Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Hey everybody, what is going on with the Liz Cheney Marjorie Taylor Green story?
Is it about politics?
Is it about Republican establishment versus the grassroots conservatives?
It's actually a lot deeper than that.
It's about how we finance our elections in our country.
We have been talking about for some time campaign finance reform, and I will demonstrate to you in this episode why it is an issue that every American should care about and conservatives need to focus in on.
If you'd like to support our program, please do so by going to charliekirk.com slash support.
It helps our team of editors, researchers do what they do.
And also, we will give away three signed copies of the MAGA Doctrine.
All you have to do is show us your subscribe to the Charlie Kirk show, screenshot it, and email it to us at freedom at charliekirk.com.
And just in the subject line, say campaign finance reform.
And do me a favor, in the body of the email, tell me your thoughts on this episode.
I worked really hard on it.
It's close to my heart, very passionate about one of the reforms I think we need in our country that I think will make a significant difference.
If you'd like to get involved with Turning Point USA, where we play offense with a sense of urgency, go to tpusa.com.
How do we actually fix the underlying problems in our country?
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.
Are you guys sick of all the cancel culture?
Stand with one of the fighters, Mike Lindell, right now.
I want to talk to you about how MyPillow has changed so many people's lives.
I know people that use MyPillow, made in America, by the way, and they say they're sleeping better, they're a better person, and it's just a game changer.
For a limited time, Mike is offering his premium MyPillows for his lowest price ever.
You can get a queen-size premium MyPillow for $29.98.
Regular, $69.98, and that's $40 savings.
Kings are $5 more.
Not only are you getting the lowest price ever, $29.98 for a queen-size premium, but Mike is extending a 60-day money-back guarantee to March 1st, 2021.
So right now, support the good guys, support the people that are trying to cancel.
Go to mypillow.com and click on the Radio Listener Square and use the promo code Kirk.
You will also get deep discounts on MyPillow products, including the Giza Dream bedsheets, the MyPillow Mattress Topper, and MyPillow Towel Sets.
Or call 800-876-0227 and use promo code Kirk.
Support Mike Lindell.
He's a good American.
He's fighting hard.
Go to mypillow.com, promo code Kirk.
Hey, everybody.
How are we doing today?
Welcome.
Email us your questions.
As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
This is the Charlie Kirk Show.
We are honored to have you with us today.
There is a lot to go over.
I want to start today with a story about the Republican meeting late last night.
Republicans in the House of Representatives are trying to figure out what direction they're going to go.
Understandably, after the Capitol Hill riot tragedy, which is more and more looking like a premeditated infiltration than just a spontaneous act of randomness, I think that we have outlined that in great detail about how there were different groups of people.
There were professional agitators.
They were BLM Incorporated supporters.
There were militia types, which were the main infiltrators into the Capitol.
And then there were Trump supporters that, in their own description, joined in on it and regret it.
With the pipe bombs beforehand, it's more and more looking like an act of premeditation.
But that has now become the political focal point of all the fallout that we are covering.
From Liz Cheney to Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to Alexandria Acasio-Cortez to impeachment.
January 6th is now the center point of all of it.
And understanding what really happened on that day is critically important.
But then understanding how a party should chart its future is also very, very important.
So last evening, Liz Cheney survived a vote to oust her as Republican leadership chair.
I believe that is the right title.
GOP Conference Chair.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
They have all these titles.
Third in command of the House of Representatives for the Republicans.
Third in command.
And so this was a private meeting that Republicans had last evening.
They've been under immense pressure from the activist media and from Democrats to address Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a newly elected congresswoman from Georgia.
She had said some things that I completely and totally reject.
She apologized for them last evening, and she received a standing ovation from what I hear based on all reports from Republicans.
Marjorie Taylor Greene will now have a vote of whether or not to expel her from Congress.
And so the next chapter of this is how Liz Cheney was up for a vote last evening.
Now, Liz Cheney does not represent the Republican Party.
Liz Cheney, of course, the daughter of the former Vice President Dick Cheney, Congresswoman from Wyoming.
They have one congresswoman, one Congressman, Congresswoman.
She represents the entire state.
And Matt Gates, alongside other grassroots conservatives, forced a vote against Liz Cheney.
She survived with 61 votes against.
There's one part of this story, though, that everyone is missing.
There's a critically important part of the story that is not being covered, which is this was a private ballot.
How many people, if they would have had to go back to their constituents and justify that they would have someone who voted for the impeachment of President Trump to still stay in third command, they wouldn't be able to justify that.
The meeting was five hours long, five hours long.
And one of the reasons this is continually being a story is because Liz Cheney is now digging in.
Liz Cheney is almost saying, you think I'm so unpopular?
Come after me.
Now, the media is now running cover fire for Liz Cheney.
In a bizarre turn of events, the Cheneys are now media darlings.
If you remember anything about Bush-era politics, George W. Bush was hated.
Dick Cheney was the most hated Republican for a decade.
He was an apologist for gitmo tactics.
He was the chief sponsor behind the Iraq war, and many biographers say that he was the one that originally floated the idea, pushed the idea, theorized what it would look like, convinced the people within the Bush administration to go forward with the invasion of Iraq.
And so Liz Cheney is getting headlines saying she survives what a defeat for Trump Republicans.
First of all, just forcing a vote is a win.
That's number one.
Number two, six times as many Republicans voted to remove Liz Cheney from her position than impeach Donald Trump.
Six times as many.
Liz Cheney went and peached Donald Trump thinking that there would be this grassroots groundswell of people that would follow her, and it was like 11 people at most.
This was a five-hour meeting last evening.
And it really kind of showed where the private interests of Republican congressmen are.
It showed that in private, 61 Republicans do want to move on from the Bush-Cheney forever war agenda.
But in private, the vast majority of Republicans, let's get a final number of what that was.
I think it was 182 or something.
Republicans, they want to keep things as is.
Now, the fact that it's 61 is a reason to applaud that.
But what does Cheney represent?
Answer.
An unlimited flow of corporate dollars going into the reelection accounts of establishment Republicans.
145 to 61, more or less right on there.
So how does one actually fix this?
What is the solution to fix the Liz Cheney problem?
And I have a different answer than what most podcasters or pundits or writers will have here.
It's not about Liz Cheney.
It isn't.
Liz Cheney is just the latest manifestation of a broken campaign finance system.
Liz Cheney is just the latest empty suit to occupy a spokesperson for open border globalist corporate interests.
So the solution is not just about getting Liz Cheney out of Republican leadership.
That would have been great.
Terrific.
But the solution is actually much deeper here.
And it's twofold.
Number one, grassroots conservatives, we need to get better at organizing.
We need to get better at vote tallying and counting.
We need to get better at tactics and strategy because there were a lot of promises made that we have the votes, we're going to do it.
And my friend Matt Gates, credit to him for even being able to get the forces together to do this.
But the deeper issue here is if you remove Liz Cheney, okay, well, who's going to replace her?
Just another spokesperson for corporate America.
Another megaphone for the Chamber of Commerce.
Another person that is going to be walking the halls of Congress with a big binder that says dreams about Myanmar, about how they want to bring an aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal with a big show of force for a country of 54 million people and a GDP of 66 billion.
I'm half being sarcastic, but I wouldn't be surprised if Lindsey Graham is trolling the halls of the Senate today trying to get support for a ground invasion in Myanmar.
That's who Liz Cheney represents.
And so I want to explore this with you of how do we actually fix this problem?
Because it's actually not about Liz Cheney.
It's about the people behind her that have been doing so much damage to our country.
So Congresswoman Cheney is the third in command of the Republican Party of the House of Representatives, the House GOP Leadership Conference, I guess someone, that's one way to put it.
And she is definitely a spokesperson for corporate America.
She's a spokesperson for open borders.
She is a spokesperson for a different type of worldview than what is represented in grassroots conservatism.
It's definitely not consistent with traditional Wyoming values.
It's definitely not consistent with the values of the most conservative state in the entire country.
And that is exactly why her approval rating has plummeted.
And that is why the rally that Congressman Gates in Wyoming did so well.
But if you remove Liz Cheney, what's going to take her place?
The answer is just another ambitious person who is willing to take money from the top corporate interests in our country.
And so you can go to openseecrets.org and see her contributors.
You can see where she gets a vast majority of her contributions from.
You want to know why Liz Cheney is not speaking out against the GameStop saga?
It's pretty obvious.
She's funded by the very companies that were threatened by it.
She's funded by Morgan Stanley.
She's funded by Wells Fargo.
She's funded.
Oh, yeah, she's funded by Raytheon Technologies.
You don't know what they do?
Look it up.
Raytheon, they have a big whiteboard and it just says Burma on it.
She gets, oh, she got a lot of money from Lockheed Martin.
She got some money from Northup Grumman.
Sure, there's nothing to see there.
She gets funded by all the companies that are censoring conservatives.
You go through her list of biggest corporate donors.
It is like clockwork.
They give $10,000 to Liz Cheney's pack, one after the other, after the other, after the other.
And the corporations are going to do what's in their best interest.
They see someone willing to take their money, represent their interests on Capitol Hill.
They're going to do that.
And this is something that Cortez, Alexandria Casio-Cortez, when she isn't making broad fictional narratives, which we will get into, she's actually right on.
This is something that Matt Gates is right on.
The way we finance our elections is broken.
There was an old meme about a decade ago that is just as it's actually more applicable today than it was 10 years ago, which it says, why don't we have all the members of Congress walk around with their corporate sponsors like NASCAR drivers do?
Why doesn't Liz Cheney just leave the Republican conference meeting with a Lockheed Martin jacket or a Northrop Grumman jacket?
And by the way, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman do amazing work in regards to military technology.
Phenomenal.
Incredible engineering, innovation.
They deserve credit for that.
But the incentive structure when you're in the bomb-making business is to go make more bombs.
Where do you go use bombs?
I think the answer, we all know that.
And so if we're serious about actually reforming our country back to constitutional governance, if we're serious about giving a voice to those 61 people that rejected Liz Cheney, what they were really rejecting, and the reason why the other 146, is that right, 146 didn't go alongside with the rejection is because they were afraid of this corporate stream of money being put in jeopardy.
Verizon Communications, Charter Communications, Abbott Laboratories, Comcast Corp.
That's right, Comcast, who owns NBC Universal, donates to Liz Cheney.
Controlled opposition.
It's not about Liz Cheney, though.
You'd be stunned to find that a lot of Republicans take money from Comcast.
A lot of Republicans take money from the top law firms.
Berkshire Hathaway, owned by Warren Buffett, who owns Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, Burlington, Northern Santa Fe Railroad, which benefited tremendously from the abolition of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Campaign finance is something that only Democrats have talked about with the exclusion of Matt Gates.
That's the real story here that everyone's missing.
That's really what's happening here.
That's why everyone is really skittish about saying anything bad about Liz Cheney.
Because she has figured out, she probably learned it from her father, how to master this corporate financing terrain.
The way we finance our elections is broken.
It's not just broken.
It's the reason why you feel our government is so disconnected from you.
It's a very simple argue of economics.
What is your incentive?
Economics, put as simply as possible, is the battle against scarcity.
But to explain economic behavior, to explain behavior in an economic market or in a market in general, you must look at incentives.
So what is the incentive of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger?
What is the incentive of the Republican ruling class?
The incentivists to get reelected.
You see, grassroots conservatives care more about improving the country than ruling the country.
And so you have some power-hungry, sometimes sociopathic Sociopathic people that want to be in politics.
They just want to be there for a couple decades and they want to rule.
Since they want to rule, they're willing to broker deals to make them in charge for a long period of time.
Now, bribery is illegal in our country.
You cannot bribe a politician, but you can contribute a lot of money to their campaign account.
Now, if you're a retired business guy and you want to see the country move in a certain direction and you feel that Andy Biggs or you feel that Matt Gates or Madison Cawthorne is going to be the best way to save the country and you don't have any sort of immediate financial government contracting regulatory interest, I don't find that to be the main problem of campaign finance in our country.
I don't.
Could there be some conflict of interest?
Of course there could be.
But the real issue is when you have people that are on quarterly estimates that have to hit corporate projections, that have to report to a board of directors who have to go to corporate America.
I'm sorry, the corporate America then goes to the congressperson and says, hey, we are Raytheon.
Raytheon is a defense contractor.
And they do phenomenal work in regards to innovation and being able to have our military be the premier military in the country, on the planet, I mean.
However, the incentive structure at Raytheon or Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin, and yes, they do employ tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, but their incentive structure is to make sure that there are congress people in positions of leadership that are going to purchase their products using taxpayer dollars.
And so when you go through the list at opensecrets.org and you see who actually finances your leaders, our rulers, it all kind of starts to make sense.
And yes, there are campaign contribution limits, but boy, do they max out those limits every single time.
So you have someone like Adam Kinzinger, Adam Kinzinger, who voted to impeach President Trump, Adam Kinzinger, who never misses an opportunity to defend the corporate agenda, not the small business agenda, not the muscular class agenda, but instead the Zoom and Skype class agenda, what protects the Chamber of Commerce.
That's who he represents.
And then you go and you say, well, I wonder who's funding Adam Kinzinger.
Well, it makes sense.
Verizon Communications basically maxed out to his campaign.
MasterCard maxed out to his campaign.
Intel maxed out to his campaign.
Dell maxed out to his campaign.
Motorola maxed out to his campaign.
Raytheon gave him a significant contribution.
Pfizer gave him a significant contribution.
So here's a guy who's supposed to represent rural Illinois, an area I know very well, who probably is more likely to answer and to represent the people that fill his campaign account than the constituents of Illinois' 16th congressional district.
The founding fathers never wanted a system where private business interests would be able to influence the creation of laws disproportionately.
Now, there's a fine counter argument to this, which is, well, Charlie, if you get rid of this, then how are these companies that employ a lot of people going to have their voices heard?
And that's a fair question.
However, I think a reasonable society, if we were interested in governing and fixing our systemic problems, could address that very quickly and reasonably.
Have a capacity where these companies are allowed to, through a lobbyist representative where it is disclosed, contact lawmakers and make it public exactly what was discussed.
For example, Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, Comcast, which owns Saturday Night Live, Comcast, which owns the most left-wing Democrat propaganda machine donated to Adam Kinzinger's campaign.
Because we as conservatives and grassroots activists have not made a bigger issue of the financing of elections, Adam Kinzinger takes the money from Comcast.
He's like, oh, they employ people in my district.
That's completely irrelevant.
So does Planned Parenthood, Adam Kinzinger.
Would you take money from Planned Parenthood?
Of course you would.
You see, we have, as conservatives, created some rules of engagement with campaign finance.
For example, if Adam Kinzinger were to take money from Planned Parenthood, he would get primarily and lose.
He might get primarily and lose anyway.
If you're listening to this on AM560, the answer, my friends in Chicago, go help with that.
If Adam Kinzinger took money from the teacher unions, he would come under backlash in his district.
If Adam Kinzinger took money from Mike Bloomberg, he'd come under fire in his district.
However, when he takes money from Comcast, he gets reelected.
The point is that we as conservatives have to realize that the flow of capital from these companies from the woke industrial complex, which is what they are, no different than Dwight D. Eisenhower warning us against the military industrial complex.
There's the woke industrial complex.
That's the problem.
So what's the solution?
Well, I don't think the solution is necessarily public financing of elections.
I don't.
But I would say we have to put limits on how much these companies can give, way more limits than they already have.
And I also think that you should not be able to, if you're a corporation that is actively seeking government contracts or dealing with federal regulation, I do not think you legally should be able to contribute to a member of Congress or a person running for Congress.
It is the clearest conflict of interest I could possibly imagine.
So it is illegal to bribe an elected official.
It's illegal if Comcast came to Adam Kinzinger's office with a briefcase of $10,000.
But it's legal if Comcast comes into Adam Kinzinger's office with a check for $10,000 to his campaign account.
That's legal.
Just a little funny side note, Adam Kinzinger received a max contribution from the John Bolton PAC, too.
John Bolton, who wanted to invade Venezuela.
And it's actually a real thing.
He was walking around with a binder, no, a notebook that said 10,000 troops to Venezuela.
And Liz Cheney has the same sort of corporate donors.
And so here's the fight, the metaphorical fight that we must Focus on.
And Congressman Matt Gates, to his credit, has been ahead of the curve here.
We, as grassroots conservatives, need to ask our representatives who's financing your campaigns.
Then you'll be able to find out whether or not they're going to pick the tough fights when they go to Washington, D.C.
It's that simple.
Liz Cheney receives $13,400 from Goldman Sachs.
She will do nothing to represent the people of Wyoming.
Goldman Sachs, otherwise known as government Sachs, runs the Treasury Department in our country.
There's a joke that Goldman Sachs is never on the wrong side of a deal.
Yeah, because they create the deals.
Hank Paulson, Timothy Geithner, what's the globalist?
Oh, Gary Cohn.
They all were Goldman guys.
And the left is on the right side of this issue.
That's right.
You heard me correctly.
Talib, Cortez, Omar, they reject corporate money.
Now, part of it is because Democrats are really good at giving small dollar donations.
It's part of the mob mentality.
They all think of themselves as a big kind of organism that is self-sufficient.
They give $10 a month to Cortez.
Hundreds of thousands of people do every single month.
Whereas Republicans, we love liberty.
Therefore, we love to be disengaged from the process because we want to go live our life.
Politics is not everything for us.
And so then Republicans use that as an excuse.
They say, well, I can't really raise small dollar donations.
I'm going to go to Raytheon.
I'm going to go to Goldman Sachs.
I'm going to go to Comcast and fill up my account.
It's one meeting.
It's one lunch.
It's not that big of a deal.
So the solution has to be number one.
We have to applaud and praise the Republicans that don't take this corporate money.
So the 61 people that voted yesterday privately, I would like to see that roll call vote.
Liz Cheney was elected not to represent the Republican Party, but to represent the people of Wyoming.
It's a big difference.
Washington, D.C. is Liz Cheney's home turf.
That's her kingdom.
That's what she occupies.
But the people of Wyoming are suffering right now.
The people are out of work.
The virus has crushed many of them.
The lockdowns have crushed a lot of them even more.
Their schools are struggling.
Yet Liz Cheney is taking money from corporations that are lobbying for the continued woke industrial complex, lobbying for lockdowns indefinitely.
That's who represents the people of Wyoming.
Not Liz Cheney, but the corporations that fund her campaign.
That's the issue that we must focus on through robust campaign finance reform, small dollar donation support, and lifting up and congratulating Republicans that reject the easy money just to get reelected.
I think that a lot of this discussion around the direction of the Republican Party needs to be who's going to be financing the Republican Party.
It's that simple.
We will keep on being disappointed.
Bills will continue to be killed that might benefit our country.
Bad bills will continually be proposed if we do not fix the way that this process works.
Right now, we have a group of 100 companies that finance a vast majority of all the political activity in our country.
And because of that, you, the American worker, the carpenter, the plumber, the teacher, the parent, where's your voice?
Your voice gets minimized.
And this is what made Donald Trump so different.
It made Donald Trump different because he took the small, he was able to build a small dollar donation army, something Republicans had never done before.
And instead, Liz Cheney doesn't think about, well, maybe Donald Trump was onto something to actually represent the muscular class in this country, the entrepreneurs, the people that start something from nothing, the people that are trying to create new,
not just the people that are trying to get favors from the government, not just people like Liz Cheney, something that her father perfected, which is how do I maximize the U.S. taxpayer for my own benefit.
There's nothing conservative about that.
That's corporatist.
There's nothing capitalist about that.
It's favoritism, pure and simple.
But the fact that we're even having this discussion is a very good development.
Because for years, the inside-out access that corporations had to our government went completely and totally unchecked and unchallenged.
Yes, Liz Cheney won the vote.
Why?
Because most Republicans actually just want to get reelected.
They don't want controversy.
They did it in private.
Liz Cheney doesn't just raise the money for herself, but she's the gatekeeper for a lot of these corporate interests for the other members of Congress.
For members of Congress like Adam Kinzinger, like Peter Meyer from Michigan, who decided to run as a grassroots conservative and then all of a sudden became a corporate type.
We won't forget that, Congressman Meyer, come the next elections.
I know people in Western Michigan are very, very fired up to primary you and to hold you accountable.
Congressman Meyer, we did a Super Saturday for you at Turning Point Action, and we wanted to see you win.
One of your first acts of Congress is indulge yourself in an unconstitutional circus.
You could have gave a House floor speech condemning Trump to the sky, but then as soon as you did the impeachment exercise, you went back on your promise to the voters of Western Michigan.
So that the 146 people that supported Liz Cheney, what they're really saying is, keep the easy money coming.
I don't want to have to pick the tough fights.
I don't have to go raise money for anyone that's outside of corporations, outside of Comcast, Raytheon.
And I hope you all understand that's easy money for these guys.
It's easy money.
You just promise that you won't challenge them on committees.
You give a wink and a nod that you won't have to make any alterations to the multi-trillion dollar stimulus, to the multi-trillion dollar bills.
And Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Comcast, and all those cast of characters will continue to contribute to your campaign account.
What's amazing is when you look at Liz Cheney's contributions, very little of her money is raised from Wyoming.
If Liz Cheney was representing the people of Wyoming, not the investment bankers on Goldman Sachs or the war planners at Raytheon, then she would have a ton of money from Wyoming.
Trust me, there's plenty of money to be raised in Wyoming.
Plenty.
And she's got some people here and there.
So that's the real issue that we must zero in on.
Nothing will change till we get to the fundamentals and we find solutions to this.
And a temporary solution outside we get of the legislative is that just Republicans that are watching this, you must demand from your elected officials that they will find ways to finance their campaigns through a people-focused agenda, not through a corporate-financed agenda.
You want to know why we're in this circus in D.C. where we talk about things that don't matter?
It's because if you actually got into the nuts and bolts of what actually is hurting the American people, maybe a couple of their corporate financiers might get a little bit upset.
And so for any Republican out there that doesn't take the free flow of money from corporate America, we will lift you up and applaud you.
Those that do, we'll continue to challenge you on this program.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Again, if you want to win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine, just email us your subscription to this podcast and maybe get a friend to subscribe too.
That really helps us out a lot.
Text this episode to your friends if you think that this episode helped clarify some things or gave you some information or knowledge you didn't have before.
It would help us out a lot.
And email it to us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
God bless you guys.
Thank you so much for listening.
Oh, and before I forget, TurningpointUSA, TPUSA.com.