Learn English with Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking is a world-renowned neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of The Dark Side of Enlightenment. He is a leading voice in the anti-Western, anti-Marxist and anti-colonial movements of the 20th and 30th centuries, and is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. His work has been widely known and appreciated throughout history, and he is a frequent lecturer at international conferences and conferences. He has been a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, and The New Republic, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1989.
00:00:20.000I want to talk today about the battle for the heart of Western civilization.
00:00:24.000But to do that, we have to start with a definition of what Western civilization actually is.
00:00:30.000Western civilization, rooted in man's individual liberty and his collective duty, in his freedom of speech and in his duty to act virtuously, in his property rights and in his familial obligations.
00:00:44.000In the right to the equal application of the law, Western civilization is unique.
00:00:48.000It is the wellspring of virtually all human prosperity and all human progress.
00:00:54.000And Western civilization did not come from nowhere.
00:00:57.000It came from biblical wisdom, the wisdom of thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:01:03.000It came from the Bible's admonition that we ought to seek truth through the light of reason.
00:01:08.000When we cut ourselves off from the sources of our own civilization, Our civilization decays.
00:01:14.000And make no mistake, our civilization is now in the midst of decay.
00:01:19.000We can see that decay in the anarchic marchers in the streets, chanting on behalf of radical Islamic terror groups by the hundreds of thousands.
00:01:28.000We can see it in the push by intellectual elitists for a bizarre alternative morality that suggests the fundamental free-flowing nature of sexual identity, where boys can be girls.
00:01:41.000And behavior ought to be separated utterly from the realm of morality.
00:01:45.000We can see it in the push for an ever-growing domination of a powerful governmental infrastructure, crowding out familial bonds, crowding out church in favor of a faceless state that offers money rather than virtue.
00:01:59.000We can see it in that crusade against churches that refuse to jettison their values in favor of moral relativism flying rainbow flags.
00:02:08.000What are these forces that have mobilized against our civilization?
00:02:11.000Well, the key force is the force of Western postmodern leftism.
00:02:16.000Sure, we can look at the radical Islamists who have invaded Europe, who support terrorism, who use Western governments to impose effective fatwas against Westerners who speak out against them, people who target Jews and Christians, who openly chant for the downfall of the civilization that they leech upon.
00:02:33.000But the question really isn't radical Islamists.
00:02:36.000They, after all, are doing just what they have always done, invading and conquering.
00:02:40.000The question is why the West allowed them in.
00:02:44.000And the answer is that the West, thanks to that postmodern left, bears a peculiar and self-defeating blood guilt.
00:02:51.000A guilt that says that because the West is too successful, it owes it to the rest of the world to destroy itself.
00:02:59.000Maybe the most colorful champion of this philosophy was the Marxist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.
00:03:05.000In 1961, a Francophone rebel named Frans Fanon wrote a shockingly violent book titled The Wretched of the Earth, in which he posited that colonized peoples had a moral duty to kill their colonizers, that they ought to unleash, in his words, red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.
00:03:22.000Frans Fanon expressed that the colonized man was right to want to rape the wipe of his colonizer, to murder him, to take what he had.
00:03:30.000And Sartre, just a Western leftist, agreed.
00:03:33.000The West, Sartre said, was an inherent colonizer.
00:03:37.000Its very success in the world, whether through war or through markets, was a sign of its uniquely rapacious and exploitative nature.
00:03:45.000Thus, Sartre argued, Europeans had to die at the hands of their victims.
00:03:50.000He said, quote, To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.
00:03:58.000Then there remains a dead man and a free man.
00:04:09.000Now part of the answer that lies in the West's pathological and religiously based adherence to the reality of sin and the necessity of repentance.
00:04:17.000Our culture, Western culture, is a guilt culture.
00:04:20.000A culture that focuses on the reality of absolute morality.
00:04:23.000And says that when we fail, we are guilty.
00:04:26.000This means that we feel bad when we sin.
00:04:30.000But there are lots of other cultures, shame cultures, like, say, the Islamic cultures, or pre-World War II culture of Imperial Japan, or, say, the modern left, that focuses not on any absolute standard of morality or conscience, but on the evil of being humiliated.
00:04:45.000For these folks, admitting fault is the weakness.
00:04:48.000Well, because we in the West reflexively look to our own sins before those of others, we fall prey to civilizationally suicidal impulses.
00:04:57.000They're happy to blame us for their problems, And unfortunately, we're all too happy to blame ourselves.
00:05:03.000As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes, quote, the duty to repent forbids the Western bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions.
00:05:13.000Our past crimes command us to keep our mouths closed.
00:05:36.000Just a couple of days ago, for example, King Charles visited Canada, a country with a parliament, only because it was once a dominion of the British crown, and then read a land acknowledgement to the Algonquin Indians as though the British Empire ought to repent its establishment of the country of Canada.
00:05:53.000Watching King Charles sit there in all of his royal regalia, lamenting his own empire, is insane.
00:06:09.000And that lie gained an enormous amount of credibility due to the horrors of the 20th century.
00:06:14.000We were told, often by Marxists like Sartre, that imperialism was a uniquely Western phenomenon, despite the fact that human beings have conquered other people for as long as human beings have existed.
00:06:24.000We were told that the Nazis and their allies We're natural outgrowths of Western civilization rather than perversions of it.
00:06:32.000We were told that if we abandoned biblical values in favor of a sort of namby-pamby secularism, we could avoid all the terrible atrocities of the past, even though it was the pagan dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, the secular dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, not their biblical adherents that led to their assault on humanity.
00:06:49.000We were told that if we mitigated our cultural honor, if we discarded it, we could then expunge our sins.
00:06:56.000Even though it was craving cowardice in the face of transnational left-wing movements like Nazism and Communism that led to their domination of the European continent, and proud resurgent patriotism that stopped it.
00:07:08.000We were told that if we abandoned our borders, we could alleviate our guilt, even though, obviously, the Nazis and the Soviets had no respect for borders and sought to obliterate them themselves.
00:07:19.000It was not adherence to biblical values, rule of law, free speech, and private property rights that led to the tragedies and horrors of the 20th century.
00:07:27.000It was the rejection of the West's core values that led to those horrors.
00:07:31.000But too many in the West believed the lie that the horrors were the result of Western civilization rather than a perversion of it.
00:07:37.000And in believing that lie, we surrendered our own civilization to people who would destroy it.
00:07:42.000We turned over our nations to consortiums of international elitists.
00:07:49.000Well, now it is time to reverse that process.
00:07:58.000We have to, in all humility, recognize that Western civilization, like all civilizations, has of course committed sordid wrongs and egregious evils.
00:08:06.000But the truth, the real truth, something we have known for a very long time, like since the Garden of Eden, is that all human beings have a capacity for evil.
00:08:43.000Western civilization has wildly reduced it.
00:08:46.000And the secular postmodern leftists who refuse to admit this, they are engaging in evil of their own.
00:08:52.000This country, the very country these secular postmodern leftists seem to despise, a country they label Nazi-esque, is the only country in Europe, perhaps, that is not currently overrun by Islamic radicals.
00:09:03.000This supposedly Nazi-esque country is the only country in Europe where I, an Orthodox Jew, can walk in safety and comfort down the street wearing a yarmulke.
00:09:12.000It is a country where children don't actually have to fear that their innocence will be robbed by a perverse anti-biblical left seeking the spiritual destruction of those children.
00:09:22.000Hungary, like the rest of the West, isn't perfect, because no country is.
00:09:26.000But Hungarians are trying to stand up for their civilization, our shared Western heritage and civilization.
00:09:31.000And that is a thing that is worth fighting for.
00:09:34.000And if we fight for it, we will emerge victorious against the forces that seek to destroy our civilization from outside and inside as well.
00:10:06.000We've got Flag Day, the U.S. Army Birthday on June 14th, National PTSD Awareness Day, Independence Day.
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00:10:54.000I have a question regarding the national identity.
00:10:58.000So although President Trump took office in Washington, D.C., here globalist elites in Europe are actually trying to erode our national sovereignty by mass migration and by open border policies.
00:11:14.000And my question to you is, what do you think, what is the best way for European conservatives to reassert our national identities?
00:11:27.000I mean, I think, number one, One place where Hungary clearly has led Europe is in reasserting its national identity, specifically with regard to rejecting mass migration from areas that absolutely reject Western civilization as a whole.
00:11:40.000And you guys are paying, I believe, something like a million euros a day for the privilege right now, thanks to the predations of the European Union.
00:11:47.000I think that you are starting to see a rising tide that is going to reject mass migration.
00:11:53.000That rising tide is happening in France.
00:12:26.000You'll see an upsurge in right-wing or conservative or anti-mass immigration sentiment.
00:12:31.000And then it will sort of be shoveled off to the side because no one really wants to talk about it.
00:12:35.000But you can only suppress that for so long.
00:12:37.000That situation for supposedly center-right or center-left parties that are siding with the radical left on these issues, eventually the lid is going to blow off of that jar, and what's going to come out is going to be the sentiment of Europeans, that they do not actually wish to have their cultures discarded in favor of a failed multiculturalism that has destroyed every state it's touched.
00:13:08.000My name is Balazs and my question is the following.
00:13:11.000Secularism has hollowed out the spiritual core of the Western civilization.
00:13:17.000How can conservatism survive in such conditions in a godless culture?
00:13:23.000And how can we actively reintroduce the Judeo-Christian values set to our societies to ensure order and the real meaning?
00:13:39.000So, I mean, the answer is that Western civilization cannot survive full-scale secularism and godlessness, and that's what we've been watching.
00:13:46.000And the restoration of church is the fundamental basis of a restoration of the West.
00:14:00.000It is deeply, deeply important that they go to church and re-engage with their religious heritage and re-engage with God and re-engage with an absolute morality that suggests that there is a right and that there is a wrong.
00:14:09.000Because again, all the things that I just talked about spring from those biblical values.
00:15:05.000It's why the only country actually in the West that currently has above replacement rates of population growth is Israel.
00:15:12.000Because it's a country that is largely religious.
00:15:15.000Even the secular people in Israel have some semblance of religion.
00:15:17.000And also because they're surrounded by enemies on all sides, and that means that they feel the actual patriotic necessity to have kids.
00:15:24.000That sort of thing can be restored, but you have to have civilizational pride, and that civilizational pride is rooted in a belief in a higher power that demands something of you.
00:15:33.000Also, the success of Western civilization rests on a very simple principle, which is, if you fail, it's probably your own fault.
00:15:40.000Every failed civilization is rooted in the opposite.
00:15:42.000That if you fail, it's somebody else's fault.
00:15:44.000But successes in life and successful civilizations say that freedom exists so that if you fail, you're the one to blame.
00:16:04.000So I think there's a reason why people are going back to church, thank God.
00:16:07.000I think that there's a God-shaped hole in people's hearts that was opened up by secularism.
00:16:11.000People have tried to fill that hole with everything from pornography to chatbots to just the Internet itself to rage and political polarization.
00:16:21.000None of that fills the God-shaped hole.
00:16:23.000The only thing that fills the God-shaped hole is God.
00:16:33.000Mr. Shapiro, allow me to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who said that the strength and weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization.
00:16:43.000If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development.
00:16:52.000A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
00:16:55.000Mr. Shapiro, we all see the efforts of the Trump administration, which you support.
00:17:00.000To improve the industrial and governmental structure of the United States.
00:17:04.000However, is equally as much being done to reinvigorate the more important spiritual energies of the West?
00:17:14.000And it goes to the heart of what government can actually do in concert with religious institutions.
00:17:19.000Because the truth is that religious institutions are what we would call intermediary institutions in life, right?
00:17:25.000You have, like, you and your family, and then you have the government, which...
00:17:30.000But then you have these sort of intermediate institutions that you deal with, these informal societal institutions where you really form all of your social bonds.
00:17:37.000The question is, what can government do to prop those up and strengthen them?
00:17:41.000And by the way, I totally agree with you that everybody who's looking for re-industrialization to fill the God-shaped hole, again, the only thing that fills the God-shaped hole is God, not a factory job.
00:17:51.000And so if you're trying to actually fill that God-shaped hole with God again, then what you actually need to do...
00:18:00.000That's something that we in the state of Florida, in Florida, we do this.
00:18:04.000We actually have stipends for everybody who wants to go to private school, and religious schools are really filling the gap.
00:18:08.000We have huge vouchers for every kid in the state of Florida.
00:18:12.000And my kids, for example, our recipients, they go to a Jewish day school.
00:18:16.000They have a lot of friends who go to Christian schools, specifically because of this.
00:18:41.000If there needs to be a meal train, right, everybody needs to get together and help fund this person to get through hard times, people in the community do it.
00:18:48.000When government fulfills that role, when government comes in and just hands you a check, It breaks the bonds that you actually have with the people in your church and in your society.
00:18:56.000That level of mutual dependence that exists at the intermediate level, that comes along with spiritual obligations.
00:19:01.000Because if you want to be part of that social club that represents my synagogue, that comes along with certain duties to God.
00:19:07.000You have to keep Sabbath, you have to send your kids to Jewish day school probably, you have to keep kosher.
00:19:11.000And that was true for literally all churches for all the time.
00:19:14.000To be part of this social club, there were obligations that attached as well, which is also how you knew that your neighbor wasn't mooching off of you.
00:19:20.000You knew that your neighbor wasn't just taking money out of your pocket because they had to fulfill religious obligations and show skin in the game.
00:19:26.000The increase in the size and scope of government has crowded out a lot of the social functions of churches and intermediate institutions.
00:19:32.000I would, number one, suggest that government does have an active role to play in allowing people to send their kids to more expensive religious schools in the United States, for example, because that's good.
00:19:44.000But I also think that the government should get out of a lot of these realms and allow that social gap to be filled by what it used to be filled by, namely the people that you live next to and with, and with whom you share a religious belief system.
00:19:56.000We'll get to more on that in a moment.
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00:22:30.000So the question is about the shift in American foreign policy and what it represents right now.
00:22:34.000I will say that I think there are multiple strains of foreign policy that are currently playing out simultaneously inside the Trump administration, and the result is a lot of uncertainty.
00:22:43.000I'm not sure that anyone has sort of a solid read on what the next move from the Trump administration will be in, say, Ukraine, or with regard to Israel, with regard to Iran, with regard to China.
00:22:54.000There are a bunch of strains that are competing.
00:22:56.000So the speech that you mentioned, J.D. Vance's speech at the Naval Academy.
00:22:59.000What he was rejecting was, I think, a straw man that's been burned 20 years ago, essentially.
00:23:04.000He's saying that we will no longer engage in the sort of interventionist Wilsonian philosophy that led to the war in Iraq.
00:23:13.000I'm not sure how many Americans at this point raise their hand when you say, if you know then what you know now, would you go to war in Iraq?
00:23:21.000So he's fighting against an impulse that no longer exists in the American body politic.
00:23:26.000The question is, what does he mean practically?
00:23:29.000And so I've always believed that President Trump understands peace through strength, which was sort of Trump 1.0, which was we don't have interests in every conflict all along the globe.
00:23:39.000We don't have to get involved in every conflict.
00:23:40.000But where we do have interests, we have to muscularly defend those interests.
00:23:44.000And the only thing in some cases that defends those interests is the credible threat of use of force.
00:23:49.000And that's why, for example, when it comes to Ukraine, I've taken the position that President Trump is right that he wants to get to an off ramp.
00:23:55.000I've been calling for an off-ramp in Ukraine since August of 2022, but He gave him a 30-day ceasefire.
00:24:06.000He's giving him the rare earth minerals deal.
00:24:08.000He's giving him the possibility of a face-to-face negotiation with Putin, no preconditions.
00:24:12.000And Putin, meanwhile, is doing none of those things.
00:24:14.000And so the only way to get Putin to the table, presumably, is to up the ante on the pressure with an eye toward an off-ramp.
00:24:21.000Now, is that something that J.D. Vance wants?
00:24:24.000I'm not sure what the president's foreign policy is.
00:24:27.000With regard to Ukraine, it seems to shift fairly frequently.
00:24:30.000And again, there's something to strategic ambiguity, but there's a point where strategic ambiguity, like, you don't know what he's going to do next, so don't screw with this guy.
00:24:37.000There's a point where strategic ambiguity shifts over into just pure uncertainty.
00:24:41.000And America's enemies can take uncertainty as a sign of weakness, and that's one of my concerns.
00:24:53.000And my question was, we have 10 kids and we moved out of the States because of how intense and invasive the woke culture has gotten in the States.
00:25:04.000And my question is, how do you think Donald Trump, if he can stall this decline in the U.S., if he can reinstate conservative values, what do you think?
00:25:16.000So I do think that woke culture is on...
00:25:21.000By this I mean that ten years ago, when I was saying that boys are not girls, I was nearly kicked off of every social media platform.
00:25:29.000Now, that is actual government policy from the White House on down.
00:25:33.000And I think that there's been a very harsh reaction to the woke philosophy, which essentially suggests, in essence, that every disparity in outcome is due to discrimination.
00:25:43.000That if one group does worse than another group, it must be because the system is designed in order to harm that group.
00:25:48.000I think the American people are tired of that.
00:25:49.000I think that's why some of the most popular stuff that President Trump has done is taking on, for example, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is just wokeness, or taking on the transagenda in the United States, which, again, is really unpopular in the United States.
00:26:02.000I think that wokeness has a real problem on its hands.
00:26:05.000Now, the thing that I'm fearful of is that all the good that President Trump is doing, how long does it last?
00:26:12.000Is there a reversion back to woke in the aftermath of President Trump?
00:26:16.000And the answer there is going to be determined by how successful President Trump is on sort of the baseline governance things.
00:26:23.000If the economy remains very strong, I think wokeness is in serious trouble for the long haul.
00:26:26.000If the economy were to tank, and now it's a package deal where you get a sort of left-wing populism that surges along with the wokeness, you could get a package deal where wokeness rears its ugly head all over again.
00:26:38.000I don't think you can wipe out wokeness in a single moment.
00:26:40.000I think the attempt to do so is laudable, but I think that...
00:26:50.000It's going to take a more long-term vision of how to keep that at bay.
00:26:54.000But I do think the American people are very, very tired of it.
00:27:40.000They ignore the fact because they feel a particular way about a particular issue.
00:27:43.000Should we be making more emotionally laden arguments?
00:27:45.000I mean, the answer is absolutely sometimes.
00:27:48.000I mean, my hope would be that the emotional argument comes atop a layer of facts.
00:27:53.000It's sort of a pie in which the crust of the pie, the base of the pie, is going to be the facts.
00:27:59.000And then you do have to put in some emotional content that appeals to the heartstrings if you hope to actually foster a positive agenda sometimes, because, of course, you're going I think that when the emotions substitute for the facts, that's where I start to lose it.
00:28:17.000And, again, I'm not sure that that's only a left-wing phenomenon.
00:28:19.000I think it's a universal human phenomenon.
00:28:21.000You sometimes see this on the right, which is why the right will drift into sort of conspiracy theories.
00:28:25.000They'll say, I don't care about the facts.
00:28:27.000There must be somebody who's attempting to screw me.
00:28:28.000It's probably the small cadre of people.
00:28:30.000And, you know, if there's no facts to back that, I'm very uninterested in that take.
00:28:35.000If there are facts to back it, now you're talking about something completely different.
00:28:53.000And my question is about what people like to call lately the woke right.
00:28:59.000So, as we all see and all observe in the last two years since the war began in Israel, that more and more pretty prominent conservative voices in America started to say sometimes subtle, sometimes not as subtle.
00:29:38.000And how do you think we should reply or we should deal with this new financial?
00:29:49.000And so I'll try to be very specific about who I think you're talking about and you tell me if I'm wrong.
00:29:54.000I think that the philosophy of the people that you are referring to essentially says that there is, just like the left, a group of people who are put upon.
00:30:03.000And that group of people who are put upon are put upon by an elite cadre of people.
00:30:07.000You hear they're often named Czech Jews or Israelis or Israeli foreign aid.
00:30:12.000And that's what's making their life bad.
00:30:14.000So it's that in the same way that the left will argue that every disparity is, in fact, discrimination, that everything that is unequal between two parties must be because someone is harming the right might say that it's white Appalachian people in America.
00:31:00.000I think some of it is being bolstered, frankly, by algorithmic problems at places like TikTok, which is a Chinese spy app, or like at, certainly, X is being gamed by malign actors.
00:31:16.000Not particularly popular with the American people generally.
00:31:19.000It is increasingly popular with young people who are being told, after years and years of being lied to by the elite, The elites can never be trusted, and the only people you can trust are people who posit conspiracy theories.
00:31:31.000The logic goes something like, the elitists told us something was false, and they were lying.
00:31:36.000And I told you the truth because I said they were lying.
00:31:38.000That means I'm telling you the truth about literally everything, and there's a conspiracy behind everything that I'm also uncovering.
00:31:43.000That sort of conspiracy theorizing, that just asking questions that I've criticized so frequently.
00:31:48.000The purpose of a question should be to elicit an answer.
00:31:50.000The purpose of a question should be to elicit a fact.
00:31:53.000If you're just asking questions, because what you actually hope to do is seed doubt about people in the minds of other people, not based on fact, but based on sort of a malignant hatred, then yeah, I'm obviously very much worried about that.
00:32:51.000Thank you for joining us for this session.
00:32:53.000My question would be about that both Europe and America is facing with a cultural crisis, which is pressured by cultural vocism.
00:33:09.000So, what do you think, what could be the cornerstone of a transatlantic conservative alliance?
00:33:15.000I think that, as we've been talking about, the cornerstone of any transatlantic conservative alliance will actually have to be shared traditional values, which is amazing, because 20 years ago, the right was totally disunified about traditional values, and I think that's why you had the subsequent 20 years.
00:33:31.000If you went back to the year 2000 and you said, what unifies the right?
00:33:34.000Well, you would say is there's actually a lot of social debate over everything from sort of abortion to same-sex marriage.
00:35:16.000And I was horrified, as I think most people, most common-sensed people, were by the murder of the Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C. And as shocking as that was, it was shocking, but I have to say,
00:35:47.000The left is going to do what the left is going to do, but how do you, how do we engage conservatives, people on the right, to become more vocal, to become more active, and to engage in this fight to support Israel?
00:35:58.000Well, I mean, I think that the first thing that people on the right and generally in Western civilization should understand are that the people that Israel are fighting are fighting the entire West.
00:36:07.000I mean, that's something that this country actually really understands, which is why they closed their borders to migrants who are coming from especially those areas.
00:36:14.000And the notion that Hamas has a hatred for Jews, but they love Christians, it's insane.
00:36:22.000The notion that Hamas, they really, all the people shouting from the river to the sea, And wearing, on the one hand, a rainbow flag, and on the other, a Hamas armband.
00:36:33.000These people are friends to the traditional people of Western civilization.
00:36:41.000There's a reason why the enemies of Israel are constantly talking about how they wish to not only kill Jews, but also to free Al-Andalus, which is Spain.
00:36:54.000That all of the hatred of the radical Islamic world is directed against Jews is so historically ignorant.
00:37:00.000The reality is that for about a thousand years there, for significantly more than a thousand years, the main target of radical Islamists was Christians.
00:37:08.000I mean, Istanbul used to be called Constantinople.
00:37:12.000Lebanon used to be a Christian country.
00:37:14.000Coptic Christians used to be a major demographic group in Egypt.
00:37:18.000Actually, I was talking, as I got off the plane today, with a nun from Syria.
00:37:24.000And she was talking to me about the threats that now exist to Christians in Syria and Lebanon, have existed there for a while.
00:37:30.000And she was pointing out the solidarity between Jews and Christians along these lines.
00:37:34.000The absolute willingness to ignore that in favor of bizarre conspiracy theories about Jewish power, I wish I could say that I understand it beyond the simple conspiratorial desire for somebody to blame for your own problems.
00:38:07.000My question is about how, across all of the West, art, literature, and history are constantly being rewritten in the name of decolonization.
00:38:17.000And what can we conservatives personally do to protect our culture without being called a racist or a bigot?
00:38:24.000I mean, so, I've said this for a long time.
00:38:29.000The proper response, very often, you know, I'll go to a campus, somebody will call me a racist, or I'm on a show when somebody calls you a racist.
00:38:34.000The proper response to, you're a racist, is not, let me explain to you ten reasons why I'm not a racist.
00:38:55.000And you can't fight back against a character assassination by legitimizing the person who's actually making the argument.
00:39:01.000The minute that you start defending yourself, oh, I'm not a racist, and let me tell you all the reasons why I'm not a racist, what you're actually saying is, you're a reasonable person who's calling me a racist, which means that it's reasonable for you to call me a racist or to think that I'm a racist.
00:39:22.000Not only do you have no evidence of this, it makes you a schmuck to actually make this argument and to character assassinate people that you know nothing about and against all available fact patterns.
00:39:41.000In fact, a logical retort to an insult is typically ineffective.
00:39:44.000The only actual appropriate response to an insult is to take umbrage and to either walk away or to engage on the same level that somebody's insulting you.
00:39:59.000I have a question regarding the relationship of Israel and Germany.
00:40:04.000The new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who is a conservative, says he does no longer understand what Israel is doing in Gaza and that the war cannot be explained with the fight against Hamas anymore.
00:40:17.000I wonder how dangerous is this for Israel and our Europe and especially Germany still on Israel's side.
00:40:25.000I mean, obviously it's not good for Israel that so many of the European powers have decided that basically they are fine with Hamas regaining control of the Gaza Strip.
00:40:32.000And I'd recommend to the Chancellor that if he has a good plan for Gaza, he should table it right now.
00:40:36.000Because I've heard zero plans from anyone that are actually practical or practicable in the Gaza Strip.
00:40:42.000There's a reason that no country in the region will take the Palestinians.
00:40:45.000There is a reason for that, and it is because the Palestinian population, by polling data, by literally all polling data, is heavily terror-supported.
00:40:57.000The notion that Israel is supposed to sort of leave and then leave Hamas as the governing power in the Gaza Strip is insane.
00:41:05.000Obviously, no one is positing any other solutions, including the Chancellor.
00:41:09.000So my response to that is always the same.
00:41:11.000The minute that you posit an actual practical plan that doesn't involve Hamas actually running the place again, redeveloping all of its terror tunnels, The minute you come up with that plan, I'm happy to hear it.