← The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
Why Israel's & America's Interests are Intertwined-An Exclusive Interview w Dr. Victoria Coates
00:38:48
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- [00:02]
Senator Ted Cruz
Welcome. It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you. And to all of you listening right now, I hope you had a fabulous Thanksgiving center. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.
- [00:11]
Ben Ferguson
With your family as well, a wonderful Thanksgiving. And I hope everyone had a chance to have some turkey and stuffing and cranberry and be with family and pause to just reflect on the many things we have to give thanks for. Thanks for being Americans, being free, living in the greatest country in the history of the world. And I hope that you're taking these few days a break from work just to hug on people you love and to remember. You know, I've never met anyone at the end of life who says, you know, I just wish I'd spent less time with my kids. That's not what people say. And so spend time. You know, this past weekend was my mother's 90th birthday, and. And Heidi and I hosted a dinner, and we had family and friends come in and just went around the table, and everyone took the chance just to talk about my mom, talk about what an amazing person she is, talk about how she had touched each of our lives. My mom is 90 and still going strong, and I'll tell you, it was kind of fun, Ben. So I had everyone also record a little video that we played for her at the restaurant. And as a surprise to her, when I was flying with Trump on Trump Force One down to Boca Chica for the rocket launch, I asked Trump if he'd be willing to record a video for my mom for her birthday. So I pulled out my cell phone, and he was happy to do so. He recorded a very, very nice video and wished her happy birthday. And in classic Trump style, he said, eleanor, I hear you're an amazing woman. I understand you're turning 90, although everyone says you look 40.
- [01:50]
Senator Ted Cruz
That's a Trump fashion right there, by the way. That's exactly what you would expect from him. Did she absolutely love the moment?
- [01:58]
Ben Ferguson
Yeah, she laughed out loud. She was astonished.
- [02:02]
Senator Ted Cruz
I gotta brag. I just gotta brag on you for a second because it was so fun. Election night. Getting to spend a little time with your mom to watch how much fun she was having and how proud she was of you. You would never talk about this, so I'm just gonna do it. I've never enjoyed watching a parent, and I've been around your dad a lot, and your dad is incredible, but I think it's a little bit more normal for him. He's in the fight. He kind of. He's. He's really in there. He gets into it and, and that's fun. And if you've ever seen Cinder cruise dad, he's such a, he's just a blast to spend time with and he's so animated and he loves the campaign trail. It's different with a mom. Just to see the pure, I think, joy. It's when, when parents, when, when a kid succeeds, it's like 100 times more excitement. And to watch her on election night in the war room and just the pure joy on her face watching you get to do what you do and watching the room react to you winning, I don't know because there's so much going on. If you got to see it from the angle I did, I just got to say I have never enjoyed a moment on the campaign trail. And I mean that sincerely more than I did that moment watching your mom watch you win reelection. I don't know if you got to see that, but she was so proud of you.
- [03:19]
Ben Ferguson
That's awesome. She's an amazing woman. Maybe we'll do a podcast and have my mom on because she's got. Got quite the life story. That'd be kind of fun to let her tell her story.
- [03:27]
Senator Ted Cruz
That's. I love that idea. No, no doubt about it. And it was. Yeah, it's fun. So to everybody, we hope you had a fabulous Thanksgiving. Be safe on the road. Many of you download this listening on your way home. Even during this holiday season, there are still attacks that are happening each and every day against the people in Israel. And that is incredibly sad. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is wishing you a blessed Thanksgiving as you gather with your families, grateful for the blessings that God has given all of us. But we need to remember those who are facing unbelievable hardship and a real need right now of food and hope in Israel. The people of Israel, they're being threatened and the attacks continue from enemies all around them. And during these hard times, Israelis are thankful for the fellowship, for the food and the basic assistance that they so desperately need. We're talking about life saving aid that the rest of the world seems to have turned their back on the people in Israel. And that's why I'm asking you to pause and give a gift of $25 right now that will help provide food, a box of food to an elderly Jew or a Jewish family who are suffering and are in desperate need. A gift of a hundred dollars will help provide four of these life saving food boxes this Thanksgiving season. Take a moment and help the people in Israel. Please consider standing with Israel and the Jewish people, how do you do this? Go to support IFCJ.org that is support IFCJ.org to make a gift. Now that's supportIFCJ.org or you can call and give as well over the phone. 888-488-IFCJ. That's 888-488-4325 or supportifcj.org Senator, this is one of those fun episodes for us. You get asked, I know, to lend your name to certain things here and there. And there is a book that is coming out. You're excited about you. The Forward was written by you. And it deals with a very, very important issue, the Jewish state and the people of Israel and America and this connection.
- [05:48]
Ben Ferguson
Well, that's right. And we've got a special guest on the podcast today, and our guest is a very dear friend of mine, Dr. Victoria Coates. Now, Dr. Coates is the vice president of the Heritage foundation for National Security and Foreign Policy. And Victoria is an amazing woman. She has a PhD in art history, which she's one of the preeminent foreign policy and national security experts in the country. And those who doubt her sometimes, sometimes scoff at the fact that she's an art historian. She actually was a professor at Pennsylvania and was teaching art history at Penn. And I'll tell you an amazing story of how Victoria got full time into the national security and foreign policy world, which is 20 some odd years ago. She was blogging anonymously on Red State and she had a pseudonym. And Don Rumsfeld was the secretary of defense at the time. And he was reading what she was writing on Red State. And it was really profound and insightful about foreign policy. And Rumsfeld called in his staff and said, hey, I want you to figure out who is writing these columns because and he said, listen, this is obviously a colonel buried somewhere in the heart of the Pentagon who understands military policy, foreign policy, national security. This guy's an expert. I want to hear what he has to say. Well, they tracked the colonel in the Pentagon down, and it turned out it was a professor of art history at Penn named Victoria Coates. And she ended up coming and working for Don Rumsfeld when he was writing his autobiography. She worked with him on that. And when I was newly elected to the Senate, she was my very first national security advisor. And Victoria and I worked hand in hand for four years. She was amazing, helping advise me on the very complicated and dangerous world in which we live. And when Trump became president, she went into the Trump White House. She and she went into the Trump National Security Council, and she managed to actually survive four national security advisors. She was hired initially by Mike Flynn. Remember, Mike Flynn lasted just about 30 days, and then she ended up staying through HR McMaster and then staying through John Bolton and then staying through Robert O'Brien. And she rose to be deputy national security Adviser to President Trump. And then she finished the Trump administration at the Department of Energy, where she was a senior advisor to the Secretary of Energy. And she was dealing with the Middle east in particular. And Victoria is an expert on many things, but one of the things she's an expert on is the Middle east and this book. She has a brand new book that is coming out right now, and the book is called the Battle for the Jewish State, How Israel and America Can Win. And with that, Victoria, welcome to Verdict.
- [08:44]
Dr. Victoria Coates
Well, thank you for having me on. I'd just like to correct the record a couple of things.
- [08:50]
Ben Ferguson
Sure. Although my first boss said never let truth stand in the way of a good story.
- [08:57]
Dr. Victoria Coates
No, I just say it wasn't quite 20 years ago.
- [09:01]
Senator Ted Cruz
There we go. I like that.
- [09:05]
Dr. Victoria Coates
Maybe a little bit less.
- [09:07]
Ben Ferguson
Wait a second. When was Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense?
- [09:10]
Dr. Victoria Coates
This was more 20, 25, 26, somewhere. 18, 19 years ago.
- [09:17]
Ben Ferguson
You're splitting hairs there on that one.
- [09:20]
Dr. Victoria Coates
I don't like to be dated, but no, it's been an extraordinary journey. And the other date I'd like to mention is 2014, when you and I made my first journey to Israel together. I think your second, if not your third, in May of that year, which was our first trip abroad on, you know, as a senator. And to go to Israel and have that experience together with our then chief of staff, Chip Roy, who has obviously become something of a name on his own. Right. But to have that experience was really profound. And I would just add we went from Israel to Kiev, we went to Ukraine. And so we got to see these two theaters that are so important to us right now 10 years ago and experience this, meet, meet these people. But. But the book was really very much a document of these 10 years that have gone on since then. And I think for both of us, watching Israel, observing it, studying it, and then in your case, actually legislating on it has been quite an extraordinary experience.
- [10:41]
Ben Ferguson
It has been an amazing journey, and it is a very dangerous world. Let's start with Israel itself, and let's start with maybe the simplest question. Why is Israel at war right now? What. What happened to take us from four years ago? We had peace and prosperity. We had the Abraham Accords. Being signed on the South Lawn of the White House. And now we've had October 7th, the worst mass murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. We have war throughout Gaza. We have war in Lebanon. What happened to change things so dramatically?
- [11:16]
Dr. Victoria Coates
Well, clearly it was a change of the executive branch. And one of the most obvious policy contrasts between the Trump administration and the Biden Harris administration was on Middle east policy. And so you had President Trump go in, work on a number of the things that you and I worked on. Moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the recognition of Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory, and conventional wisdom held by those like John Kerry, among others, that this would cause upheaval in the region. Instead, it caused clarity. This is where the United States is. The United States stands with Israel, and if you want to stand with us, great. And what we found was that many of our Arab partners, traditional partners and allies decided that's what they wanted to do. So we signed the Abraham Accords with Bahrain and UAE and Morocco, and this led to peace in the region. And then we had Biden Harris come in, and they decided that they were going to embrace the Obama era policy of having distance with Israel, trying to domesticate the Iranians. And this led to disaster. And instead of, you know, peace, we wound up with October 7th of 2023 now, I guess 14 months ago, and, you know, the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. And I felt like so many Americans kept asking me, why is this happening? And that's why I wrote the book.
- [13:03]
Senator Ted Cruz
So, Victoria, I got to ask you this question. With all the news that has happened with with Israel, when did you actually decide to write the book?
- [13:11]
Dr. Victoria Coates
And it was actually a fit of temporary insanity last April, where I had the idea, and I thought, I need to answer these questions that people keep asking me. And I got in touch with my publisher at Encounter Press, and Roger Kimball said, okay, if you can get this to me in 90 days, I can get it out.
- [13:33]
Senator Ted Cruz
Wow.
- [13:35]
Dr. Victoria Coates
So, as I said, bit of temporary insanity, but we got it done just because the questions were so clear. How did this happen? Why Israel? Is there an alternative to Israel? And then what's next? Those are the four questions that drive the book. And it just kind of was a cri de cour. This just needed to get it out there, and I did it in 90 days, and here it is.
- [14:06]
Ben Ferguson
So what's the answer to each of those four?
- [14:09]
Dr. Victoria Coates
So how did this happen? Is a question. Actually, Senator, you really answered in the foreword to the book, which is, how did we get from October 7th to all of the demonstrations in the United States that are pro habas, I mean, most normal people responded to the terrorist attacks with horror. But then suddenly, all of these people were flooding our children's campuses, our streets. Pro hama. How did that happen? And I thought you wrote very movingly about the testimony of the three university presidents. My president, Amy McGill, the president of Harvard, your alma mater, and the president of mit, being unable to to why this was a problem. And it's why this is a war not just on Israel, but also on America, because we have anti Semitism here on our streets. We have it on our campuses where it's being taught to our children. This is a huge problem, and we have to get after it. And the Biden administration clearly had no answer to that. Then many Americans want to know why Israel is a great ally to the United States. And that's a little bit of a history lesson. And as you mentioned, I'm an art historian. That just makes you able to write about history. Sometimes there are pictures, but in this case, it's going back to what is the connection between the Jews and the Holy Land? Why was the modern state of Israel founded? What is the relationship between the United States and Israel? That is not well understood. And I tried to approach it like a 101 class in college so that you would have that kind of information in front of you. Then there's what I call the bipartisan history of failure, which is the third question is, if, is there an alternative? And the answer to that question is, yes, there are two. One is the Palestinians and the other is the Iranians. And we've had lots of folks on both sides of the aisle try to domesticate both of those groups. As you and I know very well, that has not turned out well. And that's exactly where the Biden and Harris people were heading. God forbid if they had gotten another four years. And then the fourth question is, what's next? And the amazing thing is, is that we can right now talk about a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. If you told me eight years ago, when I first went into the Trump administration, that I could talk on a podcast about an Israel Saudi deal and not get angry phone calls from both sides, I would have been shocked. But now it's talked about as when, not if. And that's an extraordinary development. So we can build on that. We can go forward with that.
- [17:19]
Ben Ferguson
Well, and that's the direct result of clarity, of. You know, for decades, the conventional wisdom in Washington was to deliberately embrace strategic ambiguity that whatever you give to Israel with one hand, you take away with the other. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. So Jerusalem, maybe Israel can have it, but maybe the Palestinians can have it. Maybe the west bank needs to be. Go back to. We need to go back to the 1967 lines. And we saw with Democrats and with a lot of Republicans that there was a very deliberate strategic blurring of the lines. And the most important thing that Trump did on Middle east policy, and this is something that I advocated strenuously, it's something that you advocated within the White House for. Is, is, is have that clarity to say, we stand with Israel, period, the end. And that produced an historic flowering of peace. And, and, you know, Victoria, I want to pause on something you said at the outset when you were answering the first question and you were talking about those who hate Israel and hate America. And it just, just occurred to me as you were talking that there is an almost perfect equivalence that if you look at the people on college campuses chanting we love Hamas, chanting against Israel, to a person, almost every single person who hates and despises Israel, hates and despises the United States of America. And I guess the question I wanted to ask you is why? Why is that if you're an anti Semite, if you hate Israel, we know that you are very, very likely to hate America as well.
- [19:01]
Dr. Victoria Coates
No, this is an interesting phenomenon, and it's a new phrase I learned, which is called settler colonialism. And at the Heritage foundation, we were watching very carefully from our balconies as the thousands of pro Hamas protesters marched past Heritage to go down to Union Station when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here. I know you were there at the address to Congress in July. And they marched down to Union Station and dragged down flags and burned them and put up Palestinian flags. And those were American flags. Those aren't Israeli flags. And then being a Philadelphian, I was particularly offended that they defaced the cast of the Liberty Bell that also is there on Columbus Circle. But it's. I mean, that's it. They hate us both. And the reason they hate us is, is this whole issue of settler colonialism, which is both Israel and the United States are the two countries that are theoretically settled by others. My particular ancestors came from Scots, Irish and Denmark. I know you are both Irish and Cuban, Ben. I don't know what your pedigree is. And I did want to take a minute to wish a very happy 90th birthday to Eleanor and send her lots of love. But this, this is the Thing is, these are the two countries that they consider illegitimate because most of the people who live here come from other places. And so that's why it's a war on both of us. And if you look at our enemies, our enemies like Iran, they refer to Israel as the little Satan and the United States as the great Satan. But guess what? We're both Satan. And in that, you know, in that we are the same to them. And what you're seeing from all of these enemies of the United States and Israel is they're buying into that, that we're more or less the same. And what, you know, you and I have discussed so many times. Okay, fine. Let's make that a strength rather than a weakness. You say we're the same. Great. Then we're in this together.
- [21:24]
Senator Ted Cruz
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- [24:16]
Dr. Victoria Coates
Well, the good news, Ben, is as a, as a sort of broken down academic myself, I can tell you one thing, which is that what the one thing they care more about than their parking spaces is their funding. And so if you hold their funding at risk, they will stop this behavior. And so I was at Penn last April to give remarks on why I think it's a bad idea to hate Jews. And I required three layers of armed guards. I had Philadelphia city cops, I had Penn cops. And Heritage was not satisfied with that. And they sent an additional armed guard with me because it was such radical thing for me to go on campus and make these remarks. And that speech isn't free. A lot of people had to pay for that, including the taxpayers of Pennsylvania, amongst others. And it just, it was a really enlightening moment that we have to hold this funding at risk. And I've heard President Trump talk about this, I think very forcefully that no university should get federal funding. And I think we can also look at this from the state perspective and hold that funding at risk and that will actually change this behavior.
- [25:42]
Ben Ferguson
Well, and I got to say, Victoria has a lot of courage going on to college campuses and facing the crazy left, the angry left, the Israel hating and America hating left. And we need to see more of that courage, more of that courage among academics, more of that courage among students. And, you know, I think back, you know, I mentioned Ben at the outset that Victoria was my first national Security advisor. And I think it's worth recounting a little bit of that story when we first started working together. So I was elected to the Senate 12 years ago. I show up in December of 2012, sworn in in January of 2013. And when you're a brand new senator, when you're a baby senator, they put you down in these little bitty basement offices, and it's basically freshman hazing. I mean, there are a hundred Senate offices that are full offices, but they keep the new senators down in the basement for three, four, five months, just basically as an initiation. And so Victoria was part of our very first team that came together right when I was newly elected. And she came and joined us initially for what was going to be two weeks, and just to help us get started, help us hire some staff. And then she. Then she was going to move on. And when we got there, one of the very first things we had is we had a vote on John Kerry, who had been nominated as Secretary of State. And John Kerry, at the time I was elected, he was a senator. So he was a colleague of mine for like four minutes. And then Obama at the beginning of the second term, nominated Kerry as Secretary of State. I remember John Kerry came by my basement office. Victoria was sitting in the office in the meeting, and Kerry was, let me speak nicely, incredibly confident in himself. I'm trying to put that in a kind tone. And he gave me this sort of long lecture how I really needed to embrace the law of the Sea treaty, which. The law of the sea treaty, among other things, significantly undermines U.S. sovereignty and gives away the ability of we the people to make our own laws. And I remember sitting there just kind of laughing and being like, okay, this guy has no idea who I am. Like, none whatsoever. And, and, and we, we then came to the vote on the floor of the Senate, and it was one of the very first votes I ever took. And I went down and voted no. And there was literally an audible gasp on the floor of the Senate when I voted no, because a freshman senator was certainly not supposed to do that. The vote was 97 to 3. So 97 senators voted yes. There were only three of us that voted no.
- [28:20]
Dr. Victoria Coates
It was actually 94 to 3.
- [28:22]
Ben Ferguson
Oh, was it 94 to 3? Okay. Well, then I guess Kerry didn't vote for himself. And I remembered the three. I remember that. I don't know who skipped. Whoever skipped, they did better than the 94. And then immediately thereafter, about concurrently with it was the confirmation of Chuck Hagel. Now, Chuck Hagel is who Obama had nominated to be Secretary of Defense, and Chuck Hagel had been a Republican Senator. I didn't know Hagel, but as I looked at his record, his record was terrible. And so I ended up leading what was the very first filibuster in American history against a Defense secretary. And it was, it was successful. It was before Harry Reid had used the nuclear option, before he'd blown up the filibuster. So you can't filibuster now a cabinet nominee anymore, but you could then. And we successfully held 41 Republicans, we stopped his nomination. And then actually, Republicans being what they are, several other Republicans who joined us went wobbly and decided to confirm him anyway. But that's another story. But what I will say is I think it got Victoria's attention that this was not going to be just a quiet go along to get along tenure in the Senate, that we were there to fight battles and lead battles, and she ended up staying in. And I'll tell you something astonishing, Pat. So if you rewind the clock. 12 years ago, 12 years ago, I am elected to the Senate. I'm elected to the Senate. I'm 41 years old, Brand new, elected to the Senate. And as I came into the Senate, I had areas that I knew a lot about. If you were talking about legal issues, if you're talking about criminal justice, if you're talking about constitutional law, I had a long background in all of those issues. When it came to foreign policy, I had essentially zero background, just my professional career. I'd never worked in foreign policy. I never worked in the State Department or the Defense Department. I'd never dealt with foreign policy. My focus had always been domestic. When I was on the George w. Bush campaign 24 years ago, I was the domestic policy advisor. That was my specialty. And so look, economic matter, domestic matters. I had a lot of experience. Foreign policy, I had essentially none. But, but I did have some strong beliefs. I'm, you know, the son of a Cuban immigrant who had fought in the Cuban revolution. I believed profoundly in freedom. I was inspired by Reagan. Peace through strength is, is. Is a principle and philosophy that I believed deeply in, but I didn't have a terribly deep subject matter expertise. And so one of the things I give, give that background, because one of the remarkable things Victoria did is basically convened a university in the United States Senate to train me up in foreign policy. And I Say so with complete humility. And what proceeded for four years is we would do deep dives. And when I'm in dc, Heidi and the girls stay back in Houston. So when I'm in dc, I'm solo. I don't have, I don't have anybody at home. And so my philosophy, if I get to get to my apartment at 7 or 8 or 9 o'clock at night, I'll be mad at my team. I'll be like, wait, what am I doing sitting in an apartment staring at a wall? There's work to be done. Like now, if Heidi and the girls were there, I'd want to be home with the kids. But if they're not there, I want to work. And so every night when I'm in dc, I do a working dinner. And what Victoria began convening is we'd do working dinners. And many of them were with subject matter experts where we'd bring in, say a Middle east policy expert or couple. We'd bring in an Israel expert or an Iran expert, we'd bring in a Russia expert, we'd bring in a China expert, and we'd do a deep dive onto a subject matter and sit there and have a three, four hour dinner, really asking, you know, I'm a big believer that there are no stupid questions other than the question you don't ask because you're afraid to ask. And so I was perfectly happy to ask question after question after question. And I will just say now, 12 years later, where I have been in the middle of virtually every foreign policy battle in the Senate for a long time now, it's worth Looking back to 12 years ago, the incredible job Victoria did, systematically giving me a knowledge set to go along with principles that I started with. But I didn't have the subject matter expertise. And there's literally no person on planet Earth more responsible for my being able to develop that subject matter expertise than Victoria.
- [33:08]
Senator Ted Cruz
Victoria, let me ask you a question. Following up on what he just stated there. And that is it's getting close to Christmas. A lot of people buying gifts. It's Black Friday right now. As people are listening to this. When you wrote this book, who did you envision reading it? Is this one of those books that you should absolutely get for maybe your kids are in high school or in college. Is this, I mean, when you write it, When I wrote my book, I'm like, I was trying to vision, who do I want to read this book? Who am I trying to give information to?
- [33:39]
Dr. Victoria Coates
I'm trying to give information, Ben, to People who are interested in American national security. And not to correct Senator Cruz, but not that I ever would. But the only thing, thing I would adjust to what he just said is it's not foreign policy. This is national security. This is what touches all Americans every day. And so I would hope everyone from a high school senior to somebody who's just interested in the Middle east would be interested in this book because they want to know why this is in the United States best interests. And I would boil this down to a single issue. And I remember so clearly when we made the decision to do this, which was when Senator, Senator Heller's bill to move the Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem came up right away in January of 2013, and it did not have a co sponsor. And I said to Senator Cruz, would you like to be co sponsor? And he said, yes, I would. You know, this seems like a really good idea because this gives that kind of clarity that we were just talking about. And that's when I knew we were off to the races. Same thing with the vote on John Kerry, same thing with Chuck Hagel, that we are going to take a new approach to these issues. And it's one of the reasons it was not easy for me to leave Senator Cruz's staff to go into the Trump administration. But I had no conflict of interest because it was essentially the same policies. These are the America first policies. And one of those keystones of that is the relationship between the United States and Israel. And so that's really the purpose behind the book, to explain to people why that is and then to give them ammunition to spread that information around. Because I think the disinformation about Israel, the very negative information about the Jewish people as well as Israel is so pervasive. So that's why I wrote it.
- [35:49]
Senator Ted Cruz
I know it's going to be an important book and a lot of people are going to want to try to grab this. Where can they get it? Where do you tell people to go?
- [35:57]
Dr. Victoria Coates
Unfortunately, they can get it anywhere they would like. They can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, they can go to the Encounter Press website. But Amazon is probably the easiest what we all have on our phones. So really appreciate any kind of pre orders and I hope it makes a great gift.
- [36:15]
Ben Ferguson
So the book is the Battle for the Jewish How Israel and America can Win. It's an excellent book. Victoria is a preeminent expert. If you find yourself around the Thanksgiving table or at work or at school with people arguing, arguing about Israel, arguing, well, don't the Palestinians have a point, aren't the Israelis really terrible to them? And you feel like something's wrong with that argument, but you're not sure what. This book is a really helpful tool to understand. Okay, wait a second. Here are actually the facts and I'll say something real quick that Victoria just said a minute ago. And this is something I think that is incredibly important for all of us who are strongly pro Israel. I urge everyone in the pro Israel movement to articulate a defense of Israel very directly from the perspective of why it is good for the United States of America. I think too many in the pro Israel movement talk about aid for Israel as if you're giving welfare to some down on his luck neighbor who just needs help. And I think that's a profound mistake. If you look at every year the United states provides roughly $3 billion in military assistance to Israel that is incredibly beneficial to America. If we tried to recreate the intelligence network of the Mossad, the benefits that America gets from the Mossad spying on, sabotaging, engaging with the enemies of America, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, it would cost tens of billions of dollars and we wouldn't recreate it half as good. The enemies of Israel are the enemies of America. And when Israel defeats Hamas, as they are doing now, when Israel defeats Hezbollah, as they are doing now, that benefits America. And this book explains that. It's powerful and useful to know. So I'll say with Christmas season coming up, you should go and order a copy. The Battle for the Jewish How Israel and America Can Win and it's by Victoria Coates.
- [38:17]
Senator Ted Cruz
There you go. Be safe on the road. For all of you that are driving home from Thanksgiving with your family and your friends, don't forget Senator Cruz and I do the show Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Hit that subscribe or Auto download button. We also have on Saturday, the Week in Review, what you may have missed during the week. Got that for you on Saturdays as well. And don't forget on those in between days, grab my podcast, the Ben Ferguson Podcast. I'll keep you updated on the latest breaking news there and the center and I will see you back here Saturday for the Week in Review.