Ben Shapiro and Bishop Robert Barron dissect Jaden Ivey's NBA release, arguing the Chicago Bulls' "conduct" citation masks hypocrisy regarding traditional Christianity versus Pride Month. They analyze Ayman Khazali's West Bloomfield terror attack as Hezbollah action, critique Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed, and detail President Trump's strategy to dismantle Iran's military capabilities while addressing war law nuances. The discussion clarifies Pope Francis's stance on unjust wars, refutes Marcionite heresy threatening Jewish-Christian ties, debunks the Tyler Robinson conspiracy theory, champions family formation over economic determinism, and concludes with Arthur Brooks linking youth unhappiness to technology's disruption of meaning-seeking brain functions. [Automatically generated summary]
So that seems like fairly traditional Christian belief right there that you should not actually celebrate pride in what is considered a sin by the vast majority of the religious world.
Well, the immediate response of the Chicago Bulls was to can him.
They announced that they had waived him due to conduct detrimental to the team.
Apparently, it was very, very bad for the team that he put out an Instagram video proclaiming the same thing that churches all over the country say all the time.
The Chicago Bulls had coach Billy Donovan was asked about all of this.
It was suggested that Ivy seems to be spiraling.
Now, Ivy has reported depression in the past.
It is unclear whether he's in the midst of some sort of mental issue or not.
But if you're going to cite evidence of a mental issue, this is not the best evidence.
And him just saying traditional religious belief that you shouldn't celebrate pride in what is considered a sin, that is not a spiral.
Here was the Bulls head coach trying to explain.
unidentified
I know some of the things that were put out there.
You know, I think it's a situation for him where, you know, it's on his own personal Instagram.
I don't want to get into what he put out there, but certainly I hope for him, you know, he's okay.
I don't know, you know, like I've had conversations with Jaden and stuff, and he's been always about who he has me and trying to bribe and want to play.
But I think organizationally, there's certain standards I think we want to have as an organization to try to move up to those each and every day.
So, again, not a ringing rebuke there from the coach.
Nonetheless, the Bulls let him go because, of course, you cannot say anything that violates the precept of full-scale wokeness on these sorts of issues.
So, Jaden Ivey then went to Instagram Live to defend himself.
The team could have just said, we disagree with his comments.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
By the way, in the UFC, this happens all the time.
And Tana White routinely says this about people that he disagrees with in the UFC who say things that are actually quite morally bad.
And he will say, you know, you're allowed to say what you want to say.
I disagree with it, but it's not my job to sort of police the speech of other people.
But the Bulls just cut Ivy.
They just waived him, which is kind of incredible.
Well, Ivy also went off on Steph Curry.
And the reason he's going off on Steph Curry is because Steph Curry is frequently brought up by critics of traditional Christianity in the league, apparently, as sort of the example of what Christianity should look like.
Meaning that you sort of cite the vaguest verses from the Bible while ignoring actual sort of traditional moral practice.
Now, again, I'm just wondering precisely what Ivy said here that merits being waived.
I mean, let's be real about this.
If he were saying the opposite, that Pride Night is the best.
In fact, if he came out as gay today, he would be celebrated by the league.
He'd be touted as one of the most important basketball players alive if that happened.
The NBA has a political bent, without doubt, and they are putting at risk an entire Christian audience and traditionalist audience that look at this and say, hold up.
You get waived for saying that you don't believe that Pride Night ought to be celebrated?
Not even because you did anything wrong, just because you said that you don't agree with the league's stance on these issues.
Back in January 2025, Ivy talked about how he had become a Christian.
He sort of explained the story.
And again, here he was giving his testimony.
unidentified
My testimony is that, you know, when you're away from Jesus, when you're not, when you're not close to him, and when you have a relationship with him, you're going to, like, Satan is there.
Now, again, recall that the NBA had to have an entire controversy engulf it surrounding whether they should have a night honoring a strip club in Atlanta.
Remember this.
And that required the NBA to actually step in after weeks of consternation about whether or not that should happen.
But apparently, the minute you sound off and you say, hey, Pride Night, it's got some connotations that are anti-Christian.
The minute you say that, gone.
That's an insane tactic from a league that wants to maximize its fan base, not minimize it.
And again, during Holy Week for Christians, it's a kind of astonishing stance by the league.
I'm hopeful that some other team will give Jaden Ivey another chance.
Because man, the Chicago Bulls really screwed up here in a major, major way.
In just a second, we'll get to a domestic terror attack as we now know that it was not only a terror attack, but a foreign-driven terror attack.
And we'll get to the latest on the war in Iran.
Plus, Bishop Barron will stop by to talk about the Pope and about Holy Week first.
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So speaking of breaking news, yes, there are, in fact, internationally driven terrorists who are living among us.
They're living in the United States.
They're ready to commit acts of violence against Americans.
There's new information that is now emerging about a terrorist named Ayman Khazali.
That would be the radical Muslim who attacked the Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan on March 12th.
So according to 6 ABC, apparently, Ghazali 41 of Dearborn Heights sat in the parking lot for a few hours on March 12th before smashing his pickup through closed doors and into the hallway of an early childhood education area, striking a security guard.
And then he exchanged gunfire with another guard and then he shot himself.
That's what the FBI said at the time.
That Ford F-150 was stocked with commercial-grade fireworks and jugs of gasoline.
And of course, it caught fire during the confrontation.
Well, here is the FBI's Jennifer Runyon, the head of the Detroit Bureau, describing the video that Ghazali left before the attack, in which he basically acknowledges full scale that he is a member of Hezbollah, or at least an adjunct member of Hezbollah.
Now, again, we know that his siblings in Lebanon were, in fact, members of Hezbollah.
Remember, the entire media on the left and some people on the horseshoe right reported that he was only doing this because his family had somehow been victimized in Lebanon.
His family were literal members of a terrorist group.
James Gorgon, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, he says, listen, this was not some guy who was self-radicalized or something.
I've seen some odd attempts to explain away or even lessen this terrorist attack by claiming that he was an isolated lone wolf.
But that is misleading.
Terrorist propaganda is designed to activate the so-called lone wolf to act on behalf of the terrorist organization.
And it makes no legal difference if the current leader of Hezbollah himself, Naeem Qasem, called this man and told him to attack Temple Israel, or whether he simply heeded Hezbollah's call to kill Jews and, in his words, burn their world.
We need fewer people immigrating to America who are terrorists.
I know this may be controversial to some, but I don't know.
I feel like that one is pretty commonsensical.
We also could use fewer elected officials who agree with actual honest to God terrorists.
So, this person, this terrorist, came from Dearborn, Michigan.
Michigan, of course, has a very, very large radical Muslim population.
One of those radical Muslims is a man named Abdul El-Sayed.
He is a candidate in Michigan.
And according to the Washington Free Beacon, he said they've discovered audio of him saying that he needed to stay silent about the killing of Ali Khamenei, who would be the leader of the Iranian regime.
He literally told staffers he didn't want to say anything about it at all because there were too many people in Dearborn who were sad about it.
In fact, here is the audio of Abdul El-Sayed admitting full scale that Dearborn, again, this is a major city in the United States, is distraught over the killing of the leader of a terrorist regime responsible for the death of hundreds, if not thousands of Americans over the last 47 years.
Again, this guy is running for Senate.
Here he was.
unidentified
I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.
So like, I just don't want to comment on Khamani Khamenei at all.
I don't think it's worth even touching that.
Like, they're going to try, this is what we practice, but like, isn't Is Al Khamenei a bad guy?
Isn't it great that he's dead?
Well, my first amendment was 86 years old.
He was going to be dead sometime soon anyway.
Second, that doesn't justify the fact that he was a bad man does not justify our breaking of international law and unilateral action outside of wartime.
Like, this is a bigger question about the United States' responsibility to international law, and we have been breaking it wantonly.
This is the second leader that we've gone after in a matter of months.
We are not the world's policeman, and that's not what he got elected to do with.
Do you want in America who is literally sad over Khomeini's death, like truly sad over the killing of this terror master and murderer?
And then, again, this tape is pretty astonishing, and kudos to the Free Beacon for uncovering it.
Abdul El-Syed, who again is likely to be the Senate nominee in Michigan for the Democrats, he says that if somebody brings up Khomeini or if somebody brought up the sadness in Dearborn over Khomeini, that he would just misdirect over to pedophilia and claim that President Trump is a pedophile, basically.
Understand the op.
Understand the op.
And the grievance party, meaning people from Abdul El-Syed to the Tucker Carlson right, who all wink hands in this sort of stuff, they are using exactly the same tactics.
And those tactics, by the way, are being promoted by Iran directly.
You have literally the foreign minister of Iran who is doing what Abdul El-Syed is doing, saying that the United States is violating international law.
And by the way, Epstein, it is an op, meaning it is not a normal thing that normal people do.
It is being driven top down by engagement whores and by actual dedicated anti-Americans, many of whom are inside America's borders.
This guy is going to likely be the Michigan Senate Democrat candidate.
Insane.
unidentified
They are going to go super hard on trying to get you to sympathize with the regime.
Like, that's what the conservatives and even some of our moderate enemies are going to try to get you to do.
And I can say, I've got no love lost for the ISO media, just like I've got no love lost for Donald Trump's best friend, Mohammed bin Sadaz.
I've got no love lost for any of them.
You know who I care about?
People back home in Michigan who still struggle to afford their groceries and their housing.
Those problems are bigger than Donald Trump, and he's unwilling to actually address them.
And I'm just going to go straight to pedophilia, frankly.
I should be like, President Pride decides that he doesn't like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.
There was a time when you all were talking about America first.
Now, El Syed is currently engaged, as we say, in a hotly contested Senate primary.
He is campaigning with sleazy limousine communist Hassan Piker.
So, according to the New York Times, Abdul El-Syed is meeting with Piker and doing a rally with Piker.
Well, Piker's huge young following has made him an appealing ally for progressive Democrats.
Some have called Mr. Piker the Joe Rogan of the left.
And people have pointed out that Hassan Piker is an insane radical who says the United States deserved 9-11, supports a wide variety of communist dictatorships, a wide variety of Islamic terror groups.
The New York Times asked him about all of this, and he responded, why is it only now that people are getting very frustrated by it?
I assume it's because there is a power center in the party that is worried about losing its grip, losing its relevancy.
Well, I mean, listen, if Democrats want to keep embracing the radicalism and the stupid, and yes, the anti-Semitism, because Hassan Piker, all he does, he does a stupid game.
His stupid game is he means to say Jew and he just says Zionist.
That's all.
That's his game.
In any case, podcaster Jonah Platt, he pointed this out on CNN, and he is not wrong.
unidentified
What Piker does that a lot of people of his ilk do is they try to inoculate themselves against claims of Jew hatred by pointing it out in places that aren't them.
He's been very clear pointing things out on the right.
Oh, that's anti-Semitism.
These are the tropes they use.
And then he'll use the exact same tropes and just sub-Jew for Israel.
Well, coming up, we'll get to the latest in Iran, what's happening over there, plus Cuba.
Plus, Bishop Barron and Arthur Brooks are stopping by.
So, a lot going on today.
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Okay, so back to the Middle East.
Where do things stand right now?
Well, according to Channel 14, in Israel, they have now obtained an exchange between the Iranian president Mahmoud Pazeshkian and the IRGC's Ahmed Vahidi.
Pazeshkian would be the quote-unquote moderate in this scenario.
And Vahidi, of course, is a radical.
He's the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Those are the quote-unquote hardliners.
So Pazeshkian apparently said, quote, I want to be involved in the negotiations with the U.S. Without a quick deal, our entire economy will collapse in three weeks.
So first of all, that is accurate.
They do not have an economy.
This is the great worry of the Iranians right now.
Right now, they're still being allowed to move oil out of Iran to the tune of a couple of million barrels of oil per day.
If that stops, their economy does not exist.
It does not exist.
The IRGC chief, Vahidi, he said, that's exactly why you can't be involved.
You'll give up everything for a deal, which shows you where the IRGC is.
Apparently, according to Channel 14 in Israel, after the call ended, the report says the Iranian president told his companions he feels like a hostage, quote, I'm unable to resign.
I can't make my own decisions.
All I can do is read from a script I'm given.
Yeah, fair.
So, where are the American people right now?
Well, if you watch again, all the online traffic, the American people are desperately upset about what's going on.
Well, not so much, actually.
Brand new Harvard Harris poll.
It shows 51% support for the airstrikes in Iran.
In fact, it shows, according to this polling data, do you think it is in the U.S.'s interests or not to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon?
74%, yes, including 69% of independents.
Is it important to restrain the global influence of China and Russia?
66%, yes, including 63% of independents.
Again, these are not numbers that suggest that the American people are desperate, desperate to stop this right now.
Three-quarters of all voters, according to this poll, say that winning the war is important and also that the United States is in fact winning.
Two-thirds agree that Iran is the leading source of instability, terrorism, and that the Iranians do not support the Ayatollahs.
67% of people believe, again, that Iran is the big source of instability and terrorism in the region.
So this begs the question, why is President Trump lagging in the polls?
Because his approval ratings are down.
I mean, the answer really is because of the economy, as always.
Right now, a lot of dyspepsia about the economy.
And because of the war, the stock market is down and gas prices are up.
46% of Americans, according to the same poll, think inflation is the most salient issue.
53% say the economy is worse than it was under Joe Biden.
Now, again, we keep hearing that MAGA Republicans are abandoning President Trump.
That's actually not true.
What is happening is that Democrats and independents who jumped on the Trump bandwagon, largely because they didn't like Kamala Harris, some of those people are dropping off.
Kristen Soltis-Anderson, who's an excellent pollster, writes in the New York Times, she says, my polling shows MAGA thinks Trump got it right when it comes to Iran.
When I separate Republican respondents on whether they think of themselves as a Trump supporter or a Republican Party supporter first, I find more than nine in 10 Trump first Republicans support the Iran strikes compared with 72% of party first Republicans.
So in other words, the Republican Party is on board and it is a fringe of the Republican Party who are not.
Why?
Well, because they are more aligned, frankly, with sort of dispossessed Democrats.
Again, these are the people who are upset with Trump.
And this is why when you see columnists suggesting that like Joe Rogan or Theo Vaughan defines MAGA, kind of like saying that Kerry Prejond defines Catholicism.
The late-breaking decider who jumps on a bandwagon to effectuate his or her own values rather than, you know, joining in order to facilitate the values of the central institutions, those are typically not the people who define the institution.
Because here is the thing.
President Trump has been talking about all of this forever, forever.
We've played this clip before, but yesterday, Trump truthed it out himself.
This is from 1987, talking about taking Iran's oil.
When this operation is over, it will be open and it'll be open one way or another.
It will be open because Iran agrees to abide by international law and not block the commercial waterway, or a coalition of nations from around the world and the region with the participation of the United States will make sure that it's open.
He says, listen, we're negotiating, but we're not going to tell you who we're negotiating with because, again, as we have seen, a lot of different opinions inside the Iranian government right now as their entire economy is in a state of collapse.
Well, I'm not going to disclose to you who those people are because it probably would get them in trouble with some other groups of people inside of Iran.
Look, there's some fractures going on there internally.
And at the end of the day, I think that if there are people in Iran who now, given everything that's happened, are willing to move in a different direction for their country, that would be great.
But the bottom line is the president is still engaged in a very high level of strategic ambiguity, right?
He doesn't want our enemies to know exactly what we are doing.
Yesterday, he posted a video of an explosion in Isfahan.
This explosion is astonishing.
It is almost certainly the destruction of a major missile facility underground.
I mean, look at this.
Look at that secondary explosion.
A secondary explosion is where you hit a target, and then there is another explosion where a bunch of stuff blows up.
That's what you see in the movies, right?
Where a car blows up and then the entire building blows up because there was a bunch of flammable in it.
Well, that's that in Isfahan.
My goodness.
Reports are now suggesting that perhaps President Trump would be willing to end the war without actually opening the Strait of Hormuz and instead just leave it to the Europeans.
According to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump told AIDS he's willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran, even if the strait remains largely closed, according to administration officials, likely extending Tehran's firm grip on the waterway and leaving a complex operation to reopen it for a later date.
In recent days, according to the journal, Trump and his aides assessed a mission to probably open the choke point would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks.
He decided that the United States should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran's Navy and missile stocks, wind down current hostilities, and pressure Tehran diplomatically.
And if that failed, then Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the Strait.
President Trump did put out a statement on Truth Social yesterday telling the Europeans, hey, you know, if you don't like what's going on, maybe you should go get your own oil.
Quote, all of those countries that can't get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the U.K., which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you.
Number one, buy from the U.S.
We have plenty.
Number two, build up some delayed courage, go to the strait and just take it.
You have to start learning how to fight for yourself.
USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us.
Iran has been essentially decimated.
The hard part is done.
Go get your own oil.
Now, again, on principle, he's not wrong, but the reality is that's unlikely to happen.
The president knows that the Strait of Hormuz, if left in Iranian control, would allow for the Iranian government to rebuild and strengthen.
And let's be real about this.
The whores of Europe, meaning the leadership class over there, would basically just try to bribe the Iranians.
Hell, they might build them a nuclear facility just to allow the oil to move through.
These are the same Europeans who are happy to use Russian oil while simultaneously claiming the United States ought to defend Ukraine.
So what is the most likely scenario here?
Probably major action to reopen the strait, to grab Kharg Island, to throttle the Iranian regime by cutting off its lifeline to the global economy.
Because again, let's be real.
The Iranian economy is non-existent.
And if the oil flow goes away, they can't pay their boys.
All of their IRGC and Besiji friends are going to go without paychecks.
As Stephen Moore points out, the change over there is not a long-term prospect.
As soon as we get the straits open, I'm going to predict on your show we're headed right back down to $50 a barrel.
Dean Broulette may not agree with me on that, but I think the world is awash in oil.
This is a very temporary situation.
And the only last thing I'll say is, look, I'm in favor of U.S. controlling the Venezuela and the Iran oil, but let's give the money to the citizens of Iran.
Let's give the money to the Venezuelans so that they have a future.
Now, the president is suggesting that as far as the costs that we have incurred, our Arab allies will help defray that cost because, again, he's not wrong.
The idea that we ought to actually get something from the Arab Gulf nations who have not yet dropped a single offensive bomb, makes some sense.
Here's Caroline Levitt at the White House yesterday.
unidentified
Who's paying for the cost of this war?
Will those Arab countries step up to do this that?
Well, President Trump, again, is readying all potential tactics in the arsenal.
He put out a statement on Truth Social yesterday.
He said the United States is in serious discussions with a new and more reasonable regime to end military operations in Iran.
Great progress has been made.
But if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately open for business, we will conclude our lovely stay in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plans, oil wells, and Harg Island, and possibly all desalinization plans, which we have purposefully not yet touched.
Now, of course, this is making all of the members of the legacy media very, very, very dyspeptic.
They're very upset.
They're getting some heartburn.
Reporter from NBC said, why is Trump threatening a potential war crime?
unidentified
The president posted this morning about his threat that on leaving Iran, he said we might be blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, Harg Island, and possibly all desalinization plans.
Under international law, striking civilian infrastructure like that is generally prohibited.
Why is the president threatening what would amount to potentially a war crime with the U.S. military?
And how do you square that with the administration repeatedly saying that the U.S. does not target civilians?
Look, the president has made it quite clear to the Iranian regime at this moment in time, as evidenced by the statement that you just read, that their best move is to make a deal, or else the United States Armed Forces has capabilities beyond their wildest imagination, and the president is not afraid to use them.
Now, again, they keep saying war crime, war crime.
Here's the thing.
It is not explicitly unlawful or automatically a war crime to attack an enemy's electrical grid, according to John Spencer, the executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute.
Meaning it can be, but it isn't just by definition.
Under the law of armed conflict, such targets can be lawful if they provide a military advantage, and every single strike has to be adjudicated under proportionality, distinction, and precaution.
So what do those things mean?
Well, distinction means that the target has to be a military objective, not directed predominantly at civilians.
And again, it is not in the interest of the administration to target the civilian population of Iran, which we correctly believe to be on our side.
Proportionality means that the expected damage can't be excessive in relation to concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
So in other words, you're not allowed to blow up an entire city block in order to take out one terrorist in general.
And finally, precaution includes ensuring that civilian casualties actually be minimized.
So it's not clear whether this would violate any of those prescriptions.
The bottom line here is that the Iranians are living on borrowed time.
And as always and forever, all they can rely upon is people to undermine the war effort and make President Trump stop short.
That is all they can rely upon.
All right, in just a second, we're going to get to the situation in Cuba where we're actually allowing oil to flow into Cuba.
Not sure what's going on there.
Plus, we'll talk about some comments by the Pope about the war.
Bishop Barron will stop by.
Isabel Brown versus the View.
Tons coming up on today's show.
First, Passover is almost here, a sacred time to remember God's deliverance.
This year, many in Israel are going to mark the holiday under the shadow of war.
Obviously, I'm talking to a lot of my friends in Israel.
They're literally setting up their Seder in bomb shelters right now.
This is why the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is on the ground right now, delivering food, equipping shelters, caring for Israel's most vulnerable.
IFCJ is doing great work for vulnerable people on the ground.
People have been living in a state of war for a couple of years at this point.
Your Passover gift declares that the story of deliverance lives on through faith, through action, and through you.
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Now, again, Marco Rubio, he is pointing out that the people of Iran are incredible.
Again, the goal is not to harm the people of Iran.
The people who lead them, this clerical regime, that is the problem.
And if there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future, that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world.
But we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case.
Suffice it to say, I do not think that the president is going to give up the ghost right now, not while he has the Iranians on the ropes, contrary to all the legacy media trash coverage.
Now, meanwhile, when it comes to Cuba, the Cuban regime is also on its last legs, deprived of Venezuelan oil.
They're basically just bleeding along.
That's all that's happening here.
Well, according to, again, the New York Times reporting on all of this, the United States Coast Guard is allowing a Russian tanker full of crude oil to reach Cuba, delivering a critical supply of energy to the island nation after months of an effective oil blockade by the Trump administration, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter.
Well, that is, it's weird that we would let the Russian ship through for sure.
That is definitely a strange move by the Trump administration.
Basically, President Trump is saying, you know what, it's temporary.
We don't want people to starve.
And let's be real about that.
The real answer is that we need to finish one thing before we get involved in another.
Here was the president yesterday.
unidentified
There's a report that the U.S. is going to let a Russian oil tanker go to Cuba.
Okay, again, I think the real thing here is that initiating some sort of full-scale blockade on Cuba in the middle of the conflict in the Middle East is probably a distraction.
And as the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio says, Cuba's been having blackouts all of last year.
Yesterday, Pope Leo gave a Palm Sunday homily in which he made some comments about war.
It seemed to be a veiled reference to the United States' war in Iran, although he was, I say, somewhat unclear about what exactly he was saying.
Here is some tape of the Pope.
And he did not arm himself or defend himself or fight any war.
Speaking of Jesus, he revealed the gentle face of God who always rejects violence.
Rather than saving himself, he allowed himself to be nailed to the cross, embracing every crossborn in every time and place throughout human history.
Brothers and sisters, this is our God, Jesus, King of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.
He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen.
Your hands are full of blood.
And so we don't have to continue to play the rest of the statement in, I believe that's in Italian or Latin.
My languages are not particularly good here.
It's definitely a strange statement.
And I got to be honest, I'm not sure what the Pope means by this.
Obviously, the notion that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, I assume here that he's talking about unjust war, because otherwise it makes no sense.
I mean, otherwise, there are some problems just historically and also textually here.
Obviously, the Old Testament is filled with figures who both prayed to God and went to war.
Moses, Joshua, Barack and Deborah, Gideon, Samuel, King David, who wrote entire psalms to God while at war, Hezekiah.
And there are lots of popes, it turns out, historically, who have initiated full-scale crusades or blessed them.
For example, Pope Urban II, who initiated the first crusade with these words, quote, this land our Savior made illustrious by his birth, beautiful with his life, and sacred with his suffering, he redeemed it with his death and glorified it with his tomb.
This royal city is now held captive by her enemies and made pagan by those who know not God.
She asks and longs to be liberated.
And an incomplete list of other popes who blessed crusades or other forms of war, that would include, obviously, everyone from Eugenius III to Gregory VIII to Innocent III to Boniface IX to Nicholas V to Clement V. So, I mean, again, this is why I don't think that the Pope means what people think he means there.
I would assume that he means unjust war, not all war, because otherwise we sort of have to ignore the entirety of the Old Testament and pretty much all of Catholic history.
And just to clarify that, I did talk to my friend Matt Fratt of Pines with Aquinas, who knows way more about this than I do in terms of Catholic doctrine.
And he pointed me to the works of both Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who point out when war is justified.
So, again, if Pope Leo wants to make the case that the war in Iran is unjustifiable, he should make that case.
I'm not a fan in general of when leaders use inartful and broad language that can be deliberately misinterpreted by members of the legacy media.
Joining me on the line to discuss this, the rest of current events, and of course, it's Holy Week, is Bishop Robert Barron.
He, of course, is the bishop of the Diocese of Winona, Rochester, and is one of the most prominent Catholic voices in modern media.
And he, of course, is the head of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
No, I think that's the right distinction, the one you made.
And of course, Pope Leo is an Augustinian.
So he's shaped by the Augustinian intellectual and spiritual tradition.
And it was Augustine, as you suggest, who was the first major figure in Christianity to give us a just war theory.
Now, mind you, Augustine was very strong on peace and that the God revealed in Jesus Christ crucified is a God of peace and nonviolence.
Augustine held to that.
He held to a critique of Rome that was predicated upon the constant use of violence.
So Augustine is no war monger, but he also recognized in a finite, fallen, conflictual world, sometimes the only way to oppose deep injustice is through the violence of warfare.
And then he gave us these criteria.
Thomas Aquinas amplified them and so on.
So I think that's the right distinction.
The Pope is certainly critiquing an unjust war or someone who's invoking God to support an unjust war.
And I furthermore agree with you that he's not referring specifically or precisely to the Iran war.
And if you want to look at a situation, look at it in light of the seven criteria that determine whether war is just or unjust.
And, you know, right, if you say simply God does not hear the prayers of warriors, well, then Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
So I think what he meant, I think you're making the right distinction.
It's the prayers of those who are seeking his sanction for an unjust war.
You know, Bishop Baron, one of the things that I think is driving me a little crazy about the current sort of online dynamic is the unwillingness to grant any sort of favor or credibility to the most obvious explanations of things and the leap to the sort of most extreme interpretation of events.
I think that's happening here where people are immediately jumping to he must mean a condemnation of President Trump or the Secretary of Defense.
I think that's also what happened on Sunday, on Palm Sunday, in Jerusalem, where it seems fairly obvious to me that there was a pretty terrible misunderstanding between Cardinal Hisabella over in Jerusalem, where he wanted to go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Yeah, exactly.
But forgive me the pronunciation.
And he goes to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Israeli authorities, the home front authorities, have basically shut down the entirety of the old city.
I mean, they shut down the Western Wall.
They shut down the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
That is because they have rules there that basically, in the middle of missile attacks, if you have a site that is, in fact, not protected from missile assault and it is not within walking distance or quick access to what's called the mamad in Hebrew or a safe room or a bomb shelter.
And again, the old city, you've been there.
I've been there.
It is a warrant.
I mean, all the streets are extremely narrow.
And so you can't get emergency vehicles in there.
And so that is why there have been significant restrictions on not only large-scale gatherings, but even small religious services in kind of historic sites that are not protected.
My guess is what happened is that there was an Israeli police officer stationed outside the church.
And the cardinal showed up and he said, I want to go in and perform Mass.
And the Israeli police officer said, my superior says no one is allowed to come in here.
And that turned into an international incident.
And quickly, everybody in a position of authority in Israel, from the prime minister to the president, immediately sounded off, said, We need to make some sort of provision so this doesn't happen again.
And yet this turned into some sort of gigantic critique of, I suppose, Jewish anti-Catholicism or something.
And that seems to me like the least likely scenario of what actually was happening there.
We recall the events just prior to the crucifixion of Jesus and then his resurrection on Sunday.
So beginning really with Holy Thursday, so when Jesus gathers with his disciples for the Last Supper, the Garden of Gethsemane that night, then Friday, the day of the crucifixion, Saturday, we call it Holy Saturday when Jesus spends the day in the tomb and then Easter Sunday.
So we call that the Paschal mystery.
So the Passover mystery, Jesus passing from death to life.
It's the event by which we are saved from our sins.
And I'd say this too, Ben, in light of Jerusalem and such a focus now on Judaism, it's the fulfillment of Israel.
Christians are those who say that the great story of Israel, including temple and covenant and prophecy and promise, all of it is fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
That's what St. Paul or Rabbi Shaul, who studied the feet of Gamaliel and knew the Hebrew scriptures intimately, after he met the risen Jesus, he rethought his Judaism in light of the resurrection.
And it's also why when Paul went to these towns in the Eastern Mediterranean, he first went to synagogues because the Jews would understand his message, that the story of Israel has come to its fulfillment.
That's why, see, we are tied to Israel.
That's, you know, the recent popes have made that claim.
It's up and down the Christian centuries, despite a terrible history of anti-Semitism that pops up, you know.
But the great Christian truth is we're tied to Israel.
You cannot understand Jesus without reference to Israel because we see him as the fulfillment, as Paul said, yes to all the promises made to Israel.
So that's why anything like anti-Semitism from a Christian standpoint is intellectually incoherent.
There's something that's intellectually repugnant about it and something morally repugnant too, because it gave rise to this deep rift between Christians and Jews.
Read Paul to the Romans chapters 9 through 11 is his great treatment of this problem.
And in a way, we've never improved upon Paul, Romans 9 to 11, as he's tried to tease out.
He says, look, I'm a Jew.
I'm the tribe of Benjamin.
I was a Pharisee by formation.
I was zealous for the traditions of my fathers.
And now I've met the risen Jesus and I'm trying to rethink it all in light of that.
So we've been wrestling with this problem from the very beginning, but Paul represents a very beautiful appropriation and retention of Judaism.
Well, in other news, shifting from things that are really worth talking about to things that are not worth talking about, but we have to talk about them anyway because we cover the news.
There is a brand new garbage conspiracy theory making the rounds.
This is regarding the trial of Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, whom all, I repeat, all evidence points to.
So the defense is now predictably throwing spaghetti at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.
So what are they doing here?
What they're really doing is they are chumming the waters with irresponsible media, hoping that the jury pool will end up being tainted.
That is the goal, to get somebody in the jury pool who is a conspiracist.
So there is a piece that was printed, and it never should have been printed in the UK Daily Mail because it's trash.
And the piece is headline, quote, bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did not match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson, new court filing claims.
Now, if you just read that headline, if you just read that headline, what you would assume is that there is a bullet that is identifiable and did not match the rifle, which would be groundbreaking stuff, right?
That's what the title suggests.
Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did not match rifle.
Okay, that is missing a key piece of context.
A key piece of context here is that the bullet fragmented.
There is no whole bullet to match up with the rifle.
And when a bullet fragments the way this bullet apparently fragmented, it makes it unidentifiable because all of the striations that you'd normally see on the bullet that match it up with the chain, with the barrel of the rifle, those are not present.
You can't identify it.
That is an absence of evidence.
It is not evidence of absence.
It's not evidence that Tyler Robinson is innocent because the bullet fragmented.
And now you can't directly link the bullet to that rifle because you can't link that bullet to any rifle.
It's not like there's another rifle you can link it to.
But that's not how the Daily Mail wrote the story, which is trash.
And the Daily Mail should be ashamed of itself.
Again, bullet fragments are difficult to match to the original rifle.
This is sort of like making the case that if OJ's knife had somehow been discovered after the crimes and it had been tossed in a vat of hydrochloric acid and all identifying marks and DNA had been dissolved, that somehow the inability to connect that knife to OJ's DNA would not just not link OJ to the crime.
It would be exculpatory.
It would make it sound like he was innocent.
It's just trash.
It's stupidity.
It makes no sense at all.
None.
So just to dispense with that idiotic conspiracy theory, because of course your usual suspects, the Candace Owens of the world, are still trying to apparently get Tyler Robinson off on the basis of their own smooth-brained nonsense.
Before we move on to what's going on with Gen Z and our very own Isabel Brown, who was taken to task by the ladies of the view, let's take a question from a caller.
Do you think that within the remaining years of the Trump administration, it may be prudent to shift our battles with our foreign enemies to the enemy within our borders?
That is the growing anti-American radical leftists, seditious politicians, and the non-assimilating anti-American naturalized citizens who are abusing our bloated social welfare programs.
So, I mean, I think that we have to chew gum and walk at the same time.
It's a good question.
But I think one of the great lies about American politics is that we somehow, if we focus on the butter, we can't focus on the guns.
If we focus on the guns, we can't focus on the butter.
The idea being that we must spend resources that we would otherwise spend abroad at home.
These are separate departments of government.
We're spending more money than we have ever spent on anything.
We're spending $7 trillion a year, $7 trillion.
That is a lot of money, a lot of money.
And it turns out that the world continues to revolve whether or not we wish to be a part of the international scene.
That is just the reality of life.
And so if you quote unquote, draw within so that you can focus on immigration.
And meanwhile, Iran spreads its tentacles all over the Middle East, threatens all of our allies, threatens all of the shipping lanes, and basically grinds our economy under its boot heel, that's a problem too.
You got to handle all this at once.
This is the hard part of being president.
Okay, meanwhile, the Trump administration is now launching a new effort to hire members of Gen Z.
This is a thing that they are focused in on.
Kind of an interesting approach.
According to Fox News, the Trump administration is launching a new effort to make a government cool again by hiring Gen Z workers to rebuild the federal talent pipeline after a year of Doge cuts and to compete more aggressively with the private sector.
Now, again, part of this is probably related to the downturn in job expectations for Gen Zers.
Now, see if you can provide some jobs for the youngsters.
So some of it is likely political.
But when you talk about Gen Zers and the big problems with Gen Z, you got to say that there is a bigger problem with Gen Z than mere unemployment concerns.
So, for example, we should be somewhat concerned about the fact that there is a complete degradation of things like family formation with Gen Z, that the entire pathway from childhood to adulthood is being ignored or blocked off by members of Gen Z. According to a lot of the studies, more than one third of Americans, 15 up, have never married as of 2022.
That is up from 23% in 1950.
In the U.S., nearly 1.5 million more adults under 35 live with their parents than one decade ago.
And most importantly, there was a 2023 Pew survey of 18 to 34-year-olds, and it found that 57% of men said they definitely want children one day.
Only 45% of women in the same age range do.
That is a disaster area.
First of all, only 57% of men is already low.
A minority of women saying that they want children one day is crazy.
That's crazy.
So Isabel Brown, of course, she's one of our hosts here at Daily Wire.
If you're not encouraging your children to grow up and have the courage to get married and have kids, more kids than they can afford before they think they're ready, it is high time to start.
It is these choices like deleting our dating apps and putting birth control pills and saying I do at the altar that ultimately trickle down into the political policies that we will see save our country.
So again, I'm wondering what's so controversial about that, telling people it is good to have kids and that you should get married and that you should have kids.
All thriving societies rely upon this, but of course, the ladies at the View are very upset, very upset.
And again, the notion that my wife is somehow barefoot and pregnant at home in the kitchen, right now she's pregnant.
Sometimes she's barefoot and sometimes she's in the kitchen.
She is also a doctor.
This notion that you can't choose to do many things all at once or that you decide that you want to stay at home with your kids for a while and then work part-time.
Like these are all choices.
But to pretend that a society ought to be utterly indifferent about the choices you make, that it makes no difference to society whether you want to have kids or don't want to have kids, that to me is nuts.
That makes no sense at all.
How can any sort of society survive along that basis?
Of course we ought to have a preference for a morality that pushes childbearing and rearing.
But it is incredible how many people on the left seem to believe that if you say it's good for women to have kids, that this is somehow an order, like it's somehow a mandate.
No one is forcing anything.
Ana Navarro says, don't tell me what to do with my uterus.
I'm not telling you what you must do with your uterus.
I'm telling you that it is better for society when women have children than when they do not.
And it is better for women, as a general rule, when they want to have children than when they do not.
I don't know why that's remotely controversial, but I guess that's where we are.
Again, no one is denying anybody a choice.
We're just saying that some choices are better than other choices.
No one's telling you what you must do with your uterus, but again, we teach our kids all the time what our values should be, what our values should be.
It makes no sense to me to treat Isabel's statement that we ought to teach our kids that it's good to want kids as some sort of assault, as some sort of offensive.
Sonny Hawson, of course, says that children are too expensive.
That's the real reason why people aren't having them.
Again, that is not the case.
Poor countries, all over the world, people have tons of kids.
In fact, there is a reverse correlation between the wealth of a society and the number of children that women are having.
In this country, there's this affordability crisis.
And for a two-person household, a married household, you need over $400,000 for child care, over $400,000.
Most people don't make over $400,000.
So she's advocating for people to be born into poverty, people not being able to feed those children, people not being able to educate those children, and people not being able to house those children at the same time when this government is cutting all of the services that would allow people to have families and big families.
And none of that, by the way, none of these women, if services were to massively expand for women, none of them would be saying anything different about what Isabel said.
If the government had broader services, no one on that panel would be saying, she's right, we should encourage women to have more kids.
Well, you know, we just talked to Bishop Barron a little while ago about Holy Week.
Obviously, a lot of people finding spiritual meaning this week.
Your book is about how people find meaning in life.
And, you know, I was just talking a moment ago about Isabel Brown at CPAC saying that we should encourage young women to get married, to have children, and then women on the view being very upset about this.
Why are so many people upset about the idea that we ought to promote values that themselves provide meaning in life rather than, I suppose, indifference to those values?
And, you know, this is a research project I've been working on in this book for the last five years.
We in our society, which is sadly a decline, have lost the ability to find meaning through the institutions that bring it.
And there's a lot of explanations for it.
I mean, we can talk about ideology and polarization, but fundamentally, this is about how we have used technology largely after 2008, somewhat before that.
But to the extent that everybody has a cell phone attached to their hand and they're scrolling their hours away, the average person looks at the cell phone 205 times per day, which literally makes us use our brains in the wrong way to find the meaning of life.
I mean, you go back a couple of generations and the things that you were talking about were not controversial.
And the reason is because everybody knew that an ordinary life filled with relationships and faith and friendship and love and family, these were the secrets to the meaning of life.
And we have lost that, not just because of ideological polarization, but because of technology, which has changed our brains.
So let's talk about that technology changing our brains.
So it is absolutely true that it's almost as though a hack has been performed on the human mind by a lot of the tech companies that have programmed for virality and by content providers who, of course, are attempting to maximize their exposure.
I mean, we do that here on the show in order to get more people to watch, to get more eyeballs.
But the reality is that it is as though we have found the most lizard-brained parts of ourselves and then maximized those and poisoned ourselves in the process.
I mean, humans are unbelievably ingenious and we will wipe out small problems and in the process create major crises.
It's just amazing when you think about it.
Let's see if we can wipe out a little bit of physical pain, which will turn into analgesics that become so incredibly dependency provoking that we have 100,000 deaths a year overdoses.
I mean, it's a classic case.
And again, I'm not a techno doomsayer.
On the contrary, I'm a techno optimist, but we have not learned how to use our technology appropriately.
And the result of it is that our brains, which are hemispheric, there's two sides to each brain.
This is all in my book, How This Works.
The right side is dedicated to mystery and meaning and love and happiness, and the left side is dedicated to solving technological and analytical problems.
And we've stopped using the right side of our brains, which is why people are depressed and anxious and lonely, and they'll lash out for all sorts of dumb activist reasons.
I mean, all of the activism and conspiracy theories, this are nothing more than a cry for meaning, a sense of coherence in life.
And the way to actually get that is to put down your device and go love your friends and family.
It's almost that simple.
Of course, it isn't because that's not ordinary anymore.
So this book is a six-part plan in real life with real hacks and real techniques to find the meaning of your life, just like the old days in the next six months.
You know, if we were talking about dependency on drugs and alcohol, I would say you actually can't go live a new, brand new, squeaky, clean, wonderful life if you don't actually get clean from the substances.
And so I have a whole chapter on actually how to break your neurochemical addiction to devices with all the latest research on how to do that.
And by the way, Ben, it's not that hard.
You just have to have a little bit of will, commitment, and discipline, and you can do it in about three weeks.
Then after that, there's a bunch of ways that people haven't thought about maybe in a long time.
Deep conversations.
I give a list of the kinds of questions that you could ask and talk about with your friends that will literally illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain where questions of meaning will actually find you.
I also talk about the importance of giving your heart away, falling in love, having kids.
I talk about how incredibly important it is to look upward to the divine, to actually practice a faith, practice it, notwithstanding your beliefs, and certainly notwithstanding your feelings.
I mean, you and I as traditionally religious people, me as a Catholic and you as an Orthodox Jew, I mean, we feel it sometimes, man, but we practice it every day.
And that turns out to be the secret to the meaning of life, right, Ben?
And again, you know, we were talking with Bishop Barron about Holy Week.
I mean, the fact that you practice in the world is the thing that makes you a religious person.
And it is living a religious life, not believing.
I think that we've also become very abstract in the way that we view life, way too abstract in some sense.
The idea that religious people sit around all day contemplating their navel and the existence of God is not correct.
I mean, people who are religious typically spend most of their day doing the same kinds of things everybody else does, but orienting themselves toward the idea that they're doing it for a godly reason.
It's the exact same kind of stuff.
It's just you're doing it for an actual bigger reason.
And in other people's lives who are not religious, they do it with their kids.
I mean, you can do it with your kids or with your spouse.
If you're doing things for a better, bigger reason, you're going to feel more fulfilled in your life than if you're doing it because your phone told you that it's important to be more famous or because some people were responding to you in your mentions on X or something.
And there's one more thing that a lot of young people have been taught that's quite incorrect.
Now, I actually think that young people have been quite victimized by our culture because they, you know, you and I, I mean, you're a lot younger than I am.
You're 20 years younger than I am, but you still remember the before times, as do I, you know, before we were attached to our phones to this particular extent.
But one of the things that the lies that has been perpetrated with a lot of young people today, leading to the kind of conversation that you just illustrated about this non-controversial idea that family makes you happy is because people are uncomfortable and they've been told that if they're depressed or anxious, that's evidence that they're broken and that their suffering must be eliminated.
The truth of the matter is, and I have a whole chapter on how never to waste your suffering.
I have the latest scientific techniques on how to use your inevitable suffering in life to find the meaning of your life, which is what, by the way, our religions have taught and our grandmothers have taught.
And I talk about the fact that when you believe that I'm sad and I'm anxious, I need to fix this thing.
Well, guess what?
Sadness and anxiety in life is evidence that you're alive and have a normally functioning limbic system, that your emotions are working the way that they're supposed to.
I tell my students at Harvard, by the way, when I've been working on this book, I say, look, if you study at Harvard, if you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy.
Because the truth is you're doing a hard thing and you're doing it on purpose.
And that's how you find the meaning of your life.
So this is six ways to find the meaning of your life.
All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
We're going to answer your questions about free speech in the NBA, how to prevent your loved ones from being blackpilled, so to speak, and the straight of hormones.
Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.