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Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the
Peking Yona Show. I want to welcome back Daryl Cooper.
How are you doing now?
Speaker 2: What's up? Man? I'm great? How are you doing well?
Speaker 1: Doing well? All right, let's uh, let's jump into a
topic that I asked you to come on and talk about.
When the phrase the Jewish question, and that is a
capital J, capital Q historic question. When someone raises that up,
what do you think.
Speaker 2: Oh, somebody that I don't have any background on.
Speaker 1: You know, no, no, I was saying. I was saying
when no, no, if if, if you just hear it,
like I say, an academic was well, when you hear
that term, like historically, where do you go to? What
is what's your frame or reference?
Speaker 2: Well, I look at it. It's like part of the
modern Jewish European experience and you know, having to do
with the period of national uprisings across Europe and how
Jews fit into societies like post post national nationalist awakenings.
I mean, it is kind of a thing that you know,
the themes that came out that come out as people
work through through the Jewish question the various European countries.
You know, you see these themes all throughout history. You know,
you read Tacitus the Roman writing about them. You read
Menetho of various Greek writers writing about Jews, and you
kind of see that there's a running theme that comes
up again in Europe. You know that in a society
like feudal Europe was in traditional you know, traditionalist aristocracy,
different estates with different rights and privileges and everybody kind
of nobody really questioned that that was the way things
ought to be put together. You know, the idea of
universal human rights that apply to everybody equally. It was
just not a thing. And so, you know the fact
that you had this sort of self contained, semi autonomous,
self governing community of people who weren't really quite part
of the community, but they performed certain vital that was
okay in a society, you know, where where you didn't
words like things like the rule of law, like we're
not nobody really thought that something like that should be
applicable to you know, like a peasant should be able
to bring a suit against a king or something. Nobody
believed that, and so it worked. When you know, you
get to the French Revolution. I think the Jewish question,
the phrase, I believe it popped up in England in
like the seventeen fifties when they were debating like Jewish naturalization,
but took on the form that we're most familiar with
it after the French Revolution, I think, because you know,
it was a time where you know, you had this
group of people that was set apart in every way,
like they were basically self governing, had their own customs,
they had their own laws. I mean, depending on where
you were in Europe and what time you're talking about,
I mean, they could execute their own members for religious laws,
you know, and like in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, the
local authorities would sometimes enforce those rules for them. They
would go arrest Jews who the rabbis you know, request
to be arrested, and they would bring them in for
punishment corporal or otherwise. And so when you have that
and all of a sudden, you know, you have a
series of revolutions and this nationalist idea that everybody is
an equal citizen, the rule of law and stuff. But
you still have this group of people. You have to
figure out what to do with them, because you know,
it's everybody has this idea that like the ghetto and
the Schettle were places that the Jews were confined to
like concentration camps or something. There was some there was
some amount of that where the local societies were trying
to like keep them, keep them away from the Christian population,
but the majority of like the push for that came
from within the leadership of those Jewish communities themselves. They
saw it as a way to protect their own people
from the influences of the outside. And so when Jewish
emancipations started getting underway after the French Revolution, first in
western and Central Europe and much later in the East,
you know, you had this kind of push push and
pull where you know, young Jews usually just like young
people usually want to do, you know, they want to
leave the farm and go to the big city or something.
And you know, the rabbis are watching their Jewish communities,
their villages kind of bleed their young people as they
want to go out to Paris, they want to go
to London, you know, learn the local language and read
the local literature and poetry and become you know that thing.
Because that spirit was in the air anyway, everybody kind
of wanted to be a part of it, you know,
and so it was sort of a crisis for the
Jewish community in general, and it became a crisis for
the host societies you know, themselves, because you know, you
had a group of people who, you know, this was
a this was a very it was a very capable
group of people in many ways, well organized and capable
in the sense that you know, a lot of the
a lot of the vocations and skills and habits that
we associate with modernity that at this time, you know,
as people are moving from the countryside into the European cities,
like we're gradually sort of being introduced to the Jews
had already sort of been in that in that place
for quite a while, kind of waiting for everybody else
to catch up. And so, yeah, this very like capable
group of people that performed functions that nobody else could
really perform at the time, at least at the scale
that was necessary, who had very often you know, a say,
their their relationship to the local commoners, you know, ranged
from apathetic to hostel, but who had good relations with
the local rulers or local lords who gave them the
privileges and the protection they needed. And so you know,
when all of a sudden, you know, the all of
those commoners. Those that's the voting public who gets to
decide what the government policies are and stuff. Now, like
it's kind of a crisis on all sides, it had
to be navigated. So to answer your question in short,
I mean when I hear Jewish question, I think of
the modern European experience during the nationalist era. But again
it is something that you can kind of trace the
themes of going all the way back at least to
the Second Temple period.
Speaker 1: I think it seems like in the modern day it
basically transformed a little bit. So Bruno Bauer in eighteen
forty three writes the Jewish question, and it's I guess
with all of those young people coming out, they're like, okay.
The way Israel Shahak talks about it in his book
Jewish History Jewish Religion is that a lot of the
younger people, a lot of the people in the stettles
and in the villages were basically kept there and with
quote unquote democratization happening, basically now it's legal, they can
actually make a legal plea to the government to be
like we want we want to be separated from this,
we want to end you know, Bauer basically was trying
to answer the question, oh, how do you do how
can we make them free? And he's like, well, a
Christian society can't make them free, because a Christian society
can't be free. Bruno Bauer was this weirdo secularist who
is like, got to get rid of religion. The state
is the only thing that can save you. Then six
months nine months later, Marx, in one of his most
famous essay is on the Jewish question, answers Bauer, and
he takes it a step further. His essay has things
in it like where he talks about religion being the
opiate of the masses. That's from that essay. It's a
much longer quote. In context, it makes a lot more
sense than he starts to describe from more of a
left radical viewpoint, how he sees the jew basically contributing
by the way they are and by the way they
operate to his what he sees. He sees capitalism as
a necess very function to derascinate all of humanity so
that humanity can come in and abandon the state, abandoned religion.
Except you know what, basically, a Marxian, a Marxian like
utopia quote unquote, but as it goes forward, basically it
looks like, especially in Russia, the question really starts talking
about assimilation. Russia in the eighteen hundreds had the Derjavin Commission.
There was like eleven conferences to how do these people,
how does this nation within an orthodox Christian nation operate?
And I think that that's you know, even if you
bring it all the way up to today, Basically it's
like you have a people who consider themselves to be
separate and have their own interest and how does a
society that is maybe founded in Orthodoxy or founded in Protestantism,
how do you incorporate that into it? So it really
seems like assimilation is the big question, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, it became that and it you know,
it sort of became the I guess the fly in
the ointment that you know, that that sort of drove
I think, especially in the twentieth century, that really like
accelerated and drove the process of the secularization of European societies,
you know, because you know, look, you know European people
and their descendants here in America and Australia and stuff,
we're just we're generally like open hearted tolerant people. You know,
we don't like being unjust without cause, you know, I mean,
it's just that's just generally the case. I mean, even
you reading like mindcomf when Hitler's talking about his early
years when he started thinking about the Jewish question, how
he was beset by fears that like he you know,
that he was being unjust and then he was even
you know, so even somebody who who broke through that
and went all the way to the other side, like
still experience that because it's natural, I think for us,
for Christians, and you know, so there was this like
trying the attempt to answer that question of how you
integrate these people, assimilate these people into a Christian society.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, the answer kind of came to be stop being
a Christian society, and that you know, I don't think
that was the solution that anybody at the time would
have hoped for, planned for, but it's the one that
we came to. I mean, one of the things that
and actually to flip that around too, Jews kind of
had their own answer to that question. You know, that's
what reform Judaism really is. You know, their answer is
how do we assimilate what we got to stopping Jews Christians.
Christian countries kind of decided, well, we got to stop
being Christian countries, you know, and so this was going
on on both sides. They tried to solve that problem.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I think maybe the uh, you know, like like a
place like New York in the first half of the
twentieth century was probably like a good example of how
this could operate in a in a more or less
healthy way, you know, sort of a where you people
maintain they have their identities and their separateness, and yet
they still have their enough of a collective identity with
their neighbors that they can operate cooperatively in a in
a city government, you know, and you had a situation where,
you know, it's sort of like it was kind of
like it wasn't written into the New York you know,
constitution or whatever they have or whatever. But it's kind
of like Lebanon, where in Lebanon, like you have a
Christians fill certain government positions, Sooni's fill other et cetera.
And they do that because you know, they in a
diverse society, you know, in a healthy diverse society, you know,
such as it is people are very open about the
fact that it is diverse and that the people there
have separate identities and separate interests, and the question is
how do we how do we get them to cooperate
and work together and recognize that they have more in
common than they do with the people across the border.
And you know, I think that a lot of the
big cities in the US like sort of did that
fairly well for like up until the first half of
the twentieth century. And uh, when you when you try
to build a society based on denying those differences, you know,
pretending that they don't exist at all, and they are
you know, any any idea that there are separate communities
with separate interests or anything like that. You're you know,
they take that as an accusation that like, these people
are not one of us, or they're not loyal or
something like. When you try to do that and you
just deny reality like that, you know, reality persists and
your solutions become wackier and whackier as you try to
solve for for problems that that that aren't real. You know.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned that the Christian country, the Christian nation
basically has to stop being Christian. And you mentioned the
Reformed Jews who say that you have to stop basically
being religiously Jewish. But even when Jews stopped being religiously Jewish,
there's still a Jewish identity there. When Christians lose their Christianity,
especially like in the United States, well what's their identity?
What's there? So basically what you have then is you
have a group that has deracinated itself from something that
held them together, especially through the Founding, and now you
have another group who's come in later. German Jews started
coming in early eighteen hundreds. Sombart says that some of
the cavaliers and the Puritans were probably Jewish. There was
a big group that had converted over the years, so
you had people who are ethnically Jewish now calling themselves
Christian who were here. But it's really the eighteen eighties
when you start seeing the Palist settlement, the Russian Jews
come in, and that's when, I guess, not too far
after that, that's when really Christianity is starting. You start
seeing it falling away, and when you have a group
that is now really only well, we're Americans. There's no
metaph there is a metaphysic to that, if you really
think about it, a historic metaphysics, but it's not as
strong as metaphysic as being like a Christian nation. But
then you have another group that's come in who is cohesive,
even if they're not religious, or cohesive in an identity
and an ethnic identity, and it's a lot easier for
a group that's cohesive like that to organize and for
lack of a better term, and I don't think anyone's
going to argue with especially what we see with things
that come out of Ted Cruz's mouth and things we've
seen it recently, that it's very easy for them to
take over if you are organized. It's basic elite theory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's one of the things I try to
drive this home to people on the right who you know,
they start reading about this stuff and it can get
overwhelming and they start to they start to see like
this big, overwhelming kind of Jewish conspiracy, whether in the
United States or world well, whatever it is. And what
I try to get through to them is like, you know,
the United States, I mean to like, up until about
the sixties and seventies, we had a recognizable, not official,
but still a recognizable like ancestral ruling class in this country.
You know, you had people who stretched back to the
founders or at least to like you know, like people
like Rockefellers, Vanderbilt's, Harriman's, all of these people who they
had a sense of proprietorship over the country. And even
they did a lot of things that we would look
back on and say, we're terrible and destructive and probably
like let us down the road we are now, but
they still had that sense of this is our country,
and this is going to be our great great great
grandkids country, and we need to operate with that in mind.
In the sixties and seventies, like what was left of
that class really got delegitimized by the Vietnam War and
the Cultural Revolution, and then they just kind of stopped
having kids or the kids they did have were they
didn't pick up the torch, you know. They I think
the last rock, the last meaningful Rockefeller, was probably Nelson.
He died in seventy eight, seventy nine. And who even
knows what the Rockefeller's names are now? Nobody really knows.
And I know one of them went to the South
Pacific and got eaten by cannibals or something like that,
but nobody even knows, you know, because their kids didn't
pick up the torch. And all of a sudden, you
have this apparatus we call America the system, American government,
but also just sort of the corporate system and all
the other institutions that kind of make it up. The
controls just we're just floating through space, and nobody was
at the controls. And it turned out that once you
know that, that that old wasp elite had sort of
vacated and abdicated their responsibility, anybody who you know, who could,
who could, who knew how to work the controls and
was able to get in there and and and and
take them in hand, could could do it. And so
you see, like other groups, they try to do what
the Jews do in America, and they try to get
the American system, American government to like bend to their
ethnic interests. And some of them are more or less
successful in various ways. And nobody's as successful as the Jews,
because the Jews are just really good at it, you know,
they they have been. And part of the reason for that,
I think, I mean part of it is that they've
been in urban people for a lot longer than the
rest of us happening. So they're they're they're literate, they're urban.
They this is kind of a part of their col
One of the other is that they're tight knit, they're intelligent,
you know, in general. And I think also like the
the the fact that you know, they have a religion,
and again like even Jews who aren't religious, like the
culture is still in there just the same way if
you're born in America, you know you're a Christian in
a certain way, regardless you know, whether you like it
or not. That you know, they have like a cultural
tradition going back, I mean thousands of years at least
that is really based on like teaching them how to
survive and thrive in host societies by endearing yourself to
power and learning how to bend it to help and
benefit your own people. You know, you have like you
go back to the period of the exile when the
Babylonians carted off the Jewish leadership cast you know, to Babylon,
and within a generation, you know, they had become very prosperous,
economically powerful in the vicinity of Babylon just through trade
and tax collecting and money lending and a lot of
those traditional vocations of theirs. And there's a lot of evidence.
Heinrich writes, the Jewish historian who wrote a great six
volume history of history of the Jews back in the
eighteen hundreds, really really good history. I think, you know,
he kind of lays out why he believes that, and
there are good reasons to think this, that the Jews
who were there in Babylon probably were in touch with
the Persians and kind of helped pave the way for
the Persian invasion and destruction of Babylon. And that's why
when the Persians took over, the Jews were given a
lot of privileges. They were given high positions at court,
you know, as you see in the Book of Esther
for example. And you know, the of course Ezra and
Nehemiah and their clique were allowed to go back to
Jerusalem and sort of sub you get the people who
live there who have been left behind, you know, after
the exile and reimpose quote unquote sort of Jewish government
on those people on behalf of the Persians, right, and
so you know, and it was probably right during that time,
right after the Persian liberation that, like the stories of Joseph,
were probably added to the Book of Genesis. The story
of Daniel was probably written during that time. The story
of Esther was certainly written during that time, and all
of these, all of these are stories that are built
into the Old Testament. They are people Jews who showed
their devotion by getting close to the powerful people in
a local society through their wit or charm or you know,
divine revelation, and then using the positions that they're gain
and the privileges they gained to help their own people,
you know. And you see this in extreme form in
like the Book of Genesis with Joseph. It's something that
when you you read the story in Sunday School of
Joseph and everything, and it's just kind of the coat
of many colors and all the other kind of stuff,
and you don't really pick up on what it's really describing.
You know. He becomes basically the Grand Vizier of Egypt.
You know, he's in charge of putting aside all the
grain and everything because there's a big famine coming. And
when Jacob and his sons bring their people to ask for,
you know, some help because there is a famine all
throughout the region. It goes through and talks about how
now that Joseph had collected and put aside all the
Egyptian grain, he started charging the Egyptian people for this
grain and eventually expropriating like everything they had, you know,
to get to so that they could feed their families.
And then when his when his own people came, he
just sort of, you know, he kind of brought them
in sort of free of charge and set them up,
as you know, on good land. So this is and
this is something that's looked at as an ultimate act
of piety, you know, which you know, you have to
it is in a way, I mean, you know, I'm
not I don't A lot of people I think who
who talk about these subjects, they they they sort of
begrudge the Jews this this attitude of like this self
referential attitude. I don't at all. I mean, they're good
for them, you know, this is as far as they're concerned.
This is their world and everybody else is living in it.
And you know everybody should think that way to some degree.
So I don't I don't hold that against them necessarily
in that sense, but you know, you have like the
Jewish religion in general. I mean, you can take this
all the way back even to like you know, the
dietary laws and things like that are you know, the
whole thing is sort of a survival guide for a
people in exile. You know, it's a it's a how
do you hold together, resist assimilation and just sort of
maintain your own sense of identity and safety and all
get all the things that you need from a host
society over time. And that's what the the what Judaism
really is in a lot of ways as an instruction
manual for doing that. And it's because you know, that's
the way that they've been living for alone, or at
least the people who have have sort of left the
Jewish tradition as we know it. It's how they've been
living for a very very long time. You know. The
the you know, you go back to the time of Christ,
for example, and you know, something like they were like
ninety percent of all the Jews in the world lived
outside of Judea. You know, they lived in Babylon, they
lived in Alexandria, they lived in Rome, they lived in
the Greek cities all over the place. And this was
already by the time of Christ. Like you know, most
Jews lived outside of Judea, and you know, Jerusalem didn't
even have the largest Jewish population of a city in
Alexandria had a larger larger Jewish population, and so, you know,
and you really had even during even during those days,
you know, you had sort of step para it Jewish
power centers that sometimes were in competition with each other,
and it was kind of a you know, you had
like the Jews of Alexandria and Rome and the Babylonian Jews,
who you know, they kind of looked at the Jerusalem Jews,
who are the descendants of the Ezra and Nehemiah kind
of they're they're sort of like the uh, they're they're actually,
it's probably a good way to put it. They're like
the they're like the extremist settlers that you see out
in the West Bank today. That's what like the people
Ezra and the Amayah brought back were right and so
because i mean, you know, the Jews were prosperous in
Babylon by this point, they've been there seventy years, most
of them had all been born there. They didn't want
to leave their businesses, their friends and all those other
kind of things, and a small clique of them went
back when the Persians let them do it. But those
were like the hardcore Yahuists who wanted to go back
and reimpose this like really strict version that now has
come down as just that's what Judaism is, you know,
to us, because that's you know, eventually like what kind
of one out. But even then, I mean, you know,
the the Babylonian Jews, the Alexandrians, a lot of the
other more cosmopolitan types, they looked on the Jerusalem and
Judaan and Jews sort of as a kind of the
way like a like a Muslim in Beirut, you know,
and when Beirut was still a you know, really nice
would look at the Saudi Arabians. You know, they're like, yeah,
they you know, respect whatever. They they take care of
Mecca and Medina, and we'd defer to that, but can
you guys please give it a rest, you know, like
it's kind of ridiculous. And that's how they were kind
of looked at. And so you know that that whole
sense of like having a cultural tradition that is entirely
dedicated forward maintaining your separateness amidst other people at a
time when the entire project you get to get back
up to the nationalist period in Europe, like it was
not just a cultural drive or a movement, It was
a political project that had policies that were enforced against
not just Jews, but all kinds of people. Well, to
nationalize these peoples, to make all the different people here
in Russia who had just been imperial subjects, make them
into Russians, you know. And this was something that was
going on all around Europe as the national you know,
as the nationalist period progressed, and you have this one
group of people, which you know, in most of Europe
outside the Russian Empire, which is kind of a separate issue,
but you know, in Western and Central Europe, you know,
the Jews were very often like pretty much the only
minority that were there. So it's not as if there
were a lot of different minorities that had to be managed.
So you have this one minority that's there that you know,
again as a cultural tradition going back twenty five hundred years,
that's entirely dedicated to resisting the nationalization project that you're
trying to now impose on everybody in your country, you know,
and it was a recipe for trouble, and you know,
and that's obviously how it turned out.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess the question to ask is is it
good for the host population? So in Spain historically not
even I know, people want to talk about the gates
at Toledos seven to eleven. I don't care about any
of that. The Moslims, the Moors, took over Spain and
the Jews were given free reign, they ruled certain areas,
they were allowed to take slaves. Bruce Bachrock's book One
Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe is a really good
source on that.
Speaker 2: That is a very good book.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And so when it got to the point
of the reconquista, and you finished a reconquista, obviously, if
there's been somebody there for seven hundred years who has
been treating the native population, has not only been treating
the native population like slaves, but also has been conspiring
the whole time with Moslims, surprised that actually happened. Jews
and maslim get along get along very often. You know,
it's like, okay, well, now that we've taken the country back,
these people have treated us the way they've treated us
for seven hundred years. We're going to get rid of them.
We're going to kick them out. So bring bring that
all the way up to like, let's bring that up
to nineteen hundred.
Speaker 2: So the Zionists can I just jump in real quick
on that point because they think people understand Like in
fourteen ninety two when the Riconquista was sort of completed
and the Jews were expelled from Spain. You know, you
have to remember it, like they didn't have like an
Ellis Island where like people showed up and you now
a naturalized American citizen or whatever. They didn't have any
of those concepts. There were no citizens. There were no
any of those things. And so like, how do you tell, like,
after we just got done with a seven hundred year
long war against people who were still right on the
other side of Gibraltar over there, how do we make
sure that like the people who are here are one
of us. You know, you can't be like, well, he's
a citizens. There was none of that. And so the
way that they did it was, you know, this was
Christians versus Muslims, and the Jews were on the side
of the Muslims and that's how you tell. And so
they you know, obviously everybody's listening to you for a
while knows that the Jews were and Muslims actually, like
a lot of a lot of Muslims, not all of them,
but they were given the opportunity to convert to Christianity
and stick around if they wanted to a lot of them, did,
you know, and just sort of melted into the Christian population.
A lot of them adopted Christianity kind of on the surface,
you know, so that they could enjoy the legal privileges,
business privileges and stuff that were sort of put aside
for Christians. And you know that that led to confusion
and then eventually, you know, being positioned because you had
I mean, and again, like you know, people who think
like people think of the Inquisition as if it was
just this like this religious madness, like the Salem witch
trials or something like that. But this was a real
political problem. You know, you had these people who were
here who had converted to your thing and were wearing
your clothes and speaking your language and doing all these things,
who had just come over from the side that was
helping the people we just conquered and threw out a here,
and you really have to make sure that these people
are on board with your program, you know, and there's
a question of like how do you do that, And
the answer is that every solution, every answer, is extremely
difficult and probably going to lead to mistakes and problems.
And that's just how it is, you know. And so
that part is really important to understand that like Jews
in the pre modern European context, it was not as if,
like you know, you had like like you're just a
minority living in an American city or something, and you're
just sort of a person who happens to look different
or just whatever. It wasn't like that. You had people
who were separated communities who lived together, who had their
own customs off in their own language, not so much
in Spain, but and so you know, this idea of
like universal citizenship and there's certain people that aren't being
accorded their rights. It was just very, very very different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it's good to put that in there, because
a lot of people have done covered Demeestra's letters on
the Inquisition, and it's not what a lot of people
think it was. It was literally they wanted to find
out if it was a genuine conversion to Christianity, and
if it wasn't, they could convert, or they could they
had to leave. That's pretty much what it That's pretty
much what it was. And then it turned into a
system of a system like a court system actually, and
you can read about that over the centuries. But I
think it was like even the Inquisition numbers were like
they found sixty to seventy percent genuine conversions, So it
wasn't like they were like they were really going hard.
I mean, you can pretty much go to someone's house
and tell if they're they're Catholic at that point, you know, so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and anytime you're anytime you're running a program
like that from you know, it could be uh in
the Soviet Union, you know, where they're trying to find
out if you're really a communist back to back. Then
you run into the problem of like perverse incentives, you know,
where you had like a lot of times you had
Jews turning in other uh you know, Christianized Jews to
the authorities saying that they were false Christians because there
was a reward behind it. If you know, you if
you turn someone in and you create all these bad incentives,
it kind of become like a negative feedback loop. And
that's just again like it's you know, those are situations
you want to try to avoid in any society, but
when you get into them, I mean, there's no easy
way out of it.
Speaker 1: So well, and another good thing's a point out about
the inquisition is is that it lasted about three hundred
and twenty five years and roughly three thousand people were
put to death, not by the Church but by the
Cortes and the government did it. And then fast forward
to the Spanish Civil War in nineteen thirty six. The
second half of nineteen thirty six, over four thousand priest, nuns,
and seminarians were murdered in Spain.
Speaker 2: So yeah, interesting, I believe I can't remember where I
was reading about this, but it was a while back,
but about fifty years before the expulsion in fourteen ninety two.
It was in the fourteen hundred some time in Spain.
The Jewish communities there that were under the power of
the Christians, they actually requested and received permission to do
an inquisition of their own against their own people who
were falling away and doing things, you know, and that
was allowed, and so you know, this was just kind
of it was the way they tried to solve a
very difficult problem back then. And you know, I'm sure,
look there were probably people who got caught up in
it who didn't deserve it. But as you said, I mean,
when you want to talk about the scale of it,
you're talking about a few thousand people being you know,
being executed over the course of a few hundred years.
And not to downplay that. If that was you know,
me or my mother or something, you know, it would
be a big deal to me obviously, But when you
start comparing it to you know, just the mass casualty
events that we start to see as time goes on,
it really doesn't compare.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in the fourteen twenties, about seventy years before before,
you had the Disputation of Tortosa, which was basically Jews
and Christians coming together having a conversation talking about their beliefs,
and there was a lot of conversions over that actually,
and it was very it was very civil. This was
when Spain was starting, you know, at almost at that
point they'd gotten back most of the country, they just
hadn't had it all, and they had this disputation disputation.
I did an episode on it with Paul Fahrenheit. It
was really good. I think people should go check it out.
In the Spain Golden Age of Spain series that we're
in the process of still doing this sort of like you,
it's taken we're doing twelve episodes. It's taken us over
a year. But all right, so let's let's come forward
a little bit. Okay, So let's come forward to you
know what what I've been reading and what I was
studying recently was, and I know you've already done the
whole history of with fear and loathing. So when Zionism
is really taking hold in the Unit, it seems like
it's really important for Jews who have embraced Zionism in
the West to influence their countries as much as they
can to try to support this project. So in the
nineteen tens, Lewis brandeice Is they're they're apparently Wilson wanted
to have a He's getting pushed to have a Jewish
Supreme Court justice the first one, so Brandeis Is chosen
Louis Brandeis. I actually read a Philip Weis's article Mondo
Wis's article claiming that he wasn't even a Zionist before
that he actually became a Zionist because it was like
a prerequisite and then he just embraced it fully. But
then you have something like the Parisham, which is a
secret society based in universities where Jews and Gentiles are
taking secret oaths to their over their families, over their
countries that they are going to do everything that they
possibly can so that they can push the United States
to push for a Palestinian homeland for the Jewish people,
to the point where where Brandeis does get appointed to
the Supreme Court, he is a part of this secret
society with Felix Frankfurter or another Jew who will be
elected to the Supreme Court as well. But basically, when
we've heard this story about how when the Balfour Declaration
was drawn up, it had been years they had been
drawing this, like three paragraphs. They had been working on
this for a couple of years. When it is drawn up,
we get this story that, oh, well, you know, Colonel
House is there and he's pushing because he's friendly and
aligned with the Zionists in Britain. The whole story is
get us into it, We'll give you this Balfour Declaration
if you get the United States to join into the
war into World War One. And apparently from other books,
and you know, I've done the research on this. I've
I've read books of people who have been in the archives.
As you know, Douglas Murray would say, have you been
in the archives? And Brandeis was one of the people
who went to Wilson and said, you know, we need
to get in this war and we need to help
save save Europe.
Speaker 2: So well, and you also had you had Zionists like
Kaim Weizman, who was kind of the leader of the
movement at the time you lived in in England, and
he was rubbing shoulders with people like Balfour, you know,
Lord belfour and uh yeah. They openly were telling them,
you know, if you if you do this for us,
and this is in standard histories, it's not some conspiracy theory.
They were telling them that if you do this for us,
then we'll use all the influence and power that we
have in the United States to help make sure America
has drawn into the war. You know what the what
the standard histories will say. And I think this is
probably this is probably at least partly justified, is that
they were kind of overplaying their influence a little bit.
You know, this is not post nineteen sixty seven like
Jewish America. You know, they the mass migration to Jews
that only started forty years before, thirty years before really
at this point, and you know, the level of influence
they had was growing, for sure, but it wasn't it
wasn't overwhelming by any means. But you know, you had
guys like Louis Brandeis, and you know, it's interesting because
Zionism was a minority was a minority movement among Jews
in the United States until the nineteen thirties, and it
was you know, and it was for reasons that you're
really seeing kind of manifest today like in the modern day.
Is like the question that other well a lot of
them were just communists, and so they didn't like the
idea of Jewish nationalism anymore than any other kind, you know,
and they they didn't want to go that direction. But
also there was just a more a question that asked
more in good faith and goodwill, which was, you know,
once there's a Jewish state, once to stop the people
in these countries that were living in from saying sounds
like you got a country to go to, buddy, you know,
like why don't you go there, or starting to look
at us as if we're fifth columnists for this foreign state,
you know, or starting to hold us collectively responsible for
this Jewish state doing the kinds of things that states do,
you know. And this was a fear that they had,
and it kept a lot of American Jews from being
from being Zionists up up until the thirties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you have that kind of influence. You also
have the boats full of Jews that are coming to
the United States at the when World War Two is
breaking out, and famously, and this is well documented, Zionists
went to Roosevelt and said, no, turn them back. They
either they either go to Palestine or they go back. So,
I guess what the question comes down to. And we
can bring this up to the up to the modern
day because you know what we're seeing and you know
something you've already said post nineteen sixty seven, we're living
in Jewish America. Is it good for us? Is it?
How has this been good for us? Is this having
this group who eventually do get their country In nineteen
forty eight, through means that are terroristic. Monoco Bagan famously says,
we brought terrorism to the Middle East, and then and
then he goes and not only the Middle East, to
the world stern gang Irgun Hagana, all these groups they
get their own country, and then, like you said, okay,
there's a lot of Jews that are not going to
go there. They're not going to want to go there,
so they stay in the United States, they stay in Europe.
And not only are so you have them in this
country now of their own country over here, but then
you have them working. You have them in this country
and in the West. Basically after World War Two, it
would seem especially if you look at the Nuremberg Trials
and the people who are behind that, all the thought
leaders behind West Germany and the Allies. Basically it's Jewish power.
So they not only got there, it seems like they
not only got their country, but they also got ours.
So it's like, okay, how am I you know, the
question needs to be all right, here's a new Jewish question.
How is this good for us? As you know, I mean,
I'm not a wasp, but I mean I'm this is
the only country I know It's the only thing. The
only place I feel like this is I feel like
an American. I live in the South. I chose to
live in the South because I feel like this is America.
And I'm like, well, I'm watching Ted Kruz talk about
how the my main goal to go into the going
to get elected was to be the number one representative
for Israel. I watch Benjamin net Yahoo come and get
his chair pushed in. I watch Trump bombing. How well?
I have a new Jewish question? Is this good? How
is this good for me? How is this? How is
this good?
Speaker 2: I don't think the Pete kenyone shows audience probably needs
much convincing on that point. I mean, it's look, it's
never good to You're gonna have minority government one way
or another, no matter again, just go back to elite theory,
no matter what the question, is there any sense of
like attachment to the people that they're ruling, a sense
of no bless oblize or anything like that. And when
you when you have people wilding a tremendous amount of power,
who uh, who are not just I mean, it's not
even you know, it's not even you know, like if
it was if it was the Jewish mob, you would
almost be better off because they're just trying to extract
resources and get what they can get and you know,
take advantage of the system for their own ends or whatever.
Speaker 1: I've said, I would rather live in a I would
rather I've said this in the past. I've given interview
saying this in the past. I would rather live in
an Italian mob neighborhood that's that's governed by the Italian
mob than this government.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there's not like a there. You don't have
like a deep seated hostility to the society that you
know that you're that you're ruling. I mean, you know,
and that's something that you know. I've made the point
many times, and I'm certainly not the first one to
do this, but that when you think about the Jewish
question in Europe, is very useful to look at other
sort of commercial minorities in other parts of the world,
whether the overseas Chinese, the Indians in East Africa, the Lebanese,
and like South and Central America. These are groups of
people who were outsiders who came in as minorities, did
a lot of the same things that Jews do. You know,
they were the merchants engaged in trade things like that,
and became very prosperous, especially later on when the global
economy started picking up. They became the people who ran everything.
You go, you know, all the way up into the
two thousands, and I think it's probably still like this.
The last book I read about it was written in
like twenty ten, but pretty sure it's all still like this.
You go to like Indonesia, the Philippines, all the airlines,
all the conglomerates, all of those are owned by the
tiny minority of Chinese people who live in those countries,
and there's a lot of resentment from the local population
who see that. You know, there's a lot of locals
who work as servants for the overseas Chinese. There are
no Chinese people working for as servants for you know,
local wealthy Peo. It just doesn't happen. And so, you know,
you have these countries that are relatively poor and starting
to try to develop, and they see this minority that
owns everything and is cozied up to the rulers of
the country because they provide benefits to each other and protection,
and you know, and you start, you know, they talk
about like the overseas Chinese and the Indians in East Africa,
and the same terms you're familiar with from like European
anti Semitism. You know, they're greedy, they're materialistic, they're Planish,
and you know, sort of off putting to other people
with their manners and the way they behave all these
kind of things that you're just kind of used to,
and so in that sense, like it's a phenomenon that
is not particularly unique. But the difference, you know, in
the European Jewish context is that you have like the
overseas Chinese, like they might look down on the local
Filipinos or Indonesians, you know, or something like they might
think they're more sophisticated, and they are. They're just but
they don't have like any kind of a deep seated
like hatred or resentment of them. You know, it's not
something it's just they just don't think of it that way.
Whereas you know, people can talk about today being like
a different situation, and I think it is to a degree,
but you go through like most of European history, you know,
they weren't just living in a random It wasn't like
the overseas Chinese who decided to go to the Philippines
and set up shop there to like run businesses. These
were people who were forced to live under the power
and in the countries of people who were the religious
descendants of a heretic that they had executed, you know,
for high trees and in heresy that you know, and
his followers then went on to build the greatest civilization
and the history of the world that the Jews themselves
are now having to like pick up table scraps fall
down in order to make their way in the world.
And that's something that like, I mean you see it
in certain passages in the town lived, but also just
Jewish writings like in general, like you see like that
there's a deep seated sort of like it's sort of like, uh,
you know, I've always found interesting, right, Like if you uh,
if you would read like pre Civil rights era, if
you would read African American activist writers from the south
right who lived under Jim Crow, all the you know,
anti racist this is unjust all those other kind of things,
but you don't detect the really hostile, violent like anti
white hatred that you start to get later on from
the northern cities and especially from the people who are
educated in the universities, you know, and it's because like
those people like who you know, you you you go
to Harvard, you're a first generation you know, ever in
the history of your entire lineage to you know, go
beyond sixth grade and now you're at Harvard or Columbia
because you know, they instituted lower standards to try to
get the number of people you know, from your group
in there. And you get there and it is way
too hard for you, and the people there, even when
they're really nice to you, you suspect that they're really
kind of patronizing you and like they're just you start
to get this sense of a wounded pride that you
didn't have when, you know, from the people who were
just down at the bottom and they were the lower
caste in society. And so you know, because what was
happening is, you know, you have a group of people
and this this happened very much with the Jews in
especially the Paliest settlement Jews, because the Jewish emancipation there
happened so much later, you know, and so European society
had had more time to kind of develop that. Like
when Jewish emancipation started to kick off in you know,
in Western Europe back in the seventeen hundreds, we were
starting to develop, you know, but they weren't exactly leaving
their villages and walking out and seeing this spectacular civilization
that like overawes and almost shames them.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: By the time you get up to like the later period,
you have these people coming out of the shattles and
encountering there's you know, there's no other way to put it.
In fact, a Jewish writer, I can't remember, maybe Milton
Himmel far but it was a Jewish writer who put it.
A lot of the the problems they started to arise
came out of this confrontation of the newly emancipated Jews
with a superior, a clearly superior civilization, you know, and
they would go out into it. You know, like I
grew up in the street, Like I grew up really poor,
mostly in ghettos and barrios and stuff, really poor. And
so like today, every once in a while now that
i'm you know, a podcaster and whatever, like I'll get
invited to like a conference right somebody's putting on. When
Claremont used to invite me to these things, they don't anymore,
but like when they did, they'd bring me right. And
it's all the stuff where like you have seven forks
and fourteen spoons and all that kind of stuff, you know.
And I get there and even though I'm you know,
I might have the highest IQ of anybody at my table,
I might you know, have done more interesting things in
my life than a maybe maybe all that's true, I
still feel this sense of like I don't belong here,
and that like I you know, I feel out of
place and sort of self conscious. And that's just I
think that's kind of a normal thing. Now if you
take that and say, okay, but that's not an event
you're going to. That's the world you live in. Every
day you're in, you encounter a society that is clearly
more refined and more advanced, uh than you're sort of
then you're competent to operate in successfully, you know, and
you start you you you run into the you know,
to these problems where you're sort of you know, your
your uh, your lack of ritual competence to put it
in like an Irving Goffman, you know, sociological framework, your
lack of ritual competence, you know, and by ritual, I
just mean like the little ways that like we are
able to the little things that we do on a
daily basis that make that grease the skids, the social skids,
Like in an urban world where we have to be
confronted with and deal with strangers all the time, you know,
there's just little rituals of how we make sure that
we respect the others dignity properly and we don't offend
and do certain things. And if you come from you know,
if you're like the Beverly Hillbillies and you go out
to Beverly Hills, like that's a comedic show. But the
reality is we have sort of examples like that. My
father's side were Okie's who came out from Oklahoma and
Alabama and they came out and you know, everybody who
knows the history of the Okis who came out to California,
Like it was a tough transition, man, because you had
these people coming from the country and coming into places
that look down on them that they were really not
sort of knowledgeable enough or competent enough to operate in
these society successfully. And they were able to assimilate, but
it took a generation or two. You know, even when
I was a kid, when we would live and you know,
a lot of my uh friends who you know, were
sort of from the same same lineage, you know, that
Oaki lineage. Like one of the things that our parents
would say when we would act up or just be
you know, get start start acting a fools, they'd say,
stop acting like a little Oakie, you know. And that
was something that they were very conscious of, even a
couple of generations on at this point. And so when
that happens and in a you know, to a people
who to a people who have this uh, this strange
you know, this is sort of like the narcissists in
an individual psychological sense. It's the narcissist dilemma, where you know,
narcissism is essentially defined by a personality that feels inferior
to all the people around them, and yet on some
level knows, whether intellectually or emotional whatever, that they're actually
superior to all the people around them. And so that
feeling of superiority that's constantly rebuffed and constantly sort of
sent back by your encounters with the real world. That's
like the narcissist. That's the core problem of like the
narcissistic personality. And so when you have like you know,
you're the chosen people, you're going out into a society
that is that has been constructed by people of a
faith that you that your whole cultural and religious identity
is really base like the rejection of it is like
what your cultural identity is, you know, and recognizing every
day that yeah, we're the chosen people. This is our
world and they're just living in it. But you look
around and you realize that clearly, like this is a
superior civilization, and I feel like a yokl every time
I go outside, and it creates you know, it can
create a sense of real resentment. And so you know,
when you take people who who kind of have that
neurosis built in and you put them in charge of
the you see this. Look, this goes back all the
way you talk about like in Spain, but there are
examples like in the Middle East and North Africa where
the Muslims would come in and conquer and the Jews
would support them, and they would put Jews in charge
of like various areas. They would work as police, they
would work as you know, various things. There were several
examples where the Muslims had to come in and like
tell the Jews like, you guys are out of you
got to cool it, Like you guys are making it
impossible to manage these Christians because you're just brutalizing them
so much, Like that's not what we're trying to do.
And it's not like they were doing that out of
like humanitarian concern. It was just they were trying to
manage a budding empire. And so you know, that's a
that's a problem that it goes back very very far,
and you know, and it's one I think that persists
to this day. And again, like it's not something you
want to you know, it's a lot harder these days
to even really you know. Shlomo sam makes the point
that like you know, he says, like if tell me
what a Jew is, like what is a Jew? And
his answer is a Jew is a religious person who
practices Judaism. Because other than that, like tell me a
thing that you can say about Jews that applies to
all Jews. There's you cannot find them. Like there's atheist Jews,
there's religious Jews, there's Zionist Jews, there's anti Zionist Jews.
There's black Jews, there's white Jews. Just like you can't
tell me anything that just is a characteristic that you
can say, this is a group of a coherent group
of people that you can describe as such. And so
it's it's hard to even do that these days, and
so you don't want to, like, you know, when you
say the Jews that meant something throughout most of history
that today is like a little bit more nuanced, you know,
And so you don't want to when we talk about
these things. You know, it's it's always important to sort
of remember, and I try to always keep this in
mind and make sure other people do when they're listening
to me, that you know, really what we're talking about,
we're not talking about We're not talking about Jewish people. Obviously,
everything is you know, at the bottom of it, there
are people. We're talking about organized Jewish power like and
that is a social and political phenomenon. That is that
your your neighbor, you know, who's an accountant down the
hall like may or may not have anything to do
like It's just what we're talking about is like a
corporate entity that is highly organized. I mean, you have
like an organization like the Council of Presidents of major
American Jewish organizations that it's like two hundred, two hundred
and fifty organizations that have endowments and annual incomes of tens,
probably hundreds of billions of dollars. And they get together
twice a year, the heads of all these organizations. There,
religious organizations, you know, Zionist organizations, just Jewish charities, the ADL,
the APAC, just all these kind of things, and a
bunch you've never heard of. They get together just to
make sure that they're all on the same page, that
they're not spending resources in ways that are redundant and overlapping,
so that everybody knows like what this year's priorities are,
and we're all kind of pushing toward this, and you know,
that's just a that's a that's when you have a
society like ours that is based theoretically on individualist democracy,
you know, where everybody sort of listens to the guy
give his stump speech, and you know, I vote my
conscience and decide whether I agree or not, and that's
kind of the liberal ideal, you know. And then you
have like a group of people that is very tightly
organized that is acting as a group to you know,
benefit themselves, to influence the system and ways that benefit
their group, to attack their enemies. You know, Americans have
always been like very very wary of secret societies and
of you know, we we spend a lot of time
kind of breaking down the extended family connection of like
Mediterranean and other like European immigrants who came from places
with like strong extended families, because we just have always
looked at that as like kind of it's like it's
sort of an anti liberal, anti democratic, you know, thing
that can really kind of poison the way the system
works because when one group of people in a system
that is comprised of individuals, when one group of people
starts banding together, well now everybody kind of has to
do that just to compete and stay afloat, and it
sort of spoils the you know, spoiled the punch. And
so you know, it's a it's a tough thing to
do because you know, if you take somebody like I
don't know, you probably know people in your personal life.
I do take somebody like Sam Harris, right, who his
parents are Jewish as far as I know, But you know,
in what way is Sam Harris Jewish. I mean, he probably,
like him being Jewish probably does not play like an
operative role in his identity, like on a daily basis.
Like ever, I doubt maybe a little more now because
it's more of a thing that's in the news whatever.
But like you go back ten years, he probably like
it's just not how he thought of himself. If you
were to pluck him out of modern America and put
him in, you know, in Munich in nineteen thirty four,
he would feel very Jewish very quickly, you know. And
it's because, you know, these things start to play off
each other, and you get this sort of this self
fulfilling cycle where you know, the separation invites distrust, and
the distrust sort of hardens the boundaries of separation and
so forth, you know, And so it's you know, and eventually,
you know, when that starts happening and people start talking
about this stuff, especially in a sloppy way, what it
ends up doing is it pulls people who might just
be that dude who happens to have Jewish parents and
never thinks about this stuff, to all of a sudden
now having to clian up with his people, you know
what I mean, just kind of because that's where that's
where the society's driving them. And so you know, it's
I think it's hard for for people who are on
the on the right like we are, you know, on
the on the say passed you know, beyond republican right,
where on one level, like we're comfortable with with with
different groups having group identities and self interest of their
own and we all kind of think that that's how
people ought to operate, you know, what the boundaries of
the of the of the groups ought to be, and
you know, how they should be defined and whatever those
can be up for up for negotiation. But you know,
on our side of the right, people are generally pretty
comfortable with that. But the thing is, like it's you know,
any any attempt by other groups to do that or
well groups of white people, different groups of white people
and Christians to do that are really attacked with the
full course of the state and the system in general,
you know, and so there's a there's an incongruity there
that just inevitably invites the development of hostility between you know,
between groups. And again, like it's it's also tough because
it's like what you said, I mean, there's a there's
a certain way in which Zionism, which is like the
predominant Jewish religion in twenty twenty five, I think, you know,
really is Zionism. There's a way in which Zionism really
needs anti Semitism. It feeds off of it, you know,
I mean when you know, you read things like about
how the young Israeli government in nineteen forty eight had
agents setting bombs in Jewish centers and synagogues in Baghdad
to frighten the Jews there and get them to flee
to Israel. Like you kind of see that. You know,
if you want every Jew in the world to move
to Israel, then the last thing you want is for
the world to be a welcoming place for the Jews,
you know. And so there's a lot of these things
that kind of feed off each other and make a
solution to the problem like very difficult.
Speaker 1: Well what you're describing is I mean, well, okay, let's
let's take a look around the landscape. We have laws
popping up that are anti Semitism. Laws talk of stripping
people's citizenship if they and they're not I haven't heard,
I've heard citizenship, which means your family could have been
Mayflower in that case, and you see people. When you
see one group that is exercising so much power, then
it's like, oh, okay, that's how they did it. They
came together. So then eventually other groups are going to
come together and they're going to not only seek to
organize and seek to push back, but sometimes the pushback
is just like I'm sure you've heard this and you're
familiar with this troop. You're just jealous of our success? Well,
can we define some terms here? First of all, what
is jealousy mean? And second of all, what is success?
Because I remember a like a secretary of State, an
attorney general, a DHL basically Biden's. Biden's staff was sixty
to seventy percent Jewish. And then Doug M. Hoff, the
first man, first dude, he put out a picture saying
here is just some of the four hundred and fifty
seven Jews working in the Biden White House. And I'm like, Okay,
what metric am What metrics of success am I supposed
to be jealous of? Because people are telling me right
wing Jews are telling me that Biden was the worst,
he had to be voted out. Yet the whole White house,
and like more than half of his happened to run
by Jews two percent of the population. By the way,
So how am I what exactly am I supposed money?
I've never been jealous of money. I mean, I've never
been jealous of success Asians. I have never had any
problem with Asians. And I've never had any problem with
high IQ, with really really high IQ people like some
of the Asians out there and even some of the
Jews out there. I have a pretty high IQ myself.
Never really been jealous of that, never been jealous of money,
not really, not really that important to me. Security is
a little more important. Money might be a part of that.
But when you have laws that are being passed, when
you have people who are just saying, oh, you're just
you know, Jordan Peterson, You're you're just jealous because Jews
are so successful. I look at that, and really, my metric, yeah,
my metric of success is a lot different than most people.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's an answer that people give who don't
want to actually have to give an answer, you know.
I mean, for the issue, the reason this like this,
this issue again and again gained so much force is
that it has nothing to do with that. I mean,
what it has to do with is like there's a
it's almost it's like it has to do with a
sense of honor in the sense that like your your
sense of honor is offended when you know that your
country is serving the interests of people who are not you,
who are who are you know, not your own So
when people see, you know, the US government just being
so obsequious to Israel, I mean just to the point
of where you almost think they're making fun of you.
I mean, when it's you know, you have like this,
you saw that you mentioned Ted Cruz saying you went
into the Senate because he wanted to be the number
one defender of Israel. That was why you went into
the Senate. You have that State Department spokesman not that
long ago that said America is the greatest country in
the world, well except for Israel. You know, like that
woman should have been fired from her position at the
State Department that day, Like how do you how do
you say something like that? And then you know, I
can't remember how many American politicians I heard call the
IDF the most moral army in the world, which, as
a veteran, is incredibly offensive to me and totally untrue obviously,
but just when you see things like that again again,
you know, the people who are who these laws are
being passed to control, you know it just it's going
to offend your basic sense of honor because you start
to recognize that you don't have sovereignty, and that's what
people want back. They want back sovereignty. And if it
were a question of like you know, look, Japanese Americans,
very successful group of people, very like well integrated group
of people. Back in you know, back in the Second
World War era, there might have been a few, not
nearly as many as probably the more paranoid people thought
that were that were still loyal, you know, ethnically to
Japan or whatever. But in general that's not that's just
not the case, certainly not today. These are American citizens
who are one hundred percent American, and if we went
to war with Japan, they'd fly the bombers over there.
Like these are just you know, these American people. And
if you have a group of people like that who
become very successful and just by all signs, you know,
they are not serving any interests other than the ones
that you're aligned with. They care about the things you
care about. They are their primary point of reference for
their identity, and their future is the same as yours.
This country, you know, then it's just a it's a
people don't get upset about that. You can be as
rich as you want. Nobody gets upset about you know.
What people get upset about is when it becomes just
unavoidably obvious. Unavoidably obvious, you know, especially in the last
couple of years, since the Gods that things been going
on and really now, I mean, I mean, like you said,
like the Times of Israel actually put out like a
celebratory article that listed all of the high officials in
the Bible cabinet and his government that were Jewish, And
I mean it's like people, I think you're you know,
seventy percent. Like maybe it's a bunch of low level people,
it's like seventy percent of the cabinet. I mean it
is like secretary of state, secretary, I mean, just everything
down the line. And the way to kind of think
of that I always ask people to think about it
is just imagine that those are all ethnic Chinese. You know,
there's like roughly the same number of them as there
are Jews in the country. Just Imagine seventy percent of
Biden's cabinet was ethnically Chinese. Imagine that you're we're in
the run up to the Iraq war and you turn
on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and you have a panel
of six people who are all telling you that we
have to go over there and kill Saddam Hussein, and
you know, or put it a different way, let's say
that China's you know, we're talking about whether or not
we should support Taiwan against China, and you turn on
all those channels and five out of the six people
on the panel or all ethnic Chinese saying, you know,
all we should abandoned Taiwan. People would notice that, and
obviously they would. They'd be crazy not to, you know.
And this is something I mean, you got David Brooks
like writing in the New York Times about how we
have to go to war with Iraq and his son
is serving the idef, you know, and if you bring
that up, that's supposed to be a problem, Like it's
something you're not supposed to talk about it, as if
it has no as if it has no attachment whatsoever
to the discussion, you know, whereas if it was any
other group of people. Again, just imagine we're debating going
into the Iraq War and every channel you turn on
it's a panel of six people and five of them
are Arabs. You would notice it, and you should notice it,
and we should be able to talk about it. And
the thing is, if we could talk about it honestly
and openly, it wouldn't be that big of a problem,
you know what I mean, Like, it really wouldn't. That's
really like at the core of the issue, wouldn't there Look,
I don't. I'm married to an Armenian woman. Armenian people
are super American at least, you know, I'm the LA
community that I know, which is most of them. But
they all love Armenia. They all are not gonna they're
not going to lose their attachment to the homeland. And
they love the culture, they love the country. They hate Azerbaijan,
and they still hate the Turks, you know, all that
kind of stuff. It matters to them. And so I
don't expect, like, you know, like Jewish Americans to just
all of a sudden just they don't care about Israel.
Like it's just they're totally neutral. I'm an American, dammit,
And Israel's just a foreign country to me. I don't
expect that. We just have to be able to talk
about it openly so that when something like that happens,
we can ask, like whether you know Biden's cabinet being
seventy percent Jewish is does that have any any role
in our Mid East foreign policy? How did this happen?
Like what's the story there? You know? I mean, but
you can't ask these questions, and so all there is
like one. I mean, when people tell you that you
can't talk about something, if it's important enough to you,
there's only one step after that, and that's to fight
over it. You know, they're basically challenging you to a
fight when they when someone tells you you can't talk
about that, they're basically challenging you to a fight. They're saying,
you can't talk about it. If you keep talking about it,
then there's going to be a problem, you know. And
that's you know, that's where that kind of mentality like
just drives thing and inevitable, you know. And uh, and
I think more and more people are kind of getting
to a point where, you know, Americans are we're civil
people in general, and we don't you know, we don't
want to entertain the idea of like hard solutions to
these problems. But more and more people are starting to
recognize that it's a problem that has to be solved
one way or another. And you know, I maybe, you know,
as I get older, I'm like, I'm really becoming kind
of a softy and so like I think a lot
about just you know, hoping that when when this thing
kind of comes to a head, that it that it
doesn't go in a direction that you know, I don't
want to. I don't want to live in a worl
world where Dave Smith can't walk around without you know,
people calling them out for being a Jew, and like
that becoming a problem. I don't I don't want to
live in that world, you know, And like figuring out
how to solve this problem without allowing allowing things to
veer off in that direction. It really has to be
like the primary the primary concern, I think, because you
don't want to lose your soul in the course of
trying to, you know, to deal with a problem that again,
like is an unavoidable problem that has to be dealt with.
And you know, I'll say the last thing on it,
I mean, you know, this is a this is a
this is a thing that is really like global in scope,
or at least you know, it's like to the to
the West, it's global. And you know, you think about
how in the nineteen nineties when Russia fell apart, and
by nineteen ninety five ninety six, you had seven oligarchs
that own fifty eight percent of the entire Russian economy,
the entire economy, right, six out of those sevenligarchs were Jewish.
Jews were like one and a half percent of the
Russian population over in uh in Ukraine, the six most
wealthiest oligarchs in Ukraine were all Jewish. And like when
you and they were similar, similar thing, or like two
percent of the population. And so when you see something
like that, you're like, well, how does that happen? And
that the obvious answer and the correct answer is that
when you're part of a group of people that transcends
national borders. You know, when the opportunity came up, you
had a second cousin in New York who worked at
JP Morgan and could front you the money to buy
up the steel industry in Europe or in Russia. And
so it's like, you know, it's a it's a large
kind of transnational thing in a world that, for better
for worse, is still made up of nation states, and
that's still like the primary point of identity reference that
that most you know, most Westerners have, and you know,
it's it's a you know, it's funny because if you
look at like I could, he could, he wrote a
whole book about it. But you know, things like Marxism
are are you know, a lot of the like there's
a reason that the that that Jewish communists, most Jewish
communists throughout the West were Trotskyists, and they didn't like Stalin.
And then even when the Soviet Union after Khrushchev took over,
and like they really kind of you know, started taking
the whole socialism in one country thing, like really seriously,
and uh, they all became malists, you know, because Mao
is still the internationalist, you know. And it's because the
dry people think that they were all trotsky Is just
because Trotsky was Jewish. And I mean Trotsky was the
way he was because he was Jewish. It's not the
other way. They didn't follow him because he was Jewish.
He had the approach and the ideas he did because
he was Jewish. It was another way out of the exile.
You know. It was just break down all the countries,
all the cultural differences, all the national differences, linguistic, break
them all down, and then we're not in exile anymore,
you know. And uh, and that's why you know. Churchill
makes it point in nineteen twenty in his paper Is
in the article he wrote Zionism versus Bolshevism, he basically says, look,
we can have it one way or the other, like
these people are either going to tear our continent and
our civilization apart trying to find a way for like
them to fit in or burn it down on the way,
or they can have their own country and they can
just go be a normal people like everybody else. That
was Churchill's idea, you know, And that was Balfour's idea.
Balfour believes something kind of similar to that. You know.
It's like a lot of people today point out that
Balfour was an anti Semite. How can he do that?
It's like, well, he thought about it the way Churchill did.
You know that like that living in and all the
Zionists did. Really, I mean, you want to talk about
like the most anti Semitic writings that you can probably find.
Most of them were written by hardcore Zionists back in
the early twentieth century. These are all people who look
at the state of the Jews throughout Europe and the West,
and they say that the exile has just ruined us
as a people, you know, not having soil, not having
attachment to a place, always having to sort of like
find a way to make a living, you know, underneath
the table set by others has just it's it's it's
sort of spoiled our mindset in important ways. And that's why,
you know, especially in the in the first in the say,
probably first fifty sixty years of the Zionist project, it
didn't matter if you were a banker, if you were
you know, a merchant, whatever it was, you go to
you go to Israel or you go to you know,
the the you should before it was Israel, and you're
getting your hands dirty, you're putting your hands in the dirt,
you're learning to farm, you're gonna sweat. Because they was
like almost they talked about it as purging the people
of the exile, you know that and sort of correcting
these these collective these national character defects that had collected
over that kind of an experience, that sort of very unnatural,
inorganic kind of gypsy lifestyle that always led And so
you know, I think that uh, you know, look a
right winger it it's you can look at Israel and
say I and I do hear this sometimes from people
who are even like far right, will say like, hey, like,
you can hate the game all you want, but like,
you know, the Israelis like are they're about Israel? And yeah,
like it's bad for you because they're exerting influence over
your government and causing you to do things that are
against your interests and may be harmful to you. But
you kind of got to you've got to kind of
respect the fact that like, for them, it's all about
them and that and that's that. And there's a lot
of people that even on the right that kind of
see it that way. And we want to talk about
being jealous. That's really what I think a lot of
people are jealous of. You know, they're jealous of a
group of people who actually still have something that they
can hold on to collectively and you know, in a
sense of cultural and religious continuity that they think at
least goes back like thousands of years. That kind of
defines them as a people, something really worth preserving, and
I think a lot of people in the West are
having especially in the United States. It's very difficult today,
you know, ever since the mid twentieth century when everybody
pushed out into the suburbs and lost that sort of
corporate ethnic identity that they had in the cities and
just became kind of white people. Not even really white
Protestants anymore. They're just kind of white people with a
Jewish neighbor over here and an Italian neighbor over here,
and none of them go to church, and like trying
to figure out like you know, and this is the
problem I think that like white nationalism always runs into,
is like you're trying to construct something like ex nihilo
and yeah, like you know, there's you could say, like
Europe has a cultural tradition and stuff, but you know,
the idea that like everybody with white skin is somehow
part of a collective identity group, that's a that's a
new concept that like doesn't have like deep, deep, deep
historical roots that you can just pick up and you know,
sort of decorate the tree with. And so you know,
it's it's a it's a it's a tough problem on
all sides. I mean, when you have a people who
are very very very firm in their identity and their
sense of collective interests living in the people who are
not just not like that, but like I really have
been in a very short period of time, like stripped
of all of that, you know, of even their neighborhood identities,
and are kind of casting around looking for something to
build in replacement of it. That you know, it becomes
one of those things that that that that you know,
people start to look at that as as if it's
inherently inherently bad or inherently something to be suspicious of,
you know. When again, I think all of this stuff
could mostly be solved. The Jews wouldn't have to change
anything they're actually doing. For the most part, it could
mostly be solved if everybody could just talk about it.
Everybody could just talk about it, you know, nobody I
talked about like in the first half of the twentieth century,
like how New York operated with all the different ethnicities
that live there, and the power sharing agreements in the
local government and economy and things that people were just
very open about there's that group and have these interests,
they want these things, and that's going to have to
be balanced off this other. And being able to do that,
like it really lets off a lot of pressure, you know.
Speaker 1: Y's it operates like a guild where you know, an
old European guild where one one isn't going to outcompete
the other, you know, to a great deal where you
know when you competter it when you at a time
when competition is considered not you know, it's it's rude.
Competition be rude. So you just figure out a way.
And that's what I've always said, is like it'd be
great to just have a conversation about all this. You know,
I've been studying the last two thousand years of these
people's history because I basically feel like they roll over,
like they roll over this country, like they control this country.
And I'm trying to figure out exactly what, why, who
and how we get through this. You know. Thomas Thomas
always says he there's no like third position right now.
It's like literally globalism. There's globalist power and then there's
us and there's everyone who opposes it. And yeah, I
mean you can if you're in power and more people
are popping up to oppose it. I understand you want
to stay in power, but you know it's going to
come to a head unless you can figure out exactly,
you know why, you know, why it has to why
one group feels like it has to be this way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you know, and it's kind of you know,
the sort of steroids that are thrown into the mix
are just the sense of you know, the sense of
paranoia and persecution that Jews have that a lot of
minorities have, but it's very different with Jews because you know,
like you might have like.
Speaker 3: A you know, a black dude who when he goes
to order a coffee and the dude behind the counter
is a jerk who thinks he's gonna think he's being
a jerk as I'm black, and maybe he's not.
Speaker 2: Maybe the dude's just a jerk, but he's gonna take
it that way. You know, that's just kind of something
that you deal with in a diverse society with you know,
that's just one of those things we have to we
have to deal with, you know, the the the the
unique part of it. And actually, like Dennis Praeger said,
this in his debate that he did with Dave Smith
on the panel is he said that Jew hatred is
different because it's extermination. And so if I say something
about Churchill having some culpability for escalating, you know, the
German German Polish war into the Second World War, that's
not like an academic claim. It's not even just a
claim that implies that I have something against Jews. It's
that I want to kill you, like that's the way
they take it. Like if you you know, if you
question tenets of the official narrative of the Second World War,
it's not because you're a contrarian or because you want
to you know, look at some of those things, because
you hate us and want us all dead. Like that's
and that's like a unique thing. Like a lot of
a lot of minorities feel out of place and even
threatened in a lot of societies.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Again, I'm married to an Armenian, and Armenians they had
a genocide inflicted on them that was every bit and
probably I mean as far as like the official documentation
that we have of the events was more top down
directed like intentional just total genocide. Then what happened to
the Jews in the Second World War, just based on
the documentations that we have, and yet they don't have
this sense of just pervasive, universal threat wherever they go
all the time. And if there's somebody there who doesn't
like Armenians, you know, who live in Los Angeles, they
can take that as like, well, yeah, because you know,
you live in the other neighborhood over there and you
can pete with our businesses and we don't like each
other or whatever. They don't take it as like essentially
a death threat every time they run into inner group confrontations,
and so you know, that adds an element to it
that just brings like a level of panic to almost
like any mention of these issues. The reason that we
that we can't talk about them is not you know, generally,
I'm up until very recently, there were no laws being passed,
Nobody was getting deported or losing their citizenship or anything
like that. Those things weren't happening. It was that, you
know that every that bringing this up, even in the
most roundabout kind of civil way, even if it's like
the most obvious thing that should be brought up, you know,
people should be talking about the fact that David Brooks's
son is in the IDF when he's advocating for us
to go over there and take out one of Israel's enemies.
That's an obvious thing that people should mention, right, But
anything like that is met with just a level of panic,
you know that. I think most people are just like
I just don't yeah, okay, okay, okay, fine, I don't
want to deal with it, you know, but that opens
up again, you know, it opens up a lot of
space for people to operate with impunity. And anytime you
have that, I mean, look at Israel has been able
to do that now for fifty years, and you see
what you get. You know, everybody knows what kids who
are allowed to do anything they want, never discipline whatsoever.
How they turn out, they turn out, they turn out bad.
And so yeah, I mean, you know, a lot again,
a lot of times like when people ask, like what
can be done about these issues? They're looking for like
political solutions or some kind of solution that like people
always run away from it because they all sound like they're,
you know, either step one or step two toward Nuremberg
in nineteen thirty five. But I always tell them they
like the solution to Most of this is we just
have to be able to talk about it. That's really
all it is. Like, you know, the people on there
telling you we have to go to war with Iran
are going to lose a lot of their influence the
minute you can say, well, yeah, but like three of
you are dual citizens of Israel, so you know, maybe
we should hear from somebody else. Like if you could
just say that without having the Trump administration to port you,
you know, then a lot of this stuff would fix itself.
They're still free to voice their opinions. They're free to
make their case for why it's actually a good thing
for America to intervene on Israel's behalf. They can do
all that stuff, but we have to be able to
be open about the motivations and the and the dynamics
at play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking about the gentleman that that Scott
Horton debated on Lex Friedman Show is Dublets, Mark Dublets,
and he's yeah, he was trying to tell Scott, you know,
it's like I've been an Iran expert for twenty two years.
I'm like, that's interesting. And then Scott, you know, it
was like, you know, I was born here. Yeah, I'm
a Texan. You know you weren't even born here. And
he goes, well, I've been living here for twenty two years,
and it's just things like that where I go. Are
You've been living here for twenty two years. You've been
an Iran expert for twenty two years, and you're basically
pushing that Iran needs to be suppressed. You couldn't do
that from Britain. You couldn't do that from South Africa,
you couldn't do that from Israel. You had to come
here and do it. It's like, can we just why
can't we have a conversation about that? Why can't I
mean yeah, And then you read someone like Maurice Samuel
and he says, well, we can't have a conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean again, I keep using this as
a reference point because I think it's a valuable one.
But like the Armenians, man, like they want the US
to step in and rein in Azerbaijan. You know, they
don't like the fact that we're so cozy with Turkey,
but they'll say I want to I want the US
government to step in rein in Azerbaijan because I'm Armenian
and I care what happens in Armenia, and if that's fine,
that's totally fine, you know what I mean, Like you
go back to the First and Second World Wars, somebody's like,
I'm Irish, I'm Irish American. I don't want us allying
with Britain to like go to war with Germany. Hell no,
I don't want That's totally fine. You know, if it's
out in the open, we can actually discuss these things.
But it's when you know, you're you're everybody is sort
of required to pretend that that element of it is
not part of the equation at all. But you can't
have any real conversations about anything because we're all just
skirting the actual the actual issue.
Speaker 1: You know, I've kept you long enough. I really appreciate
your time. I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate the work
you're doing. I look forward to the rest of the
work appearances and the first real episode of the uh
of the of the Germany series. But you know, just yeah,
the plug.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anytime, man. I always love talking to you, and
I just appreciate the work you do very much, and
so yeah, I'll come on anytime. You want. I always
enjoy it, so yeah, you can find me The Martyr
Made podcast much more measured and probably coherent than I
am in an interview like this. We cover all kinds
of historical topics. And I just started a new show
with my buddy Scott Horton, who many of your audience
probably know well, called Provoked, which is the name of
the recent book he wrote on Russia, but I thought
it would be a good name for our new podcast too,
so check that out. We've done two episodes. We're going
to record the third one tomorrow. I think we're going
to talk well, I don't know if it'll be tomorrow
for you guys anymore, but episode three we're going to
talk about Epstein. So yeah, that's all man. I really
appreciate the work you're doing. I was telling you before
off air. Your the series that you've done with Thomas,
the one that you're working through now with doctor Johnson,
are I mean, really invaluable, like educational tools for especially
for young people coming into the right and you want
to learn about this stuff. It's one of those things
where you know it's crazy, right because you're got your podcaster,
you got the piquinone show. You're not a professor at
a big university or something like that, and so you
would think, like, you know, if I want to go
right about World War One, it's like, okay, good luck, man,
like because pretty much everything has been written on World
War One, like go knock yourself out. This stuff that
you guys are talking about, It's like, dude, the entire
culture has just been leaving this sitting here for somebody
to pick up and actually deal with for one hundred years,
you know, and it's just been sitting there. Nobody's been
actually addressing it. So when somebody comes into the right
and they want to educate themselves, they look around and
there's just not a lot out there, like real good
stuff out there, and you're providing that service. And I
hope that you know how much I mean, not just me,
but everybody. I think a lot of people out I
really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: So well. I hope you understand how much I appreciate
the recommendations that you give and also encouragement that you give.
Thank you, Thank you. I really appreciate what you do.
Now that we're done, Now that we're done stroking struggles,
it's talk to your letter man later
Speaker 2: H.