The Megyn Kelly Show - Every Leftist Social Justice Talking Point Under One Umbrella, and Campus Snowflakes, with Michael Knowles and Alan Dershowitz | Ep. 654

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Megyn Kelly begins the show by talking about the anti-Semitic attacks in schools and cities throughout America, Biden administration press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre trying to change the subject and talk about Islamophobia instead, calls for "one solution" and "intifada" against Israel in New York City, and more. Then The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles joins to discuss what the anti-Israel protesters want for America, what each side in the Israel war wants, a newfound commitment to free speech by the White House and the left, whether the campus snowflakes are actually winning, the anti-America and anti-Israel professors who are shaping the next generation, Greta Thunberg transitioning to anti-Israel messaging, connecting reproductive justice to the Israel war, the attempts by the left to wrap every social justice issue under one umbrella, border and terrorism, The Squad continuing its anti-Israel talking points, Trump's latest comments drawing fire, and more. Then Alan Dershowitz, author of the forthcoming book "War Against The Jews," joins to discuss leftists lecturing America about foreign policy, the fallacy of the "occupation" talking point, why those who claim to support Palestinians are only supporting Hamas, Mehdi Hasan equating Israel with Russia, Hamas' "CNN strategy," the state of the plea deals in Trump World, and more.Knowles: https://www.michaeljknowles.comDershowitz: https://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Jews-Hamas-Barbarism/dp/1510780548/ Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Hate filling our streets and our schools as we learn about a shocking incident at a middle school in Manhattan Beach, California. This story first brought to our attention by the Libs of TikTok X account. She reported that four Jewish middle schoolers had been subjected to nasty comments, to put it mildly, in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel. Among the things said, revenge is beautiful and, quote, all Jews should be killed. The school reportedly investigated and told the victims

and their parents that they needed to sign a gag agreement, warning them not to tell other students about the incident. School leaders also reportedly suggesting the anti-Jewish students' words were political, not hateful. The school board says student privacy laws prevent it from disclosing the results of the investigation, but appropriate consequences have been administered, including obviously shutting up the victims. The news infuriating a rabbi who spoke to a local NBC affiliate. Watch. These girls were not sought out because they were Israeli, because they were soldiers of the Israeli defense forces. They are young Jewish girls who were sought out at lunch. And to me, there's nothing political about that. That is hate. These four girls did nothing. They were just being themselves.

And so to reprimand them, to me, seems extremely unjust. Unbelievable. The Anti-Defamation League of California is now calling on the district to conduct a more thorough investigation. This comes as the White House press secretary appears to have trouble understanding English again. Karine Jean-Pierre has asked a question about anti-Semitism in America. Pretty straightforward. Pretty sure we all know why that subject's coming up right now.

And responds with her deep concerns about what's happening to Muslims. Cannot make it up. Level of concern right now about the potential rise of anti-Semitism in light of everything that's going on in Israel. So a couple of things. Look, we have not seen any credible threats. I know there's been always questions about credible threats. And so I just want to make sure that that's out there. But look, Muslim and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks. What is she saying? And Certainly President Biden understands that many of our Muslim Arab, Arab Americans and Palestinian American loved ones

and neighbors are worried about the hate being directed at their communities. What are you saying? The question was about anti-Semitism. Not everything has to go back to Islamophobia. All right. so she either wasn't listening or paying attention, or she just can't get off of her Democratic talking points, but that what's really important here is any backlash against the people who perpetuated this disgusting attack. That is how the left is talking about Israel already. Look, we've documented at length on this show what is happening to Jews in America. There have been numerous incidents of people ripping down posters of innocent Israelis who have been kidnapped by Hamas and Jewish Americans who

have been kidnapped by Hamas. There have been attacks on Jewish people. And they get away, they just pull down the posters in most instances and walk along their merry way. Thank God for the X account, stop anti-Semitism. If it weren't for that account, none of these people would be identified and caught. This lovely couple here in Brooklyn was just the latest when confronted with tearing down the hostage posters. The wife, Kelly, clutches the papers in her hands while the husband, identified as Noah Schaefer, starts laughing. It's so fun when you try to impede the investigation and recovery of hostages suffering children. Such a good time, Noah. Love to have that guy over for cocktails. And then there are those

who are publicly celebrating the deaths, still calling for the annihilation of Israel. Just last night in New York City, Eli Klein, a commentator on Twitter, I think he's in the art business, a Jewish man, says he'm going to take the bongo? Israel is a hero, not another guy. No more money for Israel's crime. Like who says I'm going to take the bongo? Who's like, I'll be the guy. I'm going to hit the bongo. That'll be my contribution to our big Intifada march. Could somebody grab like some castanets too while we're, you know, all together? The group calls for intifada, as you heard right there, which of course is believed by many Jews experiencing this event right now to be a call for the elimination entirely of Israel, not to mention Jews, including right here in America. Joining me now, Michael Knowles. He's host of The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles Show.

Michael, welcome back. You know, it's like, you're like, I'll do it. You know, I'm going to bring my clarinet. I'm just going to toot along on my woodwind to show my hatred for the Jews. It's the tuba player in the marching band. There's just no way to look cool while you're doing it. You know, the bongos, that's not, you're not going to come out looking very cool. You're probably not going to come out looking very cool if you're marching for the Intifada

generally, though it's, as you pointed out, Megan, it's not just the extreme fringe left. It goes all the way up to the White House. When I heard Karine Jean-Pierre's answer to that question, I thought of an old Norm McDonald joke. The late, great Norm McDonald once said that his greatest fear was that jihadis would get their hands on a dirty bomb and they would detonate it over a major city, killing tens of millions of innocent people because then the backlash against peaceful Muslims would be terrible. And he kept a straight face and so did Karine Jean-Pierre. That joke, which was pretty

funny when Norm said it, is now apparently the official White House policy, even as crimes against Jews skyrocket. Yeah. These fictions become reality as time goes on. Here she is today trying to clean it up this morning. To be clear. Oh, that would be wonderful. Thank you. But actually, you were perfectly clear. You're just off point and pressing the wrong thing. The president and our team are very concerned about a rise in anti-Semitism, especially after the horrific Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. OK, so I you weren't clear the first time because the question was directly about anti-Semitism and you immediately pivoted to Islamophobia. And that's that's what they do. That's what people like Karine Jean-Pierre, who are obsessed with skin color and identity, have been doing from the start of this thing.

I don't believe for one second she simply wasn't paying attention. I think it was her own priors kicking in. This is a wedge issue for Democrats, and it's increasingly a wedge issue for Democrats. Previously, both parties in the United States supported the state of Israel. That began to weaken during the Obama administration, because Barack Obama hated Bibi Netanyahu, and something tells me the feeling is probably mutual. So Netanyahu cozied up more to Donald Trump and the Republicans. This was occurring as the base of the left wing turned more against the state of Israel and more in favor of Palestinian liberation. The reason that that was occurring at the

base of the American left is because the arguments for Palestinian liberation echo many of the leftist domestic arguments here against colonialism, against Western civilization, against imperialism and all the rest of it. This is why you're seeing BLM here in America siding with the Hamas terrorists and even posting pictures of the paragliders saying that their fight is the same fight as the fight for BLM because those same historical themes are cropping up. Now the normal Democrats, the more clubbable Democrats in the suits and the ties like Joe

Biden, they obviously don't want to march in the streets for Hamas or anything like that. But Joe Biden is not a conviction politician. Joe Biden wakes up every morning, he licks his finger, he puts it in the wind and he figures out which way the wind is blowing. So they have to make a choice. Are they going to defend the state of Israel, or are they going to side with the more radical base? And the choice has been clear enough, not just from Karine Jean-Pierre, but from Justin Trudeau, the leader of America's evil top hat.

Trudeau has come out and he said, we stand with the Palestinians and black Muslims and whatever. And so if you're looking around and you're confused on. And so, you know, if you're looking around and you're confused on this issue and you say, well, I don't really know much about war in the Holy Land and this conflict seems to go back millennia and I don't really have a dog in the fight. I'm not Muslim. I'm not Jewish. I don't really know what to think about it. I think one good rule of thumb is look at where your own political allies and opponents are lining up. And in this case, all of the worst politicians in America seem to be siding with Hamas, or at the very least with the Palestine Liberation Project. Did you call Canada our evil top hat?

I was using the official technical term, yes. That's amazing. You're so good at coming up with these little things. Let's not forget Transheiser Bush. That's a Michael Nolzer as well. That's amazing. Yes. So what's happening here is like somehow Hamas is getting dumped into like the BLM basket and the same cast of characters that defended BLM is coming out. And now we're seeing similar tactics. You know, we saw them surround that old man's car yesterday. We played the video in, was it Minnesota? Minneapolis? I'm trying to remember where that guy was.

Yeah, it was Minneapolis. They got around this old guy. He got scared. He pulled a knife to try to defend himself and then tried to get out of the crowd. And then you've got this BLM guy standing up then tried to get out of the crowd. And then you've got this BLM guy standing up saying, we tried to ram the crowd. No, he tried to get out of the crowd. You threatened him. He was terrified. He was an old man. So you see that tactic. Then yesterday in Chicago, this was posted all over Twitter last night or X. One of Charlie Kirk's associates from

Turning Point was out there trying to escort a Jewish couple to a pro-Israel event through the throngs of these Palestinian Hamas supporters. And the guy got attacked. His name is Peter Christos. It's not 20. Hey, back up. So there's that. And then there's more of this. Here's a woman walking by this pro-Palestinian protesters. She's walking by walking while you watch it. It's from Skokie. Similar protest. It's not 17. Look at her, look at her, look at her. Racists go home! Racists go home! So, these are the streets of America now because it's turning into BLM 2.0. It is. And this is why the American interest in this war is very clear, at least to me.

The American interest in this war is to contain the war. That's not true of the other belligerents. The interest of Hamas is to obliterate the state of Israel. The interest of Iran is to obliterate the state of Israel. The interest of the state of Israel is to at least decapitate Hamas, potentially flatten Gaza, certainly regime change in Iran. Those interests don't all exactly line up with any of the other belligerents in this war. But for the United States, the interest is very clear. We have to contain the war because we are so close to World War III. We were already titling on the brink of World War III because we saw the first major war in Europe since World War II breakout in Ukraine, which seems to be yesterday's news. No one

remembers Ukraine anymore, but that's still going on. We also have an open border. We know that Hezbollah operates in Mexico. We know that there are Islamic militants in the United States. We know that if a major war does break out, if the United States, for instance, goes to war with Iran, we know that there could be attacks on the homeland and very likely would be. So we have to be clear about our strategic objectives here. And the other thing we need to be clear about is the parallels between the arguments. The argument that the pro-Palestine people are making against Israel is that Israel is

a colonial project of the British Empire and colonialism is very bad and that's why we need to wipe the whole nation out. I think we need to be clear-eyed about it and say they kind of have a point. They have a point in as much as the establishment of the modern nation state of Israel comes out of the Balfour Declaration from the British Empire, the British mandate for Palestine, and then is established by the United Nations, which is also a kind of colonial project. The reason it is very important for Americans to be clear about this is because every single one of those arguments can be used about this is because every single one of

those arguments can be used for the abolition of the United States of America, which is also a colonial project that also came out of the British Empire with the same sorts of people marching in the streets, in fact, waving the very same flags, calling for not just the death of Israel, but the death of America as well. This is why Iran refers to Israel as the little Satan and America as the great Satan. That's why there is a convergence of interests here that could teeter over out of the Middle East all the way to the American homeland. And in both circumstances, we each fought wars to establish our right to be in charge of ourselves and to have our own independent country. And we won. We won and

Israel won. I mean, sorry. I guess you didn't like the way it turned out, but that's the way it turned out. You guys lost. Israel got attacked by six other countries. It was a devastating event. It wasn't six, but my point is they got it from all different angles and they won. And now it's like, well, you should have given up the territory anyway. And time and time again, I mean, over the past 50, 70 years, Israel has tried. They have tried to offer a two-state solution. They have said, what about this? What about that?

What about that? They've given or offered Hamas and the Palestinians almost all of what they wanted. It's never good enough because what they want is not two states. They want one, theirs, and no Israel. Well, this is why when you hear members of the squad who are American leftist politicians, when they say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, the meaning of that statement is clear as day, which is that the nation state of Israel needs to cease to exist. But let's take their logic a little bit further. When they say

from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free, we all know that they would apply that very same argument to the United States. This is why all of these people sign their emails with those ridiculous little Native American acknowledgement lines. I acknowledge that I'm on the land of the Huckahookee Indians, wherever it is. It's always fun to challenge them and say, okay, if we're going to destroy the United States, cease to exist as a body politic, and we give the land back to the Indians, which Indians do we give them to? Do we give the land back to the Comanche? I guess we could, but we might want to give it back to the Apache from whom the Comanche

stole the land. Or should we give it back to this group or that group? Even you hear these arguments about the Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills. And we're told by these very same people arguing for the liberation of the oppressed indigenous people, they say, we need to give the Black Hills back to the Lakota Sioux. Well, when did the Lakota come into possession of the Black Hills? In antiquity? No, it was in 1776. It was right around the time that we launched our own revolution here in the United States. And they took it from another group. And the law of conquest still holds as it has held for all of history. If we fall into the trap of radical revolutionary ideology,

there will be no end to the turmoil and there will be no end to the bloodshed. Well said. We just went to Mount Rushmore this past year and took a little venture over to see Crazy Horse, which is under development as well. Do they want to give that back? Who do we give that one back to? Do the Native Americans get that or does it have to go back to the white man

since we're switching it all up? We'll find out. We'll tune in. Let's talk about the White House messaging on this. So we play Karine Jean-Pierre. We're really what we're really concerned about is Islamophobia. That's that's really the issue in response to a direct question on anti-Semitism. Then she tries to clean it up today. She was also asked about the insanity on college campuses and what we're seeing there. And suddenly,

just like those college campus university presidents, she and this White House have found their commitment to free speech in America, Sat 8. But does the president view anti-Israel protests and sentiment on college campuses as anti-Semitism? So look, I'm not gonna get into what's happening across the country and at different universities, not gonna get into the specifics. As the Admiral said, the First Amendment, right? That's what something, peaceful protest is really part of our democracy, being able for folks to be able to express their feelings.

I'm not going to get into any specifics on that. The president has been very clear on denouncing any type of violence. And so as it relates to peaceful protesting, people have the right to do that. Do they? Because I seem to remember some white supremacist rally in which somebody was killed, but separate and apart, just the tiki torch holders. They they became a campaign issue for these people for how long? I'm not sure they're so in favor of peaceful protests when you're saying things like, there's no such thing as a man becoming a woman. When you're saying things as vile as the white supremacists say, right?

It depends on the issue. Corrine, does it not? And this case is the absolute perfect example, Megan, because the most prominent anti-Israel pro-Hamas protest we've seen on campus just took place at Harvard University, where you had dozens of student groups signing this letter against Israel and in support of Hamas. A Harvard professor, Professor Kayem, I think her name is, at the Harvard Kennedy School, just came out in The Advocate, which is some LGBT, LMNOP blog, and called me a stochastic terrorist because in a speech I said that I don't believe in transgenderism and I think men and women are different and

one can't become the other and we should stop entertaining this delusion. This professor at Harvard calls me a stochastic terrorist for saying that boys and girls are different. Meanwhile, Harvard is openly supporting actual terrorists who are committing actual egregious acts of terrorism in the United States and in Israel with absolute impunity. The inversion to them doesn't seem to occur. No surprise, you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much. The inversion doesn't seem to occur because reason has fallen out of their politics. This is one of the hallmarks of the new left, which came about because of a bunch of egghead intellectuals from the Marxist tradition in the 1960s, people like Herbert Marcuse and

others who have followed and infiltrated all of the universities. They have taken reason largely out of the equation and so politics ceases to be a matter for rational inquiry that grants the reality of objective truth which we can discover using our reason and using logic. That all goes out the window. What we've been told by especially the neo-Marxists in the academy is that that's all just a cover for power. All of those arguments are nothing but a facade for the bare bones, bare knuckle battle of

political power. What politics ultimately comes down to for them is we need to destroy our enemies and reward our friends, even if it means that we have to openly support terrorists and we have to cancel ordinary people by calling them terrorists. It's amazing that they've suddenly found their newfound commitment to free speech now. Now, I mean, this White House, by the way, it wasn't just Karine Jean-Pierre. She referenced the admiral. She's talking about John Kirby, who got up and said something similar. Watch him. There's been an uptick on the right among some Republicans who have called for students or foreign nationals who are demonstrating in some of these pro-Palestine demonstrations or, you know, allegedly pro-Balmast demonstrations to have their student visas pulled or face deportation? What is the administration's response to those kinds of remarks, that kind of rhetoric?

I would just tell you you don't have to agree with every sentiment that's expressed in a free country like this to stand by the First Amendment and the idea of peaceful protest. I'll leave it at that. Okay, so now we're getting it from it. So it's okay. If you say you're pro Hamas terrorists, um, because of the first amendment, even though the first question was about college campuses, which don't necessarily involve the government. So the government, you know, they're, they're very careful now, right? It's like, Oh, what's happening on college campuses. Suddenly we don't want to weigh in. Secondly, the issue of deporting foreign nationals who are here, who are openly supporting a

terrorist group and a terrorist attack. It's not imagined. It's not ethereal. It happened two weeks ago and they're in support of it. And they were supporting it and chanting in the streets even before Israel began its retaliation campaign, its justice campaign. So now he wants to defend even the foreigners who are here on our invitation, by our grace, chanting what? That American Jews who were killed in Israel, American Jews who have been taken hostage, that they should stay in Hamas's hands. Get out. Go home. Of course. I point this out in my book, Speechless, that even if we were talking about the First Amendment here, the First Amendment has always had all sorts of limits around it, particularly for this kind of speech going back

to the founding of our country. But that doesn't even really apply to the conversation here. We're talking about foreign nationals who are in the United States on visas at the pleasure of the United States and the government. We easily could rescind these things for any number of reasons, but all of a sudden the White House doesn't want to do that because- Well, and Michael, open support of terrorism is a stated grounds for revoking these visas. It's not even like we have to make it up or make an argument. It's right there. Exactly, exactly. But they're they're in a very tough spot because don't forget the recent historical context surrounding this attack on the state of Israel. Joe Biden had just given the Iranians a ton of money and then the Iranians go ahead and they fund these terror groups that commit the atrocities.

So Joe Biden's hands are not exactly clean here. And there's another issue that goes even below the level of explicit policy down to culture, which is that for a long time in the United States, basically everybody supported the state of Israel. And then that started to break down a little bit during the Obama years with Bibi Netanyahu and then Netanyahu likes Trump and all those things happen. There is the cultural fact that support they're the most gung-ho on the state of Israel. And we're not with them. We're elite educated people from the Beltway or from the ivory tower. And so just as a cultural aversion, a class kind of aversion, you're seeing that class distinction now for support of Israel. And it's happening very,

very quickly, but it's infiltrating all of the elite power centers, including now all the way up to the NSC through its spokesman. It's crazy to watch, you know, like, oh, you know, yeah, they can stay. I mean, how explicit does the support for terror have to be? Because having foreigners here in the United States who openly support terror didn't work out for us so well on September 11th. And we need to be really careful, really careful about this because the latest reports are there are more and more terrorists coming into the United States right now. According to the latest numbers, listen to this. It is hold hold on, 169 people on the FBI's terror watch list have crossed the southern border

as of September. That's fiscal year 2023. That is the highest ever recorded in this past year, for one year, highest year ever recorded, higher than the previous six years combined. Combined. These are people already on the terror watch list streaming across the southern border now, Michael. And if you don't think that we're not going to get a fair amount of Hamas and Hamas, you know, affiliates trying to exploit that weakness, you're crazy. I'm sure they'd love to get here. I'm sure they'd love to go to New York City and to L.A., where we have very large Jewish populations, and see what they can't do to help out the cause domestically over here. Megan, why would Joe Biden and the Democrats

care about foreign terrorists entering the country when they encourage domestic terrorists on their own side? This has been going on at the very least since the George Floyd riots. Don't forget, you had domestic terrorists, BLM and Antifa, people committing textbook definition acts of terrorism, attacking civilians to achieve a political purpose. They were burning down buildings. They were killing dozens of people. They were looting. They were committing arson. They were setting federal buildings on fire. Not only did the Democrats not try to stop it, the Democrats bailed them out of jail. Don't forget, Kamala Harris, now Vice President of the United States, herself directly made an appeal to bail those terrorists out of jail. Staff members for Joe Biden, now the President of the United States, made an appeal to bail those terrorists out of jail. So they support these

kinds of actions. I suspect one of the reasons is that the liberal elite actually benefit from this kind of a chaos. A term used for this is sometimes anarcho-tyranny. So I'm not surprised at all. Probably Joe Biden is going to roll out the red carpet for Hamas and Hezbollah to cross the Rio Grande because they're too busy, worried at what they consider the real terror threat, which is parents who show up to school board meetings, which is Catholics who go to mass, which is pro-lifers who pray on the street outside of abortion clinics. That's where they're going to focus their threat. Meanwhile, the jihadis are going to come skipping across the border. You know, you're I know you're, you know, sort of making a joke, but there's real truth to it, because if you look at that

one hundred and five billion request that Joe Biden announced the other night, one or four or one or five, 60 billion would go help Ukraine. Four billion would go to our southern border, and I think $11 billion to Israel. How do we get the smallest amount of border security and two foreign countries get, I mean, way more than double, I can't do the math, how many times before we're going to 60? A lot, a lot of times, right? So we can see where his priorities are right now. He doesn't care about the war that's being unleashed against us on that southern border as we've completely lost control of what's happening. That number, 169 in a year, would never have been tolerated even five years after 9-11, but now we're getting complacent. Well, of course. And not that long ago, the Democrats were opposed, at least in word,

to illegal immigration. Go listen to Bill Clinton's speeches from the 90s. He would be called a far-right fascist, given his rhetoric today. By the way, Megan, even that $4 billion, while yes, it is paltry, it is nothing compared to $60 billion, compared to $11 billion, but even that $4 billion isn't going to do anything if the Biden administration makes it its official policy not to detain and deport the illegal aliens. So what are they going to do? They're going to staff up a little bit more.

They might build five more inches of a border fence. The people are still going to come across. They're going to be processed in the United States where they're not released on the spot. Then even after their process, they'll be released into the interior of the country, never to be heard from again until they come back and in Joe Biden's expectation, show up and vote for Democrats. So you could give $4 billion or $40 billion or $400 billion if the policy is just to take in whoever comes and not really to deport all that many people, then it's not going to make a difference at all.

And that clearly is the policy. There's been almost no effort to clean up that southern border. And now when he's going back with hat in hand, it's an afterthought. He obviously only included that amount of money just to placate the Republicans whose votes he needs in order to get that through. All right, stand by. We're going to take a quick break and we will be right back more with Michael Knowles, who stays with us. We know what the problem on college campuses, that's very clear. The White House doesn't want to talk about it, but the professors certainly want to be heard. Sev,700 sociology professors, they have nothing else to do, that's obvious, sign a letter accusing Israel of genocide, accusing Israel of

genocide after it's just had 1,500 of its citizens brutally murdered in their beds, in their homes, in their safe shelters, civilians, babies, old ladies, accusing Israel of genocide and arguing that Hamas terror must be contextualized as a response to 75 years of settler colonial occupation and European empire. This is via Chris Ruffo, who's got his finger on the pulse of what's happening on these campuses. So you look at the 1700 signatories, they include signatures from professors at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Brown, Berkeley, and other institutions. If you scroll through, apparently, apparently, they accepted the people of the 1700 and then had to remove as a signatory Dr. Joseph Mengele. But guess who got through as you scroll through? Guess who got through Adolf Hitler, Professor Emeritus, Sociology, University of Austria.

Wow. I don't know why they did such a careful screen of their letter. That sums it up, I think. Some years ago, there was the wonderful SoCal squared grievance studies hoax from Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, where they submitted a bunch of nonsense papers and they were accepted by these nonsense departments, which was really wonderful. We saw in psychology, there was the replication crisis a few years ago, where a lot of studies couldn't be replicated. Forget about sociology and all these other ridiculous pseudo-academic departments. These people want to talk about colonization

in the Middle East. That's fine. I think we should want to talk about colonization in the Middle East. That's fine. I think we should begin by talking about colonization in the academy, however, because what the left has so brilliantly succeeded at over the past 60 years is amassing power by first colonizing the universities. And so what they've done is they became the tenured radicals, to use the phrase of, I think it was Roger Kimball's phrase. They were the radical students of the 1960s. They then remained in the academy. They got professorships, even far left terrorists, members of the Weather Underground, people like Bill Ayers. They become professors. They take over these departments. They establish new departments that exist for no other purpose than to promote leftist ideology

and indoctrination, departments like ethnic studies or women's and gender studies or all the studies, studies departments. And so they fill those departments up with their fellow travelers, and then they gain a greater role in the governance of the university itself. And eventually, they've so stacked the deck that a conservative professor can't even really get through. Forget about in sociology and gender studies and all those ridiculous departments, but even in the relatively more normal departments, departments like history, departments like philosophy, departments like mathematics or engineering. Even those, to a lesser degree, become so stacked with the leftists

who have an agenda that the conservatives get squeezed out. That's happened at virtually every single prestigious university in the United States, to the point that conservatives have now needed alternatives. Conservatives have Hillsdale. Conservatives have Franciscan of Steubenville. And by conservatives, I mean just ordinary people, Christians in many cases, Ave Maria University, Liberty University, Thomas Aquinas College, there are a handful of these, but they lack the massive power and prestige and endowments that you have at places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton. And so these wacko sociologists probably don't know what end is up. I'm almost certain of it. They're going to say things that are egregious and preposterous,

but they're not going to face any consequences for it because they own the universities and with it, a lot of influence. You're so right. I mean, like to jump right to, okay, we have to contextualize the terror, which they don't use the word terror, just the violence in the context of 75 years of settler colonial occupation. Oh, tell us, what side are you on? It's hard for us to glean. They go on to say as educators, it's our duty to stand by the principles of critical inquiry and learning. Well, that's true, but you've completely abandoned your duty to hold the university as a space for conversation that foregrounds historical truths. And then they go on to say we're also deeply troubled by the lack of concern and care for Palestinian and Muslim students at many of our universities, as well

as efforts to clamp down on student organizing and free speech. Leave the students for justice for Palestine students. Leave them alone. Let them go out there and chant that Israel has no right to exist or kill the Jews or gas the Jews or whatever happens to be the slogan du jour. They're the ones who are the real victims. Just ask Karine Jean-Pierre. So these people, you're right. They have access to our kids at all of these elite universities. Bill Ayers founded Weather Underground, who you mentioned. He's at University of Illinois. His wife, Bernadine Dorn, she was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted. She's at Northwestern Law School. You're right. They got into these universities and we mocked them and we kind of scoffed at it like this is absurd. And yet they're creating their own new terror adjacent network.

Of course. I mean, I suppose it already existed because they were literally terrorists in the 1960s. So the network has been festering for a long time and we all mocked it. And we said, five or six years ago, we said, oh, look at these crazy little snowflakes on the college campuses. Just wait until they get into the real world and then they'll learn a lesson or two. And that didn't happen. They taught us all a lesson or two. They taught us all a lesson about political power. Where these sociology professors who support terrorism give away the game, though, is just after the justification. Because they say, well, we oppose colonialism and settlements. And the implication is they

oppose the establishment of the state of Israel. And one could even grant all of their questions and say, yes, the Israel-Palestine conflict is a very long one. It's gone on in its present form for more than a century, and it's gone on in some form or another for millennia at this point. So, yes, there are all sorts of complexities to it. In no circumstance justified by none of those complexities can one attack civilians and commit acts of terrorism and rape, kill, pillage, and burn innocent people. If one wants to make an argument that the Palestinians are entitled to some form of war or some form of state or whatever, then in order to make any argument at all, you have to subject that argument to reason.

Fortunately, we in the West have something called just war theory, and it dates all the way back to antiquity. It goes back to Cicero, perhaps even further back, and it's developed by people like St. Thomas Aquinas and many great thinkers since then. And it means that there are certain criteria that must exist in order to justify, one, going to war, and two, conducting war. And those are related but distinct fields. And one can think about it and have a discussion about it and make sure that you dot your T's and cross your I's while you are engaging in war. There is no argument whatsoever, according to any ethical or moral view, that would justify acts of terrorism against civilians.

Now, have these sociologists ever even considered just war? Have they ever read a serious philosopher in their lives? Probably not. But it just shows you how hollow the university has become because they dress up their arguments and all this fancy jargon with their nice little hats and diplomas and university robes from the ivory tower, but it's all completely absent any actual intellectual rigor or tradition. It is nothing but a facade for their naked, appetitive political interests to bludgeon the people that they consider to be their enemies. And then they'll go and sip high tea afterwards in Harvard Yard. But it's all a farce for the most ruthless, brutal, thuggish kind of behavior that one could expect. Okay, because I am an OCD type person, I have to say it's cross your T's and dot your I's. Oh, I was so close. It's like a little robot inside of me like, have to correct.

It's going to bother me. I know you know that, um, you, something you said is very true and kind of chilling, not kind of, it is chilling about how we laughed at them and we thought we'd be teaching them a lesson. And in fact, they're teaching us a lesson. I used to say years ago on Fox, I used to say, great, you know, you go ahead, cry in your soup, you little snowflakes. I can't wait until my kids have to compete against you. You losers. My kids are going to crush you. They're going to crush you all because they're strong and they've been allowed to fail and they understand what true safety and true danger are. And it's,

it's not true. Like, look at the way you have to apply to get into college now. It's destitution derby. You know, I'm oppressed on many, many fronts. I'm I'm a lesbian and I'm black and I'm in a wheelchair and I'm whatever, whatever. I'm trans. I'm actually secretly a man. All of it to try to one up the next applicant. My mother washed more floors for less money than your mother did. And I promise you she was darker.

Yes, it's a personal statement component. My mother washed more floors for less money than your mother did. And I promise you, she was darker. Yes. It has to have a melanin component. It has to have a melanin component because the class no longer matters. But like you as Michael Knowles, this brilliant young white man applying, saying, I am a Christian and I had a really lovely childhood. I had good parents and I had a nice supportive system around me. It's like, it's a no, get out, right? They have one. Well, even now, after the Supreme Court shot down affirmative action in college admissions, because it was being used to discriminate

against white people, which probably would have been fine, they would have gotten away with that. But it was also discriminating against these poor Asian people. And even in our politically correct culture, that still was a bridge too far. So they struck down race-based affirmative action. But then what did the universities do? What did Harvard say the next day? They said, oh, don't worry about that decision. Yes, we're not going to have the racial box on the application anymore. But don't worry, we still have the personal statement. So in fact, they doubled down on exactly what you're describing, the oppression Olympics. Some started asking for videotape submissions. If you could just read your essay aloud.

What do you need that for? Whatever do you need that for? Keep going. Just to see if they like the cut of our jib, I think. That must be what they're after. It's so transparent, but it's so infuriating, right? That wellness will be held against you. And these weak snowflakes, they're the ones who are getting into these colleges. Not that we want our kids to go to these colleges anymore. But all of this has fed into what's now exploding on these campuses at the professorial and the student level. You know, my friend Yoram Hazoni made a really great point.

Speaking of Jews and intellectuals, Yoram Hazoni, an Israeli philosopher, made this point that all we hear today is about the importance of critical thinking. Even I've used the phrase, many of us on the right use the phrase, but he said, why do we have this exclusive focus on critical thinking to the complete neglect of constructive thinking? Isn't the point of thinking to build upon ideas and to grow in complexity and to gain a clearer view of the world and objective reality? Why is everything merely about criticism and breaking things down? It ties into just what we were talking about at the university. The story of the destruction of the Western university has been the story of the growth of critical theory, critical literary theory, critical legal theory, critical this theory, critical racial theory, all of

these different critical theories which seek ultimately something that was called for by Karl Marx, which is the complete destruction of all that exists. So we tear things down. They're very good at tearing things down. They're very good at exalting brokenness and failure and all sorts of unpleasant conditions. But to your point, Megan, shouldn't we want to be normal? Shouldn't we want to have a good society? Shouldn't we want to flourish? Isn't that the standard to which we are aiming? What the universities have done not only is take truth out of the equation,

what the universities have done is not only take the great works of the Western canon out of the situation, but they've even inverted the standard. Now the standard to be aimed at is brokenness and resentment and envy and pride and all of the deadly sins, all of the brokenness of this world, rather than what it used to be, which is you would go to education to become most perfectly yourself, to make sense of your freedom, and to become good and normal. Good and normal have no place in the modern university. I'm just now seeing, forgive the analogy because it's too extreme, but I'm just seeing it. We've been talking a lot about how Hamas, and it's not just Hamas, let's face it, there are many Palestinians who do this too, raise their kids to hate Jews. It's kind of it's baked right into their school books,

their cradle lessons that you hate. You hate Jews. You see them is the Israelis are the infidel. You have to you know how many they teach math with like you killed three Israelis and your brother killed two. How many Israelis are dead? That's in textbooks over there. It's it's kind of, you know, far afield, but it's kind of related to the way our professors see our children going into these universities. They have all these fresh recruits on whom they can imprint their terrible ideas. And let's face it, the parents have a hand in it, too, because I know that when you get older and have children who are college age, Michael Knowles' children will not be in danger of being indoctrinated

in this way at any university. Brown, Stanford, Harvard, they won't. And mine won't either, because they're being inoculated by me and my husband every day. I wish we didn't have to do it, right? But it's a treacherous combo of parents who are too busy or just trusting the schools, and then these agenda-driven professors who really want to recruit them as soldiers. Of course. And I think the analogy is apt, because this has always been the great promise of education, is that kids' minds are pretty malleable. Especially when they're much younger, you can shape them. But even when they're in college, it's much easier to shape a kid's mind than a 50-year-old's

mind. But you point out that Hamas raises their kids just to consistently hate Jews. What the university professors teach the kids to do is to hate their parents, hate their family, hate their heritage, hate their culture, and hate their country. So it's much closer to home. And that principle that seems like it's so far away on the other side of the world, it's in action here as well. Yeah. And you know, Victor Davis Hanson has a really good piece up talking about what to do to figure out whether you're about to send your kid to one of these campuses. One of the things he says is, go sit on the quad for an hour. See what groups are there. See what you hear. Get your hands on

some syllabi. Go through the bookstore, the college bookstore, and see what books are required. It's all good stuff. And there's a bit about federal loans as well. Michael Knowles stays with us. Don't go away. Michael, the congressional reaction from the squad continues to horrify. Rashida Tlaib now continues to refuse to acknowledge that it was not an Israeli airstrike and it did not hit a hospital. It was a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas that fell on a parking lot next to a hospital. And like the New York Times, which continues to repeat that this Palestinian, this Hamas information that it was hundreds, it was almost 500 dead. The Europeans that have gone in to investigate, they say they believe it's between 10 and 50 who died, not 500. Okay. So the New

York Times continued to push that yesterday, even as they were trying to issue a correction of their earlier misreporting Rashida Tlaib, AOC, same continue. And in the face of all this, so Rashida Tlaib blames us, both the Israeli and the United States governments have long documented histories of misleading the public about wars and war crimes. Okay. In this context, she doesn't believe our Pentagon, our Pentagon's, I guess, just knee-jerk siding with the side that provided radar, that provided raw video, that we saw on Al Jazeera simultaneously, that provided an intercepted call between two Hamas terrorists. Okay. So she won't go there. She doesn't want to know the truth.

Then here's AOC talking to, I mean, really, he's just, he's a Hamas sympathizer, Mehdi Hassan, MSNBC's face of the coverage here. And here's the conversation, just a bit of it that they had on Sunday, Sot6. You mentioned dehumanization. All or almost all of the at least 18 House Democrats who've called for a ceasefire in Gaza are people of color. How much of the at least 18 House Democrats who've called for a ceasefire in Gaza, are people of color. How much of the congressional indifference to Palestinian life in Gaza, the refusal in D.C. to acknowledge sometimes the humanity and the innocence, not to mention suffering of ordinary Gazans, how much of that is driven by the fact that they're Arabs or they're mostly all Muslims or they don't look like us, do you think? I mean, I will say that I have long found

the ignoring and sidelining of Palestinians in the U.S. House of Representatives, the humanity of Palestinian populations in the five years that I've been in Congress quite shocking. There we go. Back to skin color and the reason the lunatics like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush are being sidelined is their skin color, not the lunacy of what they're saying, Michael. Yes, not because Rashida Tlaib called for the abolition of all prisons in the United States, not because of any. That's just one example. It's like shooting fish in a barrel with bad political opinions from Rashida Tlaib. No, no. It's because she is vaguely brown. Yes. If you look outside of Rashida Tlaib's office, you can get a perfect picture of the American left. You get a union sticker on the door, a union sticker for striking union workers who are striking

because of Joe Biden's policies on union workers. You get that disingenuous union sticker on the wall. Then you get a Palestine flag. Then you get a flag of the state of Michigan. That's good. Then you get a flag of the city of Detroit. Okay, that's pretty good. And then you get the rainbow gay flag. There's one flag that's missing. I don't know if you could catch in that summary. There's one kind of important flag. The American flag has no place whatsoever in Rashida Tlaib's office because the left, while always vaguely anti-American,

is now overtly anti-American. And so I don't think there's anything wrong with disregarding the opinion of a woman who would raise all sorts of flags, but the one that she's supposed to represent as a member of Congress. And further, I would go further than that. I would say no American politician outside of a diplomatic role should be flying the flag of a foreign country at their government office. There's something deeply disordered about that. But then there's much that is deeply disordered with the entire squad. They are all demanding an immediate ceasefire. They continue to not take responsibility for Hamas in terms of contextualizing the civilians who are dying in Gaza right now. It's all on Hamas. Every civilian that is dying in Gaza is a result of Hamas's terrorist attack. That's the truth. The civilians that are troops killed inadvertently in Afghanistan

when they invaded in Iraq. That's all as a result of the 9-11 terrorists. That is not American soldiers wanting to kill civilians. This is what happens in a war. A fact that the media won't report. They want to blame it all on Israel, evil Israel without contextualize any, any of it. And this is, we get more details on the horrors that led Israel to engage in this retaliatory strike to begin with. Um, we talked about this a little bit yesterday, but there was a very just jarring article in the Atlantic by Graham wood about what was shown to those reporters, that 43 minutes of raw footage that the Israeli defense forces felt the need to show reporters because there's been

so much, quote, Holocaust denialism. There's been so much denialism or downplaying of what happened to these 1500 Israelis who were killed, captured, maimed, tortured 1500 dead, nevermind the number who were tortured and maimed and hurt. Um, and we're not even accounting for the emotional trauma of what these young children in particular had to witness, nevermind their moms and dads. Um, here's in part what he writes and you should keep in mind, I talked about this with Dershowitz. He's actually going to be here in a minute. He told me years ago about how Hamas uses civilians as human shields and how Israel, and then because they want the footage, they want the footage of the civilians, you know, and the children dead or hurt on TV. The Israelis do exactly the opposite. They almost

never release photos of their dead because they have a respect for the dead that prevents it. So it is extremely rare for them to be releasing any of these photos or videos that were taken by the terrorists and that they got their hands on. So this is what Woodwright writes in part. Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not. The terrorists surround a Thai man they have shot in the gut, then bicker about what to do next. About 30,000 Thais live in Israel, many of them farm workers.

Give me a knife, one Hamas terrorist shouts. Instead, he finds a garden hoe, and he swings at the man's throat, taking thwack after thwack. The audience gasped. I heard someone heave a little at another scene, this one showing a father and his young sons surprised in their pajamas. A terrorist throws a grenade into their hiding place and the father is killed. The boys are covered in blood and one appears to have lost an eye. They go into their kitchen and cry for their mother. One of the boys howls, why am I alive? And daddy, daddy. One says, I think we're going to die. The terrorist who killed their father comes in and while they weep, he raids their fridge. Water, water, he says. The spokesman

was unable to say whether the children survived. The videos show pure predatory sadism, no effort to spare those who pose no threat, and an eagerness to kill nearly unmatched by eagerness, nearly matched by eagerness to disfigure the bodies of the victims. In several clips, the Hamas killers fire shots into the heads of people who are already dead. Some of the clips I had not previously seen simply show the victims in a state of terror as they wait to be murdered or covered with bits of their friends and loved ones as they are loaded into trucks and brought to Gaza as hostages. There was no footage of rape, although there was footage of young women huddling in fear and then being executed in a leisurely manner. I don't have any tolerance for AOC, Rashida Tlaib.

I don't want to hear about collective punishment. I don't want to hear about ceasefire. I don't want to hear about where that congressional indifference to inhumanity over there is causing the U.S. support of Israel. Those are all lies. And it's completely inaccurate framing of what happened here. As you point out, Megan, Israel does a very good job, relatively, of minimizing civilian deaths. Unlike Hamas, they don't go out and target civilians, though sometimes civilians do die as a result of any military conflict. This is not to say that Israel has the perfect policy or Israel is above criticism. I have all sorts of disagreements with Israel on matters of foreign policy.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict recently would be an example of that. But when we're talking about this particular conflict, I think there is a pretty good rule of thumb, which is not just that AOC is so wrong about this issue or Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar or any of the rest of the radical leftists in the American government. They haven't heard the evidence. They haven't heard the stories. They haven't heard the stories. They haven't seen the pictures. They're just wrong about this. No. The fact is they're wrong about basically everything. They disagree with normal, well-formed people on questions of first principles, which is why they reliably get every single issue wrong. And so when one looks at any political conflict, and up to and including war, if all the people who are wrong about everything are on one side

of the conflict, then it's a pretty good bet that you ought to be on the other side of the conflict. You could apply that same rule, and I know you you have with our old pal Greta Thunberg. She's decided to weigh in on this. My God, it's almost as bad as Alyssa Milano. Greta Thunberg has decided to come out for the audience. As a reminder, she's a Swedish climate activist. She's now 20, the ripe old age of 20, burst onto the scene in 18 when she was 15 years old. And she posted on X, today we strike in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza. The world needs to speak up and call for an immediate ceasefire, justice and freedom for Palestinians and all civilians affected. She was apparently holding a light blue stuffed octopus on her

shoulder in the original post, which critics interpreted to be this mythical multi-tentacled sea beast that was occasionally used in Nazi iconography. Greta pleads ignorance, saying she had no idea. But last week, she shared on her Instagram a post from this pro-Palestinian account, Palestine Speaks, which was celebrating Hamas's lethal assault on Israel. They thought it was wonderful. I mean, I could keep going. So she's back, Michael, and she's got similarly inane thoughts to the ones that first put her on the national scene. Greta's on strike. Megan, correct me if I'm wrong, but in order to go on strike, don't you first need to have a job? Isn't that a prerequisite of striking? I sort of thought it was. But she's been striking. That is the job. The job is to strike. And she's been striking to stop the sun monster from killing us all for the past 269 weeks, I guess. And now for 270th week, she's going to shake it up and forget about Mother Gaia for a second and protest in support of Hamas.

My favorite thing about the whole post is the one poor little girl in the background. And by little girl, I mean, you know, 20-something-year-old woman. She's got a poster up that says, Climate Justice Now. So while all the rest of them, they're talking about Gaza and Palestine and Israel, she didn't

get the memo and she still had the old protest sign. So it was very unfortunate. They should have let her retake the photo. But it can be very confusing because these leftist causes change by the day, sometimes by the hour. But once again, I think another't feel sorry for that girl in the back because this is what they are doing. They're trying to wrap all their causes into one. BLM, it's the same thing as stand with Palestine. Climate justice is the same thing as justice for Palestine. On Twitter yesterday, I retweeted this. We'll put it up on the board. They're marching. Reproductive justice means free Palestine.

What? Abortion? Is that like? And honestly, literally, these Hamas terrorists were pulling babies out of pregnant mothers' wombs. And these idiots are walking out there with this sign. Well, this actually is the only comparison that I think actually makes sense because reproductive justice, quote unquote, you know, just killing babies in the womb through abortion has a lot to do with the arguments in favor of Hamas. It's all about killing innocent people and acting outside the ordinary norms of morals. So that one makes sense to me. I think the abortionists and the Hamas people have a lot in common. The one that seems to make a little bit less sense is, I don't know if you've seen the viral photos of the Queers for Palestine.

This is a movement of LGBT, LMNOP activists, and they are strongly supportive of Hamas. And this is another one where it's maybe horseshoe theory. Perhaps I'm coming around here and trying to come to a nice conciliatory middle ground. I believe that every single LGBT activist in America should get their wish and be sent to Palestine. Not just the ordinary LGBT element of people have whatever they do in their own homes. I'm talking about the activists with the flags who yell and scream and try to indoctrinate your kids. If they want to go to the Gaza Strip, I support congressional authorization for billions and billions of dollars, first class airfare, I will donate.

It's so unbelievable. Yeah, exactly. I love, did you just tweet that? I don't want to ruin the surprise. You'll see when you get there. Get back to us on how it goes. Let's switch and talk about, it was on your show. That's where I heard you say. Let's talk about politics for one minute, like presidential politics, not AOC and those lunatics. So Trump is back out there and he's making news for all sorts of reasons. But I've got to play you this sound because I don't know what he's doing here. And I would love to get the Michael Knowles weigh in on the following bit of wisdom. Stop 14. Macron, nice guy. You know, look, he's for France. I'm for us. I'm for us. You know how you spell us, right? You spell us, U.S.

I just picked that up. Has anyone ever thought of that? I just picked that up. A couple of days I'm reading and it said us. i said you know if you think about it us equals us is isn't that now if we say something genius they'll never say it i gotta take notes i gotta hold on let me get my notepad out here megan did you know over into kamala harala Harris territory there. He doesn't need to do that. How about this, Megan? Did you ever consider the fact that we drive on the parkway, but park in the driveway? Did you ever consider that either?

Did you ever consider the fact that grape nuts have neither grapes nor nuts? Hmm. Megan, I need a little bit of a moment to process this. I'll tell you though, this is a particularly extreme version of Trump's characteristic rhetoric, but why does it resonate? One, it's kind of entertaining, but two, we're living in an age where no settled truth is accepted anymore, where up is down and black is white and left is right. And so when a man gets on stage and he says, hey, you ever consider the fact that us is spelled U.S.? How about that, huh? That is, frankly, it's a revelation.

You know, I do. I get what Trump is saying and I get what the America First crowd wants and why they're like, screw everything and everyone other than us until we get a handle on, you know, inflation on our economy, which the vast majority of people hate on, including Democrats and independents. This is why he's leading Biden in, I think, five or seven critical swing states because it's because of the economy. And he's way ahead of Biden in a couple of these. And it's because of the border, which we discussed earlier, right? Like, that's what people are saying. Keep saying we can do it all.

We can do it all. We don't have to choose between Ukraine and America. But we're not choosing. We're choosing them instead of us, which is, I mean, I think I put it more fully than Trump was getting at in that one clip. Just slightly more eloquent, perhaps. Yeah, that's a bit very very I mean, I'm not particularly eloquent today, but I get the point. Here's the other thing he's getting hammered on.

Tell me what you think of this one, because our pal Ben Shapiro has been railing on Trump for a long, long time now about if you think the 2012 2020 election was rigged, what is your plan to unrig it in 2024? Because if it's nothing, then what's the point? It's just going to lead to apathy. People aren't going to go out and vote. You need a you need a plan. If they stole it, how they steal it. What's the remedy? If it was, you know, ballot harvesting, then what's your plan? Do more ballot harvest harvesting on the right. What is it? And I asked Trump about this in our interview, and he didn't really have a solid answer, to be honest with you. He kind of meandered. And so he speaks again to voting on Election Day.

And here's what he said in New Hampshire on Monday. So we have to be careful. You got to get out there and you got to watch those voters. You don't have to vote. Don't worry about voting. The voting. We got plenty of votes. You got to watch election night. You know, it used to be election day, election night. Now it's election month. So don't worry about voting is not the best. It's not the best. One might say, unfortunately, phrased because I assume what President Trump meant to say is don't worry about voting. We've got all the votes. All the people are going to come vote for us. You don't need to worry about getting out to vote.

You got to watch the ballot box. Now, it might be better to phrase it a little more explicitly for people who might otherwise want to sit home. But the point he's making on counting the vote is really important. It gets back to some advice that FDR once gave LBJ after LBJ lost a race. FDR said, you forgot to sit on the ballot box. It's one thing to get out the vote, but counting and tabulating those votes is what really matters. And LBJ took that to heart when he stole the Texas Senate election in 1948, an election that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And then the Supreme Court didn't

want to hear the case. So they just rejected hearing it, and LBJ was allowed to go to the Senate and then become VP and then become president. We didn't find out with good proof that the election was stolen until decades later. LBJ was already dead at that point. There's some similarities here because the courts often don't want to be the deciders of elections. So they'll say, well, you don't have jurisdiction to bring suit, or we don't have jurisdiction to argue. And so anyway, we're out of here. Just run your own elections. So Trump is right about that. I was disappointed that he didn't have a clearer answer in your interview with him. I felt that was the most important part of the interview. The answer

cannot be that the right needs to do better at ballot harvesting, in part because our voters live in rural areas, and the our voters live in rural areas and the voters live in the cities where the machines are very, very effective. So we can harvest as many ballots as we can try to harvest, but it's just not going to work. They have a major geographic advantage there. The only way that the liberals could not rig the show quite as much as they did last time. This time is if the COVID lockdown voting rules are greatly reduced. I mean, that was the way that they changed the voting laws in Pennsylvania in that case against the state constitution and the way they changed the voting rules in terms of widespread mail-ins and ballot drop boxes and all the rest of it all throughout the

country. So the GOP needs an answer to that. And, you know, Trump is probably otherwise occupied right now dealing with all these crazy court cases and all the rest of it. But where is the RNC on this? You know, where are the other Republican leaders? Because you don't need to believe that, you know, Hugo Chavez was counting ballots in Venezuela on a secret Dominion machine to believe that there were lots of problems with the 2020 election. I mean, there were the same problems that Barack Obama predicted even 10 years ago with widespread mail-ins and all the rest of it. But if you're in Republican leadership now, if it's your job to run Republican campaigns and elections,

what's the answer? Because I want something to hold on to hope for. I think the people will resonate with our message. But if you don't sit on the ballot box, if you don't count the ballots the right way, but nobody right now has enough votes to actually win the big vote. You can't elect a speaker. The RNC isn't changing much to get a free and fair election. And the guy most likely to be the nominee is charged in four different criminal trials, which are BS, I grant you. However, he's going to be extremely distracted over the next

year leading up to November 2024 dealing with all these criminal trials where he does have to sit in the courtroom. He's going to have to be there and he's going to have to answer these charges and they're going to be a huge distraction for him as he deals with all this nonsense and most of the dollars that people donate to his campaign are going to have to go to his lawyers. It's extremely expensive to pay for lawyers around the clock for one criminal trial, never mind four. Right. So, I mean, I know like the polls look pretty good here and there, but it's like you got to like be careful. Don't let yourself get too excited because not much has changed about those covid voting procedures that have changed. The RNC seems in disarray. The Republican Party seems

in disarray. And the guy most likely to win the nomination has got one hell of a year coming his way. Exactly. And obviously, the reason that the Democrats are pushing all of these preposterous lawsuits and criminal prosecutions is precisely for that to divert not only attention, because I think that there will then be a lot of media attention on the trial, so that might redound to Trump's benefit, because they're so obviously unjust, but it's going to suck up a lot of money, as you point out. It's extraordinarily expensive to pay these legal fees. That's why they're doing it, and yet we're not hearing any solution to those election

rules that largely remain in place. And we're not seeing unity from the Republican Party. The Republican Party has always had more factions to it than the Democrats did. The Democrats used to be divided between the progressives and the blue dogs, the conservatives. The conservatives don't exist anymore. Joe Manchin is the last one. It's all progressives. It's all leftists.

So they have unity. They're united behind Hakeem Jeffries in the Congress. For the conservatives, for the republicans rather, we've got the conservatives. We've got the chamber of commerce people. We've got the libertarians who are sometimes with the conservatives and sometimes with the libertarian people. We've got the neocons. We've got – I've heard it said that obscure political monikers are the right wing version

of gender pronouns. Every individual seems to have his own. And that's a big problem because if now we can't pick a speaker and we've got to come to some compromise candidate with Democrats, not only is it going to impede our ability to investigate Joe Biden, to impeach Joe Biden, to obstruct the Democrats' terrible policies that are going through the House, but it's also going to be a representation of a broader problem in the election. Is the Republican Party going to be able to come together, work together to win that election? It's like that old H.L. Mencken line that democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. We lament the sorry state of Congress.

Well, they are our representatives and they represent legitimate factions and divisions within the Republican Party that don't seem to be ready to come together anytime soon. Yeah. It's like electing the Hatfields and McCoys to co-govern together. Good luck with that. Just the latest update, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Republican from Minnesota, he's won the internal vote for whose name they should send to the floor. But that does not mean that was after five rounds of secret ballot votes among the conference. That does not mean he has the two 17 needed to become speaker. He was number three when Kevin McCarthy was speaker. He is not liked by the more Trumpy wing of the party. Um, Trump has opposed him, Steve Bannon,

whatever he opposes him. Uh, so, you know, it's not going to be a cakewalk for him that it doesn't seem like MAGA is just going to jump in line behind him. So around and around and around we go. Where are we stop? Nobody knows. Michael Knowles. Thank you, my friend. Great to see you. Great to be with you, Megan. Thanks for having me. OK, when we come back, Alan Dershowitz. And here's what I'm going to ask him. You've heard all about the occupation, the occupation, the occupation. What the hell do they mean? What is there an occupate?

Like what? Alan Dershowitz is going to walk us through this and you will learn the lies that are being told. Okay. In very straight, he's very easy to understand. All those years as the favorite professor at Harvard law school have given him a unique ability to communicate clearly. I'm going to ask him about that. I'm also going to ask him about these lawyers who have just flipped on Trump down in the Georgia case, Sidney Powell, another guy and Jenna Ellis today. Stand way back in episode 104 in may of 2021 we had a great debate on this program about israel and the

long-standing issues with the palestinians hamas and beyond i recently re-listened to it it stands it withstands the test of time our guests in that episode were alan dersershowitz and Shadi Hamid, and they were great. They were civil. They conceded points. They fought on points. But you really do get a very good overview of how how things have unfolded there over the past 75 years. Well worth a listen now, and especially after the events of October 7th. Alan Dershowitz joins me now again. And, you know, he's got this timing thing. He wrote The Case Against Trump, then Trump got indicted four times. Now he's written the upcoming book, War Against the Jews, How to End Hamas Barbarism, which is set to be released in December.

Alan, what's the deal? Did you write this from October 8th through now? No, I started on October 7th. I actually violated my religious principles and worked on Saturday and began writing the book, called my publisher on the 8th. He asked me if I could get it in 10 days. And I said I could, and I dropped everything. And I wrote the book. Yeah, you know, fairly what happened on October 7th and Israel's reaction to it, what's going on on campuses, what's going on all around the world. And I think it's a pretty good summary and analysis of and forecast about where we're going from here. So first of all, let me say that I'm very sorry

about everything that's happened in Israel. And I know you've spent so much time over there and over the course of your lifetime trying to work for peace. And it must have been extremely upsetting to you. I don't know if you had anybody killed or you know kids, young men and women going into the forces, but I'm sure it's been tumultuous. Oh, yeah. I know a lot of my relatives are in the army and they're on the Gaza border. Four of my father's brother's families all live in Israel. You know, I've met with every Israeli leader and every Palestinian leader. I, you know, I've had dinner with Mohammed Abbas. I had dinner with Fayyad. I have lots of Palestinian friends on all sides of the issue. I don't have any Hamas friends, I have to tell you that. I'm

very proud of that. And one point that I think has to be made very clearly right at the outset, I know you're going to ask me about pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses. Let me state categorically, there has never been a pro-Palestinian demonstration on any university campus since October 7th. Not a single pro-Palestinian event. Every single event, every single rally has been anti-Palestinian, anti-Israel, pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism. Because if you're pro-Palestinian, you cannot be pro-Hamas. You cannot be in favor of what Hamas did to the people of Palestine, what it continues to do. Every time it attacks Israel, it knows that Palestinian civilians will die as collateral damage. So there have been no demonstrations that are pro-Palestine. They've all just been anti-Israel. I have seen not a single sign

demanding the two-state solution. Nobody wants the two-state solution. They want to see Palestine will be free from the river to the sea, which means that everything that is now Israel will be Judenrein, to use the Nazi phrase, rid of Jews. So don't let anybody confuse pro-Palestine. I'm pro-Palestine. I'm in favor of a two-state solution, in favor of Palestine. These people on the street are not pro-Palestine. And just for the record, there's a lot of topics I want to get to, but for the record, you pointed out when you were on in 2021 debating this, they've been offered a two state solution over and over and over. They don't want it. They were offered. They got all of Gaza. They were offered most of the West Bank time and time again. It's been a no.

Palestinians don't know how to take yes for an answer. And they were offered a state 38, 48, 67, 90, 91, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, and most recently, during the end of the Trump administration, they've always said, no, they don't want two states, they want one state, and they want it to be a caliphate, they want it to be an Islamic jihad state, they want it to be like Iran, they want it to be a caliphate. They want it to be an Islamic jihad state. They want it to be like Iran. They want it to be an enemy of America. And many Israelis, the majority of Israelis, are in favor of some kind of a two-state solution. And many Palestinians, individuals, probably are too, but certainly Hamas, it's in their charter. They reject the two-state solution categorically. And the demonstrators, these new neo-Nazis who are on the streets today,

some of them are Jewish, some of them are Christian, some of them are Muslim, but they all support Hamas. And if you support Hamas, it's like the Harvard students in the 1930s and the Yale students who supported Adolf Hitler. They demonstrated in favor of Adolf Hitler. There were marches down the street of York raped, it was their fault. The children who were beheaded, it was their fault. I put them in the same category as the Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s. The IDF, the chief of staff on Tuesday spoke from the southern border saying, I want to be clear, we are ready to invade. They have not yet invaded Gaza. And there was, I'm sure you saw it over the weekend, an opinion piece by Tom Friedman in the New York times titled Israel's about to make a terrible mistake. And he went on to say that if they, as Israel rushes, if they rush headlong

into Gaza now to destroy Hamas, and, and if they do so without expressing a clear commitment to seek a two state solution with the Palestinian Authority and end Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank, it will be making a grave mistake that could trigger a global conflagration and explode the entire pro-American alliance structure that the U.S. has built in the region since Kissinger and really had was sounding the alarm saying the hour is late. I've never written a column this urgent before because I've never been more worried about how the situation could spin out of control in ways that could damage Israel irreparably, damage U.S. interests irreparably, Palestinians

and threaten Jews everywhere, not to mention destabilize the whole world. What do you make of it? Well, Tom Friedman has made mistake after mistake after mistake. He has his own narrative of what Israel should do. It's been wrong almost all the time. Here, I mean, he has a point. I would like to see Israel delay any ground incursion, largely because it will kill Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers. I'd rather see them continue

to conduct their attack on Hamas and Hamas leadership from the air. And I agree with you that it ought to be open to a two-state solution. They have been open. Is this the time for it, while people are still mourning their children and 220 people of all backgrounds are being held as hostages. You know, Tom Friedman has this inability to understand time. He doesn't understand the room. He doesn't understand the atmosphere out there. His ideas may have some relevance in the future, but certainly don't ask Israel now to extend an olive branch of peace to its enemies before they have managed to destroy the enemies of civilization, that is, the new ISIS, Hamas. Once that's done, then let's listen to Tom Friedman and other voices, and let's see if we can move to a two-state solution,

as Israel tried to do for so many, so many years. But Tom Friedman, please stop lecturing Israel on the two state solution. Start lecturing the Palestinians. You are close to them. They listen to lecture them on the two state solution. OK, can you explain, Alan, because you hear these leftists on the campus, on cable news, in the halls of Congress, from the squad talking about how it's the occupation. The occupation has to end the occupation, genocidal apartheid state. Can you just take that on in a way that like people who are not as steeped in Israel as you are can understand? First of all, almost all these people mean by occupation, the occupation of Tel Aviv,

the occupation of Haifa, the occupation of Jerusalem, the people who were killed in the horrible brutality were not on the West Bank. They were not in the Gaza. They were people, peacemakers, who lived in the Kibbutzim. So although I've been opposed to civilian settlements for a long time, that is not the core of the problem. The core of the problem is not what Israel does. It's what Israel is, not the core of the problem. The core of the problem is not what Israel does. It's what Israel is, the nation state of the Jewish people. And these folks, they don't care about the occupation. In fact, they thrive on the occupation. What is the occupation? Define the occupation. Define the occupation.

In 1967, all the Arab armies essentially declared war on Israel and threatened the genocidal elimination of Israel. Israel then, of course, attacked Egypt and Syria. Jordan then attacked Israel. Israel won the war. Jordan attacked Israel, and Israel captured the West Bank. Israel is immediately offered to return the West Bank in exchange for peace. Rejected. The Arab countries all went to Khartoum and issued their three famous no's, no peace, no negotiation, and no recognition of Israel. So it's not to be returned were areas necessary for Israel's strategic protection. And Palestinians rejected that offer. So don't talk to me about the occupation. Talk to the Palestinians. They could have ended the occupation

over and over and over again. Sorry to be dumb about this. Forgive me. But is it the fact that there are Israeli settlements within the West Bank? Like what? In what way are they occupying Palestine? I know about the blockade, of course, in Gaza. Well, remember, the blockade in Gaza didn't start when Israel. I know that we've been talking about that, but stick with the occupation as a larger concept. That Gaza is occupied and the West Bank. And yes, there is a military occupation of the West Bank, just like we, the United States, occupied Germany and Japan until they fully surrendered and gave up all of their arms.

And of course, the Palestinians haven't surrendered. So a military occupation is perfectly acceptable under international law. It's the settlements, and there are different settlements. One of the first settlements was an area that was supposed to be part of Israel in the 1948 UN resolution. And the Arabs overran it and killed, I think, 43 people who had already surrendered with their hands up. And once 67 war occurred, the families of the people who were killed went and said, we need that land back. It's part of Israel. That was the beginning of the so-called occupation. Then it's been expanded, and I've been opposed to the expansion. I had a front page signed statement with a number of us opposing the first religious settlement called An-Morah on the West Bank. You can argue about

all that, but Israel was prepared to give all that up in exchange for peace. So the occupation is not at the center. It's an excuse. It gives them a justification. It allows them to use the terrible term apartheid, which has nothing. I defended Nelson Mandela. I was one of his lawyers. I understand what apartheid means. These are phrases that are turned around. And the world, you care about the Palestinians. Why don't you care about the Kurds? Why don't you care about the Uyghurs? The only reason they care about the Palestinians is that the people that allegedly oppressed them are Jews. This is core, basic, old-fashioned anti-Semitism turned into anti-Zionism. If you care about the Palestinians, why don't you care about the Kurds?

There are more of them. They were promised more. They use nonviolence for the most part. But they are oppressed by the Syrians, the Iraqis, and the Turks, and no one gives a damn about the Kurds. They only care about the Palestinians because the Palestinians are allegedly occupied and oppressed by the nation state of the Jewish people. It's bigotry, pure and simple.

We've heard some outrageous things in the media over the past few days, including this guy, Mehdi Hassan, over at NBC. I mean, honestly, like what the stuff he says, it could be coming straight out of Gaza. And this is his, his comparison most recently was that Israel is very much like Russia. Take a listen to this soundbite. Five standard. And it's interesting that he did a whole thing about Hamas and Russia and linking them together. It was a slightly axis of evilly, uh, putting them together because they've really got very little in common just when you look at them. Because a lot in the rest of the world would say, OK, if you're going to compare Ukraine and Israel, Biden and a lot of people in America may see Ukraine and Israel as the same.

A lot of people around the world see Russia and Israel the same. They see Russia occupying and invading another country and annexing land and dropping bombs on civilians and saying, hey, human shields. And they see Israel doing that in Gaza. Israel is the occupier of the West Bank in Gaza. So that kind of stuff. I know we don't talk about it here in the U.S. Thoughts on that? I know Ukrainians kidnapping Russians, beheading them. I don't remember any Ukrainians sending rockets into the middle of Moscow. No, Israel has the perfect right to defend itself and to maintain military forces. Look, I think Israel made a terrible mistake in 2005. I supported it then. I was wrong. By ending the military occupation of Gaza, it should have maintained a military occupation of Gaza. That would not have permitted these slaughters and other slaughters

to have occurred. They should have ended the civilian settlements in Gaza, but not the military occupation. You don't end a military occupation until you have peace. That's why, tragically, Israel may have to reoccupy at least some areas of the Gaza. I hope they don't. I hope they can just get rid of Hamas and end the threat. But if they don't, no country would ever allow its neighbors to be sending murderers to be had their their children or sending rockets into kindergartens. No democracy that. Alan pointed out on our on our show the last time when Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip and gave it entirely to the Palestinians in 2005,

they unburied their dead. I mean, it was a talk about a full and complete pullout. It was a complete pullout. And then they elected a bunch of terrorists to run Gaza. And here we are. They started unleashing rockets within a couple of years and it never was peaceful, really often intermittent. And you said the last time you came on that 2021 show, you said every five years they find an excuse to launch another group of rockets. And then Israel's forced to respond. And immediately Israel gets condemned. And it's all part of Hamas's plan. They want Israel to respond so they can be demonized in the press because Hamas is very good at propaganda. They call it the CNN strategy. I'm crueler. I call it the dead baby strategy.

What they do is they deliberately attack. They know there'll be a counterattack. They know there'll be some collateral damage where they know there'll be some children killed because they use them as human shields. They're ready to take them out and show them to CNN, and CNN is ready to display them without real explanation. And I predicted, I predicted in 2002, I predicted in 2013 in books that I wrote, this cycle will continue because it works. Terrorism works when you attack a country and kill its people like Hamas does to Israel. And Israel responds, and then there are human shields, and then it turns into dead children. It's going to get world condemnation of the victim, Israel,

and world support for the perpetrators, Hamas, and that's what's happened on university campuses. And so if this continues, you can be sure it will happen again and again and again. There is an easy prescription for making sure it happens again and again. Just show the dead babies on television, blame it on Israel. Don't give context, don't give explanation. And you just encourage them, encourage Iran to encourage Hezbollah and Hamas to do it again and again and again. And remember, too, every enemy of Israel basically is an enemy of America. These attacks were on America as well

as on Israel. The victims were mostly Israelis. There were Americans who were victims. But Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah hate America with a passion. And one of the reasons they hate Israel is it's the small devil. The big devil is the United States of America. Episode 104 to hear a more expansive discussion of this, including Alan talking about the lie that Palestinian that the Palestine is completely compact and that more people live in every square inch of Palestine than any place else in the world. It's not true. They could be launching their rockets from unpopulated areas. There's plenty of open space. Alan's been there. They choose to do it from where the children are, from where the

hospitals are, because they're counting on Israel's not hitting back at those particular locations. Alan is a true expert. I got to get in my one question on what's happening in Trump land, if you don't mind, before you go. And that is we've had we've seen Sidney Powell, one of the other lawyers who represented Trump and now Jenna Ellis, who's more junior on the team, all cop pleas in the Atlanta in the in the Georgia case against him, the Rico case to conspiracy to state false facts, things lower level felonies and all are getting probation. If you turn on MSNBC, they say this is absolutely devastating for Trump because they're all going to work now

with prosecutors against Trump. How do you see these pleas? You know, 40 years ago, I invited Rudy Giuliani, who was then U.S. attorney to my class on legal ethics and tactics at Harvard. And he described this to a T, called it the domino theory. You indict a bunch of people and then they begin to fall away. You make deals with them, and they testify against the big guy. But we know, and smart juries know, that not only are bought witnesses, people who are paid basically by getting a decent sentence, not only are they willing to sing, they're often willing to compose, to make up stories, to satisfy the prosecution, because otherwise the prosecution wouldn't make a deal with them. So I think that it's definitely a bad

day for Trump and Giuliani when these people flip. But their lawyers should and will, I'm sure, cross-examine them about why they suddenly found religion, suddenly admitted that they were wrong. They did it because they had an incentive. And incentives sometimes cause people to tell the truth, but sometimes cause them to exaggerate and even tell lies. So there will be convictions of Donald Trump. I have no doubt about that. The goal of the Get Trump movement has been get down and dirty convictions in places where the jury pool is heavily against Trump. And then there'll be some reversals on appeal, but that will happen after the election. So it is to to affect the election. It hasn't hurt Trump in the primaries. It hasn't hurt him among Republicans, but it may hurt him

in the general election. Remember, I'm not. What do you think the odds are, Alan, that he'll go to, if he's the nominee, November 2024, having been convicted of a crime? Oh, I think he'll be the nominee having been convicted of a crime. And he won't be in prison like some previous candidates have been in prison, Eugene B. Debs, and I think the mayor of Boston. But he will be a convicted felon when he runs for office, and that will have an impact perhaps on independents and some Democrats who might otherwise vote for Trump. So these have had an impact. And I've said right from the beginning, if you're going after the man who's running for president against the incumbent, you better have the strongest possible case. These are not strong cases. They may win.

Not it. OK, I got to leave it at that. Alan Dershowitz, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for all of your great Israel coverage and Trump as well. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.