[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

Below is the video of remarks given by American conservative political commentator, attorney, and columnist Josh Hammer at the Freedom Center’s Las Vegas Retreat. The event was held Sept. 11 & 12 at Fontainebleau in Las Vegas. Don’t miss it!

A Transcript follows.

TRANSCRIPT:

Josh Hammer

This has been a difficult week. I’m not going to pretend like it hasn’t been, it started on Monday with the slaughter of six Jews in Yerushalayim. May their blood be avenged.

And then Wednesday, obviously was the tragedy in Utah. Charlie was a very good friend of mine. We spoke less than 24 hours before that bullet struck. We spoke on Tuesday night about his campus tour. We were literally strategizing about how we how we should handle questions on this tour about Israel, about anti-Semitism, about Jewish-Christian relations.

You’ve probably seen some of these clips of his over the past couple of years. Really ever since October 7th, he was just completely bombarded, inundated, with these questions. I mean, all these kooks asking about the Talmud as if this young evangelical was a Talmudic scholar. I mean, you know, all asking all sorts of questions about  APAC, the Israel lobby.

So we are strategizing and talking about all this and that. And then being, I guess, the last conversation that I had with him, but to Daniel’s point, you know, the last time I saw Charlie in person was about a month ago. We were at a Turning Point retreat in the Hamptons, of all places, and I actually signed my book for him and gave it to him there.

And in our last conversation this past Tuesday, Charlie joked to me, I mean, it was it was joke. It wasn’t joke. I don’t know. He said, Josh, you know, when the Israel question comes up on campus, I’m literally going to plug your book. I’m going to say, check out Josh Hammer’s Israel and Civilization. And I ended up being the last conversation that we had, but I think it’s worth talking about it a little bit.

You know, why this book, why the themes of that book? Why would I’ve been trying to communicate for the past few years, really generally kind of resonated with Charlie Kirk, who again, was, a very good friend. The movement is not the same.  I know that David  was one of Charlie’s earliest mentors, and, this is an irreplaceable void, obviously.

So please consider this speech to be in Charlie’s honor. The best that I possibly can do. But, why did why did my book, Israel and Civilization? Why did this theme of the ecumenical biblical undergird of the West resonate with Charlie? So, I look the book kind of.

I wrote this book in response, not necessarily to the pogrom of October 7th, but in response to the pogrom. Okay. So there was there was a very brief period where the world had an opportunity to very clearly see, on the one hand, a genocidal seventh century aspiring totalitarian Sharia law, Islamist death cult, and on the other hand, this free and flourishing polity, this people that happens to be the birthplace of the Bible; the birthplace of monotheism.

And the world had an opportunity to very clearly say right then and there that we are with the latter and we are not with the former. That’s not what happened, though. Literally within hours, while the blood was not dry, while there were literally still Hamas terrorists inside of Israel, recall that they didn’t actually get all the lone wolf types until 24 to 48 hours later.

It was then the people like Zoran Mamdani were blaming it on the occupation or whatever the buzz-word of the day is. It was literally then when you had these 33 Harvard University student groups that said it’s actually the Jews that are solely culpable for their own slaughter, their own Nazi pogrom. By the way, the Qatari Foreign Ministry said the exact same thing, the same Qatari Foreign ministry that’s been trying to both sides this negotiation for the past almost two years.

The formal statement of the Qatari foreign Ministry within hours literally held Israel singularly responsible, singularly responsible for October 7–the West and their purported allies. Qatar is, of course, just an ostensible ally. They had an opportunity as the point to look at this dichotomy, this stark dualism, and choose the fact that they could not arrive at a clear conclusion.

I mean, it’s embarrassing, pathetic, I think would be the understatement century, but it reveals just a genuine rot and a profound confusion about who we are at our core, what is the West, what is its civilization, etc. so, I mean, this is essentially the, the entry points for my book; and the classic kind of formulation as to what is Western civilization.

I mean, those of you who are a little more familiar with political theory, you’re probably familiar with with Leo Strauss, the 20th century University of Chicago political philosopher It’s not going to be a Strauss seminar. Don’t worry. Strauss essentially says that Western civilization is kind of this interweaving DNA like strand, this double helix, if you will, between reason and revelation, between Greco-Roman reason predicated and ascend and revelation, which links back to Mount Sinai, of course.

And the Bible. And I don’t necessarily object to that premise, but part of the purpose of my book is to advance an argument that is perhaps somewhat out of fashion. Perhaps it’s not vogue these days. Perhaps you might even say is outmoded or even anachronistic. And that argument is actually revelation that is more important than reason.

You see, reason which is not grounded by revelation, which is not grounded in Scripture, Bible. And God himself can go off the rails really  quickly. Cannot. Let’s think for a second about the Third Reich. I mean, I’ve been to the death camps. I’m sure some of you have been. There is Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is actually the logical conclusion of what was, at the time, the most philosophically and mathematically, scientifically, culturally, musically advanced society in the world, acting in the purported name of reason. Their doctrines, including the doctrine of compassion.

For those who are not of the Aryan race, thoughts of eugenics ends with the train tracks going to Treblinka, and afterwards. I’m not saying the reason here, there and everywhere ends there. I’m saying that reason not undergirded by something else, can really, really get there quite in a hurry.

So what is that, something else? Well, that’s something else, obviously is revelation, that something else is the Bible. That something else is God’s relationship with man going back to God’s first revelation there at Mount Sinai with Moses and the Israelites standing there, right there at the bottom of the very fiery mountain. By the way, this is not something that the American founders misunderstood. Actually go back even further than the American founders, literally the sailing of the Mayflower in 1620, the captain, the Mayflower was Sir William Bradford who becomes one of the first governors of Plymouth Colony. When the ship lands successfully in colonial Massachusetts. Sir William Bradford, believe it or not, spoke about a thousand words of Hebrew. He was a student of a well known Christian Hebraist. That’s kind of another outmoded term. Habraist is a term referring to someone who is a cultural, linguistic, historical, biblical scholar of the Hebrews.

So as a well known Old English Christian who brought his name to Sir Henry Ainsworth, William Bradford’s study under him spoke a thousand words of Hebrew. There was some chatter on the Mayflower, some chatter. Not me, not Tom there, it came up in conversation that maybe, maybe, maybe they view themselves as modern day Israelites crossing their version of the Red sea to escape their version of Pharaoh’s oppression in Egypt.

That was religious persecution. England, they thought about they discussed briefly about maybe just severing a clean break from the English language and speaking Hebrew. It didn’t happen, but it was discussed again. The American founders, there was not an iota of doubt. There was literally not an iota of doubt in their minds. When Benjamin Franklin proposed that the National seal of the United States be Moses parting the Red sea with the Israelites there, he had no doubt that this country was founded on an ecumenical biblical foundation, really rooted ultimately in the Hebrew Bible, in the scriptures, something that my late great friend Charlie Kirk adamantly believed.

Charlie literally once said that America was founded on Torah values. I agree with that statement, Thomas Jefferson proposed the exact same thing for the Commonwealth of Virginia. He said that the seal for Virginia should be Moses parting the Red sea over and over and over again. You see this play out through American history. I mean, think about just the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. I mean, what is inscribed on the Liberty Bell? You know, it’s not Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It’s not a speech from Cicero on the floor of the Roman Senate. It’s Leviticus, Leviticus chapter 25, verse 10. Thou shall proclaim liberty throughout the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof. You know, I was listening, and I will pay for my sins.

With Yom Kippur coming up, I was listening to a recent episode of the Tucker Carlson show, and he had on it,  like a hate lesson thing, right? And he had on a pastor, whose name is escaping me and Tucker, it made a really kind of shocking concession here, actually, a concession,whatever you want to call it, where he concedes in his gospel. He actually just read the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, for the first time last year.

But for someone who talks a lot about his professed Christianity, I think it’s a little weird to be honest with you. But he’s he admits that. And then he goes to his guest, a well-known pastor who’s been doing campus talks with Christian outreach for 40 years.  Tucker says, you know, and I was shocked by the murder and the violence and the genocide.

Now, his guest to be clear, this pastor’s last name Nick Neftali, if I recall, the pastor did not take the bait to the pastor’s great credit. He pushed back and said: I disagree, this is judgment, this is etc. etc. he did not take the bait as Tucker’s best guest these days.  But you know, the implicit argument that he’s advancing and which is, I think, increasingly coming from a small but vocal fringe, is that America was founded on a form of Christianity that had no role for the Hebrew Bible.

Really, if you take it to its logical conclusion, what Tucker is actually saying, I think, is that the God of the Hebrew Bible is not the God of the New Testament, which far be it from me as an observant Jew, to get into the weeds of Christian theology that strikes me as literal Christian heresy on its own terms.

Actually, there was a second century Christian theologian named Marcion of Sinope who said this, and he was unanimously deemed by his co-travelers of time to be a literal heretic. This has been held to be heresy for 2000 years of Christianity. There are some folks pushing it today anyway, but really, what Tucker and those folks ought to do was just go to Philadelphia.

I mean, just literally read the Liberty Bell. Dude, it’s not that hard. When Abraham Lincoln spoke in Trenton, New Jersey, in February of 1861, referring to Americans as an almost chosen people two months prior to the shots being fired in Fort Sumter, South Carolina, did he think that the God of the Hebrew Bible was not the God of New Testament?

Really? Well, Lincoln did the same thing in his amazing second inaugural address. This pithy speech, which is, I’d say, widely regarded by most rhetoric and oration experts, as probably his finest moment. That is, this speech ending with malice for none, with charity for all, where he talks about binding up the nation’s wounds. Well, what is his binding up? The nation’s wounds? That’s Psalms chapter 147. Over and over and over again. This Reaganite notion of America as a shining city on the hill.

So there really is a sprawling information operation out there. You guys see it? I see it, Daniel. Definitely season and this information operation, which is multifaceted. I mean, you have some of the podcasters, you have this recent information off in Judea and Samaria about this alleged arson of the Church of Tibet, which ends up being a complete manufactured hoax.

There was literally no arson. It was it was a literal lie, a literal demonstrable, like videotaped lie. There is a sprawling information operation out there that is dedicated to trying to distance, not merely the United States from our ally Israel, but also Jews from Christians. One of the reasons that Charlie and I developed a close friendship is because I as a Jew, and he is a Christian, understood this; and we understood that we had to do everything we could to hold this together.

Charlie’s Christianity was the Christianity of the American founding. His Christianity was a Christianity that was rooted in the Hebrew Bible, that understood that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, all this is the basis not just for Christianity itself, but also for the Anglo-American legal cultural tradition. The American Constitution. I mean, how many examples do we need here? I mean, I could just rattle off a bunch of examples.

I mean, you know, in recent years we’ve heard this notion about Donald Trump being prosecuted and the lawfare stuff. I mean, how many times have we heard the left say, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, all these bozos, no one’s above the law. Well, look, I mean, I agree with that, to be clear, but where is that coming from?

I mean, where is this notion that no one, not even the president or the king is above the law? Where is it coming from? I’ll tell you. When John Fortescue codified this into the English common law in the late 1300s early 1400s, a great conservative a few centuries prior to Edmund Burke. When Fortescue codifies this notion in the English common law, the King of England is not above the law.

What does he literally cite? Deuteronomy chapter 17. We actually read it in synagogue just a couple weeks ago, the king in ancient Israel had to write Torah scrolls, have it by his side every day as a reminder to humble himself because he is also not above the law. That is a Judaic Hebraic contribution to the West. There’s just so many examples here.

Okay? I mean, we might saw something like federalism and we might even sort that all the way back to Jeremiah chapter 29. This imperative to seek welfare in your own city in exile, because there, you shall find happiness and welfare. So you know those of us in this room who are trying to keep this alliance together, the time really is now.

The time really is now. Because only with an understanding, I think, of that ecumenical, Judeo-Christian, biblical undergird can we actually be prepared to go against our enemies. You know, this panel that we just heard, this great panel was talking about the Red Green Alliance. It’s real and it’s horrible. It is. I mean, Zoran Zamdani is the literal singular encapsulation of the Red green alliance.

Is he not? This notion of Marxism, Islamism, wokeism, globalism, all these horrific ideologies, it is my suggestion that is both the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel that are the tip of the spear effectively against all of these ideologies. I mean, we can kind of go one by one, actually. I mean, Islamism kind of speaks for itself, right? I mean, you know, like the Hamas charter of 1987-88, whenever the exact year is to be clear, they call for the death of all infidels. They’re not mincing words, but they seem to have a particularly pretty egregious hatred of the Jewish people. Right. This is this is kind of jihadist Islamism, Sharia supremacy ideology 101 so the Jewish people are kind of the tip of the spear there as well. The Jewish state of Israel, certainly, as it was pretty clear and obvious self-evident reasons for wokeism. Well, ultimately, certainly, it seems to me that the woke DEI crowd want nothing more than to essentially harm all oppressor classes, and their ultimate goal are white people, Christians. But who’s the easiest person to get to on the way there?

If you’re trying to kind of fight a Grand DEI battle, well, it’s the Jews. You start with the Jews as a means to something else. And this is certainly something that Karl Marx understood. Right? I mean, kind of one of, you know, if you if you think of Wokeism as I do, is kind of a form of neo-Marxism.

Karl Marx certainly understood this, that this goal of Marx was nothing less than to overturn Christendom and Western capitalism. But if you actually look at the history of what he wrote, his infamously anti-Semitic essay on the Jewish Question. It lays bare his naked, visceral hatred for Judaism. He abhorred the fact that there was this remnant, there’s people going back thousands of years just stubbornly sticking to their law and to their God.

He understood that to get to the Sunday people, you obviously have to start with the Saturday people. I think the exact same thing with modern Wokeism today. How about globalism? I mean, look, there are many reasons why the United Nations and various globalist cesspools put the state of Israel in their crosshairs more than any other country that there’s a lot of reasons for that.

And a lot of it, I think, is, simply put, just old fashioned anti-Semitism. But I think there’s actually even a deeper reason than that to, you know, I spoke just last week at the National Conservatism Conference in DC, and I’ve been thinking about nationalism recently. It strikes me that Israel is actually, in some ways, the paragon nation state, is it not?

In fact, if you go back 3000 years, give or take, to when King David united the tribes into Jerusalem, that’s kind of the biblical antecedent of the nation state, isn’t it? I mean, they didn’t have hegemonic ambitions to subjugate beyond their borders. The borders were literally decreed by God. They weren’t trying to conquer elsewhere, beyond the borders, because God gave the borders.

In fact, if you go back millennia, you can you can kind of compare the biblical model of the nation state versus the Roman imperial model of global empire. Right? So it kind of logically makes sense, in a diabolical satanic way; it does kind of logically flow  if you’re ultimately trying to get what John Lennon imagined: no borders, no religion, no global government, this George Soros pipe dream.

If you’re actually trying to get there, it actually logically makes sense that you want to undo the national integrity of the unique Jewish state. Does it not?  So the Jewish state and the Jewish people really are the tip of the spear here in this civilizational fight against wokeism, Islamism, globalism.

And it’s just indispensable that the part this coalition stay together. We can’t do this without the original people. The Book. We can’t do this without the original recipients of God’s Word sticking to the law. And we definitely can’t do without Christians, who are the people who actually have built Western civilization off of that biblical foundation. We absolutely, unequivocally need both sides there.

And I think this is a very, very important message. And again, something that my friend Charlie understood very well. Another thing that Charlie understood well is the imperative of the actual state of Israel as an entity unto itself. He spoke very movingly about this over and over and over again. And, you know, among the questions that I was trying to get Charlie kind of up to speed on for these campus talks was what a lot of folks say: it’s pretty clear how Israel benefits from America, this aid package, etc., etc.. You know, what does the United States benefit from Israel?

Okay. I mean, fair enough question. I suppose it’s actually pretty straightforward, to be honest with you. You know, last year, I mean, to be clear, we just saw the precision strike in Doha earlier this week. So it hasn’t stopped. But last year Israel went on kind of a genuine kind of a months long killing spree, ultimately culminating, among other things, with the target assassination of Hassan Nasrallah cowardly hiding in his bunker in Beirut, Lebanon, along with Yahya Sinwar, the October 7th mastermind down in the southern Gaza Strip.

But on the way to get them, on the way to get those guys, two of the other high ranking in both cases, Hezbollah jihadis they took out, remember the name of Ibrahim Aqeel, the thought core. Now, unless you’re like really deep in the weeds of counter jihadism, which to be clear, this crowd definitely might be. But I’m actually really deep in the weeds here.

You might not know who Ibrahim Aqeel and such a core are. Well, I’ll tell you who they are. They are the masterminds, respectively, of the 1983 Beirut, Lebanon U.S. Marine barracks bombing that slaughtered 241 men and the 1983 U.S. embassy bombing. In the exact same year, the United States state Department had bounties on Ibrahim Aqeel and which, of course, head of $5 million and $7 million, respectively.

Those bounties existed for over 40 years, and nothing happened until Israel took them out last year. I’m not sure if Israel has come to collect this bounty. Check my luck. A little bad given the aid, I don’t know, but you know, that’s that. That’s the answer, obviously like intelligence and there’s all sorts of other important stuff there like cell phone technology, all these apps and turning to, you know, desalinate in the ocean water.

I mean, the crazy is really there’s a lot that but the bread and butter, the core above all in this civilizational context, the civilizational paradigm of light versus dark, of good versus evil, of Bible versus barbarism. The number one thing, I think that the United States really does benefit from the state of Israel is that we have someone who’s essentially cleaning up our dirty work on our behalf that is patrolling and securing a region on America’s behalf, on the West’s behalf, ideally from kind of a grand strategy.

The fact is that America can then focus perhaps disproportionately on its genuine geopolitical threat, which is actually the Chinese Communist Party. So that’s really kind of the grand kind of geo strategy element going on here as well. And to me, that’s actually the definition of an ally. I mean, not to pick on Tucker, but I’ll pick on Tucker because how can I not?

I mean, you know, you know, Tucker had a recent interview where he was like an ally. I don’t know what an ally is. You know, meanwhile, I think, I think a few weeks later he was calling Qatar an ally, which is kind of funny. But to me, a very clear and easy definition of an ally is the following: an ally is a country that when it acts to secure its own national interest, it has the secondary or tertiary effect of also securing your national interest. If there’s another country in the world that does that, that is an ally. And as a country that should be that should be given generally freer, if not outright free reign to patrol the region and to secure its national interest, because you yourself will benefit, likely in a pretty economically better off way than if you were actually going ahead to do it yourself.

So that’s where we are, and we have to do everything we can to fight back against these, these voices. And Tucker is just one, but it’s increasingly viable. The left is beyond gone. They’ve been gone for, I mean, they’ve been gone essentially since the left came into power with the with the French Revolution over 20 years ago.

Right. I mean, they’ve been gone essentially since, since the get go, the right remains the only best hope of of saving this country, really. And America remains the only great hope of saving this civilization. So we have to make sure the right stays in order. In order to stay in order, we have to understand where we are coming from, what our first principles are.

And only from there can we proceed. Only from there can we understand who we are and have the confidence, the tenacity, the vigor, the fervor, the audacity, and the courage to take on all of our civilizational threats. This is something that my friend Charlie Kirk– may his memory be a blessing. May his blood be event– understood extraordinarily well.

Literally. In one of his final interviews with our mutual friend Ben Shapiro earlier this week, Charlie was talking to Ben about Gaza, and Charlie says where team civilization on this show, he would he would phrase in in those stark terms, he understood this is imperative on the on the men, women in this room to continue to understand that and to proceed onwards from there.

We have to say we have time for a couple of questions.

Audience Question:

I’ve read your book. I would encourage everyone here to read the book. It is, phenomenal. Thank you. I want to go back to the Judeo Christian tradition, the Bible we’re told in Exodus and then in more detail in Samuel, to fight against Amalek.

This is Amalek. It is evil. And we’re told by God to remove evil from the world. Yep. On the other hand, we’ve got to believe and we’ve got to believe in God. But there’s so good things that are said by people about how we all have to come together. Democrats and Republicans. I want to go back to the Bible and what God tells us, not just what, ecumenical, politicians can say.

Can you address that? How do we how do we deal with what’s going on, what’s what’s on TV, what’s on podcast now?

Josh Hammer:

You mean in terms of calls for unity? There’s a lot there’s a lot to be said, I guess, I think the biblical worldview is replete with moral dualism.  With it, with a very sharp discernment between good and evil, light and darkness. I mean, you know, frankly, when you understand that there is such thing as this moral dichotomy that exists in the world, then you’re essentially already conservative, racist. For instance, you know, me personally, it’s the story in my book, which you read. But it was, you know, I basically became a conservative on 9/11. I was 12 years old. I was, living 25 miles north of New York City in my childhood hometown, saw smoke on the Twin Towers. And when you realize that there is evil in this world, you by definition also know that God exists in this world because it just defies any kind of belief or reason or moral intuition that God would create a world solely for there to be evil. So if there’s evil, there’s good. Once you accept that there is both evil and good, you have automatically rejected the John Lennon imagined utopia and you’re basically on the right. Okay, so that’s kind of how I became red pilled at the age of 12. So, I mean, taking that kind trying to apply it to your question, there, look, it’s forming coalitions and alliances is always going to be a question of prudence, right?

It’s not it’s not going to be a question of principle. It’s all going to become an ad hoc case of prudence. I generally am on the side of a bigger tent approach within the right of center, and I’m perfectly fine making common cause with folks with whom I disagree on certain important issues there.

But at the same time, it really just depends, right? Because there are certain issues that are just so core and unambiguously a part of who we are, what it means to be on the right, what it means to be an American, a constitutionalist, a conservative, and so forth there. And, you know, if you don’t understand that, that the Bible, all of it is the wellspring of this country and also civilization, I don’t really know how you can even call yourself, you know, my ally on the right there.

That seems to me to be about as foundational a belief as ever. You know, as far as the left, you know, calls for unity there. I mean, they probably lead by example. Shouldn’t they? I mean like, how many times have we heard, you know, the clamoring of, you know, Donald Trump’s a fascist Nazi there? I mean, very hard not to connect the dots from that to the bullet, you know, missing him by a millimeter in Pennsylvania, you know, very hard not to realize that essentially all high profile acts of political violence over the past 10 to 15 years, this country had been by committed left wingers. I mean, there was Floyd Lee Hawkins trying to shoot up the Family Research Council in Washington, DC in 2012.There was James Hodgkinson, who tried to shoot up the Republican congressional baseball team in 2017. It was obviously the summer of love following the death of Saint George Floyd, our martyr, in 2020. There, there was Nicholas Roski, who flew from California to Maryland in 2022 trying to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh. There was a covenant school shooting in Nashville, Minneapolis, a similar transgender influence school shooting there. The assassination of Brian Thompson denied health care CEO in the streets of Manhattan last year, the shooting of the two Israeli embassy staffers this year by a free Palestine communist nutjob from Chicago. And now the highest profile them all of the assassination of my friend, Charlie Kirk. So if they want to, you know, call for unity. Okay, but you know what? The ball’s in their court.