Dave Smith: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. Yeah. Concerning and troubling and all of that stuff. But then you also see people who will be asking completely legitimate questions, or making completely legitimate points that are called antisemitic. And then that, I think, does not help the dynamic at all because now you’re almost like, number one, you make the word meaningless, you take away the disincentive for anybody else to actually be a Jew hater. I mean, I think there’s a lot going on. One of the things is that for young white men in America today, they’ve lived through the years of real insane progressive woke-sim. I’m 42, it’s just a different thing for me, I come from a different culture in a different time. That just simply was not the case that when I was a teenager, or when I was in college, or when I was in my early 20s, that the school, the faculty, the politicians, Hollywood, all of them embraced racialism. They all said, “We’re playing identity politics, and it is okay to dice people up along these racial lines,” and have that first and foremost in your mind. And there is this weird feeling over this last year and now with Trump being reelected, that we snapped our fingers and woke-sim and went away or something like that. But these guys still came up in this era, and it was always the case that one of the dangerous elements of playing this game was like, hey, you think you’re going to play this and that young straight white men aren’t going to start playing this game too? Why the hell would they not? Why would they just accept, we’ll just sit here while everybody else is allowed to have a racial identity, and a grievance about it. And yet we’ll be the one group who, yeah, could just stomp all over us, we’re the bad guys. And that’s part of the reason why I always opposed the woken sanity. I mean, first and foremost, just because I think it’s wrong, I think it’s wrong to be shitty to people based on their racial group, and that includes white people too. But then also you’re like, you don’t see that this is going to result in something bad. So there’s that. And what’s weird to me is that, I guess it’s because a lot of the people who are the most upset about the antisemitism also happen to be supporting Israel, there’s a big correlation between that. But clearly it’s a huge factor in this. It’s not a coincidence that all of this rose up while Israel is just conducting this brutal campaign with our weapons and money. a big correlation between that. But clearly it’s a huge factor in this. It’s not a coincidence that all of this rose up while Israel is just conducting this brutal campaign with our weapons and money. And so I always think with these things, whether it’s with Putin, or with Al-Qaeda, or with whoever, and I’m not saying the guy who posts Jew-hating stuff on Twitter is the same as them. I’m just saying in all of these situations, you always kind of got to separate, what are legitimate grievances and what are, okay, you’re wrong on that and you shouldn’t be doing that. So it’s pretty easy for me, if I listen to the Putin interview with Tucker, I thought his whole 30 minute opening thing was horrible and just kind of stupid, especially when you’re talking to Tucker Carlson. This is for an American audience. You know how much that does not resonate with Americans being like, “We have a historic claim over another.” Our entire society is founded on, we think that’s bullshit. That’s the entire history of our society. It’s like, nah, it doesn’t matter. Sorry. Literally read the Declaration of Independence, it just refutes everything Vladimir Putin said in the first 30 minutes. Our view of the world is that God wants us to be free, and we get to overthrow governments if they’re infringing on our rights. So that was stupid. But then when he is talking about NATO enlargement, and bringing Ukraine into the American Military Alliance, you’re like, “Okay, he’s got a legitimate point there. We would not allow one of our neighbors to be brought into China or Russia’s military alliance.” And so likewise, when it comes to those guys, I do think that, look, it is just true. It is the case that America has fought many wars over the last seven years with Israel playing a very influential role in us fighting those wars. And this was a scheme that was cooked up by the neoconservatives and the [inaudible 01:39:03] in Israel that we would go through this path. But this has been confirmed by four Star General Wesley Clark. He literally said, “It was a study paid for by the Israelis that we were going to topple seven countries in five years.” And we didn’t get there in five years, but we’ve made attempts to topple all of those countries since then. study paid for by the Israelis that we were going to topple seven countries in five years.” And we didn’t get there in five years, but we’ve made attempts to topple all of those countries since then. You see Trump’s bombing the Houthis because they’re pissed off about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and so they’re trying to shut down their straits or whatever. So we’re just bombing another group on behalf of Israel. And if you really are concerned about the rise of Jew hatred, I would say, look, sometimes people would argue, the thing I said in the beginning about the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, they hate us because we’re over there. And people would say, “That’s just what Osama Bin Laden says.” He just says he hates us for our military, but he really just hates us because he’s an Islamist and we’re free people or whatever. And you’d be like, “Okay, well even if that’s what’s in his heart, that sure is his recruiting shtick. That sure is how he gets other people to blow themselves up.” And so even if you want to say, which might very well be the case, that some of these people just hate Jews, and it wouldn’t matter if Israel was at war with Gaza or not. It’s like, okay, but that sure is their recruiting shtick. That sure is how they get other people to go look at what these Jews are doing in our foreign policy. So I don’t know. There’s a lot going on. I think racialism of all different forms is stupid and wrong. It always just leads to sloppy thinking and bad results, it’s always kind of ugly. And then weirdly, it also always ends up hurting the person, it’s not good for you, it’s not good for your soul. So I don’t like seeing that stuff. I was saying before about there’s this hierarchy of outrage that you got to have in order to think and act, you have to kind of put these together. It’s something that, despite being described as a self-hating Jew, I am really not. I love Jewish people, I love Jewish culture. I’ve benefited a lot from it. It’s in many ways made me the person I am, and I think it’s influenced some of the best parts of me. But there is a whininess and a hysteria about this stuff that I think is just not healthy. I think it’s not good. I’ve told many Jewish friends and family this privately, but the way I look at it is like, I’m an American, this has been a wonderful country to be Jewish. Jews are doing exceptionally well in this country. We are 2% of the population or so, and we are thriving by any metric. And if mean stuff on Twitter is our great burden to bear, I don’t think we should be talking about it like we’re in the middle of Nazi Germany or something like that. So I do think people get hysterical about it.…

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