assassination attempt on the president, seemingly the vice president as well. Political violence is absolutely on the rise. Celebrating Hassan [__] as though he were the new face of progressive politics. This is obviously morally deranged. The left has been successfully manipulated by Islamists and apologists for Islamists, and people on the left are morally confused.
Do you think Mandan is an Islamist?
Jihadism and Islamism have to lose. There can be no accommodation with it. Islamophobia is pure bull.
As long as that scripture exists, you're always going to have some people who take it literally.
That's why I said Islam needs a reformation, a renaissance, and several civil wars.
But what's happened more recently is that there's a side of the right that seems to be taking the same position. A lot of the anti-Muslim rhetoric that's put out there originates with people who are very, very pro-Israel who kind of need us to demonize them.
Most people think that if Israel just went away, all of this conflict would disappear. What you'd see is Muslims have to be in the business of killing jihadists.
Do you think Islam is compatible with the West? You have been a fierce critic of Trump. You lay out that his biases are actually not just in favor of the West, but his bias is against the Islamist world. Given that you had previously supported or endorsed Kamala at the last presidential, can you say the same about her?
Sam, thank you so much for taking time to speak with me.
I have been listening to you for years, and I think you were actually my gateway to the intellectual space. So to be sat here is really special for me. So I'm very grateful. I know how busy you are as well. So to make the time particularly special, I wanted to start this, as we were discussing before, speaking. There's a lot of craziness to get into.
This morning I woke up to the news that the person, the suspect for the Palisades fire...
which killed 12 and destroyed something like 7,000 homes here in California, and his name is Jonathan Reind. He is said to have been a big fan of Luigi Manioni and wants a sort of restoration of justice, saw that as part of his project.
And what I see observing America from the outside, and I know you'd be keen to talk about the lunacy on the right, which no doubt we'll get to, but I see a lunacy on the left that's pretty concerning. Whilst we've been here on this trip, there's been an assassination attempt on the president, seemingly the vice president as well, although it's a little unclear exactly what happened there. And political violence is absolutely on the rise, and it seems to be at the moment, maybe not historically, at the moment, an issue on the left.
Not exclusively. I can name versions of it on the right for sure, but it seems to be an issue here that's going on.
You have called out lunacy from the left despite having voted for or supported Kamala at the last election, and I wanted to get your impression of where this comes from. And I partly ask because you've previously said with regards to some things the rhetoric of Trump has played a part in the sort of heightened discourse. And for me, that's not quite enough. I can't accept that it's... let's say even if Trump's rhetoric played some part...
This has got to be... is this a deeper and more profound issue that's going on? Is it a deeper and more profound...
Yeah. No, it's much bigger than Trump, and certainly precedes Trump. Well, on the left you have this ideology around power relations, and that, you know, all power on some level is corrupt, and, you know, in the limit, evil. And on the left there's just direct ties historically to Marxism and socialism and other kind of ethics of redistribution and, you know, revolution, frankly, that are more radical. And the left, unlike the right, has captured mainstream institutions to a remarkable degree. So you have in recent months the New York Times not only platforming but really celebrating Hassan [__] as though he were the new face of progressive politics in America. I mean, they gave him a glowing profile in the style section. They gave him his own op-ed. Ezra Klein embraced him as, quote, 'not the enemy.' He was on another podcast anchored by a New York Times writer with a New Yorker writer, and he and the New Yorker writer were agreeing that looting was now... microlooting was now a...
an ethical strategy of protest. Just steal from corporations that you think are too rich or that you don't like. This is obviously morally deranged, and you would not get the analogous right-coded derangement celebrated by any kind of mainstream news outlet, right? So the fact that Hassan [__] is not recognized to be as odious as someone like Nick Fuentes, I mean, they're fairly interchangeable. I mean, maybe not. Maybe Fuentes has got a little more topspin that makes him a little worse. But I mean, they're both kind of morally nuts, right? And they absolutely, you know, contrary to what the original title of Ezra Klein's op-ed said, Hassan [__] absolutely is the enemy of any sane American politics and certainly any viable future for the Democrats in America. So, I mean, the fact that he's being sanctified by nothing less than the New York Times is a sign of how fully the rot has spread. And that's much more than... I mean, Trump doesn't help, but it's a much deeper problem than Trump.
It's deeper, but it's not apparently wealth inequality that's struggling. I mean, Hassan Per comes from a wealthy background. He's wearing Rolexes.
No, but he's messaging to people who are worried about wealth inequality. I mean, he's a hypocrite, right? I mean, so he's just a hypocrite, you know, and he's an impostor, right? He's a poser, but he's just morally unserious in every way, right? So he's not a serious person. He's a provocateur. But the fact that he's taken seriously is a sign of just serious confusion in mainstream places. But it's not clear to me that he's... he might be appealing to people who think wealth inequality is a problem, but it doesn't mean that those people are the poor.
And you see this also with people who voted for Mamdani in New York. It wasn't actually the poorest or the richest. It was the middle block that seemed to vote for Mamdani. So it's another phenomenon. I think it's not... you might say it's wealth inequality, and it might indeed be people who say wealth inequality is the problem, but it's not necessarily the poor.
No, it's not. Yeah, it's not necessarily the poor. And yet I don't think we should downplay how anxious even middle class and upper middle class and even, you know, in global terms, wealthy people can be around inequality, right? So if you're living in Manhattan and making, you know, $200,000 a year, you know, you're rich by any rational standard globally, you're not rich in Manhattan. In fact, it can be hard to live in Manhattan, you know, or certainly have the lifestyle you want in Manhattan at that level of wealth.
So it's because so much of our sense of our own status and well-being is comparative that you get these perverse effects where even if all boats are rising with the same tide and things are getting better for everyone at every strata economically, people don't necessarily feel that things have gotten better. And I'm not saying things have gotten better uniformly across the economy for everybody in recent... But you know, if you look at what everyone has now compared to what they had 50 years ago, you know, even the poorest people have a supercomputer in their pockets. I mean, things have many things have changed for the better for more or less everybody. And yet it's easy to not feel that way if you're always just simply comparing yourself to somebody who's obviously doing better than you are.
Yeah, that's human nature to a large degree. But how much do you think ideology is at play?
Well, there's just a lot of confusion. I mean, yes, I think Marxism and, you know, the kind of historically adjacent notions to Marxism have filtered in. But there are a lot of people who are spouting kind of Marxist homilies who aren't aware of having been influenced by Marx or anyone else.
They're marinating in it.
Yeah. I mean, it's just the sense of what is ethically right or ethically unseemly gets filtered through culture and begins to affect people's politics. And a lot of that has shifted. I mean, certainly a lot has shifted in right of center. I mean, you know, on the right there used to be notions of, you know, that character mattered, and I mean, just think of just how much pain Clinton got from the right for his indiscretions. Um, I mean, that has completely evaporated, right, right of center. So the culture shifts in ways that are surprising. But on the left, I think wealth... I mean, we're not talking about wealth inequality as much as I think it is influencing everything. I think it's an enormous thing, and I think it's going to be sharpened up by advances in AI. I think AI is going to make it the unavoidable topic.
Yeah. Before we move to the right, and I listened back to your conversation with Ben Shapiro, and I think one of your arguments for supporting Kamala at the last election was that she had distanced herself from the more extreme side of wokeism or the left and progressivism. But it's not entirely clear to me that that's what's going on at the moment. If you see, for example, Obama two weeks ago did a photo shoot with Mamdani. Mamdani to me seems pretty radically left. Obama very happy to be side by side with him, and likewise the likes of Ilhan Omar and the squad. These are not people who are pushed to the side by mainstream Democrats, or as far as I've interpreted it. Do you think I'm wrong? Do you...
No. No. And so the real error there is that the left has been successfully manipulated by Islamists and apologists for Islamists, and in certain cases this is a knowing alliance, and in certain cases just frank manipulation, and people on the left are morally confused. I don't think someone like Hassan [__] is confused. I think he knows exactly what sort of alliance he has, and I think that's true of Mamdani too.
Do you think Mamdani is an Islamist?
Yeah, I mean, well, he's certainly an apologist for Islamists, right? He's just... the fact that he can't quite figure out what's wrong with the phrase 'globalize the intifada', and that the worst he'll say of it is that he doesn't use that language nor does he encourage it, but he's not going to condemn it. And that he's just so fixated on the Middle East, right? He's mayor of New York, and his main fixation is Israel and Palestine and Gaza, etc. One of the first things he did was change the definition of antisemitism. You know, that Eric Adams had kind of rammed that through as some kind of executive order at the mayoral level, and Mamdani changed it. Now, I don't necessarily agree with the definition of antisemitism that is being promulgated by Deborah Lipstadt and other people who are... I forgot the name of it, but it's a very expansive conception of what it means to be antisemitic, which shuts down conversations. Yeah. And it seems to shut down, at least to my eyes, some conversation about what Israel is doing as a nation and just criticizing Israeli politics, etc. So I agree that there's something to debate there and just how we should bound, you know, the Overton window on that topic. But the fact that Mamdani is just, you know, he's a proud DSA member, you know, Democratic Socialists of America, they were out on October 8th supporting Hamas, right? I mean, like, there's just no way that should be possible. And there's no way that anyone who's got that level of callousness and confusion — I mean, confusion being charitable — should be running a major American city, right, much less being, you know, the darling, you know, the poster boy for the future of democratic politics. So it's... yes, he knows exactly how fully the Muslim Brotherhood through the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, in America has gamed, you know, our politics. I mean, there's something very sinister about the way Islamists have spread their ideology through the West and targeted liberals, right? I mean, people whose primary, the center of ethical gravity for them is to never be, quote, 'racist', right? As though race tracked any kind of criticism of Islam, which of course it doesn't. But that's the notion. It's like, okay, to criticize Islam is to be racist. That's the first piece of confusion. And Islamophobia as a meme is used to silence any criticism of the doctrine of Islam as indistinguishable from just bigotry against Muslims as people, right? And so it's that piece of confusion that's being leveraged, and Mamdani is someone who knows enough about this, right? I mean, both his parents are just up to their eyeballs in this kind of discourse. So he grew up with this. He knows that he's, you know, not saying the quiet part out loud or struggling not to say it out loud. And he knows just how calculated all of this is to confuse people about really what is in fact spreading theocracy.
Yeah. So what's strange in the change in America specifically on this issue is that this has always been a problem, a blind spot for liberals, right? But what's happened more recently is that there's a side of the right that seems to be taking the same position. I found an old, and we'll show it, an old appearance of yours on the Tucker Carlson show. It must have been about 25 years ago, probably in the wake of 9/11.
I think it could have been my first television interview. The irony for me has always been that, you know, if the jihadists ever took power in this country, the first people who'd be rounded up and executed, probably slowly, would be liberals, would be secularists, would be gays, would be the very same people who are always making excuses for radical Islam. It seems like almost like masochism to me or self-hatred.
You won't hear Tucker saying that now. In fact, now it's a defense of...
Well, now he's castigating Trump as the antichrist for criticizing Islam, right? Or disrespecting, you know, the Muslim God, right? Like he's so... yeah, he's pining in a way in defense of... I guess his master ethic is defend monotheism of whatever flavor at any cost. And he's... yeah, he's... I mean, Tucker, we can talk about Tucker. Tucker is a deeply weird person, and he's showing that weirdness, you know, it's coming out of his pores now. And it's very hard to predict what his politics will be from one week to the next, but he's tracking something. Yes, right of center. The America First wing of the MAGA cult has broken with the president on this issue. I mean, you could, you know, the president at least nominally or, you know, at least functionally most of the time is still staking his claim defending the West against, you know, Islamism and jihadism, right? Like he doesn't talk about that very much. He doesn't... I don't know that he has more than two sentences in his head to describe that project, but his bias seems to be, you know, if anything, it's a caricature of what the left fears, right? We don't want any more of these people coming from [__] hole countries, right? Now, that's not the way to say it. That's not even the way to think it. That doesn't track the real problem, but at least that is functionally tracking the issue of we should want to know who's coming into our country and we don't want any more jihadis, right? You know...
So, that's a bias of the president.
Yeah. But you have a lot of America First people who seem to be... I think antisemitism is largely at work here. But their epiphany now seems to be, you know, it's the Jews that got us into this problem with Islam in the first place. If it weren't for these Jew-scheming Jews, there wouldn't be any... there might not even have been a World War II, right? I mean, like the Jews convinced Winston Churchill to get us into World War II, according to, you know, Daryl Cooper on Tucker's podcast and on Rogan's podcast. So it's like this is... maybe it's all about the Jews. Maybe we wouldn't have a problem with these sincere religious believers who just happen to be Muslim, but for the Jews. And so let's just withdraw from any kind of entanglement in the Middle East. Let Israel sink or swim on its own. Let's put our hemisphere in order and let's forget that 9/11 even happened, and that, you know, the Charlie Hebdo massacre happened, or the Bataclan massacre happened, or any other thing that had nothing to do with Israel, with the Jews. And let's convince ourselves that we don't have any kind of civilizational conflict with traditional Islam.
Yeah. So seeing as you have been a fierce critic of Trump, and here you lay out that his biases are actually not just in favor of the West, but his bias is against the Islamist world.
And obviously it's the case he's one of the most pro-Jewish presidents in history. It's just his foreign policy has been very compatible, and I don't think Israel controls American politics, but it's very pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, and not least he has Jewish grandchildren.
And with that, presumably that aligns with your worldview. I mean, actually I shouldn't presume, but...
Well, there's some caveat to the issue there, but...
Well, we'll come to the caveats, but given that you had previously supported or endorsed Kamala at the last presidential, can you say the same about her? Was the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris, are their biases in the same way? Are they pro-Western? Are they pro-Israel? I mean, Kamala said some things like 'all eyes on Rafah', and there was definitely rhetoric from their side that suggested their biases are not in the same direction.
Yeah. Well, the short answer is I think the Democratic Party is certainly capable of promoting someone who would just be a deal-breaker on all those issues, who's just a closeted Islamist on some level, or just a masochist, or someone with Stockholm syndrome who just doesn't know what they're talking about on these issues and would sell out everything in order to just, quote, 'not be racist' or 'not be Islamophobic'. So yes, the Democratic Party is... I'm still worried that they have not gotten the firmware upgrade they should have gotten on the basis of the loss in 2024, and, you know, they don't realize all the things they should realize in order to win in 2028. So a character like Mamdani is that, or, you know, there are people like that. I don't think Kamala was as much of a liability on that front as many people feared. I mean, I think I don't have any deep reason to know this. I mean, one, her husband's Jewish, so that's one data point. But I just never heard her be as, you know, fatally confused about the defense of Western values and open societies as some other Democrats. So, and I don't think Hillary Clinton would have been confused.
You didn't hear Kamala be confused? I don't remember hearing her say anything coherent. I was confused by everything she said.
I think she basically just avoided the topic, and also she... yeah, she was just not a good candidate. I mean, there are many reasons not to like her. And also, I mean, to give a shout-out to the people who supported Trump in that election because of this single issue. I mean, there are people who were single-issue voters, you know, right-of-center Jews who are concerned, you know, about the fate of Israel and the fate of Jews globally, who thought, well, Trump is just going to, in a very straightforward way, be better than Kamala on that issue, and that's my only issue. That probably was a safe bet. I think there are reasons to believe that Trump supported Israel more than certainly Biden would have, and Kamala would have after him. We wouldn't have bombed Iran under, you know, with Israel, with...
But you support the Iran war in principle.
I do. I don't support the way Trump got us into it. So I think that the war could well be a disaster and actually be worse than not having done anything. And that just remains to be seen what happens, right? So, but Trump, I mean, Trump, his messaging about it has been terrible. He's done nothing to prepare the American people or Congress for it, you know, for any sacrifice, you know, from, you know, higher gas prices on down.
What should he have done with Congress?
He's alienated all of our allies. We have no allies other than Israel. He's... I mean, if you recall, President Obama was rightly castigated for having drawn a red line in Syria, and then when Assad crossed it, you know, he did nothing. You know, Trump has drawn a dozen red lines and blinked and blinked and blinked again. And, you know, we're just in a world where now words don't appear to matter. But like, he has done a tremendous amount of harm to the stature, you know, both political and moral of the United States on the world stage. And it just remains to be seen whether the end of this war is going to seem like an improvement over the status quo or not. And I think that we just don't know at this point.
But you think he's done that in the way he's conducted the war, not the war itself, right?
Yeah. And I think he's... I mean, the problem with him is that he's not... I don't think he actually knows much of anything or believes much of anything. He's just a pathologically selfish person, right? So he's... yes, he has been, as you said, very supportive of Israel and the Jews, but I don't think that runs very deep. It certainly doesn't run deeper than his own self-interest. So if he can cut some deal where he sells our most advanced AI chips to the UAE in defiance of our obvious security concerns, because the UAE is just going to share those with China, with whom they do joint military exercises, and he does this because he's raking in, you know, $2 billion into his, you know, his cryptocurrency scheme, he will do that. And I think if the mullahs in Tehran had offered him a $2 billion golf course deal, we might not have bombed Iran. I think he's that transactional, and he's that... and so he's not... I think his support of Israel is much less secure than many Jews hope based on that. I just think he's just not a totally rational actor. He's a narcissist, right? I mean, you could... I think you could...
It's hard to argue against the fact that he's a narcissist, but I think that there, believe it or not, there are some consistencies. He's been talking about Iran for decades, and he's been calling it the enemy of America for decades. When Obama and Blinken, they were trying to do these deals, which... and Biden, which only gave more money to Iran, who carried on with their nuclear enrichment all the while, Trump was saying all along, 'What are you doing? You're nuts.' And likewise, he's been consistent on China. He has been calling out China as the threatening counter-hegemon to America for decades. So if you take the sort of day-to-day tweets of Trump, it's hard to make sense of it. But if you step back and look at what he has been saying consistently, it's just shocking.
Yeah, I don't think he gets the larger piece around jihadism and Islamism. I think he's... I mean, I don't see any evidence of that. I think he's... he hates Iran for... I mean, he had a formative experience, as many people of his age did, in 1979 during the hostage crisis and the obvious ineptitude and just powerlessness of the Carter administration in the face of that, and just the humiliation of our country by this group of religious maniacs, right? So he saw that, and that formed some kind of indelible impression. I get it. I have the same impression. But does he know about Twelverism? Does he know about the kind of the topspin Khomeini gave to Shiism that produced the current product of Iran?
Look, he might not know that. I bet he does know that they are Islamists who want to kill and destroy America. They tried to kill him twice. So yeah, I don't think he's dumb enough that...
I just think he's... if he meets a telegenic Islamist... actually, he met a telegenic jihadist in Syria and was suddenly a big fan, right? So I mean, he's just... I don't think he's... he's practically, you know, most of his brain is a pragmatist...
is some television social media algorithm, right? Like he's not... he's pushed around by concerns that are not deep, they're certainly not principled, and I wouldn't say they're deeply rational either, right? So he's not... it's by accident that he hasn't been glad-handed sufficiently by some odious Islamist regime. The truth is I don't even know how he's behaved in the Gulf on all these points. I mean, it is true that MBS now is doing some helpful things to de-radicalize the clerics in Saudi Arabia. So despite the fact that he butchers journalists and does other psychopathic things, he's more of a mixed figure if your issue is somehow stemming the tide of Islamism and jihadism. But the way Trump has grifted the Gulf, I don't know that he's tracking whether he's empowering and partnering with funders of terrorism or not, right? I mean, Qatar is like, you know, Qatar has been a bad actor up until yesterday.
On terrorism, right? And the Saudis before that. But yeah, there's a lot... you know, there's a lot that's happening there that is auspicious, and I think we'll take the help wherever we can get it. But there's, you know, there's the layer of kind of the royal families, and then there's a layer of the, you know, the so-called Arab street where minds have not necessarily been changed, and I don't know that Trump is tracking any of that.
But with regard to that, so the good faith argument to defend his behavior would be he's playing realpolitik, and if you were to take a position on foreign policy which was highly principled and sort of be almost puritanical about 'we will not operate and work with anyone who hasn't got a perfect, beautiful, pristine record', then America would not be able to work with any other nation. So it's not being that finicky.
Yeah. I just think he's not... there's no world in which it's a good thing for him to have expressed more or less nothing but fondness for Putin up until the hour where Putin just kind of humiliates him again and again by not doing anything he says and continuing to butcher people in Ukraine, right? I mean, the fact that we have a president who's walking around saying that Ukraine started the war, right? I mean, not even Putin says that, right? I mean, this is... it's completely insane, right? It's just not... I mean, we put a game show host in charge of the world's lone superpower. We did that. America did that, right? And the world is now dealing with the consequences of that. It's not that everything he's done is bad, but he's just not a serious person, right? It's just... we're going to wake up at some point and everyone will realize that this is... we did something that should have been impossible.
But so now we're going back to our own sort of reality of politics. So I don't have a vote in America, so it's not relevant to me. But if the option is between Kamala Harris and Trump, and the biases of Trump are pro-Western, pro-America, anti-Islamist, pro and Western civilization which includes Israel...
But it's not pro-America in any rational... I mean, there's no pro-America...
West, you're pro-America.
Yeah. No, but he's destroyed our soft power. I mean, we have no... we used to have a tremendous amount of influence based on a global perception, certainly among, you know, the Western democracies, the free, open societies globally, there was a perception of shared values and competence and stability and kind of moral probity, right? It's not that we were perfect, but all of our failures were judged against ideals that we actually held, right, and articulated well for others and inspired, you know, in fledgling democracies. All of that's gone. I mean, we have a complete... we now, we're now a country that doesn't judge any other nation for anything. I mean, you can throw your journalists in jail. You can kill your journalists. You can attack your neighbors. There's no judgment here. There can be no judgment here. We have a deeply amoral, at best, executive branch that is just... that is treating everything, all of American power, all the levers of American power, as an extortion racket. I mean, basically what he's done is he's weaponized American trade policy and foreign policy for his personal advantage, right? I mean, like, so he puts a 46% tariff on Vietnam. How does Vietnam get that tariff relieved? They greenlight a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family, right? That alone, I mean, he's done hundreds of things like that. That one thing is the worst thing that has happened in our lifetime for the erosion of the moral standing of this country on the global stage. It's like... that's extortion. It's insane. And yet he's treating American power as though it's his personal property to be traded away for his own advantage and the advantage of his family and friends. And he's made billions of dollars in the last 12 months. So the fact that that's even possible, much less, you know, goes unremarked right of center as though there's no downside to it. There's an enormous downside.
Yeah, I think you're right to call that out. And I don't think World Liberty Financial is defensible in the slightest. I don't understand why he would do the cryptocurrency he did. There's no...
Well, you understand why he did it. He did it because he could. It's a toll booth. I mean, it's a way to pay bribes directly to him. And apparently it's legal.
