Van Jones attacks me, I respond, and Tim Kane says one of the darkest, most chilling things I've ever heard a senator say. And then Ben Shapiro joins the show to talk about George Floyd Israel and his latest book, Lions and Scavengers.
00:00:43.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, turning point USA.
00:00:50.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are gonna fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:59.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:12.000Twenty-million dollars for many period thousands of years.
00:01:13.000you When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.
00:01:22.000And to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.
00:01:29.000A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation.
00:01:36.000We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:01:51.000That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
00:01:58.000That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, organizing its powers in such form as them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
00:02:17.000That is the beginning of our birth certificate.
00:02:23.000That is the Declaration of Independence.
00:02:25.000Now you read this, articulated by Thomas Jefferson and the American founders, is a theory and an understanding of natural rights in government.
00:03:54.000This is a U.S. senator that does not know as much as some of the college students that I will be dialoguing with tomorrow at Utah Valley University in Utah.
00:06:33.000He believes the government gives you rights, that laws give you rights.
00:06:38.000That's why he's okay with aborting babies.
00:06:42.000Because those humans have no rights because the government hasn't given those rights to him.
00:06:47.000That's that's why he's fine with mutilating kids in trans surgeries, because those kids have no rights because the government hasn't given those rights.
00:06:55.000Yeah, he's fine with potentially gulags because the government, there's nothing wrong with mass murdering people in gulags because the government didn't give those rights to them.
00:07:02.000The government decided not to give them those rights.
00:07:07.000Tim Kane, we're not even going to use the Holocaust example, because that one is overused.
00:07:12.000Was Mao wrong to mass murder millions of people?
00:07:16.000government decided not to give those people rights.
00:07:19.000We believe in something transcendent above government that government appeals towards.
00:07:26.000Government's job is to protect our unalienable rights that we were born with, that every human being is born with.
00:07:33.000Our rights coming from God makes them inalienable because they are rooted in the equal God-given dignity shared by all human This is an inarguable spiritual element to our nation.
00:07:46.000Some people say, oh, Tim Kane is kind of dumb.
00:10:19.000Why ReFi does not care what your credit score is when the payment on your distress or defaulted private student loan is so big that you can't ever get ahead in your finances?
00:11:03.000I mean, we commonly say, praise God, President Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming president, but praise God he prevented Tim Kane from becoming vice president.
00:11:12.000And that alone, he should just have a permanent place in our hearts as doing a phenomenal contribution to American society.
00:11:21.000And I guarantee you, I mean, he said out loud because he's some staffer gave it to him, but I guarantee you Kamala Harris believes this.
00:11:27.000They do not believe in the natural rights theory of government, which is self-evident.
00:11:32.000As soon as you believe there's a natural law, of which there is, that normativity is woven into nature, that there is a natural being to our existence and physics and math and morality and thermodynamics, whatever.
00:11:45.000You look as if there is a law in nature, then immediately you can say, then who is the law giver?
00:11:51.000Once you admit there is a natural law, there's a law giver, and that is why Thomas Jefferson said the laws of nature and nature is God.
00:12:01.000The importance of natural rights is it makes your rights eternal and transcendent, and nobody can ever take those rights justly away from you.
00:12:09.000It's a big deal when you think about it.
00:12:11.000Email us as always, freedom at Charliekirk.com.
00:12:14.000So last night on CNN, the only time I've ever watched CNN is when they mentioned me or Scott Jennings.
00:12:35.000Anyway, so so Van Jones was talking about me, and there's so much, there's so many lies involved in what he said here.
00:12:42.000First of all, I never said the first element what he said.
00:12:45.000I did say the second part, but this is a very important thing to focus on.
00:12:48.000So Van Jones is saying I should be ashamed of myself.
00:12:52.000And just reminder, the murder of Arena Zarutska, did you know that the attacker said, quote, I got that white girl?
00:13:00.000The attacker racialized this, just for the record.
00:13:03.000Now, mind you, do you notice that the media all of a sudden tries to play the moral high ground when we start to try to make them live up to the standard that they created and the construct that they forced and the paradigm that they constituted under George Floyd, the moment that we make them have to live up to their own standard, they start to cry foul.
00:13:23.000As soon as we start to make them live up to the George Floyd standard, oh, what is Charlie Kirk racializing this?
00:13:28.000And by the way, Van Jones also has a major lie embedded into this whole thing.
00:13:35.000Listen carefully, race hustler, Marxist, Van Jones.
00:13:38.000By the way, Van, you're welcome on my program.
00:14:53.000First of all, when Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, was asked repeatedly by the media, was there racial animus involved in Derek Chauvin's actions against George Floyd?
00:15:04.000He said no, and they dodged the question.
00:15:06.000Do you know that there is no evidence that Derek Chauvin acted racially?
00:15:09.000If you think Derek Chauvin acted racially, then you're a racist and parting racial type fantasies and mythologies into a situation of which it does not exist.
00:15:17.000And by the way, just if you're taking notes, media matters, George Floyd overdosed, okay?
00:15:21.000You can write that down, take to the bank.
00:15:23.000In fact, we have Ben Shapiro coming up next segment, of which I'm going to have him remind us of all the facts.
00:15:28.000Anyway, that's not what it's even about.
00:15:32.000Quote, if a random white person simply walked up to and stabbed a nice law-abiding black person for no reason, it would be an apocalyptically huge national story used to impose national sweeping political changes on the whole country.
00:15:48.000Our media thirsts for stories like this.
00:15:50.000I want you to imagine if a white guy sitting on a bus and a black woman just on her phone, all of a sudden the white guy took out a knife and just stabbed her in the neck repeatedly.
00:16:00.000How do you think our media would react?
00:16:11.000I mean, it would be so on top, they'd start burning the Denny's.
00:16:15.000They use Emmett Till 70 years later because of this, because it's a case of a horrifying murder of an innocent black person by hateful whites.
00:16:23.000It's so rare they had to go back 70 years, but you know what?
00:16:26.000When a white person is murdered, we don't burn down the country.
00:16:30.000But when George Floyd overdosed on drugs, it's Floyd of Palooza.
00:16:35.000But for the opposite, we have to go back one day.
00:16:37.000Literally, there was another, you know, several happened this last week.
00:16:41.000Another white girl was just murdered by a black person in Alabama, a woman butchered walking her dog.
00:16:48.000There was also one that happened in South Carolina and one that happened in Virginia.
00:16:51.000That is four white women in the American South that just recently were butchered by black criminals.
00:16:58.000So we take a step back and say, well, what's really going on here?
00:17:01.000What's really going on here is a situation where Van Jones is acting like if I said something I did not say, when in reality, we're asking a very simple question, Mr. Jones.
00:17:12.000Very simple question, which is will you apologize for all the criminal justice reform that you pushed forward that allowed these 14-time criminal offenders to walk the streets?
00:17:23.000Because you are the architect and the designer of constantly feeling bad for the criminal that then can kill more people like Irina Zarutsky.
00:17:31.000And by the way, I did not bring up race.
00:17:33.000The attacker said, quote, I got that white girl, end quote.
00:17:39.000Oh, it matters because you made us care about race in the summer of 2020.
00:17:42.000Looks like you got it live up to the book of your own rules.
00:17:45.000The second that we make you live up to your ridiculous paradigm, you collapse like a house of cards.
00:17:52.000Gentlemen, let's get real for a second.
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00:19:41.000I mean, it was basically just the autopsy report.
00:19:42.000I mean, the autopsy report showed that he had a massively enlarged heart, that he had extraordinary quantities of drugs, including fentanyl in his system, enough fentanyl to kill a normal person multiple times over.
00:19:52.000The original coroner suggested that if they had found George Floyd dead in his home, they would have assumed that he died of a drug overdose.
00:19:58.000If you actually watched the tape of the confrontation with the officers, he's saying I can't breathe well before he gets out of the car.
00:20:04.000In fact, one of the reasons they take him out of the car is he is taken out at his own request.
00:20:09.000And so, again, the the the medical evidence does not suggest that there's no damage to his trachea, there's no damage to his neck.
00:20:14.000Uh, the medical evidence does not suggest that he actually died as a result of Derek Chauvin's knee on his neck.
00:20:18.000It suggests that he died as a result of probably excited delirium, meaning elevated heart rate as a result of both ingesting drugs, in the large heart, and the excitement of being arrested.
00:20:28.000Well, and on top of that, they also say that this was racially motivated.
00:20:32.000Is there any evidence at all that there was racial animus in this situation?
00:20:35.000So Van Jones said it was obviously a racial thing.
00:20:38.000If you're you're actually imparting your own racial stereotypes onto a situation of which even Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, rejected the claim that race was involved in this.
00:20:49.000I mean, there was a federal civil rights charge that was brought against Derek Chauvin, and it did not even allege that there is a violation of civil rights on the basis of race.
00:20:56.000So literally no one, not the prosecutor of the state, not the prosecutors federal, no one made the actual legal claim that the actions of Derek Chauvin were rooted in racism.
00:21:04.000The best available criminal case against Derek Schumann would have been like a low-degree manslaughter case for negligence in his handling of the actual situation.
00:21:12.000But literally zero evidence was provided to the idea that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd because George Floyd was black.
00:21:28.000We want to see the maniacs of Hamas be defeated and the barbarians of Islam not be able to storm the gates of the West.
00:21:37.000So we've seen um news this morning that quite honestly I'm a little confused by, and I was hoping you could navigate it and help us understand, which is that Israel uh bombed Qatar, which houses a lot of Hamas officials.
00:22:01.000So I think that the lead up to understand here is that Qatar sort of plays both sides when it comes to its negotiating stance between Hamas and Israel and the United States.
00:22:11.000So it has provided extraordinary material support to Hamas directly.
00:22:14.000Billions of dollars in material support to Hamas, the leadership of Hamas have been living in Qatar for years at five-star hotels.
00:22:21.000Hamas's priorities have been pressed by Qatar in negotiations multiple times.
00:22:25.000Qatar has not put significant pressure on Hamas in the past to release the hostages or to end The war.
00:22:30.000And so basically, as Israel nears the end of the war, which is what this last movement in Gaza City is supposed to be, that there's a final offer that was put on the table actually by the Trump administration that essentially said that Hamas should release the remaining 48 hostages, meaning 28 dead bodies and 20 alive hostages, and the United States would then guarantee through his own honest brokerage, some sort of end to the war that would result in the disarming of Hamas and the movement of the Gaza Strip to presumably some sort of coalitional government supported by regional states and the rebuilding of the area.
00:22:59.000And Qatar was pushing Hamas, apparently, we we heard.
00:23:03.000And Hamas this morning in Arabic actually rejected it.
00:23:06.000That's not been widely reported by the media, but it's true.
00:23:08.000Hamas actually rejected the American offer.
00:23:10.000president had put out via truth social a statement saying this is your last chance and if you don't do that bad things are going to happen the the idea that that israel would be able to fly 10 f-16s all the way across the middle east to qatar to strike a very specific terror target in doha without american knowledge beggars the imagination it It is extraordinarily unlikely to say the very least.
00:23:30.000Honestly, it would not be wildly improbable if Qatar knew that that was coming as well.
00:23:35.000And so Israel struck at the top level of the remaining Hamas in Qatar in an attempt to basically change the negotiating status.
00:23:43.000So the basic idea here was if you will not negotiate, if you refuse to get to the end of this war, well, then maybe we'll find somebody who can.
00:23:50.000Or maybe the idea is that you're safe nowhere until this war ends.
00:23:53.000Additional pressure had to be brought to bear, and that's why Israel did what it did.
00:23:57.000Obviously, I as well am on team civilization.
00:23:59.000I'm very happy to see Hamas's top leaders killed.
00:24:02.000I I hope that that as many of them in the in the leadership with as little loss of civilian life as possible.
00:24:07.000I hope that as many of them died in this attack as it's humanly possible.
00:24:11.000I mean, we do know actually from contemporaneous reporting that the United States was at least given the heads up on the Israeli operation in the moments before it went.
00:24:18.000I I just spent time in Japan, and one of the things that kind of looms over Japan is that Japan, they engage in an unconditional surrender that they said we're done.
00:24:29.000And they laid down their arms, obviously after the two atomic bombs, very controversial.
00:24:46.000Because I think we could all agree a long war is not good for Israel, a long drawn-out war, and we're now ending, we're coming towards two years uh in about a month.
00:24:59.000So what does ultimate success look like in the Gaza Strip?
00:25:03.000So my main critique of the Netanyahu administration and Israel and Netanyahu government is they didn't move faster.
00:25:08.000I think this should have been a much more accelerated process.
00:25:11.000Israel set out at the beginning of this war with two goals, as articulated by the Israeli government.
00:25:15.000Goal number one was to get as many hostages out as humanly possible to free the hostages, and second was to win the war.
00:25:20.000In many ways, those are mutually exclusive goals, because if you actually wish to win the war, then you have to do things militarily that are going to involve actual movement on the ground.
00:25:29.000And meanwhile, Hamas is attempting to basically use the hostages as its own form of human shields.
00:25:35.000They've used their own civilians as human shields, they're also using the hostages as a form of human shield.
00:25:39.000And so as you came to the end of the war, this is always going to be the question is how the war kind of came to its final terminus.
00:25:44.000The priorities that Netanyahu has laid out publicly include essentially basically it's let the hostages out, and there can't be a future military threat to Israel.
00:25:52.000Those are, if you had to sum it all up, those are the two things.
00:25:54.000How that materializes, in my opinion, is likely to be an Israeli military occupation of large swaths of the Gaza Strip, the setting up of humanitarian areas, particularly on the coast and in Rafah, in which humanitarian aid is provided, a pathway out for people who actually want to leave.
00:26:08.000This is the only conflict of which I'm aware on planet Earth, in which there are outside countries telling people who would like to leave that they literally cannot.
00:26:15.000The Trump administration has been trying to facilitate the ability of people who want to leave to do so and has also been trying to facilitate the entry of not only humanitarian aid, but investment into the areas that have been cleared of terrorists, and then you can see some sort of Hamas free rebuilding.
00:26:29.000That would be the goal of the end of the war.
00:26:31.000Now, my understanding is that the sort of last untouched area of the Gaza Strip in terms of Israeli's serious military operations is Gaza City.
00:26:39.000It's why there's been so much focus on Gaza City.
00:26:42.000Last I heard, Israel already controls something, 40 to 50% of the territory in Gaza City.
00:26:46.000They've been warning people to get out for at least a couple of weeks now.
00:26:50.000Hamas has been stopping people at checkpoints and turning them back and shooting them if they don't stay in the city to be used as human shields by Hamas.
00:26:55.000So that's the current situation on the ground.
00:26:57.000What other feedback or criticism would you have about this situation?
00:27:02.000I I know that it's impossible for anyone to listen to everything that you ever say.
00:27:07.000But looking at this from an American perspective, what else would you say things could have been handled differently?
00:27:14.000Maybe on the PR front, maybe also just on a conduct front.
00:27:19.000Where would you say as an outsider things that could have been handled better, um, more efficiently or with more precision?
00:27:27.000So, number one, there's there's no such thing as a perfect war.
00:27:29.000So obviously, in any war, there are gonna be things that happen that are ugly and that are terrible, and that is why war is is a terrible thing.
00:27:36.000As far as a sort of operational front, again, I've spent an awful lot of time in Israel.
00:27:40.000I've watched tape of operations happening, drone operations.
00:27:43.000Uh I've met with an enormous number of Israeli soldiers, young men and women, people who are 18, 19, 20 years old, who have had legitimately their limbs blown off, going house to house in an area where they didn't have to.
00:27:53.000Uh the charge that Israel has been indiscriminate in its use of force in the Gaza Strip is an absurdity on its face.
00:27:58.000Israel has complete air superiority over the Gaza Strip.
00:28:00.000If it wanted to level the place and turn it into a parking lot October 8th, it certainly had the military capacity to do so.
00:28:06.000Instead, it has sacrificed legitimately a thousand of its own young men, particularly in these areas and thousands more who are wounded for the rest of their lives, going house to house in an attempt to prevent all that, and is currently shipping in forty, four hundred calories per day per person into the Gaza Strip, much of which is then stolen by Hamas.
00:28:23.000So that that is not to say that anything that any war is perfect.
00:28:26.000This war has been conducted in about as meticulous way uh as any urban war in history.
00:28:31.000Just because war is ugly doesn't mean that it's being fought wrongly.
00:28:34.000And I think that the the main mistake that Israel has made is misunderstanding how how public relations works in the sense that they couldn't have presented this war in a better, kinder way that people would have loved.
00:28:44.000What they could have done is move faster.
00:28:46.000And and the reality is that the American way of of doing war is to win as fast as possible.
00:28:51.000And we don't like long drawn-out occupations.
00:28:53.000We don't like long drawn-out military operations.
00:28:55.000That's true in Iraq, it's true in Afghanistan, it's true in Ukraine, it's true in the Gaza Strip.
00:28:59.000And so the kind of things that that we Americans like to see are, for example, the operations against Hezbollah that took about three weeks to five weeks, or the operation against Iran, which took about 12 days, right?
00:29:10.000Those are operations that any ally of the United States can sustain.
00:29:13.000Long operations like the one that Israel has been performing in the Gaza Strip are inherently very, very difficult uh from from PR level.
00:29:20.000And I'm not sure, to be frank, that there is a way for Israel to quote unquote win the PR war in the middle of a very long war against an intransigent terrorist enemy that legitimately embeds itself in in the most damaging places.
00:29:30.000Aaron Powell A claim I receive often, and we're starting our campus tour tomorrow is that Israel is committing genocide.
00:29:38.000There there is literally no definition of genocide by which Israel is committing a genocide.
00:29:42.000Typically a genocide involves the the targeted killing of the vast majority of the population, or at least an attempt to do so.
00:29:49.000That there has never been a genocide attempted in world history in which the food that was being shipped in was more than the daily caloric intake of the average American into the areas where you're supposedly attempting to genocide the population.
00:30:03.000The total population loss in the Gaza Strip thus far has been three percent.
00:30:06.000During the Holocaust, just to take a reference, it was fifty percent.
00:30:09.000During Rwanda, it was significantly higher than three percent.
00:30:12.000You don't issue leaflet warnings to people.
00:30:14.000You don't go house to house in a genocide in an attempt to reduce civilian casualties.
00:30:18.000I I understand that people use genocide at this point to just mean thing I don't like.
00:30:26.000Certainly not the Israelis were not at war on October 6th.
00:30:29.000Uh the the fact is that that every Israeli family has to send their 18-year-old son or daughter off to the military with the possibility that they're going to get blown up in Gaza.
00:30:38.000That is not something that any Israeli wants, right, left, or center.
00:30:41.000The the real question is whether the accusations are accurate.
00:30:44.000They they certainly are not, again, by any stretch of the imagination.
00:30:47.000Author uh Bet Ben Shvure author of uh Lions and Scavengers, we're gonna get to that in a second.
00:30:52.000I have one or two other questions on Israel.
00:30:53.000I think it's very important for our audience to hear this, though, because there is a an incessant campaign.
00:31:00.000Um one thing a friend send to me interestingly, which is okay, Charlie, we've pushed back against the media on COVID, on lockdowns, on Ukraine, on the border, on so like maybe we should also ask a question is the media totally presenting the truth when it comes to Israel?
00:31:15.000Just a question, you know, that maybe we shouldn't believe everything the media says, because I know I've been conditioned to ask a lot more critical questions over the last couple of years.
00:31:26.000Charlie Kirk here, crime is skyrocketing.
00:31:28.000You may already own a firearm, But before you face the financial and emotional weight of pulling the trigger, consider Berna.
00:31:34.000Burna's less lethal launchers fire tear gas and kinetic rounds designed to incapacitate attackers for up to 40 minutes, giving you time to escape and call for help without deadly consequences.
00:32:42.000In your opinion, what would a good outcome five years from now be and how does one respond to the claims of ethnic cleansing?
00:32:49.000So ethnic cleansing, the idea, presumably that that population movement is equivalent to ethnic cleansing.
00:32:55.000I think ethnic cleansing is a term that that's been fairly recently coined to describe population movement during war.
00:33:01.000The reality is that's been ongoing for literally all of human history.
00:33:04.000Uh the idea that that Israel is quote unquote forcing people out of the Gaza Strip, that is not the stated policy of the Israeli government.
00:33:10.000The idea is if people want to leave, they can, but they're not being forced to leave.
00:33:14.000Uh again, moving people out of heavily urbanized areas that are honeycombed with terrorist booby traps pretty much everywhere, is not the same thing as quote unquote ethnic cleansing.
00:33:22.000And I think that ethnic cleansing is is very often used as sort of a softer form of the genocide attack, the idea being that Israel is trying to kill everyone, which of course is not true.
00:33:31.000As far as your earlier question about what we believe from the media, one of the things that I find kind of astonishing and in some of the folks on the right who are highly critical of Israel is actually the lack of credibility, the lack of skepticism when it comes to legacy media.
00:33:44.000Legacy media are radically anti-Israel overall.
00:33:46.000The New York Times can certainly not be accused of being a pro-Israel outlet.
00:33:50.000It'd be very difficult to make the accusation that the associated press, which is where Ken and Glove with Hamas for years or Reuters, that these are these are wildly pro-Israel outlets.
00:33:58.000And yet when it comes to the reporting, it seems to be sort of the opposite.
00:34:02.000So the presumption the legacy media is like owned by the Jews.
00:34:04.000And then we're not going to be able to do that.
00:34:10.000As you can tell by all the wonderful headlines you guys get.
00:34:12.000Well, I mean, uh, dude, the the accusation that we own the media has not prevented, you know, the Daily Wire from from employing people who radically disagree with me on all of these matters.
00:34:22.000I mean, I I don't agree with Matt Walsh on foreign policy.
00:34:25.000Matt obviously is a major host over at Daily Wire.
00:34:33.000I'm not going to pretend that to say otherwise would be absolutely silly.
00:34:37.000To suggest that that a some sort of atheistic Jewish person by birth who does not care about Judaism or Israel owning the New York Times means the New York Times is pro-Israel is to ignore literally every bit of coverage they have ever done for my entire lifetime.
00:34:50.000Uh we we we're running out of time here, but just la last question on this, Ben.
00:34:56.000I know this might be a tougher question, but BB said, quote, I didn't like how you said this, I'll be honest.
00:35:01.000You can't be MAGA if you're anti-Israel.
00:35:05.000How how did you how did you analyze that statement from BB?
00:35:07.000I mean, and I think that there is the ungenerous way of interpreting that and then the generous way of interpreting that.
00:35:11.000So the ungenerous way is to suggest that you have to hold a particular position on every Israeli governmental activity in order to in order to be MAGA, uh, which of course is not true.
00:35:21.000I mean, you can disagree from the right or from the left with Bibi's policies, and and you can still be plenty of MAGA.
00:35:27.000I think the idea that the BB is putting out there is that if you are taking Hamas's side against Israel in a conflict, it is very difficult to align that with the with the stated positions of the Trump administration or what President Trump himself is doing right now.
00:35:46.000But if you're pro-Hamas, you're something darker.
00:35:47.000Ben Shapir is author of Lions and Scavengers.
00:35:50.000Ben, tell us about your important new book.
00:35:52.000So the basic idea in Lions and Scavengers is that inside every human heart, and this goes back to the book of Genesis, that there really is the dutiful part of you that wants to engage in what God made for you, the this incredible rationalistic world in which you can mostly understand what's going on and you have a duty to do the moral thing.
00:36:08.000You get up every morning, you try to build something, you try to be innovative and risk-taking.
00:36:11.000You you try to defend your civilization.
00:36:13.000You You try to build the social fabric.
00:36:15.000And then there is the part of us that's driven by envy.
00:36:17.000And that part of us just looks at our problems and immediately attributes it to some shadowy force outside of our control and tries to rip down the very systems that actually provide prosperity, tries to rip down the lions out of pure envy.
00:36:30.000And you know, uh that that exists in all of us, but it exists civilizationally as well.
00:36:34.000And when you look at at the sort of activities that were taking place on college campus last year, and you see the weird agglomeration of causes that all come together under varying banners.
00:36:43.000Sometimes it's hating President Trump over immigration, sometimes it's on Israel, sometimes it's on LGBT.
00:36:47.000But it's the same exact people all marching together.
00:36:50.000And you wonder to yourself, what do these people have in common?
00:36:52.000And the answer is pretty much nothing, except they really, really don't like our civilization and see the fundamental basis of our civilization as evil and wrong, and believe that it needs to be torn out by the root.
00:37:03.000This is, you know, to take the most obvious example, queers for Palestine.
00:37:06.000Everybody's been puzzling over what the hell is that, right?
00:37:08.000Queers in Palestine get thrown thrown off buildings.
00:37:12.000The answer is that the radical LGBTQ group doesn't have much in common with the Pro-Hamas group, except that both really, really hate the West and believe that the traditional values of our civilization need to be destroyed in order so that they can live more fulfilling lives in some way.
00:37:27.000So what you you write, you write in here, Lions and Scavengers, saying it's the true story of America.
00:37:35.000And you you seek to defend the principles that shape freedom of a fair and powerful society.
00:37:41.000We would imagine those emanate from the Bible, obviously.
00:37:45.000And is Islam compatible with our civilization?
00:37:49.000Would you put them would you put them in the scavenger category?
00:37:54.000I I certainly think that the Islamic civilizations that we're seeing contemporaneously on the globe, it's very hard to see how that fits in in sort of the lion category.
00:38:02.000It doesn't mean that there aren't individual Muslims who who fit in that category or that there can't be a sort of interpreted version of Islam that that couldn't fit into the idea of a God-given world in which you have duties and creative power in line with kind of general, very broad principles of biblical morality.
00:38:18.000But but uh I think the proof is in the pudding.
00:38:20.000You're not seeing a lot of Islamic countries on planet earth right now that live by any of the fundamental principles like freedom of mind, private property, equal rule of law applying to all citizens and traditional virtue.
00:38:31.000What would you say is the missing component for those of us in the West to stand up against these forces?
00:38:40.000What would you say we're doing well and that we need to do more of?
00:38:43.000I mean, I I think that what we lack, and I think we're starting to see a restoration of it, is the courage to actually stand up on our hind legs and say no.
00:38:50.000I think that good people tend to be introspective.
00:38:52.000We tend to think, okay, what did I do wrong?
00:38:54.000And we tend to apologize when we do something wrong.
00:38:57.000Bad people tend to take an apology and then grind your face into the dust over it because they're not engaged in guilt cultures, they're engaged in what are called shame cultures, where the most important thing is not to be made to feel shame, and it is to shame others.
00:39:10.000And so I think that we, you know, those of us who consider ourselves part of Western civilization, you know, we need to recognize that a constant self-abnegation, a constant attempt to tear ourselves down out of a misguided sense of humility in the face of people who are happy to just destroy our civilization from without and within, that is a gigantic mistake.
00:39:28.000And it is totally fine to say to people who wish to destroy our civilization, no, your values suck and they don't belong here.
00:39:34.000Where does all this resentment come from?
00:39:37.000Uh it comes from a wide variety of places, but it tends to come in general from a feeling of frustration and enervation.
00:39:43.000And so I think that that you you can get that from people who believe they have been marginalized.
00:39:48.000You can get that from people who believe they deserve more.
00:39:50.000You see it a lot, actually, with university students who seem to believe that they deserve a 250,000 salary for a gender studies degree because they've been taught that they ought to be getting more, and then they don't get it, and then they're angry at their parents for for not having put them in a position to do that, and so they rebel against everything that they've been taught and or and everything they haven't been taught.
00:40:07.000I also think it comes from a bored population.
00:40:09.000Very often you have people who grew up without any sense of external threat, and they think that pretty much everything that's good in life is the baseline, that that's just normal, and that you can tear away everything without the the baseline falling away.
00:40:48.000Boy, that uh that that feels like the whole story of Zoran Mamdani, the resentful, envy-driven, bitter Islamist who wants to be mayor of New York City.
00:40:58.000Ben, thank you for your time and thanks for uh going through all the questions on the very important topic today.