By Ryan McPherson
During the final event of the 2025 Student Action Summit (SAS), TPUSA Founder and CEO Charlie Kirk moderated a debate between comedian Dave Smith and political commentator Josh Hammer over the subject of Israeli conflicts and whether it is ethical for the US to be involved in them.
At the outset, Kirk said the debate would cover topics in the following areas:
- The twelve-day war between Israel and Iran
- The “appeared fake or real” amount of Israeli influence in US politics
- Any solutions to problems stemming from Israeli conflicts
This was Dave Smith’s first time attending a TPUSA event. Smith is a libertarian and follower of former US Congressman Ron Paul, who is widely considered to be the leading figure in US libertarianism.
“American foreign policy for my entire life has been insane–criminally insane,” Smith claimed during his introduction. “We’ve launched war after war, we’ve talked about peace through strength all the time, but all we’ve gotten is permanent militarism and forever wars against countries that pose no threat to us.”
Smith blames this on neoconservatives’ “hijacking” of foreign policy after the attacks on September 11, 2001. These neoconservatives were joined “at the hip” with the Israeli Likud party, Smith claimed.
“Instead of the Israelis making peace with the Palestinians,” Smith said, the Israeli state could have the US “overthrow surrounding governments giving Israel a hard time.”
“We should reject this insane foreign policy and embrace the foreign policy that Dr. Ron Paul advocated, which is the foreign policy of the founding fathers: stay out of entangling alliances, stay out of unnecessary wars, be friends with the world and trade with the world, that’s the key to prosperity,” he said, concluding his opening.
Hammer began his part of the debate refuting Smith’s reference to the right-wing Likud party as the instigators of US involvement in Israeli conflicts.
“Dave always conveniently neglects to inform the audience of this, that the actual leader of the Israeli right, a man named by the name of Ariel Sharon, vehemently opposed the Bush administration going into Iraq,” Hammer stated. “So this whole notion that Israel is talking America into foreign wars, is total nonsense. In 2011, when the Obama administration toppled Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, it is actually well known that Libya sent secret diplomatic envoys into Israel to try to tell them to talk the US and France to talk NATO off of that attack there. This whole narrative is totally backwards.”
Hammer then praised the US and the foreign policy of the Trump Administration and how Israel figures into it, noting the support it has received from Trump’s base.
“An overwhelming majority of self-identified MAGA Republicans support close US-Israel relations. According to a CBS news poll, 94% of Republicans support Trump’s decision to strike facilities in Iran,” Hammer said.
Turning to Smith, Hammer criticized him for calling for Trump’s impeachment over these actions. He then went through a series of Smith’s social media posts condemning Trump’s foreign policy decisions, including one in which Smith called Trump a war criminal. This should make people livid, Hammer exclaimed.
“He’s calling our president, the greatest president in my lifetime, an impotent b****,” Hammer told the audience after quoting another of Smith’s posts.
Trump’s foreign policy is neither neoconservative nor isolationist, Hammer said. This was shown by the recent airstrikes in Iran. “Trump deprived the Iranian regime of nuclear weapons while not losing a single American sailor, soldier or marine.”
Concerning Jeffrey Epstein, Hammer dismissed Smith’s belief that Trump is covering up a child sex-trafficking operation, continuing to reference his posts on X.
“I am disgusted this man is on stage,” Hammer said at the end of his opening statement.
Smith was annoyed with Hammer’s commentary on his X posts, finding it worthless for a debate.
“Every single time I come up here to debate issues, and they come here to debate me and my character,” he lamented. “Because they can’t actually take on any of the arguments, and so [they take] the most pathetic low-hanging fruit of ‘you guys don’t like Trump,’ ‘this guy said bad things about Trump.’”
Smith then doubled down on criticizing the president for his actions with respect to foreign policy and Jeffrey Epstein. “This is America. You criticize the government when they get things wrong,” he exclaimed.
Concerning the recent Iran-Israel War, Smith said that the war never needed to be started.
“Iran did not have nuclear weapons: according to all the intelligence, including our Director of National Intelligence… Iran had not made the political decision to acquire a nuclear weapon and they were in negotiations with Donald Trump at the time to bring their enrichment down,” Smith argued, citing the Annual Threat Assessment.
Hammer later professed “agnosticism as to the imminent nature” of the nuclear weapons Iran had because he had not seen the reports.
“I’d be curious if Dave Smith also believes in the tooth fairy and pink unicorns,” Hammer quipped, responding to Smith’s views on Iran and its nuclear weaponry. “What lie does Dave Smith not believe frankly? The recent twelve-day war is literally the encapsulation of the Trump doctrine.”
Trump ran against neoconservatism, Hammer said, further extolling the President’s foreign policy.
“It’s good that Trump opposes moralistic nation-building boondoggles. Guess what? Donald Trump is also not, and never has been since day one, a hardcore isolationist. He is a foreign policy nationalist and realist. We can say he is a Jacksonian… because he believes in generally following the very wise advice of George Washington in his farewell address, you should beware of foreign entanglements. But when you are attacked, you’re going to punch back three times as hard.”
The cooperation between Israel and the US in the Iran-Israel War was a “perfect tag team operation to neutralize and set back by many years the threat of a regime that has been at war with the US at least since 1983,” Hammer claimed.
Smith said it would be bad for Iran to have a nuclear weapon after being asked by Kirk.
“I don’t think anybody should be allowed to have nuclear weapons secretly,” Smith stated, which Kirk claimed was a subtle dig at Israel’s nuclear weaponry. He then continued to discuss the Iran-Israel War.
“People died in this war. There were both Iranian civilians and Israeli civilians who died in this war,” Smith noted. “My point is that the war never needed to be launched to begin with. There is no reason why we even have to be enemies with Iran: this is a third-world country in the Middle East that does not have nuclear weapons, does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles, does not have an air force capable of hitting us with anything. This is Israel’s problem: we don’t need to be involved in this. We’ve got our own issues here.”
The risk of a third world war that Smith suggested in the X posts Hammer quoted from does not prove any argument, according to Smith. Upon mentioning the irrelevance of quoting these, Hammer interjected, saying he quoted them “because [Smith was] dead wrong and looked stupid.”
Kirk then shifted the debate to the question of Israel’s alliance with the US. Hammer believes Israel is an ally to the US, while Smith believes otherwise, and that there are greater problems the US needs to deal with than those of Israel.
“Our problem… is the deep state in the United States of America,” Smith stated. “They’re the ones who framed Donald Trump for treason. You know what that deep state wants is permanent war. Christians and Jews and Muslims have a connection to that land – but that doesn’t mean we have to bomb Iran for Israel. It doesn’t mean we have to support Israel slaughtering people in Gaza.”
The state of debt in the US is also problematic for Smith. He links this to the spending of money on war and the reckless printing of money, finding this a greater issue to focus on than war in the Middle East with Israel’s foes.
“Adolf Hitler and the Nazis couldn’t bring down America; Joseph Stalin and the Commies’ couldn’t bring down America; the British Empire couldn’t bring down America, but you think that Hezbollah and Lebanon are a threat to us? They’re a problem for Israel to deal with, we have our own problems!”
Hammer was angered over Smith’s statement, finding it insensitive toward the deaths of those who died in past conflicts caused by Hezbollah.
On the question of aid to Israel, both debaters agreed that the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) is a problematic entity, and that aid to Israel should be brought down considerably. However, Hammer doesn’t believe AIPAC is a “big powerful lobby.” Smith declared to the SAS audience that they should hate AIPAC for contributing to progressive politicians.
In his conclusion to the subject, Hammer said the US has important reasons to ally with Israel due to the influence of Jewish tradition on historical American political figures and laws.
At this point, Kirk condemned an anti-semitic attitude often sprouting from this debate in the public forum, specifically from those who take a side similar to Smith.
“There is this dark Jew hate out there. It is not good…it will rot your brains, it will rot your soul.” Kirk said while asking Smith about the misuse of his views by others to spread an anti-Semitic agenda. The foreign policy the US is pursuing, rather than his views on the subject, is guaranteed to produce anti-semitic agendas, Smith responded.
One of the final debate topics was Hamas attacking Israel on October 7, 2023. Kirk said that those of similar views to Smith on the subject “could do a better job of remembering the horror on October 7.” The “moral culpability” between Israel and Hamas falls on the people using human shields, Hammer said of Hamas.
Smith claimed the contrary.
“If you support what Israel is doing to Gaza right now, my advice to you guys is you never have a leg to stand on claiming to be pro-life for the rest of your life,” Smith said to the audience. “It’s okay to support a policy killing babies, all of a sudden, killing babies is negotiable.”
Hammer interrupted, saying it was a stupid argument and that Hamas is not pro-life for killing people. Smith replied that Hammer had no counterargument.
“It was a horrible day, and the world feels for those civilians,” Smith said. “But the way you respond to this is going to be how you’re characterized by the international community,” he said of Israel.
“This was time well-spent,” Kirk said at the end of the debate, expressing his takeaways. He commended the debaters for the few agreements they had.
“This is better to have this out in the open than silence people and censor them and call them names. Instead this is how we solve our problems,” he stated.
Watch full speeches from all SAS speakers on the Turning Point USA YouTube Channel.
