Josh Kiman
The Power of Twisted Ideologies: A Framework to Analyze October 7th
Josh Kiman - The Power of Twisted Ideologies: A Framework to Analyze October 7th
- Hi everybody. Welcome back to our second session today. I am very excited to have a special guest tonight. My nephew, Josh Kiman, is on with us and he’s going to be talking about the power of twisted ideologies, a framework to analyse October the 7th. Josh is a principal at Puma Venture Capital, which is focused on investments in digital and robotic surgery. He practised law for 10 years before getting his MBA and working in the nonprofit sector. He’s extraordinary intellectually curious and dives deep to understand society’s complex challenges. He loves sharing interesting content with all his circle, including me. I get many interesting podcasts. We have fabulous discussions. I always love spending time with Josh. It’s always special time. We all love Josh and we, I’m so thrilled that he agreed to jump on “Lockdown” tonight and to share his knowledge with us. Welcome Josh.
Thank you so much. It’s a real honour, Wendy.
So great to have you with us. Whoops, there we go. All right, so over to you when you’re ready.
Sure. Well, my heart goes out to all those who have been directly impacted by the atrocities of October 7th. As Wendy said, I dive deep to try to understand society’s most complex challenges. It really runs the gamut from misinformation to disinformation, hyperpolarization, the rise of populism and authoritarianism, the tremendous harm caused by social media. Spend a lot of time thinking about geopolitics, ultra-woke ideology, how that feeds into right-wing populism, and all of the events in Israel have really made all of these issues I’ve been thinking deeply about for the past couple decades come to the fore. I count as my intellectual heroes a huge group of people. My all time favourite is Sam Harris. People note that I’m obsessed with him pretty much immediately. Bill Maher, Barry Weiss, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Neil Ferguson, Douglas Murray, Coleman Hughes. There’s so many people who’ve been thinking about these issues for so long, and there are new intellectual heroes of mine like Haviv Rettig Gur, Michael Oren, Brett Stevens, countless others. Israel holds a very special place in my heart. It’s not just because I’m Jewish. All four of my grandparents survived the Holocaust. My family is pretty much wiped out. My dad was born in Germany in 1946 and moved to Israel in 1948. Growing up, we always heard about how amazing Israel is and what it meant to my family and what it meant to the Jews who had been persecuted and fleeing and had nowhere else to go. Today I’d like to share some of my learnings. October 7th hit us all extraordinarily hard. I would say it’s been a bit of a compulsion.
I want to share a little bit about what it’s been like for me since that day hit. Pretty much every morning I wake up before my kids get up, I have a three and five-year-old, and I probably listen to one or two podcasts and start scrolling through newsletters. I’m off social media because I think it’s absolutely awful, and I’m going to talk about that quite a bit, but since October 7th, I have had regular moments where I get these flashes when I look at pictures of my kids who I put on a photo stream so my family can see them regularly, and I just think about the kids who were murdered and the kidnapped victims. I think about my wife, who I love so dearly, and I realise that this could very well have been me and it’s been very hard to shake. I generally take notes when I read new content or when I listen to podcasts, and this has not been any different. If anything, I’ve been tracking things to an unusual degree, transcribing my favourite podcasts, summarising things, and I started passing that along, and as Wendy said, that’s really how this came about. So much of what I’m going to share might be some things you know, but I’m hoping to pass along some interesting new learnings and to share a little bit about how I’ve been thinking about this over the last couple decades. I’m going to give you a roadmap for where I plan on going. I want to start off with the twisted ideologies at the heart of Hamas’ actions and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. So we’ll talk about jihadism, we’ll talk about martyrdom, and we’ll talk about eliminationism, which is really at the heart of this predicament. I’m going to touch upon what I consider to be the most interesting and compelling analysis I’ve seen since October 7th.
It’s an article by Shany Mor called, “Ecstasy and Amnesia in the Gaza Strip.” I highly recommend you read it, and I just want to back out a second and share that anyone who wants to see any of the resources I’ve collected, I’ll be happy to pass them along. I keep them all in one organised document. After we get through the ideologies at the heart of Hamas’ attacks, I want to get into the West’s tragic response to the events of October 7th. We’ll talk about social justice theory, these twisted power dynamics, and victimhood narratives, and then I’m going to move on to the double standards applied to Israel, specifically with respect to its military response. I’m going to also spend some time towards the end talking about what I think needs to be changed in our educational system. What’s happening in Israel makes it so crystal clear how deep and pervasive this rot really is, and I’m going to close with some personal notes about the decision my wife and I made to send our kids to a Jewish school and what that has meant for us as a family since October 7th, and for me personally, again, it’s a real pleasure. So let’s start off talking about jihadism, martyrdom, and eliminationism. This is really at the heart of October 7th, and it’s been at the heart of every single attack from Hamas since day one, and much of the conflict with the Palestinians over the past 100 years. All you have to do is look at the Hamas charter, listen to Hamas’ leaders, listen to what Sinwar recently said, that Hamas will do this again and again and again. I think one of the reasons why I’m so drawn to Sam Harris, and I’ve read every single thing he’s put out since “The End of Faith,” is because he has been honest about the power of ideas and the power of the belief systems that drive people. They tell you what they believe in, they tell you why they believe in it, and they tell you what drives their actions, and there has still been this unwillingness in the West to accept how central the role of religious extremism is to this conflict, and it’s not just Hamas.
Again, it’s important to separate out the innocent civilians and the Palestinian community, but there is a non-negligible portion of that community that supports what Hamas did, and the same can be said of the broader Arab community. I’ll touch upon that a little bit later on as well. I think it’s been utterly shocking to hear about what Hamas actually perpetrated on October 7th. I’ve been off social media for so long, and I have made a very conscious effort not to watch videos, to stay away from the news. I don’t want to see the images, but I’ve of course read about them and I think about them pretty much daily. I’m happy there are people like Douglas Murray who are going there to see this with his own eyes and provide the most amazing testimony. Same goes for Barry Weiss and her whole team. Extending beyond the narrow Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it’s really important to remember, again another point that Sam Harris raises time and time again, the jihadist philosophy is anti-Western that is global. We’re talking about a messianic vision. This will not stop with Israel. This is not the way it works, and lastly, this goes without saying, but antisemitism is baked deeply into this ideology. Again, people will say things along the lines of not everyone who’s pro-Palestinian is an anti-Semite, and there’s certainly truth to that, but you don’t get a jail out of free card for supporting the pro-Palestinians and not being very clear about where you stand with respect to Hamas, and that is something that has been glaringly absent across most of the Palestinian rallies that I’ve seen. I’m not even sure if any of them have really made the distinction between Hamas as clearly as should be done. I’d like to spend a little bit of time talking about eliminationism or as I like to think about it, this all or nothing approach that has been at the heart of the Palestinian-Israeli predicament over the past 100 years.
There’s a fantastic article by Sol Stern called, “It’s Not The ‘Occupation,’ Stupid.” Highly recommend going through that. I don’t want to spend too much time, but in a nutshell, what he argues quite persuasively is that these arguments that the occupation is what has driven Hamas are completely specious. They’re extraordinarily illegitimate arguments. When there was no occupation, long before Israel was formed, Palestinians were attacking the Jews, Jews who had lived there for hundreds upon hundreds of years, and every single Palestinian leader from al-Husseini to Arafat to Abbas has categorically rejected any peace offer, no matter how good it is, and this really comes down to this notion that there can be no compromise. It’s been really interesting to learn more about the riots that took place in 1920, killing many innocent Jews, the 1929 riot in which al-Husseini claimed falsely that the Jews were going to attack the Dome of the Rock. These are the tropes that have repeated themselves over and over and over again for well over 100 years. You can look at the Oslo peace process and Ehud Olmert’s offer in 2008, which Sol Stern notes as one of the most graphic pieces of evidence that this has nothing to do with the occupation. These core belief systems have driven October 7th. They’ve driven Hamas’ attacks since it’s inception. They drive what Hezbollah does, what the Houthis do. They’re at the core of Iran’s craziness in the Middle East, but journalists very rarely put this front and centre. It is a glaring absence. I’d now like to move into “The Ecstasy and Amnesia in the Gaza Strip.” This is that Shany Mor article, and I must step back. One of my friends from college has been sending me tonnes of the best podcasts and articles, and he’s responsible for this one. Again, I highly recommend that everyone read this article.
There’s also a follow-up video with Shany Mor, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, and one of my personal favourites, Haviv Rettig Gur. I think he might be the strongest voice on Israel right now. He’s always on Dan Senor’s podcast on a, each Monday. So to begin with, at the heart of this analysis is eliminationism, the thread we just left, that there can be no state for us without the disappearance of the state of Israel, and it’s impossible to really understand the last 100 years without accepting that fundamental truth. Shany Mor has this really interesting framing of the Israeli-Palestinian predicament. He breaks it up into a few key components, nation and statelessness, the first two, which he claims are very common across other territorial disputes. He gives the example of the Kurds, but there are three exacerbating factors which are unique here, displacement, occupation, and fragmentation, and he believes that the entire Israeli-Palestinian predicament can really be explained through three wars separated by three generations, and while all three wars were quite different, there were extraordinary similarities across these different conflicts, and they have reared their head again with what happened in October 7th. We’re talking about the 1947-1948 war, which led to the displacement of a couple, hundreds of thousands of Arabs, the 1967 war, which led to the occupation of West Bank and Gaza, and then 2000 on the second Intifada, the counterinsurgency campaign and over 140 terrorist bombings that led to the ultimate fragmentation, the West Bank and Gaza ruled by different parties, Gaza by Hamas, the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority, and what Shany shares and what again I consider to be extraordinarily persuasive are these two fundamental elements that tied all three of these wars together.
The first is the pre-war jubilation, this utter sense of ecstasy and righteousness about what was about to happen, the opportunity to completely destroy the state of Israel and kill Jews and eliminate the idea of Zionism. There are countless accounts of how extraordinarily happy people were when these attacks were initiated by the Arabs, and then immediately we get into the second component, which is loss converted within an instant into this twisted narrative of a moral victimhood. You take all three of these wars and you think about who instigated and who really was acting in defence. Israel is cast as the aggressor even though it was acting defensively, and the Palestinians are cast as victims, no agency whatsoever. This is the piece that really strikes me because it ties into the social justice component, this victimhood narrative that the Palestinians have absolutely no agency, the Arabs have no agency. They’re just victims here, and one comment that Shany remarked upon, which I think is worth quoting, something that I have thought about quite a bit in the past, which is, “transforming self-caused defeat into noble victimhood "isn’t just ahistorical. "It more or less guarantees that "the defeat will be repeated.” I think this is a really important point to think about. If you always think of yourself as a victim and you cast your enemy as the aggressor, as the villain, a villain which carries all faults whatsoever, and you pass this down from generation to generation with narratives like the Nakba, and you don’t share the history and you don’t learn from what you’ve done in the past, and you pretend that Israelis have never made any peace offers that were legitimate, you put yourself in a position where it’s impossible to actually ever get closer to peace, and this is another point that Shany raises, which is just that the rejection of all the peace offers were extraordinarily popular, and they remain extraordinarily popular.
There was no dissenting camp which stood up and said, Arafat is making a huge mistake. Abbas is making a huge mistake, Al-Husseini is making a huge mistake. We can pretty much get most of what we want. There’s some other interesting facets to this article. I’m going to try to breeze through them a little bit quickly, but again, it’s a must read. Another really unique component of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is how it fits into the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. Most national conflicts are tied to the two parties at play, but here you have this broader story where the rest of the Arab world is always sucked into it, and that obviously makes this a much more difficult situation. As Shany Mor explained, the post-imperial Arab states managed to wipe out the Jewish presence everywhere else in the Middle East, except for one place where they were able to form a majority and defend themselves in Israel, but let’s now move on to October 7th. The exact same two components appear. There is the utter exultation upon this attack, the most heinous attack we can imagine since the Holocaust. Again, it’s really hard for me to wrap my head around what was done. I think this is something we’re going to continue to struggle with. I don’t want to stray too much, but the failure to condemn Hamas immediately and every day thereafter, the UN, Antonio Guterres, who I think should be ashamed of himself, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, all the university presidents, corporate leaders, there’s a moment of real reckoning here that there has been a failure to condemn Hamas, and you’ve seen it with these pro-Palestinian rallies immediately after October 7th, before Israel retaliated, the joy, the ecstasy. This is something Shany Mor kept repeating over and over again, the same common theme, and then immediately within days, this story is again reconceived as victimhood.
People are calling for a ceasefire before Israel did anything, and they are rejecting the truth and they are refusing to recognise the fact that Hamas actually broke a ceasefire on October 7th. There are some other interesting things I’ve learned about. I’m sure most people have learned quite a bit over these last two months. The amount of forwarding back and forth is pretty staggering. People that I don’t even know that well are sending me a tonne of information, and I think one of the most interesting parts of Shany Mor’s analysis is about the UN and what he refers to as the monster that is UNRRA, the cruellest human experiment of post-1945 diplomacy anywhere in the world. As Shany explains, and again, this has been really elucidating for me because I didn’t know much about this, refugees are typically quickly resettled and rehabilitated when their territorial conflicts, the borders are redrawn based upon who won the conflict, and there isn’t this perpetual state of occupation or semi-occupation, but with this one conflict, the Palestinians are treated completely differently. UNRRA has an extraordinarily different mandate than the United, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which is the agency that is responsible for the rest of the refugee crises around the world. What UNRRA has done is created a perpetual refugee class. This doesn’t exist anywhere else. UNRRA is responsible for the displaced Arabs from the 1947-48 war. Descendants from that displacement even today are counted as refugees. Even those, so many of the Palestinians have not actually left across international borders. They’re still counted as refugees, which is also unusual, and lastly, even if they get citizenship in another country, they’re still counted as refugees. So what started as 200,000 refugees has now become 2.2 million.
This is staggering, and lastly, because Shany Mor has such a away with words, I’m going to quote him when he talks about the left colonial narrative, oppressor dynamic. “A global programme of anti-colonialism "and left identity politics has taken up the existence "of Israel as the worst example "of white European colonialism on the planet "and the Palestinian cause "as its rightful justice bringing nemesis.” This will lead us in to social justice theory, power differential, the oppressor versus oppressed narrative, the victimhood narrative, and what Yascha Mounk refers to as the identity trap. This is something I think people are starting to spend a lot of time thinking about. People I don’t really think realised how insidious this has been on the college campuses, and it must be said, while there’s tremendous focus on the college campuses, this is starting all the way down and as young as kindergarten. So at its core, the ideology that I consider to be extraordinarily twisted which has shaped the West’s tragic response to the events of October 7th, I back to this notion of power, the powerful versus the less powerful, the oppressed versus the oppressor, the coloniser, settler, imperialist categorization. I didn’t know who Frantz Fanon was until quite recently when my same friend introduced me to an Eli Lake podcast and I learned that in “The Wretched of the Earth,” Frantz Fanon really fleshed out this theory which focuses on power and the belief that violence against the oppressor can liberate a country and an individual’s mind. This is something that you’ll hear again and again and again across college campuses, across earlier childhood educational institutions. Violence against an oppressor is okay, and this was tied to the Algerian revolution and the ultimate exit from I believe over one million French colonialists, and as Haviv Rettig Gur shared on a recent Dan Senor podcast, the PLO modelled itself after this exact kind of oppressor versus oppressed ideology.
One of the interesting facets here is the victimhood narrative. All agency is removed. There is literally no accountability. There is a victim who is blameless and there is a bad guy. There is a villain, and we of course will get to Israel very soon. I want to step back and share a little bit of a framework that I considered to be extraordinarily compelling. Again, another intellectual hero of mine, I’ve read every single book he’s written, Jonathan Haidt. If you don’t know him, I highly recommend getting “The Coddling of the American Mind.” “The Righteous Mind” is also fantastic, and just reading his articles about social media and the mental health crisis and hyperpolarization keep going and going, but he and Greg Luciano wrote this book and they were spending a lot of time thinking about what was happening on college campuses. This was about a decade ago, and Jonathan Haidt breaks it down into the three great untruths that have been shaping the hysteria and insanity on college campuses. The first great untruth is the untruth of fragility, the idea that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the premise should be. We’re creating very fragile children, people who are easily offended, people who believe they are harmed if they have to listen to a different viewpoint. There is so much sanctity, there’s so much hypocrisy here. The second great untruth is the untruth of emotional reasoning. Always trust your feelings. That is something so many students have learned to do. It has been validated by parents and it has been validated by teachers. If you feel a certain way, that’s it. If you feel that you’ve been discriminated against, that’s it. If you were wrong about that, you don’t have to apologise.
So much confirmation biases here, so much laziness is baked in to this kind of narrative, and the last great untruth is the untruth of us versus them. Life is a battle between evil people and good people. There are different groups of people, and some of them are cast as a villain. It’s a Manichean view. It’s an all or nothing approach. I think of this almost as a simple framework for little kids. I think about my five-year-old where you have check boxes for the good side and you have check boxes for the bad side, or X’s, that is. Now I’m going to move into “The Identity Trap,” which is Yascha Mounk’s fantastic book. I believe I started reading this before the attacks of October 7th. Again, I’ve been thinking about these issues for quite so long, but it was amazing to read such a clear and cogent thinker who went through the alleged intellectuals who are at the heart of the insanity that is happening in our culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about ultra-woke ideology and how it feeds into right wing populism, and that’s why I felt like it was absolutely imperative to listen, to read this book in full. I can also get you a link to the full podcast with Sam Harris and Yascha Mounk. It’s an excellent primer here. So let’s begin. Society is defined by rigid and distinct identity groups. Universalist aspirations are not the goal. Tribalism is actually what happens here. There’s a focus on social injustice, which is obviously okay in a vacuum, but as implemented, this ideology is extraordinarily counterproductive. It subverts the goals of those who are party to this twisted ideology.
As Yascha Mounk says, this is a political trap. The idea is to create diversity, but you are separating people into distinct groups, and at its heart, you are basically saying that you cannot trust others if they weren’t born exactly the way you are. Colorblindness as Martin Luther King envisioned is not the right goal, and I don’t know if any of you have seen this, but there are these amazing videos where you see people really losing their minds when they think about Martin Luther King, Jr. and what he actually espoused and how far we have come and how deeply twisted that narrative is. Dissent is discouraged. There is a deep pessimism about the possibility of progress. Obviously it’s extraordinarily disheartening what is happening in the West, and we are going to talk about the double standard that is applied to Israel, but setting aside Israel and the Jews for the moment, there has been tremendous progress. I’m 41 years old. Think about what it’s like being born today in America or in many parts of the world compared to 60 years ago, compared to even 20 years ago, and then zoom back out 100 years, 200 years, 1,000 years. It is undeniable that we are making progress, especially when it comes to equal rights and tolerance, and again, there are backlashes, the rise of populism and authoritarianism, Trumpism. It’s been terrifying but again, if you deny that any progress has been made, you put yourself in such a strange place, and something that I keep coming back to is this victimhood narrative. If your identity is so wrapped up in this notion of victimhood, it is impossible to have any progress. I firmly believe that. It removes all accountability and again, not denying that there’s racism, not denying that there’s tremendous amount of prejudice in the world, but sometimes it’s not discrimination, sometimes it’s not prejudice, and having this kind of limited, simplistic view through which to see the world means that we’re not being serious thinkers and it means that we’re not able to tackle these challenges.
Again, don’t want to go off on a tangent, but another book that I think is well worth reading is Martin Gurri’s “Revolt of the Public,” and it ties into this. He does a fantastic job explaining all the leaderless movements that really took shape beginning in 2011 as across the world, you know, Occupy Wall Street. There were, you know, Arab Spring. There were so many different, similar leaderless movements, very much nihilistic, this idea of tearing down whatever the current system is, whether it was capitalism or you name it, but not actually replacing it with an alternative, not proposing an alternative, and that is something that I think at its heart is a fundamental problem with this particular ideology. I’m going to briefly go through some of the intellectual thinkers that Yascha Mounk highlights in the book. Michel Foucault, the key ideas being the rejection of universal truth, and a deep scepticism about the possibility of progress. Derrick Bell, one of the earliest thinkers of critical race theory, a term that has been tossed around a lot over these last couple years. One of the fundamental tenets of his ideology is the denial of universal moral principles, being able to bring genuine political progress. Then we’re going to get to some of the most notable players in this space today. Ibram Kendi, who I think a lot of people have heard of, “How to Be an Antiracist Baby” is his book, which is intended for two and three-year-olds.
I remember when I first saw this at the bookstore and I had to flip it open. It is mind boggling to think that this is the right approach with a two or three-year-old. Essentially, he says, everyone is either racist or anti-racist. Then you move on to Robin DiAngelo, who basically says that all white people are racist, and if you disagree, guess what? That just shows how racist you are, and let’s get to this idea of intersectionality, and I think this might be maybe the most important idea, at least in my mind. The way Yascha Mounk breaks it down is into two elements. The first part is that people in different identity groups can never fully understand each other. It’s just not possible. So that’s the first predicate, and the second piece of it is that you have to agree to a set of specific positions across a whole host of issues that you might not know anything about. So if you’re for Black rights, you have to be anti-Israel. It’s not a coincidence that in the early BLM platform, there was a crazy anti-Israel stance, which referred to the genocide committed by the Israelis, and I believe it said that it was worse than an apartheid state. Again, I highly doubt that the person who created that platform understood anything about Israel, but this is what people are instructed as part of this very simplistic social justice theory. I want to chat a little bit about affinity groups and Black-only dorms, because that is something that I’ve come across in my lifetime. When my wife and I were exploring schools for our five-year-old last year, this is something that cropped up in at least one of our interviews. The idea of separating young children into identity groups is so clearly counterproductive. I am certain that there is no evidence supporting that this is the right way to deal with young children, but these institutions have been captured. Again, there might be very pure intentions here, but there is no doubt that is not the right approach. We do need to focus on shared humanity. We do need to focus on universalist aspirations. It’s wonderful to explore diversity. It’s one of the things that’s so amazing about going to a college which has people from all over the world and where you can meet people from very different walks of life, but when you separate people out like this, especially at a young age, what faith does anyone really have at the educators at these schools have any idea what they’re doing and that they’re not going to do a tremendous amount of damage, and how balkanized do we want to go?
You know, one of my closest friends from college, I think he might be listening, half Black, half white. What if he doesn’t feel comfortable with some of those categorizations? And we’re talking about young kids who might not really understand racial construct in the first place. This entire narrative smacks of incredible intellectual laziness. This is something that all of the thinkers I deeply respect come back to again and again and again, critical thinking, viewpoint, diversity, the pursuit of truth, the willingness to embrace nuance, intellectual honesty, a deep understanding and appreciation of history. These are the ideals that should be guiding our society and our students from day one, but we have a system right now where we are instructing kids to make check marks. If you want to be on the right side of social justice, these are the bad guys. You don’t have to do anything else. You literally don’t have to do any thinking. You know, it’s like, I sometimes think about this idea of critical thinking, but this is the absence of any thinking whatsoever. The ignorance is staggering. It’s absolutely staggering, and that’s why I think sometimes it feels like such a huge mountain to climb with these college students, the TikTok generation, and again, don’t want to date myself. I proud to say I’m 41. I don’t want to be a part of that younger generation, but we need to confront this honestly. We need to recognise what’s happened here. There’s another interesting piece that I’m not going to spend too much time on, but that relates to journalism. Matti Friedman has an amazing article in 2014 all about the coverage in Israel. Highly recommend that. There’s a recent podcast, I can also get that to you, but he noticed more than a decade ago, I think he sort of dates us back to 2008, that journalism was reconceived as activism.
There were certain narratives, and in this case, Israel as the villain, and if you didn’t adhere to that very simplistic narrative, you were censored, and this has been going on for a couple decades now, and you see it since October 7th, time and time again. The Al-Ahli Hospital, you’re seeing it with the coverage every single day. So when we think about our educational system, it’s important not only to stay with the colleges. We have to talk about kindergarten, we have to talk about our middle schools, we have to talk about our elementary schools, but if we move to colleges because they are getting so much press and these are going to be the people theoretically leading our country, they have become extraordinarily bureaucratic. There are insane speech codes. We are talking about microaggressions all the time. You have tremendous ideological conformity. There are really very few conservative professors, and even how you define conservatism here is somewhat problematic. You think about how ultra left so much of the professor base has become. We really need to get back to the centre. We need to get back to classical liberalism. We need to encourage real viewpoint diversity, embed debate into every single class. I’m also going to touch a little bit upon cancel culture. Greg Lukianoff just came out with another book, which I also read, can get you a summary about that one, called “The Cancelling of the American Mind.” One of the fundamental tenets here is the silencing of dissenting opinions. We’re not encouraged to debate.
We shout down people who have different viewpoints than us, and we say we’re harmed if we have to listen to something else. Again, there’s some interesting events taking place against Jews, and that’s an entirely separate chat, which I highly recommend that Wendy tries to find a constitutional expert on to really talk about free speech, to get into codes of conduct at campuses, to get into private versus public, but it’s undeniably clear that the colleges have lost their way. If anyone has seen the recent Penn and Harvard president’s speeches, it’s an abomination. There’s no doubt that they should resign or be fired soon, and I’m hopeful that that’s going to happen. We have to talk about social media. It is absolutely necessary. You think about Gen Z, which Greg Lukianoff refers to as the most cancelable cohort. Think about these kids and the extensive digital record that they have since day one basically. They are terrified of being ostracised. There’s so much virtue signalling that happens on these social media platforms. If you don’t post something 10 seconds after George Floyd was murdered, people might assume that you’re racist, and that that is really what we’re talking about. So you have this idea that people who might have different viewpoints are silenced, and then this complementary idea that you have to show that you are on the right side of social justice. You have to do that through social media, and when we step back, this is something I’ve thought about for a long time, which is why I consider Meta to be one of the worst companies on the planet. You look at the amplification algorithm and you look at how this operates to make social media companies huge sums of money. It’s about rage, it’s about the basis of our emotions.
Then you think about misinformation and disinformation campaigns, you think about the skillset that Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China have honed over the last decade and the truth is at this point, like the crazies on the left are doing the job of those countries. They don’t even have to interfere as much, but that’s an entirely different story, and TikTok, that incredible artificial intelligence at the heart of TikTok, shorter and shorter clips. So that means that these platforms are able to curate the platform faster and faster and faster. People are not diving deep into anything. Younger kids are not reading as much and they’re tethered to their phones and they’re getting a tonne of false information passed their way. There was a study done not too long ago which showed that falsehood travels six times faster than truth. Just think about that and think about how these platforms make money. Falsehood makes these companies money, and lastly, when I think about the identity trap, something that I think is so incredibly perverse is this notion of diversity and DEI and all of these rather shallow claims made that the goal is diversity, but you are separating people into distinct groups. You are telling them that they cannot understand people who are from different groups. That is not a promising future for a sustainable society that has trust and respect for everyone living in that society. We’re lucky to be in America. I’m an American. I know there are a lot of people from different countries listening in, I assume most from the developed world, and you think about how lucky we are to be born in a country that is multicultural. I don’t for a second believe that I controlled basically anything, my genes, when I was born, where I was born.
Going off a little bit on a tangent, but I think it’s something that very few people really appreciate, and how lucky, how grateful we should be to be in a place where classical liberalism is at the heart of what our society is trying to advocate. When we take this very twisted ideology and apply it to Israel, it’s very clear how the simplistic narrative works. To be on the right side, you have to be against Israel. Israel is the oppressor. It is white, it is settler, colonialist, imperialist. Israel and its citizens and its, the Jewish citizens can never be victims. Israel is always the aggressor. It is always the villain. This is all about occupation, their myriad justifications to support any attack against Israel because you’re taking a blameless victim that is just rising up against its awful oppressor, and something I’ve come back to again and again as I’ve thought about this conflict is that Israel does not have a right to exist. That’s really what this comes back to. 1948 should never have happened. It doesn’t make a difference that Israel has been attacked and won repeatedly. Doesn’t make a difference that it’s surrounded by one of the craziest enemies anyone could possibly imagine in Hamas, an enemy that uses human shields, that wants its civilians to die. Israel is the bad guy and there are no shades of grey here. There’s a clear generational divide. You are seeing this in the stats. A week after October 7th, as Neil Ferguson said in one of his podcasts, 81% of people 65 and over approved of Israel’s military response. In the 18-34 cohort, it was just 27%. Penn and Harvard’s president’s testimony, again, something everyone should watch, they will be appalled. You think about social media and TikTok, which I just got into, for every video view with the pro-Israel hashtag in the US, there are 54 pro-Palestinian hashtags. Think about that, 54X difference. Let’s not think of demagogues who have always used lies to spread their crazy ideologies. Think about what these amplification algorithms are doing, the scale, the frequency. It’s staggering and again, shorter and shorter clips, more and more videos. This is a huge, huge problem, and I just want to share one little anecdote that goes back to the ignorance here.
I was chatting with a friend and he has a couple kids who are quite a bit older than mine. I don’t remember if his kid is 17 or 19, but she was talking about her friend’s views of what was happening in Israel. He had actually asked her, he was curious what she thought, and she said, “Oh dad, don’t you mean the Palestinian genocide?” Again, don’t need to delve into the details. It wasn’t part of that conversation, but what this person found out not long after, is that his daughter didn’t even know what happened on October 7th. You think about what lies are being shared every single minute, every single second about Israel, and this is the beast that we are dealing with. Again, don’t want to go off on too many different tangents, but we could talk about BDF, why no other nation. You know, that is a whole other podcast, the double standards that are constantly applied to Israel, the pro-Palestinian rallies before Israel even retaliated. This is something I thought about again and again and again. Where is the separation from Hamas? Where are peaceful pro-Palestinians saying, Hamas is the worst culprit here? It’s accountable for all of the losses on both sides. We need to get rid of Hamas. We support the Israeli Jews. There’s none of that, and there is an exceptional treatment of Israel here. It’s really impossible to think of another situation where something like this could have happened to a group of innocent people and then there would’ve been rallies immediately trying to justify in some way what happened with no separation, no daylight between Hamas and the Palestinians, or whatever other parties you might try to substitute.
It’s laughable to even think about a situation like this. I’m going to talk very briefly about Israel’s response because it’s something that you see in every outlet. This always seemed clear to me that there is a need to degrade Hamas’ military capabilities after October 7th. The status quo just is not workable. What would any other nation of developed world do with an enemy like this one that is willing and has proven for decades that this is what it wants to do, that is telling you this is what it’s going to do, and just proved it to you on October 7th? How quickly calls for ceasefire crop up, staggering. The twisted notion of proportionality and essentially the idea that Israel is not allowed to defend itself. National security and deterrence are absolutely key here. How can any Israeli stay in that society and feel secure if Hamas is not degraded to such a degree that people can go back to their homes and feel like there is a future here? And what happens with Hezbollah and Iran and Houthis if there’s just a ceasefire and Hamas continues to do what it’s doing? Won’t those nations feel emboldened? I think Brett Stevens put it quite nicely maybe a day after the attack. He said that when we talk about proportionality, the result is perverse as it guarantees future conflict and tragedies, and you think about World War II, you think about other world conflicts. You think about December 7th, today, the day that Pearl Harbour was attacked and the steps that our country took.
No other nation has to deal with these kinds of claims, these kinds of double standards. There’s something else that I’ve thought quite a bit about when it comes to proportionality, and again, no intention of sounding callous here, but what number would be appropriate for collateral damage here when you have an enemy like Hamas that embeds itself within the civilian population, that uses human shields, that wants its own to die because it knows that it’s great for the international court of opinion, and it also subscribes to this idea of martyrdom? There are a couple other related ideas which I think are interesting to touch upon. One is this idea that you cannot destroy Hamas as an ideology. First off, you can try to weaken it. You can try to improve Israel’s national security. You can try to deter, even if you can’t get rid of every single Hamas leader, every single Hamas soldier, you can severely degrade its capabilities. So this claim seems quite specious to me, and then as Douglas Murray recently shared, we have destroyed ideas like Nazism, like Japanese imperialism, but again, it all comes down to this attempt to put Israel in a safer place, and like the pro-Palestinian rallies and the impossibility of imagining any other conflict in the world where something like this could happen, the theme applies to this particular situation. I know we’re coming up to the end of the hour, so I’m going to breeze through a little bit more of the thoughts I have with respect to our educational institutions. We are seeing all of these antisemitism task forces come out. You know, again, it’s important to think about the fact that there are these bloated DEI bureaucracies and they aren’t able to handle this antisemitism piece, and it’s because it is not a part of the twisted ideology that is at the heart of many of the DEI operatives.
It’s more than just an admission, a condemnation of Hamas here, or maybe an admission that the early statements that these presidents have made were not appropriate. There needs to be a much bigger reckoning, an admission of a mistake about how we have been teaching our children. Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, oppressed vs. suppressed narratives, the simplistic lens where we are encouraging no thought whatsoever, the complete absence of factual analysis, no debate, no critical thinking, no viewpoint diversity, we have to move away from that, and we have to do that in kindergarten. We have to get rid of affinity groups, we have to get rid of Black-only dorms. We have to embrace our differences, but we have to create an entirely different culture, and where is the coordination among all of these universities where they’re actually coming up with a new curriculum? Jonathan Haidt, Coleman Hughes, Barry Weiss, all of these brilliant thinkers. It should be part of the interview process. The administrators should have to read these books. Faculty should have to read these books. It should be part of the interview process for students. It should be part of orientation, it should be part of the entire first year of the school. If you’re going to teach Ibram Kendi, you should have to teach Coleman Hughes’ upcoming new book. You should have to teach John McWhorter’s “Woke Racism.” We have to teach people how to debate ideas seriously.
We have serious challenges in the world. We cannot have simplistic reasoning, and look, there’s this bigger moral question here. Look at what has happened on our campuses, that we have so many students who have fallen prey to these ideologies, who are so ignorant, who are antisemitic, and if they’re not antisemitic, they should be ashamed of themselves for taking this kind of simplistic view of the world. I’d like to close with a personal note about my decision, my wife’s decision and my decision to send our kids to a Jewish school. It was about a year ago. We were deliberating where to send our kids and it was a very difficult decision for us. We took a long walk in Central Park, live in New York City. We originally weren’t sure about public school, private school, secular versus Jewish, and I’m an atheist, so it was not the easiest decision for me to send our kids to Jewish school, even though I went to Jewish school, even though my wife went to Jewish school, but my wife felt like we wouldn’t be able to give them the kind of tethering to Judaism and the moral compass and the sense of community at a Jewish school if we went to a secular school, and you might run into a situation where your kid absolutely hates going to Hebrew school and just falls by the wayside ‘cause your kid is playing sports or in music and just hates it. I’m so grateful to my wife for pushing on this. I remember digging in my heels a little bit, but it has been so meaningful to be a part of a Jewish school since October 7th, to see my kids writing challah after leaving them on the day of rage when we weren’t sure if we were going to send our kids to school.
There’s a lot more to being Jewish than just the religious piece. There’s a cultural component and there aren’t that many of us, and I think a lot of Jews who might be atheists or who might not be as attached to this cultural component are thinking a lot more about it, and on this first night of Hanukkah, it’s something that I really think about a lot that is really meaningful to be a part of a community that is thinking about this the same way. I don’t worry about my kids getting BDS nonsense thrown in their faces, about them hearing crazy propaganda, and this is a huge undertaking to try to shift the narrative in our educational system. It’s hard to imagine how people will confront this crazy task, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable. I hope that there is a real reckoning right now, and I want to also note that Donald Trump, in my opinion, is a singular threat, and it might seem like it’s coming out of nowhere, but there’s so many on the left who claim to love democracy, who claim to be terrified of the notion of populism and authoritarianism, but these kinds of audiologies play into the hand of the right-wing populist leaders, and it’s so important to step back and be a little bit pragmatic about this.
We have to shift that reasoning. Think about the centrist voters, think about the independent voters in our country right now and what they’re thinking when they look at colleges, and again, President Biden’s been amazing, but it doesn’t make a difference to a lot of voters. They’re just going to see this as the craziness of the left. So I just wish you all the very best. You know, this is an incredibly tough time. This has been all consuming. We’ve all been losing a lot of sleep, the last couple nights for me in particular as I’ve been thinking about this even more so than normal, and I am proud to be a Jew and you know, I’m proud of my family and where we come from and I’m proud of the family that I’ve built right now. So that’s it, Wendy. I know we only have a couple minutes. Like, I don’t know if it’s enough time for Q&A, but if anyone does want to ask a question, I’m happy to.
Thank you, Josh. The questions were, first of all, it was absolutely outstanding. It was filled with so much information, so much food for thought, and I really want to ask you, Corrina, it would be great if we could just get the books and the references and share it with our participants because there’s so much to assimilate. You know, certainly I, it’s, I’m going to listen to your, the, this presentation again. You already gave us so much food for thought.
Yeah, probably too much.
No, no, no, no, it’s great, and all the references which brilliant. So thank you very, very, very much, and I’m glad that you now have clarity because I know the school debate went on for a long, long time, and actually, you know, it’s heartfelt to see that it’s such a tragic situation actually gave you and Pammy clarity, and as you said, tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, and I want to say to all our listeners that if you go to our website on Shine A Light, Shine A Light website, and have a look at what the organisation Shine A Light is offering for the next week, I really want to give them a shout out, 'cause they are absolutely excellent. Carly and many of her colleagues and our colleagues have been, Lee, the whole team, our team together with many other teams have been leading this initiative, and you refer to it, Josh and yes, please, if you would take questions, if you’ve got time for questions, we’d appreciate it.
Q&A and Comments:
Yeah, sure. I’m seeing some and a lot of people are asking for a reading list, so I am very happy to do that. I will not only give you a reading list. I will send you, you know, my summary is my transcripts, my links, and something I didn’t really get into, and again, I know everyone’s time is precious and people are in very different time zones. There’s so many arguments here, apartheid, war crimes, genocide, the smartest thinkers, people who are infinitely smarter than me, infinitely more articulate, they have spelled this out so clearly, and I sort of break it down, you know, all of these huge arguments that are raised every single day. So yes, I’ll be really happy to do that, and anyone who has any other questions like, please feel free, I’m open door.
[Corrina] And Josh, just to confirm, you’ll send that list to me and people who want it should send an email to info@lockdownuniversity.org.
Yeah, absolutely.
[Wendy] Brilliant, and I’m pre, I’m very happy and proud to say that this is a platform where we do have freedom of speech. I think it’s one of the few platforms where there’s freedom of speech. So thank you. Thank you. Josh, are there other questions?
There are, but you know, it’s hard to get through all of them. I think there’s a thing with Q&A because now I’m starting to see like 15, 20 of them. Some people are asking me which books I’ve read and you know, I, you know, I guess I’ll just read, let me just see if like, can read one that seems interesting. Yeah, I guess someone is sharing an perspective. It says, one way in which today’s antisemitism differs from previous antisemitism is that no one now admits to it. It’s pursued under the banner of anti-racism. The Jews are the racist. To be anti-racist is to be anti-Jewish. We should not be misled. Antisemitism has survived the discrediting of its name, and I think this is an interesting point and appreciate that individual raising it.
You know, there are just so many tropes here. The whiteness trope, again, something else I’ve learned. Listen to Yuval Harari’s chat with Sam Harris, just that like 50% of Israelis are actually tied to the Mizrahi wing. You know, I see this with my kids’ schools. We are worried about there not being enough diversity and there’s so much more diversity. Like people don’t realise we, like Jews are not just a group of white people and you know, there are just so many of these nuances that we need to make clearer and again, this comes back to like this broader coalition. You know, I, we need the smartest people thinking about this, like, I want Barry Weiss, I want Coleman Hughes, I want Jonathan Haidt, I want Neil Ferguson. I know some of them are working on their own university, but there has to be a concerted effort here because some of the students at these college campuses, it’s going to be hard to get them. We have to try, but this is for the incoming students. This is for the people in middle school and elementary school. You know, it’s just we have to start attacking this in an organised way. Again, went off on a little bit of a tangent. So yes, I think given how many Q&As are coming in right now, it’s almost like impossible for me to really answer any of them right now.
[Wendy] All right.
But again, I want to engage more with the community and, you know, just a pleasure to be here, Wendy and I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity.
[Wendy] Thank you Josh, and thanks to everybody for joining us. Josh will be back, I hope. We’ll discuss offline and a lot of food for thought, and looking forward to seeing you soon. Thank you, thanks everybody for joining us.
Likewise, take care.