trying to
1:22:27
they’re definitely succeeding with the universities and others maybe for sure they should try with the the political
1:22:32
class more if they’re trying to turn us anti-Israel or something like that cuz both major parties in this country will
1:22:38
fund and and unconditionally support Israel no matter what so I mean I don’t know no matter what but I mean uh Kata
1:22:45
is is definitely trying to influence things their way as other countries are uh I mean I just I cite it as an example
1:22:51
of something that’s very interesting which is an attempt to interfere in American public life which gets almost
1:22:56
no attention and uh um indeed the uh the governments whether Democrat or
1:23:03
Republican still seem to adore the Qataris uh even as they uh they act as one of
1:23:10
the backers of terrorist groups across the Middle East and elsewhere and I I I cannot understand why it doesn’t get
1:23:16
more attention well according to the former uh defense minister of Israel they uh they were begging uh cutter to
1:23:22
pour that money into Hamas no that’s not what happened well that’s what he said
1:23:28
his words begging um the uh you you’re referring to the funding of Hamas in the
1:23:33
2010s yes yeah no the the Qataris poured the money in and the question on the
1:23:40
Israeli side was what you allowed to do with funds that were going into Gaza and they the Israelis allowed the funds to
1:23:46
go from Katar to I think a little bit more than that i think when the funds dried up uh Netanyahu sent the head of
1:23:51
the MSAD in there to beg him to keep the funds going again I’m not sure it’s like quoting the head of the CIA quoting the
1:23:58
head of the Mossad so maybe but that’s not the that’s not the evidence of the
1:24:03
last 18 years i mean it’s you can Okay so I I mean I guess I think I’m allowed
1:24:08
to quote powerful people when they admit what they’re doing i mean it’s kind of No I know but again I mean it’s just
1:24:14
it’s just an interesting thing because again it’s a discipline about this which is do I only quote powerful people when
1:24:21
they say the odd thing that I agree with or do I simultaneously distrust all
1:24:26
powerful people it’s just an interesting rhetorical Well no i mean I think that
1:24:32
obviously like I I don’t blindly trust any uh anyone in the political class or
1:24:37
the media class uh for that matter either but when they admit things that are like very against their interest to
1:24:44
admit uh and kind of give away the whole game that now they’re pretending doesn’t matter are you sure CIA or must add that
1:24:51
it isn’t just if they say something that you happen to want to be the case well this is kind of like saying if I were to
1:24:56
end on trial and I were to like I’m the prosecution and I’d enter into evidence a written confession by the defendant
1:25:03
and you go “Well are you only entering this in because this kind of goes along with your case?” Like I I suppose we’re
1:25:08
all guilty of having these these incentives to some degree but I do think it’s a relevant detail that the former
1:25:14
defense secretary admitted this and by the way Netanyahu’s admitted this ahoud Barack has admitted this they admitted
1:25:19
that they allowed funds to go from Katar to Hamas because Hamas was in the Gaza for the reason of preventing the
1:25:25
establishment of a Palestinian state no that was not the case that is what Netanyahu said that is what Ahoud Barack
1:25:31
said it’s all up and down one uh uh claim there’s one recording of Netanyahu
1:25:37
saying something along those lines but look I mean we should get on we should get on to it i could read you the quotes
1:25:43
from Ahood Barack as well all of them have talked about it the the situation
1:25:48
let’s let’s get on to it uh the situation there and the war of the last 18 months now more than 18
1:25:56
months in the Middle East uh is a result not of that but of Hamas deciding to
1:26:03
start another war with Israel and trying to annihilate their neighbor and but you don’t think if they if they were being
1:26:08
propped up by Israel that has nothing to do with being propped up by Israel the reason why Hamas were in power as you
1:26:15
know much much against the interests of the Israelis was that they were voted
1:26:21
into power after the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in ‘05 condisa Rice and other
1:26:27
American and other American states folk uh insisted that the Palestinians should
1:26:32
have elections straight after the Israeli withdrawal they had elections uh
1:26:38
perhaps unwisely and Hamas won and then didn’t have another election again and
1:26:43
ruled the Gaza for 18 years until they finally got the great fruit of their labors on the 7th of October 2023 and um
1:26:53
uh went around southern Israel massacring everyone and they could including young people at a dance party
1:27:00
and then caused in turn uh the destruction of the place that they were
1:27:05
meant to be governing it’s uh the whole thing is a great tragedy and all of it
1:27:12
is at the feet of Hamz um I certainly agree with you that it’s a it’s a great
1:27:18
tragedy um and I do you know I think it’s
1:27:23
it’s you know when you accuse me of using the quotes that kind of you know back up what I believe I think it’s very
1:27:30
convenient here to remove all responsibility from the Israelis like even if I’m telling you that you have these quotes I mean I’m again I’m not
1:27:37
talking about fringe fig figures uh figures we we could read through the list of people who have admitted what
1:27:42
the strategy was with uh them funding Hamas and propping him up but hold on let me just say so if you’re going to tell me Israel props up this this
1:27:50
terrorist organization in order to kill the peace process in order to make sure that the international community gives
1:27:56
them a no one By the way uh Smootrich right the the finance minister okay he’s
1:28:01
on record he’s on record saying “Look Hamas is an asset the Palestinian
1:28:06
Authority they’re the liability hamas is an asset because we then we can tell the international community well look what
1:28:12
do you want us to do there’s a terrorist organization here we can’t do business with them.” And and then even audac
1:28:17
admitted like this was also so that liberal uh um Israelis you know if it was the Palestinian Authority they’d be
1:28:23
like “Hey we should make a deal with them but since it’s Hamas they can’t.” Okay so if Israel props up this terrorist organization and then as a
1:28:29
response to them committing a horrific act of terrorism decides to level the entire place and just slaughter women
1:28:36
and children in large numbers decided to do that and it didn’t do that but yeah it didn’t level the place gaz is not
1:28:42
hasn’t been destroyed pretty leveled by now yeah but it did not go in to level the place like that no okay they went in
1:28:47
and leveled the place but that wasn’t their intention let’s just let’s just go back to the beginning if we can sure
1:28:53
because it’s important um since you’re interested in the question of the Palestinian state the
1:28:59
Palestinians were given another state in 2005 when every single Jew was removed
1:29:04
from the Gaza by the IDF and when even the graves of Israelis in Gaza were dug
1:29:10
up and taken into the rest of Israel the the of all of the whatifs of
1:29:17
Palestinian Arab history the era since 2005 should be one of the great whatifs
1:29:24
which is what if the American taxpayers money that was poured into Gaza the
1:29:30
European Union taxpayer money that was poured into Gaza had been used by a
1:29:35
government in Gaza to build a state that lived side by side with their Israeli
1:29:41
neighbors and flourished and it’s not like the money wasn’t there it’s not like there wasn’t the
1:29:47
international will uh Ishmael Haneir and the other leaders of Hamas used that
1:29:53
money as you know to make themselves billionaires and to buy themselves and their kids condos in Qatar and to live
1:30:01
extremely well whilst withholding the money from the Palestinian people whilst
1:30:07
building their network of tunnels throughout Gaza and building an infrastructure of terror and that’s what
1:30:13
they did with 18 years in Gaza and of all of the whatifs just
1:30:20
consider that that one was in their hands the Israelis did not make them
1:30:26
vote in Hamas the Israelis would not want a terrorist entity that wants to
1:30:32
annihilate the state of Israel that is there on their doorstep constantly
1:30:38
firing rockets starting wars every few years that why would the Israelis want a group
1:30:45
there that means that if you’re living in towns like Stat or Ashkon or Ashdod
1:30:50
your children grow up all the time knowing that they might have to go to the bomb shelters and that’s during
1:30:56
peace time well according to them the reason they want it there is because then it kills the peace process and then
1:31:02
you have a a no uh no one to negotiate with certificate and that then you can
1:31:07
keep your eyes on building up settlements in the West Bank there are as now many people to negotiate with
1:31:14
mahmud Abbaz may be I don’t know as the joke goes currently in something like his 20th year of his first four-year
1:31:19
term as head of the Palestinian Authority but Mahmud Abbas is there in Ramla the compounds of the Palestinian
1:31:26
Authority which I’ve been to many times in Ramallah are there they run their portions of the West Bank they could be
1:31:34
there to negotiate with at any moment the Israelis have said they want to negotiate with them at any moment and
1:31:40
come to the deal in fact Netanyahu you’re so fond of quoting said again before this war began that he would come
1:31:46
to the table with no um uh red lines to
1:31:51
begin with to start another negotiation with the Palestinian Authority but let’s
1:31:57
just get back to this thing because this is so crucial i am so startled by the post October the 7th
1:32:05
world not just in Israel and Gaza and everywhere where I’ve spent most of the
1:32:10
last 18 months but in what’s happening here in the United States of America it
1:32:15
blows my mind much of the response here and the desire to leap over the first
1:32:25
victims of this and go on to all of the proximate causes theoretical causes
1:32:31
whatifs and so on i was as I described in the opening of this book I was in New York on the 7th
1:32:37
of October and I I woke up and started seeing what was happening and discovered that later that
1:32:43
day already there were attempts there were um plans to organize a protest in Times Square and what was the protest in
1:32:50
Times Square massive protest in support of Hamas as the massacre was still going
1:32:56
on and one of the things I just cannot get out of my head is why in the last 18
1:33:02
months when Hamas did what they did have so many people made excuses for them or
1:33:09
decided to side with them or deny their actions or excuse their actions why do
1:33:14
you think that is several very very big things um one is
1:33:22
um I think people wanted to ignore the nature of the atrocity because it was so
1:33:27
appalling that it went against much of their narrative um I was at a reunion of one
1:33:34
of the survivors of the Nova Party on one occasion and he said to me “What would you uh do if this had happened in
1:33:40
your country?” And I thought “Well it hasn’t happened at this scale but
1:33:45
something like it has happened.” the Ariana Grande arena bombing in Manchester in
1:33:52
2017 the Batclan massacre in Paris in 2015 the Pulse nightclub shooting in
1:33:58
2015 but all of these occasions when young people were murdered for being at a pop concert or a
1:34:05
nightclub the world’s attention the world’s empathy the world’s sympathy went to the victims
1:34:12
only in the case of the young Israelis dancing in the early hours of the morning on October the 7th
1:34:18
2023 do the victims become victimized again and not believed the
1:34:25
era we lived through in the late 2010s was the era of believe all women and of
1:34:31
all the Israeli women who were raped that morning much of the international community does not want to listen to
1:34:36
them at all and certainly doesn’t want to believe them and there are many reasons one at the most fundamental
1:34:44
level is that I think a part of a generation that’s coming up has been
1:34:50
told there is something especially wicked about Israel that there is
1:34:55
something especially wicked about Israel’s existence and its actions and its people and it means that when their
1:35:02
people are burned alive in their homes or raped at a music festival and shot in the head they are uniquely undeserving
1:35:08
of sympathy and I think that people have been indoctrinated by very bad actors
1:35:14
into this and as a result have excused atrocities or make excuses for them make
1:35:21
excuses for the people who do them i think in addition it plays to the some
1:35:27
of the darkest things of uh the regional mind as well as the international mind
1:35:35
the aims of Hamas the stated aims include the
1:35:40
annihilation of the Jewish people and October the 7th they had their best go at doing that
1:35:47
and the fact that in a in a decision between whether or not you’re on the
1:35:54
side of the people who want to dance and live in peace with their neighbors or whether you’re on the side of the people
1:36:00
who want to rampage through a dance party bar in the early morning macheteing at people i find it amazing
1:36:08
that there are so many people who don’t know which side they’re on but there are a lot of them there are a lot of reasons for that but one of the foremost reasons
1:36:16
is the fact that the state of Israel has been uniquely lie has been uniquely lied
1:36:22
about its history has been uniquely lied about it has been uniquely put under an
1:36:28
international spotlight and then misrepresented in a way which I cannot
1:36:34
think of many other countries in the world that have been treated that way and there are um deep reasons for it and
1:36:42
shallow reasons for it the deep reasons include some of the most ancient bigotries of the human heart and the
1:36:48
shallow reasons are people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking
1:36:53
about um okay i think that there’s Look I I’m not going to
1:37:00
speak for what every person out there believes i I don’t exactly agree with
1:37:06
like the characterization that there was no outpouring of like feeling after October 7th and certainly like everybody
1:37:13
I know was just like oh my god this is like a horrific atrocity and like what the an unprecedented terrorist attack
1:37:20
from Hamas the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history um against Israelis and
1:37:27
it it was horrible i think what a lot of there I’m not I’m not arguing that there
1:37:32
are no people who are actually pro- Hamas or there are no people who are actually like hate Jews or something like that i do think that what happens
1:37:39
is that a lot of people get put in that category who do not belong there much
1:37:44
like we’ve seen this over the last year and a half where a lot of people you know you have um uh John Pud Horitz
1:37:50
calling Thomas Massie anti-semitic scum because he said we’re dead broke we
1:37:56
can’t afford to fund everybody else’s war here um people have been calling Tucker Carlson uh anti-semitic all over
1:38:02
the place but these are two guys Thomas Massie and Tucker Carlson who have never uttered the words the Jews in their life
1:38:08
like they they’re just not anti-semites at all so there’s a lot of people I think who are when they’re critical of
1:38:14
the Israeli government’s response to this get lumped in as pro- Hamas i I
1:38:19
will certainly say that’s certainly not my position i think your description of them death cult by the way the same term
1:38:25
that Daryl Cooper uh Daryl Cooper used to describe Hamas I think is an accurate one um and it was horrible but I I think
1:38:32
that the you know I think that your characterization first of all of of that
1:38:37
they gave the Palestinians a state in 2005 is just wrong and I just think that
1:38:43
is not at all an accurate way to describe the disengagement which we could get into more if you want to but
1:38:48
first of all I would just point out that if the if the two-state solution was achieved um I assume you’re arguing it
1:38:55
was taken away after that you’re not still arguing that the Palestinians have a state or are you saying they have had a state since 2005 they had they were
1:39:02
given a state and the Gaza and when did it when was it taken away well they kind of screwed it up for themselves on the
1:39:08
7th October so you’re saying from 2005 all the way till October 7th there there was a two-state solution it had been
1:39:14
achieved well it was another state yeah okay but that would be two states then no it was another state it was different
1:39:19
from the PA okay right but I’m saying a Palestinian state okay so what’s
1:39:25
interesting about that is that this is not how like this is not how any of the leaders really describe it i mean when
1:39:32
Netanyahu himself is not claiming that there they had already achieved a two-state solution why are you talking about this what happened in 2005 in the
1:39:39
disengagement was that essentially Israel went from occupying the place to surrounding the place and they’ve had it
1:39:46
under a brutal blockade um since 2007 and yes you were right why do you think
1:39:51
why why do you I don’t agree the blockade was brutal by any means you really you don’t think the blockade of
1:39:56
Gaza was brutal i mean I how brutal do you think the Egyptians are pretty
1:40:01
brutal yeah they laid allowed stuff in
1:40:07
okay i mean since some stuff has gotten in yes that’s true since No more than some stuff more than some stuff okay
1:40:13
some from I’ll say this right because there’s been different levels of blockade even before 2007 going back I
1:40:19
know in 1996 they had like a a pretty strong blockade that year according to
1:40:24
the World Bank it contracted 40% of the GDP of Gaza so just for uh for for
1:40:32
reference the Great Depression we was a 30% contraction this was in 1996 for one
1:40:37
year they gave them something worse than our Great Depression that was just one year they from 2007 on there’s been a
1:40:44
blockade of that country you don’t think that’s kept the country poor why do you think there’s a blockade of any kind why
1:40:50
is there a blockade well I mean the the argument from Israel would be No what do you think
1:40:57
i would say okay I think that the disengagement I think Smootrich was correct when he said that I’m sorry I my
1:41:04
my mistake there I think the um which another quote that I’m sure you’re familiar with but uh uh Dove Weissclav
1:41:09
uh who was the senior adviser to Chiron who was the prime minister at the time he essentially said the reason we’re doing the disengagement the reason we’re
1:41:16
doing this is so that we can put the peace process in for Maldahhide that ex this is the reason we’re not answering
1:41:22
my question right-wing Israeli politicians but what do I’m getting there i’m
1:41:27
getting there i’m saying so I think they disengaged in order to kill the peace process i think they put the full blockade around the country for the
1:41:35
reason that they’ve always kind of done it there that yeah they don’t want too much stuff getting in they want to keep them as they put it on a diet and they
1:41:41
don’t want uh rockets to fly into Israel the second one is a kind of important one isn’t it the final one you said it
1:41:47
is um if if uh the Palestinian leadership in Gaza after
1:41:54
2005 had not from the get-go decided to use Gaza as a stockpiling place for
1:42:02
rockets to fire into Israel all of it would be different if they had just
1:42:07
resisted the temptation that so many of us do in our lives to stop keeping RPGs
1:42:12
in our cellars and then Kusha rockets in our children’s bedrooms all of it could have been different if that desire to
1:42:20
live in peace beside your neighbors had superseded the desire to stockpile
1:42:26
rockets it would all be different yeah or if Israel just had occupied them for 60 years it would all be different too i
1:42:32
mean why is it always on them well you believe in self-determination I’m sure
1:42:39
yes i believe in individual rights yeah sure okay individual rights and that includes the right to make bad decisions
1:42:46
yes the Palestinians in Gaza when they voted in Hamas made a very bad decision
1:42:51
yeah of course hang on hang on and in the years after that they made bad
1:42:57
decision after bad decision it was a very bad decision to continually fire
1:43:03
thousands of rockets into Israel it was a very bad decision to use what boats
1:43:09
came in early on and the and and to use the smuggling networks from Egypt not to bring in supplies that you could
1:43:15
actually build a thriving society with but to bring in rockets it was a very bad idea no there was not starvation in
1:43:23
Gaza after 2005 no there was no deficit of goods coming in i’ve been plenty of
1:43:29
time no deficit no there are plenty there are plenty how many Have you been to the crossing points no
1:43:36
when were you last there at all i’ve never been you’ve never been well I’m not Am I not
1:43:43
allowed to talk about it now i’ve never been to Have you ever been to Nazi Germany are you allowed to have feelings about them you can’t time travel but you
1:43:50
can but you can travel okay but so what so what’s the point like I find that lots of people have been there and agree
1:43:55
with me and lots of people have been there and agree with you if you’re going to spend a year and a half talking about about a place you should at least do the
1:44:01
courtesy of visiting it all right i just think this is a non-argument okay
1:44:07
no I think it’s a non-argument but if you’re an ex Well you have to go and touch the ground no I think you have to see I think it’s a good idea to see
1:44:14
stuff particularly if you spend a career talking about something yes i I have a
1:44:19
journalistic rule of trying never to talk about a country even in passing unless I’ve at least been there okay
1:44:25
it’s sort of normal in it’s a normal thing to do you’re talking about Hang on
1:44:30
talking about crossing points and not only have you never been to a crossing point in either Egypt or in Israel but
1:44:36
you’ve never even been to the region okay again I think this is a non-argument i don’t understand no it’s not a non-argument yeah it is it’s not a
1:44:43
non-argument if you’re insisting that you’re an expert of some kind or not
1:44:48
claiming you’re an expert but still talking about it about the provisions going into Gaza or not if you’ve never
1:44:55
seen any of this going on so you’re not allowed to speak about things that you’ve read about you ha you can only
1:45:00
speak about things that you’ve seen with your own eyes you can talk about what you want uhhuh as you’re
1:45:07
proving but that is a different matter from spending an awfully long amount of
1:45:14
time talking about an issue in a region you haven’t even had the courtesy to
1:45:21
visit whilst developing all of these views about it i mean now I slightly get
1:45:28
an idea of where you’re coming from you’ve read about this blockade and so you imagine that that’s
1:45:36
what it is i imagine you’ve read all the people who say that Gaza was a concentration camp and you probably
1:45:42
think that too am I right i mean again literally a
1:45:48
concentration camp it shares a lot of similarities I would think wow well as I
1:45:55
say you can’t time travel back to the era let’s go back to the book to the
1:46:00
Middle East and actually visit okay the world the World Bank said in 1996 for the one year is quoting the World Bank i
1:46:07
love it it doesn’t mean anything this is a non-argument yes I’m saying the World Bank did their own analysis of this and
1:46:13
they said that it was a 40% your own analysis hold on you got to stop interrupting and let him finish the
1:46:19
sentences the World Bank said that 40% drop in the GDP of one year due to the
1:46:26
blockade and there’s been a blockade from 2007 on so are you saying that there this hasn’t had an economic effect
1:46:31
is that the argument no I’m of course it’ll have an economic effect so you’re saying you have to be on the ground and
1:46:36
do an audit of the blockade in order to be able to combat i think you should at least know what it is what the territory is what the what the situation is in the
1:46:43
region yes absolutely and the only way to do that is to be there in person i think that’s the best way it’s not the only way but it’s the best way for sure
1:46:50
for sure if you have never seen the countries in question you’ve never spoken to the people in question you’ve
1:46:57
never interviewed anyone you’ve never gone around you’ve never seen the terrain and so on and you’ve used
1:47:03
Wikipedia i’m sorry no that’s not the same thing okay well I’ve not just used Wikipedia but didn’t you write a big
1:47:10
piece when the war in Ukraine first came out titled something like “I’ve been to Ukraine and they can win they can repel
1:47:16
the Russians.” So you could go there and still get it wrong right no I was with the Ukrainian armed forces in 2022 when
1:47:22
they were retaking territory from the Russians right the last time they had any advances yeah yeah i said I can see
1:47:28
how they can win which would be advances like that yeah you said if we just fund them or if we just arm them that they can then said that the Ukrainian army
1:47:35
was making great successes which it was when I was with them in the fall of Listen there were lots of people who
1:47:40
went to Iraq and said we’ll be greeted as liberators and it’ll be paid for in oil and democracy will spread through the region so I I don’t know either take
1:47:47
on the arguments or don’t but I don’t think I say but your argument is incorrect okay fine well then then
1:47:52
present a counterargument to it but to just tell me I’m not allowed to talk about something because I’m not an expert okay fine but you’re not an
1:47:58
expert so you shouldn’t talk about it you haven’t been there yeah I know but you keep playing this game where it’s like the whole opening to this podcast
1:48:05
was like the non-experts talking about this is such a problem now you’re saying cuz I haven’t been there I can’t talk
1:48:10
about it is there a blockade there that’s causing economic uh devastation or not according to the World Bank there
1:48:16
is first of all I don’t think it’s a game i don’t think it’s a game at all me
1:48:22
neither i’m not playing a game okay but this is semantics no but this is important mhm i’ve seen plenty of this
1:48:30
up close i’ve seen plenty of this with my own eyes because I do believe that
1:48:36
one of the things you should do if you’re talking about something is to see it yeah you’ve established that is there
1:48:41
a blockade the blockade that existed to the extent it existed was a blockade to try to make sure that the Israelis and
1:48:47
the Egyptians knew what materials were going in and out of Gaza after the first rocket fires when Hamas in fact before
1:48:54
Hamas was elected the Israelis and the Egyptians the Egyptians didn’t do a very good job of it were meant to be trying
1:49:01
to make sure that the materials that went into Gaza were not materials that could be used to build up the Gazen Hamaz war machine the reason why uh
1:49:10
trucks get searched is not because the Israelis want to search through grain or
1:49:18
flour it’s because they wanted to stop the trucks containing the arms and the
1:49:24
munitions that the guards and Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters were going to use
1:49:29
to fire against Israel and I’m sorry it it just makes the most obvious strategic sense as the great late great Joan
1:49:36
Rivers once said if if uh if uh as an appeal to authority um that one along
1:49:42
the uh that one I like she also said if Michelle Obama is a man yeah I know you should do that i’m saying she got
1:49:47
everything right so continue go ahead but uh as Jen River said if if New York
1:49:52
was being rocketed from New Jersey we would level New Jersey uh I don’t think
1:49:58
you need to level it by the way but you would at least try to make sure that rockets weren’t being imported in larger
1:50:04
quantities into New Jersey of course okay that’s all the Israelis were doing and they haven’t turned away any food or
1:50:09
aid they haven’t turn They haven’t said you can’t bring potato chips in or you can’t have cookies cuz they have dual use isn’t this their whole argument that
1:50:16
there’s anything that could be used to build a rocket has to be excluded anything that could be used to build a
1:50:21
rocket yeah right yeah yeah but that’s a good reason again not to build rockets
1:50:27
and fire them at your neighbors it’s almost like there’s a cost to play it’s almost like there’s a cost to pay for
1:50:33
instead of living in peace with your neighbor constantly trying to wipe them out and that is what Hamas did for 18
1:50:40
years 18 years this is what this is why I think it’s so unbelievable taking agency away from
1:50:47
the Palestinians of Gaza is that the Hamas had 18 years and 18 years is is
1:50:53
obviously the time from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education they literally had the
1:50:59
opportunity to create a generation in Gaza that wanted to live beside their Israeli neighbors and from everything
1:51:06
I’ve seen since the 7th of October in the region and from all of the dead and the survivors and the family members
1:51:12
I’ve seen so many of them particularly the people in the south who were attacked on the morning of the 7th were
1:51:17
literally people who dreamed of living in peace with their Palestinian neighbors they were people like Vivian
1:51:23
Silva whose body wasn’t identified for months because there wasn’t enough of her charred remains left to even extract
1:51:29
DNA from she spent every weekend like so many people in the communities in the south of Israel every weekend driving
1:51:36
children with the most rare uh um medical conditions that couldn’t be treated in one of the Hamas run
1:51:42
hospitals in Gaza into very specialist units inside Israel and she spent every
1:51:48
weekend doing that and working with Bet Salem and all of these radical left uh uh Israeli groups and it didn’t matter a
1:51:54
bit when Hamas came in because they burnt her in her own home anyway my point is in all of the counterfactuals
1:52:00
of this conflict the most important one is what could have happened if instead
1:52:07
of educating a generation into wanting to annihilate their neighbors hermes in
1:52:12
power had spent 18 years building up a state teaching peace
1:52:19
creating coexistence with their neighbors you think any of the people on the kibbutsim in the south or the young
1:52:26
people dancing at the Nova party weren’t dreaming of the day that the Palestinian
1:52:31
uh government in Gaza would have created those conditions for them to live beside as well of course mhm anybody’s argument
1:52:39
yeah no right everybody’s against Nobody’s argument Douglas it’s just I
1:52:45
mean it’s not what I’m saying look I I’ll say this again because you bring up the point about uh agency again and I I
1:52:51
hear this a lot as a counter much like I said in Ukraine it’s not denying anybody
1:52:56
agency i’m not saying that believe me if I was in control of how people acted I
1:53:03
would certainly there are this there Palestinians could have handled things much better and there are
1:53:10
different points where we probably all would agree that we wish they had done it this way and not this way and I think
1:53:15
that um embracing for those Palestinians who embrace terrorism which from you
1:53:21
know which pretty early on I mean Israel and Palestine have been at war since the existence of Israel really and I know
1:53:27
it’s convenient to like kind of pretend October 7th was like the first thing but actually there’s a long history here i’m
1:53:33
not denying any of them agency the problem is that I see it as like you only seem to focus on the agency of one
1:53:39
side and then you know if you want to talk about counterfactuals I think the most interesting counterfactual well
1:53:44
maybe I’ll give you two number one uh would be Heim Whitesman who was essentially supposed to be the David
1:53:50
Bengorian like he was in line as like the number one ranking Zionist uh this is pre the creation of the state of
1:53:56
Israel who urged all of the the Zionist militias to not embrace terrorism and he
1:54:01
ended up losing that battle ultimately in many ways this is how terrorism was introduced he was the first president of
1:54:06
the state David Bengorian was I think he yes um and he he basically ended up
1:54:12
losing his position to David Bengorian because they were just wanted to be more hardcore and embra by the way the uh you
1:54:19
know the the Urggon and the Lehi and the Hogana they openly embraced terrorism to
1:54:24
drive out an occupying force this is literally the story of the creation of the state of Israel the Palestinians
1:54:30
fell into a terrible tragic uh uh mistake early on and I’m saying listen I
1:54:37
reject terrorism as we all should just cuz killing innocent people is wrong i’d like to get to that a little bit more in
1:54:42
a second because it’s interesting that we haven’t really gotten into the what I think is a great humanitarian crisis
1:54:47
here um but they were following I think in some ways they were very influenced by the uh Algerian model that they were
1:54:55
like hey look we could em listen there’s a lot of groups whether it’s um which Algerian model well the driving the
1:55:00
French out um the first Algerian war yes and right and but look I mean there’s a
1:55:06
lot of these uh scenarios where we we look back at Nelson Mandela for example you know Nelson Mandela was not
1:55:11
imprisoned because he was you know uh making picket signs I mean there there have been people who have embraced
1:55:18
violence as a means to achieve a policy end including the early Zionist settlers
1:55:23
including the Israeli government including the US government and lots of governments around the world the tragic
1:55:28
tragic mistake in terms of political outcome from the Palestinians is that they really just underestimated the fact
1:55:35
that these Jews had no home to go to this was their home and you could drive out the French from Algeria because they
1:55:42
go “Screw it we’re going back home to France.” the Jews had been so persecuted in Eastern Europe that there was no home
1:55:47
to go and of course then after World War II they were here to stay and so it’s of course it’s been a tragedy and of course
1:55:53
a lot of Palestinian actions I wish would be different i wish Hamas didn’t exist it should be pointed out by the
1:55:58
way that in 2005 you did mention that it was really part of the Bush administration’s exporting democracy
1:56:04
around the world that put pressure on them to have these elections it should also be mentioned that Hamas did not win a majority in one single precinct they
1:56:11
won pluralities all around so just saying when we’re bringing up this election uh half the population of Gaza
1:56:18
today is under the age of 18 they were toddlers if they were alive in 2005 of the other half that maybe maybe half of
1:56:25
them voted in these elections there it was never a majority that supported Hamas they they eaked out a victory and
1:56:32
then of course there was an attempted coup uh after that and that’s when Hamas seized complete uh control the coup
1:56:39
failed regardless of any of that I agree with you that like yeah the
1:56:44
Palestinians have agency and I wish some of them had made better decisions now many of them have made better decisions
1:56:50
and it’s still resulted in nothing better happening for them and their people and so I do find it kind of hard
1:56:56
to like lecture a group of people who are going through so much like the level of human suffering that’s being
1:57:02
inflicted on the in people of Gaza right now cannot be overstated and so you know to lecture them about how you’re
1:57:08
supposed to handle that exactly but I will say man I think there’s kind of this
1:57:15
selective empathy that you have here like I agree with you you know talk about these these teenagers being
1:57:21
slaughtered at a music festival on October 7th it’s like my god like I have little kids i can’t like imagine the
1:57:27
nightmare of this happening to somebody’s children but at the same time we’re not having this conversation on
1:57:32
October 9th or in November or December of 2023 we’re having it in 2025 where
1:57:39
the the tragedy that’s been inflicted on Gaza is orders of magnitudes greater
1:57:44
than October 7th there are just every day people are inundated with images of just dead women and children this is
1:57:51
like one of the most brutal wars and by several metrics that really you know
1:57:57
like personally matter to me like the number of dead kids i think that’s a pretty good one it’s more children have
1:58:03
died than in any recent war i mean this is like it does I do think there’s almost um like a fundamental framing
1:58:10
bias that you get into when people have these these debates and I’ve had several of them as you have also but it seems to
1:58:17
me that there’s almost an implicit um difference in the value that you
1:58:22
place on Israeli life versus the value that we place on Palestinians life and to even like we’ve gone this far into
1:58:29
the conversation and haven’t even talked about the fact that like dude Israel has feel however you feel if you want to
1:58:35
argue I haven’t been there stuff does get through the blockade okay fine this is a captive people you know that Israel
1:58:41
has dominated since at least 1967 many of them are there because of
1:58:47
the creation of the state of Israel who used to live in what is now called Israel and they are just g I mean the
1:58:53
amount of human suffering that’s being inflicted on them when even as you kind of acknowledged with the George W Bush
1:58:59
expo exporting democracy Hamas in many ways was forced on these people um in
1:59:04
fact we saw protest against Hamas just recently so I don’t know I mean that to me seems to be the greatest human
1:59:10
tragedy and I think much more so than you can characterize it as people being pro- Hamas or people being anti-semitic
1:59:16
but I actually think that the mass movement around the world of people who oppose this war has been that people
1:59:22
feel really awful about all these babies and and who who are being slaughtered
1:59:27
okay quite a few things first of all just let’s just get one term correct
1:59:32
because you said uh you do think it’s a concentration camp said it shares many
1:59:38
you know right and you also say that there’s a disproportionately heavy youth
1:59:43
population in Gaza yes do you think that’s not accurate i
1:59:49
think the second one is accurate right but it’s a very strange thing to say
1:59:54
that there’s a population boom in a concentration camp in Avitz in the 1940s
1:59:59
there was not a doubling of the population yeah I didn’t say he didn’t say it was a concentration camp he said it shares many of the characters Avitz
2:00:07
was a concentration camp yes it started as a concentration you
2:00:13
didn’t you’ll notice that people were not doubling in size their number
2:00:18
because of the the children they could have in Avit yeah but nobody’s make nobody’s calling it a concentration camp
2:00:24
because it’s the same as Ashit i don’t know but let’s just just just at least tidy up the language a bit either you
2:00:30
think the place is a concentration camp or you think it’s not a concentration camp and I don’t think it can be a concentration camp or any such term is
2:00:37
suitable when you’re talking about a place which you yourself have admitted has a disproportionately young population so that’s the first thing i
2:00:43
don’t think breeding in any way argues again but okay I didn’t call it a concentration camp either you said it
2:00:48
has many of the same but you asked him if it did you asked him if it had any of the characteristics of a concentration camp
2:00:55
yes because he said earlier that it did okay well okay so let me let me be much more precise let me be much more precise
2:01:01
okay so I’m not claiming that it is a concentration camp or that it is akin to Awitz i’m saying that it’s been under
2:01:07
full blockade since 2007 israel rules the seas the heirs they control electricity that goes in they’re not
2:01:13
allowed to have an airport they’re not allowed to have a seapport they don’t have the freedom to leave without permission from the Israeli government
2:01:18
they don’t have the freedom to trade with the world they don’t have a freedom to vote over the government that rules them i don’t know call it whatever you
2:01:25
want to that’s the situation all of which all of which is the result of the election of Hamz none of it’s Israel’s
2:01:31
fault israel is not responsible for one of the babies that have died of the bombs that they are dropping let’s get on to that then because you say it’s one
2:01:38
of the most brutal wars it’s a very brutal war it’s a very brutal war it’s
2:01:43
certainly not even sadly about among the standards of our time by any means the most brutal we don’t need to get into
2:01:49
the rather statistician ugly debate about whether or not you follow the Hamas
2:01:56
uh government in Gaza’s figures for the death counts which is what they which
2:02:02
most of the world’s media rely on and which I don’t think are reliable to the least extent but you don’t need to rely
2:02:07
on that to say that even by the standards of a conflict in neighboring
2:02:13
Syria the highest Hamas death count inside Gaza for the appalling last year
2:02:20
and a half is less than an average year has been for the last decade in Syria
2:02:27
during the civil war so the whole de I mean total far more people died in Syria
2:02:33
i’m not arguing that but you’re saying it’s it’s less than any year i think there were years that were 6 to 800,000
2:02:38
people have been killed in Syria during the civil war there and uh I give it as
2:02:44
an example far too many examples of wars in the region and in the wider world to
2:02:49
go to but I think we get once again back to the issue of of language on this it says one of the most brutal wars is
2:02:56
simply obvious that it’s an appalling war but it is not by any numerical or
2:03:02
other standards the most appalling war of our time it’s a war that Hamz started because they shouldn’t have invaded
2:03:08
their neighbor and they shouldn’t have tried to genocide their neighbor now if the war uh can be prosecuted could be
2:03:16
prosecuted it was always for two reasons always for two reasons the first one as
2:03:21
stated by the unonymity of Israeli politicians and others was to retrieve
2:03:28
the hostages who we also haven’t spoken about but there are still hostages in Gaza held for the last 18 months by
2:03:33
Hamas including young Eden Alexander from New Jersey um if Hamas had not
2:03:39
stolen the hostages and hidden them in their tunnels and hid them in civilian homes this war would have all been
2:03:46
different if they had have given them back and they could give them back tomorrow it would all be different but
2:03:52
they didn’t they decided to do what they did on the 7th and to hold on to the 250
2:03:58
odd hostages as it was at the beginning from the be the second reason that why the war is still being prosecuted is
2:04:04
because of the stated aim to destroy Hamas which is the stated aim of the
2:04:11
Israelis neither of these things is remotely easy okay and just from a point
2:04:16
of humility I think on everyone’s side we should concede none of that is easy
2:04:22
it is not easy to get 250 hostages back when they have been distributed across
2:04:28
the Gaza to civilian homes hidden in tunnels surrounded by munitions and much more hamaz is not an actor
2:04:37
like Denmark its backers don’t behave the way that
2:04:43
our governments do in the west they have a totally different time scale that they
2:04:49
think along they have a totally different scale of values as well the taunts of Hezbollah’s
2:04:57
leadership of Hamas’s leadership of their backers in Tehran are annihilationist to their core
2:05:06
but at any point in the last 18 months the Qataris for instance or the Iranians the Iranian
2:05:13
revolutionary government or the Turkish government or others could have put their pressure on Hamas to return the
2:05:20
hostages who are still being held in captivity and everything would be different
2:05:26
secondly as you know I’m sure you don’t have to have seen this with your own eyes to know it as I’m sure you know the
2:05:32
way in which Hamz built up the structure of the Gaza throughout the 18 years that they had was precisely to flout and use
2:05:40
every law of war against the Israelis every army in a
2:05:47
conflict has certain rules of war that you’re meant to abide by one of the most
2:05:53
obvious is that you are identified as being a combatant not as a civilian
2:06:01
okay another is you don’t put weapons in civilian houses and civilian buildings
2:06:08
you do not fire from houses of worship rockets you do not launch attacks from
2:06:14
hospitals you do not keep detention facilities where you can torture and disappear people inside hospitals and
2:06:21
other medical facilities all of these laws of war are the laws that Hamas
2:06:27
breaks every minute of every day by their actions so if you want to get the
2:06:34
hostages back and if you want to destroy Hamas when you’re fighting against a
2:06:40
force which does not only not follow the rules of war but uses your following of
2:06:47
the rules of the laws of war against you at least concede this is a highly
2:06:54
specific and complex military operation and if you have or anyone else has and I
2:07:01
say this genuinely a better way to get back the
2:07:07
hostages and to destroy Hamas I at any rate am all
2:07:12
ears okay um Okay well there’s there’s a lot there so number one like I I do
2:07:18
agree generally with your point about having some humility in these complex situations but I would also say like do
2:07:24
you not then at any point as you’re like a very well-known public figure who’s supporting this war think about the
2:07:30
level of human suffering that is being inflicted on these innocent people and go like man is there another way maybe
2:07:36
I’m getting this wrong maybe this is the Iraq war all over again you know which you also supported that like maybe that
2:07:41
was a big mistake in fact I don’t need to think about it i’ve seen it i know it
2:07:47
i describe it in my book i describe what I see in Gaza with the Palestinians in
2:07:52
when they’re when they’re moving down the humanitarian corridor okay let me just respond to some of the stuff you say okay so then I guess it’s not really
2:07:59
that much of humility involved in this but there’s two very different goals that are being stated here right like
2:08:05
there’s the retrieving the hostages and then there’s taking out Hamas now that
2:08:10
retrieving the hostages and actually many of the uh the families of hostages who are taken have been some of the only
2:08:16
people really protesting this war in Israel because of course you know if you imagine if you have your family over there and your government is leveling
2:08:23
this place that is not the best path to pursue to make sure you get all the hostages out alive i would say that D uh
2:08:30
it fell apart um but Donald Trump having his envoy Witito go over there and work
2:08:35
out this ceasefire deal that they had for a few weeks they did get uh I believe 30 hostages back during the
2:08:41
phase one of this uh this ceasefire seems to me like that would be the method to pursue to try to get the
2:08:48
hostages back but if you’re trying if you’re talking about eliminating Hamas and I think there’s something kind of interesting that you touched on there i
2:08:54
don’t complete you know I disagree with much of your characterization of it that like Israel are the good guys who always
2:09:00
follow the rules we could kind of get into some of that there’s lots of rules like in that Israel does not follow that
2:09:06
being said yes of course i mean you’re describing guerrilla warfare terrorist organizations that’s right they stated
2:09:14
differently gaza doesn’t have an air force or an army or a navy they’re
2:09:19
they’re just a basically militias running around terrorists who are trying to do everything they can to fight an
2:09:25
asymmetrical war and just like we helped teach Osama bin Laden how to do the Soviets and then Osama bin Laden
2:09:31
successfully did to us the whole game in these asymmetrical wars is to get exactly what Hamas got out of this right
2:09:38
like Osama bin Laden knew that he couldn’t bankrupt the United States of America by taking down the Twin Towers
2:09:44
but he thought he could lure us into a war in Afghanistan that would bankrupt us now it didn’t completely but it you
2:09:50
know came pretty close um that being said uh well I just mean in terms of how much it drained the Treasury it was way
2:09:57
more than could have any terrorist attack could have possibly done that being
2:10:03
said the idea that it like I don’t think morally speaking
2:10:09
when you’re inflicting this level of suffering on a group of people that the calculation should be like well we want
2:10:15
to remove Hamas from power that’s the goal justice for October 7th remove you know there’s lots of governments around
2:10:21
the world that we would and Hamas isn’t exactly a government but there’s there’s lots of regimes around the world that we
2:10:27
would all like to see removed but that doesn’t mean that we would approve of any means by which to get there you know
2:10:33
if you were like “Hey I I think Kim Jong-un’s government should be dissolved.” I’m sure we would all agree
2:10:38
with that but if you were like I’m going to level the place and just like slaughter people in order to do it you
2:10:43
might be like “Okay hold on.” But aside from that this has been acknowledged at
2:10:49
the highest levels of Israeli intelligence and US intelligence that there’s just no way to get rid of Hamas
2:10:55
without it being replaced by more Hamas or Hamas-like group because it’s the basic understanding of this whole
2:11:01
situation right it’s it’s General Mcrist’s insurgent math there there’s still Hamas people Hamas are popping
2:11:08
back up in the areas that Israel’s already leveled and the more innocent people you kill the more radicalized
2:11:15
you’re going to get this population the more these people are going to hate you and join up with the resistance movement
2:11:20
and so I just think that to use the justification that we’re trying to get rid of Hamas and therefore it’s not like
2:11:28
it doesn’t matter how many innocent women and children die in the process of course or there’s no responsibility on
2:11:33
you you you now are not responsible for the bombs that you drop how many people they kill no of course you’re
2:11:39
responsible so Israel is responsible then they’re responsible for the means of their of their retaliation and their
2:11:44
war aims yes of course first of all let me first of all let me just say um I
2:11:49
totally disagree with your characterization of of Asama Bin Laden and what he wanted to do and and I don’t think that Osama bin Laden’s stated
2:11:56
public utterances along those lines anyway the the reason why the hostages
2:12:02
have been released the numbers that have is because of constant kinetic force by
2:12:08
the IDF the only Hamz does not come to the table and ever hand over hostages
2:12:15
out of goodwill it doesn’t do it goodness of their own heart it does it
2:12:20
because of the constant kinetic force of the IDF in Gaza and if it weren’t for
2:12:26
that all 250 hostages would still be there second thing is when it comes to
2:12:33
Hamz itself I totally disagree with the uh uh presumption
2:12:38
that if you tackle a terrorist entity you will create more terrorists
2:12:44
ego you should not attack the terrorist entity that’s not the argument that I’m making but okay it’s it’s it’s a
2:12:51
commonly held argument that if you respond to terrorism you create terrorism and of course the only thing
2:12:56
that in that case is you just have to sit back and take the argument that I’m making is that when you slaughter innocent people those people around them
2:13:03
tend to hate your guts that’s the argument that I’m making first of all your characterization of the slaughter
2:13:09
it’s it’s horrible the war in Gaza it’s horrible that young Israelis have to go
2:13:14
in yet again to Gaza and try to find Israeli hostages and try to get the
2:13:20
leadership of Hamas that’s what’s horrible about it it is not the case yes because I think there’s a consequence to
2:13:25
starting wars and but so it’s not horrible for the people who didn’t start a war it’s why do we become like these
2:13:32
collectivists as soon as a war starts horrible for everybody involved no it’s the most horrible for the Palestinian
2:13:39
people in Gaza right now those that is the group of people who are being [ __ ] over the most right now no yes at the
2:13:45
moment yes right but they’re not being [ __ ] over the IDF has been moving
2:13:50
through Gaza for 18 months no Israeli soldier I have spoken to ever wanted to go and see the Gaza again okay nobody
2:13:58
wanted to go back they were dragged back because of Hamaz’s actions and if Hamas
2:14:04
had acted differently or the Palestinians have voted in different people in to govern them it would all be different but again that’s a
2:14:11
hypothetical the reality of the war on the ground is that in this incredibly
2:14:17
heavily built up area with weaponry hidden everywhere with soldiers I’ve
2:14:24
spoken to too many of them they go in you have a group of people coming out of a civilian building with their hands up
2:14:31
and from their midsts come a bunch of Hamas terrorists firing at you in the hope that the IDF will fire back at the
2:14:38
civilians gaddy Eisenot one of the members of the war cabinet in the early stages of the war lost his own son and
2:14:44
then his nephew his nephew was killed in a firefight in Gaza because the Hamas
2:14:51
terrorists were firing from a mosque and that was why Gaddy Eisenot from the Israeli cabinet’s nephew died the whole
2:14:59
operating theater is hideous because of what Hamaz has done to the Gaza the
2:15:05
reason why Sinoir cropped up in Rafa finally the mastermind of October the 7th one of the most brutal sadistic
2:15:13
psychopaths to use an overrated term you can ever imagine in an Israeli prison by
2:15:18
the way for having strangled Palestinians to death in the 2000s anyway the reason why Sinoir crops up in
2:15:24
Rafa late last year is because there was nowhere else for him to run because of
2:15:30
the actions of the IDF to pursue the leadership of Hamas that was responsible for the seventh now can all of Hamas be
2:15:38
destroyed probably not can you make it a fun Can you make it
2:15:43
effectively impossible to function or incapable of functioning unable to fire
2:15:50
rockets and govern the Gaza yes right but it comes at the price tag of slaughtering tens of thousands of
2:15:56
innocent people no no and you’re you’re accepting that price no every single war of this kind will include civilian
2:16:03
casualties and you and I will almost certainly disagree on the numbers i’m not claiming that the the health ministry numbers are but there will be
2:16:11
almost certain the best an the best case analysis uh is that one uh innocent Gazahan has
2:16:19
been killed for every one terrorist that’s the best case scenario you can hear but that would be almost
2:16:26
unparalleled in the laws of war and it’s not how the American or British militaries operate in terms of casualties to terrorist ratios but when
2:16:34
we had the campaign against ISIS a decade ago after ISIS’s fighters had
2:16:41
gone and massacred people at the battleclathet in Paris and so on we used Turkish fighters brilliant
2:16:49
brave fighters from the Peshmega militias to work on the ground and the French and American and British air
2:16:55
forces bombed like hell from the air and we made ISIS effectively
2:17:03
touchwood 10 years later operationally incapable in capital cities in
2:17:09
Europe has ISIS as a whole gone away no they still have pockets in Syria and in
2:17:17
Iraq but we stopped them from being able to do what they most desired to do and
2:17:23
the same is possible with Hamas will they be replaced by some other group again then we get to one of
2:17:30
the crucial decision points for the Palestinian people is it inevitable that
2:17:36
they constantly have to elect people who want to annihilate their neighbors or will there ever be a generation that can
2:17:43
find a way to live in peace with their neighbors i agree most people don’t like
2:17:48
being bombed in fact nobody does but that if the people of the
2:17:54
Palestinians in Gaza can find it within themselves to
2:17:59
realize the thing they asked for in the elections is the thing that has destroyed the area they live in and like
2:18:07
that brave young man two weeks ago in Gaza who rose up against Hamas and was
2:18:13
identified by the people who remain in Hamz and was tortured then his body thrown onto his parents’ doorstep in the
2:18:19
Gaza and the parents started a family the clan started a bit of a war against
2:18:24
Hamas but that’s how Gaz that’s how Hamas treats Palestinian dissident but
2:18:30
if there were more people like that young man and of course as we all know the history of totalitarian and terrorist groups running societies
2:18:36
is they’re very successful and they stay in power because they’re willing to torture and use violence and much more
2:18:42
that it’s a horrible thing you have to contend with but if more people like
2:18:48
that young man had come about in Gaza in the last 18 months or before yes yes it
2:18:53
would all be different and if they could avoid electing a terrorist group that
2:18:59
invades their neighbors and fires rockets at their neighbors yes it could all be different it could all be
2:19:04
different tomorrow and I’ll tell you sorry again there is not a person living
2:19:09
by the Gaza in the south of Israel who does not dream of the day that such a generation of Palestinians emerges yeah
2:19:16
um I think that I Okay a few things here on on uh Syria there because it is true
2:19:24
i mean I think so okay so John Brennan and Barack Obama the head of the CIA and
2:19:30
and of course the the former president of the United States of America um had a policy of committing literal treason
2:19:36
before they ended up accusing Donald Trump of treason which was all [ __ ] but they had a policy of committing literal treason by funding al-Qaeda and
2:19:44
ISIS in the uh Syrian civil war poured billions of dollars uh and and tons of
2:19:49
weapons into that conflict when Donald Trump Now it is true by the way that you are correct that like there certainly
2:19:55
were military actions taken against ISIS after they invaded Iraq which was not supposed to be part of the plan there
2:20:02
was also a lot of military actions taken by Vladimir Putin uh against ISIS after he came in uh on Assad’s request as you
2:20:08
know in 2017 uh when Donald Trump came in one of the best things Donald Trump
2:20:14
ever did he cut off the CIA uh program to fund the anti-Assad rebels and this
2:20:19
was also a big part of what ended up like taking the um you know the energy out of ISIS also I think there was a lot
2:20:25
of good reporting that just uh they turned enough people on the ground against them they were even just too radical and just people ended up hating
2:20:31
them it is true that they receded for quite a while although the former Amir of al-Qaeda uh Al Galani is now ruling
2:20:39
Syria uh which does not seem like a great deal or something that people in America should support uh the the true
2:20:46
enemy of the American people al-Qaeda now being in in charge of Syria i think
2:20:52
that you know it’s it’s easy to talk about how like if the Palestinians had done this different then maybe things
2:20:58
would have worked out different but I just think again when you look at things when you say which essentially I think
2:21:04
is your point here right which I mean I tried to push you on this but you’re saying look we can degrade Hamas but the
2:21:10
cost of that is going to be slaughtering a whole bunch of people slaughtering it’s war
2:21:17
okay i think you’re okay they’re not being slaughtered they’re being killed okay how whatever word you want killed
2:21:23
in a brutal war started by Hamas yes yes it’s it’s babies uh and little kids
2:21:28
screaming out for help under rubble and no help is coming they sit there under the rubble until they die that is the
2:21:35
level of human suffering that’s being inflicted and if you want to say well listen that’s a price that I’m willing
2:21:40
to pay to try to degrade Hamas even though you yourself recognize that we can’t totally eliminate them but we
2:21:45
could maybe degrade them or maybe take them down a peg and the price for that is these babies being tortured to death
2:21:53
essentially whatever you want to call it that okay but from the other side of
2:21:58
that story like if there’s like I got little kids i I don’t know if you have kids i know you have kids Joe if anybody
2:22:03
ever was saying to me that like my kids were the acceptable price for this policy that we want to put into place
2:22:10
I’m saying I don’t think there’s any scenario any scenario Douglas where there would be any time where you would
2:22:16
accept Israeli kids dying like that as an acceptable price for a policy that you’re going to be uh um advocating for
2:22:24
first of all again you go back to the what is actually happening
2:22:30
there is no desire or aim by the IIAF or
2:22:36
the IDF to go into Gaza and kill women and children well they’re doing it though hang on hang on there is no
2:22:42
desire for that does it happen collaterally certainly certainly and
2:22:48
that is one of the very ugly rules of war and law things that happens in war and it’s another of the reasons why it’s
2:22:54
almost like you shouldn’t start a war and hide your rockets and your terrorists inside civilian buildings yeah but you’ve made this point a lot of
2:23:01
times but okay well it clearly can’t be made enough because there is no intention on the Israeli side to cause
2:23:09
the death of non-combatants oh come on i mean what you think you think why do you
2:23:15
think the Israelis would want to go and kill children in Gaza i listen let me just How about I say it like this okay
2:23:21
and by the way when I say it like this I’m I’m not claiming that um disputes between nations are the same as handling
2:23:28
uh dispute domestically i’m just saying on on the idea of intentionality or who wants to do this or whatever look if you
2:23:35
even if you had the right let’s say somebody uh broke onto your property and killed some of your family members and
2:23:41
you want to go kill this guy if he goes back to his uh apartment building and
2:23:46
you know that there’s women and children in that apartment building and so your move is to blow up the building what you
2:23:51
would be charged with is murder in the first degree cold-blooded premeditated
2:23:57
intentional murder and you could sit there and tell the judge “I didn’t want to kill all those people why would I
2:24:03
want to kill all of those people i just had to kill that one guy but that’s [ __ ] that’s not what counts you did
2:24:09
it intentionally you dropped a bomb knowing that there were women and children in that building you’re taking
2:24:15
an action knowing that these innocent people are going to die then that is by definition intentional and you know you
2:24:21
could sit here and talk about and and it is true there have been documented cases of Hamas placing missiles in mosques and
2:24:27
in schools and things like that but when you look at the aerial footage of Gaza that does not describe every single
2:24:33
strike that Israel is comm that Israel has launched there have been tons of bombs dropped where it’s simply and we
2:24:39
have very good reporting on this where they’ve literally just have information that they believe with some degree of
2:24:47
certainty that a couple of Hamas militants are in this building and so they blow up the building that is
2:24:53
intentionally murdering innocent people and you if you’re gonna advocate for this war I don’t see how you can do it
2:24:59
without saying that like at least bite the bullet that Maline Albbright did when she was asked uh back we’ve played
2:25:05
the this clip on the show before when she’s point blank asked about the uh sanctions on Iraq and our 500,000
2:25:12
children is that price acceptable and she said yes we believe that price is acceptable you’re saying if you’re going
2:25:18
to support this war you know this is the price of it so why can’t you just say yes that price is acceptable because
2:25:24
then we could have a real conversation about why the other side is going to look at you like a monster because first
2:25:30
of all I don’t agree with any of the characterization you make any of it okay um you say that the Israelis get some
2:25:37
information as if this is like like what they’re making it up or you think the
2:25:42
Israelis want to drop a bomb or like No they they they act they act on
2:25:48
information about where the terrorists are just like they act on information of where the hostages are
2:25:55
secondly when you talk about the destruction in the Gaza something you probably haven’t haven’t realized but is
2:26:01
one of the reasons why the destruction looks so bad and is so bad is because
2:26:07
when the IDF were clearing the areas that they’d asked the civilian population to leave and were going house
2:26:14
to house and it isn’t just stories here or stories there it’s every second or
2:26:21
third house in Gaza that has either munitions or tunnel entrances every second or third house
2:26:28
this is not the odd case one of the things that everybody who has been there
2:26:33
knows is that you go into a mosque and you know there will be either rockets and or tunnel entrances you go into a
2:26:40
hospital and you know that there will be grenades or or or tunnel entrances or
2:26:46
dungeons or whatever just on a on a a lighter note early in the conflict when the Shifa complex which is used as a
2:26:53
Hamas headquarters and has also been used as a hospital but even in 2014 the BBC said this is where Hamas are
2:26:58
operating from when that was shown by the Israelis to be have massive weapons stores in the in the tunnels and sellers
2:27:06
underneath it the um they had grenades RPGs Kalashnikovs and the BBC’s chief
2:27:12
middle east correspondent was asked live on air why would these things be in a hospital and Jeremy Bowen said “Well
2:27:20
it’s perfectly possible because there’s a lot of you know guns in the Middle East it’s perfectly possible the security department of the hospital had
2:27:26
the clash in the coff.” I said “Yeah and did the grenades belong to the cardiologists?” I mean why why is this
2:27:33
so normal that these every civilian mil building like this and every second or
2:27:39
third house in Gaza is a weapons dump or a place that you enter the tunnels from but the reason why the devastation which
2:27:47
it is in the north in particular but also in Rafa and elsewhere is what it is
2:27:52
is because every time the IDF went into an area where they had they had told the
2:27:57
civilians to leave the Hamas terrorists that
2:28:03
remained were in civilian buildings and booby
2:28:08
trapped a very large number of the buildings so what they did as they proceeded through those areas of the
2:28:15
Gaza to clear them was to set off munitions which the American military and others use which sets off secondary
2:28:21
explosions in places that are booby trapped and much of what you see in the photographs that you see and many other
2:28:27
people have seen from Gaza is the result of that it is the result of the IDF trying
2:28:34
to clear an area which has been very carefully and well booby trapped for
2:28:39
years let me make one other very quick point about the bigger picture that you said because I think it’s important we
2:28:46
were talking about the Syrian you you mentioned the Syrian conflict and ISIS i think again it’s really important to
2:28:52
keep this in mind what I said earlier about let’s not think we are the primary actors everywhere or even that important
2:29:01
i remember the debate over the Syrian intervention issue and at the time
2:29:06
despite being in many cases an interventionist I said on that occasion I said we didn’t know what we were doing
2:29:12
clearly didn’t know who are going to back uh if you remember John McCain went to Syria to speak to some rebels and one
2:29:18
of them immediately turned out to be a kind of headhacking jihadist and that wasn’t great and I said I don’t have any
2:29:24
confidence that we know who to back and uh despite many Syrian friends of mine imploring me otherwise I said I don’t
2:29:29
think it’s something we can get involved However if you look at the last 10 years
2:29:35
or more what is it now 13 years of conflict in Syria the US and the Western
2:29:41
powers are not remotely significant actors in that conflict the significant actors in that conflict were always have
2:29:48
been the Russians the Iranians i mean one of the things that
2:29:56
blows my mind in the analysis of the region is the fact that the prime mover
2:30:03
in the region the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran that has been oppressing the Iranian people since 1979
2:30:09
and has been holding a great civilization in in in captivity that the Iranian revolutionary
2:30:16
government in Thran has literally been colonizing the region i have this rule about I took it from Vaseli Gman the
2:30:22
great Soviet Jewish writer who had this great line about tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I’ll tell you what
2:30:28
you’re guilty of this absolutely runs as well with the accusations against the Jewish state in the region the Iranian
2:30:35
revolutionary government is constantly accusing the Israelis of colonialism of expansionism it is the Iranian
2:30:41
revolutionary government that has been colonizing Iraq colonizing Yemen colonizing and destroying Lebanon and
2:30:47
colonizing Syria and the amazing thing when you look at the disaster that has
2:30:53
happened in Syria in the last 13 years and I don’t see it getting especially better under the the current jihadist um
2:31:01
the disaster is not of our making primarily we are bit players america is
2:31:08
a bit in Syria we are a bit You mentioned Iraq in there too i know well what with the the great idiocy of of of
2:31:15
that was that that that Iraq notices our um failings our lack of staying power
2:31:21
our desire to to get out as soon as possible and much more which is all understandable whether you agree with it or not hang on hang on hang on and they
2:31:28
moved in and they moved in of course but I was talking about Syria in this Syrian
2:31:33
theater the the main actors are not us and one of the things I’m still
2:31:39
interested in about this mindset that you have is why does it always have to be us it’s other people who have act
2:31:48
actions in the world the Russians the revolutionary government in Iran they are so busy i see I think this is all
2:31:56
about uh framing here because I don’t think I’ve ever once made this claim you’ve made this point several times so
2:32:01
far but I’ve never once made the claim that everything is always us i think you’re the one who’s downplaying the influence and impact that we have we are
2:32:08
after all when I’m saying we I’m saying the United States of America’s federal government is the largest most powerful organization in the history of the world
2:32:14
it is the world empire and to sit there and say Iran colonized Iraq no george W
2:32:21
bush invaded the country on a bunch of lies a war that you supported he went in
2:32:26
there and overthrew Saddam Hussein and installed democracy in the Shiite majority country of course he handed the
2:32:33
thing over to Iran but that but to say that that had no impact on Syria or that the the US military funding and arming
2:32:40
the anti-Assad rebels had no impact i’m not claiming the entire thing is is America bashar al-Assad was an actor
2:32:47
there were other forces there aside from the US uh meddling there but at the same
2:32:52
time you got the most powerful government in the history of the world who as we all know put Syria on its
2:32:58
seven countries in 5 years list of who we’re going to go overthrow and this had a profound impact on the region of
2:33:05
course it did it was a huge contributing factor to that civil war to begin with i I I think America is obviously a major
2:33:11
factor it certainly could be is meant to be the major actor on the world stage i think that the history of the region and
2:33:16
many other regions around the world is that America does not have either the staying power the capability the
2:33:22
intelligence the kind of people that you would produce in order to have the kind of impact that you actually think it has
2:33:28
american uh weakness in the Middle East has been I mean I say this as somebody
2:33:33
obviously from Britain but when Britain was a was a dominant world power she
2:33:39
produced the type of person who was keen to go and be a governor of uh you know a
2:33:46
stan somewhere and learn the local dialects and uh you know run the civil service you guys were better at empire
2:33:52
than we are the point is they they produced that sort of person because they wanted to stay america has never
2:33:58
produced that sort of person and it certainly hasn’t in the Middle East in particular it it it acts militarily on
2:34:05
occasions and in my view sometimes well sometimes poorly but in but the reason
2:34:10
why America was so badly outplayed by the Mullers in Iraq was simply that as
2:34:16
you say after the war America had nothing like the staying power of the Mullers in Thran had nothing like the
2:34:22
ability to affect post-war change like the Iranian revolutionary government did and so yes if we create a vacuum like
2:34:30
that or somebody else creates a vacuum and after all we did not cause the beginning of this the we the west I’m
2:34:35
saying on this occasion did not cause the beginning of the uh Arab Spring as it was it was optimistically called at
2:34:42
the beginning or the over or the beginning of the re the revolutionary uprising in Syria in
2:34:48
2011 these things were ground up and the actors in the region moved in much more
2:34:55
deafly and effectively than we did it’s the same with Lebanon it’s the same with Lebanon america doesn’t even have eyes
2:35:00
over Lebanon it Iran has an army that has a checkpoint at Beirut airport that
2:35:07
will check you on behalf of Hezbollah when you come in there you can’t tell me that America is just because America’s
2:35:15
uh it on paper and much more has the power that America is the deaf operator
2:35:21
in the Middle East there are so many people who outwit America in the Middle East all the time yeah but you can’t tell me that there hasn’t been an an
2:35:28
impact from the $8 trillion that we’ve spent there and the multiple regime changes all around the Middle East that
2:35:33
were done by America these weren’t just going to happen on their own are you saying that didn’t have an impact iraq
2:35:38
was certainly done by America of course okay so Iraq was certainly done by America libya
2:35:44
NATO right but Okay but NATO is the European wing of the American Empire i
2:35:49
mean let’s get real that that’s the an American decision sure right i’m saying it’s not it’s not because some random
2:35:56
European country decided to go back just because I mean the the Libyan intervention I was very I was pretty
2:36:01
iffy about at the time um but uh that was done not to create an empire or
2:36:08
anything like that it was done for for one very clear reason and I remember the debates in the European capitals and in
2:36:14
Washington DC at the time there was a belief that uh after the uprising
2:36:20
against Gaddafi began that there would be a mass slaughter genocide carried out
2:36:27
by Gaddafi against the people in we’re talking 2011 and it was 2011 yeah uh
2:36:34
there was a belief everybody believed it he had started his son if you remember Sif Gaddafi formerly of the London
2:36:40
School of Economics showing that we can produce the best uh Sif Gaddafi uh uh
2:36:45
stood up and said we will fight to the last bullet and so on and uh and everybody believed them and uh the
2:36:52
desire to intervene was caused in an attempt to not to people do not want the
2:36:57
resources of Libya nobody wanted Libya to fall apart or anything like that they did it because there was a genuine
2:37:03
belief in what was called at the time which has gone out of fashion but right to protect duty to protect and that was
2:37:09
why they went in so okay if that’s why it’s important to No it’s interesting it’s interesting i Well I don’t but I
2:37:14
don’t think it’s correct i mean you always kind of like ascribe the best of motives to Israel and the West and
2:37:20
nothing but the worst of motives to all of their enemies so just riddle me this then if we just went in because there
2:37:25
was this uprising in 2011 and because we were worried that Gaddafi was about to go genocidal something that your own the
2:37:31
UK parliament did an investigation into and found out said was just complete completely wrong but why is it then that
2:37:40
I got fourstar general Wesley Clark Supreme Commander of Supreme Commander
2:37:45
of the NATO forces why is it that he told me that he saw the plans in 2001 to overthrow Gaddafi and that this was part
2:37:52
of a strategy to overthrow seven governments in 5 years and all of them
2:37:57
except one have been done at this point so you’re telling me it’s a complete coincidence that he saw that the
2:38:04
neoonservatives had this plan to overthrow Gaddafi and then 10 years later we happened to do it when we have
2:38:09
the opportunity the two aren’t related at all first nice to hear the n word
2:38:14
again um the n word did I say that conservatives oh that one i was thinking
2:38:20
of a different one okay the um first of all I would assume I would
2:38:25
hope that there’s American military planning for absolutely everything i would hope that there is a scenario for
2:38:31
absolutely everything somewhere in the American in Pentagon or whatever yeah but but he didn’t say we’re drawing up
2:38:37
war games you said this is the plan that we’re going to I would assume that I
2:38:43
would hope that any major power like America would have plans in place for almost everything that is likely
2:38:49
including I mean this America could have should have started planning for some
2:38:56
kind of kinetic force in in uh Libya from the 1980s of course of course
2:39:03
there’d be plans yeah again this is not what he this is not what uh uh Wesley Clark let he he wasn’t saying like we’ve
2:39:09
drawn up war games we’ve drawn up war games with everybody we have war games with China war games with Russia we’ve
2:39:14
we’ve mapped out how a kinetic war would work even with countries that have nuclear arsenals like just in case we
2:39:19
have to fight a a traditional war and nukes aren’t being used that’s not what he’s talking about he said that not only
2:39:25
are he he was told we’re in Afghanistan now this is late 2001 he goes next we’re
2:39:31
going to Iraq after that we’re going to Libya after that we’re going to Syria Somalia um was it Sudan uh and and
2:39:39
finishing off with Iran he laid out the the the path of what we’re about to do
2:39:44
and then we did it in the next administration you don’t think there was any connection between those two well we
2:39:50
did Somalia and Sudan no I’m sorry he’s listen his I’m sorry if you go look at the list of seven countries it was Iraq
2:39:58
Afghanistan Syria Libya um I believe Somalia Sudan and Iran I believe why Why
2:40:07
would America want to do any of those things who who wants to do it well what he said is that essentially these plans
2:40:13
he said later in a interview with Pierce Morgan that he that he had seen the plans at first in 1991 that they came
2:40:19
from Paul Wolfwitz that basically then they got uh what what’s funny about what the four-star general said okay can
2:40:26
continue no I’m just curious what’s laughable about this uh Paul Wolfwitz is a um a great uh
2:40:35
figure for almost any uh deep conspiracy in this country because he was an deputy
2:40:41
secretary of defense at the highest in his life he is forever being ascribed
2:40:47
almost uh uh almost supernatural power
2:40:52
uh the largest the largest the highest position he ever got to was as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy and um it’s it’s a
2:41:01
very strange thing always when Walritz’s name comes up because he was a relatively low-level
2:41:08
person to whom almost everything can be ascribed and I I didn’t describe again if this is I didn’t ascribe everything
2:41:15
to him i’m literally telling you what anyway go i’m telling you what the fourstar general said about him and I
2:41:20
wouldn’t say deputy secretary of defense is like a nothing position uh it’s pretty consequential position not as
2:41:27
important as Rumsfeld or Cheney but yeah yeah agreed but what but who said it was no fire on i just feel like you’re
2:41:33
batting down straw man i never said that he is the creator of all conspiracies or anything i’m literally saying that the
2:41:38
fourstar general said that he first saw the plans from him that he had brought this to the national security adviser
2:41:44
and it had basically been like ah we’ll look at this after the election and that then it was resurrected later by uh
2:41:49
Richard Pearl and that the these guys were producing again not me saying this this is fourstar general Wesley Clark he
2:41:55
said in a study uh paid for by the Israelis and yeah you can laugh at this all you want to Douglas but you can go
2:42:02
read the clean break memo for yourself this was the neoconservative strategy along along with their counterpart the
2:42:07
Lakuds in Israel that they wanted to remake the region in a way and that and I’m sure by their own justification they
2:42:14
believed that democracy would sweep the region and it would be better off for them nonetheless they pursued this path
2:42:20
that has ended in nothing but disaster and I don’t think that to say that in in 2011 it was like a purely humanitarian
2:42:26
mission to go overthrow Gaddafi I do not think is right well first of all before I get to the substance of it why why why
2:42:32
would they want the current situation in Libya huh why would they want the current
2:42:38
situation in Libya well because they wanted Gaddafi out why well okay if you read the clean
2:42:44
break memo what their argument essentially is is that you wanted to have regime change against the hostile
2:42:50
surrounding Muslim countries but was Gaddafi not hostile to Israel
2:42:56
to Israel yeah sure but he was I mean the the Europeans and everybody else in
2:43:01
NATO found that Gaddafi was a really relatively easy person to get on with latly right yeah no I think it was an
2:43:08
insane policy no no but you you’ll notice that uh after he hands over the nuclear program and thus makes himself
2:43:14
very uh vulnerable unfortunately uh for the future of world peace uh he uh Libya
2:43:21
has been unarably disastrous hang on no just a clarifying question disrous for
2:43:26
Europe and and Somalia and Sudan why why why why does America or Israel want to
2:43:33
like do regime change in Somalia can I just ask you can I just ask you a clarifying question on this uh what when
2:43:39
you say that was a disaster for the prospects of world peace you mean overthrowing Gaddafi was a disaster i say that that that him being sorry I
2:43:46
should have clarified my thing is him being overthrown after he’s given over
2:43:51
the nuclear weapons is a disaster because it leaves on the table this thing that you have to hold on to nuclear weapons and if you don’t hold on
2:43:57
to nuclear weapons you could be dead do you think maybe uh the Israelis should stop using the term the Libyan model to
2:44:02
push for uh negotiations with Iran no I don’t think anyone should uh should use
2:44:08
what happened to Gaddafias as being a good uh precursor for Well I we certainly have a lot of agreement there
2:44:13
it was an absolute disaster particularly to do it to let a guy get sodomized to death after he denuclearized is not a
2:44:20
good uh president to set i agree and it’s one of the reasons why um uh one of the reasons why Iran wants a nuke on I’m
2:44:28
not sure it’s just tot they want a nuke because they
2:44:35
I mean if you like what the Iranian revolutionary government’s done since 1979 you’d love what they’ll do with the
2:44:40
world when they’ve got a nuke but anyway put that aside for a second i mean the um I just I’m sorry we slightly come
2:44:47
back to where we started but I I when you start talking about Paul Wolitz and Richard Pearl I I just it’s it’s all
2:44:56
awfully um noxious smelling
2:45:01
richard Pal was a member of the Defense Policy Board which had an advisory capacity
2:45:09
toward the Pentagon in the early 2000s but it was in no by no
2:45:16
means a policy board that dictated Pentagon policy okay
2:45:22
in the last 30 years of American foreign policy there have been many major actors
2:45:29
paul Wolfitz is a relatively major one but we come slightly back full
2:45:36
circle in my view I’m not saying you’re guilty of this certainly not knowingly in my view when people start
2:45:42
talking about Paul Walford I always remember that line of Mark Stein many years ago and he said “You can’t help thinking that one of the reasons why
2:45:48
people find Wolitz so appealing to talk about is that his name starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish.”
2:45:57
That is a funny thing to say love saying forfeit it’s such a great name it is for an evil movie you say he’s perfect for
2:46:06
it perfect for it and he looks perfect for it you’ll say “Oh the crafty Paul Wolf of his crazy eyebrows.” So you’re a
2:46:13
bigot you’re a Jew hater if you mention the neocons no no no just just let me continue with the thought so I I
2:46:19
remember those days and uh his boss uh Donald
2:46:26
Rumsfeld was like the ruler of the world at that time he he had uh uh such
2:46:34
charisma such genius was attributed to him for the initial invasion of Iraq
2:46:41
like people you can’t imagine the admiration that would existed in the defense
2:46:46
establishments around the world for uh for uh Rumsfeld Dick Cheney was so
2:46:53
powerful that people of right left particularly on the left spent all those
2:46:59
years in the W Bush administration saying W wasn’t the real president he
2:47:04
was being run by Dick Cheney because he was the brilliant etc etc you’re certainly listening to him at the
2:47:10
beginning Okay but I’m just saying it goes back to this thing of when certain
2:47:15
ideas catch hold and what’s really going on in them to attribute American foreign
2:47:22
policy in the last 40 years to Paul Wolfwitz and Dick Pearl is knowingly or
2:47:28
otherwise to encourage a conspiracy that has very obvious legs and I just urge
2:47:35
you not to do it okay uh let let me respond to this a little bit first of all um I did not it is not at all saying
2:47:43
that these guys therefore just control everything i’m just pointing out what a
2:47:49
fourstar general uh claimed where plans originated and that they ended up being
2:47:54
implemented that doesn’t mean that they were the absolute uh ruler or arbiter of
2:47:59
what was going to happen but again I got to say for you to say that I can’t bring
2:48:04
up the neoconservative okay let me let me just Right but the implication is that I’m unwittingly
2:48:12
giving fertile ground to some like Jewhating conspiracy if I bring up a guy
2:48:18
who’s got a Jewish last name who was a consequential person in our government this is like identical to the arguments
2:48:23
of the woke left that would just be like “Oh if you even say something you know if you bring up uh the crime rate in
2:48:29
Chicago you’re basically a bigot because other people could take this and run with it.” Come on no you come on what’s
2:48:35
the argument if you said to me I said a four-star general said something and there’s no what’s the response if if if
2:48:42
if you said to me or somebody said to me uh don’t you think there’s a that some
2:48:48
people are running the global financial system and I said uh possibly and you
2:48:54
and I said who do you think it is and they said the
2:49:03
Rothschilds i think I’d be right in saying there was something a bit off
2:49:09
about the character of the person doing that because it seemed like they were playing to some kind of lazy old trope
2:49:16
and I think similarly that if you if you give the implication that a cabal of people
2:49:23
particularly and you should be really careful about this because of the people who will come up underneath you if you
2:49:29
give the implication that these cabals exist and you decide to to elevate the
2:49:36
Jews or people with Jewish names in it and then play down the non-Jews I can
2:49:42
tell you you will be opening up a world of madness but am I really playing down
2:49:49
the non-Jews i mean go look at the stuff that I’ve said about Obama about George W bush i You said Middle East policy is
2:49:56
Dick Pearl and Paul Wolfworth and I said No no no no i mean this is this is why I’m saying this is a woke leftist tactic
2:50:02
i literally just mentioned that a fourstar general said this i’m quoting
2:50:07
him and now you’re telling me that this is the same thing that when you quote somebody it’s a totally arbitrary thing
2:50:13
which you just pluck out of the air you decided I’m not arguing I’m not arguing that it’s arbitrary i’m saying I’m using
2:50:19
the quote for a reason i was connecting it to an argument and I’m saying to you
2:50:25
I’m giving fertile ground to Jew haters to to mention it i think that when you
2:50:30
decide to elevate what is a conspiracy of people who are overthrowing the
2:50:38
governments of various countries some of which haven’t been overthrown and others of which have by the way were not
2:50:44
overthrown by American dominance certainly not in Syria um and then you say that the people who are doing it are
2:50:50
kind are these uh people with Jewish names i think just be you should you should be
2:50:55
uh more judicious than that because you you probably know what bubbles up underneath you online by now um yeah
2:51:03
look I mean there’s no question that there are you know no matter what and by the way you know it’s funny just hearing
2:51:09
you say this to me i mean look and by the way I completely agree with you i think you’ve been one of the best champions on uh opposing Europe’s insane
2:51:16
immigration policy um I also think the United States of America’s had an insane immigration policy i’m happy to see that
2:51:22
that seems that seems to be being reversed but imagine you made a point about immigration and I were to say to
2:51:28
you be careful what’s bubbling up online because now you’re get look the fact is
2:51:33
if you are if you are taking a position that opposes say Muslim immigration into
2:51:39
uh the UK then yes it is quite possible that a lot of people who really just hate Muslims are going to end up liking
2:51:45
what you had to say or following you but that doesn’t mean you’re responsible to it and if I were to say that to you
2:51:50
would be the first to very eloquently point out that that is a complete non argument the question is is this policy
2:51:57
good or is it bad and and whether there’s not and if you want to say to me hey I should like disclaim when I make
2:52:04
this point that like hey I’m Jewish i love Jewish people the fact that there were some Jewish people involved in our
2:52:11
foreign policy establishment does not mean that it’s the Jews then fine I’m happy to say that but I just think it’s
2:52:16
a non-argument to say that like oh you know you’re you’re kind of like giving
2:52:22
you’re creating fertile ground for this hatred if I’m being completely honest I think we’ve seen a what you’re talking
2:52:27
about bubbling up on Twitter do you think that’s gotten worse over the last 18 months
2:52:34
uh yeah sure right i I think kind of what Israel is doing in this war and the US funding and arming it have been
2:52:40
something that is really a great facilitator for that stuff to bubble up as I say we we could go back to that but
2:52:45
I disagree i think that Israel has every right to go in and destroy the terrorist group that carried out the mass yes but
2:52:50
again but no one but no one’s arguing if they have the right to destroy the terrorists the question is they have the right to kill innocent people again
2:52:56
which I think we we’re just not answering what I’m saying well I think I’ve already answered that but just just to go back to the meat of that I think
2:53:04
you don’t realize that actually uh people like me who have a voice and
2:53:10
write and much more do think about that all the time it’s a profound uh concern
2:53:18
and responsibility i agree with that right right and don’t think I don’t
2:53:24
worry all the time and make sure I intervene into the debate very carefully
2:53:31
at times when I think some people have picked up something that I’ve been saying and are going to go wrong with it
2:53:38
i that scares the hell out of me and I do it regularly and I do it because I
2:53:44
have to yeah listen so okay so that’s a point of agreement too but you don’t stop believing in that policy for it and you won’t stop bringing that up do say
2:53:52
but you do say on occ I mean most obvious one on that if there is
2:53:57
something where something really uh feted happen something really
2:54:03
terrible and there’s a bunch of people that decide to uh riot or commit
2:54:10
violence or something like that I know that I have to as a
2:54:16
duty say absolutely this is to be condemned
2:54:21
If it is people trying to pretend that all Muslims this or all that absolutely
2:54:27
I intervene to stop that i think that is but I think that this is one of the responsibilities that comes with putting
2:54:34
out ideas in the public square yeah and I think that none of us are um blame
2:54:42
free but all of us have some kind of responsibility to know that what we put
2:54:50
out there is very carefully watched very carefully followed and
2:54:56
that we have to tread well well okay so I agree with that but when you say you
2:55:01
intervene what exactly do you mean by that you mean you voice opposition to it you say “Hey that’s not what I’m saying
2:55:08
i’m saying that like we have to have a say in immigration policy that’s good for our country.” Make sure I you know say which politician I think can deal
2:55:15
with it decently and which ones will not i mean I’ I’ve made plenty of enemies on
2:55:20
the European right by saying who I think is bad and who will not do this well but yeah I just put it out there i think I I
2:55:27
literally I say it as a point of uh caution yeah well I I mean I don’t
2:55:33
disagree with that and I’ve certainly done the same thing and said that like I don’t know like I don’t like the I don’t
2:55:40
like Jew hatred on Twitter and I don’t like people uh jumping to wild conspiracies that they don’t have enough
2:55:47
nearly enough evidence to uh you know actually back up which I’ve seen quite a bit of that being said I also think
2:55:53
there’s a whole lot of real conspiracies and I’m not going to stop talking about those just because some people on Twitter might take it in a bad direction
2:56:01
well as the great Michael Malice said and as you quoted one red pill not the
2:56:06
whole bottle i’ve been trying to limit people to one red pill one red pill a year is all you need a lot of people
2:56:11
they take one of those things and they just get hungry sort of like boosters like boosters well it ends up it ends up
2:56:18
Yeah exactly you take take none of those no you’re supposed to take one red pill what’s the one what’s the one in front
2:56:24
of you which one that one there black one yeah it’s nicotine oh I see oh that’s the chewing ones it’s a like a
2:56:30
pouch chris Williamson showed me yesterday this uh one that you uh he said weightlifters are using in Austin
2:56:37
uh it’s like a a powder or something weightlifterss yeah creatine powder no
2:56:43
it’s it’s not licking it’s something like it creatine no it’s it’s like the it’s it’s to sniff oh no no no that’s
2:56:51
smelling salt we do smelling salt that’s right smell goof for silly we do that to be silly i hadn’t heard of that since
2:56:58
19th century women who thought they had the vapors and he said “These are smelling sauces.” Well they used to use it for boxers when they got knocked out
2:57:04
to wake them up that was it that was it does it work it’s Well it works for weightlifters you You sniff it before
2:57:10
you lift incredible amounts of weight allegedly powerlifters use them that’s literally why they sell it it It just
2:57:18
jolts your entire central nervous system because it’s so horrific want to smell no
2:57:25
this is by the way if a little insight into the comedy community uh the deal is that Joe will help advance the careers
2:57:32
of comedians unlike anybody since Johnny Carson but then the cost is you do have to sniff smelling salts we all have to
2:57:38
do that it’s a It’s a bargain of sorts but it is what it is
2:57:44
do you have a heart out Douglas uh kind of i got to get to DC okay my one of my
2:57:49
least favorite cities in the country but another area of agreement there we go um
2:57:55
thank you thank you for doing this appreciate it it was very very good i enjoyed it very much and thank you Dave
2:58:01
i do uh yeah of course thank you to you John thank you Douglas very much i do appreciate that while we do fundamentally disagree on a lot of this
2:58:07
stuff I do admire that you will come have these conversations show everyone the book here it’s so Jesus Christ
2:58:13
avoided on myself luckily um on democracies and death cults Israel and the future of civilization douglas
2:58:20
Murray did you do the audio book i did do the audio book you can you can hear these maleifuous tones yes love it it
2:58:27
would be a tragedy if anybody else did it um thank you very much yes all right beautiful all right goodbye everybody
2:58:33
thank you [Applause] [Music]