#410 — The Whole Catastrophe
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 7 minutes
Words per Minute
172.91692
Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, I sit down with Douglas Murray to discuss his experience on the Joe Rogan Experience, and his new book, The Strange Death of Europe: The Death of the West and the Future of the Middle East.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
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I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, it's great to see you again.
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So this has been interesting. I feel like I'm riding shotgun on at least
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one car crash of late, where we're going to talk about your experience on the Joe Rogan
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experience. And it was an experience, but we're going to talk about your book as a-
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I'm not sure I like the opening about a car crash, but yeah.
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You get out of a crash and just get into another car.
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Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that is our method. But you have a book on democracies and death
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cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization, which is, I guess, is part of now a quartet of
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books. The Strange Death of Europe, The Death of the West, or-
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I mean, all of which hit the same grotesque object of Western capitulation to unreason and
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a kind of masochistic flight from sanity in the face of the provocation of Islamism and
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jihadism and other attendant confusions. I think we will cover all that. I'm definitely
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going to track through the book with you, but I want to start with the intervention you
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attempted to perform on our mutual friend, Joe. I hope he's still a mutual friend. That
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remains to be seen, I guess. And his sidekick, Dave Smith, over on the podcast. Because I
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thought what you attempted there was fantastic and much needed. This was a kind of moral intervention,
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which I thought was very important to do. I've been attempting my version of it, not directly
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in dialogue with Joe, but I certainly would do that as well. I thought what you said was
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quite brilliant and important. And I think there are probably a few crucial points that
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were misunderstood. And so I'd like to do a bit of a postmortem on that. But I'm wondering
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what your experience of it was. How do you view, how much of the aftermath have you seen? No doubt,
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even if you don't read comments, you're still getting some of the comments somehow because
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I don't really follow very closely. If I think I've done the right thing, which I try to do
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routinely, I don't think I ever knowingly mean to do the wrong thing. But if I do something,
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I feel perfectly content with myself in that I can look myself in the mirror the next morning.
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I have no interest in seeing what people rampaging across the internet have to say.
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Right. So although there is a certain type of almost friend who can never resist sending you
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the nastiest response they've seen online is saying, I disagree with this person.
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That's right. I don't think you're nearly that fat or ugly.
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I disagree with everyone else. I like you. Despite some people doing that and thus giving me a glimpse
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into it, I really don't bother. I have a book out. I've been doing a lot of traveling and speaking
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and so on. So I don't really have time to absorb very much of the podcast, talking about podcast
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Oh, that was just a typical BBC thing. They got me into pre-record for 20 minutes. I attacked
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Newsnight. They edited it down to seven minutes and then afterwards had a panel of three people
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I'm sort of, I'm sort of used to that. I find it sort of normal that if I'm allowed to speak on
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the BBC, they must have, you know, 500 anti-Douglasites to, uh, to defame me and much more. And that's
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That actually surprised me. I thought the level of confusion they expressed, uh, there in the
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aftermath is now on Newsnight. I thought that the pendulum had swung back enough in the UK where
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that species of confusion wouldn't be so prominent.
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Not on the national broadcast. So the national broadcast, as I think I told them in one of the
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bits, so they edited it out. I said, you're just wildly out of date. Like this is weird. This is
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having a conversation from 10 years ago and you just haven't updated your software and, uh,
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shame, shame, but that's why nobody watches the program.
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Um, so I want to know your, what was your experience of attempting that intervention? How
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Well, I liked Joe and enormously admired what he's done. He's, uh, he's so good at talking about
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interesting things with guests easily. And for a long time that a lot of other people think that
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it's extremely easy and it just isn't easy. He's a, he's a master of it. But I had noticed that he
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had in recent years, not really had anyone on who had my views about the Russia Ukraine conflict or
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indeed about the Israel Hamas conflict. And, uh, and he had had some people on who I have had to
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become aware of very annoyingly, like all of us, but who are just retreads of a school of pseudo
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history, which was seen off a long time ago and which I dislike. And I suppose I just wanted to try to
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say to Joe as gentle as possible that I thought that something was going very badly wrong here
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and that he was misleading his viewers about listeners, about what the, the story is on each
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of these things, you know, that specifically that, you know, Ukraine actually does have a right to
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defend itself against Putin's aggression. Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas's brutal
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invasion of Israel. And I believe, and just, just wait for this. I think Adolf Hitler was a really
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bad guy. I do. Yeah. Uh, as Norma Donald said, I've said it before I'll say it again. I said it
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before it was cool to say it. Um, I think Adolf Hitler was the bad guy of world war two. And I think
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Churchill was one of the people in history who saved civilization, almost single-handed at one point
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in 1940. And so when I see people just throwing out the, this absolute rubbish about, for instance,
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what they try to do is they try to minimize the crimes of Hitler. They try to maximize the crimes
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of Churchill. This is what David Irving used to try before he was completely debunked as well.
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And then what you do is you have this thing where you say that the allies and the Nazis were on an
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equal footing in world war two. And then you go for your next move, which is actually the allies
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were the baddies. Right. I just, I can't put up with that. I just, it's, it's intolerable to sit
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by and see this stuff going on. And so, yes, I tried to cite that. I was, of course, the whole thing
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was two against one because although Joe has had people like comic Dave Smith, by the way, I have yet
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to hear being funny on anything. And maybe, you know, somebody else can point me to it, but he's
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just spent 18 months criticizing Israel in the most ignorant terms. And, um, I was annoyed that
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Joe had said, you know, you can only come on if you're on with comic Dave Smith. Whereas just a week
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before comic Dave Smith was on, on his own, once again, sounding off and he didn't seem to need a
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bodyguard or tag team double or anything like that. So, so, okay. It's two against one. That's,
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I've had worse odds, but it makes it extremely difficult, undoubtedly, because if I'd had a
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sidekick, they could have mopped up some of my points, but you know. Yeah. I mean, I think the,
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there are several reasons why it was almost an impossible task. I mean, there's something,
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you know, in there. Well, the only, I should just say the only tasks worth doing are the impossible.
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That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to try to track through what I think is a, is a kind of the
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center of their confusion. Cause I think there's, there's something that's genuinely hard to parse
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here around the role of expertise and you know, what, what it is, how we recognize it, when we honor
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it, uh, how you avoid arguing from authority, et cetera. I think that some of that stuff is genuinely
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confusing and they were mightily confused by it and quite content to be and, and felt that you were
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simply arguing from authority and, and urging upon them some kind of mirror credentialism.
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It was clear to me, you weren't doing that, but, and this relates obviously both to, to both the
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topics you were touching, the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. I will focus on Gaza because I want
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to track through your argument in your book. But, um, one thing I would just point out is that the war
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in Ukraine and the, and the war in Gaza are connected in at least two senses. For one, it's, um,
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it's clear which side of those conflicts you should be on if you want to be defending the West and
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open societies and liberal democracies against their enemies. Uh, and secondly, Vladimir Putin is
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on the wrong side of both of these conflicts and Joe and Dave couldn't seem to untangle that. And,
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um, yeah, I just think that's, uh, it's worth noting. So by the way, there's a, there's an additional
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problem there, which is that I'm supportive of both countries' rights to self-defense. And, um,
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unfortunately, because of the, uh, degradation of the age and the decision to make politics almost
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entirely a team sport, whereas a part of, uh, on the American right, there's almost, certainly on the
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mainstream Congress, Senate, and so on, there's mainstream support for the Israelis in their war
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against Hamas. There's increasingly contempt for the right of the Ukrainians to defend themselves
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against Putin. And the opposite exists on the left. So the left increasingly believes that Israel
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does not have the right to defend itself, but the Ukraine does. So, um, I suppose I find myself,
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in the words of Richard Strauss, as a librettist in Capricho, I find myself burning between two fires.
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Yeah. Well, I'm going to try to push you into the, the right word fire a little bit, because,
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uh, I think you have a problem there. Honestly, I think you have some unfortunate company that,
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you know, it's just a matter of time before, uh, it becomes too uncomfortable to not notice the,
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the differences of opinion. And Ukraine is obviously a very sore point, but I think it also
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is worth worrying about the level of antisemitism on the right. And, and much of the confusion you saw
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from, had you read the comments, you would have seen a tsunami of confusion coming from Joe's
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audience. And much of that audience is not the, I would say most, I would maybe 90% of it isn't,
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is kind of rightward leaning, if not fully in Trumpistan, it's definitely not the, the AOC
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supporting, you know, leftward confusion. Yeah. But let's talk about expertise. So I have some notes
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here because I find this, it's, this is all very clear in my mind, but I find that whenever I talk
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about this, I fail to track it through systematically enough for people to have their doubts removed. So
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the first point I think we need to make is that everyone acknowledges whether they want to or not,
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everyone acknowledges the, the reality of expertise and its importance. And this is a point I think
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you've made before. I've made it as well in response to the aftermath of your podcast with Joe
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that, you know, if you put someone in front of Joe who wants to talk about MMA as though they were an
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expert as though they knew something and they knew next to nothing, very, very quickly, Joe would
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recognize the problem there and begin to turn down the screws and it would be excruciating, right?
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There's just, there's no way you can pretend to know about MMA sitting in front of Joe Rogan when
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you, when in fact you don't. Everyone, when they got on an airplane wants their pilot to be a real
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pilot, not just, you know, one who's LARPing as a pilot or who's self-taught, you know, in a simulator
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they have at home, uh, unless, unless they don't want to land the plane, right? In which case,
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unless they're jihadists, but let's leave that aside. Yeah. If you were going for brain surgery
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and just before you're wheeled into the, um, operating theater, comic Dave Smith appears and
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says, I'm doing the task. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not an expert, but I never claimed to be an expert,
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but I am carrying out the operation. Yes. Yeah. I've got a free four hours. It'll be inside your head.
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Um, okay. So it's just simply indisputable that there's a, in any domain that matters and certainly
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in any domain that purports to be in touch with reality, any side of it, whether it's journalism,
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history, science, or just how to get things done, you know, just physically, whether you're a plumber
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or not a plumber, right? The difference between knowing something or knowing nearly everything
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and knowing nothing is extraordinary and it matters. And so far as the topic matters and
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there is, so in that context, you can see that a consensus among experts is rather often meaningful,
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right? So if you have the lone person who's going against the consensus of 99% of the specialists in
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a field believe X and you've got somebody believing Y, maybe somebody who is himself an expert, he has the
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right credentials, but certainly in the case of someone who, who isn't an expert and doesn't have the
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right credentials, it is more often than not the case that you're, you're not in the presence of
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a lone genius who's just figured everything out on his own. You're very likely in the presence of
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somebody who's mistaken or a crank or otherwise, you know, has some incentive that, uh, is going
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undetected and they're going against the, the mainstream for bad reasons. Now that's not to say
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there's no such thing as there, there being a lone genius who does overturn a field of knowledge.
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Yeah. But if you had, if you had to walk into a casino and bet on prevailing opinion in any field,
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you would be right to bet on what 99% of oncologists think about this cancer rather than your, your uncle
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who just has strong opinions about cancer. And that's just a probabilistic bet we all place every
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day whenever we're granting credence to knowledge claims. And we're always tending to go with the
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mainstream consensus of specialists. And that's because expertise really is a thing and probability
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Well, I agree with, um, however, as you probably know, a significant caveat, which is that, as I've
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said for a long time, one of the things that COVID did was it stripped us of the consensus that the
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scientists were the last sort of cathedral of knowledge that you really did listen to.
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And I, I, I, I said long time ago about this, that, you know, once, once trust the science
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wasn't respected anymore for some good reasons, we were completely stripped of anything in our
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If you said trust the media, although there's great things in the media, but if you said trust
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the media, increasingly people would laugh because the media would, much of the media
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would let itself down in the realm of facts and, uh, unacknowledged biases. Yeah.
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If you said trust the politicians, you know, um, I think generally that all, every time there's
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a poll of public opinions about who they, who they trust more, I think journalists are somewhere
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beneath, uh, hookers and, uh, politicians beneath us. So, I mean, it's, um, but science, this, the
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breakdown of the science trust was devastating. And I think that the, the breakdown of belief in
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almost everything in the state, everything, every arm of government, every, and the attributing of,
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you know, the most appalling actions to parts of the security state, for instance, having somebody
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like RFK Jr. saying that he, it was, uh, that the evidence that the CIA killed his uncle was
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overwhelming. Right. Right. Well, that means that the CIA can kill presidents, which means that
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you're in a country with a completely rogue intelligence service and, and just all of this
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added onto it. But, but the COVID thing was the last cathedral to fall. It made science fall,
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it seems to me. And, but, but I would argue, and I, and, uh, this was tacit in some of the things
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you were saying, whether it was just the fact that you were there saying it, I would argue Joe
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has more than his fair share of responsibility for that and alternative media in general, big podcasts
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in general, but Joe above all, given his taste for conspiracy thinking and given the lessons he has
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drawn from COVID. I mean, I, I'm not, so I, I share your concern about the failure of institutions
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and the, the, obviously the woke ideological capture of so many mainstream institutions,
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distorted scientific communication is to certainly distorted journalism. And it has predictably,
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and to a degree that's intolerable, destroyed trust in those institutions. Yeah. But the,
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the remedy for all of that is not mere contrarian anti-establishment, no nothingism or a, much less a
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disavowal of expertise. It's real expertise, real science, real journalism being aimed at the correct
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targets. Yes. Shorn of the dumb ideology that distorted that conversation in the first place.
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Yes. And by the way, there's, um, I mean, there's a sort of delineation that's important to make as
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well, which is, I think that part of the confusion that I'm told has been occurring is of course,
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that I think that there are probably realms in our society stem, so on, which is just easier to
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shore up. If you just make sure that stem subjects are as protected as possible from wild
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ideological outside influence. Yeah. Sort of feels easier. Although even you had some,
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I think it was the Smithsonian Institute was declared that the math was, was, was white
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supremacist, you know, the notion of objectivity. Absolutely. I, I charted this in math. Having a
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right answer. Absolutely. Don't think that it'll stop at stem, but stem it seems to me is more,
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it could be more disciplined in order to just push that out. It's easier to see how that happened.
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How do you do that in the humanities, including in the study of history? It's somewhat harder. Yeah.
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And I think that is the case. Yeah, that's true. And I think that is somewhere where,
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let alone with journalism and current events, I think that there is probably a harder way for
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people to pass what expertise would look like. But as I said in my column in the New York Post today,
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although journalism has been significantly deracinated of late, we do still have rules.
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I mean, one rule for instance, is that if you are writing from a country, you are in the country,
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you're not allowed. You don't have a VPN that's sending you through.
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You're not allowed to sit in West Palm Beach, pretending to be on the front lines of the
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Ukraine conflict. And a friend of mine who I do listen to said to me after that podcast,
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maybe you were too annoyed with the lack of any credentials of comic Dave Smith and were just
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angry that, you know, you needed and you needed to show that you were right and he was wrong. And I
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thought, well, and I said, well, of course that. But I said that the real thing is just that simply
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on a journalistic level, if you haven't spent your time on the ground somewhere, your ability to write
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about it or the likelihood that your readers will read about it is very significantly diminished.
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And I can't say that I don't resent rather spending so much of my life on the ground in places going
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through things that my readers know I go through, but I don't go on about only to be told that my
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witness, my testimony, my evidence is to be compared with somebody who has never gone further than
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Wikipedia in their sourcing or I did the research about the region. It seems rather galling to me.
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Well, this was a genuinely confusing point because so then now I'm bending over backwards to be
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charitable to Dave Smith, who I notice rarely makes the effort in my direction or yours. When you were
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saying to him, I mean, you were basically shaming him for pretending to know what was going on in Gaza
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without ever having been there. And it was quite natural for you to do that because the point
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you were making really would have been resolved had he been there because what became clear in the
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conversation was he was reading into certain phrases like blockade or, you know, concentration
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camp or open air prison, a notion that life was such, you know, pre-war in Gaza as to be completely
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intolerable where, and you said, were you ever there? Did you ever see what life in Gaza was like
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a few years ago? And no, he's never been to the region. And so it was, it was relevant to make
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that point. But on his side, he wanted to argue and, and, you know, generically, I agree with this
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that you need not, in order to judge the ethics of a war, right, provided you are actually in touch
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with the facts about it and you're reading good sources and you're, you know what is actually
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happening, you can judge the ethics and you can know who's on the moral high ground without ever
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having been to either of the respective countries, right? Like you, you can, I mean, you could
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obviously judge, we could be talking about a war that happened a hundred years ago and be scholars
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of that conflict. And the burden is not upon either of us to have been to the region.
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Well, that was a rather lame point that comic Dave Smith tried to make, which is he said, uh,
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I haven't been to Nazi Germany either, but can I not have views about that? As I pointed out to him.
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He does have views about that though. Yeah, he does have views about that. But I said, I said,
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yeah, but I mean, you can't time travel, but you can travel. And this is to me quite an important
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point, which is if the reason why it matters in the, in the now is that if you were litigating
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a foreign conflict or domestic conflict that happened a hundred years ago, much, if not all
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of the dust would have settled, you'd be able to get a rounded view of what was happening,
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what had gone on and be able to reflect on it. When it's something that is happening now,
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the dust is not settled by any means, literal or metaphorical. And the consensus view has not emerged
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and much, if not most of the reporting and more that comes out of the region is, is wildly, uh, off.
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Hmm. So I don't think it is possible actually to simply rely on some published sources. No,
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no, I don't think that at all. And I think it would, it is the duty of somebody commenting on
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such a thing to go and see it firsthand. And that is a journalistic standard. But there we get into
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the follow on problem, which is the shape shifter thing. And I'm not talking about the, uh, language in
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which the far right talks about the Jews, the shape shifter thing, which I was also trying to
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fight in that conversation is the, I never said I was a historian.
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Yeah. I just spent five hours on television this week declaiming about the topic.
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I merely, when people introduce me as a historian, I don't demur from the, uh, the introduction.
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And if somebody introduces me as the world's greatest living historian, I don't say,
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Yeah. But if you were to have at the beginning of this podcast introduced me as the world's
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leading engineer of a suspension bridges, Douglas Murray, I think I might have, but if, if I started
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to speak as if I was that at some point you are pretending to be that if, if you keep being
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introduced to historian, but then you have the move of saying, I never said I was a historian.
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Hmm. If you keep saying, uh, I'm a comedian, but I'm not, I'm a commentator on a particularly,
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uh, febrile foreign conflict. And then you say, but you don't know about this and go,
00:24:26.280
well, I'm just a comedian. And you'd play these endless games of assertion of knowledge followed
00:24:33.380
by, if you get caught a, okay, I don't know about this. This is a very, very annoying rhetorical
00:24:39.840
trick that some of us have observed because it means you can never be pinned down because
00:24:45.780
you're always shifting your presentation of who you are. It was one of the things that
00:24:50.880
always made me most irritated about Russell brand who I've never wanted to debate with
00:24:57.940
or discuss with because I always saw him doing this, that he would, he would indeed 20 years
00:25:05.240
ago to go on the BBC announced the need for revolution, um, explain how we need to completely
00:25:10.940
change the system of global finance. He would get shown a chart and he would say, I ain't got
00:25:17.600
time for no chart. I'm not a comedian. Right. Yeah. This is a very annoying move. John Stewart
00:25:22.580
used to do it as well. Well, it's tennis without the net and you find you can hit the ball rather
00:25:28.780
hard when there's no net. Right. Yeah. And sometimes your rackets are made of jelly. I
00:25:34.080
mean, it's sort of just endlessly absurd. What are they doing in this thing? Why the constant
00:25:42.340
shifting? It's for people to work out what's going on there. The problem is that you're in
00:25:47.220
front of an audience and, you know, Joe is, has cultivated this audience and perhaps been
00:25:52.080
in turn changed by this audience that is anchored to some very strong, if unacknowledged claims about
00:26:00.660
the nature of knowledge and authority and also certain moral principles. I mean, so for instance,
00:26:06.900
I saw two, at least two heuristics running in the background of that conversation. One is
00:26:12.620
sunlight is the best disinfectant. And by sunlight, I mean, let's just turn on the microphones and talk
00:26:19.600
at length, right? That's so, there could be nothing intrinsically, there can be nothing wrong and
00:26:24.240
only goodness in sitting across the table from someone like Daryl Cooper, who is an amateur,
00:26:31.580
you know, self-taught historian, talented podcaster who has, as you pointed out, an appetite for,
00:26:37.660
you know, contrarian taboo history of the David Irving flavor about the Holocaust. Nothing wrong with
00:26:44.220
Joe just sitting with him for four hours and midwifing a conversation from him, which at no
00:26:52.500
point entails Joe pulling him up short on any of the points he's making. He's simply receiving this
00:26:58.920
person's expertise, even while if you pushed and said, oh, but are you really a historian? He'd say,
00:27:05.580
no, no, I'm just a podcaster. I'm a fan of history. But the assumption is, and again,
00:27:10.040
this is the assumption from Joe's audience, is that if you're talking for hours, people are going
00:27:14.780
to recognize what is true. You're trusting your audience to know what is true. And it is just an
00:27:20.340
obvious fact that you cannot trust Joe or his audience to know when an already debunked David
00:27:27.280
Irving talking point is being recycled in front of him, unless he's done the homework to know what
00:27:33.420
he's actually in dialogue with. Well, if I can say so, there are also two other things going on there.
00:27:37.800
One is, I suspect that what you describe as sort of viewer aggravation with appeals to expertise or
00:27:45.300
indeed defense of expertise feels like a personal assault on a large number of listeners because
00:27:51.400
they feel like they're doing that and they'd like to do that. It's elitism.
00:27:56.040
Yeah. But because they'd like to do that, they're kind of doing that by listening to long form
00:28:01.100
podcasting and developing views. Again, they are welcome to do that. I'm all for that. But the point
00:28:08.800
that I keep trying to bring across is that you can still hold on to the principle of truth,
00:28:16.820
of standards, and much more. And the second thing is, I think there is a very obvious
00:28:23.460
algorithmic excuse for this, which is that if you do a podcast in which you say Adolf Hitler was bad,
00:28:34.420
definitely the bad guy of World War II, and Churchill was a hero, the algorithm doesn't favor you.
00:28:39.700
Whereas if you say, aha, I've got this fantastic new view on it, which is that Hitler was trying not
00:28:44.900
to be at all anti-Semitic in the 1930s. He was keeping the whole stuff down. And then he just sort
00:28:48.880
of, you know, but they had his reasons to dislike the Jews. And I'm going to get into those in the
00:28:52.400
next podcast. And, and that's sort of your, your, you, you, you, you forgot the part that
00:28:59.200
there was no, no intention to kill the Jews. They just found that they couldn't feed them once they
00:29:02.780
rounded them all up. So it was more compassionate to put them to death. Might it not be more
00:29:07.840
compassionate to, to euthanize them. And that, unfortunately, that's what certain people are
00:29:14.180
doing and pushing. And I was genuinely, I mean, I said at the end, I said to Dave, I think he says
00:29:22.820
he has a, he has a Jewish grandfather. So he, I think he probably wouldn't be regarded as Jewish
00:29:27.640
in a very orthodox way, but he'd certainly be caught by the Nuremberg laws. And Hamas would
00:29:34.180
certainly regard him as full blown, fully Jewish, the complete catastrophe as Tom Stoppard memorably,
00:29:44.180
But he, people like him who are doing this, I just warned him. I said, you must know,
00:29:51.460
because he said something like, you know, there's this sort of fertile ground at one point. I said,
00:29:55.640
you're doing the watering of it. You're watering this. You're, you're bringing it up. You're
00:30:02.880
conspicuously engaged in the process of trying to grow an extremely poisonous tree. And it's going
00:30:10.940
to get you and then all of us, by which I mean, of course, you encourage the most ugly, debunked,
00:30:20.760
destructive, bigotries of human history. And they are always ones which once they flourish and once
00:30:29.860
The crucial point is that you were not saying that Dave Smith couldn't possibly be right because he's a
00:30:39.500
You're saying that he's a non-expert and it shows because he's making obvious errors. And so it is
00:30:46.660
with Daryl Cooper. And so it is with any of these people that are getting platformed, right? And so it's
00:30:50.360
just, it's not the consequence of being a non-expert in this case is that these guys are
00:30:57.960
trafficking in recognizable distortions of fact and coming to the wrong moral conclusions as a
00:31:04.640
result. And then a very easy way to summarize that problem is, listen, you're talking to people
00:31:10.360
who are non-experts. Why not talk to the experts? That's not to deny the fact that people are entitled
00:31:16.580
to their own opinions, that sometimes someone can be self-taught and actually make a valid
00:31:22.400
And to flip it around, it's also the case that arguments from authority are illegitimate and
00:31:28.600
nothing is true simply because a consensus of Nobel laureates says it is. It's just that a
00:31:34.600
consensus of Nobel laureates is often a very good guide to the best state of the evidence,
00:31:39.860
right? I mean, that's shorthand for finding the best evidence and the best arguments.
00:31:44.500
But by the way, I just would say one other thing, which is that the, what I think a lot
00:31:49.340
of people aren't aware of, but, you know, I do believe that when something becomes very
00:31:55.600
fetid on your, what is roughly your political side, you should call it out, identify it.
00:32:02.740
It's very difficult to do this, of course, at the moment, because there was a movement on
00:32:05.800
the right in America and elsewhere, which says that anything that is gatekeeping is demonstrably
00:32:13.800
bad. And therefore let's lift all of the sluice, all of the sewer sluices and let it, let all the
00:32:23.100
shit run. And I think it's worth identifying one other thing, which I don't know you're probably
00:32:28.700
aware of, but a lot of people aren't, which is that there has always been a reason why a type of
00:32:34.440
American right-wing figure will play with this stuff. And it's slightly different to the reason
00:32:41.620
why you get the same stuff on, for instance, the continent of Europe. On the continent of Europe,
00:32:48.300
when this dark game is played about World War II, what they try to do is to, they demonstrate they
00:32:56.700
cannot contend with the utter atrocity of Nazi fascism and try in the end to either downplay it
00:33:06.700
and upplay Soviet communism in some zero-sum game, which is never going to end well. Try to get around
00:33:14.660
the mountain of the Holocaust and in the end find a way to absolve their country's history of this.
00:33:21.940
And I understand this, but it's also lamentable because they have to contend with the histories of
00:33:27.860
collaboration and fascism and much more. One of the reasons, again, why in an incredibly British way,
00:33:34.480
I reassert that the fact that some of us historically, our countries didn't do that. So I'll have the right
00:33:39.660
to feel some pride for that. But the thing on the American right that's always existed on this is
00:33:44.600
that World War II was a catastrophe to enter into, as was World War I, because America should have let
00:33:52.440
the Nazis and the Soviets battle it out, and we didn't need to get involved. And that's the dream.
00:34:00.480
I mean, that itself is an interesting revisionist exercise, and it's one that's happened for years.
00:34:07.200
I saw Pat Buchanan argue this years ago when he had a book out, very unconvincingly, but it was stimulating
00:34:12.480
in a way, and stimulating to see him prove wrong. But in any case, that's a game, because as Clive James
00:34:19.760
used to say, we're here because history happened. There's a sort of limit to which you can play this book.
00:34:25.320
So why do you want to play it? You want to play that dark game because you want to get onto a
00:34:29.600
different game now. Yeah. There's also, I don't know if you have the same degree of conspiracy
00:34:35.720
thinking in the continental version of this. I mean, yes, the Jews are often at the bottom of
00:34:42.940
many conspiracy theories going back over a hundred years, but it seems to me that there's an appetite
00:34:49.540
for conspiracy thinking in America now. Again, I locate the epicenter of this somewhere near Joe's
00:34:56.520
podcast, unfortunately. That is, I mean, it is being, you know, algorithmically boosted to a degree that
00:35:02.920
it seems in danger of subsuming everything else. It's a complete disaster because, of course,
00:35:08.480
people need to hold in their heads the thing that some things that are called conspiracy theories
00:35:14.400
The COVID lab leak, obvious example, obvious example in recent time, and it fell apart in
00:35:19.480
recent time. But when you look at the fact that, for instance, a majority of Americans believe the
00:35:23.640
CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK, President Trump releases the last JFK files. And
00:35:29.780
to the amazement of many, it seems that the man who the Dallas police fingered for this a few hours
00:35:37.760
after the assassination of the president was the person. Might have actually done it.
00:35:42.060
Was the person who did it. And the man, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had a gun that his wife
00:35:47.180
noticed was missing that morning from the house, and who, when the police come to her house, say,
00:35:53.500
was it my husband who did it? It seems like probably Lee Harvey that did it. And that,
00:35:58.520
you know, the one member of staff of the book depository who was heard to be firing rounds on
00:36:04.500
the floor above, and was the only person to run out of the book depository immediately after the
00:36:11.840
Yeah. And the shooting, which was supposedly was impossible for one man to accomplish, but
00:36:19.340
You know, that no sharpshooter could possibly do this, but it's demonstrated. And Lee Harvey
00:36:24.140
Oswald was a practiced sharpshooter. But it just goes on and on. But my point is simply that I made
00:36:30.020
this point a little while ago about Bobby Kennedy Jr., which is, I said, you know, if I was living in a
00:36:35.780
country where I honestly believed that my father and my uncle, two of the most important people in
00:36:41.420
the country, had been assassinated by the government, I think I'd hot-footed out of the
00:36:47.460
country quite fast. I think it's a dangerous place to be. I think that just, so that's just one,
00:36:53.980
but you can do this on multiple areas of American public life. Look, America is the only country
00:37:00.240
where the citizens are encouraged to generate conspiracy theories about America's successes.
00:37:10.520
On the great successes of American engineering and exploration, and significant chunks of the
00:37:18.100
American public do not believe that America did this. Yeah.
00:37:21.860
And one of the things, by the way, that's fascinating about that is if you speak to Russians who grew up
00:37:26.660
under Soviet communism, where you were lied to about everything, everything was a lie.
00:37:33.920
This year's crops are particularly good, always a lie. But even in that world of lies,
00:37:41.200
they didn't think that you're a Gagarin didn't go up into space because they were proud of it and
00:37:47.380
they wanted it to be the case. So I do think, and I know now that now I can predict there will be a
00:37:53.180
flurry of, ah, you haven't seen the way in which the, the flag holds up and the shadows are in the
00:37:59.580
wrong direction. The shadows are in the wrong direction and all this. I can, I can imagine the
00:38:03.380
inbox now, but Joe used to be one of those guys. And I gather he reversed course because he, he ended
00:38:08.980
up recognizing that America couldn't have got away with faking the moon landing because the Soviets
00:38:15.000
would have exposed it. Yeah. That's a nice counterpoint. All right. So I want to get to your book
00:38:19.940
and we're not leaving the current topic because the goal here is to make the case that the, the
00:38:27.600
moral confusion you were up against in that podcast interview is, um, is as bewildering as, uh, your,
00:38:33.740
uh, temper suggested. I mean, it was just the moral high ground is so obvious here and the, the wider
00:38:42.100
concern. I mean, that, that it's one thing to view this as Israel, its specific history with the
00:38:47.620
Palestinians, its right to exist, the legitimacy of Zionism and get sort of wrapped around the axle
00:38:53.840
of all of those specifics. It's another to actually look at the conflict in Gaza and in Israel's
00:39:01.460
history generally as part of this larger picture of a jihadist and Islamist conflict with the West,
00:39:07.840
which is what I tend to do. Um, now that you're, you know, your book doesn't focus on that, but it's,
00:39:12.000
it's important to keep that in view and it becomes incredibly clear where the moral high ground is when
00:39:17.380
you look at the details. But let me just, before I let you run, I want to, I want to point out that
00:39:22.020
there are two very different lenses through which people look at this conflict and, and they explain
00:39:27.480
the impossibility of discussion. The lens that certainly Dave Smith and his fans have here is
00:39:35.000
that the extremity of Hamas's violence demonstrates the immensity of Palestinian suffering. I mean, the,
00:39:42.840
like the fact that they would behave this way, it can only be attributed to the fact that they've
00:39:49.360
been pushed past the point of sanity by the Israelis, right? So in some strange way, the onus for the
00:39:55.860
atrocities of October 7th and other atrocities, the sort that you saw during the second intifada,
00:40:00.700
uh, and this reasoning gets mapped onto jihadist atrocities everywhere. The onus gets put on the
00:40:07.100
victims of the atrocities. And this is a point that Paul Berman made brilliantly 20 years ago in his book,
00:40:12.840
terror and liberalism. So there's that, that weird distortion, the opposite way of seeing this. And
00:40:18.540
I'm convinced and have been convinced for more than 20 years as, as the true one is that jihadism
00:40:23.860
is an independent variable. And you can, I mean, you can find this death cult behavior in people who
00:40:30.260
have been immiserated by occupations and been treated badly. And you can find it in people who have not
00:40:35.740
been immiserated. And so it's the, it's the ideas that give you the death cult. And conversely,
00:40:41.660
you can find people who have been treated far worse than the Palestinians and they never
00:40:46.120
manufacture an endless supply of suicide bombers. So it's the ideas, it's the culture. And, uh, you
00:40:53.520
know, so, you know, the, the most glaring, uh, scotoma in, you know, Dave Smith's non-expertise
00:40:59.620
is a complete failure to appreciate the reality of jihadism and just what Israel is actually dealing
00:41:04.460
with in Hamas. I believe that it's also a strain of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism,
00:41:10.760
which is a belief that nobody in the world can do something wrong and bad unless we have somehow
00:41:17.400
pushed them to it. Yes. This is Noam Chomsky's gift to our politics. Yes. Yes. It used to be on
00:41:22.600
the left and now it's on the right as well. Yeah. This is a profound and deep anti-Americanism,
00:41:28.160
which I cannot sign up for and will not profound anti-Westernism sees the world. Actually, funnily
00:41:34.720
enough, Edward Said, to the extent that his theory on Orientalism holds at all, might've
00:41:40.500
found this trend interesting of Westerners now looking at the rest of the world and saying,
00:41:45.960
they're just, they can't do anything unless we make them. Right. Totally without any
00:41:50.600
robs agency of all the people you would otherwise give agency. No moral agency. And if there is an
00:41:55.400
explanation for why somebody goes and blows themselves up and everyone that they can kill
00:42:00.740
on a bus in Jerusalem, it's because of something to do with British mandate policy 80 years earlier.
00:42:10.260
I completely reject this and I reject it for many reasons. But one is that riding shotgun with the
00:42:17.520
claim that only the West, only America can lead anyone to do bad things is what you rightly
00:42:23.880
identify, Sam, as the utter inability to recognize that some people seek utterly different things
00:42:32.720
than we do. I, um, you remember there was a story some years ago that seemed to me to be emblematic.
00:42:38.500
I must look it up again. I think it was what you reported in the New York Times of an American
00:42:42.040
couple, a nice, nice couple. I don't wish to make any sort of laughs at their expense, but, uh,
00:42:47.260
they decided to give up their job somewhere in San Francisco and cycle around the world and they
00:42:52.560
kept a blog and the aim was that they wanted to show their belief that essentially everyone in the
00:42:57.220
world wants what they did, which is, you know, security, comfort, wellbeing, happiness, a bit of
00:43:04.500
money to bring up your kids well, and, uh, you know, love and peace. And it, uh, their, uh, their journey
00:43:11.360
log ends, um, when they're cycling through, I think it was Uzbekistan. And unfortunately for them,
00:43:16.200
a truckload of ISIS fighters are driving the other way. I can't believe their luck that there
00:43:20.820
were these two Americans on a tandem and stop and, uh, torture and kill them. And that's where their
00:43:28.120
story ended. I use it because as an example, because it's a particularly unpleasant one, but
00:43:33.780
emblematic of a total failure of imagination or, or study for many people in the West who do not
00:43:41.980
realize that when it comes to what I'd call the death cult ideology, which has manifested on the
00:43:46.800
right and the left in history, it manifested in Spain in the 1930s with the Frank West chanting to
00:43:53.360
Miguel de Unamuno, you know, vive la muerte, long live death. And, you know, the great Spanish
00:43:59.660
philosopher of his era realizes his life, his work is just done because it's over because he's in front
00:44:06.000
of, he's at a university in front of a group of young men chanting long live death. And this, it's
00:44:11.100
over, it's over. Reason and rationalism will no longer work. Well, the death cult of art that I write
00:44:17.380
about here is a death cult of Hamas that really could have not done what it did. And as I say in one
00:44:24.640
of the, you know, passages in the book, you know, after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, there was
00:44:30.280
a Palestinian state in Gaza. They were even encouraged to have elections by the George W. Bush
00:44:36.940
administration, Condoleezza Rice and others. They had elections. They voted in Hamas, which states
00:44:42.520
that it's a genocidal terrorist organization, which wants the annihilation of the Jewish race and then
00:44:47.900
get onto everyone else. They voted in Hamas. Hamas immediately used the billions of dollars that
00:44:53.160
came in to make sure they built up a terror infrastructure tunnel systems, not for the citizens of
00:44:58.380
Gaza, but for the rockets and for their fighters, kept on importing rockets and other military hardware
00:45:04.600
to fire at Israel. And after many iterations of the war in 2023, 4,000 of their terrorists flood into
00:45:19.260
Israel and massacre their way through the South. This is, this is the fruit of Hamas. This is what
00:45:25.900
Hamas wanted as well as leadership wanted. And they do not want to live in peace and coexistence.
00:45:31.940
They want to murder and slaughter, and they even want to die themselves. And I think that, I mean,
00:45:38.920
we're hitting, sitting here in LA, why would anyone in Los Angeles understand this? Like we, it's just,
00:45:48.140
I mean, you do, but we had 9-11, we had our own, insofar as you're a student of the news. I mean,
00:45:53.600
this is of a piece with what happened in Paris on multiple occasions, the Bataclan most horrifically,
00:46:00.100
in your country, the Manchester bombing. I mean, this is, this is just, I mean, we memory hole it
00:46:06.680
and other things, other bright, shiny objects capture our attention, but it's the same species
00:46:11.180
of confusion and anti-Western bias that caused people to blame the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for
00:46:19.900
getting, having the indecency of getting murdered by jihadists. And then you had the Penn America
00:46:24.440
Foundation, you know, rescind the award that they were going to give them and for, you know, for
00:46:29.940
courage. I mean, this confusion is everywhere. I want to actually just draw a few bright lines
00:46:36.780
where people can see them to show the moral high ground here. So there's just some striking
00:46:41.480
differences between the two sides that you elucidate in your book. I mean, one is that one side takes
00:46:46.760
hostages, even young children and old women, and it's community. It's, you know, the non
00:46:54.260
combatants receive these hostages, not with looks of horror, but with, you know, open celebration,
00:47:02.920
right? It's like, it is completely intelligible from a cultural standpoint within Gaza that this
00:47:10.160
is exactly what you do. This is, the good is on your side for stealing these infants and young
00:47:16.080
children and old women and forcing them underground for years at a stretch. One side uses its own
00:47:23.280
civilians as human shields. One side murders its civilians when they try to flee to safety.
00:47:30.360
And if you try to flip this, if you try to imagine the other side, that is the Israelis doing any of
00:47:36.900
these things, it's obviously unthinkable. And anyone who is standing in criticism of their behavior,
00:47:45.220
I think, still wouldn't go so far as to imagine that the people of Tel Aviv are capable of using their
00:47:51.720
own women and children as human shields, right? Or that they would celebrate, you know, that the IDF
00:47:57.500
would want to seek to maximize civilian casualties on its own side. I mean, even that is not as confused
00:48:04.380
as people are. No one, it seems to me, is confused about that. And yet they don't see the relevance of
00:48:10.380
There's lots of reasons. One is they don't want to. If you were supporting a side that turned out to have done
00:48:17.220
October the 7th, and some people say to me, oh, no, no, no, the world's sympathies with Israel. No, they weren't.
00:48:22.800
No, some of the world's sympathies were briefly with Israel. But in London, on the evening of the 7th,
00:48:30.160
hundreds of people gathered in the streets of Knightsbridge to wave flares and celebrate the ongoing massacre.
00:48:36.780
On the 8th of October, I relate in the book that I was in Times Square to see a pro-Hamas protest as the massacre
00:48:45.000
was still going on. This started very early. And we get back to that strange collection of simultaneous thoughts
00:48:54.700
that people can have. Hamas GoPros and records and Instagrams their atrocities. And their followers can,
00:49:03.420
it's another one of these double moves, these jiu-jitsu moves, these, um, they, they say,
00:49:09.520
how thrilled they are about the atrocities. And also the atrocities didn't happen. And that then
00:49:15.840
the third move is the atrocities are actually carried out by the other side. You set your watch
00:49:20.560
and you'll see it. Um, last year there was a claim that IDF soldiers had gone into Gaza and were raping
00:49:26.060
the women of Gaza. There were many reasons why this is completely implausible and not just implausible,
00:49:31.580
but deeply offensive. But all these people who said, who were relating this, repeating this smear
00:49:38.840
of the Israeli defense forces, were all the people who were denying that Hamas had raped women on the
00:49:46.360
7th. There's a muppet of a journalist, not only a journalist, a sort of commentator, agitator in the UK,
00:49:52.480
who passed around the libel that the IDF was raping women in Gaza, who, when he saw a version
00:49:58.940
of the 43 minute atrocity video, came out of it and reviewed it by saying it was disappointing because
00:50:05.300
you didn't actually see any women being raped and therefore it seems unlikely any rapes occurred.
00:50:11.460
This is one of my, this has become, as you know, I call it Grossman's law now after Vasily Grossman.
00:50:17.060
This is this thing of, tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of.
00:50:22.480
Absolutely 100% application of this law. The side that says it's both good to kill babies and
00:50:32.020
denies that they kill babies, then attack the IDF and IAF for killing babies. It's everywhere this
00:50:39.080
form of projection, I suppose, which is one of the things it is. And it's deliberate desire to not
00:50:47.940
recognize the difference between deliberately maximizing civilian casualties, as Hamas did on
00:50:54.980
the 7th, and deliberately trying to minimize them, as the IDF has. If the IDF had wanted to
00:51:00.440
carry out a genocide in Gaza, it could have done. They were accused of having a genocide in the Gaza
00:51:04.960
since 2005, which is weird because the population doubled after 2005 up to 2023. But then it's not like
00:51:12.720
consistency is particularly important, it seems, in this era. After all, the same people who claim
00:51:17.000
that, who say that there is a genocide in Gaza are the same people who say, why don't the Israelis
00:51:24.580
realize that they are operating militarily in an area with a disproportionate number of people under
00:51:31.980
You have a line in your book, forgive me if I don't get it verbatim, but it was something like,
00:51:38.260
how do you fight an army that wants to maximize the loss of life on its own side?
00:51:45.760
Right. I mean, this is, it is, people don't, it seems to me, make contact with how, one, how just
00:51:53.040
morally perverse that situation is, but two, what an insuperable obstacle it is to actually practically
00:51:59.360
fighting a war so as to minimize the loss of civilian life.
00:52:02.840
I mean, hundreds and hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed in the last 18 months because
00:52:09.440
they are going methodically and in exceptionally dangerous situations, house to house in areas of
00:52:17.740
Gaza that are meant to have been cleared of everyone but Hamas fighters. Hundreds and hundreds of young
00:52:22.960
Israeli men primarily have been killed by, instead of carpet bombing an area, going
00:52:28.800
assiduously through it, at enormous personal risk. They have, every soldier you speak to
00:52:37.260
has the same stories of, for instance, people coming out of a civilian area with their hands in the air,
00:52:46.400
and then from their midst, a group of Hamas terrorists come dressed exactly the same as the
00:52:51.260
civilians and start firing at the soldiers. In the knowledge that the soldiers either have to just
00:52:56.860
receive the incoming fire and lose their own lives, or they have to fire back and risk killing some of
00:53:03.820
the civilians that Hamas has so gleefully sprung out among. None of this is just, all of this is what
00:53:13.060
every soldier has faced for the last 18 months, every single one. And Hamas's leadership, say,
00:53:20.680
there was an interview on Al-Arabir the other month with one of the remaining leaders of Hamas,
00:53:26.820
who was asked, if the Israeli airstrikes from the air that you describe are so devastating,
00:53:31.380
why don't you allow the citizens of Gaza to shelter in your very extensive tunnel system?
00:53:36.600
And his reply was, because the tunnel system is not for the civilians of Gaza. The tunnels are for our
00:53:42.640
rockets and ammunition and for our fighters. And asked who should build shelters for the
00:53:50.300
citizens of Gaza. He said the international community, that's their responsibility,
00:53:56.520
There's the same community that gave them billions and billions of dollars to build those tunnels
00:54:01.980
And I have a genuine, genuine offer I'll put out there. I can't attach a cash prize this time,
00:54:08.780
but I'll- this is a completely sincere offer to anyone listening to pick me up on the following
00:54:14.780
challenge. Your listenership, I'm sure, Sam, is intelligent enough to understand what it is to
00:54:21.000
extrapolate out civilian or other casualties by ratio of population. Not everyone gets me on this.
00:54:26.720
But of course, Israel is a country of 9 million people. America is a country of about 340 million.
00:54:31.880
30, 40 million people. Nobody knows how many people there are in the UK, so it doesn't work
00:54:37.180
Well, we soon won't know how many people are in America, given all the doging, but-
00:54:41.680
Well, but the, but, so, and again, just preempting any of the morons who want to claim that I'm
00:54:50.900
saying that a Jewish life is worth 10 American lives or anything like that. No, it's extrapolating
00:54:56.220
out from population. So, if October the 7th had happened in America by proportion of population,
00:55:00.880
it would have been 44,000 Americans murdered and burned alive in their homes in one day,
00:55:06.060
and another 10,000 Americans taken hostage. So, my challenge is, whether in Gaza with 1,200
00:55:15.120
civilians in Israel murdered and 250 taken hostage, and the two stated war aims of the Israeli government,
00:55:22.620
the return of all the hostages and the destruction or capture of all of Hamas's leadership and fighting
00:55:27.840
brigades, whether it's in the case of Israel trying to carry out this operation of rescue
00:55:32.840
and so on in Gaza, or whether it would be how America would get back 10,000 hostages in an
00:55:42.220
equally built up, intensely booby-trapped terrain. If anyone watching has a battle plan for how to do
00:55:50.180
that, send it to me, and I will send it to everybody I know in Israel. Because I'm sure that if there is
00:55:57.960
a military genius watching and listening who knows how you would carry out that operation with no
00:56:03.740
civilian casualties on the side of the Gazans and minimal to no casualties on the side of the IDF,
00:56:11.440
I can assure anyone watching. I and many others will be all ears. But I hear no such thing. I hear
00:56:19.800
no such thing. The best I've had, I think it came up in that Rogan debate, the best I've heard is
00:56:25.920
the hostages that have been released have been released by getting around a table and negotiating.
00:56:32.500
Horseshed said by people who don't know what they're talking about. The only reason Hamas has
00:56:38.740
released any of the hostages to date, including the dead bodies of babies, is because of the kinetic
00:56:44.560
military force exercised for 18 months by the young men and women of the IDF. Only military pressure
00:56:51.060
has made Hamas give any of the hostages back. They would all still be sitting in underground tunnels
00:56:57.960
and in the basements of Al Jazeera journalists and much more if there had been no military action
00:57:05.300
in Gaza. Sinwar would still be alive if the IDF had not painstakingly fought in Gaza for a year.
00:57:16.020
People simply do not understand this. And when they say things like, but wouldn't it,
00:57:21.560
why don't the Israelis just get around the table with Hamas? I'm afraid you completely demonstrate,
00:57:29.060
Yeah. Yeah. What do you think Israel's policy should be going forward around hostages? I know
00:57:35.200
this is difficult for you to answer, perhaps, given the fact that you know many of these families,
00:57:40.820
but I can only imagine that there are very few people in Israel now who think that the Gilad
00:57:47.340
Shalit deal was wise in retrospect. That was the, you might summarize what that was, but that was the,
00:57:53.880
I think the 1,027 terrorists to one hostage exchange that freed Sinwar to mastermind October 7th.
00:58:02.880
That piece of history looks, you know, increasingly untenable. And I mean, given the understandable
00:58:09.280
pressure brought to bear by the hostage families throughout this war, given the fact that the
00:58:14.080
leverage is undeniable, once you have hostages, you have leverage. How do you, how does this get
00:58:21.500
Let me preempt that by saying that there are similar cases around. I was, when I was reporting
00:58:26.360
from Ukraine recently, I was, among other things, interviewing families and children who had been,
00:58:33.000
behind the enemy lines, had been in a territory captured by Putin's forces. And it's thought that
00:58:39.640
around 20,000 Ukrainian children have effectively been kidnapped by Putin and the Russians. This
00:58:45.080
includes people in orphanages, but it also includes children that were encouraged to go to summer camps,
00:58:49.640
and their parents sent to summer camps and then would disappear. I found out something very interesting
00:58:53.960
the other week when I was looking into this story and trying to bring some more light to it, which
00:58:57.720
is that there was, there seems to me to have been an almost deliberate attempt to the Ukrainian side
00:59:05.640
Because, and this is a, this is something of a supposition speaking to some of the people
00:59:10.920
campaigning for the kidnap children, that the Zelensky government knew that the minute that it is
00:59:17.080
about getting the children back, you will get intolerable pressure from your domestic population
00:59:22.360
because anything is worth it to get the children home. It's a, it's just a terrible, terrible thing.
00:59:28.920
And I suspect that some of their thinking on that has been influenced by watching the Israelis being
00:59:34.360
pushed into this intolerable position. It's incredibly hard in Israel because not only is there the, the
00:59:42.280
religious edict to fight for life and that this is one of the commandments central to the faith,
00:59:50.280
but it is also a commandment that then is central to the state. Everybody, when they join the army,
00:59:56.840
the air force or anything, everyone fight, flying a dangerous raid over enemy territory is told if
01:00:03.800
something happens, we will come and get you back. We'll come and get you back. We tear up the earth
01:00:08.600
to get our people back. Everybody in the IDF, no, no man left behind, no man left behind in the
01:00:14.520
battlefield. And so Hamas like Hezbollah know that that is the Israeli view that they put an exceptionally
01:00:21.880
high price on life. And by the way, that isn't just the life of Jews to preempt one inevitable line of
01:00:29.880
attack. It is literally to get back every Israeli and the Israelis who have been captured, by the way,
01:00:37.320
included Bedouin, Arabs, Druze, Druze, and others. It's, it's, it's, it's, but so, but it's agonizing.
01:00:47.560
It is completely agonizing as Hamas knew it would be. Some families of the hostages refused to engage in
01:00:55.240
the, um, in the hostage families forum and it's, uh, it's work because they said, we know, and our
01:01:03.080
child knew, and sometimes the child had left a message saying, please don't swap me. It's not
01:01:09.800
worth it. Other, other families will suffer. And they really do. I mean, uh, there was a, uh, in one
01:01:15.560
of the swaps I, I, myself having, you know, spent all this time there and getting to know so many
01:01:21.320
people involved victims and, um, families and more. I myself had one the other month where
01:01:28.920
one of the hostages released was someone whose family I know well. Um, one of the terrorists
01:01:36.200
released in swap from the Israeli side was a man who killed the brother of a friend of mine in
01:01:43.080
Israel some years ago. So one family is celebrating, you know, way, which you just, it's like a miracle.
01:01:51.640
Yeah. You cannot begrudge that. And on the other hand, there's a family who knows that their loved
01:01:57.880
one's killer is, is free after only a few years in prison. So this is all just horrible. And it's
01:02:05.320
deliberately horrible because Hamas makes it. So the torture porn, they push out on videos,
01:02:11.720
videos, videoing hostages, watching the release of other hostages in order to double, double up the
01:02:17.800
pressure. But interviewing a hostage, they're releasing, knowing that his family has been
01:02:24.600
killed, but he doesn't know it. Yeah. That was, uh, it's every permutation of this.
01:02:29.960
Yes. He got, he got back. The Beaver's father gets back, believes cause he's been separated from his
01:02:35.320
wife and kids and they must be alive. And then finally is released from over a year of torture and
01:02:40.920
deprivation in the underground tunnels of Hamas, and then discovers that both his babies and his
01:02:46.840
wife dead. But I think if, if memory serves, I think they asked him on camera, whether he was
01:02:52.040
looking forward to seeing his family, knowing the status of his family. That's right. That's right.
01:02:56.360
I can't, it can't be understood enough. This from the Western viewpoint that the reason I use the term
01:03:04.840
death cults is that some people, some groups literally worship death, glorify in death. They
01:03:13.160
love death. We love death more than you love life. Yeah. That, that has to be taken at face value.
01:03:19.640
Yes. And as Nasrallah said, uh, in 2004, he said the great weakness of the infidel is their love of
01:03:28.040
life and we will use it against them. But as you know, that's one of the things I meditate on in this
01:03:34.120
book is what is the answer to that? Because for much of my life, I thought it was almost unanswerable.
01:03:39.160
What do you do against a movement that not only glorifies in your death, but glorifies in the deaths
01:03:45.320
of their own side and sometimes in the deaths of their own family, like Ishmael Hanir, who finds
01:03:49.880
out that his sons, all Hamas leaders have been killed in an airstrike.
01:03:53.080
You know, we have the video, we can see his reaction to that knowledge.
01:03:58.440
So this is a piece that I think it's very difficult for people to understand, especially secular people.
01:04:03.240
And it's, it's easy for us to allied or seem to allied in our description of this phenomenon as
01:04:09.160
being evil or as being an expression of hate, because it's, it's worse than that.
01:04:14.040
I actually think jihadism, I think there's something worse than evil. I'm not saying
01:04:18.040
that there isn't evil to be found here and there, or that there isn't hate to be found here, but
01:04:22.760
misguided religious exaltation, misguided religious triumphalism allows for actually psychologically
01:04:33.080
normal and otherwise compassionate people to be part of a death cult. And I, and I, so I was reading
01:04:39.960
in your book and I had this thought that the framing, the evil framing was somehow not capturing
01:04:45.400
what I was worried about here. And I've been worried about it again for now going on something
01:04:49.640
like 25 years. And I remembered that I saw an ISIS video. This had to have been at least 10 years
01:04:55.160
ago, maybe 2014 of ISIS members throwing gay men or, or, and, and boys or men and boys who they claimed
01:05:03.960
were gay off of rooftops. And I think they were also toppling walls. These are like, these are
01:05:08.760
traditional punishments. But I remember seeing some video where there was actual tenderness being
01:05:17.080
expressed by the ISIS fighters toward the people they were about to kill. Like I remember seeing,
01:05:23.720
and I wasn't sure whether I hallucinated this, I, or that, you know, just that it was, you know,
01:05:27.960
fabricated the memory. I remember seeing the, like the reassurance, like, it's going to be okay,
01:05:33.000
bro. Like, like we have to do this to you, but you say the Shahada and you're going to, going to be
01:05:36.440
fine. Right. Like, like there was, it was not an, clearly not an expression of hatred. And just before
01:05:41.000
this, I, I did a search. I couldn't find the video, but I found a still from what I am sure is the
01:05:46.280
video. And I want you to look at this because there's so much contained in this image. Yes.
01:05:52.760
Now the vibe, the vibe being communicated by the two people who have hands on that man's shoulder,
01:05:59.640
right, is not hatred, right? Everyone you see there is an ISIS fighter and the man who's in a hood is
01:06:06.640
about to be hurled off a rooftop, right? There's something more disturbing about this for me than mere
01:06:14.520
evil. Again, the evil is there. I mean, I have no doubt that Sinwar was a psychopath and, you know,
01:06:20.120
a sadist, and we have a tremendous amount of testimony on that point, much of which you give
01:06:25.080
in the book. But what is worse is that it's possible for a death cult ideology to subsume
01:06:32.360
the values of even good people, right? Even normal people. Once you recognize that these people
01:06:40.440
actually believe that they know the moral structure of the universe and how to live within it,
01:06:45.480
and they know there's one way to get to paradise. And that's the only thing that matters. And this
01:06:51.320
world is worthless, right? This is just an antechamber to either hell or paradise. And the only thing that
01:06:57.340
matters is that you're going to the right place. Then I think we're in the presence of a very different
01:07:02.840
phenomenon, which is quite a bit scarier. I mean, what is scary is that when you think of something
01:07:08.360
like the NOVA music festival, which you write about in such a searing way in the book, I mean,
01:07:13.800
that for me crystallizes this collision between Western freedom and tolerance and compassion.
01:07:20.920
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