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all of our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's

0:58

the episode. You arrive at the

1:00

same conclusions I do. 100%

1:02

of the time, at least on Twitter. Yeah, it's an

1:04

instinct. It's like, I think you

1:06

begin with a certain kind

1:08

of inclination, like

1:10

view of who's running the country

1:13

and how you feel about them and why you hate

1:15

them. And then everything else just kind of follows from

1:17

that. Yeah, and it may even be deeper than that.

1:19

It's like, what's important to you? Loyalty,

1:23

honesty, children, dogs.

1:26

Totally, totally. Yeah, it's like what you get in life

1:28

too. Yeah, and we're roughly the same age. You're obviously

1:30

a lot older, but in general, we're the same age.

1:32

Are you older? I think I'm a

1:34

year older. What year were you born? Okay,

1:37

so you're two years older than

1:40

me. Okay, congratulations on your robust

1:42

youth. Yeah,

1:46

it's interesting. I think about lies

1:49

the way I do about alcohol. I just don't

1:51

want it in me at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:54

Well, because you end up deluding yourself, which is the worst.

1:56

Sometimes you can consciously deceive other people for whatever goal,

1:58

and you can tell yourself. It's justified

2:00

and maybe sometimes it even is. But

2:02

the worst thing is to delude yourself, like

2:04

to deceive yourself. There's nothing worse than to do

2:07

yourself. Or be deceived and not know it.

2:09

I mean, I've repeated so many lies in

2:11

my life, unknowingly, that I

2:13

just don't want to do that again. By the way,

2:15

thank you for setting up that Snowden meeting. Oh, I

2:17

knew you guys were going to love each other. I

2:19

was actually hoping he would change his mind and do

2:21

an interview. I think it was a good step to

2:23

doing one. Yeah, and even

2:25

if I never interview him on camera, I

2:27

was just grateful to meet him. So

2:31

you're the reason that

2:34

we know any of this information. You

2:36

were the guy who broke the story. It

2:40

did feel to me like Snowden was, it

2:42

was more important for the US government to

2:44

capture and kill Ed Snowden, an American citizen,

2:46

than like any foreign terrorist.

2:48

Well, it was the biggest leak of top

2:51

secret documents from the US security state by

2:53

far. And he planned it

2:55

so meticulously. I mean, you're talking about

2:57

the NSA, which is supposed to be like our leading intelligence

2:59

agency. He was in it, stealing

3:01

all their stuff over months, figuring

3:04

out how not to get caught. He walked out with

3:06

it. He went to Hong Kong with it, they

3:09

have no idea any of that happened. And he was just

3:11

waiting for us to come and then pass it all to

3:13

us and like put it in all secret places. Like the

3:15

only thing he cared about was getting that out before he

3:17

ended up, you know, imprisoned or killed or whatever. He was

3:19

so desperate for us to get there. Why did he do

3:21

it? I mean, I

3:23

really think it's for the reasons he

3:25

said, like he really felt betrayed.

3:28

You know, he went to enlist in the

3:30

Iraq war. He enlisted in

3:32

the army. He wanted to go fight in Iraq and obviously

3:34

do that because you believe the mythology, 100% country. And

3:39

the more he saw, the more he realized it was,

3:42

you know, a fraud and it

3:44

makes you like feel betrayed, like ethically betrayed.

3:46

Like people who want to go fight in

3:48

wars obviously have like

3:50

a code of ethics already, right? They're saying I

3:52

can only risk my life as something that is

3:54

greater than myself. And then when

3:56

you realize that, like what you're told is greater than yourself

3:58

is in fact a total lie. that you're

4:01

fighting for completely different reasons, you

4:03

feel betrayed. And then the question is like, what is

4:05

really bigger than myself? And he,

4:07

like I said, he thought he was going to be

4:09

killed or spend the rest of his life in prison.

4:11

Like if I had to bet, we weren't even discussing

4:14

the possibility that he wouldn't end up free. It was

4:16

inconceivable. Like that was the darkness that hung over this

4:18

whole thing the whole time we were doing it. Obviously

4:20

I was very excited about the story.

4:22

We were plotting, we were strategizing, like it was

4:24

under water. But the whole time I felt this

4:26

sadness that this person had come to admire

4:29

and respect so much, I was never going to stay

4:31

again. He was going to end up in prison for the rest of his life. That

4:34

wasn't like a possibility. It was like almost inevitable.

4:37

And he knew that. Yeah, of course.

4:39

Yeah. I mean, like obviously you don't, if

4:42

you're at all ethical, like not just a journalist

4:44

person, you don't use somebody as a

4:46

source without making sure they understand

4:48

the risks they're taking and the likely consequences. But

4:50

he, I remember the first conversation I had when

4:52

I started talking about it, he was like, all

4:54

while versing the espionage act and like every single

4:56

law that would be used against him, he fully

4:58

understood he was sacrificing his whole life. He

5:01

had to hide it from his girlfriend who

5:03

he wanted to marry. He was totally

5:06

in love, but he couldn't have her know

5:08

anything because she would have been complicit and

5:10

he was concerned she'd be vulnerable. They

5:12

would go after her, start charting with her crimes to get

5:14

at him. So we had to keep

5:16

it all from her. He just disappeared. He was

5:19

like, I need to go on a trip, provided to business. So,

5:21

I mean, you're describing like one of the most

5:23

ethical people I've ever met, one of the most

5:25

principled people ever. It's kind

5:28

of revealing that he's considered like,

5:30

the criminal. The criminal. Yeah, because he

5:32

actually exposed real crimes and that's what

5:34

always happens is the people who exposed

5:36

the crimes. I mean, like Daniel

5:39

Ellsberg had documents showing that the US government was

5:41

telling American citizens they knew they were going to

5:43

win the war at exactly the same time internally.

5:45

They said they knew they could never win the

5:48

war in Vietnam. And like many

5:50

other lies too. It was like, you

5:52

know, Daniel Ellsberg worked at the highest levels of the government

5:54

forever. I mean, he got a PhD in nuclear policy

5:57

and then, you know, was at the, at the Iran

5:59

corporation. with some of the most secret access ever. And

6:02

then he just couldn't believe what he was seeing

6:04

inside these documents, comparing them to the public statements.

6:07

And he was like, how am I gonna live with myself for the rest of my life

6:09

if I don't make this known? And

6:12

he was exactly the same thing. But of course at

6:15

the time he was completely vilified as a traitor or

6:17

a Russian agent, the whole thing. A hater of America.

6:19

Yeah, I mean, everybody who wasn't on the left

6:21

hated Andrew Ellsberg. And the only reason he didn't spend

6:23

the rest of his life in prison is because

6:26

of the misconduct of breaking it. They

6:28

broke into a psychoanalyst's office to try

6:30

and discover his psychosexual secrets to discredit

6:32

him for. That was like that whole

6:34

CIA group that did the Watergate break.

6:36

And they also broke into his psychoanalyst's

6:38

office and tried to steal

6:40

all those files. And then when they couldn't,

6:43

they wanted to break into the psychoanalyst's home. And

6:45

then that was like the one thing they didn't

6:47

get permission for. But when that was discovered, the

6:50

judge threw the case out solely because of government

6:52

misconduct. Had they not, he would have absolutely been

6:54

convicted. But he had the support effectively of the

6:56

American media. I mean, Daniel Ellsberg. Well, he commandeered

6:58

them. The first thing I did with Snowden

7:01

was we went to every major media outlet that we

7:03

wanted to work with in order to get them on

7:05

our side. Because if we didn't, we

7:08

would have just been two outsiders who

7:10

wouldn't, they would have called us non-journalists.

7:12

They tried to do that. Mike Isakopice

7:14

reported on them trying to assassinate Snowden

7:16

but also create theories to arrest myself

7:18

in horror, calling us information brokers. And

7:21

the whole time James Clapper would always,

7:23

whenever he referred to us, he would

7:25

never call us. Journalists, he would always

7:27

call us Snowden's, like, Aiders

7:29

and Abettors or Snowden's co-conspirators. Because they were trying

7:31

to create a theory that they could arrest us.

7:33

That's why I didn't go back. That's why now

7:35

they're worried. Now I traveled for a year. They

7:38

were being super threatening. You know, I had the best lawyers

7:40

for the Guardian. The kinds of people, Eric Holder on the

7:42

phone. It worked with him, you

7:44

know, those type of lawyers. And they were like,

7:46

if he comes back to New York, it becomes back to

7:48

the US. Can you guarantee that he won't be arrested upon

7:50

arrival? And they're like, right now we can't. So

7:54

that's why you live out of the country. Well, no, I mean, I had

7:56

lived in Brazil already, but I was always going back to the US. a

8:00

year I couldn't travel outside Brazil. The

8:02

Brazilian government said, we will always protect you because I did a

8:04

lot of reporting on how the NSA was spying on Brazil. So

8:07

in Brazil, the reporting was considered

8:10

heroic. And they were like, we'll never turn

8:12

you over, but we can't guarantee your protection if you

8:14

leave Brazil. So I stayed in

8:16

Brazil for a year. It's just a funny that the

8:18

Guardian was one of the

8:20

places that ran this data,

8:22

this information. And WikiLeaks. They partnered with WikiLeaks as

8:24

well. Yes. But do you think the Guardian would

8:26

run something like that now? Nope. Zero

8:29

chance. I mean,

8:31

they got taken over by completely

8:33

different, like the editor at the time was like one

8:35

of those old school British editors. And

8:37

now it's run by this woman who's like best friends

8:39

with the editor in chief of the, who was the

8:42

editor in chief of the intercept, who degraded it into

8:44

a partisan outlet. And they're both just like standard left

8:47

liberal white woman. And

8:49

they're all into the whole, like everything,

8:51

all that matters is Trump. They have

8:53

no animosity toward the security state agencies

8:56

any longer because they perceive them correctly

8:58

as their political allies. And

9:00

there's no chance that

9:02

they would have run

9:06

a story like that. So they're just totally

9:08

correct. Do you ever hear any left liberals

9:10

ever anymore talking about the evils of the

9:13

CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the US security

9:15

state? Never, never ever. Maybe Homeland Security for

9:17

being too aggressive with immigrants.

9:19

But other than that, that discourse is

9:22

gone. If you talk about the CIA

9:24

and the FBI now, people that

9:26

gets coded as like Trump, Trumpism and like

9:29

warning you out deep state, the deep state.

9:32

Like they mocked the idea that there's a deep state.

9:34

That's like been fundamental to left-wing politics for as long

9:36

as I can remember. And

9:38

now it reads as like, you know,

9:40

Trumpian right wing. Any

9:44

country run by its Intel and law enforcement

9:46

agencies is an authoritarian country. It's not a

9:48

democratic country. They were built to be outside

9:50

of the democratic system. There's no, they're built

9:53

to be a secret agency within the government

9:55

that is immune to democratic accountability.

9:57

And the amazing thing is when they have those

9:59

hearing like after the Twitter files and all

10:01

of that, every single

10:03

Democrat stood up and

10:05

said, like when Matt Taivi went to testify, they were

10:07

lecturing him saying, like, have you ever considered the fact

10:10

that the people at the CIA and the FBI and

10:13

our security state agencies are doing this

10:15

to protect us, not to harm

10:17

us? Can you

10:19

imagine? Like, even though,

10:21

like AOC, same thing, like even

10:23

the left wing sectors of the

10:26

Democratic Party, there's no space to

10:28

criticize. Are there any

10:31

left liberals holding office in there? Have we started by

10:33

the way or no? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we're on,

10:35

we're on? Yeah, I think we're on. I

10:38

think we'll use this. Yeah. Okay, I didn't

10:40

know, but I'm fine. You know

10:42

what an Irish exit is, right? Well, this is

10:44

when we chat anyway. This is how we chat.

10:46

So I was like, okay, we're just waiting until,

10:48

but yeah. So the Irish exit, and I'm not

10:50

Irish for the record, but is when you sort

10:52

of leave without saying anything, this is the Irish

10:54

entrance. You sort of start with that.

10:56

Right, exactly, exactly. Just sit down and start with

10:59

no formal start. Yeah,

11:01

but I mean that to me, because

11:03

it's always so bizarre to me that for a

11:06

long time, I was considered

11:08

like a left wing kind of leading

11:11

journalist and finger, and then at some

11:13

point, like with the emergence of Trump,

11:16

I had this huge breach with the left and

11:18

my allies started becoming people on the right. I

11:21

think that's now changed a little bit more since October

11:23

7th and the like, but I haven't

11:26

changed a single one of my views. I

11:28

think the primary, the two primary views that

11:30

I hold that used to be identified with

11:32

the left that are now identified with the

11:34

right is free speech, which began

11:36

as a left wing movement. I mean, the free

11:39

speech movement began at Berkeley. Some of the most

11:41

important first amendment free speech precedents were written by

11:43

the most left wing journalists. And like it was

11:45

left wing Jewish lawyers at the ACLU who are

11:47

fighting for the most absolutist versions of free speech.

11:50

And now free speech codes as a

11:52

fascist value. And then the

11:54

second is this critical scrutiny and

11:57

focus that I've always had on

11:59

the CA, the FBI. the NSA.

12:01

And that too now codes as

12:03

right wing. And the reason for

12:05

that is so disturbing. It's because

12:07

those agencies became among the leading

12:10

enemies of the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency.

12:12

That's where Russiagate came from, was from the vowels of

12:14

the CIA, the FBI. They were anonymously leaking every day

12:16

to the New York Times and the Washington Post. All

12:18

kinds of information that turned out to be false,

12:20

but that was designed to sabotage Trump's campaign and

12:23

then presidency. And Democrats looked at that and said, why

12:25

would we have any problem with these

12:27

agencies? They're on our side and they are on that side.

12:30

And this inversion of

12:32

politics, and then you

12:34

add things like neocons almost entirely migrating

12:36

to the Democratic party. Whereas when I

12:38

started talking about politics in 2005, neocons

12:40

were being talked about as bloodthirsty,

12:43

Hitler-arian types, Nazis and the

12:45

like. That's how liberals

12:48

talked about them. And now the most

12:50

influential pundits in liberal politics are like

12:52

Bill Kristol and David Frum and Nicole

12:54

Wallace and all those Bush, Liz Cheney.

12:57

Liz Cheney was hero of the year

12:59

by mother Jones in 2022.

13:03

Mother Jones is a hardcore leftist

13:05

radical who broke the law. I

13:07

mean, the idea that a hundred

13:09

years from now a newspaper named after

13:12

her would be naming Liz Cheney as

13:15

hero of the year. When people say, why have you

13:17

changed? What have you changed? I'm like, you're

13:19

the one naming Liz Cheney hero of the year.

13:21

I hate the Cheney's as much as I hated

13:23

them 20 years ago. And this

13:25

inversion of politics is so

13:27

radical and so visible and so

13:30

transparent and so abrupt, but

13:32

it's changed almost everything. It

13:35

does seem like maybe a

13:37

lot of the kind of ACLU positions,

13:39

which for the record, I always liked.

13:41

I always like Nat Hentoff, for

13:44

example. Wonderful man. But

13:47

it seems like maybe a lot of it

13:50

wasn't sincere. And it

13:52

was as soon as the ACLU kind of

13:55

took power over American society, then it was

13:57

like, now we have someone to protect. Now

13:59

we're not on the side of the world.

14:01

the underdog. I think there was authenticity to

14:03

the ACLU in the sense that I remember

14:05

this from childhood. It was

14:08

one of the most influential events for

14:10

me, even though it was only 10 at the

14:12

time when it happened. I just became very interested

14:14

in it and started reading a lot more about

14:16

it as a teenager in

14:18

1978, which was when the

14:20

American Nazi Party, which was a band of

14:24

30 losers and misfits, but they were

14:26

walking around in Nazi costumes

14:28

and stuff. They applied for a

14:30

parade permit in Skokie, Illinois on

14:32

purpose. North Shore, Chicago, overwhelmingly Jewish

14:34

suburb. Not just overwhelmingly Jewish suburb,

14:36

but particularly known for having a

14:39

huge population of Holocaust survivors. People

14:41

were in actual camps. So

14:43

imagine the trauma for people like that

14:45

to see people in actual Nazi uniforms

14:48

marching through their town, people

14:50

with swastikas on their armbands.

14:52

Pretty heavy. Yeah. And they

14:55

had their permit rejected on the grounds

14:57

that it was a threat to public

14:59

safety or whatever, but obviously it was

15:02

politically and ideologically driven because the people

15:04

of Skokie hated the ideology of the

15:06

Nazi Party for obvious reasons. And the

15:08

ACLU, despite being composed almost entirely

15:10

of leftist Jewish lawyers and

15:13

having donors that were overwhelmingly

15:15

leftist Jews who were donating to the ACLU, in

15:17

part because they were also defending the civil liberties

15:20

of communists in the fifties and sixties. Communists

15:22

were barred from becoming lawyers and

15:24

being admitted to the bar because their ideology was

15:26

considered to prove poor character and fitness and the

15:28

like. And a lot of those precedents came out

15:31

of the idea that you

15:33

can suppress communist speech and the ACLU fought

15:35

to preserve those free

15:37

speech rights. And then they did the same for the American Nazi

15:39

Party. That position

15:42

that they took and ultimately prevailed on

15:45

was something that destroyed the lives of

15:47

almost every single one of those lawyers

15:49

and the organization. I mean, almost every

15:51

Jewish supporter of the ACLU, including ones

15:53

who worked there, quit and discuss, turned

15:55

off their donations and discussed, and basically

15:58

destroyed the organization, came very close. to

16:00

bankrupting it forever. And

16:03

that's what made it so interesting to me

16:05

was that they were so devoted to this principle that

16:08

obviously was in defense

16:10

of a view they obviously found not

16:12

just disagreeable, but horrific to the point

16:15

where they were willing to sacrifice their

16:17

careers and reputations in pursuit of that

16:19

principle. And I just remember being

16:21

so enamored of that posture. So

16:24

they have proven that they, and even now

16:26

you have like a few of the remnants,

16:28

you have a few of these remnants of

16:30

like old ACLU lawyers, for example, they

16:33

represent right now, the NRA,

16:35

because the Cuomo, the Andrew Cuomo

16:37

administration sought to destroy the

16:40

NRA explicitly by threatening banks,

16:42

by threatening advertisers, by threatening anyone who's doing

16:44

business with the NRA that they will have

16:46

their state contracts cut off. And the ACLU,

16:48

like the old lawyers at the ACLU, like

16:50

the real free speech ones looked at that

16:52

and said, obviously, you can't have the state

16:54

government setting out to destroy a political advocacy

16:56

group because of their hatred for their ideology

16:59

and represented the NRA and sued the state of

17:01

New York and actually won on the grounds that

17:03

Andrew Cuomo had violated the free speech laws.

17:06

But primarily, like so many institutions in

17:08

the wake of Donald Trump, they

17:10

became completely corrupted in part because they were for the

17:12

first time, they would post like, we're going to take

17:15

Trump to court on this, and we're going to take

17:17

Trump to court on that. And they were turned

17:20

into heroes. Like the ACLU had

17:22

been pretty marginal, their whole existence.

17:25

They were flooded with tens and then

17:27

hundreds of millions of dollars. And they

17:29

became this very well-funded powerful organization. And

17:32

they knew that they were

17:34

captured as a left

17:36

liberal advocacy group solely to destroy Trump.

17:38

And now essentially the entire organization is

17:40

unrecognizable. And you have that key event

17:43

where they defended the right of Nazis

17:45

or white nationalists to march through Charlottesville,

17:47

they represented them. And then you have

17:50

that woman who was killed by one

17:52

of the parade protesters, the white

17:54

nationalist protester who ran over Heather

17:56

Heyer. And that caused this huge

17:58

uproar in the in the ACLU,

18:01

people who worked on LGBT issues

18:03

or immigrant issues saying, why are

18:05

we representing white

18:07

nationalists and their free speech rights? And it's like,

18:10

do you know anything about the organization that you

18:12

actually applied for a job and then joined? But

18:14

they didn't. And that was when the ACLU, for

18:16

the first time, retreated by issuing this memo saying,

18:18

in the future, we're going to weigh the

18:21

value of free speech versus other political values.

18:23

Societal harm, yeah. And so many other instances

18:25

then where they've taken positions that would have

18:28

been completely anathema to the ACLU. And to

18:30

me, this is so illustrative of what happened

18:32

to left liberal political culture. The parts of

18:35

it I used to really like is that

18:37

it was renounced all in the name of

18:39

defeating Trump, which in turn had all kinds

18:41

of financial values and benefits

18:43

and benefits and power and the like. So

18:46

if you're paying any attention at all to what's

18:48

going on in the world, you've probably asked yourself,

18:51

what would I do, not just for myself, but

18:53

for the people who love me and I'm responsible

18:55

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21:24

So many questions. Just take

21:26

a quick detour. What's so scary is,

21:29

you know, I never liked any of the people

21:31

in the ACLU. Like I don't think I want

21:33

to have dinner with them. But I like you

21:36

absolutely admired, almost revered their

21:38

commitment to principle. You

21:40

know, I'll die for your right to

21:42

say something that I hate. Right. Okay, so I love

21:44

that. And I still do love it. That

21:47

was on the left. That was the best thing about

21:49

the left that in their anti war instincts, in my

21:51

opinion, it's all gone. So it kind

21:53

of migrated right and conservatives start talking a lot

21:55

about free speech to my joy.

22:00

And then, you know. And also criticism of the US security state

22:02

are found only on the right now on the way to Trump.

22:05

All of that, like that inversion happened. But then,

22:07

you know, six months ago, all of a sudden

22:10

you have people on the right

22:12

being like, no, well, you know,

22:14

that speech is violence. If

22:16

you're making people threatened by saying things they don't

22:18

like, it's like stealing

22:20

almost word for word, the

22:23

language of the, what are they used to call

22:26

them? Snowflakes? Yeah, or like the

22:28

social justice war. So maybe

22:30

we need hate speech laws now. And then all the Republicans

22:32

vote for a hate speech law. And so it is, first

22:34

of all, let me just say that like, this

22:37

has been there for a long time,

22:40

working this huge contradiction in right

22:42

wing politics. And I actually have done shows

22:45

well prior to October 7th, there were an article as

22:47

well prior to October 7th, even

22:49

with my new alignment with a lot of conservatives

22:51

who now appreciated my free speech advocacy and my

22:53

criticism of the US security state, you know, lots

22:56

of people who said, like you, oh, I used

22:58

to really, you know, put my trust in the

23:00

NSA and the NSCIA and there was a Snowden

23:02

reporting and all these other things, seeing their abuses

23:05

politically against Trump that made me realize, you know, you

23:07

were right. So I had a lot of new right

23:09

wing, if not allies, like

23:11

people who were followers of my work and readers and

23:14

the like, but I was

23:16

always aware of the fact and even

23:18

saying, you have a huge

23:20

Israel exception embedded within your worldview, because

23:22

it wasn't just since October 7th, it's

23:24

been for a long time that while a lot of right

23:26

wing speech has been targeted as censorship

23:28

on campus, and I've been very vocal and objective with that, among

23:31

the most common and

23:33

frequent targets of censorship

23:36

both on campus and generally in the United

23:38

States have long been Israel critics, professors who

23:40

have lost tenure because of it, who have

23:42

gotten fired because of it, there was Norman

23:44

Finkelstein who had his scholarship approved for tenure

23:46

at DePaul University and Alan Dershowitz went on

23:48

a jihad against him to destroy his career

23:50

and won and basically made

23:52

him unemployable. There was a professor at the

23:54

University of Illinois in 2014, Steven

23:57

Salatia, who was given a contract for tenure,

23:59

they found... tweets of his criticizing very

24:01

harshly Israel for its 2014 bombing of

24:03

Gaza. And he got fired.

24:07

University of Illinois had to pay him a

24:09

million dollars, but they were pressured by donors

24:11

and by Jewish student groups saying,

24:13

we don't feel safe on campus with someone who's

24:15

so harshly critical of Israel. So this has been

24:18

going on for a long time. This is not

24:20

a new development, but

24:22

since October 7th, and I have

24:24

a lot of friends in my life who are

24:27

Jewish, but

24:29

we're either skeptical of Israel or kind

24:31

of apathetic to it who got really

24:33

radicalized after October 7th. So Israel

24:36

has kind of been on the back burner for a long time. So those

24:39

contradictions weren't very apparent. Now

24:42

you listen to the pro-Israel right, and

24:44

they sound, and not ironically,

24:46

or like as parody or

24:48

some strategic maneuver, they sound

24:50

exactly like the left liberals

24:52

who they've been heaping scorn on for the last

24:54

decade. You cannot enter

24:57

a discussion with an Israel defender without them immediately

24:59

accusing you of being a racist if they disagree

25:01

with you. Oh, you're an anti-Semite. And this is

25:03

one of the primary right wing grievances against liberals

25:05

for the last decade. Oh, the minute you disagree

25:08

with the liberal, they call you a racist. They

25:10

call you a bigot. They call you a, you

25:12

know, transphobe. They call you a misogynist. Try

25:15

and have an argument, even like a substantive

25:18

civil argument, disagreement, criticize Israel just a

25:20

little bit and count down the number

25:22

of seconds before you get accused of

25:24

being motivated by bigotry and

25:26

hatred. It'll be, you know, seconds. And these

25:28

are the people who say, Oh, I hate

25:30

the tactic of accusing everyone. You disagree with

25:32

being a racist. That's their only tactic, their

25:35

go-to tactic. The minute you question like, why

25:37

is the US financing Israel's military

25:39

and its wars when it not only hurts our

25:41

own country, but when millions of Israelis are having

25:43

better standard of living than millions of Americans, you're

25:45

a Jew hater. You hate, you know, you have

25:47

some kind of problem with Jews. So it's the

25:49

same tactic there. Do they say that to you

25:51

constantly? Oh, being Jewish is not in

25:53

any way does not give you any

25:55

kind of immunity from that accusation. Like

25:57

zero. Are you an anti-semite? What?

26:01

It's so crazy.

26:04

Yeah. I mean, well, it's the same thing. You

26:06

know, it's like black. You know, the other is

26:08

the amazing thing is I did a debate with

26:11

Alan Dershowitz in Manhattan on Tuesday. It's

26:13

about to come out, which

26:16

nominally was about whether the US should go bomb yet

26:18

another enemy of Israel in the Middle East, this one

26:20

Iran. But in reality, it

26:23

turned into this broader neocons debate

26:25

about neoconservative dogma, and he actually

26:27

wants regime change. And they

26:29

did a vote before and after and like 70% of

26:31

the audience was with me, which was bizarre because it

26:33

was the Upper West Side. But the 30% who were

26:35

not were extremely vocal both during the

26:37

debate. But then as I was leaving, I was

26:40

accosted by, I would say, like two dozen of them.

26:42

And they were hurling insults and screaming and trying

26:44

to be menacing. And their main argument was, how

26:47

can you be a Jew and say these things

26:49

about Israel? And I was trying to say, like,

26:51

I don't think my being a Jew compels me

26:53

to have a certain set of ideas

26:55

about foreign policy or this foreign country. And

26:58

the amazing thing about that is there has

27:00

been this sense all the time. Like if

27:03

you know, if a liberal sees a black

27:05

conservative or a gay conservative, they'll

27:07

immediately say, oh, you're an Uncle Tom, you have

27:09

some psychological problem that you're self hating. How can

27:12

you be a black conservative? How can you be

27:14

a gay conservative? As though

27:16

being part of these demographic groups

27:18

somehow compels you to embrace a certain political

27:20

ideology. Like there's a relationship between your skin

27:22

color and the political ideology that you have

27:24

to embrace. That was always some

27:26

argument on the right. Like, why?

27:29

Just because someone's black are they automatically enslaved

27:31

to the Democratic Party? And yet so

27:34

many people on the right now say, oh, if you're a

27:36

Jew, you have to have unquestioning support for Israel. But

27:39

like, what if I don't? What if I think the government of

27:41

Israel is actually wrong? But it's that

27:43

tactic, like you hate Jews or if you

27:45

are Jewish, you're self hating. And then the

27:47

hate speech, you know, I've been hearing

27:50

from liberals for the last decade. Oh,

27:52

yeah, we want free speech, but

27:54

some things are over the line in our hate speech

27:56

and they endanger minority groups because words are violence and

27:59

words can incite violence. violence. And this has

28:01

been the thing that the right has been

28:03

scoffing out like, oh, these little left-wing snowflakes

28:05

on campuses want the administrators to

28:07

intervene and protect them from ideas that

28:09

make them uncomfortable. There's nothing that we've

28:11

heard other than that from

28:13

the last seven months from right pro-Israel

28:16

conservatives, other than, oh, these poor little

28:18

Jewish students at Harvard and Yale and

28:20

Princeton who grew up extremely wealthy and

28:22

go to the most elite colleges are

28:24

now somehow endangered even though there's no

28:27

record of violence at these protests, like

28:29

almost none because hearing chants

28:31

that are pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel-y

28:34

make them feel vulnerable. Like

28:36

the conservatives in Congress, like

28:38

Elise Stefanik and Virginia Mike

28:41

Johnson, they had like a horde of Jewish

28:43

students from Harvard coming and saying, I don't

28:45

feel safe at my school. The very

28:47

things that conservatives have been mocking

28:49

so viciously when that came

28:51

from black students or trans students

28:54

or immigrants or Muslims or whatever,

28:56

the hypocrisy, the stench of it

28:58

is suffocating and nauseating. From

29:02

my perspective as an American,

29:04

I think you can have any

29:06

opinion you want on Israel. I'm not actually that

29:08

interested. I personally like Israel, whatever.

29:11

The red line for me is this is my

29:13

country. My birthright is free speech. God gave me

29:15

that right. You cannot take it away. And if

29:18

you're telling me what I'm allowed to say in

29:20

my country, you're my enemy. Like it's just

29:22

kind of that simple. You can't tell me

29:24

what to say or think period because I'm an American.

29:27

But if there were a consistent standard,

29:29

like let's say there were a consistent

29:31

standard. Let's just walk back from there.

29:33

But if there were some consistent standard

29:36

like Western Europeans have hate speech laws,

29:39

whatever, they don't really

29:41

comply with them consistently, but at least there's like

29:43

a dogma, like hate speech is not part of

29:45

free speech. In the United States, we don't have

29:47

a hate speech exception. There is no such thing.

29:49

So if you suddenly

29:52

now start, you

29:54

know, and it's not just

29:56

in the discourse. They're passing laws.

29:58

Oh, I'm aware. issued

30:01

an executive order that said there will be

30:03

no more anti-Semitism, meaning anti-Semitism speech, anti-Semitic speech

30:05

or ideas allowed in the state of Texas.

30:07

And you have, I don't know if you

30:09

saw the video this week, but there was

30:12

a video emerging where a school administrator went

30:14

to a group of Palestinian protesters and said,

30:16

I just want you to know if

30:18

you chant from the River to

30:20

the Sea, Palestine will be free or

30:22

globalize the intifada. You

30:25

will be turned over to law enforcement. We will

30:27

call the police on you and you will be

30:30

arrested and held legally accountable. That is now a

30:32

crime in Texas. They passed a law. They say,

30:34

is that actually true? Yes. Yes. Yes.

30:37

I mean, the whole point of Greg Abbott's executive

30:40

order was to say no anti-Semitic

30:43

speech is permissible in Texas. You're

30:46

allowed to have anti-Black racist speech. You're

30:48

allowed to have anti-Muslim speech. You're

30:51

allowed to have white, gay speech. You can

30:53

have anti-white speech. You just can't be anti-Semitic

30:56

to the point where these students are

30:58

now being told that if they do

31:00

these political chants, no violence, no obstruction

31:02

of buildings, nothing illegal, the chants themselves,

31:04

the ideas themselves will be

31:07

to create illegal. As

31:09

you say, you don't have to

31:11

hate Israel or whatever, but we talk all

31:13

the time. You have at every pro-Israel rally

31:15

in the United States, you'll hear people saying,

31:18

wipe out all the Arabs, turn Gaza into a

31:20

parking lot. Gaza belongs to Israel. We

31:22

constantly talk about bombing this country, bombing

31:25

that country. We're always advocating violence against

31:27

this group, against this country. This

31:30

country is illegitimate. There's only one country

31:32

that has the protection of these laws, which is the

31:34

country of Israel. But you can't have these laws in

31:36

the first place. No, and it's so obvious. If

31:38

they were chanting, expel Tucker Carlson

31:40

from the country. Well, I am

31:43

Tucker Carlson, so obviously I'm opposed to that. I would

31:45

have exactly the same position that I

31:47

have on this or any other speech-related

31:50

matter, which is I'm an American. Every

31:52

American has the right to say exactly what he thinks

31:55

at all times, period. Period. Like, I

31:57

thought that was the whole point of the country. Well,

32:00

let me just say too that like, just

32:02

because I hear this argument so much and

32:04

I think a lot of people who are

32:06

conservatives, who understand that they're now veering into

32:08

this territory, try

32:11

and justify it by saying, look, we're only doing

32:13

this because the left has been doing it. We're

32:15

not gonna allow the left to do it. And

32:17

we're not gonna do it constantly. That's the justification.

32:19

And the thing is, this is the big delusion,

32:21

as I was saying, you know, about these protestors

32:23

being fired as pro-Israel critics have long been one

32:25

of the most common targets of

32:27

censorship. I'll just give you an example. There

32:29

were 23 different red states, including Texas and

32:31

Greg Abbott, but also New

32:34

York and Andrew Cuomo, who

32:36

well before, you know, in the Obama

32:38

administration and then in the Trump administration,

32:40

passed laws that said this.

32:42

It said, if you are a contractor

32:44

and you work with the state, from

32:46

now on, you have to sign a

32:48

pledge that you do

32:50

not believe in and will not participate in a

32:53

boycott of the state of Israel. And

32:55

I interviewed this woman and profiled her once. She

32:58

was this speech pathologist in Austin, Texas. She had,

33:00

was her specialty, was she worked with children who

33:02

had speech sustainability? What does that mean, a boycott?

33:04

So you can't refuse to buy Israeli products? Yeah,

33:06

like there's a movement, like, you know, when the

33:08

1980s, there was a movement to divest from South

33:11

Africa, to boycott South Africa, not to go to

33:13

South Africa, not to buy its goods in order

33:15

to bring down the apartheid regime. So there's a

33:17

similar movement called the Boycott, Divestment and Sanxious Movement.

33:19

Like, let's not invest in Israel. Let's not go

33:22

to Israel. Let's not support its products in order

33:24

to end the occupation and give the Palestinians a

33:26

state. In the United

33:28

States, in 24 different states, there

33:31

was a, there's a law that

33:33

says, you cannot get a contract with

33:35

the state unless you

33:37

now sign this pledge saying you don't support this boycott

33:39

and will not participate in it. Do you have to

33:41

sign a loyalty pledge to a foreign country? Only one,

33:44

this is the amazing thing. You're allowed to boycott any

33:46

other country in the world, including your own. You can

33:48

boycott Peru, you can

33:50

boycott South Korea. You can say, I'm not

33:53

gonna buy Norwegian good. You can boycott South

33:55

Dakota. Well, that's the other thing. Or Wisconsin.

33:57

Andrew Cuomo, who did this by executive order.

34:00

said that anyone who boycotts Israel has no right

34:02

to have a contract. He wrote a Washington Post

34:04

op ad. The headline was, if you boycott Israel,

34:06

we'll boycott you. Now, six

34:09

months before that and six months after

34:12

by executive order, he required state employees

34:14

to boycott the state of North Carolina

34:16

and then the state of Indiana in

34:18

protest of their bathroom bills that they

34:21

enacted for, you know, if you, you

34:23

have to use the bathroom of your

34:25

biological choice. So not only are you

34:27

allowed to boycott your own country and

34:30

harm economically the citizens of other states.

34:33

Andrew Cuomo actually ordered boycotts of

34:35

American states while at the same

34:38

time banning anybody from boycotting

34:40

the state of Israel. It's a single

34:42

country that has all kinds of special

34:44

privileges and rights. And let me

34:46

just tell you another thing. Do you think they would

34:48

say anything about this? Well, I was writing about all

34:50

the time, but a few people cared. Finally, those cases

34:52

got brought to the courts and thankfully courts have overwhelmingly

34:54

almost unanimously said, this is a great violation of the

34:56

first amendment are being struck down. But

34:59

the, I'll tell you something so amazing.

35:01

This just kind of encapsulates it for me. So Ben

35:03

Shapiro, a

35:06

good friend of yours and

35:08

a long time political

35:10

ally. Obviously one of the main

35:14

kind of unifying views of conservatives is

35:16

that we shouldn't have job sell-aside for

35:18

certain groups. We shouldn't have, we shouldn't

35:20

judge people based on the color of

35:22

their skin or their ethnic group when

35:24

hiring or their religion or it

35:26

should be a meritocracy or can you do

35:28

the job best? Exactly. So Palantir,

35:31

which is an intelligence

35:33

corporation that was started by

35:35

Peter Thiel, and that has

35:37

all kinds of contracts with

35:39

the CIA, the Defense Department,

35:42

but it's run by Jewish

35:45

vocal supporters of Israel announced

35:47

in October or November

35:50

after hearing all the stuff about Jewish students being

35:52

discriminated against because of the views or whatever. And

35:54

it was never really Jewish students. It was pro-Israel

35:57

students, students who support the war because a lot

35:59

of these protests. have overwhelming

36:01

numbers of Jews inside these

36:03

protests. Protests. Yeah, so it's

36:05

not a hostility toward Jews, a hostility toward

36:07

anyone who supports this war that the protest

36:09

engines. Palantir announced that they

36:11

were creating 180 new jobs that

36:15

were available exclusively for

36:18

Jewish students on campus who felt like they

36:20

were being made uncomfortable. It was 180 jobs.

36:23

No Christians could apply, no Muslims could apply,

36:26

no atheists could apply, no black people, only

36:28

for Jews. Ben Shapiro saw

36:30

that and he went

36:33

onto Twitter and above that Palantir announcement

36:35

said something like, wow, this

36:37

is fantastic. And then

36:39

after his own followers spent the day saying, what

36:41

do you mean? This is exactly the thing you're

36:43

supposed to oppose. At the end of the day,

36:45

he was kind of forced to say, yeah, you know what? Maybe

36:48

it would be best if it

36:50

were open to everybody. But then like, what's

36:52

the point of the announcement? He would never

36:54

have commented on it. Obviously he was happy

36:56

about that. Barry Weiss, same thing, you know,

36:58

Ms. like anti-woke. This

37:00

is identity politics is pure as it

37:02

gets, creating 180 jobs solely for Jewish

37:04

students. And it's, I think, very hard

37:06

to make the case that Jewish Americans

37:08

are like an endangered or marginalized minority

37:11

in the United States. Very, very hard

37:13

to make that case. When she saw

37:15

that announcement, she put this like very

37:17

excitement, wow, on top of it. And

37:19

so you see this like utter and

37:21

complete abandonment of what these people have

37:23

been claiming were their principles, not

37:25

even in defense of their own country

37:27

or people in their own country, but this foreign

37:29

government in Tel Aviv. And,

37:32

you know, when

37:34

you watch something like that and you see

37:36

a political movement expose itself as a complete

37:38

fraud. Now I should say there are a

37:41

lot of exceptions to like hardcore conservatives, like

37:43

Chris Rufo has often condemned some of these

37:46

bills you have too, Candace Owens has too, Tom

37:49

Massey in Congress has been like incredibly steadfast to the

37:51

point where A. Pack tried to take him out and

37:54

failed. He just won his primary with like 76. But

37:57

overwhelmingly the pro-Israel sector of

37:59

the American- right has

38:01

proven itself to be such utter and

38:03

complete frauds about virtually every value they

38:05

spent the last decade pretending to champion

38:07

and believe in and it's been sickening

38:09

to watch. The reason it's

38:11

scary is again

38:15

has nothing to do with Israel at

38:17

all about which I have like less

38:19

emotion than most Americans apparently. I

38:22

just don't care that much either way but

38:24

what's scary is if there's a an

38:26

alignment between left and right which is

38:28

to say everyone within institutional power on

38:32

the question of speech in other words if you say something I

38:34

don't like I can put you in jail then

38:37

it's a totalitarian country. By definition.

38:39

By definition. There is no totalitarian

38:42

country in history that has

38:44

offered free speech and conversely there's no totalitarian

38:46

country in history that has refrained from using

38:48

censorship which is one of the reasons why

38:50

it's so bizarre that if you now wave

38:52

the free speech banner you're accused that code

38:54

is like fascist it's like show me the

38:57

fascist country that actually offers free speech and

38:59

that doesn't use censorship it's like a hallmark

39:01

of fascism to do what you're doing but

39:04

you know I do well I know

39:06

and I've been attacked recently for just

39:08

asking questions on by the right I've

39:10

been on the right my whole life

39:12

like since childhood and just

39:14

asking oh you're just asking questions like yeah

39:18

you're that's kind of like important but here's the other

39:20

thing that's my job this is the other amazing part

39:23

of it is like you know very well that

39:26

under Trump and I think this is one

39:29

of the things that Donald Trump has has

39:31

done that has been very positive is he

39:33

dragged the Republican Party away from the kind

39:35

of buschaney neocon orthodoxy and even like going

39:37

back to the kind of Cold War of

39:39

endless wars and stuff by saying

39:42

like we shouldn't be focusing on all these

39:44

other countries and we should be focused on

39:46

our own citizens especially because they're not doing

39:48

very well by every metric right every city

39:50

is filled with like addicts and communities that

39:52

are being devastated and falling infrastructure you compare

39:54

the infrastructure of the United States you

39:57

know every time I come here I like come

39:59

to an airport see roads and you go to Asia

40:02

or places in the Gulf

40:04

or even in Western

40:06

Europe, the difference is so obvious. It looks like

40:08

it's a crumbling country on every level and we're

40:10

spending all this money to benefit

40:12

other countries. So the Republican

40:15

Party has basically rebranded as America

40:17

First based on the idea that

40:19

our primary priority should be the people of our country.

40:21

I can't tell you how many Republican

40:24

members of Congress or Republican journalists

40:26

or pundits I've interviewed over the last two and

40:28

a half years who say, we

40:31

can't be financing the war in Ukraine because we

40:33

don't have the money to be

40:35

financing other countries wars nor should we be doing

40:37

that. Our focus should be on our own country

40:39

and every single time well before even October 7th,

40:41

I would ask them, does that also apply to

40:43

Israel? And they would kind of stammer and stutter

40:45

and not want to say it. But

40:48

now, you

40:50

say like, you don't care about Israel and

40:52

I totally understand that. The problem though is

40:54

that Israel has received far more aid from

40:56

the United States than any other country by

40:58

far over the last three to four decades.

41:00

We pay for their military. We pay for

41:02

every time there's a new war, we send

41:04

them billions and billions of more on top

41:06

of the $4 billion a year that Obama

41:08

negotiated with Netanyahu. Not only do

41:10

that, but we arm them, the bombs that they

41:12

use to kill gods and civilians come from the

41:15

United States. And I think worst of all, we

41:17

isolate ourselves from the entire rest of the world.

41:19

Do you know how many votes there have been

41:21

at the UN over the past seven months where

41:23

the entire world is on one side and Israel

41:25

and United States stand alone on the

41:27

other with a couple of

41:30

those tiny little countries that we often

41:32

bribe like Micronesia and Marshall Islands, the

41:34

part of the coalition of the world.

41:36

It's only called Micronesia. Yeah, exactly. Micro.

41:38

It's like, so it's

41:40

also just the standing in the world

41:42

like our sacrificing of soft power. So we

41:45

give up so much for

41:47

Israel in so many other ways that if you're an

41:49

American you have to care about it even if you

41:51

don't want to. One of the stories we did- Well,

41:53

what I meant was I don't, I'm feeling emotional. I

41:55

just have gut level affection for it because I've had

41:57

such a nice time there and I'm- like

42:00

so many Israelis personally and know a lot.

42:03

And I just like, there's nothing more

42:05

wonderful than having dinner in Jerusalem on a summer night.

42:07

It's just, so I have a lot of affection. I

42:09

guess that's what I'm saying. So I'm not sort of

42:11

animated by, you know,

42:14

any anything really. I'm just like trying to,

42:16

I live here, so do my

42:18

kids, so did my ancestors. It's like, I just care

42:20

about this country. And if

42:23

you're changing my life or stripping my rights

42:25

from me that we've had for 250

42:27

years on behalf of any

42:29

other place, you are my enemy.

42:32

Like it's just that simple. You are my

42:34

enemy. I mean, I don't know what to

42:36

say. I don't want even to even have

42:38

this conversation. Well, that's the amazing thing is

42:40

that the devotion to Israel is so great

42:43

and so incomparable devotion of any other foreign

42:45

country, that it's to the point

42:48

that their supporters, supporters of

42:50

Israel are willing to deconstruct and erode

42:52

and sacrifice the core basic rights that

42:54

as Americans, by definition, we're supposed to

42:56

enjoy. So I won't accept that. I

42:58

won't accept that. But that is what's

43:00

happening. This is my country. I'm from

43:02

here. I'm gonna die here. I will

43:04

not accept that. And I don't care

43:06

what you call me. You can't

43:08

take away my right to say what I

43:10

think. That is the foundational right in

43:13

the United States of America. And it's the only thing that

43:15

prevents us from becoming, you

43:18

know, Stalinist, period. Who

43:20

came up with the idea that you

43:22

only vote in November in elections? No,

43:25

you vote every single day with

43:27

your time and your money. You

43:29

show your preferences. You put

43:31

your support behind things you believe in and

43:33

you withhold support from things you don't. You

43:35

can do that with your cell phone, by

43:37

the way. There's a wireless

43:39

company that if you're not on board with

43:41

what's going on in this country at the

43:43

highest levels, you can make

43:45

your preference known. It's called Pure Talk. It's

43:49

probably something you should consider. It

43:51

is proudly veteran led. It

43:53

is led by veterans of the US

43:55

military and it supports American jobs by

43:58

their customers. All of them are right here

44:00

in the United States. What other company can

44:02

say that? By the way, not many. It

44:04

proudly supports great charities, charities that

44:06

you would support yourself, like

44:08

America's Warrior Partnership. Every

44:11

dollar you spend, some of that money goes to

44:13

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44:15

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44:18

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44:20

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44:25

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44:30

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that is puretalk.com/Tucker to switch your

44:56

cell phone service to a company

44:59

you can be proud to do

45:01

business with. Well,

45:13

I remember you and I talked about this on your

45:15

show, I think three, four

45:18

weeks, maybe after October 7th, when all

45:20

these calls for restrictions on speech

45:22

were starting to emerge. And one of the

45:24

things you said, which I remember, by

45:27

some weird inversion or collection

45:30

of various events, it

45:32

has been the American right over the last decade that

45:34

has been defending the cause of free speech, which

45:37

is absolutely true. It's one of the reasons why I've

45:39

had more alignment with the right than with the left,

45:41

because that's a primary cause of mine, always has been,

45:43

always will be. And

45:45

you said if the right now starts abandoning

45:48

that and advocating for censorship, because now

45:50

the views that are being targeted are

45:52

no longer ones they love, but ones

45:55

they hate, namely criticism of Israel, the

45:58

right will never have credibility ever again. to

46:00

pretend that it believes in free speech. Because if you

46:03

go to North Korea and you praise

46:05

the government, you're not gonna be bothered

46:07

at all. You can go to any

46:09

country, any tyrannical country, if

46:11

you express the views that people

46:14

in power wanna hear, you're

46:16

always going to enjoy the blessings

46:18

of free speech. Free speech is

46:20

for dissidents, free speech is for

46:22

people who have opposing views, minority

46:24

views. And so to watch the

46:27

right wave the banner of

46:29

free speech because it was conservative speech being targeted,

46:31

everyone will always be in favor of free speech

46:33

in defense of their own views. The only real

46:35

task for the authenticity of a free speech advocate

46:38

is when it comes time to defend free

46:40

speech for the ideas you hate most, which

46:42

is why what the ACLU did was so

46:45

admirable. I search out on purpose the cases

46:47

where the views I hate most are being

46:50

assaulted and censored to defend free speech there,

46:52

because that's the only way you can really

46:54

defend that value in a meaningful way. And

46:56

defend your country. Like what does it mean

46:58

to defend the United States? It means to

47:00

defend the Bill of Rights, the thing that

47:02

makes this country, it's on a market economy.

47:05

Our system of government is based on the idea

47:07

that you have rights you were born with, that

47:09

were not conferred to you by government and cannot

47:12

be taken away by government. And that's the unique

47:14

idea, that is the idea. And if there's any

47:16

idea worth defending, it's that. And if that goes

47:18

away and people who have more

47:21

powerful computing power or more

47:23

money or access

47:25

to the levers of power can

47:28

use violence in a state sanctioned way, if they can

47:30

stop you from saying what you think, if they can

47:33

force you to believe certain things, we're

47:35

just done, we're done like that. You're

47:38

not allowed to wreck my country, actually. That's

47:40

how I feel about it. Well, and also,

47:42

we were talking about Snowden earlier. I mean,

47:44

one of the real cause that

47:46

motivated over Snowden was not

47:49

so much the right to privacy. Obviously that was

47:51

a big part of opposing this balance state. What

47:53

it really was, was preserving

47:55

this incredibly new and powerful

47:58

innovation that had emerged in

48:00

his adolescence that he

48:02

became very enamored with, which was the

48:05

internet. The internet is a remarkable weapon

48:08

for citizens to communicate with one

48:10

another, to spread information, to organize

48:12

without the ability of state and

48:14

corporate power to intervene and control

48:16

it. And he saw the degradation

48:18

of the free internet, which was always the

48:20

principle. You go back to the mid nineties

48:23

with the proclamations about the importance of the

48:25

internet was always a free internet. Keep your

48:27

hands off the internet. That was the whole

48:29

point. They degraded it into the, the, the

48:31

one of the most powerful systems of surveillance

48:33

ever created. But this

48:35

cause of free speech really means now mostly

48:37

free speech on in the place that where

48:40

we communicate most, which is the internet. That

48:43

was why the Biden administration systemic attempt

48:45

to force these big tech companies

48:47

to remove the scent that two

48:49

separate courts have now concluded were one of the

48:52

gravest salts on the first amendment was so offensive

48:54

to me. But the similar

48:56

thing, it comes from the other direction. And

48:59

if you take away the right

49:01

of free speech, it not only means

49:03

it doesn't only mean that people who

49:05

dissent lose the ability to express

49:07

that dissent without being punished. What it means even

49:09

more seriously, and I think more destructive with that.

49:11

We don't often think about is

49:13

that it enables power centers to

49:16

propagandize without challenge. We drown in

49:18

a closed system of

49:20

information that power centers approve of because

49:22

they've eliminated all these other ideas is

49:24

disinformation or hate speech or incitement to

49:26

violence or whatever theories they invent to

49:29

erode free speech. And then

49:31

we're hopeless. We're totally impotent. Every other

49:33

right we have doesn't matter because that's

49:35

the that's our minds are controlled. Our

49:37

mind what we believe is manipulated. So

49:40

we'll be obedient, we'll be conformist. Those

49:42

other rights won't be necessary because we'll

49:44

be good conformist, obedient citizens who don't

49:47

realize how propagandized we are. And

49:49

that is the what's at stake. And

49:51

so when you see any group of

49:54

people, especially ones who claim to be

49:56

believing free speech, suddenly abandon that and

49:58

start cheering for censorship as a. framework,

50:01

it's incredibly dangerous because even as a

50:03

self interested matter, you know that this

50:05

system will eventually be used against you,

50:07

even if it's not at the moment.

50:10

And conservatives of all people should know how

50:12

easily it will be weaponized against them. And

50:14

yet they're cheering for the very systems that

50:16

they've spent a decade now

50:18

claiming to hate along with all these

50:21

scripts about everyone's a racist who disagrees

50:23

with me and no, this isn't free

50:25

speech. This is hate speech, you know,

50:27

all or hate hate speech hoax hate

50:29

hate crimes hoaxes like Jesse Smollett hate

50:32

crimes hoaxes like Barry Weissesite pushed this

50:34

idea that there are Jewish students walking around

50:37

and suddenly being attacked by violent hordes of

50:39

anti Semitic mobs and being stabbed in the

50:41

eye with Palestinian flags. And it all began

50:43

with this one woman who is a longtime

50:45

Israel activist who claimed that it happened. And

50:47

she went all over the media claiming I

50:49

was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian

50:51

flag. There was nothing wrong with that all

50:54

because it didn't happen. A someone waving a

50:56

flag was

50:58

walking past her and it brushed by her. And

51:00

that was a hate crimes hoax. And then Mike

51:03

Johnson, the speaker of the house went two days

51:05

later, the Holocaust Museum and turned that one hate

51:07

crimes hoax that this one singular incident said, we

51:11

are now a country where Jewish students cannot walk out on

51:13

the street without being

51:15

endangered of being stabbed in the eye

51:17

with a Palestinian flag. So every single

51:19

component of left

51:21

wing culture that the American right has

51:23

been here can write has been heaping

51:26

scorn on and viciously mocking and deriding

51:28

for a decade are now they're defining

51:30

beliefs and tactics in defense of this

51:32

foreign country. That it's so interesting. So

51:34

you mentioned Barry Weiss. Barry

51:37

Weisses, I think pretty popular. I have

51:39

strong feelings about Barry Weiss either way,

51:41

but she seems very popular on the

51:43

right and some parts of the right.

51:45

So here's someone who's, you

51:48

know, a liberal who's opposed to

51:50

free speech and as a liar.

51:52

How did she all of a

51:54

sudden become, she's everything, conservatives are

51:56

supposed to dislike or oppose, maybe

51:59

not personally. charming actually, but like

52:02

how did she become like

52:04

a darling of conservatives? Well, I

52:06

think we've talked about this before,

52:08

but Barry Weiss got hired

52:11

away from the Wall Street Journal by

52:13

the New York Times on the same day

52:15

that they also hired Brett Stevens away from

52:17

the Wall Street Journal. And all the liberals

52:20

were focused on and obsessed with Brett Stevens.

52:22

They were all up in arms and angry

52:24

that Brett Stevens was a climate denier and

52:26

now he was going to have the space

52:28

as a New York Times columnist. But I

52:30

was trying to get everyone to understand that

52:32

the far more significant hire, the far more

52:34

consequential person was Barry Weiss because I had

52:36

seen her. She's extremely shrewd. She's very cunning.

52:39

She understands how media works. She's very

52:41

smart. And I know

52:43

I've gotten to know her personally and

52:45

she's impossible to dislike as a person.

52:48

She's like incredibly charming and I

52:51

think like genuinely compassionate. Like

52:53

you cannot dislike her as

52:55

a person. And that's an

52:57

important weapon. But one

53:00

of the reasons why she became a folk hero is

53:02

because she resigned from the New York Times was such

53:04

a kind of denunciation of the New York Times, like

53:06

ideological dog when there was a lot of truth to

53:08

that for sure. But then, you know,

53:11

if you actually look at, and I think

53:13

this is one of the things that I've

53:16

only become, I've only come to understand recently

53:18

is that there are a lot of, there's

53:20

been a lot of focus over the last,

53:22

say, decade under the banner of anti-woke. And

53:24

that's really Barry Weiss's kind of brand is

53:26

like, I'm against woke

53:28

ideology. I'm against media capture by

53:31

ideology. And there

53:33

was all this fixation on college campuses.

53:35

And a lot of times people are

53:37

like, why are 40 year old pundits

53:40

and journalists constantly talking about what 19

53:42

and 20 year olds are doing on college campuses?

53:45

Like almost not just disproportionate, but a

53:47

little bit creepy, especially Ivy

53:49

League college. Like, actually who gives a

53:51

shit in a country that's dying of

53:53

fentanyl ODs where people are so unhappy

53:55

that life expectancy is declining. Like we're

53:57

spending a lot of money. a lot

53:59

of time talking about Columbia students. Exactly.

54:02

And like, you can say, well, those

54:04

are the future leaders and it's true. I guess. But like

54:06

19 and 20, you know how fucking stupid I was when

54:08

I was 19 and 20? Not

54:10

as stupid as I was. Like the kind of idealism

54:12

and naivete and just like my view of the world

54:14

was so simply because that's part of being young. Like

54:16

you kind of want that youthful energy. But

54:19

the real reason is that

54:22

the thing that is

54:24

Barry Weiss's obviously animated cause is the

54:26

cause of Zionism in Israel. That's I

54:28

don't think she would even deny that.

54:31

And there has been this fear on the part

54:33

of the Israeli government and the pro Israel movement

54:35

that the greatest danger of the Israeli cause is

54:38

faces is the activism of students

54:40

on college campuses where it's the

54:42

only place where robust criticism of

54:44

Israel is tolerated. And

54:46

it's the movement, as we were describing, where

54:48

this boycott, divestment and sanction movement has taken

54:50

hold. And that was in part the

54:53

thing that brought down apartheid South Africa, which is

54:55

a very close ally of both Israel and the

54:57

United States. And they were petrified

54:59

that if that took hold, then that would become

55:01

a very effective movement against Israel,

55:03

weakening its position, weakening its standing in

55:05

the world. And so there were all

55:07

kinds of strategic memos of saying we

55:09

need to target college campuses and make

55:11

sure that this is that this climate

55:14

is transformed. And the

55:16

whole reason why people like Barry Weiss

55:18

and Bill Ackman, who uses

55:20

his billionaire status suddenly to become political

55:23

activists, focus so much on college campuses,

55:25

wanting professors, wanting a university president inspired.

55:27

Bill Ackman led the way of saying

55:30

any college student who signs an anti-Israel

55:32

petition will be permanently blackballed and all

55:35

his billionaire friends and hedge fund managers

55:37

and corporate CEOs and people at Palantir joined

55:39

in is because they

55:42

identified college campuses as the place

55:45

where Israel criticism was bubbling over

55:47

and was really being active. It's

55:49

the same reason that TikTok

55:51

got banned. You know, this TikTok ban, if

55:54

you think about it, I thought it was because of

55:56

China. No. OK, so I'm just kidding. Right. I know.

55:59

So. When it was first

56:01

introduced, that was the idea, right? We can't have

56:03

the Chinese Communist Party gathering

56:06

our data as though all

56:08

of that data is not available on the

56:11

open market. There was a big scandal that

56:13

the CIA and intelligence communities were buying on

56:15

the open market, huge amounts of data about

56:17

American citizens. They're listening to us on this

56:19

right now. Everything is tracked. Why would China

56:21

need to create an app to get all

56:23

this buying information that they can buy from

56:25

anywhere else? At

56:28

the same time, the people who run TikTok

56:30

are pure capitalists. The guy who's the CEO

56:32

was born in Singapore. He went to the

56:34

London School of Economics. Then

56:36

he went to Harvard. He worked

56:38

for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, a

56:40

classic. All he cares about is

56:42

money. This idea of banning TikTok

56:45

has been around for four years

56:47

and it couldn't get past. It

56:49

was considered way too extreme, banning

56:51

American citizens who voluntarily

56:53

choose to use this app to

56:55

find communion, to spread ideas, to

56:57

make themselves heard, to read news,

57:00

taking that away from them or forcing

57:02

a sale was considered way too extreme.

57:04

Yet suddenly, after October 7th, instantly an

57:07

overwhelming bipartisan consensus formed in order to

57:09

ban it. It ran through Congress and

57:11

President Biden signed it. Why? You go

57:13

and ask any one of the sponsors

57:16

of this TikTok ban why it finally

57:18

got enough people to support it after

57:20

spending so many years not even

57:23

near a majority. They will all

57:25

tell you that the reason is

57:27

because they became convinced that there

57:29

was far too much Israel criticism

57:31

being permitted on TikTok. That

57:33

was the issue that became the tipping

57:35

point for banning an app that 180

57:38

million Americans, a

57:40

third of the country voluntarily choose to use.

57:42

It was because of the Israel issue. And

57:45

I think we're

57:47

required so often to tiptoe around this.

57:50

You get accused of pushing anti-Semitic

57:53

tropes that Jews are behind everything and have much

57:55

power. I just want to live in a free

57:57

country. Just leave me alone. Yeah, just want to

57:59

live in a free country. That's also it's not

58:02

just I don't care. It's not

58:04

just American Jews who are inculcated from

58:06

birth with the idea that they have

58:08

particularly stuff with like evangelicals is people

58:11

in the national security state like this

58:13

country has such a special status and

58:15

hold and it's not me like speculating

58:17

that Israel was the reason the people

58:20

who got the bill through Congress say

58:22

that the tipping point was that all

58:24

these members of the Democratic Party who

58:26

previously resistant to banning TikTok became convinced

58:29

that that was one of the major

58:31

sources that was allowing Israel criticism and

58:33

pro-Palatinian speech, meaning like lots of videos

58:35

circulating about, you know, Gazan children dying.

58:38

They wanted to ban the app or force it to

58:40

be sold to a an American

58:42

conglomerate that would be far more susceptible to

58:45

pressure from the administration like

58:47

Google and Facebook have been to censor it

58:49

that that was the reason they felt like

58:51

the reason why young people turn against Israel

58:53

because they were getting too much information on

58:56

TikTok and it was too free. That

58:59

should alarm everybody. Well, it's it's

59:02

again, if you're an American and

59:04

you just want to live in a free country,

59:06

that's completely unacceptable. That's like there's no

59:08

way to describe that as anything

59:11

but a state

59:13

clampdown on free speech, which is not

59:15

allowed in the United States. That's totalitarian,

59:17

just super simple. I'm

59:20

really struck by how non-obvious that seems

59:22

to be to everybody. And I'm wondering

59:24

like, where's the you don't have a

59:26

Bill of Rights. You don't have a

59:28

free country unless someone's fighting for it.

59:31

And I don't see anyone with power fighting for it. So

59:34

no, I mean, well, it's so interesting. I mean, first

59:36

of all, I think we have to acknowledge the

59:38

reason, you know,

59:41

the founders, when they created the Bill of Rights, guaranteed

59:43

rights that they knew would otherwise be vulnerable

59:45

if they weren't guaranteed. Well, right. Like that's

59:48

the whole point. And the

59:51

very first right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and

59:53

the First Amendment is the right of free speech. That

59:55

was for a reason they were kind of children of

59:57

the Enlightenment, the idea that there's no more. ability

1:00:00

for us to put our faith in centralized authority

1:00:02

to decree truth. We were endowed with the capacity

1:00:04

of reason and we're supposed to figure that out

1:00:07

for ourselves without being... It's so

1:00:09

foundational to every right. Because you are not

1:00:11

a slave. That is the marker of being

1:00:13

a human being. The right

1:00:15

to think what you want and to

1:00:17

say what you want. If you don't have that

1:00:19

right, you are not fully human. Right.

1:00:21

And I feel that way as a Christian. I'm just

1:00:23

gonna say I think God created people. There's inherent value

1:00:26

in every person and that's

1:00:28

why it's so important to me. It's actually bigger

1:00:30

than America. It's like are we gonna treat people

1:00:32

like human beings with dignity or we're gonna treat

1:00:34

them like objects? It's one

1:00:36

of the things that ultimately distinguishes us

1:00:38

from other animal species. Exactly. The

1:00:41

capacity to reason, to engage in critical

1:00:43

analysis. And so, but

1:00:46

conversely, the reason that right needed to

1:00:48

be guaranteed is because we are all

1:00:50

tempted to look at the views we

1:00:52

find most threatening and to hate and to want those

1:00:54

banned and to kind of invent theories

1:00:57

as to why they should be even if we

1:00:59

believe that we're supporters of

1:01:01

free speech. Like somehow these views that

1:01:03

we hate most and find most threatening,

1:01:06

those are something different. And

1:01:08

you see the left having done that for

1:01:10

the past 10 years by claiming that people

1:01:12

who question gender ideology or inciting genocide against

1:01:14

trans people or people who are opposed to

1:01:18

racial reforms or affirmative action or people

1:01:20

who hate black people, people opposed to

1:01:22

immigration, hate non-white people. So this is

1:01:24

how they created these justifications

1:01:27

for supporting censorship and now the American right. I

1:01:29

don't want to say now in the sense that

1:01:31

they suddenly started because like I said, it's been

1:01:33

predating October 7th for a long time. But that's

1:01:36

you know, I don't think it's like so conscious

1:01:38

that oh, we're political centers. I think they view

1:01:40

Israel criticism as very dangerous and

1:01:42

very threatening and they don't fight the human temptation

1:01:44

that we all have to

1:01:47

want the ideas that we most hate to

1:01:49

kind of be outwinding. If you cared about

1:01:51

your own country, which

1:01:53

you run, which you run, you have

1:01:55

an obligation to care about your country since it's your job

1:01:58

to administer and run the country. and preserve

1:02:01

what we have for our children, you

1:02:04

can't reach these conclusions. Like if you

1:02:06

are an office holder in the United

1:02:09

States, you have one job and that's

1:02:11

to preserve and improve your country. And

1:02:14

if that's not your main driving

1:02:16

desire, then

1:02:19

you're betraying your country. Yeah,

1:02:21

and I mean, I think first of all, we

1:02:23

are all inculcated with the idea from

1:02:25

birth, I know I was, that

1:02:28

the United States is the greatest country in the world,

1:02:30

it represents freedom. I mean, we were born in the

1:02:32

Cold War, where it was really important to believe that,

1:02:34

but even after, and we were given explanations as to

1:02:36

why that was true. It wasn't just a declaration. And

1:02:39

like one of the reasons was that we have freedoms

1:02:41

guaranteed that other countries don't. That was free country. Do

1:02:43

you remember when people would say? Exactly, look, and we

1:02:45

were taught to revere the constitution and the Bill of

1:02:47

Rights and all of the values that are represented. So

1:02:50

if you're willing to abandon those and

1:02:52

sacrifice those, and this is the thing,

1:02:55

it would, like the left, the

1:02:57

American left has been accused of being,

1:03:00

I think quite validly, embracing

1:03:02

censorship, but at least they're

1:03:04

doing it, I don't mean to justify it, I'm just

1:03:07

saying, distinguishing it, at least they're doing it in

1:03:09

defense of what they consider to be other

1:03:11

Americans who live here, minority groups who live

1:03:13

here, and they think censorship is important to

1:03:16

protect the ability of other Americans

1:03:18

who are part of minority groups not to

1:03:20

be endangered. It's a totally

1:03:22

misguided idea. They exaggerate the extent to

1:03:24

which everyone's being endangered. I think racial relations in the

1:03:26

United States are better than they've ever been, but

1:03:29

that's at least their idea. What the

1:03:31

censorship we're talking about now is designed

1:03:34

to do is to sacrifice the rights

1:03:36

of American citizens in order to benefit

1:03:38

this foreign country to

1:03:40

which people in the United States have,

1:03:43

obviously, more loyalty than they do to their own

1:03:45

country. And I don't just mean American Jews, I

1:03:47

mean a lot of evangelicals, I mean a lot

1:03:50

of non-security people, and that

1:03:52

is the part that is so bizarre and

1:03:54

disturbing that the reverence for this foreign country,

1:03:56

I mean, you could

1:03:58

say anything you want about. American leaders,

1:04:01

about the leaders of your own country.

1:04:03

You can say they're evil, they're criminal,

1:04:05

they're corrupt, they're genocidal. Yeah, you could

1:04:07

do any of that. You

1:04:10

cannot do that about the leaders of this one

1:04:12

foreign country. You can have leaders about any other

1:04:14

country you want, just not the leaders of this

1:04:16

one foreign country. And like I said,

1:04:18

I think the time to stop

1:04:21

tiptoeing around that has long passed.

1:04:30

Well, I agree with that. And I say

1:04:32

that as someone who spent, I don't know, a couple

1:04:34

of decades just sort of avoiding the topic just because

1:04:37

I mean, almost all my friends

1:04:39

love Israel. I have no problem with that

1:04:41

at all. Great, love Israel. I mean, it

1:04:43

doesn't bother me at all. As I've said three

1:04:45

times and I mean it, I just have great

1:04:47

affection for the country and the people who

1:04:49

live there. I'm like hardly anti-Israel, like not

1:04:51

even a little bit. I

1:04:53

just care about my country. And all of

1:04:55

a sudden, there's like such a massive threat

1:04:58

to our foundational rights, stemming from

1:05:00

this issue. And I think, of

1:05:02

course, you face all sorts of, I mean,

1:05:04

I've had people I know and

1:05:06

really like and have known for many decades,

1:05:09

call me or text me, you know, and really attack

1:05:13

me actually. And I say exactly what I'm

1:05:15

saying to you because I mean it. Let

1:05:17

me ask you, I perceive, and I'm wondering

1:05:19

if you do. I

1:05:22

do think like for the last, say, five or

1:05:24

six years when you had your Fox News eight

1:05:26

o'clock show, I think it's

1:05:28

not controversial to say that you were, if not,

1:05:32

I think I would say the most

1:05:34

popular and influential voice in American conservative

1:05:37

politics, maybe second only to Donald Trump.

1:05:41

And I've seen that for a long time. Only

1:05:44

in the past seven months when

1:05:46

you started expressing some dissent on this particular issue,

1:05:48

and it wasn't even anti-Israel. It was just, hey,

1:05:50

why are we doing all this for this foreign

1:05:52

country? Something you've been saying about Ukraine and many

1:05:55

other countries. Is there

1:05:57

a real animus for the

1:05:59

first time? among certain factions of the

1:06:02

conservative movement in the United States, including very

1:06:04

prominent people, not just to criticize you, but

1:06:06

to try and exclude you to try

1:06:08

and destroy your reputation. Like we were talking about

1:06:10

that fake report that you had launched a new

1:06:13

show on Russian TV. And I watched the people

1:06:15

who were celebrating that and spreading that. They were

1:06:17

people who a year ago would never have dared

1:06:19

criticize you. This one issue, and same

1:06:22

with Candace Owens, who was

1:06:24

incredibly popular among conservatives as well. And you can point

1:06:26

to other people too, it's

1:06:29

this one issue that can just

1:06:32

be the ultimate wedge. And I'm wondering if you

1:06:34

perceive that. I really

1:06:36

try not to think about it. I think I

1:06:39

don't want to become angry at all.

1:06:41

And I think that just being as

1:06:43

honest as I can be, I do

1:06:45

think, and I have noticed this, if

1:06:48

you start focusing on the Israel question,

1:06:50

people get really angry about this

1:06:52

stuff, really angry, and it ticks over their brains. And

1:06:54

I just don't want that. I'm a, I

1:06:57

think a fundamentally happy person. I have a

1:06:59

wonderful family and wonderful friends, and I live

1:07:01

in a wonderful place. And I don't want

1:07:03

to focus. I don't want to go crazy

1:07:05

and be like mad. And

1:07:07

I also don't want the concerns of a foreign country

1:07:09

or the arguments about that country to define my views.

1:07:12

I care about where I live in

1:07:15

my family and preserving what

1:07:17

I grew up with. And I don't mean

1:07:19

money. I mean, Your

1:07:22

values and your rights and your structure. 100%.

1:07:24

Exactly. So I just have

1:07:27

really tried to ignore it and tried not to

1:07:29

get involved. And I know that people love

1:07:32

Israel so much, which does

1:07:34

not bother me at all, but

1:07:36

that it makes them super emotional, whatever. But when

1:07:38

you start to tell me that

1:07:40

as an American, I can't say certain things in

1:07:42

my country, I won't

1:07:44

have it. I just won't have it. So I

1:07:47

just really feel like I was pushed into saying

1:07:49

something. And I also have a special concern for

1:07:52

Christians in the Middle East. And so I've

1:07:55

only done one interview in my

1:07:57

life Right. That challenged any. Which

1:08:00

was about that pastor in the West Bank. Yeah, well, the pastor, I

1:08:02

know nothing about him. And, you

1:08:05

know, I'm not like carrying water for him. I just

1:08:07

think it's a totally fair question to say like, well,

1:08:09

how are Christians doing in the Middle East? And

1:08:12

the answer is not well at all. And maybe we should

1:08:14

hear from them. That was my

1:08:16

only agenda right there. And all

1:08:18

of a sudden, like, you know,

1:08:20

I get attacked personally as some sort

1:08:23

of crazed Nazi or something. That

1:08:25

was too unreasonable for me. But even then I was

1:08:27

like, I'm not going to engage. I don't want to

1:08:29

have these arguments. It's not worth it. I've got a

1:08:31

million different interests. This is not a great interest of

1:08:33

mine. And as I've said

1:08:35

five times, I just don't care that much. But

1:08:38

then the speech thing, when you're wrecking my

1:08:40

country and lying

1:08:42

constantly and encoding those lies into

1:08:44

my laws, then

1:08:47

just it's my patriotic duty to be like, no.

1:08:50

And yes, are you, do you

1:08:52

get destroyed for that? Are people trying to destroy you? Obviously.

1:08:56

And all of a sudden, Barry Weiss, who's like, you know, I've always

1:08:58

gotten along with Barry Weiss. I'm not a get, you know what I

1:09:00

mean? Super charming woman.

1:09:03

I totally agree. Done some lot of things I

1:09:05

like. All of a sudden,

1:09:08

she's like telling Eli Lake, who I know I

1:09:10

went to the same college as him. I've always

1:09:12

liked Eli Lake. Write some hit piece on me

1:09:15

saying that I'm anti-American. And

1:09:17

like Ben Shapiro and the whole of LA

1:09:19

wiring that whole sector. Totally. So I actually,

1:09:22

I was shocked. I don't read anything about myself. I'm a

1:09:24

little bit cut off. So I didn't even know this happened.

1:09:26

Someone sent it to me. Eli Lake attacked you. Eli Lake,

1:09:28

whatever. You know, not a huge part

1:09:31

of my life, but I've never disliked Eli Lake. So

1:09:33

I texted Eli Lake and I was like, you said

1:09:35

I hate America in this piece. You've got my text.

1:09:37

Of course, I texted him. Why don't you

1:09:39

just call me and ask me about views on American? I would just

1:09:41

tell you, because I'm, I think, pretty transparent about my views. No

1:09:44

response. I said, you wrote a piece about

1:09:46

my views when you have my text, when you know me, why don't you

1:09:48

just ask me what my views are? Happy to go on the record and

1:09:50

tell you what I think of America. He

1:09:53

didn't respond. So I hit him again. He's like, yeah, I guess

1:09:55

I should have done that. I'm

1:09:57

like, no, this

1:09:59

is a. I mean, again, I'm not going to dwell

1:10:01

on it or I don't want to wine. I have no cause

1:10:04

for wining at all in my life, period. However,

1:10:07

that's so dishonest that

1:10:11

I just, it's like, oh, that's

1:10:13

how it works. But I think it's such

1:10:15

an important point because, so just let me

1:10:17

say two things on this. One is, I

1:10:20

think the thing that you've talked about most on your

1:10:22

show when you had the Fox show and

1:10:25

probably the thing that I've talked about most too over

1:10:27

say like the last two to three years has been

1:10:29

the war in Ukraine and for very similar reasons, not

1:10:31

because like who runs Eastern

1:10:33

Donbass or the Crimea is of significance

1:10:36

to me. It's really actually not. It's

1:10:38

because our country has become so involved

1:10:40

in it, not just with money, but

1:10:42

with like our weapons and risking escalation

1:10:44

that you feel obligated as an American

1:10:47

given that that's exactly what policymakers in

1:10:49

Washington have decided that our country that

1:10:51

is now our war. And I

1:10:54

think that's the same thing with Israel. It's not like

1:10:56

I have some special, I

1:10:58

mean, I grew up very

1:11:00

much an American Jew, like all four of my grandparents

1:11:02

are Jewish. My parents are Jewish. Most of the people

1:11:04

I went to school with were Jewish. I consider

1:11:07

myself a Jew. I think like Jewish

1:11:09

accomplishment is something to be proud of. I

1:11:12

have family in Israel. I have no animus

1:11:14

at all. It's to me, it's the same

1:11:16

exact policy principles that

1:11:19

led you to criticize the war in Ukraine

1:11:21

that have led me to criticize lots of

1:11:23

wars, including the one in Ukraine. But the

1:11:25

reality is, and I think this is so

1:11:27

important is that it's just is the case.

1:11:29

And as someone who grew up embedded in

1:11:31

American Jewish culture, my

1:11:33

grandmother fled Nazi Germany

1:11:36

in the late 1930s to come to the United

1:11:39

States. She was a Jewish immigrant, literally German Jewish

1:11:41

German immigrant who had a big German accent until

1:11:43

the day she died. And only she

1:11:45

and her younger sister came and the rest of her

1:11:47

family stayed and were all killed in the Holocaust. So

1:11:50

these were the things I grew up with and

1:11:52

fed on and all of that. And

1:11:55

for that reason, I know, she

1:11:57

sent me to Jewish summer camp. I went for

1:11:59

like five trade summers and

1:12:01

you sing Jewish prayers and you're indoctrinated

1:12:04

with the principles of

1:12:06

Jewish culture, American Jews are told and

1:12:08

indoctrinated from birth that one of their

1:12:10

duties is to be loyal

1:12:13

to and defend and protect the state of

1:12:15

Israel. Even if you're an American, you're

1:12:17

a Jew in Argentina, you're a Jew

1:12:19

in wherever, that is something

1:12:21

that being Jewish, you're

1:12:23

told from birth, obligates you to do.

1:12:27

And then recently evangelicals have also

1:12:29

taken on this view that Israel

1:12:31

is this country of great special

1:12:34

religious and theological value. And so we

1:12:36

do have a lot of people in

1:12:38

the United States who for various reasons

1:12:41

have decided that this one foreign country

1:12:43

has such great importance

1:12:45

that if forced to choose between the two,

1:12:48

and of course we have different national interest

1:12:50

and different strategic

1:12:52

interests all the time, that

1:12:55

protecting and venerating and elevating

1:12:57

Israel is a more important

1:12:59

goal than even defense

1:13:02

to our own country. And that is just the

1:13:04

reality and you see it manifesting in so many

1:13:06

ways. And that's why

1:13:08

people can tolerate disagreements of

1:13:10

almost every kind. But

1:13:13

we lost, I think, 15 to 20% of our subscriber

1:13:15

base and our viewership

1:13:18

in the first four weeks after

1:13:20

October 7th because of my position

1:13:22

on Israel. And people say,

1:13:24

I can disagree with anything, but this is

1:13:27

the one issue I just can't tolerate. I

1:13:29

have to run in the opposite direction. And

1:13:31

I think it's important to acknowledge how many

1:13:33

people are inculcated from birth to believe that.

1:13:35

And that's the thing I think is our

1:13:38

greatest obligation as human beings, why free speech

1:13:40

is so important as well and the ability

1:13:42

to access other information. I want to read

1:13:44

what Russia is saying. The EU made it

1:13:46

illegal to platform Russia state

1:13:48

media. Adults in the EU,

1:13:51

even if they want to, can't read Russian media

1:13:53

because of how it's illegal. I want to have

1:13:55

different information sources other than what my own country

1:13:57

is telling me because one of the things as

1:14:00

adult, I think is the greatest obligation is

1:14:02

to go back and reevaluate what

1:14:05

you were trained and indoctrinated,

1:14:07

inculcated to believe, and

1:14:09

not just reflexively continue to believe that

1:14:11

in adulthood because it was indoctrinated, but

1:14:13

to reassess whether or not those

1:14:15

really are your views as a result of your

1:14:17

own critical analysis, or whether you

1:14:19

have different views, including the role of

1:14:22

our own country. All of these things

1:14:24

are so important to not being a

1:14:26

propagandized kind of automaton. And

1:14:28

it is just true for a

1:14:30

lot of American Jews that this indoctrination

1:14:32

is so extreme, I think now for

1:14:34

evangelicals as well, that it's

1:14:36

become the

1:14:38

paramount view, like the view that subsumes every

1:14:41

other. And I think that's why when you

1:14:43

see this conflict between a

1:14:46

devotion to protecting the civil liberties and free

1:14:48

speech rights of American citizens, when

1:14:50

that comes in conflict with this other goal

1:14:53

of shielding and protecting Israel, so

1:14:55

often the shielding and protecting of

1:14:57

Israel wins out even when

1:15:00

it comes time to protect and defend the freedoms of

1:15:02

our country. So that's got to be the red line.

1:15:04

And again, even for people like me, you know,

1:15:08

again, I don't have any problem with Israel. I

1:15:10

have any problem with people who love Israel. People

1:15:13

think Israel is great. I love other countries. I

1:15:15

love Brazil. I love Brazil. I love

1:15:17

countries that I visit. You can

1:15:19

love other countries. I love Israel as a place to

1:15:21

visit. And I'm not against it. If

1:15:24

you don't allow me to

1:15:26

say what I think or think what I think, you

1:15:28

are not treating me as a human being, period.

1:15:30

And the defense of human

1:15:33

dignity has to be the highest goal, period.

1:15:36

And you cannot treat me like a

1:15:38

slave. And it's just gotten to this point

1:15:40

where, yes, of course, obviously, there

1:15:43

are massive drawbacks

1:15:46

to saying that out loud, but like, you don't have a

1:15:48

choice at this point. You just don't have a choice.

1:15:50

Well, and I also think this is what I really believe

1:15:52

too, is that, you know, you've obviously

1:15:55

got to a place in your career where you

1:15:57

have a lot of security, where you have you

1:16:00

know, even with this dissent on this issue, a lot of

1:16:02

people who still listen to you and trust you and are

1:16:05

gonna pay attention to you no matter what, I

1:16:07

feel the same way. I mean, if I have like

1:16:09

a success in my journalism career, I'm at the point where,

1:16:11

you know, I feel, I don't ever feel like I

1:16:13

need to be captive to my audience or feed them what

1:16:16

they wanna hear. I've always tried to cultivate an audience

1:16:18

that knows that they can't expect to come to me

1:16:20

and hear what they wanna hear. They're, at times, they're

1:16:23

gonna hear things that they violently disagree with and I'm

1:16:25

always gonna respect them enough to make an argument, but

1:16:27

that's part of what I hope that are coming to

1:16:29

me for. But for a lot

1:16:31

of people in journalism, especially with the destruction

1:16:33

of jobs and the erosion of job

1:16:36

security as, you know, every major

1:16:38

media outlet is laying off

1:16:40

people in huge numbers and it's kind of a

1:16:42

collapsing industry, the pressure and need

1:16:44

to conform is greater than ever because most people

1:16:46

don't have that privilege or that security that you

1:16:48

and I both have at this point in our

1:16:51

lives and career. And, you

1:16:53

know, I can't tell you how many times

1:16:55

during Russiagate, when I was as vocal of

1:16:57

a skeptic of Russiagate as I could possibly

1:16:59

be from the very moment I first heard

1:17:01

that script get unveiled by the CIA through

1:17:03

the New York Times and the Washington Post, so

1:17:05

many journalists who work at major media outlets

1:17:08

like CNN and the Washington Post and NBC

1:17:11

News and others would write to me and

1:17:13

say, I'm so thankful for this skepticism that

1:17:15

you're expressing and of course, at some point

1:17:17

I was like, why aren't you expressing it?

1:17:20

But I know why, because if they did even

1:17:22

one time, they'd become the target

1:17:24

of the liberal mob on Twitter that

1:17:27

would put pressure on their editors to fire

1:17:29

them, they'd be the first to get laid

1:17:31

off, the last to get hired. And so

1:17:34

our journalism profession has become one where conformity

1:17:36

is by far the highest value. And

1:17:38

I think for those of us who aren't

1:17:41

quite as vulnerable or as

1:17:43

insecure in terms of our career position or

1:17:45

need to keep a job, it's almost like

1:17:47

you have an obligation to create that space

1:17:49

that a lot of other people can't create,

1:17:51

that's really what I feel. And

1:17:53

so no one likes having people who

1:17:55

are your readers or your viewers or

1:17:57

previous supporters. like kind of turn against

1:17:59

you or denounce you, nobody likes being

1:18:02

called names. It's not fun for anybody.

1:18:04

No. But if you're going

1:18:06

to do a job and have

1:18:08

some kind of meaning to it, some kind of purpose

1:18:10

to it, some kind of value

1:18:12

that it based on, I feel like if

1:18:15

you are in that kind of position, you have the

1:18:17

obligation to take those risks. Of course you do. And

1:18:19

to be as honest as you can be. Yeah. And

1:18:22

by the way, to keep to the extent that you can,

1:18:24

but try really hard every day to keep the hate out

1:18:26

of your heart. If you do find

1:18:28

your, I mean, there are some people I don't talk about,

1:18:30

not many, thank God, but there are

1:18:33

some people I don't talk about or write about ever

1:18:35

because I'm too mad at them. And

1:18:37

I just, I don't want to feel that way. And

1:18:40

I can smell hate on other people. Hate

1:18:43

is one of those words that's been weaponized

1:18:45

and of course hate, but

1:18:47

hate is real and we do

1:18:49

feel it. And in my religion, you're not

1:18:51

allowed to forgive or start

1:18:53

trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against

1:18:56

us. Like hate this end, but not this

1:18:58

center. You absolutely are not allowed to

1:19:00

hate people. You have to forgive people. So there

1:19:03

are a few people, individuals

1:19:05

who I feel like really betrayed by Bill Crystal. I

1:19:07

don't talk about Bill Crystal because I'm like, I'm not

1:19:10

rational. And he's gone insane in my opinion. But on

1:19:15

this topic, like I,

1:19:19

you're not going to stop me from saying what

1:19:21

I think is true by accusing me of hate

1:19:23

when I know that there isn't any hate. I'm

1:19:25

not motivated by some weird animus or something, you

1:19:27

know, some irrational dislike of anything. I'm

1:19:30

just not going to be, that's not, you're not going

1:19:32

to stop me. But I think that's such a, that,

1:19:34

that is like the attribute of being secure in yourself

1:19:36

and your own values that you don't feel like you

1:19:38

have to prove anything or there's an accusation made against

1:19:41

you that you know is false, that you have no,

1:19:43

it doesn't affect you at all because you know deep

1:19:45

down how you live, how you feel, how you smell

1:19:47

it on other people. I see people and sometimes like,

1:19:50

wow, that guy, there's a lot going

1:19:52

on inside and I don't want to be anywhere near

1:19:54

that because I may agree with some of his views,

1:19:56

but he's this, this rage. It's

1:19:58

just, oh, it's well, I am. I always

1:20:00

had like, and I think this has been so

1:20:02

important, like I used to be a lot more intuitive

1:20:04

in my rhetoric, like a lot more aggressive in my

1:20:07

rhetoric. And I heard, yeah, and you too, I heard

1:20:09

you in that show where you talked to Chris Cuomo,

1:20:11

and you guys were kind of laughing at you in

1:20:13

particular, talking about our friendship, but you were saying how

1:20:15

like, nobody was meaner to you. And I don't even

1:20:18

remember that because I was equally mean to everybody. But

1:20:20

I never felt it was like a per,

1:20:22

I never felt like I was condemning

1:20:24

the person because I didn't know the person.

1:20:26

I felt like I was condemning their views,

1:20:28

the role they were playing into the political.

1:20:31

But so many times people who I,

1:20:33

you know, like viciously condemned or denounced, I

1:20:35

ended up becoming friends with. Because I never,

1:20:37

I never wanted to, even when I'm, I

1:20:40

think it's important as a journalist to very

1:20:42

harshly criticize and denounce, you

1:20:44

know, especially people with influence and power, it's

1:20:46

one of your jobs. But it's important not

1:20:48

to let that affect who you are, because

1:20:51

it's so corrosive to be harboring hatred. And

1:20:54

by the way, what matters is people, and I

1:20:56

would argue animals also. But

1:20:58

that's what matters. And that, I mean, that's why we're having

1:21:00

these debates, because we're trying to figure out what the best

1:21:02

way to govern people to

1:21:05

live our lives, best way to structure our

1:21:07

country, but all of those tasks

1:21:09

are designed to produce the same outcome,

1:21:12

which is happier people. So

1:21:14

if you cease to care about people, then

1:21:16

like, what is the point of the exercise,

1:21:18

right? Yeah, I had this really fascinating and

1:21:20

like actually transformative experience. When I was a

1:21:22

law student at NYU, I

1:21:24

was like, you know, in my early 20s,

1:21:26

you know, I grew up in the 80s,

1:21:29

came up aged in the 80s, as a,

1:21:31

as a gay teenager, and like the moral

1:21:33

majority and Reagan were like, you know, the

1:21:35

things I was taught to hate, like that

1:21:37

were the threat to me, so anything conservative

1:21:39

or socially conservative. And

1:21:41

I had a roommate and she started dating,

1:21:43

when I was in law school, she started

1:21:45

dating this guy whose family were

1:21:47

like Rush Limbaugh fanatics. And she would go there on

1:21:50

the weekend and come back. And then she told me

1:21:52

she came back once and said, there's

1:21:54

this forum on the internet where all the

1:21:56

Rush Limbaugh conservatives go. It's sponsored by the

1:21:58

National Review and the Heritage Foundation. It was

1:22:00

and CompuServe, it was some political forum. She's

1:22:02

like, you have to go in there and

1:22:04

just provoke them and troll them and create

1:22:07

all the disruption. So I did, and I

1:22:09

started with the all malicious intent of just

1:22:11

angering them and creating all kinds of division

1:22:13

and just saying the most offensive thing

1:22:15

is like a possible we think of. And then the

1:22:17

more I stayed, the more I started having debates with

1:22:19

them and conversations with them. And

1:22:22

these were hardcore social conservatives. These were not

1:22:25

the nice conservatives who believe in some conservative

1:22:27

dog room, but then are very socially egalitarian.

1:22:29

And this was in the early 90s as

1:22:31

well when these debates were much different than

1:22:33

they are now. And just

1:22:35

my being gay, my being a lawyer

1:22:38

in Manhattan, these were very evangelical

1:22:40

people and the most rural parts

1:22:42

of the country. And then I

1:22:44

got to the point where I had stayed there for so

1:22:46

long and debated with them for so long and talked to

1:22:48

them for so long that we started finding commonalities. And then

1:22:50

they had this yearly event where

1:22:52

everybody would go and meet in person.

1:22:55

And they invited me to go and it was

1:22:57

in some suburb of Indiana at some Hilton. And

1:22:59

I was like, you know what, I think I'm

1:23:01

going to go. And my friends were like, don't

1:23:03

go, you're going to be killed. It's a trap.

1:23:06

This is how you're taught to perceive your other

1:23:08

people. And I went and I spent

1:23:10

the weekend there and everybody was so warm, so

1:23:12

happy to see me. I was so happy to see

1:23:14

them. And these were the people I

1:23:16

was taught, wanted me dead. These were the people I

1:23:18

was taught that I was supposed to hate. And

1:23:21

it didn't mean like I agreed with their

1:23:23

politics anymore than I did previously or that

1:23:25

they agreed with mine. But seeing them as

1:23:27

like actually good human beings who have the

1:23:29

same concerns in their lives, I know it

1:23:31

sounds so simple, but it's such an important

1:23:33

lesson to learn because our society is constantly

1:23:35

trying to divide us. And I think that's

1:23:37

very purposeful. Well, actually the real nugget

1:23:40

in the story is the fact that you went. Well,

1:23:43

why didn't you do that? Because I had been there

1:23:45

like eight or nine months and I felt like these

1:23:47

connections were real. It

1:23:50

was almost like I had become part of this community.

1:23:53

And some of them are like around still,

1:23:55

they're like writers, like some work for like

1:23:57

conservative outlets. And we always like laugh about.

1:24:01

But it was like my first introduction to

1:24:04

internet debate. It was at the time when

1:24:06

the internet was still segregated with AOL or

1:24:08

CompuServe, it wasn't our interconnected internet. It was

1:24:10

very the incipient stages. But

1:24:12

I went because I felt like I

1:24:15

like these people and I kind of felt like they liked me. And

1:24:17

I originally went in solely with the purpose to promote

1:24:20

their hatred toward me and to hate them as well.

1:24:22

That was why I went in. And

1:24:24

just being around them daily, day after day,

1:24:26

first debating and then convert, it made me

1:24:28

see their humanity and they saw mine. I

1:24:31

was just as anathema to them as they

1:24:33

were to me. I

1:24:35

was openly gay and I was a

1:24:37

Jewish lawyer and I was working in

1:24:39

Manhattan. And these were like evangelical housewives

1:24:42

or businessmen in rural Georgia or Idaho.

1:24:48

And I don't know, I

1:24:50

guess we just discovered each other's common humanity. And

1:24:52

it was a very transformative experience for me about

1:24:54

how you look at other people. What

1:24:57

a wonderful story Well,

1:25:02

obviously in you maybe latent, was that

1:25:04

priority other people matter more than anything.

1:25:09

Yeah. And I also I think that again like so much of the reason

1:25:11

why we end

1:25:13

up with the political views that we have, sometimes you see

1:25:15

people with people with political views that you just can't comprehend.

1:25:17

You think or collection and destructive and insane. A

1:25:21

lot of times it's because of an electoral

1:25:23

core right and there seems to be a

1:25:25

different view because that's

1:25:27

what they were formed to be. That's

1:25:29

like the byproduct and of their culture

1:25:31

and of their upbringing. And

1:25:33

if you had the same upbringing, maybe you would think the same

1:25:36

things. And I think like the

1:25:38

people who do that for a living and keep

1:25:40

these destructive ideologies, those people really warrant your contempt.

1:25:42

You know, like the Bill crystals of the world

1:25:44

and the Victoria Newlands of the world, like those

1:25:47

kind of people, the Liz Cheney's. But

1:25:50

ordinary people who don't pay much attention to politics

1:25:52

like before I started to have politics, you know,

1:25:54

I was like just reading the New York Times

1:25:56

and the Atlantic and the New Yorker thinking I

1:25:58

was like highly informed, like a high. And then

1:26:00

when I started to. writing a politics and have

1:26:02

like full time to go and read original documents

1:26:04

and not having information mediated anymore for me. I

1:26:07

realized like pretty rapidly,

1:26:09

like almost everything I believed about

1:26:11

politics was based on a fraud date was

1:26:14

not like my own, you know, my

1:26:16

own process of arriving at things

1:26:18

critically. I just was stuffed with

1:26:21

all these ideas that were not

1:26:23

mine that I kind of passively

1:26:25

ingested. And that too was a

1:26:27

very eye opening experience because you think you're

1:26:29

a very smart person, you think you're educated

1:26:31

and then you realize like, wow, you're just

1:26:33

as susceptible to propaganda as anybody. And I

1:26:35

do think smart people are people who believe

1:26:37

they're smarter of high verbal IQ. You're clearly

1:26:40

in that category to

1:26:42

a lesser extent. I am also,

1:26:44

they are better at self deception I

1:26:47

think than any other group because they're smart and

1:26:49

they read the Atlantic and the New Yorker and

1:26:52

I read the New Yorker. I read every issue of the New

1:26:54

Yorker from 1993 until 2017.

1:26:57

Right. Me too. Every issue. Yeah. Yeah. And

1:27:00

I thought it was so informed and so

1:27:02

sophisticated. Yeah, it was actually was a really

1:27:04

interesting magazine, The Atlantic under Mike Kelly and

1:27:06

after his death even, wonderful magazine

1:27:08

like that, you know, younger people won't even know

1:27:10

what we're talking about, but like magazines were the

1:27:12

way that you sort of... They were

1:27:15

like the think pieces and they had like a bunch

1:27:17

of different ideas in them. I get on an airplane

1:27:19

with my bag and I'd have like nine issues of,

1:27:21

you know, the New Yorker, the Atlantic. I read every

1:27:23

single word and all of them. And

1:27:25

then as I got older, I realized like,

1:27:29

I had no fucking idea

1:27:32

what was going on. I was actually more misled

1:27:34

than someone who hadn't been told anything was coming

1:27:36

out at cold. Like I was completely

1:27:38

propagandized. I didn't even know that. And I thought I

1:27:40

was a free thinker. Exactly. I know I had this

1:27:42

other experience. I don't want to romanticize these kind of

1:27:45

things, but I was

1:27:47

once in Milwaukee and I like in a

1:27:49

suburb Milwaukee and I like, I don't mean

1:27:51

to like romanticize like the, you know, middle

1:27:53

of the country diners, but I was in

1:27:56

a diner and it was right at the

1:27:58

time that the Intercept had this scandal. because

1:28:01

they very

1:28:04

poorly mishandled this source reality

1:28:06

winner and unintentionally outed her. But

1:28:08

the whole story was like she had given a document

1:28:10

trying to prove that the Russians were interfering in the

1:28:12

election and it made the front page of the New

1:28:14

York Times. So these people who were sitting at this

1:28:16

like adjacent table who were obviously just like ordinary people

1:28:19

not like on their phone, they saw the top story

1:28:21

of the New York Times. And it was about this

1:28:23

intercept story. Obviously, they had no idea it was sitting

1:28:25

at the next table. But they were

1:28:27

really what they were really saying was like, yeah,

1:28:30

with all this Russia stuff, it's so hard to

1:28:32

figure out what's real and what's not, because it's

1:28:34

all anonymous. And it seems like it's all driven by

1:28:36

some agenda. I was like, I

1:28:39

almost know nobody who's paid to

1:28:41

write about politics, who writes about journalism,

1:28:43

who has that recognition. And it's like

1:28:46

by through that distance, they're able to

1:28:48

see things so much more clearly than

1:28:50

the people who are immersed in it.

1:28:53

That is the true, that is absolutely the true thing.

1:28:55

And the most dangerous thing because the people who are

1:28:57

immersed in are the ones making decisions. Exactly, exactly.

1:29:00

So I

1:29:02

don't even really want to get into

1:29:04

Russia. I just can't resist

1:29:06

asking you about Navalny and his

1:29:08

death. That happened the

1:29:10

day I left Russia. Right. Right before

1:29:13

the Munich Security Conference. I know. Perfect

1:29:16

timing for you. And I'm literally on

1:29:18

a plane going through Serbia, Geneva, wherever, you

1:29:20

know, like I'm totally cut off. And all

1:29:22

of a sudden I land on my phone

1:29:24

is just exploding. You know, Putin just killed

1:29:27

Navalny. What

1:29:29

was that? I mean, I actually don't have full

1:29:31

perspective on it just because I was so far

1:29:33

away. But like, what was that story?

1:29:36

Well, first of all, you

1:29:38

we did this on our show, actually, for

1:29:40

two weeks after Nabani's death,

1:29:43

it was definitively asserted over and

1:29:45

over in the most authoritative tones

1:29:48

on every cable channel. And

1:29:50

in every newspaper that Putin

1:29:52

ordered Navalny killed, like he had he was

1:29:54

his murderer, he had ordered his death. And

1:29:57

like, you know, I think you talked about

1:29:59

this, but before, but this was at a time

1:30:01

when the House Republicans were holding up the $60

1:30:03

billion from

1:30:06

Biden. Exactly. There was no reason

1:30:08

in the world that Putin would have. And by the way,

1:30:10

you go back 20 years to every

1:30:12

president that ever dealt with Putin, starting

1:30:14

with Bill Clinton and going on, and

1:30:17

every single one of them has said he's

1:30:19

an incredibly rational, restrained, trustworthy person. It was

1:30:21

only when he had to be turned into

1:30:24

the new Hitler did the whole thing reverse.

1:30:27

So he is obviously rational. Whatever else you want

1:30:29

to say about him, he's very sophisticated. He's

1:30:32

very restrained, actually. We can say that

1:30:34

conclusively. Exactly. And

1:30:37

so why would he just suddenly tell

1:30:39

people it's time for you to kill Navalny? It

1:30:41

never made any sense, but we were told this.

1:30:45

And also, we have this cartoonish

1:30:47

idea that he not only

1:30:49

is manipulating every event in the West,

1:30:52

but also every event in

1:30:54

Russia. He's must never sleep. And

1:30:56

he must have cloned 100 of him, given how much

1:30:58

credit he gets for having manipulated and

1:31:00

controlled every event in his country and

1:31:03

in our countries. But

1:31:06

it then turned out, like just three weeks

1:31:08

ago, this happened so many times before that

1:31:10

the intelligence community admits that

1:31:12

there's no evidence whatsoever that he

1:31:14

participated in any way, let alone

1:31:17

ordered or requested or wanted Navalny's

1:31:19

death. And we obviously

1:31:21

have the, you know, we're always told like

1:31:23

we have everything in the Kremlin, like under

1:31:25

this microscope of surveillance. And you

1:31:27

know how many times this has happened where media outlets

1:31:29

have made some kind of assertion. Now,

1:31:32

Russian prisons are incredibly brutal, like a lot

1:31:34

of countries are. They're

1:31:36

very, very cold. They don't get good

1:31:38

medical care. So I have no, it's

1:31:40

not surprising that a prisoner put in

1:31:42

the most brutal Russian prisons would

1:31:45

die. But that's a

1:31:47

completely different claim than what they were saying,

1:31:49

which was that Putin had ordered him killed.

1:31:53

And if you look at how many times,

1:31:55

you know, there was this like story in

1:31:57

The New York Times exactly when

1:31:59

Trump was trying. withdraw from Afghanistan, that the

1:32:01

CIA planted with the New York Times and

1:32:03

Charlie Savage, the claim that

1:32:05

the Russians had put bounties on the heads

1:32:08

of American soldiers and were paying the Taliban

1:32:10

money for every American soldier that they were

1:32:12

killed. And then when Liz Cheney and pro-war

1:32:14

Democrats were working together to prevent and block

1:32:16

Trump's desire to withdraw from

1:32:18

Afghanistan, that was the only story they

1:32:21

cited. They kept saying, how can we

1:32:23

leave when the Russians are paying

1:32:25

to, we're going to reward Russia. And

1:32:27

then three months later or two months the

1:32:29

intelligence community has very little confidence that that even

1:32:32

happened. That has been the story of Russiagate from

1:32:34

the very beginning. I mean, every single claim that

1:32:36

came out as part of Russiagate, I mean,

1:32:39

they, they unleashed Robert Mueller for 18 months

1:32:42

with the dream team of prosecutors,

1:32:44

unlimited subpoena power, unlimited amounts

1:32:46

of money. And he then submitted a

1:32:48

report when he was done with his

1:32:50

investigation that said we could not find

1:32:52

evidence to establish what became the core

1:32:54

conspiracy. The whole thing that initiated the

1:32:57

scandal that drowned our politics for three

1:32:59

years, which was that the Trump campaign

1:33:01

colluded with the Kremlin to break into

1:33:03

or hack into the emails of the

1:33:05

DNC and John Podesta. And everybody just

1:33:07

was like, okay, I guess we'll

1:33:09

just move on to something else. Like the editor in

1:33:11

chief of the New York Times said, we have to

1:33:13

confront the fact that what we've let our readers

1:33:16

to believe was going to happen, that this information

1:33:18

was going to be discovered. These smoking guns, Robert

1:33:20

Mueller was going to unleash it all and everyone

1:33:22

was going to go to prison. None of it

1:33:25

turned out to be true. This whole story was

1:33:27

a fraud. This was the scandal that

1:33:29

the media drowned our politics in for three years, starting

1:33:31

with the middle of the of 2016 up until 2018

1:33:33

or 2019. So again, I'm

1:33:37

sorry to interrupt you. I'm not explaining Navalny.

1:33:40

I really want to hear that. But

1:33:42

you just passed over one of

1:33:44

the most interesting moments in the

1:33:46

last 10 years, which was the hack, hack,

1:33:49

I don't know what was the theft

1:33:51

of emails from the DNC and from John

1:33:53

Podesta's personal Gmail account that wound up on

1:33:55

WikiLeaks. And the Russians were blamed for that

1:33:57

I thought from the first day I don't

1:33:59

know. know, but I suspected that was

1:34:01

not true. What is true about that?

1:34:04

So let me just preface that because I

1:34:06

know how people react to these things. Like

1:34:09

if there's something that gets presented and then

1:34:11

implemented as gospel and the minute you challenge

1:34:13

it, you're accused of being like a crazy

1:34:15

conspiracy theory because it's something everybody knows is

1:34:18

true. So let me just say, if

1:34:20

you look at the last, say, 40 years

1:34:22

of American history, the one thing that is

1:34:24

a constant is that so many of the

1:34:27

things we are told are not just true,

1:34:29

but unquestionably true, the most consequential things end

1:34:31

up being complete lies. The

1:34:33

claim that led us into

1:34:35

the Vietnam War that caused the Senate to authorize

1:34:37

the military force in Vietnam was a

1:34:40

claim about the Gulf of Tonkin that was

1:34:42

a complete and total fabrication of life. The

1:34:44

claims that led us into the

1:34:46

Iraq War that everybody was so certain of was

1:34:48

a complete and total lie. The thing that drives

1:34:50

me the craziest to this day that I feel

1:34:52

has never got enough attention is that one that

1:34:54

reporting happened from the New York Post based on

1:34:56

the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop about what they

1:34:58

were doing in Ukraine and China. Everybody

1:35:01

in the media united to

1:35:03

say this was Russian disinformation when all

1:35:05

along that archive was completely authentic and

1:35:08

had nothing to do with Russia and

1:35:10

it wasn't just information. So many times

1:35:12

were told things so definitively that end

1:35:15

up being proven to be lies. Russia

1:35:17

gave another example. So the question of

1:35:19

how those documents made their way to

1:35:22

WikiLeaks. Obviously, WikiLeaks insists that

1:35:24

they had nothing to do with the Russians

1:35:26

and didn't get it from the Russians. Now that

1:35:29

may be true and yet at the same time, the

1:35:31

Russians say used a middleman. Yeah. So

1:35:33

WikiLeaks might think they're telling the truth. They might

1:35:35

actually be telling the truth, but it doesn't say

1:35:37

that Russia wasn't involved. The problem

1:35:39

is that there are a lot of people who

1:35:42

oftentimes won't say it in public, but will

1:35:45

tell you in private. I

1:35:47

mean, very well-connected people that

1:35:49

they radically disbelieve the

1:35:52

claim that the Russians hacked

1:35:54

it. And the thing is, Aaron

1:35:56

Mate is one of the best people, most knowledgeable

1:35:58

people on this, but they There really

1:36:00

isn't a lot of evidence

1:36:02

that the Russians did the hacking. This

1:36:06

firm that they got is a Democratic

1:36:08

Party propaganda firm, which is CrowdStrike. The

1:36:10

FBI purposely hid a lot of the

1:36:12

information that would have been necessary to

1:36:14

examine it. I'm not

1:36:16

saying the Russians didn't hack it, but I'm

1:36:18

just saying conceptually, if you don't question especially

1:36:20

the truth that are most aggressively shoved down

1:36:22

your throat after everything we've seen, I think

1:36:25

you're an extremely gullible person. In

1:36:27

this case specifically, there's also a lot of holes

1:36:31

in that story. I think the big problem,

1:36:33

and this was always my problem with Russiagate

1:36:35

from the start, was

1:36:37

not that the Trump campaign

1:36:39

and the Trump administration was being sabotaged by

1:36:41

the US security state with a evidence-free

1:36:45

scandal. That did bother me, journalistically.

1:36:47

This evidence-free assertion that dominated

1:36:50

our politics would bother me much more was

1:36:53

the real agenda obviously was to blame

1:36:56

Russia for everything to such an extent

1:36:58

that the Americans started once again viewing

1:37:00

Russia as this existential enemy to the

1:37:02

point where American diplomats couldn't speak with