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Oct. 26, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

56:25

The Evil of "Queers For Palestine"

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	Well folks we begin with some terrible breaking news today.
	A massacre has now occurred in Maine.
	The gunman, we don't mention the name of the mass shooters on this show, but the gunman had been committed to a mental hospital after hearing voices apparently and then he was set free.
	So once again we have a situation with a mass shooting where presumably law-abiding gun owners will now be blamed.
	It'll be an attempt, widespread attempt, by members of the media, by members of our political class to take guns away from the law-abiding Because they didn't take a gun away from somebody who literally was not supposed to have a gun.
	Apparently, according to the UK Daily Mail, this person who grappled with mental health issues recently reported hearing voices and threatening to shoot up the military base where he served.
	He was committed to a mental health facility over the summer for a couple of weeks.
	He also had a criminal background check.
	In 2007, he was charged with a misdemeanor offense for DUI.
	He was found guilty of that as well.
	He was forced to pay a $500 fine.
	He spent 48 hours in a cell.
	It is not clear where exactly he is politically at this point.
	I mean people are gonna try and link it to his politics because in March he liked a social media post from Donald Trump Jr.
	and he posted some memes from March talking about how How gun ownership was not the problem.
	He liked a post by Dinesh D'Souza at one point that talks about how banning assault weapons was a bad idea.
	This obviously was a person with mental illness, and I'm not saying that because it serves a particular agenda, but just because that happens to be the fact.
	That was, by the way, the notice that was put out by the main information and analysis center, that's law enforcement over there, calling for his capture.
	While he was still at large, they put out a notice saying, quote, According to law enforcement, the shooter recently reported mental health issues, including hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard base in Saco, Maine.
	This person was reported to have been committed to a mental health facility.
	The person is a trained firearms instructor and army reservist stationed out of that particular city.
	Apparently, he opened fire at two separate locations, killing at least 22 people and injuring over 60.
	So we'll bring you the latest on that as it continues to develop.
	And meanwhile, big question has arrived in American politics at this point, and that is, why is it that on campus there is such a thing as, like, Queers for Palestine?
	Where is that coming from?
	They hate America and they hate the West.
	That is the common thread uniting radical college students with terrorist members of Hamas.
	It's why we see marches by Queers for Palestine, despite the fact that queers would be summarily murdered in any Palestine.
	Their differences don't matter.
	They are, in the words of radical revolutionary author Frantz Fanon, the wretched of the earth, rising up to smite the hierarchies of power.
	In 1961, Frantz Fanon, a black radical member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, put forth a shockingly violent treatise calling for the revolution of the colonized.
	Pointing out the evils of colonial administration, Fanon didn't merely call for an end to colonialism a la Gandhi.
	Instead, he called for violence, which he saw as purifying in all of its varied forms.
	His book, The Wretched of the Earth, posited that revolutionary violence would usher in the new man, free of the evils of the West.
	Decolonization, he wrote, is always a violent event.
	Decolonization, he wrote, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder.
	In its bare reality, Fanon wrote, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.
	Violence, disorder, bloody knives.
	That's the essence of Fanon's decolonization.
	The colonized must take everything from the colonizers in the name of restoring himself as a human being.
	Fenno writes, quote, The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonists
	sector is a look of lust, a look of envy, dreams of possession, every type of possession, of sitting
	at the colonists table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is
	an envious man.
	Colonialism, he says, justifies any response.
	In fact, it requires any response.
	The West must be destroyed for the West has colonized.
	Quote, when the colonized hear a speech on Western culture, they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close at hand, Fanon says.
	Such a sort of colonial power was at least somewhat understandable in Algeria, but Fanon wasn't making the case for revolutionary violence merely in Algeria.
	He was actually making the case for revolutionary violence pretty much everywhere.
	The person who made that clear was existentialist and Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre, the French intellectual.
	Sartre's introduction to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth makes the case not only that the colonized have an ultimate right to violence, but that the entire West must be collapsed from within for its great sins.
	Violence, says Sartre, quote, is man reconstructing himself.
	Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed, leaving one man dead and the other man free.
	And the only honorable thing for the West to do is join in on its cultural suicide.
	Quote, you who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point
	of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed
	in your name.
	Sartre writes, Fanon reveals to his comrades, especially to those who remain a little too
	westernized, the solidarity of the metropolitans with their colonial agents.
	Sartre says that he has carried Fanon's, quote, dialectic through to its conclusion.
	We too, peoples of Europe, we are being decolonized, meaning the colonist inside every one of us is surgically extracted in a bloody operation.
	We must all recognize that we are complicit in, quote, a 1,000-year-old oppression.
	Our beloved values are losing their features.
	If you take a closer look, there's not one that isn't tainted with blood.
	So, how do we recover?
	By joining in on the violence against our own civilization.
	Violence, says Sartre, like Achilles' spear, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.
	So, who can we tell who our enemies are?
	Well, we simply attack the powerful.
	The colonizers are the powerful.
	The colonized are the powerless.
	Therefore, the powerful must be colonizers, and the powerless, their victims.
	This is Sartre's logic.
	This is, for example, how Israel, the ultimate case of decolonization across human history, after the return of a native population to its homeland and its battle to throw off the shackles of the British Mandate, became today's hottest, quote, decolonization cause.
	Sartre's radical call has been taken up sporadically both at home and abroad.
	As critical theorist Homi Bhabha points out, in his foreword to Fanon's book, the Black Panthers found inspiration in Fanon.
	So did the Iranian revolutionaries, who ended with the rise of the mullahs.
	Those revolutionaries transmuted Fanon's distinction between oppressor and oppressed into a distinction between the arrogant and the weakened, translating Fanon's Marxist-tinged radicalism into radical Islamism.
	But the coalition of Fanon's Wretched of the Earth could not materialize until the generation of Sartre came to full maturity, until the institutions of the West poisoned themselves slowly with the imbecilic suicidality of weakness.
	The West remained strong enough to fend off the radical alliance when it faced down the Soviet Union, but then it couldn't stand up for itself, and so it began to fall.
	Fast forward 60 years from Sartre, and Sartre's radicalism has now become a mass movement, a movement uniting Hamas and campus radicals, the far left, and the terrorists.
	Cornel West, the black Marxist radical, calls Fanon, quote, the greatest revolutionary intellectual of the mid-20th century.
	According to West, he compels us to acknowledge colonialism is a sustained barbaric war waged against colonized people sanctioned by Western values.
	What's more, colonialism, says West, is not a far-from-home problem.
	It means the West must be demolished.
	For Fanon, West says, revolutionary internationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism,
	anti-patriarchalism, anti-white supremacy yields a new humanism that puts a premium
	on the psychic, social and political needs of poor and working peoples,
	a solidarity and universality from below.
	West explains, quote, in our present day moment of imperial decay
	and capitalist decrepitude, the spirit of Fanon is most manifest
	in any American imperialist context in the revolutionary internationalist wings
	of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Palestinian Lives Matter movement
	aligned with the boycott, divestment and sanctions effort.
	The coalition is now complete.
	The alliance of the supposedly marginalized march together, arm in arm, toward the destruction of the West, and in particular, the United States.
	After all, the United States, even according to Fanon in 1961, had become the chief colonizer thanks to its power.
	Quote, two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
	It succeeded so well that the United States became a monster in which the taints, the sickness, the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.
	Unquote.
	The alliance to destroy the West spans the globe.
	And it's right here at home, too, threatening everything we stand for.
	If decolonization is merely a code word for attacking the powerful and the systems that supposedly sustain them, then queers for Palestine begins to make a lot of sense.
	That's why the same people caterwalling over the use of the wrong pronoun will celebrate the burning of babies in the Gaza envelope.
	As Washington Post writer Karen Atia recently retweeted after the slaughter of 1,500 Jewish civilians, quote, What did y'all think decolonization meant?
	Vibes?
	Papers?
	Essays?
	Losers.
	She might be evil, but she isn't wrong.
	In just one second, we'll get to the latest from our college campuses, where again, this coalition of funnels, supposedly wretched of the earth, rises.
	Again, we'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Okay, so as I'm mentioning, the evils on college campus have become incredibly pronounced.
	They span from the student body to the administration.
	Last night, students at Cooper Union in New York, Jewish students, were actually trapped inside a building, in a room, and the police wouldn't allow them to leave.
	Now, I've been in a situation like this before, personally, when I spoke at Cal State University Los Angeles back in 2015, 2016.
	I remember that we were actually locked in the auditorium because there were people outside who were Nearly rioting and they were attempting to beat up people attempting to get into the room.
	The police actually had to shut down the room and they wouldn't let anybody out because they were afraid that that nobody would be able to be protected.
	It was the same story at Cooper Union last night.
	Here's some film of students at Cooper Union stuck in the library as pro-Hamas protesters
	pounded on the door.
	And the people outside are chanting free Palestine, but then trying to ban it.
	bang it open the doors to to apparently get at the Jews. So again, anti-Zionism rearing its ugly head
	as anti-Semitism. Over at the University of Washington Seattle, they held themselves a
	pro-Hamas rally where they extolled the virtues of people who murder Jews.
	We know that sometimes there are Zionist pro-Israel counter-protests at these actions
	and if you see them you don't have to engage with them. We're doing our best to de-escalate them,
	to move them away.
	We don't want Israel to exist.
	We don't want these Zionist counter-protesters to exist.
	We can't control that.
	What we can control is ourselves.
	We can choose to focus on our demands today.
	We want you to cut ties with weapons companies.
	You'd have to condemn the attacks against Palestinian students.
	I mean, they're just saying the thing, right?
	We don't want Israel to exist.
	We don't want these people to exist.
	Well, I mean, saying the quiet part out loud is par for the course around here.
	Over at Princeton, people were shouting, long live the Intifada.
	The Intifada is a violent uprising.
	I mean, that's what an Intifada is.
	So they're not just calling for a two-state solution.
	That is a lie.
	Anybody who says, long live the Intifada, what they mean is violent attacks on civilians.
	That's what the Intifada is.
	Protesters in Princeton doing this again.
	Again, these are America's top universities.
	Long live the intifada!
	Intifada! Intifada!
	Long live the intifada!
	Intifada! Intifada!
	Long live the intifada!
	Justice is our command, there is no peace on stolen land!
	Justice is our command, there is no peace on stolen land!
	Over at George Washington University, students the other night decided they would project
	pro-Hamas slogans onto the walls of various buildings.
	One said, free Palestine from the river to the sea, which of course is a call for genocide.
	It is one of the slogans of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Palestinian Authority.
	The river to the sea would be the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
	That means the extermination of every Jew in that region.
	This was projected on the walls over George Washington.
	Just in case they weren't clear enough, they also projected the slogan, glory to our martyrs.
	Their martyrs would be, you know, members of Hamas who are raping children so hard that they broke their pelvises.
	That's from medical reports on the ground over there.
	These are the genius students who either are on a student visa, which means we should expel them.
	If you have a student visa and you're in the United States, this does not give you the right to be a terror supporter.
	We have no obligation to extend our hand open to you as Americans if you support terror groups.
	None at all.
	You should leave and you should leave forthwith.
	You should go hang out with your terrorist buddies elsewhere.
	It's absolutely insane that universities have become this.
	The George Washington University administration, they put out a statement in the aftermath of this.
	Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that has now been banned in the state of Florida for supporting terrorism.
	Students for Justice in Palestine claims credit for all of this.
	They also put out a statement saying, quote, These events have only reaffirmed what every Palestinian knows deeply.
	We will see a liberated Palestine within our lifetime.
	The settler colony will fall.
	Our land will be liberated.
	We will return to our homes again.
	Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.
	Again, there you see that language of Fanon.
	The settler colony.
	The settler colony.
	And again, everybody sort of understands why radical Islamists want to destroy Israel and kill the Jews.
	The question has always been, why queers for Palestine?
	Why the fellow travelers?
	And the answer is, when you build a coalition that is explicitly designed to tear away at the West, and Israel is an element of that coalition, the alliance rides again.
	That's why.
	The demonstration, by the way, also attacked the university administration, and then the university put out a pretty weak statement.
	suggesting that they were unhappy with all of this. But the statements have, quote,
	on Tuesday evening, the university became aware of several unauthorized projections on a campus
	building. The projections on the university's library violated university policy. Leadership
	intervened to ensure these projections were removed. The statements made by these individuals
	in no way reflect the views of the university. We're reviewing this incident and will take any
	appropriate steps. We recognize the distress, hurt and pain this has caused for many members
	Well, thank you for your vague statements of support.
	Really, really much appreciated.
	But again, nobody's hiding the ball.
	Over at Berkeley, protesters openly say they support Hamas.
	Here's one of them.
	You support terrorists?
	I support them 100%.
	Okay, who filmed that?
	Sorry, Drew.
	Who the f*** is this guy on our campus?
	I support Palestine 100%.
	You just said you support terrorists 100%.
	No, I didn't.
	We got it on film.
	No, you didn't.
	We got it on film.
	Okay, so everything is going probably well.
	I'm going to go ahead and end this video.
	But by the way, it's not just the student body.
	It is many, many members of faculty at America's top universities.
	We'll get to that momentarily.
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	Okay, so...
	And it's also the administration and faculty at many of these universities.
	The UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council wrote a letter to all of the University of California Board of Regents.
	First of all, professionally useless people.
	Ethnic studies departments are garbage.
	Like, full-scale, full-stop, they're garbage.
	But, they wrote a letter.
	And they say, in the strongest possible terms, the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council at the University of California, a diverse statewide body representing over 300 faculty system-wide, rejects recent UC administrative communications that distort and misrepresent the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and thereby contribute to the racist and dehumanizing erasure of Palestinian daily reality.
	In light of the history and statements by the UC regions demonizing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and other forms of Palestinian solidarity, we have no confidence the UC administration comprehends or respects its obligations.
	It is deeply distressing the UC and other higher institutions' administrative statements in the last week and a half that irresponsibly wield charges of terrorism and unprovoked aggression have contributed to a climate that has made Palestinian students and community members unsafe.
	Yeah, this is the big lie.
	I'm really enjoying the big lie.
	The people who really feel unsafe on campus these days are obviously the pro-Hamas protesters who are marching en masse through campuses and threatening people.
	By the way, how pathetic are our university students?
	They're so pathetic that at Brandeis University, which was founded by the American Jewish community, at Brandeis University, Student leaders voted 10 to 6 not to condemn Hamas.
	Not to condemn Hamas.
	Yoni Khan, a senior at the university, said that he stands with Palestinians, but this is still about condemning an extremist organization, but he was, you know, in the minority.
	So, amazing stuff there from Brandeis.
	So, again, this is a group of young, highly educated, usually upper-class students who are fully in league with the ideology of terrorism because Hamas is just part of the violent coalition to tear down the civilization, so they have to stand by their buddies.
	And what that means is that also there's a sense of tremendous entitlement from these folks.
	They're entitled to a job from you.
	They're entitled to your taxpayer dollars.
	They're entitled to your support.
	Probably the best example of this that I've seen over the past few years is a person named Reina Workman.
	Reina Workman is a member of the NYU Student Council.
	In fact, Raina Workman is the NYU Law School's Student Bar Association president.
	So she was caught on camera defacing posters of kidnapped Israelis.
	So this is something that has become unbelievably common and pretty shocking because these are just posters of people who are literally being held hostage by a terrorist group and pro-Hamas people.
	You can't call these pro-Palestinian people because this has nothing to do with being pro-Palestinian people.
	I mean, if it does, then I think you're getting the issue wrong.
	They're literally tearing down posters of kidnapped children or defacing them.
	Here's Raina Workman doing just that.
	Hey guys, look what they're doing.
	You guys want to say your name or no?
	I don't want to tell you my name.
	You guys want to put your name?
	Really?
	You guys scared?
	At least say your name.
	If you're going to do it, do it with pride.
	If you're going to do it, do it with pride.
	I'm very proud.
	I just don't want to talk to you.
	So what's your name?
	Say it to the whole world.
	I'll sign to every single firm.
	Look, say your name.
	Look what they're doing.
	They're doing over these houses signs.
	The children are dying in Israel.
	Look what they're doing.
	And of course, she had nothing to say.
	She's just standing there.
	Of course, she's not giving her name.
	Well, she had her job at a law firm rescinded because it turns out the law firms don't like to employ terrorist sympathizers.
	It's not their biggest thing.
	So, what does that mean?
	Well, it means it's time for the media to jump in and finally talk about free speech on college campuses.
	Wow, that is amazing.
	So when speakers like me get banned from, say, DePaul University, that's not national news.
	It is definitely national news when you don't get a job being a terrorist sympathizer.
	That's really the issue.
	So here is ABC News covering Rhino Workmen.
	I mean, the sense of absolute entitlement from these privileged, petty, pathetic left-wingers who, again, are in league with the quote-unquote Wretched of the Earth, according to Fanon, it's really, it's quite disgusting.
	And people should realize how revolutionary the implications are.
	Here is Raina Workman declaring that not only is she entitled to tear down posters of kidnapped children, she's entitled to a job from you.
	And if you don't give it to her, it's because you're discriminatory.
	If you were to redo the letter, obviously with the benefit of hindsight, anything you would have done differently?
	I think I will continue to speak up for Palestinian human rights and use whatever platform I have available to me to call for a ceasefire and end this occupation that's harming the Palestinians.
	I'm going to just try one more time.
	Would you change anything, even the timing of it?
	Because some people felt it was too soon, because your letter came before Israel even launched any kind of retaliation.
	I think it's important to note that the genocide happening right now did not start on October 7th.
	It started over 75 years ago.
	And that was what my message was intended to get across, was that we are seeing violence happening that is part of a much larger structural violence system that is happening in Palestine right now.
	I think what I use my platform for and who I condemn was pretty clear by my message and I think that I will continue to condemn apartheid and military occupation and that in this moment I'm focused on calling for an end to genocide and calling for an immediate ceasefire.
	Do you think that in this space that we're in right now, there's room to have empathy for the Israelis who lost their lives, who were brutalized, were raped, and also empathy for the Palestinians?
	Who are similarly losing their lives?
	Yeah, I think right now, if you turn on any mainstream channel, you'll see the stories of Israelis on every screen you look to.
	And so I think for me, I will continue to use my platform to uplift the voices of Palestinians and the struggles they're going through, because right now we have over 5,000 Palestinian lives lost.
	This is the whole thing in one human.
	The whole thing.
	The Rhino workman, we can pause it there.
	Rhino workman uses they them pronouns.
	Reina Workman considers herself to be a member of Queers for a Liberated Palestine.
	And that's what this is.
	That's what this is.
	She put out a statement before Israel actually did anything condemning Israel for the dead Jews.
	That's what she did.
	Why?
	Because again, it's part of the broader rubric of marginalized of the earth, unite and tear down the quote-unquote colonizers.
	By colonizers, they just mean anybody who has power.
	Whether that power is gotten Usefully or not.
	Whether the powerful are moral or whether they're not, it doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter.
	As long as you are a member of a quote-unquote marginalized community, it's the coalition to destroy the systems that really matters.
	And that should scare everybody because that's a lot of your kids.
	That's a lot of people that your kids are going to school with at college campuses.
	That is a rising movement on the left and it is very strong.
	It is not a tiny minority on college campuses.
	There is a reason why you can barely get 50% of young people in the United States to say that Hamas is a terrorist group.
	There's a reason for that.
	And that's not an Israel issue.
	That's a West issue.
	The West has a serious, serious problem on its hands.
	We'll get to more of this momentarily first.
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	Okay, again, this is not just this issue of the supposed coalition of the oppressed against Western civilization.
	It's bled up.
	It started at the university level with pseudo-intellectuals promoting it.
	People like Edward Said promoting it.
	People like Angela Davis promoting it.
	But it's bled up into all aspects of American society, most obviously, including our media, to the extent that the New York Times, at this point, is literally defending rehiring a freelance writer who praised Hitler.
	Not kidding you.
	According to Jewish News Service, Palestinian filmmaker Soleiman Hiji, who has posted on social media of being in a state of harmony, as Hitler was during the Holocaust, and wrote, How Great You Are, Hitler, has been rehired by the New York Times.
	He freelanced for the New York Times from 2018 until 2021.
	And since October 12th, he's had nine bylines.
	He's just writing for the New York Times again.
	Amazing.
	The New York Times, they said, Oh, you mean the standards of not being a Hitler supporter or the standards of being a Hitler supporter or silent on genocide like the New York Times was the first time around.
	to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards.
	Oh, you mean the standards of not being a Hitler supporter or the standards of being
	a Hitler supporter or silent on genocide like the New York Times was the first time around?
	And this is bled up into the media. And the way that the media do this in a softer fashion
	is they just set up this full scale moral equivalence that They pretend that you don't actually have a moral obligation to take sides in a battle between genocidal terrorists and legitimate states.
	So, the New York Times put out an entire opinion video piece Saying you don't have to take sides.
	There's nothing that suggests you have to take sides against terror groups that burn babies alive.
	There's nothing that suggests that.
	Here was the New York Times putting out a full-scale opinion video equating Israeli advocates with Hamas advocates.
	It's amazing stuff.
	Where is your humanity?
	You're going to have to pick a side.
	There's no equivocating this.
	And your silence is deafening.
	You've got to pick a side!
	You better pick a side!
	I don't know how you can sit there and say, I don't support either side.
	What's your opinion on the war in the Middle East?
	I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist on an answer.
	There are wars raging all across our small planet.
	But today, you're only required to take a stance on one.
	Compassion for humanity is a good thing.
	So what about the more than 300,000 people who've died in Nigeria?
	The roughly 60,000 who've disappeared in Mexico?
	What does The Rock think about the Rohingya?
	What is Justin Bieber doing to solve the crisis in Yemen?
	Where do the Mets stand on the war in Africa?
	By the way, there are a bunch of these conflicts that people do have opinions about.
	Like, a lot of them.
	They're so gross.
	They're so gross.
	Well, suddenly the New York Times is saying you don't have to have a moral opinion on this stuff.
	The New York Times spends its days asking every single Republican, if a Republican makes a bad comment anywhere, every Republican must now have an opinion on that thing.
	Apparently there's only one issue where you don't have to have an opinion, according to the New York Times.
	And that happens to be, you know, where Muslims are murdering Jews en masse and calling for their extermination.
	When that happens, suddenly the New York Times goes full on, well, you know, there are other things happening in the world.
	Again, many of the conflicts that they mentioned right there, you should have an opinion on.
	You should have an opinion on the Chinese government keeping Muslims in concentration camps in China.
	Some of us have expressed that opinion many, many times.
	By the way, the idea of the New York Times doesn't say you have to have an opinion on Ukraine versus Russia is insane.
	The New York Times has been pushing that for years at this point.
	But again, the moral equivocation is just cover for terrorism.
	That's all it is.
	It's PR cover for terrorism.
	So, give you the latest on the ground right now in Israel right now.
	The Israelis last night performed their largest ground assault since the beginning of this particular round of conflict, since October 7th.
	They sent some tanks in to areas in the northern Gaza Strip.
	It was a limited raid ahead of any sort of potential ground offensive.
	There are a lot of rumors that Biden has been trying to convince the Israelis to delay the ground offensive.
	Israel, for its own part, is still kind of deciding when it wishes to go, what it wishes to do, and all the rest.
	The suggestion was that Biden wanted a delay so that the United States could get more defensive weaponry in place to protect our troops abroad.
	Which, by the way, we should have had originally, except that Joe Biden was too busy playing nice and playing footsie with the Mullahs to actually defend our troops.
	That happens to be the case even now.
	But here was Joe Biden yesterday saying that he did not call for a delay on a ground invasion.
	Have you sought assurances from him that he will hold off on a ground invasion into Gaza until the safe release of the hostages can be assured?
	And of course, those include 10 unaccounted for Americans.
	No.
	What I have indicated to him is that if that's possible to get these folks out safely, that's what he should do.
	It's their decision.
	But I did not demand it.
	I pointed out to him, if it's real, it should be done.
	Now, to his credit, Biden was asked about the numbers from the Gaza Strip.
	He said, you know, we're getting all those numbers from Hamas.
	I take them with a grain of salt, which, you know, good for him for actually saying this, since the administration has so far not really done that.
	In the 18 days since Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed over 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children.
	You've previously asked Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties.
	Do these numbers say to you that he is ignoring that message?
	What they say to me is I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.
	I'm sure innocents have been killed.
	And it's the price of waging a war.
	I think we should be incredibly careful.
	I think, not we, Israel should be incredibly careful to be sure that they're focusing on going after the folks that are propagating this war against Israel.
	And it's against their interest when that doesn't happen.
	But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.
	Again, embedded in that is Joe Biden's usual garbage about how Israel has to be so careful about civilian casualties, you really have to warn the Israelis, what we talked about yesterday on the show.
	Meanwhile, Biden is trying to figure out exactly what to do with the fact that Iran is getting very, very spicy with regard to Americans in the region.
	According to the Washington Post, President Biden faces mounting pressure to strike Iranian proxies that have repeatedly been attacked and injured.
	U.S.
	troops in Iraq and Syria this month, but he's weighing any decision to retaliate against his broader concern that the war in Gaza could be on the precipice of erupting into a region-wide tempest.
	The truth is, the thing that will keep it from erupting into a region-wide tempest is if the United States makes clear that if you injure our troops, we will stomp on you like a fly.
	That historically has been the American way of doing business in these places, and that has, in fact, worked.
	When American troops are attacked, the only way to push people off of doing that is to make it very clear to them that if they do that, they and their buddies die.
	There's a reason that Donald Trump did this exactly right.
	When he was the President of the United States, if there were attacks on American troops, Donald Trump responded in kind, and he did so with alacrity.
	It was Donald Trump who pulled the trigger on Qasem Soleimani, and he was totally correct to do that, considering that Soleimani had helped plan the death of thousands of American troops in Iraq.
	Biden said on Wednesday that he warned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, that if Tehran continues to move against U.S.
	forces in the Middle East, we will respond.
	But so far, there really has been no response yet, and it's that sort of lack of clarity that is leading to an escalation.
	So, obviously, you know, it makes some sense that if there's going to be a base of attack, Iran, an insurgent group that is using a base of attacks in order to attack Americans, droning them to death would probably be a proper solution for all of that.
	Meanwhile, by the way, the Biden administration just let in the Iranian foreign minister to the United States.
	He met with Hamas five seconds ago to cheer with them.
	I don't understand why the United States is granting temporary visas to terrorists and terror supporters.
	It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
	By the way, this whole thing, of course, has been pretty embarrassing for the Biden administration.
	Even more embarrassing, since Jake Sullivan, who is the National Security Advisor to Joe Biden, he wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine before the October 7th attacks, in which he bragged about a bunch of supposed foreign policy successes.
	They had to edit it.
	Because there was a passage in it about how they'd done an amazing job in the Gaza Strip.
	Quote, That's what Jake Sullivan wrote like five minutes before Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Jews since World War II.
	He escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years
	of its absence.
	That's what Jake Sullivan wrote like five minutes before Hamas launched the deadliest
	attack on Jews since World War II.
	The region is quieter than it has been for decades.
	The progress is fragile to be sure, but it is also not an accident.
	Biden's approach returns discipline to U.S.
	policy.
	It emphasizes deterring aggression, deescalating conflicts, and integrating the region.
	Yeah, it's worked out amazingly, amazingly well.
	They had to cut all of that from Sullivan's embarrassing essay.
	Okay, well, in other news in the United States, actually good news in the United States before I change, the Republicans have now actually put a Speaker of the House in place.
	I know, I'm amazed too.
	And it's like basic functionality of the Congress.
	But the person they put in place, Mike Johnson, He's excellent.
	I think he'll do a great job.
	By the way, I thought Jim Jordan would've been excellent.
	I thought he would've done- I thought Steve Scalise was excellent.
	I thought he would've done a great job.
	I thought Kevin McCarthy was doing a fine job.
	So, in other words, we basically traded a conservative Speaker of the House for another conservative Speaker of the House.
	You can like Mike Johnson better than Kevin McCarthy on his personal policies and predilections.
	In a second, I want to talk about the incentive structure and what actually happens once he's Speaker of the House.
	Because as I've said before, every Speaker of the House is going to face the same incentive structure.
	And so if you're expecting a radical shift in Republican policy to occur because Mike Johnson is Speaker as opposed to McCarthy, you got another thing coming.
	But is it good that Johnson is in place?
	Absolutely.
	Does he seem kind of awesome?
	Yeah, you bet he does.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, meanwhile...
	So finally, some good news for Republicans.
	Apparently, Republicans, last night, they decided to stop kicking themselves directly in the nads, and instead, they decided to actually vote in favor of Mike Johnson.
	So Mike Johnson, somebody that I would say most of America had not heard of, like, ever.
	He was only elected to Congress fairly recently.
	He hasn't been in Congress all that long.
	He is a congressman from Louisiana.
	According to Politico, his anonymity in Washington was the driving force in his election as Speaker because he hadn't made any enemies yet.
	He became the unlikely leader of an unruly group of House Republicans who will now rely on him to run their side of the Capitol.
	He was next to no one's first pick.
	But, again, everybody else had a high profile and that meant that he was the guy who'd kind of sneak in under the radar.
	Now Johnson must figure out how to achieve what McCarthy couldn't compromise that doesn't prompt a mutiny.
	Now, he's gonna have an easier time with that.
	The reason he's gonna have an easier time with that than McCarthy did is because he's not named Kevin McCarthy.
	Seriously, it's that simple.
	Matt Gaetz and a few of his crew decided they hated McCarthy.
	And so what that meant is that any compromise that McCarthy cut was going to be seen as treason by Gaetz and company and used as an excuse to get rid of McCarthy.
	Well now, Johnson is gonna come in, he's gonna do kind of exactly what McCarthy did, because the incentive structure is precisely the same.
	So to take an example, McCarthy just cut a continuing resolution.
	He cut it with some Democrats.
	The reason he had to do that is because he had a better continuing resolution deal that was scuttled by Gates and company.
	Then, after McCarthy actually did the continuing resolution to fund the government, that's when he was ousted by Gates and company.
	Well now, Mike Johnson's gonna come in, and you know what he's proposing?
	Continuing resolutions!
	The same sort of stuff.
	Now, he can pass a bunch of single-issue bills, supposedly, he can pass the appropriations bills, do the process and all of that, but Democrats are going to reject it and he's going to come back to doing continuing resolutions.
	Now, the thing is that because Gates ousted McCarthy and because Johnson is the new speaker, he has an incentive, Gates does, in making Johnson appear to be better than McCarthy, which means he's not going to yell and scream about any deal that Johnson cuts.
	So, inherently, Johnson has more leeway to cut deals and make deals than McCarthy did, mainly because all the people who would be incentivized to get rid of somebody for the publicity already did that, and so they can't do it again.
	They have to play this as though they achieved some sort of massive win by substituting Johnson for McCarthy.
	And again, the policy is going to come out almost exactly the same.
	It's going to be very, very, very similar.
	Now, the fact is that Johnson has a lot less experience than McCarthy in this space.
	Again, this is not a rip on Johnson.
	Johnson's great.
	I'm going to go through his opening speech in a second.
	When he won the speakership, and it's excellent.
	It's really, really, really good.
	I happen to resonate to an enormous amount of what Johnson says.
	As a speaker, I think he's way more appealing than Kevin McCarthy was.
	However, the Speaker of the House's job is not just to be a person who speaks well and a person who communicates well.
	The Speaker of the House essentially has several jobs.
	One is to, yeah, speak well and maintain policy positions, but The kind of bigger aspects are vote counting, vote whipping, rewarding allies and punishing enemies, getting together a coalition to actually do things.
	And that requires a lot of backscratching.
	It requires a lot of maneuvering.
	It requires the kind of Machiavellian stuff that McCarthy was actually pretty good at.
	I don't know if Johnson has a lot of experience.
	Maybe he's great at it.
	We don't know.
	He's never done it before.
	The Speaker also is supposed to fundraise for pretty much all the Republicans across the board.
	So McCarthy, over the course of his time in House leadership, raised almost half a billion dollars for various House Republican candidates, including many of the same people who then ousted him.
	Mike Johnson, in the last election cycle, you wouldn't expect him to raise tens of millions of dollars.
	He's one guy running in an uncontested district in Louisiana.
	Mike Johnson, in his last election cycle, raised $1.3 million.
	So can he translate that over into raising hundreds of millions of dollars for fellow candidates?
	McCarthy, when recruited a bunch of candidates in purple districts, Johnson hasn't really done that yet.
	So, again, he's gonna have to prove that he can do all of the hard-nosed things that McCarthy could do.
	And there's a lot of parliamentary procedure to being Speaker of the House.
	It's not like anybody can just walk in the front door and suddenly transform the place.
	If you don't file a bill at the proper time, Democrats could sneak in.
	They could flip the bill.
	Like, there really are a lot of procedural complexities.
	Now, Johnson may very well be able to handle it.
	We just don't know.
	So, the notion that things are going to radically change in the House now that it's Johnson, as opposed to McCarthy, is really silly.
	Again, none of that's a rip on Johnson.
	It is a rip on the Gateson team.
	The idea that the Gateson team achieved some sort of massive material victory by throwing the House into full-on chaos for three weeks and demonstrating the fractiousness and idiocy of part of the Republican caucus, I don't buy it.
	I don't see it.
	And that is without reference to what happens going forward with Johnson.
	And so, here are a few things about Mike Johnson that are kind of awesome.
	So, Mike Johnson, very, very socially conservative.
	Has a 90% lifetime rating from Heritage Action, 92% from the American Conservative Union.
	He is very much in favor of cutting spending, which is something, by the way, a lot of the MAGA type are not really big in favor of.
	They kind of like the spending, depending on who they are.
	He's very strong on abortion.
	Extremely pro-life.
	Has an A-plus rating from the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group.
	He used to work as a Senior Legal Counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund.
	And he is anti-same-sex marriage, for example.
	He has been historically.
	Which, by the way, is the historically correct position of the Republican Party.
	That a man and a woman are marriage.
	And that any other form of human relationship is not the same morally or sociologically.
	He was involved in the attempts to stall certification of the election post 2020.
	And this is being used as a club by Democrats already.
	He devised an argument that was actually the only good argument that was made in the aftermath of November 7th, which is essentially that a lot of states, like Pennsylvania, had unilaterally shifted their voting laws so as to benefit Democrats in ways that were illegal.
	That was like the only good legal argument that was made during that entire spectacle.
	Johnson was the one making those arguments.
	And he said some stuff during that time that, frankly, is ridiculous.
	He called into question the voting systems inside of Venezuela.
	It was a Sidney Powell kind of stuff.
	But he is now moving away from that.
	I assume that he's going to ignore all of that.
	That doesn't mean Democrats aren't going to jump on it, which we'll get to in a moment.
	But Johnson gave a really quite beautiful speech last night on becoming Speaker of the House.
	He opened by thanking Kevin McCarthy.
	I want to express my great thanks for our Speaker Emeritus, Kevin McCarthy.
	Kevin has dedicated over two decades of his life to selfless public service.
	Sixteen of those years in this house.
	And you would be hard-pressed to find anybody who loves this institution more or has contributed more to it.
	He is the reason we're in this majority today.
	So he started off with that.
	He then moved on to the fact that it's time to get back to work, which of course is true.
	This has not been a good moment for the Republican Party.
	They look like clowns.
	So restoring some sort of semblance of dignity to the Republican caucus would certainly be a plus.
	I want to say to the American people on behalf of all of us here, we hear you.
	We know the challenges you're facing.
	We know that there's a lot going on in our country, domestically and abroad, and we are ready to get to work again to solve those problems, and we will.
	Our mission here is to serve you well, to restore the people's faith in this house, in this great and essential institution.
	He continued along these lines.
	He said that the pride in the institution is in jeopardy and it's time to restore that pride.
	That, of course, is true as well.
	And I think all of our parents are proud of what we're called to do here.
	I think all the American people at one time had great pride in this institution.
	But right now, that's in jeopardy.
	And we have a challenge before us right now to rebuild and restore that trust.
	He is, of course, right about that as well.
	Now, on principle, he's a very strong traditional conservative.
	He's pretty hawkish on foreign policy.
	He voted against some of the Ukraine appropriations bills.
	That would probably be the biggest distinction between him and McCarthy, is that McCarthy was pro-funding for Ukraine.
	And in the initial response, Mike Johnson was pro-funding of Ukraine.
	And then after we gave them like $100 billion, Then he started to get skittish about it and he suggested he is not in favor of that.
	But that's also where the Republican caucus is.
	The possibility of passing large-scale Ukraine funding on a standalone basis was a non-starter inside the caucus anyway.
	That's obviously the direction that the Republican Party has moved.
	We'll get to more from Mike Johnson in just one second.
	The new Speaker of the House first.
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	So, Mike Johnson, again, his speech last night was excellent.
	When he got to his principles, this is particularly good.
	So, Mike Johnson ticked off a lot of the left last night when, before he assumed his speakership position, he actually knelt in prayer with a bunch of other members of the Republican caucus.
	And this, of course, is very bad.
	We're not supposed to do this.
	It's super offensive to, you know, pay tribute to God after you achieve something of a magnitude, becoming Speaker of the House in the United States of America.
	That, of course, is deeply offensive, deeply problematic, clearly.
	I mean, being Rashida Tlaib and being an actual terror supporter, okay, according to Democrats, kneeling for prayer on the floor of the House, that, of course, is a huge problem.
	You're allowed to kneel in kente cloth for George Floyd.
	You're just not allowed to do it for God without the kente cloth.
	In any case, Mike Johnson, he said last night that it's time to reject atheism and Marxism.
	In 1962, that our national motto, In God We Trust, was adorned above this rostrum.
	And if you look at the little guide that they give tourists and constituents who come and visit the house, if you turn in there to about page 14 in the middle of that guide, it tells you the history of this.
	And it says very simply, these words were placed here above us, this motto was placed here, as a rebuke of the Cold War era philosophy of the Soviet Union.
	That philosophy was Marxism and communism.
	So obviously he is slapping at some members of the left.
	Then he listed what he called the seven core principles of conservatism.
	These are pretty traditional.
	I think it's really quintessentially the core principles of our nation.
	I boil them down to individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, peace through strength, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and human dignity.
	Those are the foundations that made us the extraordinary nation that we are.
	And you and I today are the stewards of those principles.
	That sounds pretty traditionally conservative to me.
	I mean, in there I heard, you know, peace through strength, which is something that a lot of people are not big fans of these days.
	I heard fiscal responsibility, something a lot of people on the right are not big fans of these days.
	So again, the idea that he's some sort of like wild departure from traditional conservatism is ridiculous.
	It's ridiculous.
	He's a traditional conservative, which is good.
	A traditionally conservative Speaker of the House would be a very good thing.
	I hope that he pulls the levers in a more conservative direction than House leadership has been able to do.
	I also understand, as I've said, the incentive structure.
	And the incentive structure means he has a Democrat Senate, he's a Democrat President of the United States, and he has an extremely thin majority in the House.
	And all it takes is a few grandstanders to make it so that he has to cut a deal with Democrats again.
	In the initial run, I expect that he's going to get the support of many of the people who ousted McCarthy, so those aren't going to be the people who buck him.
	But, as time progresses, he'll have the exact same incentive structure as everyone else.
	So, was this like a big, giant win for the Republican Party?
	Again, really like Mike J- Like, in a ton of ways.
	Love Mike Johnson.
	Love him on foreign policy.
	Love him on- Like, again, across the board, excellent, excellent choice for Speaker of the House.
	Can he pull the levers in a sophisticated way?
	We have yet to see that.
	Was this like, overall, an amazing move for Republicans?
	Like, a much-needed ch- Let's hold our fire on that one.
	Was Matt Gaetz a strategic genius for throwing the House into complete chaos for a month to do this?
	No.
	No, he was not.
	And any attempts to retcon that are pretty ridiculous.
	Well, regardless of what the Democrats are saying, Johnson's first move was a good move.
	He announced last night that the very first move that he was going to make as Speaker of the House was to push a resolution to support Israel and then a bill to support Israel in its war against Hamas.
	Here is what he had to say.
	The first bill that I'm going to bring to this floor in just a little while will be in support of our dear friend Israel and we're overdue in getting that done.
	We're going to show not only Israel but the entire world that the barbarism of Hamas that we have all seen play out on our television screens is wretched and wrong and we're going to stand for the good in that conflict.
	Okay, good for Johnson.
	He's very strong on that particular issue.
	That resolution did pass last night, 412 to 10.
	The nay votes were, except for Thomas Massey, who basically just doesn't like government spending on anything, which, okay.
	The other nine nay votes were exactly who you would think they were.
	Jamal Bowman, Cori Bush, Andre Carson, Al Green, Summer Lee, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Delia Ramirez, Rashida Tlaib.
	And there were six present votes as well.
	Again, more radicals, Ayanna Pressley, Greg Casar of Texas, Joaquin Castro, Chuy Garcia, Pramila Jayapal, Nydia Velazquez.
	Exactly who you would assume it to be.
	So, again, I think that it's good to get the House back in working order.
	Good for Mike Johnson, and it's time for the House to get back to work.
	Meanwhile, the Democrats are revving it up, as they would with pretty much any conservative who ended up as House Speaker.
	And they're gonna try and now demonize Mike Johnson as a radical so that they can fundraise off of it.
	This is what they're going to do.
	According to Politico, while Mike Johnson might have been an obscure four-term Congress member before Wednesday, but if Democrats have their way, he'll soon be well-known by every American as an election denier, an anti-abortion extremist, a slasher of Social Security and Medicare.
	Democrats are determined to define Johnson in the public eye before he has a chance to define himself.
	Democrats said on Wednesday they were hurriedly digging into Johnson's record.
	There were 69 episodes of his podcast on Spotify, which Johnson co-hosts with his wife, many of which touch on hot-button political topics.
	One Democratic operative was quick to spotlight one such episode as indicative of the goldmine they believe is about to be discovered, a June 5th show in which the Johnsons spotlighted an initiative to turn Pride Month into Fidelity Month, which sounds kind of great, actually.
	Like, please, go after him on that one.
	The DCCC sent a memo to House Democrats saying House Republicans may be breathing a short-sighted
	sigh of relief now they've elected a new speaker, but their decision to elevate an
	anti-abortion extremist has pushed to gut Social Security and Medicare, and who is one of the main
	architects of the illegal attempt to overtune the 2020 election will lose them the majority in 2024.
	You can see them already activating the strategy. Here is Hakeem Jeffries. Yesterday, he's the
	House Minority Leader bashing Johnson right off the bat. To start with, on Congressman Johnson,
	given the fact that there are peers, at least based on that sound, that there is momentum behind him,
	is this somebody you believe Democrats can work with across the aisle?
	Good morning, great to be with you.
	I don't know Mike Johnson well.
	Based on his track record, he appears to be an extreme right-wing ideologue.
	Mike Johnson wants to criminalize abortion care and impose a nationwide ban.
	Mike Johnson was one of the chief architects of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
	Mike Johnson also wants to end Social Security and Medicare as we know it.
	Those are extreme views.
	So, yep, they're getting ready to run against Johnson.
	Again, this is what they think they're going to be able to do, but yeah, I think it's gonna be a hard sell a little bit because Johnson does not appear offensive.
	Johnson is very conservative, and you can hear him speaking, and he seems reasonable.
	Even Jake Tapper on CNN last night, who's no friend of the Republicans, even he was like, yeah, Johnson is a very articulate guy.
	Jeffries also is trying to ramp up the rhetoric around January 6th again.
	I think it's tired.
	I don't think it's gonna work.
	I think it was, for a lot of Americans, they want to put it in the rearview mirror and they're tired of this.
	Here is Jeffries introducing Johnson by comparing January 6th to World War II.
	There are many throughout this country who are understandably alarmed at the turbulence of the moment, at the chaos The dysfunction and the extremism that has been unleashed in this chamber from the very beginning of this Congress.
	But this, too, shall pass.
	We faced adversity on September 11, 2001, when the Towers and the Pentagon were unexpectedly struck, killing thousands of lives in an instant.
	We face adversity right here in the House of Representatives, when on January 6, 2021, a violent mob of insurrectionists, incited by some in this chamber, overran the House floor as part of an effort to halt the peaceful transfer of power.
	Again, and this is going to be the line of attack, again.
	So they're just going to keep going back to this well over and over and over again.
	Again, all Republicans have to do is show some baseline competence here and that attack line goes away.
	Because nobody's focusing on January 6th.
	They're focusing on the things happening right now.
	By the way, some of those things happening right now?
	So the U.S.
	GDP grew at a 4.9% annual clip in the third quarter.
	That was better than expected, but in some ways really, really problematic because the entire purpose of jacking up the interest rates was to get people to stop spending as much money because that is inflating the currency.
	And it's also leading to price inflation.
	We now have a wage price spiral.
	People are not saving their money.
	They are spending their money.
	According to CNBC, the sharp increase came from contributions from consumer spending.
	Increased inventories, exports, residential investment, and government spending.
	There it is.
	Consumer spending increased 4% for the quarter after rising just 0.8% in Q2.
	One of the reasons people are spending so much is because they believe that their dollar is going to be worth less tomorrow than it is today.
	So you may as well buy that product that you were going to put off for six months.
	You might as well buy it right now before it doubles in price.
	Government spending and investment jumped 4.6% as well.
	The stock market did not jump on this news, which means that everybody still understands that there is another shoe to drop.
	The other shoe to drop is going to be the inflation stats, which continue to come in hot.
	And the Federal Reserve is going to have to raise those interest rates again.
	They're going to have to do it.
	They don't really have a huge debate over this, really.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, to combat high inflation, the Fed has lifted its benchmark federal funds rate to a range between 5.25% and 5.5%, a 22-year high.
	But the possibility of the economy running this hot is going to probably spur, I would imagine, some talk about the need to raise those interest rates again.
	So the notion again that we are out of the economic woods here, I think that we are way too early for anything like that.

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