Why is Antisemitism on the Rise?

I agree with the principle. Communicate. Battle of ideas. Marketplace of ideas. Very very big ideas we all want to hear about and what are the best ideas and let's rank the ideas. There are people whose views are so extreme that you can't really bring them to the table as reasonable negotiating partners for figuring something out. Right. Like Richard Spencer. Sure. Or even, I mean, okay. Imagine. Louis Farrakhan. Louis Farrakhan who I've spoken out about many times. Imagine that we want to figure out what the tax rate should be. Something that politicians have to do all the time. If you have a group of people who believe that we need a 25% flat tax and a group of people who want, you know, like an escalating progressive tax that gets as high as 70% on income over 10 million, whatever, right? Like fill it all in. All those people are going to be able to have a conversation. If someone comes in who says any taxes that the government collects are a form of slavery, how do you integrate that into the conversation about how to set tax rates? You can't. Right. Yeah. So all of this stuff, you know, there's this new movement now, which I think is great about long form conversations, going in depth, figuring out what our disagreements are. Like I'm for all of it. I'm absolutely for all of it. Well, you do it. I do it. Sure. Okay. But where I do think that there's like a lack of pragmatic reality to it is some people's ideas are so extreme that they can't in any sensible way be incorporated into an actual good faith discussion of how society should be organized. That is the problem with having conversations in scale, right? And that's the problem with Twitter and with YouTube that you're dealing with millions and millions and millions of human beings. And when you have that broad spectrum of humans, you're going to have people on the far ends of both sides. And at a certain point, there a decision has to be made about who actually gets to participate in the decision making conversations. It's great for everybody to have a voice on taxation on Twitter. But imagine if there was a significant portion of our elected officials who straight up think taxes are slavery. Like, I just don't know how that becomes integrated into a decision about tax policy. Right. I think the argument would be that bad ideas should be combated with good ideas, not with silencing someone. And that when you do silence someone, you just sort of create this blockade where the idea builds up behind it. And then the opposition to your perspective builds up. And then people start picking teams and picking sides. And I honestly think that that's something that's going to be going on right now with this whole Crowder, Crowder, Vox thing. I think people are going to pick sides and they fucking love it. People love a good conflict to get into. There's a lot of people in the cubicles right now that are weighing in and firing up. And there's people that want to dox them again. And there's people who want to infiltrate his Facebook and his Twitter. That's what people do. Yeah. And you're dealing with mill... I mean, what does Crowder have? 3.5, 3.8 million, something like that? I mean, I think what you have to also remember is it's not just the reactions that are sort of like tailored to continue the escalation. I mean, in the end, maybe Crowder personally in his personal life does refer to people he perceives to be gay or who are gay as queers. I don't know. Or he uses the word fags. I have no idea. But he didn't use that word. The t-shirt has the asterisk. I get it. It's a goof. It actually has a fig. It doesn't have an asterisk. Oh, okay. I thought it was not. The A is a fig. It's for figs. It's the idea. It's an I. Got it. Okay. It's a goofy joke. The point is I don't know any sensible person who lives in the West and has access to media, like Stephen Crowder or whoever, knows that the use of that language has a very specific path and set of reactions that it's going to trigger. Specifically that shirt. The shirt and referring to Carlos Mazza as a queer Mexican or whatever the phrase is. See, that's a weird one. The queer one is a weird one because it's with LBGTQ. Here's a good one. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. NAACP. You can't call people colored people. Sure, but that organization was named a long time ago. Sure. It's more acronyms than anything else at this point. I understand, but it's not. We both know what the acronym with the individual letters or words in that acronym are. I think the word queer is not a derogatory word, but it is- It can be or it cannot be depending on how it's used. It is if you go, you fucking queer. Yeah. Right. Sure. I mean, listen, it's the same way with Jew, right? Right, right, right, right. If I'm in a family thing and it's a bunch of Jews or whatever, that's a word that can be used in a way that if someone shows up, if Richard Spencer shows up or one of his followers and goes to a bar mitzvah and talks about this room full of Jews, the word is the same word. Yes. But we're talking about two very different things. That's a good point. But should he be allowed to say this room full of Jews? Allowed? I mean, it's not illegal. No, it's not illegal. He is allowed. Right, he is allowed. But where does it like this room full of Jews, where does it get toxic? Well, if Richard Spencer shows up at a bar mitzvah and yells about this room full of Jews, I think it's gotten toxic. That's a good subject to break this stalemate of this subject. Not stalemate, but just sort of end this. Antisemitism seems to be ridiculously on the rise. And that's stunning to me. That shocked me. Why? Because the internet, the internet sort of exposed antisemitism that I didn't necessarily know existed at the levels that it existed at. I knew there was antisemites, but I didn't know they were so brazen and overt. Well, they've gotten brazen since January of 2017. Oh, okay. I don't know that Donald Trump has created antisemites. In fact, he probably hasn't. Well, his son in law is Jewish. Son in law is Jewish, his daughter converted to Judaism, et cetera. But I think that Richard Spencer told me, we know that Trump is not literally a white nationalist who is going to talk about, let's take control back from the Jews. But we see him as the closest thing to what we would like. He talks about people from Mexico. He talks about shithole countries, et cetera. So it's just emboldened the movement. It doesn't necessarily create- Right, but people from Mexico and shithole countries, that doesn't necessarily really equate with Israel. No. Well, antisemitism in Israel also are two totally separate things. You could be against the current Israeli administration, as I am, like Benjamin Netanyahu, and still call out antisemitism against Jews in the United States, for example, or whatever. I see what you're saying. One is not directly linked to the other, but if you're a group that already has these views, and then you see a guy who opens his campaign talking about, they're sending rapists and criminals, but some I'm sure are good people, and I don't want people coming here from shithole countries, what about Norwegians, whatever. It's a signal. It's a signal. And I've spoken to former KKK people, some of whom are really interesting people to talk to, and they know exactly why it's appealing, because they see the signals and the vocabulary and the dog whistling. So I think it's just brought it out into the forefront. I don't know that new antisemitism has necessarily been generated, although it being in the forefront probably does start to get some people kind of curious, like, oh, maybe all the problems are because of the Jews. I don't know. Hmm. It's just, I guess they find groups of like-minded folks, and they join along, right? The antisemites? Yeah, they find them online, and then you can stumble into it where you ordinarily wouldn't be around people that are having those discussions. That can happen. And a lot of the people that I've talked to that got into those beliefs and then out of them said that they got in, usually on a community level, there was something about the community that was appealing to them. Right. Like gangs. Gangs, or in the case of KKK and white supremacy, people that had a bad home situation, and they found a group that would accept them. Like gangs. Partially, they would accept them because they were white. Right. And then they got pulled into the beliefs, and eventually they sort of got out of them. Yeah. It's just, so you think the rise of it in 2017, there's more antisemitism, or you think it's more overt? I believe it's more overt. Because Trump is the president. Yeah. Hmm. And, you know, groups that track these incidents, like the Anti-Defamation League and others, they have the data and there have been increases. Yeah. It's stunning to me. You know, you see it online in so many different places now. Yeah. And I just don't remember seeing it before. Or not like that. You'd run into it so often, or people calling people Zionist shills. Yeah. I mean, that's an important thing to talk about. I mean, people call me that all the time. And you know, I feel like that is an issue where I try to speak, I mean, shill to me suggests that you're saying one thing, but with some kind of other agenda that you're trying to push in some way. In other words, you are being in some way deceptive about your actual intentions and what you say. So I think when people call me a Zionist shill, what they mean is I'm talking about one thing with the secret goal or below the surface goal of actually promoting some action by the state of Israel. I think that's the idea of a shill. But you know, I mean, I, I'm opposed to the current prime minister in Israel. I've made clear that Isn't he in trouble right now? Yeah. I mean, he's been in tentative trouble for a long time. His wife is in trouble as well, I believe. But that I mean, the problem is, and I know that there are people on the left and right, that when I say this will, I mean, I'm gonna get crushed from what I'm about to say. Sometimes when someone says Zionist shill, it's related to your view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sometimes when someone says Zionist shill, it's cover for just wanting to insult someone for being Jewish or for anti-Semitism. You got to look at every instance one by one. Yeah. And sometimes people just like saying things too. Yeah. It's a popular thing to say. Especially if they find out that you're Jewish. Absolutely. It's like a thing. Yeah.