#301 — The Politics of Unreality： Ukraine and Nuclear Risk
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Summary
Kanye West's recent eruptions of anti-semitism have shocked the Jewish community and shocked the world at large with his comments on the Kanye West & Yoko Ono interview. What does it mean that a famous, influential artist such as Kanye West has become so obsessed with anti-Semitism that he is willing to speak publicly about it? Is this a symptom of growing antisemitism, or is it part of a larger anti-Jew smear campaign by the far-left and far-right, and what does it say about him that he has been so enraged by it? In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast by Sam Harris, I discuss the controversy surrounding Kanye West s recent comments on anti-Sebastian Jewry, and whether or not it is even a thing at all. I also discuss the role of Jews on the far left and far right in the anti-jewish agenda, and offer my own thoughts on the matter, as well as offer my thoughts on why it is so dangerous and dangerous, and why we should all be worried about it, especially when it comes from a man who is one of the most famous and influential people in the world. . The Making Sense podcast is a podcast by a well-known writer and podcaster, Sam Harris. His work is widely known and appreciated throughout the culture, and is a must-listen to all things related to the culture and politics of the modernity of the 21st century. His writing is widely respected and appreciated by many, including many of his fans and critics. His music is also widely appreciated by the general public. His lyrics are widely appreciated, and appreciated worldwide, and his music is widely appreciated in the mainstream media, especially by many of the Jewish press, including the mainstream, and he is widely praised by the mainstream press, and so on and so much so that you can find him on the internet and social media is widely circulated in the community and his artistry is widely spread across the internet in his music, including by the internet, even is a powerful, and widely appreciated on among other things of which we can be found online , as well by -- and so much that we can all agree that he s a wonderful human being should be respected and celebrated he s got it all to be
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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okay well um i should say something about my last podcast with meg smaker as you might recall
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meg is a documentarian who had her first feature length documentary accepted more or less everywhere
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including sundance and south by southwest and then she got attacked by identitarian grievance
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entrepreneurs and promptly defenestrated by sundance and the other festivals and this really
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was a case of picking absolutely the wrong target you just have to listen to meg for about 10 minutes
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and you realize she's pretty much the last person who should have been canceled for making the film
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she made anyway she has a gofundme page to support her ongoing efforts to get the film jihad rehab now known
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as the unredacted distributed and um when we recorded that episode her gofundme had raised
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three thousand dollars but at the end of that episode i asked you all to contribute if you could
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and now meg has raised over six hundred thousand dollars in one week so needless to say her situation
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has completely changed and it will be fascinating to see what happens next so thank you all for
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supporting her beyond changing the material prospects for the film your notes of encouragement
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i know have made a tremendous difference over there i mean the outpouring of love and support
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was tremendous and it was really really gratifying to see i love seeing a podcast guest supported in
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that way so thanks again for showing up and on the topic of love and support i can't say i received
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much for uh tweeting into the kanye west i guess now known as the artist known as yay formerly known as
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kanye controversy with respect to his recent eruptions of anti-semitism i haven't focused much on anti-semitism
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in the past i think i've devoted exactly one podcast to it out of 300 i've noticed it on the extreme
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right and the extreme left obviously briefly the way this breaks down is that on the extreme right
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jews are not considered white and therefore they fall within the scope of white nationalist racism
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with the added spin of various conspiracy theories but on the extreme left jews are considered extra white
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they get something like double the white privilege points so they fall within the scope of
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anti-white bigotry and activism so you move far enough left or right as a jew
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and you meet fairly stark expressions of hatred so i've been aware of that but it's not something
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that has been a big deal in my life certainly and has not been my focus kanye's statement on this one podcast
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i believe it was the drink champs podcast i believe they pulled down their version of the interview
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but i think it's up on other channels his remarks went on at such length and they so assiduously
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connected all the traditional dots for the anti-semitic worldview that it was fairly breathtaking
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i mean it was really a protocols of the elders of zion level confabulation about the jewish control of everything
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unfortunately there's enough truth in what he said which is to say there are prominent jews who have made a lot of money in the recording business
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and in hollywood and the other sectors of the economy that he was whinging about
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it will seem all too plausible in many quarters to say that he is just calling balls and strikes as he sees them
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right this wasn't hatred this is just the facts
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you have an extremely famous popular and influential artist truly exploding with anti-semitism
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many people thought i was reacting to something he had tweeted that got him kicked off twitter
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uh no that's not what i was reacting to i was reacting to the interview which was truly awful
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awful as much for the fact that he received basically no pushback from the hosts and uh at least in the original
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comment thread on youtube he received nothing but adulation from his fans and when i tweeted about this
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pointing out how despicable it was what i got back was pretty amazing
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you know i have a fairly thick skin at this point i don't expect a lot from twitter comments but
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the torrents of hatred and cynicism i received out of trumpistan were fairly amazing
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some of it was just expressions of hatred for what i had said about hunter biden's laptop
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people claiming that after all that i've said about islam
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i'm in no position to criticize someone for their bigotry
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obviously this just voices frank confusion about the meaning of what i've said about islam
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perhaps i should spell this out once again so it's fresh in everybody's mind because
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the degree of dangerous idiocy that swings on this fulcrum is is hard to exaggerate i have said some
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extremely critical things about islam as a system of ideas i've said extremely critical things about
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judaism as a system of ideas in fact i even made judaism to some degree culpable for the holocaust
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that sounds like a neo-nazi position if you don't understand what i'm saying
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so i've said a lot about ideas that i think are terrible and divisive and producing unnecessary harm
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this is quite different from talking about people as people
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especially for characteristics they can't change
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it's absolutely clear he is not talking about the religious ideas of jews
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he's not talking about judaism he's not talking about ideas at all
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so you just have to follow me long enough to know
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that there's nobody who suffers the consequences
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and fascist russian intellectuals of an earlier
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points together now is that when the soviet union
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falls apart it's also taken for granted that the
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borders of the republics will be the borders of
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the leaders of the russian yellow russian ukrainian republics
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meet and agree to dissolve the soviet union the reason why it's those
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three is that those are the three republics which existed in 1922 when the
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soviet union was founded and which still existed in 1991
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and so they agreed that the borders as they were would be their borders at which
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point these states become sovereign states governed by
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but governed by the the the same conventions that govern everyone else's
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borders and those things aren't contested and uh ukraine actually has a
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referendum on its territory before all of this and just also in december
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in which not only do 90 percent of ukrainians and this is 31 years ago
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not only do 91 90 percent of ukrainians vote for independence a majority in
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every single region of ukraine also votes for independence
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and in those intervening 30 years the the drift has been and i say this with
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great understatement the drift has only been in one direction and that
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direction has been in favor of the notion that there is a
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separate ukraine that deserves to have a ukrainian state
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okay so let's bring putin into this how has his
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thinking evolved here because he was i guess he came back in
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2012 correct me if i'm wrong and i mean there's a kind of crazy making
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degree of unreality to his politics right i mean this is a
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quasi-fascist regime maybe it's just appropriate to just call it a fascist
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regime it's definitely a single party state that on your account you know which
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i agree with is engaged in an imperialistic war against a democracy
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and yet is framed rather often from putin's side as a
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as a war of denazification of ukraine right like so he's the good guy going
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against the nazis uh it's probably it's inconvenient for that
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thesis that the president of ukraine is jewish but you know that's really not an
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obstacle to the claim and while i haven't noticed many high
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profile people on our side dignify the nazi part of it actually there is a
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least one exception to that there's something happening
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in america in fairly high profile right of center or even centrist circles where
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the perversity of putin's framing is not only not noticed it is denied at least
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implicitly i mean it's just well i'll bring in one specific claim here just so
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you have something to react to but for instance i noticed the economist at
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columbia jeffrey sacks on some podcast talking about this and
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it's hard to imagine the kremlin not liking anything he said right he was
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essentially said that the u.s and nato have been provocative all along and that
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the the off-ramp for russia was always obvious we just have to declare the
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neutrality of ukraine and given assurance that they'll never join
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nato because that obviously impinges on russia's core security concerns
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how would we feel if you know we had a russian client state
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in mexico or canada and there are many people saying things
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like this and i mean one thing that's perverse about that
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which i'll just point out before you give me the rest but i mean immediately
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what strikes me as perverse is that it conceives that we are the moral
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equivalent of russian despotism right and that the
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spread of democracy is no better than the spread of
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fascism if you try to flip things around in that way
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it's just you know who's to say anything is better than anything else
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on the over the surface of the earth and that's just so
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dishonest you know and and ethically upside down that it's just amazing to see
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academics in in america talking that way you know this is something you speak
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about in your book i mean this i think you call it you know schizo fascism
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that the the condition in which fascists themselves are claiming to be at war
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with fascists and nazis and it's pretty much pure fiction
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so thanks thanks for mentioning that the the book the book in question is now
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road to unfreedom where i do a very careful and slow
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dissection of all of this on the basis of the russian primary sources on the
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basis of everything that putin said that i could
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track down over the period of his two presidencies
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and in you know starting thinking of your question it's clear that there was a
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kind of evolution with putin putin number one his first
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couple terms in office was was perhaps sincerely trying to carry
00:37:08.140
and and centralized power but it turned out that in centralizing
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the chief oligarchs so what what putin ends up with
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is a dysfunctional state the most interesting feature of which is the
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extreme economic inequality and and that is a point which is really worth
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dwelling on for a minute because it's only when you have the kind of power
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that he has and the kind of money that he has that you're allowed to get away
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with the sort of lunatic ideas that he expresses if i mean it may seem like a
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simple thing but the fact that he's been in power for 20 years
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and controls the five television networks and has lots of money to spread
00:37:50.380
around among influential people around the world
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without those things i mean he's just a guy on a street corner
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you know probably with a pretty tattered looking soapbox
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because his his ideas in themselves are are not are neither original
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nor nor particularly convincing but anyway my point was that in putin stage
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two when he comes back with the he's recognized that he can't make the
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the russian state function or at least making it function is inconsistent with him
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being the chief oligarch and being able to give his friends billions of dollars if
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he wants to and so he moves to a politics of spectacle where of course russia is
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always right whether it's intervening in ukraine in 2014 or intervening in
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syria in 2015 where everything becomes a kind of show where russia is always
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innocent and the other side is is is always to blame and he develops as from
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about 2011 forward ideas about how russia doesn't have to follow the rules because
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russia has a special destiny and russia has a special mission and russia has a special
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civilization and no one else can force to understand this but russia has the right to
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do whatever it likes and you know this is this fundamental challenge to international order
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you know western non-western any kind of order he's been espousing for about a decade he made
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it very clear on september 30th talking about the annexations when he said what are the rules who
00:39:12.360
made up the rules russia has a millennial mission right and and uh these ideas are already more than
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tinged with fascism a person that he cites regularly and who probably by no coincidence he also cited on
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september 30th this year ivan ilin is the chief russian fascist thinker and he became essentially the
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house philosopher krutin was studying him all the time but not only him contemporary russian fascists
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began to get airtime on television and became part of the mainstream russian discussion and which
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which leads me to i mean the thing about the schizo fascism actually tim can you just define
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fascism yeah fascism is the idea that it's not rationality that's the basis on which we build
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politics it is will and imagination that rules are not the basis upon which we interact we interact on
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the basis of strength strength is always proven as a matter of practice therefore endless conflict is
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entirely normal and given all of that politics begins not with any kind of mutual recognition
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but with the choice of an enemy when i choose my enemy then i know who i am and the moment that i've
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chosen an enemy that's when politics can actually begin and that that takes you pretty far actually
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towards understanding the russian attitude towards ukraine because one of the problems with with
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putin's rule is that he has no definition of russia at all he has no notion of what the future of russia
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will be nor can he from the state of oligarchy therefore russia is defined as the anti-ukraine
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and it takes it takes this arbitrary choice of an enemy in order to give meaning which is also related
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to nato now i mean i'm just going to be very straightforward about this they're not russia is
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not afraid of nato at all had they been afraid of nato they certainly wouldn't have undertaken an invasion
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like this right and had they been afraid of nato they wouldn't be moving the the the bulk of their troops
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from the actual nato borders in order to fight in ukraine which is what they have done they're not afraid
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of a nato invasion they've never been afraid of a nato invasion this is a giant guilt-making factory
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they're not afraid that nato is going to invade them he putin himself until very late in the day
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did not say anything to the effect that he was afraid of nato this is something he came up rather
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late so that we could so that we could have a guilt trap for for ourselves i mean your your point
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your point about it not there being a difference between spreading democracy and not spreading
00:41:45.860
democracy is well taken but i think perhaps an even more fundamental point is that nato it's not
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that nato or the european union in large nato and the european union take on new members when sovereign
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states backed by their populations would press themselves in democratic elections choose to join
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those institutions the the reasons why poland is in the european union works or or or or nato do not
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have to do with brussels or washington they fundamentally have to do with the poles and the
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reasons why ukraine would like to join institutions doesn't have to do with brussels or washington has
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to do with the lived experience of of the ukrainians themselves and it seems to me that if anything that's
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an even more fundamental difference that what russia is trying to do is expand an order illegally by force
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whereas the european union and nato take on new members when independent states choose to join them
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yeah well let's cycle on that point one more time because it's i think it's crucial so you're saying
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that putin and russia have no fear of invasion from the west right i mean it seems completely crazy to me that
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that that any western power would want to invade russia but a person could be forgiven for believing
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that putin might believe such a thing would be possible and that he therefore would want ukraine
00:43:15.060
as a buffer between him and an antagonistic europe but you're saying that's just not the case
00:43:22.620
well that that option was available to putin and he chose not to take it the um ukraine had agreed to
00:43:30.520
russian base russian bases on the black sea for for decades when russia invaded in 2014 when russia
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invaded ukraine in 2014 it was it was giving up as a result of its own decision the possibility of a
00:43:44.940
friendly ukrainian buffer to the west when you invade a country you no longer have the option of
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treating it as a friendly buffer when you invade a country you're making an enemy of it that was a
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choice that moscow made on its own um one can decide that it was a mistake or not a mistake but
00:44:00.520
that option was available they have pushed ukraine to the west again and again with their own
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decisions before 2014 a majority of ukrainians were against joining nato after russia invaded in 2014
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a majority of ukrainians unsurprisingly decided that they were in favor of joining nato that's a result
00:44:18.280
of russia's choices so that option was there but that's not what they want what they want to be able
00:44:24.540
to i mean and this is what they say openly day in day out on television from the foreign ministry from
00:44:31.920
the president's office from the security council day in and day out what they say the commander in
00:44:37.320
chief of the operation just said it yesterday what they say is they want to ukraine where they are in
00:44:43.140
control and that's something completely different that means invading the country occupying it replacing
00:44:48.660
its leadership with someone else um that's not a friendly buffer that's you know that's a genocidal
00:44:53.400
aspiration and that's what they care about again to repeat the point if they cared about security from
00:44:59.500
nato um which they don't but if they cared about security from nato they would be dispersing their
00:45:04.640
armed forces around the finnish border um around the polish border they'd be concerned about places like
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that that's not what they're doing what they're doing is they're throwing absurd an obscene amount
00:45:14.780
of their available firepower into the project of destroying ukraine as a country which i'm just
00:45:20.560
gonna take a big step back here makes zero geopolitical sense it is weakening russia extraordinarily
00:45:26.960
and the reason i'm taking a big step back is that one of the assumptions that we're making in this
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conversation or at least one of the assumptions that's made in the views that you're presenting
00:45:35.600
is that putin actually cares about the interests of russia i think that's a that's an assumption which
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should be made explicit and questioned because i see i see very little reason to think that putin is
00:45:46.780
a geopolitician who cares at all about the interests of russia if he were he would be much more concerned
00:45:53.620
about the fact that there is a great power on russia's border which in fact does have designs
00:45:59.380
unlike the united states on russian resources which unlike the united states invests more in the asian
00:46:05.620
part of russia than russia does itself and that is china but rather than being concerned about china
00:46:11.260
what putin has done with his entire anti-western turn is to create a situation in which future rulers
00:46:17.600
of russia will have little choice but to be vassals of china and the invasion of ukraine has only
00:46:23.160
accelerated this process troops that might have been defending the border with russia have been brought
00:46:27.580
west to fight a losing and pointless war in ukraine while beijing just watches as the power relationship
00:46:33.640
with russia which was already very much in its favor accelerates to the point where it's just hard to
00:46:39.220
imagine that russia is going to be able to get out from under it a lead a russian leader who cared
00:46:43.480
about geopolitics who cared about russian interests would be balancing between the west and russia it
00:46:49.280
is geopolitically absolutely idiotic to go so far in one direction that you can't come back but that's
00:46:55.120
what putin has done i don't think he's an idiot i think he simply doesn't care about russian interests
00:46:59.940
so what does he care about he cares about dying in bed he cares about you know legacy i mean when we
00:47:07.040
i appreciate your earlier questions about putin which you know lead in profound directions which
00:47:11.360
i haven't always been able to follow in my answers we have to think of this person as someone who's
00:47:15.720
been in power for the lifetimes of many people who live in russia many people in russia can't remember
00:47:21.640
anyone else this is someone who's been in power for you know the the entirety for you know the entirety
00:47:27.300
of this of this century this is someone who is on a classical you know as described by plato as
00:47:33.860
described by shakespeare tyrannical trajectory where at a certain point he's no longer able to
00:47:39.420
hear the advice of others at a certain point his own fantasies start to become realer than the reality
00:47:45.760
around him i think there's no question that his obsession with ukraine is real i think he really
00:47:51.320
thinks something along the lines of his historically weird fantasies that he that he projects i think he
00:47:57.920
really thinks that somehow somewhere there really are ukrainians down there who who believe that they
00:48:03.880
want to be invaded by him but i i think that that is a classical tyrannical mistake and he is doing that
00:48:10.720
thing that tyrants do when they're in power for too long which is they commit state resources to their
00:48:16.200
own fantasies that's the tragedy of tyranny and that's that's where putin is right now so right now he's
00:48:22.780
in the grip he's in the grip of a fantasy which doesn't have anything to do with interests or with
00:48:27.560
geopolitics i think we take a deep breath and look coldly at russia's geopolitical position we can
00:48:33.560
generally agree that this has been an asinine move he is in the grip of something which can't be reduced
00:48:38.440
to interests or it doesn't have much to do with the state what he thought he was doing in invading
00:48:43.180
ukraine was leaving a legacy what he thought he was doing in invading ukraine was leaving leaving
00:48:48.020
leaving an indelible mark his own mark on history where he would be remembered as the person who
00:48:54.980
united what he thinks of as the russian lands as peter the great did as katherine the great did i think
00:49:00.860
that's what he thinks he was doing he's not going to be able to do that um because the world is just
00:49:05.600
not the way that he thinks the world is but i think that's what that's what has him in its grip
00:49:10.120
well he's also been doing a bit more than that in that he's been launching a a larger war mostly a
00:49:20.060
cyber war against western freedom really i mean there's just just there's been this i believe you
00:49:27.780
call it a hybrid warfare uh at various points where you know the goal seems to be to destabilize
00:49:34.900
democracies generally perhaps now is a good moment to say something about that and how that what we've
00:49:41.220
what we've seen of that since i guess you know 2014 and in the first war in ukraine i i appreciate that
00:49:49.440
question and i appreciate your earlier remark about there being a difference between democracy and other
00:49:54.340
systems and i guess i rather wish that in these conversations which are which you know which seem to
00:49:59.640
be about putin i don't mean nearer than mine i mean the kinds of discussions that you are
00:50:03.060
refereeing here people would admit like which of three positions they take because i think there
00:50:08.000
are a lot of people out there who just like fascism and i think they should just up and own it that
00:50:13.220
they like fascism and that's why they like putin and i think that would clarify matters i think a
00:50:18.300
second position is i really don't believe in anything i'm a complete nihilist i have no preference
00:50:22.960
between democracy and other things in that position you can also say well putin is fine because there is
00:50:28.420
no truth there are no values yada yada right and then there's a third position i'm sure there are others
00:50:32.860
there's a third position which says actually people seem to like to vote whether they're in iran or
00:50:37.840
whether they're in russia or whether they're in portland oregon they seem to like to vote and uh
00:50:42.600
and in countries where people are able to vote and are represented seem to be peaceful and prosperous and
00:50:47.480
freer and people seem to live lives where they're more satisfied and so on right i mean i think it would
00:50:52.400
be kind of like in some way this discussion about putin is a proxy for all of that where the people who
00:50:58.720
are slightly afraid to say yeah i'm a fascist or yeah i'm a nihilist um are willing to say well i
00:51:04.000
think maybe putin's okay or i think maybe what's happening here is is fine and now sam i've forgotten
00:51:09.080
where you well yeah well actually let me let me add one more cohort there because it's i guess it's
00:51:14.780
nihilist adjacent but it would uh they certainly wouldn't think of themselves as nihilists and these
00:51:20.320
are all the people you know most of whom are in trumpistan and so i think i'm talking about you
00:51:27.100
know maybe 40 percent of american society i think that more or less everything said about russia
00:51:34.160
attempting to destabilize democracy in particular our own and especially their attempt to hack
00:51:42.620
the 2016 presidential election amounted to a a lie you know just just a pure confection of the
00:51:50.920
democratic party wherever it is true you know even if some are going to concede that some aspects of
00:51:56.300
those allegations are true it's unimportant because we do the same thing to other countries
00:52:01.780
right i mean this is this you know this came out explicitly when trump himself said well you think
00:52:06.300
our hands are so clean you know we've been pretty bad too right and so it so we had the the
00:52:11.240
spectacle of a sitting u.s president who said he trusted putin and his intelligence services
00:52:16.660
over his own intelligence services and something like half the country was happy to go with that
00:52:23.360
and and they think that basically i mean this all gets summarized under the rubric of the the russia
00:52:30.620
collusion hoax right if you like anywhere right of center now the all you need say is the russia
00:52:37.040
collusion hoax to discredit any concern about russia's misinformation campaign that's happened on
00:52:46.000
dozens of fronts for years which has created a a politics of unreality within our own society
00:52:54.620
in large part so anyway i get you know that we might call that nihilistic but i think most of these
00:53:00.500
people think that they're not nihilists they they want to put american interests first they want us to
00:53:07.340
be essentially they want us to pull back from our engagement with a a fairly crazy world and close our
00:53:14.040
borders and they want to get back to the good things of making america great again you know so that's not
00:53:18.800
nihilism it's it's a kind of delusion and it's a complete loss of contact with certain moral imperatives
00:53:27.200
of the moment i would say but it's um i think it is a different cohort and it and there's a fair
00:53:34.000
amount of evidence at this point that russia has had more than a little bit to do with creating these
00:53:41.340
perceptions yeah no there's a there's a deep philosophical consistency here because what happens
00:53:48.520
in in russian domestic politics is that putin finds himself in a place where he can't meaningfully
00:53:55.400
promise russians a a better future and one of the moves he makes at that point very effectively
00:54:01.660
um helped by a very intelligent propagandist called ladislav surkov is to argue that well actually
00:54:08.140
things may seem lousy in russia and maybe we close down your small business for no reason
00:54:12.980
and maybe there's very little social mobility and maybe you know wealth is horribly badly distributed
00:54:19.620
and maybe your vote doesn't really count but if you look around the world the the putin line
00:54:25.200
it's actually all the same everywhere it's the same in britain it's the same in the united states
00:54:29.880
and so the the way the the the move that their propaganda makes is very different from the soviet
00:54:35.140
union the soviet union actually still said there are good things and we're moving towards those good
00:54:40.240
things that might have been a lie but it was a lie in a world where there was still truth
00:54:45.300
what what the putin propaganda does is that it says look nothing's really any good russia's rotten
00:54:52.020
we admit it but britain is just as bad and america's just as bad and then they just hit on the
00:54:56.940
things which are bad about us and they put them right in the center and they make them the absolute
00:55:01.020
essence of our countries so that is a kind of programmatic nihilism it's it's a way to stay in
00:55:07.440
power when you can no longer actually operate a state in the way that it's normally thought of as being
00:55:13.040
beneficial to to people and i so that that connects with where we are in our politics where
00:55:18.600
you know we begin to doubt that the state can do things for us or that the state represents us and
00:55:24.300
then we are captured and i'm not saying that the russians are the only ones responsible for this
00:55:28.520
i'm saying what the russians are doing is they're they're pushing forward like they're the avant-garde
00:55:33.020
in this general tendency to say well who knows whether our system is better than their system right
00:55:38.260
who knows whether it was better you know whether russia does this and we do all this and so when trump
00:55:42.900
says you know i i trust their services more than our services he has a good he has good reason to
00:55:47.980
trust their services because his services did much more for him than our services ever could do but
00:55:53.120
when americans follow that and they say well it's kind of all the same then that's not just you know
00:55:58.300
adjacent to nihilism that actually is nihilism because what you're doing and you're reason that
00:56:03.520
way is you're saying well no matter how bad something is it's probably just as bad somewhere else and
00:56:09.280
you can't really build up a democracy on that basis i mean to build up a democracy you have to have
00:56:14.480
some notion that you have that you can improve things that some values are real you know that
00:56:20.660
law that law does matter that we can organize ourselves in ways that are that are better than
00:56:25.700
other ways and um you know at the practical level you're speaking of the right here but at the
00:56:30.420
practical level this kind of posture also turns up on the left where you know the existence of russia
00:56:35.720
just becomes um an occasion to point out that america did things which are which was bad and of course
00:56:41.780
we did right but that doesn't actually answer the question i mean if you know if people if if russia
00:56:47.840
is committing a genocide in ukraine and we say well yes we did terrible things in iraq okay that's
00:56:52.580
fine that means that you know countries shouldn't carry out illegal wars so there's a there's a
00:56:57.640
principle there um and i'm happy to defend that principle but the way it goes illogically and i think
00:57:03.500
politically destructively is for people to say well you know on the one hand on the other hand as
00:57:08.280
though that were dispositive and then that just brings us to this nihilism and with the nihilism
00:57:13.340
russia wins because they're not aiming for anything else they don't really need for us to believe that
00:57:17.720
the ukrainians are are nazis right they obviously don't believe that themselves they don't really
00:57:21.900
need for us to believe that ukraine doesn't exist they just need for us to be somewhere in no they just
00:57:26.300
need for us to be in nowhere land where we shrug our shoulders and we say well who knows you know
00:57:30.440
maybe maybe we did something like that at some point that's all they're aiming for that's really all
00:57:34.860
they're aiming for and unfortunately they're getting a lot of it okay well i want to i know
00:57:39.320
you have a hard stop in about 40 minutes now so i don't want us to be short on time to address the
00:57:46.740
nuclear elephant in the room right so so many people think that we are running an intolerable risk
00:57:53.960
by not doing everything we could possibly do to de-escalate the situation i want to give you some
00:58:01.140
examples of this from what i've seen on social media and i want i want us to analyze them because
00:58:05.980
if you're not someone who's been as you have been really in the weeds of of ukrainian and russian
00:58:12.500
history and politics it's easy to think well there's got to be a reason why ukraine is not a nato state
00:58:20.860
right and then we're not treaty bound to defend it like it is one it's not therefore a core american
00:58:28.820
national interest so how is it that we are not doing everything we can do to mollify
00:58:38.180
putin at this point right i mean because this is a situation of nuclear blackmail it even gets worse
00:58:44.820
somehow if we exceed to the idea that you know he doesn't even have russia's interest at heart he's
00:58:51.600
just a tyrant who's psychologically unraveling and he's given some speeches of late which
00:58:57.920
suggest a kind of unraveling of a quasi-religious sort he gave one speech about a month ago where he
00:59:05.280
sounded practically like a jihadist in terms of his you know the the other the other worldliness that
00:59:10.880
was creeping into his claims so why are we just not doing everything we can to get off this ride and
00:59:17.660
so i'll give you just a few examples of this the venture capitalist david sacks has been making a
00:59:23.800
lot of noise about this and he wrote a an op-ed in newsweek recently and this is a quote the online
00:59:29.820
mob has decided that any support for a negotiated settlement even proposals that zelinski himself
00:59:35.600
appeared to support at the beginning of the war is tantamount to taking russia's side denouncing
00:59:40.980
voices of compromise and restraint as putin apologists this removes them from acceptable discourse and
00:59:47.120
shrinks the overton window to those advocating the total defeat of russia and an end to putin's
00:59:52.200
regime even if it risks world war three anyone who suggests that nato expansion could have been a
00:59:58.000
contributing factor to the current ukraine crisis or that the sanctions imposed on russia are not
01:00:03.420
working and have backfired on a soon-to-be-shivering europe or even that the u.s must prioritize avoiding
01:00:09.580
a world war with a nuclear-armed russia is denounced as a putin stooge so let's let's take that what is
01:00:16.180
how would you respond to that if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll
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