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April 3, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:43
Our “Unaliving” Civilization
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Well, folks, Western civilization has a major, major problem.
And that is that pretty much every societal ill that had been taken off the table by generations of received wisdom has now come back and come roaring back to life stronger than ever.
The latest example of this is a piece in the Free Press, Barry Weiss's Free Press, all about the spate of suicide and euthanasia that is taking over the West right now.
There's a piece by Rupa Subramanya talking about this.
Zaraya Turbik, 28, expects to be euthanized in early May.
Her plan, she said, is to be cremated.
Quote, I did not want to burden my partner with having to keep the grave tidy, Ter Beek texted me.
We have not picked an urn yet, but that will be my new house.
She added an urn emoji after house.
Ter Beek lives in a little Dutch town near the German border and once had ambitions to become
a psychiatrist, but she was never able to muster the will to finish school or start a career.
She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder.
Now, she was tired of living, despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.
She recalled her psychiatrist telling her they tried everything, that there's nothing more we can do for you.
It's never going to get any better.
At that point, she said, she decided to die.
It was always very clear that if it doesn't get better, I can't do this anymore.
She is not the only one, unfortunately.
Suicidality, euthanasia, these have become incredibly common across the West.
In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to make euthanasia legal.
Since then, the number of people who increasingly choose to die is startling in 2022.
That's the most recent year for which there's data.
Dutch officials recorded 8,720 cases of euthanasia.
That is a 13.7% increase from 2021.
and twenty cases of euthanasia. That is a 13.7 percent increase from 2021. That is five percent
of all deaths in the Netherlands were euthanasia. And that trend is not limited to the Netherlands.
In the United States, euthanasia has jumped from 2018 to 2021 by 53%, in Canada by 125%.
In Oregon, which in 1997 became the first state to legalize assisted suicide, the total suicide rate rose from 15.9 per 100,000 people to 16.9 post-legalization.
That's while the suicide rate in all other states actually dipped over that period in time.
Increasingly, the West is legalizing euthanasia for people who are clearly not terminal.
For example, Lauren Hove.
On November 30th, 2022, Hove, a Dutch YouTube creator who was then 27, took to her newly created blog, Brainfog, to announce she wanted to die.
She explained she had autism ADHD, ARFID, which is Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, depression, anxiety, a history of complex trauma, and since 2019, chronic fatigue syndrome.
She registered with the Euthanasia Expertise Center in The Hague.
About a year later, she then committed suicide.
Shoes 28.
So, again, this sort of stuff is becoming more and more common.
And it's not just this social malady that is plaguing the West.
It is drug abuse.
Drug abuse is plaguing the West.
It has for several decades at this point.
24% of American students in grades 8, 10, and 12 have used marijuana.
128 million Americans report having used marijuana at some point in their lifetime.
It is worth noting that marijuana today is significantly, significantly more addictive and more dangerous than marijuana when you were a kid.
When it comes to pornography, pornography is not only widespread in its availability, but also in its use and in its addiction.
The latest stats show that about 70% of American men view pornography.
24% of American women say they view pornography as well.
And the number of people who admit to being addicted is actually quite high.
The impacts of pornography on the human brain are very much like drug addiction.
There's a dopamine release and then it wears off and then people want more of the dopamine and so they go back to the pornography.
This empties out relations.
It destroys the relationship between men and women.
Men begin to see women as sexual objects in a way different than would normally be the case.
It disconnects them from other human beings.
We see this with regard to major societal issues like, for example, family formation and childbearing.
31% of women aged 30 to 34 in the United States are childless now, which is way higher than it has ever been in the United States.
When it comes to LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign identification, fully 22.3% of Gen Z now say, one in five, that they are LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign.
Which, yes, has societal impact.
It turns out that when one-fifth of your population suggests that they are no longer going to engage in monogamous heterosexual relationships with the goal of family formation, that has a major impact on your civilization.
So what exactly is going on?
Why are all of these social maladies Suddenly cropping up.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Well, there have been social scientists, people like Jonathan Haidt, who say that all of this has really accelerated due to the iPhone, due to the availability of the technology in your hands, social epidemics that are becoming epidemic much more quickly.
It would have taken a long time for these sorts of things to become contagious.
Now, they're spreading through the population like wildfire.
Undoubtedly, that's true.
But in order for that epidemic to Actually take hand.
The systemic immunity of a society has to be compromised.
The immunity has to go away.
What was the immunity to all of these sorts of bad ideas?
The answer, obviously, for literally hundreds of years, was religion.
Not just because people believed in God, but because there are two particular facts about religion that are deeply necessary to understand the beneficial and salutary effects of religion on a society.
Fact number one, religion takes certain moral matters off the table.
It says, God says X, therefore don't do X. Why is that important?
It's important because when you're talking about time-tested wisdom, I'm talking about this from a secularist perspective, not even as a religious person, which I am, where I actually believe that God said X. But, put all of that aside, pretend that God didn't say X. Pretend that God did not say, thou shalt not murder.
But from a secular perspective, one reason why any society might say something like, God says thou shall not murder, is because it takes it off the table for debate.
Once God says it, you don't need to come up with an independent rationale as to why it's not okay to murder.
And the reality is that when it comes to the vast majority of rules that we abide by in society, the vast majority of things that we are supposed to not do, those Our rules, not because somebody sat somewhere in a cave and came up with a rationale for the rule, but because over trial and error, over evolutionary long periods of time, these are rules that have been found to be effective.
It's a point that Thomas Sowell makes in his book, Knowledge and Decisions, is that one of the social purposes of religion is that the evolution of moral rules takes a very long time.
And the evolution of those moral rules is in fact a form of data.
You don't have to explain why it works.
You just have to know that it does work.
One of the great lies that the Enlightenment has told us is that everything that is good requires a rationale.
By the way, that's not even the way that science typically works.
People tend to think that the way that science works is that you have a theoretician in the lab who comes with a theory, and then the theory has practical ramifications.
Very often, it's the reverse.
Very often, the inventions that you're using is somebody who's tinkering in their garage and doing trial and error until something worked.
And they may not even know why it works.
This happens to be true, by the way, for a huge number of pharmaceuticals that are in use right now.
They don't know why it works, they just know that it does.
Well, that happens to be the case about moral rules as well.
And what religion does, it says these moral rules are now taken off the table.
We don't have to give you a rationale.
They're there because they work.
That's what religion does societally.
First thing it does.
Second thing it does, it creates the social fabric necessary to enforce those rules without a top-down state.
It creates the intermediate institutions of society that philosopher Robert Nesbitt pointed out act as an enforcement mechanism.
So, you violate the rule of society, for example, that says that you should get married and have kids and live within the boundaries of a church, and the rest of the members of the church might not want you at the church.
You're not gonna be part of that particular social fabric.
There is, in fact, a social ostracism that takes place, and that is good.
Any society has to have rules that are enforced.
Not necessarily with force, that's a government question, but by social censure.
Social censure is really important.
So, religious communities have traditionally provided a couple of things.
One, rules that are unbreachable.
And don't require some sort of secularist rationale, because it turns out that many of the things we do in our life don't actually have a secularist rationale.
They just work.
And two, a social fabric is created by any religious community that enforces those particular rules.
Well, as we have secularized as a society, we have decided to toss away both of those things.
Both of those things have dissolved.
So, we have become the touch-the-stove civilization.
So the way that you teach your kids not to touch the stove is you don't explain to your kids, really, when they're very, very young.
You don't teach them, okay, certain objects are hot.
When you touch a hot object, you get burned.
You say, don't touch the stove.
And if you touch the stove, there will be a consequence.
Well, we as a society have decided that anything we can't explain requires us to touch the stove.
So we're gonna touch the stove on everything.
So things that were just common sense propositions, like for example, it is good that you get married and have children.
We as a society decided, because we couldn't come up with a rationale, why not alternatives?
What's wrong with alternatives?
Why can't all alternatives be treated as perfectly equivalent?
The answer to that, by the way, is that it fails.
Society fails when you don't have man-woman-child.
End of story.
Societies that don't focus on man-woman-child fall apart, because that is the basis of every functional civilization.
But we decided we can't come up with a rationale why it shouldn't be man-man-no-child, or woman-woman-no-child, or man-woman-chicken, three children adopted from a surrogate mother.
And therefore, we should just do it.
So he touched the stove.
And what's the result?
The result is widespread childlessness.
Breakdown in family formation.
Destruction of existing families.
Children born into families where they're not really families, just a mom and a kid.
Because dad is nowhere to be seen.
Which of course has resulted in many more social maladies.
We had to touch the stove when it came to drug use.
We as a society were like, you know what would probably be bad?
Is if huge swaths of the population ingested hallucinogenic drugs.
That'd probably be a bad thing.
And then we as a society were like, well, but what if we tried it?
What if we touched the stove?
Maybe it'll be fine.
How do we know?
And so the time-tested wisdom that suggested sobriety was thrown out the window in favor of something different.
And has it been salutary in its effects on young Americans?
I would suggest the answer is no.
We used to say that engaging in pornography ought to be illicit.
That it is bad.
That when you view pornography, it does something to your brain that is not good.
It perverts your view of the opposite sex, of sex itself, and of relationships.
And then we're like, ah, but, but really, is it going to be that bad?
I mean, like, sure.
What are you, just a prude, man?
Just a prude?
Is that what this is?
Can you find a rationale for your prudishness?
And it used to be, well, I don't have to find a rationale.
It's, it's icky and gross and bad and you shouldn't do it.
It's bad for your soul and it's bad for you.
And that was accepted wisdom for literally hundreds of years.
And then we were like, well, let's touch the stove and let's find out what happens.
This has had incredibly negative effects on our civilization.
We have decided as a civilization that we have a right to touch the stove.
We have a right to touch the stove.
That what our civilization is built upon is touching the stove actually.
The most important thing you can do is touch the stove.
This is a perversion of what the founders meant by rights.
There's more on this in a moment.
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So rights talk is very prevalent in American circles.
We're always talking about rights.
The left likes to talk about rights to healthcare, which don't actually exist because a right to healthcare means that somebody has a duty to provide you healthcare.
So really what it is is an entitlement, not a right.
And then there are people who talk about rights, like I have a right to view pornography.
have the right to use the n-word. What are they talking about when they say that sort of stuff?
They are talking about a form of immunity, not actually a right. So let me explain what we mean
by rights. Because rights is actually a group of ideas that we define very vaguely in American
life and we kind of throw the word around in messy ways. So there was an American jurist,
early 20th century, named Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld. Very famous in legal circles.
And he broke rights down into four categories.
This is really important stuff because if you want to understand what people mean when they are talking about rights, you have to determine which kind of right they're talking about.
He said there are four kinds of rights.
There are privileges.
Privileges are things where you have a right to do them.
Like you have an active moral right to do the thing because they're a matter of either moral good or moral apathy.
So for example, you have a right to give charity.
Of course you do.
That's a moral good.
Or you have a right to eat a hamburger because we are completely indifferent as a society as to whether you eat a hamburger or whether you don't eat a hamburger.
Right, these are what we would call privileges.
So a privilege, again, is something you have no duty not to do.
I, for example, do not have a privilege to view pornography because I don't have a moral right to view pornography.
There's nothing good about viewing pornography.
There's nothing that says that I should be morally apathetic about viewing pornography.
So, privileges, again, are the kinds of, it's kind of moral right.
You have a right to do it because we are morally apathetic or we think that what you're doing is good.
Then there are claims.
A claim is a right against you.
So, for example, my child has a claim against me because I have a duty to provide for my child.
You, however, do not have a claim against me for health care.
That's why when I say that there is no right to health care, what I mean is that you do not have a claim against me to provide you health care.
You might think that it's a nice thing for me to do, but you don't actually have a moral claim on me that I must provide you health care.
My child does.
I owe a duty to my child in a way I do not owe a duty to you.
That's what a claim is, a claim right.
Then there are powers.
Powers are abilities that allow you to alter another person's privileges or claims.
So there are certain circumstances in which you have the power or somebody has the power over you to turn a non-claim into a claim, for example.
So, just to give a basic example, In an employment context, I have the power as an employer to dictate the hours of my employees' work, whether they're in the office or not, what they do at work.
Now, in a normal context, I don't have that power, right?
If they were not in an employment situation, I don't have anything like that power.
But since we signed a contract, and since I'm the employer and they are the employee, I now have the power over them.
This is like government.
Government also has inherent powers in certain areas in order to compel particular things.
So the government, for example, has the power to tax.
Now, that power is not unending.
That power has to be curbed.
This is what the founders were mostly worried about.
They were worried that the government would have too many powers to alter your privileges and alter your claims, to create too many duties of you to the government, or to infringe on your privileges, which is why the founders were very much focused on the fourth type of rights, which are called immunities.
See, immunities are pragmatic limitations on powers.
So for example, this is what we tend to mix up, privileges and immunities in this particular setting.
So an immunity is, for example, the President of the United States issues an order that every American citizen has to put up a picture of the President in their home.
You can say, no, I have immunity against that because you don't have the power to do that.
An immunity is a claim that somebody does not have the power to make you do a thing.
So what we have done in American society is we have conflated privileges and immunities.
When it comes to privileges, which is usually what we're talking about when we talk about rights.
We're morally apathetic about whether you eat a hamburger or what kind of car you drive.
We have to make a compelling case for why you don't have a duty in those cases, a moral duty in those cases.
So you have a privilege, for example, to speak freely about politics because there's no duty to remain silent.
We actually would like you to speak up about politics.
But you don't have a privilege to use pornography because you have a duty actually not to use pornography on a moral level.
That does not mean that the government has the power to compel you in certain circumstances not to use pornography.
Now, the case to be made is that powers should be given, broadly speaking, to very local governments.
If you're going to talk about government at all.
Why?
Well, because you're much more likely to agree with the use of powers at the local level than you are at the national level.
But the chief enforcement mechanism for privileges and against immunities was church.
It was religious community.
Immunities, again, are not privileges.
Just because you have a right against the government, such that the government cannot force you to do a thing, does not mean that you have the moral right to do the thing.
So, for example, the government does not have the power and should not have the power to compel me not to say the N-word.
Also, I do, in fact, have a moral duty not to say the N-word.
Saying the N-word is bad.
So, this is where civil society came in.
In that weird space where you want particular moral rights, privileges, upheld, but you don't want the government enforcing them.
So this is why it's important that in your social circle, In your church, for example, if you don't abide by the rules of the road, it's not that you want the government compelling people to abide by the rules of the road.
You want civil institutions doing that.
As those civil institutions wane, government tends to fill the gap.
Because the result is everyone touches the stove.
And when everyone touches the stove, a bunch of social maladies occur.
And then there is widespread call for the government to increase in size and scope in order to fix the social malady.
And so what you end up with is massively powerful government.
Conversely, you also end up with this really perverse situation where if the government does not speak on an issue, people take that as license to do the thing.
So, for example, this is why, for example, it's so important for so many people in America that the Supreme Court decided that same-sex marriage was now approved by the federal government.
Those of us who are religious said, okay, well, that doesn't change the moral status of same-sex marriage.
Obviously, the morality of the act has nothing to do with whether the government approves it.
But for folks who don't believe in church, who don't actually believe in those social institutions, then the government becomes the ultimate arbiter, not only of what it can and cannot do, but of good and evil.
So the government should get involved in literally everything, and then enforce what it believes to be good, and punish anything it believes to be evil.
That is the essence of tyranny.
Well, the problem is, once you get into that cycle, then it's just a battle over the government gun.
Then it's just a battle over who has the power.
If the state is the only thing that is capable of restoring any sort of duties, then the state is going to overreach and it's going to turn into a tyranny.
All of this, the touch the stove society ends with massive increase in social malady.
That ends with massive calls for more powerful government.
And that ends with rebellion against that powerful government.
That is the road that we are down.
And that is why people need to go back to church.
They need to get out and touch the grass.
They need to stop with the internet.
They need to stop figuring that ersatz social relations are going to fix the society.
They are not.
You are not going to fix society on Twitter.
You are not going to fix society on Facebook.
You are going to fix society by going to your local church and involving yourself in a local community that has sanctions Social sanctions and well-accepted, time-tested rules that you accept because you understand that they are, in fact, time-tested rules.
That is the only way that we're going to restore any semblance of sanity to our civilization.
Otherwise, we're just going to keep touching that stove until we have societal third-degree burns all over our body.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile, Joe Biden is losing right now in six out of the seven swing states according to a brand new Wall Street Journal poll.
Donald Trump is leading in Arizona by five, in Georgia by one, in Michigan by three, in North Carolina by six, in Nevada by four, in Pennsylvania by three, and they're tied in Wisconsin.
That's the only state in which they are tied.
Now honestly, I think that poll is out of whack in Georgia.
I think Trump is up way bigger than one point in Georgia.
If he's up by three in Michigan, he's up by six in Michigan.
And if he's up by three in Pennsylvania, he's probably up by five in Pennsylvania.
These are terrible, terrible polls for Joe Biden.
Both campaigns, the Wall Street Journal points out, will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and turnout efforts in these seven states.
They account for 93 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win.
And again, this is a broad map for Donald Trump.
Back in 2020, it was a very narrow map for Trump.
He had to replicate his successes of 2016.
Nevada has now been added to the map for Donald Trump.
What is the state that has been added to the map for the Democrats?
In 2016, Donald Trump won Arizona and Georgia and they weren't on the map for Democrats.
In 2020, the map broadened and suddenly Joe Biden won Arizona and Georgia.
Well now, those states appear to be increasingly out of reach for Joe Biden.
And the map is broadening in the other direction, which is why Nevada is now in play.
And in fact, the state of Nebraska may change the way that it selects its electoral votes.
Nebraska's a weird state.
They actually allocate their electoral votes by congressional district, which means that even though Nebraska is a very, very red state, it has two congressional districts and one of them is Democrat.
So there's now a move in the state legislature to reallocate the electoral votes the way every other state does, where winner takes all.
That makes a difference because right now, there's a fairly decent shot that Donald Trump gets to 269 but not 270.
But it gets to 270 if that one vote shifts in Nebraska.
In other words, the map right now for Donald Trump is quite broad.
And it seems to be getting broader specifically because Joe Biden is terrible at his job.
And he is very terrible at actually taking a clear stance on issues and thereby winning over, for example, independents.
Nowhere has this been clearer than in the Middle East.
His left-wing base is excoriating him for not siding with Hamas.
On MSNBC, voters were sounding off on Joe Biden because he was quote-unquote alienating the base by continuing to allow Israel to take on Hamas.
Another young voter involved in the uninstructed movement is 22-year-old Dahlia Saba.
This is a campaign that's being run by students and by young people who really care about this.
Saba has family in Gaza and says organizing protest efforts in Wisconsin allows her to feel empowered.
Joe Biden has already won the Democratic nomination, so the uninstructed campaign is really a way of sending a message.
It is not about Him actually becoming president or not.
It is a way for us to quantify, this is how many people care about this issue.
We are Democrats.
We are voting in the Democratic primary.
These are your constituents, and your policy is alienating them.
Michael Moore is doing the same routine.
He was on MSNBC suggesting that Joe Biden has to step in and stop what he calls ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which is not happening.
There is no ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
And the population of Gaza has increased massively since 1948.
This is a ridiculous statement by Michael Moore, but of course he's been disconnected from reality for quite a while.
And Joe Biden who has, he's really the only one in the whole entire world that has the power to stop this, say within the next hour.
Literally, by just turning off the faucet, pulling the plug, no more bombs, no more guns, no more bullets, no more nothing until you, Mr. Netanyahu, stop the slaughter.
But they're not going to listen.
They're just going to cash the checks, baby.
So, yes, I said baby, not BB.
BB is cashing the checks.
The baby was to you, the man with the aviator sunglasses.
You know who you are and what you have to do.
You must have thought it.
Creepy weirdo Michael Moore suggesting that Hamas remain in place and also that the hostages remain in the tunnels.
It's just a pathetic, pathetic kind of stuff.
And again, it is a radical base.
It is a radical pro-Hamas base that is creating this sort of situation.
This is why they were protesting a Zaka event in Teaneck, New Jersey the other night.
So Zaka, for those who don't know, is not actually a political group.
Zaka is a Jewish ritual group.
So under Jewish ritual law, When someone dies, you have to bury them as soon as possible.
Also, not to get gruesome, but if there is something like a bombing or a shooting, you have to gather as much of the human body as is possible to bury it.
So, Zaka, in the aftermath of October 7th, was witness to the atrocities.
They literally had to try to cobble together as much of the bodies as they could before burial.
They have nothing to do with the war in Gaza.
They have nothing to do with war at all.
They're what we call, in Judaism, a Hevra Kedusha.
They do what in Judaism would be called holy work of attempting to care for the bodies of the dead, which in Judaism is considered a high priority specifically because it's the only kind of commandment that can't actually be repaid, right?
When you do something for the dead, obviously, you're not expecting anything in return.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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So, pro-Hamas protesters showed up in Teaneck, New Jersey.
They shut down an actual freeway in Teaneck, New Jersey to protest a Zaka event because this is who they are.
So, just an excellent group of people out there pushing for the Hamasniks.
Meanwhile, Muslim leaders are now trying to pressure Joe Biden on this.
According to the Washington Post, a group of six Muslim leaders will meet with President Biden and Vice President Harris on Tuesday evening to discuss U.S.
policy in the Gaza Strip after they were invited for a small Ramadan dinner but rejected.
Such a gathering is inappropriate given the administration's continued support of Israel amid devastation in the territory.
Biden initially invited the leaders for Iftar, the meal in which Muslims break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday the leaders expressed the preference of a policy meeting.
The White House adjusted its plans to accommodate the request.
One person apparently walked out of the meeting as an expression of anger at Joe Biden for continuing to back Israel in his campaign to finish off Hamas.
Meanwhile, Biden again cannot help but split the baby.
He's literally pissing everyone off and he's pissing everybody off because you refuse to take a clear moral stance in a conflict between a democratic ally of the United States and a group of terrorists who are currently holding the entire Gaza Strip hostage because they could surrender tomorrow and it would all be over.
They are currently holding American citizens hostage, at least five American citizens that we know of.
So Joe Biden is taking this bizarre position where he believes that if he politically rails against Israel, that this will somehow earn him the votes of the radicals in his own party.
But then he's also providing the funding and the weaponry for Israel so that Israel can prosecute the war.
So it's kind of the worst of all available worlds from a Biden campaign perspective, but that is Joe Biden.
Because Joe Biden has never been a man with the courage of his conviction.
This is all coming to a head right now.
Because late on Monday, there was a horrific tragedy in which the IDF accidentally struck an aid convoy from the World Central Kitchen.
So it's still totally unclear what exactly happened that made the IDF make this decision.
According to a report in Haaretz, the Israeli Air Force fired three missiles in quick succession at three vehicles.
It was at night.
These vehicles were marked as members of an aid convoy, the WCK aid convoy.
According to Haaretz, essentially what happened here, is that a Hermes 450 UAV fired three missiles at the convoy in quick succession, despite the vehicles being clearly marked on their roof as being part of WCK.
They were targeted over a distance of around two kilometers.
The decision was made by a unit guarding the aid transport route, after troops earlier spotted what appeared to be an armed figure riding on a truck that entered an aid storage area with three WCK cars.
The attack occurred moments after the three cars left the storage area, leaving the truck and the armed figure behind, according to the report.
A missile hit one car, everybody got in the second car, that was hit.
And then they moved to the third car, that was hit.
So apparently, it was a mistaken identity situation.
Not because they didn't see that it was a WCK car, but because they thought that there was an armed figure on top of the car, who they assumed was Hamas.
Israel has already come out and apologized for the incident.
Israel has already suggested there will be a full-scale investigation into the incident, obviously.
Here is the IDF Chief of Staff making a full statement in English.
It's very rare, obviously, in a wartime scenario.
But, unlike when Hamas purposely kills civilians and then cheers about it, when the IAF makes a mistake, they do a full-scale investigation and they apologize to not only the group that they hit accidentally, but to the world for the mistake.
That doesn't alleviate the consequence of the tragedy, obviously, but to pretend that the Israeli Air Force was targeting an aid convoy because they knew it was an aid convoy is ridiculous, insipid, just dumb on every possible level, especially because the WCK has been working with the IDF for literally six months to get aid into the Gaza Strip.
Which, by the way, I think we should point out at this point how totally insane as a military policy this is.
I cannot name another war where an ongoing war was happening in an area that was occupied by an enemy force and that same exact area was being targeted for aid by the force that was attempting to extirpate the terrorist force.
It's legitimately unprecedented.
During a war against ISIS in Syria, the United States was not shipping in aid to the same exact area that it was bombing.
But that's what Israel is expected to do.
That doesn't mean that what happened wasn't a tragedy.
It is a tragedy.
That's the point.
It's a tragedy, not a purposeful targeting of a convoy.
Yet, the enemies of Israel have attempted to paint this as Israel purposefully targeting a convoy of aid for what apparent reason?
What would be the actual goal?
Then they have to suggest that Israel wants everybody in the Gaza Strip to starve, which is obviously untrue since they are shipping in literally hundreds of trucks a day.
The vast majority of aid workers who are being killed right now, purposely, are being killed by Hamas.
Hamas literally kills aid workers if those aid workers get in their way, which is why it's very difficult to get people to actually do this sort of stuff.
Anyway, here is the IDF spokesperson apologizing for the incident.
The IDF completed a preliminary debrief.
I want to be very clear.
The strike was not carried out with the intention of harming WCK aid workers.
It was a mistake that followed a misidentification at night during a war in very complex conditions.
It shouldn't have happened.
We will continue taking immediate actions to ensure that more is done to protect humanitarian aid workers.
This incident was a grave mistake Israel is at war with Hamas, not with the people of Gaza.
Okay, so that's the statement of the IDF.
It's an accident.
It obviously is an accident.
Again, no one can explain the actual interest that Israel would have in targeting an aid convoy that they have been facilitating for six months.
Nonetheless, WCK, which has been oriented politically against the IDF, even as the IDF and WCK work together, they put out a statement calling the situation, quote-unquote, unforgivable.
Which, again, you understand the emotion, obviously.
But accidents do occur during war.
One-fifth of all the Israeli soldiers who have been killed in the current war in Gaza have been killed by friendly fire.
The United States, for its part, the Biden administration, has been, once again, splitting the baby on messaging.
So on the one hand, they trot out John Kirby, the national security spokesperson, to point out that this was absolutely not deliberate.
There's no evidence that it was deliberate.
Here he was.
We were outraged to learn of an IDF strike that killed a number of civilian humanitarian workers yesterday from the World Central Kitchen, which has been relentless in working to get food to those who are hungry in Gaza and, quite frankly, around the world.
We send our deepest condolences to their families and loved ones.
Your question presumes, at this very early hour, that it was a deliberate strike, that they knew exactly what they were hitting, that they were hitting aid workers and did it on purpose, and there's no evidence of that.
I would also remind you, sir, that we continue to look at incidents as they occur.
The State Department has a process in place.
And to date, as you and I are speaking, they have not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.
Okay, so it's this split message.
And Joe Biden is exacerbating the split message.
Which, by the way, actually puts Israel more in harm's way, because again, Hamas's entire strategy in this war, they know they can't win militarily, they believe they can win in the court of public opinion, and thereby generate massive international support for Israel to leave Hamas in place, and allow Iran to continue to spread its terror tentacles around the region.
Including, by the way, in Jordan.
That regime is now on its last legs because Hamas and the Iranians are stirring up trouble inside Jordan, a Hashemite kingdom, That is 70% ethnically Palestinian.
Well, according to Joe, Joe Biden put out a statement on his own.
That statement, of course, is truly an egregious moral statement.
I'll explain why in just one moment.
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Okay, meanwhile.
So Joe Biden put out his own statement.
It was way worse than what John Kirby had to say.
is a written statement, quote, I'm outraged and heartbroken by the deaths of seven humanitarian
workers from World Central Kitchen, including one American in Gaza yesterday. They were providing
food to hungry civilians in the middle of a war. They were brave and selfless. Their deaths are a
tragedy. Israel has pledged to conduct a thorough investigation into why the aid workers vehicles
were hit by airstrikes. That investigation must be swift.
It must bring accountability.
Its findings must be made publicly. That should be the end of the statement. But it isn't because
Joe Biden has to get those dearborn Michigan voters out in numbers.
He's got to get the pro-Hamas voters out.
So he says, quote, Now at this point, he could point out that Hamas has been shooting aid workers.
He could point that out.
He doesn't.
He could be pointing out that Hamas has been hijacking trucks, aid trucks.
He doesn't.
He could be pointing out that Hamas should surrender and thus the aid could get in.
Easily.
And without being threatened.
He doesn't.
Instead, he says, Well, yes, I think everyone agrees that incidents like that should not happen.
There shouldn't be a war on.
This is an unprecedented situation.
done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians.
Incidents like yesterday simply should not happen.
Well, yes, I think everyone agrees that incidents like that should not happen.
There shouldn't be a war on.
This is an unprecedented situation.
Again, shipping massive aid into an urban combat environment in the middle of the urban
combat is historically unprecedented.
He says Israel has also not done enough to protect civilians.
I mean, this is like music to Hamas's ears.
Hamas is sitting there like, ah, this is great.
By the way, again, Israeli soldiers have died in large numbers trying to protect civilians.
The United States, says Biden, has repeatedly urged Israel to de-conflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations in order to avoid civilian casualties.
If he has tips on how to do that, I'm sure that Israel will be willing to listen.
How exactly they're supposed to ship aid in without Hamas attacking the aid convoys, which is exactly what happens.
The United States, Joe Biden says, will continue to do all we can to deliver humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians in Gaza through all available means.
I will continue to press Israel to do more to facilitate that aid, and we are pushing hard for an immediate ceasefire as part of a hostage deal.
I have a team in Cairo working on this right now.
Earlier today, I spoke with my friend Chef Jose Andres, the founder of World Central Kitchen, to convey my deepest condolences for the death of these courageous aid workers and to express my continued support for his and his team's relentless heroic efforts to get food to hungry people around the globe.
Now, I just want to point out at this point that effectively what Joe Biden is doing is the exact argument that Hamas has done since October 7th, which is the deliberate murder of civilians is equivalent to the accidental killing of people in a war.
There's been the entire case made by Hamas since October 7th.
Hamas rushed over the border and murdered 1,200 people and took 250 hostages.
And then Israel retaliated by trying to strike Hamas, which is hiding in civilian areas.
And unfortunately in war, civilians get killed.
And Israel's been more meticulous about avoiding civilian deaths than any army in history.
And yet, Joe Biden is playing Hamas' game, suggesting that there is a moral equivalency in Hamas deliberately holding hostages, and Israel mistakenly killing aid workers.
Those are not the same thing, by any stretch of the imagination.
You know who knows that?
Joe Biden.
You know how we know he knows that?
Because, you remember the pullout from Afghanistan?
When Joe Biden accidentally killed an entire family, including seven children, by drone?
You remember this.
It was widely perceived at the time that Joe Biden had hit that particular target and had cleared that particular target for destruction as retaliation for the blowing up of the Abbey Gate.
The United States was already effectively out of Afghanistan.
So it wasn't as though that operation was necessary to preserve the pullout from Afghanistan at that point.
Joe Biden did it anyway.
It really was not in the middle of a wartime scenario in the same way that Gaza is.
Didn't matter.
Joe Biden authorized a drone strike on this family.
They claimed that it was a terrorist.
It was not a terrorist.
It was a mistake.
It was an accident.
The Biden administration has still not compensated the family of the 10 Afghans it killed.
Still, at this point, as far as we are aware.
Was Joe Biden talking about the unforgivable sin?
No.
In November of 2021, a Pentagon official said blurry images in the videos revealed the presence of at least one child in the blast zone about two minutes before the missile was launched, but stressed that spotting that was obvious only in hindsight and with the luxury of time.
Oh, well, weird how Joe Biden's administration treats mistakes by Joe Biden in one way and treats mistakes by the state of Israel in a very different way.
Very, very weird how that works.
By the way, again, this is what happens during wartime.
In 2011, Libyan rebels painted the roofs of their vehicles bright pink to avoid friendly fire casualties after a NATO airstrike killed five fighters.
This is Reuters from 2011.
The strike hit a rebel tank column as it advanced on the disputed oil port of Briga, causing a confused insurgent retreat back toward Ajdabiya, gateway to the uprising stronghold in Benghazi.
NATO acknowledged that its planes were probably responsible for the friendly fire incident.
One of the ugliest problems with war is that friendly fire incidents are relatively common.
One of the leaders of the Libyan invasion in 2011 was David Cameron, who was then Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Now, of course, David Cameron is calling for an immediate investigation into what happened in Gaza and suggesting that Israel has not done enough to protect civilian life.
And the double standard here is pretty glaring and pretty obvious.
And it's politically motivated.
Joe Biden wants Michigan.
He wants Michigan desperately.
And he believes that he can win Michigan if he says mean things about Israel.
Ironically, it's Joe Biden's own stupidity that is going to lead him to lose this election.
Because what's going to happen here is that he's going to push Israel to delay its invasion into Rafah, which has to happen.
There are at least four Hamas battalions, maybe up to eight Hamas battalions in Rafah.
They're hiding there, knowing that Joe Biden is pushing Israel not to go in.
There's apparently a phone call between Israeli and American top officials that leaked.
Jake Sullivan said, quote, you are about to be responsible for the third incident of hunger in the 21st century.
This is not something we can accept as partners.
The evacuation you plan has presented is unimpressive and impractical.
Lincoln said, with your current pace, it will take four months for you to evacuate Rafah.
And Zermer said, Ron Zermer is the Israeli representative to these talks, we cannot beat Hamas without going into Rafah.
It's non-negotiable.
Sullivan said, if you do not have an organized plan for the day after, nothing will help you advance dismantling Hamas, not Rafah or anything else.
Yes, Jake Sullivan, wise military leader.
But here's what's actually going to happen.
Israel will delay the advance into Rafah until May or June, and then we've got riots at the Democratic National Convention.
Because Joe Biden refuses to take a stand.
And this is the message of Joe Biden's administration.
If he can split the baby, he will split the baby.
And you know what Americans don't like?
They don't like that.
They would rather a clear position.
Particularly a clear position on behalf of an American ally fighting a terrorist group that committed the worst terrorist atrocity since 9-11.
It's not a particularly hard moral question.
Joe Biden is blowing it anyway.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Meanwhile, the media are attempting, because Joe Biden is losing, to generate more headlines about Donald Trump.
The problem is that the headlines are kind of more of the same.
Now, the headline they're truly hoping to generate is the headline, Trump goes to jail.
Meanwhile, the media are attempting, because Joe Biden is losing, to generate more headlines
about Donald Trump.
The problem is that the headlines are kind of more of the same.
Now, the headline they're truly hoping to generate is the headline, Trump goes to jail.
That's what the media are desperately wishing for at this point, which is presumably why
Andrew Weissman, a former prosecutor, is suggesting, former FBI general counsel and federal prosecutor,
is suggesting that Donald Trump could get jail time if he's convicted criminally for
falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case.
That trial is slated to begin April 15th in Manhattan.
Presumably it's gonna take a few weeks for it to go forward and then presumably he will be convicted because this is New York and then presumably a judge might try to send him to jail time.
So you could pretty easily see a situation in which Donald Trump is actually running for the presidency from a jail cell.
Now is that going to hurt Donald Trump in the polling data?
Not if this is the... I have a feeling that if it looks like a politically motivated case to jail your political opponent, that might actually backfire on Democrats pretty badly.
And ironically, Truly, ironically, separating Donald Trump from Truth Social and putting him behind bars might weirdly remove him from the stage.
It's an unprecedented situation.
If they can't put him in jail, what the media would love to do, obviously, is generate a bunch of false headlines.
So, you remember, just a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump suggested that if Joe Biden's economic plans prevailed, then America would experience an economic bloodbath.
And the entire media went insane.
They suggested that Donald Trump was threatening an actual physical bloodbath if Joe Biden won.
That insurrectionary violence would break out on every street corner.
There would be murder in the streets.
The blood will run thick tonight.
You know, that kind of stuff.
And it turns out that's not what Trump was saying.
Well, now they're trying it again.
So yesterday, Donald Trump gave a campaign speech.
And during this campaign speech, he again used the word bloodbath, which apparently you're only allowed to use if you're a Democrat.
So he was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he suggested that Joe Biden is creating a bloodbath at the border.
I stand before you today to declare that Joe Biden's border bloodbath, it's a border bloodbath, and it's destroying our country.
It's a very bad thing happening.
The Democrats say, please don't call them animals.
They're humans.
I said, no, they're not humans.
They're not humans.
They're animals.
Not one more innocent life should be lost to Biden migrant crime.
The first step to restoring safety in America is to fire crooked Joe Biden.
Get him out November 5th.
So, border bloodbath.
Now again, does he mean that he is going to unleash a bloodbath?
Of course not.
What he's saying is that there are murders that occur because the border is open.
That 100,000 Americans are dying of fentanyl overdose every year in the United States because the border is open.
That's what he means.
Bloodbath is evocative language to be sure, but he's not calling for violence.
Doesn't matter.
The Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, are going to jump on this to suggest once again that Donald Trump is fomenting violence.
If this is the best they got, they ain't got nothing.
Here's Corinne Jean-Pierre trying it yesterday.
What's the White House reaction to the use of that term, bloodbath?
I'm going to be really mindful here because it is the president, obviously the former president is also a candidate here, so we want to follow the law with the Hatch Act.
But we have to denounce, our response is we have to denounce any violent rhetoric that we hear, certainly from our leaders, right?
That tears our country apart.
It could tear our country apart.
And puts our fellow Americans in harm's way, in danger.
So we have to denounce that.
Okay, so that's going to put people in harm's way.
Which people are going to be put in harm's way?
Evidence, please.
Like a little bit of evidence?
No?
No evidence?
You got nothing?
Yeah, there's a giant shock from the media and from the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, speaking of the Biden administration, legally targeting people.
The Biden administration has been going after pro-lifers.
Four pro-lifers that were involved in a protest outside of a Nashville abortion clinic were found guilty in federal court and they now face massive jail time for the crime of protesting outside an abortion clinic.
Because, obviously, praying outside an abortion clinic is very, very different than, you know, burning down entire cities during riots.
And yet, it's the Biden administration that supposedly is standing against bloodbaths and in favor of the rule of law.
Yeah, I have a lot of questions.
Okay, coming up, we're going to jump into the RFK Jr.
aspect of the race.
He is polling pretty well across the country.
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