Transcript of: “Combatting the Media War Against Israel: A Conversation With Ben Shapiro”

Rabbi Goldberg: Thank you all for being here tonight, for being part of what is a very important conversation and a critical time for Israel, a critical time for the Jewish people. The video and the tefillah, the prayer that we just watched and listened to, touches the deepest recesses of our souls to see those faces, to see our heroes, to see our brave soldiers fighting on the front line, defending not only Israel, but make no mistake, defending Jews around the world wherever we are. 

We are forever grateful to them. We pray for them. We daven that they're able to return safely with a sweeping victory, bringing back all of the hostages and bringing peace to Israel it so deserves. While our soldiers are fighting on the front lines of this war, in the south and the north of Israel, what we quickly came to learn on October 8th, was that this war has many fronts and among them, most notably among them is the media war against Israel. 

Biased and unfair, inaccurate and unjust, filled with too many distortions and too much hate. And tonight, we're so grateful to welcome back a general of the army fighting the front lines. Somebody who is right on that front line, fighting daily, who has not stopped for a moment since this war began. And that is our dear friend Ben Shapiro. 

We all know the media empire that Ben has built. The company that is the envy of other conservative media outlets. There's no doubt, an incredibly successful career, but if you know Ben, then you know that this for him is so much more than a business. This is personal. This is his soul. This is his life. 

And that comes across on each and every podcast, each and every interview, each and every debate, each and every lecture over the last six weeks. This is not Ben Shapiro, the media personality. This is Ben Shapiro, the Yid, the Jew, who has been fighting on those front lines to defend Israel and defend the Jewish people. 

We read in the Torah portion yesterday about the leitzanei hador, the cynics and scoffers and haters. Every generation has them. The haters, the conspiracy theorists, the people who criticize and attack on the outside. They came after Yitzhak. They came after Isaac. And they challenged, maybe in fact Avraham, maybe Abraham is not his father. 

Maybe he descends from Avimelech. Maybe in fact, he doesn't come from whom he says he comes from. They went at him. They criticized them, the haters, online and offline. The cynics attacked Yitzhak. And God in fact made a miracle. Because God intervened with nature. That's how dangerous, that's just how damaging, the leitzanei hador, the cynics, the scoffers, the haters can be. 

The commentaries wonder, Yitzhak (Isaac) was 40 years old when they raised their conspiracy theories, when they went after him and attacked him. If they were going to offer this conspiracy that Abraham was not in fact his father, why not do it when he was born? Why not do it at his bris? Why not do it when the email announcement went out celebrating his birth? 

Why wait till he was 40 years old? And I saw an incredible comment from Rav Shmuel Berenbaum, the Rosh Yeshivah of the Mir in Brooklyn. He says an amazing insight. He says, because when Yitzhak was born, he hadn't accomplished anything. The haters don't come out before someone accomplishes something. You know when the haters raise their voice? 

You know when they come on and attack? When someone is super successful. When they're making compelling and persuasive points and arguments, when they are influencing and impacting, when they are molding and shaping the world, that's when the leitzanei hador, the cynics and the scoffers, that's when the haters come out. 

Ben, some of the unwanted negative attention you've received of late from our generation's leitzanei hador, the cynics, the scoffers, the haters, the biased haters of our generation. 

Their raising their prominent voices to attack you is only evidence of the impact that you are having of how persuasive and compelling your arguments are and of the influence that you are having on some of their audiences to understand and appreciate the truth. 

So tonight we came to listen and to learn from you, but tonight we also gathered, hopefully, to give you a little chizuk. 

To understand just how much we appreciate. Whether people here agree or disagree, love or hate Ben's politics, or his media personality and style, every one of us love and appreciate what you've been doing the last six weeks on the front line of this media fight. 

And so we gathered to listen and to learn, but also to say thank you. Thank you for what you are doing. 

Thank you for wearing your kippah. Thank you for standing as a proud Jew, unapologetically and non defensively. 

An enormous thank you to your wife and family, your parents and in-laws, and to all who stand right by you and support you and enable you to represent and be our voice. Ha kol Ya'akov vehayadayim ydei esav. 

We just watched a video of our precious brothers and sisters who are wearing the ydei esav, who have to take up those weapons and put on those uniforms. To fight the Esav, the Yishmael of our generation. The kol kol ya'akov, the sound of the tefillah, the prayer that we began with, is our kol. 

But the voice of truth, the voice of Israel's rights, of the Jewish story, is also part of the kol kol ya'akov. 

Please join me in giving a big welcome to Ben, who will share some remarks before we begin our conversation. 

Ben Shapiro: That's very sweet of you. Thank you so much. Thank you. 

I didn't used to get receptions like that in Los Angeles. So first of all, Mazel Tov again to the newly married couple. I remember how I also spent my wedding night at a political lecture. 

I was thinking about what to talk about with regards to the media, because obviously they are a smoking trash heap of horror, and it occurred to me that I should probably start since I'm sure we're gonna get into the details with Rabbi Goldberg in a second, but it occurred to me we should start with why they are like this. 

Because I think that's the question that occurs to all of us. We watch as the media lie, whether they are lying about Israel bombing a hospital or whether, now their new narrative is that: 

Just maybe it was Israeli gunships that shot people at the Nova music festival ... Why do they lie like that? Why is it that they feel the necessity to take every mistake that the IDF makes and blow it up wildly out of proportion while minimizing the horrors that we saw on October 7th? Why is it that if the IDF tweets out a mistaken description of an event? This becomes the story of the conflict, as opposed to the fact that, Al Shifa Hospital was a military headquarters in which hostages were being smuggled literally in. That tape broke about three hours ago. You can actually watch as Hamas takes people directly into Al Shifa Hospital, which we've been told for weeks was actually just a civilian facility. And that all of the talk about Al Shifa Hospital that was just a bunch of Jewish talk. There's no reason why Israel should even be there. It's a human rights violation. The reason why we see this... there are a few reasons. Obviously some of it is coming from a press that is radically Islamic in nature. That would describe certainly al Jazeera and some of, al Arabiya, some of the press that you're seeing from the Middle East. You're also seeing a lot of the mainstream media source from these particular areas. This is why, for example, the New York Times has stringers who like Hitler. Because the reality is that if you're going to get information from a place where a lot of people like Hitler, there's a very good shot that stringer is going to like Hitler, and you see this in a lot of the source material that you're seeing from say, the New York Times or CNN when they quote somebody. And then if you bother to actually check that person on Google, you'll very often find that person has a social media history that is filled with hatred of Jews and the media just put it out there as though this is completely irrefutable evidence. Or as though it requires no questioning at all. But the real question is why the western media are the way that they are. And the answer to that question is because the Western media have a worldview and that worldview is very simple. The world is to be divided between the oppressor and the oppressed. It's that simple. That's the whole thing. The world is made up of oppressor and oppressed. And not only that, anybody who is considered successful in Western society or internationally, anybody who's considered successful is on the side of the oppressor. So Israel is an oppressor. America is an oppressor. White Americans particularly are oppressors. Even Asian Americans have now become oppressors because they're disproportionately financially successful which is why you can boot them from Harvard University and no one makes a peep. This is why you also see the crossover between, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement and the radical Hamas movement because the idea from Black Lives Matter is that there are brown people somewhere else in the world and those people are being oppressed by white people never mind that half of Israel is Mizrahi. None of that matters. The real answer is that Israel is supremely successful, its opponents are not, therefore it must have exploited and taken advantage and done something deeply wrong. And because of that oppressor-oppressed narrative, a moral equivalence must be drawn. Because if it turns out that maybe the reason that one side is successful and one side is unsuccessful is because the successful side is good and the unsuccessful side is evil, that alternative explanation blows up their worldview. Once you bring to bear a moral frame as to why people succeed and why people fail, that is something that the oppressed-oppressor matrix cannot bear. It collapses it immediately, because instead of it being that someone is unsuccessful because someone has exploited them or oppressed them, instead it might be the person's unsuccessful because they've made a series of horrifying decisions. Which is in fact the case in the Middle East. I mean as we all know the history. The reality is that Israel has accepted pretty much every peace offer ever presented to it. Its opponents have rejected every peace offer ever presented to them. Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Its opponents then proceeded to elect Hamas, burn all of the greenhouses, spend every iota of aid that was coming in to build terror tunnels and rockets, and then burst through that wall and murder 1,200 Jews and drag another 240 back into captivity. Maybe they're just bad. Maybe they're just evil. But the media can't allow that. And so what they have to do, they know that they can't actually promote Hamas as good. They've never made this argument. By the way, this is one of the great imbalances. When everybody talks about Israel failing on the Hasbara level, the reason Israel fails on the Hasbara level is because Israel always focuses on how good Israel is and never on how evil its enemies are. The Palestinian side has never for one moment focused on how good the Palestinian side is. Not for one single solitary second. Every single argument for 76 years has been how evil the Israelis are. And that's the argument today. The argument the media are making is that the oppressor-oppressed matrix is upheld because Israel is just as bad as Hamas. That's why the necessity to pretend that Israel is participating in a genocide. That's why the necessity to make believe that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians. When, as everyone with a functioning brain can see, Israel's complete air superiority. If Israel wanted to murder, forget thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians, Israel could do they certainly have the military wherewithal to do that. But Israel's not doing that. But again, the idea is that a narrative must be preserved. And in pursuit of the narrative, the truth doesn't matter. Which is why, these are not journalists, they are propagandists. The basic premise of a journalist is that you are supposed to speak fact. You are supposed to care about truth. But the media themselves are participants in the narrative. They have decided that the narrative is significantly more important than anything remotely resembling facts or truth. And it must be upheld at all costs. And so it's gonna get worse from here. Because as it becomes clearer and clearer just what Hamas is, they're going to have to make Israel out to be worse and worse. The worse the atrocities Hamas is pursuing get, the worst the atrocities Israel must be pursuing must also get in order to achieve the moral parity that allows them to preserve the narrative that they've been pushing for so long. So that's the reason that you're seeing all of this. The only way to break through all of that is actually to show all the things that the media have refused to show for years and years. I've had many meetings with Israeli leadership, the last three prime ministers I've met with, all three of them I told the same thing. Which was, if you actually wish to win the Hasbara war, you have to start showing the atrocities that are being pursued by the Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. I said this to them in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2020. I've been saying it consistently for years. And everybody was afraid to do that because they said isn't it true that Israel has a good image in the United States? We don't want to look like we're going negative. By the way, anybody in politics who ever tells you that going negative doesn't work is lying to you. It's literally the only thing that works in politics. But, the good news for Israel is, and the bad news for Israel is, that going negative happens to be the truth. And as it turns out, for the brief moment in time, which was about six hours on October 7th, when people were paying attention to what was actually going on before they reverted back into the amoral frame, when they did that, Israel, for just that hot second, was winning the PR battle. So what does that say? It says that from here on out, Israel's going to have to do that. Because this war is not the end. This is the very beginning. Once they finish off Hamas, that is just the beginning. They're gonna have to militarily occupy that area in order to retain security for literally the rest of time. This is not going to be something where they get to turn it over to the UN or the Palestinian Authority. They turned over southern Lebanon to the UN and it turned into a Hezbollah hotbed, and the Palestinian Authority is itself a terrorist group. Israel is going to have to take harsh measures in the West Bank. Israel is going to have to, at some point in the next two to three years, take out Hezbollah. They cannot allow 200,000 rockets on their northern border. Which means that this battle is going to get a lot harder. It's going to get a lot harder. And you're all part of it. Because if you are on Twitter, if you are on Facebook, if you are in the conversation, this means that you have to take part in this battle. You don't have a choice. There's no running away from it. The echo chamber that's been created, particularly on social media, is incredibly strong. The legacy media. benefit from and also promote that echo chamber. So again, my mentor Andrew Breitbart once said, if you have a phone, you're a journalist. But the reality is, if you have a phone, you're an activist. So you should treat your phone that way, because that makes you part of the war, the same way that I think everybody else is. Thanks so much. We can do a Q&A. Rabbi Goldberg: First of all, I want to again thank you for coming back. People don't necessarily appreciate, you know, when Ben joins us here at BRS, he's doing it out of the generosity of his heart. That's not lost on us, and we really appreciate it. Ben Shapiro: You should hear my normal speakers fee. Rabbi Goldberg: Before we get into the questions about the media, Israel, Antisemitism, so much on our mind, and so much we want to talk about, but I want to begin, a question you're probably not asked often in the public media, by asking about you. How have the last six weeks been for you? I know that you were in Israel just days before the horrible massacre. And that you have a lot of family in Israel who, of course, are enduring this. And as a very visibly public Jewish observant media figure, these last six weeks, as I said earlier, you've been working tirelessly. How are you doing? Ben Shapiro: My normal answer to that question when I'm asked by friends and family, as I think all of us have been lately, is who cares? Seriously, who cares? There's the thing that we have to do, and then there's how we feel about the thing that we have to do. I'm not in Gaza right now. I know people who are. I'm not. In Yehuda and Shomron right now, I know people who are, not in the northern border, I know people who are. And the reality is how I feel about the thing is irrelevant. Now, with that said, it's horrible. It's been terrible. And it's terrible for everybody. Show of hands, who's gotten like a full night's sleep in the last six weeks? Nobody. Everybody has this pit in their stomach. You wake up in the morning, you check the news. You wake up at 3:30 in the morning, and it's a hard thing not to check your phone. And, it just feels as though we are living, again, in an extraordinary post truth era. For somebody who's like me, where my entire job is to try and speak truth into sort of the vacuum that's out there. It's very difficult to live in an environment and to work in an environment where truth matters obviously so little to an extraordinary number of people. That, that, that is a realization. I'm a very cynical person about politics because I cover it for a living. But because of that, even I have been shocked by the level of untruth, by the level of viciousness by the willingness to simply lie, by, by huge name members of the media and the like. And that's a pretty, that's a pretty devastating thing. Now on the other hand, I will say, that we do have, Jews have an enormous number of allies in the United States who are not Jewish. I speak with a lot of them, so we're not alone in this fight. And as I've said before, I said it at the rally that my brother in law organized over here in Boca. And he deserves credit for that. He didn't get enough credit for that, so round of applause for my brother in law. But, and Yitzi Newman who also worked on this. So the but the, um, As I said, the other thing that's been encouraging is that, we were in Israel we left Israel on Friday morning, and then it broke out Friday night and when we were there the I had always felt as an American Jew that a lot of the conflicts and a lot of the fractures were, felt weird and exaggerated, because when you go to Israel, even the Chilonim are quasi frum, right? You go to Israel and the Chilonim know more than Reform Jews here very often do. And they practice more than Reform Jews very often do. And so it feels exaggerated, but they were very real. We were in a place that was a block and a half from one of the protests on a Saturday night. And immediately when this happened, this is when you see the Jewish people come together in a way that I'm not sure has been true maybe ever. Literally maybe ever. Maybe since Har Sinai. It's really that long since Jews have come together. In that way. As I've said So that, that gives me an awful lot of pride and hope for the future, because frankly I think America needs to come together the same way. I think the West needs to come together the same way, but certainly watching Jews do that is amazing. Watching chilonim put on tzitziot, because they want to show they have skin in the game. Watching Haredim join the IDF. Watching restaurants in Tel Aviv kashering themselves so they can feed the Dati Leumim. I mean, these are like amazing things. They're amazing things. And hopefully, this will be the experience for the next generation of Israelis. Rabbi Goldberg: Absolutely. I hope you will not repeat the question you asked at the rally, how many people here are carrying guns? We prefer you not ask that tonight. The rest of us, the rest of us wake up in the middle of the night, and we check the news. You wake up in the middle of the night, you check the news, but you also check whether you're trending. Ben Shapiro: I never check whether I'm trending. I just assume I am. Rabbi Goldberg: And that's also gotta be difficult. I know that watching you debate at Oxford, I knew you were going to win. I knew your arguments were winning arguments. Whether seeing you on Pierce Morgan, seeing you at Oxford, seeing you on college campuses, you're not only watching the other war, but you're fighting your own. How do you deal with that? How do you go to the lion's den and be in these hostile environments? Does that take its toll on you? Ben Shapiro: It's incredibly stressful. It's very stressful. Mainly because it's so hard, we've all been in this position, not to get incredibly angry when you're looking at someone genocidal standing two feet from you. And tell you about how every Jew in the region, and maybe the world, should be killed. That, that is definitely a hard one. And for me, that that's the hardest battle. Intellectually, I don't think they have good arguments. I think that what they're saying is packed with lies. And it's my job, in the moment, to debunk all of those lies and try and catalogue them and move fast. But I do that professionally, so if I'm not good at it by now, I should quit my job. The real thing that's hard is maintaining control of your temper when you're really watching people say truly evil things right in front of you and say it directly to you with vitriol and hatred in their voice. Oxford, Oxford was, that's the single most hostile room I've ever been in. I've been in a lot of hostile rooms. That was easily the single most hostile room I've ever been in. A little bit of behind the scenes. My security team they, they're there with me. They're working with MI6, and one of the problems in Britain is that you can't carry guns when you have a security team there. The, even the police don't have guns, for whatever odd reason. And and the way that Oxford was set up the, if you've watched the tape you can see it. And when I, when, after I do the Q&A with the rabidly anti-Israel moderator I then go down, and it's almost in the crowd. There's a crowd here and a crowd here, and then they set up a table it's called the speaker's box and you stand on one side of the table, the other person's standing on the other, and they just come up and they debate you. You're a foot and a half from each other. But, more importantly, right behind me, no greater than the distance between the two of us, are all of the crowd. And, my security team could see that there was a guy right behind me who was extremely jittery. He was very, he was very tensed. He was reaching into his pockets a lot. We quietly put a security guy right next to him in case he decided to get up. But it was that kind of environment. And so in that kind of environment, it's very electric. It's very, it's incredibly difficult. Yeah, it's it's, it is not fun. It is certainly fun. Rabbi Goldberg: People don't appreciate necessarily to maintain your composure, think through your argument, be eloquent and articulate and compelling, while also at the corner of your eye trying to figure out which one of these people want to jump you is not an easy thing to navigate, and of course you do it really amazingly. On your podcast, right after October 7th, you seem to have pivoted a little bit in the format of it, really jumping right in Israel. And from the heart and from the soul, and one of that early podcasts, it might have been the first one after the massacre, you did something that I doubt you'd ever done before, which is, you sang Achenu. You sang Achenu. Solo, just you, Achenu, from the heart. Was that planned? Was it spontaneous? Where did that come from? Why did you decide that your audience of millions, I don't know the breakdown, many of whom are not Jewish, I'm sure. Ben Shapiro: The vast majority. Rabbi Goldberg: Why did you want to share Achenu with them? Ben Shapiro: I think that, one of the things that I have some notoriety for is the facts don't care about your feelings aspect of what I do, right? I'm not an emotional creature by nature, except with my wife and kids. And the, the fact that this struck, I think, to everyone who was watching it as incredibly personal. It was if, if ever I was going to tap into that was the moment to tap into it. And and frankly I didn't see another way that I could really start that show. So, I have shifted the format as people may have noticed from how ... so typically when I would do the show I'd open up, I would do like a little pitch, we'd play a bad music riff say I'm playing a couple chords on guitar that's left over from when we couldn't afford to license music, and and then we would get into the show, and I don't script anything. The entire show is unscripted. It's just me and the mics and the cameras. And on that one, I wanted to be so meticulous about my language that I actually sat and I wrote the monologue, which I never did. And since then, I've written every monologue. At the beginning of every show is a cold open, right into the topic. Because I want to grab people right off the top. I want them to know what the topic that I'm discussing is. I want it to be in an organized fashion. I want to be very careful about my words. One of the things that I'm very careful by nature about my words, typically. Not always. And The thing that I wanted to be careful of is particularly because I know the kind of burden that I'm carrying, which is that, I have the ability to speak to a lot of people who I know everybody here wants to be able to speak to, too. I know that's the reality, and so I want to be, I want to be very careful about what I say. If I'm going to die on a hill, I want to make sure that it's a hill of my choosing. And that's one of the reasons to, to construct the show in that way. Rabbi Goldberg: If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching that Achenu. Like we sang earlier tonight, it is emotional and it is powerful. Ben Shapiro: It's not a very good rendition, but it is emotional. That's a much better, yeah ... Rabbi Goldberg: Next time with the violin maybe. But let's pivot into the media bias. And on October 7th, we thought this was Israel's war. Maybe still on October 7th, by October 8th, we came to learn, as we saw Antisemitism surge across the world, that Israel is the front line of this war, but it's really the Jewish people facing this war everywhere. From your perspective, the media bias, Is it greater against Israel's war, or is it a greater media bias in really telling the story about Antisemitism, in relaying, even this recent murder of a protester in, in Los Angeles. And it's hard to imagine if this were any other race, ethnicity, religion, they would cover it with the same story, the same headlines, describe it in the same way. The Washington rally that I'm really proud our community participated in such large numbers, that I saw some headlines described as, bus loads of people got together, or demonstrators gathered in Washington. Ben Shapiro: This is the metro section of the Washington Post. Rabbi Goldberg: Exactly. Are you seeing the bias greater when it comes to the coverage of Israel or the coverage of Antisemitism? Ben Shapiro: Obviously they're tied together. I think that the goal of the media is to split the two, which is why you see so much discussion of Antisemitism, not in the context of Israel, but in the context of Islamophobia. tHe idea is, which is an absurdity, by the way. What that really is an attempt to suggest that if you oppose Hamas, there's an aspect of Islamophobia to that. That's really what that is. And it's disgusting. The reality is that Jews have seen a massive uptick in the amount of hatred that they are receiving, we all know that. They've been seeing a massive uptick in the amount of violence against them. That's been happening as well. Again, we live in, thank God, an amazing country. And we live in an amazing state where we're all able to defend ourselves, and we should. We have an amazing police force. Our police force here is amazing. But to pretend that, that when you watch 300,000 people on the streets of London marching for Hamas, Islamophobia is the main problem, is ridiculous. There's a Norm Macdonald tweet that, keeps coming up in these contexts that I'm sure a lot of you have seen where it's I just hate to think that if 9-11 happened today, how much Islamophobia would break out. And it's that's right. Or he says, I think if it's a nuclear weapon went off in New York, that the amount of Islamophobia would boggle the mind. And it would be terrible. I just worry about the Islamophobia. And that that really is the attitude of the media. And you see they try to keep boxing in Antisemitism with racism and Islamophobia in one box and then being anti-Israel in the other box because this has been their lie for a very long time. And that lie got obliterated on October 7th because it turns out that the people who hate Israel, also universally, are people who really hate Jews. The mask just came off completely, and they're trying to restore that mask, I think by obviously saturating coverage of Israel being evil, and then trying to undercover the Antisemitism issue, or to pretend that the Antisemitism issue is in a completely separate box than the anti Israel issue, when in reality, what we're watching in many of these cases are radical Muslims who are participating in Antisemitism. Yeah I don't think that you can separate the two. I think they are part of the same narrative. The media have to bifurcate anti-Israel and Antisemitism in order to get back to the status quo ante, which was we can be as critical as we want about Israel, as lying as we want about Israel, but we still, we're still okay with the Jews. Rabbi Goldberg: One of the things I find infuriating, and there is enormous support for Israel and the Jewish people broadly in America, but the lower you go in the age demographic, the less support you have for Israel and for the Jewish people. It's incredibly concerning, both for that young age demographic and for the media as a whole. What's infuriating, what's mind boggling, is that Israel and its values are entirely aligned with America. And, as we've talked about, every pro Israel rally, including the one you participated in last Sunday in our community, there were American flags being waved. In the lobby on the way out, if you haven't taken yet, We're giving out Israeli flags for your car and American flags for your car because they go together. They're shared values and they have a shared destiny together and they're a shared partnership. And that's, we don't have to elaborate on what that means and why they go together. How are the media so blind to that? Why are young people who supposedly stand for these liberal values so blind to that? Ben Shapiro: Yeah, but I disagree with the premise. The media hate America and so do the young people. That's the actual answer. They really hate what America stands for. Young people do not understand what America stands for. And they hate America in many of the same ways that they hate Israel. If there were to be a massive terror attack, I'm sure many of you saw this TikTok trend last week. I talked about it on the show if you listened to the show. But this TikTok trend of people reading Osama Bin Laden's letter from 2002 and being like, that guy had some important points to make. And I saw a meme that was going around from Back to the Future. Remember there's this scene near the end of the movie where Michael J. Fox goes wild, he starts playing heavy metal, and it's supposed to be the night, it's 1955, and he's playing heavy metal. And he says, I guess that was too much for you, but your kids are gonna love it. And he's and he just said, Michael J. Fox, Osama bin Laden, right? I guess this is a little too much for you, but your kids are gonna love it. And that's unfortunately reality. There's an enormous number of young people in the country who despise everything the country stands for. They think it's an oppressor, colonialist state. They think that the same things they I think that we make a mistake if we think that they hate America because they hate Israel. They hate Israel because they hate America. They hate Israel because they hate the West. It really it's all part and parcel of the same oppressor-oppressed narrative. This is why, if you want to etymologically look at where this came from, this is really just an outgrowth of a line that goes really back to Lenin's imperialism, forward to Frantz Fanon's decolonization philosophy, forward through Edward Said, and now you're all the way here. This is the ... The etymology is basically that Western powers are exploitative and colonialist and therefore anyone who is successful is exploitative and colonialist and must be opposed by any and every means, which is what Fanon says, right? Fanon says that violence is totally appropriate. And he's quoted all the time. This is why when you see decolonize on Twitter, that's what they mean. That's why when Karen Attiah of the Washington Post retweeted somebody saying, about October 7th, what did you think decolonization was going to look like? That's what they mean. It's all part and parcel. No, I don't think that, I think that anybody who's been operating off the argument, I've always thought that it's a really weak argument for Israel that Israel has gay rights. Like, why would you possibly think that the radical left is going to buy into Israel because Israel has gay pride parades? Why would you think that? I'm honestly bewildered by the number of people who are left wing Jews who've been contacting me, and I'm grateful they're listening to the show and they're, buying into the way I'm covering the conflict because I'm trying to be as honest as I can about it, but I'm always bewildered by the people who are marching with BLM never having looked at the BLM website which back in 2020 explicitly endorsed from the river to the sea. I'm just that confuses me. Rabbi Goldberg: I guess what I'm confused by is the media are the greatest beneficiaries of this country's right to free speech They should be the ones who most understand and appreciate the only country in the Middle East that shares that value and should be standing with them and covering that story. Are we doing a good enough job, we here in America, or Israel and its Hasbara, in linking Patriotism, American values, Israel values, not the argument that because Israel supports gay rights, therefore love Israel, but just how aligned the values of the countries are, and to have people in America, Middle America should be looking out. All we should be doing is putting in their face over and over again 300,000 Jews in Washington waving American flags, picking up their garbage, thanking police. Every pro Palestinian rally, pulling down American flags, burning American flags, and attacking the police. And which do you want to align with? What do you want for the future of America? Are we doing a good enough job of making that point? Ben Shapiro: So I think that point is being well taken, particularly by middle America. The polling again shows that Americans, by and large very widely support Israel over Hamas and favor Israel over the Palestinians as well. Support for Palestinians generally when you, when it's put in that binary is usually in like barely double digits and support for Israel is usually 50, 60, 70%. These polls, it's just wildly disproportionately concentrated the support for Hamas and then for the Palestinians among very young people. And so the question isn't do we push American flags in the faces of people who are in middle America? The question is how do we get young people to like the American flag again? And that's something that I think that the Jews have a role in playing. I don't think that, it really is not about the Israeli flag. It's really not even about, Israel. I think that we as a part of the American body politic have a responsibility to make people love this country again because this country is still the last best hope. Rabbi Goldberg: That was actually my next question, which is going to be, what, what's the future of this country? I had the privilege of being in Israel with Rabbi Gibber, Rabbi Broide for a few days and we came back after looking in the eyes of our incredible soldiers and the Israeli people. And we said, this is going to be difficult and painstaking and filled with sadness and grief. And we can't begin to relate, but Israel is going to be okay. The question is, will we, when we look at college campuses, when we look at Congress and when we look at some of the highways in this country, are we going to be okay? So when we look at those younger demographics, when you look at supposedly Ivy league, advanced, sophisticated, intellectual campuses. Are we going to be okay? You look at the younger generation and what they don't believe or subscribe to, what they're allowing themselves to support. What's the future? Is it hopeless here? Ben Shapiro: I don't think that it's hopeless, but it's certainly not easy. I'm very, I'm I agree with you. In terms of the immediate future of the body politic of Israel is much more unified and much more missional than the body politic in the United States right now. We're a very fragmented country. We're obviously much larger. We have many more interests. in this country, and, the American story seems to have almost stagnated. And I think we can feel it in our elections, regardless of which side you support. Everybody feels like the American story has stagnated, which is why you see wild dissatisfaction with every institution in the country. And, unless that's restored, unless there's a a new sense of purpose and mission that the country embraces, I think that's going to be a problem. Because when countries don't have a sense of mission and purpose, Then they immediately fall into squabbling. This is basically what happened in Israel until five minutes ago. And I think that you're going to see it happen in the United States worse and worse. Unless there is, something that draws America together. Unfortunately, what history tends to show is that the only thing that draws large numbers of people together is tragedy. People are very rarely drawn together by a sense of voluntary mission. It's why, I speak all over the place, and the first thing that I say as a Jew, whenever people say what's the most important thing that I can do in the audience, is I say, these are predominantly Christian ideas, go to your church. Go to church. Christians need to go to church. They do. They need to re-embrace their religion. And that is at least giving a sense of some sort of missional purpose to the country. Because if it's one nation under God, you at least have to believe in a nation with a mission under God in order to actually effectuate that. Rabbi Goldberg: So if you had a message to these administrators, university presidents, the young people, they're not hopeless, they're getting awfully close to it. These incredibly enlightened and supposedly brilliant people on these Ivy League campuses, the young people. I think what's been more shocking and in ways devastating to all of us is not the young people who maybe don't even have the maturity yet to arrive at the right conclusion, but the presidents and the administrators and the professors, the supposed adults in the room who rather than reset and recoil and say, whoa, we've lost our bearing, we need to recalibrate, or in fact siding with them. So if you had a message, if you could establish policy on university campuses, what would those policies look like that would give us a sense of hope in the future of young people? Ben Shapiro: I think you can start with if you support a terrorist group, you should be expelled. That'd be a good start. And that's particularly true if you're not going to a public school, and it's particularly even more true if you don't happen to be a person who's here. If you're, as a citizen, if you're not a citizen of the United States, you have no right to be here. As, as far as the thing that, that we all should be doing, this is one area where we all can make a difference. Jews are obviously a very highly educated subgroup in the United States. If you've got an option to send your kid to a college that's a liberal arts college that supports this stuff, don't send your kid there. Do not give them your money. And if you are an alum, you should be pulling your money and you should be investing it somewhere else. Maybe you want to invest that money in Israel. Take that money and put it somewhere useful. And if you're a business owner, by the way, I know there's tons of business owners in this room. Stop looking at college credentials as though they mean anything. They don't. Honest to God. I'd rather hire to my company some kid coming out of high school who has a 1500 on the SAT and did not go to Harvard, than a kid who got a 1500 and did go to Harvard because after they went to Harvard, they're screwed up. Before that they're just really smart. Rabbi Goldberg: There have been some surprises in the media coverage, at least for me. Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, getting teary eyed on TV, covering the human side of the story, being on the ground at first, did not expect to watch clips coming off of CNN and be moved or be applauding or be grateful for their coverage. They're probably the two exceptions. The rest of the newsroom are, doing the usual CNN thing while Fox News is making a million dollar donation to Israel and I think through Federation, which is really incredible. Maybe there's some surprises maybe on the left of people who've stood with Israel and wouldn't expect it. There've been some surprises on the right of people who we expected to stand with Israel and didn't. So from Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and of course the elephant in the room tonight, Candace Owens. People who you might have thought would be a little more aligned, coming from that conservative bent, who have failed us. Which, which is more surprising, or how do we react? Any comments on the Candace question? Let's get that out of the way. Ben Shapiro: My, my thoughts on this have been made eminently clear, and I cannot say anything further. So I'm just going to leave it at that. As far as, some of the horseshoe theory that's going on in general on the right versus, versus on the left, there, there is a uh, you can distinguish a few strains on the right. So there, there is an isolationist strain on the right that, has cropped up again. This has been part of the Republican Party for a very long time, and it breaks down into a couple of different sort of aspects. One is traditional isolationism, which I have friends who are like this, who are like, Israel's right, Hamas is wrong, don't care, it's far away. I think they're wrong. I think that's shortsighted. That, that is at least consistent, like no foreign aid to anybody, don't care, hunker down in my cabin and that is what it's, I get it. I think again, I think that's wrong. I think that's shortsighted. I don't think that's second order thinking, but I don't think there's anything particularly antisemitic about that as long as you understand the clear moral right and wrong in the conflict. And then there is an attempt to obscure moral rights and wrongs on behalf of a different agenda and, and that I find nefarious, and that I've seen from a number of different people. That is obviously deeply disturbing to me. The effect, Tucker specifically, when he downplays, for example, and he's done this multiple times on his show, when Tucker will say things like, and I criticized it on the show, so this is nothing new either when Tucker says things like, some people seem to care so much about people getting slaughtered at a music festival in Israel, but they don't care at all about the 100,000 dead we see from fentanyl overdoses every year. And I said on my show, no, I actually care a lot about the 100,000 dead from fentanyl overdoses every year, and that's not even remotely the same thing as the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on a moral level. It is horrifying that people are shipping drugs over the border, and it's also horrifying that people are shoving those drugs into their own veins, but that is not the same thing as taking a baby and burning it alive in its crib, and pretending that those are the same thing is absurd. Also, Tucker's bizarre notion that Americans shouldn't care about the 30 Americans who were murdered on October 7th, and the at least nine Americans who are being held in captivity. It's probably more than nine who are being held in captivity. That's bizarre to me, since he spent his Friday interviewing somebody in Spain. What's he doing in Spain? He's marching in Spain with some political party, but I thought he only cared about what's going on in the United States. Why are we supposed to care about Spain, or Hungary, or Poland, or all the different places that he's interviewing? So it seems to me that there's something else that's going on there. Rabbi Goldberg: I would agree. Can we have any influence on these personalities? Is there any difference? Part of these media personalities take Tucker, for example. He left the legacy media world and that company, and they found this online world where they're not, they don't depend on advertising and they don't have to answer to people. So is there still influence for us to bring reality? Joe Rogan, another popular podcast, one of the most popular in the world, you've been on his show. And he seems generally thoughtful in trying to arrive at the truth, and yet when it comes to this, there's a bias. Is there any window or opening for influence? Ben Shapiro: I think that each one is different. I don't think Joe's in quite the same camp as Tucker, and the last time I was on Joe's show, the last 45 minutes, we talked about Israel, and he really let me go on it. And, I don't know if you've seen, there's a comedian recently, I believe, no, it was Tim Kennedy, actually. It was Tim Kennedy, the MMA fighter. And he was on Joe Rogan's show, and he was excellent. He was talking about this. Joe is not in the same category. I think, I really don't think he's an ideological creature. Listen, I wish he wouldn't have on some of the people he's had on, who I think are telling absolute lies. But I also don't think that Joe's quite doing the same thing as Tucker, because Joe is not ... He's not a political animal by nature. His entire schtick is basically, here, I don't know anything about this topic, tell me about this topic, and he does that on nearly every topic, whereas I assume that Tucker knows a fair bit about a lot of the topics he talks about, which means that he's a little bit more responsible for the kind of quote unquote questions he asks, which is, one of the games that gets played a lot in the media these days. I'm just asking. I'm just asking. Why is it that so many Jews are doing X? Why is it that people care so much? I'm just asking. I don't know. I just ... You know what an implication is. We are not all idiots. We know what you're saying. Rabbi Goldberg: And what would you say, in the news now, and these things happen in real time with social media, we are determining the media or we're putting them in a category in real time based on a tweet that they may not have put a lot of thought into. Elon Musk. You recently were on a stream with Elon Musk, dealing with combating Antisemitism. He actually responded to a tweet, that originated, believe it or not, with someone in this room. And he responded to that tweet. Not me, somebody else. Everyone decided, Elon Musk is a rabid antisemite. Then today he said he's gonna ban from Twitter anyone who promotes from the river to the sea. Elon Musk is a champion of the Jewish cause. How do we decide? We hold up a scorecard, and each day we're going to determine, this goes back to our last conversation, last time you were here about Antisemitism, and when, whom do we label an antisemite? Ben Shapiro: I think that in order for somebody to be labeled an antisemite, they should be taking a consistent tack on a particular issue. And that is the last thing that you would expect of Elon. Elon is all over the place. And I think that the, what, he's tweeting a lot these days and he's incredibly reactive on Twitter, this is one of his charms and one of his flaws and, as far as that tweet, he then went on to clarify that it was really a critique of the ADL, and it was really a critique of the fact that there are people in the left wing Jewish community who he thinks have been very easy on immigration, who suddenly are very anti-immigration because they've realized some of the people they've imported. Whatever it is the idea that Elon falls into the antisemitic category, I think is silly, and I think that there's an eagerness by a lot of the members of the media. One of the things I noted on the show is there's a real eagerness on the, on, on members of the media who are on MSNBC to hone in on the real antisemites are Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And meanwhile, Hamas, eh, who knows what they're doing. They could have all sorts of thoughts. It's oppression. You can tell. There's some people who are condemning both. Okay, at least you're consistent. There's some people who are saying what I'm saying which is that Elon is not an antisemite. Trump is not an antisemite. They're very thoughtless in how they tweet. And comparing them to Hamas is absurd. And then there's some people who are doing what MSNBC is doing, which is the real anti ... forget about Hamas. Forget about people who are murdering Jews in their cribs. The thing that really matters is that Elon Musk did a mean tweet. He did a bad, mean tweet. And that's really bad because he's mean and we don't like Elon Musk. Eh, shut up. Rabbi Goldberg: So as a matter of As a matter of Instruction, or for people to learn from. Do you think that there's a problem in our community, I use our community broadly, that we are responding to these tweets, and we're very quick to label someone, rather than give some time, let them see whether there's a pattern, let's see whether they can be won over as an ally, because many of these very public personalities, the moment you label them that, they might as well be that. Because you can't get them back. Ben Shapiro: Yeah, this is something that we talked about actually last time we were here, is, how fast should he be on the draw and on the trigger, and there is a tendency to be like ... Every time we see a thing, we just whack it, like a whack a mole, we just whack you do have to gauge each situation differently. This is why when you're comparing Tucker and Rogan, I'm saying I don't think those are the same person. And the same thing is true with regard to Elon versus Trump versus, some kook online. It's not all the same thing. And so we have to be a little bit more meticulous in how we examine those issues and try to determine, is this, the way that you would with a group of friends. Let's say you have a friend who makes an ignorant joke, okay, is this guy like, does he really hate Jews or is this somebody who doesn't even know that the joke is offensive? I know that you had this experience with Myers Leonard, right from the Heat where he made he, he made a reference. He used the K word in like a stream, and he didn't even know what it meant. And suddenly the world came down and he was out of a job. And then you met with him and I've met him. Super nice guy. He didn't know what he was saying. And very pro Jewish. And it's would it, was it a justice to him to to immediately come down on him as though he was spouting from Mein Kampf or something? You really do have to gauge each one of these situations individually. Rabbi Goldberg: Yeah, and the person who you might turn into the enemy could have become your ally and one of your biggest supporters. In his case, that's a great example. So take this and broaden it out. I don't like to use the name of this newspaper in front of an Aron Kodesh, but the New York Times, which is, I don't think it deserves to be mentioned in Shul. It's one of the repulsive inappropriate words to be used. And I would implore anyone in this room who still gives one penny ... to subscribe to them, pay for online, or take out a obituary. No Jewish organization in the world should be listing its obituaries or death notices in the New York Times. It has proven its pattern over and over again, its bias. And shame on us for not seeing that. So do we just wholesale dismiss the New York Times because of its bias? Does it have no utility to us whatsoever? Or on the rare occasion when by accident, like the clock that's right twice a day, the New York Times gets a story right? Should we embrace that, share that, promote that, tweet that? Because it's first of all, encouraging to them. We're grateful you got this one right. You're talking about the tunnels underground, or you're featuring some heinous, terrible thing Hamas did. We want to reward them for getting it right. We want to show the people who that's their only news source, that even the New York Times sees just how terrible Hamas is. When there are those who get it wrong, like the New York Times. Wholesale rejection, they're just, we demonize them entirely. Or, is there any scalpel we can take to them that if there is an occasion where they get something right, it's worth embracing that, promoting that, sharing that. Ben Shapiro: Again, I think it depends on how you're prefacing the sharing of the New York Times article. So whenever I share a New York Times article that happens to be right, I do it exactly the way that you do, which is the New York Times is always wrong, so when they happen to be right, good for them. I think that the thing we have to avoid is just sharing it without context of “they're always wrong”. Because when you share a credible New York Times article ... And you don't say that all the rest of the time they're wrong, people tend to think that credibility extends to the rest of the newspaper. And that obviously is not true. By the way, I even do the same thing with the Wall Street Journal. For those who are subscribers to the Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal op ed page is great. I really enjoy their review section, their book reviews. And the rest of it is trash. Their news coverage is actually more to the left than the New York Times. So is the Washington Post. The Washington Post has been a disaster area on this kind of stuff. They've been truly awful. And so I think that it's worthwhile noting how bad you, again, you should ... we should, as much as we can, we should try to be as meticulous as we can in labeling who is bad, who is good, what they're doing wrong, what they're doing and making sure that we give a holistic view of the outlet before we cite it. Because every time we say, CNN says, we should say, even CNN, in all of their hatred of Israel, even they recognize the truth that X, Y, and Z is happening. Rabbi Goldberg: How would you rate Daily wire? Ben Shapiro: It depends who we're talking about. Rabbi Goldberg: Fair point. I think most people in this room are familiar with your work and Daily Wire, but apropos that last comment, where would you send people to get accurate news on Israel. We're all so desperate and we're holding on and we're looking for the next headline What one of the challenges that's happened actually in this war is: how many have, I don't want to use this expression, but, jumped the gun. How many are sharing news, like how many legitimate outlets tweeted about the ceasefire in exchange for the hostages that had to be actually corrected by the White House administration itself and media outlets walking it back. I'm not just talking about the frum Whatsapp groups who've been spreading terrible information all along without it being substantiated. So where can we go? If we want to find out, is something right, wrong, true, accurate? I'm not ranking on the frum WhatsApp groups. They're wonderful, they're great. But there have been several cases of their announcing things that were not verified or substantiated. Just in general, all of us have to be very vigilant with where we get our news. Can you recommend places other than most of Daily wire? Ben Shapiro: I'm a big follower. If you have Telegram, Amit Segal is excellent. You should subscribe to Amit is a conservative journalist, right wing journalist in Israel, and you can subscribe. My Hebrew's not good enough to read Amit Segal in Hebrew, so you can subscribe, and when you do, you can pay like a little fee every month, and it'll translate all of his posts into English and that's really good insidery kind of stuff, and he's updating what's going on the ground militarily, he's updating what all the politicians are saying, so that's more of a primary source than what you're gonna get at the Jerusalem Post or at Times of Israel or something. I check all of those, and my usual ... Because I'm so suspicious of everything that's happening, unless something is double or triple sourced, I tend not to cover it myself. I've been trying to be super meticulous. I don't want to pat myself on the back here, but this show, I think, has been as meticulous as any show that is out there. More than virtually all of them. And my Twitter feed, I really try to only tweet things out that I think are fully, meticulously checked. And I know everybody, half this room has my phone number, and I know that a lot of people are sending me a lot of stuff. If I'm not putting it up, there's a very good shot, it's because I actually am not sure that it has been verified or checked yet. Because there's so much bad information that's going around, and so much bad footage that's going around. People putting up videos from Syria in 2014, or people putting up videos of something that happened, know, the Pallywood kind of stuff, but it's 8 years old, right? Everything just has to be checked and verified, because ... One of the games, I'm going to talk about this preview of tomorrow's show and I've been told that I can't curse from the stage but the the basic concept is that the, there's a strategy that's very often used in sales and it's called baffling with BS, and the basic idea is that you pick details and then you go really far, if you want to ignore the main point, you pick a detail, you discredit the detail and then you go really far into the detail. And then you just put a lot of that stuff out there, just a lot of nonsense, and the more nonsense you put out there, the harder it is to distinguish the nonsense from the not nonsense. And this is, what Twitter feels like these days. And it's, everything has to be double, triple sourced. I, I've been trying to be as meticulous as I can be. On that. So it's rare for me to recommend my own show. I actually don't like to do it very much. But I will recommend that if you don't listen to the show, you should take a listen to the show. You should watch my Twitter feed. And you should look at some of the, out, some of the places that I, myself, I Eitan Levi, who's one of the spokespeople for the IDF. He's pretty meticulous about this kind of stuff. Those are sources that I think tend to be better than others. Rabbi Goldberg: I just wanna clarify if you're the other half of the people in the room. He was not telling you to text me to get his phone number. I just wanna clarify that. Saved myself a lot of time later tonight. You're very sought after. Media outlets want to interview you, particularly on this subject, of which you are an expert, outspoken, for, it's personal for you. Let us into Ben Shapiro's world a little bit. How do you decide, when you're invited to come on to different shows, to be interviewed, mainstream media, legacy media, other podcasts, how do you decide when it's worthwhile to lend your voice there? And when? You're gonna take a pass on that one. Ben Shapiro: The first consideration is size of the outlet or size of the distribution network. Is this going to reach enough people that it actually makes a difference? Because otherwise I could fill my day doing things where it's got ten listeners. Second thing is this an honest outlet or is this an ambush? And that doesn't mean I won't go on an ambush interview. It does mean that I want to know in advance if it's an ambush. I've been in ambush interviews before and it's very uncomfortable to get caught in the middle of one. And I want to know going in so that I'm armed for bear. And the ... that means that I really check out who's interviewing me, I check out who maybe they're gonna have as an opposing guest. I very often will think whether the person who they're having on in opposition is in any way honest. It's a real problem. When you're debating people, it's very difficult to get in the room or in the ring with somebody who's willing to lie on command. And people do it all the time. And it's very, and the problem is that you being in the same room as somebody who lies on command, I can sit there, I can debunk all of it in real time, but it sounds exactly the same as what the person on the other side is saying. They're saying something utterly untrue. They'll say something like, Israel bombed the Al Shifa Hospital, and I'll say that's absolutely untrue. Israel did not bomb the Al Shifa Hospital, there's aerial footage, there is contemporaneous video on Al Jazeera, there's audio, and they'll say, none of that is true, Israel bombed the Al Shifa Hospital, and you're a liar, and you're a Jew, and it's because you're so passionate about this issue that you're saying that. And it's I have to decide whether I think that's a net win for me, or that's not a net win. And when I say for me, I really mean for the things that I'm talking about. Because not everybody is going to address these issues honestly. Again, some people really like to dig into incredible details in order to discredit. For example, you'll have people in the media who have decided, for example, that the 40 beheaded, you've heard this, like the 40 beheaded, were there really 40 beheaded babies or was it only two babies that were beheaded and the rest were burned to death? And the answer to that, for any normal person would be like, are they alive? Are they alive? They murdered babies. They murdered a lot of babies. They burned I tweeted out the pictures, I put them on my show. A baby's burned in their cribs. We know this is a fact. But what they're doing is they're picking on one claim that went viral at the beginning, and then they're trying to say that if you don't have proof of that, if you don't show me the beheaded babies, then this means that nothing, none of it happened. It's all nonsense and we can't believe you at all. If you can't go on to an interview with somebody who's gonna be like that because I can make the point that it's actually an irrelevant question. Hamas was GoProing the entire thing. Rabbi Goldberg: How do you do that homework? How do you know which interview will be fair and who will be biased? Ben Shapiro: I really try to watch a lot of tape. So if I know the person who's giving the interview, I still watch a lot of tape of them. I try to see what they've been saying about the issue. I try to see who they're going to have me on with. I try to watch tape on them. You have to be very meticulous about this sort of thing. Normally, in a less fraught situation, I might be less meticulous. But it's so fraught right now, and you know that there's literally millions of people who are waiting for a slip up. So they can use that as, I've been asked twice in the last three weeks about whether I tweeted out an AI photo. I did not tweet out an AI photo, but that claim went so insanely viral. And it was community noted, falsely, and then Elon personally had it his people literally took down the community note because it was false. But it was too late, they'd already screen capped it and put it up, and that became part of the story. That, that's how sensitive things are right now, so I'm trying to be as meticulous as I can be in all this. Rabbi Goldberg: We're going to wind down with a couple last questions. We're so grateful for your time and for this incredible audience together, came together tonight. There are some new allies that we've learned. For you as a conservative media personality, a right wing Republican, some would say there have been people on the left who've been incredible ... Spokespeople, advocates, Richie Torres, Congressman Torres, who's been to our community. Our congressman, Jared Moskowitz, who I want to give a shout out, who has bucked his party, called out colleagues, been really outspoken, and he's our congressman, and we're incredibly proud of the job he's done. When the dust ... Ben Shapiro: John Fetterman. John Fetterman's been a stud. Rabbi Goldberg: John Fetterman, yes. Yeah. WHo saw that one coming? Ben Shapiro: I did not. I wouldn't, but I did not see that one coming. Rabbi Goldberg: He'd become a hero of the Jewish people. None of us saw that part of God's sense of humor. That's really amazing. He's like the, every shul wants to honor him at their dinner, shorts, pants, cut off short, no shirt. He's the honoree. When the dust settles, and please God, Israel swiftly wins this war, does it change your perspective at all that some of the people who were the adversary, the enemy, the left, from your conservative perch, do you now see in them things that are so aligned and the things that matter most? Will that change, you think, the way you relate, the way you speak about, some of the way you cover politics? Ben Shapiro: It makes me more optimistic that they don't buy into the broader rubric that I think a lot of the left has bought into. And I think that we will also see, as time goes on, how much of it's real and how much of it's not. I think that for some of the people we've mentioned, it looks very real. And I hope that it remains. I think that the next few years for Israel are going to be very rough. What we're, as I said a minute ago, what we're watching at the beginning, right now, is the beginning. It's going to get rougher in, in Gaza, not in the sense that it's going to be as spectacular on TV, but it's going to be a long term military operation. The government is saying this. It's going to be a long term military operation. There are going to be a consistent number of dead and wounded coming out of Gaza for years to come because this is going to, because they're just going to have to police the area and treat it the same way they treat Jenin or Nablus. And speaking of Jenin and Nablus, they're going to have to go into Jenin and Nablus and they're going to have to clean up a lot that's going on in Jenin and Nablus, especially given the fact that the Palestinian Authority is effectively on its last legs over there. Israel has ... Rabbi Goldberg: You saw the poll, 75 percent of the people in the so called West Bank celebrated what Hamas did on October 7th. Those are the people that it's being suggested should be in charge of Gaza when we're done. Ben Shapiro: And this is why exactly. This is why I say we'll see how long, people stay on the bandwagon when, for example, the Biden administration insists that Israel start making territorial compromises with Mahmoud Abbas, who literally yesterday came out and suggested that the Hamas massacre did not even happen at the Nova Festival based on the Haaretz story that was botched. And by the way, you want to talk about publications that should not be mentioned in a shul ever. Haaretz. Haaretz is sheer trash. It is trash, wrapped in trash and then burned on a trash heap. It's trash. In any case ... Rabbi Goldberg: How do you really feel about Haaretz? Ben Shapiro: Oh my gosh, Haaretz ... Haaretz makes the New York Times look like the Wall Street Journal. Haaretz is just, it is ... It makes Pravda look like an outlet, a leaflet for the John Birch Society. Haaretz is just ... There are no words. Anyway, I mean there were some words but I used them. The ... But, these are all first steps, they're going to have to do some pretty harsh things in, they're going to have to do some harsh things domestically, because it turns out that, there are a lot of terror cells inside of Israel. Everybody's walking around in Israel, in Yerushalayim, in populated areas, worried, and that's why you've seen tens of thousands of people applying for a gun permit in Israel which was supposed to feel safe. You're going to see Israel, the big one's going to come when Israel swivels up north. Everybody knows it's coming, it's just a matter of time. And it's, I don't think it's going to happen in the middle of this war, although I know that Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, was encouraging it very early on in the war. But Israel cannot live with an existential threat on its northern border. They've learned what it means to believe that deterrence is going to end an existential threat. By the way, that existential threat on its northern border goes active literally the minute Iran has a nuke. beCause, right now that's Iran's forward operating base. Once Iran has a nuke, then what is to deter Iran from using that? Because the next thing that happens is Hezbollah fires off its missiles, Iran smuggles that nuke through Iraq, through Syria, into Lebanon. And they, and then they just fire it into the heart of of Israel. And they say to Israel, if you retaliate, we're gonna fire, we'll fire a nuke at you. We'll put a nuke directly in the middle of Tel Aviv. And they have the targeting technology to do that, but not from Iran, because Israel can probably shoot that down. But from Hezbollah land. So Israel's gonna have to act, and they're gonna have to act there incredibly quickly. And the world's not gonna like it one little bit. And Israel's not gonna have any choice about it. And not only that, it's gonna be a much less meticulous war. It's a very messy war. They have way more materiel in the north. They have way more men in the north. The regime in Lebanon is hand in glove with Hezbollah. And Hezbollah's really dug in. And they're not dug in these tunnel networks. They're dug in like little bunkers all over the southern part of Lebanon. So that's going to be really rough. And so we'll see, I'm really grateful for the support that Israel has received from members of the Democratic Party. And Bezrat Hashem, it should continue and it should stay and it should remain a bipartisan issue. I hope and pray that remains the case, even as Israel has to take action in its own defense that's going to get worse as time goes on. Rabbi Goldberg: Amen. Let's end with one last question. Going back to a personal question. When you reflect back, and I don't know if you have time yet to do it in the middle of these six weeks, but the position that you're in at this critical time in Jewish history, having the platform that you do, reaching millions of people, and having the opportunity, the privilege, and also the awesome responsibility. Do you feel that in a religious context? As a kippa wearing, observant Torah Jew, do you think in a religious context about what you're doing, what you're advocating for, the responsibility of being a messenger, representative of Hashem? Do you daven that Hashem give you the right words and be successful in getting the message across? How does all of this and your place in it reflect from a religious perspective. Ben Shapiro: I mean that for sure. The I'm again I've been trying to do the best that I can to be as meticulous as I can say the right things all the way through this particular conflict And, as I said before, I've, when I speak about politics, I always feel the burden of speaking for people who don't have the outlet that I have. That's particularly true under these circumstances where, again, I personally know people who are in, I know people who are families, people who have been victimized. We all do. Literally everybody does. I was trying to explain this to one of my producers. My producers came with me to Israel last time, so they got a sense of this. That there is no seven degrees of Kevin Bacon in Israel, there's one degree. Literally one. You can find any person in Israel with one degree of separation. Literally anyone. And the level of burden feels more intense along those lines. And on a religious level, of course, when you see an attack on Jews. I should point out here that when I say that there's a gestalt attack on the West. That there's an entire philosophy that's being attacked. That philosophy is a biblical philosophy. The philosophy that you are responsible for your own actions, and that they are either meritorious or deleterious, and you deserve, in essence, your success or failure. That's not always true, but it's largely true. That is a philosophy that is rooted in the baseline notion that we're all made in the image of God. And so what we're watching right now is, in fact, a religious war. And I don't just mean the war of Hamas on Israel. The war of people who hate the West against the West. That coalition is anti-Judaic. It's anti-Judaeo-Christian, and that, that western coalition is the anti-Western coalition is incredibly dangerous on a religious level as far as again, back to the personal. So since I've been old enough to daven, one of the things that I say at the end of Shmoneh Esrei in the little section where you're allowed the, rap, to freestyle rap the, in that, the one, one of the things that, that I say at the very end, when I'm done, when I'm not ing for, health of my family and everybody should be healthy and and happy is that I should fulfill my potential in every way. That's the one that I've been saying since I was like, I don't know, 11 years old, 10, 11 years old. And that has not changed for 30 years. And if my voice matters in the moment, then hopefully I'm fulfilling my potential, and it's a gift that's been given to me to be able to, it's an honor. It's a gift that's been given to me to be able to speak on these issues to so many people. And I hope that I'm justifying it. Ben, thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, Ben Shapiro.