Tucker on the Propaganda Pawns, Bibi’s Threat to Trump, and the Great American Betrayal
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 2 minutes
Words per Minute
165.87976
Summary
In this episode, we play a clip from an interview we did with Brett Weinstein about the Iran war, why it started, what it means, how it may end, and when it may come to a head.
Transcript
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In just a minute, we're going to play you an interview we just completed with our friend
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Brett Weinstein about the war in Iran, why it started, what it means, how it may end,
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and when. And we should say at the outset why we did this interview. Brett Weinstein is not
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an expert on military tactics or strategy. He's not a diplomat. He's not a Farsi speaker.
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He is instead a biologist. He's a close observer of living things and of the systems they occupy
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and create. But why speak to Brett Weinstein? Really, honestly, one reason, because he's honest.
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He's an honest man. He's a scientist, and the first requirement of science is, of course,
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honesty. Report what you know. But we know that he's honest because we've known him for almost
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10 years now and watched him evolve in some ways from a liberal college professor at Evergreen
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to a Trump voter and promoter during the last campaign of Donald Trump. And unlike a lot of
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people you see in the political sphere evolve. Brett Weinstein kept the rest of a surprise of
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his evolution as was in progress. He didn't pretend, I've always thought this. He told us
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that he had changed his mind and why. So on the deepest level, he is an honest man, honest about
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the things he sees around him, what he thinks are behind those things, and honest, most important,
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and most telling of all about himself. So it's important to get an honest analysis of what's
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happening now because the dishonesty is so overwhelming, it's hard to separate it
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from the true. So if you're following this, attempting to follow it in this incredibly
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censored moment we're living in online, you're seeing all kinds of things that seem true that
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aren't. You're seeing true things suppressed, the most basic things. How many people have been killed
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on all sides? How many have been injured? You keep reading that Israeli cabinet minister Ben
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Gavir died again and again. He's dead. Well, he was in Jerusalem a couple hours ago issuing
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decrees, so not dead, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Basic facts, like what's the physical
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damage to all of these countries sucked into this conflict, you can't find because that information
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has been censored by those countries, countries in which it took place, and by American social
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media companies. So it's really hard to know what's true. Everybody involved in this conflict
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has a strong incentive to lie and to spin. But at some point, all of that lying becomes
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irrelevant. Rhetoric itself, propaganda itself becomes irrelevant in the face of war
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because war changes physical things, not just words and minds, but physical realities like
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borders and populations of countries and control over resources, those decisions are settled by
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armed conflict a lot of the time. They certainly will be in the case of this war. And so in the
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end, it kind of doesn't matter what you say. Somebody's going to win, and somebody's going
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to lose, and the world's going to be very different, and the rest of us can assess those
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differences unencumbered or impeded by your lying, by your propaganda. And that may be why,
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actually for a war, there's been relatively little propaganda around this. The current
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administration hasn't even really tried to explain why we're doing this. Not very hard anyway. And in
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some ways, we should be grateful for that. It's a sign of respect not to lie to people too
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aggressively. The president of the United States today said on camera, we're thinking about using
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nukes against Iran. He said we could eliminate Iran, make it uninhabitable forever in an hour.
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The President of the United States is saying out loud,
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Now, you can support that or disagree with that,
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You know, it's not often that people are that blunt
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So they've been pretty direct, actually, about what is going on here and what the stakes potentially are.
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President of the United States threatening nuclear weapons.
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The propagandists for the war, the people who really more than anyone else in this country pushed us to where we are now, are weirdly, unaccountably, even angrier than ever.
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You got what you wanted, but you're madder than ever.
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The second, the first barrage was unleashed against Iran and then the counterattacks from Iran against the Gulf and American interests there.
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A licensed psychiatrist should study that someday.
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Why are they so mad since they got what they wanted?
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But the nature of their propaganda hasn't really changed.
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There's been no effort to convince you as an American citizen or a citizen of any country that it's good for you.
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only that we must do this and if you're opposed to it in any way you are a bad person not incorrect
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not wrong in your calculations not dumb but evil and you kind of got to wonder what this is other
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than an obvious attempt to divide american society into neocons and non-neocons why would
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you want to do that neocons are a tiny percentage of the american population but clearly they're
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trying but it's interesting to watch it we haven't played a lot of this don't plan to
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But there's one clip from Ben Shapiro, recent clip, that kind of sums up the arguments in favor of this war.
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Sadly, younger Republicans have become similarly prone to conspiratorial thinking.
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According to Manhattan Institute, 54% of young Republicans, men under 50, believe the Holocaust didn't happen as historians describe.
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53% of Republicans under 50 believe in 9-11 conspiracy theories.
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These people, too, have bought into a grievance-based distrust of the system.
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And it's showing in their embrace of psychotic figures and disconnected politics.
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American allies who demonstrate strength are an asset for us.
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Members of the Grievance Party are losing their mind over this.
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And now they've been relegated to basically rooting for Iran to win.
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So members of the Grievance Party, meaning Democrats and members of that horseshoe right,
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have decided that after paying lip service to the horrors of the mullahs,
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the true horror is American interventionism and destruction.
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and it's never a question that's occurred to Ben Shapiro,
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to settle any debate about 9-11, which is by declassifying the millions of pages
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of classified documents that might explain what 9-11 was. But that's never under consideration.
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We could end this debate right now. We won't, of course. But you're a bad person. And above all,
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you are a disloyal person, disloyal to the United States. You are, quote,
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rooting for Iran to win. You're part of the Grievance Party. How dare you complain? How
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dare you have grievances it's pretty weak going for a guy who literally knows nothing about the
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rest of the world at all so you know you can get annoyed by it at some point especially if
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iran wins people like that will will double their calls to arrest anyone on the other side they're
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already calling for it these people should be investigated anyone who's against this should
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be investigated on a ferret charge. They should go to jail. Their ideological opponents should go
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to jail. Who's the totalitarian here? And you'll hear a lot more of that, but you will not see
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people pay a ton of attention to yelping, childish yelping like that, totally uninformed screaming
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like that ever again, because again, this conflict has entered what the military refers to euphemistically
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People are actually firing munitions at each other.
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what people on the sidelines say at this point.
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This is a hot war and it will be decided by force.
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One of the reasons you don't want to get into a hot war.
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In other words, we've exited the part of the exchange
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where one guy just punches the other guy in the face
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So it doesn't kind of matter what you said before the punching started.
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Not that Ben Shapiro has any experience of that, but it's just true that once people
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start hurting each other, words matter less, and the dominant party will emerge victorious.
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So who is going to win this, and what does it mean to win?
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Well, the most obvious and often repeated observation about this conflict is totally
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Now, in order to change the regime, everyone pretty much agrees you would need ground forces.
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You'd need troops, boots on the ground, American boots on the ground, in order to do that.
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And there is zero appetite for that in this administration, much less in the country.
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Israel would like us to commit ground troops, obviously, but it would take a lot to get us to do that.
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It would take some sort of terror attack in the United States, probably, like 9-11, in order for us to do that.
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So at this point, we're not going to commit ground troops, which does sort of put the whole exercise in perspective.
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If Iran's burgeoning nuclear program was really a threat to our core national security interests, then of course we would commit ground troops because any threat to our core national security interests merits committing ground troops.
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and the people who decided this were told or believed somehow that we could affect regime
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change from the air because iran was in a pre-revolutionary stage and all we needed to do
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was like topple the head figure like dominoes cascading that would set off a chain reaction
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that installed a pro-western government in tehran that was the argument these arguments always seem
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ludicrous in retrospect you always laugh at them really did you really think that well apparently
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we really did. But almost two weeks in, that has not happened. By the way, that would be a great
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outcome, because it would end the war immediately, except like a pro-American government in Tehran.
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Like, why is that so hard? Well, it is hard. And the U.S. has never really been able to do it,
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despite trying a lot with these so-called regime change wars. So if we don't succeed in doing that,
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if in the end the united states decides well we can't do this what happens then that is the
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question in other words what does an iranian victory look like an iranian victory does not
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look like iranian forces you know invading the gulf and controlling dubai or something or setting
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up a new satellite capital in jerusalem that's not going to happen probably hope doesn't what
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an iranian victory looks like is really simple it's control the straits of hummus it's exactly
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what it looks like, which if you hadn't looked at a map recently, is only about 20 miles wide,
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and it's the choke point through which 20% of the world's energy flows, 20% of oil and
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liquefied natural gas, on which many countries, including American allies, are totally dependent.
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Europe, South Korea, Japan, not to mention India, and China. They need it. They need energy.
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As conservatives are often fond of pointing out, energy creates civilization. Without it,
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things ground to a halt that's just true and renewables cannot take up the slack sorry
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so if that straight that choke point and again if you haven't looked at on a map
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it's on the eastern end of the persian gulf the arabian gulf whatever you want to call it
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that body of water through which energy flows by ship whoever controls that has a lot of power now
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as of today or as of two weeks ago anyway the united states effectively controlled it that was
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the other reason we had all those military bases in the Persian Gulf. Another was to protect Israel,
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our only real ally in the Gulf. But a competing reason, maybe the primary reason, hard to know,
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certainly a big reason, was to protect the flow of energy through the Straits of Hormuz.
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And now the U.S. has been unfortunately, tragically unable to guarantee the passage
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of energy through that strait. Now, let's hope that changes. But if the Iranian regime is not
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toppled in this conflict, there's a pretty good chance that they will have control. Who else
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would? American bases have been degraded, in some cases destroyed. This war is so expensive, even
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now, less than two weeks in, it's hard to see how we could afford to expand our presence there.
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And then on a political level, how much will is there for that? We've got to send more troops
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region and so that's their goal but one impediment to that is iran which is opposed to israel's
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existence and has been funding proxies to fight against israel most notably hezbollah in lebanon
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but also hamas the houthis in yemen etc etc so you got to get rid of the iranian leadership
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probably just turn the country into a chaotic civil war because that suits israel's purposes
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and you got to get the US out. So they've already done a lot to achieve the second goal, get the US
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out. It's hard to see how the United States can guarantee safe passage of shipping through the
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Straits of Hormuz after this. We can't now. And if the Iranian regime remains, they're the ones
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the rest of the world is going to have to negotiate with. So just to be totally clear, Japan, South
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korea china india the european nations 40 percent of the heat in british homes comes from lng from
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qatar moved by boat so big countries some of them allies some of them rivals have a structural
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interest in this region and it's not going away so in the end it seems possible if not likely
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that a resolution to the core economic question here which is shipping will be resolved by those
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countries, directly talking to Iran. So China, India come in and they negotiate with Iran to
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open the straits. Think about that for a second. Does that diminish or enhance Iran's power? Well,
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you're negotiating directly with China, India, South Korea, Japan, Europe. You're more powerful
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than you were when this started. And that's a huge embarrassment to the United States. It's a
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huge reduction in American power. We were not able to force our will on this critical part
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of the world. We couldn't keep the peace. In fact, we shattered the peace. And we weren't
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able to restore order once we did. And guess who did? Oh, our other global rivals. That seems very
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likely. But from a regional perspective, this is a huge deal to the Gulf states, which have just
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been bombed for 12 days and really damaged in some cases by Iran. But the biggest problem this poses
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is for Israel, because Iran is a sincere opponent of Israel. At this point, more so than ever, it
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has been for a long time. They say it openly. They're one of the few countries in the world
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that opposes Israel's so-called right to exist. Israel has every reason to regard Iran as an
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enemy. Iran is an enemy of Israel, and again, now more than ever. So if Iran emerges with its
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leadership intact, with a leadership that might be even more anti-Israel than it was three weeks
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ago, why wouldn't it be? We just killed their leader, their 86-year-old religious leader and
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his family. How does Israel live with that? And if Israel doesn't live with that, what are its
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options. If you start to think about this for about two minutes, it gets bracing. It gets a
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little scary. It's hard to know exactly how much damage the IRGC, the Iranians, have done to Israel
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because there's so much censorship. But we know, we can conclude fairly confidently from available
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information, that the port of Haifa, which is the most important port in Israel, controlled by the
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Chinese, I think, actually. Interesting. And Tel Aviv, the second biggest city in Israel,
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have been hammered, hammered. And there has been widespread infrastructure destruction,
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and there's been loss of life of some kind. We don't know, but the video that seems real,
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they're hurting. And the Israelis have been dealing with this kind of stuff for a long time.
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It's not the first time their cities have been shelled. They've been shelled a lot over the
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years. And so their tolerance for this kind of stuff is much higher than it would be in the
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United States. If you shelled Chicago, people here have no experience of that, and understandably,
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they'd be completely freaked out by it. Israel, they've got a little stronger immune system,
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this kind of stuff, because they're already fighting a seven-front war. On the other hand,
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there's only so much that any country can take, particularly a small country that is riven by
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all kinds of internal divisions. Israel is not a united country at all, and its leader, while he's
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very popular with Ben Shapiro, is not universally loved in Israel at all. So Israel is not entirely
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stable internally, and it's absorbing a lot of punishment for a small country. But let's say
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that punishment accelerates. Let's say the Iranians decide we're going to really hurt Israel, and
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we're not going to limit it to Haifa and Tel Aviv. We're going to hit Jerusalem, where the holy sites
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are. Now, they're not apparently doing that right now, at least that we know of. And again, it's
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hard to know exactly what's going on because of the censorship, but it doesn't seem like
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they're pounding Jerusalem, but they could. And at that point, what? What happens?
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What if Israel and its main protector in the world, the United States, starts running low
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on advanced munitions and critically on missile defense? Well, that's entirely possible. There
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have been widespread reports that the United States, as the backstop to Israel, its main
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protector, is running low on those munitions. Now, why is that? Well, because we expended a lot of
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both advanced munitions and missile defense in the last conflict that we backstopped israel in in
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june and we already loathed then because we sent a lot of munitions to ukraine now why'd we do that
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what was our critical interest in ukraine well at the time they told us we have to do this because
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it is totally immoral and a violation of our sacred norms when a larger country just grabs
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the territory of a smaller country. Post-Venezuela, it's kind of harder to make that case with a
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straight face. So looking back, you've got to expect a lot of the cheerleaders for the war
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against Russia might feel a little bit silly, might feel like the moral case they were standing
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on was kicked out from underneath them because it was. But whatever, excuse me, whatever you think
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about why we were there and the wisdom of it the truth is at the demand of the very same people
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who told us we had to get into this iran war those very same people demanded you may recall
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four years ago that we get into the war against russia and that we expend billions and billions
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and billions hundreds of billions of dollars and critical munitions we could use to defend
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ourselves in the fight against Vladimir Putin because he was Hitler. Again, things look very
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different right now. But at the time, everybody in D.C. in both parties bought that story.
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The Democrats were all for it. The Republicans were all for it. This isn't the first bipartisan
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regime change war we've tried to fight. It's one of many. And in the course of that war,
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we expended a lot of critical munitions that we might be able to guarantee Israel's safety with
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now but it looks like from all available reports are running low in fact we're getting some
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apparently anti-drone technology from ukraine savor that irony for a moment if you would
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so whatever the cause and there'll be one hopes time enough for finger pointing and blame and
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reverse engineering and attempt to understand what we just went through the fact remains it
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seems unlikely that the united states will be able to guarantee the safety of israel we can't
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guarantee it now, despite a real effort to. So what does that mean? Well, it means that at some
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stage, it is possible that Israel will feel it has no choice. We hope they feel they have no
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choice. They're not doing it for fun. But in any case, they might have to resort to a nuclear
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strike on Iran, which would be a tragedy for the people of Iran, most of whom have nothing to do
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with any of this, who would get vaporized. It would be a tragedy for the region, which would
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be poisoned by radioactive fallout, and it would be a tragedy for the world because the last taboo
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would be shattered, truly the last taboo. You can literally castrate yourself and call yourself a
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woman. You get applauded. There are very few taboos left. Using nuclear weapons is the last
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remaining big taboo, and once that is gone, we know from the elimination of other taboos that
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things change really fast oh it already happened i think i'll try it and you can very easily see
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either quickly or over time you know a series of nuclear exchanges that kill most people on earth
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so that would be a huge deal for the first time in 80 years a nuclear weapon would be used and
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it's it's by the way not an attack on israel to note this though they have been very eager to
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threaten it in the past their threshold is much lower than most people's but still you can kind
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of understand it. If Israel gets targeted for destruction by Iran and the United States isn't
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there to reliably protect Israeli cities, they could use nukes. And then we could see truly the
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destruction of a lot of the world. So you don't want that to happen. In fact, you have to stop
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that from happening. You have to decelerate. But how do you do that? And again, without too much
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gloating, because this is no time to gloat or say I told you so, this is actually one of the reasons
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that some people argued against this conflict in the first place
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because, like all wars, much easier to get in than to get out.
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So there are reports today, which, again, could be lies, probably.
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But there are reports that don't seem totally crazy
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that envoys from the United States have suggested
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that our country might be open to some kind of ceasefire.
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And the Iranians, whether they're telling the truth or not,
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But the fact that even go to the trouble of lying about this tells you something have said, no, we're not doing that.
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Why would we agree to a ceasefire when your previous diplomatic efforts were clearly dishonest and didn't work in any case?
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Is diplomacy itself the search for a peaceful revolution to violent conflict?
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But apparently the Iranians have said, no, we're not interested in a ceasefire.
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they're probably bluffing too of course you know everything's a bluff this is the middle east
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but the fact that they're coming out and saying that does point to a fundamental problem
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that propaganda aside is totally real and that is the united states is not wholly in charge of what
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happens next we can of course influence it definitely but if you're a middle-aged american
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speaking for myself and you've lived your entire life in a country that called the shots globally
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a country that issued blue passports to you that were basically your amulet of protection no one
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could really mess with you when you have an american passport because the united states
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set the terms for global trade it had the greatest military in the end no one's really
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going to mess with america and if we want to shut down a war or start a war we can
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and there are no existential consequences to us we're not going to get blown off the map for
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starting a war especially with like small primitive countries so we did it a lot
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but this is the first conflict of our lifetimes where the united states is not fully in charge
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of what happens next and that's because there are not not just one but two other players in
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this calculation and as noted the first is iran and they fully understand that all they need to
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do is survive and by surviving they become much more powerful than they were when this started
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and they have all kinds of other reasons to want to continue the most obvious being you're not
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allowed to say this but it's true is that unconditional surrender leaves you open to
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who knows what and most non-degraded people most people with any self-respect of any religion in
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any part of the country understand that you can never unconditionally surrender because in so
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doing you've given up your humanity you can't do that would you unconditionally surrender
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your family to someone else? No, of course you wouldn't. Who would do that? And if you would do
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that, then you don't deserve to have a family or be the head of household because you're degraded.
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You have no self-respect and you have no real love for those you're in charge of.
00:25:45.300
It's really that simple. This is not a question of Islam versus Christianity, the West versus East.
00:25:50.380
It's a question of the way people are. Unconditional surrender is a lot to ask of anybody.
00:25:56.980
It took a nuclear bomb to get the Japanese to do it. It took complete destruction for the
00:26:03.380
germans to agree to it so if we're asking for that unconditional surrender the iranians understand
00:26:10.640
perfectly well the stakes and they kind of can't give up so that's the problem there
00:26:17.180
but the other more unusual problem really without precedent is that we are fighting this war in
00:26:23.180
partnership with another country israel now to those who say well we've done this before you
00:26:29.060
know we had joint we had coalition ventures peacekeeping forces in yugoslavia and afghanistan
00:26:36.200
and iraq yeah true but none of those coalition partners had anything approaching decision-making
00:26:43.340
authority over the mission it was united states and its allies or satellite states or countries
00:26:49.540
we have troops in in a lot of cases and they were tagging along in the same way the south koreans
00:26:54.320
did in vietnam a lot of south korean troops in vietnam most people don't remember that why'd
00:26:58.220
they do that because we protected them from invasion by the Chinese and the North Koreans
00:27:01.940
in 1953. So they're grateful and they accompanied us to Vietnam for a brief period
00:27:08.300
as a gesture of gratitude. But they were never in charge of the plans in Vietnam. Westmoreland
00:27:14.900
was in charge. LBJ was in charge. Nixon was in charge. This country has not, at least since the
00:27:20.160
Second World War, handed any measure of operational control in a wartime theater to a foreign power
00:27:27.100
and why is that not because we don't have allies or people we like or people we you know share
00:27:33.140
common goals with we've got a lot of those or we had a lot of those but because no two countries
00:27:39.920
interests are identical even identical twins if you spend enough time around them
00:27:45.840
are different in ways you can perceive no two anything are exactly the same and nations which
00:27:52.400
are complicated, don't even have that many points of intersection in their interests.
00:27:58.940
There's a lot that separates the national interests of two separate countries. So if you
00:28:03.640
enter a war co-joined with another country, you're going to reach a point very soon where your
00:28:09.680
interests diverge from those of your partner. And in a war, the stakes are very, very high.
00:28:14.100
So you would never do that, ever. If you cared about your country, why would you do that?
00:28:20.040
and of all the things that historians will reveal in the aftermath of this war the one that some of
00:28:28.820
us should be paying the closest attention to is who made that decision who decided it was okay
00:28:33.420
for the united states to be yoked to a foreign nation in the middle of a war with a country
00:28:38.480
of 92 million people that is one of the craziest things this country's ever done and the people
00:28:43.860
who decided to do it should be exposed and they should be penalized because that single decision
00:28:49.300
will cost, unfortunately, this is likely to be true,
00:29:03.560
If you know that you're gonna negotiate your way
00:29:07.940
in other words, if you're not gonna destroy each other
00:29:09.180
with nuclear weapons, demand total abject surrender,
00:29:14.760
you're gonna have to negotiate your way out of something,
00:29:39.500
in controlling or having a say in the flow of energy
00:29:44.040
out of the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz.
00:29:46.260
If you could narrow down our interest to just one,
00:29:53.460
It's very important for the United States to have some say in that.
00:29:58.700
And if we negotiate our way out when we're weaker rather than stronger, we will have less say.
00:30:04.360
And if we negotiate our way out in humiliation, God forbid that doesn't happen, we will have almost no say at all.
00:30:11.780
And so it is very important to begin those conversations.
00:30:15.460
Now, if you think there's a possibility we could negotiate our way out if we don't have to go to nukes.
00:30:26.080
they've got to be reasonable and willing to bend a little bit,
00:30:27.980
and that's not easy because they're not that reasonable,
00:30:31.900
But it's not just the Iranians, it's Israel too.
00:30:38.120
Israeli priorities have taken precedent over American priorities,
00:30:42.200
American national interest has been pushed down,
00:30:45.980
and in its place has been elevated Israeli national interest.
00:30:49.380
And what specifically are we talking about here?
00:30:53.960
So the first big strike of the war killed, eliminated the Ayatollah,
00:31:01.300
who was 86 years old and not simply the head of state technically,
00:31:08.280
Apparently had prostate cancer and was totally willing to be martyred.
00:31:14.560
why would we kill that guy he may be bad he may be the most evil person in the world mark levin
00:31:20.140
tells us he's hit or great or bad we're against that we're against hitler but killing him will
00:31:27.280
have what effect 60 seconds predict oh maybe it will unite the country on religious grounds
00:31:36.580
and make the opposition to the united states and israel stronger maybe it's also a kind of point
00:31:43.980
if no return, after which you can't really negotiate your way out. You killed our religious
00:31:49.040
leader. When was the last time America killed a religious leader? It's not a defense of the
00:31:53.500
Ayatollah. Sorry, Ben Shapiro. It's not a defense of Shia Islam. It's a defense of American national
00:31:58.420
interests. And if you're having trouble remembering the last time we killed a religious leader,
00:32:02.720
it's because we haven't killed any religious leaders, at least not openly, because we don't
00:32:07.600
want to start religious wars, because they're hard to fight and very hard to resolve. And how
00:32:12.080
was that good for us how was that good for our access to lng and oil from the gulf tell me ben
00:32:17.480
shapiro can you find the gulf on a map no so why did we do that now we don't know exactly why we
00:32:26.680
did that maybe there are american military planners who thought sincerely hey i've got an idea let's
00:32:30.600
kill the ayatollah then all the liberal elements in the country will rise up they won't actually
00:32:37.160
discover their latent shia islam and rally around an 86 year old man who was killed along with his
00:32:44.360
family maybe there are actually american military planners who thought that but more likely
00:32:48.000
there were israeli strategists who realized that once the united states kills the ayatollah
00:32:53.680
kind of can't get out we're all in and you also got to suspect that israeli priorities
00:33:00.080
may have informed our tragic decision to bomb and it was revealed today it was in fact tragically
00:33:06.540
the U.S. military by mistake bombing a girl's school attached to an Iranian naval base where
00:33:13.220
the daughters of naval officers went to school and over 100 of them were killed. Well, that's
00:33:17.480
just terrible, okay? America doesn't do stuff like that and actually doesn't. In the times that we
00:33:22.400
have done it, we've apologized and prosecuted the people who did it. When civilians are killed in
00:33:26.940
large numbers and it becomes public, the United States military going back hundreds of years
00:33:31.580
has felt a moral obligation being a Western, not an Eastern country to apologize for the death of
00:33:36.540
innocence and punish the people responsible. It's happened a lot. Because we don't do things like
00:33:42.140
that. Israel does do things like that. Israel sets off pagers in the pockets of people they
00:33:46.400
can't identify. They're just out there. They're going to go off and they'll kill some terrorists
00:33:49.460
and maybe some others, which they did. And that's the price they're willing to pay. That's not a
00:33:53.140
price we're willing to pay because we're not Israel. So you have to wonder, like, how did
00:33:57.120
this happen? So the U.S. government is saying this was a tragedy. It was a mistake. Totally
00:34:00.940
believable. It was a case of bad targeting. Where did the targeting come from? That's the question.
00:34:05.340
where do we get those targeting numbers oh we don't know of course but it's worth asking
00:34:15.340
where do we get those numbers and by the way where do we get the intel upon which we made
00:34:20.460
our assumptions that we should go into iran and that there was a huge and anxious group of liberal
00:34:28.400
minded iranians who wanted to throw off the shackles of theocracy and that just a few choice
00:34:34.660
bombs would unleash the desire for freedom within, and they would do the work for us
00:34:40.000
and affect regime change themselves, and that from among them would arise a pro-Western
00:34:48.520
Well, it may not surprise you to learn that almost all of our signals information, our
00:34:53.460
SIGINT out of Iran, is translated by our ally and partner in this war, Israel.
00:34:59.360
Now, that's not to suggest that the Israelis, who have a lot of Farsi speakers among them,
00:35:03.320
because there are a lot of iranians who moved to israel persian jews who moved to israel
00:35:06.640
it's not to suggest that the israeli government would in any way be tainting or withholding or
00:35:15.460
mistranslating or skewing this electronic intelligence to get us into a war that
00:35:21.020
doesn't serve our interests i mean really who would do that but it raises the question of
00:35:27.600
incentives so just to be clear israel has an incentive for the united states to stay
00:35:31.740
in this conflict and make sure that Iran doesn't win, because if Iran wins, that's a mass, that's
00:35:36.720
an actual existential threat to Israel, for real. Ben Shapiro's already running, existential threat
00:35:40.820
to Israel. Okay. Its nuclear program was not an existential threat to Israel. An Iran that emerges
00:35:46.660
intact after this conflict is an existential threat to Israel. That is true. That's not an
00:35:49.900
overstatement. So they have every incentive to keep us in and to tell us lies about the nature
00:35:58.320
of the threat in Iran, about what they think is going to happen next, about chatter they pick up
00:36:02.960
on the ground in Iran. They have every incentive to skew the SIGINT in their favor. Now, it's not
00:36:10.620
even an attack on Israel, by the way. The second you join in an enterprise like this with a foreign
00:36:15.760
country, you are certain to get problems like this. And by the way, to be fair, trying to be fair,
00:36:23.420
the Israelis apparently are a little bit frustrated too, because they look over,
00:36:27.580
they've got a whole set of priorities that are very important to them, and we don't share them
00:36:30.940
all. Ground troops would be a perfect example. They would like ground troops. Flat out, they
00:36:34.540
would like ground troops. Why wouldn't they? Our ground troops, not theirs. They're busy invading
00:36:39.180
southern Lebanon and cleansing Lebanon, including Christian villages in Lebanon, killing a priest.
00:36:46.080
Now, why would Israel be invading Lebanon right now? And they've lost people doing it,
00:36:51.280
by the way. It's been a slog for them. Well, strictly speaking, it's because Iran activated
00:36:56.820
hezbollah which is a proxy for iran in southern lebanon they started attacking northern israel
00:37:01.920
okay who could have seen that coming just because they killed the leader of hezbollah and israla
00:37:07.480
a year ago doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore of course it does but the effect of this is not
00:37:13.000
attacking anybody just noting it is the united states is all in trying to defeat iran push back
00:37:19.380
these attacks on all of our allies in the gulf and on israel and israel is taking this opportunity to
00:37:23.920
grab more land in southern Lebanon. So we're fighting Iran while they're taking over contiguous
00:37:31.240
land from one of their neighbors and cleansing it of Arabs. Huh, how is that in our interest?
00:37:39.320
Why would we want to take credit for that? Why would we be in favor of that? That's a problem
00:37:43.580
for Israel to deal with. But that's what they're doing. And of course, that's what always what
00:37:48.440
they were going to do because Israel is acting in what it claims is its own interest or would
00:37:53.260
Benjamin Netanyahu believes in his, is in his own interest because we don't have the same interests.
00:37:59.020
And that was very obvious in the first hours after this, when the prime minister of Israel
00:38:06.900
in his, I think, first remarks on the new war with Iran said two things. One, I've been waiting
00:38:14.740
for this for 40 years. This is part of a preexisting plan, totally disconnected from
00:38:18.640
Iran's modern nuclear program, which was not in the same condition 40 years ago.
00:38:23.260
If you've been thinking about something for 40 years, you're probably not describing an imminent threat.
00:38:30.360
This is an effort to expand the territory and the influence of Israel in the Middle East.
00:38:36.260
Of course, again, not an attack on Israel, it's just a fact.
00:38:39.240
That's the first thing he said, revealing his motive, just saying it out loud.
00:38:43.160
One wonderful thing about Israelis is, unlike Americans, they're less circumspect.
00:38:48.000
and the second thing he said and I'm paraphrasing but it's about right he said in today's Torah
00:38:54.320
portion we read about the Amalekites about Amalek and that would be a direct reference to 1 Samuel
00:39:00.840
15 in which God commands the Israelites to kill the Amalekites all of them every single one of
00:39:08.060
them to commit genocide against Amalek the men the women the children the infants is almost verbatim
00:39:16.640
unquote, and the animals, the camels and the sheep. All of them. Kill them all. Wipe them
00:39:25.580
off the face of the earth. In fact, God punishes the Israelites for not following his instructions
00:39:30.140
and sparing some. So whatever you think of that, whether it's your theology or not,
00:39:34.740
your religion or not, it almost doesn't matter. In a geopolitical context, no one has talked that
00:39:39.840
way in 80 years no national leader has stood on camera and said our goal is genocide and not like
00:39:48.380
semi-modern nerf genocide where you kill a lot of people make the rest of them leave but actual
00:39:53.580
genocide where you kill everybody and their children quote and their infants and their animals
00:39:58.300
you erase any evidence that ever existed period it's one samuel 15 in case you're interested in
00:40:06.360
reading it and it is interesting and it you know it's it's of course part of judaism it's part of
00:40:11.420
christianity it's the old testament so it's not an attack on the verse but to invoke that verse
00:40:17.880
in the middle of a hot war and respond to it by saying this is what we're doing today amalek is
00:40:26.880
Iran is to call for genocide against her opponent. Now, without even judging that,
00:40:35.980
it's worth noting that is not in the interest of the United States, despite what the president
00:40:42.380
said today about eliminating the country with nuclear weapons. That is not in the interest
00:40:45.640
of the United States. It's not the desire of the American people to commit genocide against the
00:40:51.060
Iranians. Without even considering what the downstream effects of that might be profound,
00:41:05.480
and they're like bad Islamic people or whatever.
00:41:13.020
the children, the infants, the camels and the sheep?
00:41:18.800
because first of all, we don't do things like that
00:41:25.060
israel is a different view and so that's the point this can never work in america's national
00:41:33.000
interest as long as it is tethered to another country's national interest
00:41:37.240
and if that doesn't work if it doesn't work in the middle of a war it probably doesn't work in
00:41:41.880
peace time either it probably doesn't work to have a permanent israeli detachment at say the
00:41:46.460
pentagon where wars are planned or at cia where information is collated and analyzed it probably
00:41:54.180
doesn't work to have people in all branches of government who are dual citizens with israel and
00:42:01.120
other countries what because you're always going to wind up where we are now which is tethered to
00:42:07.240
another country which may be a good country or a bad country we can debate that but it's not america
00:42:12.120
and the purpose of the american government is to serve the american people not in some abstract
00:42:17.980
way in their war against radical islam but in a concrete way like nicer airports and no crime
00:42:22.960
and decent schools the things that any citizen should expect from his government
00:42:28.640
and if you're totally ignoring all of those on behalf of another country it's just not acceptable
00:42:33.940
and it's also not sustainable and so no matter where this goes and again we pray it is resolved
00:42:40.880
peacefully and soon our country needs to think through how this happened find out in specific
00:42:47.880
terms, not bury it like 9-11 and every other traumatic event over the last 50 years or 63
00:42:53.700
years. It's like, oh, we're not really sure. We need to be sure. How did this happen? How can we
00:42:59.320
prevent it from happening again? A sober assessment of what went wrong. That's what all functional
00:43:04.640
institutions do. They used to be called after action reports, and they were mandatory, so it
00:43:09.160
didn't happen again. That's what the NTSB does with plane crashes. How'd this happen? We're not
00:43:13.260
going to guess. We're not going to blame radical Islam. We're going to find out whether the
00:43:19.500
pitot tubes worked. We're going to find out the specifics that led to this tragedy because we
00:43:26.540
don't want more tragedies. And if we'd done that after the Iraq war, we probably wouldn't be here
00:43:29.860
because the Iraq war was started, which everyone knows went on for 20 years at great cost,
00:43:36.760
trillions of dollars, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, millions of people,
00:43:40.500
all in was started under very similar circumstances pressure from israel bad intelligence in part not
00:43:50.320
exclusively but in part from israel a massive lobbying campaign by israel aligned pundits and
00:43:56.220
think tank people politicians and if it had gone well okay but it didn't and no one was ever
00:44:06.620
punished for it and more critically no one ever explained precisely what happened and 23 years
00:44:12.640
later that was 23 years ago this month we're still debating why it happened and there are
00:44:19.280
increasingly few people who are there and remember i'm one of them let's not let that happen this
00:44:24.980
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And with that, ladies and gentlemen, an honest man,
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dr. Brett Weinstein but thank you for doing this I'm always grateful to see
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you in person glad to be here yeah this is one of those moments it's it's hard
00:48:14.880
to understand what's happening but here's what I believe to be true the
00:48:20.500
president had deep reservations about doing this he promised repeatedly as he
00:48:25.000
campaigned for this job that he wouldn't do this this war with Iran he made fun
00:48:29.020
of people who suggested he do it I don't think many of his actual employed
00:48:34.800
advisors were eager to do this that's my impression based on the reporting and
00:48:40.260
the only people who wanted to do it were a group of informal advisors on the
00:48:46.960
outside were calling and you've got to do it Mark Thiessen of the Washington
00:48:51.120
Post and other people whose opinions hard to imagine taking seriously but
00:48:55.380
whatever they wanted it and Benjamin Netanyahu wanted it the country did not
00:49:00.180
want it at all as expressed in polling but we did it anyway and it's turned out to be i think it will
00:49:07.140
turn out to be unfortunately a kind of a pivot in our history why did we do this what was the point
00:49:12.180
do you have any sense well i've spent a lot of time thinking about that question and i will say
00:49:19.060
i find trump himself a fascinating and mysterious character he's highly unusual and therefore it's
00:49:30.260
Do you find him more mysterious now than you did 10 years ago when you first started watching, when we all first started watching?
00:49:35.700
Well, I understand him a lot better than I did because, of course, I now have so much evidence of how he behaves under different circumstances for both better and worse.
00:49:46.280
but in thinking about this move it's so it seems like such an obvious mistake both from the point
00:50:00.020
of view of the nation and the danger of a quagmire which i think is substantial and the
00:50:07.300
danger of a terrible outcome which i think will likely be avoided but i do worry about the role
00:50:14.320
that nuclear weapons could play here but the thing that really causes me to think there's
00:50:23.600
something i can't see is that the mistake that trump has made here is a political mistake
00:50:31.080
if you picked one realm where i would expect trump not to make an obvious mistake it would
00:50:39.600
be the political i literally think we are dealing with a political genius right if nothing else
00:50:46.880
this person has understood the way he is viewed the american electorate such that he could be
00:50:54.580
relied upon not to make a blunder of this scale especially as his presidency hangs in the balance
00:51:04.220
which it clearly does, because if the Democrats take the Senate in addition to the House,
00:51:11.200
then not only will he be impeached, which I think is highly likely with the House alone,
00:51:16.080
but he will be convicted, and that will be the end of his presidency. It will also be his legacy.
00:51:24.200
So why would a man who understands politics better than any of us, a guy who did what I
00:51:31.460
would have told you was impossible he beat the duopoly both sides of it took over the republican
00:51:37.460
party defeated the democratic party soundly that is a that is a person with insight making a move
00:51:47.620
and it leaves me with a very unsettling hypothesis i don't have high confidence in it but
00:51:56.400
my concern is that this is evidence that he is not in control he is not in control as commander
00:52:09.180
in chief of his own armed forces and that he is in fact having to rationalize decisions that
00:52:16.200
he would not have made and promised not to make on the campaign trail
00:52:20.540
and i don't quite know what to do with that it's a very unsettling thought but i don't i don't see
00:52:31.860
i don't see the win here and i don't see a win in a short enough time period that this could
00:52:38.820
put him ahead in the midterms it's very hard for me to imagine that
00:52:42.180
well i you know i think that's the least bad outcome from the perspective of the trump
00:52:48.860
administration if republicans get stomped in the midterms um but then somehow recover a workable
00:52:56.480
majority of voters i think they'll be thrilled but i think the potential consequences unless the
00:53:03.040
party is to find a leader who represents its voters because it's really that simple over time
00:53:07.860
are you addressing the concerns of your voters if so you probably get elected and if you're not you
00:53:12.120
probably won't uh i mean i think it's like you know gavin newsom is going to be president
00:53:18.360
if this continues on its current course so the question is how do you like what do you need to
00:53:25.060
restore actually i mean leaving aside how do you get out of the war which i think is very complicated
00:53:29.180
but like how do you restore confidence in the government after the government just admitted
00:53:35.640
they got americans killed on behalf of another country which is what they've admitted and what
00:53:40.180
they did well i mean i will tell you um i i don't think i was naive going into the last election
00:53:48.400
i have long viewed the duopoly as unbeatable and trump is capable of a political feat in that realm
00:53:57.700
that others weren't but in terms of how compromised our our governmental structures are by by corruption
00:54:05.020
there was always the question as to whether or not there was enough power left in American
00:54:13.400
elections to actually change our trajectory as a country. And in the aftermath of the attack on
00:54:19.540
Iran, I'm shaken. I don't know. I think the answer I just got is it didn't matter who you
00:54:26.620
voted for. The neocons had moved over to the Democratic Party. I think Iran, we know it was
00:54:33.660
on their agenda for decades. I think an attack on Iran was coming. And I tweeted before this
00:54:38.620
happened, we're going to attack Iran and we're not going to be given a choice about it. And
00:54:42.780
that feels like what has occurred. But I do want to say the hypothesis that the president is not
00:54:49.800
in control is one of two. The alternative hypothesis, as far as I can see it, is that
00:54:58.540
he is being shown a very compelling false rendition of the world that has led him to
00:55:08.940
act in a way that would be politically advantageous and would be in the interests of the nation
00:55:16.600
if what he was seeing was true, but that it isn't. Now, that's also a very unsettling possibility
00:55:24.420
That he is surrounded by people who are wittingly or not showing him a picture that is unrealistic so that he would in fact put our military in harm's way and destabilize Iran, not understanding what the likely consequences were.
00:55:41.760
well i don't think there's any question about that and the people who are calling to influence
00:55:45.520
him you know are unwise but also ignorant and have a track record of bad calls and um but you
00:55:54.080
know possess maximum aggression so there's no question that his fact picture was totally
00:55:58.880
distorted and it still is i mean the overwhelming majority of iranian signal information signal
00:56:05.360
intelligence that we receive has been translated by israel so okay it's been filtered and maybe
00:56:12.800
honestly maybe not but yeah he's not seeing the whole picture of course no president does but
00:56:18.080
he's also as you just suggested at the outset which is the most interesting thing he overrode
00:56:21.760
his own instincts he's amazing political instincts people zig he zags he turns out to be right he
00:56:28.160
attacked the iraq war when that was totally verboten in the republican party in the primaries
00:56:33.120
in 2016 and it turned out to be the most resonant thing yes finally someone's saying it only he
00:56:37.640
knew that only he understood that so his instincts are like the highest level and he ignored them
00:56:43.440
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This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading
00:58:02.200
condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need,
00:58:07.640
explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like,
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sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already
00:58:16.720
a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show,
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spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads meaning your podcast might someday pay for
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well more microphones start your show today at spreaker.com spreaker because if you're going
00:58:43.200
to talk to yourself for an hour you might as well publish it tucker well i think we need to know the
00:58:49.200
answer to that question and the i think we americans have to have a conversation with ourself
00:58:55.900
about not only how broken our system is and what it is resulting in us doing but how does it
00:59:03.060
actually work what is it that is actually driving us to do what we do and you know we can see parts
00:59:10.820
of it we can see lobbying for example it's the loophole in our system where the system is pay
00:59:18.760
for play, that is used day in and day out by corporations to get us to do things that
00:59:26.100
are bad for our health, bad for our long-term financial well-being, bad in every regard.
00:59:35.020
But obviously, our adversaries abroad will have noticed that we have a pay-for-play system.
00:59:44.460
and if they aren't taking advantage of it that would be surprising i would like to know why
00:59:50.440
they would have missed the opportunity so presumably they are and that also applies to
00:59:56.960
our allies unfortunately that is to say anytime somebody has an interest that is in conflict with
01:00:04.440
the interest that we americans actually have they are in a position to nudge us in their direction
01:00:17.060
On the other hand, I don't think that can be the sum total of it.
01:00:20.920
And I will tell you, I don't like saying any of this.
01:00:28.480
The reason that the Epstein phenomenon, whatever it was, is so important is that it suggests
01:00:41.760
a hidden power structure that was there for leverage.
01:00:47.320
It is unfortunate that in the edit that we have been shown, we don't have conclusive
01:00:52.780
evidence of who, what they were after, or even how the leverage worked. All we can see is strong
01:01:01.720
evidence that there was something. Logically, it is implied that it was connected to intelligence
01:01:08.400
services, ours, likely Israel's, who knows who else. But when you see your government,
01:01:19.900
your president functioning in ways that do not add up it's like watching a planet behave oddly
01:01:30.900
because of the gravity of some object you haven't found yet right there's the implication that
01:01:36.660
there's something with power in this system that is undeclared as far as we know it's unnamed
01:01:41.640
and the central question is what is it, how does it work, and how much effect is it having on what
01:01:51.840
we do? And I tried in my own way to raise this issue publicly. I believe we are in the midst
01:02:01.520
not only of a constitutional crisis, which arguably has been ongoing since 2001, maybe
01:02:10.240
much longer maybe 1963 around november 22nd in that range um of 1963 yeah exactly well well
01:02:19.860
that's the question is was that was that a lone gun nut or was that a coup and if it was a coup
01:02:24.320
did the thing that took power ever relinquish it i don't know the answer to that question
01:02:28.500
i'll just put it this way if the u.s government ever goes bankrupt
01:02:31.340
and disability payments stop social security payments stop
01:02:35.060
all payments stop medical research the CIA will still be well funded well the CIA
01:02:42.580
I I used to say black budget because obviously there are black budgets but then I realized I
01:02:49.160
was using the wrong term a black budget is a budget that is opaque to the outside world but
01:02:56.600
it still comes from somewhere the real problem is the ability to fund your own agency of course
01:03:03.880
And if you have superior information about the world, you know what's going to happen because you're in part responsible or you're listening into things that are responsible, then you are in a perfect position to create a budget that is under no one's control.
01:03:20.200
And I'm afraid we have rogue agencies that are independent of any structure that was imagined by our founders.
01:03:32.020
and there's no one who's not afraid of them no one who's not afraid of them so there's literally
01:03:37.460
i've never met anyone the more knowledgeable someone is about the workings of government
01:03:41.400
the more afraid he is of cia well i'm not saying cia is running around killing people but they can
01:03:45.860
i mean to some extent they are but i don't think they're like murdering thousands of americans
01:03:50.660
every year but they'll trip you up hard if you mess with them right that's true everyone knows
01:03:55.920
that they'll gaslight you into functional insanity they'll eliminate you leak your text
01:04:01.360
to the new york times for sure yeah these things can happen so i guess my point is not only are we
01:04:08.220
in the ongoing constitutional crisis it's just clear that we are what the start date is can be
01:04:13.520
debated we are also in the midst of an acute national security crisis yes something has control
01:04:22.420
within our governmental structures that does not have our interests at heart and i don't know what
01:04:30.040
we do about that but i know now why do you say whatever this control mechanism is this force
01:04:38.480
doesn't have our interest at heart well i think that's evident from what we do most of our activity
01:04:48.880
is actually negative with respect to its impact on americans i mean in fact if we simply took
01:04:57.260
the resources at our disposal and pointed them at the problems that people care about
01:05:03.320
we could be vastly better off we wouldn't live in a country with huge numbers of fentanyl
01:05:11.140
zombies in every city with you know onerous taxation and cruddy services the point is we
01:05:18.760
are simultaneously being drained on the one hand of our resources and on the other hand receiving
01:05:27.300
the worst conceivable service for it what we get yeah i would be perfectly comfortable
01:05:34.560
paying high taxes if they were making society better oh yes definitely but i'm not comfortable
01:05:43.840
with paying high taxes that are used to punish me and surveil me and all of that it of course
01:05:50.700
who would be so all i'm saying is that if i look at the activity of government it is hostile to
01:05:59.580
the interests of the american people that's right almost always almost always it's like
01:06:03.920
point for point you know it's like during covid you know if you looked at what the cdc asked you
01:06:10.060
to do every single thing was the inverse of what you should have done just to maintain your own
01:06:15.000
health. It's like that. You are getting a program in which everything that you're being fed is
01:06:20.980
poison rather than nutrition. So when your government behaves like that, it is about
01:06:28.580
something. The fact that our founders understood the hazard of conflicts of interest was top of
01:06:37.580
mind for them and that they wrote about it extensively and they had tried to build a system
01:06:43.720
that was immune to it by virtue of the fact that as people detected that their government was not
01:06:51.880
acting in their interests, they had the ability to replace it bloodlessly. And what I think has
01:06:59.100
happened is something has overwhelmed the thinking of the founders. It's not surprising. They didn't
01:07:04.400
understand what a world you know the internet or ai or any of these other modern influences
01:07:10.980
would allow but somehow we exist under a form of government that has a kind of democratic theater
01:07:21.600
to it but that's not how it works and i guarantee you it works some way right it's it's a functional
01:07:29.820
system in a manner of speaking, the lights remain on, but it is not acting in our interest. It's
01:07:35.740
basically catering to our interests exactly enough to keep us from revolting. That's about what it
01:07:41.160
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tucker at cowboy colostrum.com remember you mentioned you heard it here first by the way
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you know that's a very depressing scenario that you've just sketched out however it's better than
01:08:58.980
civil war yep um and people don't appreciate how difficult violence is to control and just how
01:09:05.800
costly it is to people because they've never seen it because they don't know anything actually never
01:09:09.640
been anywhere but um anyone who's been around that is like oh i don't want that however i think that
01:09:17.180
the current system is going to be pretty hard to maintain with this level of transparency
01:09:21.640
by which i mean while a billion federal documents remain classified the deep architecture of power
01:09:28.640
as you just said is now sort of visible it's kind of peeking beneath the surface in certain places
01:09:33.280
and you're like well that clearly is what's running it i have no control over that that
01:09:39.160
whatever it is clearly hates me and my children it's tough when this much is disclosed all at
01:09:46.480
once and it makes society unstable and it makes people frankly revolutionary and radical well or
01:09:52.740
does it no it it it does which is another thing that's been worrying me so part of what i do
01:10:01.020
is i think about game theory which is a little understood quadrant of logic but a very important
01:10:08.140
one and there's a difference between an iterated game where each round is played with the knowledge
01:10:15.460
that you're going to have to play the next round and the last round of the game where you know you
01:10:22.100
don't have to play another round so you're willing to do all sorts of things that you wouldn't if you
01:10:26.920
knew you had to keep playing right you'll burn properties exactly you wouldn't have burned
01:10:31.760
otherwise and put it all in the last hand yeah so what i feel i i can't defend it as a matter of it
01:11:12.080
It kind of makes us feel like we're making some kind of progress, like we've scored a big win, when in fact, is it going to change how we are able to govern ourselves?
01:11:24.920
Did our power go up in knowing these things, or was it just simply a kind of catharsis that was delivered?
01:11:39.340
just it doesn't matter shed the husk yep we're moving on and i i see it in a lot of different
01:11:46.420
ways well in our just the most obvious practical way in our use of anti-missile defense like we
01:11:54.200
burn through it and so there's no sort of backup in case like what if something else happened around
01:12:00.020
the world with a peer power like we're in trouble you wouldn't do that if you cared about the future
01:12:06.560
you wouldn't do any of this if you care about the future but i see it in the explicit efforts to
01:12:11.860
stoke religious conflict inside our borders and i see it with this all muslims are bad
01:12:18.260
i never thought in my wildest nightmares that i would be the guy defending muslims since i'm not
01:12:24.860
a muslim and i'm also on the record like attacking muslims a million times over the years
01:12:28.200
foolishly probably but i do know that american citizens have to be treated equally regardless
01:12:36.140
of their religion period and that attacking people on the basis of the religion of my country
01:12:41.500
is the recipe for like disaster it's a recipe for a country that i want my grandkids to grow up in
01:12:48.280
and i don't know why anyone would do that and i'm not going to stand by for it not because
01:12:53.560
i'm like a devotee of allah or whatever i'm a protestant christian well i do love a lot of
01:13:00.020
muslims but that's not why i don't want to live in a country with that why would someone try and
01:13:04.760
stoke that what is that what's the game here well i mean i this is again this this haunting sense
01:13:11.440
that this is about somebody's interest that has not been publicly shared and that we are being
01:13:16.420
steered as pawns on a on a chessboard how can a country this big and powerful get manipulated by
01:13:22.060
anybody well unfortunately the answer to that is in game theory also which is that the personal
01:13:30.360
incentives of those who are supposed to be doing our bidding in government are obviously wildly
01:13:36.160
perverse. And so you can get a lot of people who are either too cowardly to know to do what they
01:13:44.240
know is right or too corrupt to care about what's right. But I was on the beach in Clearwater a
01:13:54.880
couple nights ago, watching the sunset. Very diverse crowd of mostly Americans there on
01:14:04.220
the beach, families playing in the surf, people just enjoying the grandeur of the sun going
01:14:11.020
down. Nobody thinking about politics except me. But I was talking to people as I often
01:14:19.460
do i love to just strike up a conversation it's amazing how decent most people are how they want
01:14:27.120
the same things how they're willing to you know bond with you somebody they've never met just
01:14:32.160
because you're standing on the same beach in a country in which you're more or less free
01:14:37.340
and you know i was thinking about how it used to be you know 60s no 60s 70s 80s 90s
01:14:47.800
and the fact is this was never a fair country you know people start out with disadvantages
01:14:56.120
but we knew that it was supposed to be we knew that that was the better direction to go in
01:15:02.740
and frankly people liked it you know there's a reason as dumb as you know the colors of
01:15:08.960
benetton or whatever it was there's a reason that that ad campaign resonated with people
01:15:13.180
was that it is kind of cool to have friends from all sorts of different backgrounds
01:15:18.280
and to feel like we've put those animosities aside for something better.
01:15:27.460
It's the alternative to unthinkably bad systems
01:15:31.800
that have characterized all of history until the last couple hundred years.
01:15:36.300
So I texted while I was on the beach to Heather
01:15:47.720
Because of every conversation we've had about our predicament
01:16:04.140
if we just stopped poisoning their bodies and their minds,
01:16:08.660
if we stopped lying to them and we started telling them,
01:16:12.080
hey, here's how you can live so that you'll be healthier and happier
01:16:18.340
If we just simply confessed what we knew about how things actually work,
01:16:24.120
these people aren't so far from being able to go back
01:16:34.140
We liked that. It was good. And frankly, it was so good that for a brief period, it was contagious.
01:16:42.060
Anybody who saw how dynamic this country was, that people could be simultaneously free and wildly productive at the same time and innovative like no other country ever.
01:16:55.120
Once you see that, the only answer is, well, how can I get in on it? Can I come to your country and participate in it?
01:17:08.260
Somebody decided that our freedom didn't matter.
01:17:15.460
They had plans to corral us so that more of our wealth could end up in their pockets.
01:17:21.960
And, you know, at first the corruption was mundane.
01:17:26.760
It has taken over the entire country and it has left us with what looks like the theater of democracy and liberty and some kind of cryptic but omnipresent tyranny.
01:17:44.500
it's tragic and most people don't realize how tragic it is because they don't know what the
01:17:54.200
world looks like when you don't have the west functioning they don't understand what it is
01:18:00.260
like to live in a world where the question is how are we going to exterminate those people so that
01:18:05.260
they don't exterminate us that's not a world you want to live in and i'm afraid that we are being
01:18:10.100
dragged back into that world, which is, frankly, so much more fundamental that if the West breaks
01:18:17.320
down, that's where we naturally go, right? There's nothing, there's no other alternative.
01:18:22.520
Yeah. And the question is really, at what scale will you see that? Is it going to be at the scale
01:18:27.480
of your neighborhood or at the scale of nations? But either way, it is an intolerable loss compared
01:18:33.580
to repairing what we have as broken as we find it i mean if you just measure the well-being
01:18:41.260
of americans just by the obvious measures including life expectancy physical vigor and
01:18:47.180
health there's no question that the population the actual population down to the individual
01:18:53.020
has been degraded measurably over the past 40 years visibly visibly visibly and it's shocking
01:19:01.440
um this is so banal i'm not going to even repeat it but yes visibly that is exactly right and it's
01:19:07.800
super sad it's not an opportunity to keep scorn on people the weakest among us or you're fat or
01:19:13.040
whatever it's an invitation to empathy and uplift it's a it's an invitation for us to help and make
01:19:19.820
this better and also it's the question how did it go so wrong and it does seem like you couldn't get
01:19:25.620
this condition without leaders who really wanted to hurt you it doesn't seem accidental
01:19:30.500
Oh. Well, I mean, I will be one tick more generous. I think people do not intuit what
01:19:39.740
it would be like for someone to be completely indifferent to your well-being, right? When
01:19:44.800
we look at- That's right. You're right. What pharma has done to us.
01:19:48.120
Let me just say, I'm sorry that I said that. No.
01:19:50.400
Because it doesn't require malintent. It just requires indifference.
01:19:53.300
Yes. And I'm not saying there isn't a whole lot of malintent.
01:19:55.100
No, but you're right. You're absolutely right. And I shouldn't have said that.
01:19:57.420
But we all have to understand this, and I think the way to do it is to find it in yourself first, right?
01:20:04.780
The reality is, if you tapped into the suffering that is taking place at this instant around the globe, you'd melt down, right?
01:20:17.900
If you just had one instant of feeling it all, that'd be it.
01:20:23.360
You're built to care about things in some kind of proximity to you.
01:20:27.420
right? You care about your family. You might care about your neighbors. You might care about
01:20:32.460
Charlie Kirk. You may never have met him, but you saw him. You liked the way he sounded. He felt
01:20:38.260
like a kindred spirit. So we pay attention in some way that is biological, right? That is built
01:20:47.520
not to overwhelm us so that we have empathy where it has a utility. And then something breaks out
01:20:57.780
in Sudan and you may know about it, but you don't feel it in the same way. You are functionally
01:21:06.260
indifferent to it, right? You know something's going on and you go to Starbucks and you buy an
01:21:10.660
expensive coffee anyway, right? So we all have that capability and it's not that we are bad
01:21:16.700
people for it it's that we are functional people because of it but once you know that that exists
01:21:22.820
that you can be indifferent to somebody's profound suffering if it's far enough away from you all you
01:21:28.340
need to understand is there are people who seem close to you who feel that exact way about you
01:21:35.180
you might as well be an animal on a feedlot somewhere as far as they're concerned right you
01:21:40.100
are a source of wealth or meat or whatever and you know once you get that once you just make
01:21:48.760
eye contact with that thought it is not hard to understand how pharma works right it's totally
01:21:56.000
right yeah so you know okay would somebody really withhold the cure to some disease that worries us
01:22:04.480
all because if that cure comes out they're going to lose billions of dollars yeah there are people
01:22:10.140
who would do that and you'll never guess where you'll find them right so you know i guess the
01:22:16.520
point is look we need there aren't very many adults maybe there are none some of us are struggling
01:22:23.120
to be adult in a world that misinforms us and misleads us and tries to infantilize us but
01:22:29.140
we are trapped in a system in which other people's the slice of the pie that they have access to
01:22:41.740
is their full-time preoccupation they're trying to enlarge their slice of the pie
01:22:47.100
the way that's supposed to work if our system functioned really well you would increase your
01:22:54.420
slice of the pie by increasing the overall size of the pie. That's what it says effectively on
01:23:00.280
the brochure of free market democracy. If you create wealth, you get rich. Nothing wrong with
01:23:07.120
that. I want to live in that system. I want people who figure out how to make us all wealthier to
01:23:11.320
live in really good places and enjoy the finer things in life. That's something that makes us
01:23:16.920
all better off but there's this other way to do it you can increase your slice of the pie
01:23:24.520
by destroying wealth and if you don't find a way to systematically rule that out
01:23:31.620
then that's what you're going to see because it's vastly easier to do that it's vastly easier
01:23:37.640
to get wealthy at the expense of everyone else than it is to figure out how to make
01:23:42.740
the pie that we all enjoy bigger so we are suffering because a lot of people are behaving
01:23:50.360
in their narrow self-interest completely indifferent to our well-being and that now
01:23:56.060
extends deeply into the political it's almost the banality of evil you might say it is a decidedly
01:24:04.220
economic version of the banality of evil so i you hate to say it um because there's no
01:24:12.060
sense that i can see in which the current war benefits the united states i just don't see it
01:24:17.220
but you know theories are welcome no one's ever called me to tell me how um i hope someone will
01:24:23.660
but i see a ton of ways in which individuals are becoming enriched by this war
01:24:28.660
every time i mean it's ever present it's hard to believe that's real though
01:24:34.080
Well, you know, yes, it's hard to believe it's real because we depend.
01:24:40.220
In order to just live your daily life and interact with the people that you actually meet, you have to take that mindset off the table, right?
01:24:48.280
You can't work in your daily life with your coworkers and imagine that they're scheming behind your back in this way.
01:24:59.960
It's just that there are enough people who are capable of this.
01:25:03.020
And the system selects for them and it tends to utilize them that our overall system does not – it's not a scaled-up version of your neighborhood.
01:25:15.480
It's people behaving in exactly the opposite way that normal people do in regular interactions.
01:25:20.260
And it's something you have to learn it because your daily experience won't teach it to you.
01:25:33.020
Let's take the military engagement off the table because that's hard to know.
01:25:42.160
Politically, it's almost as difficult to see where this goes because I think there are so many people who voted for the current administration as a last resort.
01:26:00.640
well all right here's where my naivete is going to come out
01:26:06.540
we need somebody who is in a position of real power and influence somebody who has
01:26:18.060
better information than we on the outside do right to step up and take the risk and it is
01:26:25.840
a profound risk of telling us exactly what they know now i will say i'm very upset with president
01:26:34.760
trump at the moment i feel personally burned as somebody who worked to get him elected yeah i did
01:26:42.380
it for a reason and frankly if given the same choice today i would have to make the same vote
01:26:48.300
Because I think what the Democratic Party offered was anti-constitutional, right?
01:26:57.400
We had a demented president who they pretended wasn't, and then we had somebody who hadn't
01:27:07.700
So I would have to vote for Trump again, just because he's at least a qualified person who
01:27:13.960
was the nominee of his party through a lawful process.
01:27:17.060
but i'm angry at him because i voted for no new wars and when i voted for no new wars
01:27:24.380
iran was top of mind for me because i knew that it was on the agenda
01:27:28.900
of the neocons so i expected somebody to try to force this to happen
01:27:32.840
however whatever the explanation is for what president trump has done
01:27:40.680
one can imagine him coming to the podium and telling us what's really going on
01:27:50.100
across the board what happened to our country what happens when somebody who truly is independent of
01:27:56.340
the system gets to that top job now i assume there are reasons he can't do that and i can come up
01:28:05.740
with many reasons that it would not be his instinct to do that. But I think that we in
01:28:10.240
the public need to consider whether the right thing to do is to say, what are our actual
01:28:17.020
interests here? Our actual interests involve getting our country back and putting it on a
01:28:22.940
track that functions, right? Going back to being the West and ignoring race and religion and trying
01:28:29.900
to prosper through innovation, right? We are not going to get there if we continue to play
01:28:37.280
the same dumb political game. President Trump, I believe, was a true renegade who broke through
01:28:43.800
the system, even though it was built to prevent that at all costs. That is a major accomplishment.
01:28:49.680
Having done so, he now knows how the system works, what it's built to do, and how it functions.
01:28:57.640
And I would – I feel like the right deal to make is forgive him for whatever it is that he's participated in in exchange for giving us the information that we need to put the country back on track.
01:29:21.280
um i think saying the truth out loud has a supernatural effect it's well it has an effect
01:29:29.060
whether it's supernatural or not um in that it clarifies but it also elevates like what you're
01:29:36.280
arguing about the right things because you're arguing the basis of truth rather than deception
01:29:40.200
and i think even if a leader trump or anyone else offered no prescription for improving things
01:29:47.880
telling the truth about what's actually happening, how things work, who's in charge,
01:29:51.620
why do we do that? What's the truth about that? Let's just start with the Kennedy assassination.
01:29:56.880
They won't even do that. So I think that would be a massive
01:30:03.840
the problem is we would have to live up to our side
01:30:08.100
of that bargain. We would have to protect him, and
01:30:12.020
nobody can protect him fully. But the point is that would be a very risky thing to do
01:30:15.900
because you're talking about forces powerful enough
01:30:23.600
and them facing an existential threat to their power.
01:30:29.820
So everything's on the table with respect to what might be done
01:30:34.000
to prevent someone like President Trump from telling us that.
01:30:37.880
But don't you think a prerequisite for leadership of anything,
01:30:40.860
the family included, is the willingness to die for the people you lead?
01:30:43.920
Yes. And in fact, that was one of the things that I think endeared President Trump to a lot of voters. They saw him stand up to an assassination attempt. And he's not a young man. And frankly, his entire legacy is at stake. I assume his fortune isn't. But his legacy is at stake here.
01:31:06.540
And so if there was ever a moment for a person to be looking at the sum total of what they've accomplished in life and to be saying, this is the last chapter.
01:31:25.340
You know, in his shoes, I think it's what I would do.
01:31:33.100
And presumably, you know, if he were to entertain the thought, then all those around him that he might consult will have whatever reaction it is that prevents such things from ever unfolding.
01:31:47.500
So, you know, it would be a hell of a moment in American history if we finally got an answer to what's been going on since 1963 and what it has to do with our entanglements abroad and our dysfunctional policy at home.
01:32:05.600
But we're looking for – look, the thing about Trump was he was the surprising element that you couldn't have predicted, right?
01:32:13.120
So the question is maybe it's time for the surprising Trump to surprise us once more and to give us the insight that we won't be able to gain through any other mechanism.
01:32:29.380
And it would be the most worthy of accomplishments.
01:32:39.160
It would be the greatest gift you could give the country.
01:32:43.120
No matter what your religious views, I think every religion, I hope, is based on the idea
01:32:47.440
that there's an absolute truth, it's knowable, or at least it's approachable, and that telling
01:32:59.320
You circulate in a world full of people like you, a lot of liberals who voted for Trump,
01:33:05.620
who saw him as a way to fix longstanding problems.
01:33:13.120
Well, you know, the funny thing is I have now several times said unforgivable things out loud on a series of different topics since 2017.
01:33:33.460
But the way I came by them is an important piece of the puzzle.
01:33:40.420
So each time that I have stood up and said the right thing, I lose a whole group of people.
01:33:54.040
And then I meet another group of people that I didn't know existed who replaced them as my friends.
01:34:04.840
But the quality of my friend group goes up and up each time this happens.
01:34:09.800
And I will tell you, I think our discussion today, this one and the one that we had on Dark Horse just before, which I hope people will go listen to because there's a lot in there that I don't think you're going to hear anywhere else.
01:34:23.840
But our discussions today, I expect, are going to be very costly to me.
01:34:32.380
I'm hoping that the painful upgrade works and that I discover new people who, you know, are capable of replacing the ones who aren't up to the challenge.
01:34:42.360
I don't think – I've been involved in both conversations.
01:34:45.380
I don't think you've said a single radical, irrational, hateful thing.
01:35:11.820
there are lots of people who are perfectly decent
01:35:21.540
and then you get to their issue and they will absolutely turn on you for doing the exact same
01:35:28.860
thing that they loved you for the last time and i don't know what to do about that but at some
01:35:35.520
level you know i'm going to keep doing this and i'm going to find the tiny number of people who
01:35:41.820
don't have an issue like that yeah right that's what i'm going to be left with um i never knew
01:35:47.520
anybody had issues like that up until covid trump really yeah trump and covid both do it um but you
01:35:55.680
know the woke stuff if you know if you were you know embedded in the liberal world as i was it
01:36:01.960
functioned the same way so what do you think you said um in the course of our conversations that
01:36:06.860
crosses some people's line i have broken i think that i am acting out of the very high quality
01:36:19.100
moral training that i got inside a jewish home i think i'm doing the job that i am supposed to be
01:36:26.880
doing yeah but many who are aligned with the israeli regime at this moment view what i am saying
01:36:38.500
as traitorous i've been accused of all kinds of vile things including ironically enough trying
01:36:46.460
to save my own hide by switching teams which is preposterous because someone said that to you out
01:36:52.740
loud people have said a lot of things that's a very low blow the lowest and it came from very
01:37:03.000
close quarters actually yes so that's the world i'm living in and i will tell you maybe i'm nuts
01:37:13.200
and the peril the actual peril to my life that i feel for speaking my mind on this topic is not
01:37:19.620
the result of an actual threat but i feel a threat i am speaking in spite of it because i
01:37:27.000
think it's the right thing really you do feel a threat yes you can feel threats that's a real
01:37:32.960
thing well let me just flesh that out because i think to a lot of people especially people who
01:37:37.620
don't follow me or know me well that may seem like oh come on brett you think anybody's paying
01:37:43.520
attention to you you really think you're that important i think it's not the size of my audience
01:37:49.920
i don't think the size of my audience is enough to create that problem size of your audience is
01:37:54.900
and here i am so there's that but it is the fact that i try very hard to be reasonable
01:38:05.740
that i am jewish and therefore trying to be reasonable coming out somewhere where
01:38:13.020
most jews are not at the moment is striking in other words maybe if i'm saying hey i don't think
01:38:22.280
what we're doing is in the interest of the israeli people i don't think it's in the interest
01:38:27.120
of diaspora jews i think it is creating the conditions that do result in pogroms and
01:38:33.600
genocides definitely if i say all those things and i you know i'm not hot-headed that counts
01:38:41.440
and it potentially gets people's attention who are otherwise not going to pay attention to it
01:38:47.020
so i think that that will be perceived as very threatening to some people i don't trust at all
01:38:52.100
and who are they well you know whatever the forces are that just pushed us into a war either
01:38:59.880
strange timing or pushed us into a war outright those people have interests of a scale i can't
01:39:06.680
even conceive of it's true so what what might they do to somebody who speaks out of turn
01:39:11.460
i don't know but it actually i'm just going to say it we don't have an fbi we know that because
01:39:18.980
things that need to be thoroughly investigated obviously aren't whether that's the assassination
01:39:23.140
attempt in Butler, whether it's the Zorro ranch that never got searched, that Epstein had,
01:39:34.800
Now, all I know about the Charlie Kirk assassination is that I've been handed a story that doesn't
01:39:40.600
I don't know why it doesn't add up, but the fact that we didn't get to the bottom of it
01:39:48.100
in some way that we got a compelling explanation to what happened worries me for the following
01:39:54.580
reason now i didn't know charlie well we were becoming friends and i feel confident that that
01:40:02.340
would have continued and progressed rapidly but i didn't know him all that well but we were
01:40:07.300
teamed up on a project to essentially compel the president of the danger of the mrna shots
01:40:45.060
but he was very knowledgeable about the hazards. He would have been a formidable voice at this
01:40:54.060
moment. I don't know how we ended up in this conflict in Iran. It's a head scratcher to me.
01:41:02.280
It seems, as I've said to you, like such a mind-blowing political error that it's hard to
01:41:10.300
imagine that President Trump would have made it. But if I try to rerun the tape of how we got here
01:41:18.040
and I imagine that not only did President Trump have you in his ear, but he had Charlie in his
01:41:23.380
ear and you were both saying, hey, this doesn't make any sense. It's not a political win. It's
01:41:28.540
terrible for the country. And here are a spectrum of downsides that could come from this that will
01:41:35.360
have impacts for generations. I don't know what effect that would have had. But I do know and
01:41:43.820
I've been concerned about it and I've been vocal about it for a very long time that we had a policy
01:41:51.500
unfolding under our collective banner as Americans where we were toppling regimes across the Middle
01:42:00.400
East, and Iran has been on that list from the beginning. We didn't get to Iran in the war on
01:42:06.940
terror. Why? Because the quagmire in Iraq caused an analog for what used to be called Vietnam
01:42:14.240
syndrome, right? Vietnam syndrome was the unwillingness of the American public to commit
01:42:21.040
troops in foreign engagements after they were traumatized by the quagmire in Vietnam.
01:42:25.380
george bush senior famously proclaimed with glee that during the first gulf war which was a very
01:42:35.360
easy war for us to win that we had finally broken vietnam syndrome i don't know if you remember that
01:42:42.160
very well so he said we had broken vietnam syndrome and what that meant was we've got
01:42:46.780
license to start making war again okay a very ominous chapter in american history the war on
01:42:52.680
Terror resulted in ill-conceived adventures in the Middle East that ended badly.
01:43:01.900
Iraq was so bad, and so publicly so, that the public again was traumatized by the idea of these engagements.
01:43:14.860
The neocons didn't give it up, but it went on the back burner.
01:43:18.720
i feel and i cannot say for sure but i feel that something was watching and it felt the
01:43:27.980
clock ticking and its opportunity to finally bring about this war which i think netanyahu
01:43:32.560
said he's been dreaming of for 40 years he did say that so something wanted this war to happen
01:43:38.660
and there was the perception that the opportunity the window was closing so it had to be brought
01:43:43.540
about quickly. Given how public Charlie was on this topic, I can't help but wonder. Now,
01:43:53.240
obviously, that will sound crazy to many people that something would have even considered such
01:44:00.380
a thing. But I will say that after Charlie was killed, Benjamin Netanyahu very quickly
01:44:07.380
denied responsibility for it. I was shocked by this. It did not seem natural. Now, I'm not saying
01:44:14.800
that that means that anything in that quadrant was responsible for the murder. All I know is
01:44:21.500
that we didn't get a decent investigation. But I did feel, and I hope you will tell me that I'm
01:44:28.660
imagining this i did feel that that denial by netanyahu was effectively a rorschach test and
01:44:38.080
maybe designed to be one that i was supposed to feel alarmed by this and a normal person was
01:44:48.360
supposed to think that is batshit crazy he said they didn't do it obviously they didn't do it so
01:44:53.960
anyway, I'm not telling you that I see the evidence that somebody did it. But what I am
01:44:59.280
telling you is we've just found ourselves in a war that Charlie would have been opposed to. We
01:45:05.300
know that from his public and private statements and that he would have been a formidable force
01:45:10.660
in opposition. So what am I to think? Why? At least we should have an investigation that tells
01:45:19.920
us for sure that we know who committed the crime and that there wasn't something larger about it
01:45:25.300
but look now i've said unforgivable things it's done i don't know why that's unforgivable i mean
01:45:32.000
this is an american citizen someone you knew and i don't you're not accusing anyone of anything
01:45:36.140
and i do think leaving aside charlie's murder and you know the question of who did it for a foreign
01:45:43.900
leader to weigh in immediately and hog all the attention to make it all about himself and start
01:45:48.840
issuing all these statements about how Charlie lived and died for Israel
01:45:54.240
I just think if someone did that to me after my death,
01:46:01.880
So that was disgusting behavior from someone with a track record
01:46:06.920
But at the very least, we could say that's just wrong.
01:46:09.160
That's not how you behave in the wake of a young man's murder.
01:46:12.980
And I'm never alleged, I don't even talk about this topic,
01:46:16.320
and i'm not going to now other than to say i think everything you've said is entirely reasonable and
01:46:21.760
it's not an insult to the living well to want to know what happened to the dead yes of course and
01:46:27.540
you know let's put it this way if we had a healthy public discussion in which we could air
01:46:32.660
crazy ideas dismiss them because they don't stand up logically that would be fine but we don't have
01:46:37.760
that. Um, and well, you've been on a lonely mission to convince the president not to engage
01:46:52.380
in war in Iran and to get him to back out as quickly as possible, declare victory and go home.
01:47:00.480
It hasn't gone well. No, it's been a, it's been a abject failure.
01:47:04.900
what do you think charlie would have been doing if he had lived i think he'd be doing the same
01:47:14.080
of course i you know if there's one topic i talk to him a lot about is this
01:47:17.680
and uh no of course and his motive was pure um i sincerely believe that his only interest was in
01:47:25.200
in the united states and he certainly wasn't opposed to israel he loved israel he often said
01:47:29.740
that he didn't love bb that's for sure sorry that's a anyone who claims otherwise is lying
01:47:35.920
or doesn't know but he did love israel and um both as a biblical concept and as a current reality
01:47:42.580
went there and liked it but he was totally opposed to this work he said that many times and um but
01:47:49.620
it's i i do think his murder and all that has happened subsequently whether or not they're
01:47:57.580
connected i can't say but they've had the cumulative effect of intimidating the hell out of
01:48:02.060
everybody no one wants to pipe up and um i was already all in i've been against a war in iran
01:48:08.300
for 10 years and doing in whatever in my limited power to persuade decision makers not to do it
01:48:15.960
because i don't think it's good for america i'm not i'm not for iran okay like stop i just don't
01:48:20.240
think it's good for the united states and i've said that many many times and this time i found
01:48:35.400
I think we need to re-engineer this whole thing
01:48:44.180
hijacked by a determined minority of ideologues
01:48:54.120
or anything like that in fact i don't want that at all in fact one of the reasons i want full
01:48:59.060
disclosure is so everyone can settle down and stop muttering darkly i don't like dark mutterings
01:49:05.140
at all i like sunlight to quote justice brandeis and so i i hope we can do that and i hope that
01:49:11.660
there's not more deception and obfuscation and hiding of the facts because like that just makes
01:49:17.400
people hate each other right that's it i i want to find out that my darkest concerns are wrong
01:49:25.520
in an open enough public conversation that it becomes or even if they're right let's just get
01:49:30.280
it over with like get it over with whatever it is i mean i went last week to an a meeting i don't go
01:49:35.720
to a meetings but i one of my i don't drink but i went with a really close friend of mine who does
01:49:40.260
go a lot and what if you've never been i know you're not an alcoholic you should play one for
01:49:45.500
a weekend and go because the the freedom that comes from admitting your deepest sins your most
01:49:52.980
profound weaknesses the true liberation that comes from that is like it's like nothing else
01:49:59.000
there's no liberation like that and the freedom of that yep yep i did it i did it well that's it
01:50:04.260
we we need there's so much burden from what we can't discuss yes and don't know that clearing
01:50:10.900
the decks and getting it all in the open and you know some kind of reset would be a wise thing for
01:50:18.640
us yes this is like christmas dinner at the episcopalian house where it's just like a lot
01:50:23.140
of silence and unspoken grudges and everyone's mad but no one will say so it's like what that's
01:50:28.580
not healthy i want to say one other thing about the uh the unforgivable things that i've now said
01:50:36.420
Charlie Kirk and my concerns. I don't think it's logical to regard those concerns as preposterous
01:50:45.880
if you also regard the stakes in Iran as existential for Israel. In other words,
01:50:56.500
what will people do if they think their interests are all bound up in a policy that has to happen
01:51:04.400
right now and that people are standing in the way and therefore putting them in jeopardy of
01:51:10.120
elimination them and their children right and their children's children and their nation
01:51:15.660
i mean put yourself in the position of other people try to see the world through their eyes
01:51:20.880
just for a second and you can understand dynamics people risk their lives to rob liquor stores
01:51:25.460
right right and you know people people will do anything to um protect themselves and their
01:51:33.960
children from a threat that they perceive of course and my concern is that we are not allowed
01:51:39.700
somehow as americans we have lost our right to challenge the policy on its merits it's you know
01:51:47.220
you you speak logically about the likely outcome of war in iran and the response that comes back
01:51:55.020
is about your morality right that's a non sequitur we're talking we can talk about two
01:52:01.200
different things? What are our moral obligations? And what is the logical context in which we are
01:52:06.060
being asked to participate in this? Those are both worthy conversations. But when you come back at me
01:52:11.520
for my logical point about this military engagement with an accusation about my character,
01:52:19.680
then something has gone awry. That's not how we behave, right? We have a right to air our
01:52:25.920
grievances. And, you know, the marketplace of ideas can sort out which ones are right. And
01:52:30.740
frankly, there's only one metric that really matters in the end. That's predictive power.
01:52:38.180
Who is it who has deployed their model and said what they think is going to happen
01:52:42.960
and has actually been insightful, right? In the end, in science, in politics, that's the way you
01:52:50.480
know who knows what's going on is somebody who says something that has some relationship to
01:52:54.760
what actually occurs. And I think the opposite is also true. People with a long track record
01:52:59.160
of failure shouldn't be consulted as experts right if you've been married eight times i'm not
01:53:06.000
going to marriage counseling with you a hundred percent if you have a record of failure then we
01:53:09.600
should ignore you and it doesn't matter what degree you have or what office you hold you're
01:53:13.500
not a credible source um i guess i would also i'm feeling a little defensive about this because
01:53:19.840
um about the charlie kirk thing or well yeah about all of it really about the fact that you
01:53:25.160
know my character is in question by virtue of uh beliefs that i i think i've arrived at honestly
01:53:30.900
but others will imagine something else but i will also point out there's there's something i'm
01:53:36.320
obviously too close to this i should say we're the same age from the same part of the country we grew
01:53:39.840
up in the same world despite differences your family was jewish and atheist mine was agnostic
01:53:44.860
and christian but whatever we grew up in the same world and so what you're saying to me is so
01:53:49.740
self-evidently true and reasonable and moderate and sensible and logical and impressive and like
01:53:56.420
this is how we should think that i can't even conceive of how you could be attacked for saying
01:54:01.980
anything you've said and that's not flattery i'm being sincere i agree with every word you've said
01:54:06.300
i get it in a normal world it would be fine but we don't live in a normal world and in fact we
01:54:12.340
live in a world in which you have been painted as a bigot in order that your opinion that what i
01:54:21.400
just said is normal doesn't register so that's what i'm concerned about but on the merits of it
01:54:27.560
how could anything you just said i'm not even defending myself i'm defending you like how could
01:54:32.220
that be construed as unreasonable crazy hateful like i just don't see anyone who listened to the
01:54:40.300
last hour could come away like man breb weinstein that guy nutcase hater oh well if you think that's
01:54:47.760
not coming back man you're watching a different movie um well that's an indictment on the people
01:54:52.280
who make those claims it certainly should be in a in a fair fight but let me also just point out
01:54:58.080
um we're dealing with what appears to me to be a holy war being waged by secularists
01:55:09.800
which is confusing um but there's an awful lot of symbolism some of it utterly deliberate in
01:55:19.060
the prosecution of this war in the whole context right the symbolism is important
01:55:26.140
and there's another feature that doesn't have to do with charlie that strikes me as in the same
01:55:34.180
vein. The golden pager that was given to President Trump strikes me as another Rorschach
01:55:43.800
test, just like Beebe's statement after Charlie Kirk's murder. I mean, obviously, the pager
01:55:54.600
operation is no joke. I understand the predicament that Israel is in, and I don't underrate the
01:56:07.340
danger of being in the neighborhood that Israel is in, the danger of the dynamics of the region
01:56:14.960
being about lineage versus lineage violence, and therefore I can have my, you know, high-minded
01:56:20.760
western view of their predicament but i don't understand what it is like to live under threat
01:56:25.700
from people who truly want it yeah hezbollah is you know determined to crush israel that's a fact
01:56:29.840
so i get it and yep i'm you know i don't think i'm uh i think i'm an adult when it comes to
01:56:36.380
understanding what one has to do to survive under such circumstances on the other hand
01:56:41.580
what am i to make of the fact that you have these exploding pagers used to
01:56:54.040
kill terrorists obviously that's not the only people who were killed but nonetheless that was
01:57:00.720
their purpose and then one is delivered to trump you can read it into totally different ways right
01:57:09.280
The normal way to read it is that this was maybe a tasteless celebration of a successful operation and yada, yada, yada.
01:57:21.780
On the other hand, it can obviously be read as a threat.
01:57:32.880
i can imagine the meeting in which somebody says hey maybe we should send president trump a golden
01:57:38.540
pager after our successful operation somebody should immediately shoot that idea down and say
01:57:43.440
no we can't do that because it could be read in another way right so anyway as we are struggling
01:57:51.600
to understand what is taking place in our country why it was received that way too you do i do
01:57:57.720
well you're not making me feel better um i mean come on now come on right you know yeah what
01:58:08.380
was that i totally agree i thought that at the time and then to have netanyahu i broke my rule
01:58:16.340
incidentally i don't call him bb and i did earlier sorry netanyahu then later delivers a
01:58:23.360
speech in a totally separate context, of course, could mean nothing, where he's bragging that
01:58:28.400
every cell phone of everybody in the room has Israeli technology in it. Whoa. That makes you
01:58:35.260
think. And mind you, I'm not telling you that there's a threat there or technology to be carried
01:58:44.320
out. What I'm telling you is that feels like it is designed to divide us, where some of us will
01:58:50.200
hear that in one way and others will hear it in a different way and we will become
01:58:54.140
un-understandable to each other just let's just de-politicize it for a second and certainly
01:58:57.840
de-racialize it which you know that's like the that's the core sin is conflating global jury
01:59:03.620
with the state of israel or bb netanyahu it's like just insane i will never accept that it's
01:59:07.400
not true obviously you're living proof it's not true but just take all that away here you have a
01:59:12.220
guy who brags about fighting a seven front war so this i don't think it's ever happened in history
01:59:15.740
has any country fought a seven front war whatever that is it's one of the most violent people in
01:59:20.140
the world so any allusion to violence has to be taken seriously including gifts of pagers i don't
01:59:26.300
know it's like you need to experience the world on a literal level first before you start like
01:59:31.640
what is that yeah it how about a basket of olives or some dates which are some of the best in the
01:59:39.760
world israel produces amazing dates i can say firsthand and a lot of other things but why a
01:59:46.100
pager yeah well it reminds me of the uh i don't know who said it first but you know uh a gentleman
01:59:56.140
is someone who is never rude by accident right this strikes me as uh messages we are talking
02:00:06.000
about sophisticated people who are sending ambiguous messages of course with a dark
02:00:10.880
interpretation and you know the more generous interpretation is that okay there's some leverage
02:00:18.060
in people feeling uncertain and you know maybe that's what it was but in a world where people
02:00:23.080
are in their own minds fending off existential threats by shaping policy i don't know that
02:00:32.460
anything's off the table we're talking about people who day in and day out whether we're
02:00:38.140
talking about Netanyahu or the Mossad or the IDF. We're talking about people who think in terms of
02:00:44.340
who needs to die for us to persist. And the only question is, who's off the table for such
02:00:52.540
considerations? That's what I want to know. Some of us should be. I'm an American. I don't owe any
02:00:59.320
allegiance to Benjamin Netanyahu. He can think what he wants. He's perfectly free to say what
02:01:05.320
he wants but i have a right to speak my mind crazy or not as an american that is actually my right
02:01:12.540
and i don't want to have to feel jeopardy over doing it and i do feel jeopardy because i think
02:01:18.440
the world we live in is one where um people are removed who cannot be silenced i hope that when
02:01:29.160
our generation dies we're not the last generation to have the assumptions that you have which are
02:01:32.680
the most american of all assumptions and i hope that if you're attacked um for doing this interview
02:01:38.700
you will not call me to defend you because that'll just make it worse but i'm grateful you did it
02:01:43.560
thank you brett thank you very much all right can i ask a favor before we go anything okay we did a
02:01:49.080
discussion before this one for dark horse i wouldn't ordinarily deliver a plug but i actually
02:01:55.160
hope you will i'm proud of that conversation yeah i am too and i think i'm hoping that even people
02:02:00.040
maybe especially people who disagree with us will go listen to it with an open mind. I think it's a
02:02:07.740
good quality conversation and you will at least get insight into how honest brokers arrive at a
02:02:13.600
very different conclusion than maybe you have. I hope people inside of Israel will watch it.
02:02:18.800
And anyway, I think it's also probably protective if you'll watch it and sign up for the channel.
02:02:26.680
it makes it it makes it harder to ignore amen thank you i hope people will also thank you tucker
02:02:34.360
good to see you good to see you thanks for joining us we'll be back well next wednesday live see you