 I want to revisit the conversation with a clip from this past weekend of a Cornell professor expressing the exhilaration he says he felt after that attack happened. Let's roll that. Who are more violence as for you and why? Who are more departing from the millions as for you and why? Who are able to breathe? Who are able to breathe for the first time in years? It was exhilarating. It was exhilarating. It was epic. It was exhilarating. It was challenging. It was exhilarating. First let me just say that I hear complaints that harping on the stuff from lefty activists and professors is not as important as what's happening in Israel and Gaza and that is absolutely true. But the reason I think it's worth talking about is because it's a real mask-off moment for the social justice left. They use all these academic terms, decolonialization, shifting the power dynamic, but we are now seeing in practice what all of that means. It means we're okay with killing innocent people, non-combatants. Maybe we won't do it ourselves. Maybe we'll throat clear before, but we'll excuse it just like how we excused the looting and destruction in the summer of 2020 with this out-of-context MLK quote about riots as the voice of the unheard. And it's just been years of microaggressions, silences, violence, punch fascists, and fascists is like everyone to the right of Hugo Chavez. That's what I hear with this rhetoric. You're giving permission to cheer slaughter. And as long as you're on the wrong side of the simplistic oppressor or oppressed dichotomy, we're going to shrug at best when it happens. And you can criticize Israel's government all you want, and they should be criticized. I've criticized them some today, but you don't make excuses for barbaric killing because you agree with the cause. And it's just asking for something really ugly to happen in this country. And when it does, part of that is going to be on people like that guy. You're supposed to be an intellectual role model. So start acting like it. Yeah, I mean, my thoughts on this are a very strong and concise fuck that guy. There is no excuse for that type of thing. Nothing about watching innocent people be murdered was exhilarating. Nothing about that was exciting. It was despicable. It was a horrible, unprovoked, senseless act of violence. And it's really stunning to me that people all across college campuses, sometimes at very elite schools, we have this happening at Cornell. We have this happening at Harvard. We have this happening at the University of Pennsylvania. The degree to which the far left, the progressive woke campus activists and academics have really shown themselves to be simplistic in their understandings of foreign policy, simplistic in their understandings of race relations, simplistic in promulgating their colonizer narratives, acting as if basically the racial dynamics and colonist dynamics of the United States can be mapped on to every other area in the world, which is obviously patently false. I mean, for about nine years now, these same people have been shouting about microaggressions and the need for safe spaces and shouting down campus speakers. In one case, I remember, I think it was the Middlebury College case where they ended up also assaulting the person. It was the Charles Murray, Allison Stanger talk. They ended up assaulting Allison, who by the way was the sort of slightly more lefty person presented as the foil, the person there to challenge Charles Murray. So you literally in some cases have these campus speaker shout downs that are resulting in actual violence and yet these are the same people who want to act like the littlest thing is a microaggression. I'm sorry, this is a fucking macroaggression. You don't get to stand on stage and talk about how exhilarating it is to see people be brutally raped and murdered. I wonder whether this will be the moment that the radical campus and academic left breaks. It feels like the cracks have been forming. It feels like some of the grift and corruption present in the Black Lives Matter organization and the higher ups like Patrice Collors. It seems like people have really lost some faith in that. We also saw a lot of sort of Hamas paraglider graphic design co-opting by BLM and by DSA groups in the US. I wonder whether DSA Black Lives Matter and some of these woke campus groups will sort of completely lose credibility forever because of this moment. I think it's very possible. I mean it's already becoming a liability because employers are trying to ask if you are affiliated with this group or that group that did that. And you know I'm not someone who is for that kind of oppressive we might call cancel culture but to the degree that it does become a liability I think that there's enough of a backlash where we might start to see a little bit of that unwind but whether it does or not I mean we need people to stand against that and call that crap out because we have to defend like the liberal society. We have to defend the idea that it's not acceptable to violate people's rights and their life and their property just because they happen to be in a disfavored group. That's like just like a fundamental bedrock of what this whole thing is supposed to be about and these people it's reached a breaking point for me at least with this like that they are eroding that really fundamental bedrock. And by the way his assertion that oh it's so exciting and exhilarating to see this power dynamic flip. What power dynamic flip? Israel is annihilating Hamas and the Gaza Strip is never going to be the same after like there hasn't been some sort of like amazing shift in power like we learned talking to Max Abrams last week terrorist attacks like this they don't achieve their political objective and the Hamas's political objective is not to help the people in Gaza or the West Bank at least in the short term it's to bolster their image and put them at the center of some bigger movement and they'll rack up as much collateral damage as they need to to do so. So this is a really just disappointing and frustrating moment. I honestly feel like this is the second installment of the summer of George Floyd like do you remember that moment in 2020 after George Floyd was brutally killed by cops and were libertarians we completely reject the fact that so much police abuse of power exists and that type of thing is is absolutely horrific to watch. You know reasons Billy Binion and CJ Ceremella have done excellent reporting on this but right after that happened there were all of those crazy protests some of which were protests a lot of them were riots and you remember I mean it's now an internet meme the idea of the mostly peaceful protest and it was like you know some anchor talking about this as you know fires were burning in the background right behind it right like these were riots and there was enormous property destruction that resulted from this and on one hand you could say people have every right to to protest this horrific police killing but they ended up really savaging American cities I mean it was awful you had shop windows being boarded up as if that's the sign of a functioning healthy democracy it was really sad and I think for a lot of people it was this moment where there was like a oh this isn't just advocating for police reform this isn't just advocating for you know specific changes to qualified immunity right like this is people engaging in these really brutal and sometimes violent methods of trying to get what they want politically from the left and like that's not something that we like they sort of showed themselves a little bit and I wonder whether we're currently seeing this in this current moment where there's an awful lot of I think legitimate antisemitism coming out and a sense that I'm getting from some far left progressive activists that they authentically think that you know for people who they consider to be oppressed it is perfectly okay to use violence to achieve the ends that they desire and I disagree with that and I think many normal people on the left disagree with that I wonder what will happen and whether these progressive far leftist ideals and talking points and groups will continue to exist for years to come or whether they will just lose credibility en masse as a result of this well and I hope that they realize the degree to which they are tainting these conversations and the ability to have to advocate for police reform which is necessary none of us thought it was okay for Derek Chauvin to kneel on this guy until he died and I'm glad that this this man is in prison and I continue to be a believer in an advocate for criminal justice reform and police being held accountable for their actions and people not being sentenced to decades and decades in prison when they shouldn't be and similarly I have sympathy for aspects of the Palestinian cause it's partly why I wanted to have Trita on here today to try to flesh that out a little bit and explain a little bit of the history and the grievances I think it's not completely without merit but when you are embracing or you know elevating this iconography it taints the conversation and it just makes it that much harder to make any progress on these issues hey thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Trita Parsey about whether the US can and should de-escalate things in the Middle East you can watch another clip right here or the full conversation over here