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Sept. 28, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
47:01
Ask Charlie Anything 36: Netflix’s Social Dilemma, SCOTUS Term Limits? Is the Executive Branch Too Powerful? Does Democracy Move Too Slowly? And So Much More…

Charlie answers the questions you email him at Freedom@CharlieKirk.com—beginning with Charlie’s take on the Democrats’ threats to enact term limits for Supreme Court justices should they gain power in November. Charlie also addresses Netflix’s...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Court Packing and Checks 00:15:21
Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
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Hey, everybody, it's Monday, so I take your questions.
We dive into the Democrats' court packing scheme, Amy Coney Barrett, the political implications, and I give you my feedback on the film on Netflix social dilemma.
Is social media hurting our kids?
What should we do about the tech companies?
And also, interestingly, how are we supposed to analyze the quasi-addictive qualities of Instagram, Facebook, Google, and more?
We get into that, the questions that you emailed me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if I selected your question, you get a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine.
You guys can email us all throughout the week.
We review the questions and we select a couple every week when we do our ask me anything.
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I take your questions.
It's Monday.
Time to win.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Happy Monday, everybody.
As you know, on Mondays, I take your questions, ask me anything.
And you guys emailed me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
And if I select your question, you know how it works.
You guys get a signed copy of the New York Times bestseller, The MAGA Doctrine.
So let's take some questions here.
I love hearing from you guys.
You guys can always send me notes and thoughts and news clippings and more.
Let's get to this question right here from Danica.
Hi, Danica.
You win a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine.
Hello, Charlie.
I listen to your show every day and I'm a huge fan.
Thank you.
I'm learning a lot from you.
If I'm understanding you, it seems to me at this point in history, the Supreme Court is even more important than the presidency.
So here's my question.
How likely is it the Democrats will succeed in pushing through this bill to place term limits on justices?
Or will it be successful in packing the court, adding states to the union, et cetera?
Thanks so much.
God bless Danica.
This ties into another question that we got where someone was confused about the idea of packing the courts.
So first and foremost, in the United States Constitution, it, of course, establishes the legislative and the executive and the judicial branch.
Each one of those branches are there for a very specific reason and to have checks and balances against the other branch.
This is an idea that was first written by Montesquieu and before that by Cicero.
We take this idea of checks and balances for granted in our country.
And it is very easy to do so when you live under a system that has checks and balances.
The Founding Fathers guiding belief was that man was flawed by nature.
You can't really trust human beings too much.
Therefore, you must have a system to be able to make sure that the worst impulses of human behavior do not go unchecked, that there must be security mechanisms for human beings.
And as Lord Acton used to say, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And so I don't know if I necessarily agree, Danica, that the Supreme Court is more important than the presidency.
However, I think at this period of time, an argument could be made that a majority on the Supreme Court for the coming years can be an insurance policy against Joe Biden possibly becoming president.
We built that out in our previous Ask Me Anything episode.
However, in the United States Constitution, it says clearly what congressional representation looks like, what presidential representation looks like.
It does not say clearly what Supreme Court representation looks like.
Nowhere in the United States Constitution does it say how many U.S. Supreme Court justices should there be.
It does say how many senators each state should have.
It does say how House of Representatives members should be selected.
And eventually it did come to say how long a president can serve.
But the number of justices is something that started small, eventually grew to nine.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to pack the courts back in the 1930s and was unsuccessful in trying to do so.
And that number nine kind of stayed as the standard.
Now, I want to play tape from Ken Starr.
Ken Starr is on our honorary board here at Turning Point USA.
He made a phenomenal point.
Now, Ken Starr kind of rose to fame when he was the Bob Mueller of the Clinton era.
He was the special prosecutor against Bill Clinton's shady real estate dealings and eventually, let's say, unearthed Bill Clinton's adultery in the White House with intern Monica Lewinsky.
Ken Starr has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ken Starr himself was a federal judge.
Ken Starr was the president of Baylor University.
Ken Starr was also a lawyer for President Trump, very reputable guy.
And so he was on Fox News and he made a really good point.
Why nine justices in practices has worked and that should continue to be the case.
Play tape.
Okay, I'm looking at the Reuters wire right crossing right now from the White House.
The president apparently said a moment ago he thinks the election will end up at the Supreme Court.
And that's why it's important, he says, to have nine justices.
Your reaction on that?
I completely agree with the president.
And I also agree completely with Justice Sotomayor, who agrees with the president.
She said back in 2016 when there was a vacancy that, and I'm paraphrasing Bill, we don't do well as a court.
And she was talking, of course, as a general matter, a four to four court, an equally divided court, is a recipe for mischief.
The court needs to be at full strength all of the time, but especially with perhaps a serious election contest coming up.
Well, two more quick ones then, Ken.
He went on to say that the judiciary chair, Senator Graham, would not even have to hold a hearing for the nominee, says the process will go quickly.
React on that, and do you believe Senator Dianne Feinstein, the age of 87, will chair this committee, the hearings for the Democratic side?
Yes or no?
I don't know about Senator Feinstein.
I appreciated, by the way, her comment that she was not in favor of packing the court in terms of the filibuster and so forth.
But no, there has to be a hearing with all due respect to the president.
This is too important for there not to be a confirmation hearing where all of the senators get to ask questions and then the nation gets to assess the nominee.
Thank you, Ken.
Ken Starr juggling a couple stories right now.
Appreciate you coming on.
As you heard there, Ken Starr made the argument that nine was enough to be able to have differences of opinion, but it wasn't too much where all of a sudden people couldn't sit around a table and deliberate.
Ken Starr made a very good point that I had not heard previously, that being able to sit around a table and have a discussion with nine people, it's just a pretty good number.
Where if you get to 11 or 13, when you sit around a table, all of a sudden you kind of have factions and people break into different beliefs at that point.
And so what packing the courts means, we got a separate question about this that wasn't completely related, Danica, to your question, where someone said, what does packing the courts even mean?
It would mean that whomever then controls the United States Senate and the houses of Congress, they would vote to expand the number of Supreme Court justices from 9 to 11 to 13 or 15.
Basically, the Democrat approach is: if you do not give us what we want, we will change the rules of engagement.
We will pack the courts and we will make it increasingly difficult for you to be able to ever get back to a position of power.
Now, that's not a good reason not to confirm President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court.
In fact, that's a really bad reason to reward that kind of quasi-extortionist behavior from the Democrats as they are plainly threatening the fabric of the Constitution if they do not get what they want.
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Congress, in a lot of different ways, has abdicated its responsibilities to the executive branch, and therefore it has made the Supreme Court more important.
I think the executive Executive branch actually has too much power.
There are over 140 agencies that work in some form of a quasi-lawmaking capacity where they almost make their own rules and their own regulations outside of the acts of Congress.
Because of this, you need an independent arbiter to decide whether or not the EPA, which is the Environmental Protection Agency, or as I call it, the Employment Prevention Agency, as to whether or not the water acts that they're putting forward are constitutional,
or the Federal Trade Commission, or the FDIC, all of these different sub-agencies within our government have been given more and more power because Congress has been at an impasse or Congress has been serving the interests of the rich, the wealthy, the few, the elites, and the lobbyists.
A lot of the power has concentrated within the executive.
Therefore, the Supreme Court has only been elevated in its importance of adjudicating these differences.
A great example is DACA.
Congress was not able to come to any form of deal with DACA.
I think that was probably a good thing generally.
I don't think a deal for DACA should be established.
I think that if people come into our country illegally, they should leave.
I don't think it's that controversial of an opinion to say that.
However, the fact of the matter is that Congress could not come to a conclusive opinion or decision, I should say, on how to move forward legislatively.
So Barack Obama moved forward with DACA, and then that puts the Supreme Court in primary focus to figure out whether or not that order by the Obama administration was constitutional or not.
And so, Danica, you make a great point that the Supreme Court actually plays a bigger role because Congress has not done their job to oversee the actions of the executive branch with their unconstitutional executive power from these federal agencies.
By the way, President Trump has actually deregulated a lot of that authority.
President Trump has relaxed a lot of the rulemaking flexibility of the executive branch, which I think is one of his least talked about accomplishments in the time that he has been president.
And so we have to understand that the construction of our Constitution, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branch, they all have checks and balances against each other.
For example, if a Supreme Court justice acts incorrectly, that Supreme Court justice can be impeached by the United States Senate.
If a president acts incorrectly, they can be impeached by the United States Senate.
If the Senate or the House passes a bill that is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court can strike down that bill.
The architect of the United States Constitution, Madison, argued in many different Federalist papers, which I encourage all of you to check out the Federalist papers.
You guys can do that at thinker.org, thinker.org slash Charlie.
I encourage you guys to check it out.
He argued that we must have a system that is deliberative in nature, that tries to prevent the worst instincts of human nature from being able to abuse power.
In the 63rd Federalist, Madison argues that the United States Constitution was the first purely representative body in human history.
Now, what did he mean by that?
See, when they lived under British rule, the sovereign was King George.
The sovereign prior to the creation of the United States of America and the United States Constitution was never the people.
But the sovereign, according to the United States Constitution, is the constitutional majority.
Madison also argued in the Federalist Papers that we must have a longer process to try to effectuate change.
Madison in Federalist 49 argued that there must be a premium on deeply held opinions for a long time.
The Electoral College Strength 00:07:45
So if you actually play this out, in order for your particular opinion to really be enacted, it takes six years of advocacy and successful elections.
You have to win the House, you have to win the presidency, and you have to win back the Senate over a period of six times without a reaction or response from the opposing opinion.
This is how civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s.
And I'm going to be very clear.
We are not a democracy.
We are a republic.
We are a representative country.
We do have a Democrat means of electing leaders.
But a democracy would mean that your God-given rights could be put on referendum by the will of the majority next election.
That is not the way this works in our country.
Instead, we have the courts that interpret the law under a prism of natural God-given rights that can strike down unconstitutional measures even from 51 plus percent of the voters.
And now, some people say the critics of our system say that this moves too slow, that it's wrong, it's too deliberative.
Madison thought that was an attribute of our system, and I completely agree.
For people that want immediate change, for people that want things to happen instantaneously, we want Medicare for all right now.
They get frustrated that our system has so many checks and balances to be able to have that long march of the institutions, almost a Hegelian way to go about effectuating change in the Western world.
I think the Founding Fathers were brilliant.
They were ahead of their time, and Madison agreed that this was not a weakness in the system.
Instead, it was a strength of the system.
And he talks about this in Federalist 49 and the 63rd Federalist.
The question also goes: how do we elect our leaders?
You see, if we just elected our leaders through the will of the majority, and we are going to do an in-depth episode on the Electoral College, so I'm just going to tease that right here, right now, that's coming up in the next couple weeks.
It's very important that all of you understand the Electoral College, how to defend the Electoral College, the need for the Electoral College, the moral case for the Electoral College, the utilitarian case for the Electoral College.
If we just had straight-up democracy, you would not have a representative government.
Remember, the states created the federal government.
The federal government did not create the states.
I think we need to give actually more power back to the states.
We, the people, have the power through our representatives.
And if our representatives do not do our job, they should be recalled and they should be held accountable.
So going to this question that you have, Danica, do I think the Democrats will be successful in packing the court, adding states to the Union?
Probably not.
Our system does not allow for a quick, radical insertion of new ideas just because one side gets too angry.
It doesn't.
It takes long, drawn out, thoughtful, convincing, persuasive political movements to be able to have this kind of massive change, such as packing the court or adding states to the union.
Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the mandate that he had, was unable to pack the courts.
Even FDR was unable to add justices to the Supreme Court.
It is unlikely, in fact, it is almost inconceivable that Joe Biden and Senate Democrats will have that sort of political power behind them.
Remember, Madison said it takes six years of persuasive activism.
And he argued: if you have a very good contribution that you want to bring to the American system and you can persuade people for six years, then you deserve that contribution.
For example, women's suffrage, Civil Rights Act.
It took many years of activism and of deliberation, and they won.
It was a good thing.
By the way, those were Republican-led efforts and the abolition of slavery.
But do you want to know a bad legislative effort that was killed?
Equal Rights Amendment.
ERA, they called it.
And they almost passed it.
It was on its way towards passage.
And it was Phyllis Schlafly and her incredible activism.
And we're going to do a whole podcast on Phyllis Schlafly at some point.
I don't know if we'll get to it before the election, but we're going to do a whole podcast on it.
Where she argued, why do we need a new amendment to the Constitution that singles out just women?
She made the brilliant constitutional argument and completely changed all the momentum that the ERA had by saying the Constitution is a gender-neutral document and it should stay a gender-neutral document.
As soon as you start to select women versus men or black versus white, it destroys the brilliance of the U.S. Constitution as being an equally applicable document.
Of course, the 14th Amendment later clarified equal protection under the law, which again, Madison argued that those sorts of amendments should be allowed for.
You just have to have really good reasoning.
I have to win people over for a long period of time.
It's almost the system that the founders argued for was you can't get really excited for one election under a bunch of promises without a counter argument happening.
The system's not built for that.
This makes us fundamentally different than the French and the Spanish and the Portuguese and the Greeks and the Italians.
That if you get really excited in those elections and you win in a parliamentary system, you can change the country in one election cycle there.
You can.
There's very little countermeasure because as soon as you win those elections, let's just use in the United Kingdom, you actually control when the next election is.
You control when the next election actually gets to be called.
And you can then push forward government-run health care, gun confiscation.
In our system, there is a higher standard to change everything.
So, no, I don't think they'll be able to do that.
You know why?
Because there will be a response to it.
There will be.
There will be a, and we use this word a lot, and I don't mind using it, I just think it's overused, a backlash, where if they try to pack the courts, these Democrat senators in West Virginia, in Arizona, in Montana will hear from us.
There will be marching in the streets, good marching in the streets.
And I think that's part of the brilliance of the United States Constitution that we don't talk about enough.
That this thing is not easy to change overnight, nor should it be.
Because, look, the Founding Fathers were very ambitious people, incredibly ambitious.
But even what we have been able to do in our country over the last 200 plus years would have blown the Founding Fathers away.
Our economic success, our charitable success, scientific progress, what we've done for the world, military might, the standard for human rights all across the planet would have blown them away.
And so I think we need to do a better job of clearly communicating the difference between a republic and a democracy and why our government should be deliberative in nature.
Social Dilemma Insights 00:16:06
And again, you guys can check out thinker.org/slash Charlie to do a great job of that.
We talk about that quite often through the Federalist Papers.
But, Danica, it's a great question.
Happy to be able to answer it.
Thank you for emailing us, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Next question here.
Charlie, can you talk about the movie Social Dilemma if you've seen it?
I watched it and was left confused about where I stand.
Can you clear up for me and give me some thoughts if you've watched it?
Marianne from Reno.
Thank you, Marianne.
You win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
I did see Social Dilemma, and I'm really glad I watched it.
I actually deleted my Netflix account, so I wanted to watch it because I got so many emails from listeners and from all of you that listen to us and support us saying, Charlie, can you watch this?
I want your breakdown of it.
So I said, okay, so I used the Friends Netflix login.
I refused to support a pedophile network that is Netflix.
And so I watched The Social Dilemma.
So spoil alert, if you haven't seen Social Dilemma, what's going to happen in the next couple minutes here?
I will just be forthright and I'm not going to kind of disguise that I've watched it or what happens in the movie.
It's not exactly anything worthy of spoilers, but just want to give that kind of disclaimer.
Okay, so The Social Dilemma is a terrific movie for 80% of the film.
It's one of the most effective documentaries that I have seen.
So I'm going to walk through this for people that haven't seen it because I think it's really helpful.
Okay, it starts with a phenomenal quote.
I've never heard this quote before, but I loved it.
It said, Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without its curses.
It's phenomenal.
There's an argument made at the beginning that I sympathize with that these tech companies, Facebook in particular, Google, Twitter, TikTok, they are benefiting from a form of surveillance capitalism.
They make an argument that I've long said that they are selling their users.
There's another great quote in the film that I thought was so brilliant, which is: only social media and illegal drugs call the people that use their products users.
Pretty incredible when you think about it.
And so, if you are not paying for the product, the movie The Social Dilemma argues that you are the product.
They had some very fascinating firsthand testimony from the programmers that built these social media applications, from Pinterest to Instagram, Facebook, and Google, where they argue that within their experiences in these tech companies, they went through daily and deliberative meetings on how they could gradually, slightly,
but eventually dramatically change your behavior.
Tristan Harris, who is in the movie, very compelling story.
He worked for Google.
He argued that the social media apps and these phones are making us less human.
He argued that they sell a form of almost slot machine certainty, that if you use these devices, it almost guarantees a dopamine rush the minute that you open up your phone.
The entire premise of the first part of the film is the amount of data that they collect from you.
Tristan Harris argues in the film that it gives you a positive intermittent reinforcement.
I thought this was a really clever way to put it.
In Silicon Valley, we went from a place that created hardware, almost tools-based technology, computers, servers, phones, to now manipulation and addiction-based technology.
The film then transitions to almost a docudrama style, where there's a family that deals with addiction to social media.
Social Dilemma makes no qualms whatsoever saying that social media is a drug.
They profile an 11-year-old girl that is addicted to probably something that could be Snapchat or TikTok.
They don't use the exact companies in this kind of docudrama lens for obvious reasons.
They don't want to be sued.
And then a young man who is 16 years old, 17 years old, that is very into an equivalent of Instagram or YouTube.
The most powerful part of the film, where I have to tell you, of all the documentaries I've ever watched, and I've watched hundreds of documentaries, I have to say this is the very best.
They win the gold medal in the way that they portrayed the tech companies monitoring and monetizing their users.
The best I have ever seen.
Where they show a young man that is using his Instagram feed, and on the back end of the screen, they show three individuals that are dressed in all black, that are monitoring everything he's doing and programming the screen time, the content, and trying to make it more addictive for him.
Incredibly well done.
There's some statistics that were shared by Jonathan Height from the Heterodox Academy that said since mobile social media use began in 2010, we've seen 189% increase in hospitalizations with pre-teen women in self-harm, 62% increase in hospitalizations for self-harm with late teenagers.
Driver's licenses are dropping for 16-year-olds.
Romantic relationships are dropping.
Jonathan Haidt calls this a digital pacifier.
Tristan Harris agrees.
I love that comparison.
One of the most telling parts of the entire film is when they had a engineer say that since 1960, planes go basically the same speed, cars might go twice as fast.
However, the processing power for a computer is up one trillion percent.
Another woman engineer argued that algorithms are not agnostic.
She called them opinions that are written in code.
So that's a short overview.
So the thesis of the movie changed about 80% of the way through.
It started as a very well-documented, thoughtful, empirically backed indictment of the social media tech companies of how they are chemically addictive, how they are selling our children, how they are pushing forth content that does not make us wiser, smarter, or more likely to pursue truth.
All of that was phenomenal.
In fact, I was on board with, let's regulate the tech companies, let's break them up.
I was buying it all the way through.
Not 80% of the way of the film, though, they started into an extended dramatization of this young man, I think his name was Ben, where he was spending too much time on YouTube.
And all of a sudden, they made this entire argument.
It was so obvious that if these young men, white men, spend too much time on YouTube, they're going to get radicalized down the rabbit hole.
Then he gets involved in protesting and social isolation and bad political movements.
It was very obvious all of a sudden where this film was going, that somehow YouTube and the content that's being put out there is sowing the seeds of political division.
Now, I have to give the social dilemma credit.
They never used Trump.
Conservatives, they were very, very disciplined in that capacity.
But they lost me at that point.
I said, wait a second, that is not the biggest issue here.
Let me tell you what was not in the social dilemma.
Not one piece, not one sentence about censorship, about opposing ideas being taken down by tech companies.
Nothing whatsoever at all.
There is nothing in the film about how opposing ideas from mainstream doctrine were being stunted, were being suppressed, were being demonetized.
We have been through that at length with the terrific work from Alam Bakari from Breitbart.com.
We've had him on our podcast here before, and we're going to have him on again.
Not even to mention.
Instead, Social Dilemma should have been a longer film with more concrete criticisms from every perspective.
The film also did not talk about the massive amount of economic monopolization that these companies control.
Instead, it took a different approach towards the end.
Instead, Tristan Harris was saying, I actually don't mind these companies.
I just want them to work for the benefit of humanity.
And this really kind of fun guy who I enjoyed throughout the film, don't remember his name, long braided hair, he totally lost me towards the end.
Towards the end of the film, he's talking about all these things I completely agree with about how these apps are destroying humanity, how they're making young people less likely to mature, less likely to interact with other human beings.
And then he says, and because of all this, we're never going to be able to fight climate change.
I'm like, what?
All of a sudden, he hit the whole kind of crescendo of the film was, we can't make America in our socialist image because of these tech companies.
And I said, you completely lost me.
Maybe I don't hate these companies as much as I thought they do.
And it was at this moment I thought, we got to be really careful how we approach this tech issue.
Because if you give this regulatory power to some of these people, they're going to shut us all up.
And so while I agree with the criticism, and I think it's completely correct, that these tech companies are actually making us less likely to engage in meaningful dialogue, more likely to be outraged, more tribal, I think it is a timeout and it's a non-starter if all of a sudden you make the argument that we must now shut down the tech companies so we can now have Medicare for all.
We take the guns away, shut down the churches, and put forth some sort of radical environmentalist agenda.
So I actually really enjoyed the film.
I just think that there was definitely a slippage towards the end.
But if I were to say, if I were to give a piece of feedback to the social dilemma people, I would say they should cut off the last part of the film.
They should condense it down to 40 minutes, either make it longer and make the criticism more broad and more fair, because they did not talk at all about the censorship or the monopolization issue.
They talked a little bit about how wealthy these companies are, but they really didn't get into it enough.
But the part that is so powerful and the reason why this film has been viewed so many times, for good reason, by the way, they did a great job here, was when they deliberately walked through how that smartphone that your 12-year-old has or your 14-year-old has is no different than giving them cocaine.
That they will become addicted and they will become a worse person because of it.
And I thought there was actually a really good part at the end where they said, delete these apps, turn off notifications.
I have done that, just so you know.
My team manages all my social media.
I have deleted Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
The only app I have is YouTube because I actually get benefit from watching some videos out there.
I think that it can be helpful in exploring big ideas.
Again, I have my criticism with Google.
Trust me, I've been on the record about that.
That's the only one of the social media apps that I have.
Therefore, I receive no incoming of people that are just out there to criticize or troll.
I couldn't care less what they're saying.
Somebody came up the other day.
They said, Charlie, you're trending on Twitter.
I said, heh, feels the same like when I wasn't trending on Twitter.
It's not real life.
It's like a video game.
Who cares?
It's completely, it's actually my day is exactly the same when I wasn't trending on Twitter.
I'm not connected to some sort of cyborg external matrix.
It's actually really freeing to know I think the same things I thought whether I knew I was trending on Twitter or I wasn't trending on Twitter.
It's actually one of the most liberating feelings ever.
And I think that so many people are no different than Neo or Morpheus in the Matrix.
They're living in this unreal world.
Once you disconnect from that, and all I care about is what I push out into Twitter, not what I get in from Twitter, I have thought more clearly.
I've been more articulate.
I've done more podcasts.
It's been one of the greatest experiences.
I'm never going to read down those applications.
So in general, I encourage people to check out the social dilemma.
It pains me because it's on Netflix, which is on the pedophile network, where they have cuties.
So I don't enjoy having to support that.
With that being said, I do actually encourage you to watch it.
I encourage all parents to watch it with the disclaimers that I said.
I want to make something very clear.
While I was disappointed in the ending of the social dilemma, it was not enough for me to say that it's a disqualifier.
It took a trained eye.
It took someone who is more likely to see this kind of bias to kind of see that.
So I do encourage all parents to see that.
And just kind of one piece of advice.
If you are not willing to give your child a firearm, do not give them a smartphone.
I equate the potential damage that a young person can do with a firearm, the same that they could do with a smartphone.
I do believe in firearm ownership once someone is mature enough to understand what it can do, how it can be used, and how dangerous it is, and why you must always treat a firearm in a certain way.
Treat it as if the gun is loaded.
Treat the smartphone as if it's ready to ruin your life because it could.
And for young parents out there, I hold this belief, and I am not trying to condemn you at all whatsoever if you did not do this.
So please understand this is rooted in compassion and in love, truly.
Your child should not have a smartphone until they're at least 16 or 17 or 18 years old.
Buy your child a flip phone with basic texting capacity that they can text you and make phone calls.
A younger a child has a smartphone, the more likely they are to engage in social isolation, depression, and non-human behavior.
Be very careful giving a young person a smartphone, especially with the over-deluge of applications that are out there.
Thank you, Marianne, for your question.
You guys can email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
War in Europe 00:07:47
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Let's get to the next question here.
And I first just want to say thank you for all of you that support us at CharlieKirk.com/slash support.
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Hi, Charlie.
My name is Ben H.
And I am from Washington State.
I was wondering what your predictions are for the House and Senate races.
Can you go state by state through some of the battlegrounds?
Are there any House races we should be focusing on?
Big fan of your podcast.
So great question, Ben.
So look, I don't try to talk about the polls too often.
I think that polling can be very misleading.
I think the horse race is something that we should kind of stray away from.
I think that it is generally kind of a distraction issue.
But look, let me go through some of the recent polls that I find to be very promising.
An ABC News poll has President Trump up four points in Florida, also one point up in Arizona.
These are very positive trends done by two polling agencies, ABC News, Washington Post, that would not be talking about positive trends for the president unless it was true.
Some of the most important Senate races, Susan Collins in Maine, Corey Gardner in Colorado, Tom Tillis in North Carolina, Martha McSally in Arizona, amongst many others.
With the new announcement of Amy Coney Barrett, I'm literally wearing an ACB shirt right now, and you guys can check out that shirt at tpusa.com.
If you go to tpusa.com and you want an ACB shirt, you guys can go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
I believe that the Amy Coney Barrett nomination and appointment by President Trump and hopefully confirmation by the Senate will help Martha McSally in Arizona, will help Tom Tillis in North Carolina.
I think it will hurt Corey Gardner in Colorado, amongst other people at risk.
I think it will help Steve Daines in Montana as well.
And so while I don't want to get too much into the polls, I think that it doesn't factor in enthusiasm, doesn't factor in turnout, I will say this.
I am hearing from a lot of people on the ground that Democrats are growing increasingly nervous and uneasy that they are not having the absentee ballot requests, the early voting turnout, or the enthusiasm that they would have thought.
Now, the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett could change all of that, and we should be ready for that fight.
We should be prepared for that fight.
We should gear up for that fight.
But I actually think that it will disperse and win out a lot of the forces.
And Amy Coney Barrett will be a phenomenal replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
If you care about freedom of speech, if you care about the lives of the unborn, if you care about the lives of the pre-born, if you care about the sanctity of those that cannot protect themselves, if you care about the Constitution and our country, get involved in the confirmation fight for Amy Coney Barrett.
So thrilled to be able to say that.
It was a dream to have her be nominated.
To see her on the Supreme Court, praise God, if she gets this done.
We have to have her back.
We have to fight.
So, some of the other battleground states that really has come down to three states right now.
It's come down to Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania.
If Trump goes three for three in those three states, he wins the White House.
He will win North Carolina.
President Trump will win Ohio.
President Trump will win Iowa.
Thanks so much for your question, Ben.
You got a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
Really appreciate it.
Next question.
Hi, my name is Grace, and I really love studying history, especially the 20th century.
As I've been watching the recent events in Belarus unfold, riots against a fake election, Russia on one side of the EU and the United States on the other hand.
And now Russian troops have actually moved into Belarus.
This seems eerily similar to the events that started around World War I. Do you think there's much of a chance for war to break out in Europe?
Thanks so much, and God bless.
Congrats you in a signed copy.
No, I do not.
I do not think that war will break out in Europe anytime soon.
I think that Europe is much more homogenized than people realize or recognize.
And also, there really isn't the standing force army out there.
The United States military is so powerful.
We are the superpower of the continent and of the world, I should say, of the hemisphere.
Nothing's going to break out in Europe anytime soon.
In fact, if there's any place where conflict will break out, it'll be in Southeast Asia and some sort of turf war over China.
I am not worried about Poland or Hungary or Eastern European countries warring against each other.
We hold all the cards for good reason.
And there are populist movements in Poland and Hungary.
Terrific.
That's a good thing.
The European Union should break up.
But no, I don't think that'll break into war anytime soon.
In fact, I think that the over-deification of the European Union actually brought the Europeans closer to war than not.
I don't think any of what's happening in Belarus, of which I am not an expert in by any means.
Some people say it's a color revolution that is being done.
Not getting into any of that.
Kind of indifferent.
We have so much going on in our country.
We talked about all of this last episode with Darren Beattie here on the Charlie Kirk show.
But let me just say, I do not think that Europe is headed to war anytime soon.
I think it is much more likely that we had in some sort of conflict with the Chinese Communist Party than Europe tears itself apart.
Russia, we could put Russia in its place at any time.
Let me just be perfectly clear.
Russia is kind of the annoying mosquito that keeps on showing up at a barbecue.
Meanwhile, you have a legitimate threat of China.
China is the real threat.
Russia has a declining population.
They're completely dependent on the petrodollar.
Their military is antiquated.
They play a good game.
Putin is not a good person.
I'm not actually a Russian apologist like some people are.
I think we should intensify sanctions against them.
But I just, I'm kind of indifferent to Russia.
I just, I think that they have big ambitions, big aspirations, but very little sting to their punch.
They're a regional player.
They're not an ambitious world player.
Russia sows discord around the world.
Let's leave it at that.
China is the threat.
Thank you guys so much for listening today.
Thank you guys for emailing us all your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Please get involved at TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
Please consider supporting our program at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.
Buy your Amy Coney Barrett shirt at tpusa.com slash shop.
And also check out charliekirk.com for updates.
And as you guys know, we are going live on radio October 5th.
We will be live every single day on Facebook and YouTube from 12 to 2.
But when you guys subscribe to the Charlie Kirk show, you're still going to get exclusive commentary that you will not hear on the radio airwaves, that you will not see on YouTube and Facebook.
We're going to be everywhere, everybody.
We are the hardest working podcast on the planet so that you guys have the information that you need to fight and win America's culture where it's time to win, everybody.
We have an opportunity to take back the Supreme Court, win an election.
The generations that have sacrificed before us have given so much.
Time to get in this fight.
Thank you for supporting us at charliekirk.com slash support.
And thank you as always for emailing us your questions.
God bless, everybody.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks so much.
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