[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone and welcome to the 238th episode of the Atlas Society Asks. My name is Jag. I'm CEO of the Atlas Society and I am very excited to have Brendan O'Neill rejoin us on the Atlas Society asks to talk about his book after the pogrom October 7, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization. As I was just mentioning before we went live, as you can see, I've taken quite a few footnotes. So Brendan, thanks again for joining us.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Always a pleasure to talk to you, Jennifer.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: So the last time you joined us was on September 27th of 2023 to talk about your book A Heretics Essays on the Unsayable. And at the end of that interview, you express expressed a kind of cautious optimism about ordinary people pushing back against technocrats, elites here in the US and Britain in the form of Brexit, Trump votes, the rise of terfs, trans exclusionary, radical feminists in the UK, etc. Well, of course, neither of us knew at the time, but the very next week, on October 7, the world would witness the horrific Hamas terrorist attack killing over 1200 Israelis, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. So the very first sentence of after the pogrom reads October 8, 2023 ought to have been a day of shining moral clarity for humankind. Well, to say it wasn't is a bit of an understatement. And instead, what followed was widespread vilification of the victims of that attack and the largest unleashing of Jew hatred that I've ever experienced in my lifetime. Were you surprised?
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Yes, I was. I guess I was shocked, but not surprised. I was shocked because what happened in Israel on the 7th of October was unspeakable. It was, as you say, it was the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. I don't even like it when people refer to it as terrorism or an act of war or mass violence. I think it goes beyond all of that. You know, the German novelist Herta Muller said it was a complete break with civilization. And what was unique about this, what was very distinctive about it, is not only that Hamas invaded Israel and killed people, but that it did so with a sadistic glee. It filmed its barbarism. It boasted of its barbarism. One of the pogromists phoned home and boasted to his own parents about how many Jews he had killed with his bare hands. This was unlike anything we've seen in our lifetime. It was extraordinary and it was evil. And so I was shocked by what happened on 7th of October, and then I was shocked by what happened in the West. And I often say that for me, my wake up call, of course, it was the 7th of October when I really thought to myself, this is a derangement that we need to talk about. But my real wake up call was 9 October, because what happened on 9 October is that there was ostensibly a protest outside the Israeli Embassy in London. And you think to yourself, why are they protesting? Israel hasn't properly responded to the pogrom yet. It hasn't. Certainly hadn't launched its full scale invasion of Gaza by that point. The ground invasion didn't come until the end of October. And you thought, what are they doing outside the Israeli embassy? And then you realize they were celebrating the pogrom. They were playing pop music, they were dancing, they were letting off fireworks, they were burning the Israeli flag. This was a celebration of Jew murder on the streets of London in 2023. And I make the point in my book that we would remember if Londoners poured onto the streets to celebrate Kristallnacht. So we should remember that they did it for the 7th of October. And it was really that moment where I thought to myself, I knew that the response in the west to. To the pogrom in Israel, I knew it was going to be bad. I knew the left would make excuses for what Hamas did. I knew they would call it resistance. I knew that Israel would get it in the neck and it would be demonized, even though it was the victim of an unspeakable crime. I knew all of that was going to happen. But even I was shocked by the speed with which it happened and the scale at which it happened. And as you say, we witnessed the explosion of the worst episode of Jew hatred, I think, in. In many of our own living memories. And so my book is an attempt to really grapple with that and to say what happened in the west, which meant that something as evil as 7th of October was either excused or in some cases, even celebrated.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: So of your book, Jake, Wallace Simons, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, says, thank God he is on our side. And as a Jew, I can second that sentiment. But I can't help but be a little bit curious about how someone who grew up in an Irish Catholic conclave north of London, how. What was your journey that made you say, this is the book that I have to write. What. What happened. I mean, it's extraordinary, but unusual.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I've been on a bit of a journey, I guess, over the past few years, past few decades, you know, where I grew up, I Grew, as you say, I grew up in an, in an Irish Catholic part of northwest London and everyone, most of the people I went to school with were Roman Catholic and were from Irish background. So I grew up in quite a secluded secluded immigrant community I guess. But I grew up surrounded by Jewish people. So where I grew up was a small Irish enclave in North London but there were larger Jewish communities all around us. So I saw Jewish people all the time. I was friends with Jewish people and I mingled with them from a very early age. Our next door neighbors were Jewish so we had a familiarity with Jewish people that often people in Britain don't. But we grew up in a Jewish area where there just happened to be a lot of Irish people in this one small part where we lived. So I've known Jews all my life and I love them. I think they're a wonderful people. And it horrifies me that over the past few years in particular, but really for longer than that anti Semitism has been one of the acceptable forms of racism. It's one of the acceptable forms of bigotry. And you will meet people in London, you will meet hyper woke people, liberals, good so so called good Guardian readers who will denounce anti black racism as they should and denounce anti Muslim bigotry and denounce misogyny and denounce everything that we all agree is bad. But when it comes to the Jews they always making excuse for why you can be prejudiced against them. That's been around for a long time and it has blown up to the surface of Brit society and other societies since 7th of October. So that was, that's my original journey but then my political journey. I guess when I got involved in politics and you know this Jennifer, that when I got involved in politics I was in left wing politics to begin with. I was a bit of a young radical. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I was a bit of a tub thumping radical leftist and I used to go on anti war demos all the time. I by the way, I would still go on some anti war demos. I would still be opposed to something like the wasteful destructive war in Iraq.
I think there are question marks over how much our governments are given given to wars in Ukraine and other parts of the world. So I still hold some of those views. But over time when I was in my 20s I started to notice that whenever there was a protest against an Israeli war it was always a very different tone. It suddenly became a very ugly protest. It suddenly became a very bigoted Gathering. And you would hear people not only saying hands off Palestine or hands off Lebanon or whatever the slogans were, but you would also hear them saying, destroy the Zionist state, crush Zionism, or even openly anti Semitic things. People would hold placards saying they killed Jesus and now they're killing the Palestinians. And so even when I was very young and a little bit wet behind the ears, I was noticing that when it came to Israel, there was a certain tone, there was a certain form of hatred. And anti Zionism, it seemed to me, was just anti Semitism in drag. And so I really held on to that view over my political life. And bit by bit I just became someone who was openly supportive of Israel, the right of Israel to exist, the right of Jewish people to have their own homeland, and the right of Jews in the west to live free from persecution and discrimination. And over time that became a core part of, of my political belief and it led eventually to writing this book.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: So in the book you share some grim statistics how, quote, in the weeks after 7 October, anti Semitic hate crimes in London rose by 1,350% compared with the same period in 2022 in the US anti Semitic attacks rose 400%. In similar statistics in other European countries, you write that this quote was the rotten fruit of the West's turn against civilization, of our creeping abandonment of reason. Would you help unpack that for us?
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's really worth reminding ourselves how bad things got.
They really got bad. I'll give you some examples from where I live right close by, outside the window that I'm looking out now, very near to where I live, things happened that were shocking even to me. So I live quite close to the Jewish Free School, which is one of the best known schools for Jewish kids in London. And shortly after 7th of October, the kids at that school were told that they could take off their blazers on the way to and home from school so that no one would know they were Jews because they genuinely feared for these kids safety, because kids were being harassed in the street by anti Semites. So in, In London in 2023, Jewish kids were advised to hide their Jewishness. And when that happened, I remember thinking, you know, what is really going on here? And. And then everyone will remember what happened to those kidnap posters that were torn down everywhere they were put up. London, New York, Paris, Berlin, they were torn to shreds. People attacked them in the most visceral way. And in New York City, someone smeared excrement on one of these posters. In Finchley Road in North London, which is an area with a large Jewish population. Someone put up a kidnap poster of the three year old twins who had been kidnapped by Hamas. And someone daubed Hitler mustaches on the three year old twins faces. And I remember seeing that reported. It wasn't reported very widely because the liberal press doesn't particularly care about anti Semitic, but when I saw it reported, I remember thinking, if Jewish kids are now seen as legitimate targets for bigotry and hatred, then we are in a very dark place indeed. So think. And there are so many other examples of the surge in anti Semitism that we witnessed after 7th of October. And I make the point in my book that it's important to understand that this was a continuation of the pogrom. This wasn't just a bunch of opportunistic idiots saying, ha, everyone hates Israel now, let's stick it to those Jews at last and no one will complain about it. This was people actively heeding the call of Hamas and continuing their pogromist attack on Jewish people. So we saw the globalization of the pogrom, we saw the globalization of Hamas's hatred for Jews and it was globalized by activists on the left, by people in the media class, by members of the political class who really ought to have known better. So the globalization of the pogrom I thought was horrific and it does speak to the crisis of civilization here in the West. And one of the points I make in my book is that if we educate the new generation to turn their backs on Western civilization, to be skeptical of the gains and wonders of the west, to think that America was born in the sin of slavery and Britain was born from the sins of colonialism and empire. And you should hate everything about the societies in which you live, and you should be skeptical of everything from Shakespeare to Beethoven to the Enlightenment. If we do that, we are going to turn people away from civilization and bit by bit we will push them into the arms of barbarism and they will come to align themselves or to feel more of a connection with barbaric movements like Hamas, which is explicitly anti Israel and anti Western. They will come over time to feel a closer connection with movements like that than they do with the west itself. So I think the chickens came home to roost after 7th of October. And all the scum of our societies, if you don't mind me using that word, really rose to the surface. All the backward thinking, all the regressive thinking, all the anti civilizational thinking. So the turn against the Jews was fundamentally a turn against Western society itself and a turn against the values of our own civilization.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I see a kind of natural progression from your previous book in which you really took a philosophical deep dive into identity politics and by extension this idea of warmed over Marxism, of using identities to replace class categories with victims and oppressors. And in addition to positioning Palestinians as uber victims and Israelis as uber oppressors in the identitarian matrix, is there also an anti civilizational envy and resentment against Israel and the Jews more generally for their achievement? It's an argument that George Gilder recently advanced on this show in his book the Israel Test, How Israel's genius enriches and challenges the world.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Absolutely. I love George Gilder's book, the Israel Test. I read it many years ago when it first came out and it makes that point incredibly well, that Israel is envied and it's seen. You know, I've often thought that Israel has become the whipping boy of Western and Western activist class that has turned its back on the values of progress and modernity and democracy and all those other things that Israel is seen to represent. So Israel is seen by these people as the pinnacle of the Western way of life. And they're not wrong to see it like that. And but instead of celebrating it for representing that, they hate it, they hate it for representing the values of a part of the world that they've turned their backs on. So there's this envy and combination of envy and loathing for the successes of the Israeli people in fashioning a wonderful, gleaming democratic state in the deserts of the Middle East. There's an envy that the Jewish people managed to survive the greatest crime in history and came out of it the other end to build a forward looking nation that is free and open and self confident. They envy that and they hate that. But you know, the other really disturbing thing is that not only do they envy Israel's success, but this is the really twisted element. And I have a chapter in my book about this.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: Holocaust envy.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: Yeah, Holocaust envy. They also, they envy the Jewish people's pain. They envy their history of suffering because everyone knows the Jewish people have a long history of suffering and persecution. They envy that too, because in the culture of victimhood that we live in, they cannot abide the idea that the Jews were the victims of the greatest crime in history. So there is this very conscious and very repulsive effort to chip away at the Jewishness of the Holocaust to say that actually lots of people were targeted by the Nazis and to say actually the Holocaust wasn't the worst thing in history. There's also Rwanda and Srebrenica and Armenia and all these other things too. So they constantly want to downplay the two things. Firstly, the historic suffering of the Jews and secondly, the modern achievement of the Jews. And it is those two things, that kind of weird and horrible mix of envy and hatred that really fuels modern antisemitism.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
Talk a bit about, if you would, the project to deny or minimize Hamas atrocities when you were talking about this Holocaust envy. I'm thinking back to my interview with Ashley Rinsberg on all of the great reporting that he's done on what's happening over at Wikipedia, specifically with regards to shaping the narrative of what happened on October 7th, minimizing those atrocities, also minimizing the atrocities of the Holocaust.
But I want to look at particularly minimizing the atrocities committed against women, the rape and torture of Israeli women.
Despite this pertaining, as you write, to quote, one of the best documented terror atrocities in history.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, the betrayal of Jewish womankind has been one of the grossest things that's happened since 7th of October. I mean, it really is horrifying. The more you think about it, the more horrified you become. Because, you know, we live in an era of Me too. I mean, MeToo's kind of slightly fallen down over the past couple of years, but it was very powerful for a while. This was the idea that every woman who made a complaint of sexual harassment or sexual assault had to be instantly believed. I think sometimes that went too far and it ended up sacrificing important ideals like due process and innocence until proven guilty. And often men were cast out of cultural life or polite society on the basis of accusation alone. And I don't like that kind of culture. But the general idea was that sexual assault and sexual harassment are very serious. And when women make complaints about them, they should be treated seriously and they should be believed. That whole idea went out the window on 8th October 2023. A whole new ideology came into force, which is that you should believe some women, but not those women. Don't believe the women of Israel, don't believe Jewish women, because we know how these people lie. We know that they exaggerate their suffering for political gain. That's essentially what people were saying, that the rapes and the assaults that unquestionably took place on the 7th of October, they said that they were being exaggerated or completely invented in order to justify Israel's war in Gaza. That's Holocaust denial in a new form. Because the whole underpinning of the racist ideology of Holocaust denial is that the Jewish people exaggerate their suffering in order to disguise the power they truly enjoy. That is the. That's the poisonous belief that motors Holocaust denial. And it's the same poisonous belief that motored the 7 October denialism that we saw as well. And the betrayal of Jewish women is just. It still shocks me. It shocks me to my core that feminists in particular in the west, who have been making a big deal over the past 10 years about movie producers who are too handsy or people who tell off colored jokes in the workplace, or in the case of Britain, we had a front page scandal a few years ago because a Tory politician put his hand on a journalist's knee. I'm not joking you. That was on the front pages of the papers. That was on Newsnight. BBC's Newsnight did a whole segment about it. Those same feminists who were so horrified that a man put his hand on their knee said nothing about Hamas. Racist brutalization of the women of southern Israel, especially at the Nova Music Festival, where women were sexually assaulted, chased and murdered for the crime of being Jewish women. So the failure of Western feminism to reckon with this misogynistic atrocity and to speak out against it and to speak out against Hamas was. It was awful, really awful. And we ended up with a new slogan. It's no longer Believe women. That was the slogan for the past few years. Believe women. Believe. Now the slogan is Believe Hamas. Now the slogan is Believe fascists. When fascist men deny that they abused women, you should believe them. So somehow, over the past two years, feminists and other activists in the west have gone from saying believe women to believe fascists. And that's genuinely shocking and unforgivable.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: All right, I'm going to turn to some of these questions, as many have been coming in. So thanks, everybody, for your patience.
Candace Morena wants to say it must be late in the uk. Thank you for doing this. And, Candace, I did ask him, because my Jewish guilt kicked in, whether he was a night owl. And he is, so we don't have to feel too bad about it. Alan Turner asks, what role do you think the media plays in portraying, or mis portraying the situation in the Middle East?
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Yeah, well. Well, firstly, it is quite late here. It's half 10. But I am a night owl, so don't worry. And I have a beer in the fridge, which I'm going to have after this. I'm looking forward to that.
Yes, the media played a terrible role in distorting the truth of what's happened on 7th of October and since 7th of October. And you know, one of the things that shocks me most about the media coverage, and I was talking about this in a speech a few weeks ago, especially in relation to the BBC here in Britain, which often sets the tone for international coverage across the whole country. One thing that struck me is that you never really see Hamas in any of the coverage that they provide us with, in any of the commentary that they provide us with over the past year and 16 months. You hear about what Israel is doing. You hear that Israel has dropped a bomb over here and ventured into this town over there and laid waste to some building in Khan Eunice or Gaza City or whatever else it might be. You constantly hear about what Israel is doing, but you never hear about what Hamas is doing. And it leaves viewers with the distinct impression that Israel is just invading the Gaza Strip and killing civilians. That is the impression you are left with. There is nothing else that one can conclude when one watches the BBC. So they invisibilize Hamas, they hide Hamas. They actually are doing Hamas's bidding for it. They are propagandists for Hamas. And so they are presenting the war as just a brutal onslaught by a colonial settler entity. And they're not mentioning the fact that this anti Semitic army, which started the war with its pogrom of 7th of October and which is continuing the war by fighting against IDF troops and holding on to Israeli hostages, they never mention them, they never show them, they never tell us about them. So the whole antenna of the media coverage is this idea that Israel is just an evil, marauding, genocidal state and its target is the Palestinian people. Those of us who read a bit more widely or think a bit more deeply know very well that that is not true and that this is a conflict between the Jewish state and an army of Jew haters that wants to. To destroy the Jewish state. And that's an army that Israel has every right to fight and. Sorry, that's a war that Israel has every right to fight. And it's a war that I hope Israel wins.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: So Joe62 asks the marriage of communists. Well, it's more of an observation. The marriage of communists and Islamists is a temporary one that seeks to destroy the Western world. Yeah, I remember learning about the history of the Iranian revolution and how communists in that country made common cause with, you know, Islamic fundamentalists. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, why it is that those that are on the sort of economic left would decide to ally with those who in a way are really on the religious right.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it's crazy. It's. It's a suicidal form of politics. And in my book there's a chapter on called the Unholiest alliance, which looks at the growing alliance between the left and radical Islam, which has been growing for some time. You know, I mentioned that it was way back in 1994 that a radical leftist here in Britain, he published a pamphlet called the the Prophet and the Proletariat, which really tells you what the content. It was really a pamphlet expl exploring the opportunities to strike alliances between the left and radical Islamists. And what was interesting about that pamphlet is that the author acknowledged that radical Islamists are a regressive and often quite fascistic group of people. So he said if we do make alliances with them, they should be fleeting and temporary and we shouldn't get too serious about it. I think it was psychotic to have any kind of alliance, but at least there was a recognition back then that you were aligning with the devil to a certain extent. But even that, even those caveats have now gone completely out the window. We now have a situation where leftists are just jumping into bed with radical Islamists. We've seen them on the streets of our cities cheering Hamas, cheering Hezbollah, cheering the Houthis. You know, they've been chanting, Yemen, Yemen, make us proud. Turn another ship around, which is a reference to the Houthis hijacking of ships.
They're openly celebrating armies of anti Semites, armies of radical Islamists who would throw most of them off the top floor of a building if they got half the chance. And I talk in my book about Queers for Palestine, which I think really symbolize the kind of suicidal politics of the modern Western left, because this is a group that doesn't realize that if they ever went to Palestine, they wouldn't last very long. They would either be jailed or tortured or possibly killed. And I say in my book, somewhat flippantly, that very quickly their pronouns would be was, were. That's what would happen to them if they went to this place that they glorify as the most important struggle in the world. So I think it's very symptomatic. The Islamo left alliance is very symptomatic of the, I guess, the suicide of the west more broadly, where we have become so hateful of our own history and our own traditions and our own gains of modernity. We've become so distrustful and disdainful of those things that we now find ourselves aligning with the enemies of our own societies. And I hope it ends soon, this horrible alliance, but I don't think it's going to end well.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: So I had personal experience with that. I was rather surprised. I was giving a speech on Atlas Shrugged and the importance of capital capital investment as a seed corn of innovation and progress in Macon, Georgia, at Mercer University, and I was assaulted by a young woman wearing a Kathia and a Trans Pride flag as a cape, accusing me of genocide. So unfortunately, that did not end very well for her. The authorities said, oh, well, let us handle the consequences and don't press charges. And I said, if I leave the consequences to you, you're going to give her an award and throw her a parade. So I'm happy to say, at least that she was convicted of assault. But talk about the keffiyeh. You had a very funny quote by Julia Burchill asking. In an age when putting a sombrero on for 60 seconds during a drunken night out at an all you can eat taco bar can be taken as proof of conquistador level evil, why do these same students swan about wearing the keff? Is this cultural appro. Appropriation something we're not doing anymore?
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very striking, isn't it? I mean, what happened to you was awful, and I'm glad you pressed charges and that that was resolved because that's just intolerable, that kind of abuse and that kind of physical assault.
Yeah, it's so striking, you know, on university campuses over the past few years, and you will know this better than anyone, Jennifer, and lots of us have been clocking this for a while. You know, they've become hyper, politically correct, hyper woke. You know, there have been controversies on American campuses because white kids were eating sushi. That was considered a form of cultural appropriation. And if a white kid had his hair in dreadlocks, he could have been cornered in the. On the campus quad and told off for stealing black people's culture. I mean, there are so many examples of this where cultural appropriation was seen as the great crime of our time. And yet if you go to any campus now in America or Britain, you will see everywhere you look, you will see privileged white kids wearing the keffiyeh, wearing Arab head cloth, essentially dressing up as Palestinians. And it's. It's like all the old rules have just gone out the window. All the stuff about cultural appropriation apparently doesn't matter anymore. By the way, I thought the whole idea of cultural appropriation was nonsense. And I think people should wear their hair in any way they want. And listen to any music they want and so on. But it is. The hypocrisy is so striking. And you know what's happening with the keffir, I think it's become like the sartorial signifier of your virtue. It has become the cloth that you use to demonstrate to your fellow travelers in the universe of correct thinking that you are a good person. It is a shortcut to proving that you're a good, acceptable person in polite political society. So I'm really fascinated at the purpose that the keffiyeh plays. And it seems to play such an important role in virtue signaling circles that they can even overlook the problem of cultural appropriation because they gain more moral points by wearing this foreign garment than they do by policing the wearing of it. So the keffiyeh really has become a means through which that kind of upper middle class, activist class, the movers and shakers of the political left, it's the means through which they send a signal to each other, saying, I'm a good person too, because I also pity Palestine and I also hate Israel, and that makes me one of the good guys.
[00:31:45] Speaker A: Well, I'm glad for one, that they do wear it because it signals to me how deeply ignorant they are and how deeply malevolent they are, so I can steer a wide berth of them.
But in that chapter you had, I thought, one of the most important insights of the book you wrote about this cosplay going on on campus as an attempt, quote, to escape the pampered reality of their lives and taste that most prized of social assets in the woke era, victimhood, love. If you could unpack that for us.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the point I make in my book is that this is something more than cultural appropriation. This is the moral appropriation of the whole Palestinian experience by rich white kids, usually, who want to feel a sense of oppression, who want to feel a sense of victimhood, who want to feel that they are the wretched of the earth because they are ashamed of their privilege. They're ashamed of their whiteness, they're ashamed of all these things that they're told are bad and that they should atone for and apologize for. They're ashamed of all of that. And through the keffiyeh, through adopting the keffiyeh and dressing up as an oppressed person, they get to play the victim, even if it's just for a day or a week or a month. And that really is a strong component in this. I think I make the point in my book that the keffiyeh is really the Cloth with which they wash away their privilege. It's the cloth with which they wash away their white guilt and their feelings of guilt about being Western and white and wealthy. And, you know, the scenes at Columbia University in New York were the most striking for me because not only were all those kids on the Gaza encampment wearing the keffiyeh, but they were also cosplaying as starving people. So there was one point where one of their leaders gave a speech where they said, we are experiencing a humanitarian crisis because we're not. We can't get food or drink, and does the university want us to starve to death? I mean, this is literally what they were saying. Then there was another video clip which went viral, which showed a bunch of them all in kefirs, of course, bending down at the university gates to receive their humanitarian aid. And of course, it was just some blueberry muffins from the local Starbucks and a. At all coffee or whatever else it might have been. But they were desperate to cosplay as oppressed people. They were desperate to take on what they presumed to be the wretchedness of the Palestinian people. And so it's. You know, we've always had radical chic. We've always had people. We've always had wealthy Westerners who love to mingle with the Black Panthers or Che Guevara or the MAU MAU movement in Kenya or whatever else it might be. There's often been that trend of radical chic in Western societies, but this is something even worse. This is victim chic. This is oppression chic. This is an attempt to play the poor little downtrodden person in order to alleviate one's own guilt at living in the west and being very comfortable. So it's the full, complete moral exploitation of the Palestinian people for the benefit of wealthy white people in the West. And I think that's pretty gross.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: So you also had an important point in describing how the campus obsession with safe spaces has one glaring exception, and that's the safety of Jewish students. But you emphasize that the solution is not the inclusion of Jews in the system of psychic protection, but the exclusion of all students from such gravely infantilizing policies. How so?
[00:35:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that was such a striking thing after 7th of October, the. The way in which this. It suddenly became clear that the policy of the safe space on. On the Western campus did not apply to Jews. Everyone else gets a safe space. Trans students, Muslim students, female students, queer students, as they refer to themselves. Over the years, they've all been provided with a safe space. Which means policies that protect them from hate speech or literal, physical, safe spaces in which they can go to hide away from a controversial speaker like Christina Hoff Summers or Ben Shapiro or someone else whose words would apparently wound them so much they have to hide away in a safe space on a beanbag, you know, with play doh and a cat that they can pet. You know, at Cambridge University here in the uk, they had a little Jack Russell dog that people could pet. Students could go into a safe space and touch this dog to alleviate their stress when they heard a controversial idea. And so many of the students were petting this dog that the dog had to be retired. I mean, that's how serious the safe space crisis and insanity became on campuses in the west. And then after 7th of October, it suddenly dawned on everyone, I think, that this safe space was denied to one group of students in particular, Jews. And we saw that again at Columbia during the Gaza encampment where the most obscene things were said to Jewish students. They were told to f off back to Poland. They were told that they would be Hamas's next targets.
There was one banner in the middle of the Gaza encampment on the Columbia lawn which refer to Israel as the pigs of the earth. Now, people can call that anti Zionism if they want. To me, that's brazen. Anti Semitism. If you are referring to the world's only Jewish nation as the pigs of the earth, you are an anti Semite. And these things were being said openly not only at Columbia, but other universities as well. At Penn, at mit, at Oberlin, and at universities in Britain. There were numerous instances of Jewish students being hounded and chased and humiliated because they're Jewish or because they support Israel or for both of those reasons. So it seemed that university campuses that had become psychotically obsessed with crushing anything that they deemed to be offensive, which could just be someone critical of feminism or someone who raised questions about Black Lives Matter, or a terf a feminist who says she doesn't believe a man can become a woman. For years and years, these were seen as outrageous comments that had to be censored or people had to hide away from them. But all of a sudden, it became acceptable to hate Jews, to be openly racist against Jews. And I think the point I make in that chapter as you say that a lot of people said, look, we really need to protect Jews from offensive speech as well. We need to include them in the safe space. I say no. I say there's a tiny hint of respect for Jews in this mistreatment of them because there's an assumption that they are capable of surviving outside of the safe space. They don't need access to the safe space because they can survive this offensiveness. They can push back against it, they can argue back against it. And I think that element of respect that is contained within this discriminatory treatment of Jews that should be extended to all social groups on all campuses. We should say to them, you don't need the safe space. It's infantilizing. It treats you like an overgrown child who needs to have your eyes and ears covered from offensive ideas that is going to stunt your educational growth, stunt your moral muscles and turn you into a child. So I think the solution to the double standards of the safe space that we've seen over the past 16 months, the solution is to destroy the safe space entirely and allow all students to grapple with the reality of public life and political discussion.
[00:39:38] Speaker A: Yes, we're certainly not doing them any favors as anyone who is seeing some of these young people as they get jobs in various industries and have a just totally disproportionate sense of entitlement and also a profound lack of resilience, which is not setting them up for all of the many disappointments and performance reviews and everything that comes along with being an adult. So here's an interesting question from lock, stock and barrel. He's asking about the role of in, in the uk, the rise in immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.
How is that playing into this whole dynamic? Is it exacerbating a sort of pushback? We don't like any foreigners and even Jews that have been in the country for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years are now kind of being put in that category? Or is it because a lot of these immigrants are from Muslim countries that they are participating in this and helping to fuel these attacks on Zionism and Judaism. How's that working out?
[00:41:00] Speaker B: Yeah, the one thing you're not really allowed to talk about in modern Europe is the problem of Muslim anti Semitism. But there is a lot of it and it's getting worse. And we have to be honest about that. That doesn't mean I think all Muslims are anti Semites and that does not mean I think Muslims can't live in the West. I absolutely think they can. And the vast majority of Muslims here in Britain, for example, are just normal, hard working people who want a nice life. But the truth of the matter is that antisemitic thinking is more pronounced in the Muslim community than it is in other communities.
The fact of the matter is that in Europe, some of the worst anti Semitic attacks since 7th of October on synagogues or on Jewish individuals have been carried out by Muslims. The fact of the matter is that in the pogrom, the small pogrom in Amsterdam a few months ago after a football match when a bunch of men on motorbikes went on a self styled Jew hunt to attack visiting Israeli fans, the fact, the matter is that those so called Jew hunters were Muslim men. And we need to be able to talk about this. And one of the problems is that if you talk about this, you're accused of being Islamophobic. So we now have arrived at a situation where it's Islamophobic to talk about anti Semitism. It's hurtful to Muslims to stand up for Jews. It will make Muslim people's lives worse, apparently, if you go out on the streets and say, I don't think we should attack Jewish people or attack Jewish synagogues. So this is the really horrible confusions in identity politics where they create this hierarchy of victimhood where you have the most oppressed and the most privileged. And because Muslims are seen as oppressed and Jews are seen as privileged, you're allowed to stand up for Muslims, but you're not allowed to stand up for Jews. So that kind of poisonous divisiveness of identity politics is playing into all of this. But one of the key problems with Muslim antisemitism is institutional cowardice in Western governments. They are unwilling to be truthful about this problem. They are worried about losing the vote of Muslim voters. They are worried about appearing Islamophobic. This is one of the reasons we have the grooming gang scandal in England where over the past 20 years gangs of primarily Pakistani men have been raping and abusing mostly white working class girls. The reason that could happen for so long is because local officials and local police forces didn't want to appear Islamophobic by drawing attention to it. So this institutionalized cowardice at the highest levels of society actually inflames Muslim anti Semitism because it's never really reckoned with, it's never really reprimanded and it's never really sorted out. So I think there's a. There's two things going on there. And the loser, of course as a consequence of that are Jewish people in our societies who have suffered some of the worst racism we've ever seen over the past 16 months.
[00:43:59] Speaker A: So of course Elon Musk here in the United States has brought global attention to these grooming gangs. And as you say, the institutional cowardice in not forthrightly addressing it. So we do have some questions here. Curiosity a little beyond your book, which we're going to stay on. But just any thoughts that you may have on Starmer. The labor majority in the uk, have things improved or not?
[00:44:27] Speaker B: Oh my God, they've got so much worse. I'm laughing because I'm just at the, you know, my wits end with this government. They are awful. I did a radio discussion earlier today and the host pointed out to me that we're 1/8 through the Keir Starmer government. Just 1/8 through. We've got another 7/8 left before we finally get a chance to vote them out of power, which was such a dispiriting thought.
They're a terrible government. They don't know what they're doing. They said that they were the adults in the room, that they would restore normalcy and sanity after Brexit and after Boris Johnson and so on.
Exactly what Biden and Harris said, by the way, when they took power in 2021. We will restore normalcy after the crazy Trump years. But in Britain, just as in Biden's America, the opposite happened.
This government that we live under are incompetent. They're still hyper woke. They still don't really know what a woman is. They claim to support economic growth, but they're also beholden to the death cult of net zero which would drag our societies back to a kind of pre modern era. So it's a confused and incompetent government and it's not capable of standing up to some of the problems in society, like the grooming gang problem, which our government is still unwilling to speak about. So things are getting worse under this government. I don't really see a light at the end of the tunnel, except for the fact that people have become skeptical of the government very, very quickly. Keir Starmer is incredibly unpopular in this country. A large number of people want another election sooner rather than later. So it seems to me that they thought they'd get a free ride. We had 14 years of conservative Party rule and they weren't very.
And Starmer thought he would soar into Downing street and restore normal politics after 14 years of chaos. But in fact, he's just made himself very unpopular and one of the reasons is that he is unwilling to have these honest discussions about social problems because he's worried about being called racist or Islamophobic or divisive. Unless we have politicians who are brave and who are willing to speak the truth about what's going on in our societies, things won't improve.
[00:46:41] Speaker A: So I'm going to warn our audience that I'm not going to be able to get to all of your questions, nor am I going to be able to get to all of my questions, because we are going to be rounding up on 11pm and as Brendan has told us, he's got a beer in the fridge. And I have learned never to get between a man and his beer. But there are a few important questions that I really do want to get to. And one of the more troubling aspects of the antisemitism unleashed after the Hamas attack was to see its resurgence on the right. And my friend Jeffrey Tucker had always warmed me about this phenomenon. But because the only antisemitism that I'd ever personally confronted came from the left, it was easy to ignore it. Well, no more. So were you surprised by this? And what is our responsibility as classical liberals or objectivists? To make sure that we police our ranks, I mean, and. Or suffer the same fate that the left has now suffered because they elect some of the worst excesses and insanity go on, on one of their, you know, fringes. What, what is our approach need to be to addressing this when it happens on our side of the aisle?
[00:48:13] Speaker B: Yeah, that is such an important point because I have been shocked by the surge of anti Semitic thinking on the right over the past 16 months, and in fact longer than that, it has been growing for some time. It's horrible, it's repulsive, and it shares a lot in common with left wing anti Semitism, which I'm also more familiar with. Those are the people I've been having arguments with over the past 10 or 20 years. So I'm more familiar with that. But we mustn't forget far right anti Semitism, hard right antisemitism, which is getting worse and worse. You know, what I'm reminded of after 7th of October is that anti Semitism is a very unique hatred. It's not really like the other racisms. You know, the other racisms are irrational bigotries where. Or irrational forms of prejudice where you judge someone on the basis of their skin color or their national heritage, rather than on the basis of whether they're a decent person or not. So racism is an irrational bigotry and I think it has no place in society. Antisemitism is something different. Antisemitism is the swirling, deranged, conspiracist conviction that the Jews are the cause of all ills in society. It's a very Unique form of hatred. It's a very historic hatred, of course, although it takes different forms in different epochs. But it's very unique, it's very distinctive. And we see it now on both the left and the right. So the left will say that the Jewish state is the cause of all the world's ills. They will say the Jewish state is uniquely murderous and uniquely barbarous and has the leaders of the west eating out of its hands. It's, you know, how striking that what people used to say about the Jewish people, the left now say about the Jewish state, the exact same prejudices they take from ancient antisemitism and project it onto the Jewish nation. On the right, they're a bit more upfront. On the hard right, they're a bit more honest. They don't dress it up as a critique of the Jewish state, although they hate Israel. They don't dress it up as a critique of Zionism. They quite openly say the Jews. They openly say that the Jews are responsible for every crazy thing happening in Western society. They see the hidden hand of the Jews behind mass immigration, behind the trans ideology, behind political correctness, behind dei, everything. They see the Jews as the puppet masters of everything that they consider wrong and bad. So there's this pincer movement of the far left and the far right with Jews as their target. And both sides are conforming to the traditional definition of antisemitism as a conspiracist hatred for the Jews because you see them as the controllers of the world. You know, we've just gone through Holocaust Memorial Day, and we don't even need Holocaust Memorial Day to be reminded of where this conspiracist hatred can end up. It can end up with violence, it can end up with murder, and it can end up with mass murder. So the responsibility, I think, of classical liberals or conservatives or anyone who's more on the right wing side of politics, is to chase out every single example of this hatred from our ranks, to say we absolutely will not tolerate it, and to put forward the rational critique of society that is really your responsibility to do, rather than falling for any of these irrational theories about the Jewish people. They have to be confronted and crushed at every opportunity.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: Well, I think that your book, you really staked out a leadership position in that particular priority of just saying to those among our ranks, we don't do envy, we don't do bigotry, we certainly don't do antisemitism here. But on a more positive note, I recently had Todd Rose on this show to talk about his book Collective Illusions and how people falsify their preferences in order to conform to what they think, often mistakenly, their peers, their tribe believes. And one of the examples he talked about was the belief that young people today are much more anti Semitic, much more pro Hamas than they actually are. Do you think there's any credence to that?
[00:52:31] Speaker B: You know, I was thinking about that recently because a few people have challenged aspects of my book in debates I've had, or TV discussions or radio discussions. They say, look, young people aren't as anti Semitic as you say, and so on. And I don't actually say in my book that young people are anti Semitic, but I do say that after 7th of October, so called anti Zionism, which I think is a form of anti Semitism, it was very pronounced on university campuses. It was very pronounced amongst kind of youthful activists, youthful members of the activist class. That's where it was most strongly expressed. But you're absolutely right, that doesn't mean all young people are anti Semitic. It really doesn't. It might mean that a certain strata of young people are anti Semitic. And certainly politically minded people of the left, I think, have fallen for a new form of the socialism of fools. They have fallen for an anti Zionism that crosses the line completely into anti Semitism. So that is a serious problem. But there are, there's a groundswell of common sense out there. There is, you know, it's a cliche, but there is the silent majority. And I think that silent majority is ripe for discussion and rational engagement and being convinced that actually there's more to this conflict in the Middle east than just the Jewish nation killing Palestinians, they are very open to having that discussion. They still have rational faculties and critical faculties and they want to talk about these issues. And when I've gone up and down the country here talking about my book or in Australia or in New York, at the end of last year, I did a book launch and I met so many people. I met loads of people who are on our side, Jennifer, and who share our concerns, but I met loads of people who just hadn't made their minds up. And they want to have these discussions and they want to talk about it, and that includes lots of young people. So we have to maintain our faith in freedom of speech. Because one of the reasons we believe in freedom of speech, I think, is because we believe that people are fundamentally rational and that people should have the freedom to think and speak for themselves because they have the ability to make up their own minds. It's the Censors who don't trust ordinary people. It's the censors who think they are just overgrown children who need to be fed correct information because they can't make up their own minds for themselves. But we trust in freedom of speech, and therefore, we should use that freedom of speech to engage people on this question in particular, and to really convince them to see the more reasoned side. In a pretty unreasoned moment, yes.
[00:55:05] Speaker A: I'm just rereading Ayn Rand's Philosophy, who Needs It? Her collection of essays, and there's one that is what Can Be Done. And it addresses this sense of feeling overwhelmed that the problems are so big and that what can one person do? And essentially, her answer was, speak. Exercise your freedom of speech. When you hear something objectionable, no matter, it's maybe a conversation with your landscaper or it's at a political rally, whatever it is, online, just to speak up and say, you know, I don't see it that way, or here's a different point of view. All right, so as we have proven, there is a curiosity in our audience about what's going over there in the uk, and part of that is I'm just frankly curious, how is Trump's second term being greeted in the uk and do you think his administration's emphasis on free speech and opposition to DEI has the potential to set us on a saner path?
[00:56:13] Speaker B: Yes, I do. Really, I do. And one thing I've noticed over here, and I think it's true in America as well, is that there's been less Trump derangement syndrome than there was in 2016. I mean, in 2016, when he was first elected, people went nuts. I mean, there was. There were meltdowns on the streets of London, never mind what must have been happening in the us and there were protests here in London where people held up placards showing Trump as Adolf Hitler and saying, this is the end of the American Republic. This is the 1930s again. People went insane. There's been far less of that this time. In fact, there's not been anything of that scale at all here in the uk. Of course, there are still people wringing their hands and saying, oh, no, what's going to come next? But there hasn't been anywhere near the same level of Trump derangement syndrome. I think that's really interesting. I think people are realizing that 2016 wasn't a blip. There is a real powerful, significant section of American society that wants to shake politics up. They really mean it. These voters. 77 million of them, however many it was who voted for him this time around, they really mean it. They are sick of the old establishment, which they consider to be illiberal and paternalistic and doesn't care about their economic health, doesn't care about their spiritual health, and doesn't care about their community health. They are sick of that old establishment and they're taking a second punt on Donald Trump to see if he can make things better. I think what he did around his inauguration, especially with all those executive orders, was extraordinary. This wasn't just one president replacing another or one party replacing another. That happens all the time. This was the wholesale dismantling of the ruling class ideology. This was the dismantling, one by one of every edict, of the chattering classes that used to rule us dei. The gender ideology, the idea of having a completely porous border and not knowing at all who is coming over all of those things. Net zero, the death cult of net zero, which would drag our societies back to a darker age. All of them were thrown into the dustbin of history by Donald Trump and his executive orders. And he said, drill, baby, drill. Get rid of the gender ideology. There are two sexes, not 72, and treat people with equality but not equity. These are radical cries for a whole new way of doing politics. And I think the repercussions will be global. And already in Europe, we're seeing a bit of a political shift because I think more leaders are recognizing they can't get away with the old nonsense anymore because now the leader of the free world is being skeptical of it out out loud in public. So I think what he's done is good. I think it will have positive consequences for America, and it could have positive consequences for the world.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: Well, and I will second your experience at seeing a lessening of the Trump derangement syndrome. I was in Washington, D.C. on Election Day. We had storefronts, office buildings boarded up. Everybody was expecting the worst. And not only did the worst never happen, people were calmly going about their business. Of course, I'm sure many were disappointed as the city voted almost 98% for Harris Walls. But, you know, I was walking around the streets, I was eavesdropping a little bit, and people were just talking about other stuff. Really didn't seem to faze them. So I'm the only Republican in a family of Democrats, and the didn't vote the way everybody else in my family voted. But I can say that not only has there been no sort of rending of clothes and tearing of hair, but there's been resignation. But something a little bit more I think almost it's a sense of relief. So we shall see and hopefully we'll get you back in the United States before long because I really enjoyed our brief time together in Perth last year. So Brandon, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:00:31] Speaker B: Thank you so much. A pleasure.
[01:00:34] Speaker A: Go and have that well deserved beer and thanks to all of you who also joined asked your excellent questions of course if you consider this video, remember we're not just content providers. We are a nonprofit educational organization with conferences in the US and in Europe and our John Galt schools all around the world. So I hope you'll consider supporting that with a tax deductible
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