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Sean Davis Joins The Show
00:02:22
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| Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production. | |
| Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcast. | |
| Hey, everybody. | |
| Today on the Charlie Kirk show, we have Sean Davis from the Federalist. | |
| We go over the latest on the Flynn investigation, the Russia hoax, the future of the Republican Party, and the state of the presidential race. | |
| He's very smart. | |
| You're going to love this interview. | |
| Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| If you want to help support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support. | |
| And if you want to win a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk show to your podcast provider, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review, screenshot it, and email it to us at freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Sean Davis is here. | |
| Buckle up, everybody. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. | |
| Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses. | |
| 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. | |
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| Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| Super thrilled to be joined today by Sean Davis, who is the co-founder of the Federalist. | |
| Sean, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
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Debunking Hunter Biden Hoaxes
00:09:03
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| So there's a lot happening. | |
| Your Twitter account is a can't miss Twitter account. | |
| Let's start with the Hunter Biden story. | |
| What do we know factually today about all of the recent revelations of the laptops being, I guess, surfaced or discovered? | |
| And where did this come from? | |
| And what do we know? | |
| Let's just deal in facts because I watched MSNBC for about six minutes yesterday and all I heard was Russia, big hoax, disinformation. | |
| What do we know and how did we get here? | |
| So right now, there's basically two sources of information on Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings that likely had a big connection with Joe Biden's work in the White House. | |
| So the first is a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden that had been dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware and abandoned by Hunter. | |
| We know it's his. | |
| His attorney tried to get it back at some point. | |
| We've actually got a signed contract from Hunter Biden saying, yeah, I know if I abandon this and I don't pay it, then the person who runs the repair shop ends up owning it. | |
| So a good chunk of information comes from that laptop, which is Hunter Biden's. | |
| And the next source of information comes from Bevin Cooney, who is a former business partner of Hunter Biden and Devin Archer and that whole little group at Rosemont Seneca or whatever the name is. | |
| And I believe he turned over his email account, which has all the original copies of these Hunter Biden emails, to Peter Schweitzer and some other reporters. | |
| So this is not stuff that was hacked. | |
| This is not Russian disinformation. | |
| The people who have the information have access to the original primary source documents. | |
| And what these pieces of evidence show is a pretty wide-ranging, multi-year global effort from Hunter Biden to use his dad's name and use his dad's influence, major deals, multi-million dollar, billion-dollar deals with oligarchs and foreign leaders all around the globe. | |
| And again, using his dad's name to do it, which is a pretty big concern if you're actually worried about blackmail or foreign interference taking over the White House. | |
| Yeah, I would say so. | |
| Where, if anywhere, does the congressional leadership on the Democrat side or the activist media get this narrative that Russia's involved? | |
| Oh, they just made it up. | |
| And I actually think there's a great quote from Iowa Hawk on Twitter, David Berg, who said, The point of the news media is to cover stories with the pillow until they stop moving. | |
| And so that's what they did with the Hunter Biden story. | |
| When the New York Post first, he's brilliant. | |
| He's brilliant. | |
| When the New York Post first had this big break, when they got the laptop, I don't think the left knew what to do with it. | |
| So they just tried to disappear it. | |
| They tried to ban New York Post. | |
| They tried to ban anyone who posted links to the story, which was very forthcoming and clear about the provenance of its evidence. | |
| They tried to suppress it on Twitter and on Facebook. | |
| And when that didn't work, when they were unable to prevent people from hearing about the story, they just decided, okay, we're just going to lie. | |
| Anything I don't like is Russian disinformation. | |
| Anyone who disagrees with me is Hitler. | |
| This is just their mode of argumentation. | |
| And it's a thing that, you know, kind of growing up as a conservative, we have to learn how to fight constantly, constantly explain our ideas, argue all the time. | |
| We have to have near perfect command of the evidence. | |
| All the left does when they come across a fact that they don't like or that is pretty inconvenient, they either suppress it or when that doesn't work, they lie about it. | |
| I love that phrase, perfect command of the evidence. | |
| It's required of us. | |
| If we misspeak by one word, we get covered by these very same people that don't do any journalism. | |
| But I mean, Sean, I'm going to be honest. | |
| I think it's incredibly depressing, the state of American journalism. | |
| And I actually think it's really alarming. | |
| I'm not sure the country can survive. | |
| And I don't mean this in any sort of dystopian way, but the country can't survive if this is how they handle stories. | |
| I mean, you have state-run media. | |
| Have you seen anything this bad? | |
| We saw their coverage of Trump and the Mueller thing, and there was no base of evidence whatsoever. | |
| But I was just texting with a top-tier reporter. | |
| I'm going to tell you what he said. | |
| I'm not going to tell you what reporter it is. | |
| You could probably guess. | |
| And I just, I had his number out. | |
| I just, I just couldn't help myself. | |
| I said, how can you not be talking about this? | |
| And he said, if Joe Biden's lawyer handed me a hard drive two weeks before an election that he said Don Jr. left in a computer storeroom, you'd better believe. | |
| I would be extremely skeptical. | |
| And so he just keeps on justifying the, and this is a top-tier reporter, right? | |
| Like, you know, byline, all that sort of stuff. | |
| And basically, he also says the New York Post was reckless, and I never would have run with that hard drive without having capacity to do forensics. | |
| This is their justification of it. | |
| And yet they're quick to run with Trump's tax returns, Melania's phone calls, one-tenth truths about anything that's in the conversation rumor mill. | |
| Can you help me unpack this? | |
| Is it as bad as I'm saying it is? | |
| Am I missing something? | |
| Oh, I think it's worse than what you're saying it is. | |
| So a lot of the times conservatives online will say, oh, imagine how the media would respond. | |
| Yeah, I tweeted on our side. | |
| I do that all the time. | |
| We don't have to imagine. | |
| Okay, so we lived the past four years. | |
| We saw what they did with the Steel dossier, which was literal Russian disinformation. | |
| It was put together by a Russian agent for Oleg Dariposca, sanctioned Russian oligarch with ties to Putin. | |
| And it used information from Igor Danchinko, the secret primary sub-source who himself was investigated by the FBI as being a potential Russian spy and a national security threat. | |
| And that's just 2016, by the way. | |
| Then we moved into 2017. | |
| They leaked and lied about Flynn's phone calls. | |
| I think the most ridiculous example is when Don Jr. was testifying in the House, a shifts committee leaked to CNN emails, which they claimed proved that he had been conspiring, including with WikiLeaks ahead of the release of some of these hacked emails. | |
| He said, oh, yeah, we've confirmed CNN's report. | |
| And CNN said, oh, yeah, we've got him dead to rights. | |
| He was talking before this happened. | |
| Turns out they fabricated the emails. | |
| They got the dates all wrong. | |
| It was some Rando who had emailed him, sending him to a public link of WikiLeaks the week prior, having released already this stuff publicly. | |
| So you look at 2016 and you think, get yourself in the headspace of where you were then. | |
| You thought, oh, man, they really botched 2016. | |
| There's no way they could get worse. | |
| They're going to reform themselves somehow. | |
| And the lesson that they learned from 2016 is we need to do everything we did 10 times worse. | |
| We need to lie more. | |
| We need to fabricate more. | |
| We need to conspiracy theorize more. | |
| I don't know how they get worse, but the problem's bigger than the media. | |
| The left controls all the major institutions of power in America. | |
| They control academia. | |
| They control Hollywood and the culture. | |
| They control big tech. | |
| They control the media. | |
| They control the administrative state. | |
| And I honestly don't know how a republic survives, especially a democratic constitutional republic like ours, when every single institution of power says, we don't care what happens in the election. | |
| We're in charge. | |
| You will submit. | |
| We will rule you. | |
| And that's that. | |
| Right. | |
| No, it doesn't survive. | |
| That's the answer. | |
| And so that's why I think the president's election is more than just an election. | |
| It's a question as, you know, is this system just kind of a facade? | |
| Or is there actually some form of a people-centered government? | |
| And we'll find out. | |
| We'll find out if the social programmers and the ruling power class actually are still in control. | |
| How much power they actually have, which I think is, you know, more and more clear is an extraordinary amount. | |
| So you've been on top of the Russia hoax, as you mentioned, the Steele dossier, and their pathological obsession with those stories, misrepresenting them, by the way, over the last couple of years was telling. | |
| Just non-conjecture, because there's been a lot of tweets that have frustrated me of people that think they've seen things on these laptops of Hunter Biden. | |
| I'm like, you're not helping. | |
| You know exactly the type of tweets I'm talking about. | |
| It just bothers me because then it makes our argument harder. | |
| What legitimately do you think can come out of this first politically for the president? | |
| Yeah, so that's difficult because in order to figure out what the impact is going to be, you kind of have to understand what the reach is going to be. | |
| And given that there's an all-out effort to suppress the story, you got Biden hiding in his basement. | |
| You have the media asking him what his favorite flavor of ice cream is, as opposed to, hey, did you know about all these things Hunter Biden was doing? | |
| In fact, were you getting money pops, how he's referred to the big guy for this? | |
| So especially, you know, the debate's going to be a big deal on Thursday. | |
| If you had a normal debate moderator who was interested in getting the facts out and kind of learning what drives each of the candidates, you might expect something to come out of it. | |
| But we know she's a longtime Democrat partisan, Welker of NBC. | |
| She's not going to ask anything. | |
| She's not going to get within 100 miles of it unless she says, hey, Joe Biden, tell us why Trump is bad for trafficking in Russian disinformation and why he won't just let you become president. | |
|
Google Monopoly And Antitrust
00:05:34
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| So I have a really difficult time internally trying to game out how it's going to happen because we know they're in full-on suppression mode. | |
| Yeah, no doubt. | |
| I make the argument we have two governments in our country. | |
| We have the federal government and the Silicon Valley government. | |
| And I think the Silicon Valley government's more powerful in a very creepy way. | |
| What is the conservative approach to this? | |
| Some people say regulate. | |
| Some people say break up. | |
| I'm open-minded to all of it. | |
| What is your analysis on that? | |
| So I'll tell you, I've really evolved on this over the last probably 10 years. | |
| I used to have the kind of like doctrinaire view: oh, free markets, private enterprise, let them do whatever. | |
| The market will sort it out. | |
| But what we've seen over the last 10 years, especially with the mega monopolies like Facebook and Google, and Google being really the biggest example, everyone likes to think of Google as just a search engine. | |
| But when you look at Google's, not just monopoly over that, but how they are vertically integrated with the whole thing. | |
| They control how you get online with Google Fiber. | |
| They control how you get on the internet with their browser, whether it's Android or Chrome. | |
| They control how you do ads. | |
| They control video. | |
| They control every single stage. | |
| And it's similar to imagine if someone, the same company, made the tires in the engine and assembled the car. | |
| They refined the gas. | |
| They own the gas station. | |
| They own the tar. | |
| And they actually control the roads. | |
| And they decided, you know what? | |
| We have, as members of private enterprise, and we're in the free market here. | |
| We don't like you driving to church with our car and using our gas and going on our roads. | |
| So, you know, you can just go build your roads somewhere else, take a hike, maybe. | |
| Nobody here would stand for that. | |
| If we had one gas station in the city that said, yeah, we actually think gas is $50 a gallon. | |
| And if you don't like it, you can just start your own. | |
| Nobody would stand for that. | |
| And yet that's what we're seeing from these big tech monopolies. | |
| So I know the topic du jour kind of in the space now is Section 230 reform. | |
| Do we get rid of their safe harbor, their immunity for liability for what people say on their platforms? | |
| I think that ships sale. | |
| I mean, we're so far beyond that, looking at what they're doing, corruptly censoring the president while letting Ayatollah Khomeini say whatever he wants about genocide against the only Jewish democratic nation on earth. | |
| We're so far past 230. | |
| I think it's time to break him up and eliminate the monopoly market power that they've been using to stifle their competitors. | |
| I'm going to be really direct with you guys. | |
| If you're a cellular plan as with Verizon, ATT, or T-Mobile, you're just paying too much. | |
| You are paying too much for the exact same coverage. | |
| Look at your cell phone bill where it shows data usage. | |
| The average person who switches to PeerTalk is using less than four gigs of data a month, but the big carriers are charging you for unlimited data. | |
| It's like paying for an entire row on an airplane, but you only need one seat. | |
| That's how PeerTalk saves the average person $400 a year on their wireless service. | |
| Unlimited text talk and two gigs of data, all for just $20 a month. | |
| And if you go over on data usage, they don't charge you for it. | |
| Folks, switching to PeerTalk is the easiest decision you'll make today. | |
| Dial pound 250 and say Charlie Kirk. | |
| When you do, you'll say 50% off your first month. | |
| Dial pound 250 and say Charlie Kirk, PeerTalk, simply smarter, wireless. | |
| I'm with you on that, but I'm skeptical. | |
| Let me prove to you why I'm skeptical. | |
| Today, the Department of Justice files a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google. | |
| Long overdue. | |
| You and I have been wanting something like this, right? | |
| So they go through this whole thing. | |
| Google share price is up 2.6% today. | |
| Investors know that this is not going to work. | |
| This is nothing. | |
| It's not aggressive enough. | |
| We tried to break up Microsoft in the 90s. | |
| They sued for a decade. | |
| Internet Explorer, part of Windows. | |
| Microsoft settles for a couple hundred million. | |
| Microsoft's now another trillion-dollar company. | |
| I don't think these tools are powerful enough. | |
| Can you, do you agree? | |
| Or what's your opinion? | |
| I'm a big fan of using all the tools. | |
| We have regulatory powers. | |
| We have legislative powers. | |
| There's antitrust stuff and court powers. | |
| I'm open to absolutely everything. | |
| What I am not open to is just throwing up our hands and saying, well, the status quo is the status quo. | |
| What can you do? | |
| I guess we'll just have to sit and take it. | |
| That to me is unacceptable. | |
| And I've actually seen that attitude from far too many of our elected leaders in Washington. | |
| Because they're funded by Google. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, I mean, yeah, Google owns just about every think tank there. | |
| But what I think we need to start with is the baseline: is the current situation acceptable and is it tenable? | |
| And I say, no, it's not. | |
| So I'm open to whatever ideas people have. | |
| You might be right that the court route doesn't work, but I think it's certainly worth trying and it's certainly worth going down that road because who knows what will happen as a result of it. | |
| No, and they absolutely are a monopoly. | |
| And I read this article about the seven lawyers that are going to try to argue that Google's not a monopoly. | |
| And their arguments are so, I mean, I'm not a lawyer. | |
| I never went to college. | |
| I'm just not a dumb person. | |
| And I read their arguments. | |
| I'm like, there's no way that you can make this argument without being, you know, there's usually, again, some defense attorneys, they make hard arguments for a living, right? | |
| But no way can you argue that 92% of all search results going through one company is not a monopoly. | |
| Just impossible. | |
| And so, and how about just YouTube on the video space? | |
| And why exactly are they allowed to vertically integrate at every single portion of the production site from everything, from hardware to have you mentioned fiber optic to all of it? | |
| And somehow we're supposed to accept the premise that they have a marketplace of competitors. | |
| Who exactly is competing? | |
| Like duck, duck, go, really? | |
|
DOJ Powers And Political Shifts
00:14:34
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| Like, that's going to be their argument against the DOJ. | |
| Like, you know, that duck, duck, go, they're really cutting in our margins. | |
| Or how about the video space? | |
| Yeah, Vimeo's really giving us a run for our money. | |
| I mean, anyone that spends time on the internet knows this is a laughable argument. | |
| That's going to be their response to the complaints. | |
| So, Sean, I want to talk about something that I wish was covered more. | |
| And you have been on the front lines of this, which is Joe Biden's role in targeting Michael Flynn, Logan Act, Russia Gate. | |
| We just forget. | |
| One of my biggest critiques of the conservative movement is this memory loss. | |
| And we just sometimes forget how awful these people have been. | |
| Can you walk us through what is the latest with Michael Flynn? | |
| What is going on with all this? | |
| And how is Joe Biden connected to all of it? | |
| Right. | |
| So I think the easiest way to do that is go back to 2016. | |
| In 2016, the Obama administration convinced itself that Michael Flynn was actually a secret Russian agent. | |
| So they started spying on him. | |
| They got a counterintelligence investigation opened on him during the campaign while he was advising the president. | |
| He was the president's top national security advisor. | |
| And about December 2016, after Trump had won, they said, actually, you know what? | |
| We didn't find any bad information about this guy. | |
| Let's close down the case. | |
| It's done. | |
| And then they started listening to the incoming National Security Advisors' phone calls with world leaders. | |
| Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., was one of them. | |
| And they said, oh, oh, oh, this proves he was a Russian agent. | |
| And this whole plan that was hatched to keep open this investigation of him and then to get him fired was actually launched in the Oval Office of the White House by Barack Obama and Joe Biden themselves. | |
| The meeting happened January 5th, 2017, where they brought in Sally Yates, who was running DOJ at that time. | |
| They brought in James Comey. | |
| Susan Rice was in there. | |
| And Biden and Obama were in there. | |
| And they said, okay, we better talk about these transcripts of Flynn talking to the Russians. | |
| And it was Joe Biden who said, you know what? | |
| I think this might be a Logan Act violation. | |
| And by the way, this is not my opinion. | |
| This is in notes from an FBI person who was told of the meeting saying that Biden personally brought up the Logan Act. | |
| They then used the Logan Act and this nonsense law, which criminalizes private speech by private citizens, has never been prosecuted, is likely unconstitutional. | |
| They said, you know what, we're going to go interview him. | |
| We're going to send in Peter Strzok, a corrupt FBI agent. | |
| We're going to send him into the White House to ambush Flynn, not tell him what we're doing. | |
| And we're going to get him to lie. | |
| And we're either going to get him prosecuted or we're going to get him fired. | |
| Those were from the notes of former FBI counterintelligence director Bill Priestat. | |
| Again, this is not my opinion. | |
| He wrote this in his own hand. | |
| And so what happened is they looked at that and they said, actually, you know what? | |
| We don't think he lied. | |
| We're just going to let this go. | |
| We got him fired anyway, so who cares? | |
| So in comes Moeller in 2017, and Mueller's people get spun up about Flynn, and they decide they want to put his scalp on the wall. | |
| So they decide, nope, he lied. | |
| They prosecute him. | |
| He pleads guilty because the FBI and the DOJ threatened to go after his son, who just had a baby. | |
| And this is happening in late 2017. | |
| Turns out Flynn had some pretty bad counsel who were not representing him properly. | |
| They're representing both sides. | |
| Yeah, they actually, what they did was they were telling him, you need to fill out these filings for your work before you were in government. | |
| And the DOJ came in and said, actually, we're going to charge you for false filings. | |
| And the law firm that was representing him on the lying charge and that said, oh, actually, yeah, whatever you do, don't let them ring you up on false statement charges on these filings. | |
| We want them to ring you up on these false statements to the FBI. | |
| They had a completely unwaivable conflict of interest. | |
| And so in came Flynn after he kind of starts finding this stuff out, gets a new lawyer. | |
| She moves to dismiss the case. | |
| Barr opens up a wide-ranging investigation of DOJ and finds massive, massive abuses. | |
| They didn't give Flynn exculpatory evidence. | |
| They lied about what they had against him. | |
| And now DOJ itself is trying to dismiss the case. | |
| And a corrupt judge, Emmett Sullivan, will not let DOJ and the defendant, both of whom agree, dismiss the case. | |
| And so that's where we are right now. | |
| I am increasingly of the belief that we do not have a justice system in our country. | |
| And I see people like Strzok and Page and every one of them, you know, Brennan, Clapper, Comey. | |
| And I believe we have more than enough evidence to proceed. | |
| Some people have, there's two schools of thought here, which is the cynical belief, that's where I am, or the kind of Barr and Durham have a grand jury and they're sealed indictments and they're waiting until after the election. | |
| I'm not convinced of that. | |
| My friend Rich Higgins is, and that's, well, we'll wait and see. | |
| But even beyond that, the fact that Michael Flynn is still going through this kind of legal turmoil is so incredibly immoral. | |
| It's hard to process that this is happening in our country. | |
| And meanwhile, the FBI is sitting on Hunter Biden's laptop for nine months, where we can see clearly at the very least, he is guilty of not filing foreign registration forms. | |
| Like, that's a pretty clear one. | |
| That's an easy one. | |
| They got Manafort on that one. | |
| They've gotten plenty of people on that. | |
| That's an easy point on the board. | |
| Let alone there's probably, if you opened any sort of comprehensive investigation, you can probably get him on wire fraud and all sorts of different fraud-related stuff. | |
| And not to mention his connection to his father and misrepresenting statements and all that destruction of evidence. | |
| But, you know, we're not the prosecutors. | |
| We're just, you know, the subjects or whatever, the citizens that have to wait to see what they do. | |
| Are you losing faith in our justice system? | |
| Oh, well, to be losing faith, I would have to still have faith in that point. | |
| So, no, my faith is gone. | |
| And I think John Edwards, if you recall, he was a Democratic VP nominee with John Kerry and 04. | |
| He was ahead of his time because when he was running for president before he got beaten in that primary, his whole thing was there are two Americans. | |
| He was dead on. | |
| Because in America, there are clearly two different systems of justice. | |
| There's a justice system if you are a powerful Democrat, and there's a justice system if you have beliefs that the administrative state doesn't think should be legal. | |
| And we've seen it play out exactly. | |
| James Clapper, Obama's DNI, blatantly lied to Congress about mass surveillance of Americans. | |
| Blatantly lied. | |
| They never did anything to him. | |
| John Brennan, Obama's corrupt CIA director, completely lied to Congress about whether or not he spied on them. | |
| He absolutely did. | |
| John Brennan and the CIA spied on the Senate, and he lied about it, and nothing happened to him. | |
| And so, yes, I don't have any faith on matters like these and our justice system to actually equally apply the rule of law. | |
| That's a sad state of affairs. | |
| And so, Flynn is still in some sort of legal thicket. | |
| And if Joe Biden wins, I think that they're going to proceed with any of the changes that Barr made in the DOJ towards Flynn. | |
| They're going to intensify them because that Obama revenge campaign against Flynn is still very much present. | |
| And they would love nothing more than to lock him up and to make him suffer. | |
| So let's talk politically. | |
| Do you think any of that translates into a political benefit for the president? | |
| I'm of the opinion that most people don't care about this stuff. | |
| Most people don't follow it. | |
| And even kind of like base conservatives, it's hard for people to follow. | |
| Do you think any of this widespread injustice translates to a political benefit for the president? | |
| I actually think it does. | |
| So, having been on kind of this Russia collusion hoax beat for four years now, I give talks all over the country. | |
| I meet with conservative voters all the time. | |
| They know details that, you know, I assume I'm the only one who knows them. | |
| They know dates, they know names, they've got document numbers. | |
| I think they're extremely key then on it and they're very well informed. | |
| So I think there is a potential political benefit there, but it's a benefit only insofar as justice is actually served. | |
| Because at a certain point, after you've been mad for so long about justice not being served, the longer it goes on without people going to prison, rather than people hungering for justice, it makes them angry that there's none. | |
| And the risk to the president here is that for four years, we've been told something's going to happen to these guys. | |
| Barr was saying, yeah, it'll happen before the election. | |
| You'll know what happened. | |
| And it hasn't. | |
| And at some point, that frustration is going to go from a desire to make sure that good people are in office to a belief that something can descre them. | |
| They had their chance. | |
| I don't even care anymore. | |
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| I think there is an undercurrent of people that do care about this. | |
| I don't know if persuadable voters really follow it or care that much about it. | |
| I really don't. | |
| So just looking politically, what is your analysis of the state of the race? | |
| What do you think the president has to do to win? | |
| And quite honestly, what is your prediction? | |
| So I'll just say straight ahead: I'm not going to make any predictions. | |
| I learned my lesson in 2016. | |
| I ate a big ol' helping up humble pie, and so I've kind of just decided, you know what? | |
| I don't know anything more than anyone else. | |
| I don't know who's going to win. | |
| I don't think anyone does. | |
| Let's see how it plays out. | |
| But I can't give you what I think my read of the race is now. | |
| So if you believe the polls, which is a massive, massive caveat, a lot of people will dismiss them entirely. | |
| A lot of people just put total faith in them. | |
| The polls show in the states that matter, Biden's got a small league in most of the states that matter. | |
| You're Pennsylvania, your Wisconsin. | |
| Looking at the 2016 map, Trump really has to hold three close states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. | |
| And then he's got to pull off probably one, maybe two of the four kind of Midwest Rust Belty states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. | |
| And to do that, he's got to do the one thing that the media is not letting him do, which is drive up Joe Biden's unfavorables. | |
| That's the whole game of politics. | |
| How many people have a good view of you? | |
| How many people have a bad view of you? | |
| And Trump's work bringing up his own favorables after a four-year, completely dishonest onslaught from the media and every institution of power is stunning. | |
| It's stunning. | |
| He really should be losing by 50, given what they have thrown him. | |
| He's within a couple points in a lot of these big states. | |
| But the flip side is while he's done a good job getting his favorables back up, probably to where they need to be, Joe Biden's unfavorables are kind of just floating along, same amount, notwithstanding the fact that he's been in office for 50 years. | |
| So Trump has got to do something to change the narrative to Joe Biden, and he's got to do it with the completely intransigent press that's decided they will not countenance any negative news about the man whatsoever. | |
| So I think that's his major challenge in the next two weeks here. | |
| Yeah, and I think that if you're undecided at this point, you're basically a Trump voter in waiting. | |
| I mean, if you don't hate him yet, I mean, I don't know exactly, I don't really know what compelling story will come out in the next two weeks. | |
| But like, you know, I actually, I do hate him. | |
| Like, I mean, I think it's actual people that probably don't love his style, but they do agree with him on substance and they want to tilt his way. | |
| And I think that actually most elections, the late breakers go to the challenger. | |
| I think this election will be completely the opposite. | |
| I think the late breakers will go to Trump because of how much negative coverage and how he's had to climb himself back. | |
| And what you said is absolutely completely correct. | |
| The fact that this race is even close just insanely frustrates a lot of the media chattering class. | |
| They thought they had him dead to rights in April. | |
| They thought with the virus, they thought with the economic numbers, they thought with all of it, they said, no way can anyone come back to it. | |
| They thought they had him in July. | |
| I mean, you remember the numbers in July. | |
| He was only down 23 points in one of those polls in Michigan. | |
| All right. | |
| And the fact he's been able to steadily climb himself back is one of the greatest political comebacks ever. | |
| And even if he doesn't win, it'll still go down as someone who's narrowed a race that he had was dead. | |
| He was impeached earlier this year. | |
| You have an impeached president who almost goes to war with Iran and you shut down the country and the lockdowns, the economic numbers, everything. | |
| And yet he's within a couple margin points. | |
| And he'll probably, no matter what, the one thing I can predict is that if Joe Biden wins, he'll only win by a couple states. | |
| I don't think he's going to flip, he's not going to flip a Texas. | |
| He's not going to flip a Georgia. | |
| I don't think he's going to flip a South Carolina. | |
| And I think the president will actually win Florida and North Carolina. | |
| The question is: can the president hold Arizona and hold one of those northern industrial states like Pennsylvania or Michigan? | |
| I want to ask you a question that you might find somewhat interesting. | |
| What do you think the future of the Republican Party is philosophically? | |
| Win or lose, I think that there will be remnants, at the very least, of the Trump philosophy. | |
| Can you kind of preview what's going to happen in the coming months and years in the Republican Party? | |
| Because I think it's going to be really exciting and very interesting to be part of and cover. | |
| Right. | |
| I think the center of gravity for the Republican Party has really moved. | |
| And it's hard to say it's moved right or left. | |
| It just moved in a, I think, kind of like a heterodox direction. | |
| And I think it is going to be moving towards what I call conservative populism, what we previously had, which might have been corporate conservatism. | |
| And you can already see the battle lines forming in the party between, I think, people who kind of came of age politicians in 04 during the Bush era, where they kind of think, oh, once Trump's gone, we'll just get to go back to 04 and we'll get to invade all the countries again. | |
| And we'll get to kind of do whatever the chamber wants. | |
| And we'll have open borders and everything will be great. | |
| It'll be awesome. | |
| We'll have President Rubio. | |
| We'll have Vice President Ben Sasse. | |
|
Rise Of Conservative Populism
00:04:33
|
|
| And I think that kind of mindset doesn't really get what happened. | |
| So Trump didn't remake the party. | |
| Trump saw where the party was moving. | |
| So he actually had a much better instinctive sense of what Republicans wanted than their own so-called leaders did. | |
| They wanted border control. | |
| They wanted the feeling of security in their nation. | |
| They wanted a reassertment of national sovereignty. | |
| They wanted China to stop eating our lunch. | |
| They're not anti-free trade, but they're anti-giving away the store to the communist Chinese. | |
| They were kind of done with us fighting and losing war after war in the Middle East. | |
| Trump didn't do that. | |
| Trump identified it and realized it. | |
| And so I think moving forward, you're going to have a Republican Party that's a lot more skeptical of just open borders. | |
| And they're going to be far, far more skeptical of this kind of needless foreign military intervention all across the world. | |
| So I think those are the four major things that will really define the party going forward, with or without Trump. | |
| Yeah, and philosophically, he has, in a lot of different ways, I think, allowed the space for conversations on these topics that otherwise were kind of no-go zones in Republican circles. | |
| I mean, the Republican orthodoxy was: we are going to invade at least three sovereign countries a year, and you're going to like it. | |
| And we are going to pander to corporate interests because they're on our team. | |
| And don't you dare ask a question about immigration policy. | |
| Stop that. | |
| And what was really interesting is that the early years of the Tea Party movement in 2010, 2011, 2012, there was overlap between some of the needs and wants and wishes of the corporate elite and kind of the grassroots party because they all hated Obama. | |
| And now Trump, he kind of exposed that there's actually way less in common that the grassroots of the conservative movement has with the corporate elite. | |
| And he's exposed that. | |
| And I think that's kind of the kind of the corporations and the people that run them. | |
| They were in great, you know, swimming waters with the grassroots Tea Party people when they were talking about anti-Obamacare, all those things that I agree with, right? | |
| It's complete and total disaster. | |
| But then as soon as President Trump also says, oh, by the way, we also want a unified culture, a language, strong borders, and we don't like all these trade deals, the ruling class elites were like, wait a second, we don't like any of that stuff and we don't like you. | |
| And so in closing, we have about two minutes here. | |
| What, just more, I guess less specifically or more however you want to answer the question, do you think there's any people in particular that will help shape that direction, win or lose with Trump? | |
| I get this question all the time. | |
| What do you think? | |
| I mean, who do you think the thought leaders? | |
| Who do you think the people that need to be kind of inched out of the party? | |
| What's your take on that? | |
| Yeah, so that's a really good question. | |
| And I think, personally, I think in terms of Senate classes, so your Rubios, your Cornyns, the guys who came up in 04-ish, and compare them to the class that came in in 14 or 16. | |
| So wildly, wildly different understandings of where the electorate is. | |
| And so I think your leaders are going to be your Tom Cottons, your Christy Gnomes, your Josh Hawley's. | |
| I think they are clearly in the center of where the Republican Party is. | |
| And I think the Rubios, now, I don't have anything against the guy, but I just think he's representative of kind of an era in Republican politics that it's just not coming back. | |
| And so I think the center of power, the center of gravity in the party is going to be with the Cottons, the Hawley's, the Gnomes, the Blackburns. | |
| And I think they're really the future ideologically of the party going forward. | |
| Yeah, I think if the president wins, that clash will be civil and that debate will be, you know, mutual and respectful. | |
| If we lose, it'll be a bloody Republican war like we've never seen because there will be the I told you so. | |
| There will be this whole thing was a mistake. | |
| There will be a cleansing urge and it'll be definitely something that I think a lot of people will be bitter. | |
| But anyway, that debate will be one that you and I will be in the middle of. | |
| I can't wait for it. | |
| So, well, thank you, Sean from the Federalist. | |
| You do a great job, Sean Davis. | |
| And thank you, everyone, for listening. | |
| CharlieKirk.com. | |
| Thanks so much. | |
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| God bless. | |
| Talk to you soon. | |