The Megyn Kelly Show - Denying Hamas Atrocities, and Whiny Anti-Israel Students Playing Victim, with Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke

00:00:00.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:11.760 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. It's Monday, October 23rd,

00:00:17.400 more than two weeks now after the horrific October 7th terror attack on Israel, and there are still

00:00:22.820 people loudly and proudly denying or downplaying the atrocities committed by Hamas. They want to

00:00:30.260 change the subject. They want to nitpick the truth. We cannot let this happen. This morning

00:00:35.360 in Israel, authorities showed more than 100 international journalists raw footage of Hamas's

00:00:41.020 massacre in an effort to counter what's become a, quote, Holocaust denial-like phenomenon. They're

00:00:47.560 right, that we are seeing play out in America and throughout the world. The footage came from

00:00:53.080 body cams worn by Hamas terrorists themselves, some dash cams of innocents who'd been targeted,

00:01:00.580 and so on. One Middle East correspondent, Yotam Confino, detailed some of what he saw

00:01:06.100 in a thread on X. A Hamas terrorist screaming Allahu Akbar when he tries to behead a man

00:01:13.660 with a shovel who was writhing on the ground. Hamas terrorists entering one home where a young

00:01:19.500 girl was hiding under a table, estimated to be between seven and nine years old, then watching

00:01:26.760 them shoot and kill this little girl. Dead babies and children burned beyond recognition. Just a small

00:01:36.800 portion has been approved for release so far out of the 43 minutes that the IDF screen today, though

00:01:42.860 we expect that they will be releasing this entire thing publicly. The tape shown to these reporters

00:01:50.560 depicts an unsuspecting driver coming under a hail of bullets from Hamas terrorists who were dressed

00:01:58.400 like IDF soldiers in some of the instances. Again, this is just a one minute or 40 second clip

00:02:05.760 released by the IDF from what was shown to those reporters earlier. We do want to warn you,

00:02:11.040 the video's graphic.

00:02:20.740 And there's plenty more of that. Meanwhile, Fox News' Trey Yankst, who's been doing a great job over

00:02:31.000 there, described what one Hamas terrorist told Israeli forces who captured him. All right,

00:02:36.980 so the Israelis got this guy and then interrogated him. And Trey got his hands on the interrogation

00:02:42.500 video. Look at this reporting.

00:02:44.280 In the video, you see a Hamas militant. He is in a white cloth jumpsuit sitting across from an Israeli

00:02:51.280 interrogator. That interrogator is asking him questions. He describes the preparation and

00:02:56.280 coordination for this assault on southern Israel. He talks about a telegram group that Hamas fighters

00:03:01.860 had, and they were communicating as the massacre took place, sending videos as they got them, as they were

00:03:08.040 killing civilians in their homes. And this interrogator asks him about Islam. And he acknowledges that in

00:03:14.380 the religion, you are told not to kill women, children and elderly people. But he describes what Hamas

00:03:21.040 commanders told them to do. He says that commanders said they could do whatever they felt like doing,

00:03:27.180 and that this was a suicide mission, telling them they should not plan on coming back. He says commanders

00:03:33.120 told them to step on the heads of civilians to behead them and do whatever they felt like. He went

00:03:39.300 on to talk about how Hamas and ISIS are being compared. The interrogator asked him about this

00:03:45.100 comparison, and he agreed. He said, we burned, we slaughtered and beheaded people. And this interrogator

00:03:51.040 was pushing this Hamas fighter and this militant to get more information from him. And he said,

00:03:56.840 we became animals, things that humans do not do.

00:04:03.120 Trey reported some of what he saw as too graphic and horrific to even describe on air. In another

00:04:10.080 effort to counter the denials that we are seeing, or the dismissals in so many cases, a group of

00:04:15.840 forensic pathologists who examined bodies of the victims in Israel went public over the weekend,

00:04:21.620 saying they have seen, quote, many bodies, including those of babies without heads.

00:04:27.980 Countering one of the most pervasive elements of the denials happening now, they said it was,

00:04:31.800 quote, difficult to ascertain whether the victims were decapitated before or after death,

00:04:38.200 as well as if they were beheaded with a knife or simply had their heads shot off by rocket propelled

00:04:45.980 grenades. This is the level they've been forced to reduce themselves to.

00:04:50.840 They've been forced to reduce themselves to this because people want to continue pushing

00:04:55.480 back on, well, decapitated babies, were they? Was the point to decapitate them or was it

00:05:02.300 incidental post-mortem? What in the actual F? And yet the reality of what happened has been well

00:05:12.180 documented now. They have been forced, the Israelis, to walk us through every last horrific detail.

00:05:17.540 Today, we're joined by Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cook of National Review for our NR Day here at

00:05:23.320 The Megyn Kelly Show. You can find all of their work by becoming an NR Plus subscriber, and it's well

00:05:28.080 worth doing so. Rich, Charles, thanks for being here. I cannot believe that here we are this much

00:05:34.300 time after the attack and we're still having these debates. The Israelis continue to have to release

00:05:40.260 photos and forensic pathology reports on the dead babies and the dead children to try to convince

00:05:47.440 people these atrocities happened. It's willful ignorance, willful blindness at this point, or just

00:05:55.760 outright convenient denialism by those who have an agenda, Rich.

00:06:00.000 Yeah, absolutely. It's both of those things. And it's because acknowledging the true unspeakable

00:06:08.660 nature of this attack and all its just gory, Quentin Tarantino-esque details is too hard because it

00:06:18.700 would mean giving up some really important assumptions about the legitimacy of the so-called

00:06:25.600 resistance to Israel, the nature of Hamas, which a lot of these people just insist, you

00:06:31.020 know, is a social movement that just happens to, you know, occasionally rocket Israel. So

00:06:38.480 they don't want to admit it. And it also goes to the legitimacy of the Israeli response. If

00:06:43.600 you admit just how unspeakable this was, how no society anywhere would accept it, well, then

00:06:50.500 you greenlight whatever Israel needs to do to deal with this problem. They don't want to

00:06:55.240 do that either. And then there's anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism all mixed up in there too. So it's

00:07:01.160 a toxic stew. And this is a debate that will go on forever. I mean, there'll be revisionist among

00:07:05.780 Palestinians supporting intellectuals about this attack and the reasons for it forever, unfortunately.

00:07:12.920 The details, and we do think it's important to talk about them, Charles, because of the denialism

00:07:18.540 and the downplaying going on, and for the reasons Rich just stated, they're horrific. A father

00:07:23.760 scooping up his two young sons to run to their outdoor bomb shelter. The three had apparently

00:07:28.540 been in their beds when the attack unleashed early in the morning. They were still in their

00:07:31.720 underwear. Moments after they enter the shelter, a hand appears on screen, tossing a grenade

00:07:36.780 into the shelter after the family. The father dies. The boys exit severely wounded, covered

00:07:42.680 in his blood, they believe. Dad's dead. It wasn't a prank, one says, as they run back to their

00:07:48.060 home. I know I saw it, responds his brother. Why am I alive? Another terrorist uses his

00:07:53.840 victim's phone to call his parents. Dad, I killed 10 with my bare hands. Please be proud

00:07:58.580 of me, Dad. Their blood is on my hands. Let me speak to Mom, like a kid coming home with

00:08:04.120 an A on his report card. And the reporting goes on, and I'm sure we will see the full 43-minute

00:08:09.640 video at some point detailing all of it. This is what Israel is up against. And yet almost

00:08:17.400 immediately we went to, well, free Palestine. Israel's an occupier. Well, I mean, you just

00:08:25.000 want to skip right over that this was not some conventional war in which military targets

00:08:31.120 were selected. These were seven-year-old girls under tables begging for their lives who were

00:08:36.520 shot to death or burned to death or worse. Right. And I think that's, at least for me,

00:08:43.080 the key. And that's why it's important to relate these stories, as harrowing as they are,

00:08:49.680 because they obviate the debate over whether or not the grievances of many Palestinians are

00:08:59.020 legitimate. Now, I'm not especially friendly towards the charter of Hamas, as you might

00:09:06.320 expect. But if I were, there would be no justification for this sort of behavior.

00:09:13.100 There is no link between whatever academic argument you can make and this sort of behavior.

00:09:20.880 I mean, let's take an easy one, an easy historical example, the resistance to Nazi Germany. I'm from

00:09:28.020 England originally. We were alone for a while. It seemed likely that Britain was going to be invaded

00:09:32.500 and conquered by this great evil. The British government did not do that in Germany. The

00:09:38.440 British government did not go in and start killing children and throwing hand grenades at families and

00:09:44.540 gouging out people's eyes and beheading babies and so forth. So whatever your view, whatever your view

00:09:51.160 of the situation in the Middle East, and again, I'm not accepting the premise because I think Israel has a

00:09:56.340 right to exist and is a civilizational outpost. But whatever your view of that is irrelevant. People

00:10:02.540 walking around in quads and universities with signs saying, free Palestine, or making abstracted

00:10:08.740 arguments needs to reckon with what was done here, which is absolutely divorced from the overarching

00:10:15.320 questions and needs to be condemned as such.

00:10:18.820 You mean resistance? Is that what you mean? That's how they want to characterize it?

00:10:23.220 Well, sure, sure. I mean, I just think it needs to be said over and over and over again,

00:10:27.540 that the debate over the geopolitical question is totally irrelevant when we are talking about this

00:10:35.920 sort of behavior. I mean, in the United States, where we had a great evil and slavery, Abraham Lincoln

00:10:42.340 rejected the actions of John Brown, because he said, this is not how we will engage with, you know,

00:10:48.960 and that was a genuine problem. And so I'm so bored of reading academics saying, well, look at this,

00:10:57.000 which happened in 1987, or look at this border dispute. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's

00:11:02.320 important that we acknowledge all of these great, you know, barbaric acts, because they make it clear

00:11:09.440 the motivations of the people who staged them. There is nothing that can be said that could lead to the

00:11:15.460 acknowledgement or justification or acceptance of what Hamas did.

00:11:19.660 Yeah, so there's resistance and there's resistance, right? Resistance, you can write,

00:11:25.420 come up with pamphlets you spread around, you can write newspaper articles, you can even wage a war

00:11:29.340 of insurgency, where your fighters shoot and engage in acts of war against the other side's fighters.

00:11:36.180 This is something totally different. I will say, though, unfortunately, human history is

00:11:40.640 that when you have young men in a situation where all the rules are off, and they consider the other

00:11:46.580 side bestial, this is the kind of acts that they engage in. You know, Charlie's absolutely right

00:11:51.860 about the British, you know, not doing it to the Germans. Well, the Russians may not have bain-eyed

00:11:55.460 babies, but they raped their way, you know, all the way to Berlin, which is why it's very important to,

00:12:00.340 one, have a society that imposes and communicates civilized norms to the entirety of its population

00:12:06.720 about the certain things you don't do as a human being, and very, very importantly,

00:12:11.560 have rules and guard royals around its soldiers and how they behave themselves. And that's what we

00:12:16.820 have. That's what Israel has. If a U.S. soldier, an Israeli soldier did anything, even remotely coming,

00:12:24.080 not even coming close to what Hamas fighters did here, but just anywhere near it, they'd be in the

00:12:28.720 dock, there'd be a trial, and they'd be in jail for the rest of their life. Instead, these animals

00:12:33.600 are celebrated by their society. That's right. And Rich, so we go through these details. Here's

00:12:39.400 just a couple more, because they're also these Hamas defenders denying that Hamas terrorists would

00:12:44.560 ever rape a woman. I guess the beheaded babies thing. Yeah, that, okay, yeah. But we wouldn't

00:12:48.820 rape anybody, because that's against the Hamas charter. That's against the Koran. There's been

00:12:53.600 so much evidence of it. Here's just one from that forensic report. No, this actually is from the video.

00:12:59.280 In a clip, a woman tries to decide if a partially burned corpse is her family member, as the dead

00:13:04.880 woman's head is mutilated. The dead woman's dress is pulled up to her waist, and her underpants have

00:13:10.740 been removed. Okay. Then there's the Major General Mickey Edelstein says, we have evidence of rape,

00:13:17.880 but we cannot share it, declining to elaborate. Further, back to the Trey Yingst reporting today

00:13:22.800 on the interrogation of the Hamas leader. The guy says, we were told by commanders to behead

00:13:27.780 Israelis and to cut their feet off that day on October 7th. He said, the commanders told us we

00:13:33.540 can do whatever we feel like doing, that this is a suicide mission. We probably shouldn't plan on

00:13:38.080 coming back. He said, the commanders told them, step on the heads of the civilians, behead them,

00:13:42.660 do whatever you feel like, and went on, as we said in the intro, to compare favorably to ISIS. He agreed.

00:13:49.440 We are like ISIS. We burned, we slaughtered, we beheaded people. We became like animals.

00:13:53.600 We did things humans do not do. Hopefully the memo will get out to these protesters who continue to

00:14:00.000 deny that Hamas did any of this stuff. Back at home, it seems like, and this guy's reaction is

00:14:09.000 not the most important, but it's, it's representative of what we're seeing on met from many on these

00:14:14.320 protests. Dave Chappelle gets up to do a comedy routine in Boston, though he's denying he was in

00:14:20.540 Boston, but it was well advertised. And there are many people who walked out of his performance. So I

00:14:25.240 don't know what he's doing saying he wasn't there, but that's what's happened. He shows up in Boston

00:14:29.260 to do a comedy set. And here's the piece I'm trying to zero in on in a perfunctory manner. He says, I

00:14:36.660 don't agree with what Hamas did on October 7th, but, but, and then tears into Israel, blames it all on

00:14:43.880 Israel, goes after Israel. How dare they cut off electricity and water and food to Gaza. They're

00:14:50.300 engaging in an occupation. I can go through the details of what he said. And I'll actually, I might

00:14:56.300 as well, because I have it right in front of me, uh, that he said what Israel's doing, their war crimes,

00:15:02.300 um, that let's see. Two wrongs don't make a right. He said two wrongs don't make a right as Israel

00:15:11.760 fights back against its dead children and it's raped women and so on. Somebody in the audience

00:15:17.560 yelled out, shut the F up. And Dave Chappelle yelled back at him. How dare you tell me to shut

00:15:23.500 up at my own show? And it was a Jewish guy. And apparently this guy and several other Jewish

00:15:28.520 Americans got up and walked out disgusted saying in this term gets overused, but here you can

00:15:34.620 understand it because the Dave Chappelle crowd started chanting, according to these witnesses,

00:15:38.540 um, go Palestine, go Hamas. And they said, I've never felt so unsafe and fearful of what I was

00:15:47.220 witnessing here. You can understand that word, but the point I'm trying to get to rich is I, you know,

00:15:54.000 I condemn it. It was wrong. October 7th is bad. However, Israel. Yeah. So you can't condemn

00:16:01.820 October 7th in the spirit of a caveat. And we don't know exactly what was said at the show,

00:16:06.220 although we have these accounts you read from, but that sounds as though that was the spirit,

00:16:09.560 you know, Oh, I don't like your methods. Yeah. You shouldn't have done that. But,

00:16:13.900 and it's that, but there, this obviously a huge moral problem. And look, you can, you can disagree

00:16:19.720 with Israel's methods of, of, of waging this military retaliation or however they're, they're

00:16:25.240 going to do it, but they, they are not attempting to commit war crimes. Everything, uh, says, uh, we

00:16:31.260 know from the past, they, they target legitimate military targets that happen to be a placed among

00:16:39.560 the civilian population to create civilian deaths in order to, um, uh, set in motion this whole

00:16:47.620 machinery. We saw it with the hospital lie last week where, wow, Israel has gone too far and Israel

00:16:52.720 has to stop. And we all knew this, this reaction would come, but what's amazing. It's, it started

00:16:59.980 really in some serious force prior to a ground invasion, right? The tanks haven't even rolled

00:17:05.140 if they are going to roll. And we already have, um, people saying Israel has, has gone too far. So

00:17:11.620 one, there's no comparison to bombing, a legitimate target and a heavily populated area that you prefer

00:17:17.140 not be heavily populated and going and chopping off heads of babies. They're just, there's no

00:17:23.060 comparison. Humanity doesn't breeze by something like that. Yes, but you don't. Yes, but the mass

00:17:30.320 murder of innocent children that is targeted. Yes. Some children in Palestine are dying right now

00:17:36.620 as Israel fights back for its right to exist. Israel does. As far as I can tell everything,

00:17:43.040 any nation on earth could do to prevent that from happening as Hamas does everything within its power

00:17:49.060 to make sure the children get hurt and then to put it on TV, Charles. Like that's the difference here

00:17:54.920 as Rashida Tlaib cries, these tears outside over what's happening to Gaza. Not one word

00:18:01.020 for the hurting or murdered Israelis. Well, here's the other difference. This wouldn't have happened

00:18:08.940 were it not for what Hamas did. So all of the complaints that are being made about what is

00:18:14.980 very bloodlessly called collateral damage in the lingo are themselves the product of that decision

00:18:21.180 by Hamas. I haven't heard anyone suggest, because it's not true, that Israel was planning to start

00:18:30.100 bombing, as it has been to start wiping out Hamas fighters, apropos of nothing. I mean, this is a

00:18:39.300 response. And presumably, we're not so morally obtuse that we can't examine the basic chronology

00:18:46.980 here, which is that Israel is now faced with what is obviously a great threat, what is a threat from

00:18:53.680 people who, as we have just established, have absolutely no limits, and will admit as much,

00:18:59.620 and it has to deal with it. If Hamas had not done what it did, there would be no response,

00:19:05.140 there'd be no secondary behavior. So when people stand up and say, well, Israel needs to be careful,

00:19:11.060 or Israeli genocide, or look at Israeli policy, well, that Israeli policy, which, as you point out,

00:19:17.020 is far more careful and deliberate than was Hamas, is the direct response to barbarism. It is not

00:19:24.740 barbarism itself. And this is actually a problem that quite a lot of people who comment on our

00:19:30.740 politics really struggle with. There's that famous William F. Buckley line, you know, about the guy who

00:19:38.960 pushes an old lady into the path of an oncoming car, and the guy who pushes the old lady out of the way

00:19:45.160 of an oncoming car, and then the observer who says, well, both of them pushed old ladies around.

00:19:50.040 No, they didn't. One of them was committing a crime, and the other was trying to help. So,

00:19:58.160 you know, the way this is discussed is, well, Israel did this. Yeah, Israel had to respond to

00:20:02.400 something that, if it had not happened, would have required no response and would not be occurring.

00:20:07.100 Yeah, but also-

00:20:08.400 These numbers that they're putting out are not reliable at all. You know, they keep putting up

00:20:13.140 500 children already murdered. I don't trust one word that comes from these barbarians. We've

00:20:19.480 already seen their life fall apart on the hospital bombing. But the press continues to just run with

00:20:25.060 however many they want to say the civilian toll is, or the children death toll is, and print it as

00:20:30.500 though it's gospel. Go ahead, Rich. Yeah, I was just going to underline Charlie's point. It's not just

00:20:35.280 that this Israeli response didn't happen in isolation, right? It was prompted by this horrific terror

00:20:39.800 attack. It was a predictable response, right? Maybe even certainly an expected response. Maybe

00:20:46.020 even the response that Hamas wanted, right? It may be that having Israel come after them hammer and

00:20:52.180 tongs just for the rest of the Arab world, and the Palestinians and West Bank shows what tough

00:20:57.900 fighters they are. So it's not as though they did this terrorist attack and then thought nothing

00:21:02.140 would happen. They knew this was going to happen and maybe wanted it to happen. And one of the mistakes

00:21:07.520 Israel made in the run-up to October 7th was not, you know, governing Gaza with too strong a hand,

00:21:13.540 right? They pulled out back in 2005, 2006. And one of the mistakes they made was, in effect,

00:21:19.880 sort of trusting Hamas to maybe have been domesticated a little bit to, yeah, they shoot

00:21:26.940 some random rockets, but really they want to focus on their own affairs and Gaza. And Israel believed

00:21:32.740 that story, which is one reason they were taken so, so surprising that hit, uh, by surprising that

00:21:38.140 hideous morning. Right. And now they're being told to go back to that status quo where, all right,

00:21:44.160 you trust, you trusted us. Like, we're going to have to trust you. We get it. I mean, they have less

00:21:48.640 reason right now than ever to trust that they can live next to these people, um, who describe themselves

00:21:54.680 as animals. So I, what is it, what are they supposed to do if not obliterate Hamas? I don't,

00:22:00.740 I understand it has all sorts of worldwide implications. I get it. But if that were

00:22:04.820 America, nobody would be questioning for two minutes that we need to eliminate this enemy

00:22:09.660 in its entirety. It needs to go. They can't be reasoned with, there's not going to be a peace

00:22:14.340 pact. And even if, even if there were, no one could trust it. These are not men of honor. I think

00:22:19.720 we can at least agree on that. Uh, you mentioned in an earlier answer, the ground invasion, it hasn't

00:22:25.680 yet happened. We continue to be told that the men are being readied, men and women, the female

00:22:30.420 soldiers as well, uh, for ground invasion into Gaza over there in Israel. Hasn't happened yet.

00:22:35.900 And now there's a question about whether there's something afoot to try to get more hostages out

00:22:40.820 before the Israelis go in there with that. We ended the show on Friday with the report that two

00:22:47.280 American hostages had been released, uh, Judith Ronan 59 and her daughter, Natalie 17 from Chicago.

00:22:53.900 They said, uh, they still have family members, eight other family members, these two who remain

00:23:00.920 hostages. And we believe according to secretary of state Blinken, there are still 10 additional

00:23:06.220 Americans who remain unaccounted for. And some of them are also being held hostage. Um, Joe Biden

00:23:12.980 was asked over the weekend about whether he is asking whether he wants Israel to delay the ground

00:23:21.760 invasion. All right. Now it's very interesting because first, the first reporter yelled,

00:23:25.780 how was your call with the freed Americans? And he answers, it went well. Then came this second

00:23:31.080 question, which he answers. Watch it.

00:23:33.760 How was your call with the freed Americans?

00:23:38.240 Well.

00:23:41.540 Should Israel delay the ground invasion?

00:23:43.900 Yeah.

00:23:44.380 Okay. Should Israel delay the ground invasion until you can pull the hostages out? Yes. He says

00:23:55.540 only to be followed very promptly by the white house saying wrong. No is the answer. The president

00:24:02.860 was far away. He didn't hear the full question. The question sounded like, would you like to see more

00:24:09.860 hostages released? Not should Israel delay the ground invasion until you can get more hostages

00:24:15.220 out? He wasn't commenting on anything else. Um, weird because he could hear that first question

00:24:21.120 with no problem and answered it on point. And then on Sunday, CNN reported, Oh, shock of all shocks.

00:24:29.380 U S seeks delay of Israeli ground incursion for more time for hostage talks. Uh, F for what it's worth,

00:24:37.900 Israel, a senior Israeli official denied that the U S is seeking that delay saying we deny this

00:24:44.200 report. Um, to me, it just underscores how feeble the president is rich and how dangerous it is for

00:24:51.340 him to be in this position. Yeah, that would be a very weird place to give that answer, but he gave

00:24:57.300 it. And I, I just don't know, you know, oftentimes military affairs and people say, or anything, um,

00:25:03.520 that we all comment on, they say they don't, they don't know enough really to have an opinion.

00:25:07.060 And that feels just like punting it, but this is one where I legitimately, it's, it's really hard

00:25:12.160 to know with, without knowing the inside information that the real decision makers are

00:25:16.860 dealing with. Is there a real chance to get out these hostages at some acceptable price that

00:25:22.180 wouldn't ultimately stay Israel's hand and they can go in afterwards? Well, then maybe you do that.

00:25:27.480 Is, is Israel waiting just because the U S is pressuring them or are they genuinely concerned

00:25:32.720 about the potential second front in the North and trying to, to deal with that and deter Iran

00:25:38.240 and get the assurance that they're not going to send all these guys into what will be a long and

00:25:42.600 bloody operation, uh, leaving that second front exposed. I don't know. So it's just, I think this

00:25:49.060 is one of these things that's really hard, uh, unless you're a plugged in military expert to have

00:25:53.940 really well-formed opinions on. But bottom line is Israel should do all it can to destroy Hamas.

00:26:00.240 And we should be giving as much leeway to do so, but decisions that, that are going into the,

00:26:06.440 the data set day, day to day, the inputs that are going into the day to say day-to-day decision,

00:26:10.920 whether and when it's really just hard to know what to make of that as an outsider. I think,

00:26:15.500 you know, I, my problem here, Charles, is that there's just so much example, so many examples of,

00:26:21.600 of his struggles, Joe Biden's struggles. And, you know, talk about the 3am phone call. This is like

00:26:28.780 the, the 3am world war three beginning. What's that? We do it. Can we do that phone call at 4pm

00:26:36.460 instead? Yeah, right. I mean, not for nothing, but he was at the beach this weekend. They say

00:26:44.400 he's working very hard from the beach, but I mean, it's just the optics of it are not so great

00:26:47.620 for our commander in chief. And just, this is as a separate point, but if it flows into the same

00:26:54.420 point, Charles, he got up and told this story over the weekend. Did you hear about this? About his

00:27:00.500 uncle, his uncle Frank allegedly getting awarded the purple heart, uh, in world war II. He's told

00:27:07.420 this story before, and it's a lovely story. It appears to be totally made up. Here's the story.

00:27:12.760 And then we'll talk about it. Sat for

00:27:14.920 by the way, I told you about my uncle who won the purple heart battle of the ball. My father's younger

00:27:23.120 brother, my father came to me after I was a Senator. He said, you know, his brother's name was Frank.

00:27:29.860 And he said, you know, uncle Frank, uh, never got his purple heart. I think you could find out about

00:27:35.740 that. I was a Senator. So I found out and sure enough, he did. So I got a purple heart for him.

00:27:40.620 I invited him over to the house of the family to give it to me. He said, I don't want to give

00:27:44.800 it to me. I said, why? He said, the others died. I did. I don't want it. And, uh, an awful lot of

00:27:55.080 brave people died over there. Oh my God. Hugh, the active listening, oohs and ahs and sympathetic

00:28:02.400 noises. Too bad. Cause it was made up from what we can tell. He told this story before last time was

00:28:09.080 December 22. In that retelling, he said it happened after he'd been elected vice president,

00:28:13.760 not Senator there. He said he was just a Senator Forbes did a fact check on it at the time,

00:28:19.040 concluding there does not appear to be any record of Biden giving his uncle this honor. He hasn't

00:28:24.240 mentioned the story in the past. There have been no news articles written about it. And Frank Biden's

00:28:28.400 name does not appear on a list of recipients held by the national purple heart hall of honor,

00:28:33.220 though that list is incomplete. Then you guys at national review at the time took a look at it

00:28:40.420 and concluded this definitely could not have happened as he just claimed when he was vice

00:28:44.120 president, his uncle passed away in 99. His dad passed away in 2002, all years before he became

00:28:49.400 vice president in 2009. So he was not giving uncle Frank the purple heart or talking about it with his

00:28:55.000 dad when he was vice president. So now he changes it back to Senator and you pointed out purple hearts

00:29:00.580 can be given posthumously to the recipients next of can a next of kin, but factcheck.org could not find

00:29:07.140 any evidence that Frank Biden received a purple heart either while he was alive or after he died. Name is

00:29:14.200 not on either of the two major databases of honorees. And we could keep going. It's just it kind of is

00:29:22.840 important to have somebody in there who is of sound mind right now, Charles. And daily we get evidence

00:29:30.520 that he might not be that man. Well, it's partly that he's not of sound mind. I think there's a lot

00:29:36.640 of evidence to support that. It's also that this is always who Joe Biden has been. The man is a

00:29:44.100 narcissist. His worldview requires not just himself, but everyone in his family and in his orbit, anyone

00:29:50.060 with whom he identifies to be the hero of every story. We are supposed to believe that going back

00:29:58.140 through the annals of history, Biden's were always the people who stood up and said what was right or

00:30:03.520 had a pithy one liner that summed up the situation. His dad apparently was big into gay rights in

00:30:09.820 Scranton, Pennsylvania in the early 1950s, as we know, statistically likely. He is this guy. When he ran

00:30:17.220 for the Senate in the 70s, he was this guy. He was forced to drop out of his first presidential run

00:30:24.080 because he was this guy because he took to shouting at potential voters about how he was top of his

00:30:29.740 class, which he wasn't. And he was smarter than everyone else in his law firm, which he wasn't.

00:30:34.900 He was in the last go around in 2000 shouting at factory workers about how he could take them

00:30:41.480 physically if he wanted to, which he can't. This is who he is. And if you combine this longstanding

00:30:48.760 braggadocio and belief in himself that is not matched by the facts, let's say, with the fact

00:30:58.120 that he's 81, 82, and that he doesn't seem to be fully in command, then you have what we're seeing

00:31:04.160 now, which is an older person telling strangers stories that were first made up when they were

00:31:13.580 younger men. He's the worst of both worlds. But I don't think we should overestimate the extent to

00:31:19.840 which this personality trait is derived from his age. It is exacerbated from his age. But this has

00:31:26.980 always been who Joe Biden is.

00:31:30.120 And now he's got the nuclear codes and is advising our closest Middle East ally on how to avoid World

00:31:37.900 War three. All right. We'll put a pin in it right there. I take a quick break and come back with

00:31:42.960 more with Rich and Charles. There's plenty more to get to today. The news, it's like drinking out of

00:31:47.100 a fire hose right now. You're at home. Thousands of anti-Israeli protesters taking to the streets of

00:31:57.200 some of America's biggest cities. Yes, it's still happening in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A massive protest

00:32:04.000 broke out. This is one of New York's largest Middle Eastern communities. Demonstrators shouting all

00:32:09.480 too familiar slogans now calling for the destruction, eradication of Israel and quote,

00:32:14.280 From the Bay Ridge to Gaza, globalize the Intifada.

00:32:19.360 From Bay Ridge to Gaza, from Bay Ridge to Gaza, globalize the Intifada.

00:32:28.920 Globalize the Intifada. No justice. No peace. What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now.

00:32:37.320 From the river to the sea. From the river to the sea. Palestine will be freed. Fire, fire,

00:32:44.060 colonizer. Fire, fire, colonizer. Fire, fire, colonizer. Fire, fire, colonizer.

00:32:59.380 Oh, they're very good rhymers. If the, if the hating Israel thing falls through,

00:33:06.940 they could get a job working for Dr. Seuss. Others had signs reading. Rich and Charles are

00:33:13.000 listening. All right, stand by getting to you one second. Others actually were holding up signs that

00:33:17.960 that that read Biden kills babies. Biden does Biden in Israel, in Palestine. Was that their

00:33:25.600 point? Also, please keep the world clean, along with a person throwing away an Israeli flag.

00:33:32.180 Lovely. Some protesters also clashing with cops when they shut down traffic and cops tried to

00:33:37.520 clear an intersection. According to the New York Post, some of the protesters hurled eggs at police.

00:33:42.920 About two dozen people arrested. I'm sure they'll be suing the police soon. And it being New York,

00:33:48.380 they'll probably get a payout. Meantime, a troubling incident out of Minneapolis,

00:33:52.060 where a pro-Palestinian rally turned dangerous. According to local affiliate KMSP, protesters

00:33:57.780 started blocking traffic. We saw it with our own eyes performing a mass, quote, die in. This is

00:34:03.600 all the rage now. A die in where they lie down and pretend that they're dead, you know, because like

00:34:08.360 they can totally relate to what it's like happening in the Middle East. This time they chose the middle

00:34:12.980 of the street, which is a good way to actually die. The blocking of the intersection led to an

00:34:18.180 altercation in which an elderly man trying to get through got out of his car armed with a knife,

00:34:24.300 trying to get the protesters to get away from his car, move back so he could keep going.

00:34:30.040 The protesters then began attacking his car. What happened next was caught on camera by a man

00:34:35.480 named Zach Metzger. He's running as a Democrat for city council. When you listen to this, if you can't

00:34:42.600 see the video, the man looks visibly upset with his face beating red as protesters swarm his car.

00:34:49.680 Watch it. He not going nowhere now. He not going nowhere now. Hold up. Hold up. Hold up. Hold up.

00:34:59.800 He not going nowhere now. He not going nowhere now.

00:35:06.540 Let's go.

00:35:10.540 Nowhere. He got it.

00:35:17.180 Motherfucker just ran.

00:35:22.060 Zach, who originally posted the video, has since deleted it. He could, instead of running for city

00:35:27.180 council, spend some time learning basic grammar because it's, he is not going anywhere now. A

00:35:33.640 simple, a simple, you know, maybe extra year in school would have helped him out here. According

00:35:38.780 to the KMSP report, police say no one was injured and that they are now reviewing the incident back

00:35:44.540 with me, Rich Lowry and Charles CW Cook of national review. A lot in there. Um, you know,

00:35:52.020 we're really not sending our best and brightest out to these protests. The rhymers that he not going

00:35:57.800 nowhere now. Look at me running for city council. God help the people if he wins. Um, and yet it's

00:36:03.820 harassment. Uh, in this instance, we've seen it time and time again. And do they even know what

00:36:08.760 they're chanting for? I mean, do you guys think they even know what they're chanting? Do you think

00:36:11.580 what they know what the intifada was?

00:36:12.860 I think, I think obviously the organizers do, and I think a lot of them do. Maybe the

00:36:19.760 random people just think it rhymes and, you know, it's, Hey, Hey, ho, ho, it has to go. You know,

00:36:25.960 you don't literally mean that Western civ should be demolished, but in this case, that's what they're

00:36:29.840 talking about, right? Because this terror attack didn't just, it wasn't just awful where Hamas could

00:36:35.480 reach there in the areas, um, abutting the Gaza strip. It showed if Israel were ever denuded

00:36:41.840 militarily and at the mercy of its enemies, this is what would happen across the entire

00:36:48.100 country, right? It wouldn't be an orderly transfer of power where the Israeli government's toppled and

00:36:53.080 it goes to the control of Palestinian or Arab government. It would be this, it'd be massive

00:36:58.400 bloodletting, dislocation, human suffering on a unspeakable scale, right? It wouldn't just be

00:37:05.900 Israel would continue to exist under, under different governance. No, it would be a genocidal

00:37:11.660 campaign of ethnic cleansing. And that's that, that is what they're calling for. And just,

00:37:18.100 you know, it's not the most important thing, you know, in terms of what we're talking about

00:37:21.200 Israel and this dispute. I mean, this is, this is a historic, um, big league stuff,

00:37:27.380 but these protests aren't that, but I just hate, you see it all the time, hate when they stop a

00:37:34.300 innocent motorist, right? We saw the black lives matter protest and what that guy's scared,

00:37:38.980 right? And what's he supposed to do? Is he supposed to just sit there in his car while

00:37:42.520 people beat on the car, maybe break the windows, maybe try to drag him out. He doesn't know

00:37:46.140 or try to drive away and endanger other people who are standing around his car. Maybe they're,

00:37:52.180 uh, part of the gang banging on the car. Maybe they're just someone innocently crossing the

00:37:56.660 street while he's trying to get out of there. It presents a horrible choice, a horrible choice,

00:38:01.240 which is why I think just obstructing traffic that, that, that, uh, crime as part of these

00:38:06.680 protests should be prosecuted seriously. Cause it leads to these sorts of situations.

00:38:11.480 Yeah. Before the drone footage of the incident with the old man came out in Minneapolis, Charles,

00:38:16.040 uh, they tried to frame it as old white man drives through a pro Palestinian protest,

00:38:21.360 but then somebody got their hands on drone footage of the whole event, which shows

00:38:25.320 he was trying to just drive his car and they surrounded him. He wanted to keep going.

00:38:31.480 It was reminiscent of what we saw during BLM. So have a lot of the slogans, uh, been reminiscent,

00:38:36.540 you know, uh, no justice, no peace we're seeing. Uh, and the guy was surrounded and got scared here.

00:38:43.260 He's driving. You can see they have the end of the road barricaded and you can hear the voiceover

00:38:48.080 going, all he can do is turn around. All he can do is turn around, like, wait, you know, like,

00:38:52.140 let's wait for him. He's, he's got to come back toward us as this guy, this ringleader running

00:38:56.760 for city council. This guy, Zach, uh, is thrilled saying, we've got to find him. We let's go find

00:39:02.440 him. What, what were they going to do to this poor guy if they actually got him? Yeah. And what if he

00:39:08.840 was on in Florida and most States, actually your car is legally deemed an extension of your home

00:39:18.340 and is therefore included under the castle doctrine. And in many States, Florida is one

00:39:25.240 of them. Uh, you don't need a license to carry in your car back when Florida needed licenses

00:39:30.860 for that reason. And, you know, these people, they stopped these cars and then one in a hundred of

00:39:37.440 those people will get very scared quite reasonably. Maybe he pulls a gun out and then suddenly it's

00:39:42.760 not, you know, reported as you described, it's reported as old white man drives into protest and

00:39:49.260 opens fire, which wouldn't have been true, but this, this is a really, really scary moment. I think

00:39:54.420 for, for the people inside of those, those cars, um, you know, rich, you said that, uh, that we should

00:40:02.240 treat this as a crime. Florida did just change its law on this actually, um, for exactly that reason,

00:40:07.540 because this isn't just, uh, an abstract question anymore. This does seem to be happening

00:40:13.520 increasingly. Um, but look, these, go on. Sorry. I was just going to say also, it's kind of

00:40:20.940 connects to what we're talking about in the first segment about the, the erroneous, horrible reporting

00:40:26.540 about the hit on the hospital. We live in such a time of identity politics where everyone is in a

00:40:33.020 category. And if you're in the wrong category, you're presumed guilty. So this poor guy, who knows,

00:40:38.020 you know, he's going to pick up milk at the grocery store and all of a sudden he's a white man, right?

00:40:42.580 Driving through a protest. No, he's, he's a citizen somewhere. Right. But, but all of a sudden he's,

00:40:49.140 he's assumed, presumed guilty. Yeah. And if I could just build on that, Megan, because this is a part of

00:40:57.260 this right all the way through, since we first learned this horrible news out of Israel that I think has been

00:41:02.040 really instructive. And that is that all of the framework that progressives have spent years

00:41:08.820 building up, the framework that is supposed to designate oppressor, oppressed, is supposed to

00:41:16.480 determine what is safety and what is not, that is supposed to, uh, provide for, uh, the, at least

00:41:25.200 frowning upon or even censorship of hate speech and so on and so forth was nonsense, wasn't it? It was

00:41:31.700 nonsense. I mean, just to take these two examples first, that guy. So who in that situation, who

00:41:38.480 in that situation is weaker? Is it the guy whose car is surrounded by a mob shouting at him? They

00:41:45.840 don't know what he thinks about anything. It's not even as if he's involved in the discussion purely

00:41:50.700 because he's there. Is it, is it him or is it the crowd? Well, by the terms that they have laid out,

00:41:56.100 he should be the victim in that scenario. And yet instantly, as Rich says, he becomes the perpetrator

00:42:00.380 because he's, he's a white man. But more broadly, more broadly, the, uh, way that Israel has been

00:42:06.860 treated simply does not comport with all of the rhetoric that we hear. Israel is surrounded. Every

00:42:13.760 country around Israel has some level of animosity towards it. Israel was attacked. It didn't attack.

00:42:20.760 Israel was attacked. Not just that civilians were attacked in Israel. Babies were attacked. Women were

00:42:26.340 raped. And what happened? What happened was that Israel's claims were so widely disbelieved or

00:42:33.480 poo-pooed that they have had to release videos of them, of the most horrendous acts they didn't want

00:42:38.260 to do. Whereas Hamas says, you know, Israel just leveled a hospital, as happened last week. And it's

00:42:44.000 instantly printed in every single newspaper in the world as if it's a fact. And then it has to be

00:42:48.440 retracted. And in some cases, it hasn't been. All I hear from college campuses, when people are

00:42:53.940 talking about this sort of thing, is that you can tell who has the privilege and who is the oppressed

00:42:59.380 by how they're treated. So apparently, as a white man, I have all the privilege. So people will

00:43:04.320 intrinsically believe me and my way through will be easier. And you can tell who is oppressed because

00:43:09.900 the opposite will apply to them. And yet with this abomination, exactly the opposite has obtained.

00:43:15.760 Israel says, hey, these people came into our country and they raped women and they beheaded babies

00:43:21.180 and then took out whole families. And the institutional press in the United States and

00:43:26.680 elsewhere said, we don't really believe you until we see some videos. Meanwhile, the people who did

00:43:31.240 that, who have a track record of doing it, the people who did that say, oh yeah, Israel has just

00:43:35.800 killed 950 million of our people in 12 minutes with a sock. And it's the top of the BBC website the

00:43:41.920 next day. And I just think it is time for Americans who feel cowed by these people, who feel cowed by

00:43:48.480 their terms and their threats, to say that the emperor has no clothes. Because what we have seen

00:43:54.320 here is the perfect refutation of all of that garbage for the last 10 years that no longer deserves to be

00:43:59.880 taken seriously if it ever did.

00:44:01.160 Yeah. So well said as usual. It's, it's one long exercise in, well, how short was her skirt? She was

00:44:09.000 asking for it. I mean, it's really, it's just like a massive example of that. Like, yeah, shouldn't

00:44:13.800 have dressed that way. And then you wouldn't have gotten raped. Take some responsibility. It's really

00:44:17.100 your fault. Um, on the subject of these whiny college students who see everything through an

00:44:25.360 identity prism, which is part of the problem and part of what's being exposed in the reaction here.

00:44:31.160 I don't know if you guys saw this New Yorker piece, but it does a deep dive on the students

00:44:35.780 who signed these, this Harvard letter that was supported by, I've read 30, 31 and 35 different

00:44:42.240 groups. Um, so I don't know what the actual number over 30 is fair. And, uh, they find the Palestinian

00:44:47.860 American students behind it, uh, and profile some of them, a couple who decide, of course they won't

00:44:53.340 offer their real names. She decides to go by Yasmin for the piece. Yasmin and her friend who asked to be

00:44:59.360 called Nadia. Um, okay. And then a third one named who decides to go by Yara. They decide to give an

00:45:07.560 interview, all Palestinian American graduate students to the New Yorker. The type, the piece

00:45:11.640 is entitled the anguished fallout anguished from a pro-Palestinian letter at Harvard. Now don't forget

00:45:19.460 this pro-Palestinian letter said, Israel is to blame entirely for what just happened to it.

00:45:26.240 Your skirt was too short. You had on too much makeup. You get raped when you do that Israel

00:45:33.120 period. Um, same people, right. Who would be outraged at that slander of rape victims have

00:45:40.400 completely jumped on board when it comes to Israel. And they detail how the letter came together

00:45:44.540 together. Immediately. This group began composing a draft letter, the highlighted lines. They added

00:45:50.200 statistics. They left comments. They debated how much historical detail to provide about the

00:45:54.880 Palestinian people and the conditions and the Gaza strip. It has to be punchy. They agreed. Uh,

00:46:00.420 and then they go on to say, okay, one undergraduate who had been doxed. Okay. It's she would been doxed

00:46:07.020 because her name had been outed. Don't sign letters. If you don't want us to know your feelings.

00:46:10.600 Okay. Um, said her parents were new immigrants to America during the nine 11 attacks before she was

00:46:16.760 born. Quote, we're seeing echoes of what they talked about that. I never understood because now

00:46:23.120 it is me that's being targeted. It is my Brown Muslim face up there on that truck, riding around,

00:46:32.940 trying to out the students who said, who signed this letter in response, which my note reads,

00:46:36.740 and I quote boo fucking who it was my Brown face. Your Brown hand signed the letter. No one cares

00:46:46.660 what your skin color is. It's your stupid ass words that condemned the terror victims as the

00:46:53.060 children were still being murdered. That's what we have an issue with rich. You can't make it up.

00:46:57.720 Yeah. I mean, what whiny entitled cowards. I mean, they're one, they're incapable of moral reasoning

00:47:05.860 because they're not capable of seeing people in certain categories as fully people. Right. So

00:47:10.300 Israel is defined as Charlie, uh, was eloquently stating earlier as the colonizers. So just by

00:47:15.880 definition, they can't be victims. Nothing wrong can ever be done to them. They are guilty of all the

00:47:21.000 world's ills. And they signed on the stupid letter, which is meant to be a public statement,

00:47:24.720 which a gendered public debate. And now they're complaining about it.

00:47:29.440 And then they said, Charlie, in this interview, they're, they're lamenting that not more students

00:47:34.900 come forward with them saying if people would just band together, it would take the power out

00:47:39.160 because you can't fire 700 Harvard students. It would be a scandal. That's a privilege we have.

00:47:47.960 Well, I mean, they, they said the quiet part out loud as the, as the kids say, but I think what this

00:47:53.140 shows more than anything is that the ultimate aim of this sort of person is actually to engage with

00:47:58.900 the world without ever hearing anything back. Uh, that's why these student groups for years have

00:48:04.840 been trying to get so-called hate speech banned, which they get to define because then no one is

00:48:08.840 allowed to say you're wrong or explain to them, um, where they disagree. And, and this is just a

00:48:13.700 perfect example of it. I mean, if you sign an open letter and it has precepts to which you've added

00:48:18.620 your name, you are then open to criticism. That's how free speech works to then push back against

00:48:23.580 the idea, uh, that anyone might disagree with you demonstrates that you expect to exist in the

00:48:29.180 United States, um, with, without, uh, critique. And that's, it's just not an option.

00:48:35.440 It's amazing. They, they detail that, um, there are antisemitic posts in some other chat group

00:48:41.560 on side chat that some Israeli students show the New Yorker, including one that reads,

00:48:46.160 let them cook with 25 thumbs up, let them cook. And these people are, their responses,

00:48:52.860 they can't fire us all. That's a privilege we have as Harvard students. More when we come back,

00:48:57.940 don't go away. One of the most unsettling parts of the story out of the Middle East

00:49:05.640 has been the global reaction to this terrorist attack and to the victims and what they suffered.

00:49:11.820 We've seen it on college campuses and in cities across our own country. It's one thing to watch

00:49:18.920 terrorists do terror. It's another thing to watch Americans cheering for it. Just a few examples.

00:49:26.200 A UC Santa Barbara professor named Lisa Hajar posted a triumphant image of a bulldozer with a Palestinian

00:49:35.020 flag busting through a fence. Lisa has since protected her tweets. How brave Lisa profiles

00:49:43.120 and courage. There you are in Brooklyn, New York. Two people were spotted tearing down posters of the

00:49:49.760 hostages. Listen to what happened when they started being filmed.

00:49:53.960 Charming. They're proud of what they're doing. Pulling down pictures of missing babies. According

00:50:17.360 to the Stop Anti-Semitism Twitter account, which you absolutely should be following if you're not,

00:50:21.460 the woman in orange keeps calling the Jewish man filming them a dog in Arabic. That's what that

00:50:26.640 word was. And then tells him to burn in hell. I'm sure she means it. That woman has since been

00:50:31.400 identified as Sarah Dahoud. Sarah, Sarah. Great to meet you. So glad we have a name now to go with

00:50:39.380 the face. The outlet dug up an old bio for her from 2017. Apparently she calls herself queer,

00:50:46.140 gender fluid. She goes by all pronouns and she is the child of Muslim refugees. Over in Boston,

00:50:54.400 a woman was filmed at an upscale shopping center, removing posters of Israeli children who have been

00:51:01.340 taken hostage. She has been identified as a doctor named Zina Al-Hadib and she has now been fired.

00:51:10.180 Enjoy retirement, Zina. Good luck because there isn't a Jewish person on earth who would want to

00:51:16.860 be in your care. Nevermind the rest of us. It's important to remember exactly what these people

00:51:21.460 are tearing down. Okay. Think about it. Images like this, a baby boy who is nine months old. He,

00:51:29.860 his four-year-old brother and their terrified mother are all believed to have been taken hostage.

00:51:33.620 The mom's cousin sobbing in an interview with CBS news saying she can only hope the three of them

00:51:40.420 are together, that she tries not to think about the worst. Or little Raz, about four years old.

00:51:47.880 Look at this video. Precious sweet child. Oh my God. Look at this girl. Weeks ago,

00:51:54.040 she was playing guitar and dancing as so many little girls do, making a heart with her hands,

00:51:59.220 playing. She and her two-year-old sister and their 34-year-old mother are among the missing.

00:52:06.320 The dad says he has seen video of them in a vehicle, apparently being kidnapped by Hamas.

00:52:12.880 These are the images well-meaning citizens are putting up to try to call attention to them and

00:52:18.080 their plight, to try in some way to do what they can to get them back. And these are the images,

00:52:24.180 terrorist sympathizers, because really that's what they are, don't want you to see.

00:52:29.220 Back with me now, National Reviews, Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cook. How many of these are in your

00:52:36.600 ex-feed, right? You're formerly known as Twitter. It's almost always women tearing down posters of

00:52:44.840 missing children. There's some disconnect here. These people look sociopathic to me, Rich.

00:52:52.360 Yeah. I mean, it's such a low and despicable act. We all remember anyone who was in New York after

00:52:58.300 September 11th remembers all those missing posters, right? We all knew at a certain level,

00:53:04.200 they were death notices, but to touch them, to in any way disrespect them would have been such a

00:53:10.860 malicious act. And the same thing is true here. And it goes to what we've been talking about really

00:53:16.720 the entirety of the show. There is this segment of opinion that doesn't recognize legitimacy of

00:53:23.960 Israel that is tainted, at the very least, with anti-Semitism. And if you don't have enough respect

00:53:31.480 for a missing baby to just leave that poster alone, if you don't like it, look away, right? Walk faster,

00:53:39.120 whatever you have to do, but to tear it down. Again, it's a small thing in the scheme of things,

00:53:45.300 but really a despicable act. And the way that professor's bulldoze image, we've seen the same

00:53:53.400 thing with paragliders. They have taken an image of an unspeakable act of evil and made it a symbol

00:54:02.580 of worthwhile resistance. And that, at bottom, is all you need to know about this cause.

00:54:10.960 I look at these people, Charles, and I think I would never want anything to do with them. I'm

00:54:16.940 thrilled the doctor lost her job. I am on my feet applauding it. You sympathize with the people

00:54:24.500 who've done to these children what we've been discussing for this past hour plus. I have no use

00:54:29.920 for you. I'm thrilled you've been exposed. What do you think?

00:54:34.880 Well, I think the key is what you said, which is this is sympathizing with the people who committed

00:54:39.600 these atrocities, because there's no way of attenuating this one. There are certain people

00:54:44.600 who don't know anything. They don't know anything about the world. They don't know anything about the

00:54:49.840 Middle East. They probably don't know where Israel is or anything about its history. And they get sucked

00:54:54.040 into this radical, chic idea that they're on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors. And

00:55:00.680 they've maybe put up a sign that says free Palestine or whatever. No, I think that's silly. And I disagree

00:55:06.100 with it. But at least they could marshal in their defense the argument that they were advancing an

00:55:12.540 abstraction. But what we're talking about here, there is no such excuse for. The people who are

00:55:18.620 taking down those posters are endorsing what Hamas did. This is an endorsement of tactics. This is an

00:55:28.880 endorsement of action. It's not taking sides in the dispute. It's not filtering the Israel-Palestine

00:55:38.800 conflict through some pre-existing ideological framework. It's saying that these images of the

00:55:46.620 victims do not deserve to be memorialized. The people who put up images of paragliders are saying that

00:55:56.660 that means of spreading terror and death is worth an endorsement. People who endorse the

00:56:06.880 knocking down offenses are saying Israel does not have the right to defend its border. And this is a

00:56:15.460 whole new level. And I think that's where the line is. We hear a lot in our debates over so-called

00:56:23.240 cancel culture, of which I'm a big critic, that at some point, everyone agrees that a given person needs

00:56:32.600 to be canceled. Well, yeah, I think that's true. You know, there are certain circumstances in which,

00:56:38.340 so one is if what you are doing for your job is directly related to the thing that you have said

00:56:43.520 that makes it hard for you to do your job. And the other is if you are so far away from any debate

00:56:51.960 or intellectual exercise and actually into the endorsement of evil. And I think that a whole bunch of

00:57:01.200 cases that we've seen, one of which you mentioned, fit the bill. If you are a doctor and you are saying

00:57:08.660 that you think it is a good thing that Hamas murdered children and raped women and beheaded

00:57:16.680 babies and so forth, then that is in direct contradiction to your Hippocratic oath, which

00:57:22.160 is first, do no harm. This isn't an ideological exercise. This isn't the university or a media

00:57:27.740 institution saying, this idea we came up with yesterday is now sacrosanct. That actually makes

00:57:31.840 it very, very difficult for you to have patients and customers. So there, you know, there is a big

00:57:39.120 difference here, I think, between the sort of fellow travelers who put up signs and might be caught at the

00:57:43.860 back of a protest at Harvard, who really may not know what they're doing, although they should know

00:57:48.000 better, and people who are explicitly endorsing this sort of evil. And the examples that you just gave

00:57:54.000 fit into the latter category. It's also, you know, there's that woke term erasure that I hate. You

00:58:00.080 never quite know what it means. This is erasure, right? This is someone who's so committed against

00:58:05.420 Israel that they can't stand the idea that a post, you know, somewhere in a corner of Brooklyn,

00:58:12.680 there's a picture of a missing baby. They want that whole situation not exist. They don't want

00:58:17.380 anyone to think of that baby, see that baby. That's erasure. Yeah. The, like the blowback now

00:58:25.460 that's happening, you know, it's the, the protests in the street, the tearing down of the hostage

00:58:29.720 pictures, it's bad enough, but now we're seeing blowback case after case against Jewish citizens,

00:58:36.420 like Jewish Americans here are getting harassed. Just today, Barry Weiss, you know, she started her

00:58:43.900 own independent press outlet called the free press. She posted, uh, that this was scrawled outside of

00:58:48.460 her offices, um, over the past few days. And it reads fuck Israel. And I think fuck the Jews is

00:58:56.660 the other one. Fuck Jews. Forgive my language, uh, scrawled outside of her offices. That's, I mean,

00:59:02.340 she's of course a Jewish woman who's been outspoken on this issue. She's got to show up at work and see

00:59:06.600 that if they think that's going to stop Barry Weiss, they don't know Barry. Okay. They, it's going to

00:59:11.960 have the opposite effect of the one that's been intended. And then you have this example, um,

00:59:16.680 Harvard hosted, I mentioned it before, a die-in, a die-in on its campus this week. And this,

00:59:24.220 this student walks by who I'm, I'm, I read is Israeli and goes to the business school there.

00:59:32.580 That this is according to the Washington free beacon, which did a great job reporting on this.

00:59:36.360 Our friend Eliana Johnson, um, her, her publication, the guy gets accosted and harassed

00:59:42.460 because he happened to walk by and decided to film with his phone, this Gaza die-in. I think we have

00:59:48.760 some of the tape. Let's watch. Exit! Exit! Exit! Exit! Exit! Exit! Exit! Exit! Exit! You're grabbing me.

01:00:11.960 It's not grabbing you. What's that? What's that? What's that? Exit! Exit! Exit! Stop touching me.

01:00:17.920 Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!

01:00:24.120 My God. He, he was an Israeli student who decided to film their very public protest and you can hear

01:00:32.260 them. By the way, we now know who the two instigators who are laying hands on him, uh,

01:00:37.400 were Harvard university graduate students. One, a law student, Ibrahim Barmal, a member of the law

01:00:45.820 review. Of course, of course. And the other, a divinity school graduate student named Elam

01:00:53.160 Teti, uh, who lives with Harvard undergraduate students in a supervisory role known as a proctor.

01:01:00.320 At least two of those individuals identified according to the FBI report, because this,

01:01:06.700 the victim went and reported this, um, who were aggressively confronting this guy who did no,

01:01:13.540 nothing more according to the report than pull out his phone to film the rioters. And he got

01:01:17.200 attacked. This isn't the South side of Chicago. This is on the Harvard quad.

01:01:23.900 Yep. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately the anti-Zionists or anti-Semitics have basically won the battle for

01:01:29.540 hearts and minds and a huge swath of the Academy the last couple decades. And we're seeing the effect of

01:01:35.180 it, but it is again, you know, it's tinged at least with anti-Semitism. You would think

01:01:40.260 by this reaction that what just happened two weeks ago is Israel bulldozed this way through the Gaza

01:01:47.500 wall, went to various cities and settlements near the wall, uh, raped and decapitated babies, killed

01:01:54.880 people, took hostages, and then left. Right. That's, that's the react when it was, of course,

01:01:59.500 completely the opposite. So it's, it's, um, Jews are victimized and they're still blamed. Right.

01:02:06.860 It doesn't matter, you know, and just in medieval terms, if you told a lot of these people, oh,

01:02:11.580 the Jews are poisoning the wells to kill, kill Christians. They believe it, right. They're the

01:02:16.600 kind of people who would believe it. This is the kind of sentiment that played into that. And

01:02:20.600 unfortunately, a lot of mainstream outlets would report it initially. Right. You know, according to,

01:02:25.380 uh, uh, Polish peasants, uh, the, the, the wells have been, uh, poisoned and hundreds have died

01:02:31.080 because of the Jews. And then, well, there's no evidence of it. And then a week later, well,

01:02:35.460 maybe we shouldn't have believed those Polish peasants, but that's modern terms. That's what

01:02:39.380 we're talking about. By the way, Charles, the same die in, uh, from last week organized by the

01:02:45.520 Harvard Palestine solidarity committee and Harvard graduate students for Palestine. And no, I will not

01:02:50.860 be hiring anybody who was part of these groups. Um, they, they had, uh, their, they had support

01:02:57.540 from, and an appearance by the guy who recently founded the African and African American resistance

01:03:05.320 organization, Kojo Achiampong, who graduates in 26, who said this as Afro, that's the acronym for his

01:03:15.060 group, uh, understands the apartheid regime that was here is identical to the apartheid regime in Israel

01:03:22.380 rooted in the same logic of settler colonialism. It's right here. It's alive and well it's on the

01:03:29.540 names of our buildings on the names of our streets. And there is beginning to be some weird support by

01:03:36.500 some faction of the BLM crowd for the coalition against Israel.

01:03:44.060 Yeah. I must say it's an amateur theater critic. I wasn't very convinced by the performance of those

01:03:50.060 people who were supposed to be dead, jumping up and attacking someone, uh, maybe zombies. Uh, the

01:03:57.100 examples you just highlighted both show people whose conception of what is normal is just completely

01:04:06.400 skewed. I mean, which of these two circumstances is normal at a college, a person walking around

01:04:14.020 from one building to another or people lying on the floor, pretending to be dead. And the assumption

01:04:21.060 there seems to have been that he was doing something wrong by walking through this rather than that they

01:04:26.100 were imposing on others. Likewise, the idea that there is something in common between the

01:04:36.380 makeup of the modern state of Israel and America under Jim Crow is nonsense. It's part of this

01:04:43.420 everything is everything mentality that we see on the modern left that is driven by intersectionality,

01:04:49.420 where you see Planned Parenthood tweet out, you know, climate change is reproductive justice,

01:04:54.860 which doesn't mean anything other than that they want everyone who might possibly consider

01:04:59.300 themselves to be oppressed to bandy together. I mean, it's just not true. Um, I am a little hopeful

01:05:05.980 on this though, Megan, I find it as annoying as you do, but I think that so many of these groups in

01:05:13.020 the great big progressive blob have pushed it so far here that they have actually provoked their

01:05:19.340 nominal allies to say enough. I don't think there is going to be a great desire for an endless

01:05:26.540 suicide pact between people who thought they might be on the same side. I'm starting to see

01:05:32.220 a fracturing of it. Now, I don't think that that's necessarily going to make a big difference at

01:05:37.620 Harvard or at some of our really badly infected elite institutions, but I do think in the public

01:05:44.300 it will. And I think it could start to affect elections as well, because if you look at polling

01:05:48.700 on this question, Americans are quite sensible. They don't like masks. They do think Israel has the

01:05:53.660 right to exist. They are appalled by what happened two weeks ago. Um, and I've seen more of my Jewish

01:05:59.420 friends than ever, uh, who don't normally talk about politics saying that they were surprised

01:06:04.780 by how widespread the institutional criticism of Israel and of Jewish people in general has been.

01:06:11.820 I have been surprised too. I I'm naive. Clearly I didn't realize that it would be quite that pronounced.

01:06:17.980 And I wonder whether we're going to start seeing groups that have historically worked together and

01:06:24.460 everything is everything mindset saying, you know what, that was a big moment for us. We're not

01:06:28.860 getting on board with you. Yeah. I, I told part of the story last week, but a Jewish friend of mine

01:06:34.220 in New York, who's a Democrat was telling me she's only watching Fox news right now. You know,

01:06:40.140 she's doing media and the digital lane like ours and she's doing Fox news and she's abandoned what she

01:06:44.940 used to like, which was CNN and occasionally MSNBC. She can't take it. Then, uh, I went to a,

01:06:50.860 a cocktail party with a bunch of people in my community on Friday and person after person

01:06:56.300 came over to me. These were liberals, self-described liberals saying, thank you for your coverage.

01:07:01.580 We've been watching religiously. We can't stomach MSNBC anymore. You know, we feel like people without

01:07:07.260 a party. We can't believe what's like it's happening. Like Jewish Americans are recoiling

01:07:13.660 in response to what happened here. And it reminds me, you know, Trump has been railing on the Jewish

01:07:17.660 Democrats forever. Why don't they vote Republican? Why don't they vote for me? They should like me

01:07:23.020 vote in your own self-interest. Um, I don't think they like Trump, but I do think for the first time

01:07:28.140 he's got a shot at their vote because they're so horrified rich by what a huge faction of the left

01:07:34.940 is doing. And I'll just give you one other stat to put some meat on it. There was a poll out last

01:07:39.420 week. Hold on. Let me get it. That showed, um, 50% only 50% of Democrats blame Hamas for the

01:07:51.340 attack on Israel. Only 50% of Democrats do 73% of Republicans put the blame squarely where it

01:07:58.140 belongs, which is on Hamas. Yeah. I've seen some polling that is better on Democratic sentiment.

01:08:03.740 I do think there is a separation between the radicals on the left and the mainstream Democrats

01:08:07.820 and their attitude about this because our mainstream Democratic friends, they are human beings,

01:08:11.580 right? They, they get who's in the right and who's in the wrong here. But you know, I, I think this,

01:08:17.100 the whole, uh, just in sheer political terms, all this helps president Trump. He said some dumb

01:08:22.700 things, you know, about Hezbollah being smart and attacking BB cause he has some grudge against him

01:08:27.500 personally. But you, you knew four square that there was no question he was going to back Israel when he

01:08:34.140 was president. And he makes a very intuitive case when he says, look, you know, kind of funny, right?

01:08:39.500 You know, Russia didn't invade Ukraine when I was president, this kind of horrific assault on Israel

01:08:43.420 didn't happen when I was president and, you know, maybe some good luck there, but it makes a lot of

01:08:49.100 sense that adversaries were scared of him or at least uncertain what his reaction would be. So he

01:08:56.860 carried this kind of personal deterrent force that Joe Biden just doesn't have, right? At the very

01:09:02.860 least, you know what Biden's going to do, right? It's going to be the, you know, you put it in a

01:09:07.260 blender and come out with the standard, uh, American president's response to any crisis.

01:09:10.940 That's what he's going to do, right? Because he's so conventional, whereas you couldn't do that

01:09:15.020 with Donald Trump. So I think this helps them again in the primary. And I didn't need that.

01:09:19.180 They need a lot of help at the moment, but potentially also helps in the general, not just

01:09:23.100 because there might be Jews disaffected from what they've seen from their ideological allies on this,

01:09:27.420 but also because like, uh, you know, maybe this guy, despite all the craziness,

01:09:30.700 uh, would, would keep her safe, keep us safer than we have been, or our interests safer

01:09:36.300 than they have been the last four years. Just an addendum. That was an NBC news poll of college

01:09:41.580 students. 50% of Democrats in college, uh, think that that's a pretty good finding, right?

01:09:48.220 I know. Oh, and also, uh, FYI, the doctor who was fired, um, who we talked about out of Boston,

01:09:54.540 taking down the hostage pictures. It's interesting to me because she was an endodontist,

01:10:00.220 which I've never been to an endodontist, but I, they're the people who work on what's described

01:10:04.060 as the pulp of your teeth. So it sounds like root canal, but it sounds horrible. But the point is,

01:10:10.620 think about this. Think about a Jewish person having to sit in the chair of this woman,

01:10:16.620 the closest contact imaginable, right? Like they're in your face, in your mouth,

01:10:22.620 next to your nerves, your most sensitive nerves, who would want a person who clearly hates Jews

01:10:30.620 touching them and in care of their pain and wellness at that level. She had to be fired.

01:10:36.540 That's why it's so important what this X account stop antisemitism is doing because they get a screen

01:10:42.940 grab of the person, they post it, and then they say, help us identify the person. And then the

01:10:47.740 person is identified and where appropriate, the person gets fired. Absolutely right. Otherwise,

01:10:52.860 who'd want their, you know, Jewish friends sitting in this woman's care. I, not me, not I. Okay.

01:10:58.700 On the subject of these woke, I don't know what they are annoying, anti-Israel college students.

01:11:06.140 All of it, as we're seeing now, Charles has, has bled out into society, you know, same as our

01:11:11.580 immigration policies have bled out into society. We see that in a lot of these protests. And that

01:11:17.020 leads me to the state department, which is no exception to the, it is bled out rule. There was

01:11:23.020 a report, uh, on the 20th and it detailed, uh, AI monitor. Is that the publication detailing

01:11:31.500 what's happening inside the state department? Um, this is a Washington based outlet that reports on

01:11:36.940 the Middle East. It's been referenced in the past by the, by the journal, the times, the economist,

01:11:41.100 it's a legit, it's a legit outlet. In fact, if anything, it leans left. And they report that

01:11:46.540 secretary Blinken is holding listening sessions, listening sessions with Muslim Arab Americans,

01:11:55.980 and separately Jewish staffers. You want to say students here, but no, it's staffers

01:12:01.980 amid growing internal frustration over the state department's handling of the war.

01:12:06.060 Meetings came after a state department official resigned in protest this week

01:12:09.740 over continued us support for an Israeli bombing campaign. On Friday afternoon, Blinken met with

01:12:15.260 a small group of state department staffers who are members of two Arab American and Muslim employee

01:12:20.860 organizations. A source familiar with one of the meetings called it an opportunity for Blinken to

01:12:25.100 hear directly from the workforce since his trip to the region. Uh, it came as HuffPo reports that

01:12:30.780 U S diplomats are drafting a dissent cable over the Biden administration's approach to the conflict.

01:12:36.700 Goes on Huffington post to talk about how there is a mutiny brewing within state at all levels and

01:12:45.340 goes on to say the negativity is surfing in a variety of ways. One official described peers as depressed and

01:12:53.100 angry about it all. Another said some staff are experiencing resignation and that official recalled

01:13:00.140 a colleague in tears during a meeting over this person's view that the U S policy statements emphasize

01:13:06.300 support for Israel over the lives of Palestinians. They're crying in the state department because

01:13:13.100 their preferred outcomes are not being advanced by the secretary and the president.

01:13:19.340 We have three branches of government in this country. We have the executive branch, the legislative

01:13:25.900 branch and the judicial branch. We don't have four. The state department is not a separate branch of

01:13:30.940 government. It doesn't have any freestanding powers. It is there to represent the wishes of the

01:13:36.860 executive branch as tempered by the legislature and it's staffed by people who are chosen by the

01:13:41.340 executive and approved by the legislature. And that's the end of it. What the individuals within

01:13:48.540 the state department think of government policy is irrelevant. It is up to the government to set

01:13:54.620 that policy. That government is elected in Congress and in the White House. If anyone within the state

01:14:01.820 department cannot abide by the policies that they're required to carry out, then they can resign and that's

01:14:07.100 fine. And we can criticize them for their views or praise them for their views, perhaps, depending on

01:14:12.300 the circumstance. But this is a principle that is imperative and that is just forgotten in so many

01:14:17.340 different circumstances in the modern era where we seem to think that these federal agencies have their

01:14:22.780 own volition and they don't. I'm reminded looking at this, especially in conjunction with the news that 400

01:14:31.500 or so congressional staffers anonymously signed, I'm not quite sure what that even means, but

01:14:37.100 anonymously signed a letter of Yuval Levin's point about the role of institutions having changed over

01:14:44.940 time such that many people now go into an institution thinking that they can use it for their own

01:14:50.780 advancement or as a platform on which to stand rather than as something that they serve or that is bigger

01:14:58.060 than them or that exists externally to them. The State Department has been around since the

01:15:03.020 founding of the country. It's one of the original departments. It has always fulfilled the same

01:15:07.020 role. It has always sat within the same constitutional structure. I just do not want to be reading as an

01:15:13.020 American citizen in the newspaper or elsewhere about the private views of people whose role within our

01:15:19.500 system is to act as functionaries or bureaucrats. And, you know, Joe Biden is not in charge of anything

01:15:25.580 because he's old and out of it. But at some point, a U.S. president is going to have to make this point

01:15:32.460 internally and externally that we have an executive in this country who is elected and he, with congressional

01:15:38.220 input, is in charge.

01:15:41.580 Just to correct my reporting, all monitor. This is not a publication with which I am familiar, which is why we ran it

01:15:46.460 down to see if it's legit. All monitor reporting that. He's got his own deep state now, Rich. They're crying inside the

01:15:53.740 State Department. They want a different policy of the one that the president is pursuing. Welcome.

01:15:58.700 Welcome to the game. He's got his own deep state. Yeah. Well, this is not unusual. This is the typical

01:16:05.420 State Department sentiment about this conflict, no matter what the flare up is or the occasion for it.

01:16:11.740 It's always restraint on Israel. That's always their default answer. So it isn't surprising that this is

01:16:17.980 happening. Maybe there's kind of an added element from our culture and kind of campus culture spreading

01:16:24.140 over where people are crying and upset and need a safe space to deal with the fact that this is the

01:16:30.220 president's policy, at least for now. And I'd underline that last point because the natural

01:16:36.460 gravity in terms of U.S. government policy is going to be towards staying Israel's hand. We've seen it

01:16:43.180 over and over again. Maybe there's going to be a window lasting longer. Maybe it's already closed.

01:16:48.620 Some of these reports we were talking earlier are accurate about the U.S. saying don't go in on the

01:16:53.420 ground. But but this this is the natural kind of bureaucratic gravity and it has to be resisted.

01:16:59.500 And you hope the president and the secretary of state have the the strength and gumption to resist it.

01:17:05.420 But it's understandable if you have some doubts. Well, we have all the usual suspects pressuring

01:17:12.060 Joe Biden to change his policy thus far. Thus far, he's been standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel

01:17:18.140 and has been saying the right things and sending the aircraft carriers all that. Very good for

01:17:22.540 people who believe we should stand by Israel. But you've got the college campuses, of course,

01:17:27.900 speaking up, you've got deep state upset with his policies and you've got the celebrities who are

01:17:34.700 starting to weigh in. I mentioned Dave Chappelle, by the way, just just FYI, I'll show you my team found

01:17:39.980 this of him back in 2021. He did a bit on on Jews, which. Well, you tell me here it is.

01:17:49.180 In my movie idea, we find out that these aliens are originally from Earth,

01:17:56.060 that they're from an ancient civilization that achieved interstellar travel and left the Earth

01:18:01.260 thousands of years ago. Some other planet they go to and things go terrible for them in the other

01:18:06.700 planet. So they come back to Earth, decide that they want to claim the Earth for their very own.

01:18:12.700 It's a pretty good plot line, huh?

01:18:13.980 I call it space Jews.

01:18:19.580 All right. OK, so yeah, it's pretty on the nose. So there's Chappelle. And then I know you guys,

01:18:28.140 Charles, when I think about you and I think about this conflict, I was thinking I know what Charles

01:18:32.060 wants an answer to. What does Alyssa Milano think? I know she's your North Star. So Alyssa Milano,

01:18:39.660 John Stewart, Wanda Sykes, Joaquin Phoenix, Sandra Oh, Kate Blanchett, Rosario Dawson, Margaret Cho,

01:18:48.460 Jessica Chastain, Channing Tatum, a bunch of other people I never heard of signed a letter demanding

01:18:55.580 a ceasefire right now because I'm sure Alyssa Milano is very versed in Mitty's policy, Charles,

01:19:03.900 and she really wants a ceasefire this instant.

01:19:09.820 Well, look, don't underestimate my regard for Wanda Sykes. It's not just Alyssa Milano. You've

01:19:15.260 got to have both the North Star and the South Star. Wanda Sykes fulfills that, at least for me,

01:19:21.160 with the others in a constellation somewhere around the globe. I mean, look, I think Dave Chappelle's

01:19:27.780 Hilarious. And I also think he's an entertainer. And I just don't particularly care what a bunch

01:19:34.180 of entertainers, some of whom I like and some of whom I don't, think about geopolitics. And I don't

01:19:38.500 understand why it is that they think we should care about what they think. And I feel the same

01:19:43.620 with sports and anyone else, really, who just wanders into this. There is no particular moral

01:19:50.800 weight attached to being a comedian or an actress or a musician. And that doesn't matter whether you're

01:19:54.620 a bad musician or if you're Paul McCartney. You just don't have any special role to play within

01:20:01.000 this debate. And yet the sanctimony and the self-regard in the letter you referred to, which

01:20:06.500 I read, because of my great love for Alyssa Milano, was astonishing. It's astonishing. And it's very

01:20:13.000 strange to me that this is a thing that we do in our culture. We say, well, did you hear what

01:20:19.100 Alyssa Milano said about the situation in Israel? I did because I have a strange job which requires

01:20:26.480 me to follow these things. But why? Why did they do it?

01:20:32.620 Right. Why? Good question. They think they have the ability to change policy, I guess. Like

01:20:37.900 Jerry Seinfeld put out a statement and some other Jewish supporters put out a statement,

01:20:42.980 you know, with their that. He's got like a vested stake and I guess, you know, was concerned about

01:20:48.560 himself, his family, I'm sure. But Alyssa Milano, like what? There's no vested anything. She just

01:20:54.120 fancies herself an activist on these things that she likes to see her name in the paper. One of my

01:21:00.020 favorite things about Rose McGowan, who I realize is very controversial, but I kind of love her,

01:21:05.560 is to hear her talk about Alyssa Milano. I mean, she is just excoriating. Alyssa Milano says all the

01:21:13.640 things you know in your heart are true. But she sounds an awful lot like an elected representative

01:21:18.940 we know is Ilhan Omar, Rich, who went out this past weekend, was it? It was on Friday

01:21:26.700 to offer the following statements to President Biden. She's on board with the criers at the State

01:21:33.020 Department with Alyssa Milano. And of course, Rashida Tlaib. Listen to SOT 5.

01:21:38.800 Where is your humanity? How do you look at one atrocity and say this is wrong?

01:21:49.360 But you watch as bodies pile up, as neighborhoods are leveled. Where is your humanity? Where is your

01:21:59.040 outrage? How is it that we have a president who is talking about releasing hostages, who is talking

01:22:07.560 about getting American citizens out of Israel, but could not get himself to say, I want to save

01:22:16.140 and work to save the hundreds, thousands of Americans is stuck in Gaza? What is wrong with you?

01:22:25.500 Now, I'm going to say the first part of that clip was what the kids call a cell phone.

01:22:34.320 Right? How can you look at the bodies pile up and not say anything? Let me refer you to a clip where

01:22:39.920 Fox News' Hillary Vaughn, who's been doing a great job, confronted her just same day on Friday and how

01:22:46.860 she handled it.

01:22:47.360 How can Israel have a ceasefire with terrorists whose entire mission is to wipe out their existence?

01:23:08.420 How can they have a ceasefire if they're trying to wipe out this crazy lady? Don't worry about her.

01:23:17.240 Ignore this crazy lady. Don't worry about her, it says Elan Omar to her security team.

01:23:21.740 How can you sit there and watch and not say anything? How rich?

01:23:26.420 Yeah, I think it was Hillary Vaughn also last week. Congresswoman Tlaib was walking in the hallway.

01:23:32.660 Do you condemn condemn the killing of babies? She wouldn't say, of course. Right. So it

01:23:38.420 all goes to where these people are fundamentally coming from. And let's be clear, if you're calling

01:23:41.620 for a ceasefire now, you're calling for Hamas getting away with this. Right? That's what you're

01:23:46.980 calling for. We all have sympathy for innocent Gazans. And look, Biden administration has been

01:23:52.340 concerned with trying to get humanitarian trucks in there and whatnot. But it goes back to what we

01:23:57.300 were talking about earlier. The ultimate responsibility for this situation goes to Hamas. If they hadn't

01:24:04.740 done this, none of this would have followed from it. And if you don't acknowledge that,

01:24:10.020 if you find excuses for it, you are morally bankrupt. And the members of the squad are just

01:24:16.260 that. The members of the squad seem to be not only in the deep state, but in the media in abundance,

01:24:23.940 because the way that hospital attack was handled and some other examples, which we'll get to next,

01:24:28.500 have been truly stunning. I mean, even for The New York Times,

01:24:30.900 this level of dereliction was surprising, I have to say, even to me. I'll tell you the latest on them.

01:24:36.580 They're now finally acknowledging part of their error, but not the full thing.

01:24:41.860 And wait until you hear who they just hired. More with Rich and Charles just ahead.

01:24:49.940 OK, so The New York Times finally now almost, I don't know, almost a week after their terrible

01:24:55.540 reporting on that alleged hospital bombing, which they said, quote, was an Israeli strike that killed

01:25:02.740 hundreds in hospital, none of which was true. It wasn't an Israeli strike. It didn't kill hundreds

01:25:08.500 and it wasn't in the hospital. And they kept restating these errors over and over in their

01:25:12.980 second, their third attempts at this headline. Then they let it sit there. They finally corrected

01:25:18.500 the headline, but they let the error sit there without being acknowledged. And as you guys know,

01:25:22.820 in journalism, it's not enough to just correct it. You have to say the earlier reporting was wrong.

01:25:27.860 Here's how we were wrong. We regret the error. That's how you call attention to your mistakes,

01:25:32.100 which everyone makes. And it's sadly a reality of our business. But this one is a huge one. It was a

01:25:37.780 huge one that helped lead to riots in the streets and a swell of anti-Israel sentiment. Now they have

01:25:45.620 an editor's note saying our initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to

01:25:51.540 Palestinian officials and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast.

01:25:56.100 That's their own cover for themselves. However, the early versions of the coverage and the

01:26:00.820 prominence it received in a headline news alert and social media channels relied too heavily on claims

01:26:06.420 by Hamas and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. Indeed,

01:26:11.220 what they said was the Palestinians were saying this rich the Palestinian health authority without

01:26:15.780 making clear that was a Hamas tied organization full of propaganda. And then they go on to say

01:26:20.660 the report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account

01:26:25.460 was. And they go on to say, you know, we we corrected the headline within two hours. They did not,

01:26:30.820 however, correct the fact that they're still reporting hundreds dead. We don't know that that's

01:26:35.380 still coming from Hamas or the fact that they they use the wrong photo in showing the devastation.

01:26:43.860 They pulled a different photo of mass devastation. This one right here, which was not of the hospital

01:26:49.940 or the parking lot, also not acknowledged in their attempt to correct the record.

01:26:55.860 Yeah, so this is, you know, in journalism, we all get it wrong occasionally, but this was a completely

01:27:00.420 avoidable era. Everyone I follow on Twitter, who's followed this dispute over the years,

01:27:07.300 immediately said, don't believe this. Do not believe this, that this was an Israeli strike.

01:27:13.700 Very often there are rockets that go astray. Just wait, you know, let's wait and see. And very quickly,

01:27:18.900 you realize that that's very likely what happened. You had people tracing rockets coming in and

01:27:26.180 and and doing the maps and and whatnot. It figured out very quickly it was a stray Palestinian rocket.

01:27:33.940 And the New York Times, it kind of it moved in real time, right? The headline slowly got less certain.

01:27:40.020 But if you're splashing that, as you just showed, across your front page with an with an image from

01:27:46.020 it from a different bombing. And yeah, you know, you have the Palestinian health authority says,

01:27:52.500 but the strong presumption throughout the story is it's true. That's the only reason you'd play it so

01:27:58.020 big. Right. Because you you find this incredible. So this was real horrible in this malpractice.

01:28:07.940 And I give them credit for, you know, in the editors note, at least they say we were too credulous

01:28:11.860 about claims from Hamas. Right. But that's what they were. And how damning is that? Right. They they

01:28:18.180 they rape women and the head children. And then you're going to believe what they say

01:28:23.620 about a highly sensitive like this that they can use for propaganda purposes. How possibly

01:28:28.500 does that make sense, except for the reflex? A lot of these journalists, not all of them,

01:28:33.220 you know, some really good ones, but kind of culturally and institutionally tends to be the same

01:28:38.020 as those deep state people in the State Department. It's an anti-Israel reflex. And we saw it

01:28:44.900 out here. Well, maybe they're turning over a new leaf at the Times with this editor's note,

01:28:48.820 Charles. Maybe maybe they've seen the light on their anti-Israel bent and they're going to change

01:28:54.580 their reporting now that they've been massively humiliated. Or maybe not, because there's a report

01:29:00.020 out today via The New York Post that The New York Times just hired a new reporter to cover this conflict

01:29:06.340 between Israel and Hamas. His name is Solomon Hiji, H-I-J-J-Y. And the problem with Solomon

01:29:17.860 is back in 2018 and 2012, he decided to go on social media and post his thoughts about Israel.

01:29:26.260 And let's just say they weren't exactly mild. OK, here he is in 2012. Quote,

01:29:31.220 how great you are, Hitler. OK, it's a problem. You know, I guess he wrote it in Arabic,

01:29:41.780 so we weren't supposed to notice how great you are. Then there was more praise for Hitler in 2018.

01:29:49.380 And when this pro-Israel media watchdog group noticed that The Times had hired him to report

01:29:56.260 on this conflict, they called them up to say, what are you doing? Because we already called

01:30:02.340 this guy to your attention. And you told us back in 2022, I think it was, or I don't know,

01:30:06.900 not long ago. Yeah, 2022, that you were looking into his disturbing posts. Now you've rehired him

01:30:14.100 and you aren't making any apologies whatsoever for what he's done. In fact, The New York Times

01:30:20.980 response to the post was they defended their decision to hire him. We reviewed his problematic

01:30:26.260 social media posts and took a variety of actions to ensure he understood our concerns

01:30:32.900 and could adhere to our standards if he wished to do freelance work for us. So we're against Mr. Higgy

01:30:41.300 praising and aligning with Hitler. If you could keep that in mind on your coverage,

01:30:47.300 I would really appreciate it. I mean, who among us has not repeatedly praised Hitler

01:30:54.900 and our Twitter feed while covering matters of great import to Jewish people? I think The New York

01:31:02.340 Times, as did many in the press, frankly, wanted it to be true that Israel had hit that hospital. And

01:31:09.460 that's not because the people who work in those institutions wanted people to die.

01:31:13.780 But well, maybe the guy with the Hitler fan club did, but the rest probably didn't.

01:31:21.220 But it's because it immediately allowed them to both sides of the issue, which is the one thing

01:31:25.460 they say they're against, but they really aren't. If you look at how the attack in Israel was covered

01:31:31.860 and how long it took before the number of dead in Gaza was put on the other side of the screen,

01:31:38.900 with numbers that were rising and rising and rising, all again being put out by Hamas, you will see how

01:31:46.180 quickly this was treated like a sports game. It was initially 300 dead, 500 dead, 800 dead. The scale of

01:31:54.740 it became apparent, and then it was 1,000 dead at least. But by the end of the day, on the other side of

01:32:01.060 the screen, it was 400 Palestinians at 900 Palestinians, 2,000, 2,500. And that's now how

01:32:07.460 it's been reported across the press. The New York Times does it every day. USA Today had a particularly

01:32:15.940 grotesque front page with a visualized dead on one side, Israeli dead, on the other side,

01:32:25.060 Palestinian dead, with many more on the Palestinian side, and text beneath it that made it seem as if

01:32:32.740 this was just a sort of spat among lovers. And again, I don't think that people in the Times wanted

01:32:40.100 death. But I do think that this was sort of made the whole thing easier, because it took away the

01:32:47.620 pressure. It made it seem more remote, made it seem more difficult to discern, made it easier for

01:32:51.860 people like Michelle Goldberg to write that we can't know anything anyway. What could we possibly

01:32:55.700 know about what's going on? There's just no way of discerning, so we may as well throw up our hands.

01:33:00.500 Well, I look forward to Michelle Goldberg meeting this guy at the office holiday party. That's

01:33:10.100 really spicy. All right, the time we have left. I'm so disgusted by the House Speaker thing. I know

01:33:17.060 pox on both their houses. I just can't stand anything that's going on there. But I'll get your quick take

01:33:23.060 on it as tonight, they're supposed to hold a Speaker Candidates Forum. Then tomorrow at 9am,

01:33:28.580 an internal speaker vote is scheduled. Interested candidates had until noon yesterday to declare

01:33:33.460 if they wanted the job. They say the two, I don't know, I don't know if these are the top,

01:33:38.340 but two of the names being bandied about are Byron Donalds of Florida and Tom Emmer of Minnesota. He

01:33:43.380 was number three under Kevin McCarthy. So he's got Kevin McCarthy's backer backing. Byron's more of a

01:33:48.260 Trump guy. He's got more Freedom Caucus cred. And then a bunch of others, most of whom we've never

01:33:53.380 heard of. So quick takes on the House Speaker race. Charlie, I'll start with you.

01:34:00.340 Well, I think the whole thing is a catastrophe that is born out of a failure to acknowledge

01:34:05.220 that Republicans didn't do as well in 2022 as they wanted to do and therefore have a small majority.

01:34:10.420 And you've got the tail wagging the dog here and then trying to throw back all of the responsible

01:34:15.700 virtues that they themselves rejected to convince the majority to do what they want. I'm glad that that

01:34:20.900 hasn't worked. Unfortunately, it's still thrown everything into chaos. It seems to me that Speaker

01:34:27.460 McCarthy, who I have problems with, was probably the best they were going to get given that reality.

01:34:34.180 The idea that they're going to get someone who is perfectly acceptable to this faction or that

01:34:38.980 faction without changing the factions or the size of the conference itself seems far-fetched to me.

01:34:45.620 So they'll probably go through a whole host of these candidates and then likely settle on someone

01:34:51.540 who has all of the same flaws and liabilities as did McCarthy.

01:34:56.820 Great. It's an utter waste of time, Rich.

01:34:59.620 Yeah.

01:35:00.580 Yeah. So Matt Gaetz has been a nihilistic idiot in this and most of the initial aid vote against

01:35:06.180 McCarthy. But then it's taken on this element of tribal warfare where the McCarthy people don't like

01:35:10.900 Scalise because they don't think Scalise backed McCarthy strongly enough. And then the Jordan

01:35:15.460 people are mad at Scalise and McCarthy and Emmer for not supporting him enough. So then they'll turn

01:35:20.500 around and oppose Emmer if he gets the designation from the conference. So there's some significant

01:35:26.500 chance they just won't elect a speaker. We'll have to stick with Patrick McHenry, the speaker pro-tem,

01:35:31.540 and find a way for the majority to kind of govern without a speaker,

01:35:35.940 which is just crazy and, you know, advertises your chaos and dysfunction in a way that, you know,

01:35:42.900 they're going to be bigger issues in 24 if it's a big Trump-Biden rematch. But at the margins,

01:35:47.780 this is going to hurt what's already a narrow majority hold onto the House.

01:35:53.060 This is as petty and bitter as the election for head cheerleader in the deep south Texas

01:35:59.060 Friday Night Lights crowd. I mean, that's how backstabby it's getting. I have almost no

01:36:06.020 appetite for the story, but they'll get back to us when they finally select the new one, who almost

01:36:11.220 certainly will be just like the old one. Rich, Charles, thank you guys. Doing double duty for

01:36:16.980 us today. We really appreciate it. Great to have you. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

01:36:22.100 Tomorrow, Michael Knowles will be here. He's always great to talk to.

01:36:24.980 Looking forward to his take on all of this, and we will see you all then.

01:36:30.900 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - October 23, 2023

Denying Hamas Atrocities, and Whiny Anti-Israel Students Playing Victim, with Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke ｜ Ep. 653

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