Do the rights of Americans come from God or from the Democrat National Committee? Charlie reacts to an appalling and revealing statement by Sen. Tim Kaine, then talks to Ben Shapiro about Israel's air strike on Qatar, the truth about the George Floyd case, and his new book about the heroes and villains of American life. 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, Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
Van Jones attacks me, I respond, and Tim Kane says one of the darkest, most chilling things that I've ever heard a senator say.
And then Ben Shapiro joins the show.
We talk about George Floyd Israel and his latest book, Lions and Scavengers.
Email us as always, freedom at Charlie Kirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.
That is the Charlie Kirk Show podcast page and get involved today at turning point USA at TPUSA.com.
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Buckle up everybody here, we 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's running the White House, folks.
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 point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are gonna fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
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you When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.
And to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.
A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, organizing its powers in such form as them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
That is the beginning of our birth certificate.
That is our birthday, July 4th, 1776.
That is the Declaration of Independence.
Now you read this, articulated by Thomas Jefferson and the American founders, is a theory and an understanding of natural rights in government.
This is very simple elementary stuff.
Said differently, our rights come from God, not from government.
It makes our country unique.
What are natural rights?
Natural rights are basic freedoms we are born with because we are human.
The first of which is life, then liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
You do not earn them, and no government gives them to you.
They are built in.
Where do they come from?
They come from God or at the very least from nature's law.
Government does not make them.
They can only respect them or violate them.
Let me say that again.
Government does not make your rights.
Government can only respect them or violate them.
This is pretty non-controversial stuff, right?
Now I was in Asia last week.
I was in South Korea and Japan, and I saw this story, and I made a note to myself.
I gotta talk about it next week.
And yesterday was such a busy news day that we didn't have an opportunity to cover it.
It is without a doubt one of the darkest, most chilling things I have heard a U.S. Senator say.
And I we've heard some beauties.
This is not just some sort of local college campus studio.
No, people say all the time, Charlie, why do you debate these college kids all the time?
First of all, they're adults, they're voters, it's seen by millions of people.
All that.
But hold on.
This is a U.S. senator that does not know as much as some of the college students that I will be dialoguing with tomorrow at Utah Valley University in Utah.
This is Senator Tim Kane.
In one of the darkest pieces of tape that you will find.
This is a U.S. senator who went to Harvard.
So when I say that college is a scam, this is exhibit A. He went to Harvard with a JD.
Literally.
He has a JD from Harvard.
Tim Kane is talking to Bobby Kennedy about some health thing.
Some H that whole hearing was a drive-by shooting that the Democrats tried to do against, try to do against Bobby Kennedy.
And the U.S. Senator who supposedly pretends to be a devout Catholic.
So we're talking about where do rights come from.
This is fundamental.
What Tim Kane has said, I hear often from a lot of these campus activists.
You have to wonder how many Democrats also believe this.
Everybody, what you're about to listen to is exhibit A of evidence that the Democrat Party represents a country not called America.
The Democrat Party, they believe in a country that is not this country.
Tim Kane, what he says here, if what he says is true, then what we are is no different than China.
If what he says is true, we are no different than North Korean.
Chinese people have rights, they are just granted or denied by their government.
We are leading with this today because this is without a doubt one of the most important chilling clips ever.
And it's not even about a making fun of him.
This shows that we are up against an existential parasitic force that does not even share our simple birth certificate.
They have a different birth certificate for America, and it's not the Declaration of Independence.
Here is Tim Kane.
Play cut 342.
The notion that rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government, but come from the creator.
That's what the Iranian government believes.
It's a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Baha'is, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities.
And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their creator.
So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.
Woo.
He believes the government gives you rights, that laws give you rights.
That's why he's okay with aborting babies.
Because those humans have no rights because the government hasn't given those rights to him.
That's that's why he's fine with mutilating kids in trans surgeries, because those kids have no rights because the government hasn't given those rights.
Yeah, he's fine with potentially gulags because the government, there's nothing wrong with mass murdering people in gulags because the government didn't give those rights to them.
The government decided not to give them those rights.
And someone should ask Tim Kane.
Tim Kane, we're not even going to use the Holocaust example, because that one is overused.
Was Mao wrong to mass murder millions of people?
government decided not to give those people rights.
We believe in something transcendent above government that government appeals towards.
Government's job is to protect our unalienable rights that we were born with, that every human being is born with.
Our rights coming from God makes them inalienable because they are rooted in the equal God-given dignity shared by all human This is an inarguable spiritual element to our nation.
Some people say, oh, Tim Kane is kind of dumb.
Obviously, he is.
He went to Harvard, but that means absolutely nothing.
But it's worse than that.
He didn't come up with this.
He is simply a mockingbird parroting something that is infected the Democrat Party.
They don't think we have an alienable rights.
They think there's nothing special about being a human being.
If rights come from the government, the government can take them away whenever they want.
They can take away your right to speech, and yes, your right to life.
They can drone strike you whenever you want.
This is why America is unique.
Let me repeat again.
All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
This is why we are a refuge for liberty.
The founders tied our freedom to something higher than politics.
Tim Kane acts as if our rights are like a driver's license.
Driver's licenses can be given, suspended, or revoked.
That's what government-given rights look like.
Government given rights are like driver's licenses.
We believe that natural rights are your birthright.
You don't apply for them.
They're yours by birth.
It's because you're human.
If Tim Kane is, if Tim Kane is right, Stalin was justified, Hitler was justified, Mao is justified.
Maduro is justified.
Rights aren't favors from politicians.
Government does not give you freedom.
It protects the freedom you already have because you are a human being made in the image of God, and the natural law dictates that.
If government can give them to you, could take them away, that's not freedom.
These are not privileges.
These are not preferences.
There's something special about being a human being.
And that is not just some local yokel.
That's not just some sort of person college campus.
That is a U.S. senator who almost became vice president of the United States in 2016.
That yammering fool was inches away.
He was 40,000 votes away from becoming the vice president of the United States under Hillary Clinton.
So this is an existential issue and a little window into what we're fighting against.
This is more than just a difference of opinion.
It's of a difference of birthright.
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I mean, we commonly say, praise God, President Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming president, but praise God he prevented Tim Kane from becoming vice president.
And that alone, he should just have a permanent place in our hearts as doing a phenomenal contribution to American society.
We all dodged a bullet.
And I guarantee you, I mean, he said out loud because he's some staffer gave it to him, but I guarantee you Kamala Harris believes this.
They do not believe in the natural rights theory of government, which is self-evident.
As soon as you believe there's a natural law, of which there is, that normativity is woven into nature, that there is a natural being to our existence and physics and math and morality and thermodynamics, whatever.
You look as if there is a law in nature, then immediately you can say, then who is the law giver?
Once you admit there is a natural law, there's a law giver, and that is why Thomas Jefferson said the laws of nature and nature is God.
That is in the declaration.
The importance of natural rights is it makes your rights eternal and transcendent, and nobody can ever take those rights justly away from you.
It's a big deal when you think about it.
Email us as always, freedom at Charliekirk.com.
So last night on CNN, the only time I've ever watched CNN is when they mentioned me or Scott Jennings.
Own somebody.
So Van Jones, who's actually a very pleasant person, he's actually the nicest communist ever met in my life, and he's very sweet.
I met him uh during one of my things I shouldn't have been doing, which was advocating for prison reform.
It's I'm I'm atoning for my sins, everybody.
Okay.
Anyway, so so Van Jones was talking about me, and there's so much, there's so many lies involved in what he said here.
First of all, I never said the first element what he said.
I did say the second part, but this is a very important thing to focus on.
So Van Jones is saying I should be ashamed of myself.
And just reminder, the murder of Arena Zarutska, did you know that the attacker said, quote, I got that white girl?
The attacker racialized this, just for the record.
Now, mind you, do you notice that the media all of a sudden tries to play the moral high ground when we start to try to make them live up to the standard that they created and the construct that they forced and the paradigm that they constituted under George Floyd, the moment that we make them have to live up to their own standard, they start to cry foul.
As soon as we start to make them live up to the George Floyd standard, oh, what is Charlie Kirk racializing this?
And by the way, Van Jones also has a major lie embedded into this whole thing.
Listen carefully, race hustler, Marxist, Van Jones.
By the way, Van, you're welcome on my program.
I'll treat you well.
I will give you an uninterrupted opening statement.
Van Jones, if you want to go talk about black crime and urban decay, man, you're always welcome on this program.
Because even though, quote unquote, you're an expert in race hustling, I've been around the block a couple times.
I I know your tricks and they don't work here.
Your magical spells don't work here.
Your little hocus pocus, you are racist.
Doesn't work here.
We got holy water here.
Play cut 351.
For Charlie Kirk to say we know he did it because she's white when there's no evidence of that.
It's just pure race uh race mongering, hate mongering.
It's wrong.
Then he says that if something like that had happened the other way, there would be sweeping changes imposed on society.
Where is the George Floyd policing act?
It didn't pass.
Even when you had a white police officer murder a black man on live television, the whole world saw there were no sleeping changes.
In fact, not one law was passed at the federal level.
That we don't know how to deal with people who were hurting in the way this man was hurting.
Hurt people, hurt people.
What happened was horrible.
Someone like Charlie Kirk, he should be ashamed of himself.
No one mentioned the word race, white, black, or anything except him.
Okay, so there's a lot.
There's a lot there.
First of all, when Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, was asked repeatedly by the media, was there racial animus involved in Derek Chauvin's actions against George Floyd?
He said no, and they dodged the question.
Do you know that there is no evidence that Derek Chauvin acted racially?
If you think Derek Chauvin acted racially, then you're a racist and parting racial type fantasies and mythologies into a situation of which it does not exist.
And by the way, just if you're taking notes, media matters, George Floyd overdosed, okay?
You can write that down, take to the bank.
In fact, we have Ben Shapiro coming up next segment, of which I'm going to have him remind us of all the facts.
Anyway, that's not what it's even about.
Here is the tweet that I sent out.
Quote, if a random white person simply walked up to and stabbed a nice law-abiding black person for no reason, it would be an apocalyptically huge national story used to impose national sweeping political changes on the whole country.
Of course, this is true.
Everybody knows this is true.
Our media thirsts for stories like this.
I want you to imagine if a white guy sitting on a bus and a black woman just on her phone, all of a sudden the white guy took out a knife and just stabbed her in the neck repeatedly.
How do you think our media would react?
We would have protests.
Wendy's would have point.
I'll tell you right now, there would be a hundred burned Wendys around the world.
I mean, in every city.
I mean, it would be so on top, they'd start burning the Denny's.
They use Emmett Till 70 years later because of this, because it's a case of a horrifying murder of an innocent black person by hateful whites.
It's so rare they had to go back 70 years, but you know what?
When a white person is murdered, we don't burn down the country.
But when George Floyd overdosed on drugs, it's Floyd of Palooza.
But for the opposite, we have to go back one day.
Literally, there was another, you know, several happened this last week.
Another white girl was just murdered by a black person in Alabama, a woman butchered walking her dog.
There was also one that happened in South Carolina and one that happened in Virginia.
That is four white women in the American South that just recently were butchered by black criminals.
So we take a step back and say, well, what's really going on here?
What's really going on here is a situation where Van Jones is acting like if I said something I did not say, when in reality, we're asking a very simple question, Mr. Jones.
Very simple question, which is will you apologize for all the criminal justice reform that you pushed forward that allowed these 14-time criminal offenders to walk the streets?
Because you are the architect and the designer of constantly feeling bad for the criminal that then can kill more people like Irina Zarutsky.
And by the way, I did not bring up race.
The attacker said, quote, I got that white girl, end quote.
People say, why does the race matter?
Oh, it matters because you made us care about race in the summer of 2020.
Looks like you got it live up to the book of your own rules.
The second that we make you live up to your ridiculous paradigm, you collapse like a house of cards.
Gentlemen, let's get real for a second.
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Joining us now is a good friend, Ben Shapiro, author of Lions and Scavengers.
Uh, congratulations, Ben, on the new book, uh, The True Story of America, and we will get to that uh in great detail.
I want everyone to check it out.
It's Lions and Scavengers.
Uh Ben, I was refuting Mr. Van Jones on a variety of different things because he decided to attack me on CNN.
But I want to, you've done some really important work on George Floyd's cause of death.
Can you remind the audience what your study and your research showed about George Floyd overdosing on drugs?
Sure.
I mean, it was basically just the autopsy report.
I mean, the autopsy report showed that he had a massively enlarged heart, that he had extraordinary quantities of drugs, including fentanyl in his system, enough fentanyl to kill a normal person multiple times over.
The original coroner suggested that if they had found George Floyd dead in his home, they would have assumed that he died of a drug overdose.
If you actually watched the tape of the confrontation with the officers, he's saying I can't breathe well before he gets out of the car.
In fact, one of the reasons they take him out of the car is he is taken out at his own request.
And so, again, the the the medical evidence does not suggest that there's no damage to his trachea, there's no damage to his neck.
Uh, the medical evidence does not suggest that he actually died as a result of Derek Chauvin's knee on his neck.
It suggests that he died as a result of probably excited delirium, meaning elevated heart rate as a result of both ingesting drugs, in the large heart, and the excitement of being arrested.
Well, and on top of that, they also say that this was racially motivated.
Is there any evidence at all that there was racial animus in this situation?
So Van Jones said it was obviously a racial thing.
Hold on.
If you're you're actually imparting your own racial stereotypes onto a situation of which even Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, rejected the claim that race was involved in this.
Is that correct?
This is exactly right.
I mean, there was a federal civil rights charge that was brought against Derek Chauvin, and it did not even allege that there is a violation of civil rights on the basis of race.
So literally no one, not the prosecutor of the state, not the prosecutors federal, no one made the actual legal claim that the actions of Derek Chauvin were rooted in racism.
The best available criminal case against Derek Schumann would have been like a low-degree manslaughter case for negligence in his handling of the actual situation.
But literally zero evidence was provided to the idea that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd because George Floyd was black.
That just was not inevitable.
It wasn't even alleged.
So uh and you've done phenomenal work on this, everyone should should check it out.
It's really important.
Shifting gears here for a second.
So we're on team civilization here.
We want to see the maniacs of Hamas be defeated and the barbarians of Islam not be able to storm the gates of the West.
So we've seen um news this morning that quite honestly I'm a little confused by, and I was hoping you could navigate it and help us understand, which is that Israel uh bombed Qatar, which houses a lot of Hamas officials.
Uh, what happened here?
And if I were to introduce just a skeptical question, will this potentially endanger America's own interests in the Middle East?
So please, Ben, help me better understand the situation.
Sure.
So I think that the lead up to understand here is that Qatar sort of plays both sides when it comes to its negotiating stance between Hamas and Israel and the United States.
So it has provided extraordinary material support to Hamas directly.
Billions of dollars in material support to Hamas, the leadership of Hamas have been living in Qatar for years at five-star hotels.
Hamas's priorities have been pressed by Qatar in negotiations multiple times.
Qatar has not put significant pressure on Hamas in the past to release the hostages or to end The war.
And so basically, as Israel nears the end of the war, which is what this last movement in Gaza City is supposed to be, that there's a final offer that was put on the table actually by the Trump administration that essentially said that Hamas should release the remaining 48 hostages, meaning 28 dead bodies and 20 alive hostages, and the United States would then guarantee through his own honest brokerage, some sort of end to the war that would result in the disarming of Hamas and the movement of the Gaza Strip to presumably some sort of coalitional government supported by regional states and the rebuilding of the area.
And Qatar was pushing Hamas, apparently, we we heard.
And Hamas this morning in Arabic actually rejected it.
That's not been widely reported by the media, but it's true.
Hamas actually rejected the American offer.
president had put out via truth social a statement saying this is your last chance and if you don't do that bad things are going to happen the the idea that that israel would be able to fly 10 f-16s all the way across the middle east to qatar to strike a very specific terror target in doha without american knowledge beggars the imagination it It is extraordinarily unlikely to say the very least.
Honestly, it would not be wildly improbable if Qatar knew that that was coming as well.
And so Israel struck at the top level of the remaining Hamas in Qatar in an attempt to basically change the negotiating status.
So the basic idea here was if you will not negotiate, if you refuse to get to the end of this war, well, then maybe we'll find somebody who can.
Or maybe the idea is that you're safe nowhere until this war ends.
Additional pressure had to be brought to bear, and that's why Israel did what it did.
Obviously, I as well am on team civilization.
I'm very happy to see Hamas's top leaders killed.
I I hope that that as many of them in the in the leadership with as little loss of civilian life as possible.
I hope that as many of them died in this attack as it's humanly possible.
And again, I'd be very surprised.
I mean, we do know actually from contemporaneous reporting that the United States was at least given the heads up on the Israeli operation in the moments before it went.
I I just spent time in Japan, and one of the things that kind of looms over Japan is that Japan, they engage in an unconditional surrender that they said we're done.
And they laid down their arms, obviously after the two atomic bombs, very controversial.
People have mixed opinions on it.
I certainly do.
But that that it is unconditional surrender.
Is that what Israel is aiming for here?
I suppose that is a question that I get a lot on campus.
What does success look like?
Because I think we could all agree a long war is not good for Israel, a long drawn-out war, and we're now ending, we're coming towards two years uh in about a month.
So it's been about 23 months.
So what does ultimate success look like in the Gaza Strip?
So my main critique of the Netanyahu administration and Israel and Netanyahu government is they didn't move faster.
I think this should have been a much more accelerated process.
Israel set out at the beginning of this war with two goals, as articulated by the Israeli government.
Goal number one was to get as many hostages out as humanly possible to free the hostages, and second was to win the war.
In many ways, those are mutually exclusive goals, because if you actually wish to win the war, then you have to do things militarily that are going to involve actual movement on the ground.
And meanwhile, Hamas is attempting to basically use the hostages as its own form of human shields.
They've used their own civilians as human shields, they're also using the hostages as a form of human shield.
And so as you came to the end of the war, this is always going to be the question is how the war kind of came to its final terminus.
The priorities that Netanyahu has laid out publicly include essentially basically it's let the hostages out, and there can't be a future military threat to Israel.
Those are, if you had to sum it all up, those are the two things.
How that materializes, in my opinion, is likely to be an Israeli military occupation of large swaths of the Gaza Strip, the setting up of humanitarian areas, particularly on the coast and in Rafah, in which humanitarian aid is provided, a pathway out for people who actually want to leave.
This is the only conflict of which I'm aware on planet Earth, in which there are outside countries telling people who would like to leave that they literally cannot.
The Trump administration has been trying to facilitate the ability of people who want to leave to do so and has also been trying to facilitate the entry of not only humanitarian aid, but investment into the areas that have been cleared of terrorists, and then you can see some sort of Hamas free rebuilding.
That would be the goal of the end of the war.
Now, my understanding is that the sort of last untouched area of the Gaza Strip in terms of Israeli's serious military operations is Gaza City.
It's why there's been so much focus on Gaza City.
Last I heard, Israel already controls something, 40 to 50% of the territory in Gaza City.
They've been warning people to get out for at least a couple of weeks now.
Hamas has been stopping people at checkpoints and turning them back and shooting them if they don't stay in the city to be used as human shields by Hamas.
So that's the current situation on the ground.
What other feedback or criticism would you have about this situation?
I I know that it's impossible for anyone to listen to everything that you ever say.
But looking at this from an American perspective, what else would you say things could have been handled differently?
Maybe on the PR front, maybe also just on a conduct front.
Where would you say as an outsider things that could have been handled better, um, more efficiently or with more precision?
So, number one, there's there's no such thing as a perfect war.
So obviously, in any war, there are gonna be things that happen that are ugly and that are terrible, and that is why war is is a terrible thing.
As far as a sort of operational front, again, I've spent an awful lot of time in Israel.
I've watched tape of operations happening, drone operations.
Uh I've met with an enormous number of Israeli soldiers, young men and women, people who are 18, 19, 20 years old, who have had legitimately their limbs blown off, going house to house in an area where they didn't have to.
Uh the charge that Israel has been indiscriminate in its use of force in the Gaza Strip is an absurdity on its face.
Israel has complete air superiority over the Gaza Strip.
If it wanted to level the place and turn it into a parking lot October 8th, it certainly had the military capacity to do so.
It has not done that.
Instead, it has sacrificed legitimately a thousand of its own young men, particularly in these areas and thousands more who are wounded for the rest of their lives, going house to house in an attempt to prevent all that, and is currently shipping in forty, four hundred calories per day per person into the Gaza Strip, much of which is then stolen by Hamas.
So that that is not to say that anything that any war is perfect.
This war has been conducted in about as meticulous way uh as any urban war in history.
Just because war is ugly doesn't mean that it's being fought wrongly.
And I think that the the main mistake that Israel has made is misunderstanding how how public relations works in the sense that they couldn't have presented this war in a better, kinder way that people would have loved.
What they could have done is move faster.
And and the reality is that the American way of of doing war is to win as fast as possible.
And we don't like long drawn-out occupations.
We don't like long drawn-out military operations.
That's true in Iraq, it's true in Afghanistan, it's true in Ukraine, it's true in the Gaza Strip.
And so the kind of things that that we Americans like to see are, for example, the operations against Hezbollah that took about three weeks to five weeks, or the operation against Iran, which took about 12 days, right?
Those are operations that any ally of the United States can sustain.
Long operations like the one that Israel has been performing in the Gaza Strip are inherently very, very difficult uh from from PR level.
And I'm not sure, to be frank, that there is a way for Israel to quote unquote win the PR war in the middle of a very long war against an intransigent terrorist enemy that legitimately embeds itself in in the most damaging places.
Aaron Powell A claim I receive often, and we're starting our campus tour tomorrow is that Israel is committing genocide.
How do you respond to that then?
There there is literally no definition of genocide by which Israel is committing a genocide.
Typically a genocide involves the the targeted killing of the vast majority of the population, or at least an attempt to do so.
That there has never been a genocide attempted in world history in which the food that was being shipped in was more than the daily caloric intake of the average American into the areas where you're supposedly attempting to genocide the population.
The total population loss in the Gaza Strip thus far has been three percent.
During the Holocaust, just to take a reference, it was fifty percent.
During Rwanda, it was significantly higher than three percent.
You don't issue leaflet warnings to people.
You don't go house to house in a genocide in an attempt to reduce civilian casualties.
I I understand that people use genocide at this point to just mean thing I don't like.
And I get that.
I understand.
No nobody likes war.
Nobody wants war.
Certainly not the Israelis were not at war on October 6th.
Uh the the fact is that that every Israeli family has to send their 18-year-old son or daughter off to the military with the possibility that they're going to get blown up in Gaza.
That is not something that any Israeli wants, right, left, or center.
The the real question is whether the accusations are accurate.
They they certainly are not, again, by any stretch of the imagination.
Author uh Bet Ben Shvure author of uh Lions and Scavengers, we're gonna get to that in a second.
I have one or two other questions on Israel.
I think it's very important for our audience to hear this, though, because there is a an incessant campaign.
Um one thing a friend send to me interestingly, which is okay, Charlie, we've pushed back against the media on COVID, on lockdowns, on Ukraine, on the border, on so like maybe we should also ask a question is the media totally presenting the truth when it comes to Israel?
Just a question, you know, that maybe we shouldn't believe everything the media says, because I know I've been conditioned to ask a lot more critical questions over the last couple of years.
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So Ben, some people would accuse Israel of wanting to ethnically cleanse.
Some people in the Israeli government are saying, again, that's all over the place, right?
You have opinions all over.
In your opinion, what would a good outcome five years from now be and how does one respond to the claims of ethnic cleansing?
So ethnic cleansing, the idea, presumably that that population movement is equivalent to ethnic cleansing.
I think ethnic cleansing is a term that that's been fairly recently coined to describe population movement during war.
The reality is that's been ongoing for literally all of human history.
Uh the idea that that Israel is quote unquote forcing people out of the Gaza Strip, that is not the stated policy of the Israeli government.
The idea is if people want to leave, they can, but they're not being forced to leave.
Uh again, moving people out of heavily urbanized areas that are honeycombed with terrorist booby traps pretty much everywhere, is not the same thing as quote unquote ethnic cleansing.
And I think that ethnic cleansing is is very often used as sort of a softer form of the genocide attack, the idea being that Israel is trying to kill everyone, which of course is not true.
As far as your earlier question about what we believe from the media, one of the things that I find kind of astonishing and in some of the folks on the right who are highly critical of Israel is actually the lack of credibility, the lack of skepticism when it comes to legacy media.
Legacy media are radically anti-Israel overall.
The New York Times can certainly not be accused of being a pro-Israel outlet.
It'd be very difficult to make the accusation that the associated press, which is where Ken and Glove with Hamas for years or Reuters, that these are these are wildly pro-Israel outlets.
And yet when it comes to the reporting, it seems to be sort of the opposite.
So the presumption the legacy media is like owned by the Jews.
And then we're not going to be able to do that.
I was going to say, Ben, but come on.
You Jews own the media, Ben.
So I mean, come on.
As you can tell by all the wonderful headlines you guys get.
Well, I mean, uh, dude, the the accusation that we own the media has not prevented, you know, the Daily Wire from from employing people who radically disagree with me on all of these matters.
I mean, I I don't agree with Matt Walsh on foreign policy.
Matt obviously is a major host over at Daily Wire.
And that's just my shop.
And I'm I'm overtly pro-Israel, right?
I mean, I'm not making any bones about this.
I'm a Jew and I'm a Zionist.
I'm not going to pretend that to say otherwise would be absolutely silly.
To suggest that that a some sort of atheistic Jewish person by birth who does not care about Judaism or Israel owning the New York Times means the New York Times is pro-Israel is to ignore literally every bit of coverage they have ever done for my entire lifetime.
Uh we we we're running out of time here, but just la last question on this, Ben.
I know this might be a tougher question, but BB said, quote, I didn't like how you said this, I'll be honest.
You can't be MAGA if you're anti-Israel.
I don't like it for a couple reasons.
How how did you how did you analyze that statement from BB?
I mean, and I think that there is the ungenerous way of interpreting that and then the generous way of interpreting that.
So the ungenerous way is to suggest that you have to hold a particular position on every Israeli governmental activity in order to in order to be MAGA, uh, which of course is not true.
I mean, you can disagree from the right or from the left with Bibi's policies, and and you can still be plenty of MAGA.
I think the idea that the BB is putting out there is that if you are taking Hamas's side against Israel in a conflict, it is very difficult to align that with the with the stated positions of the Trump administration or what President Trump himself is doing right now.
And that much I certainly is true.
You cannot look, I I think you can have disagreements on Israel and still be MAGA, obviously.
You should be America first.
But if you're pro-Hamas, you're something darker.
Ben Shapir is author of Lions and Scavengers.
Ben, tell us about your important new book.
So the basic idea in Lions and Scavengers is that inside every human heart, and this goes back to the book of Genesis, that there really is the dutiful part of you that wants to engage in what God made for you, the this incredible rationalistic world in which you can mostly understand what's going on and you have a duty to do the moral thing.
You get up every morning, you try to build something, you try to be innovative and risk-taking.
You you try to defend your civilization.
You You try to build the social fabric.
And then there is the part of us that's driven by envy.
And that part of us just looks at our problems and immediately attributes it to some shadowy force outside of our control and tries to rip down the very systems that actually provide prosperity, tries to rip down the lions out of pure envy.
Here, think Zoran Mamdani.
And you know, uh that that exists in all of us, but it exists civilizationally as well.
And when you look at at the sort of activities that were taking place on college campus last year, and you see the weird agglomeration of causes that all come together under varying banners.
Sometimes it's hating President Trump over immigration, sometimes it's on Israel, sometimes it's on LGBT.
But it's the same exact people all marching together.
And you wonder to yourself, what do these people have in common?
And the answer is pretty much nothing, except they really, really don't like our civilization and see the fundamental basis of our civilization as evil and wrong, and believe that it needs to be torn out by the root.
This is, you know, to take the most obvious example, queers for Palestine.
Everybody's been puzzling over what the hell is that, right?
Queers in Palestine get thrown thrown off buildings.
So what is it?
The answer is that the radical LGBTQ group doesn't have much in common with the Pro-Hamas group, except that both really, really hate the West and believe that the traditional values of our civilization need to be destroyed in order so that they can live more fulfilling lives in some way.
So what you you write, you write in here, Lions and Scavengers, saying it's the true story of America.
And you you seek to defend the principles that shape freedom of a fair and powerful society.
We would imagine those emanate from the Bible, obviously.
And is Islam compatible with our civilization?
Would you put them would you put them in the scavenger category?
I I certainly think that the Islamic civilizations that we're seeing contemporaneously on the globe, it's very hard to see how that fits in in sort of the lion category.
It doesn't mean that there aren't individual Muslims who who fit in that category or that there can't be a sort of interpreted version of Islam that that couldn't fit into the idea of a God-given world in which you have duties and creative power in line with kind of general, very broad principles of biblical morality.
But but uh I think the proof is in the pudding.
You're not seeing a lot of Islamic countries on planet earth right now that live by any of the fundamental principles like freedom of mind, private property, equal rule of law applying to all citizens and traditional virtue.
What would you say is the missing component for those of us in the West to stand up against these forces?
What would you say we're doing well and that we need to do more of?
I mean, I I think that what we lack, and I think we're starting to see a restoration of it, is the courage to actually stand up on our hind legs and say no.
I think that good people tend to be introspective.
We tend to think, okay, what did I do wrong?
How do I fix that?
And we tend to apologize when we do something wrong.
Bad people tend to take an apology and then grind your face into the dust over it because they're not engaged in guilt cultures, they're engaged in what are called shame cultures, where the most important thing is not to be made to feel shame, and it is to shame others.
And so I think that we, you know, those of us who consider ourselves part of Western civilization, you know, we need to recognize that a constant self-abnegation, a constant attempt to tear ourselves down out of a misguided sense of humility in the face of people who are happy to just destroy our civilization from without and within, that is a gigantic mistake.
And it is totally fine to say to people who wish to destroy our civilization, no, your values suck and they don't belong here.
Where does all this resentment come from?
Uh it comes from a wide variety of places, but it tends to come in general from a feeling of frustration and enervation.
And so I think that that you you can get that from people who believe they have been marginalized.
You can get that from people who believe they deserve more.
You see it a lot, actually, with university students who seem to believe that they deserve a 250,000 salary for a gender studies degree because they've been taught that they ought to be getting more, and then they don't get it, and then they're angry at their parents for for not having put them in a position to do that, and so they rebel against everything that they've been taught and or and everything they haven't been taught.
I also think it comes from a bored population.
Very often you have people who grew up without any sense of external threat, and they think that pretty much everything that's good in life is the baseline, that that's just normal, and that you can tear away everything without the the baseline falling away.
That of course is just false.
Some of it comes from ignorance, some of it comes from envy.
The reality is that gratitude as a as a characteristic of human beings has to be cultivated.
It's something you have to teach your kids gratitude.
Envy is totally natural, right?
Envy, envy is easy to do.
You see it, You see it with small children, right?
I have four.
And it's very easy to see kids envy each other and get on each other's kids.
Being grateful for what they have is a very difficult thing.
You have to teach your kids to say thank you.
You don't have to teach your kids to say no.
The book is Lions and Scavengers.
Boy, that uh that that feels like the whole story of Zoran Mamdani, the resentful, envy-driven, bitter Islamist who wants to be mayor of New York City.
Ben, thank you for your time and thanks for uh going through all the questions on the very important topic today.
