1208: Antisemitism | Skeptical Sunday

1208: Antisemitism | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher Nick Pell. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just [00:01:00] visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. It's not the most pleasant topic on earth, but make no mistake about it, antisemitism is on the rise in America and in the west.

Part of this is a problem of exposure. The internet allows people to just post whatever crosses their mind at any given moment, but it isn't limited to the internet either. The Anti-Defamation League noted a 360% increase in anti-Semitic incidents, including 56 physical assaults, 554 incidents of vandalism, and over 1300 incidents of verbal or written harassment.

There was also the May, 2025 shooting outside of a Jewish museum in Washington, dc The firebombing of the protest for the release of Israeli hostages in Colorado. One quirk of modern antisemitism is that it's mostly not coming from the usual suspects of swastika wearing skinheads. Today's leading lights of antisemitism are soft spoken, well read, and armed with charts and citations, and perhaps most disturbingly just [00:02:00] ignoring them is perhaps the most dangerous thing that we can do.

Today's antisemites are dressed, pressed, and probably more serious than ever. All of this raises the question, why do smart people fall for dumb ideas? And why is antisemitism rearing its ugly head yet again Here today to help me fact check the fine print on the world's oldest conspiracy theory is writer and researcher Nick Pell.

So Nick, before we get into it, explain why you were so insistent about covering this topic. And by the way, quick note, as many of you already know, I am Jewish, so keep that in mind during the episode for reasons that'll probably become pretty obvious.

Nick Pell: Honestly, because I'm so tired of seeing people confront antisemitism in this lazy, kumbaya.

All people are the same. Hate is bad kids, okay? It's this like afterschool special, lazy, childish way. It's ill-prepared to confront modern antisemitism, and it puts. People I love in danger.

Jordan Harbinger: Are you also a member of the tribe? People

Nick Pell: want to

Jordan Harbinger: know

Nick Pell: [00:03:00] I'm not Jewish, but I am married to a Jew and we have a baby on the way.

So for those of you unfamiliar with Mosaic Law, that means that I'm about to be the father of a Jew, right? Any children we have will be Halachically Jewish.

Jordan Harbinger: Is halachically a 50 cent word that means half Jewish?

Nick Pell: So according to Jewish law, there's not really such a thing as half Jewish. Your mom is a Jew, you're Jewish.

Okay? Your mom is a Gentile. You're a Gentile. I mean, it's kind of moot because Hitler didn't care about Mosaic law. It was more of a racial thing in Nazi Germany. Regardless. When me and my wife were first talking, we agreed that if we ever had kids, we were going to raise them with a very strong sense of their ethnic Jewish identity.

Jordan Harbinger: What does Jewish identity mean in your case specifically?

Nick Pell: We celebrate Passover and Hanukkah At home. She found some like box collection thing that's about Jewish holidays. That's for kids. We'll probably get that. I [00:04:00] always tell my mother-in-law, happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah. I speak German. I am adamant that my children learn Yiddish around 12, 13, 14 because that's what all the European Jewish newspapers, plays, poems, novels and such.

Were in for the last several hundred years is actually dying off since the founding of the state of Israel, which is is really sad. There's very few people outside of certain parts of Brooklyn that can read Yiddish anymore. I think the point of this for our listeners is that a lot of people don't really know what it means to be Jewish.

Is it a race, is it a religion? It's kind of a bit of both. The sociological term is ethno religious community.

Jordan Harbinger: So is that part race or ethnicity and part religion kind of? Is that what that means?

Nick Pell: Yeah. If you become a Christian or a Buddhist or anything else, you're still Jewish in some sense. It's also worth super briefly touching on, even the [00:05:00] Jews we have here in the West aren't a united ethnicity.

You've got Ashkenazi Jews. We're mostly Russian. German Austrian empire. Right. You know, Poland would've been part of that. That's me. Sephardic Jews, that's my wife. That's most Jews in, uh, the United States. Yeah, particularly in the Northeast. Sephardic Jews, who you would see more in the American South are Mediterranean, Spain, Italy, certain parts of the Lavant.

As Rahi Jews originate in Persia, or you know, recently in Persia. I know they all come from the the Holy land, but, so I don't want people to think that I'm minimizing that, but their traditions come from time in Persia.

There's other groups, Ethiopian Jews, Yemeni Jews. They're not very common in the west, but they all have their own overlapping traditions.

So when someone talks about how the Jews control the world,

it's like. Which ones?

Jordan Harbinger: All of them Barot. No, that's, I mean, a meaningless phrase can have a meaningless answer. Anyway, that's the nickel tour of the different Jewish ethnic [00:06:00] communities, I suppose. But what can you tell us about the history of antisemitism?

Obviously this spans thousands of years, so maybe we try to keep it brief. I mean, if all the Jews come from the Holy Land, Israel, whatever you want to call it, and then you've got like Mizrahi Jews from Persia, but that, oh no, that's recent. That was only 4,000 years ago. It's like, oh God, I'm getting conf.

You know, can we do this in less than, uh, seven hours?

Nick Pell: Oh, absolutely. And it's actually interesting that you, you say that, 'cause that's a like common gripe of Antisemites, is that Jews aren't, you know, they're not really from Israel, they're from Poland or whatever. As

Jordan Harbinger: long as you stop history at a point that's

Nick Pell: convenient for you.

Yes. Benjamin Danya is from Philadelphia. I know. Fun fact, the short version is that modern antisemitism can be seen broadly in three phases. First, there's the religious antisemitism. This is inquisition of the Middle Ages, that time period. That revolves around grotesque misrepresentations of Jewish religious practices, claims that Jews used infant blood in their rituals [00:07:00] and poisoned wells and things like that.

Jordan Harbinger: All of that's pretty obviously untrue. Yeah,

Nick Pell: right. There are all kinds of expulsions of Jews from places in Europe and North Africa. These expulsions, as well as more recent ones, are often used in a way to kind of, it's like where there's smoke, there's fire thing, you know? Well, the Jews have been thrown out of all these countries.

Don't you think there's something there? The figure generally used is that Jews have been expelled from 109 countries.

Jordan Harbinger: When I hear that, I'm like, geez, that's, gosh, tell me why that, what's that all about? But is that figure even accurate? Have Jews been expelled from 109 countries or is that one of those like, Hey, we chose this number 'cause it sounds persuasive, but you know, we pulled it outta thin air.

Nick Pell: It's not a real number. Okay. It's counts. For example, the expulsion of Jews from London as being expelled from an entire country. The real number of countries that Jews have been expelled from is difficult to pinpoint exactly, but it's somewhere around 12.

Jordan Harbinger: All right, well, let me make a note. London, not a country, but it's almost like a semantic [00:08:00] argument, right?

'cause people might go, well, London was a city state back then, so it kind of counts as a country and modern parlance. So it's the same thing. I don't know, but okay. Is it unclean? As it makes me feel to play devil's advocate on this particular issue, the point still remains that Jews, we, Jews I should say, keep getting expelled from various places.

Yeah.

Nick Pell: Well, first of all, I, I think when people have to exaggerate facts, it's because their actual facts suck. We don't do that on this show. We steal, man, all of our arguments. And if your whole argument revolves around various straw men, your argument sucks. Second of all, if we're using this statistic to the degree that it's even true.

It's worth asking why? I think that's a totally fair question.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I'm curious about this. Why did Jews get expelled? Because it is something that seems to happen here and there. I mean, Gabriel Mizrahi's family, you know, left Persia, went to Spain, went to Portugal, they don't live there anymore, they went to Mexico.

Right? And it's like, okay, what's going on here?

Nick Pell: That's like the encapsulation of the Mizrahi diaspora, like [00:09:00] right chain of that. There's a lot of different reasons, and I'm not saying this is true in all cases, but a bunch of the medieval and early modern expulsions are due to financial reasons.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, okay.

So is this the stereotype that Jews control the banks? Let's get rid of them, or what? What's that about?

Nick Pell: Yeah, so people kind of hand wave this, but at a certain time in history, there's a truth to Jews. Run the banks today, it's just false. Of the 10 biggest investment banks in the world, it's, again, it's very difficult to pinpoint these numbers because of the whole fuzzy area of what counts as a Jew.

But I could identify three who were definitively Jewish in some sense. One of them is the CEO of Goldman Sachs, which is a firm founded specifically because other banks wouldn't employ Jews.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. Your banks run by Jews. Yeah, we all had to work here because you guys said we couldn't work there 'cause we were Jewish.

Well, I'm still right. Like okay. Yeah. It's like

Nick Pell: big [00:10:00] shock Brandeis universities run by Jews. Yeah, the university founded because Jews couldn't get into Harvard.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, I hate to laugh, but it's like my buddy's dad was, he left Russia, 'cause he had a PhD in chemistry or something and he couldn't get a job.

So he left and went to the United States and worked at Dow Chemical and you know, made a ton of money or whatever. And. My friend was telling me that like other Russian extended family in Russia that's not Jewish is like, see the Jews, they just go internationally and make a bunch of, and it's like, I couldn't get a job, no one would employ me because I was Jewish.

So I left the country and got a job at a place that wasn't racist. And now you're pissed off about that. And it's like, yes, yes, that's exactly you. Nope, no, you got the right, you got it right. That's, that's why we're mad, like, make it make sense. Come on,

Nick Pell: we'll drill into the negative effects of getting rid of all of your Jews a bit later.

But there's precisely one Jewish IMF governor, uh, he represents Israel by the way, surprised and one member of World Bank Board of Directors who [00:11:00] is Jewish that I could find. Again, it's a very difficult number to get. So if, if it's, you know, four, I'm sorry, I did my best. There are two central banks in the entire world headed by Jews, and again, one of them is Israel's big surprise.

Jordan Harbinger: Again, not surprising. So you said there's some truth to this in history, though. In fact, for some of what we're talking about, there's a kernel of truth that gets blown up into a gigantic lie. I ask Nick on here to again, steal Steelman antisemitism for a couple reasons. First, I thought it was way more valuable to have a conversation about what intellectually sophisticated in air quotes, I suppose antisemites actually believe rather than like the cartoon version of antisemitism.

Second Nick is, what do you call it, intellectually curious. And that leads him to dive pretty deep into topics that he doesn't necessarily agree with, of course, but nonetheless finds interesting. I mean, I'm, I guess I'm similar.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I find weird, marginal, bizarre, and yes, even hateful beliefs. Interesting.

I mean, [00:12:00] some of them are just. Weird and stupid. There was a group of communists who wanted to communicate with dolphins called ISTs.

Jordan Harbinger: What? Really? That's extra dumb.

Nick Pell: Yeah. They also thought aliens would necessarily be communists.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Is that weirder? I don't know. The dolphin thing's pretty weird too.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's all weird.

It's a fun thing to Google that. Like what? I was 15. I knew about it and when I would tell people about it, they just thought I was insane and now it's like, Hey, they got a Wikipedia entry. This is verified real. Okay. Why did you tell me that? Because I like, yeah, I just, I find weird beliefs. Interesting.

Some of it's just weird. Some of it has, you know, some kind of intellectual merit to it and it's worth exploring because it doesn't fit in this neat little box. Or they may be right about this one thing and you incorporate that into your thinking, but they're wrong about everything else. I've done super deep dives on absolutely idiotic ideas that I 100% disagree with.

I find the psychology and the [00:13:00] motivations of the person who believes these things. Interesting. You know, it's just good to know things.

Jordan Harbinger: I agree. From my perspective, I just see antisemitism as growing in terms of acceptability and influence. I mean, I've been in conversations with people online and like five years ago you'd say like, wait, do you hate Jews?

And they'd be like, no, that's not what I'm saying. And now they're like, yeah, and what, what are you gonna do about it? And I'm like, uh oh, that's weird. I did not, I'm not gonna do anything about it. You're clearly just like a weird, insane person. One guy. One guy I thought of you during the, this guy was arguing with me and he was like pretty mask off.

And I was like, mask off a. And he is like, yeah. And by the way, I don't see any Jewish astronauts. And I'm like, so is your argument that Jews haven't really accomplished much because there are no Jewish astronauts? Is that, is that what you're saying? Because maybe there are no Jewish astronauts, but if that is sort of supposed to indicate that like Jews haven't done anything, I like gestures broadly at every industry on planet earth.

You know, like, okay, yeah,

Nick Pell: let's do Nobel Prizes next. Yeah, exactly. We'll do Nobel Prize winners.

Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. It's so [00:14:00] ridiculous. Anyway, I wanted to do my part to raise the red flag about all of this without being alarmist. I also wanted to make sure people knew that Antisemites weren't toothless. Klansmen living in the hills someplace.

Those folks obviously exist, I guess, but I don't, they're not the biggest threat of to Jews in America and the West, right? They're probably shooting guns off the back of their porch somewhere, daydreaming about, what do they call it? Societal collapse. But they're not influential. They're not doing anything, and the only person that they're convincing to join their fold is their sister cousin.

Right? So who cares?

Nick Pell: Yeah, I agree. Antisemitism is becoming more acceptable in what you might call polite middle class circles. It's becoming more of an issue. I mean, I genuinely worry about my wife and my mother-in-law.

Jordan Harbinger: So in the case of Jewish banking, what's the truth that underpins the lie here?

Because you said that there's not that many bank directors that are Jewish. So where does this come from?

Nick Pell: Christians were prohibited from lending money at interest through most of the Middle ages, [00:15:00] most slash all. So if you wanted to borrow money, you had one of two options. You could offer a return, a percentage of the return on your investment.

You might get blacklisted for paying a loan on time because one of the ways they got money was you being late, which sucked. Nobody wanted to do that. So the other option was you could go to the Jews and the Jews were allowed to loan money and interest, and thus offered a obviously superior financial product because we, we don't do the weird medieval Christian form of money lending anymore.

We just do the interest thing.

Jordan Harbinger: So when you say offer a percentage of return on investment, basically it'd be like instead of taking a loan from a bank. You're basically saying, Hey, you give me the money and if my business is successful, I give you a return on that. And if it's not, you lose all the money.

So there's massive risk for the lender, and then you have to do the math and see if the return is worth the risk. Whereas with interest, it's like, okay, I have to do the math here, but I'm gonna earn this much just based on time, so whatever.

Nick Pell: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's, it's just a [00:16:00] way easier way to calculate everything.

Nick Pell: Yeah. It was like 10% of your spice holdings from wherever in exchange for the money for your ships. Yeah. Merchant. Yeah. Like it's not like people weren't getting loans to open like a cobbler shop. They were getting them to like send 20 ships to Turkey and come back with. Spices. Yes. Whatever people, scarves,

Jordan Harbinger: silks, you know, like, so the lender's basically like also your insurance company and they're an investor and it's like, I can't even imagine that would be very successful.

You have to pick so carefully who you loan out to at that point. Whereas if you're just loaning on interest, you can kind of afford to like lend smaller amounts to people who are higher risk at higher interest, and you just change the math.

Nick Pell: Everybody hates it. Who has to borrow? Because there's all these slimy ways that they would use to make money.

Like I said, like there was sometimes penalties for paying back on time, but that was what the contract specified. How the lender made profit was if you didn't pay back on time, you had to pay. Some exorbitant [00:17:00] amount of money on top of the loan. And it's like this guy pays his loans on time, don't lend to him.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. So the Jewish product, the, the loaning on interest, it's like, pay me back early. Fine. You just, you still owe me interest from the moment you took out the loan. So I make a little bit of money, pay me back early, I don't care. I still make money. Yeah. Now I get it. So how does this lead to Jews getting expelled from countries in Europe though?

Connect the dots for us here because it seems like you need money lenders, they're offering a great product. How are they like get these extremely useful, wealthy people outta here as soon as possible.

Nick Pell: The biggest borrower in any country in Europe, especially during the Middle Ages, is going to be the king or the local Lord.

And many, many times would they get in over their heads and decide it was just easier to expel all the Jews than pay back their loans. And to do that, they would spread accusations that Jews were up to no good poisoning wells, torturing Gentile children in religious rituals, or just the old standby. They killed Jesus.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. I shouldn't laugh, but I didn't see that coming. [00:18:00] So basically these kings and Dukes, they're defaulting on loans and they're like, man, how am I gonna pay this back? And someone's like, yo, don't do that. Just tell all 300 of them to leave and tell people that they're poisoning their kids. They'll push 'em out with their own pitchforks.

Nick Pell: Right. They'll drive 'em out for you. Yeah. So the modern European history is mostly about Jewish emancipation. The more recent expulsions are in response to the founding of Israel and most of the Arab states, in fact expelled their Jewish population in or

around 1948.

Jordan Harbinger: And in that case, they're not even saying, oh, the Jews did something.

They're just, what mad that Israel exists at all. And they keep losing wars trying to wipe it off the map at this point in time. So, but if I'm not mistaken, expelling an entire minority, doesn't that usually have serious negative consequences?

Nick Pell: Yes. Particularly when they're model minority, market dominant minority, however you want to put it.

But yes, I think from a moral standpoint, I think that doing Im immoral things causes people to suffer [00:19:00] in some meaningful way. But from a practical standpoint, it's not the wisest move.

Jordan Harbinger: What are the consequences then, say of throwing out all the Jews in your country?

Nick Pell: Spain expelled all its Jews in 1492.

Antisemites, absolutely love to correlate this with the beginning of the Spanish golden Age. But the fact is that local economies collapsed because of a lack of financiers. You need liquid capital in a society if you want any kind of growth. And Jews are the only ones allowed to lend money and interest, which is, as we've discussed, simply a superior financial product.

So within a generation, Spain was eclipsed by Portugal. Which took in nearly all of Spain's Jews.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, wow. Okay. What about the Nazis? I mean, they obviously didn't expel their Jewish population. I know. I, I think didn't they try to initially where they just ship everybody to Madagascar or something, but other countries, Madagascar,

Nick Pell: [00:20:00] Uganda, there was a bunch of different places discussed or just, just move 'em somewhere and then it became, yeah, you know, eastern

Europe and

Jordan Harbinger: right Eastern Europe, but other countries, they didn't want boatloads of refugees, Jewish or not.

So what, what were the consequences of Germany for ostracizing and persecuting Jews? Nazi Germany.

Nick Pell: So, Jews were less than 1% of the population of Germany, but they made up about a quarter of the doctors, lawyers, and academics. So they lost Einstein over this. And that's just the most famous example. The Arab states had a similar experience to Spain.

You throw out all the Jews, you're gonna see a massive outflow of capital. A massive brain drain. A Africa. It's not limited to Jews. Africa had a similar problem when decolonized African countries thought it would be smart to expel all their Indians, as in sub continental Indians. It wasn't just financiers and exporters, doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics.

I mean, Joseph Stalin couldn't find a doctor when he was dying because he became an [00:21:00] anti-Semitic paranoia at the end of his life and just started killing off Jewish doctors.

Jordan Harbinger: Note to any anti-Semites who might be listening, it's bad to expel Jews if you want decent doctors and lawyers around. Not that everybody wants lawyers around, but doctors anyways, right?

So this is probably also a great place to discuss the whole Jews are communists trope because how are we money lenders and doctors and lawyers and businessmen, but also we're communists, like for God's sake, just pick a lane. I don't know.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's a very bizarre trope because it's just not true and it's kind of one of the easiest ones.

You could spend 90 seconds on Wikipedia and see that this isn't true. There's two ways of looking at this. Let's start with Jewish membership in communist organizations for a wide variety of extremely complex historical, cultural, and social reasons. A number of prominent Jews were involved in socialist and communist movements, which at a certain point in the 19th century are kind of the [00:22:00] same thing.

There's not very, really much, if any, daylight between communists and socialists throughout a lot of the 19th century. By the way. One big reason for the involvement of Jews in left wing movements is that European right wing movements tended to be explicitly antisemitic. Big shock. Jews are not on board for your, we hate the Jews political movement.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, but what about communism specifically? Weren't the sort of figureheads of this also Jews? Is that where this comes from?

Nick Pell: Karl Marx was ethnically Jewish. Halachically Jewish, but he was raised Lutheran, and personally he was anti-religious. Most Jews were not communists, no leader of the Soviet Union was Jewish.

Lenin was basically a Russian mutt. His ancestry is just all over the place, but not Jewish. Stalin was a Georgian Khrushchev and Brezhnev were both Ukrainian and Gorbachev was mixed Russian and [00:23:00] Ukrainian

Jordan Harbinger: other than Marx, zero Jews there. And Marx was like, yeah, I'm Jewish, but we have a Christmas tree in that.

You know, so it's okay. Yeah. Where does the Jewish, so he says Jewish as I am. Where, where does the Jewish communism trope come from then? I mean, I, something tells me it wasn't Ma Zong who threw that one out there.

Nick Pell: Like I said earlier, membership. Um, big shock. When you're a legally oppressed minority, you tend to side with political parties that criticize your legally enshrined depression.

There were prominent communists who were Jews, uh, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Luxemburg. But these people are like, these are the waluigi of communism. They have zero influence on actually existing communism in the world. They have big cults in the west among dissident, communist groups of communists who don't want to identify with the Soviet Union.

But in, in terms of actually existing communist countries, they have negative influence. I

Jordan Harbinger: see.

Nick Pell: So there's either this undue [00:24:00] emphasis placed on what are, comparatively speaking minor figures like  Zinoviev, who I'm sure most people don't even know what  Zinoviev is, or they move goalposts to, well, Stalin counts because his wife was Jewish.

Jordan Harbinger: Cool. That makes you Jewish. Then Nick, if you become Jewish when your wife's Jewish, and that makes me Chinese. I guess. That's interesting.

Nick Pell: The other goalpost shift is to say that Jews ran. The hated security services and secret police of the Soviet Union of the Eastern Bloc country. So I see Beria, who was perhaps the most notorious monster in Soviet history was Georgian one Jew, precisely one, ran the NKVD, which was the precursor to the KGB.

That was for three years during the Great Purge, and Stalin had him executed. There's a couple examples outside of the Soviet Union in Soviet satellite states. I'm not going to mention them by name, because their people no one has heard of. So [00:25:00] the, do you see Jews? Yes. Are they running the show? I'm not seeing any evidence for that.

Jordan Harbinger: It's also interesting because are we Jews supposedly bad because we're communists? Or are we supposedly bad because we're capitalists? Are we money grubers who are dominating the west through finance? Or are we evil communists who want to force everyone to own? Nothing, make up your damn mind already.

Nick Pell: So we'll explore this more deeply in a bit, but the short answer is both, of course.

Okay. In the view of modern antisemites, everything Jews do is in the service of Jewish supremacy, even if it's entirely contradictory and they would be working against one another. So in any event, the next stage of antisemitism after religious antisemitism is what we would call racial antisemitism.

Though it's somewhat more complicated than just the Jews are race and they're bad. The Dreyfus affair in France is a very early example of racial antisemitism. The short [00:26:00] version is that the French artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus was accused of spying for Germany. He was almost certainly not guilty of spying for Germany.

The issue here is very much rooted in race because it views Jews as some kind of un assimilable. Other, in the case of Dreyfus, they're saying Jews are inherently German. They have a German character about them. They have German loyalties, which in 19th century France is very, very, very bad.

Jordan Harbinger: Why was that?

People don't tend to think of Nazi Germany and think, all right, there's a country that loves Jews.

Nick Pell: This is before that, but the, at the time, Germany and France were the main geopolitical rivals on the continent. But there is racial antisemitism in Germany. And in Germany it has a slightly different character where they're not so much seen as like, oh, they're the French fifth column in our country.

They're just seen as other, and we'll never assimilate them. And if they do try to explain it, [00:27:00] it's too claim that they're some kind of Asiatic race that they're from, like Central Asia.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a new one to me. I have not heard that.

Nick Pell: We don't have a ton of time to go into it, but during the Middle Ages, a central Asian kingdom may have had a mass conversion to Judaism to avoid picking a side between Islam and Christianity.

anti-Semites will argue that all modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from these people who are called Czars. It's called the Kaar Origin Theory.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I've heard of this. So the claim is that these people, myself included, I guess. Aren't even the Jews of the Bible, but some other group masquerading is them that like had converted or secretly blah, blah, blah, became Jews.

Nick Pell: Yeah, correct. So they'll use DNA evidence that Jews have Asian genetic makeup. Assuming this is true, sort of doesn't really matter because like I said. Jewish law regarding who is and is not a Jew [00:28:00] is matrilineal. So you'd expect some kind of genetic drift over time. I mean, I just don't really understand what saying a bunch of people converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages is even supposed to prove

Jordan Harbinger: No.

Also, it is interesting 'cause I do have like 0.4% Yakut, which is like this weird region in the middle of nowhere, Siberia, whatever adjacent, which is su apparently super dangerous part of the former Soviet Union slash Russia. And my mom's like, I knew it. That's why your eyes look like they're on upside down sometimes.

'cause like Genghis Khan bred one of my, I don't know, like super 15 generations ago, whatever, a hundred generations ago, whatever ancestors. And my mom's like, aha. Because apparently we have all this family that looks a little bit asiany and it's like, why? But even still, even if we accept that weird theory, who cares?

So 400 years ago or what, I don't even know, 600 years ago some group converted and

Nick Pell: yeah, there's gonna be a lot of, even if this is true, [00:29:00] who cares? Yeah. Throughout this episode.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Getting back to racial antisemitism. Is this totally a German thing or is it kind of all over the place?

Nick Pell: It's kind of all over and weirdly, uh, Jews aren't immune to antisemitic rhetoric around this time.

There's a whole current among secular Jewish intellectuals in the 19th century that uses language that's not terribly different from what you might have read in German Racialist magazines. In fact, the Nazis sometimes quoted these very Jews in their propaganda. So Hena was one of them who called the Talmud a spiritual ghetto.

Ludwig Burna viewed Jews as a burden on progress. Otto Vinegar said the Jew is nothing. He is a counterfeit human being. To reiterate, because these are German sounding surnames. These are Jews talking about other Jews.

Jordan Harbinger: Gosh,

Nick Pell: more than that, they're all highly intellectually influential. These aren't like random Twitter [00:30:00] schizo posters of their day.

Right. Ludwig Burnes considered the founding father of the German free press, and in the case of vinegar and Born they're liberals.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So racial antisemitism, is this the stage that gives us the Nazis and concentration camps and all that stuff? Is that kind of where this comes from?

Nick Pell: Yeah, and the not, like I said, the Nazis didn't care.

If your dad was Jewish and your mom was a Gentile, they certainly didn't care if you were Jewish and you converted. If you had Jewish blood, they considered Jew a Jew. They had a very complex system of determining who was and who was not a Jew. It had nothing to do with your beliefs. It was entirely based

on

race.

I mean, during the Inquisition you could convert.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Nick Pell: But this is not an option for people in Germany in 1936.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Or at least the Nazis idea of race, I suppose. So is this the era of the protocols of the elders of Zion and the International Jew? And for those of you who don't know, these are two early 20th century foundational texts for Antisemites, right?

Nick Pell: Yeah. They're [00:31:00] kind of like Fisher-Price, my first antisemitism. Okay. Uh, it's what every antisemite dips their toe into these at some point.

Jordan Harbinger: Have you read either of these books or are they books or pamphlets or whatever They are.

Nick Pell: They're books. I've read them both as well as a, a lesser known gem called Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, which also has some real, real book.

Yeah. And you know, I've heard people breathlessly reference it as if it's the Encyclopedia Britannica of Jews or something.

Jordan Harbinger: People are gonna go, why did you read those? So why

Nick Pell: I think the better question for people asking that is why haven't you. It's not really disputable that the protocols are an important historical text.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Nick Pell: That doesn't give it a morally positive value. I've read Mein Kampf, I've read The Communist Manifesto. I don't endorse any of the ideas in either of those books, but it's simply not up for debate that they're historically important. And on that basis, you know, I, I would recommend that people who want to know [00:32:00] about the history of any idea read its.

Foundational tax. Sure,

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We take a principle from the show and make it very practical, something you can apply right outta the box. Again, a little bit of a bite-sized thing from us to you every Wednesday. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now back to Skeptical Sunday. The protocols of the Elders of Zion has always been, for one thing, it sounds like science fiction, but it sounds like fascinating to me because, well, it's fake.

It's provably, laughably fake, a forgery. Everyone in air quotes knows it's fake, but people still quote from it like it's a legit text. Again, for those unaware, it purports to be a record of a secret meeting of Jewish supremacists, cabal, if you will, to use modern parlance talking in detail about their plans to take over the world.

And in reality, it was a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, probably produced by agents of the Russian Imperial Secret Police. So prior to the Soviet Union, the the Czar's Secret [00:35:00] Police, basically,

Nick Pell: it's also heavily plagiarized from a book called Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by somebody named Maurice Joli.

You are right. It's a proven forgery. There's no evidence that it's legit. People will still claim that it's legit. It's not really debatable whether or not it's legit. And then the International Jew published by Henry Ford. Yes. That Henry Ford plagiarizes the protocols pretty heavily. The thing about most of these foundational screeds of racial antisemitism is that so many of them pair at one another.

It's like a conspiracy website citing another conspiracy website as its source.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. So how do historical currents like religious antisemitism and racial antisemitism, how is that different from what we see today?

Nick Pell: I would call what we have today, intellectual antisemitism. And it's why I get sort of shook up when people treat antisemitism in a lazier, cartoonish way, because it's not [00:36:00] mouth breathing, hillbillies cooking meth in a.

Prison toilet. Who are the primary disseminators of antisemitism in the world today? It's smart, handsome, successful, capable, friendly, likable people. And this is what makes modern antisemitism. So dangerous. They're not selling weird pseudoscience about skull measurements. They're not selling discredited blood.

Libels.

Jordan Harbinger: To be fair, you know a lot more about this than I do, but I think you have a strong point that you know, like this saint your dead is antisemitism, and that a more sophisticated and intelligent response is probably warranted here. What even is intellectual antisemitism? How is that different? And as you argue, how is it more dangerous than other forms of antisemitism because, well, let's take a step sideways into the academic world for a moment before we get into the juicy stuff, like how Jews supposedly run, even the porn industry.

Nick Pell: You can't really talk about intellectual antisemitism without talking about one man, [00:37:00] Kevin McDonald, who has been called the marks of the Antisemites.

Jordan Harbinger: Is that a crazy YouTuber? Who is this guy?

Nick Pell: He's a retired professor of evolutionary psychology from California State University Long Beach.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow, okay. I didn't really expect to hear that.

To your earlier point about it not being YouTubers in mouth breathing. Klansman. Okay.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And I got another surprise for you. I've met him. I had lunch with him once.

Jordan Harbinger: I am dying to know how you met the world's foremost antisemite or intellectual antisemite and just had a BLT with a guy.

Nick Pell: It was Chinese.

Okay. And, um, well, nevermind then.

When I was a journalist, speaking of air quotes, I'll put some air quotes around that. But when I was a journalist, I attended a lot of weird stuff with weird speakers, many of whom I didn't necessarily agree with. And in the course of that, I had lunch with Kevin McDonald and he was a nice guy.

Jordan Harbinger: It seems like an obvious question that I'm sure a lot of listeners are asking right now.

If he's the main guy behind intellectual antisemitism, [00:38:00] how can he also be a nice guy? Where are you going with this?

Nick Pell: So people have to put aside this like Star Wars villain of what an antisemite is, if they're gonna get anything from this episode. McDonald is highly intelligent. Soft spoken, affable. He's, dare I say, avuncular in his manner.

I don't think he mentioned Jews once during our lunch. He was telling me about his house and how CSU Long Beach gives him all this make work. Stuff to do because they can't fire him because he has tenure. What do you want me to say? He was nice. That's why he is so dangerous. I see. Uh, he's not a frothing at the mouth weirdo on the Donahue show.

He could be your neighbor. Throwback.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, fair point. And I think you're correct that smart and otherwise nice people can harbor stupid and even kind of awful. Well, quite awful beliefs. That's kind of what makes all this stuff so dangerous. That's why people love those photos. And I guess certain people love those photos of like Hitler with a little girl, Hitler playing with dogs.

'cause you're like, this person is a [00:39:00] complete monster, is totally irredeemable and you're right about that. But then it's like, oh wait, he has a human side where he was just like a normal person. That's even scarier. Right. So I don't really see my listeners giving a lot of credence to anything a guy waving a swastika flag around says, or has like SS tattoos on his neck.

But I do know that people can be taken in by stupid and dangerous ideas if they are packaged in a compelling way. You, you got statistics, you got a pie chart, you got some clever arguments, and you got a good rhetorical style. That goes a long way, man.

Nick Pell: Yeah, exactly. And McDonald is kind of ground zero for all of that with regard to this brand of high intellectual charts and graphs, antisemitism, his professional pedigree certainly isn't anything to sneeze at.

His advisor in grad school was a man named Benson Giddens Burg, who was one of the founders of Modern Behavioral Genetics. He was the secretary archivist of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and he also served on the board of that. Organization.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So he's smart and accomplished. You already [00:40:00] said that, but what's his deal?

What specifically makes his antisemitism more intellectual than previous iterations?

Nick Pell: The main thing McDonald is known for is a trilogy of books called The Culture of Critique.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. And what are these books about? It doesn't sound like the International Jew, or maybe it evolves to that.

Nick Pell: Well, they're not really about one thing.

I mean, they, they're, it's gotta be 3000 pages long, the whole thing. It's long, it's dense. He explores different ideas throughout the trilogy. The first one is called A People That Shall Dwell Alone, and it explores Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.

Jordan Harbinger: Meaning what exactly? I don't even know what a group evolutionary strategy is, or how it could relate to Jews like we're all working together to evolve.

What does that mean?

Nick Pell: He frames Judaism as a way that Jews survived, reproduced, and maintained social cohesion within often hostile societies. So he identifies characteristics like high investment parenting and a strong preference toward cultural intermarriage, marrying people within [00:41:00] your, your own culture as opposed to people outside your culture, and a very high value placed on verbal intelligence.

Jordan Harbinger: Honestly, that all sounds like kind of a good thing. I'm not really sure what the problem is.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I think having a moderate sense of cultural and social solidarity is a good thing. I certainly think that high investment parenting and valuing high verbal intelligence, these are good things. But here's the problem.

First of all, he frames this not so much as a conspiracy, but like, it's almost like he's making the case that Judaism isn't, it's not really a religion, it's just a way that Jews outcompete your kids. I see. And thus he ascribes to it as sort of goal orientation and how you prove that other than Jews are successful.

I don't really know. And this is something that we're gonna see throughout, is that. Most of this is, would be a compliment if you applied it to any group other than Jews.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. I've noticed this myself. Actually. The stereotypes are all like, oh, Jews are so [00:42:00] successful. Oh, they run Hollywood. Oh, they run Wall Street.

It's like, okay, so you were really smart and capable and hardworking. What's the problem here?

Nick Pell: Yeah, I mean, you'd think that that would be the reaction, but you know, of the eight major film studios in Hollywood, five or six are headed by Jews depending on how you count. I think as recently as 2018, it was all eight.

In the case of Hollywood, it's kind of like a first mover effect. 'cause Jews moved into the film industry very early and it's like Irish cops or something. But either way, this doesn't make Hollywood a Jewish conspiracy to ruin America. It just means Jews have done very well in the entertainment industry and so what?

Who cares? Why is that a bad thing? Why is this some nefarious plot? Because it's Jews and you know, not whoever else.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think there's a, this kernel of truth behind all this that Jews are overrepresented or whatever in these powerful positions.

Nick Pell: Well, I'm gonna stop you right there because I [00:43:00] take issue with the term overrepresented and it is, hang on, bear with me people, because it's relevant to this.

It's not just some, you know, crackpot, right winger thing, but I don't accept the grammar of this. Like overrepresented according to whom. What is the proper amount of Jewish representation in any given field?

Jordan Harbinger: I think people are talking about with respect to their percentage of the population. Like if we're, I don't know, what are like 4% of the population's, probably way less than that 4% of the population.

How come it's like 28% of executives in Hollywood? I don't know. Those numbers are made up by the way, but I think that's what people are talking about.

Nick Pell: So are black people overrepresented on the Supreme Court? Yeah, because it's two outta nine. Like I, I don't think so. To be clear, it's interesting. I don't think so.

Right. I don't think that the Supreme Court has to, or Hollywood or anything else has to. That's a good point. Mirror the population, uh, dynamics. Exactly. At every, you know, you're right. That

Jordan Harbinger: doesn't make sense.

Nick Pell: And I think that we kind of begin flirting with totalitarianism the second. We assume there's some appropriate [00:44:00] level of representation in certain fields for people of certain backgrounds.

I think the minute you accept these kinds of rhetorical priors, McDonald has already won because you end up saying, well, yeah, they're overrepresented, but, and it's like they're not, Jews are not overrepresented in Hollywood. They're not overrepresented on the Supreme Court. They're not overrepresented in Wall Street.

They're just successful. That's fine. Good for them. That's okay.

Jordan Harbinger: When does the full blown antisemitism start, assuming that it's not present in this, his first book or work here?

Nick Pell: Yeah, I mean, I've talked to people who've read only the first book and were like, that guy's an antisemite. I had no idea. So it's not quite as present in the first book, though.

I, I wouldn't say that it's fair to say that it's absent either. I wouldn't let him off the hook quite that much, but you may not pick up on it in any event. So he starts dipping not so much his toe, but like his whole foot into anti-Semitism. With the second book, uh, separation and its discontent, [00:45:00] this book frames anti-Semitism as a rational response to Jewish success.

Jordan Harbinger: So from a sociobiological frame, it could be tempting to use any means necessary to keep other groups from being successful, right?

Nick Pell: There's a few problems with this. First of all, it assumes a zero sum game and economic growth in any event is not zero sum. Economic growth and innovation benefits everyone.

You benefit from the Salk Polio vaccine and toilets, high speed internet. This is kind of the miracle of modern capitalism, which to get back to your earlier point, you know, are, are Jews evil because they're communists or capitalists? Well, according to McDonald, it's both. Anything and everything Jews do is in the service of Jewish supremacy.

Jordan Harbinger: Where does the third book go? I know he is got his, his trilogy here. Where does that go? Where the first two stop?

Nick Pell: The third book is ca is the one that's actually called Culture of Critique. This is a favorite of modern antisemites and one of the three that most have actually read. A lot of people skip straight to that one.

Here he says that [00:46:00] Jews use leftist intellectual movements as a weapon against other cultures, as a means to subvert them through constant critique. Okay? First of all, it's Unfalsifiable because again, right wing Jews are just using different tactics towards the same goal. The book was written 30 years prior to the rise of Stephen Miller, the Deputy White House chief of staff, but I'm sure he has.

He being McDonald has some convoluted theory about how the most fire-breathing right winger in Trump's inner circle is somehow serving the same interest as Birdie Sanders.

Jordan Harbinger: I didn't even know Stephen Miller was Jewish.

Nick Pell: Jewish excellence baby.

Jordan Harbinger: All right.

Nick Pell: There's a somewhat notorious bit of laziness with regard to the all-encompassing.

Jews always act in the service of Jews theory because McDonald mentions Noam Chomsky once in culture of critique in a footnote, which is kind of a huge deal because Noam Chomsky is indisputably. The most important Jewish public intellectual of the last [00:47:00] 50 years. Whether you like him or not, I don't like him, but Right.

It's not, it's just not disputable. He's the most important Jewish intellectual,

Jordan Harbinger: and Chomsky hates Israel, so it's, this is like heads, eye, wind, tails. You're a Jew. H how does any, how does even, I'm imagining Stephen Miller and Bernie Sanders just hanging out knitting gloves and like, I mean, I can't imagine two guys who would hate each other more sitting in the same room and they're like, we got everybody fooled.

I mean, it's just so, it's like a ridiculous image. Gloves aside.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So his argument is that these are just competing factions of Jews arguing over tactics. But you're absolutely right. It's this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby everything a Jew does can somehow, we can somehow like reverse engineer the way that this benefits Jews.

Uh, I think McDonald. Is also a case study in why we should engage with seemingly intellectually sophisticated antisemitism.

Jordan Harbinger: Why can't we just ignore this kind of bullshit?

Nick Pell: Well, the academic [00:48:00] community tried to do that with McDonald. He sent a people that shall dwell alone to every prominent Evo, psych and sociobiology professor in the country.

No one bothered to respond to it. Stephen Pinker wouldn't even danger read it. He said it was beneath academic evaluation.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, Stephen Pinker's, also Jewish. Hey, can you read this book about why Jews are bad, Dr. Finkelstein? Like, no, uh, no thanks. I got a full inbox. Come on. Isn't it beneath academic evaluation?

I mean, the idea that Judaism is an evolutionary strategy, why do you think serious academics should even engage with this kind of stuff?

Nick Pell: I think that if you accept Evo psych and sociobiology as legitimate fields of scientific inquiry, which it's above my pay grade, whether or not they are,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, same.

Nick Pell: I know CSU Long Beach thinks it's legitimate enough to employ the world's, uh, foremost antisemite.

Right. You know, so I, I think that sure, they think it is anyway, but, uh, assume that these are legitimate studies, uh, legitimate [00:49:00] areas of inquiry. How is Jewish success not a legitimate subject of inquiry within that discipline? I just don't consider Jews so fragile that they can't be examined under the same microscope as other groups.

Okay. And again, like he wasn't some crank with a weird YouTube channel who was like, Hey, Steven Pinker, go check out my YouTube. You know, he was a professor at CS U Long Beach. It's just like, right. It's not Harvard, but it's a real universe. It's a real research university. I suspect that being ignored caused his ideas to metastasize to some degree.

Jordan Harbinger: Interesting. I mean, yeah, his feelings got hurt, so he became worse. Are you saying that he was basically so mad at Jewish professors like Stephen Pinker episode 5 93, by the way, who, who wouldn't read his book? That he just seethed so hard? He became a, like an Olympic level professional anti-Semite.

Nick Pell: No, I, that's not what I proposed.

I might be true. I only had lunch with the [00:50:00] guy once,

Jordan Harbinger: but, uh, it was Chinese food, so you should, you should know.

Nick Pell: I, uh, I don't really do that kind of armchair cycle analysis. I don't think it's really that beneficial, but yeah, it's true. What I'm saying is, is that the junk in his book. Could have been corrected at an earlier point in his career, and no one bothered to engage McDonald in any serious way until 2018.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Now I see where you're going with this. Right. Okay. So what happened in 2018,

Nick Pell: a guy named Nathan Kauf wrote a review of Culture of Critique that just absolutely eviscerates the book. It's not a cheap takedown. It does exactly what we're trying to do here, which is to play fair with McDonald. Engage his ideas in good faith and mount a response that's based in reality and fact, not these empty platitudes of Kumbaya and after school specials or appeals to emotion about how it's so dangerous to even ask these.

These are just questions that man dare not ask.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? 'cause it's like you, you say like, Hey, is it true [00:51:00] that Jews ran the banks? And like certain people will say, you're basically a Nazi for asking that. Or you know, this is why there were concentration camps. 'cause people talked about this. And it's like, no, right, I agree with you.

That's not exactly, there's a few steps in between. So we're gonna link to that paper in the show notes if anybody wants to read it. So did McDonald ever respond to this, like take down of his book?

Nick Pell: He did respond to it. He responded extensively. It doesn't, in my opinion, frankly, read like someone making a serious defense of his ideas.

It reads as very defensive and reactive. And to your earlier point, you know, who knows? Maybe that would've been his reaction in 1994 when the book first came. Maybe that's just what he's like as a person. But you know what? We'll never know. Mm-hmm. And bad ideas need better responses than silence. Why have Jews historically outperformed other ethnic groups in the West?

That is a totally legitimate topic of inquiry, and when you refuse to respond to bad explanations for Jewish success, [00:52:00] you're receding the playing field to those bad explanations. Or you bury your head in the sand and say, well, it's just not true. And it's like it is. Yeah. You can look at income figures.

It's true. And asking why is fine. It's absolutely fine to ask why that is. But when you refuse to engage with bad ideas, bad answers about why this is. You create McDonald, not as this obscure professor at CSU Long Beach, but now he's this, you know, keeper of dangerous secrets that no one dare discuss. And by the way, when people start reading it on that basis, there's no response.

There's no response to any of the things that he says. So otherwise smart. Thoughtful, rational people go, I don't know, may I think maybe he's got a point.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Nobody said anything. Where's the challenge of this? I mean, does that mean people are sort of accepting that he's got a point here? Yeah, I can see that.

Or they're

Nick Pell: just too afraid to engage with it [00:53:00] and they're just so embarrassed by how right he is that they just, they can't, there's no answers to any of this. It's like, I think, uh, KA this was like a grad student when he wrote

Jordan Harbinger: this,

Nick Pell: you know? It's not like, yeah. It's not the hardest thing in the world to take down.

Jordan Harbinger: This reminds me of people say stuff like. And I don't know what this is, it's a quote from somebody, but it's like, if you ever want to know who your secret master is, just look at who you're not allowed to criticize. And it's like children with cancer, you're not allowed

Nick Pell: to criticize Jews, children with cancer rule the world.

You know? That's actually

Jordan Harbinger: a really good response. Children with the cancer. Yeah. 'cause it's like you're not allowed to criticize Jews and it's like, I'm pretty sure we're talking about a lot of people criticizing Jews all the time. That's literally what this entire episode is about. It's about thousands of years of people criticizing Jews.

So, yeah,

Nick Pell: it's funny because it's always the guy who says, well, you're not allowed to talk about Jews. And it's like, dude, you don't talk about anything but Jews.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? Your entire personality is Jews.

Nick Pell: Right? Your entire personality is about how much you hate Jews. What do you mean people aren't allowed to talk about.

Jews. People talk about Jews all the time. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And the

Nick Pell: reason your

Jordan Harbinger: kids don't talk to you [00:54:00] is not because you're criticizing the Jews, it's because that's all you do is and that's your entire life. And nobody wants to hear that on Christmas morning or at Thanksgiving. Yeah. Okay. So what about the academia thing that McDonald talks about?

Is this like the Jews run Hollywood trope, that's sort of mostly true, like Jews also run academia.

Nick Pell: Just real quick, I just want to put a button on the last thing I said like, sure. Kevin McDonald is absolutely wrong and he should be systematically and rationally called out for exactly why he's wrong, not shamed for being wrong.

Gotcha. That's the difference. So yes, a lot of Jews is people who, you know, have maybe met, a few know, uh, many Jews are very smart and many of them work in academia. And the issue here becomes, yeah, there's a lot of Jews in academia. Are we weighting these positions at all? Is an associate professor who works, you know, 70 hours a week for $12 an hour.

Is he the same as the dean of faculty? What about how influential their ideas are? Certainly Noam [00:55:00] Chomsky or Stephen Pinker count more than

Jordan Harbinger: someone you'd never heard of. 'cause they haven't published heard of. Right. How widely published are they?

Nick Pell: Yeah. You know, are they just kind of like a research grunt or are they publishing papers?

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. So the TA who's technically an academic is not the same as Stephen Pinker or Noam Chomsky or whoever. And yeah, lots of Jews in academia were nerds. Literally everyone knows this.

Nick Pell: So then we get into McDonald's argument about the leftist, Jewish intellectual trope. Academic Jews are absolutely all over the map.

Ideologically, do they skew left? Maybe. I think there's probably some evidence that they do, but who cares? It's self-defeating in a way, because McDonald's argument is that no matter what their broader worldview is, it's in the service of the Jews. And if you're a Jew, everything you do is somehow about helping Jews.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. When I show a mattress on this show, hashtag it's for the Jews, right? Like, uh, I want you to buy these dick pills [00:56:00] for the Jews. You don't shield dick pills. No, I don't. I don't. But I was trying to think of another sponsor that's not a real one. And I came up pretty dry. Well, I guess I'm one of the capitalist Jews because, well, here are some ads.

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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday, we talked about Jews in Hollywood and there does seem to be something there. What about the trope of Jews running the porn business, you know, to Hollywood adjacent, actually, north Hollywood mostly Van Nyy. Yeah,

Nick Pell: it's, that's the, uh, it's the valley. It's the Silicone Valley that's not

Jordan Harbinger: the Silicon Valley, both of which I've lived in.

It's funny, I never put that together.

Nick Pell: There's this quote that gets thrown around a lot in anti-Semitic circles by a guy named Al Goldstein who ran a sex magazine [00:59:00] creatively called Screw, and it's supposed to be this epic. Smoking gun of evidence of Jewish animosity toward gentiles and porn as a tool of That

Jordan Harbinger: Sounds like good reading.

What does, what does Jewish smut Pedler Al Goldstein have to say?

Nick Pell: The quote is basically about how Jews love porn because they hate Jesus and hate Christians.

Jordan Harbinger: Look, is this quote legit? I mean, that's actually ridiculous.

Nick Pell: It's legit. He said it, but who cares exactly. Is Al Goldstein the head rabbi? Now? He's some weird sex pervert who happens to be Halachically Jewish.

Who gives a shit what Al Goldstein has to say? Why is he like, he's the emissary of the Jews Uhhuh. He's not, he's some random guy who cares. Big news. Lots of people are assholes and say mean things about other groups of people.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh man. Okay. But as a whole, are Jews in a similar position of power in the porn business as they are in Hollywood?

I now, it all seems all decentralized. So maybe before,

Nick Pell: not really, not even, you know, during what you might [01:00:00] call the golden age of pornography, um, there's this one story that gets circulated around a lot, and I'll put it in the show notes, but it's from a Jewish magazine called The Forward, and it claims that a rabbi owns PornHub.

That doesn't sound right. Does a rabbi own PornHub? No. A rabbi does not own PornHub. PornHub is owned by a private equity firm called ironically Ethical Capital Partners. That's right. I forgot about that. The guy in question is named Solomon Friedman. He was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi, but from what I can tell, he's been a lawyer his entire adult life, so he is.

He's a rabbi in the same way that you're a lawyer. Okay. And you know what? He's not the CEO, he's the VP of compliance.

Jordan Harbinger: So yes, the true puppet masters of any private equity firm, uh, the VP of compliance, sending cease and desist letters. Yeah. And making sure that the IRS, so that's PornHub. What about the massive rest of the industry?

Nick Pell: A zillion years ago, a guy named Ruben Sterman [01:01:00] had 80% of the Porn magazine market cornered.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Porn comes in magazines too. Oh yeah. I forgot about all that. Yeah.

Nick Pell: Uh, that's exactly it. Mann's relevance today is porn magazines. Like, did they even still make those? I I would guess they probably, I doubt it.

Jordan Harbinger: Maybe they must for sale at gas stations. Yeah, they must. Yeah. Yeah, probably

Nick Pell: so. Other than, you know, Goldstein and his one magazine, Sterman, who I believe has since passed and owned 80% of a now mostly defunct sector of the adult entertainment industry. Uh, you got Michael Lucas. Who's a secular Soviet Jew and like many secular Soviet Jews is a very outspoken neoconservative.

Mm-hmm. He is a hawkish conservative man. So if you're gonna make the case about Jewish subversion and Zionist influence, this is your best case. And it's one guy and he makes gay porn swing somewhere. There's some rabid antisemite coming up with a list of people in the [01:02:00] porn industry, or Jewish. The claim that Antisemites are making isn't lots of Jews do porn.

This is almost impossible to quantify in terms of how many and what percentage the claim they're making is Jews run the porn business, which is demonstrably false, and as you said, is kind of like a bit of a non sequitur as it becomes more decentralized. We've got an episode about OnlyFans coming up for anyone interested.

But the other thing is, I want to say this is like the, oh, the Jews did the slave trade

Jordan Harbinger: trope. Oh, I have. I don't know if I heard that. Is that true then?

Nick Pell: Not really. Were Jews involved in the slave trade? Yes. Were they the primary force of the secret puppet masters? No. There's just not evidence for that. So the porn thing, like the slave thing is like Jewish pornographers are not why you are cranking your hog to gang bang super cuts for eight hours a day.

You and you alone are to blame for that. I find it [01:03:00] really rich when antisemites have this complaint like, oh no, the Jews sold me a product that I use. Well then stop buying it. Stop buying it if you think it's evil. It's really that simple. If you think porn is evil, stop watching it. I think porn is bad. I don't blame other people about it.

I just don't watch it.

Clip: Daddy chill.

Jordan Harbinger: No, there's, there's no comment. There's no comment from me there. I do think you're right though, that there's this tendency to blame things for Jews as a group for things some Jews might tangentially be involved in. And I also think there's definitely a tendency to see everything a Jew does as somehow nefarious and in the service of, you know, Jewish interests, regardless of what side of the fence it comes down on.

I also get these emails like, you're a shill for Israel. And then 10 minutes later, somebody writes in to tell me how I'm like a, I don't know, terrorist sympathizer or a CIA plan. And it, it's like, guys, make up your mind already.

Nick Pell: You can find broad patterns in any [01:04:00] group. The problem is when you associate those broad patterns with the entire group at an individual level.

So 78% of Jewish voters went for Harris in the 2024 election. That's pretty decisive, but

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Nick Pell: It also means that over 20% of Jewish voters went for Trump. Which is a ton of people in a country of 350 million. True. There's also differences between Jews when you drill down into those numbers, like Jewish men went 30% for Trump, Orthodox Jews went 75% for Trump.

There is so much more going on in the nuances of this than most Jews vote for Democrats. Ergo, all Jews are hard left.

Jordan Harbinger: It's true.

Nick Pell: This doesn't add up.

Jordan Harbinger: Many slash most of my Jewish friends are the most conservative people that I know that would never consider voting for a Democrat. I was like, oh, there's Jews on the right.

And they were like, we literally have whole groups, uh, at our law school alone. Like the Federalist Society was like half Jews, right? It was like, okay. I don't want to go too far down the [01:05:00] rabbit hole because I think it's a little obscure for most people. But in preparing for this episode, I did read some quotes from the Talmud, from antisemitic websites that seemed to specialize in well Talmud quotes for some bizarre reason.

Nick Pell: Well, I hope you washed your hands when you were done.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, I had just picked up one of Al Goldstein's magazines because I needed a, I needed a deep dive into intellectualism anyway. I needed a good scrub, if you know what I'm saying. Anyway, yeah, the entire experience was a little unsettling, both because I hated going to those websites and giving them any traffic, and because I found the things they said, well, that they said were in the Talmud, they were kind of disturbing.

Right. But I definitely left with the experience that they were either making it up or I was being misled in some way.

Nick Pell: Well, it could have been both. Yeah. 'cause both exist, but more broadly. Anyone who doesn't know what the Talmud is, the Talmud is a collection of commentaries on the Torah. That's the first five books in the Old Testament.

The Talmud was written by Jewish rabbis between the [01:06:00] years 200 and 500 ad. I think the most important point to make right off the bat is the Talmud is not the Jewish Bible. There's tons of self-contradictory stuff in the Talmud. Because the Talmud is designed to represent different points of view, individual rabbis are then fully allowed to pick and choose what they agree with and what they don't agree with.

And there's parts of the Talmud that like none of them agree with. Rabbis probably get their ideas about what's right and what's not from their rabbi or whatever seminary they went to. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So I'm not gonna get into what I read because I, I don't really want to give it any traction on the show.

And I think, given what you've told me, we don't even have to, if we want to discuss misconceptions about the Talmud, generally,

Nick Pell: the Talmud is a complicated tax, first of all. You may not and probably are not interpreting it No correctly because? Because I

Jordan Harbinger: don't know anything about it. I'm reading it verbatim and being like, wow, that's kind of a weird thing.

Crazy thing to say. [01:07:00] Yeah, that's it.

Nick Pell: Yeah. You're not privy to a 1500 plus year long conversation around the Talmud. Right, which is necessary to understand really any single part of it. Each passage builds on 20 other passages from the Talmud, and those are building on a Torah. So you walk in and read one passage that's totally taken out of context that's been selectively cherry picked to terrify you, and that's, congratulations.

You're gonna be terrified. You can't really understand Talmud without studying all of it, and it's insanely long and incredibly dense. If you ever encounter somebody who like isn't a rabbi that told you that they read the Talmud, they were lying to you, like you don't read the Talmud unless you're a rabbi.

Most Jews, even observant ones. They have no idea what's in the Talmud. They count on their rabbi to tell them what to do and what not to do to be a good Jew. They don't sit down and read Talmud and then [01:08:00] figure out what they're supposed to do on the basis of that.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it. So anti-Semites quoting Talmud are just misrepresenting the Talmud, not because the quotes they're using are manufactured?

Well,

Nick Pell: they might

Jordan Harbinger: be okay.

Nick Pell: There's also like quotes from the founding fathers on Jews. Anytime you see that, Google them. A lot of times they're just completely invented.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay. So maybe there's quotes, but, but because they're presenting it as this is what all Jews believe and it's like, maybe it's what some Jews believe, or no.

Jews believe it's not technically Jewish law and it might not even be widely believed among Jews at all.

Nick Pell: Correct. There's a ton of heterogeneity. Among Jewish belief, there are Jews who believe in reincarnation. It's not common, but Right. It's a thing. There's Kabbalah, that's, it's a kabbalistic. Sex would potentially believe in reincarnation.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So Kabbalah is like this, basically like mysticism where you like use magic to talk to God. I'm, I'm simple oversimplifying it, but I remember a rabbi being like, whatever, bro. [01:09:00] When I asked about it, this is like a Hasidic rabbi and he's like, yeah, the Kabbalah, that Madonna's learning is not the thing and it's not as simple as like lighting candles and chanting and you're talking to God.

Like, that's not how this works. You gotta be like a, basically you need like a PhD in everything beforehand. And it's, I don't even think this rabbi believed you're directly talking to God. I think he was kind of just, yeah, like, okay, whatever. Some people will pay money for that kind of thing. I think you're supposed to be like

Nick Pell: a married man over 40 who's also a rabbi to actually like study Kabbalah or something.

But yeah. Uh, I used to be friends with a girl who was from a, uh, raised in a orthodox. Family who were, were part of a kabbalistic tradition. There's all kinds of, all kinds of belief among Jews. There's a joke of that's like, um, how do you get three different opinions on Jewish law? You ask one Jew.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Well there's, we always say Two Jews, three opinions.

Nick Pell: Yeah, exactly. So this is a great pivot to the problem of serious [01:10:00] intellectual antisemitism. It's ultimately very intellectually lazy, despite its veneer of academic gravitas. And I think that like many of the leading lights of intellectual antisemitism, shall we say, they're not dumb as we've been saying.

And there's like, without calling out anyone in particular, there's no way that they don't know that the Talmud is like, it's a long. Book, that's a history of discussion about Jewish law, none of which is definitive or authoritative on its own, and none of which is considered directly inspired by God in the same way that Torah or the Christian Bible would be.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it. Yeah. And I, I think to and Islam have this right. There's there, I forget what it, this stuff is called, but there's a whole lot of commentary and some of it's hadith. Yeah. Some people will look like, look at what they said about these people in the Hadith and, and other people are like, yeah, my particular strand, or whatever you want to call it, like sect of Islam is [01:11:00] like, yeah, that guy, we don't like that guy.

And that's just kind of like, all right. So you ignore mostly those books 'cause you're like, eh, that guy's a little bit of a crazy person. But then another sect is like, we primarily read him and it's like, oh, so you're the ones that are giving the rest of us like the a bad name. Right? It's kind of like we have that too.

So this has always been kind of my problem with antisemitism. It's just, it just comes across as so stupid. Like I know Jews have a lot of power in Hollywood in certain positions. It doesn't bother me. I like movies even when I don't, I'm not seeing some unconscious plot. To create the downfall of the West.

And people might be like, well, you're a Jew, it benefits you, fine, whatever. But the Jewish banking thing I knew a little bit about, but I just assumed, okay, well I, I guess we're good with money. Um, you know, maybe not me, but like some, some of us are, but it sounds like that's not even true at all. And I, I mean, we didn't discuss how represented they are in terms of the lower ranks of the finance industry, but at the top level, Jews are not running the banks in 2025.

It reminds me of that episode of the office where they go clubbing and Michael [01:12:00] tells the girl that he's a bank teller and everyone's like, what? And then they do the face to camera and he is like, if Ryan told me to tell everybody, any girl that I met that I was in finance, like, it's like, okay, the Jews are running the banks.

I mean, the manager of my local Chase is Jewish. Um, he doesn't have enough power to override that $30 overdraft fee though. Sorry. But at the end of the day, it just comes across as all this criticism. It comes across as resentful. Bitter and it really is kinda like they hate us 'cause they ain't us, if you will.

Nick Pell: I think that's a fair evaluation. People may roll their eyes at this, but Frederick Nietzche, who I believe to be the finest philosopher in human history, pegged antisemitism as what he would've called resent Aman, which is resentment of your betters, basically. It's absolutely classic Nietzsche and ent.

You've reframe your failures as some kind of moral virtue and say that actually excellence is bad and victimhood is good.

Jordan Harbinger: Uh, I see this a lot. This is a, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, but you [01:13:00] see a lot of these people who, they're 20 somethings often and they're very resentful. They're like living in their parents' basement and they'll have some job that they hate.

And instead of being like, yeah, I'm in training for this and I'm gonna move up to that, they're like, at least I'm not participating in the capitalist system that oppresses people. And I'm like, yeah, because you can't, you're still farting around trying to get your GED at age 29 and you play video games all day.

Like you would love to contribute to the capitalist system that is oppressing other people because then you could buy more games to play and porn memberships to crank it to in your mom's basement, pal. But yeah, you see this stuff like on Reddit, you know, at least I'm not doing this. And it's like, oh, how sad.

But it's also a bit of an intellectual black hole because once you decide that antisemitism is true, you just start seeing the rationale for it Absolutely. Everywhere. Yeah. Give 'em a hammer. All they see

Nick Pell: is

Jordan Harbinger: nails. Yeah. And it becomes people's entire personality. I mean, I back when you could follow people on Reddit, if people were really crazy, I would be like, oh, what else has this [01:14:00] person wrote?

And it's like, oh, I see the last three months are all threads about Jews. That's why we think somebody's a robot. And you're like, no, they're not a robot. They're a loser. It's kind of the same thing.

Nick Pell: Yeah. My experience with these types is that they just, they can't go 10 minutes without talking about Jews.

I mean, there was like, I used to be friends with a, a semi-famous writer whose name I won't mention. Who went all the way down this rabbit hole and I stopped talking to him and engaging with him when I was on, you know, vacation in Italy. And I wake up to an email from this guy and it's like three pages about how Jews are responsible for mass migration to America.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh God, are they, are we? To get back to the point of there's a kernel of truth in there,

Nick Pell: I have no idea how many Jews were even in positions of power to make that happen. When this became the policy in the 19, I see sixties under the Heart Cellar Act. I [01:15:00] believe that it's true that Ashkenazi Jews largely supported an end to national quotas because their families were in six different countries, you know, so I got a family in Russia and Poland and right, and Austria, and I want all my family to be here.

I also believe that it's true that Sephardic Jews, who by the way, have been in America a lot longer and form a non-trivial portion of the upper crust of Southern society. There was a Sephardic Jew in the Confederate cabinet.

Jordan Harbinger: In the Confederate cabinet. That's, I did not know that. That's interesting.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Juah p Benjamin was variously Attorney General, secretary of War and Secretary of State for the Confederacy.

Jordan Harbinger: You don't think of the deep South as like a Jewish, Jewish area at all. Kind of the opposite.

Nick Pell: And again, it's a, a non-trivial portion. I'm not, people walk away from this and think, are

Jordan Harbinger: they overrepresented in the

Nick Pell: south Nick?

Yeah, they're probably not even that. Um, but you know, like there, there's a certain segment of [01:16:00] Southern upper crust society that is Sephardic Jewish. They, to, to my knowledge, again, it's a hard thing to get numbers on, but to my knowledge, Sephardic Jews generally opposed heart, which was the act that ended national quotas.

Because they have longstanding prejudices against Ashkenazi Jews. It's true. Who they view as like hillbillies from Eastern Europe. Yeah. Guilty. Uh, and they didn't want coming into the country, so. The only way you square that circle is by somehow making each and every possible position on any possible issue, an expression of Jewish interest, which is stupid.

Jordan Harbinger: You've argued with me privately that right wing antisemites aren't really that dangerous. I, I don't know if I totally agree, but I understand your point that you're more likely to become socially ostracized, unemployable, and a pariah than you are to lead some terrorist attack on a synagogue.

Nick Pell: Well, there was that one terrorist attack in, in Pennsylvania in the last 10 years.

Um, so I, I [01:17:00] think that we should definitely acknowledge that if we're sure specifically checking name, checking terrorist attacks on synagogues. But I do think the elephant in the room is left wing antisemitism. Right wing antisemites are generally considered weirdos and people want nothing to do with them.

Left wing anti-Semites have representation in Congress.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Nick Pell: anti-Semitism is coded as anti-Zionism and becomes a completely acceptable position in the Democratic party, and is increasingly a shibboleth for primary candidates in Democratic party primaries

Jordan Harbinger: Shibboleth ban points for using that on the show.

Good word. Yeah. You mean the anti-Israel stuff, which we're not getting into that Israel stuff. That is a whole nother podcast that I probably can't even run.

Nick Pell: So I do mean the Israel stuff, but it's not limited to criticisms of Israel. Al Sharpton incited a racial pogrom against Jews in 1991 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

He called them Diamond [01:18:00] Merchants at a funeral No less. Al Sharpton also reportedly said, and I'm quoting here. If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yamikas back and come over to my house. End quote. Wow. Sharpton had a daily and now weekly hour long show on NBC. He is something of an elder statesman in the left wing of the Democratic Party whose ring you have to kiss.

Right? People do not have to, uh, go kiss Kevin McDonald's ring to get the Republican party's nomination for Congress critter from the seventh District of Montana. It is not a comparable thing.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I wasn't aware of that quote, but that What about people say like, Hey, that was 40 years ago. Is there anything more recent

Nick Pell: from Sharpton specifically?

No, but the current Democratic nominee for mayor of America's largest city, Zoran Momani, which is the name of the candidate, not the city. Has defended the slogan, [01:19:00] globalize the ada.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: You know, kill Jews everywhere.

Jordan Harbinger: Citations in the show notes. People don't get mad. Yeah. Citations in the show notes. He hasn't

Nick Pell: personally said it or endorsed it, but he has defended other people saying it.

I

Jordan Harbinger: see.

Nick Pell: Okay. Which is, you know, you're just outsourcing it to other people to do your dirty work for you. Mm-hmm. So I say at the very least, antisemitism is not disqualifying for public spokesman and candidates in the Democratic Party, but also the relentless obsession with Israel on the part of some Democrats does seem suspect to me.

And I don't think it's suspect just because I think Thomas masses, who's a Republican Congress critter from Tennessee or Kentucky. He has a weird fixation on Israel that, yeah, I find that suspect,

Jordan Harbinger: I see this bandaid about a lot. The idea that Israel is somehow running American foreign policy, and it strikes me as wrong, but I'm also not really sure how to respond to that.

They're like, oh, you know apac, they control everybody. And I'm like, do they? 'cause that sort of sounds like the whole Jews [01:20:00] control the world thing, except you're limiting it to the us. But then it's like, but the US controls the world 'cause they're the hegemon. And it's like, okay, so, but again, where's the kernel of truth in this, if any?

Nick Pell: There kind of isn't one. The, you know, a country with a GDP of Maryland and the population of Michigan is not running the country with the world's largest military and nuclear arsenal. And if you argue that it is, you are woefully misinformed at best. Okay. That is the generous approximation of that view.

Israel gets tons of foreign aid from the United States. I am personally opposed to foreign aid period. But I don't understand why people want to focus on foreign aid to Israel. By the way, American Aid to Israel is an American jobs program. 70% of the aid that the United States government gives to Israel is earmarked for spending on American munitions.

We give them money and then they have to spend it on American military hardware [01:21:00] made by Americans.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. So basically we're giving them coupons to use at Northrop Grumman. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, there's all kinds of lobbying and congress, which is a topic all by itself. Where did the pro-Israel forces fall on the spectrum here though?

I like, I went to the APAC conference in college 'cause they bust us over there and it sounded like a fun trip to New York. But we just sat there and then, I don't know, clapped at speeches and then like went out. Drinking

Nick Pell: APAC is less than 1% of all PAC money. That includes all APAC affiliated groups. So it's not like there's some dark money that the, you know, well, they're really 70 when you count all the puppets.

Ah, okay. Uh, no, it's 1% all APAC affiliated groups. Undisputably, it's a major player in foreign relations PAC spending, but so is Lockheed Martin, so is Boeing. So is Raytheon, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries you can say I don't like that either. I don't like that. Yeah. But why is the focus on apac. I mean, it's like when people are like those bankers at Goldman Sachs and it's like, this is the only bank that you want to mention is [01:22:00] Goldman Sachs.

You know? Like why? Why is that the one that you're gonna focus on?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Meanwhile, HSBC is laundering money for the cartels, but it's the Jews. Right? Yeah. I hear what you're saying. There were all those protests after the Gaza War started with a lot of disturbing rhetoric, both from randos protesting at Yale and Congress members.

That definitely had my antisemitism radar sort of beeping a little bit at the time.

Nick Pell: Yeah. It wasn't Nazis standing outside at Columbia asking people if they were Jewish. It wasn't Nazis preventing Jewish students from going to shul. It was lefties. It's gross, and it gets a total pass under the guise of anti-Zionism.

Democrat friendly media runs cover for this and repackages it as this is just some acceptable view of the world. And I think like people, oh, you're saying you're not allowed to criticize Israel. You're absolutely allowed to criticize Israel. You're allowed to criticize anything you like. What I'm saying is, is that an outsized amount of attention on Israel?

In a world that includes the People's Republic [01:23:00] of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. I find that suspect. I find that strange.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But your belief about all this is that we should openly discuss it and fairly and honestly argue about it.

The thing that troubles me about that, even as somebody who's very much in favor of fair and open inquiry, I don't know, there's a part of me that's like maybe even discussing this is bad for Jews. And I know people say that. Do they have a point?

Nick Pell: I would suggest that people read a book, uh, by Hannah Arendt, called Eichmann in Jerusalem.

I would argue that it's one of the most important books of the 20th century, and it explains precisely how your normal neighbors that you, you know, grill with on Labor Day Weekend become the people ratting out Anne Frank in the Attic. It's not because they're won over by strong convincing academically sound arguments of Antisemites.[01:24:00]

It's a very good book. I really cannot recommend it enough. Again, it's called Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. It's also worth mentioning a man by the name of David Cole. He was huge in Holocaust denial circles for decades, and he stopped being a Holocaust denni because of his own open inquiry into the subject.

We have a link in the show notes. He's very candid about his past and his trajectory, and spends quite a bit of time debunking this stuff as it crops up. There is a certain type of smart person who is attracted to weird and forbidden ideas because mainstream narratives just don't add up for them. But this is also exactly the type of person who is going to read both sides and come to a final conclusion.

That's probably the right one. I spent like the whole two thousands being a nine 11 truther and I'm not, you know, it was a bunch of Saudi guys and the CIA got caught with his pants down and what happened on nine 11 is basically what they [01:25:00] in capitol. Letters said happened. Okay. I didn't stop being a nine 11 truther because I got bullied hard enough that I gave it up.

I stopped because that, there was this one friend of mine who was just constantly sending me stuff that was like, here's why this thing that you think is either not true or is nonsense. And it was just kind of, and then I read a book and was like, yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: you got persuaded by facts. That's impressive. That never happens.

Really. No, it doesn't. Kind of doesn't ever happen. Um, what, what do you think people should do about the growth of antisemitism in the West?

Nick Pell: I think you need to resist the urge to censor and shout down because I think that that has a tendency to metastasize the problem. You need to pick your battles. You don't need to be arguing with every guy with a Pepe the frog, PFP, on Twitter about this stuff.

But you do need to engage seemingly good arguments directly. You should learn the talking points that these people are using so you know how to dismantle them. And don't lie to [01:26:00] protect the truth. Learn how to tell the truth better. All outward appearances to me, say canceling people for bad ideas just makes those bad ideas stronger.

Jordan Harbinger: Definitely some good food for thought here. In general, I think that the solution to bad ideas is good ideas, not fewer ideas. And when it comes to something like modern antisemitism, especially the kind that's dressed up in academic language or political activism, the answer isn't to ignore it or panic over it.

It's to understand it, ask what it's really saying. What it's trying to hide, because under the charts and the citations and the intellectual posturing, it usually comes down to the same old thing. Resentment. A need to explain away failure or powerlessness by blaming somebody who looks like they're doing better than you, that's not a truth that needs protecting.

That's a pattern that needs exposing. Thanks Nick for explaining why today's antisemitism doesn't come with jack boots. It comes with just enough footnotes to fool people. Thanks everyone for listening. We did go a little bit long. I hope the ride was worth [01:27:00] it. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own, and yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel. The Old Testament or the new, even if it's fact checked. So consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. If you know any Jews, they might be interested in this. If you know anybody who hates Jews, well they'll certainly be interested in this, but probably not for the same reasons.

Anyway, share this episode with 'em and RIP, your inbox. Anyway, [01:28:00] in the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. What's it like to earn the trust of a ruthless drug cartel, knowing the whole time you're gonna bring him down? Robert Maser went undercover as a money launderer inside Pablo Escobar's operation, building fake businesses, fake friendships, and even staging a fake wedding, all to

stay alive.

JHS Clip: In my view, I felt as though that my background tended to give me an opportunity to be able to more convincingly pose as a corrupt businessman. As a long-term undercover agent, information became my heroin. I had to get the next big piece of information, and the risk had to be higher than the last risk, or I wasn't accomplishing my mission.

There was a half million dollar contract on my life. You gotta take that serious that I came within three minutes of being murdered. There's some people who aren't very happy with me. The bad guy's smarter than you. Don't ever forget that. [01:29:00] It's amazing to think that the people who were in charge of the Honduran government operated clandestine cocaine labs in Columbia and Honduras provided a gateway for hundreds of tons of cocaine to the US and Canada.

Put millions of dollars in political figures, killed hundreds of people involved in human rights defenders, environmental defenders, competing traffickers. They conspired with corrupt senior military and law enforcement leaders. They sold military grade weapons to the cartels and they provided military escorts for caravans of drugs.

And this was going on just under the nose of all of us and has been and continues to and will continue to that it's not gonna stop.

Jordan Harbinger: To hear more about the high stakes world of undercover ops and the razor thin line between playing the part and becoming the role. Check out episode 987 with Robert [01:30:00] Maser.