00:00:44.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:52.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:56.000And I know some of you say, Charlie, we don't like CNN polls.
00:01:59.000I got to be honest, I think this is very accurate based on my experience speaking on college campuses, speaking to the next generation, talking to baby boomers.
00:02:07.000It's an 81% of people that are baby boomers support Israel.
00:02:10.00027% that are Gen Z or early millennial do not support Israel.
00:03:31.000A lot of American Christians hold that belief.
00:03:35.000There's also a belief that Israel's enemies are America's enemies.
00:03:39.00081% of people over the age of 65 would be outspokenly pro-Israel.
00:03:45.000And you see this reflected in our politics.
00:03:47.000Republican leaders, even the ones that are the most skeptical of foreign intervention, have been outspokenly pro-Israel, largely because their constituents are pro-Israel.
00:03:59.000I just came from the state of Missouri.
00:04:01.000You could see it very clearly, anything I said that was pro-Israel.
00:04:05.000People over the age of 60 or 70, enthusiastically on board for helping Israel, sending support, and sending arms.
00:04:13.000So there's this massive generational divide.
00:04:15.000Why is it that people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s are 10 out of 10 have a zeal for Israel, and yet younger people do not.
00:04:26.000Well, first, let's talk about support, the reason from the left.
00:04:31.000From the left, young people, younger people on high school and college campuses, are taught to view the world through oppressor and oppressed prisms.
00:04:41.000That if there's any, if there's ever anybody suffering, they're not suffering because of their own choices.
00:04:46.000They're not suffering because of anything they've done.
00:04:49.000They're suffering or they are not succeeding and they are not thriving because of a zero-sum morality, because somebody else is oppressing them.
00:04:58.000So they see that Gaza or the Gaza Strip or Hamas or the Palestinian Authority or what they call Palestinians are not doing well.
00:05:36.000You see a group that is not succeeding, that is not thriving, that is not flourishing, and it must be somebody else's fault, not their own fault.
00:05:47.000So Gaza could be rich if they wanted to.
00:05:50.000The Palestinian Authority could use all this aid to build a functioning and thriving economy, defend private property rights, to liberalize in the best possible way their markets.
00:06:02.000Young people in America see that Gaza is terrible and they don't think, oh, it's because it's run by Hamas, a horrible terrorist group that kills babies.
00:06:12.000Instead, they say, it's because Israel hates them for no reason.
00:06:16.000And those filthy Jews, as they would say in air quotes, are the scapegoat for the failing Arab government.
00:06:24.000And you understand that when you look at the trans issue, the Black Lives Matter issue, and then yes, geopolitics through that lens, it is zero sum.
00:06:34.000And so you see this massive divide with activists on college campuses.
00:06:39.000They think that the people of Gaza, no matter how hard they try, no matter how much energy they put into it, they can never succeed because of Israel.
00:06:50.000They believe that Israel is the architect of the oppressive system, and America and the West is the enabler.
00:06:59.000They believe that Israel legally was founded through the same term that they criticize America from, colonialism.
00:07:07.000Now, I've spent a fair amount of time in pro-Israel circles, being outspokenly pro-Israel.
00:07:14.000I've spent time around left-wing Jewish activists and right-wing Jewish activists, and then people that are more in the middle.
00:07:21.000And I remember a conversation I had four or five years ago.
00:07:24.000It was a pro-Israel type conference, and I was invited to speak as a Christian conservative.
00:07:30.000And I'd had some sidebar conversations, and this was a moderate middle-of-the-road Jewish donor.
00:07:35.000And he said, Charlie, what we need to do is win over young liberals for Israel.
00:07:40.000And we could do that through showing that Israel has, you know, gay pride parades and that they're most open to all the LGBT stuff.
00:07:47.000And I said, you're really not viewing the issue correctly.
00:07:50.000That as long as young people view the world through oppressor and oppressed lenses or that prism or that kind of binary choice, they will never support Israel.
00:08:02.000They'll never support Israel as long as they view things through a postmodern Marxist type perspective.
00:08:12.000They look at Israel as an oppressor and they believe that all action against oppressors is justified.
00:08:20.000That's why when Hamas goes and kills 1,300 people, when Hamas goes and beheads babies, they'll go back to a thinker by the name of Frantz Fanon, who's an anti-colonialist type intellectual from the Caribbean, who said that decolonization means the replacement of one species by another.
00:08:45.000This is someone who is supported by almost every major college across the country, and he believes that all violence is justified.
00:08:53.000That if you are an oppressed group, that you could do whatever is necessary.
00:08:58.000That they think that Hamas is defending themselves by going around massively raping, killing children, taking hostages, cutting people's heads off.
00:09:09.000This is the ideology of the next generation of America.
00:09:13.000It's the ideology that you'll see at Harvard and Princeton and Yale and Stanford.
00:09:17.000It's the ideology that is supported when you send your kid to college.
00:09:22.000It is not some sort of one-off fringe mentality, and this will not get better with time.
00:09:27.000This is indoctrinated from a fundamental perspective because it goes down to something that is so critically important.
00:09:35.000They do not want to tell the black community, tell the Gazans, tell whomever is complaining, stop complaining and get your life together.
00:09:50.000Instead, they'll play into the complaints.
00:09:53.000They will weaponize those complaints to use it for political power, political expediency, to try and shed off the quote-unquote colonization and occupation.
00:10:04.000And in real time, you are seeing wealthy older Jews shocked that all these hundreds of millions and billions of dollars that they gave to left-wing institutions, deep down, they actually hate them too.
00:10:19.000They've been funding the West's suicide and funding the suicide of the Jewish people.
00:10:25.000So that's the predominant critique from the younger generation towards Israel.
00:10:32.000But it's not as partisan as you might think.
00:10:35.000When I go to these college campuses, I would say a majority of the critiques towards Israel actually come from the right.
00:10:44.000I would say that people that self-identify as conservatives are the ones that are actually the most vocal against Israel.
00:10:52.000And their critique is very different than that from the left.
00:10:56.000They do not engage in oppressor-oppressor type narratives.
00:11:00.000They're not saying, oh, the poor Gaza people that are being oppressed.
00:11:09.000And I've been trying to, you know, I've been getting a lot of text messages and quite honestly, not being listened to by people that are in the pro-Israel space, both Christians and Jews.
00:11:20.000And I'm like, you guys have a serious problem.
00:11:22.000The American right is turning its back on Israel from the rank and file.
00:11:26.000Not that they hate Jews, it's just there's not exactly an outreach method, or it's not very persuasive.
00:11:35.000Okay, so first is this, is that with The emergence of America First, there has been this belief that I share, by the way, that when your own country is falling apart, why do we care so much about foreign countries?
00:11:54.000Alex says, I support Israel's right to exist and fight back, but we have our own problems, the southern border being the biggest, our corrupt government being extremely important in the upcoming elections.
00:12:34.000And there was a lot of controversy that followed that.
00:12:37.000They will also mention at times whether or not Israel is undermining allegedly American national security interests abroad.
00:12:46.000They will mention Jonathan Pollard, for example.
00:12:50.000Another one that will be mentioned from the critiques that come from the right is that Israel has spied on us, which is true.
00:12:57.000They've also mentioned that the Israeli government was the main reason that Bin Laden put in his letter as to why he did 9-11.
00:13:07.000Bin Laden wrote a letter after 9-11, acknowledging that he did, in fact, plan 9-11, saying that he cited other reasons to be clear, but Israel, he said, was the main reason why he attacked America and the connection between Israel and America.
00:13:25.000Now, understand, as we take a step back here, I'm not saying I believe any of this.
00:13:30.000I'm simply articulating the landscape as it stands right now.
00:13:35.000And I call balls and strikes as I see it.
00:13:37.000And I was on a text message thread with some very pro-Israel activists, and I tried to warn them.
00:13:42.000I said, You guys realize you're losing the American right very quickly.
00:13:47.000And they said, No, we're not stronger than ever.
00:13:50.000I said, Okay, just trying to caution you guys.
00:13:54.000And the other reason as to why some people are weakening in their support or lessening in their support of Israel is that there's almost this standard that it can never be enough.
00:14:06.000And I certainly experienced this the last week and a half.
00:14:09.000And I put this in my tweet: after a decade of pro-Israel activism, after defending Israel and its right to exist and its sovereignty, debating students for justice of Palestine, sending students to Israel, hosting a young Jewish leadership summit, going to Israel for the embassy opening, being accused of being a Jewish shill.
00:14:29.000I have a 90-second piece of tape with Patrick Bett David that I support 100% what I said, questioning whether or not there was an intel failure and whether or not people in the Israeli intelligence knew this was going to happen, of which the Axios article supported my belief.
00:14:43.000And I was called a Holocaust denier, attacked by Jews like you wouldn't believe.
00:14:48.000And I put in my tweet, I said, if this is the way you're going to treat your allies, good luck.
00:14:55.000Doesn't exactly make me want to go all in for that issue.
00:15:03.000Backlash will never change my beliefs.
00:15:06.000Does it soften my intensity of support because I feel as if all that work that I put in over the last 11 years gets me treated like trash and garbage?
00:17:28.000So last evening on Life Liberty Levin, the great one, Mark Levin's program, mega church pastor John Hagee appeared on Fox News to lay out the case as to why we should support Israel.
00:17:40.000Now, to be clear, I agree with him theologically on this, but this is unpersuasive for younger audiences that don't believe in God at all, let alone believe in the inerrancy of scripture.
00:17:52.000Young people find this line of thinking unpersuasive.
00:17:56.000In fact, they find it rather repulsive.
00:17:59.000But this is the argument that is being made that is not resonating.
00:18:03.000Younger people on both the right and the left, but more the left than the right, obviously, they don't believe in any God.
00:18:08.000They worship at the golden calf of secular humanism.
00:18:30.000And he, as owner, has given to the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, their covenant with them that they should own this land forever.
00:18:45.000That covenant is recorded in the Bible more than 20 times, and it remains their property to this day.
00:18:54.000That covenant with God has never been broken and it still stands.
00:18:59.000The people who are saying the land does not belong to Israel do not believe in the God of heaven and they do not believe the Bible as the word of God.
00:19:11.000God gave to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob a written contract and covenant in the word of God many times for those who are slow to get the message that this land belongs to the seed of Abraham forever and forever.
00:20:15.000Feeling very let down by Charlie recently, text to our producer.
00:20:19.000So you can't mourn the death of Christians in Gaza, even though I am a Christian and it's an ancient Christian church without people that are pro-Israel and Jewish texting our team saying that Charlie is letting us down.
00:20:36.000I'm not going to say who sent that text, but that is a perfect example as to why the American right is going to retreat away from the Israel issue.
00:20:45.000So I'm getting text messages saying that we should get an answer about what happened.
00:21:34.000Basically, I'm getting hate mail simultaneously saying, how dare you say the USS Liberty was an accidental attack from the Israeli government?
00:22:06.000But let me just add another element to this, which I don't think a lot of pro-Israel advocates understand, which is that being pro-Israel is still a majority position on the American right.
00:22:20.000But the American right has changed in the last five or ten years.
00:22:25.000The American right is de-emphasizing foreign conflicts, especially while our own country is collapsing.
00:22:33.000And the failure to read the room, I think, is a mistake.
00:22:38.000I can tell you right now, amongst our constituency, our audience, there's a pro-Israel sentiment, of which there should be.
00:24:05.000But my advice for whatever it's worth, and obviously I am not listened to, is if the Israeli government wanted to win over the PR war, they would gather their allies.
00:24:18.000They would not go troll Gigi Hadid on social media.
00:24:24.000Understand that they're up against the worst people in the world.
00:24:27.000Hamas is ISIS in terms of how repulsive and evil they are.
00:24:32.000Look at what they're up against in our own government, in our own government.
00:24:39.000I want to say how insane and painful and scary it is to work and serve in a space where we have a member in our caucus say all Muslims are responsible for this and not a single condemnation comes from our caucus leadership or any member of Congress.
00:25:06.000How is it that we are serving in a body, serving in a body where there are members who condemn us for asking for peace, for ceasefire, the most simplest thing.
00:26:28.000And the media is playing into it, whitewashing this entire thing, which then goes to the next question, which I don't want to dwell too much on, which is, I do not think currently Israel has the stomach nor the PR support or the international support to do a ground invasion.
00:27:23.000What a beautiful book Ecclesiastes is.
00:27:29.000Both, by the way, everything we should be asking is: we should be on the side of America, the side of civilization, and the side of decency.
00:27:38.000And honestly, if we are on Israel's side, which we are, and they did indeed bomb a church, isn't it in their best interest to receive some tough love and say, hey, guys, don't do that.
00:27:52.000And if you're going to do a ground invasion, be extra careful because the number one constituency that supports you are American Christians.
00:28:29.000Bottom line is this: Israel has to up their PR game.
00:28:32.000I'm saying this with advice and counsel and also caution and warning that they might be turning off their greatest allies, American Christians here.
00:28:43.000I want to talk about relieffactor.com.
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00:29:21.000So let me just vocalize one other attack from the American right, which are two things.
00:29:28.000Some people on the American right say, wait a second, is this really God's chosen holy land with the amount of gay pride parades and all that?
00:29:38.000Now, I'm not saying that's a good argument.
00:29:41.000Where some people on the American right will say, spare me the kind of this is the holy land when it has become an increasingly secular version of America.
00:30:10.000But there's a fair amount of confusion.
00:30:13.000But you put all of this together, and you have older Americans that are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and younger Americans that are overwhelmingly opposed to Israel.
00:30:25.000It's creating this massive generational divide.
00:30:29.000And it's not getting better for Israel.
00:30:31.000As the days go on, that support is actually weakening.
00:30:35.000And I will say, email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:30:38.000Some of the people that there's so many contradictions on the left.
00:30:41.000They're all for some on the left are like for AOC, all on board descending aid for Ukraine against Russia, but then she has all this nuance when it comes to Israel and Hamas.
00:31:01.000It is from 2017, okay, just to be clear.
00:31:05.000But this is what Tucker Carlson with Senator Roger Wicker, when asked about whether or not we should be involved in Syria, his gut answer is Israel.
00:31:32.000Iran is seeking to dominate the whole region.
00:31:37.000I think we have national interests in Syria.
00:31:41.000And let me play another piece of tape here and understand that people on the right are seeing neocon warmongers that they really don't like, that they have disgust for, that are right now the most ferocious in support for escalating against Iran.
00:31:59.000You must understand that there's pattern recognition in some of this.
00:32:02.000And some people on the right say, wait a second, hold on.
00:32:04.000I support Israel, but I don't like Lindsey Graham.
00:33:18.000And I don't think those people are saying it because they hate Jews.
00:33:22.000I think that there is such mounting crises here on the homeland.
00:33:27.000And we have reconfigured the American right to be an America first party that we have retrained the muscle memory in the conservative world to now say, and by the way, I think this is a healthy retraining and a healthy reconfiguration and a healthy reorientation, that there needs to be some balance.
00:33:50.000So the question should be, hold on, totally understand Israel targeted for a genocide, defend themselves, let's cover it.
00:33:58.000But also, there are mounting issues here on the American homeland that seem to be given a second or third fiddle to this.
00:34:08.000That's a piece of criticism I hear time and time again.
00:34:13.000We love Israel, but these critiques of the current PRN messaging are because we care.
00:34:20.000Additionally, there are dozens of other issues that I feel as if we're not talking about very much.
00:34:29.000Are we talking about the border still?
00:34:31.000So the core final takeaway is this, before we head into the next hour.
00:34:34.000Israel supporters need to make the case for supporting it.
00:34:38.000And they've taken it for granted for far too long.
00:34:40.000And the polls show that this is the wrong move.
00:34:42.000Instead of calling everybody you don't like an anti-Semite or a Hitler-type figure, you have to engage in the public discourse and persuade people.
00:34:51.000Treat your allies like allies and not your allies like enemies.
00:34:55.000If you don't fix this, in 20 years, America will be outspokenly anti-Israel.
00:35:00.000And that will be bad for civilization.
00:35:02.000It'll be bad for the archaeological excavation to prove the truth of the Bible.
00:35:07.000Maybe Israel needs to do daily press conferences.
00:35:10.000Maybe Israel needs to put their hand around American evangelicals and be closer to the people that have actually defended them and will defend them.
00:35:20.000But instead, they're doing the opposite.
00:35:22.000Instead, they're moving very slow in the PR war.
00:35:24.000Their social media team is an outright joke.
00:35:30.000Al Jazeera, Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post, they're all captured by Arab interests.
00:35:36.000Now, maybe Israel is going to just win over the PR war here, but I could see a storm coming.
00:35:41.000And the pride and the hubris and dare I say the arrogance by some people, the top levels of the Israeli government, that they're just going to have widespread support no matter what, they are wrong.
00:35:51.000And if they don't change things, it will not end well.
00:35:54.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:35:55.000Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:35:58.000Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
00:36:04.000For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.