1208: Antisemitism | Skeptical Sunday

Summary

The Jordan Harbinger Show — Skeptical Sunday

Episode 1208: Antisemitism | Skeptical Sunday
Date: September 14, 2025
Host: Jordan Harbinger
Co-Host: Nick Pell

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Overview

In this Skeptical Sunday episode, Jordan Harbinger and co-host Nick Pell tackle the topic of antisemitism: its ancient roots, modern manifestations, and the misconceptions fuelling its recent resurgence. The pair critically examine where classic antisemitic tropes originate, challenge popular myths with fact-based discussion, and address why today’s antisemitism is more embedded in intellectual discourse than in the caricatured extremism of the past. The episode combines personal perspective, historical exploration, debunking of conspiracy theories, and a case for engaging even offensive ideas with reasoned counter-argument.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Talk About Antisemitism Now?

• Rising Incidents: Explains the surge in antisemitic incidents with chilling statistics from the ADL (360% increase, high-profile attacks in 2025) [01:10].
• Why Nick Chose This Topic:

  "I'm so tired of seeing people confront antisemitism in this lazy Kumbaya. All people are the same. Hate is bad, kids. ... It's ill prepared to confront modern antisemitism and it puts people I love in danger."
  – Nick Pell [03:18]

2. What Does “Being Jewish” Mean?

• Jews are an "ethno-religious community"—neither simply race nor just a religion [04:32].
• Brief rundown of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, and Yemeni Jewish communities.

  “When someone talks about how the Jews control the world, it’s like... which ones?”
  – Nick Pell [06:32]

3. A Brief History: The Evolution of Antisemitism

Three Phases:

a. Religious Antisemitism (Middle Ages, Inquisition, blood libels)
b. Racial Antisemitism (Enlightenment & Modern Era, Dreyfus Affair, Nazis)
c. Intellectual/Contemporary Antisemitism (today’s ‘sophisticated’ iteration)
[07:21–07:46, 36:32]

• Myths about "Jews being expelled from 109 countries" debunked — real number closer to 12 [08:26].

• Medieval expulsions often for financial reasons: rulers would expel Jews to avoid repaying debts, justifying it with slander [18:12].

  “They’d get in over their heads and decide it was just easier to expel all the Jews than pay back their loan.”
  – Nick Pell [18:12]

• Consequences of Expulsion:

  • Local economies suffer; Spain expelled Jews in 1492, economies tanked, Portugal (which accepted Spanish Jews) soon outstripped Spain.
  • Nazi Germany: huge brain drain (Einstein, etc.). Same for Arab states post-1948 [19:54–20:59].

4. Iconic Antisemitic Tropes: Explanation & Debunking

Trope: Jews Control the Banks

• Medieval roots: Christians forbidden to lend at interest; Jews fill the gap [15:39].
• Today: demonstrably false. Only a tiny number of leading bankers worldwide are Jewish.

Trope: Jews Are Communists

• Kernel: a handful of prominent Jews in early socialist/communist circles—explained by right-wing repression of Jews in Europe [22:13].
• Reality: Soviet leaders were not Jewish; Marx was ethnically Jewish but anti-religious [23:15].
• Contradiction in anti-Jewish rhetoric: “Are we money grubbers dominating the West, or evil Communists?” [25:50]

Trope: Protocols of the Elders of Zion and "The International Jew"

• Both are historically important, but proven forgeries and full of borrowed plagiarism [36:10–36:25].

  "It's kind of like a conspiracy website citing another conspiracy website as its source."
  – Nick Pell [36:25]

Trope: Jews Run Hollywood & Porn

• Hollywood: Due to historical barriers elsewhere, Jews found success in entertainment early on (e.g., Irish cops, not a ‘plot’) [42:51].
• Porn: No, a rabbi doesn’t “own Pornhub.” Occasional Jewish involvement vastly exaggerated [61:09].

  "Big news. Lots of people are assholes and say mean things about other groups of people."
  – Nick Pell [60:33]

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5. Modern/Intellectual Antisemitism: The New Challenge

• Today’s antisemites are more often “soft spoken, well read, and armed with charts and citations” [01:40].

• Kevin MacDonald (“the Marx of the anti-Semites”):

  • Former evolutionary psych professor, his influential trilogy ("Culture of Critique") claims Judaism is an evolutionary group strategy aimed at outcompeting others.
  • Nick recounts meeting MacDonald—he’s charming, intelligent, not a clichéd “villain,” and that's worrying [38:37–38:47].
  • MacDonald's theories as "compliments" mis-framed as conspiracies (“high-investment parenting,” “verbal intelligence,” “cultural solidarity”).

• Intellectual Antisemitism’s Danger:

  • Harder to spot, more persuasive, influential in “polite middle class circles,” less socially radioactive [15:17].

  “People have to put aside this, like, Star Wars villain of what an anti-Semite is if they’re going to get anything from this episode.”
  – Nick Pell [38:47]

• Why Ignoring Is a Mistake:

  • Failure to seriously engage bad arguments allows them to “metastasize” [50:24–50:44].
  • Notable: It took decades for any serious academic takedown of MacDonald’s work (see Nathan Kaufness's 2018 review) [51:13].

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6. Weaponizing Jewish Heterogeneity

• Anti-Jewish narratives often require mutually contradictory claims [26:06]:
  • "Jews are leftist revolutionaries" and "dominating right-wing capitalists."
  • Turns ordinary group variation into sinister intent—e.g., voting patterns, Jewish subgroups, etc. [64:41]

  “The problem is when you associate those broad patterns with the entire group at an individual level.”
  – Nick Pell [64:41]

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7. Misuse of Jewish Texts: The Talmud

• Talmud is a dense, contradictory compendium of rabbinic debate—not Jewish “bible” or accepted doctrine [66:29–67:19].
• Antisemitic sites take passages out of context, willfully misleading or even fabricating quotes [68:53].

  “If you ever encounter somebody who, like, isn’t a rabbi that told you that they read the Talmud? They were lying to you.”
  – Nick Pell [68:46]

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8. Antisemitism on the Political Right and Left

• Right-wing antisemitism: Now stigmatized, largely confined to fringe, but responsible for rare but horrific violence (e.g., Pittsburgh synagogue shooting) [77:38].
• Left-wing antisemitism: More socially accepted in some activist and academic circles, often coded as anti-Zionism.
  • Example: Al Sharpton’s Crown Heights incitement and enduring respect in politics [78:18–79:10].
  • Recent political candidates defend “globalize the intifada” rhetoric [79:32].

• Obsessive focus on Israel, Israel lobbying “controlling” US foreign policy: debunked as overblown, Israel is not the puppet master of America [80:53].

  “A country with a GDP of Maryland and population of Michigan is not running the country with the world’s largest military and nuclear arsenal.”
  – Nick Pell [80:53]

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9. Why You Must Engage, Not Censor

• Censorship feeds the “keepers of dangerous secrets” narrative and drives interested people into the arms of bad ideas [50:24, 86:18].
• The answer to bad ideas isn’t to ignore or crush them, but to present better arguments and truthfully debunk them [86:53].

  “Don’t lie to protect the truth. Learn how to tell the truth better.”
  – Nick Pell [86:18]

10. Antisemitism as Resentment

• Drawing on Nietzsche, Nick describes antisemitism as the “resentment of your betters,” reframing failure as moral virtue and others’ success as evidence of evil [73:12–73:39]:

  “You reframe your failures as some kind of moral virtue and say that actually excellence is bad and victimhood is good.”
  – Nick Pell [73:39]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On intellectual antisemitism’s danger:

  "He’s not a frothing at the mouth weirdo on the Donahue Show. He could be your neighbor."
  – Nick Pell [39:24]

• On historical expulsion:

  “The biggest borrower in any country in Europe, especially during the Middle Ages, is going to be the king or the local lord. ... Easier to expel the Jews than pay back the loan.”
  – Nick Pell [18:12]

• On overrepresentation:

  “Are black people overrepresented on the Supreme Court? Because it’s two out of nine? Like, I don’t think so.”
  – Nick Pell [44:16]

• On the value of disagreement:

  "Bad ideas need better responses than silence."
  – Nick Pell [53:35]

• On the futility of Talmud-based attacks:

  “You can’t really understand Talmud without studying all of it. And it’s insanely long and incredibly dense. ... Most Jews, even observant ones, they have no idea what’s in the Talmud.”
  – Nick Pell [68:46]

• On left vs. right-wing antisemitism:

  “Right-wing antisemites are generally considered weirdos and people want nothing to do with them. Left-wing antisemites have representation in Congress.”
  – Nick Pell [78:18]

• On conspiracy thinking:

  “Once you decide that antisemitism is true, you just start seeing the rationale for it absolutely everywhere.”
  – Jordan Harbinger [74:34]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Introduction/Context: 00:47–03:18
• What is Jewish Identity: 04:29–06:37
• History of Antisemitism: 06:37–12:37
• "Jews & Banks": 15:39–20:31
• Jewish Communism: 22:13–25:06
• Protocols/Foundational Texts: 31:28–36:25
• Modern Intellectual Antisemitism & Kevin MacDonald: 36:32–51:13
• Jews in Hollywood, Academia, and Porn: 42:51–62:01
• Talmud Myths: 66:29–70:08
• Nietzsche on Antisemitism as Resentment: 73:12–74:34
• Right vs Left Antisemitism, and Israel: 77:38–83:57
• Debating, Not Censoring: 84:14–86:53
• Closing Thoughts: 86:53–end

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Conclusion

Jordan and Nick provide a comprehensive, fact-based examination of antisemitism, past and present. They expose the “kernels of truth” behind persistent myths, detail the dangers of ignoring intellectual antisemitism, and urge good-faith engagement over censorship or platitudes.

Key takeaway: The antidote to antisemitism—like all bad ideas—is open inquiry, factual engagement, and the courage to drag persistent old lies into the daylight and show them for what they really are: expressions of resentment, not hidden truths.

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Full episode and resources available at:
Jordan Harbinger Show — Skeptical Sunday

Transcript

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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 and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers. On Sundays though, is Skeptical Sunday, where a rotating guest co host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic. Subjects like astrology, acupuncture, recycling, chemtrails, banned foods, diet supplements, the lottery, and more. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.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, D.C. 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 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 will 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 after school 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 want to know.

[Nick Pell]

I'm not Jewish, but I am married to a Jewish 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 Holocaustly Jewish.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is holocaustly 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, your mom is a gentile, you're 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 always Tell my mother in law Happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah. I speak German. I'm 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 Jews we have here in the west aren't a united ethnicity. You've got Ashkenazi Jews who are mostly Russian, German, Austrian Empire. You know, Poland would have been part of that. Sephardic Jews, that's my wife, that's most Jews in the United States, particularly in the Northeast. Sephardic Jews who you would see more in the American south are Mediterranean, Jewish, Spain, Italy, certain parts of the Levant. Mizrahi Jews originate in Persia or, you know, recently in Persia. I know they all come from 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, bro. No, that's. I mean, a meaningless phrase can have a meaningless answer. Anyway, that's the nickel tour of the different Jewish ethnic communities, I suppose. But what can you tell us about the history of anti Semitism? 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 or whatever you want to call it, and then you've got like Mizrahi Jews from Persia. But oh no, that's recent. That was only 4,000 years ago. It's like, oh God, I'm getting, you know, can we do this in less than seven hours?

[Nick Pell]

Oh, absolutely. And it's actually interesting that you, you say that because that's a like, common Gripe of anti Semites is that Jews aren't, you know, they're not really from Israel, they're from Poland or whatever.

[Jordan Harbinger]

As long as you stop history at a point that's convenient for you.

[Nick Pell]

Yes. Benjamin Netanyahu is from Philadelphia.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I know.

[Nick Pell]

Fun fact. The short version is that modern antisemitism can be seen broadly in three phases. First, there's the religious anti Semitism. This is the 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 and poisoned wells and things like that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

All of that's pretty obviously untrue.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, 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 that. To kind of. It's like, where there's smoke, there's fire thing, you know, all 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 because it sounds persuasive, but, you know, we pulled it out of thin air.

[Nick Pell]

It's not a real number.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Nick Pell]

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 argument, right? Because 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, as 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.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, well, first of all, I think when people have to exaggerate facts, it's because their actual facts suck. We don't do that on this show. We steel, 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 know, left Persia, went to Spain, went to Portugal. They don't live there anymore. They went to Mexico. Right now it's like, okay, what's going on here?

[Nick Pell]

That's like the encapsulation of the Mizrahi Diaspora's like, chain of fat. 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'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 because we were Jewish. Well, I'm still right. Okay.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah. It's like, big shock. Brandeis University is run by Jews. The university founded because Jews couldn't get into Harvard.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I hate to laugh, but it's like, my buddy's dad was. He left Russia because 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. 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, nope. 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. He represents Israel, by the way.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Surprise.

[Nick Pell]

And one member of the World bank board of directors who 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 asked Nick on here to again steel man 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 anti Semitism. 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 guess I'm similar.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah. I find weird, marginal, bizarre, and yes, even hateful beliefs interesting. I mean, some of them are just weird and stupid. There was a group of communists who wanted to communicate with dolphins called posadists.

[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 is pretty weird, too.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, it's all weird. It's a fun thing to Google that. Like, When 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay. Why did you tell me that?

[Nick Pell]

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 because I find the psychology and the 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 anti Semitism 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 going to do about it? And I'm like, oh, that's weird. I did not, I'm not going to 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. And he's 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.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, let's do Nobel Prizes next.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, exactly.

[Nick Pell]

Nobel Prize winners.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Exactly. It's so 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 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. Anti Semitism 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. 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 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 going to earn this much just based on time, so whatever.

[Nick Pell]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it's. It's just a 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 chips 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 silks, you know, like, so.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The lender is 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 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 loaning on interest, 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 out of 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 lo. 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. So basically these kings and dukes, they're defaulting on loans and they're like, man, how am I going to 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 them out with their own pitchforks, right?

[Nick Pell]

They'll drive them out for you. So 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 immoral things causes people to suffer 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. And anti Semites 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, okay. What about the Nazis? I mean, they obviously didn't expel their Jewish population. I know, I think, didn't they Try to initially where they ship everybody to Madagascar or something, but other Madagascar, Uganda.

[Nick Pell]

There was a bunch of different places discussed or just, just move them somewhere. And then it bec became, 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 at all the Jews, you're going to see a massive outflow of capital and a massive brain drain. 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 subcontinental 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 anti Semitic paranoiac 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 were 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 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 anti Semitic. 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, Hellenically 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 Ukrainian.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Other than Marx, zero Jews there. And Marx was like, yeah, I'm Jewish, but we have a Christmas tree in the house, you know, so it's okay.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Where does the Jewish. So he's as Jewish as I am. Where does the Jewish Communism trope come from then? I mean, something tells me it wasn't Mao Zedong who threw that one out there.

[Nick Pell]

Like I said earlier, membership, big shock. When you're a legally oppressed minority, you tend to side with political parties that criticize your legally enshrined oppression. There were prominent Communists who were Jews. Zinoviev, Trotsky, Luxembourg. But these people are like, these are the waluigis 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 terms of actually existing Communist countries, they have negative influence.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see.

[Nick Pell]

So there's either this undue emphasis placed on what are, comparatively speaking, minor figures like Zinoviev, who I'm sure most people know Zenoviev 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 countries. So I see Berea, 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 they're people no one has heard of. So 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? Are we supposedly bad because we're capitalist? Are we money grubbers 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, in the view of modern anti Semites, 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 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 unassimilable 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 at the time, Germany and France were the main geopolitical rivals on the continent. But there is racial anti Semitism 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, it's to 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. From these people who are called Khazars. It's called the Khazar 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 as 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 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 because I do have like 0.4% Yakut, which is like this weird region in the middle of nowhere, Siberia, whatever, adjacent, which is 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. Because, like, Genghis Khan bred one of my, I don't know, like super 15 generations ago, whatever, 100 generations ago, whatever ancestors. And my mom's like, aha. Because apparently we have all this family that looks a little bit Asian. And it's like, why? But even still, even if we accept that weird theory, who cares? So 400 years ago, or, I don't even know, 600 years ago, some group converted and yeah, there's going to be a lot of.

[Nick Pell]

Even if this is true, who cares?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Nick Pell]

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, Jews aren't immune to anti Semitic 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 Heydrich Heine was one of them who called the Talmud a spiritual ghetto. Ludwig Berna viewed Jews as a burden on progress. Otto Weiniger 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. Gosh, more than that, they're all highly intellectually influential. These aren't like random Twitter schizo posters of their day.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Nick Pell]

Ludwig Borna is considered the founding father of the German Free Press. And in the case of Weiniger and Born, they're liberals.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see. So racial anti Semitism, is this the stage that gives us the Nazis in concentration camps and all that stuff? Is that kind of where this comes from?

[Nick Pell]

Yeah. And then 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 you a Jew. They had a very complex system of determining who was and who was not a Jewish. And 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 kind of like Fisher Price, my first, Anti Semitism.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Nick Pell]

It's what. Every anti Semite 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 lesser known gem called Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, which also has some real, real book.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Nick Pell]

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 going to 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 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 would recommend that people who want to know about the history of any idea read its foundational tags.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure, hating Jews might be stale, but these deals and discounts are as fresh as they get. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Simplisafe. True story. Jen's cousin just got robbed. They had hardwired cameras and an alarm system, but they did not have active monitoring. So when they came home one evening, the alarm was tripped. They got the alert, they called the cops. By the time the police showed up, the bad guys were long gone with their valuables. I told them, lock your back gates. And more importantly, you gotta get SimpliSafe's Liveguard protection. Here's the problem with most home security, it's reactive. The alarm goes off after somebody's already inside. That is way too late. Simplisafe, flip that script. They built a system designed to stop crime before it even starts. Here's how it works. Their Active Guard Outdoor Protection uses AI powered cameras that don't just pick up random motion, they actually identify a person lurking around your property. So the alert goes then to Simplisafe's monitoring agents in real time and the agents step in right then they'll talk to the intruder over two way audio. Hey, we see you cops are on the way. They can blast a siren, they can flip on a spotlight, they can call 911 if needed. The intruder never even makes it inside. And that's the difference. Proactive versus reactive. And I trust Simplisafe because they back it up. No long term contracts, no hidden fees. You can cancel anytime. They've been named best home security system by U.S. news and World Report for five years straight. They've got a 60 day money back guarantee. So if you want real peace of mind and 50% off any new SimpliSafe system right [e-mail] Jordan that's simplisafe.com Jordan. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. This episode is also sponsored by Progressive. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Also, don't forget about our newsletter. It's almost every Wednesday. It's a two minute read. It's a great companion to the show. We take a principle from the show and make it very practical. Something you can apply right out of the box. Again, a little bit of a bite sized thing from us to you every Wednesday. Jordanharbinger.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 police, basically.

[Nick Pell]

It's also heavily plagiarized from a book called Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by somebody named Maurice Jolie. You're 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 anti Semitism is that so many of them parrot 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 anti Semitism 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 lazy or cartoonish way. Because it's not 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 the saint you're dead is anti Semitism 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, Kevin McDonald, who has been called the Marx of the anti Semites.

[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 and mouth breathing Klansmen. 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 anti Semite or intellectual anti Semite and just had a BLT with a guy.

[Nick Pell]

It was Chinese.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Nick Pell]

And.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, never mind then.

[Nick Pell]

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, 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 anti Semite is if they're going to get anything from this episode. MacDonald 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's so dangerous.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see.

[Nick Pell]

He's not a frothing at the mouth weirdo on the Donahue Show. He could be your neighbor.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Throwback. 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. And 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. Because you're like, this person is a complete monster who's 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 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 Gittinsburg, 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 said that. But what's his deal? What specifically makes his anti Semitism more intellectual than previous iterations?

[Nick Pell]

The main thing MacDonald 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, there. It's gotta be 3,000 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, reproduce, and maintain social cohesion within often hostile societies. So he identifies characteristics like high investment parenting, and a strong preference toward cultural intramarriage. Marrying people within 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 out compete your kids.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see.

[Nick Pell]

And thus he ascribes to it a 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 going to 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 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 because 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 this kernel of truth behind all this, that Jews are overrepresented or whatever in these powerful positions.

[Nick Pell]

Well, I'm going to stop you right there because I 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? It'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? Because it's two out of nine? Like, I don't think so. To be clear. I don't think so.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Nick Pell]

I don't think that the Supreme Court has to, or Hollywood or anything else has to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a good point.

[Nick Pell]

Mirror the population dynamics exactly at every.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You know, that 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 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. And 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 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 anti Semite. I had no idea. So it's not quite as present in the first book, though. 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 antisemitism. With the second book, Separation and Its Discontents. This book frames antisemitism 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 Jews evil because they're communists or capitalists? Well, according to McDonnell, 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's got his trilogy here. Where does that go? Where the first two stop.

[Nick Pell]

The third book is, is the one that's actually called Culture of Critique. This is a favorite of modern anti Semites and one of the three that most have actually read. A lot of people skip straight to that one here. He says that 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 interests as Bernie 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 lazy 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 50 years, whether you like him or not. I don't like him, but.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Nick Pell]

It's not. It's not disputable.

[Jordan Harbinger]

He's the most important Jewish intellectual and Chomsky hates Israel. So this is like, heads I win, tails you're a Jew. 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. I think McDonald is also a case study in why we should engage with seemingly intellectually sophisticated anti Semitism.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Nick Pell]

Well, the academic 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 and no one bothered to respond to it. Steven Pinker wouldn't even danger read it. He said it was beneath academic evaluation.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, Steven Pinker's also Jewish. Hey, can you read this book about why jews are bad? Dr. Finkelstein, like. No, no. Thanks, Maya. 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 foremost anti Semite.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Nick Pell]

You know, so I think that. Sure, they think it is anyway. But assume that these are legitimate studies, legitimate 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Nick Pell]

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 CSU Long Beach. It's just like, it's not Harvard, but it's a real universe. It's a real research university. And 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 Steven Pinker, episode 593, by the way, who wouldn't read his book, that he just seethed so hard he became like an Olympic level professional anti Semite?

[Nick Pell]

No, I. That's. I want to propose. I mean, might be true. I only had lunch with the guy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Once, but it was Chinese food, so you should.

[Nick Pell]

You should know, I. I don't really do that kind of armchair psychoanalysis. I don't think it's really that beneficial. But, yeah, 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's 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 Kaufness 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. Because it's like you. You say, like, is it true 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, because people talked about this and it's like, no.

[Nick Pell]

Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I agree with you. That's not exactly. There's a few steps in between. So we're going to link to that paper in the show notes if anybody wants to read it. So did McDonald ever respond to this, like, takedown 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 have been his reaction in 1994 when the book first came out. Maybe that's just what he's like as a person. But you know what? We'll never know. 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, 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. 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.

[Nick Pell]

Or they're just too afraid to engage with it, 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 Kauftus was, like, a grad student when he wrote this. 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 children with cancer to criticize Jews.

[Nick Pell]

Children with cancer rule the world.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You know, that's actually a really good response. Children with the cancer. Yeah, because 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.

[Nick Pell]

So Yeah, 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 reason your kids don't talk to you 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Gotcha.

[Nick Pell]

That's the difference. So, yes, a lot of Jews, as people who, you know, have maybe met a few, know 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 Chomsky or Steven Pinker count.

[Jordan Harbinger]

More than someone you've never heard of, because they haven't done that.

[Nick Pell]

Right. How widely published are they? 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 Steven 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 shell a mattress on this show, it's for the Jews. Right. Like, I want you to buy these dick pills for The Jews.

[Nick Pell]

You don't shill dick pills.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. You ever catch yourself venting? Maybe a little oversharing with your barber or your nail tech? While there's nothing wrong with asking for life advice from friends and family, let's be honest, they're not all licensed therapists. That's the difference with BetterHelp. When you're dealing with relationships, anxiety, stress, you want somebody who's actually trained for it. Clinically trained, licensed, knows what they're doing. BetterHelp's been around for over 10 years, helped 5 million people, and with 30,000 therapists, finding the right match is not luck. It can take a few tries. That's one of the many reasons I like and use BetterHelp. BetterHelp has been around for over 10 years, helped 5 million people, and with 30,000 therapists, finding the right match isn't luck. It can take a few tries. That's one of the many reasons I like and use BetterHelp. And you try a therapist, if it's not a fit, switch anytime, no additional cost, and it's all online. Just click a button and you're in session. That's why BetterHelp has a 4.9 rating from over 1.7 million reviews. Sometimes you need more than small talk. You need real help. And that's where BetterHelp comes in. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Our listeners get 10% off their first [e-mail] Jordan that's better. H E L P.com Jordan I've got Homes.com is a sponsor for this episode. Homes.com knows when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or the condo. It's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location. It's the neighborhood. If you got kids. It's also schools, nearby, parks, transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in depth information they need to find the right home. It's so hard not to say home every single time. And when I say in depth information, I'm talking deep Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood, complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know. All in1place.homes.com. we've done your homework. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting this show. To learn more, get links to all the great deals and discounts you hear on the show so you can help support the podcast. It's all searchable, it's all clickable. All in one place. Jordanharbinger.com deals thank you for supporting those who support the show. 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, Hollywood adjacent? Actually, North Hollywood, mostly. Van Nuys.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, that's the Valley. It's the Silicone Valley, not the Silicon.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That sounds like good reading. What does? What does Jewish smut peddler Al Goldstein have to say?

[Nick Pell]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look, is this quote legit? I mean, it's actually ridiculous.

[Nick Pell]

It's legit. He said it. But who cares? Is Al Goldstein the head rabbi now he's some weird sex pervert who happens to be holy Jewish? Who gives a shit what Al Goldstein has to say? Why is he, like, he's the emissary of the Jews? 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 now? It all seems all decentralized. So maybe before.

[Nick Pell]

Not really. Not even, you know, during what you might call the golden age of pornography, 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That doesn't sound right. Does a rabbi own pornhub?

[Nick Pell]

No, a rabbi does not own pornhub. Pornhub is owned by a private equity firm called, ironically, Ethical Capital Partners.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's right. I forgot about that.

[Nick Pell]

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'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. The VP of Compliance sending cease and desist letters 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 Reuben Sturman had 80% of the porn magazine market cornered.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow. Porn comes in magazines, too. Yeah, I forgot about all that.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, that's exactly it. Sterman's relevance today is porn magazines. Like, do they even still make those? I would guess they doubt it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Nick Pell]

So other than, you know, Goldstein and his 1 magazine, Sterman, who I believe has since passed and owned 80% of a now mostly defunct sector of the adult entertainment industry, you got Michael Lucas, who's a secular Soviet Jew, and like many secular Soviet Jews, is a very outspoken neoconservative. He is a hawkish, conservative man. So if you're going to 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 anti Semite coming up with a list of people in the porn industry who are Jewish. The claim that anti Semites are making isn't, Lots of Jews do pornography. 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 trope.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 really rich when anti Semites 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Daddy, chill. There's no comment. There's no comment for 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's like, guys, make up your mind already.

[Nick Pell]

You can find broad patterns in any 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

True.

[Nick Pell]

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 at our law school alone, like the Federalist Society. He was like, half Jews, right? It's like, okay, I don't want to go too far down the 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 seem 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Nick Pell]

Because 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 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. The rabbis probably get their ideas about what's right and what's not from their rabbi or whatever seminary they went to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right. Okay. So I'm not gonna get into what I read because 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 text. And first of all, you may not and probably are not interpreting it correctly because.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because I 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. Yeah, that's it.

[Nick Pell]

You're not privy to a 1500 plus year long conversation around the Talmud.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Nick Pell]

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 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 going to 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 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.

[Nick Pell]

Well, they might be.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 people. Belief. There are Jews who believe in reincarnation. It's not common, but it's a thing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There's Kabbalah that's.

[Nick Pell]

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 simple oversimplifying it, but I remember a rabbi being like, whatever, bro, when.

[Nick Pell]

I asked about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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, like, that's not how this works. You got to be like a. Basically you need like a PhD in everything beforehand. And 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.

[Nick Pell]

I think you're supposed to be like a married man over 40 who's also a rabbi to actually, like, study Kabbalah or something. But yeah, I used to be friends with a girl who was from a. Raised in an 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, 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. Yeah, exactly.

[Nick Pell]

So this is a great pivot to the problem of serious intellectual anti Semitism. 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 think, doesn't Islam have this. Right. I forget what this stuff is called, but there's a whole lot of commentary, and some of it hadith. Yeah. Some people will go like, look at what they said about these people in the hadith. And other people are like, yeah, my particular strand or whatever you want to call it, like, sect of Islam is 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 because you're like, yeah, 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, a bad name. Right. It's kind of like we have that, too. So this has always been kind of my problem with anti Semitism. 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 guess we're good with money. You know, maybe not me, but, like, so some of us are. But it sounds like that's not even true at all. And, 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 tells the girl that he's a bank teller. And everyone's like, what? And then they do the face to camera and he's like, if Ryan told me to tell everybody, any girl that I met that I was in finance, it's like, okay, the Jews are running the banks. I mean, the manager of my local chase, this is Jewish. 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 and bitter and it really is kind of like they hate us because 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 Nietzsche, who I believe to be the finest philosopher in human history, pegged anti Semitism as what he would have called resentment, which is resentment of your betters, basically. It's absolutely classic Nietzschean resentment. You reframe your failures as some kind of moral virtue and say that actually excellence is bad and victimhood is good.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see this a lot. This is a. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole. But you see a lot of these people who, they're 20 somethings, often 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 going to 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.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, Give them a hammer, all they see is nails.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 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 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, if 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 1960s under the Hart Celler Act. I 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 family in Russia and Poland and in Austria and I want all my family to be here. And 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 I did not know that. That's interesting.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah. Judah 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 non trivial portion. I'm not. People walk away from this and think.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Are they overrepresented in the South, Nick?

[Nick Pell]

Yeah, they're probably not even that. But you know, like there's a certain segment of southern upper crust society that is Sephardic Jewish. They, to my knowledge, again, it's a hard thing to get numbers on. But to my knowledge, Sephardic Jews generally opposed Hart Celler, which was the act that ended national quotas because they have longstanding prejudices against Ashkenazi Jews.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's true.

[Nick Pell]

They view as like hillbillies from Eastern Europe.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Nick Pell]

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 anti Semites aren't really that dangerous. 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. So I think that we should definitely acknowledge that if we're specifically checking, name checking terrorist attacks on synagogues. But I do think the elephant in the room is left wing anti Semitism. Right wing anti Semites are generally considered weirdos and people want nothing to do with them. Left wing anti Semites have representation in Congress. 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, man. 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 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 yarmulkes 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Nick Pell]

People do not have to 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 saying, like, hey, that was 40 years ago. Is there anything more recent from Sharpton specifically?

[Nick Pell]

No. But the current Democratic nominee for mayor of America's largest city, Zoran Mamdani, which is the name of the candidate, not the city, has defended the slogan globalize the intifada.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Nick Pell]

You know, kill Jews everywhere.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Citations in the show notes. People don't get mad. Citations in the show notes.

[Nick Pell]

He hasn't personally said it or endorsed it, but he has defended other people saying it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see, okay.

[Nick Pell]

Which is, you know, you're just outsourcing it to other people to do your dirty work for you. So I say, at the very least, anti Semitism is not disqualifying for public spokesmen 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 Massey's, 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 bandied 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, aipac, they control everybody. And I'm like, do they? Because that sort of sounds like the whole Jews control the world thing, except you're limiting it to the U.S. but then it's like, but the U.S. controls the world because they're the hegemon. It's like, OK, so, but again, where's the kernel of truth in this, if any?

[Nick Pell]

There kind of isn't one. 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 made by Americans.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right. So basically we're giving them coupons to use at Northrop Grumman.

[Nick Pell]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, so yeah, there's all kinds of lobbying in Congress, which is a topic all by itself. Where do the pro Israel forces fall on the spectrum here, though? Like, I went to the AIPAC conference in college because they bussed 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]

AIPAC 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, you know. Well, they're really 70 when you count all the puppets.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Nick Pell]

No, it's 1%. All APAC affiliated groups. Indisputably, it's a major player in foreign relations pack 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. 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 Goldman Sachs. You know, like why? Why is that the one that you're going to focus on?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Meanwhile, HSBC is laundering money for the cartels, but it's the Jews. 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 anti Semitism 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 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 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 grill with on Labor Day weekend become the people ratting out Anne Frank in the attic. And it's not because they're won over by strong, convincing, academically sound arguments. Of anti Semites. 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 denier 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 narrative 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 2000s being a 911 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 911 is basically what they in capital letters said happened. I didn't stop being a 911 truther because I got bullied hard enough that I gave it up. I stopped because 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Was like, yeah, you got persuaded by facts. That's impressive. That never happens, really. No, it doesn't. It doesn't ever happen. 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 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 and 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 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 jackboots. 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 it. Topic Suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me jordanordanharbinger.com advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, [e-mail] deals I'm ordanharbinger 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, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sidlowskis, 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 well being. 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 them and rip your inbox. Anyway. 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 going to bring him down? Robert Mazur 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, in my view.

[Robert Mazur]

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 heroine. 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 got to 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. It's amazing to think that the people who were in charge of the Honduran government operated clandestine cocaine labs in Colombia and Honduras, provided a gateway for Honda, hundreds of tons of cocaine to the US and Canada, put millions of dollars in political figures, killed hundreds of people involved the 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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's not going to stop. 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 Mazur. Hey, it's Austin James. Yes, I'm living with diabetes, but it doesn't have to define me. Thanks to the freestyle Libre 3 sensor, I get real time glucose readings readings throughout the day. The Freestyle Libre 3 Plus sensor is small and easy to wear, giving me the freedom to focus on my life as a parent and a musician. Now this is progress. You can get a free sensor at FreeStyleibre US offer available for people who qualify. Visit MyFreestyle US to see all terms and conditions.

[Nick Pell]

Certain exclusions apply.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Data on file Abbott Diabetes Care or prescription only. Safety info found @freestyleibre us.