For challenges like this, I’d expect a respectable source that dated the census (or census announcement) after Jesus’ birth. My impression is that this assertion came from much later non-Christian Jewish records. If anything came square at the Pharisees and challenged their status and authority — it was Jesus.
This show might be in the vein of “What do various people say about Jesus.” And you’re going to hear answers ranging from “He is a bunkum story” to “He is really, truly, and demonstrated my personal Savior and that of all who believe.”
“One of the “expert Historians” pontificated that the census did not occur until ten years after Jesus’s birth, and that there was no murder of the children in Bethlehem. But they needed Jesus to be born where the prophets said he’d be, and they wanted him to be like Moses as well, so basically, the Gospels lied.”
The “census” was probably an enrolling that Augustus ordered in 3 BC, and didn’t get around to Judea until a couple of years after that.
(See info at The Christian Think Tank, on Luke’s Census, for example — a great source, btw)
Macronius, a pagan playwright, mentions the slaughter of the innocents, and attributes the famous pun of Augustus, “safer to be Herod’s pig than his son” as referring to this incident.