The Charlie Kirk Show - Ben Shapiro on George Floyd, Israel, and Gen Z

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

Do the rights of Americans come from God or from the Democrat National Committee? Charlie reacts to an appalling and revealing statement by Sen. Tim Kaine, then talks to Ben Shapiro about Israel's air strike on Qatar, the truth about the George Floyd case, and his new book about the heroes and villains of American life. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com!    Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, everybody. Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio. Van Jones attacks me. I respond. And Tim Cain says one of the darkest, most chilling things that I've ever heard a senator say. And then Ben Shapiro joins the show. We talk about George Floyd, Israel, and his latest book, Lions and Scavengers. Email us, as always, Freedom at Charlie Kirk.com and subscribe to our podcast. That is the Charlie Kirk Show podcast page and get involved today at Turning Point USA.com. That is TPUSA.com. Buckle up, everybody here. We go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job. Building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives,

and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts, and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands, which have connected them with another. And to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station,

which the laws of nature and nature's God in touch, them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute a new government, laying its foundation

on such principles, organizing its powers in such form as them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. That is the beginning of our birth certificate. That is our birthday, July 4th, 1776. That is the Declaration of Independence. Now you read this articulated by Thomas Jefferson and the American founders is a theory and understanding of natural rights in government. This is very simple elementary stuff. Said differently, our rights come from God, not from government. It makes our country unique. What are natural rights? Natural rights are basic freedoms we are born with because we are human. The first of which is life, than liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

You do not earn them and no government gives them to you. They are built in. Where do they come from? They come from God or at the very least from nature's law. Government does not make them. They can only respect them or violate them. Let me say that again. Government does not make your rights.

Government can only respect them or violate them. That's just pretty non-controversial stuff, right? Now, I was in Asia last week. I was in South Korea and Japan, and I saw this. story and I made a note to myself, I got to talk about it next week. And yesterday was such a busy news day that we didn't have an opportunity to cover it. It is, without a doubt, one of the darkest, most chilling things I have heard a U.S. Senator say. And we've heard some beauties. This is not just some sort of local college campus student. You know, people say at the time, Charlie, why do you

debate these college kids all the time? First of all, they're adults, they're voters. It's seen by millions of people. All of that. But hold on. This is a U.S. Senator that does not know as much as some of the college students that I will be dialoguing with tomorrow at Utah Valley University in Utah. This is Senator Tim Kane in one of the darkest pieces of tape that you will find. This is a U.S. Senator who went to Harvard. So when I say that college is a scam, this is Exhibit A. He went to Harvard with a JD, literally. He has a J.D. from Harvard. Tim Cain is talking to Bobby Kennedy about some health thing.

That whole hearing was a drive-by shooting that the Democrats tried to do against Bobby Kennedy. And the U.S. Senator who supposedly pretends to be a devout Catholic. So we're talking about where do rights come from? This is fundamental. What Tim Cain has said, I hear often from a lot of. lot of these campus activists you have to wonder how many democrats also believe this everybody what you're about to listen to is exhibit a of evidence that the democrat party represents a country not called america the democrat party they believe in a country that is not this country

tim kane what he says here if what he says is true then what we are is no different than china if what he says is true, we are no different than North Korean. Chinese people have rights. They are disgranted or denied by their government. We are leading with this today because this is without a doubt one of the most important chilling clips ever. And it's not even about making 1 fun of him. This shows that we are up against an existential parasitic force that does not even share our simple birth certificate. They have a different birth certificate for America and it's not the Declaration of Independence. Here is Tim K. Payne, play cut 342.

The notion that rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government, but come from the creator, that's what the Iranian government believes. It's a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Baha'is, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their creator. so the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling he believes the government gives you rights that laws give you rights that's why he's okay with aborting babies because those humans have no rights because the government hasn't given those rights to him that's that's why he's fine with mutilating kids and trans surgeries because those kids have no rights because the government hasn't given those rights.

Yeah, he's fine with potentially gulags because the government, there's nothing wrong with mass murdering people and gulags because the government didn't give those rights to them. The government decided not to give them those rights. And someone should ask Tim Cain. Tim Cain, we're not even going to use the Holocaust example because that one is overused. Was Mao wrong to mass murder millions of people? The government decided not to give those people rights. we believe in something transcendent above government that government appeals towards

government's job is to protect our unalienable rights that we were born with that every human being is born with our rights coming from God makes them inalienable because they are rooted in the equal God-given dignity shared by all human beings this is an arguable spiritual element to our nation some people say oh tim cane is kind of dumb obviously he has he went to harvard but that means absolutely nothing but it's worse than that he didn't come up with this he is simply a mockingbird parroting something that is infected the democrat party they don't think we have an alienable rights they think there's nothing special at being a human being if rights come from the government the government

can take them away whenever they want they can take away your right to speech and yes your right to life they can drone strike you whenever you want this is why America is unique. Let me repeat again. All men are created equal endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. This is why we are a refuge for liberty. The founders tied our freedom to something higher than politics. Tim Kane acts as if our rights are like a driver's license. Drivers licenses can be given, suspended, or revoked. That's what government given rights look like. Government given rights are a like driver's licenses. We believe that natural rights are your birthright. You don't

apply for them. They're yours by birth. It's because you're human. If Tim Ken is, if Tim Kane is right, Stalin was justified, Hitler was justified, Mao was justified, Maduro is justified. Rights are at favors from politicians. Government does not give you freedom. It protects the freedom you already have because you are a human being made in the image of God and the natural law dictates that. If government can give them to you, you can take them away, that's not freedom. These are not privileges. There's not preferences. There's something special about being a human being. And that is not just some local yokel. That's not just some sort of person on college campus. That is a U.S. Senator who almost became vice president of United States in 2016.

That that yamering fool was inches away. He was 40,000 votes away from becoming the Vice President of the United States under Hillary Clinton. So this is an existential issue and a little window into what we're fighting against. This is more than just a difference of opinion. It's of a difference of birthright. Private student loan debt in America totals about $300 billion. about $45 billion of that is labeled as distressed. Y-ReFi refinances distress or defaulted private student loans that others will not touch.

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that is yerefy.com, I guarantee you somebody in this audience has private student loan debt issues. We'll get out of debt today at yrefi.com. Because of private student loan debt, so many Americans feel helpless and they've even lost hope. Why refi gives you a light at the end of the tunnel. So go to yrefi.com. Why refi offers a three minute rate check without any credit impact. Go to yRefy.com. That's yrefi.com. I mean, we commonly say, praise God, President Trump, prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming president, but praise God he prevented Tim Cain from becoming vice president.

And that alone, he should just have a permanent place in our hearts as doing a phenomenal contribution to American society. We all dodged a bullet. And I guarantee you, I mean, he said it out loud because some staffer gave it to him, but I guarantee you Kamala Harris believes this. They do not believe in the natural rights theory of government, which is self-evident as soon as you believe there is a natural law of which there is that normativity is woven into nature that there is a natural being to our existence in physics

and math and morality and thermodynamics whatever you look as if there is a law in nature then immediately you can say then who is the lawgiver once you admit there is a natural law there is a lawgiver and that is why thomas jefferson said the laws of nature and nature is God, that is in the Declaration. The importance of natural rights is it makes your rights eternal and transcendent, and nobody can ever take those rights justly

away from you. It's a big deal when you think about it. Email us as always Freedom at Charliekirk.com. So last night on CNN, the only time I ever watched CNN is when they mentioned me or Scott Jennings owns somebody. So Van Jones, who's actually a very pleasant person, he's actually the nicest communist

ever met my life. And he's very sweet. I met him during one of my things I shouldn't have been doing which was advocating for prison reform is I'm atoning for my sins everybody okay anyway so so van Jones was talking about me and there's so much there's so many lies involved in what he said here first of all I never said the first element what he said I did say the second part but this is a very important thing to focus on so van Jones is saying I should be ashamed of myself and just reminder the murder of arena Zerutska did you know that the attacker said, quote, I got that white girl. The attacker racialized this just for the record.

Now, mind you, do you notice that the media all of a sudden tries to play the moral high ground when we start to try to make them live up to the standard that they created and the construct that they forced and the paradigm that they constituted under George Floyd? The moment that we make them have to live up to their own standard, they start to cry foul. As soon as we start to make them live up to the George Floyd standard. Oh, what is Charlie Kirk racializing this? And by the way, Van Jones also has a major lie embedded into this whole thing. Listen carefully, race hustler, Marxist, Van Jones. By the way, Van, you're welcome on my program. I'll treat you well. I will give you an uninterrupted opening statement.

Van Jones, if you want to go talk about black crime and urban decay, man, you're always welcome on this program because even though, quote, unquote, you're an expert in race hustling, I'm in around the block a couple times. I know your tricks, and they don't work here. Your magical spells don't work here. Your little hocus, pocus, you are racist. Boop. Doesn't work here. We got Holy Water here. Placott 351.

For Charlie Kirk to say, we know he did it because he's white, when there's no evidence of that, it's just pure race mongering, hate mongering, it's wrong. Then he says that if something like that had happened the other way, there would be sweeping changes imposed on society. Where is the George Floyd Policing Act? It didn't pass. Even when you had a white police officer murder a black man on live television, the whole world saw, there were no sweeping changes. In fact, not one law was passed at the federal level.

We don't know how to deal with people who are hurting in the way this man was hurting. Hurt people, hurt people. What happened was horrible. Someone like Charlie Kirk, he should be ashamed of himself. No one mentioned the word race, white, black, or anything except him. Okay, so there's a lot. out there. First of all, when Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of Minnesota, was asked repeatedly by the media, was there racial animus involved in Derek Chauvin's actions against George

Floyd? He said no, and they dodged the question. Do you know that there is no evidence that Derek Chauvin acted racially? If you think Derek Chauvin acted racially, then you're a racist, then parting racial type fantasies and mythologies into a situation of which it doesn't exist. And by the way, just if you're taking notes, media matters, George Floyd overdosed, okay? You can write that down and take to the bank. In fact, we have Ben Shapiro coming up next segment of which I'm going to have him remind us of all the facts. Anyway, that's not what this is even about. Here is the tweet that I sent out, quote, if a random white person simply walked up to and stabbed a nice law-abiding black person for no reason, it would be an apocalyptically huge national story used to

impose national sweeping political changes on the whole country. Of course this is true. Everybody know this is true. Our media thirsts for stories like this. I want you to imagine if a white guy sitting on a bus and a black woman just on her phone all of a sudden the white guy took out a knife and just stabbed her in the neck repeatedly how do you think our media would react we would have protest wendies would have point i'll tell you right now there would be a hundred burned wendies around the world i mean in every city i mean it would be so on top they'd start burning the denies they use emmett till 70 years later because of this because it's a case of a horrifying murder of an innocent black person by hateful whites.

It's so rare they had to go back 70 years, but you know what? When a white person is murdered, we don't burn down the country. But when George Floyd overdosed on drugs, it's Floyd a paloosa. But for the opposite, we have to go back one day. Literally, there was another, you know, several happened this last week. Another white girl was just murdered by a black person in Alabama, a woman butchered walking her dog. There was also one that happened in South Carolina. one that happened in Virginia. That is four white women in the American South that just recently

were butchered by black criminals. So we take a step back and say, well, what's really going on here? What's really going on here is a situation where Van Jones is acting like if I said something I did not say when in reality, we're asking a very simple question, Mr. Jones, very simple question, which is, will you apologize for all the criminal justice reform that you pushed forward that allowed these 14-time criminal offenders to walk the streets, because you are the architect and the designer of constantly feeling bad for the criminal that then can kill more people like Irina Zerutska. And by the way, I did not bring up race.

The attacker said, quote, I got that white girl, end quote. People say, why does the race matter? Oh, it matters because you made us care about race in the summer of 2020. Looks like you got live up to the book of your own rules. The second that we make you live up to your ridiculous paradigm, you collapse. like a house of cards gentlemen let's get real for a second are you frustrated with today's woke dating apps

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Joining us now is a good friend, Ben Shapiro, author of Lions and Scavengers. Congratulations, Ben, on the new book. The True Story of America. and we will get to that in great detail. I want everyone to check it out. It's lions and scavengers. Ben, I was refuting Mr. Van Jones on a variety of different things because he decided to attack me on CNN.

But you've done some really important work on George Floyd's cause of death. Can you remind the audience what your study and your research showed about George Floyd overdosing on drugs? Sure. I mean, it was basically just the autopsy report. I mean, the autopsy report showed that he had a massively enlarged heart, that he had extraordinary quantities of drugs, including fentanyl in his system, enough fentanyl to kill a normal person multiple times over.

The original coroner suggested that if they had found George Floyd dead in his home, they would have assumed that he died of a drug overdose. If you actually watched the tape of the confrontation with the officers, he's saying, I can't breathe well before he gets out of the car. In fact, one of the reasons they take him out of the car is he's taken out at his own request. And so, again, the medical evidence does not suggest, there's no damage to his trachea, there's no damage to his neck. the medical evidence does not suggest that he actually died as a result of Derek Chauvin's knee on

his neck. It suggests that he died as a result of probably excited delirium, meaning elevated heart rate as a result of both ingesting drugs, in the large heart and the excitement of being arrested. Well, and on top of that, they also say that this was racially motivated. Is there any evidence at all that there was racial animus in this situation? So Van Jones said it was obviously a racial thing. Hold on. If you're actually imparting your own racial stereotypes onto a situation of which even Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of Minnesota, rejected the claim that race was involved in this. Is that correct? This is exactly right.

I mean, there was a federal civil rights charge that was brought against Derek Chauvin, and it did not even allege that there was a violation of civil rights on the basis of race. So literally no one, not the prosecutor's state, not the prosecutor's federal, no one made the actual legal claim that the actions of Derek Chauvin were rooted in racism. The best available criminal case against Derek Chauvin would have been like a low-degree manslaughter case for negligence in his handling of the actual situation. literally zero evidence was provided to the idea that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd because George Floyd was black. It just was not inevitable. It wasn't even alleged. So, and you've done

phenomenal work on this. Everyone should check it out. It's really important. Shifting gears here for a second. So we're on team civilization here. We want to see the maniacs of Hamas be defeated and the barbarians of Islam not be able to storm the gates of the West. So we've seen news this morning that quite honestly I'm a little confused by. And I was hoping. hoping you could navigate it and help us understand, which is that Israel bombed Qatar, which houses a lot of Hamas officials. What happened here? And if I were to introduce just the skeptical question, will this potentially endanger America's own interest in the Middle East? So please, Ben, help me better understand the situation. Sure. So I think that the lead up to understand here

is that Qatar sort of plays both sides when it comes to its negotiating stance between Kamaas and Israel and the United States. So it has provided extraordinary material support to Hamas directly, billions of dollars in material support to Hamas. The leadership of Hamas have been living in Qatar for years at five-star hotels. Hamas's priorities have been pressed by Qatar in negotiations multiple times. Qatar has not put significant pressure on Hamas in the past to release the hostages or to end the war. And so basically, as Israel nears the end of the war, which is what this last movement in Gaza City is supposed to be, there was a final offer that was put on the table actually by the Trump administration that essentially said that Hamas should release the remaining 48

hostages, meaning 28 dead bodies and 20 alive hostages, and the United States would then guarantee the Arizona on its brokerage, some sort of ends of the war that would result in the disarming of Hamas and the movement of the Gaza Strip to presumably some sort of coalitional government supported by regional states and the rebuilding of the area. And Qatar was pushing Hamas, apparently, we heard, and Hamas this morning in Arabic actually rejected it, that it's not been widely reported by the media, but it's true. Hamas actually rejected the American offer. The president had put out,

via truth, social statement, saying, this is your last chance, and if you don't do that, bad things are going to happen. The idea that Israel would be able to fly 10 F-16s all the way across the Middle East to Qatar to strike a very specific terror target in Doha without American knowledge,

beggars the imagination. It is extraordinarily unlikely to say the very least. Honestly, it would not be wildly improbable if Qatar knew that that was coming as well. And so Israel struck at the, the top level of the remaining Hamas in Qatar in an attempt to basically change the negotiating status. So the basic idea here was, is if you will not negotiate, if you refuse to get to the end of this war, well, then maybe we'll find somebody who can, or maybe the idea is that you're

safe nowhere until this war end. Additional pressure had to be brought to bear, and that's why Israel did what it did. Obviously, I as well, I'm on team civilization. I'm very happy to see Hamas's top leaders killed. I hope that as many of them in the leadership with as little loss of civilian life as possible. I hope that as many of them died in this attack as it's humanly possible. And again, I'd be very surprised. I mean, we do know, actually, from contemporaneous reporting that the United States was at least given the heads up on the Israeli operation in the moments before it went. I just spent time in Japan. And one of the things that kind of looms over Japan is that Japan, they engaged in an unconditional surrender that they said, we're done. And they laid down

their arms, obviously, after the two atomic bombs, very controversial. People have mixed opinions on I certainly do. But that is unconditional surrender. Is that what Israel is aiming for here? I suppose that is a question that I get a lot on campus. What does success look like? Because I think we could all agree a long war is not good for Israel, a long drawn out war. And we're now coming towards two years in about a month. So it's been about 23 months. So what does ultimate success look like in the Gaza Strip? My main critique of the Netanyahu administration, in Israel and the Nihahu government is they didn't move faster. I think this should have been a much more accelerated process.

Israel set out at the beginning of this war with two goals, as articulated by the Israeli government. Goal number one was to get as many hostages out as humanly possible to free the hostages. And second was to win the war. In many ways, those are mutually exclusive goals because if you actually wish to win the war, then you have to do things militarily that are going to involve actual movement on the ground. And meanwhile, Hamas is attempting to basically use the hostages as its own form of human shields. their own civilians as human shields. They're also using the hostages as a form of human shield. And so as you came to the end of the war, this is always going to be the question,

is how the war kind of came to its final terminus. The priorities that Netanyahu has laid out publicly include essentially, basically it's let the hostages out and there can't be a future military threat to Israel. If you had to sum it all up, those are the two things. How that materializes, in my opinion, is likely to be in Israeli military occupation of large swath of the Gaza Strip, the setting up of humanitarian areas, particularly on the coast and in Rafa in which humanitarian aid is provided, a pathway out for people who actually want to leave is the only conflict of which I'm aware on planet Earth

in which there are outside countries telling people who would like to leave that they literally cannot. The Trump administration has been trying to facilitate the ability of people who want to leave to do so and has also been trying to facilitate the entry of not only humanitarian aid, but investment into the areas that have been cleared of terrorists, and then you can see some sort of Hamas-free rebuilding.

That would be the goal of the end of the war. Now, my understanding is that the sort of last untouched area of the Gaza Strip in terms of Israeli serious military operations is Gaza City. It's why there's been so much focus on Gaza City. Last I heard, Israel already controls something 40 to 50 percent of the territory in Gaza City. They've been warning people to get out for at least a couple of weeks now. Hamas has been stopping people at checkpoints and turning them back and shooting them if they don't stay in the city to be used as human shields by Hamas.

So that's the current situation on the ground. What other feedback or criticism would you have about this situation? I know that it's impossible for anyone to listen to everything that you ever say, but looking at this from an American perspective, what else would you say things could have been handled differently? Maybe on the PR front, maybe also just on a conduct front. Where would you say as an outsider, things that could have been handled better more efficiently or with more precision? So number one, there's no such thing as a perfect war. So obviously, in any war, there are going to be things that happen that are ugly and that are terrible, and that is why war is a terrible thing. As far as a sort of operational front, again, I've spent an awful lot of time in Israel. I've watched tape of operations happening drone operations.

I've met with an enormous number of Israeli soldiers, young men and women, people who are 18, 19, 20 years old, who have had legitimately their limbs blown off going house to house in an area where they didn't have to. The charge that Israel has been indiscriminate and its use of force in the Gaza Strip is an absurdity on its face. Israel has complete air superiority over the Gaza Strip. If it wanted to level the place and turn it into a parking lot, October 8th, it certainly had the military capacity to do so. It has not done that. Instead, it has sacrificed legitimately a thousand of its own young men, particularly in these areas and thousands more who are wounded for the rest of their lives, going house to house in an attempt to prevent all that

end is currently shipping in 4,400 calories per day per person into the Gaza Strip, much of which is then stolen by Hamas. So that is not to say that any war is perfect. This war, has been conducted in about as meticulous way as any urban war in history, just because war is ugly doesn't mean that it's being fought wrongly. And I think that the main mistake that Israel has made is misunderstanding how public relations works in the sense that they couldn't have presented this war in a better, kinder way that people would have loved. What they could have done is move faster. And the reality is that the American way of doing war is to win as fast as possible. And we don't like long-drawn-out occupations. We don't like long-drawn-out military operations.

that's true in Iraq, it's true in Afghanistan, it's true in Ukraine, it's true in the Gaza Strip. And so the kind of things that we Americans like to see are, for example, the operations against Kizbalah that took about three weeks to five weeks, or the operation against Iran, which took about 12 days, right? Those are operations that any ally of the United States can sustain. Long operations, like the one that Israel has been performing in the Gaza Strip, are inherently very, very difficult from PR level. And I'm not sure, to be frank, that there is a way for Israel to, quote, unquote, win the

PR war in the middle of a very long war against an intransigent terrorist enemy that legitimately embeds itself in the most damaging places. A claim I receive often, and we're starting our campus tour tomorrow, is that Israel is committing genocide. How do you respond to that then? There is literally no definition of genocide by which Israel is committing a genocide. Typically, a genocide involves the targeted killing of the vast majority of the population, or at least an attempt to do so. There has never been a genocide attempted in world history in which the food, the food, that was being shipped in was more than the daily caloric intake of the average American into the areas where you're supposedly attempting to genocide the population. The total population

loss in the Gaza Strip thus far has been 3%. During the Holocaust, just to take a reference, it was 50%. During Rwanda, it was significantly higher than 3%. You don't issue leaflet warnings to people. You don't go house to house in a genocide and an attempt to reduce civilian casualties. I understand that people use genocide at this point to just mean thing I don't like. And I get that. I understand nobody likes war. Nobody wants war. Certainly not the Israelis who are not at war on October 6th. The fact is that every Israeli family has to send their 18-year-old son or daughter

off to the military with the possibility that they're going to get blown up in Gaza. That is not something that any Israeli wants right left or center. The real question is whether the accusations are accurate. They certainly are not, again, by any stretch of the imagination. Author, Ben Shapiro, author of Lions and Scavengers. We're going to get to that in a second. I have one or two other questions. on Israel. I think it's very important for our audience to hear this, though, because there is

an incessant campaign. And one thing a friend sent to me, interestingly, which is, okay, Charlie, we push back against the media on COVID, on lockdowns, on Ukraine, on the border. So maybe we should also ask a question, is the media totally presenting the truth when it comes to Israel? Just a question, you know, that maybe we shouldn't believe everything the media says, because I know I've been conditioned to ask a lot more critical questions over the last couple of years. Charlie Kirk here, crime is skyrocketing. You may already own a firearm,

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but the legal and moral complexities of lethal force. What I love about Burnah is there proudly American. Over 80% of their compact launchers components are sourced in America, and each unit is hand-assembled in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Best of all, Burna is legal in all 50 states. No background checks, ships directly to a door, trusted by hundreds of police departments and government agencies around the world. Visit burn and to learn more. That is b.rna.com. So, Ben, some people would accuse Israel of wanting to ethnically cleanse. Some people in the Israeli government are saying, again, it's all over the place, right? You have opinions all over. In your opinion, what would a good outcome five years from now be? And how does one respond to the claims of ethnic cleansing? So ethnic

cleansing, the idea presumably that population movement is equivalent to ethnic cleansing. I think ethnic cleansing is a term that's been fairly recently coined to describe population movement during war. And the reality is that's been ongoing for literally all of human history. The idea that Israel is, quote, unquote, forcing people out of the Gaza Strip. That is not the stated policy of the Israeli government. The idea is if people want to leave, they can, but they're not being forced to leave. Again, moving people out of heavily urbanized areas that are honeycombed with terrorist booby traps pretty much everywhere is not the the same thing as quote unquote ethnic cleansing. And I think that ethnic cleansing is very often

used as sort of a softer form of the genocide attack, the idea being that Israel is trying to kill everyone, which of course is not true. As far as your earlier question about what we believe from the media, one of the things that I find kind of astonishing in some of the folks on the right who are highly critical of Israel is actually the lack of credibly, the lack of skepticism when it comes to legacy media. Legacy media are radically anti-Israel overall. The New York Times can certainly not be accused of being a pro-Israel outlet, be very difficult to make the accusation that the Associated Press, which has worked Han and Glove with Khamas for years or Reuters, that these are wildly pro-Israel outlets. And yet, when it comes to the reporting, it seems to be sort of

the opposite. But Ben, the perception, the legacy media is like owned by the Jews. I was going to say, Ben, come on. You Jews own the media, then. So, I mean, come on. As you can tell by all the wonderful headlines you guys get. Well, I mean, dude, the accusation that we own the media has not prevented, you know, the daily Wire from employing people who radically disagree with me on all of these matters. I mean, I don't agree with Matt Walsh on foreign policy. Matt, obviously, is a major host over at Daily Wire. And that's just my shop, and I'm overtly pro-Israel.

I mean, I'm not making any bones about this. I'm a Jew and I'm a Zionist. I'm not going to pretend that to say otherwise would be absolutely silly. To suggest that some sort of atheistic Jewish person by birth who does not care about Judaism or Israel owning the New York Times means the New York Times is pro-Israelist to ignore literally every bit of coverage they have ever done for my entire lifetime. We're running out of time here. But just last question on this, Ben, I know this might be a tougher question.

But BB said, quote, I didn't like this said this. I'll be honest. You can't be MAGA if you're anti-Israel. I don't like it for a couple reasons. How did you analyze that statement from BB? I mean, I think that there is the ungenerous way of interpreting that and then the generous way of interpreting that. So the ungenerous way is to suggest that you have to hold a particular position on every

Israeli governmental activity in order to, in order to be MAGA, which, of course, is not true. I mean, you can disagree from the right or from the left with BB's policies, and you can still be plenty MAGA. I think the idea that BB is putting out there is that if you are taking Hamas's side against Israel in a conflict, it is very difficult to align that with the stated positions of the Trump administration or what President Trump himself is doing right now. And that much I certainly is true. You cannot, look, I think you can have disagreements on Israel and still be MAGA, obviously.

you should be America first, but if you're pro Hamas, you're something darker. Ben Shapiro's author of Lions and Scavengers. Ben, tell us about your important new book. So the basic idea in lions and scavengers is that inside every human heart, and this goes back to the book of Genesis, that there really is the dutiful part of you that wants to engage in what God made for you, this incredible rationalistic world in which you can mostly understand what's going on and you have a duty to do the moral thing. You get up every morning, you try to build something. You try to be innovative and risk-taking. You try to defend your civilization. You try to build the social fabric. And then there is the part of us that's driven by envy. And that part of us just

looks at our problems and immediately attributes it to some shadowy force outside of our control and tries to rip down the very systems that actually provide prosperity, tries to rip down the lions out of pure envy here, think Zor and Mamdani. And, you know, that exists in all of us, but it exists civilizationally as well. And when you look at the sort of activities that were taking place on college campus last year, and you see the weird agglomeration of causes that all come together under varying banners, sometimes it's hating President Trump immigration. Sometimes it's on Israel. Sometimes it's on LGBT. But it's the same exact people all marching together. And you wonder yourself, what do these people have in common? And the answer is

pretty much nothing except they really, really don't like our civilization and see the fundamental basis of our civilization as evil and wrong and believe that it needs to be torn out by the root. This is, to take the most obvious example, queers for Palestine. Everybody's been puzzling over what the hell is that, right? Queers in Palestine get thrown off buildings. So the answer is that the radical LGBTQ group doesn't have much in common with the pro khamas group except that both really really hate the west and believe that the traditional values of our civilization need to be destroyed in order that they can live more fulfilling lives in some way so what you write you write in here lions and scavengers saying it's the true story of america and you you seek to defend the

principles that shape freedom of a fair and powerful society we would imagine those emanate from the obviously. And is Islam compatible with our civilization? Would you put them in the scavenger category? I certainly think that the Islamic civilizations that we're seeing contemporaneously on the globe, it's very hard to see how that fits in sort of the lying category. It doesn't mean that there aren't individual Muslims who fit in that category or that there can't be a sort of interpreted version of Islam, that they couldn't fit into the idea of a God-given world in which you have duties and creative power in line with kind of general, very broad principles of biblical morality. But I think the proof is in the pudding. You're not seeing a lot of Islamic

countries on planet Earth right now that live by any of the fundamental principles like freedom of mind, private property, equal rule of law applying to all citizens and traditional virtue. What would you say is the missing component for those of us in the West to stand up against these forces? What would you say we're doing well and that we need to do more? of. I mean, I think that what we lack, and I think we're starting to see a restoration of it is the courage to actually stand up on our hind legs and say no. I think that good people tend to be introspective. We tend to think, okay, what did I do wrong? How do I fix that? We tend to apologize when we do something wrong. Bad people tend to take an apology and then grind your

face into the dust over it because they're not engaged in guilt cultures. They're engaged in what are called shame cultures where the most important thing is not to be made to feel shame. And it is to shame others. And so I think that we, you know, those of us who consider ourselves part of Western civilization, you know, we need to recognize that a constant self-abnegation, a constant attempt to tear ourselves down out of a misguided sense of humility in the face of people who are happy to just destroy our civilization from without and within. That is a gigantic mistake. And it is totally fine to say to people who wish to destroy our civilization, no, your values suck and they don't belong here. Where does all this resentment come from? It comes from a wide variety of places,

but it tends to come in general from a feeling of frustration and enervation. And so I think that you can get that from people who believe they have been marginalized. You can get that from people who believe they deserve more. You see it a lot, actually, with university students who seem to believe that they deserve a $250,000 salary for a gender studies degree because they've been taught that they ought to be getting more and then they don't get it. And then they're angry at their parents for not having put them in a position to do that. And so they rebel against everything that they've been taught and everything they haven't been taught. I also think it comes from a board population.

Very often you have people who grew up without any sense of external threat and they think that pretty much everything that's good in life is the baseline, that that's just normal and that you can tear away everything without the baseline falling away. That, of course, is just false. Some of it comes from ignorance, some of it comes from envy.

The reality is that gratitude as a characteristic of human beings has to be cultivated. It's something you have to teach your kids gratitude. Envy is totally natural, right? Envy is easy to do. You see it with small children, right? I have four, and it's very easy to see kids envy each other and get on each other's case. Being grateful for what they have is a very difficult thing.

You have to teach your kids to say thank you. You don't have to teach your kids to say no. The book is Lions and Scavengers. Boy, that feels like the whole story of Zoran Mamdani, the resentful envy-driven bitter Islamist who wants to be mayor of New York City. Ben, thank you for your time, and thanks for going through all the questions on the very important topic today. Lions and Scavengers is the book. Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks, Charlie.

Thanks so much for listening. Everybody email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.