Murray, Rogan and the limits of ‘edgelordism’

You could almost feel Douglas Murray’s vexation. There he was, invited on by the weed-puffing, free-thinking king of the podcast bros, Joe Rogan, to debate prick-kicking comic Dave Smith. Smith has wielded his contrarian cudgel against everything from lockdowns to ‘woke insanity’. And yet what was Murray hearing from this supposed slayer of sacred cows? Israel-bashing. The kind of thing you get from every Guardian pod and every keffiyeh-sporting rich kid of the Ivy League.

That’s what this viral spat brought home for me: the sheer omnipresence of ill-will for Israel. Every online subculture, from the showily unwoke to the pronouns people, feels a frothing animus for the Jewish State. There’s little difference between the views of brash libertarian Dave Smith and the faux leftists of the Queers for Palestine cult: both say Israel is a uniquely barbarous nation. You could accidentally switch between the motormouth rantings of crank rightist Candace Owens and the daily musings of Novara Media and not notice you’d done so: both will be wanging on about Israel’s ‘genocidal mania’.

I share Murray’s frustration at this heedless loathing for Israel that has taken hold of both the conformist left and the contrarian right. He criticised Rogan for ‘platforming’ more Israel haters than supporters. And for having cosy chats even with people whose hot takes come from the Middle Ages. Like conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, who thinks Israel was behind 9/11 and Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad asset sent to ensnare America’s horny elites. And Darryl Cooper, too, the creep who makes madly long pods hawking the lunatic idea that Churchill, not Hitler, was ‘the chief villain’ of the Second World War.

Cooper once even tweeted that Paris was better off under Nazi rule than it is today, in our messy, woke era. It’s not good enough, Murray said to Rogan, to say you have these people on to stir up debate. ‘If you throw a lot of shit out there, there’s some point at which “I’m just raising questions” is not a valid thing’, he said. He’s not wrong. If you give someone three hours to peddle the falsehood that Churchill was a worse man than Hitler, you’re not ‘having a debate’ – you’re aiding and abetting a lie. Rogan, true to form, took the criticisms in good faith, while pushing back against Murray in places.

Murray reserved his real ire for Smith. Smith really hates Israel. Murray asked him if he’s ever visited. Guess what? He hasn’t. Now, I don’t think you have to have been to a country to have an opinion on it. But to hold forth so ferociously on a foreign nation, all while refusing to hop on a plane to see what it’s like, is a testament to the dogmatic aloofness of the Israelophobes. They never test their ranting against reality. They don’t need to: their fevered, fact-lite claims are reflected back to them daily by a media and cultural establishment that hates Israel as much as they do. Israelophobia is the internet age’s great self-reinforcing circle jerk.

This pod clash has shone a light on the limits of edgelordism. It seems even self-styled iconoclasts dutifully bend at the altar of anti-Israel sentiment. Even dudebros who doubt everything from the efficacy of vaccines to the idea that a fella can be a lesbian will happily bow to the establishment mantra that Israel is the wickedest nation. No number of red pills, it seems, can inoculate you against the potent allure of modish Israel-hate. Hence, you’ll see even unwoke comics coming off like some genderfluid intern at Human Rights Watch the minute the Jewish State is raised.

Israelophobia is the great unifying obsession of our times. It’s rife in both establishment circles and among the performative radicals of the revolting campus. It binds the crank right and the woke left. Fascist midget Nick Fuentes holds forth on the vileness of Israel every day. So does Owen Jones, the gurning darling of Britain’s bourgeois left. A new ‘insurgent’ right is coalescing around hostility towards the Jewish nation just as the left has done for years. The end result is that you can’t go online these days without seeing someone – whether it’s a phoney Marxoid in Arab headgear or one of those ‘Hitler had a point’ dudes – saying that Israel is the most murderous and nefarious of nations.

Well, maybe they’re all correct, some will say. They aren’t, though. Both Israel’s woke and unwoke haters trade in untruths. Both peddle hyperbole, both obfuscate. Both damn Israel for ‘massacring 50,000 Palestinians’ yet never see fit to mention how many of the dead are Hamas terrorists who dream of killing all Jews. Both slam Israel for bombing civilian infrastructure while gleefully overlooking that Hamas is inside that infrastructure, plotting Israel’s destruction. Both have become blind to other awful conflicts – like Sudan or Myanmar – as if the Jewish nation’s war on its invaders were so incalculably wicked that it makes every other instance of human suffering pale into insignificance. You don’t need a PhD in the hysterias of the pre-modern era to hear echoes – unwitting in many cases, not so much in others – of yesteryear’s suspicion of Jews. The 1400s called – they want their bigotry back.

Good on Murray for calling this out. Rogan is a clever bloke: he fizzes with an intellectual curiosity too often absent in our stifling times. If he could only aim his iconoclasm at that most foul icon of our times – hatred for Israel – then public debate might improve immeasurably. Do it, Joe.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy