Montana Tucker is a multi-talented influencer and activist whose social media following of over 14 million on platforms like TikTok and Instagram has made a tremendous impact on how young Americans absorb information about Israel and antisemitism online. Montana s viral content ranges from dancing on Hollywood Boulevard to man-on-the-street interviews that gauge the public s perceptions about Zionism and the war in Gaza. In today s episode, Montana discusses her experiences touring college campuses, the most common misconceptions she hears about Israel, and her takeaways from personally meeting with the victims of the October 7th attacks.
00:00:00.000I think meeting the kids really hit me in a different way.
00:00:03.000One time I broke down and cried when I was with one of them.
00:00:07.000The other times I felt like I really had to stay strong.
00:00:10.000And then when I got back to my hotel after filming that day, I think all my emotions came out.
00:00:15.000Because you can't understand not only the trauma that they dealt with either when they were taken hostage or...
00:00:20.000I interviewed a kid who saw Hamas kill both of his parents right in front of him and then he had to hide under his mother's dead body for a few hours so that Hamas would think that he was dead as well.
00:00:31.000Can you imagine laying under your mother's dead body just to survive?
00:00:36.000Montana Tucker is a multi-talented influencer and activist whose social media following of over 14 million on platforms like TikTok and Instagram has made a tremendous impact on how young Americans absorb information about Israel and antisemitism online.
00:00:49.000Montana's viral content ranges from dancing on Hollywood Boulevard to man-on-the-street interviews that gauge the public's perceptions about Zionism and the war in Gaza.
00:00:57.000This December, Montana will share her latest documentary, The Children of October 7th, where she interviews the child survivors of the kibbutz attacks as they survey their damaged homes and pay homage to the family members they've lost.
00:01:07.000In today's episode, Montana discusses her experiences touring college campuses, the most common misconceptions she hears about Israel, and her takeaways from personally meeting with the victims of the October 7th attacks.
00:01:17.000Using the power of dance and storytelling, Montana has inspired so many to utilize their creative platforms for good.
00:01:22.000Stay tuned for this wonderful conversation with Montana Tucker on the latest episode of the Sunday Special.
00:01:27.000Montana Tucker, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:02:03.000And my grandparents spoke at all the schools down in South Florida and around the world, and to anyone that would hear them, they would share their stories.
00:02:10.000I would hear about what they had to go through, what Jews had to go through, and that never again and never forget stood with me my whole life.
00:02:19.000When my Zadie passed away four years ago at the age of 97, my grandma is still alive today at age 96, I just knew that I had to now take over their legacy and their goal and their mission.
00:02:30.000When October 7th happened specifically, Something came over me that it was like, okay, this is now my time.
00:02:36.000I have a platform of a combined following of 14 million followers.
00:02:39.000If I don't use it to educate people of what is actually going on, the truth of what is going on, you know, I've been back to Israel now three times.
00:02:47.000I'm going again in a few weeks, and I'm trying to interview as many people as I can and show the truth about what is going on.
00:02:54.000So let's talk about how you got to 14 million followers, because this is a pre-existing following before you started doing the Israel activism.
00:03:02.000So what was it like training for that?
00:03:04.000How do you build up a following that big?
00:03:05.000Yeah, so I did build my following on dancing, on singing, on acting.
00:03:09.000I would, you know, collaborate with Paul Abdul, Terry Crews, Lance Bass from NSYNC, Ric Flair, the wrestler.
00:03:17.000So I would really collaborate with all kinds of amazing people, and that's what people followed me for.
00:03:22.000So when I did my Holocaust series specifically, that was a really big risk for my platforms because people were not following me to see me cry and to see me talk about something so serious, especially the Holocaust.
00:03:32.000They were Follow me to see me dance on the streets and, you know, sing.
00:03:36.000So it was definitely a big risk and, I think, shock to the world, but it really made a huge impact.
00:03:43.000And, you know, especially when I first started talking about Israel, I lost hundreds of thousands of followers.
00:03:48.000The death threats, I mean, I'm sure you can fully understand and relate.
00:03:52.000The death threats every day, still to this day, the death threats that I get are insane.
00:04:00.000Following of people who really share my morals and values and missions.
00:04:05.000And not only is it the echo chamber of Jews or pro-Israel activists, I really have a following of people of all races, religions, walks of life who are now actually being educated about this and now really are understanding what's going on.
00:04:20.000So did you spend a lot of time in Israel before October 7th?
00:04:41.000So where were you when October 7th happened?
00:04:43.000I was actually in LA, and I was actually going to celebrate one of my great friends' birthdays that day.
00:04:51.000And I don't know about you, but when I found out, I felt like I got hit by a truck, and obviously I'm just in my nice apartment in LA, and I felt like my whole world just crashed.
00:05:05.000And I don't know if it's generational trauma or what it is exactly, but I think most Jews around the world specifically felt this feeling.
00:05:13.000And I just, like, I couldn't do anything.
00:05:14.000I ended up not leaving my apartment for a whole week.
00:05:36.000I don't know how familiar you are, but he's...
00:05:38.000Gone to Israel now, I think, twice or three times since October 7th, and he's donated so much, and he really cares so much, and it's amazing.
00:05:47.000So we marched the entire time, side by side, and that was kind of my first time leaving, and then my first time at a rally, actually.
00:05:55.000Now I've been to hundreds since, but that was my first time at a rally.
00:05:58.000And I was like, okay, there are so many other people that are here feeling the exact same way that I'm feeling.
00:06:19.000And so my in-laws were still in Jerusalem at the time.
00:06:24.000So we had a lot of friends and family, obviously, over there.
00:06:27.000And so for I think there are really kind of three major issues that came up for Jews in America.
00:06:34.000One was many of us know people in Israel.
00:06:36.000Many of us have friends and family in Israel.
00:06:38.000And so, you know, it's such a small country and it's such a small community that you obviously know people who are directly impacted by everything that's going on.
00:06:43.000And if you don't, you're one degree removed from somebody who's either been killed, kidnapped or or had to fight in the army over there in order to in order to stop this sort of stuff.
00:06:52.000Number two was the the shaking of a feeling of security that Jews around the world had had prior to October 7th.
00:06:59.000So if you weren't living in France where you're under some sort of constant sort of assault, low level assault, if you aren't living in Denmark, whereas it turns out there's some real problems.
00:07:08.000But you're living in America, which has been the friendliest country in the history of the world to Jews.
00:07:11.000If if you're living in the United States, this is not an issue that you really had to deal with.
00:07:18.000Even people like me, where I got hit with a huge wave of anti-Semitism in 2015-2016, for example, It didn't really impact my daily life in any serious way other than I needed a little bit of extra security.
00:07:28.000But the idea that my world was shaped by anti-Semitism in some serious way, it never really occurred to me.
00:07:33.000And I think that was true for virtually every Jew, including Jews, many Jews in Israel, who had come to sort of just...
00:07:40.000I don't understand that they live in the world's roughest neighborhood.
00:07:51.000And when that happened, I think that the feelings of vulnerability obviously skyrocketed for Jews, not just in Israel, but around the world.
00:07:58.000And then there was the, what I say was sort of the triple whammy here, which was the anti-Semitic response to October 7th, which was the thing that truly astonished me.
00:08:05.000I wasn't shaken by anything except the evils of October 7th about October 7th because It turns out there are people who want to murder Jews in that region of the world, and they're quite plentiful.
00:08:13.000The part that was shocking to me was the immediate response by hundreds of thousands of people across the West, including in the United States, before Israel had even responded to October 7th, to essentially side with Hamas and take the side of the people who are doing the murdering, the raping, the pillaging, the kidnapping.
00:08:30.000That was an amazing shock to the system.
00:08:32.000Well, that just shows you that I think this has been built up inside of them for a long time, and I think that it's just now socially acceptable.
00:08:39.000For a long time, I feel like it wasn't as socially acceptable to be just flat-out anti-Semitic.
00:08:43.000But now, literally, as we see on social media, as we see on the campuses, it's literally popular and trending to be anti-Semitic, anti-Israel.
00:08:54.000Like, I'm seeing it so much on social media.
00:08:56.000media, it's crazy what videos like are going viral are really these hateful videos that have people who have no skin in the game or people who have no clue truly about the conflict.
00:09:07.000But social media, it's like it's like pushing this.
00:09:10.000And on campuses, kids who feel maybe like they haven't found themselves or they haven't found a group, they're seeing how it's it's popular to do these encampments or it's popular to do these crazy protests.
00:09:21.000So they're following along because they want to feel like they're a part of something.
00:09:24.000How much of that do you think is social media?
00:09:26.000You spent an enormous amount of time and effort, obviously, on social media.
00:09:29.000You built your career on social media.
00:09:31.000So if we here at Daily Wire, obviously, whether you're talking Facebook or YouTube, you're talking TikTok, any of those social media sites have been a boon for independent content creators.
00:09:39.000But there's no question that the algorithms, particularly at TikTok, have been virulent in generating extraordinary antisemitism and broadcasting that antisemitism to an ever larger crowd.
00:09:50.000Unfortunately, I blame social media for a lot of it.
00:09:52.000I think that this is where kids aren't watching CNN and Fox all day long.
00:10:58.000There's no question that the CCP, which effectively runs TikTok, it's a Chinese app, that the material they have promulgated to the West on TikTok, number one, is very different from the stuff they allow in China.
00:11:09.000In China, they legitimately shut down an enormous amount of material to prevent any sort of criticism of the regime or Westernization of the country.
00:11:17.000But they've been openly promulgating anti-Semitic content in the hope that it will split the West.
00:11:23.000I mean, I don't think there's any question that it's an actual strategy.
00:12:24.000I think a thing that people don't realize, this is not specifically about the conflict, but I'm sure you know as many times as you've been to Israel how Israel's an apartheid state.
00:12:33.000I think that one bothers me so much because you land in Israel, and I think I've never seen a more diverse group of people in one area.
00:12:42.000It's insane and amazing and beautiful how many different types of people coexist in Israel.
00:12:47.000It's really beautiful, and I think that's something that people don't know.
00:12:50.000I think it's just white Jews that live there.
00:12:52.000And there are so many different types of Jews that live in Israel, too.
00:12:55.000So I think that is something that I'm really trying to show as well.
00:12:58.000And people ask a lot of the times, like, oh, is it just, like, white Jews that live there?
00:13:02.000And they think that no Arabs live there at all.
00:13:04.000And the statistics are incredible of, like, how many actually live there and live there peacefully.
00:14:06.000In the West, very few people have actually served in the military.
00:14:08.000The draft in the United States ended during the Vietnam War that's now 50 years ago.
00:14:12.000So it's been a very long time since you've had mandatory military service in the United States.
00:14:15.000Mandatory military service is the way that it is done in the state of Israel.
00:14:18.000If you hit 18, you're going to the military, and now that they're starting to end exemptions, even for the Haredim, for the ultra-Orthodox, it really means pretty much everybody, except for actually Arabs who are not drafted.
00:14:29.000Is bound to do either army service or military service.
00:15:02.000The number of people who were called up to the military after October 7th, it's like hundreds of thousands of people.
00:15:08.000I mean, it literally cleaned out nearly every business in the country.
00:15:11.000You had people who were working in the banking sector in Tel Aviv were getting called up.
00:15:15.000You You had small business owners who owned a pizza shop were getting called up.
00:15:18.000People who had six, seven, eight kids were getting called up.
00:15:21.000I mean, they mobilized pretty much everyone in the country after October 7th.
00:15:24.000And many of the Israelis who are getting wounded and killed in combat are people with small kids, are people who have their own business.
00:15:30.000And because, again, in the United States, there is no war front in the United States that is immediate.
00:15:36.000The closest thing you can come to it is probably the southern border, but the southern border is still not nearly as violent, obviously, as southern Lebanon is right now, or the Gaza Strip is right now, or even places like Janina or Nablus.
00:15:48.000The immediacy of the geography is something that I think a lot of people don't understand, because especially if you live in America, this is an enormous, amazing country.
00:15:55.000It spans 3,000 miles in terms of its width.
00:15:59.000And the state of Israel, at its closest point, if you're talking about ignoring the West Bank, is nine miles wide.
00:16:05.000I mean, it's the distance from where we're sitting to the Atlantic Ocean right now.
00:16:22.000I don't know if we're talking too much about what happened in Amsterdam, but that also proves why Israel needs to exist.
00:16:30.000I think that is one of the perfect examples of why Israel needs to exist and why The calling for the globalizing, the intifada, what that actually means.
00:17:06.000Like you said, they were doctors, they were lawyers, they were working at banks, and they had to get up and leave.
00:17:11.000And their resilience, though, and even though this is not something that I probably wanted to go do, they will go and fight for their country and for their people and do whatever it takes to save their people.
00:17:23.000And I think that is something that is so beautiful.
00:17:25.000We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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00:18:35.000Yeah, I think one of the things that October 7th has made clear in the period since, including what happened in Amsterdam.
00:18:40.000For those who missed it, what happened in Amsterdam is that there was a soccer match between the Dutch national team and the, and Makabe Tel Aviv, which is a team that's based obviously in Israel.
00:18:49.000And, um, and a bunch of Israeli fans were there for the soccer match.
00:18:53.000Uh, some of them in the, in the lead up were, were sort of getting into shouting matches with, with Palestinian protesters who'd shown up with Palestinian flags.
00:19:01.000Uh, got a little bit rowdy before the game.
00:19:03.000And then after the soccer match, uh, there were organized bands were chasing those Jews down and other Jews and beating them, trying to run them over with cars, forcing them to jump into the canals, trying to break into hotels where people were actually just staying.
00:19:16.000It was essentially an excuse to break into a violent riot or a violent pogrom against Jews.
00:19:23.000The reality of the necessity for the state of Israel is obviously clear, particularly for people in Europe.
00:19:30.000There is this great and ridiculous irony where in the aftermath of October 7th, you'll see people who hate Israel say that the Jews should go back where they came from.
00:19:40.000Because the implication being, of course, that the Jews are European, which ignores, number one, the history, which is that the Jews are innate to the region, that they are, in fact, indigenous to the region.
00:19:49.000Number two, that probably half of Jews, maybe more than half at this point, who live in Israel and Mizrahi, meaning that they're Sephardi, meaning they're from the actual Arab countries that surround that area.
00:19:58.000My in-laws are Moroccan and my wife is Moroccan.
00:20:01.000So like that, she's not European in any way, shape or form.
00:20:04.000And so the irony of go back to Europe and then in Europe, Jews are being, are having the shit kicked out of them on the streets or they're being attacked in France for being Jewish.
00:20:13.000There have been significant attacks on Jews in France, including murder.
00:20:18.000And Jews are realizing this now, moving to Israel, and then being told, no, no, no, you have to go back where, quote-unquote, you came from, which would be the places where they committed a genocide like 80 years ago.
00:20:37.000I mean, many of the people who are committing, I would say most of the people who are committing the anti-Jewish violence in Europe right now are not natives of Europe.
00:20:45.000They're people who are coming from the Middle East and Northern Africa.
00:20:47.000They're Muslim and they're radical Muslim and they're hurting Jews in Europe.
00:20:53.000It's hard to even square the argument, but it's not a good faith argument in the first place.
00:20:57.000It's not, and I think for me, seeing this and hearing this, I heard my grandparents' stories.
00:21:33.000And that's why everyone needs to take this extremely seriously.
00:21:36.000I think that this is one of the big points, is that what's happening right now is not indicative just of hatred of Jews.
00:21:43.000It is indicative of the hatred of the West that has been imbibed throughout Western civilization, particularly in young people.
00:21:49.000It's not everybody who's young, obviously.
00:21:51.000It's a minority, plurality, depending on where you are, of young people who now believe this anti-Western claptrap.
00:22:00.000Basically, the West is guilty for exploitation and evil.
00:22:03.000And anybody who is successful is an oppressor, and anybody who is unsuccessful is the oppressed.
00:22:08.000And when that matrix is then applied to the Middle East, where Israel is wildly successful, being a country of seven and a half million Jews, a couple million Muslim Arabs, some Christians as well.
00:22:17.000The total population of Israel is about ten and a half million.
00:22:20.000A country of ten and a half million is the militarily dominant force in the region, the economically dominant force in the region, without any natural resources.
00:22:29.000I mean, now they have oil in Leviathan oil fields offshore.
00:22:31.000That was found like five, ten years ago.
00:22:33.000It's not as though Israel built its capital off the back of just drilling the way that virtually every other country in the region did.
00:22:42.000Israel has a Western-style government with Western-style property rights, Western-style GDP, Western-style living standards.
00:22:49.000And it's specifically because of that that people hate Israel.
00:22:53.000That's the real reason that people in the West, who are on the left particularly, hate Israel is because the idea is that Israel is too successful.
00:22:59.000The reason they're successful is because they're exploitive colonizers.
00:23:03.000And anti-colonization has to happen not just in Israel, but in the rest of Western civilization.
00:23:08.000The anti-colonization mentality, the decolonialism mentality.
00:23:12.000They're applying it to Israel, but that's just because it's easy to externalize that particular argument to the Middle East.
00:23:20.000What they really mean, and people will say this if they're honest about it, is that they want to decolonize America.
00:23:23.000And what they really mean by that is they just want to tear down all the systems.
00:23:36.000I mean, you see it in the Netherlands where Gerd Weilders has been saying, like, this needs to stop for years.
00:23:41.000and he went from being a supposed fringe voice to being the largest party in his parliament.
00:23:49.000You're seeing it across Europe, whether the European parties wish to acknowledge it or not.
00:23:53.000Everybody is moving to the right, whether it's Maloney in Italy, whether it's Mille in Argentina.
00:23:58.000Across the world, there's a backlash that's coming for what I've termed the scavenger mentality I've suggested that the world is now divided, unfortunately, between lions and scavengers.
00:24:09.000They're people who want to go to work, have a job, innovate, build, have communities, have families, and live within a system of property rights and free speech and duties and values.
00:24:20.000And then you have scavengers who just want to tear all that stuff down because they think that all that stuff is a system of exploitative colonialism and that has to be torn down and that anytime somebody fails, it's not because they've made bad decisions.
00:24:31.000It's because the system has victimized them.
00:24:32.000And I think Western civilization is tired of this shit, honestly.
00:24:36.000I think Western civilization is looking at this and saying no.
00:24:39.000And it's manifesting in all sorts of ways that have nothing to do with Israel.
00:24:42.000I think that you're seeing this with young people, frankly.
00:24:45.000I think there's going to be a backlash among young people who are tired of being told that they are the representatives of a civilization that is evil and bad, and the only way that they can I think that there are a lot of people who are like, no, you know what?
00:25:02.000I think you saw that in the election in the United States.
00:25:04.000I think that you're going to see that in elections around Europe.
00:25:06.000I think the rising power of right-wing parties in Europe, which you're starting to see people trying desperately to hold back, I don't think they're going to be able to contain it because it turns out that things like open borders where you ship in people who hate your values, people don't like those things.
00:25:18.000It turns out that people don't like being told that the best they can hope for from their life is Sort of this gradual decline into irrelevance and that you should feel guilty over the success of your civilization.
00:25:34.000So I think the backlash is coming and I think that, again, because everything happens in the Middle East first because that's where the borders are the closest.
00:25:40.000I think that you're seeing that in Israel.
00:25:42.000I mean, just the Israeli body politics is an amazing example of this.
00:25:45.000If you go back just a year and a half ago, the Israeli body politic was tearing itself apart over things like judicial reform, or as an internal issue over how much power should be delegated to the judiciary versus how much power should be delegated to the parliament in the state of Israel.
00:25:58.000And you had massive, huge, open protests, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, open talk about civil war in Israel, which was wildly exaggerated and absurd.
00:26:07.000And people who are spending all of their time worrying about how do we allocate resources within ourselves, Is it fair?
00:26:16.000And then it turns out there's an existential threat at your doorstep.
00:26:19.000And when the existential threat at your doorstep materializes, it turns out that all the people who are protesting in the streets and all the people they are protesting against are in the same unit.
00:26:27.000And you see a bunch of people who are khiloni, that's secular, in Israel, and a bunch of people who are dati, meaning religious in Israel, who five minutes ago were sort of over at each other's throats over things like judicial reform.
00:26:38.000So they're like, guys, we have bigger priorities right now.
00:26:40.000It turns out that there's something that is much, much worse.
00:26:42.000And so you've seen a transformation of the body politic in Israel.
00:26:45.000I mean, first of all, the far left in Israel no longer exists as a functioning political entity.
00:26:51.000When I was growing up, the Labor Party in Israel was the actual governing party in Israel in half of elections.
00:26:56.000Before Menachem Begin, the Labor Party was the only party in Israel that had ever governed.
00:27:00.000And now, if you were to allocate sort of on the political spectrum in Israel where things stand, of the 120 seats in Knesset, a minimum of 80 of them would have to be characterized as center to right.
00:27:11.000There is no functioning left in Israel anymore because the left that had been, you know, sort of flagellating itself over the evils of Israel being Israel.
00:27:20.000Like, well, it turns out no matter what we do, people still want to murder us.
00:27:23.000I mean, one of the things that happened on October 7th was that the attack happened in the Gaza envelope.
00:27:27.000The Gaza envelope, for people who don't know Israel and don't know the geography, it's like they attacked San Francisco.
00:27:30.000That area is the most left-wing area in the state of Israel.
00:27:33.000It is not an area that's in territorial dispute.
00:28:55.000You know, in the beginning, I didn't necessarily interview children.
00:28:58.000I met one girl, Emily Hand, who was a hostage.
00:29:02.000She was probably the first child that I met.
00:29:05.000This was closer to the beginning, right after she got released.
00:29:09.000And again, I think because I heard my grandparents' stories and my grandma was 13 when she was taken to Auschwitz, I think meeting the kids really hit me in a different way because a lot of them, I interviewed kids from 11 to 17. And their stories and looking them in the eye, sharing their stories with me.
00:29:30.000You know, one time I broke down and cried when I was with one of them.
00:29:35.000The other times I felt like I really had to stay strong.
00:29:38.000And then when I got back to my hotel after filming that day, I think all my emotions came out.
00:29:43.000Because you can't understand not only the trauma that they dealt with either when they were taken hostage or I interviewed a kid who saw Hamas kill both of his parents right in front of him, and then he had to hide under his mother's dead body for a few hours so that Hamas would think that he was dead as well.
00:30:00.000Can you imagine laying under your mother's dead body just to survive?
00:30:06.000And you hear that and you know the trauma that they dealt with then, but now the lifetime of trauma that these kids are going to have to deal with, they're never going to be the same, ever.
00:30:15.000Now this kid is missing both of his parents.
00:30:17.000Another kid was a hostage for 54 days and his father is still a hostage.
00:30:22.000I mean, you can't even understand what these families are going through and these kids are going through.
00:30:28.000A lot of the women that I interviewed, you know, the sexual abuse that they endured or the mental abuse that they endured.
00:30:37.000I've become friends with a lot of them now and I feel like they're all my family, you know?
00:30:45.000I think the kids was the one that hit me the most.
00:30:48.000But I think the more I meet these people, the more it makes me want to fight harder.
00:30:53.000Because I know what they've been through, and I know what they're going to continue to go through, and I know that it's...
00:30:58.000I feel it's my absolute responsibility to make sure their stories are told and shared with the world.
00:31:03.000And I've posted just small clips on my social media already, and they already have, like...
00:31:08.000Almost 20 million views across platforms of just their small clips and the full-length documentaries coming out in December.
00:31:14.000And I think that, again, it doesn't matter what anyone thinks of the conflict necessarily or what your opinions are.
00:31:20.000When you hear from these kids and you hear their personal stories, I think all of that goes away and you really feel for what happened to them.
00:31:28.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:32:35.000So, you know, I think one of the things that's happened in the media is they've attempted a sort of moral equivalence, obviously, between October 7th and then the response by Israel to October 7th.
00:32:57.000There have actually been more births in Gaza since the beginning of the war than there have been deaths in warfare in Gaza on the Palestinian side since the beginning of the war.
00:33:04.000So that's an awfully stupid way to go about doing a genocide if that's what you're seeking to do.
00:33:07.000And they just sent out the polio vaccines, right?
00:33:10.000They're sending 2,500 calories per person per day into the Gaza Strip.
00:33:14.000A lot of that's being hijacked by Hamas or stolen by the UNRWA before it was outlawed by Israel.
00:33:19.000But the reality on the ground is ridiculous.
00:33:22.000I mean, the situation that you mentioned where you have a child hiding under the body of a dead parent in order to survive, the reason that that would never be an issue in Gaza is because Israel is not attempting to kill children.
00:33:32.000Israel is attempting to preserve life and kill terrorists.
00:34:06.000Because they said, we're not going to kill a kid.
00:34:09.000I mean, I've seen the tapes from, if you ever go to, if ever our viewers have a chance to go to visit an Air Force base in Israel, they have footage, and they will show you the footage of how they go about doing a drone strike on terrorists.
00:34:20.000And much of that footage is them deciding not to do a drone strike.
00:34:23.000They have to go through four layers of legal scrutiny before they greenlight a drone strike, which takes like an additional 45 seconds to a minute just to go through those clearances to actually perform the drone strike.
00:34:34.000That's how meticulous Israel is attempting to be legally.
00:34:43.000That's something I feel like people keep forgetting about this war.
00:34:45.000If you look at the history of wars, it's not even comparable.
00:34:50.000Israel has the single best civilian-to-terrorist kill ratio in the history of urban warfare, and it isn't particularly close.
00:34:57.000For every civilian who's tragically killed, Israel kills about a terrorist.
00:35:04.000It's almost a one-to-one ratio at this point by the data that's being provided by the IDF, and even by the data that Hamas is providing, it's like 1.6 to 1. Those sorts of ratios are unheard of in urban warfare.
00:35:15.000When the United States is engaged in urban warfare in the past, you're talking about kill ratios of 4, 5 to 1 in terms of civilians and terrorists because terrorists legitimately hide among civilians in order to avoid Western powers killing them.
00:35:25.000And so if any Western power has to do that, I mean, you can see this in Black Hawk Down.
00:35:32.000Terrorists routinely hide behind civilians because they understand that the Western way of war is to try to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible since World War II. Meanwhile, they're going to exploit that as a vulnerability.
00:35:45.000Last time I was in Israel, which was back during the summer, I was sitting at Mincha, which is the Jewish afternoon service, and the person sitting next to me was a young soldier, a 20-year-old guy, who had been in Gaza.
00:36:01.000They were going house to house, trying to avoid civilian casualties, and his unit had been hit by an IED that was in a building, and the entire building came down on his unit.
00:36:20.000The reason that they were in there on the ground in the first place is to attempt to avoid civilian casualties.
00:36:26.000If this had been World War II, then total air power would have been the obvious response to 10-7.
00:36:33.000And so the fact that, again, Israel's been performing, and the proof is in the pudding, meaning that When Israel performs some of the most targeted operations in human history against terrorists, the level of criticism is precisely the same.
00:36:47.000So forget about what's going on in Gaza.
00:36:48.000When Israel does this unbelievable beeper operation in Lebanon, where they literally use the supply chain...
00:37:01.000I mean, the Lebanese people have been living in a hellscape since the PLO came into the country in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and proceeded to help destroy the country.
00:37:08.000And then Hezbollah with Iran came in as well.
00:37:11.000And that country's been a sectarian hellhole for the last couple of decades, minimum.
00:37:15.000More like since the late 1970s, early 1980s.
00:37:18.000And because of what Israel is doing right now, it's possible that there may be an actual...
00:37:24.000Possibility of a real government being established in Lebanon, you would hope, for the first time in decades.
00:37:30.000But when Israel did the beeper operation, again, the single greatest anti-terror operation in the history of humanity, where they used the actual supply chain of Hezbollah in order to target Hezbollah terrorists, they literally used only devices that Hezbollah was handing out to its fellow terrorists to get explosives in the beepers, and then they blew up the beepers, and they hit...
00:37:50.000One civilian, I believe there was one child who was killed because it was a kid of a terrorist who was carrying the beeper when it went off.
00:37:57.000And the level of response by the people who hate Israel was exactly the same as if Israel had deliberately bombed civilians.
00:38:04.000Because it's not about the killing of civilians or the harming of civilians for people who hate Israel.
00:38:08.000Anytime Israel flexes muscle, anytime Israel continues to not die, that would be the problem they seem to have.
00:38:18.000That's why I know I have to do everything I can to keep standing for Israel in every way, shape, and form.
00:38:23.000And that's why I continue to go back and continue to share the real stories and share what's actually happening on the grounds.
00:38:29.000And I also try to humanize the IDF. I think that's another thing that The world has dehumanized the IDF completely.
00:38:38.000And I think sharing personal stories like you just shared and like I just shared are so important for people to hear like actually the morality of the IDF as well.
00:38:47.000So given the fact that you are a dancer, which means that you know that actually takes practice and you have to keep doing it and all that.
00:38:52.000Have you been able to keep up your lifestyle during this year?
00:38:55.000It's been the craziest year of my life, I have to say.
00:39:00.000Florida is my home and I have a place in LA and I feel like I'm like just barely in either place.
00:39:06.000But this is the most important thing that I could ever do in my life.
00:39:10.000And I think any Jew specifically that is not standing up right now in their own ways, you don't have to be on social media like me and be as outspoken as I am on social media.
00:39:20.000But this is the craziest time for Jews since the Holocaust, right?
00:39:26.000Back then, and I keep reiterating this, it didn't matter how famous you were, how successful you were during the Holocaust.
00:39:32.000If you were Jewish, that was it for you.
00:39:38.000And we need to make sure that we all speak up and do something in our own ways because this is what our ancestors couldn't have done or weren't able to do back then.
00:39:46.000So for me, if I have the opportunity to use my platforms to combat anti-Semitism, to combat all forms of hate, to debunk the crazy propaganda that's going out there, if I have the opportunity to speak around the world And make a difference.
00:40:01.000So it's been, I've always tired, for sure, just constantly tired.
00:40:07.000But I think when I meet these, all my trips to Israel, every single time, it inspires me more and more to keep going and to keep speaking up.
00:40:15.000And the more people that I meet, also online, it could be a scary, terrible place.
00:40:21.000And the crazy messages I receive are crazy.
00:40:24.000But the messages that I also receive from people around the world saying like, I was ready to give up and then I saw your post and you inspired me.
00:40:36.000And then I see all of your necklaces all the time and how prideful you are.
00:40:40.000And you've inspired me not to put my necklace back on.
00:40:42.000So it comes with also a lot of love and support.
00:40:46.000I'll be on the street and somebody will come up to me and just say, thank you for what you're doing.
00:40:49.000So all of that keeps me going and makes me want to go even harder and speak up even more.
00:40:54.000I think one of the big differences, obviously, also between now and the pre-Holocaust era is that there are so many people in the West who really, really side with Israel and who really, really understand the nature of the conflict.
00:41:06.000That's particularly true in the United States.
00:41:08.000There are certainly a lot of people in Europe.
00:41:10.000Obviously, we're friends with many of them, people like Douglas Murray, who totally understand it.
00:41:14.000But in the United States, the United States is a wildly philo-Semitic country.
00:41:21.000I mean, there are pockets of terrible people on college campuses, particularly, which incentivize this behavior.
00:41:26.000But the number of people in this country who truly love Jews, who truly also love Israel, and who see the civilizational conflict that's at play here...
00:42:31.000And one of the people from the town gets up and says, we have a present for you.
00:42:35.000So this person takes out a giant Israeli flag and says, after October 7th, one of the members of our town was so upset and disturbed and thought it was so necessary that he went out and he bought this giant Israeli flag.
00:42:49.000He stuck it on the back of his Ford F-150 and he was just driving around this all-non-Jewish town with this giant Israeli flag with the Ford F-150.
00:42:56.000And everybody in the town was so moved by that and in such solidarity with Israel and the Jews that we all wanted to sign this.
00:43:01.000So we spent the last year signing this flag.
00:43:03.000Here is a flag signed by hundreds of Christians in northern Ohio who love Jews, love Israel, and understand the civilizational battle that we're in right now.
00:43:58.000There's another one, Loai, who's from Yemen.
00:44:00.000And he literally grew up to hate Jews, of course.
00:44:04.000And he went to Israel for his first time.
00:44:06.000And then his whole perspective changed.
00:44:08.000And he now stands for Israel and stands up for Jews.
00:44:11.000And there's a lot of amazing people who have also come out and I've showed their pride for Israel and standing for Israel, not just the Jews, which is amazing.
00:44:20.000So you have your new project that is coming out in which you interview all of these kids from October 7th.
00:44:28.000And then obviously you also have a docu-series on the Holocaust that you've talked about, How to Never Forget, and We Can Dance Again, which of course was this very widely seen dance film with Nova Festival survivors.
00:44:39.000So what's next in terms of what you're producing next?
00:44:43.000What kind of content are you hoping to put out there?
00:44:45.000You know, for me, I think I've tried to share the same message in different ways.
00:44:48.000I feel like that's been my goal since the seventh is to continue to share the same message just in different ways.
00:44:54.000And as we know, social media, everyone's algorithm is different.
00:44:57.000A video can land on this page and not land on this person's page.
00:45:00.000And so for me, it's been important to do these unique ways of sharing the message.
00:45:04.000That's why the NOVA dance video specifically was kind of a crazy idea.
00:45:07.000Everyone thought you're going to do a dance video at the NOVA site with NOVA survivors, a dance video.
00:45:13.000And I knew that people went to the NOVA festival to dance.
00:45:16.000And I got together a bunch of the survivors and I asked them if they'd be comfortable with this.
00:45:21.000The dance group that is in my video, they lost three of their members at NOVA. And they dedicated a whole dance piece to NOVA. So everything came together.
00:45:30.000The person that designed my outfit is really everyone that had also friends that were lost in NOVA. So every single person involved in that video had a real attachment to what happened there.
00:45:41.000And to see the survivors with me at the end of the video, holding my hand, walking powerfully.
00:45:46.000Moran Steli and I was actually a hostage for 54 days.
00:45:50.000She's in my video with me, and I love her so much.
00:45:53.000But to see her, she told me that she showed right behind us of where we did the video was where she had to run to escape, where she tried to escape.
00:46:02.000After she dealt with everything that she dealt with, to see her standing strong and dancing again.
00:46:10.000In that video, when you first watch a video, you think it's like a music video.
00:46:13.000So it attracted a different audience from people who may not care about the conflict or want to see me speak about this again.
00:46:19.000They thought they were watching a dance video.
00:46:21.000And then all of a sudden, halfway through, you're hit with the reality of what happened at NOVA.
00:46:24.000And again, the children of October 7th, why I think this is so important is I think really hearing from these kids is going to impact people in a really different way.
00:46:34.000I'm going to Israel, like I said, November 30th, and we're going to do like a small premiere there with all the families, with President Herzog and make it really special because this is really about the kids and their families.
00:46:48.000And like I said, I think it's going to really impact people in a big way.
00:46:51.000I'm going back to Israel in January to film a movie.
00:46:54.000So I just have a lot of amazing things going on.
00:46:58.000So the movie that I'm filming in January, I can't say too much about yet.
00:47:01.000But I also just filmed one that's coming out in April called Mob Cops.
00:47:08.000So that one has nothing to do with Israel, but that one's really cool.
00:47:10.000I can't wait for that one to come out.
00:47:12.000And I'm also doing another one called The Mensch with Jonah Platt.
00:47:16.000So a lot of really exciting things going on, but my number one priority is combating anti-Semitism, standing for Israel, and trying to make a real difference in this crazy world.