Dave Smith: Debating Douglas Murray, the “Woke Right” Narrative, and the Moment He Found God

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Dave, I'm really glad to see you.

I know you've been here before,

but it's nice to have you back.

I am an expert in all things, Tucker Carlson.

So,

I know you've been asked this a million times, but I'm coming to this late.

How do you assess

the debate that you had with Douglas Murray?

Now, it's been a month.

How long has it been?

Something like that.

Something like a month, right?

So, a few weeks.

Looking back, what was that?

it's an interesting question i mean i think uh I think essentially it was what everyone saw.

It was, it's, it's like my first impression of it.

My impression during it, during the first half hour of the debate, I was like, well,

Douglas just embarrassed himself in front of the world.

And

I felt that in real time.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, it was, you know, look, it was, he was ridiculous.

And it was, uh,

it was kind of strange to witness as it was happening.

I go, so you decided to open the debate by just chastising everyone as not being as good as you that the expert class ought to be the ones consulted, that you, I mean, you know, you could argue what he exactly he was saying, but he was clearly saying that you, you guys on podcasts are simply not qualified to talk about these subjects.

Now, you're saying this on the Joe Rogan experience.

Of all places to go and deliver this message, This is the place guaranteed to turn the entire audience against you.

And of course, I just think that

I think it's a, it's a ridiculous non-argument that never would have made sense.

But coming off of the COVID years,

the idea that you're going to convince people that

you ought to kind of,

they ought to trust your opinions.

They ought to, that your class ought to be trusted was a ridiculous

class.

I mean, he's not.

I know Douglas, and I think that I've always gotten along with him, and I think that he's clever, but he's clever in a boarding school way.

He went to boarding school as I did and you instantly recognize it in the way that he debates, which is by dropping references that suggest deep area addition that doesn't actually exist.

I think he's clever.

He's got a kind of bullshitty boarding school vibe to him again that I recognize, that I have sometimes.

So I'm not, you know, not trying to be holier than now, but like the idea that he's an expert is absurd.

He's a journalist like the rest of us who's been taken on PR tours in various countries by their governments trying to win his support.

Got it.

I've done that too.

But he's hardly an expert on anything.

Well,

what?

Well, also, it doesn't look all of this in so the analogy that I've used about it is that like if you had two UFC fighters that are going to fight, so they've signed the contract, they've done their training camps, they show up to Madison Square Garden, they both get in the octagon, and like one of them puts up his hands, and then the other one puts his hands down.

and goes, you know, I'm such a better fighter than you.

And this is ridiculous that me and you are even fighting.

It's like, okay, but we are.

But we are.

We're here.

We both accepted.

We're both here.

So if you are such a better fighter, if you have trained so much more, if you have all these advantages against me, well, then you can't just, you have to demonstrate that.

Take on the argument.

You should be able to then destroy me.

And so he weirdly opened with this thing where he was going to turn everybody off, turn everyone against it because the style is bullshit.

Even if you're, and I've had lots of people who are pro-Israel reach out to me since then and be like, listen, I disagree with you on the issue, but that was ridiculous the way he attempted to argue.

Because weirdly, number one, you're turning everyone against you.

And number two, you're just setting the bar so much higher for yourself.

Because now once we start actually getting into the debate, you've already explained that you should be dominating me on every facet of this.

And yet you're not.

And yet actually, when it comes down to it, you have no answer for the points that I'm making.

And that was the theme of the entire knowledge, either.

Yes, that's right.

But no, but there was,

there were two points in the debate that actually stuck out to me the most.

And it wasn't the, have you been, which is, you know, was the funniest thing that everyone's making that, you know, Douglas Wilby mocked for eternity for, but, you know, he made his own bed.

But the two points to me that really stuck out in the debate, because this is the way my mind works, is that I'm like, oh, if you like, give me something, give me something to challenge me on.

That will actually keep me up at night, by the way.

If you were to be like, no, Dave, you got this completely wrong and you need to read these three books to understand why you're missing all this information.

Can I just interrupt and say, knowing you pretty well, I think I mean this, I believe I would take a lighter texture test and pass.

I believe that if you read those books and found that you were wrong, that you would admit it.

Oh, yeah.

And I've done this lots of times before.

I have views from a decade ago that are quite embarrassing in Heinz.

I was at one, I was an atheist at one point, I was pro-life, excuse me, I was pro-choice at one point.

God, this isn't bad, I was up for open borders.

Oh, I've been, I've had all of those views.

I've had some really bad views over the years, and I've changed my mind all the time.

Douglas would admit if he was wrong.

Well, of course not.

I mean, that's odd.

No, but that's kind of the aspect of that.

Well, look, if you can get Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and COVID wrong, and then with certainty say you're right about the next one, and then also tell also arguing that the other person should have some humility.

I mean, come on, like, what is this?

It's just too, you couldn't write.

If I just scripted this for you and wrote it on a script, you'd be like, take it down.

This is too ridiculous.

No one would believe this.

But

regardless of that, so there were two moments that actually really stood out to me in the debate.

Um, were, okay, so number one was in the Ukraine portion, number two was in the Israel portion.

So in in the Ukraine portion, at one point, I said to him, we were talking about the,

you know, what led up to the war.

And so he said something like, he goes, you know, the real question is why all these countries wanted to join NATO.

I mean, we didn't incorporate them in NATO through force.

And I was like, well, yes, obviously that's the argument isn't that we force the governments willingly wanted to join NATO.

Yes.

I was like, that's pretty obvious why.

You'd want to be have your defense subsidized and want to have the most powerful government in the history of the world guaranteeing your defense sure and also because they're concerned about the former soviet union which is still russia and still okay but i was like but that wasn't the argument you know the argument is why would we do this and so i i was like let me just give you two bullet points right two quick arguments and the two uh quick points that i made were number one uh the net means nyet memo which of course as you know well you've talked about this a lot you talked about this back on your fox news show was that uh uh bill burns later director of the CIA, yes.

Yes, the CIA director through Joe Biden's four years,

who was the CIA director through this entire war up until Trump took back over.

But then the ambassador

in 2008, he was the ambassador to Russia.

He wrote a private cable to Condoleezza Rice.

This is not for the public.

This was a private cable that later, the heroic Julian Assange released.

It's the only reason we know it exists.

And he lays out in there that all this talk about Ukrainian entry to NATO is going to lead to a war.

And he specifically says that this is the brightest of all red lines for the Russians.

And if we keep moving forward, they fear this could result in civil war and then they might have to intervene.

In his words, quote, a choice the Russians do not want to have to make.

So I was like, hey, there's a pretty compelling piece of evidence.

And then, number two, I said,

Stroltenberg, I always say this name wrong, but the head of NATO,

Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, he said that Vladimir Putin in late 2001 put in writing, sent a draft treaty to NATO and said, if you just put into writing that you will not bring Ukraine into NATO, I will not invade the country.

This is the head of NATO said.

So I give him these two points, okay?

There's, I could talk a lot more about this, but I was like, let's focus on these two.

Seems to me that all the powerful people involved are admitting that this war was about Ukrainian entry into NATO.

And his response was,

The war was not about Ukrainian entry into NATO.

It was about Vladimir Putin's desires to reconstitute the Soviet Union.

And I was like, yeah, but what's the response?

Like, what's the response to my point?

Like, I made a point.

You made nothing.

You just made an assertion.

So there was this one where it's like, once you actually get down to it, once you remove all this, like, you're an expert, you're not an expert.

You've never been.

What are you watering?

What are the, you've got no actual argument here.

Because you're not an expert yourself.

Right.

But even that, it's like that, again, just the way I work,

that doesn't do anything for me.

Then you got to have an actual argument.

Otherwise, you're not going to persuade me.

And I think for most of the time, your knowledge, too.

And I just refer back to the boarding school thing.

It's like the whole point of that style and debating is to create the illusion of knowledge.

Like you have an Aeschylus quote, sort of, you know what I mean?

Or you can cite the titles of three D.H.

Lawrence novels, but you haven't read the novels.

You haven't read Aeschylus.

You don't have an original thought that's actually yours.

You don't even have the material.

You haven't even, you haven't even read the books.

It's just, it's a sleight of hand.

And

that's what they teach you in boarding school.

Well, okay, so then the other one, which some people did pick up on this, but this to me was like actually the biggest moment of the debate, I thought.

And it was sad in a way, because Douglas Murray is someone who I have some degree of respect for as a smart person.

I was kind of sad that he was reduced to this.

But so he made the argument.

He said,

first off, he was dishonest where he, and I didn't call him, I know this, but I let it slide.

But he goes, you know, I was very iffy about the war in Libya.

It's like, I've read your columns at the time.

No, you fucking weren't.

Okay.

Anyway, but he goes, I was very iffy about the war in Libya, but the war in Libya was fought because there was this tremendous fear that Gaddafi was about to go genocidal and it was a humanitarian intervention.

And so then I said, okay.

Now they have slave markets in Tripoli.

Right.

It's humanitarian.

But even, but forget even the point that, okay, maybe, maybe their argument is they thought he was going to go genocidal and they didn't realize it would be so much worse without him.

Like what?

But I said, okay, Douglas, so riddle me this then.

If it was a humanitarian intervention, how come I have four-star general Wesley Clark telling me 10 years prior that we had already made the plans to go overthrow Gaddafi?

Because he said this very clearly to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

And then I mentioned that he later, actually very recently on Pierce Morgan, he clarified.

This is really interesting.

If people go watch, Scott Horton, who is amazing, by the way, his book Provoked is the best book on Russia, U.S.

post-collapse of the Soviet Union relations.

His book, Enough Already, is the best book that's been written on the terror wars.

So Scott Horton is debating Wesley Clark on Pierce Morgan.

And this gets brought up.

You know, the fact that you said in 2001, you had already seen in the Pentagon that we were going to overthrow seven countries in five years.

okay, so he says, he goes, well, actually, the plans go back to 1991.

And I saw them first from Paul Wolfowitz's office.

And then basically the plans got killed.

And then they were revived

by Richard Pearl and a study paid for by the Israelis.

This was Four Star General Wesley Clark's comments on it.

So I brought that up.

And I go, well, look, you're going to say that this is a,

you know, a humanitarian intervention, but that seems strange because the plans to overthrow overthrow Gaddafi were already written many years earlier.

And then they had their opportunity and they did it.

I think it was more than just a humanitarian intervention.

And then his response is

this thing about how Paul Wolfowitz's name starts with an animal and ends Jewish.

And it was kind of funny the way he said it.

But then he just, he went, be careful what you're watering there.

Because you can't, you know, a lot of people are going to hate Jews if you just start bringing up Paul Wolfowitz's name.

And I just could not believe, by the way, the end result of that is he had no response to what I was saying.

He didn't have a response to why this is.

Because Paul Wolfowitz has an identifiably Jewish name,

you're abetting anti-Semitism by bringing it up, even though he's a government official who helped get us into this war that killed a million people.

Yeah, he's also in other places talked about how Paul Wolfowitz is like a hero in the

Kurds in Iraq consider him a hero because he was the architect of the war that overthrew Saddam Hussein.

But like, I'm not allowed to mention him because that, which is, first of all, it's just beside the point.

Like, forget what this will lead to.

What's the truth?

That's what matters.

So he's, of course, a very pro-Kurdish, I would imagine.

Right, yes, yes, I'm sure.

Well, I actually have been there.

Oh, have you?

Yes, I have been there.

And I can say firsthand, the most brutal people I've ever met in my life were Kurds.

Like, actually, I saw it firsthand.

So I'm not against the Kurds or whatever, but it's just interesting, everyone in Washington, no one's ever met a Kurd or can't define what a Kurd is, but everyone reflexively loves the Kurds.

And I've never had strong views about the Kurds.

But again, I just want to say I've seen it in action in Iraq.

And I was shocked by the Kurdish

personally.

Yeah.

Well, also, you know, it's

all the people who are, you know, were knocking Donald Trump in his first term when he wanted to pull out Assyria.

And they were like, what about the Kurds?

We can't betray the Kurds.

And then those same people will tell you what a great president George H.W.

Bush was, but we can't betray the Kurds, right?

The guy who really betrayed the Kurds.

I mean, told them to rise up against Saddam Hussein and overthrow him and then decided, we're going to back off that and just

allowed them to get slaughtered, you know.

But

and look, I mean, it was just kind of blatant.

It's like, I'm presenting an argument and you're responding with a pure woke tactic.

Exactly.

A pure woke tactic to say, which I, as I mentioned to him, I go, but wouldn't this apply to everything you stand for?

I mean, everything you stand for about how we shouldn't have so much Muslim immigration into the UK.

Okay, well, someone could take that and that might lead to a rise in hatred of Muslim people.

But that's not a counter argument.

No.

That's not an argument.

That's like, well, okay, well, then maybe you could say you should also add in there.

I don't mean all Jewish people are guilty of some conspiracy, but that

first of all, I'm Jewish and he's not.

So like, what the hell are we talking about?

You're Jewish.

So that gets me to, I mean, I don't think you've convinced Douglas that you're Jewish.

So

I saw that and read the commentary after.

And as someone who's always liked Douglas and known him for a while, my first instinct was, why, he just destroyed his career like he's done.

No smart person will ever take Douglas seriously again.

And I don't, I don't know if he felt that way, but it was clear by a day or two after he realized he destroyed his career.

And in response, rather than admitting that and admitting what he'd done wrong, he attacked you.

Really kind of double down in the New York Post.

I want to read this because I was offended by this.

He goes, the whole column's an attack on you, and I'm quoting, claiming some Jewish ancestry.

Smith has spent the last 18 months since October 7th being very unfunny.

Indeed.

Claiming some Jewish ancestry.

Now, I'm not really sure.

Well, I'm just going to, I don't know why that just, oh, wow.

So, what do you claim some Jewish ancestry?

I, uh, my mom and dad are probably the big ones.

Uh,

I do, I do claim some Jewish ancestry, uh, but yeah, it's, it's, I mean, it was so, well, first of all, I joke, which I'm not even the first, because everyone made this joke already about the art, but he says, I haven't been funny.

And I just, Douglas has never been to one of my comedy shows, so he should come and check it out, and then he could tell me what he thinks.

I think I'm pretty damn funny in my shows, and the audience seems to think so.

But what is your

Jewish ancestry?

I mean, first of all, he suggests that you're like a fake Jew.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Claiming some Jewish ancestry.

It's like you're hiding behind a cloak of Ursat's Judaism.

Which is, in a way,

you know, one of the things I thought was so interesting about the piece

was that, and I couldn't imagine, man, I hope I'm never this person.

Because even now, right, like there's so, there's so many shots I could take at Douglas.

But even when you ask me about the debate, like my first instinct is to go like, well, look here are the points i made that he didn't have counters to because i'm about the argument you know like that's what actually matters and it's it's tough for all of us because there is as as you know well you've talked a lot about this right but it's like in this kind of show business news world where we're talking about events and things that matter but also there's a camera on us and we're talking on a microphone and we're we're public people and so it's kind of impossible to completely remove your ego and your own narcissistic tendencies from that Yes.

But like, you got to keep reminding yourself, like, yeah, but there's a fucking war going on.

Like, that's what actually matters.

All of this is much less important than like the actual policy.

So you try to focus on that, but I could not imagine writing an article about a debate that I had just been in where the reaction was so unfavorable toward me.

And in the piece, what you might notice is he does not take on a single one of my arguments.

He does not point out something that I got wrong.

He does not say, Dave argued this, but this is so clearly clearly a reflection of his lack of knowledge on this subject because he didn't account for X, Y, and Z.

It's just once it, just like the actual debate, he would only debate me.

He wouldn't debate the topic.

I was in a restaurant the other night, in fact, this weekend, and I had a little trouble hearing what people were saying.

And I thought to myself, I'm a little young to go deaf.

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So why do you think he did it?

I mean, he was basically, it felt to me like he was sent on a kamikaze mission.

That's the way it looked.

Here, the guy just flies into your aircraft carrier, doesn't sink it, but it destroys his plane, his career.

Like, I don't get it.

In a sense, I don't know.

I don't think Douglas Murray destroyed his career.

I think he destroyed his reputation.

And so his reputation amongst the people,

but his career is actually going to be fine.

Much like Kamala Harris's career is actually going to be fine.

And I don't know.

You know, I'm speculating a little bit with this because

there was not almost any interaction off the podcast.

Like Douglas Murray showed up five minutes later we were recording.

He left immediately afterward and me and Rogan hung out.

So like there's nothing more that the viewer didn't see that I saw really.

Hellos and goodbyes.

But I think

number one, one of my guesses, I'm speculating here, is that he just didn't

wasn't really prepared for me.

And it was like, oh, some comedian will be on there.

And maybe he came in kind of confident that like he'll be able to handle me.

I've had that happen a few times in my career.

I think it's happening less.

I can't imagine he didn't like look into me before the debate, but maybe that's possible.

But the feeling that I got as it was going on was kind of, okay, I, do you remember, you remember?

I'm sure you do.

You remember very well when Kamala Harris was running for president.

I know that seems like a long time ago, but that actually happened, which is really crazy.

It's like a dream sequence.

Now, it's not just that Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney endorsed her, but she started bringing Liz Cheney out to campaign events and campaigning with Liz Cheney.

Now, if you were just looking at this on paper, you'd go, okay,

what demographic of voters is this for?

And you'd very quickly realize that that demographic doesn't exist.

No.

Are the leftists, they still remember her last name as Cheney, and especially with the year that had preceded that, like,

They're kind of anti-war again, and they're not really into like the idea of we've got a Cheney cheney on our side it's not going to win you oh it's not going to get out your base and then on the other side i mean she lost by like 50 points in her congressional run i mean she's it's not like you're bringing republicans in and so i think the only thing you could conclude is that oh this isn't actually for the voters There's somebody else who Kamala Harris is talking to here.

Of course.

There's a power source that may be a little concerned about her.

And she's trying to let them know, don't worry, I'm good for business.

I've got Liz Cheney right here.

That's kind of my assumption.

It seemed to me with the Douglas Murray thing, he wasn't playing to the audience.

He certainly wasn't trying to persuade Joe.

No.

He perhaps was talking to a different audience, which will make sure that his career is just fine going forward.

That's the sense I got.

If you want to make people paranoid and hateful, act like that.

Well, again, look, there's two things that I

really want to make sure I express.

Number one, with the thing where he's this, this claim some Jewish ancestry thing, which by the way, would be, I think, if you were to ever do this to, say, like a Jewish person who was on your side, you would be like, well, that's a pretty anti-Semitic thing to do, right?

To like challenge their Jewishness because they disagree with a policy.

What does your Jewishness have to do with it anyway?

Well, right.

That's the whole fucking point.

And that, you know, it does, I think it's basically like this.

I think that particularly when it comes to the Israel stuff, a lot of these guys don't know what to do with me because typically, as every American who's ever criticized Israel knows, you get labeled as being a Jew hater.

Oh, you must be anti-Semitic.

That's why you would say something like that.

Like, remember that horrible anti-Semite Pat Buchanan, who said that the Israel lobby wanted a war in Iraq?

She just hates Jewish people.

Even though we all know that's true, when you say it, they go, you're an anti-Semite.

That's like the game that they play.

That's much tougher to do when you're talking to someone who's Jewish.

And so

in a sense, that ends up being kind of a shield against the accusation.

And so they want to remove that shield so that you don't have.

But the bottom line is that no one should have that shield.

And I am Jewish.

My mother and father are both Jewish.

I am, I think I was 86% Ashkenazi Jew on my DNA test.

I think that's enough.

But

the point is, it shouldn't matter.

It shouldn't matter at all.

You should, anybody.

We're talking about the behavior of nations, by the way nations with militaries and parliaments congresses like these are countries

and i what does this have to do i mean well first of all and this isn't even the most important point but the american taxpayer is forced to pay for this stuff so but even if he wasn't even if you didn't have to pay for it If you're a human being, forget even an American, if you're a human being, you have a right to have an opinion on any issue you want to have an opinion on.

This is what the left did during COVID.

It was like, wait a second.

It seems like this came, you're telling me it came from a pangolin in a wet market, a fish market, a mammal sold in a fish market somehow, you know, was the genesis of this virus.

But there was this level three biolab like a mile away.

Maybe that was the source.

They're like, oh, you hate Asians.

And they claimed racism, so you couldn't pursue that line of inquiry.

I see people like Douglas Murray, supposedly on the right, and there are a lot of others like Douglas Murray, saying the same thing.

Like, you can't,

you can't express an opinion about about where your tax dollars go or about people dying or else you're a bigot.

How is that different?

Right.

No, it's not.

It's the same thing.

It's the same kind of pathetic tactic where

if you can't argue against someone's ideas, you just say, oh, you're a bad person.

And that's why you have these ideas to begin with.

It's a very, it's a very low-grade like social psychology attempt to shame someone out of having the views that they have.

And yeah, it's exactly, it's what the woke did on everything.

No matter what it was, if anytime is a, I don't, I can't remember who coined the term, but

a racist is anybody winning an argument against a progressive?

Exactly.

You know, it's, that's it.

And so he's doing the same thing.

But then the other thing, which is, is really separate and secondary from that, but the argument that Douglas Murray is making is that if I call out Paul Wolfowitz, or even, you know, more broadly speaking, if I call out the neoconservatives and how they hijacked American foreign policy and how they very much had Israel's interest in mind, which I get from reading the neoconservatives.

I don't get this from reading critics of them.

It's from their own words.

He's saying me calling that out is fertile ground for Jew hatred to rise.

And it's like, no.

What you're doing is fertile ground.

I agree with that.

What you telling me I'm not allowed to call out the deputy defense secretary because his last name is Jewish.

That's actually what leads to a rise in people not liking Jews.

I would agree more.

And I do think Douglas, though he's not an expert or a genius, is smart enough to understand that, but he did it all the way.

Yeah.

And I don't know his motive, but

in the moment that I think maybe actually turn it off.

I had to stop watching,

but it was most revealing of all, is when he goes after Daryl Cooper, the historian, really one of the great historians in the United States, Daryl Cooper,

and doesn't know his name.

Yeah.

And but goes after him personally as like a Nazi or something.

And let me just parenthetically, and I'll shut up after this, but Daryl Cooper is one of the kindest, most reasonable, most fundamentally liberal people I know, anti-Nazi people.

I know, a guy who you could give your routing number to would never steal money.

A guy who, if he had absolute power, would kill nobody, like a truly decent Christian man.

basically called him a monster and didn't even know his name.

And so that suggested to me that he was like briefed by somebody before.

So make sure you get in this Holocaust deny, which he is not, Daryl Cooper.

Like, what is that?

Well, it's also, you know, if you're, if you're smearing people who, which, and Daryl wasn't the only one, but if you're smearing people whose like names you don't know and who you admit you've never listened to any of their

work, Maybe don't put that right in the middle of an appeal to expertise.

You know, like, like maybe don't, Maybe have that in a different section than in the section where you're going, you really have to know what you're talking about in order to have an opinion on these things.

And so that didn't, that didn't work out very well.

Daryl is a, is an amazing guy.

He is brilliant.

His work is phenomenal.

I know him personally, and he's like genuinely a great person.

He's a humane man.

Yes.

And it's...

It is something, it's a comment on our time and on our society that the guy who essentially,

if you actually consume any of Daryl's work, as I have consumed a lot of it, basically

Daryl's whole kind of his template, the way he operates is he's, there's basically only like a couple rules.

And like, number one is he has to read everything that's available on the subject.

So he reads everything.

The guy's a machine.

His depth of knowledge is like second to none.

He just knows everything.

And then number two is whenever you talk about history, basically his rule is that you have to understand that everyone involved is a human being.

Every one of them was a three-year-old at one point.

So like totally innocent, like good little boy, like my three-year-old that I have at home.

And that they grew up in real circumstances and real things happened to them.

And if you're going to do history, you have to constantly be doing your absolute best to put yourself in this person's shoes and then put yourself in this person's shoes and then put yourself on this side of the conflict and then put yourself on this side of the conflict.

That's basically it.

It's pure empathy.

And actually,

as I've mentioned to you personally, and I've told Daryl this personally, he is probably the best shot people have at de-radicalizing people in the worst.

form of being radicalized.

He's the guy, listen, for me personally, and I thought I was pretty well read on the history of Israel-Palestine.

And he has this incredibly long series, like a 30-hour series called Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.

And like the thing is, I knew most of what I knew, not all of it, but most of what I had read about with the Israeli-Palestine conflict, like most people,

like starts in 1947, 1948 and then goes up to today.

His series is about, it's like from the 1890s until 1947.

So he's talking about the creation of the state, from Zionism being created to the state being created.

Right, right, exactly.

That's basically the, the whole thing.

You know, he has a little bit where he's talking about the pogroms that preceded the Zionists, but that's really the story.

And

it actually made me much more sympathetic to the Zionists.

You know, as somebody who grew up kind of in that propaganda, in the pro-Israel propaganda, then ultimately turned on it and became a critic of Israel.

Listening to his series, you understand, it just puts you in the position and you do understand like, oh, okay, these were real men who were reacting to the circumstances of their day.

You can kind of understand why why a lot of them wanted to do this.

By the way, it's pretty amazing that they pulled it off, however you feel.

I agree.

However you feel about what the government of Israel is doing, it's amazing that they did this.

And yeah, look, and of course, for the one, this is why I say it's a comment on our time.

So there's one guy here who's going like, listen, you got to like really completely educate yourself on a subject and then you have to have empathy toward all sides.

And then everyone goes, Nazi, that guy's a Nazi.

That's what it is to be a Nazi in 2025.

It's just so funny.

I'm too old for a lot of this stuff.

And so I thought, you know, among the many lessons, great lessons of the Second World War that I mean, I grew up marinating in, dehumanizing people is bad.

Treating them like, treating human beings like they're not human is bad.

And I still believe that.

I think it's the core of Christianity.

But it's also just the core of any civil society, any decent society.

And that's what Daryl is trying to do.

And I don't know that I've ever heard anybody try and take apart his, his,

factual analysis.

It always immediately goes to motive.

You're a Nazi.

Shut up.

You're a Holocaust denying that.

Right.

Or claiming he said something that isn't at all what he said.

Like he downplayed the atrocities the Nazi.

He just asked him.

No, he didn't.

It's also.

But why?

Why?

So Daryl Cooper,

and by the way, a number of my friends, people I really like, have been involved in this.

Like their authority has been marshaled to destroy Darrell Cooper.

And I grieve to see it because it's, you know, they're paid to do it.

It has so degrading to them and dishonest and sad.

But why?

Daryl Cooper's like this one guy living in the Pacific Northwest.

Why spend all this time and energy to destroy him?

Well, I love,

you said this,

I forget a few years ago.

I can't remember what it was where you said this, but it was you.

And this really hit home with me.

And this isn't like, and you weren't suggesting that this is like a proof.

This isn't like a, like a irrefutable logical argument.

It's kind of like a guide.

But, you know, you said the thing about you could tell when something's infected because you touch it and you recoil and you go, ooh, something's going on there.

Now, what exactly is it?

No, it's, that doesn't prove what's going on.

But look, you can't, the fact that Daryl's moment on your podcast, sitting right here where I'm sitting,

got such a reaction

really demonstrates something.

Like something, and you see that it's like, oh, you touched on like a third rail.

A hurt dog barks.

Yes.

Well, and in the same way when you had first questioned the morality of dropping nuclear weapons on cities.

And then there's this big freak out over that.

And now nobody here has said, hey, the Nazis were the good guys.

The Nazis didn't commit any atrocities.

The Nazis were bad.

No one's even downplaying.

No one even made the argument that.

I remain anti-Nazi for the work.

Yes.

For the record.

But I'm saying like, no one even made the argument that like it was 5.9 million, not six.

You know, like there's nothing.

This topic hasn't even been broached.

No.

But what you are attacking is really the underpinning of the origin story

of the American empire.

Exactly.

And that's what you're not allowed to question because.

And you see it the way every

defender of every war, including the current one, if you can call it a war, going on in Gaza.

I'm not sure war is exactly the right term to this war.

There's only one destruction of

a captive people um

but every single person who defends it will always invoke world war ii at one point not even arguing that like not even making an argument that this is why it was justified in world war ii just like we did it in world war ii we did in world war ii and we're the good guys so good guys are allowed to slaughter entire peoples you know it's like it is the and and look

Even if you, even if you accept the official World War II story as being completely correct, it's still something that's used to justify all of these other indefensible wars.

Every war of my lifetime, and I doubt too many people really want to defend the ones in between World War II and when I was born.

You know, I don't think anyone's going like, look at Vietnam.

It did such a great job.

It's such a good thing that we did that.

And those who are attempting to defend it are pathetic.

But,

you know, Iraq.

and Libya and Syria and Afghanistan and even the ones when I was a little kid, you know, Serbia.

Every one of these guys they always said was Adolf Hitler.

Milosevic is Adolf Hitler.

Saddam Hussein is Adolf Hitler.

Gaddafi is Adolf Hitler.

Noriega's Adolf Hitler.

Every bad guy has always been, it's like they use this model to justify.

You're only ever allowed to learn the lesson in history that's like Chamberlain was an appeaser.

appeasing bad exact confrontation good as if that's as if the lessons of history are that

aggression is always correct.

Trying to work out a deal is always wrong.

And that's why I think it's so important to attack that narrative.

Yeah, and from my perspective, it's like not even about principle as much as it is effect.

If what we're doing was working, then I guess I wouldn't be interested in, you know, analyzing it so critically, but it's not working.

It hasn't worked for the West, which I love.

It's where my ancestors are from.

It's where my children live.

So it's like, I don't know.

I think it's fair to ask, like, how did we get here?

It's all falling apart.

Why?

And maybe the assumptions were bad.

And what are those assumptions?

Well, they're rooted in that war, as you said.

It's just interesting that anyone would want to defend that.

Like, I don't really, I still don't get the motive.

Maybe I never will.

Like, why would you want to defend any of that?

Why would you want to defend Dresden or Gaza or any things that America did?

But by the way, it's not attacking, not

even attacking Israel.

I'm attacking the U.S.

government, which I pay for, which my ancestors helped build.

Like,

why would you ever want to defend bad things well it is um you know there there is a tendency by people who if you're

if you're pulling away like the underpinnings in someone's entire worldview yes they usually get very defensive you're right you're totally right and i've been by the way i've been there yeah so that i have felt defensive when i first heard alex jones question 9-11

i was outraged by i was totally outraged by it and so i in a in a reflexive stupid way well I remember just because I was like very

on, I was very on board with the Ron Paul presidential campaigns.

This was my like radicalizing moment was Ron Paul running for president.

And I remember that you were hosting the

event that he had.

I can't remember what it was called.

Very well.

It was the Rally for the Republic.

The Rally for the Republic.

I was the Jesse.

I should have remembered it.

2008.

I was the MC of that.

So at the time, it was a really big deal for us that we had you

MCing it.

And because it was like Ron paul was getting blacked out in all the the you know mainstream media as we used to call it at the time yep uh and but we had tucker carlson we had like one of the big players in that world hosting the event and i remember um when you walked out well you it i saw like an interview with you where someone was like hey why'd you walk out of that event and you were like i don't know man the the saying 9-11 was an inside job stuff was just a bridge too far for me and honestly i totally understood that at the time.

I was just pissed off at Jesse Ventura because I was like, come on, dude, we actually got like a chance here to make a mark and then you're going to go, you know, start spouting out with these conspiracies.

No, he believed it.

I mean, I think Jesse Ventura is a whole rabbit hole.

I won't even go down, but I think

Ventura is a very flawed guy.

Yeah.

For sure.

We're all flawed people.

I'm a little less judgmental than I used to be now that I know the depth of my own shittiness, but which I think is important.

Yeah.

Meditate every day on your death and your own flaws and you'll be a happy person with better perspective.

But

I shouldn't have done that.

I don't know why, you know, so my views are so different.

But anyway, the point is I understand what you're saying.

Well, it's also that you, you know, it's not even,

it's not even necessarily that you would have to like all these years later, be convinced that he was right.

It's just, I think, after so many years of seeing how evil

our government actually can be, that you go like, okay, I'm listening.

All right, fine.

I dismissed that out of hand, but now I'm more.

Or how about the only question that matters is whether or not something is true.

Yeah.

And another way to put it, a phrase that I've coined in my copyright is facts don't care about your feelings.

That's a good one.

You like that?

Someone should really run with it.

I like that.

That's a good one.

You could get a long way.

You could get like a special deal with Facebook on the basis of that.

But I actually agree.

I agree with that.

Right.

And I agree.

I don't think you should hurt people's feelings on purpose, but I think the core question, the only one that matters, is, is something true?

And I know that you share that.

And that's why, and I hate to beat beat up on poor Douglas, who's like a sad, a sad character, but he had this line in here.

Oh, this isn't, sorry, I never go to my notes, but I'm

this is from a guy called Sam Harris.

I'm loosely familiar.

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So Sam Harris,

wow, he doesn't care for you at all, or it looks like me either, but whatever.

I'll ignore the stuff about me.

I'm not even exactly sure who Sam Harris is, but a sad atheist guy.

But he describes you as a pure misinformation artist who lies as freely as he breathes.

And I just thought as I read this, like you'd say, you know, Dave Smith, I don't know, whatever, but I feel like that's the opposite of the truth.

I feel like maybe you lie under duress, but in general, you, you are like very focused on what you think is true.

Well, I mean, again,

I just feel like it's a, I, I benefit in a way from us having this conversation like after COVID and after kind of all of these insane things.

Okay.

So Sam Harris, what did I get wrong?

Like, I don't think if you're gonna, if you're gonna smear me as being a misinformation artist, which i you know i'll take that to i should make t-shirt t-shirts about misinformation artists i'll take that pure misinformation

everything you say is a lie it's like breathing to you dude i got i got called that throughout all of covid and i was right about everything i was saying so keep calling me this okay fine make an argument what if i said that sam harrison why does he why is he so mad at you oh well samp's a rationalist right oh yeah yeah he's the guy who uh defended the war in iraq and torture and uh fell for the Russiagate bullshit, thought Trump was a Russian spy, fell for lockdowns and vaccine mandates and all this stuff.

So I'll put my misinformation track record up against Sam Harris's, you know, whatever.

I mean, I know he's got a meditation app or something like that.

Did you see the Tim Dylan thing the other day?

Oh, so it's so great.

That was like, I texted him.

I said it was funny.

Tim Dylan, the brilliant comedian, is the best.

Think about how Sam Harris has a meditation app.

I didn't even know that.

So by day,

he's a meditation guru and by night, he's encouraging like carpet bombing of children.

I mean, it's just on, it's just too ridiculous.

And, you know,

all, you know, all of these guys, it's sad in a way because

you can't contradict yourself on what your entire

like.

purpose was for your entire career without some people noticing.

And that's kind of what's going on with all these guys.

Why the emotion?

So I notice it even now in our conversation, you are, there's a lightness to the way you describe things.

You obviously have passionate views, but you don't seem emotionally overwrought.

Douglas seemed emotionally overwrought.

This guy, Harris, seems emotionally overwrought.

They seem very emotional.

What is that?

Well,

I mean, I would say that kind of ironically, although not really actually ironic, and this kind of goes to, you know, the conversation that you and Brett Weinstein were having the other day, who I really love Brett.

I think he's great.

I'm on your side of that debate, but I think

one of the fundamental flaws in atheism is that it doesn't really exist.

Yes.

They think that's the flaw in believing in God.

See, they think the flaw in believing in God is that God really doesn't exist.

God does exist.

What doesn't exist are atheists.

There's no such thing.

That's so true.

And you could even get into into an, like, maybe if there was such thing as atheists, it would be a good thing to be one, but there aren't.

They don't exist.

They all have their religion.

And it's, it's almost, it, it's almost by definition that whatever your highest thing is becomes your religion.

Um, I don't know if it's quite by definition.

And I suppose it is, it is theoretically possible to be an atheist, but almost no one ever is.

And so what you're seeing is just that, you know, I'm attacking their religion.

And according to them, that makes me guilty of blasphemy.

But it's just so interesting that they're so brittle about it.

You'd think if you're an atheist, you'd be like, does it really matter?

I mean, there's no right or wrong, obviously, because how can, you know, who's the authority on that?

Well, there is no authority.

So it's all just a matter of preference.

And in the end, you just cease to exist.

And so the stakes are zero.

So what are you so mad about?

Like, why do you care?

You'd think everyone would be like.

Well, I'll take it a step further.

Sam Harris does not believe in free will.

So what is he upset with me about?

I have no choice.

You're just

a misinformation artist.

This is what I'm, I'm wired to be a misinformation artist, right?

So what are you upset with?

And he's not even making the choice to say that.

Listen, anytime, and this was one of, again, I really, really like Brett, but I think one of the areas where he failed kind of in that conversation with you, in that, you know, very friendly debate, is that he had to say several times throughout it, yes, yes, I live as if what you're saying is correct, but I view things this way.

So, yes, I'd much rather live, but if you're,

if your like thesis involves you having to engage in a performative contradiction, then something's not right with your theory.

And so, Sam Harris will sit here and say, none of us have free will, but I'm still going to act as if all of us have free will.

You've got a major flaw in your theory that like, this is just too much.

This is, this is too fun.

You can't do that.

That's not right.

And so, yes, again, with all of them.

The bottom line, I think, with a lot of these people, like, and some have adapted better than others.

I think Brett's one of the ones who's really adapted well from like the old academia world to this new podcast world that we're in now.

But I think the problem with a lot of them, like

Sam Harris, and I think Douglas Murray, too, is that what they've worked their entire career on has been completely rejected.

And that's a tough position to be in.

But it's

not really.

I mean, I spent my whole life in cable news.

It, you know, obviously is in terminal decline.

I had all kinds of views that I argued for passionately.

They were totally wrong.

I admitted it.

I gained perspective and

humility in admitting it.

You're just a human being.

Yeah, but that happened.

Listen, you, that may have happened kind of naturally for you.

I'm just saying when you run it on scale, very few people are able to do that.

It's not hard.

It's, it's, it's, it's the only act of liberation that's really possible in this life is freeing yourself from like the lies.

And the number one lie is, I'm God.

Yeah.

And like, I'm omniscient or the, you know, is perfectly wise person, whatever.

It's like, you know, you make mistakes.

You're, you're a ridiculous primate.

It's a little bit.

It's covered in fur.

Like, just admit it.

There's just there.

Look, you got some things wrong.

Yeah.

But there's a difference between that and your entire foundation

being built on hypocrisy and that hypocrisy being shown.

You know, look, I mean, you can't make this stuff up, right?

Ben Shapiro

built a career opposing identity politics as a proud Zionist.

Yeah.

Now you, listen, feel however you feel about Zionism.

It's identity politics.

Like, like, that is the definition of, you could not find a better example of a a politics built on an identity.

And yet you're out here saying facts don't care about your feelings.

Identity to politics is wrong.

And then while you're saying that, your number one priority

is this, this manifestation of identity politics.

You can only keep that charade going for so long.

No, it's totally true.

Before someone sees through it.

There's something in people that,

the lowest part of people that instinctively accuses others of doing what they're doing.

And I've never really,

man, I don't, that's the one thing I don't want to be is a guy who does that.

But I remember Bill Cristo, who I worked for for years and really liked and was grateful to, and he was a great boss in the 90s

and came out against me and called me a Nazi and all this stuff, like without calling me.

By the way, I called him and asked him to lunch.

He refused.

He wouldn't go to lunch with me.

End of our relationship.

But one of the criticisms against me, I'll never forget it when I realized this phenomenon was real, is when he accused me of advocating, and I'm quoting for an ethno-state.

Now, I have a lot of flaws.

They're all on display.

I've never wanted an ethnostate.

And it's like, wait, one of us is for an ethnostate and it's not me.

But you just said that, like, of all the possible criticisms.

It's just too unbelievable.

I mean, it's like,

you're just like, you're crystal accusing me of wanting an ethnostate.

But you're like, you just.

You almost like don't even, you can't even respond.

You just have to go like,

it's like, I didn't say anything.

I was like, okay.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, people can't hear themselves.

I mean, you notice when people get old, you know, they tell the same stories and you just, you know, when you love them, you're indulgent.

But I, I just hope that doesn't happen to me.

I hope I don't lose all self-awareness to the point where I've got like lunch on my chin and like accuse other people of doing exactly what I'm doing.

Yes, exactly what I'm doing.

While you're going, you have lunch on your chin.

Yeah, that's you don't want to be that.

I don't want to be that guy.

And I think that there's like, look, obviously, like we're living through something, you know, we're probably living through several things that are very profound, but one of the most profound things has been this revolution in

information and the technology.

And this, it's led to this like kind of mass decentralization of media.

Yeah.

And where there's now like, there's so many.

things and shows and different voices.

You know, I find people all the time who I've never heard of before.

You know, I'm sure you've had this this experience too yeah you'll find someone you'll be like oh that guy's actually really smart people should know about this guy really smart how many followers seven million oh he's got seven million followers oh he's huge like i just found some guy who is bigger than anyone on cable news and i didn't even know he existed you know and so now it's just because of this dynamic there aren't you know as you know the the corporate media apparatus, like big newspapers and big cable news shows and things, was very controlled, very controlled.

The range of allowable opinion was very narrow.

It's what my good friend and brilliant historian, Tom Woods, always called the, was it the three by six card of allowable opinion?

You know, you get this little area of allowable opinion, and then that's where the conversation takes place.

That's been shattered into a million pieces.

And now there's voices from all over the place, and some good and some great and some bad and really bad.

But it's just much harder for people to, you know, that control control existed so that you don't get exposed so that you don't get exposed so that you could go like look even the right-winger john mccain agrees or even the far left activist nancy pelosi i mean it's like dude i have to hear or aoc

sean hannity goes the far left nancy pelosi it's like how many leftists have you actually talked to in your life how many leftists have you ever read you think nancy pelosi is a far leftist like really living on her vineyard in napa it's all these different you you know these different tools of corporations are left and right but so that's over now and now i think it's just much it's much tougher to keep this charade going and it seems to be collapsing so fast yes yes and it's not again you could

you could be honest about it and and kind of maintain some of your respect but the the truth is that like look even when they'll say these things

like if you if you accuse ben shapiro of having dual loyalty, they go, oh, that's an anti-Semitic trope.

That means you hate the Jews.

But then he'll sit there in his own words and say, I forget his exact quote, but it was something like, my favorite thing about the United States of America is that it protects Israel.

And

so you're already saying you have loyalty to both of these countries.

In fact, I'm not so sure about one of the loyalties, but I'm very sure about the other one.

And that is not, I'm sorry, that's not a statement against Jewish people.

I'm Jewish.

I love Jewish people.

You know it's like i get called a self-hating jew on twitter or whatever it could not be further from the truth i actually really love jewish people there's many things about jewish culture that have you know had a huge impact on me made me the person i am made me a better person uh for their their impact on me but this is a foreign government like i'm i'm sorry that's we're we're allowed to talk about that if you you know I saw Glenn Beck the other day had Douglas Murray on and he wasn't like Glenn Beck wasn't like mean to me personally but which i appreciated um but he was just going i mean it was just so ridiculous but it's like you were sitting here we're gonna we're having a conversation about a foreign government you started crying on your show talking about this foreign government that's fucking weird that's weird we we should not be doing that what the hell is going on here like i don't even think you should cry about our own government you know but if you're going to cry about one it should be ours and no but no no one would even think to cry about it Right.

I mean, like, come on, like, let's have a real conversation about this.

And if you don't, especially, and by the way, this is not my primary goal.

My primary goal is to tell the truth and to advocate for what's good for our country.

But if you're concerned about like the young men getting a little bit too radical and, you know, being too obsessed with the Jews or too against the Jews, which I do think is a legit concern.

It definitely is.

You know, that's not good for you.

And it's not good for you.

It's not good for the conflict.

It's not good for the country.

I just don't think any of racial collectivism always leads to bad places.

You don't want to embrace that stuff.

But if you're concerned about that, well, then the first thing you have to do is tell the truth.

You can't keep lying to people.

And you can't keep sitting here and going like, oh, no, the neoconservative.

You can't say neoconservative, right?

Wasn't that Mark Levin?

Didn't he just say if it's the neoconservative?

Mark Levin,

who I also know.

I mean, I've been in right-wing world my whole life.

I know everybody.

I work with Mark, always gotten along with Mark, always been nice to me.

But yeah, he just accused Trump, the Trump administration of anti-Semitism

for calling someone a neocon.

Well, what he did was he accused Steve Witkoff of anti-Semitism.

Right.

And I just want to say, I think Steve Witkoff is, if there's anyone who is, you know, has the hand of God on him, it seems to me.

I sort of overstated, but I feel that way.

It's Witcoff, who's like a thoroughly decent man man and who was running around the world trying to bring peace.

And also, by the way,

who single-handedly saved 20 Jewish hostages.

Well, exactly.

I mean, I don't know if they were all Jewish.

I think most of them were.

I think almost all of them were, but I think they got 20 hostages released in the phase one of the ceasefire that he worked out.

Then Israel violated the ceasefire, and so they didn't get the other hostages back.

Although, thankfully, the American was just released.

But this guy, Witkoff, has actually done more to help those hostages.

So here's what,

I mean, here's what he said.

I actually wrote this down because I was really bothered by it.

This is Levin on Twitter, Mark Levin, who works at Fox, which is like, basically seems to have turned its programming over to advocating for a war with Iran.

Neocon is a pejorative for Jew.

Unbelievable.

And this is in response to Witkoff saying, quote, the neocon element believes that war is the only way to solve things.

So you have Mark Levin calling Steve Witkoff an anti-Semite.

Right, right.

right.

And again, we've reached peak crazy.

I mean, I think Witkoff is Jewish, right?

Again, again, but it's, I don't even know, but again, it shouldn't matter.

It shouldn't really matter.

It doesn't matter.

He's American and he's on the side of peace.

And so I'm for that guy.

But, you know, the crazy thing.

So I also, I,

at one point in the debate with Douglas Murray, I said something about the neoconservatives and he went, oh, the N-word, you know,

making a play on the N-word or whatever.

And it's, it's interesting.

I mean, Douglas Murray wrote the book called Neoconservatism, Why We Need It.

It was his book.

And so what happened was, for people who don't like know, you know, a lot about this, it's there, there was a, this was their term.

The neoconservative was not a pejorative term until the neoconservatives got control of our foreign policy and ruined everything.

And then it became a term that will call every war hawk.

We'll be like, oh, another neocon.

Now, now, a lot of times we will use the term when, strictly speaking, this person may not have been a self-identified neoconservative.

It's just become a

pejorative for someone trying to get us into stupid war.

But the neoconservatives themselves, the original group, this was their name.

Oh, I know.

For themselves.

And you were there.

You worked alongside them.

I worked for that.

I worked for Bill Crystal for five and a half years.

I was a neocon.

Yes.

It wasn't intended.

And they had no.

They're an Episcopalian neocon.

But look, they had no problem using the term until everybody started to hate them.

And then they went, you you can't call us this.

But it's like, no, you guys, like, this was your own

term that you used for yourself.

You can read their own documents and the Project for a New American Century.

You read the Clean Break memo.

They laid out what they wanted their foreign policy to be.

I mean, literally, right, wasn't it.

Oh, God, I can't remember whose quote it was.

I know that a bunch of them loved sharing it.

But what is it that every 10 years, we got to throw a small, puny little country up against the wall and show them who's boss?

This was their foreign policy.

We need multiple theaters of war in the Middle East in order to ensure the new century is an American century.

So immoral and disgusting.

Yes.

And also that, and look, as anybody can read, I think we talked about this last time I was on, but anybody can read for themselves the Clean Break memo.

It was written by Richard Pearl and David Wormser to Benjamin Netanyahu.

That was like, look, here is our plan.

And the break.

was from the peace process.

The break was from Oslo.

And they go, look, here's the plan.

You know how Yitzhak Rabin and all these liberal Jews are saying we have to make peace with the Palestinians so that we can then make peace with the broader Arab world?

Well, no, we got a new plan.

We're going to break with all of that.

We're not doing this land swap thing.

We're not giving the Palestinians a state.

What we'll do is we'll have America overthrow all of these other governments.

That way, you never have to make peace with the Palestinians and you can just enjoy domination over the region.

And from my reading of it, it does seem to me that a lot of them believed it.

You know, I think a lot of them hubris and

yeah, we overthrow Saddam Hussein, this democracy will sweep the region, then we'll overthrow Gaddafi, then we'll overthrow the Mullahs in Iran, and then the region will be way better.

Except every time they actually did it, it resulted in nothing but disaster, which really could have been very easily predicted and was predicted by wiser people than the neocons.

But all these years later, you either have to like apologize for your role in this catastrophe or defend your role in this catastrophe and talk about how you still really believe it was the right thing to do.

But you can't sit here and say, you're not an expert and you're a Jew hater if you say the word neoconservative.

That's not an appropriate response.

But if Mark Levin is calling the Trump administration anti-Semitic, Steve Witkoff,

we're at the end of something and the beginning of something new.

I mean,

right?

I mean, that's so, I almost called Mark when I saw it because I really, I know him, but I really love Steve Witkoff and I think his decency, I don't agree with him on everything at all, but his decency is just palpable.

I mean, it just comes through his concern for people, his reasonableness

is just so obvious.

And the effects of what he's done have been so great, great for America, great for the world.

So I almost, I was so offended.

And then I thought, I'm not going to solve anything by calling Mark Levin and scolding him.

Probably scream at me.

But, but I did think like, he's not stupid.

If you're saying, if you're calling Steve Wickoff an anti-Semite on Twitter, like, you know, you're losing, right?

Is that what that is?

And it's such a, you know, in the, what's, what's weird is that at the same time, because I know all of these, these people will, they'll be lecturing me about how I don't understand like the gravity of anti-Semitism.

And it's like, no, actually, I kind of do.

Oh, I know.

And I would never just throw the accusation around like that.

I'm very hesitant to ever call any person a bigot or a Jew hater or racist or any of these things because it's like you're, you're intentionally trying to dehumanize them

on the accusation that they're dehumanizing others.

Scaring the crap out of people.

I'm getting texts from people I really love personally who are very, very, you know, who aren't paying a lot of attention.

They just hear that there's anti-Semitism and I'm part of it.

hurts their feelings and they're confused and upset.

And it's like, it has such a divisive effect.

Yeah.

Like for real.

And it's.

I'm a little bit concerned.

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Yeah, I mean, I'm concerned about all of it.

None of it's particularly good.

No, but there's also something which is, it's interesting to me as somebody who is, I am not a conservative.

I mean, I'm a bit of a right-winger, but I'm not a conservative.

I'm kind of a radical libertarian.

And I kind of, you know, well, if Tom Tillis is what a conservative is, I'm not.

Yeah, right.

I mean, I mean, there are some, as a libertarian, like there certainly are some things that I think ought be conserved, you know, like I, I think like the Bill of Rights and the

Ark traditions and I think Christianity, I think there's a lot of things that like should be conserved.

But it's so bizarre to me that now that I'm at this level where it's like I'm talking or not talking to, but being lectured to by like the leaders of Conservatism Inc.

And I have to explain to them that like I don't believe in moral relativism.

Like I like as if this is like a new thing for them to wrap their head around.

I've gotten calls from Con Inc.

trying to bring you into line.

I've gotten for the first time in my career, really, I've gotten a few of the calls.

But I mean, it's, it's, I'm too far gone for them.

You know, if I, if you were going to get me to sell out, you would have had to get me a while ago.

You just shouldn't have let me.

Too late.

Well, it is.

I remember.

So when I, this is like, I want to say like 2000, 2014, 2015.

It was somewhere in there where I saw it.

The first time I ever got on television, the first person who ever put me on TV was Kennedy.

um who i just adore yeah and will for the rest of my days sweet girl just

just like one of the sweetest kindest, really funny, really smart.

Weirdly smart.

Yes.

But like when I say weirdly smart, I mean weirdly smart, like knows about stuff that no one should know about and then has like a lot of information about it.

But she's a wonderful person.

So she was the first, she put me on Fox business.

And then

Greg Gutfeld and Tom Shalou, who was hosting Red Eye at the time, they started using me on their Fox news shows.

And so it was like the first time in my career I'd like started getting on TV.

And I remember a few people at Fox had told me that they were like, hey, there's like some people in management are like interested in you.

Like they're, they're taking, you know, some interest in you.

And then it was kind of explained to me, not like ever directly, but it was like, you know, you're,

you're a little out there for Fox News.

And I remember at the time, I was broke.

I mean, dead broke.

Only on, just to be, I put a finer point in that.

What do they mean?

Not in your personal life, your personal life.

Oh, no, no, no.

More button down than most people who were.

Well, at the time it wasn't.

This is before I was married and had kids and stuff.

But that's believe me, that's not what they care about.

They don't care.

I found out pretty quickly

by just doing shows at Fox News and then going to the bar afterward with some of the people there, you're like, oh, conservatism Inc.

is not exactly what you thought.

They're actually pretty liberal when it comes down to the bar hang after the show.

I would say.

But it was, you know, I was a Ron Paul guy and I was younger.

So I was a more,

you know, you know, Ron Paul was a country doctor wearing a suit and tie.

I was like a kid from Brooklyn who was like, you're all a bunch of killers.

You know, like, this is all bullshit.

It was the foreign policy stuff.

It was all the foreign policy stuff.

As it always is.

That's always what it's really all about.

And I don't say that because I want it to be the case.

It's just the fact that that's always, really what it's all about.

It took me 40 years to figure this out, but yes, that's right.

Correct.

By the way,

all of these even debates today, the people on Twitter talking about the woke right, it just happens to be that everyone who's labeled woke right are the ones who are opposing American wars.

And everybody who's throwing out the accusation all happen to support them.

What's woke right?

It's a nonsense term that they're trying to say.

It's totally ridiculous.

But let me just, on the Fox News thing.

So I remember then, and this is the time, I was broke.

I mean, like, broke, like, where they're like, hey, let's go grab a beer after the show.

I'm like, all right, are you buying?

Because I can't, because if not, like, let's go grab a six-pack at the store and go back to my apartment and sip.

Cause like, I just had no money.

And I would have, at the time, when they said they were like, look, they're thinking about you for one of these contributorships, you know, it was whatever it is.

It may give you like 100 grand a year or something like that if you get one.

It would have been like life-changing for me, life-changing.

And I remember consciously at the time thinking, you know, at a time when I'm making 25 grand a year, thinking, man,

maybe I just don't talk about the foreign policy stuff.

Maybe I just do that.

And then even in the moment I thought about it, just being like, nah, Ron Paul's my hero.

My hero are the people who tell the truth.

Yes.

So like, I'm just not going to.

But so if I didn't, if I didn't sell out then,

the idea that I'm going to sell out now when I'm doing really well, it's like, no, that's ridiculous.

Like, no, you know what I'm saying?

Like, it's like, that's, that's insane.

It was just funny that I think that

Murray thought he was administering the kill shot.

I think that's what it was supposed to be.

But the opposite happened.

It's like,

and not to brag, I knew this as I was watching it.

I was like, Dave is about to become way more famous, but not just famous, more authoritative, more respected, more closely listened to than ever before.

Has that been your experience?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's essentially just done nothing except make me bigger.

You know, were you, did you pay Douglas to do that?

I did not.

I don't have that to do.

Maybe you throw the fight on purpose.

I don't know.

I wish I had that.

I'm doing okay.

I don't have money like that.

I don't have buy off Douglas Murray money.

I think he's good.

I don't think it would take too much.

Well, he's, it's not just, you know, one of the things that was interesting is that it's not just, so there was the debate.

There was the reaction to the debate.

But then what was really interesting is that then there was the reaction to just because it became such a big thing, it ended up coming up on Rogan's podcast with other guests like later on.

And they're all just kind of making fun of.

of Douglas and how ridiculous he was, because he was ridiculous.

And then it's almost like you see the realization set in with those people that, oh, shit,

Joe was what essentially happened here, right?

And this is, I think, for almost everyone to see, is that I've been debating all these guys on Israel-Palestine, and I've been beating all these guys in these debates.

And I'm not even saying I'm beating, I'm just saying like the reaction, the Oxford-style voting is that I win dominantly.

And then Douglas Murray was almost brought in as the king bones.

Dad's here, right?

Like, this is the, I mean, Ben Shapiro's not going to do it.

He's not going to come debate me.

And so, who is it?

Who's the best guy to come to?

Well, here's Douglas Murray, the guy who's just known for his prose and his rhetoric and how good he is at debating.

I mean, this is what he's known for.

And then he came in and couldn't lay a land a blow.

He couldn't take on one argument.

He had to just be resorted to.

Like, it was like you were debating an anti-racist college professor on what, who's just going to tell you the whole time that I'm not even allowed to have this opinion.

Yes.

It was just that.

And so then what do you think the response to that was?

Here's, here you have Joe Rogan, who has got some of these guys on his show who clearly are making a case where he goes, all right, yeah, this is a pretty good argument that this guy's making.

And he brought, you know, as much as Douglas was complaining in his op-eds after the fact that it's so unfair that I couldn't just go on alone.

I had to go on with this guy who doesn't know what he's talking about.

It's like, yeah, but this was your opportunity, man.

You could have blown me out of the water.

And then had Rogan being like, ah, shit.

Maybe I should have more experts on.

Like, maybe I've got this comedian guy who I think's making really good points.

But then this guy just came in and like totally took him on.

And, but he was unwilling or unable to do that.

And so that was the next freak out is they realized that like, oh, Joe just got pushed more in my direction as his whole audience did.

I wonder, though, if there's not something a little more sinister underneath it.

I mean, you keep referring to this as a debate, but it wasn't a frequent

debate.

It was.

Douglas trying to scold Joe into never having you or anyone like you on his show again.

It was basically he was playing the heavy.

Yeah.

A little bit.

It was kind of threatening, I thought.

Like, you know, you don't really know because you were a sitcom actor slash comedian slash bow hunter that actually you're playing with some pretty serious shit, Joe Rogan.

And we've been watching, and maybe you should stop having these people on.

And that was definitely the vibe I got from it.

Oh, no question.

It was, they even used the word

when he was talking to Barry Weiss,

you know, that embodiment of expertise.

uh that is barry weiss uh they they were talking and he used the word platforming that joe shouldn't be platforming all of these people.

It's like, okay, so you're you look, I'm saying this is just animal farm, right?

We're at the end of animal farm where the pigs and the people are indistinguishable.

Like if you're a conservative using the word platform as a verb,

like how long before you call me a white supremacist, actually, which essentially, I guess, white supremacist isn't the term, but anti-Semite is the term that they're going with.

It's the exact same playbook.

And then they have the balls to whip around and call you woke, right?

Yes, that's right.

It's Bill Crystal calling me, you know,

calling for an ethnostate.

Yes, it's all the same thing, right?

You're sitting here.

We have in this country right now, we have speech laws being passed, you know, in the name of students feeling not safe on college campuses.

And you get the accusation of bigotry used to shut down real dissent and real conversations.

And then they're going to turn around and say the other side is woke.

So that's when I stopped laughing.

That, I mean, that is

shocking to me.

And the fact that the Congress had scheduled, it was thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene, it was pulled off the schedule, but God bless her.

But

what a weird world we're in.

Who really is.

She's the savior.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is who that's where we're at.

You know why?

Because Marjorie is totally sincere.

Yeah.

She's actually not a liar.

She's sincere.

That's why they hate her.

But there was a blossom

vote scheduled on a bill that would have made it a felony for Americans to participate in a boycott of Israel.

And as someone who has zero interest in participating in any kind of boycott, much less against Israel, I'm just not interested.

I'm happy to

whatever, buy the hummus and use the software.

I don't care.

But I probably would have engaged in one just to make the point that I'm a free man in a free country.

And we can't, like, how could you even consider voting on something like that?

And isn't the most outrageous part of it, or at least to me, I mean, I guess it's all outrageous, but the most, the crazy thing is that we've, and we've seen this in, uh, in the last decade, where all like Hollywood types and like big musicians would boycott red states.

Like if they tried to pass like a six-week heartbeat bill for abortion, or the beats that could boycott that, yeah, boycott.

So you could boycott states in our own country, but you can't boycott a foreign country.

It's like the

The double standard there.

Again, this is why I said the thing about like relativism.

Because in the same way that um you know that people will talk about constantly and the same people who will harp on you know anti-Semitism on Twitter and like I'm not denying something's going on there clearly big time like there's there's a real thing happening here big time and it's not as I've said and again this isn't necessarily the most important aspect to it but personally, one of the things that annoys me about that is like, it's not helping my argument.

Like, it's not, it's, it's an albatross around my neck.

And it's the reason why every goddamn debate that I'm in, the first thing they're going to bring up is, well, look at all these people on Twitter who are saying all this stuff.

So I wish those people would knock it off.

But you also, okay,

we don't need two standards here.

One standard will do just fine.

Let's have one standard and apply this across the board.

Because the amount of anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-Palestinian bigotry, dehumanizing of the entire Palestinian...

Sam Harris is engaged in for 20 years.

Yeah, that's right.

And then they're going to turn around and be like, oh my God, there's all this bigot.

There's all this dehumanizing bigotry out there.

It's like, yeah, none of that is good.

None of that is good.

It's not good for you.

It's not good for the conversation.

It's just bad.

You don't want to dehumanize an entire group of people ever.

And that should be fairly obvious.

But also, I will say

that.

You know, Donald Trump, who I voted for and supported in this last election, and I think has done some really good things in his first 100 days or so and some not so good things.

But, you know, I mean, he, he would turn in the debate and call Joe Biden a Palestinian.

He said this about Chuck Schumer too.

He's basically a Palestinian.

You're like, whoa.

And for all the people who have been screaming bigotry for the last decade, no one ever thought to be like, hey, you know, that's not like an insult.

I know.

It's not an insult to call someone a Palestinian.

I've met lots of Palestinians who are really great people.

There's nothing wrong with them.

And again, like if anyone, if a presidential candidate ever like stood up in the debate and went, oh, this guy's a real Jew, we'd all be like, whoa, what the hell is that?

I know.

You don't get to say that in a political debate.

I know.

And so there's this, there's a ton of this.

You have,

you know,

Nikki Haley going over and signing bombs.

Hard to overstate how much I hate that, by the way.

Yeah.

Well, right.

And I mean, there are a lot of unreasonable Palestinians, of course.

There are also some wonderful, a lot of Christian, a lot of Christian Palestinians.

A lot of wonderful Muslim Palestinians.

So I hate that.

Yeah.

It's terrible.

Yeah, it's terrible.

It's terrible on any side.

You don't dehumanize people like that.

I agree.

And so, what's his name?

I'm blinking.

What's the congressman in Florida, Randy Fine?

Is Fine his last name?

I don't know, but did you see the stuff he's posted?

Oh, my God.

It's just, you know, so again, okay, you want to talk about it?

Is he the one who's like, we want to kill all their children or something?

Well, someone basically, like, I think someone tweeted like a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, and he said, like, good, we need more, or something like that.

It was something really close to that.

I don't want to get this wrong.

You could vote for someone like that.

Trump endorsed him after that.

After he said it was good that a baby was dead?

I mean, you know, again, I would love to have him just pull up the actual tweet on that because I don't want to like misremember it, but it was something really egregious.

And he's, you know, there's just, look, there's a lot of this stuff.

It's how you get Nikki Haley signing bombs that are about to go get dropped on women and children.

You're like, I'm sorry.

That's fucking sickening.

Like, what the hell is that?

Like, it's, what are we, a part of some death cult or something?

I mean, this is like real.

And so, of course, then, you know, Douglas Murray's book is like democracies and death cults or whatever, and which is kind of funny in a way

to be pro-democracies while you're also making the argument for expertise.

Because you would think, like, if you're for democracy, the whole point of this, the whole point of experts is to explain it to regular people who will ultimately have the authority of deciding which experts are in charge and which experts are not in charge.

You know, there's a little contradiction there.

But again, this is my issue.

And this is where I think, Tucker, in some way, we're really like kindred spirits.

What a higher IQ you have than Douglas Murray.

It just cracks me up.

Well,

he's got a very high verbal IQ.

He's more talented in a lot of ways than me.

I'm just, I'm, I'm telling the truth.

No, no, but I mean, that's such a deep contradiction that I doubt he's aware of.

Probably not.

But I will say this, and this is where I think in some ways, this is why me and you always get along i think we're kindred spirits in this way in some sense for sure but i really do

i mean this i mean this so sincerely in my soul in my heart of hearts i'm a crotchety old right-winger yeah like that's who i want to be okay that's who i try my best i want to be i i'm uh i'm i'm not just like a western

chauvinist or whatever.

Like I think Western society is better than everything else.

I think it's I'm a libertarian and I think it's one of the goofiest things about libertarians in general that they kind of try to run away from that and be egalitarian to some degree.

That's ridiculous.

What are you talking about?

You believe in individual liberty?

Well, then you don't get to say every civilization is equal because only one of them respects individual liberty and that's the better one.

Okay.

That's the

by your own definition.

That's right.

So screw all this other.

Egalitarianism is a revolt against nature, as the great Murray Rothbard wrote.

It's, I'm, I'm against all of that.

I don't believe in relativism.

I don't believe in all cultures are equal.

I would like to sit here and look down on the Muslim world.

That's what I would like to do because my society is so much better.

And if anything, I'd be lecturing you.

You guys got to do liberty better.

You guys don't really even understand how a free society works.

I'd like to be there.

That's actually what confirms.

That's what confirms my bias is like stuff like that.

The problem is I just know too much about our government and what our government's done to these people and not just what we've done to them, but that we've been propping up the Islamists for 40 years.

Literally.

And so what are we talking about here?

You can't then turn around and go, look at them.

They're a bunch of Islamists.

No, I know what you did.

You propped up the Islamists so you didn't have to deal with the commis.

Like, regardless of any of that, I just, again, I insist on one standard for everything.

If you're going to say Hamas is a death cult, what the hell is the U.S.

government?

What is the Israeli government?

You get to sit here as my government.

has in the last 25 years destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine, and now Gaza.

That's what my government's done.

I don't get to call someone else a death cult.

I'd like to.

I'd like to just look down at them as a death cult, but sorry, we're the biggest purveyors of violence in the world, not Vladimir Putin.

And like, again, it's just, if you look at these things, you just have to have one standard and apply them across the board.

This is what I've been arguing the whole time.

And if you're going to say, it's like, okay, October 7th was horrible.

It was absolutely horrible.

Why was it horrible?

Oh, yeah, because intentionally killing innocent civilians is like one of the most evil things you could ever do.

Okay, then.

Because people are what matter.

Yeah.

In the end, right?

And all your theories are valid to the extent that they serve people.

And when they hurt people, then they're invalid, you know, I think.

Yeah, I think so.

So you said that there's this

brand new media landscape, information landscape, possibility of true free thinking and free speech.

I think it's it's all true because the old control system has shattered, as you said.

So we're living in this just incredible moment.

How long can it last?

Ooh, that's a good question.

It's very hard.

You know, it's very hard to make predictions because it's such a new model.

And it's like we really don't know much about this.

You know, one of the things that I find that I'm, which, you know, you never want to get ahead of yourself, especially these days.

And there's so many things that could happen that it's kind kind of like impossible to even know what 2028 looks like.

But so I'm assuming right now, J.D.

Vance is probably going to be the guy.

Hope so.

Yeah, I hope so too.

And so you look at this dynamic where you go, okay, so part of

so you look at Kamala Harris's campaign and say Joe Biden the same way.

And Joe Biden, specifically because he was senile, not, you know, Joe Biden, younger Joe Biden, while he was never a very bright guy, maybe would have been a little bit different politically.

But Kamala Harris, so she kind of famously, infamously now turned down the Joe Rogan experience.

She could have been on the show, but she didn't.

Now, a lot of people were saying, oh, what a stupid move,

turning that down.

I kind of disagree.

I go, it probably was the right move.

If you had no soul, and you're working for the Kamala Harris campaign and your only objective in this world was to get her elected and that invite came in, you're probably going, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You will be exposed.

You can't go do this.

The fact is that Kamala Harris, by the nature of who she is as a person and by the nature of what she was running on, is not built for a three-hour unedited, unscripted

conversation.

New.

You can't do that.

You know, like say whatever you will about Donald Trump.

The man's got a lot of flaws, but he is built for that.

He could do eight hours, I think.

Easily.

Without going to the bathroom.

Right.

Yeah, which is what I heard.

And Joe said he didn't go before or after.

True.

I've never done the Joe Rodin experience and not gone to the bathroom before or after.

Yeah, of course.

This is insane.

The guy's not human.

It's unbelievable.

But,

okay, so

going just into 2028, think about what a change this is.

This is the new standard.

To be a presidential candidate, you have to be able to go and do a three-hour podcast.

And actually, probably several of them, right?

I mean, Trump did a whole bunch of them before he got elected elected and she didn't and lost.

That's it.

And so that in itself just changes everything.

Now we have to actually see who you are as a person, you know, because it doesn't even matter.

It doesn't even matter what you're talking about for three hours.

It doesn't even matter if you're getting grilled.

So true.

It's just, I get to see who you are.

And it comes out.

So, okay.

No one can play a role for three hours.

Right.

So that's the new normal.

You know, that's that in itself is a huge transformation.

I think that has to be stopped.

I think that has to be stopped.

And,

you know, I don't want to be like too paranoid, but one of the exploits, I think some of the anger and the hate online is,

you know, it's organic and it's rooted in frustration and facts in some cases.

And, you know, I'm not, it's not all bad, but some of it is so

clearly inorganic.

It just obviously is, that you sort of wonder, like, is this all a pretext for shutting it down?

I just can't escape that.

Yeah,

I get your point.

And certainly,

you know, like, I never know what is, you know, a pretext or what is not, but it's certainly like, oh, this is going to be used that way.

So like, that's another thing.

It's very short-sighted, you know, for anyone, you know, it's kind of like nobody ever,

which I get it.

It's, it's a little bit difficult to do because it's like second or third order thinking, but no one ever kind of thinks about like what the reaction is going to be to what they're doing.

It's just whether they can get away with it in the moment.

But it's not the fact that it's like, hey, there is going to be a correction for this and almost certainly an over-correction because that's always the case.

You know, it doesn't seem like any of those leftists ever thought about when they were pushing like all the trans and the kids stuff.

They'd be like, what do you think the result of this is going to be?

You go, oh, here's the result.

Donald Trump winning every swing state.

That's the result.

And a handmaid's tale, like ultimate,

we're going to have Sharia law.

Well, it's, but it does, you know, it's, and then, right.

And then, you know, people are always like, really, how did the Muslims take over Europe?

Because Europe went tranny.

That's why, right, right, right.

You're going to see white girls begging for Sharia law.

And of course, of course, there's like, there's many factors involved, but there's no question that there are these cycles.

And

I do think

there's an onus on, say, people who do, you know, want who were against the censorship regime and were against, or are against the U.S.

Israeli, you know, special relationship.

It's like, okay, but if you've got the freedom to actually speak about this now, understand a couple things.

Understand that, like, you're getting something that generations before you, they never had.

Generations before you, your career would have been ruined.

You never would have been allowed to say these things.

And there does, that carries with it a responsibility.

You know, it carries with it a responsibility to do this in a way that, like, number one, you're getting it right.

You're not being sloppy.

You're not leading people down a bad path.

You're not demonizing people who don't deserve to be demonized, who are not a part of this.

And ultimately, that you won't be handing the excuse to the other side, who obviously, as you said, needs to rein this in.

These guys cannot compete in a free market.

And so they have to rig the market in their favor.

They had forever, they had the market rigged in their favor.

For the first time now, they kind of don't.

They still do a little bit, but they don't in terms of the conversation.

They still certainly do in terms of the power of government, but they don't in terms of the conversation.

It's like, okay, what do you want to do with that now?

The problem is that so much has been hidden either intentionally or just through kind of the veil.

of misdirection

that people are learning a lot of stuff at once.

Yeah.

And it's frying some circuits.

And I think the

thing that I try to meditate on every single day is that I am commanded to and intend to treat each individual as an individual.

Period.

Period.

Yeah.

And when you do that, it keeps you from going totally insane.

And it also opens you up to the beauty of life, to the joy of life, which is being surprised by people and their complexity, good and bad, and like the capacity of someone like Steve Wickoff to like do stuff.

If you'd asked me, can Wickoff do that?

I don't know.

I mean, I knew Wickoff before, but like, look what witcoff is doing it's incredible i don't know it's just treat people as individuals you're commanded to do that and i it's i do think it's harder to do that online yes i i agree and i also you know it was weird because so i you know it was an interesting experience for me this last month or so because i've never really you know i'm i think this has helped me in my career is that i didn't like uh i didn't blow up out of nowhere.

Like I know other people who have in comedy, I know people who are like, you know, just like exploded.

You know, they were at open mics with me and then they got an audition for Saturday Night Live and then they got it.

And now they're world famous.

You know, you go literally from being a complete unknown, not even an established comedian, a newer comedian who can't even work the clubs, to being like world famous.

I've seen people have that.

How'd that work for Britney Spears?

That's pretty bad.

Well, it's not especially bad when you're young.

That's the worst time for it to happen.

It happened to me, actually.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, that's right.

You, you had that.

Luckily, I was humiliated along the way.

So it's

way more normal.

But that's the the antidote for it in a weird way, right?

I totally agree.

Because it's all ego stuff.

So the antidote for blowing up your ego is destroying your ego.

Which is very painful, but it's good.

Like a hangover.

The hangover is actually getting you healthy.

Yes.

It sucks, but the hangover is the cure.

So getting drunk was the problem.

That's why it's hard to become addicted to cocaine.

People seem to pull it off anyway, but I never understood that.

How did you become addicted to this?

You feel horrible.

I know.

It is.

Well, that's right.

Sorry, sorry.

No, but that's exactly right.

But so, okay, so for me,

it was always like a, like a logical progression, like one step more, one step more.

My profile kind of rose, but this,

you know, this thing was the biggest thing I've ever done in my career.

It was like the biggest reaction to any show or any debate that I've ever done because it was on Rogan's podcast and he doesn't usually do debates and it was the most contentious issue of our day.

So it became this big thing.

And now I'm at a place where, you know, I'm 42.

I have a great wife.

I got two little kids that I play with every day.

I have a nice house.

My life is like set up.

I'm an adult.

This isn't so, but when the kind of hate attack, this coordinated attack, and everyone who's attacking me just happens to have like, you know, their name written in Hebrew letters and a Jewish star, you know, in their bio, and they're all saying the most vicious stuff.

I've been sitting here and I'm like, wow, dude, if I were 25

and I wasn't Jewish, I could very easily see my response to this just being like,

man,

screw these people.

I get it.

And like, now, I'm not saying that would be correct, but it's just like you feel that because that's the impulse when you're like attacking.

But like what you just said, I think is the key point, which is that like, if believing in individualism.

is like a grounding force.

It kind of inoculates you against collectivist nonsense.

And when I say that, see, one of the problems here now is that the left, which is what they do, is they attack terms and concepts.

And so whenever you think about something, you start thinking about the lefty version of it.

And it's like, no, no, no, not that at all.

So the left kind of made individualism.

They, they kind of mixed it together with like this like self-actualization type thing.

Like, oh, all that really matters is like, whatever you're feeling and whatever you're feeling is correct.

And it's correct because you're feeling it.

And you're feeling it because it's correct.

And that's like, that's like the devil.

That's like, you do not want to go down that path.

You do not want to ever say that, like, well, if you feel something inside of you, then that must be true.

That's essentially what the trans thing was all based on.

Of course.

Right.

Was this view that, well, if you feel it, then it must be true.

Like, that's not where you want.

That's, that's the path to hell.

You don't want to go down that path.

You know, that's no, that's, it's not true that because you feel something, it therefore should be actualized.

And that's terrible.

However, more old school individualism, like in the classical liberal enlightenment tradition, is understanding that the individual is a unit of analysis, that the

individuals are how we exist.

We act as individuals.

We suffer as individuals.

We collectivize as individuals.

We are born and die as individuals.

Exactly.

And so, and that collectivism, what collectivism used to mean, was the idea that the individual ought.

to be subservient to the larger group.

Not that groups don't exist, not that we shouldn't come together.

Of course, we create families.

We create churches, communities.

All of these things are wonderful.

But when you do understand like true individualism, like on that, like that individuals ought to have rights.

Yes.

Things like that, it does, it shields you from a lot of this nonsense.

Well, the question is,

does the human being have a soul?

Yes, exactly.

Something that is distinct from all others.

There are billions of human beings in this world.

You are fundamentally different, not just in your fingerprints and iris scan, but in your soul, this thing that we can't quite define, but that we know is real.

Yes.

And that's why you have a right.

That's why you have right to exist.

That's the only reason.

Exactly.

The only reason.

So this is right.

I remember I was watching,

as I mentioned earlier, I was watching you and Brett Weinstein.

So I was just yesterday was watching this.

And there was one point where Brett said, and I think he was completely right about this, and you guys kind of agreed, but he said, he goes, you know, the claim that Israel has a right to exist has always seemed a little bit strange to me.

And he was was like, I mean, they do exist, but do they have a right to exist?

Exactly.

Every country has a right to exist.

Well, I think the point is almost this.

Countries don't have rights.

Exactly.

Individuals have rights.

You're using an individualist term and then attempting to apply it to a collective government.

That's not how it works.

Every single individual who has Israeli citizenship has a right to exist.

Exactly.

Every single individual who does not have Israeli citizenship has a right to exist.

Exactly.

Every Palestinian.

This is why people make these arguments.

There never was a country called Palestine.

Totally irrelevant.

Has nothing to do with anything.

Doesn't matter if there was a government or a country.

It doesn't matter where the lines on a map are drawn.

Now, again, I'm not making a lefty argument here.

I'm not saying, therefore, you can't have immigration restrictions.

Of course you can, because a group of people can own a plot of land and they get to decide who can come and who can't come.

That's right.

But the point is that If you're trying to apply rights to collectives, you're going to realize that it doesn't make sense.

And the same way they do this constantly, where they apply things like,

they'll say, does Israel have a right to defend itself?

You go, no, individuals have a right to defend themselves.

And by the way, when I defend myself, I don't have the right to aggress upon other innocent people who happen to be in the general vicinity of the person who I want to defend myself against.

Exactly.

That are distinct but equal to mine.

Exactly.

And that's really all it takes to kind of cure you of a lot of this collectivist nonsense.

Yes.

And there is something about the form, though.

I do think form matters in the same way reading a book on Kindle is a different experience from reading one in print.

It just is.

Wish it wasn't.

There's something about the form of social media that disaggregates people from their souls.

And I, or at least that's my experience of it.

Like you can just get so pissed off

that you forget that every person, what was it?

You were telling me this at breakfast this morning.

You're telling me about the preamble to Daryl Cooper's World War II series.

Can you just say that?

Will you say that?

Yeah, he's so he's

he hasn't put the series out yet.

I think he's he's working on it.

I hope it's out soon.

Um, but so Daryl, as he talked about on your show, is putting together this big World War II series.

And when Daryl Cooper does this, we're having him back this summer.

I can't wait.

I can't wait.

Just also, just I'm excited for the reaction.

Uh, but I actually think a lot of you know, a lot of people are probably going to be disappointed because he's not going to give them, you know, like it's weird.

He's not going full Nazi?

Well, that's the thing.

Of course not.

Of course not.

And it's weirdly the only people, by the way, it's so funny because it's this symbiotic relationship that you see all the time.

It's like the only people who want him to, it's like the Nazis and the Zionists are the ones who are like, please be a Nazi.

Please be pleased.

So that we have this, you know, everybody else is like, oh, great.

They're getting paid from the same source.

I suspect some of them are.

I'm throwing that out there.

In fact, I don't suspect I know.

I'm sure a lot of them are.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, that's part of this new landscape that, but so he does this um he put out the prologue for the series and he had this wonderful partner um i hope i can kind of do it justice but it was so beautiful the way he said it but he was talking about like when you start to think about um

you know the people in germany in world war ii and how there there were little three-year-old girls and eight-year-old boys and there were women and there were all the, you know, and if you start to kind of humanize them, there's, or if you start to dehumanize them, as many were making the attempt to do, he said, you, you might find yourself having two competing voices in your head.

Like on one level, you go, well, of course, there were innocent women and innocent children.

And of course, these are people just like anybody else.

And then you might have some other voice that goes, well, they were Germans and it was World War II.

So what are you doing?

Trying to humanize anyone.

And he goes, okay, that second voice is not you.

That's not you.

That is a spirit outside of you acting on you.

And just so you know, it's the same spirit that was acting on the Nazis when they were talking about Jews.

And that's, and dude, it's so funny for people trying to demonize this guy.

Like, this is who he actually is.

When he's talking to his audience and he's got a message to give them, this is the message he's giving them.

And I, man, he's just so right about that.

And it's the same thing as like when you see like some hardcore Israel supporter and then some hardcore like radical pro-Palestinian and like they're going like all the Jews blah blah blah blah blah and then they're going all the Arabs blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you're like, you're the same person.

Both of you are the same person.

And I'm not trying to completely equate it because I get it.

The Palestinians have lost in this conflict.

They're the ones who have been, you know, truly, you know, they've been fucked over in a way that the Israelis haven't.

But anytime that you're like dehumanizing an entire group of people, setting the stage to then justify some type of brutal aggression that could not be justified without dehumanizing them first, you are participating in in the same exercise that is

the reason throughout all of human history that we've had genocides and wars and ethnic cleansing campaigns and just horrible atrocities.

Don't do that.

Whatever you do, if you ever find yourself doing that, don't do it.

We're not allowed to do that.

Yeah.

I mean, we play, you play with fire when you do that.

And I, and I've stayed silent a lot.

as I've seen it happen and I feel shame thinking back on it.

When Osama bin Laden's wife was shot, I remember thinking, okay, she got shot and married to Osama bin Laden.

That's a pretty risky proposition, being married to Osama bin Laden and living in Pakistan, got it.

So I guess, you know, there are risks and she knew what they were.

On the other hand, I'm not cheering an unarmed woman getting shot to death under any circumstances.

And I don't want anyone in my country doing that either because I love my country and I love the people who live here and they're my

countrymen.

And

I think it's bad to just stay silent, okay?

But don't anybody who encourages you to take take pleasure at the death of another person is, you know, acting on behalf of forces that we should be rejecting.

Yeah.

You know, I said this.

I don't care who it is.

I was on Lex Friedman's podcast pretty recently.

That guy's a good interviewer.

He's great.

He's a great interviewer.

Everyone makes fun of Lex Friedman.

I made fun of Lex Friedman probably, or I heard other people do it.

I didn't say anything.

And then I was interviewed by Lex Friedman.

I was like, this guy's weirdly good at this.

Yeah, it's really good.

It's easy for people to look at it and think they could do it too.

It's a skill to interview somebody and he's rex.

Look what he gets.

He gets.

Did he get good stuff?

I haven't seen it.

Did he get good stuff?

Oh, it was great.

And he was, you know, he was asking me, like, he started really getting into the detail of like what I believe a just war is and what an immoral war is and why is that.

And the example I used, which I think

I know you, because I've heard you talk about this stuff too, I think you'll agree with me.

But I was like, okay, let's take World War II and let's say that like, not only is the official narrative right, let's let's tweak some things here.

It's so much more right than, you know, the Nazis are, if it's possible, they're even worse than the real Nazis were.

And if it's possible, they actually were going to take over the world.

And actually, we would all be speaking German.

Like, let's say not only were they going to take over England, they were going to cross the Atlantic and come take over North America also.

And the entire world would have fallen into Nazi totalitarianism had they won the war.

And let's say, in order to stop the Nazis, we had a way where we could do it, where no innocent civilians were killed except one.

You know, we could, we could literally just, we could take out the Nazis, save the entire world from totalitarianism.

By the way, in this model, there's no Joseph Stalin.

Joseph Stalin's a great guy, and the Soviets are a free country.

There's no moral questions about who we're working with.

Just all of that.

All we had to do was we could take out the Nazis by dropping this one super bomb, but one six-year-old girl would be killed.

Okay.

This is, so I've made it the most clear-cut war in human history.

In that scenario, I guess you'd go, look, we have to do this.

We have no choice.

The whole world will fall to totalitarianism, or the whole world can be saved, and one six-year-old girl is going to get killed.

Okay.

I can understand being like, we're making an impossible decision.

We have to do this.

Every year on the anniversary of that war, we should all like weep to ourselves.

We should all feel horrible that we had to do that.

Because it's a six-year-old girl got killed.

Like, I have a six-year-old girl.

This is the most horrible thing in the world that you would ever like kill a six-year-old girl.

I mean, my God, I would set the whole world on fire to stop someone from doing anything to my little girl.

And like, so if that were in this very clear-cut scenario, not the complexity of real history, in this scenario that I'm laying out, we should still all be nothing but pity and sorrow that it ever came to that.

And we should rack our brains every day thinking, was there any alternative to that?

Was there any way that we could have done that without this little girl getting killed?

And like, people could say that's kind of like pie in the sky or hippie-ish or whatever.

But at the very least, dude, when you're talking about like inflicting this level of human suffering on people, like the onus is always on the people who are advocating for it to absolutely prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there's no other option, that we've exhausted everything else we could do.

It has to be this.

And if you come to the conclusion it has to be this, you should still be really sad and somber about it.

This spiking the football stuff, having a Bob Hope special after a war, the stuff that America got involved in after the Second World War, it became like kind of like this business of war, this, this, we're spiking the football.

It's just like, it's disgusting.

And then you tell me about how some other society is a death cult.

Like, let's examine our own.

Well, it is disgusting.

And I think you don't have to know the right answer going forward to know what the wrong answer is.

Right.

And it's just, again, you want to treat,

you want to approach life and statecraft and bureaucracy and everything in your life with humility.

I don't always know the outcome.

Not God.

I have limited power.

I think I know that murdering a six-year-old girl will bring world peace, but what if it doesn't?

Right, right.

Whatever.

I think dropping an atomic bomb will

work out.

I think, you know, dropping the atom bomb will stop an invasion of Japan.

Okay.

I think dimming the sun will stop global warming, but maybe I'm wrong.

You know, maybe I'm wrong because I'm a person.

And it's when people stop stop remembering the limits to their own wisdom and power that things like that you get genocides and stuff.

Well, also, again, like I said before, because this is always just my, it's the weird way my neurotic brain works or whatever, but I just like, can't, like, I have this consistency obsession or whatever.

But, you know, I was listening to your, uh, your show with Matt Walsh

the other day, and I, I kind of, I did appreciate some of the things he said about me and the debate with Douglas.

It was for a Daily Wire employee.

I think that's about as nice of

it.

That's about as good a reaction as I'm going to get.

But he was like at one point saying that he was like, well, you know, so then the real important, the good point that he said that Douglas Murray made was when he asked me,

well, then how do you get rid of Hamas?

Like, what's your plan?

So number one, it's not a point.

It's a question.

But then Matt Walsh was saying like, well, look, I can understand you saying you're against what Israel is doing, but then what should they do to get rid of Hamas?

And it's just interesting to me to see any conservative going, wait a minute, so you're against

these babies being killed.

And it's like, yes, yes, let's call this, I don't know, anything of a term for it, the pro-life position.

Let's call it that.

Remember, remember the foundational principle that you've been talking about for your entire career?

But wait, hold on.

So, first of all, before, which by the way, there are lots of other ways to deal with Hamas, obviously.

But no, actually, I don't have to solve that problem before I can object to killing innocent children, right?

Like, no, it is not incumbent on the pro-life person to work out a plan for like the

adoption or the college tuition.

No, actually, no, I'm allowed for my starting point to be you can't murder babies, right?

I mean, come on.

Yes.

Like, what do we, and, you know, the other thing which I did want to say is that I do think, um, and look, by the way, I, I, as I'm saying, we're both here kind of coming out against the excesses on both sides.

I'm against racial collectivism.

I'm against collective guilt,

against collective judgment.

Punishment.

Yes, collective punishment for sure.

But so like, I'm not saying you don't have to like,

you shouldn't hate Jews and you don't even have to hate Israelis.

I think you shouldn't hate Israel.

Oh, there are lots of great Israelites.

There's lots of great people there.

Yes, they're awesome.

There's lots of really, really great people there.

And their government's just done a lot of messed up stuff, but like so is ours and so have lots of governments around the world probably all of them um probably a direct correlation to how much power they have and how much evil stuff they can do exactly exactly you know i do think it's a little bit of a cop out for some people who i like very much you know like i i like matt walsh i've never met him but i like i think his documentaries are great i think he's been an important voice in the national conversation like a very important voice um i like tim pool very much i've done his shows lots of times i've met him lots of times i think he's a great guy um but there are these guys who will basically say, like, I'm a non-interventionist.

I only care about America.

I don't care about these other countries.

So I don't care.

I don't have an opinion on it.

And it just seems to me like that's a cop out.

It's kind of like in 2006 saying, you don't have an opinion on Iraq.

I don't care about Iraq.

I only care about America.

It's like, well, we're in Iraq right now.

Well, I agree with that.

That's right.

And that's why I have felt from the beginning kind of like shanghai into this.

I mean, I don't care on the level that I just want to focus on my own country.

But if we're deeply involved in it, then I have an obligation to care if it's my job to pay attention to what our country's doing, which it is.

Right.

Well,

listen, I have no argument to anybody who goes, I'm just not going to pay attention to politics.

My best friend in the world is Luis J.

Gomez, who came on your show.

And he's the best.

And literally, and this is, he is being completely sincere.

When you asked him on your show, you go like, so what are your politics?

And he goes, politics is gay.

And that's literally his only answer.

And I have in all of my years, I'm literally, I'm his best friend.

I don't have a counter to that.

I go, that is a pretty good point.

I married a woman like that.

Yes.

Yeah, me too.

You know, and like, so it's like, I have no argument against that.

But if you're in this world where we're talking about these things, then you, you don't get to just say, well, look.

taking this opinion, which is the obvious logical conclusion of my stated principles, but if I take them to their conclusion, that will cause me grief.

Therefore, I'm going to say, I don't really care care about that because look here's the thing if you don't if you do care about being america first and you care about america not getting into another stupid catastrophic war in the middle east

well who's pushing us in that direction right and this is not a conspiracy theory this is like totally out in the open right i mean the longest serving prime minister in israeli history is john mck uh benjamin netanyahu okay right benjamin netanyahu came to the U.S.

Congress in 2002 and testified as a regional expert that we should go overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq because democracy will sweep the region.

He then also said in front of a congressional testimony that we should overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and that we should overthrow the Mullahs in Iran.

Okay.

He's been advocating, he's been John McCain, he's been Dick Cheney this whole time advocating that we fight this next war and this next war and this next war.

They're right now, what was it,

three, four weeks ago, they drew up war plans, including us, to go to war with Iran.

It's only because Donald Trump, who seems to be willing to help them ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, but said, that's a bridge too far for me.

I'm not going to war here.

And so thank God now we're in negotiations with the Iranians.

But if you know this, then like for you to be a non-interventionist America first, it has to at least come with, and hey, we should cut Israel off and we should not listen to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Like, I'm sorry.

That's just totally reasonable.

Or Kirstarmer or any of them.

That's right.

So, okay, just take the position, which is the obvious one.

We should stop funding what Israel is doing.

We should stop propping them up.

It's been quite a while.

The country was created in 1948.

It is 2025.

You can either go with this alone or you can't.

Come on.

And those are fair terms, by the way.

I mean, those are the terms that the rest of us live our lives on.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, you make budget decisions in your home on the basis of what you can afford.

Yeah.

And there's some things you don't do, you know.

No, all of us mere mortals have those constrictions on our behavior.

Like they're the things I want to do and they're the things that I think I'm capable of doing.

Yeah.

And if I was sitting here and giving like these bravado, you know, infused speeches about all of the things that I can do, but really it relied on me borrowing the money from you in order to do it, you'd be like, hey, maybe stop giving this speech.

Maybe Benjamin Netanyahu should stop going to the UN and going, there's nowhere that Israel can't touch.

Actually, there's lots of places Israel can't touch.

Oh, I know.

There's nowhere the U.S.

can't touch.

I know.

I just think it's getting too out in the open.

And I do, I mean, I guess I fret too much in general, but I do worry now that it's like super obvious

what's going on that things will just devolve into like

somewhere very ugly.

Well, that's why if you have any sense about you.

And you don't want to see things devolve into something ugly.

That's why you want to make sure we don't get into another war right now.

I totally agree.

It's unbelievable.

It's so, it's remarkable.

I'll tell you this, right?

And I'm somebody who has

really,

you know, been focused on this stuff for a long time.

You know, I mean, I host, I do a show four days a week, and I'm always reading about this stuff.

And I've done all the background reading.

I mean, I know a lot about like the neoconservatives and what motivates them, what their worldview was.

I will tell you the first thing that really surprised me, and I was, I was genuinely, and I hate the neoconservatives.

Like, I'm not, it's not that I don't understand how evil what they believe is.

I was really surprised that the Ukraine thing,

the Nazis in Ukraine didn't mess with them at all.

I was shocked.

I was really surprised.

You know, I know why they support all the wars they have supported.

I thought that for the neoconservatives, real deal, not even neo-Nazis, Nazis, like the grandsons of, you know, the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust in Ukraine, proudly wearing swastikas, tattoos, and waving flags.

I mean, like, they threw their support behind the Azov battalion.

This was very strange.

Like this was a line to me that I was like, oh, wow, they'll really go that far.

But I'll tell you, I am blown away by the fact that anybody who is out there shrieking about the rise in anti-Semitism is not wise enough to go, we cannot fight a war with Iran right now.

Because if we get into a war right now that's clearly on Israel's behalf after 25 years of terror wars, which were pretty clearly at least partially on it.

You know, I'm not, I'm not going to go quite as far as like Jeffrey Sachs, although I get, you know, he's an expert and I'm not.

So I guess he's right that I'm not.

But, you know, I wouldn't quite say that, you know, we outsourced our foreign policy to Israel.

Like, I, you know, there's a lot of truth to that statement.

Was it, was it Mearsheimer or Sachs who said, I view Benjamin Netanyahu as the worst U.S.

president of the 21st century?

It's pretty hilarious.

And there's, there's a lot of truth to that, but it's not like 100% true.

It's like, okay, but look, it's obviously, as I just said, Israel has been using its considerable influence to convince us to go to war in Iraq and Libya and Syria and all of these places.

I think Yemen was more for the Saudis.

Afghanistan was our own thing, but those wars, particularly, Israel was really on board with.

And if we were to go get into a war with Iran right now, which will be a much bigger disaster than any of the previous terror wars, there's really no argument about that.

Iran is just not a pushover like these other countries.

At all.

Yeah, that's right.

They can take out a lot of our guys.

And then what do we do after that?

Well, they can also destroy Israel with conventional weapons.

Yeah, there's a lot that they can do.

But if we actually go to this war on behalf of Israel, I mean, what do you think that does to the level of anti-Semitism?

Now, by the way, I'm not saying that's not the number one reason not to do it.

No, it's not.

That's like the number six reason not to do it.

But for these people who are so concerned, they're so concerned about the existential threat to israel well here's the thing right hamas while they did pull off october 7th which was by far the biggest attack hamas has ever pulled off um hamas was never an existential threat to israel but this actually is i agree what they're doing right now agree in some sick self-fulfilling you know uh prophecy this actually is creating like an existential threat to them i completely agree i if i live there

um and i think enough of jerusalem that i would like to live in jerusalem i think it's the most incredible city in the world.

I truly love it.

But I would leave because I think, I think they're, and I said this to an Israeli friend of mine recently, like, I'm a little bit concerned.

Not that it's my job to be concerned for your country.

Lots of other people have that taken care of, but just as a bystander, it's like, whoa, this is not good.

Yeah.

And

I didn't, you know, he had no sense of what I was talking about.

But I,

yeah, no, I think the one area where I agree with Mark Levin

is that Israel is really in danger.

And I think it's people like Mark Levin who are putting Israel in danger.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I think that's wrong.

No, I think that's right.

I think just like I was saying, Douglas Murray, it's actually like, no, you're creating fertile ground for anti-Semitism by telling me I'm not allowed to criticize a guy with the Jewish last name.

In the same sense,

you claim some Jewish anti-come on.

But that's so low.

It's so low to debate like that.

It's really.

You're the famous debater.

Yeah.

And like in an op-ed, after you lose a debate, or not even lose, after you refuse to debate and kind of beclown yourself and then you're writing an op-ed and you don't take on one argument i made but you do attack whether i'm really jewish as they'll by the way as he'll criticize the just asking questions people but what the hell is that what the hell is that's me by the way that's who they're talking right i know i know it's all it's all it's so funny the first time i heard that i was like wait Are you actually mad that I asked a question?

Isn't anyone who's trying to shut down questions, isn't that person by definition on the wrong side?

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's funny.

Like, what world are we living in?

I've lived too long.

I should have died 10 years ago.

Well, you know what's so funny about it, too, is that there's, because there's all these different techniques for control.

And one of them is just framing.

Like how you frame a conversation really like with the Israel thing, it's obvious, right?

Like, look, I mean, however you feel about the conflict, the fact is that Israel has occupied Palestine since 1967.

You know, okay, I know that they're, no, we disengaged in

No, you didn't, but like, whatever.

I'm not even like, I've had this debate enough times.

I'm just saying, this is the fact is that Israel's occupied Palestine since 1967.

That's the fact.

And then the conversation, they go, does Israel have a right to defend itself?

And you're like, well, that's a hell of a way to start.

You know, like, you're the ones doing the occupying and you want to start every debate with whether you have a right to defend yourself.

Okay.

But with all these things, there's kind of, you know, like, this is what was interesting to me about the conversation with you and Brett Weinstein about the, you know, about God versus atheism and all this stuff is that like, so people,

it's very easy to have the framing of going like, oh,

you're telling me you believe there's an invisible man up in the sky who created all things.

That's pretty goofy, right?

It's like, yeah, if you just frame it like that, sure, it's pretty goofy.

I'm sorry, what's your belief?

You believe everything used to fit on the top of a pin and then it exploded into everything.

everything came from nothing and then exploded into this is just as ridiculous as anything anyone's ever believed so like as soon as you look at both sides and apply the same standard to both and you know, there's been a, one of the things that's very interesting dynamic to me because I've seen this a lot when people will try to attack you, where what they'll do is they'll pull like kind of the five things you've said that seem like almost the goofiest of all the things.

Well, he said this thing about like a demon attacking him.

Okay, he said this thing about, you know, like happened.

Right, right.

But they'll pick it up.

I didn't want it to.

No, but look, but look, even yes, in itself, but like, okay, that sounds like an outlandish claim.

Like I'm not denying.

But then it's almost like they're trying to ignore the totality.

I see this a lot with Bobby Kennedy.

This has been one of the most interesting things about Bobby is that the people who attack him, they pick on the five, you know, goofiest things they can find that they think he said, you know, he blamed the Wi-Fi for this, or he said something about whatever, the COVID targeting certain genetics and not other genetics.

And it's like, look.

Even if I grant you there are these five claims, which I don't know if I read, you know, Bobby said some things that I'm like, I don't know if he's right about that that or not.

It seems kind of, but this, but they're trying to remove the central thing that he said, of course.

And the central, this is Trump in a nutshell, too, right?

The central thing that Bobby Kennedy said is that we spend more money than any other country on healthcare and we're the sickest.

Exactly.

Now, until you can take on that,

you're never going to win by just trying to knock out these other goods because at least he's talking about the major thing.

And by the way, not only did he say that, none of you have ever mentioned that.

Never.

I've watched every presidential campaign.

It's never once come up.

Well, in fact, everything they do mention is a way to avoid mentioning it.

Exactly.

But

we had a whole debate in this country about health insurance, and this never came up.

We had the Obamacare debate,

and no one even ever mentioned it.

I didn't know it until Bobby came on my show.

Yeah, me neither.

I'm embarrassed about it.

He was banned.

Yeah, no.

But I have to say, the thing that I have learned

really above all other things is the only way to assess a claim is on the basis of whether or not it's true.

Right.

Not on whether or not I want to hear it, on whether or not I've thought of it before, whether or not I'm shocked by the fact that you asked the question.

The only thing that matters is, is it true?

Now, can I know?

Most of the time, no, I can't know, but I want my orientation, the way I approach each question to be the same every single time, which is, is that true?

And the second I stop caring about whether it's true, then I'm acting on behalf of evil.

Right.

It's that simple.

Right.

Right?

Yeah.

No, I, I completely.

So when Bobby Kennedy's like, oh, COVID's, you know, targeted on the basis of genes, I was like, really?

Is that true?

Yeah.

Well, I kind of felt, I felt the same way.

And I think particularly what, and I think it's very similar to talking about the 9-11 truther stuff with Jesse Ventura.

It's like, what, what ends up happening is that after you're kind of red-pilled about so much,

the claims don't seem quite as outlandish.

That's not saying that they're right.

You know, like, and I've, you know, with the 9-11 conspiracy stuff, I've never been like completely sold.

I think there are a lot of people who jump to conclusions that are, and like, actually, the evidence isn't nearly as strong as you think it is.

You're kind of, you're doing what everyone does, where you start with a conclusion and then you work your way backward from there.

And there's a lot of that.

But at the same time, it's like the people who go, well, our government would never.

You're like, now that doesn't work anymore, dude.

Sorry.

So yeah, they totally would.

They actually totally would.

I'm not even saying they did in this case, but they totally would.

Or it's so painful to re-examine the worldview I've built on what might be a fake assumption that I'm not going to do it.

I'm I'm going to yell at you instead for challenging that worldview.

Like, that doesn't work either because it's already happened.

You can only lose your virginity once.

Right.

Right.

And once you realize that the Warren Commission really was a cover-up, I mean, it just was.

And on the basis of evidence, I've concluded that, then it's like, okay,

if the U.S.

government will hide details about the murder of a democratically elected U.S.

president, then there's really nothing that they wouldn't do.

Right.

And then if you, and then the Nixon one is a big one-two punch.

Totally.

You know, because you realize that, like, oh, the guy who became the villain you know like the guy who was like supposed to be remembered as the most corrupt president was actually the most popular president and who was totally set up was you know and you're like okay well then we're just not living in the country that superstar I came to that independently having known a lot of those people I know Bob Woodward personally and I

I lived in that world for my whole life.

And

Nixon had the highest popular vote percentage of any president in American history.

I didn't in 72.

I just didn't even know that.

And when I found out that Bob Woodward was a naval intelligence officer detailed to the Nixon White House, and then the next year gets the biggest story in journalism history handed to him.

How old was he?

30, 28, something like that.

That happens a lot.

That's totally, that's totally normal.

And Deep Throw was the deputy director of the FBI and the guy they installed as president was on the Warren Commission.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I never liked Gerald Ford because of the the

withdrawal from Saigon on April 30th, 1975.

I just thought that was like, everything about that was so ugly.

But

anyway, whatever.

Yes, I agree.

So it's not enough to say, I'm not allowed to think something.

Right.

Or that, or, or once you, but once you recognize those things, it's just impossible.

It's impossible to reconstruct the image of America that you once had.

You're like, oh, that's not at all what

any more than saying, like, criticizing a government does not make you a bad person.

No, this is, it's a, it's,

this is, um, what is it?

It's Frederick Bastiat stuff.

Like, this was already figured out a long time ago.

Uh, society and the government are not interchangeable things.

They are different.

You know, criticizing Joe Biden is not criticizing America.

I'm not criticizing the hills and the lakes.

I'm criticizing this one senile criminal.

Or my neighbors or my relatives.

Right.

Right.

People I love.

There's so many of them.

So last, last last question, you made reference to the Brett Weinstein conversation we had last week about creationism versus Darwinism, et cetera, et cetera, the existence of God.

Do you find in your life, this is a quiz I give a lot of people, more people you know personally talking about God

than you did, say, 10 years ago?

Yes.

And I am that person.

I mean, I was an atheist 10 years ago.

What happened?

I had my daughter.

Yeah.

That's, you know, as I found God the day my wife delivered our first

child, and which is a fairly common experience.

Uh, I know other people who have had the same thing were atheists until that moment.

And, um, what, what can, what changed in you?

So, all right.

So, it was uh basically, so I met my

so, you know, it's a fairly normal story, but I, I met my wife and we got engaged and then we got married.

Um, so my wife's like the most amazing chick.

She's just great.

And I know this is, it's always a thing to say.

It's like, my wife's better than your wife type thing, but everybody who knows my wife, I don't mean you, I've never met your wife, but she is better.

And I'm just kidding.

I don't, I don't hear people compliment their spouses enough, actually.

I don't think everyone always says that.

I wish people said that more often.

Well, I do, you know, it's not me.

She's really just the best.

Everyone who knows her would agree.

I mean, like, it's just like, she's like the most amazing woman.

She's just gorgeous and she's really super smart and she's really sweet and kind.

And she's just like, she, she puts everyone above herself.

She's like, I really hit the lottery with her.

And I was never, you know, I was like habitually single.

I was never a relationship guy.

And I never really wanted to get married.

I kind of always had this view of like, you know, women are trying to change you or trying to control you.

Every girl that I ever dated always wanted a relationship and then they always wanted me to not do this or not do that.

And my wife was just, she just had my back.

She just always like wanted to make my life better.

And she did.

And I just, I fell in love with her.

Wow.

And I, I was like, I'm going to spend the rest of my life with this woman.

And so then we, when she got pregnant, I was just very excited.

It was like, you know, I just got married.

I got a baby on the way.

I was just like, this is going to be, this is the best.

Like, I'm really excited to do this.

And, and I was right.

It was the best thing I've ever done.

And so the

day that was,

well, she was over her due date.

So then they scheduled to come in to induce pregnancy because they don't let you go too long these days, which I guess is maybe they're right about that.

I don't know.

But anyway, so we go to the hospital.

They get the potocin out.

Yes, that's right.

So we're at Lenox Hill Hospital in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

And

by the way, I should, I should add, just leading into the story, over the, I had been like a militant atheist when I was younger.

I had started to open up my mind a little bit to being like, I was seeing some of the holes in the atheist arguments, but I still was not like a believer in God.

And so we were at Lenox, Lenox Hill Hospital.

And this was the first one.

This is how it started was

the anesthesiologist came in to give my wife an epidural.

And at Lenox Hill, or at least this guy, they asked me to leave the room.

They said they ask the fathers to leave the room when they do it, you know, because they're putting a spinal thing in and they have to be very, very precise.

Yes.

Right.

So like, and they don't want, I guess they don't want you there to react because then she might react.

Exactly.

Right.

And so they don't want to, so I go at.

And she can't see what's happening.

Right.

Right.

She can't see, but she could see you seeing.

And so they want people with a straight poker face who have seen this a lot of times and are not watching it happen to their wife and baby, you know?

So it's a reasonable ask.

But so I go, I go out and I'm in the hallway in the maternity ward at Lenox Hill Hospital.

And I'm just, and it just hit me.

It was like for the first time, I guess I had not really thought about this.

I was just so excited to get my family started.

But for the first time, it hit me that like something could go wrong

and that I could leave here alone, you know, like something could go wrong that I could lose the baby, I could lose my wife and it's totally out of my control.

And like as this started hitting me, I started like really getting emotional.

And it's like I'm out there and I'm like, I'm crying in the hallway of this maternity ward.

And immediately I just started talking to God.

And I just started not just talking to God, but like negotiating.

with God.

And I was just like, you know, like, like, dear Lord, if you, if you make sure that they're okay,

I'm going to do, like, I'm going to be the best husband and the best father and I will do this.

And, you know, like all the different things in your life.

Have you ever prayed before?

No, never once in my life.

And it all, you know, like all the things that you know you're supposed to be doing that you're not doing that well.

You know, like I was like, okay, I'll clean this up.

You know, I'll call my mom more often.

I'll do this thing.

I'll do it.

And so anyway, so I just started like praying to God and not just praying, but like negotiating.

So anyway, everything was fine with that.

But my wife, this was the first of many times.

She had a very, there were a bunch of complications in the pregnancy.

Everyone came out okay.

Thank God.

But so I ended up talking to God a lot that day.

And then just like, as the days went on, it's so interesting.

It's gorganic.

Well, that lifetime of not believing and then

you just start to think about it.

And so this is almost like what intellectually, you know, converted me later was I was like, hey, what the hell was that?

I mean,

I can't look back and just ignore that.

And

there was one, you know, like, again, I'm almost a little uncomfortable talking about these things because I like talking about things where I have like a real tight argument that I can prove is irrefutable.

It's a profound argument, actually.

It was something where I was like, look, so in the moment when it was really all on the line and out of my control, I wasn't thinking maybe God exists.

I knew for a 100% certainty, unlike nothing I've ever known in my life, that not only did I know that God existed, but I knew what he wanted from me.

Like I knew what my negotiating power in this was, is that I could, you know what I'm saying?

Like I could promise I'll be a good person I'll do so not only did I know God existed I knew that God wanted me to be a good person and there was and look this is something that people who have found God know and people who don't believe in God maybe will not accept but there is something to

when you open yourself up like that to God

like you find out that he's real and it's not like he speaks to you or he hallucinates i don't like see a fiery bush and the words of god started talking but like he fills you.

Like you, when you open yourself like that to it, you get filled by it.

And there's no, there's no more debate in your mind over whether that's a real phenomenon or not.

You're like, any more than like if I were to leave here and someone were to be like, do you believe in Tucker Carlson?

And like, I'd be like, no, I know for certain, like, I know for a certainty that Tucker Carlson is

just with him.

It's, it's like that.

And so it was, um, and it's never, it's, it changed my life.

And ever since I'm, I regularly pray to God.

It's something I'm conscious of every single day.

No, why?

Every day.

Every day.

And always, I don't even pray exactly.

I don't ask for things ever.

I ask for one thing ever from God,

which is that my, my wife and my kids are healthy and safe.

It's the only thing I ever pray for.

I don't ask for anything.

The only other thing that I do is I

express gratitude.

Like I just say thank you for everything I have.

So that's, but that's the extent of it.

But I think that I cannot overstate how much I think that's made me a a better person.

Really?

Yeah.

Just it's, it's very, very good for you to constantly remind yourself how lucky you are that you have all the things that you have.

It's, it's very easy to get away from that.

And that's where, that's where you, you ruin your inner happiness, your inner joy is if you start, you start taking the things you have for granted.

Because once you like, you know.

Once you, when you think you could lose everything you already have, and then you don't, that's when you really appreciate it.

You know, you really appreciate what, how lucky we all are.

Well, not to be like too blunt or too personal, but you're on the cusp of like change in your life on the basis of what's happened in the last month in your life.

I've just seen this story so many times.

Yeah.

So, to be vulgar, your income in this year will be higher than last year.

I'm just telling you that, because you're way more famous and you're also on the right side of history, I think.

Yeah, I hope so.

And

certainly on the right side of popular opinion.

So, like, that, do you think,

I mean, the danger in life is getting what you want and finding yourself unhappier.

Are you worried about that?

No, I'm really not.

And I do just think that it's because, again, if this was happening to me at 25 or at 30, I would be very concerned about that danger.

Literally, like what I just told you has kind of already happened in my life.

I know who I am as a person.

I kind of know what money actually means.

Like, there's lots of nice things.

I'm not downplaying money.

It's, it's very important, particularly in my position.

It's very important for me to be able to protect my wife and kids that we have some money, you know what I mean?

So that I can do that.

But no, I'm not, I'm really not worried about that at this point.

I think I've kind of like my wife herself is a very grounding force for me.

She's the person whose approval I seek.

Yes.

She's the person whose opinion I really care about.

You know, and so like that's, and, and she keeps me very grounded.

Also, just, as you know, you know, having these little kids just keeps you grounded because they're, uh, they're, they just don't care at all.

Like literally at all.

my six-year-old the other day we were at to dinner um and so we're out to dinner we're sitting down my wife my my six-year-old girl and my three-year-old boy and the uh the owner of the restaurant is like a fan of mine so he comes over to the table he goes oh thank you guys so much for coming i just wanted to shake your hand i really appreciate everything you're doing and i was like oh thank you so much i appreciate that so he leaves and then my daughter my six-year-old who's kind of 17 but she's six she turns over at me and she goes why'd he come over and say hi to you dad because you're famous and just looks and then just turned right back to her menu i mean it was like she could not have just undercut me more than that.

I was like, oh, I guess I'm not really that cool.

All right.

But that stuff helps.

It's the best.

I'm really lucky that I didn't have this moment 15 years ago that I had it now.

So I think I'll be good.

But then, you know, you cut back to me in a year.

I come back here.

I got like the shades on or something.

It's totally ruined me.

Pellegrino, not Perrier.

Dave, it's wonderful to see you.

Same.

No matter how many times you've been here, I hope you will return.

I hope to

being again.

And can I just say, by the way, just the last thing I'll say, and then we get in, but I will say that, you know, a big part of like the reason why I'm able to do what I do and be kind of protected because I'm not like, I'm not vulnerable, at least I don't think.

I hope I don't live to eat these words, but I don't think I'm going to be ruined or canceled or anything like that.

And a big part of it is that

Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have my back.

And you kind of can't really cancel someone in today's world as long as those guys have your back.

Well, and so, no, but I'm saying you're providing a lot of cover for people to be able to tell the truth and know that, like, oh, you're not going to be able to like shut this person out of the conversation for the crime of telling the truth.

Well, the money thing is important to that extent.

Money does not make you happy, but being dependent on other people's money can make you enslaved.

And not having debt, not having investors.

We don't have debt or investors.

That makes a huge difference in my life.

But you also have actual skills.

You can just go do shows for the rest of your life.

Do you know what I mean?

And I'm quite happy to do that.

That's what I'm saying.

So actually, you were talking about Matt Walsh, who I really do like.

And I thought for, you know, to the extent that, you know, he said what he said, kind of impressive considering he works at the Daily Wire.

He still works the Daily Wire, however.

And I know I'm not mocking him at all.

I worked at Fox News for, you know, 15 years.

And you do have like in the back of your mind, mind,

can I say that?

Or

you self-censor even when you're not aware that you do.

But if you're truly independent, then you can be independent.

Yeah.

Which is the best.

The best.

It's really just so great.

Well, I think you're funny, even if Douglas doesn't.

Dave, thank you.

Thank you, Tucker.

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