00:12:53.000We got Call of Duty as an option, Civ 5, or we could watch the Hazoni debate, or something else.
00:12:58.000Or we could do something else if you have something in mind.
00:13:01.000And usually it's me picking things out, but I just have autism.
00:13:06.000So, what I tend to do is just the same things over and over and over again, repeatedly.
00:13:14.000So, I don't know how you guys feel about that, but I thought maybe we could just open the floor up to suggestions.
00:13:21.000Not games so much, but if you want like content or you have a link or something, because I just find myself falling into the same patterns, the same habits, just doing the same things, driving the same places, eating the same meal, the same thing all the time.
00:13:39.000And that's like, so I figured maybe we could switch it up a little bit.
00:16:17.000So I don't know if I should just take off everything on the beard and keep the mustache, or if I just get rid of the whole thing, honestly.
00:16:26.000I'm remembering why I shaved to begin with.
00:16:28.000It's like I look completely different with a mustache.
00:16:31.000The other day, I went to the bank and the guy was talking to me and he's like, oh, so you must be like 30 or something.
00:16:41.000Back, um, I forget when this would have been, but like August or something.
00:16:47.000I remember going through Midway and I went to the girl, you know, when you give her the ID and the, um, your ticket and they scan it or whatever, and she goes, uh, 21.
00:20:16.000But this is something I've talked about a lot.
00:20:18.000I don't really get into it on the show so much, but this is the crux of the entire.
00:20:26.000Contemporary historical worldview, the entire post war liberal worldview, which is the Holocaust.
00:20:36.000You know, it might seem because for a long time I thought all these issues were kind of separate and like randomly combined, like race realism and talking about organized power at the top and talking about World War II.
00:20:52.000And I thought all these South Africa, I thought they were all separate, but they're really all related.
00:21:00.000And, you know, dumb dumb Dan Crenshaw basically just spells it out.
00:21:04.000He spells out the whole thing in this little video about Holocaust Remembrance Day, really in like the last 15 seconds.
00:22:06.000It's important for us to know about that because we don't want that to happen again.
00:22:11.000And how can we prevent it from happening?
00:22:13.000Well, Dan Crenshaw says we have to study how it happened.
00:22:17.000We have to study how the perpetrators of the Holocaust rose to power.
00:22:21.000We have to study how Hitler and a German National Socialist Workers' Party rose to power.
00:22:28.000In particular, what does he say about identity politics?
00:22:32.000It was society when one group is blamed for all of the.
00:22:36.000We have to learn what happens when identity politics is promulgated in society and when one group is blamed for all of the problems.
00:22:46.000So, the causal link that he's creating is that identity politics causes the Holocaust.
00:22:54.000Identity politics and the idea of the so called scapegoat, which we hear this theory all the time in like, excuse me, social studies and history class and elementary, middle, and high school.
00:23:07.000Blaming a certain group for your problems, blaming a group for your problems, and identitarian politics causes the Holocaust.
00:23:20.000This is the most important, like, and it's not, I don't think a lot of people even like consciously think about it or know about it, but it's the most important narrative in American politics.
00:23:35.000Why do people, you know, well, here, almost everybody or a lot of people agree in some capacity with the spirit of what we're saying.
00:23:46.000You know, we talk about Donald Trump's rhetoric, that it's implicit.
00:23:50.000When Donald Trump talks about make America great again and Muslim ban and so on, It is implicit.
00:23:57.000They support, you know, because Donald Trump says it in an inoffensive way, they support it.
00:24:02.000And spiritually, that is what we represent, which is a return to tradition, hierarchy, authority, order, all these things, an end to immigration.
00:24:15.000But why do people not support it outrightly all the time or overtly or explicitly?
00:24:21.000Because we've created this mental shortcut that white identity, well, who's associated with white identity?
00:24:46.000And so the same people that are advancing these ideas about tradition and homogeneity and order and so on, well, they're like this other guy.
00:24:56.000And this other guy did some fucked up stuff.
00:24:59.000And these guys, too, will do some fucked up stuff.
00:25:08.000Because we have to know what identity politics and the so called scapegoating leads to.
00:25:15.000So, when we say, for example, that international corporations are the source of our problems or immigrants are the source of our problems, when we assign blame, when we hold particularly non white groups accountable, we are scapegoating.
00:25:30.000We're blaming one group for society's problems.
00:25:48.000And this is probably what this guy actually believes.
00:25:51.000This is what most normie people believe that we have to learn about this event to prevent it because these very basic, primitive tribal impulses will lead to grave tragedy.
00:26:09.000And there's also something implicit in there about the idea of majorities and minorities.
00:26:15.000Because obviously he's not against, you know, and we talk about this all the time.
00:26:18.000Turning Point and Dan Crenshaw and Conservative Inc. are not against playing identity politics, obviously, when blacks play identity politics.
00:26:26.000Does anybody have a problem with the NAACP existing?
00:26:29.000Because they should if they're against identity politics.
00:26:44.000So if you're, and I know that's a trite talking point, you hear that a lot, but it just goes to show that it's not about identity politics, it's about white identity politics that leads to the Holocaust.
00:26:55.000And it's not about blaming any group because Dan Crenshaw wants to blame the alt right for everything.
00:26:59.000He wants to blame the alt right for all society's problems.
00:27:03.000You know, pick your poison with the different scapegoats Republicans have socialists, Democrats, George Soros.
00:27:15.000It can only be a certain scapegoat, and it can only be a certain kind of identity politics.
00:27:21.000And that's why the Holocaust narrative is so important, because it's so particular.
00:27:25.000It was something, you know, in the collective imagination, which is so heinous.
00:27:31.000The visuals, the imagery, you know, what they show you in schools of these emaciated corpses and mass graves and so on, I mean, they don't show anything else like that.
00:27:41.000They show you that one, and they show it with Jews.
00:27:46.000You know, these are supposed to be the most harmless people in the world and the most harmless victims.
00:27:52.000And, you know, this is the bully, the white man.
00:27:56.000Look at what the white man will do if not unchecked.
00:27:58.000Look at what the white man will do if not knocked down a peg.
00:28:02.000At the peak of the white man in the middle of the 20th century, after the Great War, you know, this is the peak of colonial empires, the peak of European power, the greatest disparity between Europe and all the rest.
00:28:13.000And then look at what they did when they were unchecked.
00:30:00.000We shouldn't be afraid of becoming monsters.
00:30:02.000Because, of course, you know, this is kind of like a Jordan Peterson talking point, but, you know, all it means to be a monster is have the ability to do harm.
00:30:10.000But you necessarily must have the ability to do harm if you also have the ability to do great things.
00:30:17.000You know, if you're a bodybuilder, if you're some kind of jacked maniac, you have the ability to do terrible harm.
00:30:23.000You have the ability to, you know, rip people in half, punch people so hard they die, but you also have the ability to protect people and to build things and so on.
00:30:32.000So, necessarily, You need to have that level of power.
00:30:36.000You need to have that level of achievement in order to do great things.
00:30:42.000But they want us to believe that because of the propensity or the possibility for us to go in a bad direction, that we should never strive to achieve anything, really.
00:31:27.000I don't understand how people don't get that, which is why, you know, I don't know, which is why it's an important narrative to think about, which is, you know, a lot of people said, About when I made that cookie thing or whatever, like, oh, that was like the worst optics ever.
00:31:41.000It's like sooner or later we have to confront this like foundational myth, like, not myth, like in the sense that it's not true, but this like foundational idea that has shaped political discourse in the contemporary world in the last 80 years since the war.
00:31:57.000So I thought I saw, I just want to go over that thing really quick.
00:31:59.000It's one minute, but that's Dan Crenshaw.
00:32:02.000We're going to put our music back on here and I'll check on the poll.
00:34:28.000And they want you to believe that Nazi Germany is like the most evil thing ever.
00:34:34.000Not even the devil is as bad as Nazi Germany.
00:34:37.000And it's like, look, for what it's worth, like, there's two schools of thought on Hitler there's like a baby view of Hitler and Nazi Germany, which is like the villain of history, the worst thing ever, unambiguously, totally, in every way wrong.
00:34:54.000There's no nuance, there's no subtlety, it's bad.
00:37:28.000Because the way you're brought up, the indoctrination is so strong and so thorough and overwhelming that you literally do think of this guy as like a cartoon character or like a supervillain in a comic book.
00:37:40.000You think of all of that as like a movie.
00:38:33.000Like, it's so different to look at the post war and interwar, or rather, the interwar and World War II Europe as, like, in the same context as the 19th century, you know?
00:38:46.000But we tend to regard the World War II as, like, this extremely exceptional time, extremely different, sort of like cartoonish, almost like not real, almost like mythological.
00:38:56.000There are villains and good guys in this mythological effort, this, like, You know, it's like the Odyssey or something.
00:39:03.000When in reality, what you had is the statesmen and you had this era of ideology, you know, you had the decline of this great power period, the aftermath of industrialization.
00:39:15.000You know, she had a lot of different factors, the confluence of all these different factors which came to create this conflict.
00:39:21.000And, you know, you can look at Hitler in the context of historical Germany, you know, the unification in 1871, their consolidation of power.
00:39:32.000The changing power dynamics in Europe, Germany rising against British hegemony.
00:39:38.000You look at it after World War I, where it was, you know, the Holy Alliance or whatever, the Triple Entente or the Triple, I get it all confused, the Triple Alliance, but you know, of these more monarchical powers, these more conservative powers, obviously in Germany, in Austria, in Russia versus these liberal powers.
00:39:58.000And then, you know, Germany being divided up again.
00:40:02.000You know, in other words, looking at it with an actual historical lens, like an actual academic historical lens, and not like SpongeBob SquarePants Mickey Mouse glasses where it's like everything is black and white.
00:40:18.000Like the day that I really looked into it and started thinking of Germany as like, you know, Germany and the Nazi regime as just like another evolution after unification, and him as like a statesman among other statesmen in these conflicts over land, it's like.
00:40:36.000Well, suddenly all the other myths start to fall apart.
00:40:40.000You don't have this supervillain with his dastardly supervillain plot to wipe out people for no reason.
00:40:47.000They act like this guy's like Lex Luthor.
00:40:50.000I want to bring the moon crashing into the earth, like Dr. Doom or something.
00:40:55.000As opposed to thinking about the history of Jewish people in Europe.
00:41:00.000Do people even know that prior to German unification, Jewish people were a corporate entity?
00:41:37.000ZX says, elected, scapegoated a group, empowered his people, all for no reason at all.
00:41:42.000Well, it's like, you know, not for nothing, but Hitler did save the German economy.
00:41:47.000People eval, like, you know, for example, when Dan Crenshaw talks about, we have to study how Hitler came to power, like, he's not talking about the war debt that Germany had to pay, right?
00:42:01.000He's not talking about how they got screwed over at the Treaty of Versailles and were forced to take, what is it?
00:42:23.000It was because the United States intervened on the side of the British, right?
00:42:27.000You know, like World War I was a stalemate and should have ended with concessions and, you know, would have been a lot less catastrophic if the United States didn't throw their weight behind the British and everybody else and force this unambiguous, crushing defeat on Germany when they had to pay all these debts and their economies destroyed and you have the Great Depression and hyperinflation and so on.
00:42:52.000Like, when Dan Crenshaw says we have to talk about how Hitler got in power, what he means to say is like the children's book, where it's like Adolf Hitler got in front of a podium and he brainwashed everybody.
00:43:06.000You know, you had all these normal people, and I don't even know.
00:43:10.000I guess his words put them into a trance, and they all of a sudden, for no reason at all, you know, rallied behind this angry supervillain, you know?
00:43:21.000I mean, that's what he wants us to believe.
00:43:23.000When he says we have to study how they rose to power.
00:43:26.000They're like, we need to talk about how this guy started World War II over the Holocaust and he got elected because he wanted to kill all Jews for no reason.
00:43:39.000And everybody just went with it because he was good at giving speeches.
00:43:43.000Like, that's literally how they want us to think about it.
00:44:59.000And we're like, oh, no, you don't, you know.
00:45:03.000I would bet that probably less Americans know, like, even think about the fact that there was an Eastern theater of World War II than they know about the Holocaust.
00:45:15.000Like, I would bet you that more Americans would tell you that World War II was fought over the Holocaust than would tell you that World War II was fought over Pearl Harbor.
00:45:24.000I would bet you money that that is the case.
00:45:27.000That if you went up to 100 people, more people would say that we fought Germany in World War II because he was perpetrating the Holocaust.
00:45:35.000Then would tell you that we declared war on Germany and Japan because of Japan's strike on the Pearl Harbor base, right?
00:45:41.000And I would also guess that more people would know what the Holocaust is than know what Pearl Harbor is, or that there was even an Eastern theater, that there was even we were fighting in the Pacific and, you know, talking about invading Japan, and that was the more pressing thing.
00:45:57.000Because that's the way it's taught in schools.
00:46:22.000And like, why would anybody even care?
00:46:24.000You know, it's like, that's the funniest thing to me is that like, you will have completely apathetic, numb, apolitical burnouts who will get offended that you're a Holocaust denier.
00:46:44.000But when the media calls me a Holocaust denier in the press or whatever, you know, you'll have people that are, you know, basically unconcerned with anything like that.
00:46:56.000You know, stoners, pot smokers, degenerates, you know, just total vapid airheads.
00:47:04.000And they'll be like, oh, I heard he's a Holocaust denier.
00:47:55.000Like, I would venture to guess again that the vast majority of people that throw that kind of shit around and act like so appalled about it, they don't even.
00:48:02.000It's just like a pre programmed phrase.
00:48:59.000It's like looking at London, looking at Berlin, looking at New York City, all the great cities in 1900, and saying, like, that was the peak of human history, and we want it back.
00:50:24.000I used to listen to a lot of this when I worked at UPS.
00:50:31.000I listened to a lot of smooth jazz when I worked at UPS because normally when I drive around, I listen to music at full blast, just the most loud, percussive music to feel something.
00:50:47.000But when I used to work at UPS, I would work the night shift.
00:50:50.000I would work from 10 o'clock typically until 1 or 2 a.m.
00:50:56.000And that was my shift over the summer in like 2017.
00:51:00.000And at the end of the shift, my ears would be ringing from like how loud the machinery would be.
00:51:06.000And it was a big facility with a lot of, you know, it was like Chicago, what is it?
00:51:11.000Chicago Area Consolidation Hub, largest UPS facility in the world.
00:51:16.000And there's just like this Leviathan industrial machine.
00:51:22.000And I'd be in there and it's just so loud these industrial fans and conveyor belts and trucks and, you know, everything like that.
00:51:30.000And so by the time I got off my shift, I'm like, I need something that's just gonna chill me out, you know?
00:51:35.000So I put on the local jazz station from College of DuPage.
00:52:22.000I have his book, it's called America in Retreat.
00:52:25.000And his whole foreign policy he's like the new, in my mind, it's like him and Max Boot and a few others are like the new neocons.
00:52:34.000They're like the new class of neocon pundits.
00:52:36.000After you could say, like, Krauthammer and Bill Kristol and some of the others, their influence has waned.
00:52:42.000So he's this hardcore, you know, he used to present as more of a conservative maybe five years ago when he was opposed to Obama and he wrote for WSJ.
00:52:51.000But not only worked for the New York Times, he's just this, like, hyper liberal, internationalist, neocon Jew.
00:52:57.000And, you know, he was one of these big guys during the Obama administration who would talk about how Obama's feckless leadership has made us weaker.
00:53:07.000Obama has emboldened our enemies overseas.
00:53:13.000Talking about this nightmare scenario where, what the fuck did he write?
00:53:17.000In his book, he wrote about what happens when Hillary Clinton becomes president and Russia invades Ukraine and at the same time Iran invades Israel and China invades Japan.
00:53:38.000And I remember finding it so compelling when I was in high school.
00:53:42.000I would use all these arguments in speech team.
00:53:44.000I would write these speeches about how, you know, Obama did not enforce the red line, and now ISIS is on the march, and Russia is sending tanks into the Donbass, and Obama is sending hamburgers and blankets.
00:54:00.000Hamburgers and blankets was the rhetoric at the time because Obama sent non lethal aid to Ukraine when the Crimea referendum happened, and you have the so called little green men, the Russian paramilitary in Luhansk and Donetsk and Ukraine.
00:54:16.000And everybody said, Barack Obama is only sending the Ukrainian government, which was, I think it was what, Petro Poroshenko, is only sending him hamburgers and blankets.
00:54:26.000And Putin knows that he could take advantage of us because we won't respond.
00:55:15.000He's this chess champion, total idiot from Russia.
00:55:19.000He's like this chess grandmaster, and during the fall of the Soviet Union, he put a Russian Federation flag pendant as his national symbol instead of the Soviet Union flag, and that was like a big fucking deal or something.
00:55:35.000And so he wrote this book called Winter is Coming about how Vladimir Putin is crushing dissent and he's an enemy of democracy and the West has to stand up to Putin and we need NATO now more than ever.
00:57:01.000In the book, he argues that nationalism is about basically arbitrarily grouping people together.
00:57:08.000And in the book, he says that Syria, the basis for Syrian national identity, Is too loose.
00:57:18.000You know, Syria as a nation is incoherent.
00:57:21.000Syria should split up into three countries.
00:57:24.000But he says the United States, even though it's breaking apart at the seams, must reassert this completely arbitrary, like, creedal identity.
00:57:33.000And so the virtue of nationalism is basically like, well, the enemies of Israel must be ripped apart.
00:57:39.000The enemies of Israel must be ripped apart.
00:58:27.000And people are supposed to believe that he's like a serious, super serious nationalist leader, super serious American nationalist with dual loyalty, and who thinks John Bolton is a nationalist.
00:59:19.000Which won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 2019 Best Conservative Book of the Year, Yoram Hazoni is the president of the Jerusalem based Herzl Institute.
00:59:30.000He is also the founder and former president of Shalem College and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a new public affairs institute in Washington, D.C., which hosted the National Conservatism Conference in July of 2019.
00:59:44.000Other Hazoni titles include the 2012 book, The Philosophy of Jewish Scripture, and the 2000 book, The Jewish State, The Struggle for Israel's Soul.
00:59:50.000Mr. Hazoni's A.B. is in East Asian Studies from the university, and his Ph.D. is in Political Theory from Rutgers.
00:59:56.000New York Times op ed columnist Brett Stevens will be joining Mr. Hazoni this evening.
01:00:00.000He has a long career in journalism prior to the New York Times, which he joined in April 2017.
01:00:04.000Mr. Stevens was deputy editorial page editor at the Wall Street Journal and also for 11 years a foreign affairs columnist.
01:00:10.000Before that, Mr. Stevens was editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post.
01:00:14.000A recent Stevens book is America in Retreat The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, which came out in 2014.
01:00:21.000Mr. Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2013.
01:00:24.000His BA is in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, and his master's is in comparative politics from the London School of Economics.
01:00:30.000On behalf of college Republicans and the Tory, I'd like to thank the other contributors to this event, namely.
01:00:34.000The Tikva Fund, the Princeton Federalist Society, the Princeton Spectator, the American Way Cliosophic Society, the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, Projects Board, the Princeton Department of Politics, the Princeton Program in American Studies, the Princeton Department of Philosophy, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs.
01:00:50.000Finally, I'd like to invite all of you to pick up a copy of the new issue of The Tory entitled Western Civilization Revisited.
01:00:55.000It's on the back table as you exit the event.
01:00:58.000Moderating the event is President of College Republicans Adam Hoffman, who worked tirelessly to organize this event.
01:01:03.000Please join me now in giving a warm round of applause to Yoram Hassoni and Brett Sifi.
01:01:20.000I'll also be moderating tonight's conversation.
01:01:22.000Before we begin, I'll say a short word on the significance of tonight's discussion.
01:01:25.000The topic is conservatism, nationalism, and the future of the GOP.
01:01:28.000I'm going to raise some of the deepest tensions within the political world today, not least within the Republican Party here in America.
01:01:34.000We cannot be joined by more fitting speakers.
01:01:36.000Dr. Hazoni has become a trusted source to make the best arguments for the nationalist ideas.
01:01:40.000Mr. Stevens has been a vocal critic of Hazoni's ideas, going so far as to call national conservatism a movement in which Hazoni plays a leading role, excuse me, another road to serfdom.
01:01:49.000I need not highlight what makes this discussion so pressing.
01:02:44.000Dr. Hazoni, I entered your book with a conception of nationalism that I think aligns with the understanding of most people in this room and perhaps in this university.
01:02:51.000Your book turned my understanding of nationalism on its head.
01:03:27.000My background is Zionist, Jewish nationalist, Israeli.
01:03:31.000And Israel, like many other countries in the world, has a nationalist political tradition which is framed by seeing nationalism.
01:03:39.000Joe Blow says these are very serious people, very serious academics.
01:03:43.000The source of self determination and liberation movements.
01:03:46.000So, Israel, like India, like Italy, like Ireland, like Poland, many, many countries, we'll talk about the United States, I guess, a little bit later, but many countries have these kinds of living traditions of a positive nationalism.
01:03:56.000And if I can just roughly describe it, a nationalist is someone who takes a principled standpoint that says that the world is governed best.
01:04:05.000when nations are permitted to chart their own course, to cultivate their own independent traditions, to pursue their own independent interests as much as possible without outside interference.
01:04:15.000And in this nationalist tradition, nationalism is always, just about always, defined up against, as opposed to imperialism, which is sort of an alternative view that says, no, no, actually, the world is governed best when, as much as possible, we bring peace and prosperity by bringing down the borders, by uniting all of mankind under a single way of doing things and a single political regime.
01:04:37.000And this is something that goes in my book, I trace it all the way back to biblical times.
01:04:42.000The Hebrew scriptures are what we would today call generally nationalist, and they were up against all of these Middle Eastern empires.
01:04:47.000In the West, the most famous empire is the Roman Empire.
01:04:49.000And many, many leaders, the Holy Roman Empire and Napoleon and even Hitler, and I don't mean to equate any of these things, but they, in different ways, drew their inspiration from the Roman Empire, which believes in a world without any borders.
01:05:03.000The goal of the Roman Empire is, like I say, peace and prosperity for all mankind as much as possible, taking down the borders.
01:06:17.000When it comes to this, you know, I use nationalism in a very, like, I guess, subjective way because I feel like anybody that would look at the Roman Empire and say that's open borders globalism is obviously missing the point.
01:06:30.000They're obviously not really understanding what our end game is here, you know, or something like that.
01:06:35.000So I would say that, yeah, the idea that.
01:06:38.000I mean, right now we're fighting for survival, so it's, you know, it's a little different.
01:06:43.000But for somebody to say, like, oh, the Roman Empire, that was globalism, that was.
01:06:52.000Because obviously, the distinction is about the contemporary world where you have a global elite, a transnational or post national super elite.
01:07:06.000You know, this kind of class has never existed in history.
01:07:10.000Maybe it did in the balance of powers in Europe where you had, for example, the Russian monarchs spoke French, you know, and were probably much more similar to.
01:07:20.000In the other European monarchies and aristocracies, much more similar to Western Europe than their own people.
01:07:26.000But, you know, what we're talking about this elite that is just totally separated and divorced from their nations, it's in that context that we're talking about nationalism.
01:07:36.000And also, what's contextual is we are talking about a period of post colonialism where, you know, it's only been in the last 70, 60 years that we've had decolonization.
01:07:49.000Prior to that, you had empire, and empire was the norm for 500 years.
01:07:53.000And before that, it was empire, but it was more localized.
01:07:56.000That was before we discovered the New World, you know, and before we penetrated the interior of Africa.
01:08:02.000So almost all of it is like context dependent and particularist.
01:08:06.000So when he says, like, oh, we don't want to be like the Roman Empire because that was globalist, like, that is just such a wrong way of looking at it.
01:08:27.000I am an illiberal, you know, probably authoritarian, I don't know what you would say, expansionist, something like that.
01:08:35.000I mean, there's a big difference between like bringing in millions of people within your borders and like invading other countries and colonizing them and, you know, making them make your produce your raw materials.
01:08:49.000Like, would anybody argue that the United Kingdom extracting raw materials from India and Africa is the same as Indians and Africans pouring into London?
01:08:58.000Like, that's we're supposed to believe that's the same.
01:09:01.000Imperialism, that's the same globalism?
01:09:06.000There's been both in Europe and in America, the leading intellectuals and the leading political figures on both the left and the right for an entire generation supported some kind of a vision.
01:09:14.000We can argue about to what extent is the word imperialism really relevant, but to me, and I think to many others on the national side, when George H.W. Bush says there's going to be a new world order and we're going to replace the law of the jungle with the rule of law, that means that the United Nations or the United States or somebody is going to project a single set of standards, of norms.
01:09:33.000That are going to be enforced by somebody, probably by the US Armed Forces, and that's supposed to embrace the entire globe.
01:09:39.000So, the nationalism that we see, and I'm quick to say that I'm talking about principles.
01:09:44.000I don't mean to endorse every single nationalist leader who we've seen arise in every country, much less every single tweet of every single nationalist leader.
01:09:52.000But if we look in general at these movements, what they are reacting to is this universalist, I would say imperialist vision that says the world needs to have one set of political norms.
01:10:03.000America is going to be the enforcer, and probably the Europeans see themselves as the ones figuring out what America is going to enforce.
01:10:11.000What happened to 400 years since, you know, of Europe being governed by kind of an understanding that each nation would have its own traditions, its own religion, its own language, its own laws, its own way of doing things, which ultimately is the nationalist aspiration?
01:10:39.000I think what he's getting at is national sovereignty.
01:10:42.000The concept of sovereign nation states was born out of the Treaty of Westphalia in the early 1500s.
01:10:53.000This is where the doctrine was basically established that the separate European powers would mind their own affairs, that the sovereign, which would be the monarch of a given country, would have jurisdiction over his country, and everyone was supposed to respect that jurisdiction.
01:12:07.000So, point being, though, Is that when the Peace of Westphalia was passed, you're talking about what were the existing local political entities in the 17th century?
01:12:24.000You had the various European empires, you had the Ottoman Empire, you had, you know, all the way in the Orient was China, and you had these empires.
01:13:14.000When they were making these constitutional conventions, they were not anticipating millions of immigrants.
01:13:21.000They're not anticipating full legal equality for blacks.
01:13:25.000That just wasn't in their imagination.
01:13:28.000And in the same way, talking about national sovereignty and the international system that was created after Westphalia, it's a totally different context in 1648 than it was in 1965 after decolonization.
01:13:46.000Because in 1648, you're talking about European powers interacting with European powers and to a lesser extent the Ottoman Empire.
01:13:54.000In the current day, you're talking about all these independent, like basically, I mean, these African nations, these other nations we're talking about, it's not even fair to say they're nations in the same breath that we're talking about our nations.
01:14:08.000You know, France has a history, the polity known as Namibia does not, Germany has a history.
01:14:19.000So it's a much different thing to say that you're going to have an international system comprised of nation states, which include the French Empire of Louis XIV and the British Empire and the Russian Empire and the Austrian Empire and the Ottoman Empire and so on.
01:14:35.000And you have this handful of established empires, Eurasian empires, versus talking about all these little tribes of flags that have a little desk, they have a little pendant.
01:14:50.000Write a little flag pendant at the United Nations General Assembly.
01:14:53.000It's completely different that we would engage with these countries as equals or that these countries could meaningfully express or administer their states in the same way that we were talking about with nationalism, like Hazoni's saying about how the Europeans came to agree on this.
01:15:45.000Why would we engage with the Congo on the same level that the German Empire, not the German Empire, that didn't exist at the time, but you know what I'm saying?
01:15:54.000That the French Empire would interact with the Italian, or not the Italian Empire, it didn't exist either.
01:16:16.000In the world, but as a kind of a guiding star, what should we be trying to do with our politics?
01:16:21.000A nationalist will say what we should be trying to do with our politics is to establish diversity in the world.
01:16:25.000There's nobody, not in Washington or Brussels or at the UN, there's nobody in the world who's capable of governing all the nations in the world in a way that is just.
01:16:34.000We've seen this kind of socialist thinking plenty of times.
01:16:39.000You allow independent countries to pursue their own ends and their own ways of doing things.
01:16:43.000The competition, I believe, obviously it sometimes leads to wars, but it also is responsible for most of what's good about the modern era is that competition among national states, among nation states.
01:16:52.000If you look at what we consider to be the best of modernity, whether it's in science or in advances in government and economics, they're all the result of competition among independent national states.
01:17:03.000Brett has written an eloquent and articulate book which takes almost the opposite perspective, so there's certainly arguments to be had on both sides.
01:17:10.000But I think the important thing to focus on.
01:17:12.000Is that where we as Americans, Europeans, Westerners tend to see an idea of let's just bring peace and prosperity to the world?
01:17:22.000Many other nations look at those kinds of efforts and they say, well, that's just a new imperialism.
01:17:27.000It's just what it was that we were trying to get away from in World War II or in the Cold War.
01:17:47.000And, you know, all of his own ideas, his idea of nationalism is just BS because people are not equal.
01:17:54.000And that has consequences in our country and it has consequences for the international system.
01:17:59.000You know, the idea that competition between African states is going to produce advancements in government and science is laughable.
01:18:08.000You know, the idea that the competing governments of Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, And Mozambique, the idea that in southeastern Africa, you're just going to have this laboratory of political systems and policies and so on that would match the ingenuity of one European empire controlling all of them together.
01:18:35.000I'll bet, and so I feel doubly privileged.
01:18:39.000Yoram is someone I've known for many years, and he's a person of high intelligence and a wonderful writer and a very fine human being to boot.
01:18:48.000So, I really mean that by way of preface to say that I think his thesis is total garbage and hypocritical and absurd and dangerous.
01:19:00.000Hypocritical for this obvious reason, which is that Yoram is an American Israeli.
01:19:04.000I learned this via a tweet of yours when some nationalist accused you during your conference on national conservatism.
01:19:12.000What business does a non American have of holding a conference on national conservatism?
01:19:18.000So, you're a little bit, if I may say, like a bigamist making a text for traditional marriage.
01:19:22.000I mean, if you're a real nationalist, you should be either an American or an Israeli, but not the two.
01:19:27.000I think you're, you know, to use the cliche, eating your cake and having it too.
01:19:31.000The second point is that nationalism, to go back to a wonderfully redolent phrase from Woodrow Wilson's advisor Robert Lansing at the time of the Versailles Peace Conference, is a phrase, as he put it, loaded with dynamite.
01:19:45.000Because it turns out that the world is much messier than what nationalists believe.
01:19:48.000That is to say, if you look at the nation of Hungary, I'm just taking it, you know, sort of at random, well, Hungary isn't quite a nation, at least in the sense that it's mixed in with other peoples who live.
01:19:58.000In cities that are supposedly Hungarian.
01:20:00.000And as a result, there are Hungarians in Transylvania and Romanians in Hungary.
01:20:04.000And the result of all that is that border adjustments need to be made, fights have to be had, and places need to be cleansed in order to become truly national.
01:20:12.000So nationalism has historically been a fast route to all kinds of human rights depredations, which I'm sure Joram would rue.
01:20:21.000The truth is that once you establish this as a guiding principle of politics.
01:20:24.000Do I even need to point out the obvious here?
01:20:31.000Hungary is not a nation because some Romanians live in Hungary.
01:20:37.000And it's not all the way coherent because these border adjustments would have to be made.
01:20:42.000Brett Stevens, the Jewish Zionist, the Jewish Zionist militant supporter of Israel, the state of Israel, says that Hungary is not a nation because some Romanians live there.
01:21:12.000A nation with a defined set of borders, then people who are not willing to participate in the life of that nation, culturally, ethnically, religiously, and so on, are going to have to get on trains and run for their lives.
01:21:23.000And no better example of that, of course, than the partition of India in 1948.
01:21:27.000But you can look to the creation of African states in the wake of colonialism and see terrible bloodletting in one place after another because.
01:21:36.000For every Nigeria, there was a Biafra, just to take another example.
01:21:40.000So that's why Lansing was prescient in calling it a phrase related to dynamite.
01:21:44.000Now, I'm not unalterably opposed to nationalism.
01:21:45.000I mean, there's a certain argument to be made that it is, in fact, true that different peoples around the world have ethnic, ancestral, historical, linguistic, sometimes religious affinities, and these become a fairly reasonable basis for democratic self governance.
01:21:59.000So, you know, the Danes are Danish, and if you just ignore the Schleswig Holstein question, then that's like an ancient joke.
01:22:07.000Thought at Princeton everyone would get it.
01:22:25.000So, you know, countries, the basis for most UN member states is a kind of national state concept.
01:22:32.000And that's okay so long as that concept is leavened with a set of ideals which we might call liberal.
01:22:37.000And by liberal, I don't mean conventionally liberal or progressive or Elizabeth Warren liberal.
01:22:40.000I mean liberal as in believing that the individual, And his or her rights and dignity and so on are the foundation stones for proper self rule.
01:22:50.000But nation states that do not abide by that liberal principle can become despotic and very ugly.
01:22:57.000Look at Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, just to take one example, or EDIA means Uganda, or for that matter, Xi Jinping's China today.
01:23:05.000Third thing that disturbs me about this is that basically, once you say, okay, nationalism leads to diversity and that's a good thing, well, what kind of diversity are we talking about?
01:23:13.000Are we supposed to remain silent, for example?
01:23:15.000When the Chinese government imprisons in gulags hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million Uyghurs, because they feel that the Muslim population of China is a threat to the nationalist integrity of the Chinese state.
01:23:25.000I would argue, in fact, that's very contrary to what a thoughtful and decent and humane foreign policy ought to be.
01:23:31.000But that is, in effect, what you end up with.
01:23:32.000You end up with a kind of Putin esque concept of what he calls sovereign democracy, which is to say, you stay out of our business, we're going to stay out of yours.
01:23:40.000And it actually creates a kind of cultural relativism, which used to be sort of anathema to what most conservatives of our generation tended to think.
01:23:48.000Final point that I want to make is this, which is that however you feel about the nation state concept, whether it's Danish or Israeli or someplace else, that is not the American concept.
01:23:54.000We are novus ordo seclorum, we are a new order for the ages.
01:23:58.000Now, that doesn't mean we should ignore things like borders or sovereignty or the concepts of citizenship, right?
01:24:06.000That is to say, we are a nation in which it makes total sense for all of us to sit in this room as an Israeli American, where there's no contradiction in that identity, as a guy who grew up in Mexico, as people from all over the world, and nonetheless, with those hyphenated or non-hyphenated identities, participate fully in American life as individuals in a liberal democratic republic.
01:24:23.000And conservatism, at its best, should champion that liberal democratic idea, obviously with caveats.
01:24:29.000Obviously, with a sense of how the real world operates, but nonetheless, as the core of our political philosophy.
01:24:37.000I'm not really interested in America as the place that is bounded by the 49th parallel, the Rio Grande, and the two oceans.
01:24:45.000I'm interested in an America that is founded on a set of principles and ideas whose articulation begins with the Declaration of Independence and then is expanded historically to encompass more and more Americans in a richer and fuller way, because I think that is, in a sense, what Abraham Lincoln called the last. best hope of mankind.
01:25:01.000And when conservatives abandon that idea for what amounts to a kind of blood and soil nationalism, and I use that term both advisedly as well as deliberately, we are destroying the possibility of a conservatism that can attract people, that stands for some kind of sense of a decent world or a decent, I don't want to say world order, but a decent political order, and we are essentially adopting or putting ourselves onto a road that leads to collectivism and a kind of narrow ethno nationalism that serves everyone ill.
01:26:54.000When he talks about the United States, he says, My conception of the United States as a nation is not the 49th parallel and the two oceans and the Rio Grande, it is the ideology.
01:27:05.000So he doesn't believe the nation is its land or its people or its history or its shared experience or anything tangible.
01:27:13.000Really, it's like a Best Buy or like a shopping plaza or something like that.
01:27:18.000I don't know that's invoked a lot, but that's exactly how he views it that it has no intrinsic value in itself.
01:27:25.000It's merely for lease or for sale or something like that.
01:27:32.000So, his liberal nationalism stands in opposition to our illiberal nationalism because my idea of nationalism is exactly opposite that.
01:27:41.000It is, of course, the nation, which is its geography, the specific topography, the land, the people.
01:27:49.000And I would take, you know, he uses China as a bad example and Putin and Erdogan as bad examples.
01:27:56.000Those are good examples of nationalism.
01:27:59.000Those are, he says they're despotic like it's a bad thing.
01:28:01.000They're not despotic, they're authoritarian.
01:28:04.000And they're directing the state to advance the welfare of the nation, of the people.
01:28:09.000He, again, uses collective like it's a bad thing.
01:28:12.000We're talking about the public welfare here.
01:28:15.000And Brett Stevens does not care about the public welfare.
01:28:17.000He doesn't believe in a public, he believes in ideas.
01:28:21.000He believes in rules of the road and referees.
01:28:25.000And what happens to the drivers on the road or the players in the game, well, you know, that's all up to them.
01:28:31.000And it's Brett Stevens, very coordinated, you know, very, what would you say, very loyal team versus all the individuals, versus all these other free agents that are running around and trying to score points for themselves as individuals.
01:28:50.000He said, so we've got Uyghurs, decent foreign policy.
01:28:54.000Russia, oh yeah, and then this democratic sovereignty idea.
01:28:57.000Yeah, I mean, that is the idea of national sovereignty, which is sort of intrinsic in like any conversation about nationalism.
01:29:04.000He believes in this like right to protect.
01:29:06.000RTP is this doctrine in the United Nations which says like if there's a genocide happening, then there's like this international obligation for us to come help people.
01:29:15.000And he says Putin is a bad person because he respects international sovereignty.
01:29:19.000And I'll say I'm not the biggest on like these international norms and customs and gay rules and things, but it's like.
01:29:25.000You know, a nation should pursue its foreign policy as ruthlessly as possible.
01:29:29.000And there should be rules only insofar as they are pragmatic and reciprocal and arrived at because there's mutual benefit, not because, like, some faggot, like, legalistic country writes them in some charter.
01:29:42.000Like, the rules that we should arrive at, like, national sovereignty might be a good one because there's reciprocity.
01:29:48.000You know, if great powers are respected for each other, maybe it leads to less conflict.
01:29:53.000But that's arrived at because it's in both countries' national interest.
01:29:57.000It is a ruthless, cold, sober calculation that it is in the interest of both countries to refrain from intervening in the affairs of the other country because they both will derive a benefit in the long term.
01:30:08.000And each is pursuing it because they derive a benefit.
01:30:11.000Not because, like, you know, some global Congress said that was okay, not because, you know, more African nations in the United States voted for a resolution or something.
01:30:22.000So, I mean, that is ridiculous that we have to intervene wherever something bad is happening.
01:30:29.000So, the general worldview of Brett Stevens about this idea of America is made great by this, what would he say, expanding idea of national identity, that we become a more fuller and richer democracy and all this, all of this is like liberal, revolutionary, outsider's perspective.
01:31:05.000Because when you don't have enough diversity and you have too much of this chauvinism or national pride or whatever, well, people become acutely aware and conscious of outsiders and insiders.
01:31:18.000And of course, who is the eternal outsider in Europe?
01:31:22.000And they are the eternal outsider because Europe in the modern era is defined by Christendom.
01:31:27.000You know, at least since what, the fourth century, Europe as an entity or whites or the Europeans has been Christendom.
01:31:36.000Before that, you had tribes and things like that and empires.
01:31:40.000But since then, it was Rome and then it was Christendom.
01:31:43.000And so, of course, the ultimate outsider for that and a variety of reasons is the Jewish people.
01:31:49.000They feel threatened when you have what is the antithesis of internationalism and tolerance and inclusivity?
01:31:55.000Well, you have exclusivity and intolerance and nationalism.
01:32:00.000The pride of the group comes at the expense of the outsider.
01:32:04.000The benefit of the nation, the welfare of the public, Is prioritized over the benefit of an individual who may be an outsider, who may not conform to the normative definition of America.
01:32:16.000So, when he talks about expanding American identity, when he talks about a richer and fuller, what he means is so that he can contribute.
01:32:21.000What it means is so that he will never be suspect, under the gun, pushed outside, whatever.
01:32:26.000That's kind of a big problem that our nation can't express itself because you've got these people who, well, I want to be taken care of.
01:32:36.000Well, maybe you should go to live in Israel, you know?
01:32:39.000This is a guy who says, Well, I lived in Mexico and you lived in Israel and now we're all in America and we have these hyphenated definitions.
01:33:48.000And that's a problem for people that are tribal and storytellers, people that tell stories about themselves, people that interpret meaning through symbols.
01:33:58.000We have to think of groups and tribes in terms of symbols, in terms of these abstract type things.
01:34:04.000So that just doesn't work that we're all just going to be floating around and we're just going to stamp a barcode based on what longitude and latitude we are.
01:34:12.000Why don't we just call America a number?
01:34:14.000We'll just call America a number, and it's like our longitude and latitude coordinates of the four points that make up like a square that America takes up on the globe.
01:34:23.000Like that, then that's what he's talking about is to reduce it beyond.
01:34:27.000When he talks about making it fuller and more inclusive and expansive, he's talking about diluting out everything that is distinct about America such that it means nothing in terms of experience, history, geography, topography, anything like that.
01:34:56.000So, yeah, Brett Stevens is like the archetypal, you know, wanderer, the archetypal nomad, archetypal Zionist, Mexican American, transplant, pundit nomad, intellectual.
01:35:11.000And he's going to talk about, like, oh, I want a liberal nationalism.
01:35:14.000Well, you don't really believe in nations.
01:35:35.000We've got to bring back hating liberals, but not talking about SJWs as a synonym for liberals, but liberals, like people that believe in this post national globalist idea.
01:35:49.000Anybody that is not reactionary is a liberal.
01:38:58.000Look, what's incredible about an institution like the United States Army, for example, is that today, on some outpost along the demilitarized zone in Korea, there is the son of a slave who's an officer giving orders to the son.
01:39:12.000Of, or the great grandson, I should say, or descendant of a slave owner.
01:39:17.000And their buddies on either side are the children of immigrants from one from Greece, the other from Egypt, a third from Mexico.
01:39:22.000And they are brothers in the United States Army defending the free world against a tyrannical opponent.
01:39:27.000Now, that actually happens, I mean, I'm just using that as an example, but that happens everywhere in America.
01:39:32.000And the bond that ought to matter is a sense of mutual respect, a sense that we are governed by a set of laws that recognize the dignity and the rights and the responsibilities of every individual that are, in fact, in a practical way, also bounded by.
01:39:46.000Obviously, a shared language, certain basic shared norms.
01:39:49.000But the moment it becomes a question of, like, well, you're a different religion, you're a different race, we are actually giving way to precisely the kind of identity politics that, up until Donald Trump became president, most conservatives used to rail against.
01:40:00.000And by the way, rail against for a very good reason, because if we are, each of us, no more than our highly particular identity, it's the very road to political disunion and antagonism that we should be striving against.
01:42:05.000Or if we're saying Christian Americans and, you know, maybe some peripheral people that are mixed or something, or some highly assimilated minorities, maybe we're talking 70% of the population.
01:42:17.000Is that highly, extremely particular and exclusive?
01:42:32.000Superimposition of yet another identity along with all these other smaller identities I don't think solves the problem.
01:42:36.000The only thing that actually resolves the issue is when you're saying, okay, America is a liberal democratic nation whose primary purpose is to serve the needs and aspirations of individual human beings that have nothing to do with or are not really about their sense of collective identity.
01:43:13.000Jewish people act essentially as a corporate entity.
01:43:17.000You know, and that is much looser than it used to be maybe 300 years ago, but they do act in essence as a corporate entity.
01:43:23.000That's why this individualism stuff is all a gambit.
01:43:26.000It says we need to be treated as individuals and not as collectives because if we broke down into collectives, well, you know, that would mean disunion and antagonism and all this warring factionalism in the country.
01:43:38.000We need to have individual identity that's based on ideas.
01:44:06.000So please, please treat me as an individual, acts as a corporate entity.
01:44:11.000Now, why would it behoove a corporate entity, which is a minority, to live in a society of individuals?
01:44:18.000I mean, it's obvious what the benefit is.
01:44:21.000Because if our people act as a corporate entity, well, we would have a much bigger corporation than he would.
01:44:32.000And that would present a threat to his corporate group.
01:44:36.000So, no, We cannot have these allegiances.
01:44:41.000Egyptians and Mexicans and freed slaves, I don't know why I brought that up, and white people and so on.
01:44:48.000But Mossad and Israel, and they get to have a completely corporate ethnic identity.
01:44:53.000I mean, it's just like this guy is so slimy.
01:44:57.000But that, in a sense, is indistinguishable from an identity politics that guys like Yoram probably were railing against when they were editing the press conference.
01:45:55.000Flavor one is a kind of Reagan esque vision of a conservative movement, which emphasizes individual rights, opportunity, economic expansion, getting government out of the way so that you can sort of maximize your potential as a human being.
01:46:07.000The second vision of conservatism is kind of the nationalism or the nationalist vision that you see re emerging in places like France under the guise of the National Front.
01:46:15.000In Germany, through the alternative for AFD, the alternative for Deutschland, places like that.
01:46:22.000Would you rather that your domestic political opponent be someone who merely wants to lower your taxes because of an economic set of views and values?
01:46:30.000Or do you want it to be someone who's going to say, we're going to close our borders to immigrants?
01:46:33.000By the way, immigrants like our parents and grandparents.
01:46:45.000Would you rather face somebody who is innocuous for us or actually advantageous or somebody who is disadvantageous to us and our ancestors?
01:46:55.000We, us immigrants, not us Americans, not we who descend from the founders in a spiritual assimilated sense.
01:47:05.000And that's what assimilation is, by the way, is when you see yourself as part of the same legacy as the founding fathers and the founding stock and so on.
01:47:23.000Would you rather have an opponent who is like a toothless, innocuous, somebody who will not harm my immigrant people, my foreign outsider people, international, transnational, or the group that will?
01:47:36.000We are going to organize our economy based on a collectivist vision where we're going to support national champions.
01:47:40.000You're never going to be allowed to drive a Hyundai again because we only buy American on a national base.
01:47:45.000So that's the choice you really have to make.
01:47:47.000And I think that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are at this crossroads, in part because of people like Joram, where it's like, oh, there's this fantastic alternative vision.
01:47:55.000And now this vision also has a champion in the person of Donald Trump, which is, it always disturbs me when political leaders with zero ideas get input from people with too many ideas.
01:48:03.000And then we're going to be stuck with a Republican Party that looks like the National Front in France.
01:48:10.000Anyway, look, I don't recognize myself or my movement in all of this, you know, blood and soil, which is just, you know, a semi polite way of waving Nazism at me.
01:48:47.000And Irving Crystal, if you go back and you read his books today, then what you'll see is that the kinds of things that you are attacking are precisely Irving Crystal's point of view.
01:48:56.000Irving Crystal thought that the United States should withdraw from the world, having defeated the Soviet Union, that the United States should take care of its problems at home.
01:49:02.000Irving Crystal was a free marketer only to a limited degree.
01:49:04.000One of his most famous books was Two Cheers for Capitalism.
01:49:09.000If it's allowed to exceed the bounds of the economic sphere in which it's the best engine that we have for growth productivity, for the production of growth, that if you allow capitalism to exceed that sphere, to enter the sphere of the family, to enter the sphere of national life, then what you will do is you will corrupt and destroy every institution that holds a country together.
01:49:26.000For Crystal, the way that he taught us was that modern conservatism consists of three pillars.
01:49:30.000The first is religion, which he considered to be the most important.
01:49:35.000The first was religion, the second was nationalism, and the third was economic growth.
01:49:37.000When I published The Prince and the Tory, it was a national conservative magazine.
01:49:40.000That was the line that we took, and yet somehow, Even though we were enthusiastic Reagan supporters, but we were national conservatives, we saw Reagan as a pro religion nationalist.
01:49:48.000He wasn't talking about the United States eternally ruling the world.
01:49:51.000He didn't speak as you do about the United States being the world's policeman.
01:49:54.000He didn't speak as you do about the United States having a moral obligation to establish norms and impose them on the entire planet.
01:49:59.000Reagan stood for exactly the opposite.
01:50:00.000Reagan never invaded anything larger than Grenada, a one week operation.
01:50:04.000Reagan believed in a world of free nations.
01:50:07.000And what you and my fellow friends in the liberal wing of the conservative movement have done over the last 30 years is To twist Reaganism in such a way that religion is dropped and forgotten and nationalism is dropped and forgotten.
01:50:19.000And instead, all that we have left is free markets, which I support, but I don't support them to the point that they have to stay free even if the Chinese are taking advantage of them.
01:50:27.000I don't support them even if free markets means unlimited immigration and starts tearing your country apart, which it is tearing this country apart.
01:50:32.000Whether you and I appreciate the reasons or not doesn't make any difference.
01:50:38.000Of course, there are many things that you say about nationalism and your criticism which are true.
01:50:41.000And if we went down the list, I bet I would agree with most of your objections of possible ways it could go wrong.
01:50:46.000But we're not choosing nationalism or non-nationalism.
01:50:49.000We're choosing between nationalism and imperialism.
01:50:50.000What's happening in the Republican Party right now?
01:50:52.000Is we're choosing between your vision of the United States as the world's police officer, where you call for greatly expanded American presence globally.
01:51:01.000You call for America to be dictating to the countries of the world what moral standards are going on.
01:51:12.000Okay, all right, so I'll read it to you.
01:51:14.000Because otherwise, we'll just go around in circles on this.
01:51:16.000I have to jump in here just before he reads that part about Reagan, which is all wrong.
01:51:21.000He says that Reagan was, what he's referring to is fusionism.
01:51:24.000Fusionism is the idea that Reagan united these three disparate elements of the conservative post war movement in America, which was the free market people, the social conservatives or the religious right, and the nationalists, as he calls them.
01:52:20.000And we're talking about all the people from these old Trotskyites.
01:52:27.000Who, when the Soviet Union was supporting the Arabs against Israel, jumped ship and began supporting the right because they saw that communism posed a threat to Israel.
01:52:39.000And those people later then became the neocons.
01:52:42.000So the idea that, like, oh, Reagan was this Christian nationalist combined with capitalism, and the only thing that remains is capitalism is wrong.
01:52:59.000And, you know, conducting this, like, International war against the Soviet Union, whether we put the boots on the ground or not, it's really kind of irrelevant.
01:53:07.000These kinds of global ambitions against the Soviet Union, the defense spending, everything like that, I mean, that is not really an idea of nationalism, I don't think.
01:53:18.000And Hazzoni just gets done talking about he wanted the world to be free.
01:53:22.000Well, but how did he want to free the world?
01:53:24.000By imposing liberal, free market capitalism and democracy on them.
01:53:29.000It was an ideological war globally with the Soviet Union by imposing our way of life.
01:53:34.000And, you know, There's not anything about the Cold War.
01:53:37.000I'm not making a value judgment about that.
01:53:39.000But to say that he was this nationalist and that was dispensed with, well, how do you explain the 1990s then?
01:53:46.000How do you explain this New World Order idea?
01:53:48.000How do you explain George W. Bush, who was comprised of a lot of former Reagan type officials?
01:54:11.000If they were, you know, people like Peter Brimelow and Sam Francis and Patrick Buchanan were ostracized by William F. Buckley and all of Reagan's successors in the fusionist conservative movement.
01:54:24.000The only thing that really remained is the free market stuff and the neocons.
01:54:27.000So it's a completely inaccurate reading.
01:54:30.000It is amazing how these people just revise history, the way they just rework things.
01:54:35.000There's a tradition of this in the Torah.
01:55:42.000They come up with justifications to interpret what Islamic law would say about the modern day if Muhammad didn't lay it down in the 7th century or whatever.
01:55:54.000And in Judaism, they come up with these stories to explain away inconvenient elements of the Torah or explain away how we arrive at new laws.
02:01:20.000It says Midrash was initially a philological method of interpreting the literal meaning of biblical texts.
02:01:26.000In time, it developed into a sophisticated interpretive system that reconciled apparent biblical contradictions, established the scriptural basis of new laws, and enriched biblical content with new meaning.
02:01:38.000Reached its peak in the schools of Rabbi Ishmael and Akiba, or I don't know how to pronounce that, where two different hermeneutic methods were applied.
02:01:45.000The first was primarily logically oriented, making inferences based upon similarity.
02:01:54.000Every fucking five minutes, my headset turns off.
02:01:57.000Making inferences based upon similarity of content and analogy.
02:02:00.000The second rested largely upon textual scrutiny, assuming that words and letters that seem superfluous teach something not openly stated in the text.
02:02:10.000So, the midrash process is to paraphrase, recounting the content of biblical text in different languages that may change the sense.
02:02:18.000Prophecy, reading the text as an account of something happening or about to happen, and parable or allegory, indicating deeper meanings of words of the text.
02:02:34.000Yeah, so Midrash was what I was looking for.
02:02:36.000And the point was to say that this is what they engage in.
02:02:39.000This is the kind of verbal IQ, like linguistic trickery that they engage in, which is to say that what we were taught in college is that what they would do with Midrash is they would read the Torah, and if there were things that were contradictory or something like didn't make sense or they didn't like the meaning of it, they would come up with like sort of this linguistic workaround.
02:03:02.000They would come up with a story, they would come up with some kind of a parable that would sort of like rework.
02:03:09.000A literal interpretation or a literal translation and sort of accommodate whatever they were trying to achieve.
02:09:43.000I'm not really, like, in one sense, I'm a gamer because I like to play games and I do play them, but I'm not one of these people that can sit down and just, like, play video games all day.
02:09:54.000My tolerance runs out after, like, a couple hours.
02:09:57.000Unless it's, like, Civ 5 or a strategy game.
02:10:00.000But I could never play Call of Duty for longer than like really like 90 minutes, actually.
02:18:13.000When I went on my band field trip to Disney World, which I talked about a little bit the other day, we took this 24 hour bus ride down to Disney with Marching Band when I was in high school.
02:18:28.000And I remember on the way back, we went to some mall in the south somewhere, and I got an OJ's CD.
02:18:35.000And I'll never forget, I was just blasted into my car for the whole school year.
02:18:42.000I got an OJ's CD, I think I put it on my iPod.
02:18:46.000Yeah, we went to some mall, we went into some like CD store on our way back because we made like a pit stop to eat or whatever.
02:28:50.000Oh I got, I got, I got, I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA.
02:29:01.000Cocaine, quarter, piece, got war, rampies inside my DNA.
02:29:05.000I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside my DNA.
02:29:09.000I got hustle, though, ambition flow inside my DNA.
02:29:12.000I was born like this, and born like this, see, make you lick conception, not transform like this, perform like this, which else you wouldn't contemplate.
02:29:20.000I meditate there off your fucking head.
02:34:29.000I don't find Irish to be particularly good storytellers.
02:34:33.000My Irish side is, um, well, I don't want to say anything mean on the internet about it, but it's like, I think I get all my storytelling from my mom and my grandma, if you want to know the truth.
02:34:47.000My grandma's a really good storyteller, and she's Italian.
02:34:51.000So, but maybe the volatility, the machismo, probably Mexican for sure.
02:34:58.000You know, my father is very chauvinistic and, you know, all that.
02:35:38.000I guess one of my great great uncles like spit on a judge or something and it was in the newspaper that he got arrested for robbing a bank and he like spit at the judge when he got his his what do you call it sentence so yeah pretty pretty based pretty based family Watch me have the- oh yeah, okay.
02:47:06.000The sword Solid Snakes is that one video of the black people in New York City talking about that kind of funny, though.
02:47:12.000Yeah, Occident says, Oh, he must want me to clarify it.
02:47:16.000That's the funniest thing is when people super chat something like that, and I'm like, Well, I have no idea what that is, and they're like, Oh, it means this.