Watch the full episode here:
https://Rumble.com/v2joxdu-system-update-show-76.html
There's something I've noticed about people who launch new programs like this one. Perhaps you've noticed it, too. I've seen it many times over the years. People launch a new show and they announce that this show is going to be devoted to airing voices and viewpoints you don't hear in other places and oftentimes people mean that when they say it. It's very well-intentioned and authentic but what ends up happening is that they end up having people and voices and viewpoints that you can, in fact, hear in many other places, or the only people who end up on the show who might some way be marginalized elsewhere are fully aligned with the viewpoint of that show.
Well, we vowed that we were going to be a show that aired viewpoints and views that aren't available elsewhere. And I was very adamant both to myself and to my colleagues, that we go out of our way to make certain that we make good on that pledge because the inertia is very easy to simply call on otherwise available people because that's the easiest course. The most difficult course is to actually interview people who are genuinely banned or canceled or marginalized, whatever term you prefer. Not people like, say, Dave Chappelle, who has $40 million deals with Netflix and was just invited to host Saturday Night Live a few months ago. He's widely criticized. I wouldn't say he's been canceled. People who are actually canceled are people who are rendered unemployable, or who are not welcome in almost any media space by the expression of controversial political views.
We obviously don't want to just interview people for the sake of interviewing them just because they happen to be reviled. Some people deserve to be reviled. Some people who are reviled or genuinely canceled don't have interesting things to say. We want to confine ourselves to speaking with people who have been relegated to the margins because of their political views, but who are very substantive and thoughtful about how they express those views and the work that goes into forming them, even if they're people whose views are extremely inflammatory.
A few weeks ago, we interviewed one such person, the University of Pennsylvania Law professor, Amy Wax, who has all sorts of quite polarizing and definitely radical views on things like race and how to think about various racial groups. And those views have caused her to be very much at risk of being fired or losing her tenured position at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, despite having among the most impressive academic and scholarly credentials of anyone in the country. She not only graduated from a top school and became a lawyer at Harvard, but also for many years was a neurologist. I believe she went to Harvard Medical School as well. So, when we interviewed Professor Wax, she was as candid and blunt as she typically is. Some of her statements were shocking, even to my audience that generally is receptive to those kinds of views.
But we also, as part of that show, put on Professor Norman Finkelstein, who himself had his own controversy with academic freedom. He was – he is – a scholar who graduated with a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University. He had written two or three very influential and well-regarded, though controversial books, primarily about his critical analysis of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and his advocacy for Palestinian rights. He has also very frequently spoken of what he regards as the tendency for American Jews to self-victimize, and he contrasts it with the actual success and career success, the economic success that Jews in the United States have had, very similar to the way conservatives often claim that African Americans and Latinos or LGBT or Muslims self-victimized as well. You just don't hear it said much about American Jews. Professor Finkelstein says it.
In 2007, when he was a professor at DePaul University, Alan Dershowitz led a very vindictive campaign to have Professor Finkelstein's tenure denied as a result of his criticisms of Israel. Alan Dershowitz is obviously a steadfast defender of Israel. It wasn't so much a claim that Professor Finkelstein’s scholarship was lacking or faulty. I found him to be one of the most rigorous and fastidious scholars I've ever interviewed. He just reads and reads and reads and has an amazing recollection. It was the fact that his views, as expressed in his books, not just being critical of Israel, but especially his argument that American Jews have exploited the Holocaust as an industry to not just extract money but shield Israel from critique and get other benefits, including enormous sums of money in operations from Germany. That is obviously very radical and for a lot of people an offensive thing to say. But as I said, he says it in a way that is very scholarly, based on all kinds of evidence. And so, when Alan Dershowitz succeeded in destroying Norman Finkelstein’s academic career, he's been unemployable ever since. In any academic institution, it had a kind of ripple effect where he was also excluded from almost every major media outlet as well, except for some left-wing media venues where he was welcome – in places like Democracy Now! and a couple of left-wing YouTube shows or podcasts. It is pretty much the only place where he would be heard.
He now has a new book that he wrote in 2022. It is entitled “I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It” – Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture and Academic Freedom. In that book, Professor Finkelstein offers a very emphatic and unflinching critique of left-liberal politics. So, he's critiquing the political faction, the only one left, really, that had still given him a platform in some ways by claiming that leftism in the United States has lost its radicalism, that it no longer risks anything, that it instead is about lending support to the Democratic Party – people like Angela Davis or Judith Butler. And the only courageous things they do are things like changing their pronouns. And he really is not critiquing wokeism or identity politics for its own sake but he's arguing that the obsession with things like the trans debate and other issues of that kind have distracted the left from what used to be their primary focus – things like opposing the U.S. Security State or engage in class politics on behalf of the working class – and instead they're now captive to the Democratic Party and obsessed with these culture war issues that have very little to do with how power is dispersed. And as a result of that critique of the Democratic Party – and not just the Democratic Party but the left wing of it – he's almost become persona non grata among the one faction he had left, hence the name of his book – “I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.” But I've always found him to be a very compelling thinker, somebody who is absolutely worth hearing, even if you don't agree with him. We put him on the program with Professor Wax for him to give his views on the limits of academic freedom, using his experience as somebody who was denied academic freedom and to talk about her case. But as part of that interview, we also conducted a wide-ranging interview with him on many topics. Time constraints prevented us from finishing, so we finished this week taping it.
We begin by talking about his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, how it is that, as the son of actual Holocaust survivors – both his parents were actually in German concentration camps, his father in Auschwitz, his mother in several others, and they came to the United States as immigrants, fleeing, when they were liberated from the camps. Why, as a son of Holocaust survivors, who loved both of his parents – it wasn't some act of rebellion or self-hating pathology or anything – he came to these views academically and intellectually? Why did he make a defense of Palestinian rights as a cause? Why did he so vehemently oppose the idea of Jewish self-victimization in U.S. support for Israel? But we also spend a lot of time talking about his critique of the Democratic Party when it comes to the war in Ukraine and militarism and corporatism, and especially their fixation on these culture war issues as a way of distracting from the much harder challenges that the left used to take on of challenging military power, the intelligence agencies, and especially how capital and wealth are distributed in that state. So, I found this interview with him incredibly engaging, at a point, it's very entertaining. He is very aggressive in his rhetoric. He has a lot to say about MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, about political life generally, and its flirtation with the very ideas that he used to one stand again. So, I hope you'll listen to this interview with an open mind. Even if you're somebody who believes in support of Israel, even if you believe someone who is on the side of Israel against the Palestinians, even if you're somebody who sympathizes with the left-liberal view on culture war issues, he always has something to say that makes you think. And it's in that spirit that we offer him tonight as an interview. But also this will be an ongoing segment where we intend to speak with people of this kind, people who have things to say, but who have been genuinely relegated to the margins or the fringes or otherwise silenced by those views in the spirit that we think Rumble represents, that this show represents, of allowing a free flow of information and free inquiry and allowing you as adults to decide what it is that you think.
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