Combatting the Media War Against Israel: A Conversation With Ben Shapiro

Thank you all for being here tonight. For being part of what is a very important conversation. In a critical time. For Israel, a critical time for the Jewish people. The video and the prayer that we just watched and listened to. Touches the deepest recesses of our souls to see those faces, to see our heroes, to see our brave soldiers. Fighting on the front line, defending not only Israel, but make no mistake. Defending Jews around the world wherever we are. We are forever grateful to them. We pray for them. We doubt that they're able to return safely. With a sweeping victory bringing back all of the hostages. And bringing peace to Israel it so deserves. While our soldiers are fighting on the front lines of this war. In the south and the north of Israel. What we quickly came to learn on October 8th. Was that this war has many fronts. And among them most notably among them is the media war against Israel. Biased and unfair, inaccurate and unjust. Filled with. Too many distortions and too much hate. Tonight. We're so grateful to welcome back. A general. Of the army fighting the front lines. Somebody who is right on that front line fighting daily, who has not stopped for a moment. Since this war began. And that is our dear friend Ben Shapiro. You we all know the media empire that Ben has built. The company that is the envy. Of other conservative media outlets. There's no doubt. An incredibly successful career, but if you know Ben. Then you know that this for him is so much more. Than a business. This is personal. This is his soul. This is his life. And that comes across on each and every podcast, each and every interview, each and every debate, each and every lecture over the last 6 weeks. This is not Ben Shapiro the media media personality. This is Ben Shapiro the Yid, the Jew who has been fighting on those front lines. To defend Israel and defend the Jewish people. We read in the Torah portion yesterday how the late Sonei Hador. The cynics and scoffers and haters because every generation has them. The haters, the conspiracy theorists, the people who criticize and attack on the outside. They came after Yitzhak. They came after Isaac. And they challenged maybe in fact Avram, maybe Abraham is not his father. Maybe he descends from Avimelech. Maybe in fact he doesn't come from whom he says he comes from. They went at him. They criticized him, the haters online and offline. The cynics attacked Yitzhak. And God in fact made a miracle. Because God intervened with nature. That's how dangerous. That's just how. Damaging. The late Sonei Hador, the cynics, the scoffers, the haters can be. The commentaries wonder. Yitzhak Isaac was 40 years old. When they raised their conspiracy theories, when they went after him and attacked him. If they were going to offer this conspiracy that Abraham was not in fact his father. Why not do it when he was born? Why not do it at his bris? Why not do it when the email announcement went out. Celebrating his birth. Why wait till he was 40 years old? And I saw an incredible comment. Reb Shmuel Berenbaum, the Rosh Yeshiva of the Mir in Brooklyn. He says an amazing insight. He says because when Yitzhak was born. He hadn't accomplished anything. The haters don't come out. Before someone accomplishes something. You know when the haters raise their voice? You know when they come on and attack? When someone is super successful. When they're making compelling and persuasive points and arguments, when they are influencing and impacting, when they are molding and shaping the world. That's when the late Sonei Hador, the the cynics and the scoffers, that's when the haters come out. So Ben. Some of the. Unwanted negative attention you've received of late. From our generation's late Sonei Hador. The cynics, the scoffers, the haters. The biased haters of our generation. They're raising their prominent voices. To attack you is only evidence of the impact that you are having. Of how persuasive and compelling your arguments are. Of the influence that you are having on some of their audiences to understand and appreciate the truth. So tonight we came to listen and to learn from you, but tonight we also gathered hopefully to give you a little chizuk. To understand just how much we appreciate. Whether your. People here agree or disagree, love or hate Ben's politics. Or his media personality and style. Every one of us love and appreciate. What you've been doing the last 6 weeks. On the front line of this media fight. And so we gathered to listen and to learn, but also to say thank you. Thank you for what you are doing. Thank you for wearing your kippah. Thank you for standing as a proud Jew on a unapologetically and non-defensively. An enormous thank you to your wife and family, your parents and in-laws, and to all who stand right by you and support you and enable you. To represent and be our voice. Ha kol kol Yaakov v'hayadayim yedei Eisav. We just watched the video of our precious. Our precious brothers and sisters. Who are wearing the yedei Eisav. Who have to take up those weapons and put on those uniforms to fight. The Eisav, the Ishmael of our generation. The kol kol Yaakov, the sound of the prayer that we began with. Is our call. But the voice of truth. The voice. Of Israel's rights, of the Jewish story is also part of the kol kol Yaakov. Please join me in giving a big welcome to Ben who will share some remarks. Before we begin our conversation. It's very sweet of you. Thank you so much. Thank you. I didn't used to get receptions like that in Los Angeles. So first of all, I mazel tov again to the newly married couple. I remember how I also spent my. Wedding night at a political lecture. So. I was thinking about what to talk about with regards to the media because obviously they're a smoking trash heap of horror. And it occurred to me that I should probably start since I'm sure we're going to get into the details with Rabbi Goldberg in a second. But it occurred to me that we should start with why they are like this. Because I think that's the question that occurs to all of us. We watch as the media lie, whether they're lying about Israel bombing a hospital, or whether now their new narrative is that well, just maybe it was Israeli gunships that shot people at the Nova music festival. Why do they lie like that? Why is it that they feel the necessity to take every mistake that the IDF makes and blow it up wildly out of proportion while minimizing the horrors that we saw on October 7th. Why is it that if. The IDF tweets out a mistaken description of an event. This becomes the story of the conflict as opposed to the fact that you know, Al-Shifa Hospital was a military headquarters in which hostages were being smuggled literally in. I mean that tape broke about 3 hours ago. You can actually watch as Hamas takes people directly into Al-Shifa Hospital, which we've been told for weeks was actually just a civilian facility. And that all of the talk about Al-Shifa Hospital, well, that was just a bunch of Jewish talk. There's there's no reason why Israel should even be there. It's a human rights violation. So the reason why we see this. Is. A few there are a few reasons. I mean obviously some of it is coming from a press that is radically Islamic in nature. That would describe certainly Al-Jazeera and some of Al-Arabia, some of the press that you're seeing from the Middle East. You're also seeing a lot of the mainstream media source from these particular areas. This is why for example the New York Times has stringers who like Hitler. Because the reality is that if you're going to get information from a place where a lot of people like Hitler, there's a very very good shot that that stringer is going to like Hitler. And you see this in a lot of the Source material that you're seeing from say the New York Times or CNN when they quote somebody. And then if you bother to actually check that person on Google, you will very often find that person has a social media history that is filled with hatred of Jews. And the media just put it out there as though this is completely irrefutable evidence. Or as though it requires no questioning at all. But the real question is why the Western media are the way that they are. And the answer to that question is because the Western media have a world view. And that world view is very simple. The world is to be divided between the oppressor and the oppressed. It's that simple. That's the whole thing. The world is made up of oppressor and oppressed. And not only that, anybody who is considered successful in Western society or internationally, anybody who's considered successful is a is on the side of the oppressor. So Israel is an oppressor. America is an oppressor. White Americans particularly are oppressors. Even Asian Americans have now become oppressors because they're disproportionately financially successful, which is why you can boot them from Harvard University and no one. Makes a peep. This is why you also see the crossover between for example the Black Lives Matter movement and the and the radical Hamas movement. Because the idea from Black Lives Matter. Is that there are brown people somewhere else in the world and those people are being oppressed by white people. Never mind that half of Israel is Mizrahi. None of that matters. The real answer is that Israel is supremely successful. Its opponents are not. Therefore it must have exploited and taken advantage and done something deeply wrong. And because of that oppressor oppressed narrative. A moral equivalence must be drawn. Because if it turns out that maybe the reason that one side is successful and one side is unsuccessful is because the successful side is good and the unsuccessful side is evil, that alternative explanation blows up their worldview. Once you bring to bear a moral frame as to why people succeed and why people fail, that is something that the the oppressor-oppressed matrix cannot cannot bear. It it it collapses it immediately because instead of it being that someone is unsuccessful because someone has exploited them or oppressed them, instead it might be the person's unsuccessful because they've made a series of horrifying decisions, which is in fact the case in the Middle East. I mean, as we all know, we all know the history, the reality is that Israel has accepted pretty much every peace offer ever presented to it. Its opponents have rejected every peace offer ever presented to them. Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, its opponents then proceeded to elect Hamas, burn all of the greenhouses, spend every iota of aid that was coming in to build terror tunnels and rockets, and then burst through that wall and murdered 1,200 Jews and dragged another 240 back into captivity. Maybe they're just bad. Maybe they're just evil. But the media can't allow that. And so what they have to do, they they know that they can't actually promote Hamas as good. They've never made this argument. By the way, this is one of the great imbalances when everybody talks about Israel failing on the hospital level. The reason Israel fails on the hospital level is because Israel always focuses on how good Israel is and never on how evil its enemies are. The Palestinian side has never for one moment focused on how good the Palestinian side is. Not for one single solitary second. Every single argument for 76 years has been how evil the Israelis are, and that's the argument today. The argument the media are making is that the oppressor-oppressed matrix is upheld because Israel is just as bad as Hamas. That's why the necessity to pretend that Israel is participating in a genocide. That's why the necessity to make believe that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians when as everyone with a with a functioning brain can see, Israel's complete air superiority. If Israel wanted to murder, forget thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians, Israel could do so. They certainly have the military wherewithal to do that. But Israel's not doing that. But again, the idea is that a narrative must be preserved. And in pursuit of the narrative, the truth doesn't matter, which is why these are not journalists, they are propagandists. The basic premise of a journalist is that you are supposed to speak fact. You are supposed to care about truth. But the media themselves are participants in the narrative. They have decided that the narrative is significantly more important than anything remotely resembling facts or truth, and it must be upheld at all costs. And so it's going to get worse from here. Because as it becomes clearer and clearer just what Hamas is, they're going to have to make Israel out to be worse and worse. The worse the atrocities Hamas is pursuing get, the worse the atrocities Israel must be pursuing must also get in order to achieve the moral parity that allows them to preserve the narrative that they've been pushing for so long. So that's the reason that you're seeing all of this. The only way to break through all of that is actually to show all the things that the media have refused to show for years and years and years. I've had many meetings with Israeli leadership. The last three prime ministers I've met with, the all three of them I told the same thing, which was, if you actually wish to win the hospital war, you have to start showing the atrocities that are being pursued by the Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. I said this to them in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2020. I've been saying it consistently for years. And everybody was sort of afraid to do that because they said, "Well, isn't it true that um Israel has a good image in the United States? We don't want to look like we're going negative." Uh by the way, anybody in politics who ever tells you that going negative doesn't work is lying to you. It's literally the only thing that works in politics. But the good news for Israel is, and the bad news for Israel is, that going negative happens to be the truth. And as it turns out for the brief moment in time, which was about 6 hours on October 7th when people were paying attention to what was actually going on before they reverted back into the amoral frame, when they did that, Israel for just that hot second was winning the PR battle. So what does that say? It says that from here on out, Israel's going to have to do that because this war is not the end. This is the very, very, very beginning. Once they finish off Hamas, that is just the beginning. They're going to have to militarily occupy that area in order to retain security for literally the rest of time. This is not going to be something where they get to turn it over to the UN or the Palestinian Authority. They turned over Southern Lebanon to the UN and it turned into a Hezbollah hotbed, and the Palestinian Authority is itself a terrorist group. Israel's going to have to take harsh measures in the West Bank. Israel is going to have to at some point in the next two to three years take out Hezbollah. They cannot allow 200,000 rockets on their northern border, which means that this battle is going to get a lot harder. It's going to get a lot harder, and you're all part of it because if you are on Twitter, if you are on Facebook, if you are in the conversation, this means that you have to take part in this battle. You don't have a choice. There's no running away from it. The echo chamber that's been created, particularly on social media, is incredibly strong. The legacy media benefit from it and also promote that echo chamber. So again, you know, my mentor Andrew Breitbart once said, "If you have a phone, you're a journalist." But the reality is if you're a phone, you're you you have a phone, you're an activist. So you should treat your phone that way because that makes you part of the war the same way that I think everybody else is. Thanks so much. We can do Q&A. First of all, I want to again thank you for coming back. People don't necessarily appreciate, you know, when Ben joins us here at BRS, he's doing it out of the generosity of his heart. That's not lost on us, and we really, really appreciate it. You should hear my normal speaker speak. So before we get into the questions about the media, Israel, anti-Semitism, so much on our mind and so much we want to talk about, but I want to begin, a question you're probably not asked often in the public media, by asking about you. How have the last 6 weeks been for you? I know that you were in Israel just days before the horrible massacre, and that you have a lot of family in Israel who of course are enduring this, and as a very visibly public Jewish observant media figure, these last 6 weeks, as I said earlier, you've been working tirelessly. How are you doing? I mean, my normal answer to that question when I'm asked by friends and family, as I think all of us have been lately, is who cares? Like seriously, who cares? I mean, like there's there's the thing that we have to do, and then there's how we feel about the thing that we have to do. I'm not in Gaza right now. I know people who are. I'm not in Judea and Samaria right now. I know people who are. I'm not in the northern border. I know people who are. Um and um you know, the reality is how I feel about the thing is irrelevant. Now, with that said, it's horrible. I mean, it's been terrible. And and and it's it's terrible for everybody. I mean, show of hands, who's gotten like a full night's sleep in the last 6 weeks? I mean, nobody. Everybody has this pit in their stomach. You wake up in the morning, you check the news. You wake up at 3:30 in the morning, and it's a hard thing not to check your phone. Uh and you know, it just feels as though we are living again in an extraordinary post-truth era. For somebody who's like me, where my entire job is to try and speak truth into sort of the the vacuum that's out there, it's it's very difficult to live in an environment and to work in an environment where truth matters obviously so little to an extraordinary number of people. That that that is a realization. I'm I'm a very cynical person about politics cuz I cover it for a living. Um but because of that, even I have been shocked by the level of untruth, by the level of viciousness, uh by the by the willingness to simply lie by by huge name members of the media and the like. Uh and that's that's a pretty that's a pretty devastating thing. Now, on the other hand, I mean, I will say that we do have Jews have an enormous number of allies in the United States who are not Jewish. I speak with a lot of them. So we're not alone in this fight. And as I've said before, you know, I I said it at the the rally that my brother-in-law organized over here uh in Boca. Uh and he deserves credit for that. He didn't get enough credit for that, so shout out round of applause for my brother-in-law. Um but And Yitz Newman who also worked on this. So the um but um the um Uh as I said, the other thing that's been encouraging is that you know, we were in Israel. We we left Israel on Friday morning, and then it broke out Friday night. Uh and um you know, when we were there, I I I'd always felt as an American Jew that a lot of the conflicts and a lot of the fractures were felt weird and exaggerated because when you go to Israel, even the Hilonim are quasi-frum, right? You go to Israel, and the Hilonim know more than Reform Jews here very often do, and they practice more than Reform Jews very often do. Uh and so it feels exaggerated, but they were very real. I mean, we we were in a place that was a block and a half from one of the protests on a Saturday night, and immediately when this happened, this is when you see the Jewish people come together in a way that I I'm not sure has been true maybe ever. Literally maybe ever. I mean, maybe since Herzl and I. It's it's really that long since Jews have come together in that way. I mean, as I've said, like So that that gives me an awful lot of of pride and hope for the future because frankly, I think America needs to come together the same way. I think the West needs to come together the same way, but certainly watching Jews do that is amazing. Watching Hilonim put on tzitzit because they want to show they have skin in the game. Watching Haredim join the IDF. Watching restaurants in Tel Aviv koshering themselves so they can feed the Dati Leumi. I mean, these are like amazing, amazing things. They're amazing things. And hopefully, this will be the experience for the next generation of Israelis. Absolutely. I hope you will not repeat the question you asked at the rally, "How many people here are carrying guns?" We we we we prefer you not ask that tonight. Um the rest of us the rest of us wake up in the middle of the night, and we check the news. You wake up in the middle of the night, you check the news, but you also check whether you're trending, and for what reason. I never check whether I'm trending. I just assume I am. Um And that that's also got to be difficult. I know that watching you debate at Oxford, I knew you were going to win. I knew your your arguments were winning arguments. Whether seeing you on seeing you on Piers Morgan, seeing you at Oxford, seeing you on college campuses, you're not only watching the other war, but you're fighting your own. How do you deal with that? How do you go to the lion's den and be in these hostile hostile environments, does that take its toll on you? How do you cope? it's it's incredibly stressful. It's very, very, very stressful. I mean, mainly because it's so hard, I mean, we've all been in this position, not to get incredibly angry when you're looking at someone genocidal standing 2 ft from you and tell you about how every Jew in the region and maybe the world should be killed. That that is definitely a hard one. And so, for me, that that's that's the hardest battle. I mean, intellectually, I don't think they have good arguments. I think that what they're saying is is packed with lies. And it's my job in the moment to sort of debunk all of those lies and try and catalog them and move fast and say but but I do that professionally. So, if I'm not good at it by now, I should quit my job. The the the real thing that that's hard is maintaining control of your temper when you're really watching people say truly evil things right in front of you and say it directly to you with vitriol and hatred in in their voice. I mean, like, Oxford I mean, Oxford was That's the single most hostile room I've ever been. I've been in a lot of hostile rooms. That That was easily the single most hostile room I've I've ever been in. I mean, a little bit behind the scenes. I mean, my security team they, you know, they're they're they're with me. They're working with MI6. And one of the problems in in Britain is that you can't carry guns when you have security team there. Like, they even the police don't have guns for whatever odd reason. And and the the way that Oxford was set up, the if you've watched the tape, you can see it. When I when after I do the Q&A with the rapidly anti-Israel moderator, I then go down and it's almost in the crowd. I mean, there's a there's a crowd here and a crowd here. And then they set up a table. It's called the speaker's box. And you you stand on one side of the table, the other person's standing on the other. And they just come up and they debate you. You're a foot and a half from each other. But more importantly, right behind me, like, no greater than the distance between the two of us, are all of the crowd. And my security team could see that there was a guy right behind me who was extremely jittery. He was very He was He was very tense. He was reaching in his pockets a lot. We we kind of quietly put a security guy right next to him in case he decided to get up. But it was it was that kind of environment. And so, in that kind of environment, I mean, it's very electric. It's very It's incredibly difficult. So, yeah, I mean, it's it's it is not fun. It is certainly not fun. People don't appreciate necessarily to maintain your composure, think through your argument, be eloquent and articulate and compelling while also at the corner of your eye trying to figure out which one of these people want to jump you is not an easy thing to navigate. Of course, you do it really amazingly. On your podcast, right after October 7th, you seem to have pivoted a little bit in the format of it, really jumping right in Israel and from the heart and from the soul. And one of that early podcast, it might have been the first one after the massacre, you did something that I doubt you'd ever done before, which is you sang Acheinu. You sang Acheinu. Solo, just you. Acheinu from the heart. Was that planned? Was it spontaneous? Where Where did that come from? Why did you decide that your audience of millions, I don't know the breakdown, many of whom are not Jewish, I'm sure. Why did you want to share Acheinu with them? I mean, I think that one of the things that I have some notoriety for is the facts don't care about your feelings aspect of of what I do, right? I'm not I'm not an emotional creature by by nature, except with my wife and kids. And the, you know, sort of the fact that this struck, I think, everyone who was watching it as, you know, incredibly personal. It was If I if ever I was going to tap into that, that was the moment to tap into that. And and frankly, I didn't see another way that I could really start that show. So, I have I have shifted the format as people may have noticed from from how it So, typically, when I would do the show, I'd open up, I would do like a little pitch. We'd play a bad music riff, same playing a couple chords on guitar that's a leftover from when we couldn't afford to license music. And and then we'd get into the show. And I don't I don't script anything. The entire show is unscripted. It's just me and the mics and the cameras. And on that one, I wanted to be so meticulous about my language that I actually sat and I wrote the monologue, which I which I never did. And since then, I've written every monologue. I mean, the beginning of every show is a cold open, right into the topic. Because I want to grab people right off the top. I want them to know what the topic that I'm discussing is. I want it to be in an organized fashion. I'll be very careful about my words. You know, one of the things that I'm I'm very careful by nature about my words typically, not always. And the the thing that I wanted to be careful of is particularly because I know the kind of burden that I'm carrying, which is that you know, I have the ability to speak to a lot of people who I know everybody here wants to be able to speak to, too. I know that's the reality. And so, I want to be I want to be very careful about what I say. If I'm going to die on a hill, I want to make sure that it's a hill of my choosing. And that's one of the reasons to to to construct the show in that way. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching that Acheinu. Like we sang earlier tonight, it is emotional and it is powerful. So, let's It's not a very good rendition, but it is emotional. Maybe not. That's That's a much better Yeah, Next time with the violin, maybe. But let's pivot into the the media bias. And on October 7th, we thought this was Israel's war. Maybe still on October 7th, by October 8th, we came to learn as we saw anti-Semitism surge across the world that Israel is the front line of this war, but it's really the Jewish people facing this war everywhere. From your perspective, the media bias is a greater against Israel's war or is it a greater media bias in really telling the story about anti-Semitism, in relaying even this this recent murder of a protester in in Los Angeles. And it's hard to imagine if this were any other race, ethnicity, religion, they would cover it with the same story, the same headlines, described in the same way. The Washington rally that I'm really proud our community participated in in such large numbers that I saw some headlines described as busloads of people got together or demonstrators gathered in Washington. It's in the metro section of the Washington Exactly. So, are you are you seeing the bias greater when it comes to the coverage of Israel or the coverage of anti-Semitism? obviously, they're tied together. I think that the goal of the media is to split the two, which is why you see so much discussion of anti-Semitism not in the context of Israel, but in the context of Islamophobia. Right? The idea is which is an absurdity, by the way. What that really is is an attempt to suggest that if you oppose Hamas, there's an aspect of Islamophobia to that. That's really what that is. And it's disgusting. The reality is that Jews have seen a massive uptick in the amount of hatred that they're receiving. We all know that. They've been seeing a massive uptick in the amount of violence against them. That's been happening as well. Again, we live in, thank God, an amazing country. And we live in amazing state where we're all able to defend ourselves. And we should. We have an amazing police force. Our police force here is amazing. Let's pretend that that when you watch 300,000 people on the streets of London marching for Hamas, Islamophobia is the main problem is ridiculous. There's a Norm Macdonald tweet that that, you know, keeps coming up in these contexts that I'm sure a lot of you have seen where it's like, I just hate to think that if 9/11 happened today, how much Islamophobia would break out. And it's like, that's that's that's right. Or he says, I think it's if it's a nuclear weapon went off in New York, the amount of Islamophobia would boggle the mind. And it would be terrible. I just worry about the Islamophobia. And that that that really is the attitude of the media. And you see they try to keep boxing in anti-Semitism with racism and Islamophobia in one box and then being anti-Israel in the other box because this has been their lie for a very long time. And that lie got obliterated on October 7th because it turns out that the people who hate Israel also universally are people who really, really hate Jews. I mean, the mask just came off completely. And they're trying to restore that mask, I think, by obviously saturating coverage of Israel being evil and then trying to uncover the anti-Semitism issue or to pretend that the anti-Semitism issue is in a completely separate box than the than the anti-Israel issue. When in reality, what we're watching in many of these cases are radical Muslims who are participating in anti-Semitism. So, yeah, I I I don't think that you can separate the two. I think they're part of the same narrative. The the media have to bifurcate anti-Israel and anti-Semitism in order to get back to the status quo ante, which was we can be as critical as we want about Israel, as lying as we want about Israel, but we still we're still okay with the Jews. One of the things I find infuriating, and there is enormous support for Israel and the Jewish people broadly in America, but the lower you go in the age demographic, the less support you have for Israel and for the Jewish people. It's incredibly concerning both for that young age demographic and for the media as a whole. What's infuriating, what's mind-boggling is that Israel and its values are entirely aligned with America. And, you know, as we've talked about, every pro-Israel rally, including the one you participated in last Sunday in our community, there were American flags being waved. In the lobby on the way out, if you haven't taken yet, we're giving out Israeli flags for your car and American flags for your car because they go together. They're shared values and they have a shared destiny together. They have shared partnership. And that's We don't have to elaborate on what that means and why they go together. How are the media so blind to that? Why are young people who supposedly stand for these liberal values They don't. They don't like Yeah, but I disagree with the premise. I mean, the media hate America and so do the young people. I mean, that's the actual answer. They really, really hate what America stands for. I mean, young people do not understand what America stands for. And they hate America in many of the same ways that they hate that they hate Israel. If there were to be a massive terror attack, I mean, I'm for I'm sure many of you saw this TikTok trend last week. I talked about it on the show if you listen to the show. But this TikTok trend of people reading Osama bin Laden's letter from 2002 and being like, that guy had some important points to make. I saw a meme that was going around from from Back to the Future. You remember there's this scene near the end of the of the movie where Michael J. Fox goes, "Wow, he starts playing heavy metal." And it's supposed to be the night It's 1955 and he's playing heavy metal. And he says, "I guess that was too much for you, but your kids are going to love it." And it's like and just said Michael J. Fox Osama bin Laden, right? I guess this is a little too much for you, but your kids are going to love it. And that's and that's that's unfortunately reality. I mean, there's an enormous number of young people in the country who despise everything the country stands for. They think it's an oppressor colonialist state. They think that the same things they hate like I think that we make a mistake if we think that they hate America because they hate Israel. They hate Israel because they hate America. They hate Israel because they hate the West. It really It's It's all part and parcel of the same oppressor oppressed narrative. This is why, I mean, if you want to etymologically look at where this came from, I mean, this is really just an outgrowth of a line that goes really back to Lennon's imperialism forward to Franz Fanon's decolonization philosophy forward through Edward Said, and now you're all the way here. I mean, this is the the etymology is basically that Western powers are exploitative and colonialist, and therefore anyone who is successful is exploitative and colonialist and must be opposed by any and every means, which is what Fanon says, right? Fanon says that violence is totally appropriate. And he's quoted all the time. This is why when you say decolonize when you say decolonize on Twitter, that's what they mean. That's why I went Karen Attiah of the Washington Post retweeted somebody saying about October 7th, what did you think decolonization was going to look like? Right? That's what they mean. That's it's it's all part and parcel. So, no, I don't think that I think that anybody who's been operating off the argument I've always thought that it's a really weak argument for Israel that Israel has gay rights. Like why would you possibly think that the radical left is going to buy into Israel because Israel has gay pride parades? Why why why would you why would you think that? I'm honestly bewildered by the number of of people who are sort of left-wing Jews who've been contacting me, and I'm grateful they're listening to the show and they're and they're and they're you know, buying into you know, the way I'm covering the conflict because I'm trying to be as honest as I can about it. But I'm always bewildered by the people who are marching with BLM never having looked at the BLM website, which back in 2020 explicitly endorsed from the river to the sea. I mean, I'm just that confuses me. I guess I guess what I'm confused by is the media are the greatest beneficiaries of this country's right to free speech. They should be the ones who most understand and appreciate the only country in the Middle East that shares that value and should be standing with them and covering that story. Are we doing a good enough job we here in America or Israel and its Hasbara in linking patriotism, American values, Israel values, not the argument that because Israel supports gay rights, therefore love Israel, but just how aligned the values the countries are and have people in America, middle America should be looking out. All we should be doing is putting in their face over and over and over again 300,000 Jews in Washington waving American flags, picking up their garbage thanking police. Every pro-Palestinian rally pulling down American flags, burning American flags, and attacking the police. And which do you want to align with? What do you want for the future of America? Are we doing a good enough job of making that point? that I think that that point is being well taken particularly by middle America. I mean, the polling again shows that Americans by and large, like very widely support Israel over Hamas and favor Israel over the Palestinians as well. I mean, support for for Palestinians generally when it's put in that binary is usually in like barely double digits, and support for Israel is usually 50, 60, 70% in these polls. It's just wildly disproportionately concentrated the the support for for Hamas and and for the Palestinians among very, very young people. And so, the question isn't do we push American flags in the faces of people who are in middle America. The question is how do we get young people to like the American flag again? And that's something that I think that that Jews have a role in playing. I don't think that, you know, it it really is not about the Israeli flag. It's really not even about, you know, Israel. I think that that we as a as a part of the American body politic have a responsibility to make people love this country again because this country is still the last best hope. That was actually my next question, which was going to be what what's the future of this country? You know, I had the privilege of being in Israel with Rabbi Gibber, Rabbi Brody for a few days, and and we came back after looking in the eyes the resolve of our incredible soldiers in the Israeli people, and we said, this is going to be difficult and and painstaking and filled with sadness and grief, and we can't begin to relate, but Israel's going to be okay. The question is, will we? When we look at college campuses, when we look at Congress, when we look at some of the the highways in this country, are we going to be okay? So, when we look at those younger demographics, when you look at supposedly Ivy League advanced sophisticated intellectual campuses, are we going to be okay? You look at the younger generation and what they don't believe or subscribe to, what they're allowing themselves to support. What's the future? Is it is it hopeless here? I don't think that it's hopeless, but it's certainly not easy. And I'm I'm very I'm I I agree with you. Like in terms of the the immediate future of the body politic, the body politic of Israel is much more unified and and and much more missional than the body body politic in the United States right now. We're a very fragmented country. We we're obviously much larger. We have many more interests in this country. And you know, the American story seems to have almost stagnated. And I think we can feel it in our elections regardless of which side you support. Everybody feels like the American story has stagnated, which is why you see wild dissatisfaction with every institution in the country. And unless that's restored, unless there's a a new sense of purpose and mission that that the country embraces, I think that's going to be a problem because when countries don't have a sense of mission and purpose, then they immediately fall into squabbling. This is basically what happened in Israel until 5 minutes ago, and I think that you're going to see it happen in the United States worse and worse unless there is you know, something that draws America together. The unfortunately, what history tends to show is that the only thing that draws large numbers of people together is tragedy. People are very rarely drawn together by a sense of voluntary mission. It's why, you know, I speak all over the place, and the the first thing that I say as a Jew whenever people say what's the most important thing that I can do in the audience, is I say, these are predominantly Christian audience, go to your church. Go to church. Christians need to go to church. They do. They need to they need to re-embrace their religion. And and and that is at least giving a sense of some sort of missional purpose to the country because if it's one nation under God, you at least have to believe in a in a nation with a mission under God in order to actually effectuate that. So, if you had a message to these administrators, university presidents, the young people, they're not hopeless, they're getting awfully close to it. Um these incredibly enlightened and supposedly brilliant people on these Ivy League campuses, the young people, I think what's been more shocking and in ways devastating to all of us is not the young people who maybe don't even have the maturity yet to arrive at the right conclusion, but the presidents and the administrators and the professors, the supposed adults in the room who rather than reset and recoil and say, "Whoa, we've lost our bearing. We need to recalibrate." are in fact siding with them. So, if you had a message, if you could establish policy on university campuses, what would those policies look like that would give us a sense of hope in the future of young people? I think you can start with if you support a terrorist group, you should be expelled. I mean, that'd be a good start. And that's particularly true if you're not going to a public school, and it's particularly even more true if you don't happen to be a person who's here, you know, as a as a citizen. If you're if you're not a citizen of the United States, you have no right to be here. As as far as the thing that that we all should be doing, this is one area where we all can make a difference. Jews are obviously a very highly educated subgroup in the United States. If you've got an option to send your kids to a college that's a a liberal arts college that supports this stuff, don't send your kid there. Do not give them your money. And if you're an alum, you should be pulling your money, and you should be investing it somewhere else. Maybe you want to invest that money in Israel. Take take that money and put it somewhere useful. And the the And if you're a business owner, by the way, I know there's tons of business owners in this room. Stop looking at college credentials as though they mean anything. They don't. Honest to God, I'd rather I'd rather hire to my company some kid coming out of high school who has a 1500 on the SAT and did not go to Harvard than a kid who got a 1500 on the SAT and did go to Harvard. Because everyone at Harvard, they're screwed up. Before that, they're just really smart. So, there've been some surprises in the media coverage, at least for me. Um Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper getting teary-eyed on TV covering the human side of the story, being on the ground at first. Did not expect to watch clips coming off of CNN and be moved or be applauding or be grateful for their coverage. They're probably the two exceptions. The the rest of the newsroom are, you know, doing the usual CNN thing while while Fox News is making a million-dollar donation to Israel, and I think through Federation, which is really really incredible. Um Maybe there's some some surprises maybe on the left of people who stood with Israel and wouldn't expect it. There've been some surprises on the right of people who we expected to stand with Israel and didn't. So, from Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and of course the elephant in the room tonight, Candace Owens. Um people who you might have thought would be a little more aligned coming from that conservative bent who have failed us. Which which is more surprising or how do we react? Any any comments on the on the Candace question? Let's get that out of the way. my my thoughts on this have been made eminently clear, and I cannot say anything further. So, I'm just going to leave it at that. Um as far as, you know, some of the horseshoe theory that's going on in general on the right versus versus on the left, you know, there there is a I you can distinguish a few strains on the right. So, there there is an isolationist strain on the right that that, you know, has cropped up again. This has this has been part of the Republican Party for a very long time, and it breaks down into a couple of different sort of aspects. One is traditional isolationism, which I have friends who are like this, who are like, "Israel's right, Hamas is wrong, don't care. It's far away." I think they're wrong. I think that's short-sighted, but you know, that that that is at least consistent. Like no foreign aid to anybody, don't care, you know, hunker down in my cabin, and that that that is what it is. I get it. Like I I think again, I think that's wrong. I think that's short-sighted. I don't think that's second-order thinking, but I don't think there's anything particularly anti-Semitic about that as long as you understand the clear moral right and wrong in the conflict. And then there is an attempt to obscure moral rights and wrongs on behalf of a different agenda. Uh and that I find nefarious, and that that I've seen from a number of different people. Uh so, you know, that that is obviously deeply disturbing to me. Um the the the effect Tucker specifically when he when he downplays, for example, and he's done this multiple times on on his show. When when Tucker will say things like, and I criticized it on the show, so this is nothing new either. Uh when when Tucker says things like, you know, some people seem to care so much about people getting slaughtered in music festival in Israel, but they don't care at all about the 100,000 dead we see from fentanyl overdoses every year. And I said on my show, "No, I actually care a lot about the 100,000 dead from fentanyl overdoses every year, and that's not even remotely the same thing as the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on a moral level. It is horrifying that people are shipping drugs over the border, and it's also horrifying that people are shoving those drugs into their own veins, but that is not the same thing as taking a baby and burning it alive in its crib and pretending that those are the same thing is absurd. Also, Tucker's bizarre notion that Americans shouldn't care about the 30 Americans who were murdered on October 7th and the at least nine Americans who are being held in captivity. It's probably more than nine who are being held in captivity. That's bizarre to me since he spent his Friday interviewing somebody in Spain. I guess he was doing it in Spain. He's marching in Spain with some political party, but I thought he only cared about what's going on in the United States. Why are we supposed to care about Spain or Hungary or Poland or all the different places that he's interviewing? So, it seems to me that there's something else that's going on there. I would I would agree. Um can we have any influence on these personalities? Is there is there any difference? Part of these media personalities, take like Tucker for example, he he left the legacy media world and that company and they found this online world where they're not they don't depend on advertising and then they don't have to answer to people. So, is there still influence for us to bring reality? Joe Rogan, another popular podcast, one of the most popular in the world. You've been on his show. And and he seems generally thoughtful in trying to arrive at the truth and yet when it comes to this, there's a bias. Is there any window or opening for influence? I mean, I think that each one is is different. I mean, I I I don't think Joe's in in quite the same camp as Tucker. And last time I was on Joe's show, the last 45 minutes, we talked about Israel and he really let me go on it. And I don't know if you've seen there's a a comedian recently, I believe. No, it was it was Tim Kennedy actually. Tim Kennedy, the MMA fighter. And he was on Joe Rogan's show and he was excellent. He was talking about this. So, Joe is not in the same category, I think. I really don't think he's an ideological creature. Listen, I wish he wouldn't have on some of the people he's had on who I think are telling absolute lies. But I also don't think that Joe's quite the doing the same thing as Tucker because Joe is not a political animal by nature. His entire stick is basically, here I don't know anything about this topic. Tell me about this topic. And he does that on nearly every topic, whereas I assume that Tucker knows a fair bit about a lot of the topics he talks about, which means that he's a little bit more responsible for the kind of quote unquote questions he asks, which is, you know, one of the one of the games that gets played a lot in the media these days. I'm just asking. I'm just asking, why is it that so many Jews are doing X? Why is it so Why why is it that that people care so much? I'm just asking. I don't know. I just We know what an implication is. We are not all idiots. We know what you're saying. And what would you say, you know, in the news now? And these things happen in real time with social media. We are determining the media or we're putting them in a category in real time based on a tweet that they may not have put a lot of thought into. Elon Musk, you recently were on a stream with Elon Musk dealing with combating anti-Semitism. So, he actually responded to a tweet that originated, believe it or not, with someone in this room. And he responded to that tweet. Never mind the side. else. Everyone decided, Elon Musk is a rabid anti-Semite. Then today he said he's going to ban from Twitter anyone who promotes from the river to the sea, Elon Musk is a champion of the Jewish cause. How do we decide? We like hold up a scorecard, you know, and each day we're going to determine this goes back to our last conversation. Last time you were here about anti-Semitism and when whom do we label an anti-Semite? I mean, I think that in order for somebody to be labeled an anti-Semite, they should be taking a consistent tack on a particular issue. And that is the last thing that you would expect to be Elon. I mean, Elon is all over the place. And and I think that the what you know, he's he's tweeting a lot these days and he's incredibly reactive on Twitter. I mean, this is one of his charms and one of his flaws. And you know, as far as that tweet, he then went on to clarify that it was really a critique of the ADL and it was really a critique of the fact that there are people in the in the left-wing Jewish community who he thinks have been very easy on immigration who suddenly are very anti-immigration because they've realized some of the people they've import Whatever it is. You know, the the idea that Elon falls into like the anti-Semitic category, I think is is silly. And I think that there's an eagerness by a lot of the members of the media. One of the things I noted on the show is there's a real eagerness on the on on members of the media who are on MSNBC to hone in on the real anti-Semites are Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And meanwhile, Hamas, who knows? Who knows what they're doing? They could they could have all sorts of thoughts. It's oppression. You can tell who's There's some people who are condemning both. Okay, at least you're consistent. There's some people who are saying what I'm saying, which is that Elon is not an anti-Semite. Trump is not an anti-Semite. They're very thoughtless in how they tweet and comparing them to Hamas is absurd. And then there's some people who are doing what MSNBC is doing, which is the real anti Forget about Hamas. Forget about people who are murdering Jews in their cribs. The thing that really really matters that Elon Musk did a mean tweet. He did a bad mean tweet. And that's really bad because he's mean and we don't like Elon Musk. Shut up. So, as as a matter of as a matter of instruction or for people to learn from, do you think that there's a problem in our community? I use our community broadly that we are responding to these tweets and we're very quick to label someone rather than give some time, let them see whether there's a pattern, let's see whether they can be won over as an ally because many of these very public personalities, the moment you label them that, they might as well be that because you can't get them back. Yeah, I mean, this is something that we talked about actually last time we were here is is, you know, how fast should you be on the on the draw and on the trigger? And there is a tendency to be like, every time we see a thing, we should whack it, you know, like a whack-a-mole. Just whack Well, you know, you do have to gauge each situation differently. This is why when you're comparing Tucker and Rogan, I'm saying I don't think those are the same person. And and the same thing is true with regard to Elon versus Trump versus, you know, some kook online. Like it's it's not all the same thing. And so, we have to be a little bit more meticulous in how we examine those issues and try to determine, is this I mean, the way that you would with a group of friends. Let's say you have a friend who makes an ignorant joke. Okay, is this guy like Does he really hate Jews or is this somebody who doesn't even know that the joke is offensive? I know that that you have this experience with Meyers Leonard, right? From the from the Heat. Where he made he made a reference to the K-word in like a stream and he didn't even know what it meant. And and suddenly the world came down on him. He was out of a job. And then you met with him and I've met him. Super nice guy. Didn't know what he was saying and very pro-Jewish. And it's like, well, what was it a justice to him to to like to to immediately come down on him as though he was spouting from Mein Kampf or something? Like you you really do have to gauge each one of these situations individually. Yeah. And the person who who you might turn into the enemy could have become your ally and one of your biggest supporters. In his case, that's a great example. So, so take this and broaden it out. You know, I I don't like to use the name of this newspaper in front of an Aron Kodesh, but the New York Times, which is I don't think it deserves to be mentioned in shul. It's one of the repulsive inappropriate words to be used. And I would implore anyone in this room who still gives one penny to subscribe to them, pay for online or take out a a obituary. No Jewish organization in the world should be listing its obituaries or death notices in the New York Times. It has proven its pattern over and over and over again its bias and shame on us for not not seeing that. So, do we just wholesale dismiss the New York Times because of its bias? Does it have no utility to us whatsoever? Or on the rare occasion when by accident, like the clock that's right twice a day, the New York Times gets a story right, should we embrace that, share that, promote that, tweet that because it's sort of, first of all, encouraging to them. We're grateful you got this one right. You're talking about the tunnels underground or you're featuring some heinous terrible thing Hamas did. We want to reward them for getting it right. We want to show the people who that's their only news source that even the New York Times sees just how terrible Hamas is. When when there are those who get it wrong, like the New York Times, wholesale rejection, they're just we demonize them entirely or is there any scalpel we can take to them that if there is an occasion where they get something right, it's worth embracing that, promoting that, sharing that? I again, I think it depends on how you're prefacing the the sharing of the New York Times article. So, whenever I share a New York Times article that happens to be right, I do it exactly the way that you do, which is the New York Times is always wrong so when they happen to be right, good for them. I I think that the thing we have to avoid is just sharing it without context of they're always wrong because when you share a credible New York Times article and you don't say that all the rest of the time they're wrong, people tend to think that that credibility extends to the rest of of the newspaper. And that obviously is not true. I mean, I By the way, I even do the same thing with the Wall Street Journal. I mean, for those who are subscribers to the Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page is great. I really enjoy their review section, their book reviews and the rest of it's trash. I mean, their news coverage is actually more to the left than the New York Times. So is the Washington Post. The Washington Post has been a disaster area on this kind of stuff. I mean, they've been truly awful. And so, I think that it's worthwhile noting how bad like you Again, you you should as much as we can, we should try to be as meticulous as we can in labeling who is bad, who is good, what they're doing wrong, what they're doing right. And and making sure that we give a holistic view of the outlet before we before we cite it. Because every time we say, you know, CNN says, we should say, even CNN and all of their hatred of Israel, even they recognize the truth that X, Y, and Z is happening. How would you rate Daily Wire? Um it depends who we're talking about. That's a fair point. Um I think most people in this room are familiar with your work and Daily Wire, but apropos that last comment, where would you send people to get accurate news on Israel? We're all so desperate and we're holding on and we're looking for the next headline. What one of the challenges that's happened actually in this war is how many have have I don't want to use this expression, but jumped the gun? How many are sharing news? Like how many legitimate outlets tweeted about the ceasefire in exchange for the hostages that had to be actually corrected by the White House administration itself and media outlets walking it back. I'm not just talking about the firm WhatsApp groups who've been spreading terrible information all along without it being substantiated. So, so where can we go if we want to find out is something right, wrong, true, accurate? I'm not ranking on the firm WhatsApp groups. They're wonderful. They're great. But there have been several cases of their announcing things that were not verified or substantiated. So, just in general, all of us have to be very vigilant with where we get our news. Can you recommend places other than most of Daily Wire? So, you know, I'm I'm a big follower if you have Telegram. Amit Segal is excellent. You should you should subscribe to Amit. He's is a conservative journalist, right-wing journalist in Israel and you can you can subscribe. My Hebrew's not good enough to to read Amit Segal in Hebrew. So, you can subscribe and when you do, you can pay like a little fee every month and it'll translate all of his posts into English. And and that's really good insidery kind of stuff and he's updating what's going on on the ground militarily. He's updating what all the politicians are saying. It's that's kind of more of a primary source than what you're going to get at the Jerusalem Post or at Times of Israel or something. I mean, I check all of those and my my usual be because I'm so suspicious of everything that's happening, unless something is double or triple sourced, I I tend not to cover it myself. I've been I've been trying to be super meticulous. I mean, I don't want to pat myself on the back here, but the show I think has been as meticulous as any show that is out there, more than virtually all of them. And my Twitter feed, I really try to only tweet things out that I think are are fully meticulously tracked. And I know like everybody that half this room has my phone number and I know that that a lot of people are sending me a lot of stuff. If I'm not putting it up, there's a very good shot it's because I actually am not sure that it has been verified or checked yet because there's so much bad information that's going around and so much bad footage that's going around. People putting up videos from Syria in 2014 or people putting up videos of something that happened, you know, the the Pallywood kind of stuff, but it's like 8 years old, right? You like everything just has to be checked and verified because one of the games, I'm going to talk about this preview of tomorrow's show. And I've been told that I can't curse from the stage. But the the the the the basic concept is that the there's a strategy that's very often used in sales and it's called baffling with BS. And the basic idea is that you pick details and then you go really far if you if you want to ignore the main point, you pick a detail, you discredit the detail and then you go really far into the detail. And then you just put a lot of that stuff out there, just a lot of nonsense. And the more nonsense you put out there, the harder it is to distinguish the nonsense from the not nonsense. And this is, you know, what what Twitter feels like these days. And and it's it's everything has to be double triple sourced. So I've been trying to be as meticulous as I can be on that. So it's it's it's rare for me to recommend my own try. I actually don't like to do it very much, but I will recommend that if you don't listen to the show, you should take a listen to the show, you should watch my Twitter feed and you should look at some of the out the some of the some of the places that I myself Aitan Levy, who's one of the spokespeople for the IDF, he's pretty meticulous about this kind of stuff. Uh those are those are sources that I think tend to be better than others. I just want to clarify if you're the other half of the people in the room, he was not telling you to text me to get his phone number. I just want to I just want to clarify that. Save myself a lot of time later tonight. Um so you're very sought after. Media outlets want to interview you particularly on this subject of which you're an expert outspoken for it's personal for you. Let us into Ben Shapiro's world a little bit. How do you decide when you're invited to come on to different shows, to be interviewed, mainstream media, legacy media, other podcasts? How do you decide when it's worthwhile to lend your voice there and when you're going to take a pass on that one? So there's so the first consideration is size of the outlet or size of size of the distribution network. Is this going to reach enough people that it actually makes a difference? Because otherwise I could fill my day doing things where it's got 10 listeners. Second thing is is this an honest outlet or is this an ambush? And it doesn't mean I won't go on an ambush interview. It does mean that I want to know in advance if it's an ambush. I've been in ambush interviews before and it's very uncomfortable to get caught in the middle of one. I want to know going in so that I'm I'm for bear. And so, you know, the that means that I I really check out who's interviewing me. I check out who maybe they might they're going to have as an opposing guest. I very often will think whether the person who they're having on in opposition is in any way honest. It's a real problem. When when you're debating people, it's very difficult to get in the room or in the ring with somebody who's willing to lie on command. And people do it all the time. And it's very and and the problem is that you being in the same room with somebody who lies on command. I can sit there, I can debunk all of it in real time, but it sounds exactly the same as what the person on the other side is saying. They're saying something utterly untrue. They'll say something like Israel bombed the Al-Shifa Hospital. I'll say that's absolutely untrue. Israel did not bomb the Al-Shifa Hospital. There's aerial footage, there is contemporaneous video on all of this era, there is audio. And they'll say, "None of that is true. Israel bombed the Al-Shifa Hospital and you're a liar and you're a Jew and it's because you're so passionate about this issue that you're saying that." And it's like, "Well, I have to decide whether I think that that's a net win for me or that's not a net win." And when I say for me, I really mean for the things that I'm talking about because not everybody is going to address these issues honestly. Again, some people really like to dig into incredible details in order to discredit. So for example, you'll have you'll have people in the media who have decided for example that they the 40 beheaded you've heard this. Like the 40 beheaded were there really 40 beheaded babies or was it only like two babies that were beheaded and the rest were burned to death? And the answer to that for any normal person would be like, "Are they alive? Are they alive? They murdered babies. They murdered a lot of babies. They burned I I've tweeted out the pictures. I put them on my show of babies burned in their cribs. We know this. This is a fact. But what they're doing is they're picking on one claim that went viral at the beginning and then they're trying to say that if you don't have proof of that, if you don't show me the beheaded babies, then this means that nothing none of it happened. It's all nonsense and we can't believe you at all. If you can't go on to an interview with somebody who's going to be like that because I can make the point that it's actually an irrelevant question. Hamas was GoPro-ing the entire thing. How do you do that homework? How do you know which interview will be fair and who will be biased? I mean, I I really try to watch a lot of tape. So if if if I if I know the the person who's giving the interview, I still watch a lot of tape of them. I try to see what they've been saying about the issue. I try to see who they're going to have me on with. I try to watch tape on them. Like you have to be very meticulous about this sort of thing. Normally, you know, in in a in a less fraught situation, I might be less meticulous, but it's so fraught right now and you know that there's literally millions of people who are waiting for a slip-up so they can use that as I mean, I've been asked twice in the last 3 weeks about whether I tweeted out an AI photo. I did not tweet out an AI photo, but that claim went so insanely viral and it was community noted falsely and then Elon personally had it like his people literally took down the community note because it was false. But it was too late. They'd already screen capped it and put it up and that became part of the story. You know, that that's how sensitive things are right now. So I'm trying to be as meticulous as I can be in all this. We're going to wind down with a couple last questions. We're so grateful for your time and for this incredible audience together came together tonight. So there are some new allies that we've learned. I mean, for you as a conservative media personality, a right-wing Republican, some would say. Uh there have been people on the left who've been incredible spokespeople, advocates. Ritchie Torres, Congressman Torres, who's been to our community. Um Our congressman, Jared Moskowitz, who I want to give a shout-out, who has bucked his party, called out colleagues, been really outspoken. He's our congressman and we're incredibly proud of the job he's done. When when the dust John Fetterman. John Fetterman's been a stalwart. yes. Yeah. Right. Right, who saw that one coming? I did not I wouldn't have not seen that one coming. Right, none of us saw that. Part of God's sense of humor, that's really amazing. He's like the every shul wants to honor him at their dinner, you know, like shorts, pants, cut off short, no shirt. He's the honoree. So when the dust settles and please God Israel swiftly wins this war, does it change your perspective at all that some of the people who were the adversary, the enemy, the left from your conservative perch, do you now see in them things that are so aligned in the things that matter most? Do will that change, you think, the way you relate, the way you speak about, some of the way you cover politics? I mean, it makes me more optimistic that they don't buy into the broader rubric that I think a lot of the left has has bought into. Um and I think that we will also see as time goes on how much of it's real and how much of it's not. I mean, I think that for some of the people we've mentioned, it looks very very real and I and I hope that it remains. I think that the next few years for Israel are going to be very rough. Uh what what as I said a minute ago, what we're watching at the beginning right now is is the beginning. It's going to get rougher in in Gaza, not in the sense that it's going to be as as spectacular on TV, but it's going to be a long-term military operation. I mean, the government's saying this. It's going to be a long-term military operation. They're going to be a consistent number of dead and wounded coming out of Gaza for years to come because this is going to because they're they're just going to have to police the area and treat it the same way they treat Jenin and Nablus. And speaking of Jenin and Nablus, they're going to have to go into Jenin and Nablus and they're going to clean up a lot that's going on in Jenin and Nablus especially given the fact that the Palestinian Authority is effectively on its last legs over there. I mean, it Israel You know, the you saw the poll, 75% of the people in the so-called West Bank celebrated what Hamas did on October 7th. Right. Those are the people that it's being suggested should be in charge of Gaza when we're done. And this is this is why right exactly. This is this is why I say we'll see how long, you know, people stay on the bandwagon when for example the Biden administration insists that Israel start making territorial compromises with Mahmoud Abbas who literally yesterday came out and suggested that the Hamas massacre did not even happen at the Nova Festival based on the Haaretz story that was botched. And by the way, you want to talk about publications that should not be mentioned in a shul ever, Haaretz. Haaretz is sheer trash. It is trash wrapped in trash and then burned on a trash heap. It's trash. In any case, How do you really feel about Haaretz? gosh, Haaretz Haaretz makes the New York Times look like the Wall Street Journal. I mean, Haaretz is just it is it makes Pravda look like an outlet a leaflet for the John Birch Society. I mean, Haaretz is just there are no words. Anyway, I mean, there were some words, but I used them. The But the these are all first steps. I mean, they're going to have to do some pretty harsh things in they're going to have to do some harsh things domestically because it turns out that, you know, there are a lot of terror cells inside of Israel. I mean, everybody's walking around in Israel in Jerusalem in populated areas worried and that's why you see in tens of thousands of people applying for a gun permit in Israel. Right, which was supposed to feel safe. You're you're going to see Israel the the big one's going to come when Israel swivels up north. Everybody knows it's coming. It's just a matter of time. And it's I I don't think it's going to happen in the middle of this war, although I know that Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, was encouraging it very early on in the war. But Israel cannot live with an existential threat on its northern border. It's they've learned what it means to believe that deterrence is going to end an existential threat. By the way, that existential threat on its northern border goes active literally the minute Iran has a nuke. Because because right now that's Iran's forward operating base. Once Iran has a nuke, then what is to deter Iran from from using that? Because the next thing that happens is Hezbollah fires off its missiles, Iran smuggles that nuke through Iraq, through Syria, into Lebanon, and they and then they just fire it into the heart of of Israel. And then they say to Israel, "If you retaliate, we're going to fire we'll fire a nuke at you. We'll we'll put a nuke directly in the middle of Tel Aviv." And they have the targeting technology to do that, but not not from Iran, because Israel can probably shoot that down, but from from Hezbollah land. So, Israel's going to have to act and they're going to have to act there incredibly quickly, and the world's not going to like it one little bit, and Israel's not going to have any choice about it. And not only that, it's going to be a much less meticulous war. It's a very messy war. They have way more material in the north. They have way more men in the north. The regime in Lebanon is hand in glove with with Hezbollah, and Hezbollah's really dug in. And they're not dug in these tunnel networks, they're dug in like little bunkers all over the all over the southern part of Lebanon. So, that's going to be really rough. And so, we'll see, you know, I I'm really grateful for the support that Israel has received from members of the Democratic Party, and Bezrat Hashem it should continue and it should stay and it should remain a bipartisan issue. I hope and pray that that remains the case even as Israel has to take action in its own defense. That's going to get worse as time goes on. Amen. Well, let's end with one last question. Going back to a personal question. When you reflect back, and I don't know if you have time yet to do it in the middle of these 6 weeks, but the position that you're in at this critical time in Jewish history, having the platform that you do, reaching millions of people, and having the opportunity, the privilege, and also the awesome responsibility, do you feel that in a religious context? As a keeper-wearing, observant, Torah Jew, do you think in a religious context about what you're doing, what you're advocating for, the responsibility of being sort of a a messenger representative of Hashem? Do you daven that Hashem give you the right words and be successful in getting the message across? How does all of this and your place in it reflect from a religious perspective to you? that that for sure. I mean, the the you know, I'm again, I've been trying to do the best that I can to be as meticulous as I can, say the right things all the way through this particular conflict. And you know, as I said before, I've you know, when I speak about politics, I always feel the burden of speaking for people who don't have the outlet that I have. That's particularly true under these circumstances where, you know, again, I personally know people who are in I mean, I know people who are families of people who've been victimized. I mean, like we all do. Literally everybody does. I was trying to explain this to to one of my producers. Uh my producers came with me to Israel last time, so they they got a sense of this. That there is no 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon in Israel. There's one degree. Literally one. I mean, you can find any person in Israel with one degree of separation, literally anyone. And so, the the level of of burden feels more intense along those lines. And on a religious level, of course, when you see an attack on Jews, when I should point out here that when when I say that there's a a gestalt attack on the West, that there there that's an entire philosophy that's that's a that's being attacked, that philosophy is a biblical philosophy. The philosophy that you are responsible for your own actions, and that they are either meritorious or deleterious, and you deserve, in essence, your success or failure. That's not always true, but it's largely true. That is a philosophy that is rooted in the baseline notion that we're all made in the image of God. And so, what we're watching right now is in fact a religious war. And I don't just mean the war of Hamas on Israel. I mean the war of people who hate the West against the West. That coalition is is anti-Judaic. It's anti-Judeo-Christian. And that that Western coalition is the the anti-Western coalition is incredibly dangerous on a religious level. As far as, you know, again, back to the personal, so since I've been old enough to daven, one of the things that I say at the end of Shmoneh Esrei in the little section where you're allowed the, you know, the free to free rap to freestyle rap, uh the in that the one one of the things that that I say at the very end, when I'm done when I'm not davening for, you know, health of my family and everybody should be be healthy and and happy, is that I should fulfill my potential in every way. That's that's the one that I that I've been saying since I was like, I don't know, 11 years old, 10 11 years old. Um and uh that has not changed for 30 years. Uh and so, you know, if my voice matters in the moment, then hopefully I'm fulfilling my potential, and it's a gift that's been given to me to be able to to it's an honor. It's a gift that's been given to me to be able to speak on these issues to so many people. And um I hope that I'm justifying it. Ben, thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Shapiro.