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Hey, everybody.
Today in the Charlie Kirk show, Matt Schlapp, who's the head of CPAC, with some pretty incredible revelations about President Trump's legal team.
Were they prepared?
Matt Schlapp shares some information that I think is so important.
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Matt Schlapp is here.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us today is the chairman of CPAC, or is it the American Conservative Union?
It's one of those things, but I just call him the head of CPAC.
Matt, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Yeah, man, chief cook and bottle washer, whatever it is.
There you go.
I encourage all of our viewers to go to CPAC this year.
It's in Orlando, and I encourage everyone in the surrounding area around the country to come in.
Matt, what made you guys go to Orlando?
I could venture a guess, but what brings you to the Sunshine State?
Governor Hogan shut us down.
Maybe a combination of Governor Hogan and Dr. Fauci.
And I think they expected us just to take the year off.
As Dr. Fauci has been saying, you know, no Super Bowl parties, no church, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas.
And I just couldn't look myself in the mirror.
And the same for my team and say we would be the first team to not have a CPAC in half a century.
So we thought, well, we should go to either Tennessee or Texas or Florida.
And Florida was very inviting, as was Governor DeSantis.
So we did it.
And I'm sure you're going to be bringing work for thousands of people, you know, people that set up the venue.
And so you're delivering a massive stimulus to the Florida economy, which is awesome.
Is CPAC going to look any different this year?
And for people that don't know, CPAC is an awesome event.
I'll be speaking there.
I'm really super excited about it.
We want to get a lot of young people there.
It's the premier event, and there might be some other guest speakers.
I'm hearing through the grapevine.
We don't have to go into that.
But is CPAC going to look any different this year?
Yeah, look, it's different.
You know, we're normally in this venue, this huge hotel that's just south of the Reagan airport.
So it's a new venue for us.
But the Hyatt down there in Orlando has been very accommodating.
They really wanted our business.
And, you know, it'll be a little bit of a more humble stage than the stage normally is at CPAC.
The chairs will be a little further apart.
Governor DeSantis has Florida open for business, but there are health regulations which we will follow.
And so, you know, it'll be sold out here, I think, in just a number of days.
We're selling overflow tickets and we have a few premium tickets left.
And we apologize for those folks who are used to, you know, getting the regular ticket or the senior ticket.
It's just it sold out fast.
And I think the reason is, and you know this, Charlie, because you just had a really great event down in South Florida, which you sold out on, is people, our people, people who love America, who love our founding, who love cops, who go to church, who have faith, who thinks George Washington's a good guy, not a bad guy, maybe not a perfect guy, but close to perfect.
You know, those types of people, they are hungry to get out of their basements.
They're tired of being told that they're going to get sick and die if they do anything at all.
And they are also watching this onslaught of socialism that they hoped that Joe Biden would be more moderate in approach to.
But as you and I knew, he never had any intention of being moderate.
He's reading the papers that are given to him.
And the agenda is pretty radical.
It's going to be pretty harmful because socialism has never worked for anybody but the people in power.
And so I think there's a lot of Americans who are just really worried.
That's why it's sold out.
That's why you sold out.
That's why what we do this year is so important.
I agree.
And so CPAC is probably the most covered political event of the entire year, minus this show trial in Congress or, you know, some other stuff.
But in the traditional calendar, it's really important.
It always is.
And it's going to be super important this year.
I know a lot of press are going to be watching very carefully.
Matt, you have a lot of input on who speaks, on the type of panels that are done, and kind of the direction you want the conservative movement to go.
You've done a really good job when you run CPAC.
You allow different voices of the conservative movement to be heard.
Libertarians, traditional conservatives, establishment Republicans.
However, there is sometimes a philosophical direction that you want to see the event go or the movement go.
What is that for CPAC this year?
Are you taking a stance that we need more of the Trump movement, less of the Trump movement, or to be determined or undecided?
What are just some of the more philosophical underpinnings in the direction you're taking CPAC, which with it will be characterized as the direction of the conservative movement?
I've tried over the last couple of years to really get the RNC and Republican Party entities to understand that they ought to partner a lot better with conservative groups like yours or ours.
And, you know, this year, I actually don't feel it's the best time for that.
I actually think this is the time where we need to understand that the Republican Party and the elephant is awfully important, but it's not the most important part of our coalition.
The most important part of our coalition are the great forgotten men and women all over this country who came out and said, you know, I might not have been that involved in politics, but I really like what Donald Trump is saying.
I like what his policies are.
And that added millions of new voters to our coalition.
Think about it.
Since like the last four, five, six presidential elections, Donald Trump was able to do better with non-traditional Republican voters than all these other guys who said that Donald Trump would do worse with these voters.
They actually did better.
So I actually want more of this.
I want more people who wouldn't consider themselves a conservative or Republican, but feel like they believe with these foundational principles of our country.
I want them to feel welcome.
So we're going to spend a lot of time.
And that's kind of where my language is going, which is it's not so much about one party versus another party.
And of course, we're a nonpartisan event and we're not a Republican entity.
You know, we're a C4 and a C3.
So it's about getting those voices, including small business people who've been shut down over this excess of the virus, giving them a voice.
And we're going to do a lot more of that.
So can you give us some insight into some of the speaker selection for this year?
I'm guessing Mitt Romney was not invited.
And so I know that was a controversy last year where you just said Mitt Romney is not welcome.
Can you give us some preview of some of the people that you're planning to have?
I don't think this is the year for those who believe that the president should be impeached once, twice, three times.
I feel like the Republicans who fell for that trap aren't really able to understand what the Democrats and the socialists are doing politically, which is everything possible they can do to demonize Trump and demonize anybody who might like his policies or support Trump.
And I really feel like this has nothing to do with morality or ethics or the law.
It has everything to do with trying to destroy our political movement.
And if Republicans don't get that, I just don't think this year they need to be given that microphone.
I also think that we looked more carefully at a member's voting record.
And we always have this 80% rule that Ronald Reagan said, you know, I view you as my 80% friend, not my 20% enemy.
At 80% in schools, a C. I think a member should be able to get to that 80% if they call themselves a Republican, unless they're just truly just a liberal and or, you know, a moderate to liberal.
So we were a little more careful with that.
So, you know, we have the Devin Nunes was announced today.
We have Jim Jordan coming.
We have Mike Lee coming, which I don't think is announced yet.
We have Ted Cruz coming.
We have Josh Hawley coming.
We don't believe Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley are insurrectionists that were calling for violence in simply questioning the election results.
Charlie, you and I were together election night going back and forth on our Intel on your now home state of Arizona and these other important states.
We're not shying away from the idea that what Stacey Abrams and Mark Elias and these people are trying to do is to make unregistered voting legal and to have illegal votes now be accepted in elections.
That breaks 250 years of our history.
That goes back to the days of Lyndon Johnson stealing elections in Texas.
And we can't have that.
So we're going to talk about that significantly at the conference.
And the other thing I think you'd appreciate is we're going to talk about each of the Bill of Rights and why this socialist Democratic Party wants to dilute it, undermine it, eliminate it.
They don't believe in these foundational documents or values in our society.
And we have the proof both on the illegal voting and on the fact that they want to undermine the Bill of Rights.
And we're going to soberly and carefully walk through it and you're going to help us do that.
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I always love the energy at CPAC.
And I also love how for the media, this is kind of their safari trip.
What do I mean for that?
This is their one time to kind of go on the African safari to go see the animals of the wild, aka conservatives.
So it's a great chance for them to kind of say, this is the one time we get to go here conservatives, hear what they're about.
And then we don't have to listen to them for the rest of the year and just call them awful names.
But I think that that's the time where they kind of just check the box.
I get the B-roll.
You know, they're able to do that.
And I think it's critically important.
And so, Matt, I want to talk about your time in Nevada because you just talked about unregistered voting.
There's a lot of frustration amongst our listeners.
When I mean a lot, I mean more than 80% of our listeners.
And I mean top to bottom, regardless of income level, wealth level, age, that they believe that their vote was interfered with.
And so interference can come in a variety of different ways.
Social media interference, media interference.
That stuff is not even, you know, that's 100% rock solid.
And also the signature verification, the voter registration interference.
What did you see in Nevada?
And at CPAC, will you guys be taking that issue head on?
The election integrity issue.
Yeah, we're not backing down.
I will say I don't use the word that the presidential election was stolen.
I know other people like to use that term.
I don't use that because that implies one person kind of picked our pocket when we weren't looking or broke into our house and stole our goods when we weren't there.
This was a much publicized multi-year effort by Mark Elias and Perkins Cooey, top-notch lawyers, $1,000 an hour lawyers that came up with the fake Russian dossier and are basically operatives of the Democratic Party and their allies to change and to normalize illegal voting by making it about race, which just has nothing to do with race.
If it had something to do with race, why did Donald Trump have historic levels of support from African-American voters and Hispanic voters?
I'm obviously married to a Hispanic woman.
Her family was overwhelmingly enthusiastic about President Trump.
This election question has nothing at all to do with race.
That's an old-fashioned notion.
And by the way, as a Republican, I'm proud of what Republicans have done on the question of race and voting and the fact that we were the historic pusher of civil rights for everyone.
So we got to get out of the defense of being on the defensive on these questions of civil rights.
It's the Democratic Party that is associated with Jim Crow and stopping people from voting.
But this is not about empowering black people to vote or people of color to vote.
This is about woke, white, powerful liberals using race to divide us and to put illegal ballots, probably filled in illegally by white people, not people of color, in our nation's biggest cities, not allowing us to observe it and not allowing these roles to be properly updated and cleaned.
In Nevada alone, Charlie, there was about 95,000 names that everyone knew that those people had died or moved.
The election officials were under legal mandate to scrub those 95,000 names.
They waited one day after the statutory deadline to request the state to clean the rolls, knowing that the state would say, you've already passed the deadline, so you can't clean those rolls.
Do you know what?
About 10% of those people got into the count.
Now, they didn't come back from life.
They didn't all of a sudden build a house in Nevada.
But this is what happens when you have unsolicited mail in balloting, right?
For people who didn't request the ballot.
That means that anybody who gets that ballot can fill in that ballot.
They can fill in multiple ballots.
And there's no way to check it.
There's no way in America to check if somebody voted in California and Nevada.
And that happened to the tune of thousands and thousands.
So we just have to get wise with what they're doing.
We've been on our heels because they say no judge verified any fraud.
Do you know no judge even looked at any of the evidence in Nevada?
They didn't look at the evidence.
One reason because the RNC and the Trump campaign, their legal teams, and I'll criticize them, they weren't ready for this fight.
They told us they were.
They were not ready.
They were asleep at the switch.
And so we scrambled to put legal teams together.
And by that point, the judges took a dim view of the legal teams we had pulled together.
The Democrats had the most expensive, most renowned lawyers in the country.
And we had kind of a ragtag group of lawyers who were wonderfully patriotic, good people, but they weren't election law experts.
And that meant the judges never really looked at the evidence.
All of this went down in courtrooms all over the country.
And I don't think it actually got the scrutiny it deserved.
And for that reason, half this country believes that their vote was watered down, deluded, that the elect, there were a lot of questions around the election.
And as an American, I know that we're not going to survive as a country if half the country questions the results of the last election.
By the way, it was the Democrats who questioned the legitimacy of Donald Trump.
Nancy Pelosi has tweets out there saying that we can't accept the election results of 2016.
Nobody took her to task or said she was un-American for doing it.
She had her free speech rights to do it.
Thankfully, Bob Mueller, in a perverse way, proved that her Russian collusion fantasies weren't true.
And so they should have accepted the results.
But we're not un-American when we said there shouldn't be illegal ballots in the count.
There were so many illegal ballots in the count.
I know that in Nevada and Georgia, those results would have been flipped.
By the way, David Perdue would have won before a runoff.
We never would have lost the Senate.
The results of this illegal voting and the effort by Stacey Abrams and Mark Elias to undermine our democratic norms has essentially turned the country's power over to this Democrat socialist movement.
Now is the time for Americans, not even Republicans and conservatives, just Americans who think cops aren't evil and the military isn't evil and it's okay to have a statue of Jesus without desecrating it.
Those types of people, it's time for them to wake up because I believe that our coalition could take back in the House and the Senate in less than two years and change the dynamics of this country forever.
I agree with you, Matt.
I want to zero in on something you just said to ask for some more detail on that.
We were told from the Trump campaign, and they told many donors, and I mean massive donors that I know and that you know, that they were ready for the legal fight of the century.
They raised hundreds of millions of dollars in July, August, September, and October just for this purpose.
This is a multi-billion dollar campaign.
There's $240 million left over.
Are you trying to tell me that the best lawyers were not prepared for this, that there were not law firms engaged, ready to contest this the night of the election?
The problem in Philadelphia is they could barely even get representation because they were trying to hire lawyers after the election.
Charlie, here's the problem.
How is that possible?
If you try to hire the best lawyers after you're already behind in a presidential election or a senate election, they are going to be less willing to take that client on because they will get cross-pressured.
So in Pennsylvania, every time they hired a law firm, they were cross-pressured by corporate and other interests.
Yes.
And they were dropped.
And then in Nevada, like I said, these lawyers, I love these lawyers.
I consider them lifelong friends.
You need the $1,400 an hour guys that went to Harvard that obsessed.
Not because they're better, but because it's their specialty.
And the judges, more importantly, the judges and the justices will respect those pleadings and those filings more.
Totally right.
It's the lawyers they went to law school or play golf with or feel like are at their lawyers.
Or they were former prosecutors or whatever.
Yeah.
I'm going to say this, and I know it's going to earn me.
I'm going to lose some more friends, which I seem to do about every three months in my life.
But the RNC and the Trump campaign were not ready for this moment.
It's pretty clear to me they weren't ready for this moment.
And the president himself had to try to pull together an effort just to try to make sure that illegal votes were taken out of the count.
And I feel like we were scrambling too little too late.
Look, I was a veteran of 2000.
We scrambled a lot in 2000 as well.
But eventually a team was pulled together and there was a comms strategy that was pulled together and we barely pulled it out.
We lost in court over and over again until we won in the most important court.
And what happened in this case is we really never got a chance to properly explain all this information.
So at CPAC, we're going to take the opportunity to explain to people the type of evidence that's out there, not because we think that we're going to, you know, change the election results of 2020.
That ship has sailed.
Joe Biden is our president.
The question is this.
Are we ever going to win tough seats in states like Arizona ever again?
Although Arizona had fewer problems than other states, much fewer.
Are we ever going to win tough races in these purple states if we allow for thousands and thousands and thousands of illegal ballots to get in the count?
Because Republican officials are too chicken to stand up to Stacey Abrams and her lawyers and say, you know what?
We're all going to follow the laws and we're going to make sure everybody who wants to vote has a chance to vote once and legally.
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Matt, what you're saying is stunning for me to hear.
And I've been hearing different stories because I have friends that are in those positions of leadership.
And they say, oh, we were prepared.
We had everyone ready.
I have found that hard to believe.
I find it hard to believe just based on what I've seen.
But just going back in time, Matt, which I think the bigger lesson is, though, we were promised they were ready.
We were promised they had lawyers on retainer.
We were promised they had law firms briefed.
We were promised that they were mail and balloting experts.
And it just seems that that was just either an exaggeration, a falsehood, or a misrepresentation of what was happening.
I'm zeroing in on this for a reason, Matt, because it wasn't a lack of resources.
There was plenty of money.
It wasn't a lack of notice.
The president was warning about mail and balloting problems for nine months.
It wasn't a matter of public consensus.
His base was demanding action on this.
It wasn't a matter of donors.
I know you and I both know a ton of donors that were saying, Hey, why are we ready?
Do we have lawyers here?
And so I'm really disappointed to hear that because if you have wonderful patriotic lawyers, God bless them.
Thank you for standing up.
But the way the system works, especially in hotly contested, high-threshold, high-stakes games, if you don't have the guys that have the right credibility, then you're going to get tossed out, especially if they're not working on these cases for weeks ahead of time.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
So, in 2000, obviously, you have a governor of Texas who's trying to become the president.
His brother is the governor of Florida.
That was a strange dynamic, but we were on the ground with thousands of people immediately.
I actually flew out with Ben Ginsburg.
Joel Kaplan from Facebook was on the plane with us.
He and I were partners together on the ground in Volusha County, in Florida.
We had people on the ground immediately.
I tried to explain this to the campaign and to the RC: you need thousands of people.
You don't need four people.
You need thousands of people to start to take down the evidence, take the sworn statements.
You need thousands of lawyers.
And it fell on deaf ears.
In 2002, I was the deputy political director of the White House.
It was my job to be prepared for all these Senate potential recounts.
We had planes ready.
We had lawyers who had signed up to get on those planes.
We put teams out there before Election Day.
In 2004, in George W. Bush's reelection, I have Dan Schneider here, one of my colleagues at ACU, who you know well.
He was put in the state of Ohio a month early as a volunteer lawyer to prepare for all the shenanigans that will happen in our nation's biggest cities.
When I landed in the ground in Nevada, I had very prominent lawyers tell me that in 2020, they had just showed up literally right around the election, whereas in 2016, they were there three and four weeks early to prepare.
So we just, I think the feeling was that we had the president really hit his stride at the end of the campaign, and he did.
And all of us were out there really pushing as hard as we could.
I was doing events through ACU and Battleground States.
You were doing the same thing.
And we thought we'd overcome them with all these millions of new voters.
And I have to give the campaign great credit for that.
They pulled in millions of new voters and they deserve great credit for it.
But the legal piece is the basic blocking and tackling, and we blew it.
And I'm not saying that because I want someone to get in trouble.
I'm saying that because let's stop kind of like making ourselves feel better that we left it all in the field and we did all we could.
No, it's not true.
If we had spent the money that it took to have a legal strategy four years earlier, we could have prevented thousands and thousands and thousands of these ballots from getting into the count.
And in a state like Nevada, where it's a 32,000 vote difference, it'll swing the outcome just by preventing these illegal packets of ballots.
Philadelphia, there's a long tradition that they go through shenanigans for weeks and weeks and weeks around the election to try to do their big city politics.
So the lesson out of this is we all have to hold our Republican entities to account for making sure that this type of thing never happens again.
Or I'll make a promise to you: we will never put another conservative or constitutionalist on the Supreme Court because we can never win again if these are the new rules.
Yeah, what you're saying is one of the most important things that I've heard.
And you are going to add a lot of information right now to our base that's listening to this because they've been looking for answers.
And this is an answer, no doubt.
This is an uncomfortable answer, but I just believe with my experience, it's the only thing we can conclude, which is if we don't beat Mark Elias with our best lawyers against their best lawyers, all we want to do is have legal voters.
Remember, they're the ones who are trying to break the norms of having.
They have a harder threshold to defend.
That's right.
Ours is easier.
We just have to say state passes these laws.
We must follow these laws.
But let's face it, they afflict us in each and every one of these states.
So, and just to complete the point here, Joe Biden had lawyers as far as the eye can see.
He was prepared for this.
You know, whether it's the Biden campaign or the DNC or one of their soft money groups.
Right.
They're much better.
They're much better than us of all this kind of, this is real collusion, real coordination of making sure that this happens.
But they raised tremendous amounts of money.
As you know, we're at a big money disadvantage when it comes to these outside groups.
And they had a plan over four years.
My guess is if you added up all the money they spent trying to make it easier to vote illegally in this country, my guess is it's tens of millions of dollars just with lawyers.
And I think if you looked at our spend, I would be surprised to be a tenth of that.
And we've got to change that.
I'm not a big pro-lawyer guy.
I'm fine with the way the president negotiates with lawyers.
I'm fine with getting lawyers at a discounted rate.
I'm fine with all that.
Matter of fact, I think we have a lot of great volunteer lawyers, but we've got to have a better plan.
And we have to listen.
Look, I'm old.
I got white hair.
Listen to the people who have been through the trenches on this stuff instead of assuming that everybody who's done something before is an idiot.
And what we have to do as a movement is embrace all of these people with this experience, including a lot of lawyers in courtrooms, and put our best team on the field.
If we do that, I'm telling you, we're going to win back the House and the Senate.
I agree.
The only way that doesn't happen is if this Stacey Abrams-Mark Elias strategy overturns these individual races.
And that would be another horrible tragedy.
And I'll say, Matt, you know, I have been a critic of a lot of the policies of George W. Bush, but I will compliment him.
He was phenomenal at building political machinery.
And you were part of that.
When there was, if there was a state party chair that stepped out of line, their kids wouldn't get into boarding school.
Their parking pass was revoked.
And for whatever reason, they got an angry call from their boss.
It was, and I'm joking, half joking, he had control over the party through and through.
And also, and he learned it from his father and Lee Atwater, you know, names that you're very familiar with that helped build the party and the movement.
But that kind of infrastructure just always seemed to be lacking the last couple years of the Trump campaign and the Trump movement.
And I think that they prided themselves on not having bureaucracy.
I don't like bureaucracy, but there's a difference between having bureaucracy and infrastructure.
If you're just a free-flowing movement of people, then when a real tough fight comes, you say, well, who's in charge of crisis comms and who's going to this state?
And you're just deploying people all over the planet.
And I'm glad they sent you to Nevada, but they should have had three Nevada law firms.
They are like, I actually were ready for this.
You know what I mean?
In all candor, I tried very through many channels to tell folks that I was willing to go anywhere they wanted me to go.
It was Rick Grinnell who called me and said, hey, would you help me by coming out to Nevada?
Because I think he realized, you know, he wanted to have some help.
And Kurt Schlichter and a lot of great people flew out there.
And I think we made a real difference.
But unfortunately, we lost the argument and we lost in court.
And I hate to lose.
And it's not about us.
It's about our country.
And we kind of let everyone down because we didn't put our best foot forward.
Now, I'm not criticizing any individuals.
I think everyone tried to do the best they can.
This was a very strange presidential election.
Let's just learn from our mistakes.
Let's never repeat our mistakes again.
And when it comes to this question of not having your bureaucracy and not doing it the old ways, I'm good with all that.
I can't tell you how many times I told President Trump he shouldn't do something.
He did it anyway.
And he was right.
And I was wrong.
And I can admit it.
It happened a lot of times.
The man has a really good instinct.
I just feel like too many people in positions of power told him that it was all taken care of.
That's exactly right.
What I saw from what I saw, and not only on before election day and on election day, but after throughout that whole process, what I saw was contrary to that.
Yeah, I totally agree.
So, in closing, here, Matt, you guys are ramping up for CPAC, and it really is going to be one of the most important events to people who are going to be looking for the future of the party.
And, you know, we've gone into that.
Can you just help us chart the course from now to the midterms?
And also, I meant to ask you earlier: what is the theme of CPAC this year?
I know last year it was stop socialism.
What is the theme of this?
America versus socialism.
This year, it's America uncanceled.
Tell us why you chose that.
Well, it's really personal.
First of all, I tried to cancel CPAC, right?
We're going through this whole idea where literally they're trying to make it so Donald Trump can't speak.
And they're trying to make it now so that his allies can't speak.
Now they're going to call us all domestic terrorists.
So the next step will be we can't speak.
And this is a critical time.
People feel desperation over the fact that, okay, sometimes you win races, sometimes you lose races.
But in America, we don't take those we beat and put and try to put them in jail and take all their followers and try to get them not to have jobs.
My wife's on an execution list, Charlie.
That's un-American.
Matter of fact, it's pretty unsafe for her and my children.
Whose list is that?
People are trying to.
What'd you say?
Whose list is that?
Oh, there's all these lists floating around.
You're probably on some of people who supported the president, and somehow we have to be driven from civil society.
This is not what you and I do.
This is not what decent people do.
This needs to be called out, and this needs to stop.
So, like I said, we're going to spend a significant portion of our agenda talking about why voting is the fundamental right we have in a republic.
If we can't vote and take confidence in that election, it undermines everything.
But the other part of that is, as we know, God gives us rights.
Government doesn't give us rights.
You know that.
Your listeners know that.
But we need to walk through why we have this Bill of Rights, how it is operational today, and what's the evidence that actually the socialists and the conservatives have at least a basic understanding of what it means.
I think that's been disrupted.
And we have to go back and remind people: quit being canceled, cowed, quit having your voice taken away, and quit being scared.
If we quiver in the corner, like so many are doing, and I've done it too, they will take all of these rights away, not through constitutional amendments.
They don't believe in doing that.
They just have judges do it.
And now they increasingly have corporations who do it.
Now they increasingly have foundations and these tech oligarchs.
There's just real, this is the real collusion that's going on in society.
We have to be reminded of our rights.
We have to jealously guard them and defend them.
And it's time for us all to speak.
Some of us have bigger megaphones than others of us, but all of us must speak, else we will lose this country.
And we could lose it much faster than I ever feared previously.
I agree with you completely.
And so, CPAC, Orlando, Florida, it's coming up in just a couple of days.
Anything you wanted to touch on, Matt, that we didn't get a chance to cover?
No, I'm just going to say it's going to be sold out.
We're going to have a great crowd.
Governor DeSantis is now truly America's governor.
I totally agree.
He's open for business.
He's smart and courageous.
And we really are glad that he's welcomed us and he welcomed you with open arms.
And I'm sure we're going to have a lot of great new announcements of the speakers who are going to be there.
But the best part of CPAC, and you know this with your events, are these great kids and these great people who come from all over the country and they love their country.
Some of them are rich, some of them are poor, some of them are powerful, some of them aren't.
And this is America, and I love it.
And I'm going to feel pumped.
And I know that everyone who's going to tune in to watch it is going to feel pumped too because we haven't given up and I'm not giving up.
I'm never giving up.
I'm never, sometimes I get discouraged.
When I really get discouraged, I have a martini.
And then the next day I'm ready to fight again.
So two extraordinarily quick questions.
How could people go to CPAC if they want to?
What's the website?
And then is there going to be a certain former president who resides in Florida that might show up?
You know, I would love to see the president show up.
As I've told people, if he doesn't want to, I think we'd all understand.
Or if he wants to take a pass this year, I think we'd all understand.
But he is welcome to be there.
And I think it's important.
You know, some people got a little frustrated with the president at the end of his, at the end of all this.
It was kind of ended cruddy.
And I think now with they're watching the show trial, as you call it, I think everyone's kind of been reminded that it took a certain kind of person to endure this crap for four years, all the lies, all the prosecutions, all this attempt to destroy and minimize him.
And it takes that kind of fortitude to push back on this radicalized socialist agenda that we're seeing.
And I think people would feel, I think it would give them a real boost to hear from their president.
And I know Joe Biden is the current president, but from their former president, and I'd love to have him there.
But I also will respect him.
I mean, it's hard to leave the presidency and it's hard when they're trying to do everything they can to destroy you.
They won't end with impeachment twice, Charlie, as you know.
They're going to do everything they can to destroy him.
And as they try to destroy him, I think they're going to build him back up even bigger than he's ever been.
And look, I think CPAC is going to be MAGA friendly as it always has been, as it always should be.
These are good, decent people.
And a couple of knuckleheads went into the Capitol and did terrible things.
And I think we ought to throw the book at them.
But we shouldn't allow them to make the rest of us get on defense, including President Trump, who had nothing to do with this, or Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz.
They shouldn't be on defense for the fact they simply wanted to raise questions of illegal voting.
They should be proud of that.
And we're all going to have to do that, Charlie, as we're never going to win again.
I like it.
This is going to be a time for conservatives to go on offense.
And that's why CPAC is so important.
Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
I learned a lot and I know our listeners did too.
Thanks so much.
Thanks, Charlie.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.