Charlie Kirk Was Right. Our Leaders Ignored Him.

Today is October 7th, 2026. It's the third anniversary of the most horrifying, certainly the most widely publicized attack on mainland Israel in its history. 3 years ago today, of course, you remember forces of Hamas, the militant group, also the at the time government of Gaza, the Israeli controlled semi-technically independent area south of Israel, taken by the Israeli government in 1967. run ever since fighters from Hamas rolled over the border into southern Israel into famously a music festival into a kabutz several um and began killing people and taking hostages. 1,200 people were killed the majority of them civilians a lot of them at that music festival and the world was horrified by this instantly horrified by because it was obviously horrifying. The majority of people killed, to repeat, were civilians. They were not IDF soldiers. They were just Israelis. And a lot of them were women and young people and and they were killed. And people across the world, even people who aren't generally on Israel's side, paused to acknowledge, all good people did, that this is awful. There's no excuse for this and that no one can ever defend the murder of civilians at any time, at any place. And so that was the reaction, the gut reaction of most people, certainly my reaction, certainly everyone watching this probably felt exactly the same way. What only a few people understood immediately were two things. One, this is pretty weird that this could happen. What was this? And two, this is the beginning of a change, not just in Israel or in Gaza, though it was both of those, but in the world and not just the Middle East. that this event was likely to set off a chain reaction of events that would change the world that you live in, no matter where you live. And so far over the last three years, that has proven true. That attack has given way directly to at least six separate conflicts in five different countries. Wars in which many hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. And there's no sign that those conflicts are ending anytime soon. In fact, as we speak, they are accelerating and they're becoming well, we don't know what they're becoming, but they are reshaping the world. So, as our descendants look back on this time, they will see, we believe, October 7th, very much like they see 9/11 or Pearl Harbor as the beginning of a pivot point in the life of the world of nations. This is when things began to change. And we can trace that change to one day to one violent act or series of acts. In this case, October 7th, 2023 in Israel by Hamas. So, as noted, the two things that a lot of people, me included, didn't perceive immediately was this is very, very strange. How could this happen? And it turns out the more you know about Israel, the way the country is run, how it's laid out, the geography of Israel, the security situation in Israel, the more confusing this looked to you. And one of the very first people to notice this was a woman called Ephret Fenson, who was unknown to most non-Israelis before that day, but who had served, like most Israelis, in the IDF, and shot a video, a couple of videos from her apartment in Israel and basically said, "I'm not sure how this could happen because I I'm very fluent in how this country is defended, and this doesn't make any sense. How could these foreign fighters get across the most heavily guarded border in the world? Some of them in gliders. It doesn't make sense to me. Now, from what we understand, she has not lived in Israel since, but she was one of the very first people who the rest of us saw question the official account of October 7th. The second person most of us saw make these obvious remarks was Charlie Kirk. 5 days after October 7th, he went onto a podcast and said, "This doesn't make any sense. Here's Charlie Kirk from 5 days after that tragedy." I've been Israel many times. The whole country is a fortress. When I first heard this story, I still have the same gut instinct that I did initially. I find this very hard to believe. I've been to that Gaza border. you you cannot go 10 feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun that is an IDF soldier, right? The whole country is surveiled. And so so let me let me just kind of go through this. We don't talk about Israeli politics very often and most Americans don't know this. The last nine months, Israel is on the brink of civil war. It's not an exaggeration. This judicial stuff, they were there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets because BB Netanyahu is basically redefining the Israeli constitution. That's not an exaggeration, right? He said the judicial branch has too much power. There were protests planned this week against Netanyahu where they anticipated tens of thousands of people to take to the streets. That's all gone, Patrick. Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead. I'm not I'm not willing to say to go so far that saying that Netanyahu knew or there was intelligence here, but I think some questions need to be asked. Was there a standown order? Was there a standown order? 6 hours. I don't believe it. Israel's the side of New Jersey. When I took a helicopter ride from Jerusalem to the Gaza border, it's 45 minutes. Wow. >> 6 hours. They're live streaming the killing of Jews. Was Did somebody in the government say standown? That is a legitimate non-conspiracy question. I'm not saying Netanyahu allowed this to happen because he was going to lose power if it didn't happen. Well, of course, that's exactly what Charlie Kirk was saying. That's exactly what you just heard him say. Of course, he just explained the political situation in Israel on the eve of October 7th and it was basically curtains for the ruling government, the Netanyahu government. But because of October 7th, Netanyahu remained in power and in fact does to this day three years later. Charlie Kirk knew enough about internal politics in Israel to know that most Americans had no clue and was of course close enough to many people in Israel as a longtime Christian Zionist defender of Israel to feel that he could say that out loud without being called an anti-semite. Needless to say, he was immediately denounced as an anti-semite by a number of figures on the right, all of whom are now extolling his memory and telling you that Charlie Kirk thought things that he didn't actually think. people were now close to the Trump administration. But at the moment that he said that, he was denounced by American shills for Israel for asking those questions. But they were then, as they are now, entirely legitimate questions. What did the Israeli government know about Hamas's plans to attack mainland Israel? And of course, we can fill in some of those blanks. In a moment, we're going to speak to Dave Smith, who has been following this since the day it happened, and has those answers. But we know a lot more than Charlie Kirk did when he said that three years ago. But he knew enough about what was happening in Israel to raise those very obvious questions. But of course, they were almost entirely ignored by America's political class. But that's not all he said in that interview. Here's a clip from the second part of the interview, which is even more preient and jarring to listen to 3 years later. Listen. BB and the Israeli hard-right government has a mandate. I gotta be careful the way I say this to they're going to try to ethnically cleanse Gaza. >> Yep. >> I mean that that's and I'm I don't use that term lightly. Okay. They're talking about basically removing 2.5 million people from there. Okay. >> And honestly, they have a mandate to go seek justice and revenge. They do. There there is there this idea that they need to have a tr truce or a peace treaty. That's morally crap after you see women and children be burned alive and dragged to the streets. But there are some serious questions here, Patrick. And let me tell you, my pattern recognition over the last 5 years has become pretty sharp. COVID, Maui fires, you know, Epstein. When I see a story and it doesn't click, we're our guts are usually right. Wait a second. Did Charlie Kirk just defend the idea that Netanyahu knew that this was coming? Did he just compare the Israeli government to the Epstein cabal? Did he compare October 7th to the hoax of COVID? He just did. Did he just tell you 5 days after this that the Israeli government will use these attacks as a pretext to quote ethnically cleanse Gaza? You just heard him say that. And it's interesting to hear Charlie Kirk say that. Not like Norman Finkelstein because Charlie Kirk is now remembered as a stalwart defender of Israel. Someone who stood with Israel side shoulder-to-shoulder no matter what. And in fact, many of his longtime friends today sent out tweets telling you that anyone who questions the Israeli government's response to October 7th in Gaza is an anti-semite. In fact, a Nazi. The HHS secretary sent out a tweet saying that today. Comparing anybody who calls the Israeli government's response, its ethnic cleansing in Gaza, calls that a genocide, which of course it is. It's ethnic cleansing. Compared that person to Joseph Gerbles, a Nazi, claiming that you're Qatari funded if you say that. But there's Charlie Kirk saying it five days after the attacks. Well, how did Charlie Kirk know that? Well, because it was obvious. Because he knew a lot about Israel. Because he knew the prime minister of Israel and cabinet ministers in Israel. Because he'd been there a lot. Because that's the world that he lived in. And so he knew exactly what was coming. Now, why don't we remember that that Charlie Kirk thought that? Well, because the moment, not an exaggeration, the moment he was murdered in Utah last year, his memory was well kidnapped by some unscrupulous figures, beginning with the prime minister of Israel and used to defend all of the things that he hated and warned against very much, including the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So, one of the first people in the world and certainly the first head of state to tweet condolences after Charlie Kirk was murdered was Benjamin Netanyahu. And then he kept tweeting about it. Charlie Kirk, stouard friend of Israel. He should stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us. My close friend Charlie Kirk. Well, you just saw Charlie Kirk accused Benjamin Netanyahu of a false flag that resulted in the deaths of,200 of his own citizens. Doesn't sound like a close friend talking, does it? Doesn't sound like a friend of the Israeli government, actually. In fact, if you said that now, you would be immediately classified by the Trump administration under the IH definition as an anti-semite. You would be, as the HHS secretary said today, tanamount to a Nazi for saying that. But the guy who said that was celebrated by the guy he accused of doing it as his closest friend. That's weird. That is weird behavior. The current president's first tweet about Charlie Kirk in the hours after he died, and you should pull it up if you haven't seen it, is Charlie Kirk with an Israeli flag. So, the one thing you're supposed to remember about Charlie Kirk, who was a particularly well-informed and incisive and pretty unrestrained critic of Israel, actually, you just saw the tape. The one thing you're supposed to remember is that he was at all times a defender of Israel. was the opposite actually of the truth. But everyone kind of united to tell that lie and 3 years later it's it's prevailed as lies do if you tell them enough loudly enough aggressively enough and if you penalize people who refuse to repeat them over time history records them as true. Everyone's saying it. It must be true. Charlie Kirk, one thing we know about Charlie Kirk, he loved Israel. Well, did he really? He accused the Israeli government of allowing 1,200 of its own people to die. Hm. Doesn't sound like love. It sounds like biting criticism. No one remembers. And nobody, and this really is the point, took time to answer the questions that Charlie Kirk raised at the time, beginning with how did this happen and who benefits from it happening. But how did this happen? How was the most secure border in the world in what is a military police state? That's not a criticism. It's a fact. And if you've been there, you can confirm it. You know that's true. How did that country allow guys from one of the poorest places on Earth, Gaza, to fly over in gliders and start murdering girls at a music festival? No one seemed to ask that question. And because they didn't ask that question, because they allowed obvious lies to go unchallenged, those lies were followed by more lies. And it was, as it always is, a kind of contest among our political class. Who can tell the most floor and flamboyant lie? Who can overstate the truth the most dramatically? Who can make a claim that's so wild that you'd think the audience would laugh, but when they don't, you just keep going. And if you do it long enough, you wind up where we wound up with people like Mike Huckabe, the Fox News contributor turned US ambassador to Israel, comparing what happened on October 7th, which was awful, by the way, to the Holocaust. He actually said that, listen to this. Israel had people murdered in the most dishes, horrible way that we've seen. And I wanted to say since the Holocaust, but in all cander, as awful as the crimes were in the Holocaust, they weren't worse and in some cases they weren't as malicious. Cutting off the heads of babies, putting babies in ovens. >> Correction. What happened on October 7th wasn't like the Holocaust. It was literally worse than the Holocaust. It was worse than the Holocaust. It was probably the worst thing that ever happened in human history. So rather than, and this is probably pretty familiar, rather than just saying, "Yeah, it was it was terrible." Like there's no excuse ever for killing innocent people, girls at music festivals, children, ever. Of course, no one's ever going to say that because that would be a universal principle to which the country that just suffered this crime would have to abide. In other words, if you if you say it's always wrong to kill innocents, and that constrains Israel in its response. So what you say instead is this is a unique evil. Nothing like this has ever happened anywhere. No country has ever suffered this much, which is, if you think about it, not really a criticism of killing innocents. It's instead permission to kill innocents, which is exactly what it turned out to be. Now, you may ask yourself, okay, there's a long-standing dispute between the government of Israel and the Palestinians. And, you know, people have different views on this. And, you know, the facts tell a pretty clear story. There was this region of the world controlled after the First World War by Great Britain called Palestine that had been called a lot of different things over the past 2,000 years, but had pretty much, as far as we know, the same population. And a bunch of people from Eastern Europe showed up and said it was theirs and kicked a lot of them out. Now, that's just a fact that happened. It's provable, of course, through the census numbers. Like, what happened to all those people? What happened to all those villages? Well, now a lot of them are public parks in Israel. Now, whatever you think of that, whether you think it's justified by the Bible, whether you think it's an atrocity, if you're an American, you're kind of looking at it from thousands of miles away, and you're identifying yet another ancient rivalry between peoples who want the same piece of land. And this is, you know, this is a story of every region in the world really, and always has been. So you may ask yourself despite, you know, whether or not you take a side or which side you take, what does this have to do with me? So, you know, a bunch of Palestinians killed a bunch of Israelis and now Israelis are killing a bunch of Palestinians and it's all bad, but like why do I have to take a side in this? Why is it my concern? And as if anticipating this question in the minds of most Americans, the Israeli government began to explain it's your concern for a couple reasons. one because this is far worse than anything that has ever happened to you. And so if you're a humane person, you just can't sit back and allow this to happen to us because it's just unimaginably bad. Like your imagination is not big enough to contain its badness. So how do they do this? So 1,200 people were killed and we still don't know who killed them all. By the way, some of them were clearly killed by the Israeli military either intentionally or not, but that seems to be a fact. And Dave Smith will have more on that in a minute. But it doesn't matter. They died and it's sad. But it's about 1,200. 735 of them we were civilians. So that's a lot and it's terrible. But that's not how the prime minister of Israel explained it to American audiences, including to the US Congress. He said, "Look, 1,200 people may not seem like a lot to you, but that's 40,000 Americans. That's 16 911s. Well, how does that work?" Well, it's proportionate. You know, we have 10 million people. You've got 340. So proportionally. But of course, what he's really saying, and subsequent events have proven what he really was saying was one Israeli life is worth dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands of the lives of other people. our lives are worth more and we're not guessing that that's how he feels because the subsequent three years have proven that. So there have been by official estimates that even the Israelis don't discount about 80,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. But it seems very obvious that the real numbers which can't be known with certainty because no journalists are allowed into Gaza, no one from outside of Gaza who's not under the control of the Israeli government can assess the situation. But from satellite photographs, it's very obvious that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli government in Gaza. So even if you were to imagine that all of them were Hamas fighters, of course the overwhelming majority were not. They were non-combatants. They were children. They were women. They were the elderly. They were not in Hamas. They were not hiding in tuttles building bombs, repairing their gliders for a new attack, just like normal people sitting at dinner. And they got murdered. Hundreds of thousands of them. But even if they all were Hamas fighters, you would say to yourself, 1,200 versus 190, 200,000, is that a proportionate response? Only if you think the lives of one group are worth exponentially more than the lives of the other group. And of course, we as Americans and inheritors of Western civilization reject that on its face because we believe to restate and this is the basis upon which our country was founded that every human being was created by God. And therefore, regardless of ability or appearance or whatever difference that we have with each other, our lives, our souls are of identical value because every one of them was created by God. So in order to defend a response that disproportionate, you would have to reject that idea, which is the core tenant of Western civilization. It's the basis upon which we have our justice system, which punishes the individuals for his crime and not his family for his crime. So repeatedly in public, the prime minister of Israel told us that he rejects that idea, the foundation of Western civilization, and instead told us and then proved that he meant it, the life of one Israeli soldier is worth many non-Israeli lives. Well, that is a much criticized principle that was an operation on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarosa. And when the German army was attacked by partisans moving through Ukraine or Poland and then mainland Russia, it famously killed 10, 50 partisans for every German soldier killed. And for the last 80 years, we've been looking at that standard and we have said to ourselves out loud, that is immoral because the life of every person has identical value. Therefore, when one of your guys gets killed, you can't in good conscience kill 50 of their guys because by definition that's wrong. And yet, it's happening again. And because no one in the United States in its political class has been willing to say out loud, "This is immoral." and instead have moved for the last three years to fund that ethnic cleansing, that genocide. The people promoting that genocide have been able to both tell obvious lies without any push back at all about the events of October 7th and the subsequent events that have been justified by October 7th. And two, they have been able to infect the American political class with their thinking. And this really is the virus that causes the terminal condition among nations is the way you think. The idea that it is okay to murder innocents. Well, it's of course not okay. Morally, it is always wrong, always, and everywhere. But it is also a guarantee of your own destruction because what you do to others will be done to you. This is not simply a religious precept. It's of course a Christian idea. It's an Eastern idea often called karma. It's very close to a physics principle. It is just always true. You will be treated as you treat others. And so if you murder innocents, you can look forward to a very tough future in which people you care about are murdered despite the fact they are innocent. And so wise nations don't behave this way. They also calculate threats on a realistic basis. They don't become hysterical. They don't go insane. They understand that yes, it's a dangerous world, but not everyone wants to kill you and your entire gross domestic product does not have to be taken up with preparing for some war or other. And if it is, you will guarantee having that war or other. These are obvious things that wise people understand that of course you need to be prepared and of course it's true to some extent that you know strength is a good defense. You want to deter opportunistic attacks on your nation. Obviously, you don't want to leave the back door open with valuables on the counter, of course. But if you become obsessed with war and killing and imaginary foes seeking your downfall, you will create more foes seeking your downfall, and you will have the wars that you worry about, of course. And this is the way that Israeli politicians live. These are the lies they've told their own population. We're a permanent war with every country in the region, with every nation in the world. They all hate us, but that's their problem because they're infected with this ancient virus of anti-semitism. They're totally irrational. Nothing we do is wrong. Everything they say is a lie. Like that kind of thinking gets you nowhere other than destroyed. And underneath all of it is the main thing that any sensible country should avoid, which is the total proliferation of lies. You have to have a system in place in which telling the truth is at least conceptually, conceivably, theoretically rewarded. You have to say you told the truth. That's a good thing because we're basing our whole system on things that we at least pretend are true. You can't allow everything to become a lie. Both because you get led so far off course. You have no idea where you are. You're marching without a map. If everything is a lie, there's no northstar at all. but also because you devalue your own authority to the point where no one listens to you. You're a joke. You're a buffoon who happens to have control of the guns. But you know, the second you don't have control of the guns, you're in trouble. It's not an enduring way to run a country because there's no trust whatsoever. But because our political class allowed Israel's political class not simply to mourn the tragedy of October 7th, which would be just and correct, they should. and we should join them in mourning it because it was awful. But allowed them to take that tragedy and use it as a pretext to murder other people's kids and tell endless lies about it. It corrupted both of us. That's the truth. And one of the first lies they told was this was an attack on America. Well, no, actually it wasn't. It was an attack on southern Israel by people who are mad at your country for a very specific list of things that they claim you did. Maybe you didn't do them, but this is your dispute, not ours. So, how' they rope us into it? Well, by telling us that a lot of the victims of those attacks were Americans. Well, actually, no, they weren't. They were dual citizens. In fact, we checked today and we could not find a single American citizen killed on October 7th who didn't have Israeli citizenship. Doesn't mean they deserve to die. They didn't deserve to die and we mourn their deaths. But that's not the same as rolling into a music festival in Miami. It's totally different. The hostages, we were endlessly told, a lot of them were Americans. What we weren't constantly told was, "Yeah, some of them had American citizenship, but they were Israelis serving in a foreign military. Doesn't mean they deserve to be kidnapped, and we hope they're okay, as we hope every person in this conflict is okay. But don't tell me this implicates my people or my country. Why are we allowing American citizens to serve in a foreign military in the first place? That's very unwise. It's offensive, actually. The idea that an American citizen with a blue passport could be serving for someone else's military. It It's not even worth explaining why that's absurd. It's obviously insulting to the United States, but in practical terms, it becomes very complex and can be used to lure us into conflicts that don't benefit us fit us at all because you can wind up with politicians telling you that we have to get involved because they've attacked Americans without mentioning those Americans weren't actually American. They're Israelis serving in someone else's military. watch our president celebrate the release of an American from Hamas custody. >> Very happy to announce that Edan Alexander, an American citizen who until recently most thought was no longer living, thought was dead, uh is going to be released in about two hours, actually. So that's great. I mean, look, everybody in captivity, including the tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who are in Israeli captivity tonight, facing no charges at all, but just endlessly held in prison cells. We wish all of them freedom. Free the captives. All good people feel that way. People who are held without charges, who are held for no good reason, who have been found guilty of no crime by a legitimate quarter and being held, that would include this guy Alexander. grateful when all of them are released, including him. But the guy was not an American. He wasn't even technically an American. today. Max Blumenthal at the Grey Zone proved in a piece that this guy Alexander who was born in Israel, lived in New Jersey at some point, was back in Israel fighting with the foreign military when he the IDF when he was kidnapped, has subsequent to his kidnapping, after he was kidnapped, applied for American citizenship back in the United States and then announced publicly, I'm moving back to Israel to fight with the IDF again. So, of course, you wish him well as you wish every person well. But if you are an actual American, you have to ask yourself, are we being used here? Maybe a little bit. Here's a guy who's not an American citizen. Everyone's lying, including the president of the United States, and telling us he is an American citizen. And they're using that lie to get us involved in somebody else's conflict. And by involved, we mean paying for it and putting our soldiers lives at risk. And now a bunch of them have been killed defending Israel. And like why wouldn't you resent that? Because it's a lie. But when you don't stop people from telling lies, whe