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April 2, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:30
Why Cultural Christianity Isn’t Enough
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Well, folks, bad ideas that start in Europe eventually end up here in the United States.
And the latest bad idea in Europe is that hate speech should be criminalized.
This is something that is being pushed by the European Union.
It's also been pushed now by Scotland.
Scotland has a brand new hate crime law, which has come into force, according to the BBC, this brand new hate crime law essentially
criminalizes, quote, stirring up hatred relating to age, disability, religion,
sexual orientation, transgender identity, or being intersex. The maximum penalty is a
prison sentence of seven years. Apparently, you're an offender if you behave in a manner that, quote,
a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive.
Now, the claim of the Scottish government is that this does not infringe on free speech
because, after all, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects, quote,
ideas that offend, shock, or disturb a According to proponents of the law, quote, you have to be really threatening and really abusive, and there has to be reasonable assumption from others that that is the case.
The problem, of course, Is that when it comes to things like gender identity, the entire case that is made by advocates is that you simply saying, man is not woman, is in fact not only harassment but deadly harassment.
That it is a threat, that it is a form of abuse, because that transgender person is going to kill themselves if that person is called by their original sex or their original name.
This is obviously incredibly dangerous stuff.
The fact that Scotland has gone forth in this manner is pretty astonishing.
The current First Minister of Scotland is a person named Humza Yousaf, and here he was explaining the law yesterday.
The only concern you should have when it comes to the new stirring up of hatred, the new stirring up offences, is if your behaviour is threatening or abusive, and intends to stir up hatred.
And by the way, even if that is the case, there are some defences, such as the reasonable person defence, and so on and so forth.
So unless your behaviour is threatening or abusive, and intends to stir up hatred, then you have nothing to worry about in terms of the new offences being created.
If your behaviour is threatening or abusive, and does intend to stir up hatred against Jews, or Muslims, or disabled people, or gay people, then I think the law should protect those people who are the victims of that potential hatred.
Okay, the problem is, of course, that all of these are terms of art.
Threatening or abusive.
I mean, go on X for like five minutes and you will be hit with certainly a lot of speech that is quote-unquote abusive, where people are mean to one another.
And again, the over-sensitivity, the desire for victimhood is so strong these days that obviously anybody could use this law and file a police report.
And here is the problem.
It's all discretionary.
When you have a law where the terms are so broadly defined that they are basically at the discretion of whomever is in charge of the government, then you really have no protections in terms of rights at all.
Shivan Brown described the act.
This is the member of the SNP, which is the Scottish government.
Describe the act as ambitious, while also insisting it would not necessarily criminalize anything that was not already criminal.
Asked whether misgendering someone or making a comment about their religion could be a crime, the minister replied, quote, This will be up to Police Scotland.
I wouldn't say misgendering.
If you say something on social media, for example, it would be up to Police Scotland to determine.
The superintendent of the Association of Scottish Police superintendents, they said there was a potential for huge uplift in complaints about social media posts, of course.
Now, again, the fact that the Scottish police are now going to have to dedicate an entire team to track down the purveyors of evil social media posts that say that boys are not girls and the like, that demonstrates what a violation of free speech this is.
Now, the person who should probably be most worried would be the First Minister of Scotland, who back in February 2023 was just ripping on white people.
Is this abusive?
Is this intended to threaten?
I mean, he is in fact a very powerful minister in the Scottish government.
Here he was back in February of 2023 suggesting that there is something deeply wrong in Scotland because too many white people have power.
99% of the meetings I go to, I'm the only non-white person in the room.
But why are we so surprised when the most senior positions in Scotland are filled almost exclusively by those who are white?
Take my portfolio alone.
The Lord President?
White.
The Lord Justice Clerk?
White.
Every High Court Judge?
White.
The Lord Advocate?
White.
The Solicitor General?
White.
The Chief Constable?
White.
Every Deputy Chief Constable?
White.
Every Assistant Chief Constable?
White.
The Head of the Law Society?
White.
The Head of the Faculty of Advocates?
White.
Every Prison Governor?
White.
And not just justice.
The Chief Medical Officer, white.
The Chief Nursing Officer, white.
The Chief Veterinary Officer, white.
The Chief Social Work Advisor, white.
Almost every trade union in this country headed by people who are white.
In the Scottish Government, every Director General is white.
Wow, that seems like a little bit abusive.
I mean, just saying white over and over because white is apparently a term of derision to the First Minister in Scotland.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Well, yesterday, this got hot, not just because the law actually passed in Scotland, but also because J.K.
Rowling, who is, in fact, Scottish, she issued a fiery condemnation of the law.
And then she issued a series of social media posts on April Fool's Day in which she labeled a bunch of trans women women and then said, April Fool's.
Only kidding.
Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren't women at all, but men, every last one of them.
And then she dared the Scottish government to arrest her.
She said, freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.
I'm currently out of the country, but if what I've written here qualifies as new offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.
And then she signed off with the hashtag, arrest me.
The prime minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak, he said, people should not be criminalized for stating simple facts on biology.
We believe in free speech in this country and conservatives will always protect it.
A government source told the UK Daily Mail, quote, the SNP is taking Scotland down a very dangerous path with potential for seriously chilling effects on free speech.
We are clear that biological sex matters and gender critical beliefs are protected in British law, and that will not change while conservatives are in government.
Hamza Youssef, for his part, says he is very, very proud of the act.
Now, Rowling was reported to the North Rumbria police last month.
Of course, Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter series for calling a trans TV broadcaster named India Willoughby a man.
I love that the Daily Mail has to put that in quotations because obviously it's so crazy to call, you know, a biological man a man.
Police later said that the complaint did not meet the criminal threshold.
In her social media post, the author listed 10 high-profile trans people and denied their claims to be women, including double rapist Isla Bryson, 31, who was initially jailed for eight years at a women's prison before being moved to a male prison following a widespread backlash.
Rowling said in passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.
The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls' single-sex spaces.
The nonsense made of crime data, if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women's jobs, honors, and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.
J.K.
Rowling writes, for several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by the government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts, and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable.
The redefinition of woman, to include every man who declares himself one, has already had serious consequences for women's and girls' rights and safety in Scotland, with the strongest impact felt as ever by the most vulnerable, including female prisoners and rape survivors.
She concluded, It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the
reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls,
or address the current assault on women's and girls' rights unless we are allowed to call a man a man.
So, good for JK Rowling.
Rowling, who is using her extraordinary power in order to stump for truth.
Now, why should we be worried about this sort of stuff coming across the water to the United States?
I mean, after all, we have a First Amendment, don't we?
Well, the answer is that if, in fact, there were a left-wing majority on the Supreme Court, there is very little doubt that, quote-unquote, anti-discrimination law, which applies in a wide variety of jurisdictions across the United States, would, in fact, be applied to crack down on free speech.
That it would not, in fact, be considered free speech to engage in quote-unquote discrimination in a place of business, for example.
And by discrimination, that might mean that you said that a man was a man.
That would be verboten under anti-discrimination law in places like New York and California.
And again, the Supreme Court right now has a majority of conservatives on it.
But, if there were in fact an activist Supreme Court left-wing majority, they would undoubtedly curb the First Amendment so as to mirror the law in places not only like Scotland, but also in places like Canada.
The entire West has decided that the First Amendment that frees speech principles Not only are in play, but absolutely should be thrown out in favor of the sensitivities of quote-unquote victimized groups.
Now all of this is the wages of a new paganism, of a new pagan ideology that has decided that basic Western values like free speech and freedom of religion, like property rights, all these things the West has been characterized by for centuries at this point, that all of those things are inherently bad and inherently discriminatory.
And that pagan ideology has gained root.
Why?
Well, it's gained root because all of this, free speech, freedom of religion, all of these things are rooted originally in Judeo-Christian values.
The idea of freedom of religion is rooted in the Peace of Westphalia, which again arose from conflict between Protestants and Christians during the Thirty Years' War.
The idea of freedom of speech is an enlightenment concept that relies on the idea of freedom of mind.
And that freedom of mind is reliant on a notion that we have as human beings, a core obligation to seek a higher truth.
And that core obligation to seek a higher truth requires us to have discussions with one another, to investigate and to pursue.
That is a religious concept.
All of these things are outgrowths of Judeo-Christianity.
The author, Tom Holland, wrote a book called Dominion.
He's pointed out that pretty much everything in the West is an outgrowth, uniquely, of Christian ideals.
Well, the problem is that the West has cut itself off from the roots of its own ideology.
There's a philosopher named Will Herberg, who was writing about Judaism, but this certainly applies to Christianity.
What he wrote is quote the moral principles of Western civilization are in fact all derived from the tradition rooted in scripture and a vital meaning only in the context of that tradition.
The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage these values from their religious context in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as a quote unquote humanistic ethic as resulted in what one writer has called our cut flower culture.
Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they've drawn from their now-severed roots.
After that is exhausted, they wither and die.
So, with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity, the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization.
Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they've sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality.
Morality ungrounded in God is indeed a house built upon sin, unable to stand up against the vagaries of impulse and the brutal pressures of power and self-interest.
And this is exactly right.
We live in a cut flower culture, as Herberg put it.
We live in a culture that is living off of the exhaust, off of the fumes that are left in the tank from millennia of Christian civilization and before that, Judaic civilization.
As we have cut ourselves off from those roots, we are flowers that are still in the vase, but they are withering and they are withering quite quickly.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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One of the people who's now acknowledging this is Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins has for a very long time been the most famous atheist on planet Earth.
Obviously, he's written extensively about why Christianity and Judaism and Islam and all religions are wrong.
He's written about the so-called God delusion, this idea that a belief in a higher power is in fact a delusion, but he simultaneously called himself a cultural Christian.
So here he was on LBC talking about his views of cultural Christianity.
Well, I must say I was slightly horrified to hear that Ramadan is being promoted instead.
I do think that we are culturally a Christian country.
I call myself a cultural Christian.
I'm not a believer.
But there's a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian.
And so, you know, I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.
I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.
It's true that statistically the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down, and I'm happy with that.
But I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.
So I count myself a cultural Christian.
I think it would matter, certainly if we substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful.
Okay, but we have substituted an alternative religion, and that religion is paganism, because the reality is that when you cut off a civilization from its Judeo-Christian roots, what you end up with is a paganistic replacement for that religion.
Humanism devolves into paganism pretty quickly, because all of the central premises of humanism, things like reliance on human reason, Make an argument for human reason as an independent force.
You cannot from an evolutionarily biological perspective.
You can't.
You can say that human beings are capable of using their brains in order to adapt to their environment.
You cannot say that human beings are capable of searching for truth.
There is no such thing as truth in evolutionary biology.
There's just what's effective and what's not effective.
Everything is utilitarian in nature.
You can't make the case for higher concepts like justice or freedom.
If you are operating from a non-God based universe, You might be able to live that way individually.
You can be like Richard Dawkins and be an atheist and be a cultural Christian.
But you cannot separate the church building that he is praising there off from what goes on inside the church.
The church building is an outward manifestation of the soul that is the church.
The same thing is true of our civilization.
Our civilization is built in a particular way on particular Frameworks and foundations.
And when you destroy those foundations and frameworks, what you end up with is secularist pursuit of values that ends up undermining itself and eating itself.
You end up with postmodernism.
The reason that postmodernism is a natural outgrowth is because it is a natural decay.
You go from a thriving civilization, an Enlightenment civilization that was in fact rooted in Judeo-Christian values.
This is why, for example, when it comes to capitalism, Adam Smith wrote Theory of Moral Sentiments before he wrote Wealth of Nations.
Theory of Moral Sentiments is an entire book about virtue, A necessity thereof.
And then he wrote Wealth of Nations, which was predicated on the idea that when you have a civilization that does in fact promote virtue, capitalism can thrive.
The same thing is true of things like free speech.
These all exist on deeper foundations.
Those deeper foundations are religious in nature.
Trying to separate those off, pretending that they are the natural state of the world, is historically ignorant.
History is in fact contingent.
The Enlightenment rests on Christian bases.
Pretending that it does not means that you end up severing the two and an enlightenment severed from its Christian bases ends in terror.
It actually ends in gulags and death camps.
This is the point that Nietzsche was making near the end of the 19th century.
He was making the case that when you kill God, you don't in fact end up with a higher secular humanism.
You end up with a pagan pursuit of power.
You end up with the pursuit of the ubermensch because you live in a cold, Meaningless universe in which will is the only thing that matters.
Power is the only thing that matters.
This is why the arguments that are currently made about how, for example, freedom of speech is just a guise for power.
This is the argument the left makes against freedom of speech.
Property rights are not about the natural outgrowth of human beings want to create and to cultivate.
They are in fact an imposition by a powerful cadre of people who are attempting to victimize you.
They're bad.
They're a tool of the patriarchy.
Those ideas are natural outgrowths of severing natural law.
That's a natural outgrowth of suggesting that the universe is in fact not ruled by a creator who created a human nature and that that human nature has natural consequences like property rights or should have those natural consequences.
That the freedom of the mind that is guaranteed by Genesis 1.27 where it says we're all made in the image of God meaning that we are creative and capable of will.
And when you cut that off, you end up with everything is just power dynamics and power relations.
As a civilization, you cut yourself off from your roots, and what you end up with is Scotland passing laws suggesting that you cannot speak freely on matters of whether a man is a woman or not.
And whoever is in power gets to cudgel the other side.
That's the natural consequence.
So, people have asked me many times, can there be a moral atheist?
Sure, there can be a moral atheist.
Can there be a system built on atheism that is moral?
No, there cannot.
There cannot be a civilizational system built on atheism.
This is why when Richard Dawkins says he's a cultural Christian, the question that we should all be asking ourselves is twofold.
One, is he right?
That our civilization rests on Christian foundations.
And the answer is, yes, of course he is right about that.
The second question we should ask is, then why are we destroying those Christian foundations?
If the church building exists, but there's nobody inside, how long do you expect the civilization to thrive?
If the civilization built on the Bible discards the Bible, how long do you expect that civilization to continue along the lines it has previously continued?
And the argument by Dawkins and other atheists presumably will be, yes, but all that's untrue.
Those would be necessary myths, but they're necessary myths, but they're myths.
And so truth matters more.
So first of all, I would ask, how are you defining truth?
Because according to, again, folks like Richard Dawkins, and again, I like a lot of Richard Dawkins' work, it's really interesting, but according to folks like Richard Dawkins, when he says, we can't believe the Bible because it's not true, My question is, what in evolutionary biology suggests that truth is of any paramount value?
If, in fact, he's a specialist in adaptation and the necessity of adaptation, then he should be a believer in the Bible simply on the adaptability basis of it.
He should be a Christian because it is useful to be a Christian.
Because that's what evolution says.
Evolution is all about utility.
Evolution is not about fundamental truth.
But he says you have to discard the Bible because it is quote-unquote not fundamentally true because you can't prove the miracles.
You can't prove God.
Okay, but in what world, in your world, why does truth with a capital T matter?
It shouldn't.
You live in evolutionary meme land, right?
The basic idea that the genes are self-replicating and seek to survive.
And all of that is predicated on a notion of adaptability and utility.
It is not predicated on a notion of truth.
So you can't rely upon my religious notions of truth in order to knock out the Bible.
So there's that.
Get to more on this in just a moment.
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Number two, why exactly shouldn't it be true?
If it has proved, if it has proved that Western civilization is in fact the highest form of civilization that man has experienced, And it is rooted in Christian and Judaic values.
There are two possibilities.
One, it's a necessary myth.
A platonic necessary myth.
And two, is maybe there's truth to it.
Maybe it's true.
And maybe it seems that while people like Richard Dawkins can individually reject the premises of the Bible while accepting the conclusions, maybe it turns out that the vast majority of the population cannot and should not.
Maybe it turns out that we need more Christians going to church, and we need more Jews going to synagogue.
Maybe that's actually really important with civilization.
Otherwise, you end up in the muck that we currently find ourselves.
What I would say to Richard Dawkins is, if you like the Christmas carols, someone needs to believe in Christ to sing them.
If you like the churches, somebody has to go to church to actually maintain the church.
If you like the civilization in which you live, somebody's got to maintain those biblical roots.
Somebody's got to go to the garden and cultivate and guard it.
It's pretty important.
And when you don't, what you end up with is the American White House.
So the Biden White House obviously spent the weekend suggesting that Easter was of secondary importance.
Trans Day of Visibility was, of course, of primary importance.
Pretty much all the members of the cabinet spoke on this, including the Secretary of Education.
It's very important that our Secretary of Education here in the United States speak to young Americans while wearing a Pride Progress flag pin.
It is amazing how quickly All of the left-wing progressive memes make themselves absolute necessities in the Democratic Party.
It really is amazing.
I'm talking about the flag.
Remember that time there was just a gay flag?
Remember that?
It was just a rainbow flag?
And then, like two years ago, they started promoting the Pride Progress flag, which is this ugly triangle coming in, and it only had the trans colors.
And then George Floyd died, and then they added the brown and the black.
Well now, by the way, there is a second triangle that's coming in from the other side.
So a flanking maneuver by various intersectional identity groups.
Pretty soon the rainbow is going to be completely crowded out.
But celebrating Trans Day of Visibility was our Secretary of Education, while speaking
to small children, he's wearing this Pride Progress flag pin instead of an American flag
pin.
Because after all, these are the values of the West now.
It's the Pride Progress pin, not the American flag.
To the many transgender students across the country listening on this Trans Day of Visibility,
we in the Biden-Harris administration want you to know that we see you, we support you,
and we celebrate you.
Bye.
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Today, we at the Department of Education want you to know that your school, your community, and your country are better because you're a part of it.
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From all of us here at the Department of Education, Happy Trans Day of Visibility.
Hmm.
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On this Transgender Day of Visibility, we must continue To make focused and ongoing efforts to end inequities, eliminate the impacts of injustice, and improve access to care for everyone.
Today, of all days, I stand proud and visible with my fellow transgender Americans.
Happy Transgender Day of Visibility!
Okay, so the White House has then asked about the fact that Transgender Day of Visibility had replaced Easter.
Were Easter messages released by each member of this cabinet?
I missed it, if so.
Here's Corrine Jean-Pierre, however, denying that Trans Day of Visibility had been purposefully timed for Easter.
I do want to say a couple of things because I think it's important here.
As you just stated in your questions, what we've been hearing out there, a lot of misinformation done on purpose.
And as a Christian who celebrates Easter with family, President Biden stands for bringing people together and upholding the dignity and freedoms of every American.
Now, sadly, and it's not surprising, right?
It is actually unsurprising that politicians are seeking to divide and weaken our country with cruel, hateful and dishonest rhetoric.
It is dishonest what we have heard the past 24 hours.
It is untrue what we heard over the weekend.
How's it untrue?
Really, how's it untrue?
So the White House says, but this is the day that Trans Day of Visibility is.
It's like, since time immemorial, Trans Day of Visibility has been on March 31st, and it just couldn't be moved.
It was too important.
There's no way to move it.
Okay, just for the record, Trans Day of Visibility was invented by, again, people with a particular agenda in 2009.
In 2009, the White House did not memorialize Trans Day of Visibility until Joe Biden was President of the United States.
So it's like four years old, according to the White House.
The very first proclamation about Trans Day of Visibility was 2021.
So you're telling me that Easter, which has been around for, I don't know, a couple thousand years, Trans Day of Visibility could not be, it could not be moved on the calendar.
It was just too vital that it be on Easter.
By the way, I will point out that the White House held the Easter egg roll on Monday.
Which was not on Easter.
So in other words, you can move the Easter activities to not Easter, but you cannot move Trans Day of Visibility.
That thing is locked in place.
March 31st is the day it's going to happen.
It's really important it happen that day.
The reality is again, a substitute value system has now been put before the American people and before the West, and that substitute value system is a complete replacement of the Christian value system that predominated in the West for thousands of years, even in the post-Christian era.
That post-Christian system was based on the values of Christianity.
And to pretend otherwise is to ignore all of Western history.
Like, truly ignore it.
Get some more on this momentarily.
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Okay, meanwhile, a couple of big updates from the situation in Israel.
So update number one, which actually is the biggest news in the region.
Iran's top commander in Syria was killed in an airstrike by Israel.
So Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps has been fomenting terror all over the region.
Iran has terror proxies in Lebanon, in Syria, in Gaza, in the West Bank.
In Yemen, in Iraq, and they've been activating every single one of these terror proxies against various Israeli targets.
And in particular, there is a Syrian nexus in which weapons are shipped from Iran through Syria and into Lebanon, or down to Gaza, or into the West Bank.
And so, Israel, on Monday, carried out an airstrike on a building next to Iran's embassy in Damascus, and it killed seven members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including the top Iranian commander in Syria.
This would be the new equivalent of Qasem Soleimani, who is the top commander of the terror wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, who was killed by airstrike by the Trump administration.
Apparently, the strike in the Damascus area municipality of Mezzeh hit a building that was adjacent to an Iranian embassy, according to the footage.
This, of course, was a very significant strike.
It basically decapitates the top levels of the IRGC.
Other officers killed included other top officers at the IRGC.
Iran, of course, is mouthing off, suggesting that they're now going to escalate.
But the reality is that Iran has been activating its proxies all over the region, of course, harassing shipping in the Red Sea, such that most shipping is now avoiding the Red Sea entirely, adding to your costs at the grocery store.
They've been activating Hezbollah to fire anti-tank missiles into Israel literally every night, killing Israelis and keeping some 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the north of Israel.
As the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Iran paid the first real price Monday for its proxy warfare in the Middle East after Israel killed the leading Iranians, sowing chaos in the region.
The most significant assassination since Soleimani is how the missile strike in Damascus is being reported in Israel.
Monday's strike killed General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, Iran's top Quds Force commander in Lebanon and Syria, as well as his deputy commander and his chief of general staff.
They were also meeting with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is one of the three governing groups in the West Bank.
Where the United States keeps pushing for a Palestinian state.
And the United States is funding both sides in this war right now, so your taxpayer dollars at work.
As regional chief of the Quds Force, the Wall Street Journal points out, Zahedi was point man in Iran's war on Israel.
He was the boss of Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy that has fired more than 3,500 rockets unprovoked on Israel's north since October 7th.
The attack was carried out with precision on a building next to Iran's embassy.
Monday's strike is in contrast to the U.S.
response after Iranian proxies killed three Americans near the Syrian border in January.
The Biden administration leaked news of its retaliation in advance, giving Iranian commanders in Syria time enough to get out of the way.
Israel instead decided that they were going to actually decapitate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard terror regime.
So, good, obviously, for the Israelis.
That is story number one.
That is not receiving nearly the amount of coverage this morning as a horrific circumstance in which the Israeli Defense Forces apparently accidentally struck and killed a World Central Kitchen truck that was attempting to facilitate aid into the Gaza Strip.
The group is called World Central Kitchen, and it is headed by a celebrity chef named Jose Andres.
And they've been working with the Israeli government, with their facilitation of the Israeli government, to ship aid into the Gaza Strip.
Apparently, a targeted Israeli strike accidentally killed Australian, British, Palestinian, Polish, and U.S.
Canadian staff.
The Israeli military, unlike every other country in the region where something deeply terrible happens and no investigation takes place because that's actually the intent, Israel is launching a full-scale investigation into this particular incident.
WCK has been working to unload food brought to Gaza by sea from Cyprus.
The White House was, quote, heartbroken, according to U.S.
National Security Council spokesperson Adrian Watson, stressing relief workers must be protected as they deliver aid that is desperately needed.
Obviously, this is a friendly fire incident.
Unfortunately, that sort of incident is really common in wartime.
About a fifth of all Israeli soldiers who have been killed in Gaza have been killed in friendly fire incidents.
The most famous incident thereof was the killing of three Israeli hostages who were held by Hamas, and then Israel accidentally killed its own hostages in a friendly fire incident.
The IDF spokesperson, Admiral Daniel Hagari, said in an English-language video,
quote, we've been reviewing the incident at the highest levels to understand the circumstances
of what happened and how it happened. For the last few months, the IDF has been working closely with
the World Central Kitchen to assist them in fulfilling their noble mission of helping bring
food and humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. The work of WCK is critical. They are on the
front lines of humanity. He promised that we will get to the bottom of this and we will share our
findings transparently. The IDF said the strike was a serious incident that never should have
have happened and there will be a probe and they will release all the facts.
Again, demonstrating once again, this is how democracies handle their problems.
They air them in public and they do full-scale investigations.
Nonetheless, this is being used as a rationale for now promoting a ceasefire against Hamas, which is weird since Hamas would kill aid workers without any sort of investigation.
They've been killing aid workers for legitimately months at this point.
A lot of focus being put on the fact that there was an American citizen among the killed and that is horrific and terrible.
Also, there are currently American citizens who are being held by Hamas in terror tunnels right now.
You don't know their names because the media don't care about that and they don't cover it.
So this terrible incident will undoubtedly be spun as sort of case number one for why Israel is bad, despite the fact that, again, it was number one, an accident by all available information, and two, Israel will do a full investigation into it.
Meanwhile, Hamas will continue to hold Americans in terror tunnels on purpose and pursue the murder of aid workers on purpose, and the rest of the world will declare that there must be a ceasefire against Hamas.
The media coverage of these sorts of situations is always incredibly ugly and it's pretty obvious exactly what the media are attempting to do with that sort of coverage.
Okay, in just one second.
We'll get to another piece of news from the region first.
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Meanwhile, the other big piece of news from Israel is that Israel has now passed a law barring the distribution of Al Jazeera in Israel.
Al Jazeera is, of course, the Qatari-funded propaganda network on behalf of terror regimes all around the world, including Hamas.
They have promoted pretty much every myth promoted by Hamas since the beginning of the war.
Many of the Al Jazeera quote-unquote reporters were canning glove with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The Knesset in Israel approved on Monday the so-called Al Jazeera law, which gave the government temporary powers to prevent foreign news networks from operating in Israel if they're deemed by the security services To be harming national security, this sort of stuff is fairly common across the world during times of war.
During World War II, der Sturmer was not distributed inside the United States, to the best of my knowledge, because, again, foreign propaganda that is being run by actual enemies of whatever is the administration in power, not just the administration, the entire country.
Those sorts of things happen fairly regularly during wartime.
Not a giant shock.
The United States is expressing concern over the legislation.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had comment, of course.
So as it relates to and I think you're speaking specifically at least the reports that we've seen is about Al Jazeera specifically but it doesn't matter whichever right journalist more broadly but to those particular report we've seen the reports and certainly I'm going to refer to Israel for what they may or may not be considering but If it is true, if it is true, a move like this is concerning.
We believe in the freedom of the press.
It is critical.
It is critically important, and the United States supports the critically important work journalists around the world do.
And that includes those who are reporting in the conflict in Gaza.
So we believe that work is important, the freedom of the press is important, and if those reports are true, it is concerning to us.
Okay, there's only one problem, which of course is that Al Jazeera operates in the interests of Hamas.
Former Representative Ileana Ros-Lettinen has explained in a report prepared for Congress that the network, quote, repeatedly undermines U.S.
interests in the region by supporting extremist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and the Al-Nusra Front.
Moreover, Qatar uses its state-owned, state-funded, state-directed, state-controlled Al Jazeera media network to project this vision to the United States public.
Al Jazeera has effectively acted as a mouthpiece for Hamas.
In a report for Memory, the Middle Eastern Research Institute, since October 7th, Al Jazeera has been airing official military announcements and threats by Hamas spokespeople, as well as by other terror organizations on an almost daily basis.
They've made false allegations about rape, for example, at Shifa Hospital, which they then had to back off.
I noticed that Karine Jean-Pierre does not have anything like this to say about Ukraine, where Vladimir Zelensky has shut down many opposing media outlets in the middle of a war.
Nothing to say about that whatsoever.
Again, the disparate treatment is rather fascinating.
The reason, of course, is because the Democrats are very scared of their left flank.
They are scared of people like Pramila Jayapal, the progressive nutjob from Washington State, who is suggesting that the crisis in Gaza is, quote-unquote, breaking their coalition.
Which, again, is strange, because the United States really is not involved very much in what is going on over there, other than continuing aid to an American Democratic ally against a terror group.
This particular issue on Gaza is breaking our coalition.
We need that fragile coalition to come back together.
But this is a moral issue for people, and so there's not a lot of time to fix it.
The worse it gets in Gaza, the harder it gets to bring people back in.
Okay, well, I mean, it's really not that Biden's going to lose the progressives.
They're all going to vote for him against Donald Trump.
The real problem, of course, is that he's going to lose the moderates, but his math is all bollocksed up.
Meanwhile, speaking of Ukraine, according to the New York Times, Speaker Mike Johnson has begun publicly laying out potential conditions for extending a fresh round of American military assistance to Ukraine.
The strongest indication yet that he plans to push through the House of Package, many Republicans view as toxic and have tried to block.
His terms may include tying the aid for Kiev to a measure that would force Biden to reverse a moratorium on new permits for liquefied natural gas export facilities, something the Republicans would see as a political victory against the Democratic president's climate change agenda.
Johnson said Sunday in an interview on Fox News, when we return after this work period, we'll be moving a product, but it's going to have some important innovations.
Apparently, one of the possibilities is to push the aid to Ukraine as a loan.
Now, the reality is that Johnson is stuck between a rock and a hard place with his own caucus.
Because there's obviously a hard core of people inside the Republican caucus, maybe 10 to 15 Republicans at most, who are unwilling to facilitate any aid to Ukraine, who apparently are perfectly willing to watch Russia march into Kiev.
Which is a strange take if you believe that America's interests are paramount in the world.
If you believe America first, and I do believe that American interests come first, I don't see how it's quite in America's interest to allow Russia to march directly into Kiev thanks to shortage of weaponry in Ukraine.
That does not seem to make a lot of sense to me on a sort of realpolitik level, putting aside all of the rhetoric.
Nonetheless, Johnson has a problem on his hands because the Republican majority is very narrow and because Kevin McCarthy, in order to become Speaker, instituted a set of rules whereby one member of the House Republican caucus can challenge the Speaker and then effectively force a vote of no confidence on the Speaker of the House.
That rule needs to go.
That rule is unworkable.
It essentially allows a group of 10 Republicans to overrule the other 205, 210 Republicans who are in the House.
It's really stupid and it needs to stop.
The reality is that the process of legislation is a job of sausage making.
And the sausage gets made in really ugly ways.
But the job of the legislator is to make the sausage.
The job of the legislature is, in fact, to make the best of a bad situation.
It's always choices between bad alternative policies.
And when you see people posturing on your television, members of Congress posturing on your television, with a purist position on the issues, we should recognize at this point that the Republicans don't even control two branches of the elected government.
They control the House.
They do not control the Senate or the Presidency.
And running into brick walls, it turns out, is not a strategy.
Beyond which, I still have yet to hear a clearly articulated vision of why the United States should cut off aid completely to Ukraine.
Which seems to be the practical effect right now of what is being pushed by some in the Republican Party.
I do not understand it.
I do not understand the case being made that somehow Russia is the positive force in this vision of what happens to Ukraine next.
Vladimir Putin is in fact a murderous dictator who has anti-American intentions that he is spreading all across the globe ranging from the Middle East to Africa to in fact Central Eastern Europe.
The real politic case for Vladimir Putin's victory in Ukraine has never been made.
There have been a lot of critiques of the Ukrainians.
And some of those critiques are fair.
But none of that explains exactly why it would be in America's interest to watch Ukraine completely collapse and watch Vladimir Putin win the war.
The fact that this is even a going theory in the Republican Party is somewhat strange to me because, again, I don't, like, if someone can explain the logic, I'd be perfectly willing to hear it.
I haven't heard the logic.
I've heard a lot of propagandistic talking points that make no actual sense.
We'll get some more on this in just a moment.
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Meanwhile, things are getting hot about abortion in Florida, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Florida Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the state's ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy can, in fact, be implemented.
The justice also cleared the way for voters to expand the right to abortion in November.
That, of course, is going to be a hotly fought issue, even in the state of Florida, because the state of Florida moved from the Roe vs. Wade standard, which was effectively abortion on demand until late term, up to six weeks, which is a pretty hefty move.
The state of Florida is very conservative, but that isn't to say that conservative states haven't taken the wrong position on this before.
Obviously, we've seen the state of Kansas, which is a very conservative state, take the full pro-abortion position as opposed to things like a heartbeat bill.
In a 4-3 decision, the court approved the language for a ballot measure that would protect abortion access in the state through fetal viability or more than halfway through a typical pregnancy.
If passed, the measure would effectively restore Roe v. Wade.
In a 6-1 decision, the court also ruled that a privacy provision of the state's constitution does not protect access to abortion.
Currently, abortion in Florida was legal through 15 weeks of pregnancy after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and then it was moved back to six weeks.
I'm sure the Democrats in the state of Florida are very excited about this fight because Democrats, of course, have been running on the abortion issue since the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.
The Florida Supreme Court justices ruled the meaning of the abortion ballot measure was sufficiently clear.
The measure allows health care providers to determine whether a fetus is considered viable.
That's like 23 weeks of pregnancy.
Getting a measure on the ballot in Florida was an expensive gamble fraught with hurdles for abortion rights groups.
But, of course, Democrats are hoping that this is somehow going to restore their status in the state.
It'll be fascinating to see.
It'll be a really interesting political example of how much abortion can damage Republicans if Democrats are able to not only win that referendum, but also then win additional seats in the legislature or do better than expected in the next gubernatorial race on the basis of policies like that.
It'll be good evidence for one position or the other when it comes to abortion in red states like Florida.
Whether, in fact, pro-lifers should be taking a more gradualist and incrementalist approach to protecting life in order to ensure the future viability of such legislation.
Meaning, if you push it from 15 to 12, and then two years from now you push it from 12 to 10, and then two years from then you push it from 10 to 8, is that going to be better than simply pushing from 15 to 6?
Immediately.
Obviously, you understand the moral imperative of pushing it, the ban, as early as humanly possible.
Every life saved is a life saved.
At the same time, if the legislation ends up backfiring and leading to a full-scale legalization of abortion in the state of Florida, for example, Many more unborn kids will die because of that than would have been the case if you took a more gradualist approach.
So it'll be fascinating to see, again, what the politics are in a deep-red state like Florida.
If history is any indicator, the abortion issue has not gone Republicans' way in Michigan.
It has not gone Republicans' way in Kansas.
So this will be a fascinating test case.
Okay, meanwhile...
In what is the most delightful entertainment story of the day, Shakira, remember Shakira?
She's the hips don't lie lady, correct?
Okay, so, uh, Shakira apparently did an interview with Allure magazine and shared her less than glowing take on Barbie.
She said, quote, my sons absolutely hated it, referring to her sons who are 11 and 9.
She said they felt it was emasculating and I agreed to a certain extent.
She said, I like pop culture when it attempts to empower women without robbing men of their possibility to be men, to also protect and provide.
I believe in giving women all the tools and the trust that we can do it all without losing our essence, without losing our femininity.
I think men have a purpose in society and women have another purpose as well.
We compliment each other.
That compliment should not be lost.
A journalist asked then, just because a woman can do it all doesn't mean she shouldn't.
Shakira said, why not share the load with people who deserve to carry it, who have a duty to carry it as well?
Wow.
Slow clap for Shakira.
Good job there.
I feel like maybe her sons watched a particular 43-minute critique of the Barbie movie in which many Barbie dolls were burned right at the beginning.
I feel like maybe that happened.
But enjoying the fact that Shakira is now receiving massive blowback, it's good to know that it wasn't just me.
So Shakira also taking it on the chin for mentioning that Barbie is an emasculating movie that treats men as throwaway things that are completely useless in a civilized society.
Oliver Stone has also received criticism.
He criticized Ryan Gosling for not focusing on more serious films, yet Ryan Gosling is wasting his time if he's doing that bleep for money.
He said that in June of last year.
That he shouldn't be part of this infantilization of Hollywood.
Now it's all fantasy, fantasy, fantasy.
Including all the war pictures.
Fantasy, fantasy.
And then he said, later, of course, he backed off of it.
He said, I was able to see Barbie and appreciated the film for its originality and its themes.
I apologize for speaking ignorantly.
We'll see if Shakira backs off the point.
But, by the way, Shakira's take on femininity is exactly right.
Now femininity is something that belongs to women and masculinity is something that belongs to men.
That doesn't mean that women can't do masculine things or men can't do effeminate things.
It does mean that men are required in our society and actually it is very good for men to be involved in society for women.
One of the most hilarious social media phenomena that we've seen lately is a bunch of feminists who are realizing they like it when men pay for dinner.
Well, yes, of course you like it when men pay for dinner, because it demonstrates willingness to provide, which is an essentially masculine characteristic.
When you rob men of their duty in life, it turns out that men don't just disappear, they become toxic.
When you rob men of mission, they redirect those aggressive energies into all the wrong places.
There's a great book by George Gilder, sort of a philosopher-economist called Men and Marriage, all about this.
And his suggestion is that basically men are robber thieves who act aggressively until they are civilized by women, and all those aggressive energies are channeled in the direction of building.
So either men are going to destroy or men are going to build.
When you shut men out of the building apparatus, particularly in terms of building a family, When you don't channel men's aggressive instincts toward protection of wife and hearth and home, you end up with aggressively very bad men.
You end up with no men, you end up with really bad men.
Half population, still gonna end up being men.
The only question is whether those men are going to be channeling their energies in a positive and good direction or whether they're gonna be following WWE light figures who are boasting about their muscles, shirtless while driving Lamborghinis around and running sex rings.
Those are the choices that you have.
There are no other choices.
Either men are going to channel their aggressive, testosterone-driven instincts into something good, productive, and wonderful society.
They're going to build up, or they're going to tear down.
They're either going to build cathedrals, or they're going to tear cathedrals down.
There's no in-between.
There is no man who is redefined to mean woman.
And if there were, that would not be a very good man.
And what does that mean?
It means that it is actually a duty of women to allow men to be men, just as it is a duty of men to allow women to be women, just as it is a fact that it is a form of appropriation for men to pretend to be women and take on all these supposedly female characteristics, and it's a mockery.
When women do the same with regard to masculinity, that is also bad.
It is also wrong.
Men and women are complementary.
And the single best articulation of this comes in the book of Genesis.
When God creates woman, he creates woman and says that she is ezer kenegdo, okay, which is the, that's the language in Hebrew.
Ezer kenegdo means a helper, kenegdo, against him.
In other words, men and women are not meant to be perfectly equivalent.
Men and women are meant to be complementary.
They are meant to bounce off each other.
They are meant to work in both cooperation and opposition to one another.
And when you get rid of that dynamic, which is what Barbie seeks to do, the Barbie movie is all about how men and women actually be better off not really living together.
Barbie doesn't need Ken.
Ken's an idiot.
And Ken shouldn't be dominating Barbie.
And apparently, according to Greta Gerwig's theory of life, those are the two choices.
The two choices are effectively either men are marginalized or men are aggressively predominant.
But the reality is that it's the beauty of the relationship between men and women that creates civilization.
When you have a civilization like ours, to go back to the theme at the beginning of today's show, a civilization like ours that is built on anti-biblical principles, what you end up with is relationships falling apart, men who act like aggressive bandits, women who are completely unmoored from the thing that makes them women, Which, by the way, does have to do with childbearing and rearing.
And everyone is less happy.
Everyone is less happy.
Which is why, again, we have the most prosperous and free society in the history of humanity, and we have extraordinarily high depression rates in the West.
Not a shock.
A cut flower cannot grow.
Alrighty, coming up, apparently young Americans are disillusioned with capitalism.
Well, I mean, then they're losers.
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