How does the turmoil taking place in the stock market relate to the politics of the current moment in America? How can either party capitalize on the GameStop short squeeze to rally future voters to their side? Charlie discusses how the GOP has been given a political gift by the populist uprising against the Wall Street elites, but so far it's missing the moment to capitalize. Charlie discusses what needs to happen for conservatives to fully become the party who fights for everyday Americans who are tired of rigged financial and political systems that time and again work against the interests of main street.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey everybody, what does all this stock market news have to do with the political situation in our country?
We unpack that and so much more and what the Republican Party is missing.
The Republican Party has been given a gift and they're missing it.
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The Republican Party's been given a gift.
They are missing it.
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.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show today.
We got a lot of stuff happening in the country right now.
Email us your questions, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Okay.
There's a gift that has just been given to Republicans.
A gift.
Will Republicans take it?
You see, we as conservatives have had a pretty awful month.
In fact, it might have been the worst month of my entire career just looking at how things developed.
Lost the Georgia runoff, the Capitol tragedy.
Joe Biden becomes president.
It felt like the hits kept on coming.
We got some good news about the filibuster from Kirsten Cinema and Joe Manchin, if they tell the truth.
But now, there is a story that's being covered differently by almost everybody.
And this story is revealing to us so much about the political, philosophical direction of our country.
The story is, of course, the GameStop AMC BlackBerry short-selling saga.
Certain financial news channels are covering this from a hero-villain standpoint of the villain being the Redditors who are posting on message boards.
And the heroes are the short-selling hedge fund people.
Others, such as Tucker Carlson and Charles Payne and Dave Portnoy from Barstool, are framing the hero-villain saga story, if you will, as the hedge funders as the villain and the Redditors as the heroes.
But this is a gift now to Republicans.
You see, when I started to get involved in politics in high school in freshman and sophomore year at Wheeling High School in the suburbs of Chicago, the number one criticism that I had to endure back in 2010, 2011 was that Republicans were the party of Wall Street.
You see, this criticism is not something that everyone hears now because the Democrats and the left have shifted from an outright economic class war to just a race war.
You see, when I was in high school, just nine years ago, eight or nine years ago, the political left thought that they could start a successful movement around turning working class people against rich people.
And it was always a very difficult argument for me to counter.
It was hard for me to justify the amount of wealth that certain people had.
It wasn't impossible.
Of course, when someone gets rich, it does not mean someone necessarily gets poor.
They didn't steal that money.
They had to create a good or a service.
We do believe in markets after all.
However, the discrepancy, the growing inequality, was politically very difficult.
It looked as if I was a defender of an unfair system.
It looked as if I was a defender of a broken financial model.
We all remember back to 2007, 2008, when the federal government, in collusion with the big banks, created the housing crisis in our country, the mortgage crisis in our country.
Put simply, Wall Street got drunk, Washington provided the liquor.
They both worked together to destroy the American housing market.
We had people taking out loans they couldn't afford in houses they could not even, at even the most generous interpretation of their credit score, ever pay the principal, let alone the interest on these loans.
People had multiple loans taken out, and it was a government-created bubble.
What did we do in response?
Every bank got bailed out.
No major bankers went to jail.
The taxpayers footed the bill.
The moral hazard was completely removed.
And using the FDIC, alongside Hank Paulson, some of the banks did better than ever before.
And deposits went up.
And as a result, we passed crony capitalist government regulation that the banks actually wanted passed that made it harder for small and local community banks to survive called Dodd-Frank.
If any of you are new to politics, I just want to say you've been given a gift that you do not have to deal in American politics with Barney Frank.
It's a gift.
That guy made AOC look moderate.
No, seriously.
I can honestly say American politics is better now that Barney Frank is not involved.
However, then around 2012, Obama ran largely, by the way, against this framing.
You see, Mitt Romney, we all know who Mitt Romney is, but how did they defeat Mitt Romney?
They defeated him by positioning him as a corporate raider, as an evil private equity guy that would come in and ship jobs overseas, take big bonuses for himself at Bain Capital.
And Barack Obama framed himself, thanks largely in part to the narration of Tom Hanks.
If you remember that video, which was seen by tens of millions of people, as the guy that kept General Motors alive and Osama bin Laden dead.
Now, that was a very deceiving way to frame it, but nevertheless, it worked.
Barack Obama won the industrial rust belt.
Barack Obama won states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, states that Mitt Romney was completely rejected by.
Obama won Indiana in 2008.
Romney won it in 2012.
The point is that this message was very successful.
The framing of American politics had benefited Democrats for years because the institutional financial systems that a lot of us were skeptical of, a lot of us knew there was something not totally right there.
A lot of us felt like we were watching from the outside a Gordon gecko scene where insider trading is tolerated and allowed and there's little tips and nods and winks and no one really gets prosecuted and big fines get levied and the system continues on.
Republicans, for a variety of different reasons, but mostly because Republicans were more likely to take the capital and the money from these banks to finance their campaigns.
And secondly, and additionally, the Republicans were willing to fight for the issues of Wall Street.
And Wall Street hid behind the auspice like, oh, we're free market guys.
No, you're not.
You never were.
I'm sure there's some free market guys there.
Sure, there's some believers in markets.
But generally, they're believers in their own profit structure, not in principled markets.
Donald Trump changed all of this.
He actually ran for the first time as a Republican on an anti-Wall Street message.
One of the reasons why Trump was able to win the presidency in the first place in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania is that Hillary was unapologetically taking the Wall Street money.
Hillary was unapologetically representing this internationalist, globalist, corporatist agenda.
2020 election rolled around, and Joe Biden framed himself as the fighter of Main Street, deceivingly so, took massive money from Wall Street.
No one covered it.
And of course, with all the shenanigans and everything that surrounded the 2020 election, here we are with a Wall Street candidate who's now president, with Janet Yellen, who's a Wall Street selected spokesperson.
Now we have an opportunity.
And Republicans are totally screwing this up.
Not all Republicans, but most Republicans.
Democrats are now intentionally or unintentionally about to defend one of the most unpopular financial systems in the country.
The Republican Party has been given a gift.
Will the Republican Party take it?
So far, the answer is no.
Now, what is that gift?
The gift is that raging in the markets and raging online is the ultimate struggle of the populist, middle-class worker.
A lot of these people are younger against the ruler, the rulers of our society.
In case the people on Wall Street realize it or not, they're not exactly popular with the American people.
I know that is a shocking sentiment, especially after the last year.
So the last calendar year, we've shut down the entire American economy.
Kids can't go to school.
Small businesses cannot open.
You can't travel.
Incomes have gone down.
You get peons from the government.
And the ruling class is richer, wealthier, and more comfortable than ever before.
So then, A bunch of late 20 and early 30s something say, let's start to mobilize our activity, which, by the way, as we have predicted here from day one, people are going to get arrested over this.
People are going to be held accountable for this.
We're just commenting on the framing of this.
Is that the right thing, the wrong thing?
I'm just telling you how it is.
We knew exactly when this started to happen.
I said, when you start to play games with hedge fund margins, they will send the Praetorian Guard after you.
They will crush your life.
You are talking about the lifeblood of a lot of people.
And so the Republican Party here is largely silent.
You have millions of young people that are participating in this.
Now, are they participating to get rich?
Yes, some of them are kind of having fun making a little bit of money.
They're participating in it to get attention and to stick it to the rich.
Now, Senator Ted Cruz has stepped up, but many of the establishment Republicans are missing in action.
And so are the Democrats, but a lot of Democrats.
The Democrats are the party of Wall Street now, though.
They're financed by Wall Street.
I expect them to do that.
And in a moment like this, do you know what is missing so glaringly in the American landscape?
I got up very early this morning and I typed in something from Habit: Donald Trump Twitter.
Donald Trump's Twitter account would be forcing every single Republican into line on this issue, whether he's in office or not.
If Donald Trump was still president, he would be instructing the SEC not to go after the little guy.
No, no, no, no.
To go after the collusion that exists in clear sight.
But since the tech oligarchs have basically digitally assassinated Donald Trump and he's left to just press releases on stationery of the office of the former president, whatever that is, you now have an entire political conversation and a mass of people that are ready to be mobilized with no point to be able to bring them to a point of focus.
Does that make sense why they took Donald Trump off social media?
All of a sudden, it makes a lot of these populist moments a lot less poignant.
It makes these populist moments easier to suppress.
Now, Donald Trump Jr. has been tweeting about this, and I think more so than almost any other person, and he's been terrific on the issue.
But I suppose the question that a lot of us have to ask is: why are Republicans not seizing this opportunity to cement themselves as the working class party?
You want to win younger voters?
Republicans ask me all the time, well, how do we win the next generation?
If you took a stand on this right now and you said we are going to demand that the agencies do not go after these young kids, that all of a sudden we look into the other insider trading activity, Republican Party popularity with young people will skyrocket.
You want to know why AOC is popular?
Because she picks these fights.
Instead, it's all quiet on the Western Front outside of a couple congresspeople and a couple influencers here and there.
Why?
Republicans are grappling with, how do we recover from the last month?
We lost Georgia, lost the presidency, the Capitol tragedy.
How do we win back working class voters?
Well, here's a good start.
Why don't you listen to them?
Why don't you listen to working class people and what they're trying to tell you?
What they're trying to tell you, and albeit sometimes a clumsy way, and albeit sometimes it's difficult for rulers to understand what their subjects actually want, is that they're hurting, that they're working their tail off.
They're getting up at 6 a.m. every day, trying to find work.
Many of them are involved in the muscular class of our country to just see their earnings taxed to death, to see food prices go up.
And what do they get from the government?
A $1,200 check.
They see the billionaire class increase their net worth by $500 billion over the last year.
And when a couple out of work late 20 or early 30-somethings start to go play games with the market, which again, many of them will end up being held legally liable for it, they come down on them with the entire weight of the federal government.
You know, you can manipulate medical data.
That's okay.
You can manipulate virus cases.
You can manipulate and lie about the Chinese coronavirus.
You can shut down schools and manipulate people's lives.
You can even manipulate financial instruments if you have the correct firm assembled.
But if you do this in big numbers and you try to manipulate an already manipulated market, that's when they start to come after you.
The Republican Party better quickly learn that working class parties win.
Right now, the Republican Party should have a press conference with every member of the Republican conference saying, we hear you, there's something wrong here with the economic anxieties of our country.
And that we need some big serious changes.
You know who is seizing on this opportunity?
Who's seeing her popularity soar outside of being an absolute fool and accusing Ted Cruz of being a Columbine shooter style murderer?
She actually did call him a murderer yesterday, attempted murderer.
AOC.
AOC is seizing this moment.
So here's the honest truth to the Republican Party.
And I hope that someone's watching or listening right now that's in a position to do something about this.
The populist energy is not going anywhere.
There is a belief in the Republican Party that is a work of fiction.
And the belief is that Donald Trump is gone.
Donald Trump's in Mar-a-Lago.
He's off Twitter.
And now we can get back to calmer Chamber of Commerce times.
People are going to be happy again.
They're going to fall back asleep.
We'll be able to teach them something wrapped in idealistic platitudes, and the theft can continue.
As the liberal Eric Weinstein commonly says, the idealism of a time is usually the cover for the theft.
For example, we are the world in the 1990s.
What a great cover for international globalist trade deals that destroyed the American worker.
The peacetime kleptocrats that run our country, and that's what they are, peacetime kleptocrats have no concern for their fellow countrymen.
They have concern for their campaign accounts.
They have concern for their reelection chances.
They have concern for their committee assignments.
They have concern for what country we're going to invade next.
That's a big priority for them, by the way, finding another sovereign country to go invade with our brothers and sisters in the armed forces who are American heroes.
The populist energy that started in 2008 is not going away.
And one of the main reasons it exists in the first place is because of government intervention in the economy, government intervention in the price system.
The repealing of Glass-Steagall was a mistake.
And yes, that is a deregulation, but as soon as you allowed investment banks and commercial banks be merged together, the incentive structure got screwed up.
One of my dearest friends in the whole world, the former Mayor Lynch executive, completely agrees with me.
He said that was one of the moments that everything changed for the worse.
The Federal Reserve pumping in cheap money, the continuous big bank bailouts, all of it.
And in 2008, it reached a boiling point when the financial crisis hit.
People saw their net worth plummet.
They saw the markets completely tank.
They did everything right.
They played by the rules and they still suffered.
And yet the people that actually created this crisis, they got promoted.
Hank Paulson, who ran Goldman Sachs, became Treasury Secretary.
Timothy Geithner, who ran Goldman Sachs with Hank Paulson, then became Treasury Secretary.
Ben Bernanke from a different chapter in American politics had extensive Wall Street experience.
Janet Yellen, who ran the Fed, now runs our Treasury Department, got $800,000 for speaking at hedge funds.
And so the populist energy is not going away.
Republicans and moderate Democrats are hoping and praying that this is like a thunderstorm, that it's going to go away.
That the, as long as they wait it out, they shelter in place, all of this pent-up anger and frustration will eventually calm down.
You know, let's go send people $1,000 a month.
That'll keep them happy.
Let's just go forgive their student loan debt.
That'll calm down the masses.
No different than the Romans holding Coliseum events and throwing bread to the citizens to try and prevent them from revolting.
But as the great Roman consul Cicero argued, who was a one-year serving Roman council and an author who I believe was actually murdered because of his beliefs, Cicero is one of the most articulate thinkers who actually came up with the three branches of government.
He argued and he argued correctly because he saw the downfall of Rome before Roman became the Roman Empire.
It was from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire right before Julius Caesar declared the Roman Civil War when he crossed the Rubicon.
Cicero was assassinated.
My memory is correct.
Good.
He argued that without a strong middle class, without, as Aristotle called it, the golden mean, without a backbone of working people, the country will fall apart.
You can try public works projects.
You can try throwing bread to the citizens.
None of that's going to work.
You need people that own property, protect their property, start families, and protect their families.
And so this is just the latest chapter in a book titled, We Hate You.
It's that simple.
Every chapter is a little bit different.
The Tea Party movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the MAGA movement, the GameStop, the movement to parlor.
And the book is very simple.
And again, I didn't write the book.
I'm just telling you what it's called.
Post-2008, there are people, tens of millions of people, that are different on social issues, but they're actually very much the same on their analysis of the direction of the country.
They're saying, we hate you.
You lie to us.
You lie to us about shutdowns.
You lie about lockdowns.
You lie about school data, epidemiology.
You lie to us about ICU capacity.
You lie to us about nursing homes, which Andrew Cuomo did, and we'll get to that in just a second.
You lie to us about economic data, and you get richer, and you never get held accountable.
You see, working people are actually a lot smarter than you give them credit for.
And one of the great slanders that is occurring right now is trying to slander every single Trump supporter in the country as if they're Viking shaman Chewbacca man that stormed the Capitol.
That's not correct.
As I said on Fox News a couple days after the Capitol tragedy, Trump supporters were saddened and outraged with what they saw.
It's a narrative to try to invalidate the concerns of Trump supporters across the country, as if that was an embodiment of every single person out there.
And the more we learn, the more we realize that there were non-ideological paramilitary instigators and agitators that were there before the president's speech that were there going to look for a fight, not trying to actually protest anything around the election in full military tactical gear.
And they're directly connected together.
But the working class people are actually smarter than I think we give them credit for.
They see the repeated failure or the repeated pattern, I should say, of failing upwards.
The rule in Washington, D.C. is if you screw something up and you still exist, you get promoted.
That's the rule.
The rule in Washington, D.C., like Dr. Anthony Fauci or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Andrew McCabe, you mess something up, you commit a crime, and you get promoted.
Andrew McCabe is making more money than he ever has his entire life, despite all the evidence that he acted in a nefarious way with the Russian investigation, crossfire hurricane against President Trump.
So working people under the guiding thesis of we hate you, and we feel voiceless.
We feel helpless.
And then the one outlet they had, which was President Trump, literally you can't see what he's thinking or doing at all.
No communication levers whatsoever.
He puts out press releases.
Okay, great.
And then all of a sudden, the financial elites are like, well, why are they coming for us?
Republicans are failing this moment right now.
They would be very, if they want to win back the House in 2022, go do a press conference and condemn the collusion practices that led to all of this.
Democrats are the party of Wall Street.
Do not forget that.
Republicans, I'm not sure what they're the party of.
They should be the party of working people.
But when there's a moment to represent working people against Wall Street, nowhere to be found.
Let's focus on the Democrats because it's more fun.
Let's go to cut one of these cuts, Jen Saki trying to justify all this, whatever cut that is.
Play this one.
Well, just to be clear, what I said was that we have the Treasury Secretary is now confirmed.
Obviously, we have a broad economic team.
The SEC put out a statement yesterday that I referred to, but I don't think I have anything more for you on it other than to say, separate from the GameStop issue, the Secretary of Treasury is one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy.
Which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice before she came into office.
So the Biden administration is doubling down on a widely unpopular and broken, and some people would say rigged financial system.
So Elizabeth Warren, who tries to be a crusader for the little guy, Elizabeth Warren, who goes around and says, we need to go hold Wall Street accountable and represent Main Street.
She wrote a letter, I think this is to the SEC, is that right?
To the Security Exchange Commission, where Elizabeth Warren said, quote, to what extent did online message boards such as that on Reddit or broader social media amplifications impact the fluctuation of GameStop prices?
Did any of these practices violate existing securities laws?
Here, Elizabeth Warren, I'm going to answer the question for you.
It probably did break the law, and it, of course, contributed to the fluctuation.
Why are you calling for an investigation into that?
Elizabeth Warren is going after the Reddit traders in her recent letter to regulators.
That's Elizabeth Warren, who pretends to be a fighter for the little person.
In fact, her slogan was: dream big, fight hard.
The little guy can win.
Okay, Elizabeth Warren.
Bernie Sanders, nowhere to be found.
AOC is participating, albeit rather, let's just say, spot on for her.
She's just, she's par for the course, accusing people of murder, so on and so forth.
The energy is growing for what is going to either result in an even more robust MAGA movement that will continue this idea of putting America first and our workers first, or we are going to have a Bolshevik revolution, the likes of which none of us have seen before.
I want you to imagine if the Democrats were organized.
If I was a Democrat socialist, which thank goodness I'm not, you know what I would do?
I would run and say that no one in America should have a net worth over $100 billion.
And that net worth should be taxed and given for universal basic income and free college.
They're already starting to do this, but their branding is so terrible.
The point is this.
The desire is there.
The hatred is there.
I want to read something from you from Reddit, sent to me from a friend.
Every Republican should listen carefully.
I'm going to just skip some parts of this, but you'll get the point.
I remember when the housing collapse sent a torpedo through my family.
My father's concrete company almost collapsed overnight.
My father lost his home.
My uncle lost his home.
I remember my brother helping my father count pocket change on our kitchen table.
That's all the money he had left in the world.
When this was happening in my home, I saw the hedge funders literally drinking champagne as they looked down on the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
I will never forget that.
My father never recovered from that blow.
He fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism and exists now as a shell of his former self, waiting for death.
This is all the money I have, and I'd rather lose it than give them what they need to destroy me.
Taking money from me won't hurt me because I don't value it at all.
I just burn it all down just to spite them.
This is for you, Dad.
You hear that?
I'd burn it all down just to spite them.
The future of American politics rests solely on which political movement can seize all of this pent-up political, all this pent-up populist energy.
And guess what?
The socialists are winning.
The socialists are doing a far better job than Republicans are.
Workers are struggling, and Main Street America is in crisis.
This is an SOS symbol.
I hope we'll listen.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Please support us at charliekirk.com/slash support.