#2303 - Dave Smith & Douglas Murray
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The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast. All right, we're up. Good to see you guys. What's happening? Are you going no headphones? Oh. Keep the do? I'll do that. I'm not quite sure what they add, but yeah. There we go. All right. The goal of this is...

Every time I see people that disagree with anything that's happening any Gigantic world events. It's one of these retarded shows where they're screaming is the word again. We brought it We're just talking about the word retarded is back and it's one of the great culture victories Spurred on probably by podcast but um

These things are always like Piers Morgan-y, which is fine. You know, where everyone's screaming over each other and, you know, there's five different people talking over each other. There's never just rational conversations where you discuss things. And I respect both of you. I think both of you are brilliant. And I thought...

I bet you agree on a lot of things. I bet you disagree on a lot of things. And it'd be fascinating to see your perspectives on these things. So that's why you're here together. Okay. Can I ask you something? Yes, sir. Since the war in Israel began and since the war in Ukraine began, you've had quite a lot of people who are very against both in different ways. Yes. Do you think you've had enough people on who are supportive of either war?

I don't know that word enough, if that's a good word. Let's say enough people who are on the side of Israel instead of wild critics. Well, I've had a few. I mean, I believe God's side is on the side of Israel. For sure. Jordan is on the side of Israel. You had Mike Baker, Coleman Hughes. Yeah. Coleman did it for like 20 minutes. It wasn't why he was here. No. I mean, none of them is why they're here. It's a good question.

Do you think you've tilted one way? Me personally? No, no, no. Just with the guests you've had. The guests? Yeah, probably more tilted towards the idea that perhaps the way they've done it is barbaric. But why do you think that is? Just out of interest. I'm just interested in your selection of guests because you're like the world's number one podcast. Yeah, it's not... I don't...

I don't think about it that way. I just think I'd like to talk to this person. But can I just, sorry, it's your show, but if you're going to interview historians of the conflict or historians in general, why would you get somebody like Ian Carroll?

Yeah, but Ian Carroll, I didn't bring him on for that purpose. I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business? Because his whole thing is just conspiracies. Sure. You know? But do you have any, I mean, there's been a tilt in the conversation, in both conversations in the last couple of years. And it's largely to do with people who have appointed themselves experts who are not experts.

You mean like Ian? I don't think he appoints himself an expert in anything. Who's that other dude who thinks he's an expert on Churchill? Oh, Daryl Cooper does not think he's an expert. In fact, I think it's everybody else is always calling him an expert, and he's like, I'm just a history. Have you ever absorbed any of his material? Have you ever consumed any of his podcasts or anything like that? I tried. Yeah? It's pretty hard to listen to somebody who says, I don't know what I'm talking about, but now I'm going to talk.

Or I don't know about this. Or I'm not capable of debating this historian, but I'm going to just tell you what I think. Yeah, but that's not exactly what Daryl was saying. I mean, Daryl's point of view, however you feel about this, what Daryl is saying is he doesn't really like doing debates. He likes to do long format stuff where he can really explain his position. But if you throw a lot of shit out there,

There's some point at which I'm just raising questions is not a valid thing. You're not raising questions. You're not asking questions. You're telling people. Do you think Daryl's doing that? I think there's a whole bunch of guys doing that. I think Dave is doing that, very obviously. Dave's a comedian, but he's now mainly talking about Israel.

No. I don't know if I'm mainly talking about Israel. That's all I see you on the internet doing. Well, that might be what you've seen, but I don't think that's... But that is also your shtick now, isn't it? Well, what do you mean by that's my shtick? Well, you're not a geopolitics guy in general, are you? I don't even know exactly what you're asking. I'm saying you've decided, being a comedian, you've decided now to become...

somebody who talks about Israel. I think you're incorrect. I don't think it's a decision. I just think you have long form conversations, multiple of them. It's a huge event that's in the news. So it comes up. I don't think it's a thing. I think if you're on the outside, you'd say, oh, look, they're trying to get attention by talking about this very polarizing issue publicly. You do get attention from that. If you'd spent the last year speaking about Myanmar, you would not be

on my lips. Yeah, but he does talk about Yemen constantly. He talks about a lot of things that aren't in the news. Well, I tend to talk about the conflicts that my government is directly involved in, which I think is reasonable to me. But I don't quite get, like, what's all the appeal to authority stuff? I mean, what, you have to be an expert? No, I think authority matters. I think that if you just throw a lot of shit out there and then say, I'm not interested in...

the alternative views on this, and particularly when it's a counter-narrative that is wildly off. And when you get people... Look, I just feel... We should get it out straight away. I feel you've opened the door to quite a lot of people who've now got a big platform who have been throwing out counter-historical stuff of a very dangerous kind.

You mean Daryl? Are you talking about Daryl? Daryl, who's the other one? I don't think Daryl has... I don't think he's anything dangerous. What's the other guy? Derek... What's his name? Cooper, is it? Which one is it? No, that's Daryl Cooper. Daryl Cooper. Who's the other one? There was one I just checked on the way here. Daryl Cooper and then... Oh, yeah. Daryl Cooper, Ian Carroll...

Look, these guys are not historians. They're not knowledgeable about anything. No one's calling Ian Carroll a historian. No, but then why listen to their views on Churchill? Daryl is incredibly knowledgeable. He's not. He's not. He's not. Why do you say that? Several reasons. One is when he was offered to debate...

the current greatest living biographer of Churchill, he said, I can't because he knows much more than me. And I admire his work and I've learned from it, but I can't possibly debate him.

That's Andrew Roberts. But you don't have to be able to debate people to have opinions. No, no, no. You don't have to debate people. If it's not your thing. But if you, for instance, well, OK, but if you say I've decided that Churchill is the bad guy. It's not what he said. It's not what he said. It's not what he said. Neither Carroll nor Cooper have said that. Well, listen, I don't know what Carroll said, but Darrell Cooper has not said that. What he said was he he jokes with his friend Jocko, who's an Anglo-Saxon. He jokes with him, you know.

I think that Churchill was the secret villain of World War II. And what he's saying is by Churchill's actions, the war escalated. He's not saying anything. He's not just asking questions, then, is he? No, but the claim isn't that he's just asking questions. He has a point of view. You could explain this better. He literally says he's joking. Yes, he said in the comment, he goes, listen, I'm being hyperbolic. And then he once again disclaimed, he goes...

And I'm not claiming Churchill committed the most atrocities or was the worst part. But in many ways, I do view him as the chief villain, as my hyperbolic, provocative statement. But Douglas, well, OK, but Pat Buchanan wrote an entire book on this. Is he not allowed? Is he not an expert? Is he not allowed to be interviewed? He's certainly not an expert. He can be interviewed. I've watched Pat Buchanan debate. I watched Pat Buchanan debate against Churchill historians, and he was absolutely leveled because he doesn't know what he's talking about. When did he when did Pat?

You can't debate and get love about 20 years ago. I just he's against Andrew Roberts and several other historians at intelligence squared in London I was there he didn't know what he was talking about He had a contrary view and it was interesting and stimulating to hear but if you only get the contrary view Which is isn't it fun if we all pretend Churchill was the bad guy of the 20th century at some point you're going to lead people down a path where they think that's the view and that's horseshit of the most profound kind

I don't think that's what he's trying to do. I think that's exactly what they're doing. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. Let's talk about a game changer in the world of sleep technology, 8Sleep and their revolutionary Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod is a high-tech mattress cover that easily adds to your existing bed and is clinically proven to improve sleep by up to one hour per night. The Pod regulates sleep cycles with precision technology

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Post jobs today, talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. And the problem is, is that because you, I mean, your own platform has come about because you're a very successful comedian and much more, and you do ask questions and you are interested, but there are a lot of people who have come along, partly I think because they've come on this show, who have come along and they've decided, I can play this double game. On the one hand, I'm going to push really edgy,

and frankly, sometimes horrific opinions. And then if you say that's wrong, they say, I'm a comedian. But wait a minute. What do I know? How can you tell me I'm just a comedian? I'm just throwing stuff out there. What horrific opinions that's wrong are you talking about specifically?

Once guys like this get into very obvious stuff, which is the ones I'm describing. You need to listen to Daryl to really understand what he's saying. If you take Daryl's words out of context, Daryl has some of the most nuanced, balanced, and charitable views on all the figures in history. Particularly Hitler.

it seems. No, no, you're wrong. You're wrong. He doesn't. What did he call him? How did he describe him? I think he compared him to a methed out psychopath who was holding an entire nation of people hostage, I believe was the way he put it. He also said on here that he wasn't anti-Semitic until the Holocaust. There were no speeches of Hitler's

in the 1930s. No, no, no. No, he said he was not public about it. He said he was downplaying it to win over... He said there was a period where he was downplaying it to win over popular support in Germany. There is no historian of World War II who thinks that Hitler was downplaying anti-Semitism in the 1930s. That was what he was doing. He wrote a book about it in the 1920s. He got to power on it and he grew his power on the back of it.

The idea that you can argue that in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was downplaying the anti-Semitism, like there's no historian who would agree with that. So why would you throw out the idea that in the 1930s, Hitler was not being anti-Semitic in public? That was what he was doing in public. He announces to the German parliament what he wants to do. So when you're throwing out claims like this,

He was keeping it down in the 1930s. First of all, what are you doing? And secondly, why? Okay. I mean, I think that it's kind of hard because I don't even know exactly what Daryl's point on that was. And so I'm not really in a position to argue what he was saying there. I don't think you're giving him the most charitable interpretation. I don't need to give him the most charitable interpretation to be able to see what he's doing. Okay, I think you're strawmanning him, I should say.

Look, anyone can look up what he said on this show and others, what these two guys in particular have said on repeated podcasts with both of you. It's an attempt to downplay Hitler and always to do down church. I don't think you downplay Hitler. No, I said in conversations with you and others, this is the shtick of these guys. They've decided it's edgy and funny. And I think this is very, very interesting and also very dangerous.

Because we live in an era now that the right has got some mojo back in America. We saw years of crazy left overreach where they tried to make us all say the craziest things. And completely predictably, there are now figures on the right playing with really dark and ugly stuff.

I agree with that. And they are mainstreaming this. I don't think Daryl's doing that. And I think it's partly being mainstreamed by the two people I just described. And both of you have kept speaking to these people. And you don't get on the historians who know about this. And that's just...

Alarming to me. Well, can I just say, because I kind of do agree with part of what you said there. Like, I do think it is true that almost as a reaction to like the woke insanity that we've seen on the left. And I think literally I think nobody's been a more effective critic of that than you. I do think there has kind of been a right wing reaction that has embraced racialism and racism.

is dangerous and not a good path to go down. Yeah, and now they're flirting with Holocaust denial and Hitler... Yes, but they're not... ...and absolving Hitler of blame and much more. I think you're wrong to include Daryl in that group. Now, the other thing is...

I'm sorry, because maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. You're saying people that I've had conversations with have downplayed the Holocaust? Well, who are the two guys? Darrell Cooper. I just told you, Cooper and the other friend of Carol's. I've never podcasted with Ian Carroll. I have podcasted with Darrell Cooper once, and he absolutely did not downplay any of the Nazi atrocities at all.

And I would also – I think that if we're zooming out here a little bit, maybe this is kind of part of the disconnect. Broadly speaking in American culture, the idea that it has not been driven into people enough that the Nazis were bad and that Adolf Hitler was – he is literally the modern devil. He is much more so than the actual devil. Adolf Hitler is what's viewed as the most evil thing to the point that – I mean –

just my entire life growing up, if there was a guy who sold soup on Seinfeld who was like authoritarian, he's a soup Nazi. Everyone was Hitler. The left called George Bush Hitler and they called Obama Hitler and they called Trump Hitler. Every single enemy that we've gone to war with is always called Hitler. Saddam Hussein's the new Hitler. Muammar Gaddafi's the new Hitler. Putin's the new Hitler. It is so... So the idea that like...

We haven't driven into people enough that Adolf Hitler was a really bad guy. I'm not saying that at all. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying just as the left likes to play with very dark, ugly stuff, and they've done it for decades. They have played down Chairman Mao's murder of the Chinese throughout his era in power. They played down Stalin. They still march on occasions with posters of Lenin.

They they've spent decades trying to do down evils that were done on their side. And I would suggest that one of the things that is going on at the moment is despite or maybe because of what you just described. There are movements now on the right in America, subcultures, including people who follow both of you who are very interested in playing with this movement.

absolute beyond the pale thing. Why somebody like Jake Shields wants to play around with Holocaust denial? Why? I can't answer for Jake Shields. I don't know. Why do you think? I have no idea. I think a lot of people get captured by this...

by audience capture. Captured by their audience. Yeah, I think that's the thing. You get a lot of positive reinforcement from a bunch of twisted people. Well, it's also, I mean, there's something about, you know, Michael Malice had that great line. He goes, when you take the red pill, you're supposed to take one and not swallow the whole bottle. Yes.

And I think there's like this dynamic. What happens is, and of course, people know the red pill is the analogy from The Matrix. The idea that you wake up to realizing that so much of the stuff you believed was bullshit propaganda and it's all lies. And this is a real danger when the establishment and the institutions are all caught with their pants down, having sold a bunch of

very consequential policies based on lies. And then once people realize that, they go, well, what else have they been lying to me about? And then they almost want to look into every single thing and go, yeah, I think the whole thing was lies. Now, I agree with you. There's danger in that. And I think that there are some things that then people jump to conclusions that are totally wrong. But I guess I tend to look at that and go, well, then maybe...

the people with power, not random podcasters, but like the people with real power should do a better job of not lying through their fucking teeth about everything. Well, maybe you have power. Maybe you have power. Both of you. We live in an era where podcasters have a lot of power. If you go on a podcast with Jake Shields and Jake Shields goes on to another podcast and says he doesn't think six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. What do you think's happening there?

That's an exercise of power. Okay. And I agree with you about the breakdown of trust. Absolutely. We have lived through an era where in real time we saw something called a conspiracy, the lab leak, which turns out to be true, as you and others said it might be from the beginning. I find that to be very racist. And...

against Joe. How dare you? Both of you. It used to be racist when we were saying that it was likely that the COVID variant had come out from the place making COVID variants. Especially since it's in the exact town. It seemed like it. It seemed like it was possible to us. By the way...

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on screen or by clicking the link in the description. I was referencing the New York Times calling the lab leak racist, which is just the funniest thing ever, that they go, it's racist to think that there was a sophisticated lab where they were developing gain-of-function research. And they go, no, what happened is these freaks were eating bat heads. That's right. Wait, that's not racist? The other one was racist? They were eating pangolins. Yeah.

Well, that one fell apart in front of our eyes. Well, it took four years. It took four years. And I've said repeatedly, it's kind of inevitable to me that if you see something that is called a racist conspiracy theory fall apart and become also what we used to call true in a few years, it's likely to blow a lot of people's minds. But the question then is, do you help those minds that have been blown blow?

blow themselves out some more by doing a whole load of other conspiracy stuff, do you decide to go, hey, what else have we been lied to? Maybe Churchill wasn't a great guy. Maybe Hitler wasn't such a bad guy. Maybe the Holocaust, et cetera, et cetera. And that is exactly what- No one is saying maybe Hitler wasn't such a bad guy. You are saying that. If you're saying that in the 1930s-

Hitler kept the anti-Semitism down. No, no, no, no, that's not what he's saying. What he was saying is that he didn't do it as publicly. He was doing it in meetings because the support for that kind of thinking wasn't as ubiquitous as it was. I've seen this. I've seen this before. I know exactly what these guys are drinking. They're drinking a couple of very, very discredited historians like David Irving,

and they are just regurgitating it. And it has always been the same thing. It is always an attempt to minimize Hitler's anti-Semitism actions. Eventually, down the road, you get to minimizing his actual involvement in the Holocaust.

And then you can go on to the next stage. Yeah, but you can't say that about Daryl. It's not true. What you're guilty of here is kind of similar to, I think, something that the woke left has done, which is this concept creep where you're talking about some people online who are doing this thing, and then you're lumping in other people with them. Listen, I'll just say this right now. Daryl Cooper is currently, I believe, almost finished, or he's working on a big World War II series. And when this comes out, we can see...

Yeah, he does long-form podcasts. When this comes out, I am quite confident to say beforehand that if you're going into it expecting him to be downplaying the atrocities of the Nazis or downplaying the evil things that Adolf Hitler did, you're going to be disappointed. My point is, why are we even talking about this guy? Because

Because you brought him up. Yes, because he comes on podcasts like this. My point is, this is not a serious historian. He's not a historian. He never claims to be. He's been doing these long-form podcasts on these subjects for over a decade. And if you go back to 2015 and listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, it's...

An incredible piece. And it's how many hours long? 30 something. And he it literally starts from the persecution of the Jews where they're being driven out of Europe. It's like this horrific account of what happens to these people. It's what he's trying to do is.

Paint a picture of how the world goes mad and how the world goes sideways and he's doing it from the perspective Initially of these Jewish people that are living in Europe that all of a sudden their neighbors are turning on them and they're being attacked like the it's Incredibly charitable, but what he's trying to do is is

Show what happens to human beings when they're confronted with unbelievable atrocities and how things go so incredibly sideways. Lots of people have written and spoken about that. So why is he not allowed to? He is allowed to. He is allowed to. I'm saying that there is a weird way in which figures like him whose ideas are not being counted when they are raised.

are given platform after platform to spread their views. They are welcome to those platforms. I'm not saying they shouldn't be platformed. I'm saying these are very, very fringe figures who are pushing ideas that are either debunked now, have been debunked before, or they will not stand up against somebody who disagrees with them. Okay. I would just say, maybe this is the disconnect here. When you say there's like not,

pushback, Daryl's one line on Tucker Carlson, this one line where he himself said he was being hyperbolic and kind of says this to prod at his buddy, got more pushback than any one line I've ever heard on a podcast. There were numerous articles written by historians, numerous shows that covered it. People went through their Twitter threads about it. So I don't exactly get your point. Like there was lots of pushback. You're saying he should go and debate somebody who's giving him pushback on that.

Okay, maybe. I also think it's reasonable for him to say, I don't really do debates. Yeah, I think it's weird to mainstream very fringe views.

Constantly and not give another side. I think that's weird Well, I mean, okay. I think there's a little bit of a contradiction here You're saying now that there these are fringe views, but then you're also saying that these are enormous no powerful No, no, no, there's no contradiction. Let me clear it off if you think there is I think there are very fringe views that have become Mainstreamed on the right, but then aren't they not fringe by definition? Sure. You can play an epistemological game No, I'm just no I'm just saying let's be you do understand the concept don't you that?

That fringe idea has become mainstreamed? Okay, sure. So that's it. Okay. I'm not exactly sure. So you're saying that Joe shouldn't have Daryl Cooper on? No, I'm saying that if you mainstream very, very fringe views, which are easily able to be debunked, if you mainstream them,

At some point, that view that was so fringe will be what eager, very disconnected, unhappy people are going to start playing with too. And if these people are such experts in how you see a society go weird, they can look at what is happening to a portion of the right everywhere on this stuff. There is a portion of the right across the West that is playing this game

very dark game and they're doing it deliberately and you can't not be aware of that. I agree with that. I don't think Daryl Cooper is doing that, but I do agree with your characterization. I think it's a pretty important distinction there. You're just taking this one statement.

And then this where he's trying to joke around with his buddy, this this Churchill statement. And this is this is the basis. He and these other guys are all doing the anti Churchill stuff now. But he's not doing an anti Churchill stuff. He and the other Churchill was the author of this whole Operation Unthinkable, right, where they wanted to use the Nazis to invade Russia. Wasn't that Churchill? Is that not true? We're going to have to get into the weeds on Churchill.

There is always going to be a corner, which you can get me on, on a bit of Churchill. But that's the point. You'd have to say which bit you're talking about. But that's the point, is to have a comprehensive view. Yeah. Churchill was never working with the Germans to invade Russia. No, no, no. This is a plan that was drawn up. Do you know about Operation Thinkable? Pull it up, Jamie.

Operation Unthinkable was at the end of the war, I believe Churchill was concerned about the rise of Russia, and the rise of the Soviet Union. And the idea was, and we'll find out what the historical facts are about this, Operation Unthinkable, the name given to two related possible future war plans developed by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee

against the Soviet Union during 1945. The plans were never implemented. The creation of the plans was ordered by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, on May 1945 and developed by the British Armed Forces Joint Planning Staff in May 1945, the end of World War II in Europe. One plan assumed a surprise attack on the Soviet forces stationed in Germany to oppose the

The will of the United States imposed, rather, the will of the United States and the British Empire upon Russia. The will was qualified as a square deal for Poland, but added that that does not necessarily limit the military commitment, the assessment signed by the chief...

Army staff on 9 June 1945 included it would be beyond our power to win a quick but limited success and we would be committed to a protracted war against heavy odds the code was yeah this is okay first of all I never do Wikipedia okay we don't have to do Wikipedia this is just what Jamie pulled up okay but first of all yes at the end of the war and a plan requested that wasn't seen through

That suggests that after the defeat of Nazism, communism of the Soviet form is also going to be a threat to Europe was simply evidence. I mean, it's obvious. True. It's what Churchill worried about throughout the 40s. Worried about it in Yalta. He worried about it everywhere. I'm sorry, but I have to return to this point that this man manages to do one of the most heroic things in human history in standing alone against evil in its most concentrate form.

And he does about as much as any human being can do to save the civilized world. If you just park that and you go on to a plan in 1945 to try to counter Soviet domination of Europe, you see what I'm saying? This is not doing something in the round.

Yeah, it's also... Look, I mean... Look, I'm not even, like... I'm not at all the expert on World War II. And I'm not, like, gonna debate with you about World War II. But I would say that, like, that is...

There's a lot of room for nuance and disagreement with what you just said. You know, in the 20th century, we had two world wars. They're the worst thing, objectively speaking, the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world. And the Second World War is the biggest bloodbath in human history. And it ended with handing the man who you just mentioned, Joseph Stalin, half of Europe. So listen, if you want to argue, I'm Jewish and my father,

German descent. So like, I'm not against the argument that it was the Nazis had to be defeated and that was the most important thing, but there still is just the basic facts that it was a, it,

it almost couldn't have gone worse. It was like just a nightmare for civilization. And if people want to look back at that and go, man, was there any other way this could have been handled? Was there any other way? Were there blunders that were made here? Now, personally, what I feel much more comfortable arguing would be that I try to blame everything I can on Woodrow Wilson as much as I can, because also he created the income tax on the Federal Reserve and did so much to damage my country. But

I think American entry into World War I was really a disaster. And imposing the Treaty of Versailles on Germany was a disaster. I also think that's kind of...

fairly mainstream history. Like, that's not a particularly controversial view that, like, imposing the Treaty of Versailles on Germany ended up in disaster. Well, no, except that, as Martin Amis said, the only way to not get to the Treaty of Versailles would be for Germany to win World War I, but yeah. Yeah, but we're not talking about the Nazis winning the war. We're talking about, you know, listen, I think that... But secondly, sorry, I just have to

address that fundamental. You say the outcome of World War II and everything that happened in it was the worst thing that's ever happened, and the worst thing imaginable, worst possible outcome, you said. Just about. You said worst possible outcome. Let me give you a much worse possible outcome. Hitler wins.

Right. Okay. Okay. So it's not the worst possible outcome. That's true. Listen, but okay, Hitler. Yes. Okay. I'm not saying you can't dream up a worse outcome. I'm saying what you have. It's not dreaming up. That's just what my country and others went through. But what did end up happening was the 60 million people died, including the Holocaust. And then Joseph Stalin takes half of Europe. So, okay, fine. I should, I'll correct that. There is a worse outcome. Right. But that's not a great one.

No, nobody said it was. This is a very weird argument that you now hear about. This attempt to revision this, and I know why it's happening. I don't think there's anything that's revisionist. I think there is. But this attempt to sort of say, look, you know, at the end of World War II, what have we got? Stalin has half of Europe. What was the point? And so on. That's going on. That's going on. And there are people who are feeding it. That argument is very similar. This particular school of, as it were, history is

is doing something that I've seen happen with American history as well, particularly with Lincoln. Lincoln's an interesting comparison to make with Churchill on this. There are people who will criticize Churchill for mistakes made, not hard to do, quite hard not to make mistakes while fighting at a war of total annihilation against your country. People will say, oh, he didn't sort this out in 1945. You know, it's rather like Lincoln.

He didn't solve every problem in the world for all time, but he solved a hell of a big problem for his time.

And that requires some kind of generosity of spirit and understanding in hindsight, as opposed to I will find something that he did that I wouldn't have done because if I'd have been running the British Empire in 1939, I'd have known exactly how to do it. And I don't know how to hold the whole thing together. And I kept Stalin back and he'd have been great at Yalta and everything.

This is but I don't think anybody saying yeah, I agree with you I think there's a tendency of like woke left kids to do this But I don't think that's what but certainly not what I'm saying and I don't think what Darrell saying I do also think that one of the bigger kind of the bigger picture dynamics to all of this is that we have at least since 9/11 been in a state of perpetual war and

And all of these wars have been disasters. They have been so many lies involved in selling all of them. I mean, oh, I,

The whole Iraq war, the whole war in Afghanistan, just lying the whole way through. I mean, I remember literally having conversations with Green Berets in the middle of the war in Afghanistan. And they're like, George W. Bush is telling you that the army we're building up there is really successful. This thing is going to fall in a week without us. And then all through the Obama administration, it's just like lie after lie after lie with disastrous wars. And so this does create a fertile ground.

ground for people to say, I wonder if they were lying about all these wars. Again, I'm not really trying to argue with you about World War II. I'd rather argue about these wars today. I think the interesting question is whether you're busy watering it. Well, should you not talk about mistakes that were made overall? Absolutely. Okay, you should. Absolutely. I have all four going back and looking at mistakes. So what is your argument then? It's a very weird thing to go back, zone in on a man, say this one thing,

is a mistake and should characterize him, and you ignore everything else. You're taking him out of context when you're talking about Darryl, who's done, what was it, 30-plus hours? So what? 30-plus hours of podcasting. You'd do that in a week. UFC 314 is headed to South Beach, and it won't be all glitz and glamour, but the stars will be out. Don't miss any of the action at DraftKings Sportsbook, the official sports podcast.

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Yeah, it's a very different thing. He's not doing a podcast like talking to people. Okay, nor is he doing scholarly work, nor is he working in the archives. Come on. I mean, he is not the historian of our era. He's not complaining to me. This is the thing, Joe. This is like punching jelly. No, but you don't consume his work. I'm saying because I don't need to consume...

Endless versions of a revisionist history. I understand. But it's not revisionist history. If you listen to his work, it's not revisionist history. He's basing it on historical work. Yeah, I know. Okay, so this is my point about Jelly. It's a shape-shifting thing. Comedian or historian?

He's not a comedian. Historian or podcast. Would be historian or actual historian. You say he doesn't claim to be a historian, but he's pumping out tens of hours of history. Neither does Dan Carlin. He doesn't claim to be a historian either. You see my point about the move. It's like some weird jujitsu move where you say, hang on, you know all about this as well. You say, I'm not a historian, but I'm going to spend my time talking about history.

I'm not a journalist, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing. I'm not an expert on this, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing. It's a weird move, yeah? No. You don't think? No, I'm a free American. I can talk about what I like to. You can talk about what you want. So what is the point here? I've noticed you can. But we all can. But what's the point? The point is, what are you pushing? What are you watering?

What am I pushing? Liberty, free markets, peace, prosperity, not getting in another stupid catastrophic war, which we're on the precipice of right now. That's what I'm pushing. What are we on the precipice of? Well, I think you weren't you just talking about it the other day. Everyone I hear on the inside says we're about to attack around. I think you just said something about that the other day. Am I wrong about that? I thought I saw in one of your interviews that you did. Possibly. That doesn't mean we are on the verge of a war. I mean, you keep referring to we being in wars.

There's a very big difference between a country having a military that's engaged and a country being at war.

This country has not been at war for 25 years. You have not been fighting for the American homeland for 25 years. Yes, we haven't. That's true. We haven't had a war on our shores. We've been picking on third world countries halfway around the world. Well, you haven't been randomly picking on them. I mean, Afghanistan, you went. I didn't say it was random. Yeah, right. OK. It wasn't like you suddenly decided to bomb again Myanmar or something. You went to Afghanistan to find bin Laden and

and take revenge for 9/11 and stop an attack like that happening again on the American homeland. That is very different from a country being at war. Yeah, but that's a total mischaracterization of the war in Afghanistan. It's one thing to say that might be an accurate characterization of the Special Operations Mission in late 2001, but then we thought a 20-year regime change war against the Taliban. Because you got dragged into the quicksand of war.

Yes. Okay, fine. Fine. But I thought it wasn't a war. I don't get your argument. No, I said it was a war. It's your use of we, us.

As if you're personally like suffering this war. Yeah, you're tax when I say we we pay for it. Okay fine If I went back and corrected you on every time you've used the term we to refer to your government or something like that Like if I were to say oh we just imposed tariffs on China Would you point out that I didn't and it was a Trump administration you take it obviously very personally and that that's your right to do So, of course, I'm just trying to make sure we're accurate. What do you think I'm taking personally? I just said the American Wars

Sure. Yeah. They've killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost my country eight trillion dollars and degraded my country very much. And there's a very good argument to make on that. I'm still slightly bemused about this move from I'm an expert on this and I have views to I'm a comedian. I've never claimed to be an expert on anything. This is the problem, Joe.

I mean, if somebody says- Wait a minute, you have to claim to be an expert on something to have an opinion on something? No, you don't have to be. You don't have to be. So what's the issue? This is like, I'm not a historian, but I'm pumping out history. I'm not an expert, but I'm talking all the time about this thing. But you're not even talking about specifically on what he just said. No, I'm saying, this is my point about this. You say, I'm not an expert. So what's the solution? To not talk about it? No, it's to have more experts around.

Well, the expert class hasn't done a great job. I know. This is follow the science. Absolutely. I agree with that. I just said to you, I agree with that. But one of the problems is... During all of COVID, I will put my track record against any of the expert class on COVID. I'm glad to do that. So should I have just shut up? Should I have shut up by opposing lockdowns and opposing vaccine mandates and talking about the lab leak theory? That's the entire argument that you're making. Let the experts handle this. You're not an expert. You're wildly...

Miss not listening to what I'm saying. I think you have to take. I think we should agree, perhaps on the following, that one major thing can break down in front of your eyes or many major things. And it does not mean that every single one of the sewer gates should be lifted. OK, yeah, I get that. But who's who's saying it should be?

I'm saying this is a chatter on what is part of our side at the moment, is that a lot of the sewer gates are being lifted, sometimes by people who know that they're doing it, sometimes by people who don't, sometimes by people who say, I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there. But at the very least, there's some damn hygiene that should be required, isn't there? Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but sure. Just that.

Let's have a bit of hygiene on our own side, not lift every sewer gate. And when you say our own side, you mean the right wing broadly speaking? Broadly speaking. And I'm sort of funny about libertarians. I'm never quite sure. I always think libertarians are essentially the bisexuals of politics. They should just choose, Joe. They should choose. It's kind of – they just want everything at the buffet. It's very funny. Well, I think we want –

Some things. I don't know. Okay. That's a weird way to put it, but I get your point. I see your point. All right. Well, I mean, I don't know. Look, I mean, essentially, I just don't. Maybe there's something I'm missing here. But if your argument is that, like, you're saying, I claim to be an expert, but then I have, like, a parachute to get out of it by being like, hey, I'm just a comedian who's just saying this. But I don't think I've ever, like, really claimed to be an expert. I have opinions on things. Because I'm interested in these topics. I know, but.

Isn't it weird to go around, for instance, let's get to the last year and a half. It's a bit weird to be simultaneously saying I'm not an expert on a conflict and talking about it everywhere. I don't think so. Not really. I mean, I don't know. I don't think like I don't see how you talk about these things.

Which things? All these things that we're talking about. Some of them, yeah. Are you an expert? I am on some, yes. On some, but you're talking about some that you're not an expert on. You'll notice that I didn't just... What should you do if those subjects get breached? Well, I think that you educate yourself as much as you can. Shouldn't you say I'm not an expert and then give your opinion if you're in the middle of a conversation? As I say, I think that it's a weird move to say...

I'm not an expert on this, but I'm going to talk about it nonstop. I think that is strange. Listen, I will certainly concede that I am weird. So I'm not disagreeing with you. It's weird that I'm as obsessed with all this stuff as I am. I mean, like, okay, I'm a weird guy. I tell jokes at nightclubs and then get obsessed with politics and monetary policy and like, okay, fine. But I just fundamentally disagree with this idea, which I really do think is quite anti-democratic in spirit and quite...

you know, elitist, that there's an expert class. They can have opinions on all of these things. It's weird for any regular person who's just read about it. Not my view. Not my view. Seems like what you're saying. I conceded already. I said a long time ago that I believe much of the expert class let itself and us all down very badly. And I think that happened in foreign policy in areas. Not every area, but it happened in some areas. I think it happened with COVID in many areas. But that does not mean

that it's just a free for all. No, there are some things we can still verify to be true and can still agree on as baseline levels of agreement in a free society. And yes, everyone is free to air their views, but it does not mean that everyone who sounds off on an issue, whether it's World War II, the war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine,

an equally valid point of view. No. I certainly wouldn't argue. I mean, that to me is just batting down a straw man. I mean, I certainly wouldn't argue that everyone has an equally valid point of view. And I certainly wouldn't argue that there shouldn't be some standards of like who you would want to find interesting and talk to and who you wouldn't. But also it's like, so let's have the conversation that like, I don't know, like if there's, if there is a,

If there are experts out there who can smack all of this stuff down or just destroy every point that I make over the years or whatever, like, okay, so then do it. And then let's see. Well, that's a bit weird because also then it's like the debate me bro thing. But you just criticized Daryl for not debating. No, it's fine. It's fine. Yeah, I know. Let me just make the main point. I think what I'm trying to get at, Joe, is that it's a bit like the Twitter algorithm thing.

which is, yes, everyone is and should be free to say what they like on Twitter, apart from whatever the very fringe things of like immediate incitement to violence and all that kind of thing. But we all know that one of the oddities of Twitter, including since Elon took over, is that what you hope is a restored marketplace of ideas is

Ends up pushing you really crazy shit. Yes, and that is what I'm suggesting is happening on a podcast level and maybe on a wider level beyond that I get stuff on Twitter. I just do not want I do not want a guy with one half thousand followers who's got some zany new view on something who isn't an expert but is an expert to be pushed at me and effectively what is happening with the Twitter algorithm is happening everywhere else as well and

And we're all for the open marketplace of ideas. I want that. I thrive in it. But it is different once you get into the thing of is something manipulating the algorithm behind? Is the algorithm being pushed on me? Why am I being given this? Why am I not being given that? Why am I being constantly pushed this view? And I think that the answer to a great degree is the same thing in your world as it is in the Twitter world, which is,

If you go straight online and you say, you know, JFK file drops, watch live stream of Kennedy historians reading the papers live, you're not going to get any views. No one's going to watch it. That's kind of what's needed is for the people who know the documents to go through the documents. But you and I know that if, as there was some guy who did immediately, you do something like live stream Mossad involvement in JFK,

You're going to milk it. You're going to cream it online. The money comes in. I'm saying that there's a similar algorithm in all of our lives that we're not as aware of as we should be, which is that we because we all know this at some level, that there are certain things that get your ability, your base going or get people going interesting and crazy. And then they start debating it and all that sort of thing. And that algorithm of online seems to me to be spilling into the real world.

I don't disagree that there's certainly more sensationalist stuff will get you more clicks. I also don't think that's a it's not really unique to social media or podcasting. I mean, this is true. I write for the tabloids. Yeah, right. This has always been true. So, yeah. OK, so it's kind of one of the problems. Yeah, I don't think anybody's arguing against that.

You know, it's certainly never my intention when I talk to someone to try to get more views. It sounds crazy, but I'm only talking to people that I'm interested in talking to. And in Daryl's case, it's because I've been a listener of his podcast for years. That's it. This is like genuinely how I pursue things. I believe you. That's why you're here. I'm genuinely interested in your views as well, even though you completely disagree with him. That's, I mean, this is the marketplace of ideas in real time.

I agree. Although, as I say, I think you've massively underrepresented the pro-Ukraine argument and the pro-Israel argument in the last two years. I don't know. I mean, well... That's my observation. Okay. You're totally allowed to have that observation. What's the pro-Ukraine argument that you think is not being represented enough? Well, my broad view is that, again, something to do with the algorithm, that anything that is...

conspiratorial about Zelensky or the Ukrainians in the conflict does very well. Anything that says actually the Ukrainian army is fighting to try to retain as much of their country as they can doesn't do as well. I think that everything that is pushing the idea that, for instance, the Americans caused it or something like that does well. I think everything that says actually

in February 2022, Vladimir Putin's tanks invaded Ukraine and they shouldn't have done, doesn't do as well. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that what Vladimir Putin did wasn't horrific. That's not my point. The point is that after that, there's a whole set of things. Let's look at, for instance, the issue of corruption. Ukraine is a pretty corrupt country by EU standards, by World Bank standards.

And it's been a problem as it is in that neck of the woods. And it's understandable that if the US is one of the countries putting money and arms into Ukraine, then it's going to be a subject of legitimate interest to the American people and others, the European taxpayers. Nevertheless, you end up in this. And I know this because it's the same thing in the old media. You end up on like the new bit of the story. And there's always a risk that you will lose sight of the beginning of the story.

For instance, I mean, Putin's corruption is legendary, gargantuan, and not as interesting, it seems to me. The algorithm doesn't push that. And I think that's, to a greater extent, the case with the Israel Hamas.

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Well, isn't there a little bit of a concern? Like, I would say a couple things here. Number one...

I'm not denying, I don't know how the algorithm works or what it's pushing. It's an interesting thing that we probably should all know more about, but I think there's a danger when you're, to just classify everything as well the algorithm pushes this and doesn't push this. It's like it could also be that some ideas are just resonating more and some ideas are more popular than other ideas. And there's probably both of those things are at work in that dynamic.

But I also think that something like the reason why, say, talking about Ukrainian corruption is more interesting in a lot of ways than talking about Russian corruption is obviously because, like, well, one of these countries is an enemy and the other one is one that we're sending tens of billions of dollars to. Hundreds. Yes. Well, debating on between Zelensky and the weapons companies, I don't know. He says he only got $70 billion of it, but we've spent closer to $170, so whatever. But...

The point is that obviously if there is a country that we are propping up funding arming and they're corrupt,

I would say my starting point would always be to be more concerned with that corruption than an enemy country, which it's almost kind of a given is a corrupt country. Like, I don't know. I'm sure there are fringes of the right who might say, like, Vladimir Putin, some great guy or something like that. But that is I really do not think that is the argument that most people who are critical of this, of Biden's policy are making. Sure. I mean, I think the one I think one of the interesting things that happens in this is the old cliche of losing.

the wood for the trees. It just happens an awful lot. And it's the nature of the old news cycle, let alone the current one, the social media era.

Actually, I remember that. So I don't go back to World War Two. Let me just very quickly. I remember this debate with Pat Buchanan when he was debating much more learned historians on the subject of the origins of World War Two. And the whole thing got lost in all of this sort of mad puzzle of views about iron ore production in the Bavarian forest and this sort of thing. And I remember everyone was all over the place. And the moderator turned to the historian Andrew Roberts and said, Andrew Roberts, why did World War Two begin?

And he said, World War Two began because Hitler invaded Poland. And those moments come along quite often at the moment, which is, yes, there's an awful lot of very interesting things to look into. There's a lot of very interesting things going on, which we should all be able to talk about and do talk about. But

Sometimes you have to remember the origin causes of things as well. And you have to stick to keeping that in mind. Yeah, well, I think that a lot of people are pretty bad at the moment of keeping that in mind. Like you can there you can concede Ukrainian corruption. You can concede all sorts of things and still not lose sight of the thing of if Russia rolls tanks into neighboring countries. Yeah, it can't be.

Oh, well, listen. OK, so on that, I think we have an area of agreement. And I do think like even while I much prefer the the path that Donald Trump is pursuing to the path that Joe Biden pursued when it comes to the war in Ukraine. And of course, this is, you know, Donald Trump's thing is once you piss him off, he's going to call you every bad nickname that there is. But when he and sometimes when you don't piss him off, well, you sure. But when he's a Danes come to mind.

I believe he said that Zelensky started the war. Yes, he did. Which is like, okay, all right, that's a little bit ridiculous. He said Zelensky started the war and Zelensky was the dictator. Yes, okay. What? Trump said that? Yes. But it was after Zelensky pissed him off. He said Zelensky started the war? Yeah. Really? This is how Donald Trump is?

Love him or hate him, for better or for worse. Donald Trump, it's like if he feels that you disrespected him or came at him, he's going to be 10 times more vicious to you. By the way, this happened two weeks before the disastrous Oval Office meeting. Yeah. And I wrote the next day the cover in the New York Post, which was a big picture of Vladimir Putin with the headline, This is a dictator. Just again, as I say, not to lose track in all of the melee.

not to lose track of the basic facts. Well, look, I will say this as somebody who is very anti-war, broadly speaking. And I do agree with you that it should, like, we should be able to have conversations about all the things that led up to the war and all the different, you know, like blunders that were made and also still recognize that Vladimir Putin invaded a country and is responsible for

you know, at least hundreds of thousands of people dying. And, you know, my Scott Horton, who I always try to promote on here, he just wrote this book called Provoked. I think it's the best book that's been written on the history leading up to the war between is basically takes you from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the war in Ukraine.

And even in that book, the book is called Provoked. And the argument is that Western policy was very provocative toward Vladimir Putin. And there were a lot of off ramps that could have been explored and should have been explored. But he has an entire chapter in the book where he is saying like, look,

Putin had a lot of other options. He didn't have to do this. It's not as if any of that justifies his invasion. And so I do agree with you that whenever we're talking about a war, particularly a war of aggression, that should always be in the front of people's minds. I mean, you can criticize, you know, I would say, I think I'm consistent on this across the board. You can criticize lots of things about the insurgency in Iraq, certainly, but

But you should remember that George W. Bush invaded the country when he shouldn't have and based off lies. So I say that when my government does it. I'll say it when the Russian government does it also. That being said, there's a very strong argument that there were many policies that the U.S., you know, NATO and Europe as well, but mostly the U.S. pursued that were just almost unlawful.

Like if you wanted to come to this inevitable conflict, this would have been the policy to pursue to give you the best chance to end up there. You know, I was with a British military friend recently and somebody asked, what does the fog of war mean? And he gave a brilliant example of what it means on the battlefield, which a lot of people don't understand. There's a version of the fog of war in history as well. The great Czech writer Milan Kundera said,

had a beautiful phrase in a book of his from the 90s called Testaments Betrayed, where he said the odd thing about mankind is, he said, we walk through life in a fog and we stumble along a path and we create the path as we stumble along it. He said that's not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is that when we look back, we see the man and we see the path, but we don't see the fog. Everything looks inevitable when you're standing in the present.

Everything looks like it was going to happen this way. And you have these endless, often fascinating, often futile explorations of what might have been. But it doesn't take into account the fog. It's a very good point. And the fog of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union was pretty considerable. The efforts in the 1990s to bring them into a more obvious part of the international order failed.

My own view has always been that in part we missed an opportunity to pay a kind of civilizational respect to the Russians, which they deserved. But also throughout the period that people now say there are all of these off-ramps,

And now so many people claim that NATO went around the region desperately trying to provoke the Russians into some kind of war or inevitably leading them that way because of NATO expansionism. They never take into account what was in my memory and experience very clear, which was NATO didn't go to go around recruiting people.

People came to NATO. Countries came to NATO wanting to join precisely because they feared the aggression that Ukrainians have suffered since February 2022 and indeed before. I was in Georgia just after the 2008 war began. The country, not the state. Well, it has to be.

confirmed otherwise people like what who invaded georgia we attacked georgia they're no bastards uh but i was in the country of georgia and um uh putin had tried to invade them and had seized south uh set you and abkhazia and uh they were desperate to join nato in fact they're desperate to join the european union i rather frivolously said to a georgian friend uh

If you want, we can swap. You can take our British membership of the EU. But in the NATO thing, they were desperate for it. And they were desperate for it precisely for the reason that many of the Ukrainians were desperate for it, which was only way to stop Putin expansionism. So, you know, in the whole fog of the post-Soviet era...

That is one of the many things that gets left out of the conversation. And by the way, Putin's actions in February 2022 and since, all he's done is provoke two new countries to join NATO and his borders with NATO have grown. That's true. Finland and Sweden wanted to join. And the only reason Finland and Sweden wanted to join was because they too are scared. It's a heck of a thing to get the Swedish to join a military alliance. It doesn't come easy to them. It doesn't come natural.

And these countries joined because like Georgia, like Ukraine, they desperately feared Putinist expansionism. And they weren't wrong. Okay, but I get your point. Yeah.

First off, the war in Georgia in 2008 actually came, was it two or three months after the Bucharest summit where NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine would be entering NATO. So just making that point that the NATO aspirations came first. But listen, I don't think you're wrong. I don't think anybody is ever implying that like we've expanded NATO through force and that the countries who were joining or at least the governments of the countries who were joining didn't want it.

Although, in the case of Ukraine, there's a great piece in the Washington Post about this in 2006 where joining NATO was actually very unpopular. And there was a lot done, and largely because they just didn't want to take on the headache of the conflict that this might provoke. But...

You know, the question, I think, isn't necessarily like, do these countries wish to join NATO? Of course, I think most countries in the world would like to join NATO. I think most countries in the world would like the most powerful government in the history of the world to guarantee their defense and subsidize their defense. The question is, is that in America's interest? And in terms of your point of seeing through the fog, I mean, look, there was...

As you know well, in the 90s, in the late 90s during the first round of NATO expansion, there was a lively debate amongst this. I don't mean a debate amongst outsiders or non-expert experts or whatever. I mean within the real deal experts, the wisest graybears in the national security apparatus, there was a real debate with at least three secretaries of defense who warned against this, right?

Robert Gates, Robert McNamara, William Perry, the Secretary of Defense at the time, almost resigned, said his biggest regret in life is that he didn't resign over it. George Kennan was able to see right through that fog. He literally said the Cold Warrior, founder of the containment strategy, saw right through that fog and goes, this will inevitably lead to a conflict with Russia. And his exact words were, and then when there's a Russian response, everybody will say, look, this is why we needed to expand NATO. But the point here is, OK,

Even within that deep debate which there were lively debates about even the people who were on the pro Expansionist side of things like Henry Kissinger even he said Ukraine would have to be a special arrangement Ukraine will not come into NATO because obviously that's leading to a war with with Russia And so I don't think it's unreasonable and I think this is a fair thing that we should do in all conflicts is like

To have, as Mearsheimer puts it, to have strategic empathy. To say like, hey, listen, let's reasonably place ourselves in the other person's shoes and say, how would we react if somebody was expanding their military alliance that is explicitly anti-us and is bringing it up to our borders and now is openly for years and years and years saying that we are going to bring your largest neighbor, where you have very important strategic interests from your point of view,

into our military lines and you are saying over and over again, "This is our brightest red line. Do not do this." And then they keep flirting with doing this over and over. Then they back a street putsch that overthrows the government there. Don't you think maybe that would be a provocation? First of all, two things. If you want that strategic empathy that, I'm not an admirer of, but if you want to do that, you can do it the other way around as well, surely.

Yeah. I mean, do the same thing with the Ukrainians. Absolutely. Yes. Latvians and others. Yeah, but I would never. But my response to you was never. I can't understand why the Latvians or the Lithuanians would want to be in NATO. I understand. Yes. Right. And I can understand why Russia thought that Ukrainian membership in NATO was a red line. I can understand that. But that wasn't why Putin invaded in 2022. And I think that I think there's an oddity, if I can say so. Maybe this particularly comes across on the libertarian side.

side. But the, I think there's an oddity of the, uh, let the record show him a happily married heterosexual man. Um, they all say that. Um, I think there's an oddity that sometimes particularly happens on the libertarian side, which is, which is a presumption that things only really happen in the world because we make them so. And, you know, Russia invades Ukraine because of American policy and Eastern Europe post 1989, 1990. Uh,

something happens in the Middle East because of American policy. And I think it's a very blinkered and parochial view of things because my experience in countries around the world is that there's a heck of a lot going on that America is frankly not really involved in. Well, that's certainly a straw man of my position. I'm not saying that America is... No, no, no. But what I'm saying is it is very... In fact, it's partly since you very kindly raised the issue, Joe. Your book. Your book.

It's one of the things I find very interesting about this with democracies, which is it is one of the things in the nature of a liberal democracy that because we have the right to air our opinion, because we have the right to criticize our government and much more.

We end up doing all of that. And there is a misapprehension people can come to. I don't know if you do, but they can come to, which is effectively we are the only force that causes action in the world. And there's a reason for that, which is that we have, thank God, a say in how liberal democracies are run and how we're governed. And we can chew over all of the disagreements that we have. But when a liberal democracy comes against the kind of rock like a death cult,

a totalitarian regime, a dictatorship like Russia or the Iranian revolutionary government, there's always this temptation to say, to focus our attention on our own side because we can't do a darn thing about the other one.

It's a version of, you know, the great late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said when he was ambassador to the U.N. He had this great rule, sort of known among those who know about it as Moynihan's rule, which is, he said, if you sit at the U.N. or the U.N. Human Rights Council or any of these bodies, you would come away with the belief that the most abused people with the fewest rights in the world live in America and other Western liberal societies.

And he came because we're the ones that talk about it. You know, if there's one incident of racism in America, the whole world knows about it. Everyone reads it. There'll be protests everywhere. If there's one incident of racism in North Korea, it's not going to make any news.

And then you have on top of that the fact that the way in which despotisms and death cults and dictatorships work, the information just doesn't come out. And Moynihan's rule ended up being that the... In an interesting point, he said that his rule by the end of his time at the UN was that the number of human rights violations that occur in a country happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of claims of human rights violations.

because only the countries which care about it and which such things can be aired in are ever going to get it out. But the point of Moynihan's law and the warning of it is be careful not to come away with the mistaken idea that the freest and most liberal societies are the worst. And I think there's a version of Moynihan's law that applies, whether it's from the Middle East to Ukraine and Russia, which is,

We come away with this, people may come away with the impression that the bad things in the world effectively all come from here. And there is quite a lot to be said for some of that, but there's not everything to be said. And much of the world runs on a dynamic and a dynamo, which you can't do a darn thing about other than to try to understand it.

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There is truth to a lot of that, and I think that is a fascinating kind of dynamic where there is something about kind of like... You know, I noticed this even just with my own kids. Like, it's like... And people... When you have kids and you raise them really... You know, like, you're really sweet to them and you don't hate them and you give them a good life, small things end up becoming huge, like, things in their mind. Like, someone pushed me at the playground and it's like, whoa, this is... Whereas, like, the way I grew up, that would have just been kind of like a non-event. But anyway, I think...

It would be certainly incorrect to assume that everything that happens bad in the world is somehow a consequence of U.S. meddling. I also think that there's people on the other side here, maybe the people who are more neocon leaning, more war hockey leaning. They have a tendency to only focus on the bad things that everybody else does and act like everyone.

Our policies have no impact on this. Yeah, it would be ridiculous. Right. So very specifically, you know, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I'll just get two, like, bullet points on this, and we could talk about a lot of this. But look, number one, in 2008, as you well know, right,

The Joe Biden CIA director, who was the CIA director for the entire war up until Donald Trump just came back in, he wrote the means net memo to Condoleezza Rice, a private cable to the then Secretary of State when he was ambassador to Russia to let her know that this flirting with bringing Ukraine into NATO is going to end up in a war. And by the way, the Russians don't want to do it.

His words exactly. If you keep pushing with this, the Russians are going to have they are going to have to make a decision that they don't want to make, which is whether they intervene or not. And number two, Straltenberg.

I might be butchering that again. But the head of NATO, he himself said that Vladimir Putin sent him a draft treaty in late 2021 and said, look, if you just put into writing that you will not bring Ukraine into NATO, I won't invade. Now, if you want to argue that... I admire your appeal to authority to the head of the CIA. It's not an appeal to authority. Well...

How is that an appeal to authority? You regard the view of the CIA director on that occasion as being useful for your argument. But secondly, there's an oddity to believing that

what Vladimir Putin says. No, wait, hold on. You didn't let me finish my point. So don't believe what he says. I'm not going to pretend to read his heart and mind or something like that. But at the very least, you handed him the giant excuse in order to do it. I mean, maybe he doesn't really believe it, but this is his argument to his own people and to the world that it's like, look, and...

If we put him in a position, you know, if you hate Vladimir Putin, he's such a terrible guy. Well, we put him in this position where he gets to now very plausibly say to the international community in the same way that if the Soviet Union had survived and the United States hadn't. He doesn't very plausibly have the opportunity to do that. He invaded Ukraine because he wanted to annex the whole country because he was trying to pretend the whole place had been run by Nazis.

Well, I mean, OK, the whole place wasn't run by Nazis. There's certainly worse than Nazis there. This is what he told the Russian people. Oh, he also brought up – listen, when he announced – You can lie an awful lot when you're a dictator and you have the ability not just to run all of the media but to kill your political opponents. I mean you can do an awful lot. Sure. None of this – I just got back from Ukraine again the other week and –

It's so weird. I saw the Oval Office meeting as it happened from a trench in the front line between the Russian and Ukrainian positions in the east of the country. And it was so weird seeing the way in which this country's territory was being talked about by outsiders, and particularly by America. Because there's so many oddities about it. But the people who are fighting there, the soldiers on the front lines, the ones I was with, they're not

fighting against Putin forces because of NATO expansion or anything. They're fighting because he lied to his own army. He lied to his own people. He lies to the world. And he decided he wanted to gobble up Ukraine because he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union.

And as a result, these young men are in dugouts in the middle of winter fighting Russian soldiers because the Ukrainians' homes are 30 kilometers behind them. And I just, I think among much else, that's stuff that cannot be forgotten about. None of this is simply about NATO expansion or this or that. It's about a country whose people are suffering in their third year of war. And it's almost total war.

As much total war as we've got in the modern age.

But that's not... I'm not disagreeing with any of that. I'm not saying... The Ukrainian people were fighting because they wanted to keep their country. People don't very much like being invaded by foreign countries. I understand that completely. And I've also always said throughout this whole thing, that is their right. They have a right to do that. We as Americans have a right to, you know, have an opinion on whether our government ought to be funding and arming the thing. But all I'm saying is that... I'm not making an appeal to authority here. I'm just saying that you have...

The top people in the Russian government all unanimously saying, like, this is our red line. You keep flirting with NATO expansion into Ukraine. And then you have all the people at the top of NATO and at the top of the U.S. government admitting it, too. And going like, yeah, this is the whole beef. So why is it like these two things aren't mutually exclusive? No, they aren't. But I mean.

They weren't going to expand NATO to Ukraine. Well, they kept flirting with it, and you know this. The Ukrainians wanted membership, and it was very unwise whenever anyone from the rest of the West even flirted with it. Didn't Kamala Harris openly say that NATO was going to join you? Yeah, shortly before the war. Ukraine was going to join NATO? Yeah, I never saw her as the Kissinger of our era.

There's an area of agreement He's the guy Well, obviously that guy's the future but but okay, but it is still the vice president of the United States of America and it's listen That's not why Putin invaded but well you you can invade it because he because of the thing he's dreamt of since he full of falling down in the Soviet Union is you know how he dreams and

We know a lot from what he said and what he's done since the fall of the Soviet Union and his statements, certainly very early on in his presence. But if he does have a red line and you violate that red line, is that because he's following his dreams or it's because he's...

I don't think that's exactly what he said he's he's alluded many times to like how great the Soviet Union was and what a tragedy it is that it Collapsed and things like that, but regardless something we can agree what a fiction on his part I mean oh I think the Soviet Union collapsing is one of the greatest things that's ever happened in the history of the world and the most evil regimes if not the result of American action and

Sure. There were a lot of factors in there. Just going to throw in some pro-American views. I will certainly concede that us luring them into Afghanistan played a huge role in weakening the Soviet Union. It came with the minor little price tag of 9-11. That was the... But, okay. But, you know, that's... The Soviet Union did not fall just because of Afghanistan. No, I didn't say... I said it played a role.

I didn't say it was just because of Afghanistan. The main thing was the stationing of European troops. Also because communism as an economic model just doesn't work. And it was a disaster and it was destined to collapse. We can agree on that. All centrally planned, totally socialist economies are destined for bad results. I don't like the word destined in that because, I mean, in my experience, things that don't work can go on an awfully long

Well, look, the Soviet Union went on an awfully long time. I mean, it was... I thought when I went to North Korea some years ago, that couldn't go on for much longer. And on it goes. Yeah. No, OK. So fair point there. But certainly it's going to be, you know, it's a much different dynamic for a communist country like North Korea, who is...

a relatively small and not expansionist, whereas the Soviet Union was trying to maintain an empire, which is a much tougher thing to do. Look, the United States of America is going broke trying to do it, so it was pretty tough for them to do. All I'm saying here is that, like, if you... If the dynamic... Again...

It's not just that, like, first off, in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, we announced we were doing it and we didn't give them a map plan, but we announced they are coming into NATO over and over, not just the Kamala Harris comment, over and over and over again through the years. People at the highest level of the U.S. government asserted that this is going to happen, that it's a matter of time. And then the 2014, this was a major, major provocation toward the Russians that we backtracked

this street protest against the democratically elected government there. That's, again, it's tricky because the Maidan protests were genuine students in the center of the city who were uprising against a corrupt government. I'm not even arguing with that. And they were shot. And that, again, it's like...

The people of Ukraine, like other countries, when they do have agency beyond what Washington. Yeah, I'm not claiming any of those people don't have agency. I'm just claiming that Washington poured 100 million dollars into the thing and sent our politicians over there. Our politicians openly saying we're on your side. You have the backing of America. Historically, historically, you know, America does like to be has liked to be on the side of people who.

desire freedom over autocracy. When it's convenient, not so much when it's not. Well, yeah. Not in Saudi Arabia, not in Egypt. I'm glad you joined me in my dislike of the House of Saud. Okay, fine. But look, it does attack... I was worried for a moment there. Yeah, but it does attack your central point there, that it's like, no, I'm sorry. Like, see, this is my... My beef isn't ever with talking about the corruption or the evil things that other governments do. What I don't like is this whitewashing over our own corruption and the evil things that are...

The idea that America, we have a history of just standing with the people because we love democracy so much. No. We use that as an excuse when we think it's in our strategic advantage. We will overthrow democratically elected governments with no problem, which by the way, Yanukovych was democratically elected with elections verified by the EU. But I'm not denying any of those kids had agency, and I'm sure a lot of them were protesting against their own corrupt government.

But the point is that, like, look, imagine on, I think Jeffrey Sachs came up with this, this isn't mine, but imagine on January 6th if, like, Chinese politicians were coming over and handing out sandwiches to the rioters and saying, we have your back. We have, I mean, listen, we would lose our collective minds if another country came in and did something like that, okay? And, but, I mean, we lost our collective minds about...

Vladimir Putin installing Donald Trump and it was all just completely made up. It wasn't even a real thing. But so to think, okay, those people... Well, we didn't lose our minds on that. A certain subset of mainstream media lost their minds, yes. It wasn't even a subset. No, a main set. For me being the bisexual libertarian here, you have corrected me on my collectivism several times here and you are right. Yes, we didn't lose our mind, but others, many other people here did. But look, I mean, you're pouring...

$100 million into a street protest against a democratically elected president of Ukraine, and the whole issue is over, essentially, whether he's going to tilt toward an economic deal with Europe or tilt toward an economic deal with Vladimir Putin. I mean, Douglas, if anyone did that in our region of the world...

We would – D.C. would overthrow that government, invade in a moment. If China poured $100 million into Mexican protests and was able to overthrow the democratically elected government, what do you think D.C. would do? Change the subject maybe, but Qatar pours hundreds of millions of dollars into this country, billions indeed, and tries to change policy in this country. And nobody is trying to overthrow Qatar.

Nobody's trying to overthrow the Emir or his family. And they've been poisoning American universities, American institutions, buying up American politicians. They put billions into this country. I think I just sent you something about that this morning. Yes. I mean, well, okay. But that is a little bit different than overthrowing our neighbor government and trying to install a hostile government toward us. You're saying that we'd lose our mind if anyone tried to interfere here.

There are lots of people. But I wasn't saying if anyone and the most obvious one is Qatar, which which has poured money into D.C. and into elite institutions and universities in this country. And I don't find from one week to the next anyone who's particularly riled up about it. Well, so they've been I mean, so they're pouring money into D.C. And so do you think that they are influencing U.S. policy through doing that?

I think they're trying to, yeah. Maybe they are trying to. I mean, I don't know. They're definitely succeeding with the universities and others.

Maybe. For sure. They should try with the political class more if they're trying to turn us anti-Israel or something like that because both major parties in this country will fund and unconditionally support Israel no matter what. So, I mean, I don't know. Well, no matter what. But, I mean, Qatar is definitely trying to influence things their way as other countries are. I mean, I cite it as an example of something that's very interesting, which is an attempt to interfere in American public life, which gets almost no attention.

And, indeed, the governments, whether Democrat or Republican, still seem to adore the Qataris, even as they act as one of the backers of terrorist groups across the Middle East and elsewhere. And I cannot understand why it doesn't get more attention. Well, according to the former defense minister of Israel, they were begging Qatar to pour that money into Hamas.

No, that's not what happened. Well, that's what he said. His words, begging. You're referring to the funding of Hamas in the 2010s. Yes. The Qataris poured the money in. And the question on the Israeli side was what you allowed to do with funds that were going into Gaza. And the Israelis allowed the funds to go from Qatar to Gaza.

I think a little bit more than that. I think when the funds dried up, Netanyahu sent the head of the Mossad in there to beg him to keep the funds going. Again, I'm not sure. It's like quoting the head of the CIA, quoting the head of the Mossad. Maybe. Maybe. But that's not the evidence of the last...

18 years. I mean, it's you can. OK, so I I mean, I guess I think I'm allowed to quote powerful people when they admit what they're doing. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, again, I mean, it's just it's just an interesting thing because, again, it's a discipline about this, which is do I only quote powerful people when they say the odd thing that I agree with or do I simultaneously distrust all powerful people?

It's just an interesting rhetorical. Well, no, I mean, I think that obviously, like, I don't blindly trust any anyone in the political class or the media class for that matter either. But when they admit things that are like very against their interest to admit and kind of give away the whole game that now they're pretending doesn't matter. Are you sure whether it's the CIA or Mossad that it isn't just if they say something that you happen to want?

to be the case. - Well, this is kind of like saying if I were to end on trial and I were to like, I'm the prosecution and I'd enter into evidence, a written confession by the defendant and you go, well, are you only entering this in? Because this kind of goes along with your case. Like, I suppose we're all guilty of having these incentives to some degree, but I do think it's a relevant detail that the former defense secretary admitted this

And by the way, Netanyahu's admitted this. Ehud Barak has admitted this. They admitted that they allowed funds to go from Qatar to Hamas because Hamas was governing the Gaza. For the reason of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. No, that was not the case. That is what Netanyahu said. That is what Ehud Barak said. It's all up and down. There's one claim. There's one recording of Netanyahu saying something along those lines.

But look, I mean, we should get on. We should get onto it. I could read you the quotes from Ehud Barak as well. It's all of them have talked about it. The situation, let's get onto it. The situation there on the war of the last 18 months now, more than 18 months in the Middle East, is a result not of that, but of Hamas deciding to start another war with Israel and trying to annihilate their neighbor.

But you don't think if they were being propped up by Israel, that has nothing to do with the group? They were not being propped up by Israel. The reason why Hamas were in power, as you know, much, much against the interests of the Israelis, was that they were voted into power after the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Condoleezza Rice and other American statesfolk insisted that the Palestinians should have elections straight after the Israeli withdrawal.

They had elections, perhaps unwisely, and Hamas won and then didn't have another election again and ruled the Gaza for 18 years until they finally got the great fruit of their labors on the 7th of October, 2023, and went around southern Israel massacring everyone they could, including young people at a dance party, and then caused in turn the destruction of the place that they were meant to be governing. It's a...

The whole thing is a great tragedy and all of it is at the feet of Hamas. I certainly agree with you that it's a great tragedy. And I do, you know, I think it's, you know, when you accuse me of using the quotes that kind of...

you know, back up what I believe. I think it's very convenient here to remove all responsibility from the Israelis. Like, even if I'm telling you that you have these quotes, I mean, again, I'm not talking about fringe figures. We could read through the list of people who have admitted what the strategy was with them funding Hamas and propping them up. But hold on, let me just say, so if you're going to tell me Israel

props up this terrorist organization in order to kill the peace process, in order to make sure that the international community gives them a no one... By the way, Smotrich, right? The finance minister, okay? He's on record. He's on record saying, look...

Hamas is an asset. The Palestinian Authority, they're the liability. Hamas is an asset because then we can tell the international community, well, look, what do you want us to do? There's a terrorist organization here. We can't do business with them. And then even Ehud Barak admitted like this was also so that liberal –

If it was the Palestinian Authority, they'd be like, hey, we should make a deal with them. But since it's Hamas, they can't. OK, so if Israel props up this terrorist organization and then as a response to them committing a horrific act of terrorism, decides to level the entire place and just slaughter women and children in large numbers. It didn't decide to do that and it didn't do that. Right.

It didn't level the place. Gaza hasn't been destroyed. Gaza is pretty leveled by now. Yeah. But it did not go in to level the place like that. No. Okay. They went in and leveled the place, but that wasn't their intention? Let's just go back to the beginning if we can. Sure. Because it's important. Since you're interested in the question of the Palestinian state, the Palestinians were given another state in 2005 when every single Jew was removed from the Gaza area.

by the IDF and when even the graves of Israelis in Gaza were dug up and taken into the rest of Israel. Of all of the what-ifs of Palestinian Arab history, the era since 2005 should be one of the great what-ifs, which is what if the American taxpayers' money that was poured into Gaza, the European Union taxpayer money that was poured into Gaza, had been used by a government in Gaza...

to build a state that lived side by side with their Israeli neighbors and flourished. And it's not like the money wasn't there. It's not like there wasn't the international will. Ismail Haniyeh and the other leaders of Hamas used that money, as you know, to make themselves billionaires and to buy themselves and their kids condos in Qatar and to live extremely well whilst withholding the money from the Palestinian people.

whilst building their network of tunnels throughout Gaza and building an infrastructure of terror. And that's what they did with 18 years in Gaza. And of all of the what-ifs, just consider that that one was in their hands. The Israelis did not make them vote in Hamas.

The Israelis would not want a terrorist entity that wants to annihilate the state of Israel that is there on their doorstep, constantly firing rockets, starting wars every few years.

Why would the Israelis want a group there that means that if you're living in towns like Sderot or Ashkelon or Ashdod, your children grow up all the time knowing that they might have to go to the bomb shelters. And that's during peacetime. Well, according to them, the reason they want it there is because then it kills the peace process. And then you have no one to negotiate with certificate. And then you can keep your eyes on building up settlements in the West Bank. There are, as now...

many people to negotiate with. Mahmoud Abbas may be, I don't know as the joke goes, currently in something like his 20th year of his first four-year term as head of the Palestinian Authority. But Mahmoud Abbas is there in Ramallah. The compounds of the Palestinian Authority, which I've been to many times in Ramallah, are there. They run their portions of the West Bank. They

They could be there to negotiate with at any moment. The Israelis have said they want to negotiate with them at any moment and come to the deal. In fact, Netanyahu, you're fond of quoting, said again before this war began that he would come to the table with no red lines to begin with to start another negotiation with the Palestinian Authority. But let's just get back to this thing because this is so crucial. I am so startled.

By the post-October 7th world, not just in Israel and Gaza and everywhere where I've spent most of the last 18 months, but in what's happening here in the United States of America, it blows my mind much of the response here. And the desire to leap over the first victims of this and go on to all of the proximate causes, theoretical causes, what-ifs and so on,

I was, as I described in the opening of this book, I was in New York on the 7th of October and I woke up and started seeing what was happening and discovered that later that day already there were attempts, there were plans to organize a protest in Times Square. And what was the protest in Times Square? Massive protests in support of Hamas as the massacre was still going on. And one of the things I just cannot get out of my head is why in the last 18 months have

When Hamas did what they did, have so many people made excuses for them or decided to side with them or deny their actions or excuse their actions? Why do you think that is? Several very, very big things. One is I think people wanted to ignore the nature of the atrocity because it was so appalling that it went against much of their narrative.

I was at a reunion of one of the survivors of the Nova Party on one occasion and he said to me, "What would you do if this had happened in your country?" And I thought, "Well, it hasn't happened at this scale, but something like it has happened." The Ariana Grande Arena bombing in Manchester in 2017, the Bataclan massacre in Paris in 2015, the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2015.

But all of these occasions when young people were murdered for being at a pop concert or a nightclub, the world's attention, the world's empathy, the world's sympathy went to the victims. Only in the case of the young Israelis dancing in the early hours of the morning on October 7th, 2023, do the victims become victimized again and not believed. The era we lived through in the late 2010s was the era of believe all women era.

And of all the Israeli women who were raped that morning, much of the international community does not want to listen to them at all and certainly doesn't want to believe them. And there are many reasons. One, at the most fundamental level, is that I think a part of a generation that's coming up has been told there is something especially wicked about Israel, that there is something especially wicked about Israel's existence and its actions and its people,

And it means that when their people are burned alive in their homes or raped at a music festival and shot in the head, they are uniquely undeserving of sympathy. And I think that people have been indoctrinated by very bad actors into this and as a result have excused atrocities or make excuses for them, make excuses for the people who do them. I think, in addition, it plays to some of the darkest things of...

the regional mind as well as the international mind. The aims of Hamas, the stated aims include the annihilation of the Jewish people and October 7th they had their best go at doing that. And the fact that in a decision between whether or not you're on the side of the people who want to dance and live in peace with their neighbors,

or whether you're on the side of the people who want to rampage through a dance party bar in the early morning, macheteing at people. I find it amazing that there are so many people who don't know which side they're on. But there are a lot of them. There are a lot of reasons for that. But one of the foremost reasons...

is the fact that the state of Israel has been uniquely libeled, has been uniquely lied about. Its history has been uniquely lied about. It has been uniquely put under an international spotlight and then misrepresented in a way which I cannot think of many other countries in the world that have been treated that way. And there are deep reasons for it and shallow reasons for it.

The deep reasons include some of the most ancient bigotries of the human heart, and the shallow reasons are people who don't know what the hell they're talking about. Okay, I think that...

There's look, I'm not going to speak for what every person out there believes. I don't exactly agree with like the characterization that there was no outpouring of like feeling after October 7th. And certainly like everybody I know was just like, oh, my God, this is like a horrific atrocity. And like what the an unprecedented terrorist attack from Hamas, the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history against Israelis and Israel.

It was horrible. I think what a lot of... I'm not arguing that there are no people who are actually pro-Hamas or there are no people who are actually like hate Jews or something like that. I do think that what happens is that a lot of people get put in that category who do not belong there. Much like we've seen this over the last year and a half where a lot of people, you know, you have John Podhoretz calling Thomas Massey anti-Semitic scum because...

Because he said, we're dead broke. We can't afford to fund everybody else's war here. People have been calling Tucker Carlson anti-Semitic all over the place. These are two guys, Thomas Massey and Tucker Carlson, who have never uttered the words the Jews in their life. Like they're just not anti-Semites at all. So there's a lot of people, I think, who are when they're critical of the Israeli government's response to this get frustrated.

I will certainly say that's certainly not my position. I think your description of them, death cult, by the way, the same term that Daryl Cooper used to describe Hamas, I think is an accurate one. And it was horrible. But I think that the –

I think that your characterization, first of all, of that they gave the Palestinians a state in 2005 is just wrong. I just think that is not at all an accurate way to describe the disengagement, which we could get into more if you want to. But first of all, I would just point out that if the two-state solution was achieved, I assume you're arguing it was taken away after that. You're not still arguing that the Palestinians have a state, or are you saying they have had a state since 2005? Listen.

They were given a state in Gaza. And when was it taken away? Well, they kind of screwed it up for themselves on the 7th of October. So you're saying from 2005 all the way until October 7th, there was a two-state solution. It had been achieved. Well, it was another state, yeah. Okay, but that would be two states then. No, it was another state. It was different from the P.A.,

Okay, right. But I'm saying a Palestinian state. Yeah. Okay. So what's interesting about that is that this is not how, like, this is not how any of the leaders really describe it. I mean, when Netanyahu himself is not claiming that they had already achieved a two-state solution, why are you talking about this? What happened in 2005 in the disengagement was that essentially Israel went from occupying the place to surrounding the place. And they've had it under a brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal

blockade since 2007. And yes, you were right. Why do you think... I don't agree the blockade was brutal by any means. You don't think the blockade of Gaza was brutal? How brutal do you think the Egyptians are? Pretty brutal. Yeah. They allowed stuff in. Okay. I mean, since

Some stuff has gotten in yes, that's true since I'm more than some stuff okay more than some okay some from I'll say this right because there's been different levels of blockade even before 2007 going back I know in 1996 they had like a pretty strong blockade that year according to the World Bank it contracted 40% of the GDP of Gaza so just for for

reference, the Great Depression was a 30% contraction. This was in 1996. For one year, they gave them something worse than our Great Depression. That was just one year. From 2007 on, there's been a blockade of that country. You don't think that's kept the country poor? Why do you think there's a blockade of any kind? Why is there a blockade? Well, I mean, the argument from Israel would be that... No, why do you think? I would say, okay, I think that the disengagement, I think Smotrich was correct when he said...

I'm sorry. My mistake there. I think the which another quote that I'm sure you're familiar with. But Dov Weissklaf, who was the senior advisor to Sharon, was the prime minister at the time. He essentially said the reason we're doing the disengagement, the reason we're doing this is so that we can put the peace process in formaldehyde.

This is the reason we're not answering my question. I'm getting right wing Israeli politicians. But what do you I'm getting there? I'm getting there. I'm saying so. I think they disengaged in order to kill the peace process. I think they put the full blockade around the country for the reason that they've always kind of done it there that, yeah, they don't want too much stuff getting in. They want to keep them, as they put it, on a diet and they don't want rockets to fly into Israel.

The second one is a kind of important one, isn't it? The final one you said. Yeah, it is. If the Palestinian leadership in Gaza after 2005 had not from the get-go decided to use Gaza as a stockpiling place for rockets to fire into Israel, all of it would be different.

If they had just resisted the temptation that so many of us do in our lives to stop keeping RPGs in our cellars and then Katyusha rockets in our children's bedrooms, all of it could have been different. If that desire to live in peace beside your neighbors had superseded the desire to stockpile rockets, it would all be different. Yeah, or if Israel just hadn't occupied them for 60 years, it would all be different too. They weren't occupying. The owner's always on them. They weren't occupying.

Well, you believe in self-determination, I'm sure. Yes. I believe in individual rights. Yeah, sure. Okay. Individual right. And that includes the right to make bad decisions. Yes. The Palestinians in Gaza, when they voted in Hamas, made a very bad decision. Yeah, of course, Douglas. Hang on. Hang on. And in the years after that, they made bad decision after bad decision.

It was a very bad decision to continually fire thousands of rockets into Israel. It was a very bad decision to use what boats came in early on and to use the smuggling networks from Egypt not to bring in supplies you could actually build a thriving society with, but to bring in rockets. It was a very bad idea.

No, there was not starvation in Gaza after 2005. No, there was no deficit of goods coming in. I've been plenty of times. There was no deficit? No. No goods were kept out. There are plenty. Have you been to the crossing points? No. When were you last there at all? I've never been. You've never been? Well, am I not allowed to talk about it now?

I've never been to, have you ever been to Nazi Germany? Are you allowed to have feelings about them? You can't time travel, but you can travel. Okay, but so what? So what's the point? Lots of people have been there and agree with me and lots of people have been there and agree with you. Yeah, but if you're going to spend a year and a half talking about a place, you should at least do the courtesy of visiting it. All right. I just think this is a non-argument. You don't think? But okay.

No, I think it's a non-argument. But if you're an ex- But you have to go and touch the ground to be able to talk about it? No, I think you have to see, I think it's a good idea to see stuff, particularly if you spend a career talking about something. Yes, I have a journalistic rule of trying never to talk about a country, even in passing, unless I've at least been there. Okay. It's a sort of normal, it's a normal thing to do. You're talking about, hang on, you're talking about crossing points. And not only have you never been to a crossing point in either Egypt or in Israel, but you've never even been to the region. Right.

Okay. Again, I think this is a non-argument. No, no, no. It's not a non-argument. Yeah, it is. It's not a non-argument if you're insisting that you're an expert of some kind, or not claiming you're an expert but still talking about it, about the provisions going into Gaza or not, if you've never seen any of this going on. So you're not allowed to speak about things that you've read about. You can only speak about things that you've seen with your own eyes. You can talk about what you want as you're proving.

But that is a different matter from spending an awfully long amount of time talking about an issue in a region you haven't even had the courtesy to visit whilst developing all of these views about it. I mean, now I slightly get an idea of where you're coming from. You've read about this blockade.

And so you imagine that that's what it is. I imagine you've read all the people who say that Gaza was a concentration camp. And you probably think that too. This episode is brought to you by Farmer's Dog. It doesn't matter how old your dog is, it's always a great time to start investing in their health and happiness. And thankfully, the Farmer's Dog makes it easier than ever to feed your dog a healthy diet of real meat and veggies. Dogs prefer their food, even picky dogs, and

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Am I right? I mean, again, literally a concentration camp. It shares a lot of similarities, I would think.

Well, as I say, you can't time travel back to the Nazi era, but you could go to the Middle East and actually visit it. It's not hard to do. The World Bank said in 1996 for the one year of the blockade... Now the libertarians are quoting the World Bank. I love it. It doesn't mean anything. This is a non-argument. Yes, I'm saying the World Bank did their own analysis of this, and they said that it was a 40%... Why don't you do your own analysis? Hold on. You've got to stop interrupting and let him finish the sentence. The World Bank...

said that 40% drop in the GDP of one year due to the blockade. And there's been a blockade from 2007 on. So are you saying that this hasn't had an economic effect? Is that the argument? No. Of course it'll have an economic effect. So you're saying you have to be on the ground and do an audit of the blockade in order to be able to comment on it? No, no. I think you should at least know what it is, what the territory is, what the situation is in the region. Yes, absolutely. And the only way to do that is to be there in person. I think that's the best way. It's not the only way, but it's the best way, for sure.

For sure. If you have never seen the countries in question, you've never spoken to the people in question. You've never interviewed anyone. You've never gone around. You've never seen the terrain and so on. And you've used Wikipedia. I'm sorry. No, that's not the same thing. OK, well, I've.

not just used Wikipedia, but didn't you write a big piece when the war in Ukraine first came out titled something like I've been to Ukraine and they can win, they can repel the Russians. So you could go there and still get it wrong, right? No, I was with the Ukrainian armed forces in 2022 when they were retaking territory from the Russians. Right. The last time they had any advances. Yeah. Yeah. I said, I can see how they can win, which would be advances like that. Yeah. You said if we just fund them,

or if we just arm them that they can then I said that the Ukrainian army was making great successes which it was when I was with them in the fall of 22 listen there were lots of people who went to Iraq and said we'll be greeted as liberators and it'll be paid for in oil and democracy will spread through the region so I don't know either take on the arguments or don't but I don't think like but I'm saying your argument's incorrect

Okay, fine. Well, then present a counter-argument to it. But to just tell me I'm not allowed to talk about something because I'm not an expert. I'm not saying you're not allowed to talk about it. Okay, fine. Well, you're not an expert, so you shouldn't talk about it. You haven't been there. Yeah, I know. But you keep playing this game where it's like the whole opening to this podcast was like the non-experts talking about this is such a problem. Now you're saying because I haven't been there, I can't talk about it. Is there a blockade there that's causing economic devastation or not? According to the World Bank, there is. First of all, I don't think it's a game.

I don't think it's a game at all. Me neither. I'm not playing a game, okay? Okay, but this is semantics. No, but this is important. Mm-hmm. I've seen plenty of this up close. I've seen plenty of this with my own eyes because I do believe...

that one of the things you should do if you're talking about something is to see it. Yeah, you've established that. Is there a blockade? The blockade that existed to the extent it existed was a blockade to try to make sure that the Israelis and the Egyptians knew what materials were going in and out of Gaza after the first rocket fires when Hamas, in fact, before Hamas was elected. The Israelis and the Egyptians, the Egyptians didn't do a very good job of it,

were meant to be trying to make sure that the materials that went into Gaza were not materials that could be used to build up the Gaza and Hamas war machine. The reason why trucks get searched is not because the Israelis want to search through grain or flour.

It's because they wanted to stop the trucks containing the arms and the munitions that the Ghazan, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters were going to use to fire against Israel. And I'm sorry, it just makes the most obvious strategic sense. As the great late great Joan Rivers once said, if if if as an appeal to authority.

That one I'll allow. That one I like. She also said that Michelle Obama's a man. Yeah, I know. She did do that. That's what I'm saying. She got everything right. So continue. Go ahead. But as Joan Rivers said, if New York was being rocketed from New Jersey, we would level New Jersey. I don't think you need to level it, by the way.

But you would at least try to make sure that rockets weren't being imported in larger quantities into New Jersey. Of course. Okay. That's all the Israelis were doing. And they haven't turned away any food or aid. They haven't said you can't bring potato chips in or you can't have cookies because they have dual use. Isn't this their whole argument that there's anything that could be used to build a rocket has to be excluded? Anything that could be used to build a rocket, yeah. Right.

Yeah, but that's a good reason, again, not to build rockets and fire them at your neighbors. It's almost like there's a cost to pay. It's almost like there's a cost to pay for, instead of living in peace with your neighbor, constantly trying to wipe them out. And that is what Hamas did for 18 years. 18 years. This is why I think it's so...

Unbelievable taking agency away from the Palestinians of Gaza is that the Hamas had 18 years and 18 years is obviously the time from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education. They literally had the opportunity to create a generation in Gaza that wanted to live beside their Israeli neighbors.

And from everything I've seen since the 7th of October in the region and from all of the dead and the survivors and the family members I've seen, so many of them, particularly the people in the south who were attacked on the morning of the 7th, were literally people who dreamed of living in peace with their Palestinian neighbours. They were people like Vivian Silver, whose body wasn't identified for months because there wasn't enough of her charred remains left to even extract DNA from. She spent every weekend...

like so many people in the communities in the south of Israel, every weekend driving children with the most rare medical conditions that couldn't be treated in one of the Hamas-run hospitals in Gaza into very specialist units inside Israel. And she spent every weekend doing that and working with B'Tselem and all of these radical left Israeli groups. And it didn't matter a bit when Hamas came in because they burnt her in her own home anyway. My point is...

In all of the counterfactuals of this conflict, the most important one is what could have happened if instead of educating a generation into wanting to annihilate their neighbors, Hamas in power had spent 18 years building up a state, teaching peace, creating coexistence with their neighbors,

You think any of the people on the kibbutzim in the south or the young people dancing at the Nova party weren't dreaming of the day that the Palestinian government in Gaza would have created those conditions for them to live beside as well? Of course.

Right. That's not anybody's argument. Yeah, no, right. Everybody argues against... Nobody's argument. Douglas, it's just... No, I mean here. I mean, it's not what I'm saying. Look, I'll say this again, because you bring up the point about agency again. And I hear this a lot as a counter. Much like I said in Ukraine, it's not denying anybody agency. I'm not saying that... Believe me, if I was in control of how people acted, I would certainly... There are...

This there Palestinians could have handled things much better. And there are different points where we probably all would agree that we wish they had done it this way and not this way. And I think that embracing for those Palestinians who embrace terrorism, which from, you know, which is.

pretty early on. I mean, Israel and Palestine have been at war since the existence of Israel, really. And I know it's convenient to kind of pretend October 7th was like the first thing, but actually there's a long history here. I'm not denying any of them agency. The problem is that I see it as like you only seem to focus on the agency of one side. And then, you know, if you want to talk about counterfactuals, I think the most interesting counterfactual, well, maybe I'll give you two. Number one would be

Haim Weizmann, who was essentially supposed to be the David Ben-Gurion, like he was in line as like the number one ranking Zionist. This is pre the creation of the state of Israel, who urged all of the Zionist militias to not embrace terrorism. And he ended up losing that battle ultimately. In many ways, this is how terrorism was introduced. He was the first president of the state.

David Ben-Gurion was. I was saying Haim Weissman.

The Palestinians fell into a terrible, tragic mistake early on. And I'm saying, listen, I reject terrorism as we all should just because killing innocent people is wrong. I'd like to get to that a little bit more in a second because it's interesting that we haven't really gotten into the what I think is a great humanitarian crisis here. Yeah.

But they were following – I think in some ways they were very influenced by the Algerian model that they were like, hey, look, we could – listen, there's a lot of groups, whether it's – Which Algerian model? Well, driving the French out. The first Algerian war. Yes. Right. But look, I mean there's a lot of these scenarios where we look back at Nelson Mandela, for example. Nelson Mandela was not imprisoned because he was –

you know, making picket signs. I mean, there have been people who have embraced violence as a means to achieve a policy end, including the early Zionist settlers, including the Israeli government, including the U.S. government and lots of governments around the world. The tragic, tragic mistake in terms of political outcome from the Palestinians is that they really just underestimated the fact that these Jews had no home to go to.

This was their home. And you could drive out the French from Algeria because they go, screw it, we're going back home to France. The Jews had been so persecuted in Eastern Europe that there was no home to go. And of course, then after World War Two, they were here to stay. And so it's of course, it's been a tragedy. And of course, a lot of Palestinian actions I wish would be different. I wish Hamas didn't exist. It should be pointed out, by the way, that in 2005, you did mention that it was really part of the Bush administration's

exporting democracy around the world that put pressure on them to have these elections. It should also be mentioned that Hamas did not win a majority in one single precinct. They won pluralities all around. So just saying, when we're bringing up this election, half the population of Gaza today is under the age of 18. They were toddlers if they were alive in 2005. Of the other half that maybe, maybe half of them voted in these elections,

It was never a majority that supported Hamas. They eked out a victory. And then, of course, there was an attempted coup after that. And that's when Hamas seized complete control. The coup failed, regardless of any of that.

I agree with you that like, yeah, the Palestinians have agency and I wish some of them had made better decisions. Now, many of them have made better decisions and it's still resulted in nothing better happening for them and their people. And so I do find it kind of hard to like lecture a group of people who are going through so much, like the level of human suffering that's being inflicted on the people of Gaza right now cannot be overstated. And so, you know, to lecture them about how you're supposed to handle that exactly is

But I will say, man, I think there's kind of this selective empathy that you have here. Like, I agree with you. You know, talk about these teenagers being slaughtered at a music festival on October 7th. It's like, my God, like, I have little kids. I can't, like, imagine the nightmare of this happening to somebody's children. But at the same time, we're not having this conversation on October 9th or in November or December of 2023. We're having it in 2025, where...

The tragedy that's been inflicted on Gaza is orders of magnitudes greater than October 7th. There are just every day people are inundated with images of just dead women and children. This is like one of the most brutal wars. And by several metrics that really, you know, like personally matter to me, like the number of dead kids. I think that's a pretty good one. It's more children have died than in any recent war. I mean, this is like it does. I do think there's almost...

like a fundamental framing bias that you get into when people have these debates. And I've had several of them, as you have also. But it seems to me that there's almost an implicit difference in the value that you place on Israeli life versus the value that we place on Palestinians' life. And to even, like, we've gone this far into the conversation and haven't even talked about the fact that, like, Israel has...

Feel however you feel. If you want to argue, I haven't been there. Stuff does get through the blockade. Okay, fine. This is a captive people that Israel has dominated since at least 1967. Many of them are there because of the creation of the state of Israel who used to live in what is now called Israel.

And they are just, I mean, the amount of human suffering that's being inflicted on them, when even as you kind of acknowledged with the George W. Bush exporting democracy, Hamas in many ways was forced on these people.

In fact, we saw protests against Hamas just recently. So I don't know. I mean, that to me seems to be the greatest human tragedy. And I think much more so than you can characterize it as people being pro-Hamas or people being anti-Semitic. But I actually think that the mass movement around the world of people who oppose this war has been that people feel really awful about all these babies who are being slaughtered. Okay. Quite a few things. First of all, let's just get one term correct because you said...

You do think it's a concentration camp. It says it shares many, you know. And you also say that there's a disproportionately heavy youth population in Gaza. Yes. Do you think that's not accurate? I think the second one is accurate. Right. But it's a very strange thing to say that there's a population boom in a concentration camp.

In Auschwitz in the 1940s, there was not a doubling of the population. He didn't say it was a concentration camp. He said it shares many of the characteristics. Auschwitz was a concentration camp. It was ultimately a death camp, no? Yes. It started as a concentration camp. Yes, correct. You'll notice that people were not...

doubling in size their number because of the children they could have in Auschwitz. Yeah, but nobody's calling a concentration camp because it's the same as Auschwitz. Okay, but let's just at least tidy up the language a bit.

Either you think the place is a concentration camp or you think it's not a concentration camp. And I don't think it can be a concentration camp or any such term is suitable when you're talking about a place which you yourself have admitted has a disproportionately young population. So that's the first thing. I don't think breeding in any way argues against it. But OK, I didn't call it a concentration camp either. You said it has many of the same. But you asked him if it did.

You asked him if it had any of the characteristics of a concentration camp. Yes, because he said earlier that it did. Okay, well, let me be much more precise. Let me be much more precise, okay? So I'm not claiming that it is a concentration camp or that it is akin to Auschwitz. I'm saying that it's been under full blockade since 2007.

Israel rules the seas, the airs. They control electricity that goes in. They're not allowed to have an airport. They're not allowed to have a seaport. They don't have the freedom to leave without permission from the Israeli government. They don't have the freedom to trade with the world. They don't have a freedom to vote over the government that rules them. I don't know. Call it whatever you want to. That's the situation. All of which is a result of the election of Hamas.

None of it's Israel's fault. Israel's not responsible for one of the babies that have died, the bombs that they are dropping. Let's get on to that then, because you say it's one of the most brutal wars. It's a very brutal war. It's a very brutal war. It's certainly not even sadly among the standards of our time by any means the most brutal. We don't need to get into the rather statistician, ugly debate about whether or not you follow the Hamas government in Gaza's figures for the death counts, which is what they...

which most of the world's media rely on and which I don't think are reliable to the least extent. But you don't need to rely on that to say that even by the standards of a conflict in neighboring Syria, the highest Hamas death count inside Gaza for the appalling last year and a half is less than an average year has been for the last decade in Syria during the civil war.

So the whole deck, I mean, total far more people died in Syria. I'm not arguing that, but you're saying it's less than any year. I think there were years that were six to eight hundred thousand people have been killed in Syria during the civil war there. And I give it as an example. Far too many examples of wars in the region and in the wider world to go to. But I think we get once again back to the issue of language on this. It's one of the most brutal wars ever.

It's simply obvious that it's an appalling war, but it is not by any numerical or other standards the most appalling war of our time. It's a war that Hamas started because they shouldn't have invaded their neighbor and they shouldn't have tried to genocide their neighbor. Now, if the war can be prosecuted, could be prosecuted, it was always for two reasons, always for two reasons. The first one, as stated by Hamas,

the unanimity of Israeli politicians and others was to retrieve the hostages, who we also haven't spoken about, but there are still hostages in Gaza held for the last 18 months by Hamas, including young Eden Alexander from New Jersey. If Hamas had not stolen the hostages and hidden them in their tunnels and hidden them in civilian homes, this war would have all been different. If they had have given them back, and they could give them back tomorrow,

It would all be different, but they didn't. They decided to do what they did on the 7th and to hold on to the 250 hostages as it was at the beginning from the beginning. The second reason why the war is still being prosecuted is because of the stated aim to destroy Hamas, which is the stated aim of the Israelis. Neither of these things is remotely easy.

And just from a point of humility, I think, on everyone's side, we should concede none of that is easy. It is not easy to get 250 hostages back when they have been distributed across the Gaza to civilian homes, hidden in tunnels, surrounded by munitions and much more. Hamas is not an actor like Denmark. Its backers don't behave the way that our governments do in the West.

They have a totally different time scale that they think along. They have a totally different scale of values as well. The taunts of Hezbollah's leadership, of Hamas's leadership, of their backers in Tehran are annihilationist to their core. But at any point in the last 18 months, the Qataris, for instance,

or the Iranians, the Iranian revolutionary government, or the Turkish government or others, could have put their pressure on Hamas to return the hostages who are still being held in captivity, and everything would be different. Secondly, as you know, I'm sure, you don't have to have seen this with your own eyes to know it,

As I'm sure you know, the way in which Hamas built up the structure of the Gaza throughout the 18 years that they had was precisely to flout and use every law of war against the Israelis. Every army in a conflict has certain rules of war that you're meant to abide by. One of the most obvious is that you are identified as being a combatant, not as a civilian, okay?

Another is you don't put weapons in civilian houses and civilian buildings. You do not fire from houses of worship rockets. You do not launch attacks from hospitals. You do not keep detention facilities where you can torture and disappear people inside hospitals and other medical facilities. All of these laws of war exist.

are the laws that Hamas breaks every minute of every day by their actions. So if you want to get the hostages back and if you want to destroy Hamas when you're fighting against a force which does not only not follow the rules of war but uses your following of the rules of the laws of war against you, at least concede this is a highly specific and complex military operation.

And if you have or anyone else has, and I say this genuinely, a better way to get back the hostages and to destroy Hamas, I at any rate am all ears.

OK. OK, well, there's there's a lot there. So, number one, like I do agree generally with your point about having some humility in these complex situations. But I would also say, like, do you not then at any point, as you're like a very well-known public figure who's supporting this war, think about the level of human suffering that is being inflicted on these innocent people and go like, man, is there another way? Maybe I'm getting this wrong. Maybe this is the Iraq war all over again, you know, which you also supported that like maybe that was a big.

If I say it, I don't need to think about it. I've seen it. I know it. I describe it in my book. I describe what I see in Gaza with the Palestinians when they're moving down the humanitarian corridor. Okay, let me just respond to some of the stuff you say. Okay, so then I guess it's not really that much of humility involved in this, but there's two very different goals that are being stated here, right? Like there's the retrieving the hostages and then there's taking out Hamas. Now, the...

So retrieving the hostages and actually many of the families of hostages who are taken have been some of the only people really protesting this war in Israel because, of course, if you imagine if you have your family over there and your government is leveling this place, that is not the best path to pursue to make sure you get all the hostages out alive. I would say that –

It fell apart. But Donald Trump having his envoy, Witkoff, go over there and work out this ceasefire deal that they had for a few weeks. They did get, I believe, 30 hostages back during the phase one of this ceasefire. Seems to me like that would be the method to pursue to try to get the hostages back. But if you're talking about eliminating Hamas...

And I think there's something kind of interesting that you touched on there. I don't completely, you know, I disagree with much of your characterization of it, that like Israel are the good guys who always follow the rules. We could kind of get into some of that. There's lots of rules like in that Israel does not follow. That being said, yes, of course. I mean, you're describing guerrilla warfare, terrorist organizations. That's right. They stated differently that.

Gaza doesn't have an air force or an army or a navy. They're they're just basically militias running around terrorists who are trying to do everything they can to fight an asymmetrical war. And just like we helped teach Osama bin Laden how to do the Soviets and then Osama bin Laden successfully did to us.

The whole game in these asymmetrical wars is to get exactly what Hamas got out of this, right? Like Osama bin Laden knew that he couldn't bankrupt the United States of America by taking down the Twin Towers, but he thought he could lure us into a war in Afghanistan that would bankrupt us. Now, it didn't completely, but it came pretty close. That being said – well, I just mean in terms of how much it drained the treasury, it was way more than any terrorist attack could have possibly done. That being said –

The idea that it's not like I don't think morally speaking, when you're inflicting this level of suffering on a group of people, that the calculation should be like what we want to remove Hamas from power. That's the goal. Justice for October 7th. You know, there's lots of governments around the world that we would. And Hamas isn't exactly a government, but there's there's lots of regimes around the world that.

We would all like to see removed, but that doesn't mean that we would approve of any means by which to get there. If you were like, "Hey, I think Kim Jong-un's government should be dissolved," I'm sure we would all agree with that. But if you were like, "I'm going to level the place and just slaughter people in order to do it," you might be like, "Okay, hold on." But aside from that, this has been acknowledged at the highest levels of Israeli intelligence and US intelligence.

There's just no way to get rid of Hamas without it being replaced by more Hamas or Hamas-like group because it's the basic understanding of this whole situation, right? It's General McChrystal's insurgent math. There's still Hamas people. Hamas are popping back up in the areas that Israel's already leveled.

And the more innocent people you kill, the more radicalized you're going to get this population, the more these people are going to hate you and join up with the resistance movement. And so I just think that to use the justification that we're trying to get rid of Hamas and therefore it's not like –

It doesn't matter how many innocent women and children die in the process? Of course it matters. Or there's no responsibility on you? You now are not responsible for the bombs that you drop, how many people they kill? No, of course you're responsible. So Israel is responsible then? They're responsible for the means of their retaliation and their war aims. Yes, of course. First of all, let me just say...

I totally disagree with your characterization of Osama bin Laden and what he wanted to do. And I don't think that Osama bin Laden's stated public utterances along those lines. But anyway, the reason why the hostages have been released, the numbers that have, is because of constant kinetic force by the IDF. Hamas does not come to the table and ever hand over hostages out of goodwill.

It doesn't do it out of the goodness of their own heart. It does it because of the constant kinetic force of the IDF in Gaza. And if it weren't for that, all 250 hostages would still be there. Second thing is, when it comes to Hamas itself, I totally disagree with the presumption that if you tackle a terrorist entity...

You will create more terrorists. Ergo, you should not attack the terrorist entity. That's not the argument that I'm making, but okay. It's a commonly held argument that if you respond to terrorism, you create terrorism. And of course, the only thing in that case is you just have to sit back and take it. The argument that I'm making is that when you slaughter innocent people, those people around them tend to hate your guts. That's the argument that I'm making. First of all,

Your characterization of the slaughter, it's horrible, the war in Gaza. It's horrible that young Israelis have to go in yet again to Gaza and try to find Israeli hostages and try to get the leadership of Hamas. That's what's horrible about it? It is not the case. Yes, because I think there's a consequence to starting wars.

And so it's not horrible for the people who didn't start a war. Why do we become like these collectivists as soon as a war starts? It is horrible for everybody involved. No, it's the most horrible for the Palestinian people in Gaza right now. That is the group of people who are being fucked over the most right now.

No? Yes, at the moment, yes. But they're not being fucked over. The IDF has been moving through Gaza for 18 months. No Israeli soldier I have spoken to ever wanted to go and see the Gaza again. Okay? Nobody wanted to go back. They were dragged back because of Hamas's actions. And if Hamas had acted differently or the Palestinians had voted in different people to govern them, it would all be different. But again, that's a hypothetical. The reality of the war on the ground is...

is that in this incredibly heavily built-up area...

with weaponry hidden everywhere with soldiers spoken to too many of them they go in you have a group of people coming out of a civilian building with their hands up and from their midst come a bunch of him as terrorists firing at you in the hope that the idea for fire back at the civilians the gadi eisenkot one of the members of the war cabinet in the early stages of the war lost his own son and then his nephew his nephew was killed

in a firefight in Gaza because the Hamas terrorists were firing from a mosque, and that was why Gaddy Eisenkot from the Israeli cabinet's nephew died. The whole operating theatre is hideous because of what Hamas has done to the Gaza. The reason why Sinoir cropped up in Rafah, finally the mastermind of October 7th, one of the most brutal, sadistic psychopaths, to use an overrated term you can ever imagine,

in an Israeli prison, by the way, for having strangled Palestinians to death in the 2000s. But anyway, the reason why Sinoir crops up in Rafah late last year is because there was nowhere else for him to run because of the actions of the IDF to pursue the leadership of Hamas that was responsible for the 7th. Now, can all of Hamas be destroyed? Probably not. Can you make it effectively impossible to function?

or incapable of functioning, unable to fire rockets and govern the Gaza? Yes. Right. But it comes at the price tag of slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent people. No, no. And you're accepting that price. No. Every single war of this kind will include civilian casualties. And you and I will almost certainly disagree on the numbers. I'm not claiming that the health ministry's numbers are perfect. But there will be almost the best case analysis

is that one innocent Gazan has been killed for every one terrorist. That's the best case scenario you can hear. But that would be almost unparalleled in the laws of war, and it's not how the American or British militaries operate in terms of casualties to terrorist ratios. But when we had the campaign against ISIS a decade ago, after ISIS's fighters had gone and massacred people at the Bataclan theater in Paris and so on,

We used Turkish fighters, brilliant, brave fighters from the Peshmerga militias, to work on the ground. And the French and American and British air forces bombed like hell from the air. And we made ISIS, effectively touch wood 10 years later, operationally incapable in capital cities in Europe. Has ISIS as a whole gone away? No. They still have pockets in Syria and in Iraq.

but we stopped them from being able to do what they most desired to do. And the same is possible with Hamas. Will they be replaced by some other group? Again, then we get to one of the crucial decision points for the Palestinian people. Is it inevitable that they constantly have to elect people who want to annihilate their neighbors? Or will there ever be a generation that can find a way to live in peace with their neighbors?

I agree. Most people don't like being bombed. In fact, nobody does. But if the people of the Palestinians in Gaza can find it within themselves to realize the thing they asked for in the elections is the thing that has destroyed the area they live in. And like that brave young man two weeks ago in Gaza who rose up

against Hamas and was identified by the people who remain in Hamas and was tortured, and his body thrown onto his parents doorstep in the Gaza and the parents started a family. The clan started a bit of a war against Hamas, but that's how that's how Hamas treats Palestinian dissidents. But if there were more people like that young man, and of course, as we all know, the history of totalitarian and terrorist groups running societies is

They're very successful and they stay in power because they're willing to torture and use violence and much more. It's a horrible thing you have to contend with. But if more people like that young man had come about in Gaza in the last 18 months or before, yes. Yes, it would all be different. And if they could avoid electing a terrorist group that invades their neighbours and fires rockets at their neighbours, yes, it could all be different. It could all be different tomorrow. And I'll tell you, sorry, again, there is not a person...

living by the Gaza in the south of Israel who does not dream of the day that such a generation of Palestinians emerges. Yeah. I think that... Okay, a few things here. On Syria there, because it is true. I mean, I think... Okay, so John Brennan and Barack Obama, the head of the CIA and, of course, the former president of the United States of America, had a policy of committing literal treason...

Before they ended up accusing Donald Trump of treason, which was all bullshit. But they had a policy of committing literal treason by funding al-Qaeda and ISIS in the Syrian civil war. Poured billions of dollars and tons of weapons into that conflict. Now it is true, by the way, you are correct, that there certainly were military actions taken against ISIS after they invaded Iraq, which was not supposed to be part of the plan.

There was also a lot of military actions taken by Vladimir Putin against ISIS after he came in on Assad's request, as you know.

In 2017, when Donald Trump came in, one of the best things Donald Trump ever did, he cut off the CIA program to fund the anti-Assad rebels. And this was also a big part of what ended up like taking the, you know, the energy out of ISIS. Also, I think there was a lot of good reporting that just they turned enough people on the ground against them. They were even just too radical and just people ended up hating them.

It is true that they receded for quite a while, although the former emir of al-Qaeda, al-Jilani, is now ruling Syria, which does not seem like a great deal or something that people in America should support. The true enemy of the American people, al-Qaeda, now being in charge of Syria. I think that, you know, it's easy to talk about how, like, if the Palestinians had done this different, then maybe things would have worked out different.

But I just think, again, when you look at things, when you say, which essentially I think is your point here, right? Which, I mean, I tried to push you on this, but you're saying, look, we can degrade Hamas, but the cost of that is going to be slaughtering a whole bunch of people. It's not slaughtering, it's war. Okay, I get it.

I think you're... Okay. They're not being slaughtered. They're being killed. Okay. Whatever word you want to use. They're being killed in a brutal war started by Hamas. Yes. It's babies and little kids screaming out for help under rubble and no help is coming. They sit there under the rubble until they die.

That is the level of human suffering that's being inflicted. And if you want to say, well, listen, that's a price that I'm willing to pay to try to degrade Hamas, even though you yourself recognize that we can't totally eliminate them, but we could maybe degrade them or maybe take them down a peg. And the price for that is these babies being tortured to death, essentially, whatever you want to call it. Okay.

But from the other side of that story, like if there's like I got little kids, I don't know if you have kids. I know you have kids, Joe. If anybody ever was saying to me that like my kids were the acceptable price for this policy that we want to put into place. I'm saying I don't think there's any scenario, any scenario, Douglas, where there would be any time where you would accept Israeli kids dying like that as an acceptable price for a policy that you're going to be advocating for. First of all, again.

Go back to what is actually happening. There is no desire or aim by the IAF or the IDF to go into Gaza and kill women and children. Well, they're doing it. Hang on. Hang on. There is no desire for that. Does it happen collaterally? Certainly. Certainly.

And that is one of the very ugly rules of war and things that happens in war. And it's another of the reasons why it's almost like you shouldn't start a war and hide your rockets and your terrorists inside civilian buildings. Yeah, but hang on. You've made this point a lot of times, but OK. Well, it clearly can't be made enough because there is no intention on the Israeli side to cooperate.

to cause the death of non-combatants. Oh, come on. Hang on. Why do you think the Israelis would want to go and kill children in Gaza? Listen, let me just... How about I say it like this, okay? And by the way, when I say it like this, I'm not...

claiming that, um, disputes between nations are the same as handling a dispute domestically. I'm just saying on, on the idea of intentionality or who wants to do this or whatever. Look, if you, even if you had the right, let's say somebody, uh, broke onto your property and killed some of your family members and you want to go kill this guy. If he goes back to his, uh,

apartment building and you know that there's women and children in that apartment building and so your move is to blow up the building what you would be charged with is murder in the first degree cold-blooded premeditated intentional murder and you could sit there and tell the judge I didn't want to kill all those people why would I want to kill all of those people I just had to kill that one guy but that's bullshit that's not what counts

you did it intentionally. You dropped a bomb knowing that there were women and children in that building. You're taking an action knowing that these innocent people are going to die. Then that is by definition intentional. And you know, you could sit here and talk about, and it is true. There have been documented cases of,

of Hamas placing missiles in mosques and in schools and things like that. But when you look at the aerial footage of Gaza, that does not describe every single strike that Israel has launched. There have been tons of bombs dropped where it's simply, and we have very good reporting on this, where they literally just have information that they believe with,

some degree of certainty that a couple of Hamas militants are in this building and so they blow up the building. That is intentionally murdering innocent people. And if you're going to advocate for this war, I don't see how you can do it without saying that at least bite

the bullet that Madeleine Albright did when she was asked, we've played this clip on the show before, when she's point blank asked about the sanctions on Iraq and our 500,000 children, is that price acceptable? And she said, yes, we believe that price is acceptable. You're saying if you're going to support this war, you know this is the price of it. So why can't you just say, yes, that price is acceptable? Because then we could have a real conversation about why the other side is going to look at you like a monster.

Because, first of all, I don't agree with any of the characterization you make, any of it. Okay. You say that the Israelis get some information as if this is like, what, they're making it up? Or you think the Israelis want to drop a bomb? No, they act on information about where the terrorists are, just like they act on information of where the hostages are. Secondly...

When you talk about the destruction of Gaza, something you probably haven't realized, but is one of the reasons why the destruction looks so bad and is so bad, is because when the IDF were clearing the areas that they'd asked the civilian population to leave and were going house to house, and it isn't just stories here or stories there,

It's every second or third house in Gaza that has either munitions or tunnel entrances. Every second or third house. This is not the odd case case.

One of the things that everybody who has been there knows is that you go into a mosque and you know there will be either rockets and or tunnel entrances. You go into a hospital and you know that there will be grenades or tunnel entrances or dungeons or whatever. Just on a lighter note, early in the conflict when the Shifa complex, which is used as a Hamas headquarters and has also been used as a hospital. But even in 2014, the BBC said this is where Hamas are operating from.

When that was shown by the Israelis to have massive weapons stores in the tunnels and cellars underneath it, they had grenades, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, and the BBC's chief Middle East correspondent was asked live on air, why would these things be in a hospital? And Jeremy Bowen said, well...

It's perfectly possible because there's a lot of guns in the Middle East. It's perfectly possible the security department of the hospital had the clash in the car. I said, yeah, and did the grenades belong to the cardiologists? I mean, why? Why is this so normal that every civilian mill building like this and every second or third house in Gaza is a weapons dump or a place that you enter the tunnels from? But the reason why the devastation, which it is,

in the north in particular, but also in Rafah and elsewhere, is what it is, is because every time the IDF went into an area where they had told the civilians to leave, the Hamas terrorists that remained were in civilian buildings and booby-trapped a very large number of the buildings. So what they did as they proceeded through those areas of the Gaza to clear them

was to set off munitions, which the American military and others use, which sets off secondary explosions in places that are booby-trapped. And much of what you see in the photographs that you see and many other people have seen from Gaza is the result of that. It is the result of the IDF trying to clear an area which has been very carefully and well booby-trapped for years. Let me make one other very quick point about the bigger picture that you said, because I think it's important.

We were talking about the Syrian, you mentioned the Syrian conflict with ISIS. I think, again, it's really important to keep this in mind, what I said earlier about let's not think we are the primary actors everywhere, or even that important. I remember the debate over the Syrian intervention issue. And at the time, despite being in many cases an interventionist, I said on that occasion, I said we didn't know what we were doing, clearly didn't know who we were going to back.

If you remember, John McCain went to Syria to speak to some rebels, and one of them immediately turned out to be a kind of head-hacking jihadist. That wasn't great. And I said, I don't have any confidence that we know who to back. And despite many Syrian friends of mine imploring me otherwise, I said, I don't think it's something we can get involved in. However, if you look at the last 10 years or more, what is it now, 13 years of conflict in Syria, the U.S. and the Western powers are not remotely significant actors in that conflict.

The significant actors in that conflict were, always have been, the Russians, the Iranians. I mean, one of the things that blows my mind in the analysis of the region is the fact that the prime mover in the region, the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran that has been oppressing the Iranian people since 1979 and has been holding a great civilization in captivity...

that the Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran has literally been colonizing the region. I have this rule about, I took it from Vasily Grossman, the great Soviet Jewish writer, who had this great line about, tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of. This absolutely runs as well with the accusations against the Jewish state in the region. The Iranian revolutionary government is constantly accusing the Israelis of colonialism, of expansionism.

It is the Iranian revolutionary government that has been colonizing Iraq, colonizing Yemen, colonizing and destroying Lebanon, and colonizing Syria. And the amazing thing, when you look at the disaster that has happened in Syria in the last 13 years, and I don't see it getting especially better under the current jihadist, the disaster is not of our making primarily.

We are bit players. America is a bit player. In Iraq? In Syria. We are a bit player. Yeah, but you mentioned Iraq in there too. I know. Well, the great idiocy of that was that Iraq notices our failings, our lack of staying power, our desire to get out as soon as possible and much more, which is all understandable. No. Hang on, hang on, hang on. And they moved in. And they moved in. Of course. But I was talking about Syria. In the Syrian theater...

The main actors are not us. And one of the things I'm still interested in about this mindset that you have is why does it always have to be us? It's other people who have actions in the world. The Russians, the revolutionary government in Iran, they are so busy in the region. This is all about framing here because I don't think I've ever once made this claim. You've made this point several times so far. I've never once made the claim that everything is always us.

I think you're the one who's downplaying the influence and impact that we have. We are, after all, when I'm saying we, I'm saying the United States of America's federal government, is the largest, most powerful organization in the history of the world. It is the world empire. And to sit there and say Iran colonized Iraq, no, George W. Bush invaded the

on a bunch of lies, a war that you supported. He went in there and overthrew Saddam Hussein and installed democracy in the Shiite majority country. Of course, he handed the thing over to Iran, but to say that that had no impact on Syria or that the U.S. military funding and arming the anti-Assad rebels had no impact, I'm not claiming the entire thing is America. Bashar al-Assad was an actor. There were other forces there aside from the U.S.,

meddling there. But at the same time, you got the most powerful government in the history of the world, who, as we all know, put Syria on its seven countries in five years list of who we're going to go overthrow. And it's had a profound impact on the region. Of course it did. It was a huge contributing factor to that civil war to begin with. I think America is obviously a major actor, certainly could be, is meant to be the major actor on the world stage. I think that the history of the region and many other regions around the world is that

America does not have either the staying power, the capability, the intelligence, the kind of people that you would produce in order to have the kind of impact that you actually think it has. American weakness in the Middle East has been, I mean, I say this as somebody obviously from Britain, but when Britain was a dominant world power,

She produced the type of person who was keen to go and be a governor of, you know, a stand somewhere and learn the local dialects and, you know, run the civil service. You guys were better at empire than we are. They produced that sort of person because they wanted to stay.

America has never produced that sort of person, and it certainly hasn't in the Middle East in particular. It acts militarily on occasions, and in my view, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. But the reason why America was so badly outplayed by the mullahs in Iraq was simply that, as you say, after the war, America had nothing like the staying power of the mullahs in Tehran, had nothing like the ability to affect post-war change like the Iranian revolutionary government did.

And so, yes, if we create a vacuum like that or somebody else creates a vacuum, and after all, we did not cause the beginning of this. We, the West, I'm saying on this occasion, did not cause the beginning of the Arab Spring, as it was optimistically called at the beginning, or the beginning of the revolution, the uprising in Syria in 2011. These things were ground up.

And the actors in the region moved in much more deftly and effectively than we did. It's the same with Lebanon. It's the same with Lebanon. America doesn't even have eyes over Lebanon. Iran has an army that has a checkpoint at Beirut Airport that will check you on behalf of Hezbollah when you come in there. You can't tell me that America is just because America's...

on paper and much more has the power that America is the deft operator in the Middle East. There are so many people who outwit America in the Middle East all the time. Yeah, but you can't tell me that there hasn't been an impact from the $8 trillion that we've spent there and the multiple regime changes all around the Middle East that were done by America. These weren't just going to happen on their own. Are you saying that didn't have an impact? Iraq was certainly done by America, of course. Okay. So Iraq was certainly done by America. Libya?

Right. But OK, but NATO is the European wing of the American empire. I mean, let's get real that that's an American decision. Right. I'm saying it's not it's not because some random European country decided. Just because I mean, the Libyan intervention I was pretty iffy about at the time, but it's

That was done not to create an empire or anything like that. It was done for one very clear reason. And I remember the debates in the European capitals and in Washington, D.C. at the time. There was a belief that after the uprising against Gaddafi began, that there would be a mass slaughter, genocide carried out by Gaddafi against the people. We're talking in 2011? And it was 2011, yeah.

There was a belief. Everybody believed it. He had started his son, if you remember, Saif Gaddafi, formerly of the London School of Economics, showing that we can produce the best. Saif Gaddafi stood up and said, we will fight to the last bullet and so on. And and everybody believed them. And the desire to intervene was caused in an attempt to not to.

People do not want the resources of Libya. Nobody wanted Libya to fall apart or anything like that. They did it because there was a genuine belief in what was called at the time, which has gone out of fashion, but right to protect, the duty to protect. And that was why they went in. So it's just important to keep that sort of nuance around. Well, I don't think it's correct. I mean, you always kind of like ascribe the best of motives to Israel and the West and nothing but the worst of motives to all of their enemies. So just riddle me this then.

If we just went in because there was this uprising in 2011 and because we were worried that Gaddafi was about to go genocidal, something that your own – the UK parliament did an investigation into and found out was just completely wrong. But why is it then –

that I got four-star general Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander of the NATO forces. Why is it that he told me that he saw the plans in 2001 to overthrow Gaddafi and that this was part of a strategy to overthrow seven governments in five years?

And all of them except one have been done at this point. So you're telling me it's a complete coincidence that he saw that the neoconservatives had this plan to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, and then ten years later we happen to do it when we have the opportunity? The two aren't related at all? First of all, it's nice to hear the N-word again. The N-word? Did I say that? Neoconservatives. Oh, that one. I was thinking of a different one. Okay. The...

First of all, I would assume, I would hope that there's American military planning for absolutely everything. I would hope that there is a scenario for absolutely everything somewhere in the American, in Pentagon or whatever. Yeah, but he didn't say we're drawing up war games. He said this is the plan that we're going to impose. I would assume that, I would hope that any major power like America would have plans in place for almost everything that is likely.

America should have started planning for some kind of kinetic force in Libya, but...

From the 1980s. Of course. Of course there'd be plans. Yeah, but again, this is not what Wesley Clark's like. He wasn't saying, like, we've drawn up war games. We've drawn up war games with everybody. We have war games with China, war games with Russia. We've mapped out how a kinetic war would work, even with countries that have nuclear arsenals, like just in case we have to fight a traditional war and nukes aren't being used. That's not what he's talking about. He said that not only are – he was told – we're in Afghanistan now. This is late 2000 –

He goes, next we're going to Iraq. After that, we're going to Libya. After that, we're going to Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq.

and finishing off with Iran. He laid out the path of what we're about to do, and then we did it in the next administration. You don't think there was any connection between those two? - What, we did Somalia and Sudan? - No, I'm sorry, his, I'm sorry, if you go look at the list of seven countries, it was Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, I believe Somalia, Sudan, and Iran, I believe.

Why would America want to do any of those things? Who wants to do it? Well, what he said is that essentially these plants he said later in an interview with Piers Morgan that he that he had seen the plans at first in 1991 that they came from Paul Wolfowitz that basically then they got What what's funny about what the four-star general said? No, I'm just curious. What's laughable about this? I

Paul Wolfowitz is a great figure for almost any deep conspiracy in this country because he was a deputy secretary of defense at the highest in his life. He is forever being ascribed almost supernatural power. I don't think anyone's just ascribing. The highest position he ever got to was as Donald Rumsfeld's deputy. And...

It's a very strange thing always when Wolfrid's name comes up because he was a relatively low-level person to whom almost everything can be ascribed. Well, I didn't describe – again, this is such a strong man. I didn't ascribe everything to him. I'm literally telling you what the – No, I'm telling you what the four-star general said about him. And I wouldn't say Deputy Secretary of Defense is like a nothing position. It's a pretty consequential position. Not as important as Rumsfeld or Cheney, but yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, agreed. But who said it was? No, fire on. I just feel like you're batting down straw men. I never said that he is the creator of all conspiracies or anything. I'm literally saying that the four-star general said that he first saw the plans from him, that he had brought this to the National Security Advisor, and it had basically been like, eh, we'll look at this after the election, and that then it was resurrected later by Richard Perle, and that these guys were producing it.

Again, not me saying this. This is four-star General Wesley Clark. He said in a study paid for by the Israelis. And yeah, you can laugh at this all you want to, Douglas, but you can go read the clean break memo for yourself. This was the neoconservative strategy, along with their counterpart, the Likud's in Israel, that they wanted to remake the region in a way. And I'm sure by their own justification, they believed that democracy would sweep the region and it would be better off for them. Nonetheless, they pursued this path.

that has ended in nothing but disaster. And I don't think that to say that in 2011, it was like a purely humanitarian mission to go overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, I do not think is right. Well, first of all, before I get to the substance of it, why would they want the current situation in Libya? Huh? Why would they want the current situation in Libya? Well, because they wanted Gaddafi out.

Why? Well, OK, if you read the clean break memo, what their argument essentially is, is that you wanted to have regime change against the hostile surrounding Muslim countries. Was Gaddafi not hostile to Israel? To Israel? Yeah, sure. But he was. I mean, the Europeans and everybody else in NATO found that Gaddafi was a really relatively easy person to get on with latterly. Right. Yeah. No, I think it was an insane holocaust. No, no. You'll notice that.

after he hands over the nuclear program and thus makes himself very vulnerable, unfortunately, for the future of world peace, Libya has been unutterably disastrous for Europe. Hang on, hang on. No, just a clarifying question. Unutterably disastrous for Europe. I agree with you. And Somalia and Sudan, why does America or Israel want to...

Do regime change in Somalia? Can I just ask you a clarifying question on this? When you say that was a disaster for the prospects of world peace, you mean overthrowing Gaddafi was a disaster? I say that him being... Sorry, I should have clarified. My thing is...

Him being overthrown after he's given over the nuclear weapons is a disaster because it leaves on the table this thing that you have to hold on to nuclear weapons. And if you don't hold on to nuclear weapons, you could be dead. Do you think maybe the Israelis should stop using the term the Libyan model to push for negotiations with Iran? No, I don't think anyone should use...

What happened to Gaddafi is being a good precursor. Well, we certainly have a lot of agreement there. It was an absolute disaster, particularly to do it, to let a guy get sodomized to death after he denuclearized is not a good precedent to set. I agree. And that's one of the reasons why... One of the reasons why Iran wants a nuke so bad. I'm not sure. It's just being sodomized to death, as you put it. But yeah, they want a nuke because they...

I mean, if you like what the Iranian revolutionary government has done since 1979, you'd love what they'll do with the world when they've got a nuke. But anyway, put that aside for a second. I mean, I just, I'm sorry, we've slightly come back to where we started. But when you start talking about Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, it's all awfully noxious smelling. Richard Perle was a member of the Defense Policy Board.

which had an advisory capacity toward the Pentagon in the early 2000s, but it was by no means a policy board that dictated Pentagon policy. Okay. In the last 30 years of American foreign policy, there have been many major actors. Paul Wolfowitz is a relatively major one. We come slightly back full circle. In my view, and I'm not saying you're guilty of this, certainly not knowingly,

In my view, when people start talking about Paul Wolfowitz, I always remember that line of Mark Stein's many years ago. And he said, you can't help thinking that one of the reasons why people find Wolfowitz so appealing to talk about is that his name starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish. Ha ha ha.

That is a funny thing to say. People love St. Wolf of It. It's such a great name. It is for a movie. You can say, aha. He's perfect for it. Perfect for it. And he looks perfect for it. You'll say, oh, the crafty Paul Wolf of It. His crazy eyebrows. Famous hawk. So you're a bigot. You're a Jew hater if you mention the neocons. No, no, no. Just let me continue with the thought. So I remember those days. And his boss, Donald Rumsfeld...

was like the ruler of the world at that time. He had such charisma, such genius was attributed to him for the initial invasion of Iraq. People, you can't imagine the admiration that existed in the defense establishments around the world for Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney was so powerful that

The people of right and left, particularly on the left, spent all those years in the W. Bush administration saying W. wasn't the real president. He was being run by Dick Cheney because he was the brilliant, et cetera, et cetera. You're certainly listening to him at the beginning. OK, but I'm just saying it goes back to this thing of when certain ideas catch hold and what's really going on in them.

To attribute American foreign policy in the last 40 years to Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Pearl is knowingly or otherwise unethical.

to encourage a conspiracy that has very obvious legs. And I just urge you not to do it. Okay. Let me respond to this a little bit. First of all, I did not... It is not at all saying that these guys, therefore, just control everything. I'm just pointing out what a four-star general...

claimed where plans originated and that they ended up being implemented. That doesn't mean that they were the absolute ruler or arbiter of what was going to happen. But again, I got to say, for you to say that I can't bring up the neoconservative... I never said you couldn't. I just laughed. Right. But the implication is that I'm...

unwittingly giving fertile ground to some like Jew hating conspiracy. If I bring up a guy who's got a Jewish last name, who was a consequential person in our government, this is like identical to the arguments of the woke left. That would just be like, Oh, if you even say something, you know, if you bring up the crime rate in Chicago, you're basically a bigot because other people could take this and run with it. Come on.

No, you come on. What's the argument? If you said to me. I said a four-star general said something and there's no, what's the response? If you said to me or somebody said to me, don't you think there's a, that some people are running the global financial system? And I said, possibly. And you said, who do you think it is? And they said, the Rothschilds.

I think I'd be right in saying there was something a bit off about the character of the person doing that because it seemed like they were playing to some kind of lazy old trope.

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If you give the implication that these cabals exist and you decide to elevate the Jews or people with Jewish names in it and then play down the non-Jews, I can tell you, you will be opening up a world of

of madness. But am I really playing down the non-Jews? I mean, go look at the stuff that I've said about Obama, about George W. Bush. You said Middle East policy is Dick Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz. And I said, how about it? No, no, no, no. I mean, this is why I'm saying this is a woke leftist tactic. I literally just mentioned that a four-star general said this. I'm quoting him. And now you're telling me that this is the same thing as promoting... Don't pretend to me that when you quote somebody, it's a totally arbitrary thing that you just pluck out of the air.

I'm not arguing that it's arbitrary. I'm saying I'm using the quote for a reason. I was connecting it to an argument. And I'm saying to you... I'm giving fertile ground to Jew haters to mention it. I think that when you decide to elevate what is...

a conspiracy of people who are overthrowing the governments of various countries, some of which haven't been overthrown and others of which have. But by the way, we're not overthrown by American dominance, certainly not in Syria. And then you say that the people who are doing it are these people with Jewish names. I think you should be more judicious than that because you probably know what bubbles up underneath you online by now.

Yeah, look, I mean, there's no question that there are, you know, no matter what. And by the way, you know, it's funny just hearing you say this to me. I mean, look, and by the way, I completely agree with you. I think you've been one of the best champions on opposing Europe's insane immigration policy. I also think the United States of America has had an insane immigration policy. I'm happy to see that. That seems to be being reversed.

But imagine you made a point about immigration and I were to say to you be careful What's bubbling up online? Because now you're get look look the fact is if you are if you are taking a position that opposes say Muslim immigration into the UK and

then yes, it is quite possible that a lot of people who really just hate Muslims are going to end up liking what you had to say or following you. But that doesn't mean you're responsible to it. And if I were to say that to you, you would be the first to very eloquently point out that that is a complete non-argument. The question is, is this policy good or is it bad? And whether there's not – and if you want to say to me, hey, I should like disclaim when I make this point that like, hey –

I'm Jewish. I love Jewish people. The fact that there were some Jewish people involved in our foreign policy establishment does not mean that it's the Jews. Then fine, I'm happy to say that. But I just think it's a non-argument to say that like, oh, you know, you're kind of like giving, you're creating fertile ground for this hatred. If I'm being completely honest, I think we've seen what you're talking about bubbling up on Twitter. Do you think that's gotten worse over the last 18 months?

Yeah, sure. Right. I think kind of what Israel's doing in this war and the U.S. funding and arming it have been something that is really a great facilitator for that stuff to bubble up. Well, as I say, we could go back to that, but I disagree. I think that Israel has every right to go in and destroy the terrorist group that carried out the massacres. Yes, again, but no one's arguing that they have the right to destroy the terrorists. The question is they have the right to kill innocent people. Let's not go around again, which I think we've done. We're just not answering what I'm saying. I think I've already answered that, but just to go back to the meat of that.

I think you don't realize that actually people like me who have a voice and write and much more do think about that all the time. It's a profound concern and responsibility. I agree with that. Right, right. And don't think I don't worry all the time and make sure I intervene constantly.

into the debate very carefully at times when I think some people have picked up something that I've been saying and they're going to go wrong with it. I that scares the hell out of me. And I do it regularly. I do it because I have to. Yeah, listen. So that's a point of agreement, too. But you don't stop believing in that policy for it and you won't stop bringing that up. You say, but you do say, OK, I mean, most obvious one on that.

If there is something where something really fetid happens, something really terrible, and there's a bunch of people that decide to riot or commit violence or something like that, I know that I have to, as a duty, say absolutely this is to be condemned. If it is people trying to pretend that all Muslims this or all that, absolutely I intervene to stop that.

I think that is but I think that this is one of the responsibilities that comes with putting out ideas in the public square. And I think that none of us are blame free, but all of us have some kind of responsibility to know that what we put out there is very carefully watched, very carefully followed, and that we have to tread well.

Well, OK, so I agree with that. But when you say you intervene, what exactly do you mean by that? You mean you voice opposition to it. You say, hey, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that, like, we have to have a sane immigration policy that's good for our country. Or make sure I, you know, say which politician I think can deal with it decently and which ones will not. I mean, I've made plenty of enemies in the European right by saying who I think is bad and...

who will not do this well. I just put it out there. I literally say it as a point of caution.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't disagree with that. And I've certainly done the same thing and said that, like, I don't know, like I don't like the I don't like Jew hatred on Twitter and I don't like people jumping to wild conspiracies that they don't have enough, nearly enough evidence to, you know, actually back up, which I've seen quite a bit of. That being said, I also think there's a whole lot of real conspiracies. And I'm not going to stop talking about those just because some people on Twitter might

take it in a bad direction. Well, as the great Michael Malice said, and as you quoted, one red pill, not the whole bottle. I've been trying to limit people to one red pill. One red pill a year is all you need. A lot of people, they take one of those things and they just get hungry. Sort of like boosters. Like,

Like boosters. Well, it ends up, yeah, exactly. Take none of those. No, you're supposed to take one red pill. By the way, what's the one in front of you? Which one? That one there. This? That one, yeah. It's nicotine. Oh, that's the chewing one. It's like a pouch. Chris Williamson showed me yesterday this one that he said weightlifters are using in Austin.

It's like a powder or something. Weightlifters? Yeah. Creatine powder? No, it's not nicotine. It's something like it. Creatine? No, it's to sniff.

Oh, no, no, no. That's smelling salts. Smelling salts. That's right. Smelling salts. For goof. For silly. We do that to be silly. I hadn't heard of that since like 19th century women who thought they had the vapors and he said these are smelling salts. Well, they used to use it for boxers when they got knocked out to wake them up. That was it? Yeah. That was it. Does it work? Well, it works for weightlifters. You sniff it before you lift incredible amounts of weight, allegedly. Powerlifters use them. That's literally why they sell it. It just...

jolts your entire central nervous system because it's so horrific. Want to smell? No. This is, by the way, a little insight into the comedy community. The deal is that Joe will help advance the careers of comedians unlike anybody since Johnny Carson, but then the cost is you do have to sniff smelling salts. We all have to do that.

It's a... Oh, bring the smelling salts. It's a Nazi bargain of sorts, but it is what it is. Do you have a heart out, Douglas? Kind of. I've got to get to D.C. Okay. One of my least favorite cities in the country. Another area of agreement. There we go.

Thank you. Thank you for doing this. Appreciate it. It was very, very good. I enjoyed it very much. And thank you, Dave. I do. Yeah. Of course. Thank you to you, John. Thank you, Douglas, very much. I do appreciate that. While we do fundamentally disagree on a lot of this stuff, I do admire that you will have these conversations. Show everyone the book here. It's Jesus Christ. Avoid it on myself. Luckily.

On democracies and death cults, Israel and the future of civilization, Douglas Murray. Did you do the audio book? I did do the audio book. Thank you. You can hear these mellifluous tones. Yes, love it. It would be a tragedy if anybody else did it. I trust you. Yes. All right. Beautiful. All right. Goodbye, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.