Ben Shapiro’s Q&A at Yale University | @YAFTV
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Alrighty folks, well, a couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to visit Yale and I had a sit down conversation with one of the students about October 7th. This was on the anniversary of October 7th. I also took some questions from the audience. Here's what it sounded like. We are now moving into the Q&A portion of the evening. If you have a question for Mr. Shapiro, please come forward, come to the back of the auditorium, circle your way around and stand behind this yellow line right here and we'll be able to get your question.

It doesn't have to be on this topic. Obviously, it can be on anything. And also, I do have a general rule, which is if you disagree, you can raise your hand and go to the front. But you actually have to disagree. Don't do it just to get to the front. Mr. Shapiro, thank you for sharing your thoughts tonight. America, our country, fought a protracted global war on terror for two decades. Just as you mentioned today, we have faced the ethical problems of war, political problems, opposition support for it.

But one day seemed to lay sacred in our country, the Day of Remembrance, 9-11. And even whether you were for or against the war, that day seemed to be a day where we remembered thousands of civilians, firefighters, and police lost their lives. Given that today is October 7th, what do you think the ethical consequences are of remembering

You politicize them today as a day of anti-war protest and not a day of remembrance for the people who lost their lives this fateful day. So frankly, I think that we celebrate 9-11 wrong.

I think that the idea that 9-11 ought to just be a sad day in which you remember that some people died in a tower somewhere, as a congresswoman from Minnesota might say, I think that that is a grave error. It should be a reminder of the enemies that the United States faced on 9-11, continues to face today. We seem to have forgotten about all of those lessons, which is why I think that we're doomed to repeat similar instances. I don't tend to believe that

acts of terror are equivalent to deaths by natural tragedy. I think that it's one thing to hold a commemoration for a natural tragedy, something horrible happens in life, and we all mourn that horrible thing happening. I think that when you're talking about an act of war, which is what 9-11 was, or if you're talking about Pearl Harbor, or if you're talking about October 7th, the idea that you can treat that in the same way that you would, say, a day of remembrance for people who died from

Hi, Ben. My name is Zach. It's nice to meet you.

So as we stand here, talk today, students are holding a vigil to commemorate the people who died on October 7th. And this event is counter-programming that vigil. In fact, multiple student organizations wrote you letters asking you to hold this event at a different time.

Perkei Avot tells us that you can serve God or you can serve yourself. You are being paid thousands of dollars to counter-program a vigil for the victims of October 7th. So my question to you is, how are you not serving yourself with this event? Well, since there are hundreds of people who showed up to hear me talk about what's going on, I don't think that it's serving myself, per se. I also don't think that I need the money. So my suggestion would be...

So my suggestion would be that there are many ways to commemorate what happened. I don't think that the folks who wish to hold different events have a veto on my event. I certainly don't have a veto on theirs. In fact, there was one event that contacted me that was programmed at the same time, and I attempted to actually move our event so that it did not conflict with that event. They ended up moving their event earlier and actually went to that memorial event at the Chabad at 5 o'clock.

So this notion that I'm somehow ignoring the wishes of the entire Jewish community or large swaths of the Jewish community by coming and speaking about the most vital issue on the most vital day of the last year is insipid. And your insulting attempts to quote Perkei Avot at me are frankly uninspired.

That's fine. It's fine. Yes, fine. Sure. So just to provide some additional context, I think it was Slivka, the Hillel on campus sent you a letter. I believe Chabad might have sent a letter to YFI sent you a letter. Well, I mean, all these groups of Jewish students. So weird that I coordinated with Chabad. As far as Hillel, there are many organizations on campus. I don't agree with all of them politically. They don't all agree with me politically, but I do not give anyone a veto power on my ability to speak politically.

on again a very important day about a very important topic of conversation scheduling event for a different hour not the 7 p.m i didn't realize i planned for five months event at a 400 seat theater when i could easily fill a 3 000 seat one so you you're saying right now that you never considered moving an event just one hour to allow the vigil that had been what i'm saying is i don't have my halls here

I don't book the halls here. Why don't you direct your questions at the Yale administration if you're so perturbed about this? This is a question out of legitimate concern. I've answered your question. I appreciate the time. You can hold it. Well, I'm glad I got to follow that guy.

So, Ben, my name's Don McRapini from here in Connecticut. So, listen, I want to thank you and The Daily Wire for everything you do. I'm a subscriber, a longtime listener. And what I appreciate most is the way you fight for our freedoms, whether it's mandates or it's the freedom of speech. And, you know, today something happened to me that was very disturbing. It reminds me that there's another front where we have to fight for our conservative voices. I was on ChatGPT trying to do a simple graphic presentation.

It says, never forget. I wanted to put a Star David on there. And I asked for a Jewish theme. And I asked ChatGVT for an Israeli theme. And it rejected me in every corner. And it reminds me that this is just another way where we have to fight for our voices. And I want to know if you have any plans to help fight on the AI front. Well, I mean, the good news is that Grok exists.

Right. So Grok has no limits. You can do whatever you want there. As crazy as you want it to be. Everyone knows that I'm friendly with Elon. You know, I think that Grok will generate whatever image you want. It'll do so very quickly. And the images that it makes are actually quite amazing. So I'm a big believer in AI, actually. I think that AI has tremendous potential to change the world. And I also am very pleased that there are a lot of competitors who are capable of outcompeting chat GPT if they decide to place arbitrary limits on the kind of images that can be created. Thank you. Thanks so much.

Hi, thanks for being here. I wanted to ask, so you mentioned that employers and donors could do a lot to affect change on a college campus, but since you're looking at an audience of students, I'm sure there's a lot of interesting ways that you think students can affect change on a college campus, and I want to hear what you think those are and how they could be

practically implemented by a student body that wants the world to know that evil is evil. Right. So, I mean, I think there are a bunch of things that you guys can do. So the first thing that you guys can do is actually make the public aware of what's going on on campus. So listen, when I was in college, I would say most kids didn't want to be involved in politics at all. Right. You want to get through your degree. You want to go on with the rest of your life. And then, you know, every so often you remember where you went and you brag about it and that's kind of it. Maybe you cut a check every so often.

But the reality is that most Americans don't actually know what's going on on campus, which is why it was so shocking when all of a sudden there were these giant protests that suddenly erupted on campus.

You know, sounding the clarion call, getting in touch with outlets like ours, we report on this stuff fairly regularly. There are other outlets that do as well. So I think that, number one, I'll say as my mentor Andrew Breitbart once said, if you've got a phone, you've got a camera, you're now a journalist. So you should be out there, you know, making things stories. The second thing that you can be doing is organizing. And yeah, that's uncomfortable. And yeah, it means that you're going to have to, you know, not be friends with everybody. I can safely say, as you might have guessed, not a friends person, right? So.

So when I was on the college campus, that was not my top priority, nor is it my top priority today. Well, thank God I have my own cadre of friends. I call them my children and my wife. But the but the you know, the thing that you can do is you can you can organize, you can do events and you can expose what's going on in the classroom. You can expose professors, you can expose what administrators are doing.

You know, there is a special window that you have into the campuses that no one else does because you're on one. I know this because this is actually what I did at UCLA. I mean, again, I got started in this job, you know, working in politics when I was 17. I was at UCLA at the time. My first book was about bias on college campuses. It was called Brainwash, and it came out in 2004. It's been 20 years. And what I did is I basically reported from what was going on inside the classroom. So you can all do that. Thank you.

Hey, Ben. Thanks for being here. My name's Manny. I'm actually a fan of your show, and I'm part of YAF-FPU. As a pro-lifer myself, I have an abortion question that some leftists bring up. So if you were in a burning hospital...

and on one side there were 100 in vitro fertilized eggs, and the other side there were five born babies, and you had to only save one side, which would you save and why? Okay, so the traditional answer that anyone would give is you'd save the five born babies. And the reason that you save the five born babies is because the embryos...

have a chance at life. They're already alive, but they have a chance at living a full life outside the womb already. So this is an argument about viability. Now you're arguing that a life outside the womb is more valuable because of viability. Right, but these are embryos that are not in a womb right now.

So if the question was, you know, you can save the baby or I can punch this nine-month pregnant woman in the stomach, it might be a slightly different question. Also, this does not define the value of life. Our sort of gut reaction as to which life is more valuable doesn't define the value of life. So let me give you another example where, you know, I could give, here's a very similar example. Burning building.

80-year-old person, 5-year-old child. Who do you save? And the answer that most people are going to give is the 5-year-old child. Does that mean the 80-year-old person is not alive? Does it mean that their life is not worthless? I could also give an example, a sort of hypothetical, in which you would save the embryo. So let's say that you're on a spaceship. Hypotheticals are fun. You're on a spaceship. And on this spaceship, you have a 5-year-old child or 1,000 embryos. And you're the last spaceship in existence. And you are the future of humanity.

Okay, and you got to save one, the one five-year-old child or the thousand embryos. Which one do you save?

Well, now you save the thousand embryos because the entire future of the human species is at stake. And so you want to save the thousand as opposed to the one. So our sort of gut level reaction as to which life we would save does not, it's not a dispositive answer to whether there is value to the life that's being formed. Also, it's a weird false hypothetical because you don't, that's never the choice. Nobody's ever like, you know what, I'm six months pregnant. And so here's my question. Do I save this child or do I murder this five-year-old? That's never been a thing that's ever arisen.

And then my other question is, if you support the death penalty, how should abortion be criminalized in terms of who and what the adequate punishment is? I've heard you say that you would say in the case of a woman getting the abortion that the woman has a lack of mens rea, which is lack of criminal intent. They don't meet the standards for that. But if you hire a hitman, wouldn't you be punished for hiring that hitman to commit an act of violence? Well, I mean, it's sort of a...

Questionable premise in the sense that if you hired a hitman to kill a vegetable, right, or what you thought was a vegetable, which is what most people think when they get an abortion, right? They believe that the thing that they're killing doesn't have innate human value. Very few people are willing to admit this thing has innate human value. It's a human life. I'm killing it anyway. And that's actually pretty horrifying if you think about it, if that's the way people are approaching abortion. But the vast majority of people who are approaching abortion that way are not thinking about it that way. It'd be like hiring a hitman to kill a cow.

or in the viewpoint of the person who's in your analogy. So, you know, let's say that you are an abortion doctor. Let's say you're Kermit Gosnell and you're an abortion doctor and you partially abort fetuses and then they're born alive sometimes and you kill them, then Kermit Gosnell should have received the death penalty. Right. So, you know, it depends on the level of mens rea, the level of the level of egregiousness.

egregious, you know, the egregiousness of the murder. But yeah, I mean, I'm certainly in favor of the death penalty in certain cases. It's not an across the board yes or no kind of thing. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay.

Hello. You quoted or mentioned a book earlier. I didn't quite catch it when you were talking about how peace can only be achieved through victory and long lasting peace. Yes. Long lasting peace. OK. And I was also hoping if you could give an example of a relevant example of such victory and defeat and then talk about what victory and defeat would look like in this case with Israel. Sure. OK. So the author is, I believe, Jeffrey Blaney.

The book is The Cause of War by Jeffrey Malaney. I mean, the perfect example, obviously, is World War II. So World War I actually ends with a negotiated end, right? World War I is negotiated. And everybody's like, oh, the Versailles Treaty, it's so terrible. Look how it incentivized Germany to then have to pay reparations. And then that leads to World War II.

And so look how mean, if everybody had just been nicer to Germany, World War II never would have happened. The argument Blaney makes, which is a pretty convincing one, is that we were a lot meaner in World War II when the West and the Soviets completely invaded and then parceled out the entirety of Germany. And there hasn't been a war in Germany since, as it turns out. It

Examples from the Middle East would include Israel's signal defeat of the Egyptian army in 1973. So Israel fully defeats the Egyptian army after they take their best shot in 1973, and the Egyptians decide at that point they do not have the ability to defeat the Israelis, and then they sign a peace agreement with the Israelis. So Jordan, Jordan, same sort of thing, right? Jordan attacks in 1967. In 1967, Israel defeats them. The Jordanians never go to war with Israel again. I mean, so these are not just relevant examples. These are relevant examples from the region. Okay?

Okay, so if you're talking about how do you achieve long-lasting peace in this particular region, I mean, first of all, Israel has achieved a pretty long-lasting cold peace with Egypt and with Jordan. They're achieving a much warmer peace with Bahrain, UAE, and they will with Saudi. I have full confidence. If you're talking about how do they achieve a long-lasting peace with, say, Lebanon, the answer is going to have to be such devastatingly effective military victory that there is likely a regime change that –

that ends with some form of actual military governance in Lebanon sufficient to withhold power from Hezbollah. Which, by the way, was supposed to be the case after 2005, when Israel withdrew, Israel in 2006, when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon. There's a UN resolution, I'll give it to you.

About the UN, the UN is a terrible place and it's filled with terrible people. But the UN Resolution 1701 says that southern Lebanon was supposed to be completely demilitarized and UNIFIL was supposed to maintain control. And that never happened. So the only way to actually achieve long lasting peace is by crushing the hopes and dreams of people who wish to attack their neighbors in such devastating fashion that they have no choice but to negotiate a peace.

And so when it comes to Gaza, Israel has done that with Hamas. The only way Israel is going to be able to maintain that, unfortunately, Israel is desperately trying to find somebody to run the Gaza Strip. They offered it to Egypt. He was just like, are you kidding me? No way. They offered it to Saudi. Saudi doesn't want any piece of it. They offered it to Jordan. Jordan doesn't want any piece of it. No one wants a piece of the Gaza Strip, nor have they ever, by the way.

Israel never wanted the Gaza Strip. In 1967, there was an open debate inside the Israeli cabinet whether they even had to go into the Gaza Strip, with most people arguing that if they could get away with not going in there and leaving it in Egyptian hands, they would do it. The Gaza Strip has always been a trouble area. So Israel's going to have to probably militarily occupy the area and pacify it in a counterinsurgency operation for the foreseeable future until they're able to negotiate a broader peace in which somebody is willing to accept some responsibility there. All right.

Thank you for coming to speak with us and engaging with us. My question is about free speech. So I'm a leftist and like... Well, first of all, thank you for coming. No, seriously, thanks for coming. I appreciate that. I agree. I agree that the left has a long ways to go in terms of addressing free speech and their response. But I think one of the things I struggle with is sort of like...

the sort of double standard the left is being held to, and that the right claims that the left is the only ones infringing on free speech. I think just as it is bad for the left to strawman a vocal few conservatives and label them all as white supremacists, it seems that it's just as bad to label a vocal few leftists as all Nazis.

And the same way it's like banning employment opportunities for leftists that express certain views and saying that the same shouldn't happen to conservatives. So do you think that the right has a long way to go in terms of free speech as well? Or do you think that this is purely a leftist problem?

I mean, I think that everyone can do better on free speech. I do think that it's disproportionate in terms of the attacks on free speech in the modern day and age. I think that if you had gone back to 1965, there are probably more attacks on free speech from the right than the left. And if you go to today, there are more attacks on free speech from the left than the right. Also, I think some of the examples that you're using, the suggestion that like everybody on the left is censorious. I don't think that's true. I think that there are certain people who are. I think there are certain systems that are for sure. But, you know, again, it's easy to overstate.

Just like, for example, right? Like, let's take the example of like high schools, like censoring certain types of speech are like the boycott of Bud Light, for example. Right. I mean, like in many ways, that's like similar to how the left cancels the right. Right. It's like.

isn't there a pretty big problem on the right? So this is a really good question. So the reason this is such a good question is because I think that there's a category error that often gets made with regard to these sorts of questions. What I mean by that is that it is in fact an element of free speech, and the left has said this too. It is an element of free speech for people to not want to go to my speech, for example. If people want to boycott the speech and not come, that's their prerogative. That is an element of free speech. If I choose not to buy Bud Light, that is also an element of free speech. That's how I choose to use my money. When it comes to cancel culture, I think that

There again, there's been a category error there. There are two questions. One is whether people ever deserve to be boycotted. And the answer there is clearly yes. Right. There are certain people who deserve to be boycotted. And then there's the question of who. And I think this is where you see the real imbalance for the left in the United States. The Overton window within which you have to operate in order to not earn a boycott is extremely narrow.

For the right, it's much wider, but I wouldn't say that it's completely gone. I believe in an Overton window. I do think, for example, that if I'm an employer, I do not have a moral obligation to hire people who believe that Hitler was a great guy. I don't have a moral obligation to do that. That's not me violating their free speech or boycotting them in a way that's a violation of free speech principles.

because I think the basic social contract suggests, again, they have a right to go and work in the United States. They don't have a right to earn a job from me. I'm not calling for them to be jailed. And I think we also ought to differentiate between private action and public action in this particular venue, in this particular kind of area that we're talking about.

With that said, the big imbalance that people are noting on the right is the Overton window of the left is extremely narrow. You can say very mild things and get quote unquote canceled if you are on the right. Whereas if you're on the left, it's very, very difficult to say something so transgressive that the entire world turns on you and you lose your job. You have to go a very long way in order to get there.

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Well, dude, congrats on getting in. Do they know you're Asian? Oh, no. Yeah, I hit the box. You're the dead pool of speeches and debates for me. Yes, really. So I'll get to serious business. So like three very short questions, just like. So the first one, do you think William Shakespeare was an anti-Semite? I mean, by the evidence in Merchant of Venice, sure.

I mean, yes. I mean, The Merchant of Venice is, in fact, an anti-Semitic work. Does that mean it's not a great work? No. And I have a habit of trying to read great works and then also understand that there's terrible things often in great works. That's something new. I don't like bolderized versions of literature. By the way, that's true of an enormous number of people historically. A lot of people...

I mean, a lot of great literature, a lot of great thinkers who weren't fond of my kind. Okay. And the second one, do you think the tale of Robin Hood promotes socialism? No, I think the tale of Robin Hood is a fight against overtaxation. Okay. The Sheriff of Nottingham...

So one last one. Just the last one. I don't want to take up too much time. So I don't know if you've heard of an anime franchise called Sailor Moon. Do you think it promotes homosexuality and transgenderism? Okay. I have heard of Sailor Moon. I do not know what it is. And any...

Are you asking me a question about anime? Is that a thing that's happening in real life right now? So, yeah, so, like, I used to watch it, and, like, so, like, I'm just starting to realize they seem to, like, promote lesbianism and transgenderism in certain of its seasons. I have no specific views on whether Sailor Moon promotes transgenderism. I have to say I do not have any specific views on it.

Hi, Ben. Thank you for coming. I'm Caroline.

My question is, do you think Israel is in a race against time, in a race to secure its geostrategic position before the U.S. becomes beholden to the left and its anti-Israel bias? Yes. So, I mean, so the question is to whether Israel is has got a short time frame in order to ensure its own security for the future as the left gains in power. The answer is obviously yes. I mean, you've seen the slow walking from the of the aid from the Biden administration, despite congressional approval of that same aid.

And then you would see something very similar from the Harris administration, God forbid. And I do think that you are seeing a growing sentiment, not only on the left, it's like full on anti-Israel, but there's a growing isolationist sentiments on the right that basically is doing a Fortress America routine, which I think is counterproductive, but it is growing. I think, by the way, the Israelis know that.

And that's why I think they're reshoring a lot of their defense production. I think they'll be doing more of that in the near future. That, by the way, is actually a problem for the United States. If you believe the United States ought to have strong connections with its allies and, by the way, leverage over over our allies, then you actually want there to be strong military aid connections with a wide variety of allies of the United States, because it turns out that let's say Israel does not get its arms from America. And let's say America wants to hold the leash on Israel. Is it what what what leash?

Right. So that is something that the defense establishment has always believed. The defense establishment has always been very much in favor of or at least in the modern era, post 67, of certain amounts of aid to Israel, because enormous amounts of aid are not only spent, all that it gets spent in the United States and additional military spending in Israel has to be spent in the United States, but also because that gives the United States leverage over Israel's foreign policy decisions as well. So the answer is yes, Israel is going to have to go its own way more. It's going to have to get more independent. And believe you me, they know it.

Hey, Ben, thanks for coming out today. I'm someone who used to be a Democrat and actually became a Republican after being exposed to viewpoints such as yours. So thank you for what you do. And actually now I'm running for state representative here in the state of Connecticut as a Republican. So nice. Thank you so much.

My question is, how do we appeal to younger people who may be on the fence that could be swayed by Republican values? They're not totally convinced by Democrats, but they might think that it's not cool to be a Republican. What values or issues should we focus on? Well, I mean, listen, it's not cool to be a Republican. It isn't. I mean, I think that values tend to be uncool. I've never thought that cool was a particularly important thing in life, as you might be able to tell. But...

With that said, I think that the left has moved so far left that there is a rebellion brewing. It turns out that most people want to succeed in life. Most people want to thrive. Most people, at least in the United States, wish to be lions. There's a matrix that I've been working on for a while, kind of in my own head, about everybody sort of has their version of there are two kinds of people. But here's one of those two kinds of people, oversimplifications. There's two kinds of people. There are lions and there are scavengers.

There are people who actually want to go out and they want to achieve. They want to build community. They want to build family. They want to innovate. They want to be entrepreneurial. They want to work a job. They want to grab control of their own life and make the best of that life, provide for their family, be warriors on behalf of their civilization. I think that's still most Americans because America was built on that. And then there are scavengers. There are people who truly believe that everything is owed to them and that the system in which they live needs to be torn away at. And it's a bad system and it needs to be dissolved or at least needs to be wounded. And I...

I think the left preys on that. I think the left preys on this anger against the system. But the reality is that there is no hope in that. There is no building in that. Once you tear away the only system that has ever provided prosperity and freedom to humankind, which is the sort of freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, once you do that, the property rights and the Judeo-Christian history of the West, once you tear that away,

There is nothing left to build on. And so when you say to people, listen, I'm not here to give you a handout. I'm not here to structure your life for you. I'm not here to make decisions about every little area of how you ought to live. What I am here to do is tell you, get off your ass, work, and you'll succeed in America. Because it turns out that if you do work in America, you will succeed in America. I mean, the very simple three-part rule that offends a lot of people, graduate high school, don't have a baby before you get married, get a job. You do these three things, you will not be permanently poor in the United States.

That is just the reality. And when you say to people, listen, any obstacles to those things, I want to help you clear away. Any obstacles to that, whether you're talking about big business collusion or whether you're talking about the government, which I think is mostly the problem, anything we can do to tear that away and move that away from you so you can succeed, that I think is an inspiring message to people and it gives them a hope for their own future. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Hey, Ben, thanks so much for being here tonight. You mentioned Ukraine briefly earlier. I just wanted to get your take on what the perspective from a foreign policy standpoint should be on the continuation of the war. I know you've been attacked by certain factions in the Republican Party, most notably Tucker Carlson, for your support for continued funding of Ukraine. I'm just...

I sort of want your take on what you think the end game is in Ukraine and what should be the approach from a U.S. foreign policy perspective to achieve that. Sure. So my approach to Ukraine, contra what Tucker perceives my approach to be, is that the United States should continue to fund Ukraine sufficient to maintain its current borders and pressure Russia to the table.

Right. Ukraine is not going to take back Crimea or the Donbass. Just realistically speaking, the chances that Ukraine is going to be able to do that are very low. They've been low since 2014. That's nothing new. I've been saying since probably August of 2022 that the best thing the United States could do would be to actually quickly ramp up the amount of military aid being provided to Ukraine in order to pressure Russia for an off ramp.

And then Zelensky's in a bad position. I mean, you feel for him as a leader. He's in a position where his people have been absolutely ransacked, where hundreds of thousands of them have been killed.

And his people correctly, morally speaking, don't want to give up a shred of the land they believe that they lost in 2014 and beyond. And you get that totally. So Zelensky is not in a position where he can say, OK, fine, I'll sign a deal where I give away Crimea or the Donbass or sign any of that away, despite the fact that those two parts of Ukraine tend to be significantly more prorogative than the rest of the country. So what the United States might have to do is basically cut a deal in lieu of Zelensky and cram it down on him.

Right. I mean, that might be something that has to happen where the United States goes to Russia if Russia were willing to negotiate and says to Russia, here's the deal. The we will have a mutual aid guarantee with Ukraine. We'll guarantee their security. You're not going to invade their borders anymore.

But the lines get frozen where they are, essentially. And then, you know, you might have to cudgel Ukraine on the other side. Again, there's a bit of a different story from the situation with, say, Israel and its enemies, because Israel is the overwhelming military force in the region, as opposed to Ukraine, which is fighting against apparently an insuperable supply of human flesh that Putin is just drafting out of everywhere. So, you know, if that sounds like a wildly hawkish perspective, that's weird, because it's precisely the perspective that Donald Trump has taken on the same issue. Thank you.

Hi, thank you for being here. So I want to continue with the question about Ukraine and generally don't know the answer to the question I'm about to ask you, so I'd be interested in what you think about it. So there's been several reasons given by pro-Palestinian activists, pro-Hamas activists for why they support Hamas. Hamas hates the West, but Russia also hates the West.

You know, Israeli operations have killed many innocent Palestinian civilians, but Russia uses conscripts and abductees from Nepal and India, which are poor countries, and many of them go and sign along with the Russian military only to find themselves in the front lines. Ukraine is funded by U.S. taxes. Much of Israel's military, or at least Israel's military, gets a lot of aid.

Ukraine has been a state for less time, less than half the time that Israel has been a state, and about seven times as many people have died in Ukraine as in the entire Israel-Hamas or Israel-Gaza war. So my question to you is, and seriously, I do not know the answer to this, but what is stopping somebody who is pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian, from realizing these direct parallels and also supporting Russia?

Because, again, looking for logic in these places, I think, is difficult. And I think that what it really comes down to is what is the position that is most coalitionally convenient. So I don't think that most of the pro-Hamas people on campus care deeply about, let's put it this way, the position

Radical Muslim fundamentalists who agree with Hamas don't particularly care about Russia-Ukraine. That's not their issue. It's not their bag. They don't care about it very much. And in fact, they tend to be more pro-Russia than the opposite because Russia is very supportive of many of the activities of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. The sort of left-wing bizarre dichotomy between the pro-Hamas position and the pro-Russia and the pro-Zolensky, pro-Ukraine position, I think that dichotomy comes down basically... It's weird how politics works. It comes down basically to a lot of people on the left...

really, really hate Russia, not because they hate Russia. They hate Russia because they think that Russia stole the election for Donald Trump in 2016. I mean, I'm serious about this. In 2012, it was Barack Obama who was on a stage with Dmitry Medvedev, literally telling him on a hot mic that he would make concessions to Vladimir Putin post-election if Russia would leave off. So, I mean, I know you guys are young, but back in the olden days in 2012...

It was Mitt Romney on a stage arguing against Russia and Barack Obama arguing the 1980s called him one of their foreign policy back. The only thing that switched was the bizarre left-wing perception that Russia had somehow made Donald Trump president, which of course is not true. Thank you. This will be the final question.

Hi Ben, thank you so much for coming to speak with us today. My question is regarding the concept of indigeneity often being used or being indigenous to a particular land being used as claim often by the left for a people to have a legitimate reason

to occupy a territory or a piece of land. Just this morning, I saw a post saying that today is actually not about, a post by a pro-Palestinian organization about how today is not actually about October 7th, 2023, but rather about the Nakba that happened in 1947.

I'm thinking, okay, if we're going to go back to 1947, then why not go back to the 7th century AD when it was conquered by Muslim conquest? Or if we're even going to go back further, like 2,000 years ago when they were banished from this region. And so I just wanted to hear your view on what you think

the importance or how important it is to even have indigeneity as a concept when discussing ownership or claim to a land? How should we understand it? Or if we do use it, how far back should we go? So, I mean, as you say, I think indigeneity tends to be much more of a

There's sort of internal claims and there's external claims. So internal claims, you know, this is our land, this is the land that unifies us. Those are common and those exist across the world and there's nothing new about that. As sort of an external justifying claim, indigeneity tends to be a very weak claim.

response. And it tends to be a response, by the way. It doesn't tend to be the initial claim. It's not, you know, I ought to have this land because my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had this land. We tend to perceive that as a very weak claim. We ought to perceive that as a very weak claim. It tends to be only used in the context of a counter-historical claim, right? Somebody will say, well, I ought to have this land because my grandfather had this land. And somebody says, well, your grandfather, he got it from my great-grandfather, right? And so it's more of a

counterclaim. The sort of historic game playing here elides the central issue. OK, so when I'm trying to simplify the Israeli-Palestinian issue, there's a very easy way to do this. OK, the very easy way to do this is would the world look better if it looked more like Israel or would it look better if it looked more like, say, the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority and Fatah or the Gaza Strip under Hamas?

That's a very, very simple question. And it's a very easy question to answer. And nobody wants to answer it. So instead, there's obfuscation. Instead, you get people who are saying things like, well, you know, it's really about what happened in 1947. It's really what happened, you know, about during the Ottoman Empire. And it's really what happened if you go all the way back to when this land was occupied by, you

you know, the, the crusaders. I mean, you can do that all day long. You really can. And it doesn't actually prove anything or help anything particularly. I mean, again, if you want to go back originally, originally, according to the Bible, it was Canaanite. And if you want to go back to, you know, most of the archeology, most of the archeology in Israel dates to, you know, about the second century BC when it was Jewish.

And so this is a particularly weak claim. And we all know it's a weak claim, by the way, because nobody at Yale is proposing to give up the beautiful university to the Native American tribes who originally possessed this land, obviously. So that sort of claim is, I think, a misdirect. I think it's a red herring. And I think that the people who use it

definitely know that it's that it's a red herring in order to avoid the obvious which is everyone in the world would prefer so by the way including arabs israeli arabs are perfectly happy living in israel and none of them want to leave and live in the gaza strip or or in the uh the areas of judean samaria known as the west bank nobody wants that thank you well i believe that uh thank you so much thank you thank you so much