In this episode of the podcast, comedian and podcaster Joe Pesci joins me to talk about what it's like to live in a world where you have to toe the line in order to be a part of the resistance to Trump. We also talk about why it's so hard to get along in a group and why we should all just get along better in small groups. And we talk about how we need to stop caring so much about what other people think and start caring about what we do. Thanks to our sponsor, for sponsoring this episode and for supporting the podcast! Thank you so much to everyone who has been supporting this podcast, and we hope you enjoy listening to this episode. We'll see you next week with a new episode of The Daily Show with John Dickerson! Check out his new show on HBO's Hard Knocks on HBO NOW, where he's a standup comedian, writer, and host of the hit show Hard Knocked Out. Thanks again for listening and Good Morning America! -Jon Sorrentino and Happy New Year, Jon! Jon and I hope you all have a wonderful new year and a happy 2020! I'll be back in 2020! -Jon and I will be back with more episodes next year. Jon & Joe - Jon and Jamie Jon, Jamie, Barry, Caitlyn, Joe, Sarah, . Jonathan, Tim, Gwyneth Paltrow, , Joe & Jamie, and the rest? Caitie, & more! (and the rest of the crew at , and much more! - Jon & Sarah & the rest! , Jon and Sarah, and more Barry & the crew (Jon, ) - . . and more Jon and Joe, and a little bit more Jon & Jamie - and a whole lot more. - we love you, Jon, and all of the rest, more Jon, too, and so much more, and much, much more... We hope you like it, Jon & JB & Sarah, more JB, more than you can relate to it! -- Jon & a little more Jon AND JEAN & JAMIE JANIE & JACOB & JAMES, and some more, etc., etc., AND MORE!
00:01:45.000It seems like the people that oppose him, they just want complete and total compliance with opposition, with this different way of thinking.
00:01:56.000Yeah, it's like the stakes are so high that everyone needs to be on side and an active part of the resistance.
00:02:02.000And if you deviate in any way, it shows that you're a squish or that you're actually loyal to the other side.
00:02:08.000And in fact, what that side of things is doing is that they're limiting the spectrum of what's allowed to say so, so, so narrowly that people, I think, are becoming kind of secretly radicalized because...
00:02:25.000But I think one of the reasons you're so unbelievably popular is because you just say what you think and you bring other people on here to say what they think.
00:02:32.000And the number of places where that actually happens is unbelievably small and getting smaller.
00:02:37.000It's so strange, and you get shit for it.
00:04:04.000And I think that that is just a sign of deeply unhealthy culture and like it only contributes to this sort of polarization and extremes that we're seeing.
00:04:16.000Yeah, like you were talking about the denial of the biological differences between males and females.
00:04:23.000This is something that people openly want to support today.
00:04:28.000They want to pretend that there is no difference.
00:04:30.000Well, it's like you can both believe that there are two sexes and that there are biological differences between men and women.
00:04:38.000And also believe that if someone asks you to call them by a different pronoun than the one that they used to go by or whatever, that you want to respect that person and that life is so hard and why wouldn't you just go along with that?
00:04:52.000Those are two beliefs that many people I know hold.
00:04:55.000And yet to suggest that gender and sex are only a construct is something that people don't feel like they can express right now.
00:05:19.000The way you were phrasing it sounded like the other way.
00:05:21.000I'm saying that like two things are possible at once.
00:05:24.000You can believe in biological difference and believe that people should be respected and that if Someone wants to change their gender and that life becomes much more, you know, transgender is real and also sex differences are real.
00:05:42.000And those two things are possible at once.
00:05:45.000I think about that a lot, you know, with my book, with the case of someone like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
00:05:52.000It's like Ilhan Omar is the subject of bigotry, not least from the President of the United States.
00:06:00.000And yet Ilhan Omar herself has said some things about Jews and Israel that are themselves bigoted.
00:06:21.000It's like we're dealing with the same amount of intelligent people, but they seem to be shackled in their ability to express themselves honestly.
00:06:29.000And so what are they scared of, right?
00:06:34.000You look at someone, I think that one thing that's overlooked in this, when we talk about cancel culture, right, and the social ostracism and the It's why Ricky Gervais can be Ricky Gervais.
00:06:57.000It's why JK Rowling can tweet what she tweeted a few months ago.
00:10:38.000Like, I thought, my parents were getting split up when I was little, when I was five years old, so I was really enthusiastic about God and religion because I felt like, at least in that, there's some sort of, there's structure.
00:12:38.000But honestly, I say honestly, no one knows.
00:12:41.000Like, if you say, I know there's a God, you're not being honest, because unless you know something that I don't, unless you've died and experienced it, and even then, we could chalk that up to a host of neurochemicals that your body releases when it thinks you're dying, and some of them I've actually taken before,
00:12:57.000so I know what the experience is like.
00:13:00.000And if you say, there's no God, you don't know what you're talking about either.
00:13:05.000You really don't know if there's no God.
00:13:09.000No one knows what even the concept of God is.
00:13:12.000You're talking about thousands of years of trying to decipher experiences and things that are translated from one language to another, from different phonetic languages.
00:13:24.000It's very strange to try to tell people that you know something for a fact when you've never experienced it.
00:13:50.000I mean, this to me connects to the thing that we opened by talking about, which is polarization and tribal, you know, the tribal politics we're living in.
00:13:58.000I think you've had Jonathan Haidt on the show and his book, The Righteous Mind, is brilliant about this, that we were evolved to be religious creatures in a certain way.
00:14:06.000And what happens when we lose religion?
00:15:51.000You know, everyone on the campaign trail is talking about the diseases of despair and how the lifespan in this country has gone down for the past three years.
00:16:03.000Because of opioids, because people are out of work, because factories are closing, because we're going through whatever Andrew Yang calls it, the fourth industrial revolution, because of globalization, because we're living through what I think will be remembered as an unbelievably transformative time,
00:16:57.000Yeah, but the Chappelle one was so good because if you looked at Rotten Tomatoes, right, the critics rating of it was something like 20% favorable.
00:17:34.000I mean, when we talk and people listen to reasonable discussion, then they feel more emboldened to have reasonable discussion of their own.
00:17:44.000Maybe perhaps in private, maybe they have to fucking put tinfoil over the windows and bolt the door shut and make sure that they can talk honestly.
00:18:22.000I think about like what would it look like if all the journalists at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal were banned from being on Twitter?
00:18:31.000Because like what happens, right, is like it's this circular thing where we all know the landmines, right?
00:18:39.000Like the things we don't want to touch, like the hills we don't want to die on.
00:18:42.000And it's – what's scary about the Stasi-like atmosphere of it is – Like, my job is to write opinion columns and commission other people to do that.
00:18:51.000And yet I feel the self-censoring even before I've written, right?
00:18:55.000Where I'm like, wait, I don't want to die on that hill.
00:19:54.000Like, I'm not gonna waste my life following some fake rule determined by random people on the internet.
00:20:01.000No, and this desire for you to comply, I mean, this is part of the game that's going on.
00:20:07.000When people don't have control of their own lives, they love to control other people's lives.
00:20:11.000And one of the things that happens when you have an opinion that does not follow the, you know, whatever the path has been clearly grooved for us to, when you're supposed to have very specific ideas about these very clearly defined subjects,
00:20:27.000when you deviate from those and people start attacking you, What they're trying to do in many...
00:20:33.000There's a lot of what they're trying to do.
00:21:01.000And, you know, and it's just like, what's sad about it is like the number of young people I know who are so talented and, you know, are heterodox or just independent-minded people, like liberals, they don't.
00:21:20.000Like, they decide not to go into journalism, not to do comedy, not to do any number of things because, like, why would you choose to, you know, be in that arena if this is what it means?
00:21:33.000You know, one of my favorite stories, to speak to this, is that woman who was in Canada who was a trans woman who still has her penis and balls and went to a bunch of different waxing places.
00:23:14.000Now, are you going to treat this like an abusive, insane person?
00:23:16.000Or are you going to treat this like trans people have these undeniable rights and privilege because of the fact that they've been – Put in this marginalized position by our society that you have to look at them in a very specific way.
00:23:30.000And if you deviate at all, you will be punished.
00:23:32.000And that's what happened to these poor immigrants.
00:23:54.000Well, I just, I was just telling Jamie that I was in, I spent New Year's in New Hampshire with Andrew Yang and the Yang gang, because I'm writing about him.
00:24:04.000And I have to tell you, like, I'm really not just saying this, the power of the, like, the, what I'm calling, like, the Rogan effect, it was insane.
00:24:13.000Like, I went down the line waiting to get into this bar, it was snowing outside, and I just, like, asked everybody, how'd you hear about Andrew Yang?
00:24:19.000Like, 80% of them was from your podcast.
00:25:00.000Like multiple children per year lose their penis from an unnecessary antiquated operation where you cut off their dicks to make it look different.
00:25:10.000You're cutting skin off of their dick and they wind up getting infected and they lose their dicks.
00:25:15.000I mean, it doesn't happen all the time, but it happens enough time where you go, this should never happen.
00:25:20.000This is a completely unnecessary operation.
00:25:24.000Robert Baker estimates 229 deaths per year from circumcision in the United States.
00:25:28.000Bollinger estimates that approximately 119 infant boys die from circumcision-related each year in the US, 1.3% of all male neonatal deaths from all causes.
00:25:41.000There are several case reports of death in the medical literature.
00:28:43.000And because there's this unbelievably strange coalition of like lefty Waldorf family homeschool people with like ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe that they're like remnants of pigs in the vaccine and they're coming together to do what they just did in New Jersey,
00:29:00.000which is like… I think New Jersey was close to passing a law to end the religious – there's religious exemptions for vaccines in a bunch of states still.
00:29:09.000And New Jersey was very close to – which has had a bunch of outbreaks to ending the religious exemption.
00:29:15.000And then you had these very strange bedfellows come together and lobby against the law and it lost, which is really upsetting.
00:29:23.000I do not think there should be a religious exemption for vaccines.
00:29:25.000Yeah, vaccines are a strange one, right?
00:29:27.000It's like, should you force someone to put a chemical into their body?
00:29:34.000Yes, because it's protecting all of our lives.
00:29:37.000But that is why it's an interesting one.
00:29:39.000It's a very unusual one because it's a very rare time where you're talking about something that if you do put it in someone's body and it is effective, it will stop a deadly pandemic from spreading.
00:29:53.000How do we act as a culture when it comes to that?
00:29:55.000And then there's also with everything.
00:29:57.000People think there's conspiracies with every fucking thing that ever happens on this earth.
00:30:02.000Conor McGregor just destroyed Donald Cerrone in 40 seconds.
00:30:04.000There is an entire community of people online right now Thinking that that was a setup, and that it was a fake fight, and that they had planned it all in advance, and this is just to make money.
00:30:15.000I mean, I'm talking about volumes of writing.
00:30:17.000I mean, people just page after page after page talking about things that don't make sense about the fight.
00:31:05.000And one of the things that is so refreshing about him is that I don't know if I've been in a room in the past year with so many former Bernie and former Trump people, which are a lot of his supporters.
00:31:22.000Disaffected, disappointed Trump people and then people that supported Bernie in 2016. And there's just, I don't know, like when you hear him talk, the villain of his stump speech is not Donald Trump, even though he hates Donald Trump.
00:31:37.000The villain is Amazon and Big Pharma and, you know, automation, like the things that are actually...
00:31:49.000He's like a Paul Revere for automation.
00:31:53.000He's like, hey, your fucking jobs are going away.
00:32:32.000But he has like blood pressure issues, right?
00:32:35.000I think the candidate, I will be very surprised if the candidate is not Bernie, both because of the fundraising and And because of where he is in the polls, and because, and this is the most fundamental thing, the energy in the country right now is a populist energy.
00:32:50.000And I just don't think that a moderate, like the ones that I like, like a Klobuchar or a Biden, can capture the energy of the base.
00:33:00.000I think that energy is just really with Bernie.
00:33:02.000You have more faith in the Democratic Party than I do.
00:33:04.000I think they're going to fuck up and put Elizabeth Warren in, and I think Trump's going to chew her up.
00:33:09.000Don't you think Trump would—okay, but if it's Bernie versus Trump, who wins?
00:33:14.000I think you're always going to have a hard time when someone's the incumbent, right?
00:33:17.000You're always going to have a hard time when someone is the sitting president who is— It's extremely controversial, extremely polarizing, but also we're in a great time economically.
00:33:31.000That's hard for people to deviate from.
00:33:33.000It's hard for people to deviate from good economy.
00:33:37.000When you look at the stock market, when you look at… Yeah, but most people don't have stocks.
00:34:16.000After all that grab-the-pussy stuff and all the craziness, the fact that he was able to weather that storm, and it didn't even seem to shake him.
00:34:23.000I mean, like you said, he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
00:34:38.000It's always hard to get someone out of office.
00:34:41.000I mean, what sunk George H.W. Bush was Ross Perot, and a lot of people forget that.
00:34:46.000Ross Perot, this eccentric billionaire, got on television and bought an entire half hour of regular primetime television and put on this display of why you're getting fucked and explained taxes to you and explained...
00:35:02.000So is Mike Bloomberg going to be the Ross Perot of 2020?
00:35:04.000No, he's not as charismatic and he's not very well liked.
00:35:17.000What Bernie stands for is a guy who, look, you could dig up dirt on every single human being that's ever existed if you catch them in their worst moment, and you magnify those moments, and you cut out everything else, and you only display those worst moments.
00:35:35.000He's been insanely consistent his entire life.
00:35:39.000He's basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life.
00:35:44.000And that, in and of itself, is a very powerful structure to operate from.
00:35:51.000Yeah, and he's addressing the thing that people are most obsessed with right now, which is economic inequality, and he's really consistent on it.
00:36:53.000She wants us to have less interventionist foreign policy decisions that affect people's lives and send our young brothers and sisters over there to get killed.
00:38:31.000Hillary Clinton was calling her a Russian asset.
00:38:34.000You found it strange that Hillary Clinton said that?
00:38:36.000I do, but I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton.
00:38:40.000I'm not a fan of that whole – they're a part of a different world, right?
00:38:44.000They're a part of a different world where corruption was open and accepted and it was a part of the program.
00:38:50.000If you pay attention to the Clinton Foundation, if you pay attention to the amount of money that they would get paid to speak to bankers and the fact that they wouldn't release the transcripts – that was the great thing about Bernie during the 2016 election.
00:40:29.000Oh, yeah, but also, I mean, the moment that I gave up on Elizabeth Warren's political judgment is when she decided to publicly go through...
00:40:41.000The 23andMe or whatever it was to prove that she was in fact partially Native American.
00:40:46.000It was like, just dude, back off from this thing.
00:42:04.000When you realize that this was going on in this country just 150 years ago, and that for hundreds of years, the Comanches just dominated the West.
00:43:29.000No, it's a photograph of Cynthia Ann Parker.
00:43:32.000Cynthia Ann Parker was, she was abducted by the Comanches when she was nine years old, and then became accepted as a part of the tribe, and then went on to be the wife of the major chief, one of the major Comanche chiefs, and then was kidnapped back by the United States when she was 30. But she didn't want to be in the United States,
00:44:01.000How did you get, like, what started your interest in this?
00:44:05.000I read a book by my friend Stephen Ranella called The American Buffalo.
00:44:10.000And it's the history of the bison in the United States and the Native Americans that would travel with the bison and all these different tribes that would, they basically coexisted with the bison.
00:44:20.000Just moving with the bison as they migrated and hunting the bison.
00:44:24.000And I was just like, what a strange thing that these people lived in this stone age but fantastic way with all these myths and legends and stories and so much magic in their life.
00:45:56.000And the more books I read, now I'm on Black Elk Speaks, which is my favorite one so far, because Black Elk Speaks is an actual man named Black Elk who is an Oglala Sioux medicine man, a Lakota medicine man, who in the 1930s told his story.
00:46:13.000He was there when Custer was murdered.
00:46:15.000Yeah, he was there when the Sioux were forced into reservations.
00:46:20.000He's telling the whole story of them going from living this nomadic life to being forced in these reservations and starving and alcoholism and all the chaos that came with it.
00:46:31.000And this one's the best because it's literally his words.
00:46:53.000Well, we're working on that right now.
00:46:55.000We're reaching out to a couple different Native American groups to try to find a good representative to come in and talk about their grandparents and the stories that they had heard.
00:48:28.000There was rituals they would do to protect themselves in combat.
00:48:32.000And all these things made life fantastic.
00:48:34.000The hunting of the buffalo and the nomadic way of life.
00:48:39.000And then all of a sudden to be locked into these buildings and wearing these clothes and stuck within these rituals that the white men would live.
00:48:48.000She didn't want to have any part of that.
00:48:50.000So even though, like, you know, if someone was Cynthia Ann Parker's, if she had sex with a white man and made a white baby, that is not a Native American baby, but it kind of is.
00:49:01.000You know, I mean, in terms of culture, she was 100% all in Comanche when they eventually abducted her back.
00:51:10.000This is one thing where I can give them both a generous read.
00:51:12.000I think it's very possible that they had the kind of conversation that people like you and I have all the time, which is can a woman win the presidency of the United States?
00:51:21.000And I think Bernie gave an answer that probably – that a lot of people give in those conversations, which is – Maybe not.
00:51:28.000Maybe the American people are too sexist to elect a woman.
00:56:24.000I think he'll maybe use it as a way of – I think one of the things that people are going to say about Bernie, especially from the right, is they're going to attack him on his foreign policy credentials and they're going to say that he is not going to be a good ally of Israel,
00:56:42.000not serious on foreign policy, not hawkish.
00:56:44.000And they'll point to the fact that some of his surrogates are extremely problematic people like Linda Sarsour.
00:56:50.000And I think in that sense, Bernie's Jewishness will be important because I think he'll use it to say, but I'm Jewish!
00:56:55.000You know, like, how dare you accuse me of X, Y, and Z thing.
00:58:12.000That Bernie Elizabeth Warren stuff was started, I believe, as a report on CNN the day before they hosted that debate as just maybe a way to drum up ratings, which it did work.
01:02:20.000It's almost like we've stopped talking about Jeffrey Epstein, but he's clearly been murdered.
01:02:24.000He clearly was the guy who was in some way, shape, or form a part of a gigantic ring where you would get underage girls to these pedophiles or public figures who were interested in having sex with 16-year-old girls.
01:04:03.000But what I was going to say is like, you know, I've talked to enough people that knew him, met him, went to parties at his house and said like, everyone knew this about him.
01:05:34.000This is a strategy question of if you really want, like, progress and all the things that you talk about, I could make the argument that, yeah, you're part of this crazy, ridiculous, retrograde institution, but you can probably do more good in that role than you can, I don't know, like living in Canada?
01:06:09.000Yeah, well, I think it's the idea is you don't want a monarch moving into this, you know, Canada is a colony of England, but they have their independence.
01:06:19.000So the idea would, if a royal from England moved into Canada, it's probably some ancient fucking rule, but they would be able to set up shop and start running Canada because they have power over the prime minister.
01:07:49.000Or they were not on duty or something?
01:07:51.000I know, but the problem is, right, like, you can see...
01:07:54.000The world moving on is a kind of – or the world – the press is a conspiracy or you can just – like the way I see it is there are so many things to cover in the world and the press has been so gutted that we need to decide like, yeah, is it more important to cover like Soleimani than Jeffrey Epstein?
01:08:15.000So it's not – like I don't see it as malevolent in the way that you do maybe because I'm inside of it and I just see the way that it functions.
01:10:07.000Well, I think because the way Eric describes it, Eric thinks that there are people in these, look, these are enormously high-profile people that have very buttoned-down, respectable positions in life where you really can't get wild,
01:11:04.000But of course that's just practically true, right?
01:11:06.000Like if you're an Elon Musk or someone at that level, like a public figure or Eric Schmidt or whatever, you're not going to like – what are you going to do?
01:14:24.000And it was an amazing place to grow up.
01:14:27.000I became a bat mitzvah in 1997, and it happened at Tree of Life in I actually was a member of a different synagogue called Beth Shalom, but there had been this fire, and so all of the kids who were becoming a bar bat mitzvah that year did it at Tree of Life.
01:14:43.000And in the same way that people think about 9-11 as a date, I think about also October 27, 2018, because that morning I was in Arizona to give a speech to a group, and I looked at my phone around 10 in the morning to my family WhatsApp chat,
01:14:59.000and my youngest sister had just said, there's a shooter at Tree of Life.
01:15:03.000And my thought immediately went to my dad because my dad is kind of what we think of as like a promiscuous Jew.
01:15:25.000But my mom wrote back, you know, we're going to know people there.
01:15:28.000My dad knew most of the people, 11 people were killed.
01:15:31.000It was the most lethal anti-Semitic attack in all of American history.
01:15:37.000I knew several of the people that were killed.
01:15:40.000I was supposed to actually go to Israel the next day on a reporting trip to report on this fascinating archaeological dig.
01:15:47.000But I ended up putting that trip off, doing that story later, and just spending the week to see what happens to a community when something like this goes down.
01:15:58.000Because we read about mass shootings all the time.
01:16:03.000So much so that they become kind of an abstraction.
01:16:05.000And I don't report on this stuff, so I had never borne witness to what unfolds.
01:16:12.000And it was a really transformative week.
01:16:15.000And I write this in the book, but I feel like in retrospect, I had spent my life on a kind of holiday from history.
01:16:24.000Both because I was, you know, I'm a Jew of the post-war era, which is to say I'm part of the luckiest diaspora in all of Jewish history.
01:16:34.000Like the Jews since the end of World War II in this country have had it better than we've ever had it ever before.
01:18:17.000And so it wasn't that I thought antisemitism had died.
01:18:21.000Like I was, you know, I watched antisemitism.
01:18:25.000As it was sort of resurging in countries like France and England and Western Europe, but I sort of looked at all of that with some level of distance and maybe even a little condescension, like we're sort of inoculated from that disease in America, America singular,
01:18:42.000It's sort of separate from the tragedy of so much of Jewish history.
01:18:46.000And I have to say that, like, it sounds naive, but I was sort of shocked to see it, that it's here too, you know, and that we haven't escaped from it.
01:18:56.000And, I mean, that awakening happened a little bit before Pittsburgh, which is, it happened, I think it was April 2017, you'll correct me, but when was the Charlottesville march?
01:19:12.000But I remember being shocked, right, when those people were marching and they were shouting blood and soil, like Blunt in Boden, which is a Nazi slogan.
01:19:26.000Yeah, sorry, August 2017. When I heard the Jews will not replace us, right?
01:19:32.000I heard it in the plain meaning of that phrase.
01:19:36.000Like, the Jew is not going to take my job.
01:19:39.000The Jew is not going to take my job in the corner office or whatever.
01:19:44.000But in fact, it was like a reflection of this replacement theory ideology, which is that brown people and black people and Muslims and immigrants are coming to replace our white civilization.
01:19:56.000And the Jews' job is Where does that come from?
01:20:08.000That is a deeply, deeply ancient anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, right?
01:20:15.000It's the idea of, let's go back to the New Testament.
01:20:38.000What was then the most powerful empire in the world, the Roman Empire, to do their bidding.
01:20:43.000And you have this line in the book of Matthew that is so, so, I mean, the bloodiness of this line cannot be quantified, where he says, you know, his blood be on us and on our children, which goes, you know, down through the centuries to justify the killing of,
01:21:02.000But the idea of the Jew as sort of like the wily manipulator is As the Jew as having proximity to power, not being in power, but being able to sort of be the puppet master, pulling the levers of power.
01:21:16.000You see that play out in lots of different iterations through time, right?
01:21:23.000I'm trying to think about useful examples for your listeners, but that is sort of the trope, right?
01:21:30.000And it is an ancient one, but it's being utilized in really new ways.
01:21:36.000So it's not literally that the Jew is going to replace us.
01:21:40.000The Jew, in a way, is sort of like the greatest trick the devil has ever played.
01:23:28.000If you say online in a lot of these forums, like if you say, hey, we got to get rid of all these black people.
01:23:38.000There's going to be so many more red flags than if you say, we have to get rid of Jews.
01:23:44.000I don't understand that one, because when people look different from you, if you are an Asian person who is racist against black people, or a black person who's racist against white people, or if someone's different than you,
01:24:17.000It's a way of understanding and making sense of the world, especially in times of economic and social upheaval.
01:24:25.000The reason that antisemitism is resurgent right now is because, and not justifying it, but it's because we're in, going back to our earlier conversation, A time where people are disoriented, they're disaffected, they're confused, they're shortchanged, and they're looking for an easy answer.
01:24:56.000You have to wrap your mind around the idea, which is a huge, huge, huge idea, that anti-Semitism is built into the scaffolding of Western civilization.
01:25:09.000Think about it like an intellectual disease that's built into the foundations of the civilization that we live in.
01:25:15.000And in times where that civilization or a given society is healthy, anti-Semitism along with xenophobia and racism and all kinds of other bigotry are sort of kept in check.
01:25:27.000When the society becomes unhealthy, and we're living in a deeply unhealthy society in many different ways right now, anti-Semitism is something that people reach for, right?
01:25:37.000It's like if you want to understand like the Nazi rise to power, you kind of can't understand it without looking to the fact that there was, you know, an incredible economic depression in Germany and there was a scapegoat.
01:25:47.000And if you look, it's not to justify it, but if you look throughout history, right, look at the bubonic plague.
01:25:53.000The bubonic plague came because of rats.
01:26:18.000Dunking in the ritual bath before the Sabbath and all of these other things that probably kept them more protected against the plague than their neighbors.
01:26:26.000But rather than looking into it and saying, oh, maybe they're doing something right and something we should mimic, their neighbors said, kill the Jews, literally like throw the Jews down the well.
01:26:38.000And it led to massive pogroms Killing Jews for, and the claim was that the Jews literally poisoned the drinking water throughout Europe.
01:26:48.000So it's like, it's this irrational hatred, but it is so, so deep because it goes back to the most important myth that Western civilization is built on, and that is the Christian story.
01:27:16.000It's like you have to accept as a foundational principle that this is baked into the world that we live in.
01:27:23.000And we're never going to cure it and it's never going to go completely away.
01:27:27.000The best thing that we can do is build healthy cultures that protect certain virtues like liberty, like freedom of the individual, like religious liberty.
01:27:39.000It's not a coincidence that America's been so good for the Jews.
01:27:42.000It's because so many of the ideas that protect minorities and religious minorities, like Jews, were sort of for all of their fault, for all of the founders' faults, right?
01:27:53.000And they had many, including owning people.
01:27:55.000But, you know, George Washington, he writes this letter to the first...
01:28:04.000And he says something that was then incredibly radical, which is pathetic that it was, but he says, you know, Jews in America are not just going to be tolerated.
01:28:12.000They're going to possess the same power.
01:28:19.000That at the time was a radical departure from history.
01:28:23.000In the Islamic world, the Jews had always lived as dhimis, as second-class citizens.
01:28:28.000And in the Christian world, it was worse.
01:28:30.000I mean, what people forget, right, is like, right now, radical Islam, when it comes to the religions, is the greatest threat to Jews.
01:28:37.000But for most of its history, Islam was much more tolerant of Jews than Christianity was, which is something that's kind of like, has gotten lost to history.
01:29:16.000The sign is that all these things are moving to stamp out racism, to stamp out sexism, stamp out misogyny and homophobia, and all those things that we know are a real problem in culture and society.
01:29:31.000It's the overcorrection, the overreaction, the virtue signaling that's driving people nuts.
01:29:36.000But the trend is all moving towards an area where any rational, reasonable person I think this is a good thing.
01:30:04.000But the thing that's strange again about this particular pathology is that some of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world are countries with no Jews, right?
01:31:01.000Presaged all of those categories that you just laid out, which is what makes us so hard to categorize.
01:31:07.000The only thing that mirrors it in some way is Muslims.
01:31:11.000In some way, Muslims, they vary wildly in terms of how they look, in terms of what part of the world they're from, but they think of themselves as Muslims.
01:31:23.000But Christians think of themselves as Christian.
01:31:50.000And do you think that because of that, because when – When people are so loyal to their own people, which is one thing that I actually admire about Jewish people, I think it would be nice if more people were like that, that they are profoundly pro-Jewish.
01:32:07.000There's not a lot of apathetic Jews towards Judaism or towards the tribe, I should say.
01:32:51.000For whatever reason, when they see someone who is in this sort of, I mean, I don't want to use the word isolated, because they're not really, Jewish folks in America are not really isolated, unless maybe like Hasidics, you could say they're in a very established community in Brooklyn and other parts of the country,
01:33:08.000but that maybe people look at this community, this tribe, and they think, they don't give a fuck about us, they only care about Jewish folks.
01:33:18.000They might think that and that would be an anti-Semitic idea.
01:33:23.000There's this really strange idea that people think that Jews cause anti-Semitism, right?
01:33:29.000Like when the evil man who walked into the Walmart in El Paso talked about a Hispanic invasion and then went into that Walmart and killed I think upwards of 20 people, no one thought Maybe he's right.
01:33:57.000And yet, when it comes to the Jews, people are like, well, you know, they wear their funny hats.
01:34:03.000Well, you know, they seem to, you know, be looking out for one another.
01:34:08.000I mean, like— But do you think there were that kind of rationalizations after the Tree of Life— Yes.
01:34:19.000In that case, yes, but not in the case of what's been going on in Brooklyn.
01:34:22.000There, we keep hearing things like, this is the result of communal friction, as if disputes over zoning laws cause someone to pick up a machete the size of a broomstick, walk into a rabbi's house, and hack people up.
01:34:35.000That was the story that I emailed you about?
01:35:06.000And he goes in and he tries to do that.
01:35:08.000So you have just a case of someone who any reasonable person sees as evil, which is this neo-Nazi, and people who any reasonable person sees as totally innocent, which is Jews in prayer.
01:35:32.000No, the question was, when they have something like that, do they extensively interview him and try to figure out what the fuck brought him to that?
01:35:46.000Well, a lot of the people, like the guy in the Muncie case that we're going to talk about, the machete guy, he showed signs of mental illness.
01:35:52.000I think that Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh also did.
01:35:55.000But then so did Dylann Roof, the guy that killed however many people he killed at the black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
01:36:06.000It's like these hateful ideologies Often they draw people that are deranged or young or somehow on the fringes of society.
01:36:15.000With the guy in Pittsburgh, he was deep into this replacement theory ideology.
01:36:20.000The reason that he selected Tree of Life as his synagogue is because Tree of Life the previous weekend had participated in this program called National Refugee Shabbat or Sabbath.
01:36:32.000It was celebrating the idea of Welcoming the stranger, which is a fundamental Jewish value.
01:36:37.000Do not oppress a stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
01:36:40.000And he said specifically that, you know, HIAS, the group that was organizing this National Refugee Shabbat, it stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
01:36:49.000It started in the 1800s as a way of resettling Eastern European Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, now works to resettle refugees, including Jews all over the world.
01:36:59.000And he specifically selected Tree of Life because of that, because he said the Jews are bringing in the dirty immigrants into the society.
01:37:07.000So he was like kind of the perfect embodiment of white supremacist replacement theory ideas.
01:37:14.000In Brooklyn, it's much harder cases because it's much harder for people to talk about.
01:37:18.000Because how do you talk about the fact that in many of these cases, and a lot of them have been caught on CCTV, that it's a young black man attacking a Hasidic guy walking down the street and who's visibly Jewish?
01:37:32.000It's much harder to talk about when someone who we talk about as being rightly as being from a group that is himself victimized, a poor black kid in Brooklyn, is then going on to victimize another minority group.
01:37:47.000It's just much harder when the attacker is not a white supremacist to talk about it.
01:38:03.000It's almost like if you had Amish people move in and they stuck to themselves and they lived in one sort of community, I think they would probably experience a similar level of hatred.
01:38:12.000But then you add into it this sort of acceptance of anti-Semitism in a lot of communities.
01:39:10.000And that's one of the things you actually touch on in your book.
01:39:15.000You were talking about, I mean, it's how successful Jewish people have become in this country.
01:39:23.000And there's got to be some sort of a resentment for that as well, especially by, again, we're talking about mentally deranged people, people with like severe...
01:39:32.000Some of them are mentally deranged, but some of them are young.
01:39:36.000Some of them are – that's what's really difficult.
01:40:10.000Do you remember in the video there were those two or three black men who were members of this sect, the black Hebrew Israelites, the Hebrew Israelites?
01:40:19.000And everyone kind of laughed them off as like, ha ha, they're just this obnoxious, weird sect.
01:41:25.000Then it comes to light a week ago that they had a bomb in the U-Haul that had the range of five football fields that they wanted to deploy.
01:41:35.000I mean, and everyone was laughing, like, look at these crazy people that believe this crazy ideology.
01:41:41.000Well, this crazy ideology is moving people to do very, very violent things.
01:41:45.000And there are things that haven't even made the news.
01:41:48.000You know, like, you know, if we believe this idea, right, that this, what's going on in Brooklyn is the result of communal friction, well, how does that explain my friend's father-in-law who was walking on the Upper East Side wearing a yarmulke on his head and gets the shit kicked out of him?
01:42:03.000How does that explain my friend Avram, who is a progressive Jew, wears a rainbow yarmulke, is on the subway, and he's had several interactions with this group who scream at him.
01:42:15.000One of them held up a picture of Louis Farrakhan saying, you're not a real Jew, you're a faggot, all of these horrible things.
01:42:24.000I had a friend on the Lower East Side that was visibly Jewish, not wearing a black hat, wearing a yarmulke but looked like you or me, got punched.
01:42:37.000No, not all of these are black Israelites.
01:42:39.000What I'm saying is that there's this kind of inchoate hate that's been unleashed, and that's the thing that's most disturbing.
01:42:49.000If you look at the Anti-Defamation League statistics, only a small percentage of hate crimes committed against Jews, something like 15% last year, were committed by white supremacists.
01:43:05.000And how do you contain it once it's been unleashed?
01:43:14.000When you think about these social media sites, Gab was one where this guy who shot up the Tree of Life was a member of.
01:43:28.000I'm clearly not a proponent of censorship, but...
01:43:31.000Do people, do you think they get radicalized in these, when you get to a forum where there's no restrictions whatsoever on language or ideology or behavior, you can say whatever you want as long as you're not saying something.
01:43:49.000I mean, Gab has rules like you can't do things that are illegal.
01:44:23.000One of the reasons that I feel so strongly about keeping the spectrum of acceptable opinions as wide as possible is because I think that the narrower it shrinks, like we're talking about normal ideas being closeted, then people go into these underground layers online and they become radicalized,
01:45:48.000Like when you have someone like the Christchurch shooter who was live streaming this and making references to, you know, what did he- I think he referenced the Tree of Life.
01:46:58.000In my mind, there's no clear answer here.
01:47:02.000There's not a clear answer, but I think that, look, the idea that a private company should be obligated to Stream someone killing someone or let's even go like take it less stakes than that.
01:48:23.000And there has to be a kind of reasonable middle and way to talk about it.
01:48:27.000Because if not, people self-radicalize.
01:48:30.000I just see that happening again and again and again on so many different topics.
01:48:34.000Yeah, the immigration angle is a perfect example of that.
01:48:37.000I mean, it should be absolutely possible for hardworking people to make it to America and do better.
01:48:42.000It also should be possible for us to keep gang members and cartel members from crossing the border freely and shooting people and killing people and selling drugs in our communities and all the things that we're scared of when it comes to the open border policy idea.
01:48:56.000The thing about the social media thing, in a lot of ways, it's this new experiment, right?
01:49:03.000It's something that we've never had before.
01:49:04.000Like you're saying about a KKK meeting, you used to have to go to one, right?
01:49:38.000How do we somehow or another educate and improve?
01:49:41.000How do we reach out to a lot of these people that are going to get radicalized and offer them some sort of a positive community as a possible alternative?
01:49:51.000Because this is what a lot of this stuff is.
01:49:54.000A lot of these people that get radicalized, one of the things that happens is you don't have anyone that cares about you or supports you, but you find people that very strongly believe in an idea.
01:50:05.000They believe in an idea, an awful idea, so much so that they're willing to kill people for that idea.
01:50:10.000And then you find a bunch of them, and then they reinforce each other's beliefs with these positive affirmations and And essentially, they're signaling to them.
01:50:19.000They're virtue signaling to these horrible people that they also agree with a lot of these ideas.
01:50:24.000And then you go out and you do something.
01:50:55.000This is a group that somehow or another gets them.
01:50:59.000I think one of the things that's alarming about our politics right now is things that were just regarded up until five years ago as the kind of lunatic fringe have made their way into mainstream politics.
01:51:11.000Steve Bannon proudly declared himself and Breitbart as the platform of the alt-right.
01:51:19.000And then Steve Bannon was sitting down the hall from the President of the United States.
01:51:22.000What was the alt-right in the beginning, though?
01:51:25.000See, the alt-right became something in the public eye.
01:51:28.000In the beginning, I thought the alt-right was like young Republicans that were a little different.
01:51:33.000I don't think that's what the alt-right is.
01:51:38.000But I mean, in the beginning, my perceptions of the alt-right in the beginning was like what I thought Milo Yiannopoulos was when he first burst onto the scene.
01:51:47.000Sort of like, you know, a guy who's...
01:51:53.000But the whole thing that Milo has revealed, right, is like it was an ironic posture that revealed – like if you're joking about, you know, fags and kikes, you're still saying the thing.
01:52:04.000Well, but he's gay and he's Jewish and so the idea was that he could get away with these things.
01:52:09.000Provocateur was the word I was looking for.
01:52:10.000That's essentially what he's doing and he's using that to – Build social currency, right?
01:52:17.000That social currency is developing this large group of people that follow him and talk to him and he thinks that there's some merit to his idea so he finds some sort of justification for having these provocative conversations in this stance where he's saying these things and a big proponent of free speech and all these things are happening all at the same time.
01:52:37.000That's what I thought the alt-right was initially.
01:52:40.000What I thought the alt-right was initially Was people that wanted a new, younger, more current take on what a Republican is.
01:53:29.000Look, like, the idea that some Americans are less American than others, that is certainly an alt-right idea that I think is extremely dangerous.
01:53:43.000I mean, you saw it when—here's a great example.
01:53:46.000When Trump went after the squad, okay, as—and remember when he said that they should go back to the totally broken, crime-infested places that they came from?
01:54:01.000The idea there, right, as I heard it, and maybe I'm hearing something you're not, that some Americans, because of their skin color or their ideas...
01:54:43.000And I also agree that this idea, like, go back to where you were that sucks...
01:54:50.000Is the response to someone criticizing the way things are here is pretty ridiculous.
01:54:55.000You don't have to go back to where it sucks.
01:54:57.000You're here and you're a United States citizen.
01:54:59.000You just think that this place should be better.
01:55:02.000Yes, and you can disagree with their ideas, but that concept, right, that you're not entirely of a place, that is something that has been used against Jews forever.
01:55:13.000The idea that you're not fully Iraqi because you're Jewish.
01:55:17.000Or you're not fully American because you're Jewish.
01:55:20.000Or you're not fully French because you're Jewish.
01:55:22.000Like, the idea of provisional belonging is something that I'm extremely sensitive to.
01:55:28.000So it's a toxic tribalism that's attached to the concept, the alt-right ideas.
01:55:33.000Well, but then the alt-right ideas, like...
01:55:38.000I mean, look at who Steve Bannon has made common cause with, right?
01:55:42.000People like Nigel Farage, people like Marine Le Pen.
01:55:45.000I mean, there was a really good documentary about Steve Bannon where he's meeting with people who really are not just like normal conservatives.
01:56:22.000Marion Ann Perrine, a French politician and lawyer serving as president of the National Rally political party since 2011 with a brief interruption in 2017. She's been the member of the National...
01:57:53.000I mean, are you not alarmed by the turn that you see in the Republican Party towards sort of like, I don't know, the Trumpist cult?
01:58:02.000Well, I think one thing the Republican Party has done that's wise if you want to keep a solidified team is that they haven't come out against him and they've supported him and there's very little dissent.
01:58:17.000And this is a good idea if you want your team to win, right?
01:58:22.000And there was a lot of people who were kind of never Trumpers, who softened their stance once they realized the power of his presidency, that he's really dominant.
01:58:56.000I mean, there's just – Trump has just beyond the sort of like – he said various things that are like – he was speaking to a Jewish group and he talked about your prime minister.
01:59:07.000I mean, he said so many things that are ridiculous.
01:59:10.000But the big, big thing that he's guilty of is he has like dismantled – The guardrails of the keep society decent and civil and normal.
01:59:21.000And like once you dismantle those things, like it's very easy to reverse – not very easy, but you can reverse policies.
01:59:28.000What's much harder to reverse is a culture.
01:59:31.000And he has just been gleefully making war on what I think of as very, very important cultural norms.
01:59:40.000Like – Like, not attacking the weakest people in our culture.
01:59:46.000Like, not attacking Gold Star families.
01:59:48.000Like, I mean, he has attacked, he has denigrated, like, the most heroic and the weakest people in our culture at every possible turn.
01:59:56.000Yeah, the Gold Star family thing was very disturbing and weird how it just kind of went away.
02:00:02.000Remember when he – people forget this – when he said about Judge Alonzo Curiel, who was born in this country, that he couldn't give a fair hearing to Trump University because he was born in Mexico?
02:01:00.000Indiana-born federal judge who President Donald Trump once said could not be impartial because he was Mexican cleared a major obstacle standing in the way of Trump's long-promised border wall with Mexico.
02:01:11.000Right, so I hear that and I'm like, oh, that's...
02:01:59.000We've gotten to a point in society that something that's a positive statement, like Make America Great Again, is so polarizing that people will be violent towards you and feel like they need to.
02:02:12.000They feel like they need to laugh, like you're the enemy.
02:02:55.000Well, no, I was going to say that, like, that is a culture, the whole culture you just described is one that's deeply unhealthy for Jews or any difference, really.
02:03:04.000And, yeah, it's just not a coincidence that anti-Semitism is rising.
02:03:54.000Grew up in Egypt and was, you know, he was like, I was swimming in antisemitism.
02:03:58.000I just didn't even know it wasn't normal.
02:04:00.000Like, the mosque I went to, the school I went to, it was like the Jews were this supervillain And the whole message was like, become a superhero and go and kill and defeat the Jews.
02:04:10.000And he was like, I went to a normal mosque, normal school.
02:04:12.000This is what I was taught, and I never met a Jew in my life.
02:04:15.000And he gets arrested during the Arab Spring because he starts learning Hebrew online.
02:04:21.000He's really curious about who the Jews are, and he gets arrested.
02:04:25.000I think they're suspicious that he's a Zionist spy.
02:05:22.000But that is the state of affairs for Jews.
02:05:24.000And Jews that I know hide evidence of their identity everywhere they go.
02:05:29.000There was a woman who wrote me who was reading my book on the subway in New York and was like, I'm nervous to be seen reading a book with this title in public and hit it.
02:05:41.000Because it's become so regular and everyone else just is living their normal life and we're like sounding the alarm here.
02:05:50.000Because if there's one thing the Jews have gotten really good at, it's like we have an instinct for danger.
02:05:56.000Like that is something that we have cultivated over years of being discriminated against, persecuted against, nearly wiped off the map in Europe.
02:06:05.000Like we understand and we smell danger sometimes before other people.
02:06:10.000Do you think that anti-Semitism is more prominent on the East Coast than the West Coast?
02:06:27.000Like, there are different kinds of anti-Semitism.
02:06:30.000Like the kind that we've talked about that comes on the far right expresses itself one way.
02:06:36.000And there's also anti-Semitism that comes smuggled into the mainstream through the political left that comes cloaked in language that is very seductive, like the language of social justice and progress.
02:06:47.000And if the right claims that the Jews are, you know, fake white people, the far left claims that the Jews are handmaidens to white supremacy.
02:07:10.000And that is how under Nazism, Jews are the race contaminators.
02:07:15.000How under communism, we are the arch-capitalists, right?
02:07:19.000How under the idea of white supremacy, we are these fake white people, right?
02:07:25.000We appear to be white people, but we're actually doing the bidding of these groups who white supremacists view to be lesser than black people, brown people, Muslims, immigrants.
02:07:34.000And how on the far left, the Jews are seen as sort of the great—what is the greatest evil right now to the far left?
02:08:06.000Someone like Jon Hamm at the very top and black, transgender, disabled people at the very bottom.
02:08:12.000Well, the intersectional worldview comes around and reverses that and says, no, Jon Hamm and cisgendered white men like Joe Rogan are now at the very bottom and at the very top are the transgender, black, disabled person.
02:08:24.000And so where are the Jews in that new intersectional caste system of the world?
02:08:27.000We're kind of like right above Jon Hamm.
02:08:30.000We're right near him because we enjoy all of the sort of privileges that he enjoys.
02:08:35.000It's a crazy thing, but that's sort of where we are.
02:08:38.000The handmaidens to white privilege or white supremacy is very strange.
02:08:49.000And while I see it with people where they openly express disdain for Jewish people, I've seen it from a lot of people that you would call It's like,
02:09:08.000I think of it very crudely, if racism is the sin that's sort of acceptable on the far right, hating Jews is the sin that's acceptable on the far left.
02:09:15.000The far left, because of support for Israel, they believe that Israel is dominating Palestine and that Hezbollah is misunderstood.
02:09:23.000And then there's all these different sentiments that get expressed openly in these left circles.
02:09:32.000And they're telling, you know, they're basically propagating, they're repeating without even realizing it, this Soviet propaganda line, which is that Zionism is racism, which is an unbelievable thing to say, because the majority of Jews who live in Israel are Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent.
02:10:12.000All of the conflict in the Middle East would be resolved if only we took care of this one tiny conflict between this tiny group of people and their neighbors.
02:10:23.000Where in fact, it's like a tiny local conflict in this huge drama of the Middle East of which there are a zillion players.
02:10:30.000And, you know, the Jews of Israel are only one tiny part of it.
02:10:35.000The Zionist thing is, define the difference between Jewish and Zionist.
02:11:44.000Zionism, the way that I think is the simplest definition, is the belief in the Jewish right to self-determination, and it's the Jewish liberation movement.
02:11:54.000And so, let's go back to, like, pre-1948, which is the year that the state of Israel is established.
02:12:01.000And you have Jews in, you know, Poland and all of these other places debating, like, what is the way that we can solve our constant problems?
02:12:10.000Like the systemic oppression that we are constantly enduring.
02:12:13.000And there were all of these different responses to that problem.
02:12:16.000One argument was the socialist argument.
02:12:19.000You know, if we, or the, you know, the anti-capitalist argument, if the problem is capitalism, and if only we defeat capitalism, anti-Semitism will go away.
02:12:26.000Some argued that total assimilation was the right way to solve it.
02:12:30.000We just need to kind of disappear as Jews.
02:12:32.000That's the only way we'll be fully accepted.
02:12:34.000And another group, you know, which was not even the most popular group, is this idea of we need to be able to determine our own fate.
02:12:44.000The only way that we can determine our own fate is this idea of us having our own state and our own army where we can protect ourselves.
02:12:52.000And that is ultimately the idea that sort of wins out.
02:12:56.000So when you're having a debate about, you know, when people say today they're an anti-Zionist, The reason that that is so problematic is they're not making that argument in 1920s Eastern Europe when the state doesn't exist.
02:13:10.000It's one thing to be an anti-Zionist in theory, right?
02:13:46.000So I asked the person that makes the anti-Zionist argument, what do you imagine will happen?
02:13:51.000Like, are you, do you think that you're advocating for a genocide?
02:13:56.000Right away, or like, you have to have no sense of Middle Eastern history or politics to make the argument that you can be a minority in that region without protection.
02:14:10.000That looks like the story of the Yazidis.
02:14:12.000It looks like the story of the Kurds, the story of the Zoroastrians, the story, frankly, of Christians who are going to be completely expelled from the Middle East within the next decade, which is a story no one talks about.
02:14:22.000So, the anti-Zionist sentiment, when people start talking about Zionists, what they're essentially talking about is Israel just existing.
02:14:34.000And Jeremy Corbyn made this very plain where he actually said the words, the BBC has a bias towards believing that Israel has a right to exist.
02:15:01.000Anti-Zionism has become such a plank of normative political progressivism that if you're an 18-year-old and you go onto a college campus and you're like – during the orientation week, you're signing up for legalizing pot club and better rights for cafeteria workers.
02:15:18.000Oh, and by the way, the boycott, divest, sanctions movement against Israel, which is an anti-Zionist movement.
02:15:27.000You're just kind of like swimming along with progressive waters because that's how successful this movement has been.
02:15:32.000But if you step back and you're like, wait, hold on, there's a political movement gaining popularity in the West that was in fact embodied in the person of Jeremy Corbyn and what became of his Labor Party that believes that there's only one state in the world that doesn't have a right to exist?
02:16:34.000And by the way, they're saying that, they're making that argument in a context where they are literally surrounded by neighbors who want to murder as many Jewish Israelis as possible.
02:17:06.000Jeremy Corbyn accused of anti-Semitism over shocking 2011 video in which he questions Israel's right to exist and says the BBC is biased in favor of the Jewish state.
02:17:35.000And I could see how you could look at where Palestine is and the state of the Palestinian people and saying there has to be a better way for them.
02:17:45.000It has to be a better civilization for them.
02:19:33.000Life under these regimes is absolutely horrible.
02:19:37.000So the problem is Israel then sees what happens in Gaza and they're like, okay, we're in this situation where we want to be a liberal democracy and yet we're occupying another people.
02:19:47.000It's an untenable situation if you want to be a liberal democracy to occupy another people.
02:19:52.000The problem is Literally, geographically, if they pull out of the West Bank, they will likely have another situation like they had in Gaza.
02:20:01.000And now all of a sudden, not only do you have rockets going to the south of the country in places like Starot from Gaza, you have rockets capable of reaching Tel Aviv and the population centers of Israel.
02:20:20.000I mean, I think one of the places we've arrived to is like, what does Palestinian nationalism really seek?
02:20:29.000Western liberals like me want, for years, I told myself, and I think this was certainly like the view of lots of experts, that what Palestinian nationalism really wanted was a Palestinian state.
02:20:43.000Palestinians just want self-determination like everyone else in the world.
02:20:47.000And I am absolutely on board with that.
02:20:49.000The problem is, is that they're leaders and then you look at some of these polls and the numbers are really disturbing and they say, no, the goal is not having our own state alongside Israel.
02:21:02.000The goal is for Israel not to be there.
02:21:05.000And then you look at the evidence of all of these peace offers that were, you know, Oslo and Camp David, and we can go on and on, and they were all rejected.
02:21:13.000So it's like, is the goal your own land and having a place of your own?
02:21:18.000Or have we told ourselves, and I include myself in this, a lie about what Palestinian nationalism, or at least parts of it, seek?
02:21:26.000And that's really, really upsetting to confront.
02:21:29.000So the hardcore position from people like from Hezbollah is that Israel is stolen from the Palestinian people.
02:23:18.000The number of people I know who were touched by the second intifada, like I was there during times where a cafe would just blow up down the street.
02:23:27.000So they have been thoroughly disabused of the idea that I think that many of them have given up on the idea that there could be peace in the short term.
02:23:38.000Right now to make things a little bit better.
02:23:40.000You can improve the economic life for people, for Palestinians living in the West Bank.
02:23:46.000And you can try and shrink the conflict, meaning no settlement expansion.
02:23:50.000And I would say pull out of some of these Jewish settlements that are like, you know, far flung and that the Israeli army is sort of protecting for no reason.
02:24:01.000But I think that's the best case scenario for right now.
02:24:05.000There's a book, I think it's called Catch 67 by Mika Goodman that I would recommend to people that's about how to shrink the conflict and that for now being the best case scenario.
02:24:16.000But again, it's like, you have to ask yourself, why is everyone in the world obsessed about this particular conflict?
02:24:29.000I think it's inescapable that part of it is an obsession with the Jews.
02:24:34.000Like, there are 500,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon, most of whom live in refugee camps, and by official Lebanese law are barred from being lawyers, from being doctors, from being accountants.
02:25:53.000There's going to be a certain amount of population, a certain percentage of the population, no matter what, that's going to hold those beliefs.
02:25:59.000And these have been passed down for thousands of years.
02:26:03.000Yes, and the challenge is to keep society as healthy as possible, to keep those forces at bay.
02:27:17.000And it has nothing to do with criticism of Israel.
02:27:21.000Israeli government is full of lunatics, just like our government, just like any other normal country.
02:27:28.000But it's like Israel's not treated like a normal country.
02:27:31.000It's treated in a way like this has these superpowers, both superpowers to affect peace in the Middle East and superpowers to like a supervillain.
02:27:44.000People hate a country that doesn't exist, and they love a country that doesn't exist.
02:27:48.000They project themselves and their ideas of things onto this place, and it's just like a normal country.
02:27:55.000That's where it's so strange, because that's where there really doesn't seem to be a way out of this.
02:28:03.000Because it's an idea that hasn't been fully explored but has been expressed so frivolously almost.
02:28:11.000Well, it's like if you think about if there was a movement in the world that suggested that, you know, the Japanese weren't a real people and Japan does not have a right to exist.
02:28:25.000Like, think about how crazy that sounds.
02:28:26.000But that's a normal thing that a lot of people believe.
02:28:35.000When you sat down and you decided you're going to write this book, How to Fight Antisemitism, what were you thinking?
02:28:42.000Well, first of all, I wrote, I was supposed to write another book that I'm still on the hook for.
02:28:46.000I went and begged my publisher to do this because after Pittsburgh, I just kind of couldn't stop seeing it everywhere I looked.
02:28:53.000And honestly, like, yeah, I think if Pittsburgh hadn't happened, I wouldn't have written this first, but I just became so passionate about it and so passionate about, here's, I think, maybe the shortest answer for this.
02:29:10.000When we talk about antisemitism, even you and I, like we think about Jews, like the Jews on the streets of Brooklyn or in Pittsburgh or in that synagogue in California, as being the victims of it.
02:29:22.000But the real bigger victim of it is the surrounding society.
02:29:28.000When anti-Semitism shows itself in a culture, it means that that culture is extremely broken or in some stage of death.
02:29:38.000And the reason that I think it's so important and the reason I ultimately wrote the book is I want people to understand that the fact that anti-Semitism is rising in America says nothing about Jews.
02:29:49.000It says everything about America and where we are right now.
02:29:53.000Like, we don't want to become a place where anti-Semitism is normalized.
02:29:59.000Societies where anti-Semitism become normalized are societies that no longer exist on the face of the earth.
02:30:06.000I like how you described it in your book as a symptom like that we all have certain bacteria or we all have certain viruses, but our immune system keeps them at bay.
02:30:18.000When those viruses show themselves, it's a sign that the immune system is weak, that the body itself is weak.
02:30:31.000And the question, right, is how do we rebuild back our immune system?
02:30:35.000And one of the reasons that I'm alarmed by, I completely understand the populist moment, but I'm also scared of it because populism often does not end well.
02:30:48.000For Jews, or for the political center.
02:30:51.000And I think one of the reasons that we need to, like, how do we rebuild our immune system?
02:30:55.000Like, those are the sort of things that I suggest in the last chapter of the book.
02:30:59.000And I think, I just hope we can do them.
02:31:04.000Because I'm really, really alarmed that we're living in an America in 2020, where people I know, you know, who wear a Jewish star, like, put it inside their shirt when they walk down the street.
02:31:24.000I mean, to say nothing, by the way, of like, Jews in France that have, you know, they've been hiding themselves for a very, very long time.
02:31:35.000You know, a lot of Jews I know are taking shooting lessons.
02:31:38.000I just had a guy reach out to me that was like, I read your book, I've read your speeches, I think you're great, but none of them are going to help you if someone attacks you on the street.
02:31:46.000Let me teach you Krav Maga self-defense.
02:32:33.000The other thing I was thinking about is, like, what would it look like if you got some, like, of your MMA buddies to put on, you know, to dress like Hasidic Jews and walk around Brooklyn in the next few months?