Democrats may impose their latest inventions from the top down, but on the right debate is allowed to thrive. At the Student Action Summit in Tampa, Charlie moderated a fiery, energetic, and mostly-peaceful debate between Josh Hammer and Dave Smith about Israel. The two of them battled it out over the war with Iran, the right policy for Gaza, lobbyist power in the U.S., and a lot more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, it's Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
A debate heard around the world.
Dave Smith vs.
Josh Hammer that I moderate about Israel.
We talk about the AIPAC.
We talk about foreign influence on October 7th.
We talk about the brain rot of anti-Semitism.
I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation.
Email me freedom at charliekirk.com who you think won and how you think I did moderate it.
Get involved with Turning Point USA Today at tpusa.com.
Buckle up everybody here, but we get to go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk is running the White House, buddy.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, turning toward USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
Learn how you can protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
That is noblegoldinvestments.com.
It's where I buy all of my gold.
Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.
Our last bit of programming here is going to be a debate.
As many of you guys know, I speak a lot about this on college campuses.
I get so many questions about this topic on college campuses.
Some of my best memories ever have been going to Israel, traveling to Israel, seeing where Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus walked on water, spoke in the Garden of Gethsemane, gave the sermon on Mount Beatitudes, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Hebron.
And some of my greatest experiences have been in the Holy Land and defending Israel.
But as you know, this is a very hot topic on campus and increasingly a hot topic in conservative circles.
And I thought, hey, let's lean into that disagreement.
Let's lean into that debate.
Let's have two people that don't agree on this topic that are some of the best defenders of the position when it comes to Israel, when it comes to the 12-day war, when it comes to whether or not we should be supporting or sending aid to Israel.
Because we as conservatives, we want to have this debate.
We don't want to just all of a sudden say, oh, you're not allowed to say that.
No.
We want to foster an environment where we get to the truth.
We want to find the best ideas and have the best ideas win.
And so we are thrilled to have two men, and they know what they're talking about.
I'm going to be moderating this.
We're going to make sure that this remains mostly peaceful.
So give it up for Josh Hammer and Dave Smith, everybody.
So Josh and Dave, welcome to Turning Point USA.
Welcome to Tampa.
And give it up for both these men again.
So we have a clock here.
We can blow through that if this is going well and respectful and spirited.
I first wanted to start by introducing both these men.
Josh Hammer, Newsweek, Josh Hammer Show.
Josh is a very passionate and eloquent defender of Israel and also is a great friend and someone that we talk about a lot of other issues as well.
So Josh, welcome.
Great to have you.
Great to be here, Charlie.
Also, Dave Smith.
Dave is comedian.
A lot of fans of yours here in the audience, Dave, and also a libertarian.
And we're not going to talk much about that.
But we were talking about how much we agreed backstage on certain things.
And Dave means a lot that you made work here.
You took an awful flight to get here from halfway across the country.
And so, Dave, you could plug your stuff as well because I don't know the name of your show and stuff.
But I want to start with this.
I want to start with opening statements, if you will.
There are three big things that I want to cover.
And we just did a focus group with some of our students here earlier.
The three big things we want to cover.
We want to cover the 12-day war between Israel and Iran.
What do we think of that?
Good, bad?
How did Trump handle it?
Number two, we want to talk about the appeared, the fake, or the real amount of Israeli influence in American politics, from AIPAC to how congressmen are involved and kind of have our discussion and debate.
And then finally, it's one thing to be against stuff, everybody.
You can always, you know, I don't like this, I don't like that.
I want both of these men to present what their solution is, their proposition of what they are proposing.
So with that, though, Dave, I thought it would be helpful.
This is your first turning point event.
Some people aren't familiar with your work.
Introduce yourself, make an introductory statement, and the floor is yours, my friend.
Well, thank you very much, and thank you guys for having me.
Yeah, as Charlie mentioned, I took a flight here.
Oh, so I'm going on no sleep.
So if Josh wins, it doesn't count.
But I'm a stand-up comedian, and I'm also a libertarian.
I'm really a follower of the greatest congressman who's ever lived, who is Dr. Ron Paul, who is turning 90 years old.
Happy birthday to him.
And as far as, look, I would say I think that American foreign policy for my entire life has been insane and like criminally insane.
We've launched war after war.
We've talked about peace through strength the whole time, but all we've gotten is permanent militarism and forever wars against countries that pose no threat to us.
And a huge part of the reason why we've embarked on this is because the neoconservatives hijacked our foreign policy and they were in power after 9-11.
And the neoconservatives, as everybody who's followed it knows, were joined at the hip with the Likud Party.
That's just a fact.
They all admitted in their own words.
And you can go back and you can read the Clean Break memo.
You can read the companion piece, Coping with Crumbling States.
This was written by David Wormser and Richard Pearl.
And they laid out their plan.
Now, their plan was that to help Israel, the Clean Break is a break from the peace process, a break from Oslo, which was designed to give the Palestinians their own state.
And these neoconservative geniuses decided that instead of the Israelis making peace with the Palestinians, they could just have the U.S. overthrow all of the surrounding governments that were giving Israel a hard time.
And this is where four-star general Wesley Clark says that he saw the plans right after 9-11 to overthrow seven countries In the next five years.
And what was the last country on that list?
It was Iran.
Okay?
This is a big part of what the whole conflict is about.
Now, the neoconservatives, neoconservative has kind of become like a pejorative for war hawks these days.
And don't get me wrong, I support that.
I keep calling them neocons.
But the actual neoconservatives, the self-identified neoconservatives, aren't really in power anymore.
But Benjamin Netanyahu is still in power in Israel.
And the Likud Party is still pushing for this.
Very quickly, I'll try to not go too long here.
Okay.
They actually did focus group testing back in the 90s before the first Gulf War in Iraq.
And you know, Americans weren't really moved by we have to reinstall the king of Kuwait, but they were moved by the nuclear threat.
Now, if you go read Coping with Crumbling States or the Clean Break memo in the 90s when the neocons admitted they wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein, they never said it was because he had nuclear weapons.
They said he was a problem for Israel in the region.
They only made up that lie after 9-11 because they knew that's what would sell you, or maybe not you, you're too young, but sell your moms and dads on going and fighting this war.
And by the way, when they talked about wanting to overthrow Iran, it was the same thing.
Never had nothing to do with a nuclear threat.
That's just the thing they use now as the excuse.
So yes, there is tremendous influence by Israel in our government.
That doesn't mean I'm subscribing to some crazy conspiracy or telling you to hate Jewish people.
I'm Jewish.
I'm just saying they have influence.
They've used it in a very negative way.
And we should reject this insane foreign policy and embrace the foreign policy that Dr. Ron Paul advocated, which is the foreign policy of the founding fathers.
Stay out of entangling alliances, stay out of unnecessary wars, be friends with the world, and trade with the world.
That's the key to prosperity.
Thank you, Dave.
Josh.
Opening statement.
Feel free to respond and then we'll proceed as we go.
So I thought it was about three and a half, four minutes, so same amount of time.
All right, so it's really great to be here.
Thank you, Charlie, for having me.
Thank you, Turning Point, for having me back.
It's really wonderful to be at this amazing conference.
You know, Dave joked that he didn't get any sleep last night.
Today's actually also a fast day on the Jewish calendar.
I'm not eating or even drinking water.
So we're all on the same page here.
We're all just totally screwed.
So you can kind of get off the same starting place there.
Look, there's a lot of substance to respond to.
I'll just really briefly do that and then talk about what I actually want to talk about in my opening remarks.
Dave mentioned this alleged coordination between the neoconservatives, which I presume he means Bush-era foreign policy, and the Likud Party.
I presume half of you probably don't even know what the Likud Party is.
It's referring to the Israeli right.
It's very instructive, and Dave always conveniently neglects to inform the audience of this, that the actual leader of the Israeli right back in 2002, a man by the name of Ariel Sharon, vehemently opposed the Bush administration going into Iraq.
So this whole notion that Israel is talking America into foreign wars is total nonsense.
Actually, in 2011, when the Obama administration toppled Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, it's actually well known that Libya actually sent secret diplomatic envoys to Israel trying to tell them to then talk to the United States and France to talk NATO off of that attack there.
So this whole narrative is totally backwards there.
But I want to kind of dumb things down a little bit here.
I see a lot of people wearing 47 hats.
I voted for President Trump multiple times.
I love our president.
You guys love our president, right?
You love President Trump?
Okay.
This is turning point freaking USA.
Charlie, God bless you.
You have built the largest MAGA grassroots army in the country.
Seriously, my friend, you deserve this.
You all are car carry members of it.
We here are part of that.
The good news is that while no one should be afraid of debate and this debate is a nice thing here, the MAGA movement is actually quite unified, believe it or not, all the talk to the contrary when it comes to these issues.
An overwhelming majority of self-identified MAGA Republicans support close U.S. Israel relations.
According to a CBS news poll, moreover, after the recent Operation Midnight Hammer B-2 bombers in Iran, 94%, 94% of self-identified MAGA Republicans supported President Trump's dropping those B-2 bombs on Ford Donatans and the other Irani facilities there.
This is a wildly, wildly popular policy there.
What did Dave Smith say about this?
He re-upped his now years-long crusade to call for Donald Trump's impeachment.
Y'all probably don't know that about Dave Smith, do you?
He's now called for Donald Trump to be impeached multiple times.
But Dave, you know, look, I mean, I don't like when people misquote me either.
You probably don't like when people misquote you.
So I actually have a little bit of a highlight reel here of Dave Smith's tweets over the years.
Dave Smith, March 19th, 2024.
Donald Trump is responsible for around 500,000 deaths in Yemen.
And between the weapons to Ukraine and the Abraham Accord's Jerusalem embassy, he is at least partially responsible for the two worst humanitarian crises in the world.
He's a war criminal who should spend his life in prison.
He is calling Donald Trump a war criminal who should spend his life in prison.
You should be living at that.
I am living at that as a Trump supporter.
Donald Trump, David Smith, June 16, 2025.
Trump allegedly had full prior knowledge of Israel's attacks and gave it his blessing while pretending to be negotiating with the Iranians as a cover.
If this is true, Trump is the most impotent b ⁇ of a leader imaginable.
He's calling our president the greatest president in my lifetime, an impotent b ⁇ .
Are you kidding me?
June 21st, 2025, Donald Trump is alleged to be able to lose someone who is an illegal war of aggression against Iran.
The risk of an absolute catastrophe is very high and the benefits are non-existent.
Dave Smith, June 21st.
Dead wrong.
This notion that World War III would start, not a single American casualty.
We should be celebrating that.
Donald Trump fulfilled multiple.
He fulfilled multiple campaign promises.
The escalator speech in 2015 at Trump Tower, he literally said, I'm not going to let Iran get a nuclear weapon.
And guess what?
I also, he said, I oppose a neoconservative foreign policy.
He did both of those things with Iran.
He deprived the Irani regime of nuclear weapon while not losing a single American sailor, soldier, Marine while depriving them of nuclear weapons.
And finally, trial end on this.
Dave Smith, July 8th, 2025, in the last month, Donald Trump has launched a war of aggression on behalf of a foreign government, exploded the debt, announced that he's continuing the Biden policy of Army Ukraine and cover up a giant child rape operation.
So according to my interlocutor, Donald Trump is not just engaging in wars on behalf of a foreign government, he is also covering up the world's giant pedophilic Child sex trafficking ring, allegedly, I presume, on behalf of a foreign government as well.
So I'm disgusted, frankly, that this man is on stage, but I'll end it at that.
Okay, well, got it.
So you can see peace is hard.
I'm trying to keep the peace.
Now, Dave, I want to give you an opportunity, about four minutes, to respond to that.
But also, I do want to, now that we had the opening salvos and the Tomahawk missiles launched, let's respond as you see fit.
No, and then bring us to the 12-day war.
Because that let's stay focused on that.
We can.
Well, the thing, Charlie.
Defend yourself, Charlie.
Well, the thing is, Charlie, as you may have noticed, and some of you may have seen some of my other debates, every single time I come up here to debate issues, and they come up here to debate me and my character.
It's all they have every single time.
Because they can't actually take on any of the arguments, and so the most pathetic, low-hanging fruit of, you guys like Trump, this guy said bad things about Trump.
Listen, guys, I'm a free American.
I supported Donald Trump in this last election.
Yes, he did just actively cover up a giant child rapist ring, and I'm going to criticize him for that.
Okay?
And I'm sorry, after all these years of us right-wingers saying, protect the children, come on, that's bad for your soul if you don't.
You speak up about that.
It's horrible what he's doing.
And, you know, as far as the actual substance of what Josh said here, which there really wasn't much, but I already pointed this out the last time we debated.
His topic about how Sharon was against the war in Iraq is total nonsense.
Sharon's envoy initially opposed it when he found out that Bush was going to invade Iraq, not because he didn't want Saddam Hussein to be overthrown, but because he wanted regime change in Iran first.
And then when the George W. Bush administration assured him that Iran would come next, they got on board with it and they started pumping out all types of propaganda about how Saddam Hussein's nuclear secret sites that didn't exist.
And Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, that year in 2002, came to Congress and testified under a congressional testimony that anybody can go watch and advocated not that the U.S. let Israel do it, but that the U.S. overthrow Saddam Hussein.
I believe his words were, I guarantee that peace will spread through the region.
And he also advocated that we overthrow Muammar Gaddafi and the mullahs in Iran.
So that's just, you're just wrong about it.
That's not true.
And yes, have I been critical of Donald Trump when I think he gets things wrong?
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's what we should do.
This is America.
You criticize the government when they get things wrong.
And so I'm not going to be war criminal.
What else do you want to do?
Josh, one sec, Josh.
I got to keep the peace here.
Dave, about a minute-ish.
Two minutes.
No, I'm taking the right time.
I'm just.
Look, as far as the 12-day war thing goes.
Yeah, sure.
As far as the 12-day war goes, I mean, look, I'll be honest.
Donald Trump, it might be the greatest thing he's ever done in his life that at the end of the 12-day war, after the Iranian response was as weak as it was and they gave us advanced warning, so there were no American casualties, he started pushing for a ceasefire.
And that was great that he did that.
But the point is that the war never needed to be launched to begin with.
Iran did not have nuclear weapons.
Iran, according to all of the intelligence, including our director of national intelligence, until a day after Israel bombed them and she changed her mind.
Go read the annual threat assessment from earlier this year.
Iran had not made the political decision to acquire a nuclear weapon, and they were in negotiations with Donald Trump at the time to bring their enrichment down.
There was just no need other than the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu wants that regime overthrown.
Josh, feel free to respond.
Thank you.
Yeah, I'd be curious if Dave Smith also believes in the tooth ferrier and pink unicorns.
I mean, what lie does Dave Smith not believe, frankly?
Look, the recent 12-day war is literally the encapsulation of the Trump doctrine of foreign policy.
Donald Trump ran against neoconservatism.
He is not a neoconservative.
That's good because neoconservatism is actually really, really bad.
I actually have a whole chapter in my book, Israel and Civilization, talking about how bad neoconservatism is.
It's chapter seven.
If you haven't read, you should go ahead and pick up a copy.
So it's really good that Donald Trump opposes moralistic nation-building boondoggles.
Guess what?
Donald Trump is also not and never has been since day one.
He's never been a hardcore isolationist.
He is a foreign policy nationalist and realist.
We would say that he is a Jacksonian.
He is in the mold of Andrew Jackson, one of his favorite presidents of all time, because he believes in generally following the very wise advice of George Washington in his farewell address that you should beware of foreign entanglements.
But when you are attacked, you are going to punch back three times as hard.
How many times has Trump said that in a debate there?
When he's punched, he's going to punch back really, really, really hard.
What happened in the 12-day war was you had a close ally, Israel, that through their wonderful control of the skies and they're taking out the missile launchers and the IRGC command there, essentially paved a very clean runway through that and their neutralizing Hezbollah last year in 2024 that then allowed the United States to come in with the B-2 bombers and the death blow.
It was a perfect alley you.
For you basketball fans, it was kind of like Kobe Bryan tossing it to Shaquille O'Neal back in the way.
It was a perfect tag team operation to neutralize and set back by many years the threat of a regime that, whether or not we care to admit it, has actually been at war with the United States at least since the 1983 Beirut, Lebanon, Hezbollah barracks bombings that slaughtered 241 Marines, arguably since the 1979 hostage crisis as well.
Again, Donald Trump fulfilled multiple campaign promises.
He set back the nuclear program.
Not a single American soldier, sailor, or Marine died.
It was a brilliant, brilliant move of statesmanship, a fantastical move.
Frankly, it's a borderline Mount Rushmore worthy accomplishment, I would say.
By the time this show ends, another American family farm will shut down.
Not because they stopped working, but because a lot of grocery store meat doesn't come from them anymore.
Over 85% of the grass-fed beef in the U.S. stores is imported, and most people have no idea.
That's why I get all of my meat from GoodRanchers.com.
GoodRanchers doesn't just sell meat, they guide you back to the source.
All Good Ranchers' products are 100% born, raised, and harvested in the U.S.A. from local family farms.
And with the summer and full swing, There's nothing better than good food to share with your friends and family, whether it's burgers by the pools, sticks on the grill or nuggets for an easy meal.
Make sure you're serving America's best meat this summer.
Plus, if you subscribe to any Good Ranch box today, you get your take of free meat for life.
That's free water, burgers, hot dogs, bacon, or chicken wings.
And every box for the lifetime of your subscription.
And if you use my exclusive code Kirk at checked out, you get extra $40 off your first box.
Once again, visit GoodRanchers.com and use my code Kirk to get your free meat for life plus $40 off.
GoodRanchers.com, American Meat Delivered.
So here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to insert myself because I don't want us to talk past each other because these conversations have a tendency to do that.
So I'm going to ask both of you a critical question that both of you guys already launched.
Josh, to you first.
Dave's contention, and Dave, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that the nuclear program was not a threat, correct?
That it was an intel push.
Would you even say that?
I'm strongmanning your argument, steel manning it.
Josh, what do you have to say to that, to the veracity of the claim that there was an imminent threat of Iran getting a nuclear bomb?
That is a core point of Dave's argument.
Then, Dave, I'm going to throw back an equally difficult question for you.
Josh.
Okay, so I profess agnosticism as to the imminent nature, Charlie, because I have not seen the reports.
Neither have you, neither has Dave.
Literally, no one in this room has actually seen the reports.
So I do not know literally what the exactly imminent nature of the threat was.
It would be impossible for me to say I'm not going to bullshit you and pretend like I know because I simply don't know.
What I can say is the following.
Iran has transparently and obviously been trying to acquire a nuclear weapon for two and a half, three decades.
We know this for approximately one to two million different reasons.
Among them that we can point to is that the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Administration, which is essentially the nuclear watchdog for the United Nations, they have been sounding the alarm about this and they have said very loudly and clearly that Iran has blocked their inspectors from going to inspect their enriched uranium and that they have concluded over recent years especially,
including recent months, that Iran is enriching uranium at a much quicker rate and to a much higher percentage and rate of enrichment than any civilian program would ever justify.
By the way, the notion that Iran even needs a civilian program in the first place, I think, is kind of bonkers.
It's one of the most petroleum, oil, and gas-rich countries in the world.
So that's kind of a bit of a red herring in and of itself.
But we know from a million different international organizations that they have been doing this.
And Charlie, more to the point, again, you know, Dave likes to say, oh, they just chant death to America, which they do.
They literally chant it every single day in their Potemkin parliament.
But they actually do act on it.
They killed hundreds and hundreds of American soldiers on the roadside of Fallujah, Al-Ambar province, during Iraq with Qasem Sulaimani-supplied IEDs.
They have killed Americans going back to the 241 Marines in Beirut, Lebanon.
By the way, the Hezbollah jihadists who organized that operation to slaughter those Marines in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983 was a man by the name of Fuad Shakur.
The U.S. State Department had a $5 million bounty on his head following the 1983 slaughter of the Marines there in Beirut.
He went alive for 41 years.
You know who killed him last year?
The IDF.
Israel took out this guy that the State Department had a $5 million bounty on for 41 years for killing 241 of our boys back in 1983 in Beirut.
So I'm going to now ask, really tough follow-up for you.
You do not want Iran to get a nuclear weapon.
Bad.
If it ever took, if it required U.S. troops on the ground, would that be worth Iran not getting a nuclear weapon?
Charlie, with respect, I reject the premise.
I simply do not think it does, actually.
I know.
It's a hypothetical, but it's worth thinking about.
Okay.
Dave, I got to ask you tough questions now.
Yeah, but I want to respond to some of this stuff.
You will.
Hold on.
I don't want us to talk past each other or else we're going to spend all this time on prime ministers in 2002 that the audience doesn't know about.
No, but if he's making claims about something that's just a problem.
I want to just ask a very simple question.
From your perspective, because I just asked the tough one to Josh, is are you okay, or do you think we should do anything to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb?
Anything, sure.
Yeah, there's lots of things I think we should do.
Is military action ever justified?
Well, again, this is a, yes, there are times when military action is justified, but if you're saying what we could do to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, what we were doing, Donald Trump was in negotiations with them, and I think he should have continued those.
And the truth is that the big problem with the JCPOA that Obama got us into was that there were sunset provisions.
They opened up a whole new inspections regime.
It is not true that the IAEA is saying that Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon.
Anybody you want, it's published online.
You can go read the conclusion of their last report where they explicitly said Iran does not have nuclear weapons and is not trying to develop them.
They are enriching it 60%, and they were in negotiations to maybe bring that down.
But you know, when you bring up the fact of the Marines getting killed in 1983, it's actually an interesting, Ronald Reagan, who was president at the time, he wrote about this in his memoir.
Now, if you know what Ronald Reagan did was he pulled out after that.
He turned tail and run.
And he said in his memoir, he said, I underestimated the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.
And we never should have gotten involved in that.
Now, if you want to say that Iran backed them, okay, couple years after that, Charlie, there was a scandal in the Reagan administration.
It was the something contra, Iran contra.
That's right.
Ronald Reagan was selling weapons to the Iranians a couple years after this happened.
So to come back now, 40 plus years later, and use that as the excuse why we got to go to war with Iran.
I mean, just think about how crazy this is.
And the stuff he said about the roadside bombs in Iraq is just not true.
It's been debunked.
It's more war propaganda that's been debunked.
I highly recommend anyone can read the book Enough Already.
Josh.
One second.
I highly recommend people read the book Enough Already.
It is the best book that's been written about the terror wars by Scott Horton.
He has all the footnotes in there.
You can go through it yourself.
It's completely debunked.
Those roadside bombs were built by Shiites in Iraq.
Now, some of them did have relationships with Iran, but the majority of Iraq is Shiite.
So yes, we invaded the next door country, and we got into some fights with the Shiite groups there.
But to say that's a reason why we now have to invade Iran or we have to bomb them or something?
It just doesn't make any sense.
So one or two really quick crisp follow-ups, and then we'll do this.
Both sides need to get under good cross-examination.
Do you think it would be bad if Iran got a nuclear bomb?
Yes, I think it's bad if I can't do that.
And I think we can all agree on that.
That is a moral agreement.
I don't think anybody should be allowed to have nuclear weapons secretly.
Right.
And so.
How about that?
I will ask Josh about that, because that's a not-so-subtle dig at Israel.
Hold on, are you suggesting that Israel has nuclear weapons?
I don't know, actually.
I probably do.
Yeah, you do.
I don't know the intelligence.
I'm not that of DNI, but I mean, they probably do.
But let me ask you, Dave, now another question.
What is your now, let's just say, criticism?
No U.S. troops were killed.
It required no U.S. troops on the ground.
There was no war.
It lasted 12 days.
Fordot was pretty eliminated.
And even the Iranians say it.
So looking at it now, 12 days later, what is your problem with what seems to be a masterclass in 12 days, in, out, no problem, no U.S. troops?
We've kind of moved on.
What would your problem with that be?
You know, I think, and I do think there's something really sick and poisoning about this, is that our country has become so addicted to war that if we launch a war and you go, well, hey, it wasn't a complete catastrophe.
I mean, a million people didn't die in this one, like in Iraq.
Or hundreds of thousands didn't die in this one, like in Afghanistan or Libya or Syria.
It's like, okay, look, people died in this war, okay?
There were both Iranian civilians and Israeli civilians who died in this war.
It was a terrible fit for them and their families.
This was a catastrophe.
And my point is that the war never needed to be launched to begin with.
But there's no reason why we even have to be enemies with Iran.
This is Israel's problem.
We don't need to be involved in this.
Sorry, we got our own issues here.
And look, again, I'll give Donald Trump credit that, okay, it didn't turn into a catastrophe.
He took the off-ramp when he had the chance.
But look, a lot of that was out of Donald Trump's control.
The risk of this war, like a lot of people love to, like Josh likes to read my tweets when I was saying this could turn into a catastrophe.
Because you were dead wrong.
He looks stupid.
Josh, Josh.
Don't say that.
Hold on.
No, no.
Let's de-escalate the situation.
No, no, no, accurately, what Josh is saying is the lowest IQ argument that anyone can make.
I'm warning, I was warning that there's a risk of a catastrophe.
And he's saying you're stupid because there wasn't a catastrophe.
This is on the level of playing Russian roulette.
And if the bullet doesn't go off, you go, see, dummy, you were warning that could go bad.
That doesn't prove anything.
Listen, for all you guys, you talking about how big and bad the Iranians are and what a scary threat they are, what if they hadn't given us advance notice?
What if Iran was actually as suicidal as people like Josh pretend they are?
And what if their response had killed a few hundred Americans in the region, which by all military assessments, they are capable of doing?
What would Donald Trump have had to do then, Charlie?
Was he, what would he?
I'm the moderator.
No, no, no.
Okay, sorry.
Like, come on, Dave.
It was a rhetorical question.
I know, but both sides are getting tough questions here.
The point is, Donald Trump would have had to respond even harder.
And then he would have to have a hard time.
Let's give Josh a chance to respond first.
But hold on.
It's a counterfactual.
One second.
You hadn't have had breakfast this morning.
When people talk over each other, they don't like listening to that.
So that's why I'm here.
Josh, I want you to respond to that.
But to Dave's point, do you think Israel has a secret nuclear program?
And is that a problem?
Yeah, I think it's not particularly disputed that Israel has a nuclear program.
We know exactly where it is based.
This is not a particularly hidden thing there.
I mean, it's so well known, in fact, Charlie, that I don't know exactly why it's officially a secret.
Unofficially, it's not much of a secret.
I'm non-Israeli.
I have no idea why the exact policy is the way it is.
I don't particularly have a program with it.
As I said, it's one of the world's worst kept secrets.
It kind of just is what it is.
But more generally speaking, I don't understand why we're going so far down this rabbit hole of would have, could have, should have.
The people, look, let's say something very simple here.
The people who said that Donald Trump's involvement in the 37-hour operation of the B-2 bombers flying from Missouri to Iran and back with not a single shot fired at our boys, by the way, as I said, that was partially due to the fact that the IDF had so neutralized the Iranian Air Force and their defenses there.
So the fact that he was able to accomplish that so amazingly there, we should have seen that coming because it was actually pretty easily foreseeable.
And the people who did not see that coming are the people who have lost credibility to comment, frankly, on these affairs.
People who warned about thousands and thousands and thousands of dead American lives who said that China and Russia would swoop in and that this would be World War III.
Well, you know what?
God bless you all because you apparently survived World War III.
It was the shortest World War III of all of our lifetimes.
Hi, Dave.
Dave, I restrained.
So what are you?
Dave, I restrain Josh.
Josh, keep going.
Again, this is the Donald Trump foreign policy doctrine in action.
It is quick surgical strikes.
Roger Stone was talking about it earlier.
It's exactly right.
He is not a neocon.
Neoconservatism, bad.
Isolationism, also naive and stupid.
Donald Trump agrees with both those things.
The nationalist, realist, MAGA, America-first approach to foreign policy is to have strong nationalist allies that are generally capable of securing and patrolling their own regions in a way that redounds not merely to the Allies' national interests, but also to the American national interests.
That is exactly what Israel has been doing for 40, 50 years as they have taken out Islamist and Sharia supremacist thugs in Gaza, in Yemen, Hezbollah.
I mentioned Fuad Shakur, the Hezbollah jihadi who killed 241 Marines in Beirut, Lebanon, 1983.
There's a million examples there.
That is the definition of an America-first ally.
And what has happened in the 12-day war is an encapsulation of the America-first Trump doctrine that in this case, this tag team between the U.S. and Israel against the mutual threat of Iran inaction.
Private student loan debt in America totals about $300 billion.
YReFi refinances private student loan debt, and they do not care what your credit score is.
Many clients aren't even able to make the minimum monthly payment on their private student loans when they first contact YReFi.
Go to YReFi.com.
That is YREFY.com.
You don't have to ignore that mountain of student loan statements on your kitchen table anymore.
So go to YReFi.com.
If you have a co-borrower, YReFi can get them released from the loan and you can give mom or dad a break.
Go to YReFi.com.
Can you imagine being debt-free and not living under this burden anymore?
So go to YReFi.com.
That is YREFY.com.
And let's face it, if you have distress or defaulted to private student loans, there is no better place to go than YReFi.
They provide you with a custom loan payment based on your ability to pay.
They are not a debt settlement company, so go check it out right now at whyrefi.com.
It may not be available in all 50 states.
Go to yrefi.com, that is yrefy.com.
Okay, so I want to now move because it's important, but it's connected.
So I think we have on full display a difference of opinion on the 12-day war.
Now let's go to the next one.
It's inferred in both of these points, but you only get to answer as yes or no one at a time.
Is Israel an ally of the United States?
Yes, of course.
No.
Okay, so now we have disagreement.
We're going to now figure that out.
And then I want to then indicate it in that is, is Israel influencing American politics?
So I'm going to start with Josh, and then we'll go back to Dave.
You say Israel is an ally.
Spend a minute on that and then address how some people have concerns that Israel is influencing the U.S. government.
And then I'll allow Dave to have some time.
Josh?
All right.
There's multiple reasons why Israel is an ally.
First and foremost, I think most people in this room are believers of some stripe, right?
I am Jewish.
Most of you are probably Christians, and God bless you for that.
If you have any attachment whatsoever to the holy sites, if you have any attachment whatsoever to this narrow strip of land between the river and the sea, as the Hamas propagandists call it, then you're going to have some reason to care about this particular sliver of land.
That's point number one.
Let's just kind of get it out there.
Especially if you understand that we in Western civilization are fundamentally at war with barbarism, barbarism being best represented by the Islamists and Sharia supremacists.
When you understand that Western civilization really just is the Bible, there is a special calling to have an ally with a certain part of the Middle East.
That's point one.
Point two is just the Islamist deterrent point, Charlie, which is that America has faced jihadism time and time again, going back for 40, 50 years.
9-11, obviously the most tragic example.
We just saw it again on the streets of Bourbon Street in New Orleans on January 1st, just a few months ago, there.
If you care about deterring Islamism from conquering Western civilization, a point that you have very astutely been talking about a lot recently on your TV hits on social media, a very, very important point.
If you care about defending Western civilization from the barbarians, you absolutely have to place a special premium on this particular relationship.
And then third is that if you actually care as I do, you know, paradoxically, I actually care a lot about China.
In fact, I think that America's by far number one biggest threat this century is China.
If you care about effectuating this broader pivot to the Indo-Pacific, as American foreign policy people have been talking about for 20, 30 years now, you have to have some way of stabilizing the Middle East.
The way to do that is not to just adopt the stupid and asinine Barack Obama foreign policy of appeasing America's enemies.
The way to do that is to embolden your allies.
Again, that is the Trump doctrine.
So we didn't get to the second part of the question.
So do you want to just start on the ally and then we'll do you can incorporate both, Dave.
He had two answers in a row, so take three to four minutes.
Well, look, this idea that the great battle of our time is us versus the Islamists, us versus these barbarians, you know, that's really the problem here in the United States of America.
Lebanon, that's what you got to worry about.
Listen, I think everyone here, all you guys should know this at this point.
Our problem in America is the deep state of the United States of America, okay?
They're the ones.
They're the ones who framed Donald Trump for treason.
His own intelligence agencies framed the sitting U.S. president.
And you know what that deep state wants, by the way?
Permanent war.
That's what they always want.
That's how they and their friends make their money.
And so all of this talk is just so ridiculous, man.
I mean, this talk about how, like, if you care about the holy sites in Israel, like, okay, sure.
Obviously, Christians and Jews and Muslims have a connection to that land.
But that doesn't mean we have to bomb Iran for Israel.
That doesn't.
Well, we just bombed Iran.
That was the first topic.
Okay.
Okay.
Anyway, it doesn't mean that we have to support Israel slaughtering people in Gaza.
None of that has anything to do with the holy sites.
And in fact, a lot of sites get destroyed when there's bombs flying.
But listen, the real problem for America, if you want to even talk about like the Islam taking over America or taking over Europe, well, how did that happen?
That happened because we completely destabilized the region, fighting war after war after war that did nothing but slaughter hundreds of thousands of people.
And then our Western governments had the most insane open immigration policy that was basically suicidal.
We're doing this to ourselves.
We're $37 trillion in debt, and we're looking for another enemy to go fight.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've spent $20 trillion on empire and wars.
And you know what?
We can't tax enough money to pay for it.
We can't borrow enough money to pay for it.
So what do we do?
We print the money.
And now you guys are coming out into the world and you're wondering why you're six figures in debt from college and you're getting a job at DoorDash and the average house goes for 800 grand.
Because we've destroyed the currency chasing these monsters that were never any threat to our country.
So listen, one quick point.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis couldn't bring down America.
Joseph Stalin and the commies couldn't bring down America.
The British Empire couldn't bring down America.
But you think the Hezbollah in Lebanon are a threat to us?
They're a problem for Israel to deal with.
Speak that to the families of the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983.
Seriously, say that to them.
Have you spoken to the families of the people who have been killed in 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon, the people who have been killed by those IEDs in Iraq that you're just casually dismissing?
Have you actually spoken to any of these families?
First of all, yes, I have.
The 9-11 families, any of them?
Yes, I have.
Are you aware of Iran's bombing bombing in 9-11?
Yeah, yeah, okay.
So you're just asking me questions over.
This is why I'm here.
So, Why don't we both just take a deep breath?
Because they want to see a debate where they can make their mind up.
They don't want to see interruptive stuff, okay?
That's why this is going to be a different type of discussion.
So, let me both steel man your both arguments so you have to answer to me, okay?
So, Josh, well, actually, to Dave first and then to Josh.
Josh is saying, what about all of the Islamist death that they're responsible for, Beirut bombings?
You mentioned the Shiite.
That's basically the essence of your argument, right, Josh?
By saying, did you talk to?
He's saying, why are you minimizing this?
That would be Josh's contention.
Is that fair, Josh?
And 9-11, there's Dave responded to that, and then I will throw it back to Josh.
Well, I certainly don't think I in any way minimized any of those deaths.
I've made the point that Ronald Reagan still sold weapons to Iran a couple years after that, and I made the point that those roadside weapons were built in Iraq by Shiites there.
That's not minimizing it.
This is a huge part of the reason why we never should have invaded Iraq to begin with, because we get our bravest young boys killed.
It's tens of thousands of them have committed suicide in the last few years, and that doesn't seem to stop anyone from wanting to pursue the next attack.
So the point is, right, that I think if we want to really understand this stuff, it's wise to look at what some of the motivating factors for the hatred against us is.
All you got to do is listen.
Yes, I have talked actually to families of people who have died in Iraq.
You know what?
Overwhelmingly, they're non-interventionist, anti-war people now.
In fact, did you know that in 2008 and in 2012, Dr. Ron Paul got more money from active duty military than all the other candidates combined, including Barack Obama, because the active duty military are actually the ones who are the most hardcore people.
So don't invoke them to try to sell another tolerance.
But Dave, I'm going to follow up with a tough question.
I want you to make the case, because I don't want to have you be able to get past this.
You say Israel is not an ally.
That is not an opinion that people hear a lot.
Why is that?
Look, all I'm saying is Israel has at every turn— I'm not talking about the people there.
And I'm specifically talking about Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party, who have been in control for most of this time, for most of my lifetime.
Yeah, and great, most of the 21st century.
And so when I say they have been constantly pushing America toward more aggressive policies, toward getting in more fights.
And just like I always say, if you went out to the bar every single night with your friend and every night your friend's trying to convince you to get into a fight and while you're beating a lot of people up, you're also taking a lot of wounds and you're going to jail and you're getting in trouble.
You got to stop hanging out with that friend.
And so I think that my position, I don't believe in wars of aggression and wars of choice.
I don't believe in sanctions.
I don't believe that we should be friends with Israel.
We should trade with Israel and have a good relationship with them.
But you know what?
I also don't believe in welfare and they shouldn't get another dime of U.S. taxpayer money and they should not, hold on.
Their lobby should register as a foreigner.
That's a good segue.
Finish that.
And they should stop blackmailing our politics.
Got it.
So back to Josh.
Back to Josh.
Dave had some uninterrupted time there.
Let's now address that because, you know, again, there's a text chain.
I have all the text to prove it.
Everyone knew where this debate was going, right, Dave?
There's been no surprises.
Josh, you knew that there are some concerns, and Dave mentioned it, such as I think you're saying APAC.
Is that correct?
Well, the broader Israel lobby, that's certainly part of it.
Can you address this, Josh?
Because this is a question people are confused about.
Take two to three minutes on this.
And then build out the ally Israel at the end of it.
But Josh, Dave is making a point I'd like you to respond to.
Okay, so first of all, I'm not a fan of AIPAC.
I donated once to APAC, $54, like a decade ago, and I basically got swindled into doing it.
So I'm not a fan of APAC.
But APAC is not this nefarious bogeyman that Dave Smith Peel make it out to be.
It stands for America-Israel Political Action Committee.
It is a group of Americans who place a premium on the U.S.-Israel relationship the same way that the NRA is a group of Americans who place a premium on the Second Amendment.
I do too.
I'm a concealed carry kind of guy myself.
Same way that there are any number of other lobby groups that support any number of other things.
By the way, there's also similar groups similar to APAC for American citizens who support U.S. relations with other foreign countries.
Funny how these other groups never get brought up in this debate.
For instance, anyone who's been to Glendale, California, you probably heard folks in Anka.
That's the Armenian National Committee of America, a very loud, active group in Washington, D.C. Perhaps more nefariously, there is the NIAC, the National Iranian American Council.
It's funny how in these debates, when you talk about various American citizens who get involved to lobby or to express their political opinion as the First Amendment gives you the right to do, because they think that the U.S. national interest is served by allying with a certain country, it's funny, and perhaps a little worse than funny, how the whole registrar as a foreign agent talking point comes up only in one context, in one context only, which is AIPAC.
Look, the notion, Charlie, that AIPAC, which again, I'm not a fan of, I have literally...
Why are you not a fan of API?
Yeah, I'm not a fan of APAC for the reason that I'm just about to give, actually, which is that APAC exists.
Their raison d'etre, their entire purpose for existing, is to secure large-scale annual appropriations, currently about $3.8 billion annually, in U.S. aid to Israel.
I'm not a particularly big fan of foreign aid in general, and I've been arguing for literally a decade that the U.S. should wind down foreign aid to Israel in particular.
I think it actually is a bad idea for both countries.
Do we have agreement on that?
Yeah.
If you want to wind it down to zero tomorrow, we have agreement on that.
I can't do it tomorrow because.
I'd support one agreement.
So we have agreement on an end point?
Yes, sure.
Okay.
Keep going, Josh.
Yeah, so you obviously.
Yeah.
Oh, you guys are good people.
They just cheered for agreement.
I like this crowd.
That's the point.
We're not here just to hurl insults.
You could do that online.
This is here to actually have some sort of, we're a nation.
These are our fellow citizens.
We've got to figure this stuff out.
Josh, Keep going.
Yeah, so you obviously can't do it tomorrow because that would be to betray an ally in the middle of a hot war that would send a terrible signal to other allies, Saudis, Emiratis, you name it.
So you can't do it tomorrow.
But I do agree that you should have a game plan five, 10, 20 years, whatever it is.
I don't really care.
Honestly, get a game plan in place to phase out this aid.
It's not good for the United States.
It's crony capitalism, Eisenhower Defense Industrial Complex, Boeing North of Grumman.
All of that is totally true.
And then from Israel's perspective, it's also bad for them too because it makes them overly reliant.
It actually ends up undermining the entire notion of Zionism, the notion that the Jews should control their own right to their own existence in their own homeland undermines Zionism in the long run itself.
So it's actually bad for both countries.
But Charlie, this notion that AIPAC is this big, powerful lobby can be dispelled with literally one anecdote.
And I only need one anecdote to dispel this oft-repeated notion, which is the entire 2014 to 2015 Barack Obama-Iran nuclear debate.
The fact that the JCPOA, Barack Obama's joint comprehensive plan of action nuclear deal passed, is literally the singular data point that disproves the entire alleged existence of the nefarious Israel lobby that controls all politicians there.
They failed epically to get that pass.
But I do have a question, Charlie, for Dave there, which is...
Okay.
Well, Charlie, I would be very, very curious, based on Dave's recent tweets about Donald Trump doing XYZ things, whether it's covering up for a pedophile ring or engaging in foreign wars, all on behest of a foreign power, does Dave actually think that Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and the entire Trump administration are literally bought off by the Jews?
Is that actually your honest stance?
Okay, so what Josh is asking.
Yeah, first of all.
Well, it's always, look, all of this, I mean, I threw a touch follow-up for you guys.
No, but I'm sorry, but just like everything you just said, like all of it, I just find to be like the cheapest debate tactics.
First off, I never said anyone's bought off by the Jews.
We're both Jewish, and that's a dirty little trick you play.
I'm talking about a foreign.
Yeah, I'm talking about a foreign government, and then you kind of imply.
And no, again, this is all just straw man.
This whole thing of like Dave saying APAC is this big, bad monster that controls everything, and therefore.
Hold on.
Therefore, if I have one data point of where a policy that APAC didn't want gets through, that disproves the whole narrative.
And then this distraction with talking about the Armenian lobby or this other, it's like, yeah, well, if we were having a discussion about that, maybe that would come up.
But we're talking about this.
And to compare APAC to the NRA, who, by the way, are kind of sellouts and don't go nearly far enough.
I'll write that.
Like, I'm a hardcore gun rights guy.
We got more agreement.
We love our guns, don't we, everybody?
Yeah.
Now, you know, the NRA guys who always go, the key is to enforce existing gun laws.
No, the key is to repeal every last one of the existing guns.
There should be one law, one law, the Second Amendment.
That's the law.
Okay, but all that.
No, it is totally different to have a group of Americans advocating for a constitutionally protected natural right for American citizens than to have a group of Americans advocating for a foreign government in conjunction with that foreign government.
That's a different thing.
And to even compare, let me finish, Josh.
And to even compare them is ridiculous.
And listen, by the way, I'll just say this.
Every single person in this room, you have to hate APAC.
You don't even have a choice.
You're here at Turning Point USA.
APAC contributes millions of dollars to woke progressive Democrats if they support Israel.
In other words, it's okay to destroy our country as long as that helps Israel.
So I'm sorry.
I don't know.
Turning point USA, this is my first time here.
Quick question.
Are we allowed to support groups that contribute millions of dollars to woke progressive Democrats?
Because I thought the answer was no.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Brand new year, brand new opportunities to change the world for the better.
It's easier than you might think.
You can save babies by providing ultrasounds with a pre-born.
Together with the Sanctity of Human Life Month, we're going to save 35,000 babies to show the world that not only do we believe life is precious, but we're going to do something about it.
Your gift to pre-born will give a girl the truth about what's happening in her body so that she can make the right choice.
What better way to start this new year than to join us to save babies?
And $28 a month will save a baby a month all year long.
A $15,000 gift will provide a complete ultrasound machine that will save thousands of babies for years and years to come.
It will also save moms from a lifetime of pain and regret.
I am a donor to this organization, and you should be too.
Start this new year by being a hero for life.
Call 833-850-2229 or click on the pre-born banner at CharlieKirk.com.
That is CharlieKirk.com and click on the Preborn banner.
I'm a donor, you should be too.
CharlieKirk.com, Preborn Banner.
So Josh, and then Dave, I'm going to have a tough follow-up for you, so take a drink of water.
Josh, what would you say to that?
Because look, I wouldn't, some people would ask the question, okay, does APAC have more power than like your traditional Armenian lobby?
And more broadly, let's just take it more broadly, like, is there any concern that, or how would you address the concern, let me put it this way, how would you address the concern that some people have that a foreign government tends to have an outsized amount of platform in the U.S. government?
Charlie, I think that there are tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans who care a lot about U.S. relations with the state of Israel for understandable reasons.
This literally goes back, by the way, those of you who are familiar with your American history, this literally goes back to the American founding.
The American founders were extremely, extremely eloquent and outspoken about this.
From George Washington to John Adams to Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln's famous February 1861 speech referring to Americans as an almost chosen people.
They quoted the Hebrew Bible over and over and over again.
They understood that the Christianity upon which America is predicated is not exclusively, but has a lot of Old Testament Hebrew Bible emphasis therein.
And that has been part of our Constitution, part of our legal code, part of our moral code since day one.
So it is completely reasonable for people in the year 2025 to look at that, to look at all the other things we've talked about when it comes to deterring Islamism and Sharia supremacism, when it comes to trying to achieve this Abraham Accord-style nationalist realist foreign policy, when it comes to deterring the Iranian regime and their various proxies, it's very, very understandable for American citizens, again, Americans, to look at that and to conclude that we have important reasons for allying with Israel.
They are not doing so on behalf of a foreign government.
This framing is absurd.
It's utterly absurd.
They are doing so because they are patriotic Americans and they feel it is their subjective sense that as patriotic Americans that this alliance is further.
And they are U.S. passport holders.
Some people think that they're strictly foreign nationals.
Is that correct?
Yes, and that's just simply just not true.
Now, again, I say that, by the way, as someone who's been very critical of AIPAC, but it's just simply not true.
We're using that as a filler term.
So now, Dave, for you, two quick ones.
Do you think that the Council for American Islamic Relations should register as a foreign agent?
Yeah, I don't think there should be any groups advocating on behalf of foreign governments.
You're being consistent.
Secondly, though, and Josh did not say this, but he laced it in through one of the salvos that was, he said, you know, Dave, you're accusing them of being bought by the Jews.
Now, Dave, there is a rise of, I just think, some disgusting stuff online.
I'm not blaming you for this.
I'm not one of those people, right?
But what do you have to say that there's this, like, dark Jew hate out there?
And you see it, and I see it.
I hate it.
It's not good.
And everyone in this audience, guys, don't get yourself involved in that.
I'm telling you, it will rot your brain.
It's bad for your soul.
It's bad.
It's evil.
I think it's demonic.
And so, Dave, though, how do you navigate being critical of a foreign government while also, like, some people say, well, your fans hate you.
You're not responsible, your fans.
That is dumb.
That is terrible.
I don't believe that.
At the same time, though, Dave, you have a big responsibility on your shoulders, right?
Because you're saying something that is heterodox, not in popular opinion, that some people are trying to use to push a much more sinister agenda.
Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
And I think that the fact is that the policies that America, the U.S. government is pursuing are almost guaranteed to create this.
And look, I think there's a lot of factors here.
I don't have nearly enough time to kind of give all of my thoughts on this.
But I think as you young people know, right, even though kind of over the last year with Trump's victory, wokeism has been receding, at least to some degree, it really can't be overstated how much every institution in American life bought into racialism over the last 15 years.
And it's like these young kids came up in an environment where that was just considered normal.
Like you judge people by their race and make racialist arguments.
And yes, now that has also been embraced by some people on the right.
I will say that I think what I think the best thing to always do in these situations is tell the truth, try to be a good person, try to deliver your message in the most compelling way, and let the chips fall where they may.
But I do think that the level of Israeli control over our politics is frankly pretty undeniable as much as people try to.
Look, just think one example, right, of this.
So Donald Trump, you remember at the end of the 12-day war when Donald Trump starts pushing for a ceasefire, and then what does Israel do?
They come in and start bombing regime targets, not nuclear sites.
They come in and start bombing.
And then Donald Trump was furious with Netanyahu.
Obviously, he had his most angry moment toward Netanyahu when he said, they both don't know what the F they're doing.
I kind of love that moment for the record.
I love it.
I love that moment too.
But then the next day, he's right back to just advocating that they drop the charges against Netanyahu.
He's still going to continue funding Netanyahu unconditionally.
You know, anyone else, Donald Trump, would have come up with a nickname for him already and just been smashing him all over the place.
He was trying to lure America into a war that Donald Trump didn't want to get into.
But he said he did because he literally chose to get involved.
Like, that was Donald Trump's decision.
Right, but it was also his decision.
Because Israelis had a backup for him.
Right, right, but it was also his decision to push for a ceasefire and to try to end the thing.
And Israel agreed immediately.
No, they bombed the crap out of him immediately.
That's why Trump was so upset.
Same more question.
I want to phase out USAID to Israel, okay?
I established that.
Allegedly, Prime Minister Netanyahu is now getting on board with that as well.
Certainly a lot of people in his coalition told me.
I'll believe that when I say that.
Well, he's basically said that, so you should believe it.
But politicians saying something.
Let Josh finish his question.
You should believe.
Dave, let Josh finish his question.
If the Israeli government were to agree that that is the best policy, and if the United States were to do that, then what in God's name is your actual problem?
Well, I'm sorry.
So if America was not propping up Israel and America was not— Well, there's other military intervention, obviously.
So I'm not sure I'd follow.
be very happy to wind down the foreign aid.
But other than that, what is my...
But no, I mean, I do think objectively what Israel's doing to Gaza is horrible.
I think you couldn't do it without us.
So make that case.
If they were, I would still be against that.
We have to go fast because people have flights and stuff.
But I want to get to this, right?
And we still haven't gotten to the final conclusion.
So let's talk Gaza because first I want to go, Josh, on October 7th, because I want you to remind people what happened on October 7th.
And Dave, I'll be honest, I think your portion of the debate, your portion of your community could do a better job of remembering the horror on October 7th.
I'm just going to be honest.
I'm not putting that on you.
I'm saying just your community.
But I'm going to have, right?
That's just me.
I want you just to think, because I think we kind of forget because there was something unique and terrible.
Josh, I want you to talk about that.
And then I want you to make the best case you can because every human being is made in the image of God.
I don't like seeing dead kids anywhere.
I don't like seeing dead kids in Gaza.
I don't like it.
So we're Christians here.
So, Josh, I want you to kind of walk us through the series of events because it can't be lost than us.
Talk about Gaza.
Talk about the horror of October 7th.
Then, Dave, I want you to talk about your criticism about Gaza.
And then I'm going to ask you a follow-up, Dave, about something that happened from the Joe Rogan show.
Josh, you first.
I'm just curious.
Has anyone just put your hand up and make some noise?
Have you been, any of you, to the parts of Israel that were slaughtered by Hamas?
Anyone?
All right, a few people.
Okay.
So I was also there a few months after it happened.
If you haven't been there, it's very difficult to describe what you see.
You see these kibbutzim, these small villages.
By the way, these were typically left-wingers.
These were peaceniks that were establishing their villages on the border to try to engage in pen-pal diplomacy, if you will, with the Arabs of Gaza.
These are very kind of left-wing peacenik people.
And you see just kitchenware throughout the streets, teddy bears everywhere, blood-stained walls, bullet holes as far as the eye can see.
It's very difficult to describe.
The only time that I had that similar feeling walking around places like Kafaraza was when I was in Treblinka, the Nazi concentration camp itself.
So, look, in total, and there's a brand new report talking about the extent of the mass raping and sexual violence that Hamas committed on October 7th combined, you're looking at roughly 1,200 people slaughtered.
By the way, not all Israeli nationals.
Dozens of Americans were either murdered or taken hostage in Gaza as well.
In total, something like 40 to 50 different nationalities were represented of those who were slaughtered on October 7th.
In fact, just looking at it from a very strictly, narrowly American perspective, October 7th amounted on its own terms to the largest American-only hostage crisis since Tehran in 1979 because of all the American citizens who were then taken hostage into Gaza.
So it was an unspeakable atrocity.
We don't really have all the answers to this day as to how it happened.
Perhaps we never will.
I certainly hope to get some clarity at some point there.
But it was the single deadliest day for the Jewish people since World War II.
And given Israel's small size, it's roughly the equivalent of 45 to 59-11s, if you can possibly contextualize that.
So that was what precipitated this war.
And it was a war that Israel Charlie did not want, as you know.
Hamas took over in 2007.
Israel repeatedly, time and time again, decided not to try to topple Hamas under the idea that you could potentially have an even worse alternative, better to deal with the devil that you know, and so forth there.
October 7th, I think extremely reasonably, given the sheer level of carnage and terror and just outright satanic, demonic evil that happened, they quite reasonably concluded that that policy simply had to end.
And what's happened in Gaza for the past year and a half, almost two years now, has been a protracted war in one of the most condensed urban environments in the world.
It is very, very, very, very difficult war-fighting conditions.
I would like to remind you just of at least one or two very simple facts.
One is that let's not forget that Hamas, who Israel is at war against in Gaza, is a U.S.-recognized foreign terrorist organization.
They are indistinguishable in that respect from al-Qaeda or ISIS or any of these other foreign terrorist organizations.
They are a rabid jihadist network that, like all these other jihadis and Sharia supremacists, also wants to kill not merely Jews, but Christians and all infidels.
They say that very clearly in the 1987 founding charter.
That is point number one.
Point number two, Charlie, you mentioned that this is a very Christian audience.
I am Jewish.
We happen to share most of the Bible.
And I am a firm believer in Genesis 127, that we are all made in God's image.
That is one of my foundational beliefs in everything.
I write about this at great length in my book, Israel and Civilization.
To me, that's the single foundational ethical imperative of all of Western civilization.
It informs my pro-life views and so much else.
So I, like you and like so many others, also weep whenever innocent people are dead.
There are two points to make, and I'll make them very briefly because I know I'm sensitive to time.
One is that we know, because we actually have people like John Spencer, the head of urban warfare studies at West Point, who have actually been able to crunch numbers, we know that when you actually look at the civilian to combatant death ratios in Gaza, it is the most humane civilian to combatant death ratio in the entire history of urban warfare.
John Spencer was there, by the way, in 2016, 2017 in Fallujah, Iraq, during the Trump-led ISIS counterinsurgency.
The United States Army, God bless them, did not even do quite as well as the IDF in terms of civilian to combatant death ratio, according to John Spencer of West Point.
Point number two, which is a very simple point that Dave Smith and his friends always like to look over, is that when you're just trying to ascribe moral culpability to every single tragic death in Gaza, Charlie, you made this point so, so well in your recent debates over in England against these high-fluid and British foe intellectuals at Cambridge and Oxford, when you said that the moral culpability comes with people who are using human shields.
That is just how it works.
That is the law of war.
That is the law of combat.
That is just basic morality and logic 101.
So that is essentially how I see Gaza.
I know Dave has plenty to say in response to that.
So Dave, take two minutes and then I have a crisp follow-up.
Yeah, I mean, geez, there's a lot there.
First of all, look, if you support what Israel's doing to Gaza right now, I would just, like, my advice to you guys is just know that you never have a leg to stand on claiming to be pro-life for the rest of your life.
Just saying that.
Oh, it's okay.
So it's okay to support a policy.
Let's not boo our speakers.
It's okay to support a policy that is killing babies.
All of a sudden, killing babies is negotiable.
All right, fine.
I'm just leaving the room.
So Dave, why don't you?
No, no, no, I'm not talking about it.
Hold on, hold on.
Back up, back top.
Hold on, back up.
Dave, why don't you?
Why don't I just let you go on this whole long-term?
I know, I'm going to actually help you out here, Dave, okay?
What I'm doing is I want you to tell the audience what's going on in Gaza, because some people in the audience don't know what's going on.
So don't assume they know, and let's not get back to you.
Oh, okay.
Well, I did assume that most people know that lots of babies are being killed in Gaza.
But maybe I shouldn't have assumed that.
Don't be sarcastic about it, Dave.
Instead, I mean this.
No, I meant that.
I was a conversation loop where they're on social media all the time, okay?
So walk through numbers.
Walk through what animates you to say something like that.
Well, okay.
Well, let me respond to a few of the things that Josh claimed.
I mean, if you want to go, there was just a major report a couple weeks ago in Heretz, the Israeli newspaper, where they had a bunch of IDF soldiers.
They actually had one who went on record who was saying that they were ordered to shoot at crowds of people who were going into left-wing filth, by the way.
Josh, I let you talk.
Let's please let Dave make his case.
Well, is the IDF soldier who went on the record also filth?
Probably.
Okay.
All right, there you go.
So see, you're whatever.
That's when you'll criticize the IDF.
Look, Josh is just lying when he says that Israel supported Hamas for all those years because they feared there might be a worse alternative.
It's just not true.
And this has been so widely reported.
You don't have to rely on Horetz.
You can rely on all types of reporting, or you can just look at all of the leaders in their own words, what they said.
They chose Netanyahu, and this was very controversial in Israel.
There were lots of critics of this.
Netanyahu thought he had this brilliant idea, which is that he would prop up Hamas and keep them in power.
His exact quote was, we can control the Height of the flame.
So he was like, We'll keep these terrorists in power, and that way we can tell the entire international community that, look, we have no partner for peace, we have no one to deal with here, and that way we never have to negotiate with the Palestinians.
This was the game that he played, and it blew up in his face and really blew up in the Israeli people's face on October 7th.
And I've never downplayed October 7th.
I know, but I'm just making the point that I never have.
Thank you for that.
It was a horrible totally.
You don't have to downplay any of that.
And in fact, I've criticized many other critics of Israel who have downplayed that.
It was a horrible day.
Awful, atrocious acts were committed by Hamas terrorists.
But at the same time, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was propping those guys up, in fact, according to the Israeli former defense secretary, he sent the head of the Mossad to Qatar to, quote, beg them to continue shipping the money in.
Meanwhile, they had a blockade around Gaza.
They wouldn't let sugar, they wouldn't let potatoes in, because they claim that's dual use.
That could be used to build rockets so the kids can't get food.
Yet, hundreds of millions of dollars in cash directly to Hamas.
I guess money doesn't have a dual use.
So, you know, the whole mission of this, what you can't even really call a war, because it's not a war, it's the destruction of a captive people.
Gaza's been occupied since 1967 by the Israelis.
And they're now just slaughtering the people there under, that's a fact.
And it's under the supposed goal that they want to eliminate Hamas, and they want to retrieve the hostages.
And yet, Hamas is not being eliminated.
The Israeli government is claiming that they've killed 20,000 of their fighters, and yet there's still as many as there were at the beginning.
Let me ask you the follow-up that I wish that I had an answer to when you were on the Joe Rogan show, but that thing descended into a mess, right?
It was madness.
So I'm going to try to do it here.
This was the best point that I think that you, for whatever reason, it wasn't answered.
How then should Israel have responded to October 7th?
Be specific.
I know you might say, well, don't kill kids, but hold on.
How would you say you would be okay for Israel to respond?
Because it would be a defensive war at that time.
1,300 of their own kids and women were killed and raped.
So please just answer, how then would you be okay with Israel responding to October 7th?
Yeah, well, I certainly, look, I'm not saying that Israel was going to respond with zero violence from after October 7th.
But I think the important thing to remember here is that, first of all, for the entire history of Israel's existence, they've been dealing with this terrorism problem.
Now, I would argue that the Palestinians have been dealing with a terrorism problem from Israel as well.
But this is, and they've never, until Netanyahu, they never treated it as a problem for the regular old military.
It was always targeted assassinations and special ops.
And look, the truth is, this is the fact, right?
When you have been occupying a group of people since 1967, Israel has completely controlled Gaza.
They withdrew 20 years ago.
Yes, okay.
And if you want to go back and look at this, you can read.
Sharon's top advisor, in his own words, said the disengagement was to put the people.
We're running out of time.
I know, but it's not.
Okay, I won't be able to go through all of this, but it's not true.
Israel continued to occupy the whole time.
And when people broke out of the...
Okay.
So when people break out of Gaza and just start slaughtering civilians in Israel, yes, it was a horrible day and the world feels for those civilians, but at the same time, you have to know if you're Israel that the way that you respond to this is going to be how you're characterized in the international community.
And so you would at least make some effort to not kill so many civilians.
You can't, dude, Smotrich, the finance minister, was bragging for three months that not one ounce of grain would get into Gaza.
Hamas has all the needs.
Hamas has all the food.
Dude, you interrupt every two seconds, dude.
Hamas has all the food they need.
This is a war on the civilian population.
And then, as is reported, admitted by IDF.
By the way, this is admitted by the Israeli government.
You can say whatever you want about Horetz.
They denied that they gave the orders, but they admitted that it was the IDF who was shooting at those people.
Then after you deny the civilians food for three months, then you start shooting at the people who are desperately trying to get some food for them and their kids.
So no, listen, I'm sorry.
And I guess I am partly rejecting the premise of your question.
Well, let me just say it like this, Charlie.
If you're pro-life and you say I You should not buy this food.
Just let Dave finish his sentence.
Shut up, bro.
It's not pro-life here.
It's a stupid argument.
You haven't heard the argument.
What's the argument that's stupid?
Dave, you're not pro-life, it feels like it's not.
No, what's the argument?
It's Hamas.
That is not pro-life.
What's the argument?
I just called stupid.
What's the argument?
Hold on one second, Josh.
What's the argument that you called the watch?
What's the argument that you called stupid?
Why don't you finish it, Josh?
Because he doesn't even know what it is.
He interrupted me before I even said it.
Okay, here's the argument.
If you're pro-life, it's not incumbent on you to have a plan for what the mother ought to do with the baby.
Like, you don't have to have a plan for daycare and college funds and all that.
You just say, hey, I think this option should be off the table.
I don't think you have the right to murder the baby while it's inside of you.
Likewise, I'm not saying I have to have the perfect plan.
If we had more time, I could expand on what I think they should have done.
But how about don't deny one ounce of grain for three months and then shoot at the poor people who are trying to get food?
Josh, how about you take that option off the table?
Is that argument stupid, Josh?
Dave.
Okay, Josh.
The party in Gaza that is not pro-life is Hamas.
Agreed.
Hamas is the jihadist U.S.-recognized foreign terrorist organization that in their founding charter, by the way, they were founded simply as the Palestinian Arab offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
We all agree Hamas is bad.
Well, no, I'm not going to sit here while he interrupts me every time I say he can ever interrupt me.
Look, I know there are a lot of choices when it comes to who you choose for your cell phone service.
There are new ones popping up all the time.
But the truth is, there's only one that boldly stands in the gap for every American that believes that freedom is worth fighting for, And that is Patriot Mobile.
For more than 12 years, Patriot Mobile has been on the front lines fighting for our God-given rights and freedoms, also providing exceptional nationwide cell phone service with access to all three of the main networks.
Don't just take my word for it, as the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have made the switch and are now supporting causes they believe in simply by joining Patriot Mobile.
Switching is easier than ever to activate minutes from the comfort of your own home.
Keep your number, keep your phone or upgrade.
Patriot Mobile's all U.S.-based support teams standing by to take care of you.
Call 972 Patriot today or go to PatriotMobile.com slash Charlie.
It's going to code Charlie for a free month of service.
Go to PatriotMobile.com slash Charlie or call 972 Patriot and make the Twitch today.
Dave, respectfully, you are criticizing him for interrupting.
So don't do that.
So just let's have an uninterrupted narrative.
Thank you.
Okay.
Hamas calls in their founding charter for the death not merely of every Israeli, not merely every Jew, but of every infidel, which they identify as not merely all Christians, but also all Muslims who don't subscribe to their idiosyncratic form of Sunni Sharia supremacism.
So the group in Hamas, assuming the group in Gaza that is not pro-life, is Hamas.
And Hamas has the unequivocal, and I would argue sole moral culpability for the human shield-induced deaths of all the women, civilians, and babies when they are indiscriminately firing rockets, mortars, and missiles from mosques, from United Nations schools, and on.
That is where the blame goes.
The blame goes to Hamas.
Once upon a time, anyone with any decent functioning moral compass or any knowledge of international law 101 would have been able to tell you that.
So that is where this goes.
But again, it's just you pivot to blaming Hamas, and they're the ones who aren't pro-life.
As if I was making the claim that Hamas is pro-life, I'm criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu for funding and propping up this horrific terrorist organization.
So how are you in one breath going to talk about how terrible they are and then completely remove culpability from the guy who kept them?
I am curious.
Got it.
I'm curious.
I got to interrupt.
What is your response to the human shield argument?
It has been proven.
It is legit.
What is your response to a fact?
We don't know how widespread it's done, but I think it's rather that Hamas uses human shields.
Yeah, they certainly have.
Like, I'm not denying that.
But at the same time, like, it's kind of, you know, if, let's say, like, in a domestic criminal situation, if there was somebody who killed a bunch of people and then they ran into a school and they're like using the kids as human shields, they're hiding behind the kids.
And then your local police department came over and said, blow up the school and killed all the kids.
You wouldn't go, well, they have no moral responsibility because they were using them as human shields.
Yeah, as Bill Burr said in his special, you got to work around that, bro.
And like, Hamas is terrible.
Nobody's arguing with that.
But that doesn't mean there's no responsibility for the people dropping the bomb.
And by the way, again, as you don't want to talk about, how about when they're shooting at people trying to get aid?
There were no human shields there.
I don't know if you're going to have to go.
I don't look at a picture of Gaza.
Human shields does not describe most of what's happened to Gaza.
Yes, there are certain instances.
And by the way, Israel also has a bunch of military targets in civilian areas.
I'm just saying, that doesn't actually mean it's okay to just, now you have a moral get out of jail free card to do whatever you want to the poor innocent people who, as you pointed out, are also victims of Hamas.
Josh.
And that's what people are objecting to.
Josh, what is your response to, I know there was some pushback online to the shooting at the aid site with food.
Is that as Dave is telling it?
Charlie, honestly, I have not spent too much time on the details, but what I can tell you is this.
We know for a fact that at least until the recent Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is this U.S.-organized NGO distributing aid, we know that prior to the establishment of this, Hamas was pilfering and confiscating a shockingly high percentage of the aid that entered Gaza, sometimes well more than 50%.
Because that's what they do.
They have monopoly of use of force in Gaza, and they were essentially just artificially inflating the prices of the actual Gazans' goods and then stealing it all for themselves.
That's what Hamas does.
It is a deeply corrupt kleptocracy, in addition to being a jihadist hellhole.
Now, the new aid group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is a noble and righteous effort.
That guess who opposes it?
Hamas.
Hamas are the ones who actually have started indiscriminately shooting, even much more so than whatever anecdote Dave Smith is talking about.
Hamas is the one that has actually started indiscriminately shooting at this U.S., perpetuated this U.S. orchestrated new aid distribution organization because Hamas doesn't like the fact that the United States under Donald Trump, God bless him, has found a way to get around the Hamas monopoly on aid distribution in Gaza.
We are way over time.
And so now I want to end with what we want.
Okay, we both are challenging, we're defending, so we got to go fast.
Josh, I'm going to start with you.
What are you pushing for?
What is success?
What is the end destination?
What are you prescribing?
What are you offering?
And then Dave will let you do it.
And then please don't interrupt.
Charlie, great, great debate.
Thank you for moderating this.
So I support the Trump Doctrine of Foreign Policy.
I have been a staunch proponent of the Trump Doctrine since the Trump Doctrine first came into instantiation during the first Trump presidency.
The Trump Doctrine, again, is neither neoconservative nor isolationist.
It is a nationalist, realist, America-first approach to foreign policy that understands three things.
One, America's number one focus this century must be on combating our actual civilizational foe, the Chinese Communist Party.
Two, America has declining resources.
Three, the way to deal with both those two is to prioritize in non-Indo-Pacific regions of the world, allies who are capable of securing and patrolling their neck of the woods in a way that redounds not just to their national interests, but to the American national interests.
That in the Middle East is Israel.
We've seen that time and time again throughout the Middle East.
And again, Charlie, just to drive home this point there, the guy who understands this better than anyone, despite this whole kind of very online debate about what MAGA or America First should think about foreign policy and U.S.S relations, the guy who understands this the best, as he recently reminded us, is the guy who literally defined the terms, MAGA and America First.
To Donald Trump, it is completely commonsensical.
It is utterly logical.
It flows from first principles that to be America First is to necessarily support tight-knit, close-knit U.S. relations.
We saw this in the U.S.-Iran war.
We saw the B-2 bombers do what they did, and God bless them for dropping those bombs in that 37-hour interval.
That would not have been possible were it not for the Israelis laying the groundwork with the Iranian air defenses and Hezbollah the year prior in 2024.
It was the Trump doctrine and U.S.-Israel relations at work.
So, Charlie, my vision is for an independent Israel where we ultimately wind down aid and for Israel to be the beacon of protecting and securing American interests in the Middle East, just like other countries can then take responsibility in different regions of the world so that America can then focus on China.
Look, I think if you guys are being honest with yourselves, and I do think we should really think about the threats that we really do face here at home, and I'm talking about the Democrats coming back into power.
Forget all these made-up threats about other countries that really can't mess with us at all.
I don't know if you guys have noticed, and you could say it's a very online debate all you want to, this hasn't been a good month for Donald Trump.
His base is really kind of turning on each other, and these are major issues that are dividing his coalition.
And this is J.D. Vance winning in a few years is not a given.
You know, like the Democrats are going to come back and offer someone.
And if we want to have a chance to keep progress going and to get our country in a better place, what we have to do is reject empire and return to being a republic that we were supposed to be.
The United States of America was never supposed to be an empire.
We were supposed to be a republic, a constitutional republic, a city on a hill that the world could learn from our example because we do liberty so much better than anybody else does.
And we've gotten so far away from that over the years.
And like I mentioned at the beginning, look, this is the big point.
We're going broke.
We can't afford to do this anymore.
It shouldn't even be a question of whether we should be giving Israel money or whether we should be giving Ukraine money as Donald Trump's also decided to do this year.
We don't have it.
This is like me taking out money on a credit card to lend to my friends so I can act like I'm the big shot who's lending them money.
We are destroying our own young people.
You, not me.
I'm not a young person.
I'm fine.
I'm in my 40s and I make good money.
Your whole generation is getting screwed over by this because we have to devalue our currency in order to keep up with the demands for this spending that we cannot afford.
And so the answer is that we need to pull back.
We need to focus on America.
That's what America First is supposed to be about.
Not a government that spends $7 trillion a year and a crazy casino system on Wall Street with these incredibly low interest rates where people are making tens of millions of dollars off just speculating on nonsense.
And this is what, it's the warfare state that drives it.
Look, guys, we have spent $20 trillion since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan are over.
And we're looking at our biggest defense budget ever.
This is madness, and it will be the death of our country.
No Islamist is going to take down our country, but drowning in debt and empire will.
That's how great nations fall.
And the young Republicans need to reject that.
A republic, not an empire, like the great Patrick Buchanan said.
I want to just summarize.
This was time well spent.
Both Dave and Josh agree on some plan to wind down U.S.-Israel aid.
That was an agreement, correct?
The timeline you could debate about.
Number two, they both say every human is made in the image of God, and we should not trivialize when, you know, people are killed.
Also, I think we all agreed October 7th was awful.
It was terrible.
And it should be talked about more, and it needs to be emphasized.
We also agree this Jew hate stuff has no place in public discourse, period.
End of story.
And I don't like it.
It's disgusting.
And we need to call it out when we see it.
And finally, I think the fifth is that I hope we demonstrated, and both our participants got a little lively at times, that this is a debate worth having, that it's better to have this out in the open than silence people and censor them and call them names.
Instead, this is how we solve our problems.
Give it up for Josh and Dave one last time, everybody.
